Putting his arm around Aranagi's neck, he dragged her limp body, pulling Suo by the collar at the same time, dragging him along the ground like a bag of trash.
“Hey, kid. Can't you be more careful?” Suoh asked weakly, but Minato just glanced at him sideways.
“Be thankful I decided to drag you along, you damn Yamcha.”
“Yeah, I'm glowing with happiness, I humbly bow to your indulgence, Your Majesty.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Minato noticed that Aranagi's hair had returned to its usual ripe orange color, without any white streaks, which could mean that the network had stopped working, or at least temporarily suspended.
He sincerely hoped for the former, as his body was gradually failing. The only consolation was that Tsuna wasn't screaming, which was already a good sign.
Putting Aranagi and Suoh on the ground, Minato looked at the chaos they had caused. It was as if someone had been fighting street battles during a revolution. For a second, his eyes closed and a black veil enveloped his gaze, but he could clearly hear faint cries from the recesses of his consciousness. But when he opened his eyes, there was silence, as if during a calm.
“Tsk, you might as well take a picture right now and send it to Michael Bay as a set for his next movie,” Minato snorted with slight frustration.
“Buildings can be rebuilt, unlike human lives. Be glad that no one died,” Makoto replied wearily.
"That's not what I mean. I just don't want all the dogs to be set on us. The last thing I need is to pay for it out of my own pocket or get caught in the clutches of the press. Even if I sold every organ, it wouldn't be enough.“ Minato snapped in his even voice, which reminded Makoto of how much trouble she had gotten into for turning in the bomber to the police. The memory sent a shiver down her spine.
”Don't worry about that." Suoh replied quietly, lighting a cigarette at some point. Apparently, he wasn't too concerned about the hole in his stomach. “All I have to do is pull a couple of strings, and it'll be as if you were never here. If anyone asks, your house is on the edge of town.”
"At least there's one piece of good news today. I'm already a little fed up with our team A for today." Minato sighed wearily, fending off an annoying, strangely buzzing insect that continued to pursue him despite the chaos around him. Strange suspicions crept into Minato's mind, no one had shown up despite the noise.
The eye of the insect, which had been knocked away by a palm, twitched. What appeared to be a small lump of flesh with wings was in fact a small mechanical creature. The artificial body emitted vibrating sounds from the motor, which caused the wings to move. The eye was essentially a lens with a built-in image transmission system with a range of up to twenty kilometers.
The lens stared intently at Minato, shifting its gaze from Makoto to Aranagi. On the other side, two people were watching them.
They sat in leather chairs in an absurdly large room that seemed far too disproportionate to be inside any building. There were no lamps here, but a large holographic screen in the middle of the room, along with hundreds of others, illuminated the space, eliminating the need for any other light sources.
There were no windows, no doors, no cracks to penetrate this impregnable fortress, built to survive a dozen nuclear explosions without a scratch.
Hundreds, or even thousands, of pipes, cables, and wires stretched toward the main monitor, which displayed the fight with Aranagi. Two people watched it.
One of them was dressed in standard, everyday clothes, over which he wore an unbuttoned lab coat, which made him look like a scientist or a doctor. But his gray hair and half-burned face better conveyed the essence of his nature. Kimura Kosaku, a butcher whom even the angel of death, Mengele, would envy. A man who was ready to send anyone to the slaughter under his scalpel. A child, an old man, a man, a pregnant woman. It didn't matter if it brought benefit and pleasure to his twisted mind.
With a maniacal smile that disfigured his already disfigured face like a wide crack in a clean, smooth slab of marble, he watched what was happening, revelling in every second.
Every scream, every tear, every drop of blood.
“Amazing,” he said in his low voice. “Who would have thought that Thanatos could work not only with the rest of the rabble, but also with the Sister? Even without killing anyone, he's definitely losing his touch.” the disfigured butcher remarked sarcastically. It was obvious that he took particular pleasure in Aranagi's despair, in which she was mired.
The one who listened to the incoherent ravings of the mad ripper was a human. His hair, the color of a clear summer sky, fell slightly below his shoulders. He was thin, which made him look like both a man and a woman. His youthful face made it impossible to guess his age. He looked like a cheerful young man, but his azure, angelic eyes had the gaze of a mature old man who had seen all the horrors of this world.
His pious, almost saintly appearance contrasted sharply with his cold, calm gaze; he was not ashamed of the carnage that had been unleashed because of him.
The devil incarnate and a saint, a cunning fox and the embodiment of childlike innocence, less than the Almighty, but more than an insect. A man of mystery. A man of contradictions. But, above all, a man.
“Calm down for a second, Harvey Dent, or you'll lose the other half too.” said the man in a bored voice, propping his face up with his hand and looking at the screen with a calm, analytical gaze. But after a couple of moments, his gaze shifted slightly to the side. Somewhere about thirty degrees to the left of the screen.
A young man was floating in a cylindrical tank three meters in diameter and ten meters high. The tank was filled with a toxic green liquid resembling radioactive waste, and the guy, who looked barely twenty years old, was completely naked, with his skull cut open in half, revealing his brain, to which numerous tubes were attached, as were tubes attached to his entire body.
Just a couple of minutes ago, he was writhing in agony, connected to the Aranagi network. But now he had fallen asleep.
A man dressed in a black shirt and trousers, black as death itself, slowly approached the tank, the click of his shoes echoing through the absurdly large room.
“You're right, they did well.” The man's voice betrayed his undisguised disappointment. “Life is a constant struggle. A struggle in which, time and again, sacrifices must be made in order to achieve what you desire. If you are not prepared to become white ashes, then you have no right to burn.”
Without a moment's hesitation, he pressed the button on the control panel near the cylinder, and the tubes connected to the guy's brain began to pump a red liquid into his head, made from Aranagi's serum but modified by the man and Kosaku.
The rush of substances instantly awakened the guy, and he began to thrash in agony, banging on the glass of the cylinder from the inside in desperate attempts to escape from this hell. But the man just watched the guy's torment with enviable calm, which even Minato did not have. For he looked like a saint, but was a devil in human flesh
Minato heard someone's ragged, heavy breathing. Aranagi stood up on her weak, shaky legs, but her body betrayed her every time. She pounded on her knees, which treacherously buckled, refusing to carry her into battle. Her body refused to fight, but her mind did not.
“You idiot, don't you understand anything?! Accept defeat, you won't achieve anything in this state! You won't prove anything to anyone! You'll only destroy yourself more!” Unable to contain his anger, Suoh shouted, not wanting to see Shinso break herself even more in pursuit of the unattainable.
“Be quiet... don't say a word...” Her words lacked their former fervor, there was no anger in them, only a quiet determination to go to the end, no matter how bitter it might be. “Even if it tears my bones apart, even if the whole world is my enemy, I won't stop until...” Her words were cut off by a sharp sigh.
She tried to connect to the network, her eyes filled with blood again, but something clicked in her head, like the sound of broken glass. The sigh was followed by a slight groan, slowly but surely turning into a painful scream, as if someone was trying to drill a hole in her head with a dull wood drill. The scream confused everyone. But Minato had a damn bad feeling.
“Damn, has the backlash started?” Makoto wondered, suspecting that all the tension and pain from using the network might be coming back to haunt her all at once.
The clothes on her back began to decompose, from her robe to the delicate skin of her back, where a lump of gray mass, similar to mercury, began to form. From her scream, it seemed that it was either burning through her body or trying to tear out her spine along with all her organs. But the lump gradually slid off her back, rolling twenty meters away from them, bubbling like boiling water. The heat emanating from the mass was like a red-hot stone oven.
When the clot spread out to two by two meters, something began to crawl out of it, and at that moment, everyone was paralyzed. A large, bony hand emerged, followed by the entire skeleton. The three-meter-tall body frame stood motionless. It was too bulky to be human. Every part of the monstrous skeleton was too massive, a long bony tail sprouted from the sacrum, with horizontal vertebrae and a spiked tip.
Where the ears should have been, black horns grew, forming a crescent. Smoking like a witch-burning pyre, the skeleton was covered with layers. Nerves, fat, vessels, organs, gray, torn muscles, and on top of them was a white, thin film that served as skin.
Sharp protrusions gradually appeared on its back from the back of its head to its thighs. Its head looked as if someone had torn off its nose, with small eyes. Its face was split in half by a huge crescent-shaped mouth that emitted blue smoke and was studded with rows of razor-sharp teeth.
As it appeared, no one dared to move, and it was not only because of the scorching heat emanating from the monster. An indescribable feeling of primal fear filled every cell of the body, preventing them from moving a muscle, like a small animal in the clutches of a predator.
The monster stood motionless, breathing calmly through its mouth. It seemed empty, just a shell of something real. But it was the master of the network that Aranagi had created, and which it had intercepted thanks to a human. Empty as a blank sheet of paper, its mind was seething with all the emotions that spread through the network.
That is why it absorbed anger, hatred, sadness, alienation, contempt, suffering, and envy like a sponge. The feelings of those people who were humiliated, who felt ashamed of their very existence, who were discredited and disgraced. All this darkness of human souls was absorbed by the mind of this creature and became its self.
Twenty meters away, the monster put all its strength into a lunge with its large, muscular legs, ignoring the blades that flew out from Suoh's activated traps, which were involuntarily triggered by the monster.
A couple of moments later, without giving them time to blink, it was already inches away from them. He saw it, he felt the weakness emanating from them. With one movement, his monstrous paw swept Suoh aside like the weakest link, crushing the titanium plates like paper. Embedded in the concrete wall, Suoh didn't even have time to make a sound, paralyzed by pain, as if he had been hit by a high-speed train. Even his artificial body didn't help, even it was broken. Minato and Makoto watched in horror, seeing the sadistic smile that formed on the monster's face.
The beast, standing at the top of the food chain, did not hesitate, in less than a moment, it was already looming over its next victim. The one who belonged to the strong, the gifted, the ones born with a silver spoon in their mouths, hated by all the incompetent. Makoto, who covered Aranagi with her body.
The mouth, blurred in a devilish grin, expressed utter contempt for her existence. Sharp claws hung over her like a guillotine over the head of a sinner. The speed of the swing created a gust of wind that raised a cloud of dust. The claws froze a few millimeters from Makoto's eye, but not because of doubt, but because of Minato's sweeping kick, which cut the monster's jaw and made its legs buckle, causing its hand to lose its trajectory.
“T-thank you...” Makoto muttered weakly, finding the strength to say the words she never thought she would say to him.
“You're thanking me for nothing,” Minato grumbled, spitting blood from his bitten tongue. “I didn't have time to react. If my body hadn't started moving on its own, you wouldn't be here anymore.” Minato said, watching as the hanging jaw grew back into place.
The ferocious snarl turned into a scream. A hateful, contemptuous scream directed at Minato. The monster's palm slammed into the ground as if crushing an insect, but it was enough to shatter the stone beneath it.
“What a mess. Get out of here, Arnie!” Minato shouted, moving his legs away from Makoto and the other wounded, drawing the monster's attention to himself.
The monster's claws grew larger, and, covered with air spikes, it created five air cutters with a single swing, cutting through any obstacle. Minato managed to squeeze into a small space between two cutters, hastily retreating backward, but the monster, rushing on all fours, was already looming over him like a thundercloud.
Both arms were raised above its head, which it would use as a hammer, leaving not even a wet trace of its victim in the end.
“This scum is much faster than me. If I continue to rely on my head, it will devour me and not choke.”
Pinned to the ground and with no room to retreat due to the looming monster, Minato jumped up on his hands and, using them as springs, slammed his feet into the monster's skull where its eyes should have been. The bones crumpled under the weight of the blow like jelly, and Minato's feet not only punched a hole in the monster's not-so-dense skull, but also knocked the monster off balance, allowing Minato to slip out of its strong grip and retreat to the remains of a more or less intact armored vehicle, hoping to find something more lethal than his own limbs.
Watching the battle, Makoto saw that the monster was merely toying with it’s prey. This made her feel even more useless. She knew that with her legs, she would only be dead weight, dragging them to the bottom, but her pride would not allow her to sit idly by. Her palms became covered with small threads. She pressed those palms against her broken legs, allowing the threads to dig into her flesh and sew the broken bones together.
The pain was so intense that Makoto bit her lip until it bled to keep from screaming. She knew the pain would not go away, but she would have a chance to move, even if she could never walk again.
Minato reached the wreckage of the armored vehicle in a couple of long strides, hoping to find more effective weapons in the operatives' supplies, but the monster's sharp tail, stretched out like a snake, dug into his right leg with vertebrae as sharp as machetes and a spiked tip.
“Damn it, almost!”
Quickly grabbing an iron rod and an object the size of a rock lying nearby, Minato was pulled upside down by the monster, as if he had been caught in an old animal trap. Holding him, the monster growled hatefully, the heat emanating from its mouth resembling a rocket engine.
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A clawed hand dug into his stomach, piercing his flesh, wanting to hear the sweet cries of its victim. But Minato, despite the burning pain that pierced him like an orbitoclast, did not want to give the freak such an honor, and only clenched his teeth tighter.
He tried to pierce its head with a rod, right where he had broken its skull, but the iron bent. And it wasn't that the metal was weaker than his blow. It was that this creature was beginning to adapt.
One blow was enough to increase its resistance in that area. And Minato understood that perfectly well.
“Ugh, you freak should brush your teeth more often. You stink like garbage,” Minato joked dryly. As if to mock him, it bit off the bent metal, leaving only a stub with a sharp tip.
Opening its mouth to bite off the head of the weakening Minato, it stopped, frozen in place. This was something Minato couldn't understand.
Was it malfunctioning? Or was it planning a more painful death for him? But then, looking around, he saw Tsuna raise his head, staring fiercely at the monster through bloodshot eyes.
Although he looked no better than he had a few minutes ago, he was resisting. The network was active again, and everyone connected to it was surely writhing in agony, and Tsuna was no exception.
But he held on, fighting the pain, fighting the network and his own weakness, which he despised. His mind alone was insignificant against thousands of others. Trying to resist the hatred of thousands with his convictions was like trying to repaint the world's oceans with a drop of blood.
The pain and contempt that pierced his mind through the network did not break his resolve, but only strengthened it. And Tsuna's will gave Minato the moment he so desperately needed.
With the sharp end of the metal, he made an incision in the monster's belly and tore it open with his bare hands, tearing through the thick muscles. Even the blood burned like acid, but he tried to ignore it.
“Eat up, don't spill it, you moron.” Minato spat, placing the stone-sized object into the monster's belly. A frag grenade.
Pulling out the pin and shoving it between the entrails, Minato cut off the tip of the tail that was holding him and fell out of its grip. Circling around the monster that had regained consciousness, Minato sent the heavy carcass on a short flight with a falling blow.
“Even cutting open your belly was problematic. You may be hard on the outside, but on the inside you're not much different from a human,” Minato said contemptuously, watching the monster torn apart from the inside from a distance. The entire upper part of its body was scattered into small pieces, including its arms and head, and its almost colorless organs.
Only one thing bothered the tired Minato. The legs were still standing in place. The unpleasant feeling of an impending storm of shit was akin to a shower under ice-cold water, because a new skeleton, new nerves, new muscles, and new arms with a head had grown in place of the old torso.
There was just one catch. The monster had become even more massive, its shoulders and back twice as wide, and its arms larger than any bodybuilder's.
Small black marks adorned the white film that was the creature's skin, but the monster had no time for that.
Pain. Its very nature was saturated with pain and hatred. And now, it was being caused even more pain. This caused its wide mouth to contort into an ugly grimace of disgust and anger. The blue haze changed color to burgundy, and the temperature showed no sign of dropping. Now its mouth was like a furnace.
Standing in the middle of the intersection, Minato had more room to maneuver, but this also restricted him, as the larger area made it easier for the monster to slip past and finish off the wounded first. Minato was once again in a stalemate. As he was thinking about what to do, he heard loud cries coming from behind the monster.
This was the last thing he wanted, more people to protect from the monster. But these weren't two civilians passing by, they were two Specialists. One of them was the Equalizer, a Specialist who had made a name for himself over the past few months and whose power made criminals tremble in fear.
The second was Noir, a guy dressed in black whose power allowed him to create duplicates of himself.
The destruction here did not go unnoticed, and the heroes who had come to the rescue looked on in horror at the destruction in silent disbelief.
“Noir, tell me this is just the setting for a new commercial, not real life.” said the Equalizer quietly, clenching his fists in rage, but his partner, who had also come here on duty, could not find the strength to respond. He was paralyzed with fear.
Their attention was quickly drawn to Minato, who was fighting a terrifying and unknown monster. Its very presence was frightening. But, not wanting to see an ordinary, wounded teenager fighting something so terrible, the Equalizer called out to the monster.
“Hey, creature! If you're so eager to fight, why don't you take on an opponent your own size, huh?!” shouted the Specialist, unable to tolerate the injustice.
It was a mistake. A fatal mistake.
“You idiots! Run away from here!” Minato shouted.
Grabbing a more or less intact armored personnel carrier, the monster hurled it at the Specialists with all its might, as if it were a papier-maché toy. It nearly crushed them with the multi-ton piece of metal, but the Equalizer caught it with his superhuman strength. Yet the monster was like a disaster, impossible to stop.
Neither Tsuna's attempts to interfere with the net, nor Makoto's gutting with threads, nor Minato's blow that pierced the sternum through the back helped.
With a furious, deafening roar, a heated thermal beam devouring oxygen flew out of the monster's mouth, resembling a shell fired from a railgun at maximum power in terms of its roar, power, and temperature.
Buildings, asphalt, air. Everything was heated and melted like wax figures, stopping at nothing. And even after melting the reinforced steel van to the state of a burnt candle, the beam did not stop. Only when the accumulated energy was exhausted did the monster calm down, spilling its fury on the two Specialists.
With an ominous grin, it watched the aftermath of the fiery hell it had created with its own hands. At such a temperature, not even a pile of ashes would remain of their bodies.
No one had the strength to utter a word after what they had seen. Especially Minato. Again. Once again, he was unable to do anything. He could only stare impassively at the smelter in which the two Specialists had perished.
No dramatic cries, no fanfare. Two people were reduced to nothing in an instant. And he couldn't do a damn thing. He didn't save them. Even though he should have.
“You... you... fucking bastard!” With unbridled fury, Minato's hands pierced and tore through the monster's sheet metal-hard back despite the pain.
His hands broke ribs, and he managed to pull out two sharp shards made from the bones of this gutter. With one of the shards, Minato cut the tendons in the monster's legs, forcing the giant to its knees, and with the other, he stabbed the creature's skull, splitting it open and piercing it’s brain.
Reacting to the pain, it screamed and grabbed Minato with its sharp claws, piercing his body and lifting him above its head, intending to break the annoying toy that no longer brought it any pleasure.
Watching the carnage, Aranagi, who woke up just as the beam was fired, laughed. She laughed loudly, desperately. It was not the laughter of euphoria, nor the laughter of a victor, but the laughter of a madman who had lost the last thing that connected him to reality and was gradually losing his mind.
“Just think! Even when I thought I was doing what I wanted, he still had me! He made me dance to his tune!”
She laughed not at the grief that surrounded her, but above all at herself. At her own stupidity and vanity. Vanity, for which not only she paid, but everyone around her.
She laughed at the mistakes she could never correct, no matter how hard she tried, because she had nothing left. She couldn't restore her daughter to her former self, couldn't kill those responsible for so many deaths. But she would be left alone to answer for the consequences of her actions.
It was a responsibility she could no longer bear. Her trembling hand grabbed the nearest piece of Suoh's sedan windshield and aimed it at her throat. She was ready to say goodbye to everything, but before she did the irreparable, Makoto grabbed her wrist.
“If you have time for self-flagellation and suicide, then you have time to help kill this creature.”
"Pff, as if my words carry any weight. You have no reason to believe me..." But before she could even finish, Makoto leaned close to her, smiling gently despite the nightmare unfolding around them. Rather, it was because of what was happening that she forced herself to smile, in order to somehow maintain her sanity.
“I'll take that risk and believe you. Because I know that the real Aranagi-san loves people too much to lie now.” She had no proof, no ironclad certainty, only faith in a person, faith that she loved people as much as she did. And that was precisely why she would not allow this to continue.
Stabbing a piece of rib into his brain harder, like a needle for a lobotomy, Minato forced the monster to loosen its grip and jumped back to gain some distance. Now that he was bleeding and his body had more holes than a colander, he couldn't go on the offensive.The enraged beast struck the ground with its palm, sending out another shockwave, but it was more like a bull tapping its hoof before a race.
It went on the rampage again, attacking Minato in an unbridled burst of violence, each blow cutting through the ground, each blow potentially the last, and each blow passing close to Minato. It was a battle of attrition, and Minato absolutely did not have the advantage. The leg that had just been broken by the hard tip of the tail paralyzed him for a few seconds.
A burgundy mist wafted from its mouth again, which meant only one thing: it was about to fire another heat ray, with which it intended to wipe Minato off the face of the earth.
He could use it now. His Special, with which he could nullify any attack from the monster, with which he could escape. But he couldn't bring himself to do it. He couldn't forgive himself for even a second of using this ability. Closing his eyes for just a moment, he could see only mountains of corpses.
Mountains of corpses paved with his own hands. And this creature was like his executioner, punishing him for his sins.
He heard a distant chuckle. But it wasn't Aranagi's hysterical laughter. Rather, it was a quiet, barely restrained giggle, about to turn into laughter.
Turning toward the source of the sound, Minato noticed that time had frozen. There was only him and a silhouette made of fog, whose voice suspiciously resembled his own.
“Who are you? My Boddah?” Minato asked mockingly. But the voice only burst into hysterical laughter, laughing at Minato's insignificance in this situation.
“You really are pathetic! Just fucking disgusting! If you still don't understand anything, then you really are better off just dying like a rabid dog!” the voice shouted, bursting into laughter.
Minato did not understand the nature of this silhouette, but time was relentless, and it resumed its course, returning him to the cold reality where he was one step away from death. But fate had its own plans.
Sharp threads dug into the skull of the eyeless monster, cutting through flesh like slices of meat under a butcher's cleaver. After severing the cervical spine, Makoto was able to twist the neck so that the head was thrown back, and a heat ray was released into the sky like a pillar of flame piercing the dark heavens.
This allowed Minato to escape the clutches of death once again. He knew that next time, he would not survive.
“Thank you,” Minato said weakly.
“Don't thank me. I just don't like being in debt,” Makoto replied just as weakly, which made Minato doubt the sincerity of her words.
She replayed Aranagi's words in her head over and over again. Again and again, she realized how close the solution was.
“It appeared because of outside interference. Therefore, having emerged from me, it took control of the network. If it is destroyed, not only will the monster disappear, but the network itself will disappear. But the abnormal regeneration and adaptation after each attack will only get in the way.”
She repeated these words in her head, knowing that Special Minato, who nullifies any ability, could completely destroy this creature. But she remembered that he hated it. He hated it with all his soul. And if the word “hatred” was written on every cell of his body, it would not be enough to convey even a hundredth of the hatred he felt.
But Aranagi knew. She knew the reasons for his hatred, the unbearable guilt that literally devoured him from within. And he hesitated, seeing how his inaction cost people their lives, his resolve only weakening. Now he needed just the slightest push, because if Minato didn't decide to tear this rot from his soul, then this creature would destroy them.
“You should stay in the rear. Otherwise, you'll be the first to get hit,” Minato said to Aranagi, but she didn't bat an eye.
"I don't care. I am responsible for creating this creature, so I don't care what happens to me. Even if I die, I don't care." Aranagi replied. She did not consider her life worth risking, especially after what she had done.
She had lost hope, and death would be more of a redemption than a punishment.
“Hey, if you're exhausted, I'll take over. If this scum is bleeding, then it means it can be killed. Sounds simple.” Makoto said, but he could see that just standing there was torture for her. Her legs were shaking, and sweat was pouring down her body like she had a fever.
Her words gave him the final push to realize how pathetic he really was.
Everyone was fighting for their own reasons. Some for revenge, some out of kindness, some because they couldn't do otherwise. But what was he fighting for? Why was he going into battle?
To numb his guilt? To help? What good was this weak desire?
What good was his wavering determination when others were ready to die just to finish what they had started, what they believed in?
Tsuna couldn't even move, but he resisted the net with all his might, and even when he was beaten, he continued to fight because he couldn't do otherwise.
Makoto, despite her injuries, despite the apparent simplicity of her desire, was ready to fight to the last drop of blood.
Aranagi had long since given up on herself and was ready to do anything. Even if there was no one left who would look at her as a human being. Even if the whole world became her enemy, she would do what she thought was right.
And him? He gave up so easily because of guilt, because of fear, time and time again ready to give up and throw everything away because of his own selfishness, unable to go on. Not having the right to call himself a human being.
Every person experiences grief and hardship, but people find the strength within themselves to move on.
And just by stopping in the middle of this vile swamp of corpses, would he become less than human? The answer was clear from the beginning: if he didn't allow himself to go on living, if he didn't allow himself to accept this grief, this guilt, then he wouldn't be able to do a damn thing.
“If you are not prepared to become white ashes, then you have no right to burn” Minato whispered quietly.
The monster's paw swing was interrupted when it saw black sparks coming from Minato's bangs. The animal fear it instilled in others now overwhelmed it, but it was too late.
Minato stepped forward calmly, gently pushing Makoto and Aranagi aside. He stretched out his left hand. Several violent sparks burst from his palm, but a moment later, with a roar like thunder, a seething stream of black lightning burst forth, engulfing the monster and tearing the flesh from its body, forcing it to jump back.
In terms of heat and power, these lightning bolts surpassed the monster's heat ray several times over, causing the creature to scream in excruciating pain.
The sharp, uncontrolled release of electricity caused Minato's hand to cramp in pain, and the smell of burning flesh emanated from it. But he didn't care. There was no turning back, so he just kept going forward.
“Aranagi-san, you may not care, but there are people who don't want you to die, and it will be sad if they don't see you next to them when they wake up.” Quietly saying these words, Minato headed towards the monster, which was thirty meters away.
Makoto only caught a glimpse of his expression. Even a couple of sparks would set him off, let alone an explosion of this magnitude. But his face was calm. No, rather, it was a look of humility that had descended upon him.
The monster's attempts to restore its flesh only exacerbated the situation and accelerated the process of decay.
Again. Again, the rejected and humiliated would be crushed, no matter how hard they tried. And Minato, like an executioner walking to the scaffold, walked towards his victim.
The monster's tail curled and stretched toward Minato like a poisonous snake lunging at its prey. At the same time, another heat ray shot out of its mouth, aimed in their direction. It didn't matter if the monster hurt itself, as long as it meant Minato's death.
But it was all in vain. Minato's palm turned black, and a shock wave burst from it, resembling a membrane in shape. The tail turned to dust, and the beam scattered into a multitude of sparks dancing in the air like dandelion petals in the wind.
"Hey, freak. Want to know why it's Thanatos?“ Minato asked quietly.
Without waiting for an answer, he ran at the creature one last time. It covered itself with a translucent force field that was several times stronger than Aranagi's.
”You're more trouble than your creator," Minato thought to himself.
A black mass of sparkling energy burst from his hand, stretching out like a scythe during harvest time. Cutting through both the field and the monster itself like melted butter, the scythe sliced the monster from its right shoulder to its left hip diagonally, like a plasma cutter amplified several thousand times.
Both halves fell to the ground, trying to grow back together, writhing like a worm. What was left of the torso began to swell again, increasing the monster's size even more.
"You really do get bigger after every wound. A tenacious parasite. If you don't have a core, then you just need to be incinerated," Minato thought to himself, looking at the creature with his cold, dull eyes.
The upper half fell onto its back, and Minato took this as an invitation and climbed on top, continuing to emit chaotic lightning bolts.
His face was blank, as usual for him, and so frightening for the monster. There was only resignation to the injustice of this world.
“That's why I'm just going to devour you.”
The dancing storm disappeared for a moment, as if absorbed into the hand raised above the guilty party, black as original sin, ready to pronounce the death sentence. The hand pierced the monster's chest, releasing a deafening roar of all-consuming lightning that formed a pillar four meters in diameter.
Like the mouth of a disaster that devours everything, the pillar consumed oxygen and heated the air with its heat, piercing both the earth and the split heavens.
"Amazing. This power surpasses that of several thousand people. So this is what you are, Devourer." whispered Aranagi, watching the end of this story before losing consciousness from exhaustion.
An end after which everyone will get what they deserve, just as she will finally get her punishment, from which she will not dare to run away.
Standing next to the hole in the clouds, on the ashes he himself had created, Minato just stared at his blackened, burnt hand, which looked as if fireworks had exploded inside it.
Every nerve ending screamed in pain, but he didn't care. The monster had disappeared like a bad dream, but the pain in his heart remained with him.
The large screen was covered with gray interference. Minato's electric attack had disabled all the nearby insects used for surveillance. The last moment captured before the destruction was Minato's raised hand and a flash that could be seen from all corners of the city.
With a sadistic, subtle smile, the man stared at the screen, digging his fingers into the leather of the chair. He saw what he wanted, saw endless potential, and death itself in the flesh.
His smile was cruel, yet so human.
“Exactly. Only now have you shown what you really are, kid. A devourer who is about to reap his great harvest. Death. The destroyer of worlds.” the man finally said with satisfaction.
He didn't even pay attention to the decomposing corpse of the boy in the tank, as if it were just part of the interior.
“God, and you told me to calm down. You're a hypocrite after all, Zero.”