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The case exploded.
Takaoka laughed. His classmates screamed.
Nagisa heard none of it.
The sounds around him were muffled, drowned out by the sound of his own rapid heart beat and the blood rushing through his veins. His breathing turned heavy, mind clouding over with anger and fear.
He could feel his kagune stirring, his muscles tensing beneath his skin. He grit his teeth, crossing his arms tightly as he fought to keep it down, struggling with the rush of emotions threatening to overpower his self-control. The effort was almost painful but he couldn’t afford to lose it here, not in front of the others.
Not now.
His left eye itched beneath the contact lens, changing from human to ghoul. He closed his eyes, squeezing the lids together hard enough that it almost hurt.
Control it, he hissed at himself in his mind, his concentration narrowing as he tried to force himself to calm down. His more non-human instincts strained against his rational thought, wearing it down despite his best efforts.
His body was coiled tight. A spring bound by cracking elastic.
Control it. His fingers curled into fists, his nails dug into his palms. Just breathe!
Takaoka was still laughing. Nagisa could hear it slowly melding with the rest of the noise in his mind.
Half of the class was slowly dying. And Takaoka was laughing.
Nagisa felt his anger simmering beneath his skin, an acidic taste forming behind his teeth that was only half-imagined.
How dare he.
Nagisa wasn’t an idiot. He knew some people tended to hold grudges, and considering what happened the last time any of them saw Takaoka? Well, he could understand wanting to get even. Losing at your own game at the hands of a junior high kid would be embarrassing for anyone, especially for someone like Takaoka.
It didn’t matter that they’d already started learning how to be killers before he’d shown his face.
It didn’t matter that he’d been overconfident, that he’d underestimated them.
It didn’t matter that Nagisa had followed Takaoka’s rules - the few he’d set - that he’d won fair and square.
For Takaoka, all that mattered was that he’d been humiliated, and that was reason enough.
Enough to hold a grudge. Enough to come after them while their guard was down. Enough to engineer the situation in such a way where Nagisa would have no choice but to face him again, dooming some of them in the process.
Half of the class was slowly dying, and for what? A quick shot at revenge?
Takaoka was still laughing. Nagisa ground his teeth together harder, his jaw aching with the pressure.
His anger surged, scalding the blood in his veins. He could feel more of his control slipping.
Then two things happened in quick succession.
One, he chanced a glance up at Takaoka, mismatched eyes locking on the man’s grin.
Two, something thudded against his back, in the space just below his shoulder blades.
The elastic of his self-restraint snapped.
He felt his kagune extend out, the rinkaku shimmering blue-green beneath the helipad lights. His expression twisted into a snarl.
Takaoka recoiled back a step, the grin momentarily slipping from his face. It only lasted for a few seconds.
“So this is what you were hiding.” Takaoka barked out a sharp laugh. “Everything suddenly makes so much sense.” He mused, the grin returning to his face. This time it was crueller, more jagged at the edges.
Nagisa said nothing, merely watched as Takaoka processed this new revelation and did his best to ignore the eyes staring at his back.
“I should’ve known there was more than one monster involved in all this.”
Nagisa had enough.
What right did Takaoka have to judge him? To condemn him for a simple biological quirk that Nagisa had had no say in? He wasn’t the one who’d poisoned half of the class, he wasn’t the one who doomed a group of kids to die all because of a petty grudge. Nagisa’s lungs burned with the force of his anger.
He lunged forward, faster than he ever would have been able to had he still been a normal human.
Takaoka just about managed to dodge the first strike, but his luck didn’t last long. The second rinkaku limb wrapped around his arm, trapping him in place. Nagisa squeezed it tighter, watching as Takaoka’s face contorted with a pained grimace.
He lashed out with his free arm, the one still holding the knife. The blade skimmed against Nagisa’s rinkaku but it didn’t do much. There was a reason why the agents sent to hunt ghouls were given specialised weapons, and Takaoka didn’t have one. Nagisa almost thought he did when he saw the briefcase, but that was before Takaoka had explained its true purpose, before he’d blown it up.
Takaoka let out a wordless yell and thrust the blade forward, driving it into Nagisa’s shoulder instead.
Nagisa screamed through grit teeth. Ghouls felt pain the same way humans did, sure they healed faster, but that didn’t make the initial wound hurt any less. Ajins were different. They stopped feeling it after a while, dying and resetting so many times that they grew numb to pain, they started to view the wounds they received as mere inconveniences rather than the serious injuries they would’ve been for anyone else.
Nagisa had reset more times than he’d be comfortable admitting to anyone who didn’t already know what it was like. Pain, for him, had started dulling a while ago but he wasn’t numb to it yet. The knife in his shoulder hurt, and he could already feel the blood leaking from the fresh wound and sticking his shirt to his skin.
He brought the first rinkaku limb back around, wrapping it around Takaoka’s wrist and yanking his hand away from the knife. The blade was still stuck in his shoulder, but at least Takaoka didn’t have it now.
The man let out a frustrated growl, reeling one of his legs back before slamming a heavy kick into Nagisa’s side. He grunted, stumbling with the force of it and releasing one of Takaoka’s arms without meaning to.
Takaoka advanced, hand springing out to retrieve his knife.
Nagisa ducked, surging upwards with his own knife. The angle was too awkward for him to aim it properly but he managed to slash the man’s forearm, drawing blood.
Takaoka’s hand fisted in his hair and Nagisa only had enough time to inhale sharply before a knee slammed into his stomach. He groaned, spitting out a small glob of blood from biting his tongue.
He’d dropped his knife when Takaoka’s knee hit him, but he’d managed to wrap one of his rinkaku limbs around the man’s leg. It bought him some time to regain his footing, and also forced his opponent to struggle.
Takaoka swung his free arm out again and instinct had Nagisa’s jaw clamping down on his forearm, directly over the cut he’d already given him. Blood quickly coated his tongue, and he could feel the flesh giving way beneath his teeth.
There’s two things Nagisa knew about himself. One, he was part ghoul. Two, that hadn’t always been the case.
The ghoul part of him was hungry. It urged him to bite down harder, to tear a chunk from the limb still bleeding into his mouth and swallow it down. The blood on his tongue tasted almost sweet, and he could already feel himself salivating in anticipation.
The rest of him was disgusted. He wanted to let go of the arm, wanted to scrub the taste of blood - the taste of human - from his mouth and pretend that everything was fine. He could feel bile clawing at the back of his throat, mixing with the blood that was already there and making the whole experience even more unpleasant.
The two parts of himself wrestled with each other for several long seconds. The wound in his own shoulder paired with Takaoka’s efforts to free himself only made the situation worse.
Eventually one side won out, or maybe neither of them did. By that point he didn’t really care.
Nagisa’s jaw clamped down as he jerked his head to the side, tearing a chunk from Takaoka’s arm. Blood splashed across his cheek with the movement but Nagisa forced himself not to think about it as he spat the lump of flesh out onto the helipad, choking down the blood, bile, and saliva that was left in his mouth as he refocused on Takaoka.
The man howled in obvious agony, holding the arm with the missing chunk closer to his chest. Nagisa could feel Takaoka’s other arm straining against his rinkaku, not that it really did much.
His head spun, mind still a little hazy from what he’d almost done. The lingering taste of human blood on his tongue didn’t help and Nagisa forced his rinkaku to let go. He knew it was probably a bad idea, that he shouldn’t let his opponent recover too much ground, but he was scared of what would happen if he didn’t.
Takaoka dropped to one knee, clutching his wounded arm with his newly freed one. Somehow he still had the strength to laugh, the sound grating against Nagisa’s ears as the man stared up at him. There was a crazed glint in his eyes beneath the pain.
“You really are a monster, aren’t you?” His voice was quiet, dangerous. “You think you won here? They know what you are now, you know what that means for your kind.” Nagisa did, his life would never be the same again, especially after this. He did his best to force the thought from his mind, but he could still feel several pairs of eyes burning holes into his back.
His silence must have annoyed Takaoka, because the man’s smile was quick to shift into a scowl.
“You think this ends here? Ha, fat chance of that.” He growled. “Even if they don’t, do you really think I won’t come after you again now that I know your little secret? What’s to stop me from telling everyone I see just what kind of monster you really are?” His smile returned. “Face it kid, you’re done.”
Here’s a simple truth; Nagisa never wanted to kill anyone.
Here’s another simple truth; he already had.
Every ghoul killed eventually, either due to starvation, or in a battle over territory. Nagisa had always been determined not to eat anyone, a determination which had only grown stronger when he discovered his revivals also reset his hunger. But territory? That was a different matter.
It was a simple fact that most ghouls didn’t like to travel much. Hunting was tricky in areas they weren’t familiar with; the kill itself was relatively easy once you were used to it, avoiding attention was much harder. As such, most ghouls tended to find a town or city they liked and claimed a corner of it for their own. They learned the habits of its residents, learned where all the good hunting spots were, and they forged a routine.
The problems started when too many ghouls settled down too close to each other, too many mouths vying for the same food source. At that point it didn’t matter how careful any of them were, the deaths mounted until they could no longer be considered accidents, until the human population grew too suspicious.
Nagisa’s group was lucky to have two ajins whose biology was similar enough to normal humans that they could be used as a replacement food source, even if Nagisa’s ghoul part meant that he couldn’t do it as often. But, while he might not be able to do much for the others’ hunger, he was at least able to reset his own. Food wasn’t an issue for them, but territory always would be. They’d had to ward off other ghouls more often than any of them would like to admit, and fights between ghouls were often bloody affairs that didn’t stop until someone was dead.
All four of them have killed before. Killed to protect their territory, each other, their secrets. And so, despite the witnesses, despite the fact that it means proving this monster in front of him right, Nagisa knew what he had to do.
A calmness settled over him, cooling the lingering anger in his veins as his focus narrowed. This had to be done.
He leaned down to pick up the knife he’d been forced to drop and approached Takaoka slowly, doing his best to ignore the tingling in the back of his head, the instincts that surged up during a hunt.
Takaoka didn’t move, merely stared up at him with a weirdly-victorious glint in his eyes. His arm was still bleeding, staining his skin red and forming a small puddle on the helipad.
“Go on.” He grunted, still staring at him with that twisted smile. “Finish it already.”
Nagisa stared at him for several long seconds. He could hear his classmates yelling at him, trying to get him to stop. He ignored them. He didn’t have the energy to explain why he couldn’t, that the choice wasn’t really his, that there was no choice at all.
He drew the knife across Takaoka’s throat in one fluid motion. He watched the red line appear, watched as blood began to trickle down his neck, seeping into his shirt collar.
Takaoka’s breaths turned into wheezy-gurgles. Blood spurted from his mouth and slid down his chin, joining the mess already staining his neck.
He couldn’t speak, but his lips twisted to form a soundless word. Monster.
Nagisa didn’t bother denying it. It was true enough.
In reality, it probably only took two minutes for Takaoka to die. But it felt like hours to Nagisa. When his body finally slumped to the side, Nagisa almost felt numb.
There was nothing relieving about it, no sense of accomplishment. Only a grim acceptance that everything was going to change, because Takaoka may not be able to spread the word of what exactly Nagisa was, but there were others now who could.
He didn’t want to think that his classmates would do that to him. But he had to be realistic. They were his friends, but they’d only ever known him as a human, not as a ghoul, not as a monster. They all knew what they were supposed to do if they discovered one.
He heard footsteps behind him, but he didn’t face them yet. Instead he reached up to remove the contacts from his eyes, replacing the blue with his natural red. There was no hiding what he was now, and so there was no point keeping them in.
“You got him good.” Karma said from behind him, with a forced calmness, and only then did Nagisa turn around.
His face was carefully blank, but Nagisa caught the concern swimming in his eyes. His contacts were gone too, Nagisa realised distantly, red eyes scanning him for signs of injury and catching on the knife still in his shoulder.
“You want me to…?” He trailed off. Nagisa nodded tiredly.
“Please.”
He didn’t have time to brace himself before the blade was yanked out. He hissed at the pain, too tired to scream.
Karma tossed the knife to the side, Nagisa heard it clatter against the helipad but he didn’t care to see where it fell.
A pair of arms grabbed him, and he felt his face being pressed against Karma’s chest. The sturdiness of him was almost enough to distract Nagisa from the feeling of his kagune retreating back beneath his skin, from the pounding of his own heart.
The helipad was silent.