“Who the hell are you? Why are you wearing the old lady’s mask?” Asa asked, catching sight of the embroidered mask. Wasn’t the Ghoul who’d had Tsumugi’s mask supposed to be dead?
“You have no idea what’s going on with us, huh? Meh, whatever. Losing our breadwinner’s made us a bit cranky. So I guess I’ll just torture you to death, and—”
The man stopped short and backed away from Asa. She couldn’t understand why, but then, across the street, she saw a figure emerge from the shadows.
“I’d appreciate it if you stopped that.”
Asa could hardly believe it. “Uta?” But he’d already gone off.
“Uta, from the 4th Ward, huh? Hmph. This doesn’t look good …” The man looked over at Tsumugi as he backed away from his intimidating foe. The old woman wasn’t moving at all. “Well, guess I accomplished what I came to do. No point in sticking around. See ya!” The man then leapt into the air and darted off.
Ordinarily, Asa would have given chase, but now wasn’t the time for that. “Old lady!” She rushed to Tsumugi’s side. She had injuries all over, and was bleeding out. Asa tried using both hands to stanch the bleeding, but all she succeeded in doing was getting them soaked red. Her own Ghoul body had already begun to recover, whereas Tsumugi’s life was draining away.
“Th-that’s right! The hospital!” If she took Tsumugi there, they could help her.
As Asa was about to lift Tsumugi, the old woman managed to croak out some words. “You fool. I told you …”
“Old lady!”
“How do you plan on explaining this? With all these strange punctures … the doctors will realize … I’ve been attacked by a Ghoul … ”
“So what? You have been attacked by a Ghoul!”
“And then the Ghoul investigators will come. If they investigate me … they’ll find out about you. Worst case, you might be killed …” With that, Tsumugi coughed, a large amount of blood spilling from her mouth.
Asa had killed countless people, had seen blood so many times before, but the sight of Tsumugi’s blood now made her tremble in fear.
“You can’t save me … I’d hoped for things to end this way.”
“You … you wanted this?”
Tsumugi’s eyes narrowed, and she stared up at the nighttime sky. “Yujiro raised two Ghouls … one who did the kidnapping, the other who did the butchering. The one who died was the kidnapper, so the one just now must’ve been the butcher …”
“There were two of them? But wait, why did you want this?” Asa couldn’t make sense of any of it.
Tsumugi went on, her voice halting. “He was long afraid that I might expose everything. He behaved while Yujiro was around, but now that Yujiro’s not long for this world … I suppose he decided to take action.”
It was visibly painful for her to talk, her upper body heaving with each raspy breath. The sight of her suffering like this brought a pain to Asa’s chest. “Why didn’t you say something before? I could have done something! This didn’t have to happen to you!”
Asa’s shouting made Tsumugi narrow her eyes again. “I just wanted to take responsibility for the life I’ve led.”
“Old lady …”
“This is fine …”
In the hospital room, Tsumugi had murmured something about deserving judgment. It seemed she hadn’t been referring only to Yujiro, but to herself as well.
Her eyes grew heavier, her pupils disappearing behind her eyelids. She was dying, about to drift off into the dark. It hadn’t been a long time, but the days she’d spent with Tsumugi flashed through Asa’s memories.
“No,” she said, feeling a heat growing in her chest. “Don’t you die on me, old lady! I’ve had so much fun … I’ve had so much fun spending time with you!” She was a human, and an elderly woman, at that. She would have been completely beneath the old Asa’s notice; now the girl was despairing so much that she found it hard to breathe. “Your masks were so amazing, and your embroidery is amazing too! I mean you were a pain in the ass at first, but at some point, I … I started having fun, and …”
Tears fell from Asa’s eyes, one after the other.
“There was a warmth inside me, and sometimes even a tightness in my chest … and right now it just hurts so much … Don’t die, old lady … You can’t. You still have so much more to teach me!”
Uta silently cast his gaze aside as Asa shouted. There was a sudden warm sensation on her cheek. She watched as Tsumugi took the palm of her hand and roughly wiped away the tears.
“You’re getting all sentimental on me,” the old woman said, tears streaming from her own eyes. “Don’t do shoddy work now, Asa,” she added with a tiny smile, her wrinkled face wrinkling up all the more.
With that, her hand limply fell away.
“Old lady?” Asa looked at Tsumugi in disbelief. But she wasn’t moving anymore. She wasn’t answering. “Old lady!”
Asa drew the body up into her arms and held it close, unable to hold back her scream. “Tsumugi!”
“Uta, did you know all this from the beginning?”
They were back at Tsumugi’s house. Asa had washed the blood away and lain her out atop the bed. She looked into the dead woman’s face, her voice dry. “That someone was after her, I mean. And if I’d known, would there … could I have protected her?”
Uta shook his head. He looked back and forth between Asa and Tsumugi, and then calmly muttered, “All I wanted was to take a look at Tsumugi’s embroidery. And …”
“And what?”
“And I thought you two would have really good chemistry, so …”
Asa looked back at Uta.
“I wanted you two to meet each other.”
Asa’s eyes went wide. Then she bit her lip hard as she looked at him.
Even though the loss hurt, even though there was sadness in death, even though Tsumugi was a human and Asa was a Ghoul …
… she was glad to have met her.
She truly felt that, deep down.