Looking at someone who couldn’t carve a path alone was like being forced to stare directly at their own weakness. It was suffocating, irritating. An eyesore they couldn’t ignore.
Oakley used Joanne and Alex, manipulating events from the shadows to tilt the balance in favor of the Orthodoxy side and drag them toward victory.
Karatena bent the Northeastern Branch’s believers to her will, trying to erase Oakley without staining her own hands.
To him, she was a heretic he would someday have to kill.
To her, he was the murderer of the superior she had adored.
On some level, they had both known from the start. One day, they would have to face each other head-on and fight to the death. That “one day” had simply turned out to be today.
“Haa!”
Karatena let the monstrous strength she’d gained from fusing with the parasite surge through her body, throwing a vicious hook. Reading the true strike hidden among the feints, Oakley brought his left arm up in an L-shape, catching her fist on the guard.
The bone creaked under the impact. It hurt like hell, but it wasn’t fatal. Karatena snapped her long leg up toward Oakley’s crotch.
In a fight to the death, there was no such thing as a foul. He’d been on guard against exactly that cheap shot, though. Oakley caught her knee in the palm of his hand, crushing the kick at its source.
“Tch!”
Seeing her forced onto one leg, he threw himself forward in a desperate shoulder tackle.
They crashed down together, and he rode the momentum straight into a mount, pinning Karatena beneath him as he hammered his fists down again and again.
Skin split across his knuckles, flesh peeled away, and white bone began to show—but Oakley kept punching.
Pinned and unable to use her hands to guard, Karatena’s composure finally cracked. Her lips parted just a fraction.
Oakley’s vision vanished. The parasite nestled in her throat had pushed its true body into her mouth and spat out a flood of silk.
“Ugh!”
“Just hurry up and die, you piece of trash!” she screamed.
She reversed the mount in an instant. Now on top, Karatena drove a straight punch down at Oakley while he clawed at the sticky strands blinding him. A vertical blow struck down from above to drive his skull into the floor.
At the last possible moment, his sight came back.
Oakley twisted his neck sharply, the punch grazing him instead of crushing his head, and his own fist snapped up in a counter uppercut, shattering Karatena’s jaw.
“That soft excuse for a punch is nothing compared to Joanne’s!” he snarled.
Karatena’s eyes rattled, focus slipping. She abandoned her hard-won dominant position entirely, reeling backward and staring up into the darkness overhead.
He didn’t waste the opening. Oakley surged to his feet, dropping his hips low, fist coiling tight at his waist.
He threw himself into the punch, driving all his weight behind it, and just before his fist obliterated Karatena’s neck, he saw it.
Something forcing its way out between her teeth.
The parasite was crawling out of her mouth.
Trying to abandon its host the moment she dies, or a last-ditch ambush?
His thoughts blazed through two possible answers in an instant, but either way, what he had to do didn’t change.
He would smash this insufferable woman’s jaw to pieces.
Oakley drove his fist up from the floor, voice ripping out of his throat.
“HAAAAAAAH!”
His full-power uppercut slammed into Karatena’s lower jaw.
The knuckles that caught her face solidly didn’t just lift her chin; they rammed her own parasite’s head, which had lunged halfway out of her mouth, straight back up with it.
Her own teeth closed on it.
Her bite crushed the parasite’s skull to pulp. His fist kept going, tearing through and snapping every last tooth in her mouth, upper and lower alike, while the shock violently shook her brain inside her skull.
“Kkh… Gah!” Her vision spun. The world flipped a full three-hundred and sixty degrees.
Up and down dissolved. Front and back smeared together. Even the shape of her own “self” blurred and slipped away as Karatena toppled backward.
As her consciousness sank under a blizzard of static, she saw something in that one blow Oakley had thrown.
A storm. A killing storm that tore across the battlefield. The figure of Joanne Sagamix.
Karatena’s brain matter churned, her neural cells shredded. The shock tore through her entire body, and then she stopped moving altogether. One function at a time, her body shut down.
Her flesh died.
And even so, at the very end, a gentle smile rested on Karatena Wallmix’s lips.
“Fuankilo… sama…”
Her chest stopped rising and falling.
The woman lay there with her eyes half-open and did not move again.
Only when his enemy fell completely silent did Oakley finally let the strength drain from his body and drop to his knees.
“Hah… hah…!”
He slumped where he was, sucking in ragged breaths. In the endless shaft that dropped away below them, there was only one sound of breathing left.
Standing atop the ever-falling elevator platform, Oakley threw his head back and roared into the dark.
Karatena’s final smile hadn’t been born of relief at being freed from her burden.
Even in defeat, she’d been certain: down here, at the bottom of this pit, Oakley had no way to survive.
He understood that. He understood, and still, he couldn’t move from the descending lift.
The edges of the platform scraped against the shaft walls, throwing off sparks.
At last, the mechanism could no longer bear the strain. The plant-like structure that formed the entire lift started to break apart.
“So this is it? This dim little hole in the ground is where I die!?”
The scrap of Joanne’s flesh fused to the ring finger of his left hand remained utterly still. Something must have happened to both of them after they were separated in the tunnels. He couldn’t expect any help.
All that was left for Oakley was to fall to the bottom of the shaft and wait for death.
That was when Karatena’s last familiar sank its mandibles into his frontal lobe.
The impact that ripped through him was unlike anything he’d ever felt.
A complete blindsiding. He didn’t have the strength left to even tear the thing free.
Cracks split the platform under his feet. The entire structure of the lift, woven from living plant tissue, finally gave way and collapsed.
A queasy lurch rolled through his gut as the floor vanished out from under him, and Oakley was thrown into the dark.
A heartbeat later, he was slammed by the shock of water. Spray hammered against his skin, and then the full force of the underground torrent swallowed him whole.
The young man’s consciousness sank into that murky darkness and vanished.
Deep within Oakley’s mind, the tiny fragment of Joanne that remained watched his despair with something like tender affection.