Azuma jumped from the window first. It was only the second floor, so he was able to land solidly on both feet. Next, he spread his arms out wide and waited for Kaguya. She jumped with zero hesitation, suspended in the air for just the briefest of moments—seconds, really. Less than that. Not even a single second.
“…Huh?”
However, Azuma had forgotten one thing.
They all had.
When Sakura died, the hero’s final attack had come after a delay. Once everyone had already relaxed and let down their guard.
Azuma was waiting to catch Kaguya. Koyuki was eyeing the hero’s body. Rindou’s eyes were turned toward the schoolgirl. And Haru was busy trying to convince him to follow them. They all saw it at once.
Just as the hero was about to collapse and vanish entirely, it extended a single rapid tentacle, as thin as a branch, straight toward Kaguya.
“Ah—”
Who actually made the noise? Like air escaping a tire.
A sick, fleshy sound split the night.
The hero’s tentacle penetrated Kaguya’s back and then exited out of the front, straight through her stomach.
The first thing Kaguya felt was discomfort.
There was no pain. No heat. Just the instinctively unpleasant sensation of something foreign worming its way inside her body. The cold and the pressure of suddenly being yanked to a stop mid-fall were immense.
Yes. She felt cold. Even though it was still summer. As cold as if she had suddenly been immersed in solid ice.
A moment later, Kaguya realized she could barely breathe. And then…
“Kaguya!!”
Someone was shouting her name. The despair in the voice told her that something bad had just happened to her. She turned her attention toward her own body.
“Ah…”
There was a hole through her solar plexus.
Her lungs hadn’t taken direct damage, at least, but the impact had broken her ribs, which had pierced her lungs and left them half destroyed. She coughed up a spurt of blood. Once that happened, she instinctively knew.
It was already too late.
They said that a person would always realize when they are close to death. That they don’t need to be told. There was no scientific reason for this. Animal instinct simply made it known.
Kaguya was now experiencing that firsthand. Her body heat fled through the hole in her chest, and her mind was already so foggy that she was worried she might lose consciousness at any moment. Her vision began to shut down in static patches. She could barely make out the figure of someone running toward her.
But she could no longer discern who.
Her sense of equilibrium suddenly disappeared. She was falling. It seemed to happen so slowly for her—like she was dropping down in slow motion. She barely made out the sight of a silver blade cutting through one of the hero’s tentacles.
“Kaguya?!”
There was despair in the voice. The tearful silver calling her name.
The world rapidly began to recede. She couldn’t see. From the sounds around her, she realized that somebody was rushing toward her now, but even those sounds seemed to fade into the distance. Something hot was streaming from her chest, and from the dim corners of her failing vision, she discerned the sight of her own scarlet hair, becoming steadily soaked in deep red blood.
“Silver…”
It was the last color she saw as the darkness closed in on her. A glittering flash of silver. And the briefest glimpse of icy blue.
Captain Azuma—
Kaguya’s consciousness grew hazy. The silver grew faint, and then a chestnut brown began to fill her field of view as if to blot that silver light from her mind.
Kaguya remembered that color. She knew those eyes.
Ren…
Her brother. She was no longer capable of complicated thought. Wavering on the border between reality and dream, life and death, truth and deception, Kaguya did not realize that the young man who appeared before her was only an illusion. And even if she had, she would not have been capable of understanding what that meant.
And so Kaguya extended her hand toward the dream that appeared to her on the outskirts of death.
Toward the figure of her brother.
Toward the Goddess.
They knew.
No one said it out loud, but everyone knew. Kaguya was beyond help.
The pool of blood beneath her had grown so large it looked ready to swallow her whole. Her wound was too deep, making it ruthlessly clear. Nothing could be done for her now.
But what did it mean that she was dying under these circumstances? They all knew the terrible risk. There was something they had to do. No one said it, but they all knew.
“I’ll do it…” Haru drew her knife. She did not have to explain what she meant by it. “I tried to do it for someone once before, and I failed. This time—”
“Wait.”
Azuma bit his lip, clutching the still-bleeding Kaguya. It took less than a second for him to steel his nerves. He stopped Haru before she could finish what it was she was going to say, reversing the grip on his katana.
He wasn’t facing a hero this time, however. He was facing Kaguya.
“I should be the one to do it.”
This was one thing he couldn’t entrust to anyone else. If they had to kill her, it ought to at least be as painless as possible. A single thrust with no hesitation.
It had to be through the neck. Or through the brow. Something that would rob her of life and consciousness in a single instant.
Kaguya seemed to have gone blind now. She stretched her hand out toward empty space. Azuma had a bad feeling about this. It seemed she was seeing something that wasn’t there.
Quickly—he had to kill her quickly. He moved without delay, aiming to thrust the point of his sword through her neck…
That was when it happened.
A sharp scent suddenly filled the air, billowing toward them on the wind as if to smother the blood-drenched battlefield.
It was the scent of osmanthus.
“…!!”
Azuma was helpless to respond in time. There was suddenly a man there, standing next to the prone Kaguya. He had brown hair and a face that vaguely resembled Kaguya’s. He would have been just the right age to be Kaguya’s older brother.
But Kaguya’s brother was already gone—meaning this must be the Goddess. It took them no time to realize what was happening.
Azuma swung with his sword. Koyuki laid down gunfire. Rindou dove forward in a rush. Haru brandished her knife.
Azuma’s sword was at the Goddess’s neck. Koyuki’s bullets were millimeters from the Goddess’s head. Rindou was already within arm’s reach of the Goddess’s right side, and Haru’s exposed knife was closing in from the left.
In another moment, all four of their attacks would connect at once.
But it was already too late.
All four of them were too late.
“N-no…!”
A vortex of wind rose up. A warm breeze enveloped Kaguya as if wrapping her in a sigh. Azuma tried to reach out for her, but to no avail.
And when the wind died down, the Goddess was gone. In its place appeared a single massive flower with petals of the same scarlet hue as Kaguya’s hair.
“Shit!!”
A giant scarlet rose, as large as a person. Several other flowers were bunched together in a circle around the stems in an artistic display that was familiar to even the average layman. It was just like van Gogh’s Sunflowers, only with roses instead.
The petals closest to the center were a pale violet. Two stems supported the thing’s weight, looming quietly and imparting an aura of sanctity to the flowers. The shadow that carved out the face was exactly where the stamen on a flower would have been and was about the same size as a human face. The most distinctive sign of a hero.
“No…,” Azuma whimpered. “Don’t smile. Not like that.”
He could see it. The smiling face of Kaguya Shinohara.
Her eyes lacked focus. The corners of her mouth were raised in a cold grin, an image of something fundamentally broken inside.
This was Kaguya Shinohara’s hero—ominous and terrible.
The petals were all so unnecessarily large, blooming in maliciously insistent profusion. Although it was a flower, it seemed to stand untethered, with no visible roots supporting it.
It was a flower hero, essentially. A beautiful rose in appearance, the same color as Kaguya’s hair. It did not suit her.
They had already grasped the situation and were ready to do what needed to be done. It was their only choice. It didn’t matter if they could. Or even if they wanted to. The hero had already grown to an unnatural size and was only continuing to spread and increase. Its petals had already doubled in just this brief span of time. If left to continue, it would cover the school’s grounds entirely in just twenty to thirty minutes.
“Kaguya!!”
“Azuma, calm down. It hasn’t started moving.”
Someone yanked Azuma backward by his arm, bringing him back to his senses. It was Koyuki. She had stopped him before he could dive headlong into the center of the creature’s mass.
“We can still kill it,” she said, her face as neutral as her voice. “It hasn’t noticed us yet.”
“Kill it?!”
Azuma had been through countless battles. He understood perfectly well what Koyuki meant—but he was having trouble hearing it right now.
“You mean…”
“Are you trying to make me say it?”
Although angry, her voice remained cool and composed. It was the complete opposite of her usually blunt manner. This was enough for Azuma to regain some degree of composure. She was right. If they were going to kill her, they had to do it now.
If they were going to kill Kaguya…
Azuma drew his katana and held it at the ready, dropping his hips. He had no qualms about cutting down this monster that stood before him now.
Even if, for instance, he happened to catch sight of the face hiding within its shadows.
That’s not the real you. You would never smile like that.
In the back of his mind, he knew that it only looked like Kaguya. It was something different now.
Your real smile was never so crazed.
Azuma could feel Koyuki staring at him with concern. He calmly began to issue orders.
“You’re right. It hasn’t noticed us yet. If we’re going to do this, it has to be now.” He followed up with his favorite go-to. “I’ll create an opening. You take care of the rest.”
As the most skilled of the current group, it was up to Azuma to distract the hero, and that meant heading in first. To kill Kaguya.