“Ah!” Shido’s own cry sounded foreign to his ears. Michael stabbed through his shoulder where he stood in front of the door in space. Strangely, it wasn’t exactly painful. Instead, images of a girl flooded into him as if through the Angel.
It was the dream he’d had these last few days. These were most likely Mukuro’s locked memories.
Now that he thought about it, he first started having this dream after he’d stabbed Mukuro with Michael in space to unlock her heart.
He didn’t understand the underlying principle, but the lock on Mukuro’s memories had probably started to break apart and flow into him through the Angel. And now, when they were once again connected by Michael, the lock on those memories had, at last, shattered.
“Mukuro… You… You, too…,” he said, his voice trembling faintly as he tried to reach out to her. A moment later, an intense pain shot through his arm, and he screamed. “Hngah?!”
His arm from the shoulder where Michael had skewered him down to the wrist flew off.
“Hngh… Aaah?!” The devastating pain wrenched new bloodcurdling screams from him.
The sensation was entirely different from his hand being cut off or crushed—it was an annihilation. His arm and his shoulder had rejected their very existence on his body. What little remained from the wrist down dropped to the ground in a sea of blood.
“Gah… Aaaaaaah!”
Instinctively, he activated the sound Angel Gabriel, cloaking his voice in Spirit power to heighten his healing powers, dull the pain, and stop the bleeding.
At the same time, he used Haniel to cover the open wound on his torso, although this was nothing more than a stopgap. It would have been a bad bit of luck if even this power had been sealed by Mukuro, but it seemed she had locked only Haniel’s ability to turn into Michael.
Obviously, this was a drop in the bucket compared to the treatment he really needed, but it had some effect. At the very least, he managed to avoid passing out or going mad from the extreme pain. Camael’s curative flames were smoldering at the wound, but perhaps even the Angel’s power was not enough to heal such a huge loss, or maybe it would simply take time—either way, the flames were ineffective.
Sweat springing up all over his face, he looked toward Mukuro. “Mu…kuro…”
“Ah… Ah. Aaah. No, my lord. I wouldn’t… Muku… Muku would never try to kill you…” She was shaking with terror and staring into space with unfocused eyes. She let Michael fall from her hand, babbling all the while. “No… Don’t leave Muku alone. Ah. Aaah, my lord. My sister. Muku is… Muku is…”
Mukuro grabbed at her head, clearly confused, like dream and memory and reality were all bleeding into each other. Tears fell from her eyes as a stream of somehow muddy-looking Spirit power began to pour from her body.
“Unh… Ah,” she cried. “Aaaaaah!”
“No…!” Shido had seen this phenomenon before.
Inversion.
The fact that she’d dealt Shido a fatal blow with her own hand, and the return of the memories that led her to lock her own heart—these together were indeed more than enough to paint Mukuro’s heart black with despair. Red rips appeared in her elegant, bold Astral Dress and colored it a manifestation of chaos. The tears streaming from her eyes transformed to a dark ink, and Michael on the ground vanished into dust, while, as if in its place, a massive key came into being on her back.
“No… You…can’t… Mukuro!” He managed to stagger forward somehow. If he didn’t do something, she would really invert.
But the whirlwind of concentrated Spirit power around her blocked his way forward and attacked him.
“Hngh!” In his current condition, he was hard-pressed to evade or repel this blow. All he could do was brace himself.
In the next instant, a fierce slicing attack rained down from the distant sky and dispersed the mass of Spirit power closing in on him.
“Huh?” He opened his eyes wide in surprise. For a second, he thought it was backup from Fraxinus, but no. This was Nahemah’s—
“Hmph.”
He heard a voice from above and looked up.
“Don’t get the wrong idea. Such an easy death is simply not suitable for you, not when you have dealt me such humiliation,” Tohka said, vexed, and danced back up into the sky toward Origami.
“Tohka…,” he murmured before turning back to Mukuro.
Tohka no doubt meant exactly what she said. It was an undisputable fact, though, that her blow had opened up a way forward for him. Grateful to her for giving him this chance to reach Mukuro rather than for saving his own life, Shido stepped forward and wrapped his remaining arm tightly around Mukuro.
He couldn’t really get his body to work properly yet, and he was more leaning on her than embracing her, but regardless, he called to her desperately.
“Mukuro! Mukuro! Come back to me! You have to stay. You can’t go to that side!” He hugged her as tightly as he could, using up what little strength remained in his body.
He hadn’t understood why she would go this far to try and expel the others and have him all to herself. Everyone felt jealous and possessive at times. The magnitude of Mukuro’s emotions, however, was far from normal.
Now, though, having shared her memories through Michael, he understood.
“Mukuro… You’re me,” he said, pleading with her as the dark Spirit power colored more and more of her body.
Yes. Mukuro was Shido. To the point where, when he first saw her past in his dream, he’d thought he was remembering his own past.
He, too, had been abandoned by his mother, alone from his earliest memories. He was taken in by the Itsuka family, and he had, for the first time, the warmth of a father, of a mother, of a sibling—of a family. He understood it all.
“Mukuro… You were so anxious, weren’t you?” he said, his voice hoarse, and he felt her shoulders shake just a little bit. “You felt so helpless you could hardly stand it.”
Yes. She had been anxious. Because there was nothing that could have been called love at the origin of her memories. The warmth she had suddenly been given one day felt good—it was dazzling. But somehow, she couldn’t quite grasp it entirely. She wondered if it wasn’t really all a fantasy, if it wouldn’t all disappear the moment she woke up.
She should have been happy, and yet this seed of anxiety was always in her heart. So when her family spoke intimately with anyone other than herself, when they were part of a world that she didn’t know, she felt like her heart was being pulled out of her chest.
After all, she had simply been grafted onto these people’s lives. They no doubt had other things that were more precious to them.
The young Shido had also felt this, although not to the extreme that Mukuro did.
“But look, Mukuro… It’s okay.” His vision was clouding over, so he had to grope around to find Mukuro’s head and stroke her hair as he continued. “You didn’t need to worry. Your dad and your mom and your sister… No matter how far away they are, they’re connected to you. I mean, that’s what family is, after all.”
This was what his dad, his mom, and Kotori had taught him. But if he’d gained the same power as Mukuro before he learned this lesson, he didn’t know what would have happened.
“……!”
He heard Mukuro gasp quietly.
“But…Muku…,” she stammered. “Muku has…no…”
“…Me!” His own voice grew louder in response to Mukuro’s fading into nothing. “I’ll be your family. You don’t have to worry anymore. I’ll never forget you, no matter what happens. No matter what you do, I will never hate you!”
He started to cough violently, blood choking his throat, but he ignored it and continued.
“Aaah… Just that’s…not enough, huh? Mukuro, you need…to promise, too. There’s no point…if it’s one-sided… I mean, we’re… We’re family.”
“…! My lord, Muku is…,” Mukuro said, her voice trembling. In that moment, her tears reverted from dark sludge to clear drops.