Minami yelped as the plastic fingers brushed her toes. She tore her sword from its scabbard and drove it downward. The weapon plunged into the mannequin’s shoulder and cracked its chest in two. The sound of the blade scraping the floor echoed wildly in the otherwise silent space. The mannequin crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut.
Minami turned to Kishibe and Quanxi and leapt joyfully into the air. “I … I did it! I really did it!”
The mannequin flopped over on its back. Kishibe saw with horror that it didn’t look like a mannequin anymore. The cracked plastic had become smooth skin, the blank face now had damp eyes that blinked at him, and there was close-cropped dark hair on the formerly bald head.
Aside from its severed arm, the mannequin was the spitting image of Minami Nakano.
“Eek!” Minami yelped. She stumbled back and landed flat on her behind. In a sudden burst of power, the Minami mannequin was flung violently away and shattered to pieces.
Quanxi stood with her fist clenched, cool and unmoved. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, thanks.” Minami allowed Quanxi to pull her to her feet. She wobbled slightly. “Um … does this mean we beat it?”
“That’s how you defeat a devil, Minami,” Quanxi answered.
Minami wasn’t certain of the explanation. “Um … how?”
“By pounding it relentlessly,” Quanxi helpfully clarified.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You moved so fast, I don’t think she saw your punch, Quanxi,” said Kishibe, glancing at the graceful arc of his partner’s back before turning his attention to the fragments of the mannequin. “So it was the Mannequin Devil … or maybe the Transformation Devil.” The mannequin had only changed shape after Minami attacked it. Based on the scant information he had so far, it seemed this devil could take the form of anyone who touched it.
Kishibe stood silently for a moment, then dropped into a defensive stance.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Kishibe?” Minami asked.
He scanned their surroundings before answering. Call it instinct. “If it really went down after one punch from Quanxi, great. But what if that wasn’t all?”
“You think there’s more of them?” the novice asked.
“Dunno. If you hunt devils, though, one thing should be second nature—it never hurts to assume a worst-case scenario. Not when a single mistake can mean game over. There are no mulligans in this line of work.”
Minami went quiet too. What if this wasn’t over?
Kishibe’s instincts, honed by years of experience as a devil hunter, picked up an inhuman malevolence filling the space like tobacco smoke. At least, he thought they did.
Quanxi crossed her arms over her head and cracked her shoulder joints. “You’ll only lose more hair worrying like this.”
“I’m not losing my hair. Not all of us can get by on brute strength, y’know. Gotta exercise this booze-soaked brain once in a while.”
Kishibe thought through the possibilities. The devil was able to possess and control the mannequins. By the time Quanxi had smashed its host, it could have fled to one of countless others. It could also make a mannequin look like a person who touched it. Kishibe had heard rumors of an assassin who turned humans into puppets; this devil was the opposite, making puppets into humans.
“Big deal,” Kishibe mumbled. If all it did was copy someone’s appearance, he could handle it. There were worse scenarios. Such as—
His thoughts were interrupted by an icy chill running down his spine. One of the largest piles of mannequins stirred. The blank-faced figures jumped to their feet and parted to reveal a dark shape charging forward.
“Hngh!”
Closing. Impact. Shock.
Kishibe raised his arms over his head just in time, deflecting the attacker’s fist. The blow was fast, strong, and heavy.
Through his crossed arms, he made out the shifting face of his foe. An eye patch appeared over its right eye.
The worst possible scenario, then.
Quanxi had touched the mannequin when she destroyed it, and the devil could turn into anyone who touched it. What Kishibe had feared was that the doppelganger could steal not just the appearance, but the abilities of its model. And this one looked exactly like his partner.
Kishibe felt his bones creaking as the Quanxi mannequin fought with him, driving him back into a tangle of reinforced steel along the wall.
“Mr. Kishibe!” Minami cried. She turned to her instructor, panicked.
Quanxi slowly uncrossed her arms. Her body tensed. But all she said was, “For once that old worrywart was right.”
“Is Mr. Kishibe going to be okay?!” asked Minami. She took a step toward the forest of steel bars.
No sooner had she moved than Kishibe emerged from the darkness, unsteady but still on his feet. “Whew. It surprised me, but I managed to take it.”
“Thank goodness!” Minami breathed a sigh of relief and jogged up to him.
Quanxi’s shout came a half-beat too late. “Wait, Minami! Don’t go near that thing!”
“What?”
Then two things happened at once. Kishibe drove a knife into Minami’s gut, and Quanxi rushed up and punched him in the face.
The devil could transform a mannequin into the likeness of anyone who had touched it, and Quanxi knew Kishibe had touched her look-alike.
Minami saw the thing with Kishibe’s face turn back into a mannequin and shatter. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. She could feel her consciousness ebbing away.
“Yow,” the real Kishibe grunted. He held a hand to his hip as he pulled himself up by the wall. A headless mannequin lay nearby. Lucky for him, his foe hadn’t been able to copy Quanxi’s abilities perfectly. That would be impossible, he thought with grim humor. It had literally been a pale imitation.
Even an imperfect copy of Quanxi’s power was tough to tangle with, but Kishibe had found enough of an opening to tear off the Quanxi-thing’s head.
So it wasn’t the worst worst-case scenario, he thought. But it wasn’t good. The devil was sure to have fled to another body in its nearly inexhaustible supply of backups.