Asa woke the next day just past noon, having fallen asleep at some point, to find Uta and Tsumugi next to her. She sat up with a start.
“Ah, you’re awake,” Tsumugi said, as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
“Urgh …” Asa nodded, feeling slightly off-kilter.
“We’re going out. Get yourself ready,” the old woman told her.
“Huh? Isn’t it kinda early to go shopping?”
“We’re going a bit farther today.”
“Farther?” Asa asked, tilting her head.
Tsumugi nodded. “Yes,” she replied. “We’re going to see an old friend of mine.”
They wound up taking the subway, eventually arriving at a hospital in the 8th Ward. Yomo’s words from the night before crept back into Asa’s mind. Yujiro Utsumi. He’d been hospitalized in an 8th Ward facility.
As the approached the automatic doors to the hospital, Uta stopped and said, “I’ll wait here. I kind of stand out.”
Asa was flustered. “Should I wait here with you, then?” She didn’t stand out as much as Uta did, but she still stood out.
“No, you come with me. Just remember to hide your face,” Tsumugi said.
Asa pulled her hood up and headed into the hospital.
Tsumugi led her to one of the patient rooms. “Here,” she said. A nameplate reading Yujiro Utsumi hung by the door. Inside, a man somewhere around his seventies was sleeping. There were intravenous tubes and various other pieces of medical equipment connected to his body. The sight brought a quietly pained expression to Tsumugi’s face, the likes of which Asa hadn’t seen before.
“Old lady, is this guy …?”
“Yes. He’s my former lover. And the man who commissioned the mask in that photo.”
“Huh? Wait, so is this guy a Ghoul?” But Asa had never heard of a Ghoul receiving human medical treatment.
“No, he’s human,” Tsumugi affirmed for her. “But you could perhaps consider him a Ghoul all the same.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
Tsumugi silently reached out with a wrinkled hand to touch Yujiro’s face. When he showed no response, she closed her eyes tight. “He would eat people,” she said.
Asa’s breath caught in her throat. “A … a human who … ate other humans?”
“Yes. You could call him a connoisseur of human flesh, I suppose. And he raised Ghouls to help him indulge in his desires.”
At each and every turn, this story was getting harder to comprehend. Asa listened, perplexed, as Tsumugi went on. “He would have them kidnap young women and then butcher them. And if his cannibalistic ways were ever discovered, his plan was to pin all the blame on the Ghouls he’d raised, and flee.”
The tale was starting to make Asa’s head hurt as she attempted to follow along, but then she suddenly remembered the mask. “So then you made that mask for one of the Ghouls this guy was raising?”
Tsumugi nodded to affirm. “I fell in love with his unconventional, bold demeanor, and so I helped him without telling another soul. However, one of his Ghouls was killed by a Ghoul investigator, and so it seems that the existence of the mask got out.”
That’s why the detective had that photo, Asa now realized.
“I think he realized he couldn’t keep it up for long, that he’d be discovered one day, and now he wants to leave this world behind without ever being judged for his crimes.”
The form of Yujiro Utsumi lay unconscious. Even Asa could tell that he would very likely die before he ever woke up again.
Tsumugi took her hand away from Yujiro’s cheek and murmured, “But judgment is deserved.”
The sun had already set by the time they made it back to the 20th Ward, and the surroundings were dark. Uta had already parted ways with them, leaving Asa and Tsumugi to walk alone.
“About what we discussed today,” Tsumugi said as her house was just coming into view. “I’ll leave it to your judgment whether you tell anyone about it or not.”
She must have meant the stuff about Yujiro. “I’m not really the kinda person to spread rumors.”
“I’m not worried about that sort of thing.”
For some reason, those words made Asa stop as if she’d been rooted in place, and she gazed at Tsumugi from behind. The old woman was so small. Just what was it she wanted from Asa?
At that moment, however, Asa felt an unsettling breeze run through the air.
“Huh?!” Asa sensed a sudden presence descending from above. On reflex, she looked up to see insectoid wings spread wide. Next she saw a man’s silhouette, followed by a mask.
The mask looked similar to the one Tsumugi had made at Yujiro’s request, but at the moment that didn’t matter. The man’s wings—his ukaku—stirred the air.
“Old lady, look out!”
A hail of projectiles rained down on them. Asa reached out for Tsumugi, who was walking ahead of her. However, the projectiles from the ukaku pierced through Asa’s outstretched hand, and then her body.
She cried out in pain, and as she was about to hit the concrete, she saw Tsumugi take an even more grievous injury and then collapse.
“Old lady!” Asa cried out, pushing off the ground with her injured right hand and hurrying over to Tsumugi. The masked Ghoul who’d attacked them blocked her way, however.
“Damn you!” Asa ground her molars together hard. She called on her power to release itself, splitting her skin as it rose to the surface in the scaled pattern of her rinkaku. “You son of a bitch!” She turned about and attempted to strike the masked Ghoul with all her might, but he leapt nimbly aside to dodge. It figured that he was capable. Now she had no choice but to focus her mind wholly on killing him.
“Ngh …”
Asa’s eyes darted over to Tsumugi’s silhouette. The pool of blood was growing ever larger. Asa’s mind raced, her thought process becoming muddled.
“Not paying attention?” There was no time to react. The man closed the distance all at once and attacked Asa from close range.
“Argh!” The kick caught Asa hard in the abdomen, sending her hurtling back into a telephone pole. The man then kicked her in the face where she huddled, and proceeded to stomp on her fallen form.