XCEL

A couple hundred thousand yen later, both girls emerged from the Sacai outlet on the second floor of the mall looking and feeling the best they had in a long time. Kinuka Amibari carried most of the bags—having figured out a way to use Threadwork to loop a lot of the handles over her shoulders to give her hands a break. Juusei Kanon pranced out in front, an enthusiastic point every which way to highlight the multiple further points of interest. Following an interesting looking sign for a shop that sold novelty gifts—Kinuka’s suggestion, for the others—they made their way back over the walkway connecting the upper floors on either side.

“What’s that sound?”

The coughing was the first warning. Kinuka’s brow furrowed. Lowering a few bags to the floor, she peered over the side of the bridge. The sight of the asphyxiating crowd lying shrouded in a dense black fog sent a sharp current down her spine. A slight throb in her third eye told her a presence was near. Her heart rate jumped, psychic energy pulsing through her nerves. Goosebumps rippled across her skin. Danger was afoot.

Before Kinuka could even turn around, she felt Juusei sidle up next to her on the railing. The girl stared wide-eyed down at the scene of the calamity. The carefree, cheeky grin of moments ago had vanished; it belonged to a different girl altogether.

“JPRO,” she stated. Not a moments’ hesitation. “They’re here.”

“Are you sure?” Kinuka asked. “I don’t recognise the signature from the facility.” She focused, trying to pinpoint the signature. Unlike before, the ripples came from all over the floor; the signal had been dispersed through the fog. It was like trying to locate a grain of sand in a desert.

“It has to be.” Juusei looked maddened. “They’re trying to recapture me, I know it. Put me back in that prison with the Warden.” She clenched her jaw. “I won’t let them! I won’t let them take me back! I won’t—”

“Hey, easy.” Kinuka placed gentle but firm hands on the younger girl’s shoulders. Juusei winced to start with, but began to calm. “I think you’re right,” Kinuka continued, looking her in the eyes. “But even so, you mustn’t lose yourself, okay?”

Juusei looked away and mumbled defiantly.

“Juusei?”

“Heard you the first time.”

“Okay, good.” Kinuka let go and turned her attention back to the ground floor. Something didn’t seem right. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what? I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly. The coughing, it stopped. Everyone down there was coughing just a moment ago.”

Across the ground floor, the choking dead began to rise. A few to begin with, but a wave of motion soon stirred the dense dark fog, as the ungainly grey puppets began to lift themselves off the floor. The colour had drained from their faces, and their expressions were limp, slack-jawed. Spats of coughing returned in places, but those were drowned out by the uncomfortable groaning that rose from the crowd at large.

“What on earth—” Kinuka steadied herself, taking steps back from the railing. A tickling sensation by her ankles made her look down, and the girl yelped when she saw tendrils of that smoke clinging to her shoes. It had now made its way up the stairs. The familiar cacophonous coughing started once again. People all around them began to clutch at their throats, before—just like the crowds below—their eyes rolled back in their skulls, and they too collapsed.

“The smoke!” Kinuka cried, pointing to a man standing limp. A tendril of smoke had wound its way up his body, and was now busy smothering his orifices with a noxious cloud. “Quick, Juusei, come here!”

Juusei dislodged a smoke tendril creeping up her leg with a kick and made her way over, narrowly avoiding collision with a pale-faced man in the process of succumbing. From the depths of a shopping bag—largely abandoned by this point—a white silk shirt Kinuka had bought for herself leapt to the girl’s hand. Her third eye sprung open and, in a decision that pained her plenty, she used Threadwork to tear the garment in two.

“Wait! Isn’t that your shirt? What are you—” Juusei cried. Alarmed, she watched as Kinuka wove half the silk around her face and neck, fashioning it into a gaiter. Kinuka then took the other half of the shirt, and made one for herself.

“This is to protect you!” She explained. “Look at everyone else! Something is happening to them because they’re breathing in this smoke!”

“Wow, good thinking!” Juusei tugged gingerly at the garment. Her breathing remained unobstructed, yet the burnt, tickling sensation that had begun to creep down the back of her throat subsided almost immediately.

“Silk is an incredible material for this kind of thing. Even synthetic silk has great tensile strength, and the gaps between the fibres are very fine,” she explained. “It’ll be perfect to prevent the—” She shook her head, cutting herself off. “Uh, anyway— We need to get you out of here. If JPRO’s coming after you, we’ve got to get you somewhere safe. Follow me. Let’s see if we can—”

“No!” Juusei stood stout and firm, staring resolute at the ground.

Her curt response caught Kinuka off guard. “No? What are you—”

“JPRO is coming after me, and you think I want to go into hiding?!” Juusei cried. “Just after I managed to escape their pathetic facility? You think I want that?!”

“Juusei, that’s not what I—”

“I’m done running, Kinuka!” She yelled. “I’m done hiding in the corner of a darkened room, waiting for the day I know will never come. I got my chance at freedom, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it go. I’m going to blast this scum to hell and back before it even thinks twice about bothering us again!”

“Juusei, please! Wait!” Kinuka lunged forward to grab the hem of Juusei’s shirt, but it was far too late. Psychic energy had already coiled around the girl’s legs, and with a leap, Juusei sprang over the edge of the bridge and dove into the crowd of lumbering greyscale with a whoop and a cheer.

Grasping the metal bars for support, Kinuka winced as gunshot echoed through the mall. She looked out over the carnage taking place, mere seconds to herself, before a wall of discordant groans made her whip around. A crowd of shambling bodies encircled her now, and drew closer. Each of their faces hung open, the only colour that remained was on their clothes. A few retained consciousness, but their voices were faded as they protested every single movement.

“Help… me…” One grey woman mumbled. Her lips barely moved, as she like all the others shuffled in painful unison, the blanket of smoke growing thicker with every second.

The voices sent renewed shivers across her skin. Kinuka bit back the fear pooling in her gut and unwound her forearm, steeling her resolve. The threads coiled into a long, braided whip, which she stretched taut with her other hand.

“I’ll do my best,” was all the promise she could ever give.

* * *

The rush of wind past her face was exhilarating. Juusei’s swan dive took her over the side of the bridge and into graceful freefall. Psychic energy pulsed through every little nerve on her skin. She extended the tips of her fingers as far as they’d go. The moment she touched the ground, she shoved her palms down—a wave of psychic energy momentarily clearing the smoky floor. She bent her arms, biceps burning with elastic potential, then rebounded. Juusei sprang forwards into a somersault, tumbling head over heels and breaking her fall by crashing into one of the greyskinned pedestrians.

“Come out and show yourself, you rat bastard!” She yelled. Her psychic energy, heightened by emotions running high, pulsed a gradual aura around her person, repelling most of the immediate smoke. Despite the blood pounding in her ears, she attempted to listen in. The psychic signature she picked up was so dilute she could barely feel it. The ripples emanated from the floor itself; the enemy’s aura was all-encompassing, and she’d just jumped into the thick of it.

Juusei ran, jumped and shoved her way through the crowd to try and spot the perpetrator, but knew it was wasted effort. A diminutive five foot three on her best day, Juusei found it had to see past the monochrome heads of the crowd of smoke-ridden zombies that were beginning to pile up around her. They’d taken notice and, through their own will or otherwise, were attempting to converge.

“Out of the way!” Juusei cried, driving a wild fist into the face of a man nearby. The man fell backwards without so much as a scream. Packed so closely together, those behind him toppled like dominoes. More groans from the limp puppets came from behind. Juusei yelped. Clammy hands closed around the back of her neck and upper arms. Limbs reached out towards her from every direction, to the point she could no longer tell whose hand belonged to whom.

“Let go!” Juusei cried to a crowd of ears deafer than her own. They would not let her go; even if they could still hear her, they could not let her go: the smoke that had forced its way into their nervous systems controlled every muscle contraction, every synapse.

“I said, let go of me!” She threw her weight around, but knew that wouldn’t be enough. “You want to do this the hard way? Fine by me!” Pointing her finger guns at one of the slackjaws, Juusei gathered psychic energy at the tip. The sheer force of the crackling electricity condensed in her hand made her arm begin to shake, until finally—

“Bang.”

Gunshot, thunderous gunshot. The walls of the mall reverberated something terrifying. The concussive bullet tore through the crowd. It hit the first man square in the chest, who ploughed into the two behind him, and the three behind them; the cascade of force cleared a path through the near-corpses. The tips of her fingers still trailing smoke, Juusei grinned and blew it away.

Juusei’s specialty was “Gun.” It wasn’t complicated, it wasn’t pretty; but she’d be damned if it wasn’t one of the strongest. Using a finger gun gesture, Juusei could expel her psychic energy like bullets. She never needed to explain her power; the boost she’d gain from revealing such a simple power would be minimal. That time was much better suited putting another bullet or seven between her opponents’ eyes. Her training, none of which she’d wished for, gave her the skill to condense the energy output into whatever shape or form she desired.

Had she not put a conscious cap on her psychic energy output, Juusei knew the shot would’ve killed the man. She didn’t want that. These guys weren’t Rejected. There was a chance that whatever the smoke had done to them could be reversed. By capping the piercing output of her bullets, she’d allowed the psychic energy to build up in excess, creating a larger, wider bolt of concussive force that could, instead, create some space.

Angered by her retaliation, whatever was controlling these poor people decided to respond in kind. The crowds around her surged, despondent groans arising from all sides as they pressed inwards. Juusei cursed, as the gap she’d just created was quickly filled. In a matter of moments, her escape route was gone.

“You’re not going to show yourself?” She cried, spinning on a heel to catch the slightest glance of the enemy psyche user. “You ruin my day out; you take over these innocent people, and you still refuse to show your face? Coward! Come out and fight me, one on one! I’m never going back to that cell, no matter what!”

The air around her crackled and the girl roared. Psychic energy surged through her like a tide. Pointing her fingers at the crowd, and started blasting. Gunshots echoed through the mall, along with flashes of light. People went flying with every shot, cries of pain from the concussive bullets echoing. The greying crowds shied away in fear, but smoke drifting from their mouths drove them onwards, an unceasing current. Juusei turned this way and that, firing from both hands to stem the flow. With every shot, she felt a stab at her heart. Her gunshot had long since destroyed her hearing, but she could still see the agony on the puppets faces every time she shot them, and every time they were forced to get back up. They never wanted this; they never deserved this. A righteous rage flooded every inch of her, and Juusei let loose another barrage.

“You are awfully tenacious.” From behind the relentless mob, Kemuri rose and took shape. A towering figure shrouded in mist, the smokeman loomed over Juusei. “You will only hurt your fellow humans. Why strive? They will continue to throw themselves at you no matter how many times you blast them away.”

Juusei couldn’t hear much, but she’d heard enough. She whipped around, staring up at Kemuri. The sudden agglutination of the dispersed psychic energy into a defined form was as good a target as could be. It wasn’t a psyche user; its signature gave off the impression of a reject. None of the Rejected she’d seen had ever looked like that!

A grey woman attempted to grab at her shirt, but Juusei spun her heel around into a kick, following through two shots into the woman’s back to send her flying into a group of five others.

“What the hell are you?” Juusei cried. “Nope; doesn’t matter! You’re going down!”

She trained both fingers between the smoke man’s red eyes, and another round of gunshots splintered the air. The bullets blew a pair of holes through the smoke, but Kemuri was unfazed.

“Silly girl,” Kemuri chided. “You cannot shoot smoke. I have infiltrated the nervous systems of every single person here. I control their movements. They continue to draw breath on my whim alone. There is nothing you can do against me.”

“Sounds like a challenge!” Juusei grinned. She spun around, unleashing another burst of shots to repel the advancing waves of greying bodies. “You’re the one they sent to take me in! I’ll find a way. I’ll shoot down every damn particle of smoke if I have to!”

“You think yourself so important.” Kemuri chuckled, a deep resonance. “Labour under that delusion as you will. Soon, you will be crushed by the masses—and your own foolishness. I must… complete my mission…” His voice began to fade, as the body broke apart.

The crowds around her surged, a renewed wave of discordant groans from the smoke zombies. Juusei felt her nerves spark with psychic energy, and kept on firing. She’d keep this up until they stopped getting back up. She needed to find where the reject had got to; she needed to destroy it. It wouldn’t stop at just her. It’d go after Tegata, Ruri, and the rest just as it had her. JPRO wouldn’t stop until they’d put them all behind bars, or worse. Anger bled a sheen of red across her vision, as her blasts echoed louder.

Only when she heard Kinuka’s screams from the causeway above, did Juusei realise the fatal error she’d made.