Mei Mei

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Ren found a hall soon after.

It had once been where Sunflower Children's Home held events, though not in this part of the building. In this warped environment, however, the hall had somehow appeared here.

After running inside, Ren swept a quick look over the room and picked out his escape routes. Then he turned toward the entrance and braced himself.

The sounds closed in fast.

The main doors creaked open, and a writhing mass of misshapen things flooded in. A closer look showed the same little "ghosts" he had run into before. There were just a lot more of them this time.

Each small creature looked different from the next. They let out strange, meaningless cries as they crawled toward him, tangling over one another in a way that made his stomach tighten.

Ren could reinforce his body with psychic power, but his stamina was still limited. At the end of the day, he was working with the body of a child. Taking on this many at once was going to be ugly.

'I'll try to wipe them out first. I can't get out of this place anyway. If my stamina starts giving out, I'll find somewhere to hide.'

After destroying more than a dozen of them, Ren made the perfectly reasonable decision to retreat. The more he fought, the more of the things seemed to show up. How was anyone supposed to deal with that?

Everything around him froze.

Ren slipped out of the hall while the little monsters stood motionless, stiff as statues.

By the time they began moving again, he was already gone. After a burst of chaotic screeching, the creatures settled back into their aimless wandering.

'Hm? What was that?'

Ren was moving carefully when he thought he heard something. The moment he stopped and listened, the sound vanished.

Then a harsh, jarring crash rang through the darkness, loud enough to pull his attention. It sounded like a building collapsing.

'And it sounds close. Should I go check?'

Normally, Ren would never have taken that kind of risk. Right now, though, he had no idea how to escape this place. All he could do was test every possible opening he found.

Besides, he was confident he could get away quickly if things went wrong.

He moved toward the sound, cautious and quiet.

The sight waiting for him nearly made him swear out loud.

A massive shape was crawling through the dark.

It was a horrifying infant-like ghost, enlarged countless times over. Its eyes were black pits. Its mouth had been sewn shut with dark, blood-colored thread, yet low sobs still seeped out of it. The monster stood nearly three stories tall as it crawled toward a small building.

'Is someone in there?'

From a distance, Ren caught sight of a figure inside the building, panicking and trying to flee.

After a brief hesitation, he moved closer. There was a good chance this enormous ghost was the source of the whole place. If he destroyed it, would the way out open?

The monster reached the building in moments. With a few sweeps of its hands, it tore the structure apart. When it pulled one arm back, it had a person clutched in its hand.

It was a young woman. She screamed as the creature lifted her toward a split-open mouth in its belly.

'That is...'

Ren recognized her.

Her name was Koharu Anzu. She worked at the orphanage. She had always been gentle and kind, the kind of person who treated every child there fairly. Everyone liked and respected her.

"Damn it, drop her!"

Ren was still some distance away. He bent down, snatched up a chunk of stone from a collapsed wall, and hurled it at the giant ghost.

The stone whistled through the air and struck the monster.

It did no damage at all.

Ren could only watch as Koharu was swallowed by the enormous mouth.

Anger surged up in him all at once. In that moment, he wanted more than anything to have the strength to kill that thing. But the difference in size was absurd. Even if he entered that extreme-speed state, what could his fists and feet possibly do to something that huge?

As fear, rage, frustration, and every other negative emotion broke loose inside him, Ren suddenly felt his "psychic power" swell.

For a moment, he could not even feel its limit.

Then a thought rose sharply in his mind.

'My fists won't do enough. But I can hit these ghosts because my psychic power is attached to me. What happens if I attack it with the power directly?'

Ren had tried projecting his psychic power outside his body before, but the effect on the world around him had always been limited. Most of the time, he used it only to reinforce himself.

Right now, it might be one of the few methods he had that could actually hurt this enormous ghost.

He had to try.

Gritting his teeth, Ren stared at the monster as its attention shifted to him. He fought to move the power inside him with his will.

The giant ghost looked slow as it dragged itself forward, but in only a few breaths it had already closed much of the distance.

Panic pressed against Ren's chest.

Then the power inside him finally moved.

He guided all of it into his right hand. Then he stretched out his arm, palm facing the charging monster, and gripped his right wrist with his left hand to keep it steady.

"Die!"

Ren's young voice rang out in a raw shout.

A blue flash tore across the darkness.

The giant ghost's body lurched. Most of it shattered at once, the wound smooth and rounded. Behind it, the upper half of a building suddenly had a clean hole bored through it, as if a pillar had punched through both the monster and the structure in the same instant.

A figure dropped from the ruined body.

Koharu Anzu.

From the outside, she did not seem badly injured, but she was unconscious. Whether she was alive or dead, Ren could not tell.

His body felt hollowed out. He nearly lost his balance, and the world swam in front of his eyes.

The giant ghost had fallen to the ground. Maybe it was dying, but it was still trying to crawl back up. The effort was pointless.

Ren felt the power inside him recovering at an unnatural speed. With that support, he steadied himself and looked at the monster, now missing three limbs and unable to move.

Then he started walking toward it.

His current state felt strange. Rage and other emotions churned violently in his chest, stronger than they should have been. Yet some deep part of him watched those emotions with absolute coldness.

The sensation was difficult to describe.

It should have been contradictory, but to Ren it felt almost natural. Like someone who thought drawing a circle with one hand and a square with the other would feel impossible, only to do it easily and realize there was nothing strange about it at all.

Ren knew something about his state was wrong.

He also knew the emotions were truly his.

Thankfully, a clear part of his mind remained. It kept the rising tide from drowning his reason.

The enormous ghost lay on the ground, still writhing as it tried to crawl toward him.

Ren watched it and felt the emotion inside him climb higher.

'Beat it to death.'

The thought repeated in him like a voice beside his ear. Once it appeared, there was no holding it back.

Ren took a few more steps. Psychic power gathered around his clenched right fist until it looked like a dense blue flame.

The ghost's body had already begun to break apart, but the fire inside Ren drove him to strike it anyway. He wanted to pour every last bit of that anger into a single blow.

'Kill it.'

Ren raised his small fist.

To an ordinary person, the sight might have looked almost funny, even cute. To anyone with the ability to see it, the blue blaze gathered around his right hand was terrifyingly heavy.

As Ren swung, the state where time seemed to slow appeared again.

He saw the blue flames tugging around his right hand begin to darken, gradually turning black.

A strange sensation welled up inside him.

In that moment, Ren could feel every trace of the power flowing toward his right hand. It moved with the flex of his muscles, with the force behind the punch, with the rhythm of his body.

'Breathing. That's it. It feels like breathing.'

For the first time, Ren and his power fell into perfect sync. It was the pulse of his breath and the rush of his blood. He did not have to force it into motion. The power was already moving with him in its best form.

Ren's fist landed on the giant ghost's head.

The black flame around his hand tore through everything with almost effortless ease.

A thunderous roar followed.

Ren watched clearly as the ghost's body was erased inch by inch by the distortion drawn in by the black flame. The crash came from the ground beneath it, shattering and grinding under the force.

As the last remnants of the monster faded away, Ren's emotions gradually settled.

Once he released his power, a crushing weakness rushed over him. He sat down where he stood. His right hand hurt badly enough that he could not stop grimacing.

Tap. Tap.

Clear footsteps sounded through the dark.

Ren looked over warily.

A graceful figure stepped out of the shadows. She had long white hair with a ponytail tied high at the back, and the black uniform she wore did nothing to hide her elegant figure.

The fact that she was human, and not one of those bleeding, hollow-eyed ghosts, let Ren breathe a little easier.

Still...

She looked faintly familiar.

Before he could think it through, the beautiful white-haired woman walked toward him with confusion and shock in her expression.

Her voice had a magnetic quality that suited her appearance. She looked at the exhausted little boy sitting on the ground, saw the caution still hidden in his eyes, and said, "You can call me Mei Mei. Little one, why are you here? Did you see anyone else?"

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