Chapter 34: The Lesser Sacred Relic

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“Then... could I see my mother?” Takamatsu Tomori asked softly.

Death was a terrifying word, but she was not afraid of her own approaching end.

Many years ago, when she first realized that she was different from everyone else, she had already imagined such a thing.

She still remembered the time she had given a box of pill bugs as a present to a new friend, only for the friend’s parents to call her home and berate her furiously.

Her mother had remained bent over the telephone, apologizing again and again. That humble, sorrowful smile, so meek it seemed capable of sinking into the dust, was something Tomori had been too young to understand fully. Even so, she could sense how deeply her mother was hurting.

An ordinary parent would probably have turned around and slapped her, shouting, “How did I ever give birth to such a strange child?”

But her mother never did that. In her gentlest voice, she would always say, “Tomori, why did you do something like that? I know you really like pill bugs, but I don’t think they make very suitable gifts for someone else. How about I go with you to buy a different present and give it to her? Then she might be willing to forgive you, too.”

Without her, the withdrawn and autistic Takamatsu Tomori might have left this world long ago.

When she imagined herself dying, all she felt was sorrow toward her mother and the desire to see her one more time.

“It is a reasonable request, but unfortunately, I can only refuse,” said Tachibana Masamune. “Your reason has merely returned for the moment. The berserk dragon blood remains highly aggressive, and your condition is extremely unusual. So unusual that our observation and investigation may continue for a very long time.”

“Unusual?” Tomori did not understand. Tachibana’s explanation allowed her only a rough grasp of the situation, though her memories served as confirmation.

But asking an ordinary person to suddenly encounter and comprehend things beyond the bounds of common sense required a much more detailed explanation.

“As we mentioned earlier, it was the dragon-blood gene that caused you to go berserk. Dragons truly did exist in this world. It was a distant age, when they once ruled over humanity. Later, mankind waged war against them and buried that tragic history.”

Tachibana continued, “But the dragons were never truly exterminated. They will return one day. It will be a bleak apocalyptic age, when the dragon race destroys humanity in an attempt to rebuild its former glory. The dragon blood carried by every hybrid in Japan comes from the same supreme dragon. For now, let us call her God. God is one of them as well, constantly attempting to return to this world.”

An ancient scroll, prepared long beforehand, slowly descended.

Across a vast wasteland beneath a shattered sky stood a battle general raising his sword and shouting, soldiers in armor straining forward, and evil dragons breathing torrents of flame. There was not a single human character anywhere. Japan had no written language in that era, so the only inscription in the corner was written in dragon script: Night’s Feast Plain.

It was a mural carved into a rock wall by an artist from ancient Japan. The strokes were simple and highly pictographic.

Modern technology had reproduced these authentic records and recreated them upon the scroll. At first glance, they possessed the crude quality of a child’s doodle, but the weight of genuine history could never be forged.

“For this purpose, God created numerous safeguards for herself. In imitation of the Black Emperor, she fashioned four sacred remains and infused them with fragments of her own genes.”

Tachibana’s voice seemed to come from a distant age. “We have information about the strongest and most dangerous one. As for the remaining three, no one knows precisely what they are. They might be an urn containing bones, an undying phoenix, a deep-sea monster roaming the ocean—or even an inconspicuous little insect that has actually lived for ten thousand years.”

“I am... the Dragon God?” Tomori shuddered violently.

But how could that be? She clearly remembered where she had come from. She remembered resting in her mother’s arms as a child. Her family still possessed a photograph of the three of them taken just after her birth, and it hung in the most conspicuous place in the house.

“We cannot be a hundred percent certain yet, but we suspect you may have come into contact with a lesser sacred remnant. Otherwise, your bloodline purity would be terrifying. The three lesser sacred remains are different. They will not turn you into a vessel for God’s resurrection, but they can evolve you into a descendant species approaching God’s level.”

Tachibana said, “You would become a true dragon, forget yourself, and come to believe that you were God’s servant. Then you would undertake every possible action to resurrect her. If we do nothing, you would become more than a bloodthirsty criminal—you might truly succeed in reviving and releasing God. All of Tokyo, perhaps all of Japan, would be doomed. That would be the genuine end of the world.”

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A flood of information poured into Tomori’s mind. Every detail sounded utterly preposterous, yet each was supported by logic—and, more importantly, by evidence.

She stared blankly at her reflection in the mirror. Half human, half dragon, she possessed both the delicate softness of a young girl and the savage majesty of an evil dragon, as though an angel and a demon had fused into one. The boundary between light and darkness seemed to merge within a single thought.

But this was an ending without choice. She could never rise to heaven through goodness. No matter how fiercely she struggled or resisted, only a hopeless, evil road to the underworld awaited her. A god dressed in burial shrouds danced unseen in the netherworld, uttering soundless, mocking laughter.

For an instant, Takamatsu Tomori seemed to see the future.

She had awakened the white dragon with her own hands. Its enormous wings blotted out the sky and cast the world into shadow. Beneath flames that scorched the heavens, all of Tokyo screamed. Charred human figures ran through the fire. Children cried and shrieked helplessly in despair. The neon sign of RING burned, twisted, and came crashing down, covering the shattered pavement as a horrifying scarlet seeped outward. The entire world was speckled with blood.

Someone stood high above her, shouting something loudly.

She could not hear them, and she did not care. The only thing that annoyed her was that lock of blue hair whipping through the wind.

With a casual sweep of her claw, the irritating voice vanished. A black ribbon fluttered away into the distance and fell upon a familiar pedestrian bridge.

There was no way to become human again.

Her gentle self wept. “You did all of this!”

Her stern self roared. “Are you satisfied now?”

Her indifferent self said, “I hate you.”

But what about her? What about the one she knew best? What about the voice she most longed to hear?

It turned out that the person who loved you most would always be the first to stand between you and danger.

But you had killed her with your own hands.

You ate her flesh and drank her blood. Gulping and chewing, you said it tasted wonderful. You were smiling, yet great tears rolled down your face, and you did not know why your heart hurt so badly.

“I don’t want this! Let me die! Let me die right now! If... if that can stop everything, then let me die now!”

Takamatsu Tomori struggled violently, crying and screaming. She was so terrified, so desperate. She was not even afraid of death—but she was afraid of everything she loved being erased.

Once, she had hated this world as well. She had wondered why she alone was different, why the world was always so cold toward her.

But then she had found friends, music, and the warmth of love. She had begun to love this world...

And this was actually the countdown to the bells of the apocalypse?

If that was how things were, then she only needed to burn herself away.

A withered scrap of gray grass, nearly dry enough to die—the most useful thing it could do was serve as fuel, was it not?

Burn away fate. Reduce the bones to ash. Incinerate the sacred remains!

If that was enough to let CryChic live in peace, then she would become the offering to God all by herself.

The steel restraints cracked and popped.

Once reinforced, those things weighed more than a hundred kilograms. Even without any additional restraints, merely being locked inside them would make escape impossible.

But now they were slowly collapsing. Cracks spread downward one after another. The human half of Takamatsu Tomori was fading, while the white scales breaking through her skin poured out like ants fleeing a disturbed nest. The bones protruding along her back hurt her even as they transformed the structure of her body. She was becoming more and more like the legendary god—except in size.

The temperature inside the cell suddenly rose. The instruments’ readings climbed rapidly. Flames surged up from beneath Tomori’s feet, gently licking the metal around her calves.

The restraints were capable of withstanding temperatures of seventeen hundred degrees. A brief period above that threshold would merely alter their shape.

But those flames were no ordinary fire. Their fierce heat needed only a moment of contact before the steel melted and flowed down over the scales on her feet.

Takamatsu Tomori felt no pain. Instead, she found it strangely pleasant. The searing heat and extreme temperature felt as natural and intimate as a part of her own body. Her cracking flesh repaired itself in an instant, only to burn apart again.

She bled as though she had died, yet she rose from the blood and was forged into glory.

Twisted red-and-black patterns spread from the muzzle of the machine gun toward its magazine, like dark crimson vines growing around the weapon. Yet the patterns seemed alive, writhing like snakes.

Hundreds of tiny explosions erupted in succession. The machine gun mounted directly in front of Tomori shot flames toward the ceiling. Hot wind raged through the room. For an instant, the camera image blurred, and when it recovered, countless agitated specks had appeared across the screen.

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The high explosives hidden within the cell had also failed. The terrifying burst of heat had long since exceeded their thermal decomposition point, turning every deadly weapon into a dud.

Extreme heat. Absolute precision of control.

At first glance, one might have thought that the Lord of Bronze and Fire had descended.

But Tachibana Masamune knew that was impossible.

The moment they had obtained the name Takamatsu Tomori, the headquarters’ supercomputer had begun a comprehensive investigation. Immigration records showed that Takamatsu Tomori was a native of Tokyo. She had never left Japan, and her family members were all Japanese citizens.

In other words, she was a Japanese-born hybrid, descended from God’s bloodline.

Yet neither of her parents had shown any sign of possessing such a bloodline. They might have carried it, but so faintly that it had not even drawn the attention of their family. There was even less possibility that Takamatsu Tomori possessed blood of such high concentration.

The only explanation was that she had come into contact with a lesser sacred remnant at some point. Its powerful mental component had helped her imitate the Lord of Bronze and Fire’s control over the element of flame. Though far inferior to that noble First Generation herself, it could still grow to the strength of a Second Generation.

As for the upper limit...

No one could know.

Among the dragon race, bloodline enhancement occurred through devouring one another. Even a Second Generation could become a noble Dragon Lord in its own right.

“Of course you must die. We absolutely cannot allow God even the slightest possibility of returning to the human world. But your time to die should not be now. At this point, I can confirm with more than ninety percent certainty that, sometime during your past sixteen years, you came into contact with a lesser sacred remnant. Its genes entered your body and have lain dormant within you for all this time under the identity of Takamatsu Tomori.”

Tachibana’s voice came through the loudspeaker without the slightest fluctuation.

“We need to investigate every detail of your life over those sixteen years from beginning to end—your hobbies, your social connections, the places you visited, the things you came into contact with. We cannot overlook the slightest trace. It is a task that is fundamentally impossible to complete, but we must carry it through.”

He slammed his fist into a button.

Twelve safety locks clicked at once. The heavy, airtight metal door slowly opened, and the fresh fragrance of white sandalwood rushed inside before scattering in the hot wind.

Amid the crisp clatter of wooden sandals, a dark-red figure entered with a sword in hand.

She was a girl dressed in a red-and-white shrine maiden’s robe. Her long hair was dark red, as were her eyes. Every color that composed her was striking, sharp as the long blade in her hand.

Yet she was also remarkably easygoing. Her detached temperament seemed innate, as cold as snow. When she appeared, even the hot wind fell silent.

Takamatsu Tomori’s vision had already grown hazy. The desire to slaughter surged and burned within her. Her eyes nearly split from the fury as she glared at the figure before her. Golden flames stirred restlessly, while the rising heat unfolded an invisible domain.

A faint sorrow flowed through the shrine maiden’s eyes.

She silently murmured something and walked toward Tomori step by step. Molten steel, flickering with red light, churned around her wooden sandals. She gently extended one hand. Her long red sleeve fell away, revealing half of an arm as pale and smooth as a lotus root.

She touched Takamatsu Tomori’s forehead.

A savage chill rose from every direction, forcibly compressing and annihilating the scorching domain. All the violent hatred dissolved beneath her fingertips. She was like an enlightened monk whose words were sermons of Zen: a demon who had slaughtered countless people came knocking at the temple gate, only to be redeemed at last under the shrine maiden’s guidance.

But this came at a terrible price.

As the domain contracted, Takamatsu Tomori herself was compressed along with it. She screamed as though she had been thrown into a boiling sulfur spring in hell. Her body convulsed violently, her veins swelling beneath the surface, as though crimson pigment flowed through them.

The chill saved her, yet it also continued to inflict devastating wounds. Her regenerative power fought against the damage in turn.

Injury. Recovery. Injury. Recovery.

She was like a soul suffering endless torment in hell, repeatedly passing through the cycle of death and rebirth.

The shrine maiden stroked Takamatsu Tomori’s forehead with the gentleness one might use to pet a small animal. Then she raised a syringe, drove it into one of Tomori’s bulging veins, and depressed the plunger all the way.

The thick, gel-like scarlet serum entered Tomori’s body. It acted like a specially formulated sedative. The continuing dragon transformation slowed. The scales stopped growing. The cycle of injury and recovery fell silent, and at last, it ceased completely.

A tide of weariness swept over her.

The world grew darker and darker.

Murmuring faintly, Takamatsu Tomori sank into a deep sleep.

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