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  Yurihara stooped down in front of Kusatsu Akiko.

  “Mmm... seems like a waste not to eat her now,” she said, her beautiful face contorting.

  “Yeah, but if we use her, you'll be able to assimilate four or five more in no time,” Masami chuckled. “For now, we wait, Manticore.”

  “Human society makes it hard to move.” Yurihara the Manticore said, sighing. She lowered her face next to Kusatsu Akiko's.

  Her long hair started to get in the way, so she held it back with her fingers, and kissed the corpse tenderly.

  Her tongue pried the body's mouth open, forcing a gaseous form of the essence manufactured inside her body into Kusatsu Akiko.

  Watching this monstrous, sinister spectacle unfolding in the darkness, Masami was entranced. As if he felt sexual pleasure, his face was even more ecstatic than at the moment of ejaculation.

  For thirty long seconds, Yurihara kept her lips pressed to the corpse's.

  Finally, she pulled away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her lips were bright red, but not from lipstick-the color did not rub off on her hands.

  The color of her skin was so sleek she appeared to be wearing makeup, but this was also her natural state. When she had copied the real Yurihara Minako, she had copied the makeup as well.

  “She should be revitalized momentarily,” Yurihara said, with a satisfied smile.

  “Hmm... “ Masami said doubtfully. To make sure, he kicked the corpse lightly. Its fingers twitched. “Good.”

  Bit by bit, the entire body began shaking violently, as if it were lying on top of a high voltage electric fence.

  Then the torso shot upwards, as if on a spring.

  The eyes and mouth popped open, and a blue liquid, neither tears nor saliva, came pouring out of them.

  “Woah! Can't let that touch me,” Masami said, backing away from the sweet scent wafting off of the volatile liquid.

  “Yes. For humans, it will work like a drug. It would not do for you to become addicted as well, Saotome-kun.” Yurihara placed herself between Masami and Kusatsu Akiko. “Look here, woman,” she ordered.

  The no longer dead Kusatsu Akiko did as she was told, slowly rolling her head towards Yurihara. The flow of liquid had stopped.

  “I have given you power. Power to corrupt humans. Use this power to supply me with more humans.”

  In normal society, Yurihara's words were unthinkable, but the previously dead girl nodded.

  “Corrupt them well. When they suddenly vanish, we want the humans around them to assume that this was the logical next stage of their recent poor behavior. Including yourself.”

  Behind her, Masami nodded proudly, like a parent whose son had just correctly answered a question on visitor's day.

  Yurihara whispered, “You have no memories of what happened here. You went bad of your own free will...”

  3.

  Five minutes later, Masami was walking along the street, once again supporting Kusatsu Akiko.

  “Mm... mm?” Her fainting spell ended, and her eyes opened. “Wh-where are we?”

  “Ah, good. You're awake,” Masami said, stepping away from her.

  “Eh? I was asleep? Oh no! Why didn't you wake me?” Kusatsu Akiko asked, quite flustered.

  “I shook you several times.”

  “Oh no! I'm sorry! I wonder what... uhhh...” She tried to figure out the last thing she remembered, but she couldn't remember a thing. Obviously, it never occurred to her that she had died and was now merely functioning as a puppet, thanks to the stimulus of the drug.

  “You’re pretty heavy, you know that? It was hard work carrying you,” Masami said sternly.

  Kusatsu Akiko turned bright red, but for some reason, she wasn't that hurt by his words.

  They parted ways in front of the station.

  “See you at school tomorrow.”

  “Yeah... don't tell anyone about tonight. Especially...” she started to say a name, but trailed off.

  She felt like there was a boy who she really didn't want to see her in an embarrassing moment like this, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember his name or what he looked like.

  “Especially who?” Masami asked, with a knowing smile.

  “Mm... never mind,” Kusatsu Akiko's love had vanished with her memories.

  “I had fun today,” Masami said kindly.

  But she simply replied, “Oh?” as if she didn’t care at all, and turned her back.

  She felt like there was a big, gaping hole in her heart, but she had no way of telling that her will and spirit were swiftly vanishing.

  Masami paused to watch Kusatsu Akiko venture into the station, then swiftly turned on his heel and walked back into the city.

  Yurihara was waiting at the Tristan coffee shop. She was seated in a booth towards the back.

  “It went well?” she asked. She was wearing glasses and had her hair in a sauvage style. Masami knew that Yurihara could control her hair at will, but these quick hairstyle changes always took a moment to get used to.

  “Yeah, her emotions are already fading,” Masami replied. He sat down and ordered lemon tea and marron cake to soothe his sweet tooth. “Without knowing what she's doing, she’11 make all of her friends try a drug that even she doesn't remember getting.”

  “Like a sleepwalker in the night, she'll regurgitate the fluid made by the cells in her body. She won’t even try to figure out where it comes from. Her brain is shrinking, and she can't be bothered to make decisions on her own.”

  They looked at each other and giggled.

  From the side, they looked like any peaceful, harmless young couple. But Saotome had already sacrificed the lives of three girls to Yurihara --the monstrous man-eater known as the Manticore.

  They had met two months before, just before summer vacation.

  Masami was a member of the tea ceremony club, largely because it never did anything. He had heard that it was a good idea to have been a member of a club in high school when it came time to apply for jobs or universities. Yurihara Minako was a member as well. Much like Masami, she hardly ever bothered to show up for the infrequent meetings that the club tended to have.

  One day, it suddenly started to rain in the evening, despite blue skies all afternoon. The whims of summer. Masami had not planned to go to the club meeting, but since he had no umbrella, he thought he might as well kill some time in the tea room. He turned around at the shoe boxes at the entrance to school and went back inside.

  The tea ceremony club didn't have a room of their own; they simply borrowed a room that was usually used for student guidance, as it was the only Japanese style room in the school. The faculty sponsor was the assistant principal, Komiya, and he was much too busy to ever show his face at meetings.

  That day, the room was deathly silent and there was no sign of any other students.

  Next to the door was the tea ceremony club attendance book. If your name was written in this, it appeared that you had attended the meeting. Even if you rarely came, as long as your name showed up in the book, you were treated like an active member and could stay on the rosters.

  Masami opened the book, and was about to write the date and his name, when he realized there was already an entry for that date. Someone else was here.

  Yurihara Minako.

  “......?”

  Even if she had gone to the bathroom, it was strange that she hadn’t left her bag. Before now, Masami had never even had the slightest interest in Yurihara Minako. She had a reputation for brains and beauty, but she never mattered to him in the slightest. And, like many a man before him, he had always been baffled by the idea of beauty.

  He had already lost his virginity in Junior High to a girl with a face covered in zits and who was widely reputed as being rather ugly. Their relationship was kept secret, but less because he was

  embarrassed and more because he just didn't want to listen to everyone else’s shocked commentaries on the subject. He didn't think anything at all about dating an u
gly girl. In fact, after she started dating him, her pimples vanished and actually she became quite pretty. She soon left him for another boyfriend. But Masami wasn't particularly upset. He had never actually loved her to begin with; he simply used her to relieve his sexual appetites. Instead, she ended up crying and apologizing, even though it had been her idea to break up in the first place.

  Masami no longer remembered her name and he couldn't remember Yurihara Minako’s face all that clearly either. He knew she was supposed to be good looking and that she had good grades, but that was about it.

  “Sempai, you there?” he asked, taking off his slippers and stepping onto the tatami in his socks.

  He opened the shoji leading into the inner room. It was less of a room than a storage area for tables and cushions.

  The moment he opened it, his eyebrows leapt upwards.

  In the storage area, Yurihara Minako was upside-down against a pile of cushions, face twisted around so that it faced the same direction as her torso. Her head was on backwards. Her neck was broken with her spine clearly severed. Her eyes were open and empty.

  She wasn’t moving... at all.

  She was dead.

  The first thought that flashed through Masami’s mind was relief that he had not written his name in the attendance book. He didn't want to get mixed up in something like this.

  He took a step backwards.

  This saved his life.

  just

  A hand with razor sharp claws passed through the air in front of his face.

  Some hidden killer had attacked him.

  (What -- ?!)

  He looked up.

  There was a naked girl clinging to the ceiling, hands and feet thrust in the cracks between the wood paneling. He thought it was a woman, but only assumed this because he couldn't see any male genitalia between its legs. Later, he was to learn that there was no genitalia there at all.

  The girl grinned. “You saw me,” she whispered. “Now that you have seen me, I cannot allow you to live.” she continued as if she were sharing a joke. If there had not already been a corpse lying beneath her, he would not have taken her seriously.

  Masami was stunned. He simply stared blankly up at her, immobile.

  If he had been a girl, he would have heard the legends. He would have thought, ’It's Boogiepop!’

  She moved like the wind. She kicked Masami in the chest, sending him flying into the opposite wall before he knew what happened.

  “--Gah!” He yelled as his back slammed into the wall. He moaned in pain, “Unh...” and was about to pass out, but he knew deep down that he couldn't let himself succumb to his body's frailties.

  She laughed softly as she approached. There were traces of mud and leaves on her body. The mountains behind the school ran deep. She had probably ventured through them and come out at the school.

  She looked like a majestic wild animal with a strange beauty about her; a strange fearlessness that he had never seen anywhere else, and an established aloofness found only in things that were beyond human understanding.

  Masami simply stared up at her.

  “Nice timing. I had just thought that it would be better to copy a male than a female. I shall take your shape,” she said, reaching out towards Masami.

  As if freed from possession, he blinked and said, “Wha- what?” He frowned, “C-copy?”

  “Yes. I shall become you and blend into human society. No one will ever be able to find me.”

  “Hunh,” his face scrunched up, but not because he felt despair at the sight of his approaching demise. No; the next thing he said was, “In that case, it would be far more effective to keep me alive.” He sounded a little put out by this.

  The girl frowned. “Why...?”

  “Oh, you'll just have a much easier time as a stuck up teacher’s pet with no friends at all like our little Yurihara Minako here. If you try to take my place, people will notice the difference. I've strived to maintain at least a mid-level of popularity here. People know me.”

  He sounded deeply disappointed by this. That's because he was.

  He wanted to be killed by something much more powerful than him. Even with Kirima Nagi, he had not really wanted to date her; he had wanted her to kill him.

  This was his nature. And for the first time, he understood this clearly.

  He didn't know why exactly. There was obviously nothing out of the ordinary happening at home, and he had no childhood trauma to contend with, like Suema Kazuko had almost encountered. But there it was, clear as day.

  If you searched really hard for a reason, it was a reaction against his life style -- a way for him to fight against his deliberate pretense of mundanity. But this was far too shallow a reason to satisfy a psychiatrist. People like Masami, with a fetish for indirect suicide, were not particularly unusual.

  “...... ?” The naked killer looked down at him, baffled. Until now, everyone who had ever seen her had felt nothing but hatred and fear, but this boy showed no signs of either. “Why are you so quiet? You do not struggle... you do not beg?” she found herself asking.

  “That's because I love you,” Masami answered, honestly and quite sincerely.

  “Hunh?” For the first time in her life, the girl was dumbfounded.

  ***

  “You were right, Saotome-kun. Yurihara Minako's form fits my needs well. Nobody thinks it strange if I don't talk to them in class. She was always like that, apparently,” the Manticore said, in the dimly lit coffee shop. Her face so perfectly matched Yurihara's that for all intents and purposes she was Yurihara Minako, as the former owner of that name had long since been erased from the face of the earth.

  “I thought so.”

  “The classes at school resemble some sort of game, but this studying for exams is utterly pointless. I just have to read the explanation and I can understand anything.”

  “You’re much smarter than most of us humans then.”

  “Even Yurihara Minako's parents haven't noticed the difference. They communicate with her so cautiously. Are all humans like that?”

  “Mostly. But be careful. There are a few egoists who think other people are a part of themselves. My parents, for example.”

  “Shall I kill them for you?” Yurihara suggested airily.

  “Not yet. It's still too early,” Masami replied just as evenly.

  “True. We must be cautious until we control the world,” she giggled.

  “Exactly,” Masami grinned back.

  At this point, the waitress brought the lemon tea and cake that Masami had ordered. She overheard them talking about 'controlling the world,’ but just assumed that they were talking about some sort of new video game.

  But she did think that the couple was far too horny, though, and that they should get a room before they started making out right there in the restaurant.

  ‘They can’t even be out of high school yet, but they're acting like newlyweds. They're all over each other!’ she thought. She was still reeling from a harsh break up, so she slapped the bill on the table a bit roughly and left.

  Masami carried on, “Should we make ourselves any new slaves beyond Kusatsu Akiko?”

  “Yes, if possible, I'd like two or three more. Too many, and we might get noticed, though... but at some point, we'll need them on a larger scale. Better to test the process out now.”

  Their plan was simple: remake human society with themselves at the center. Yurihara certainly had the power to make that a reality. She could become any human she wanted and could make any human do her bidding.

  The idea was Masami's. He offered to cooperate with her, but when she told him of her powers, he found himself rubbing his hands together with glee.

  “We can use that,” he said eagerly.

  When she heard his plan, it sounded quite reasonable, so she agreed. All she'd thought about before now was her own survival. She'd never actually thought about the rest of the world. And more importantly, she had always been alone. She'd been cloned as an’expe
riment’and had no family of her own. The only person who had ever told her “I love you” was Saotome Masami, whom normal society would classify as a crazed lunatic.

  “But there must be agents from the’institution’pursuing me. What should we do about them?”

  “At the moment, all we can do is hope that they don't find you. Give it a little more time, and we'll be able to fight back.”

  “And demolish anyone who wishes to’erase’me as a’failure'?”

  “Exactly! You're no failure. You're going to be the new ruler of the world,” Masami said forcefully.

  Yurihara rested her hand on top of his. “Saotome-kun, you are my prince.” The man-eating monster stroked the hand of her Mephistopheles, while sweetly whispering, “I love you.” It may have been twisted, but they were unmistakably in love.

  4.

  As they had planned, Kusatsu Akiko gradually began to come to school less and less often. Her family was falling apart, and was behind on her tuition payments, so nobody thought this at all unnatural.

  She got her friends hooked, and Yurihara and Masami took them. The first one they nabbed was Suzumiya Takako, second year, class F.

  It was easy to take her. She and her friends always gathered in seclusion, and all that Yurihara and Masami had to do was follow them as they left and simply take them down.

  Unfortunately, they were unable to alter them in the way that they had Kusatsu Akiko. They died, but they did not return.

  “It seems it requires a very delicate balance.”

  “Good thing we decided to experiment first,” they said, whispering in the darkness.

  They had been killing Shinyo Academy and other local high school girls, one after another. To cover this up, they laid down a few red herrings to throw off the authorities.

  Once the precedent was established, the rest of their work went smoothly. There were no signs of fuss at school. At Shinyo Academy, there had even been a special meeting and a resulting morning lecture, but that was all. Missing person reports had probably been filed with the police, but they were buried in a mountain of missing girls totally unrelated to them at all, and swiftly forgotten about.