F Grade Healer Becomes Strongest Biomancer-Chapter 32: Fatty and Skinny

Nana

She blinked once.

Kagami was already standing between them. The skinny girl’s head swung from his right grip by a fistful of red hair. Her body hadn’t fallen yet.

One.

His sleeve was gone. Torn or burned, Nana couldn’t tell.

Fresh blood ran down the fingers. Steaming. Hissing where it dripped onto the kitchen tile.

"Huh," the fat man said.

Then the severed head spoke.

"Wow, you’re fast."

Nana’s knees hit the floor. The pot was still in her hands. She didn’t remember deciding to keep holding it.

Kagami was already moving. His fingers went into the hole in the fat man’s chest, the empty space where organs should have been.

He tore. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Blood. Tendons. Bone. The fat man split down the middle like wet paper. One half hit the kitchen sink. The other slid across the floor and stopped against Nana’s knee.

Two.

Warm. It was warm.

"Oh." Kagami looked at the halves. At the blood on his arm. "I overestimated."

He turned to Nana. His face hadn’t changed. Same flat expression from the van. Same nothing behind the eyes.

He seemed disappointed.

"Let’s go—"

"Fatty." The severed head. Still talking. Still smiling with lips that shouldn’t work anymore. "Stop playing dead."

A grunt. From the halves on the floor.

Nana looked down. The meat was moving. Pulling itself together. The fat man’s face, half of it, grinned up at her from beside her knee.

"Ka. Boom."

The geometry on the fat man’s skin screamed. Not a sound, but a jagged vibration that made Nana’s teeth ache. Then it ignited.

Kagami’s right hand moved.

[Perfect Cube]

Glass that wasn’t glass. A box of nothing solid, snapping into existence around her. Around him. Around the pot she was still holding because her fingers had forgotten how to let go.

The apartment exploded.

Sound died. The roar of ignition, the crack of splitting walls, all of it collapsing into a muffled hum. Like being underwater. Like being nowhere at all.

Fire crawled over the barrier’s surface. Orange and white and screaming hot.

The walls were gone.

The ceiling was gone.

Mio’s hoodie on the chair was gone.

Heat bled through anyway. Not the flames, just the pressure of them. The air inside the cube turning thick and hard to breathe.

"Little brat." Kagami said, close. "Breathe."

She was holding her breath. He’d told her to, before.

"You can stop now."

She breathed. It hurt.

The flames kept coming. She could see the building’s skeleton through them, rebar and concrete, glowing cherry-red. The other apartments. The hallway. The stairs she’d climbed a hundred times.

All of it burning.

"The barrier will hold," Kagami said. "Forty seconds. Then we move."

Forty seconds. She could count that. She was good at counting. It was the only thing keeping her here.

Three. Four. Five.

The severed head was still out there. She could see it through the flames: red hair blackening, skin bubbling, mouth still moving.

Still smiling. Like the fire was a minor inconvenience.

Twelve. Thirteen.

"They’ll regenerate," Kagami said. Not to her. To himself, maybe. "Annoying."

Twenty. Twenty-one.

The fat man’s halves were crawling toward each other. Through the fire. Meat knitting back together, geometry flickering beneath charred skin. His face reformed first, grinning before he had lips to grin with.

Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine.

Nana looked at the pot in her hands. Her arms were shaking. Had been shaking. The ceramic was warm against her cramping fingers. The soil inside was dry.

The moonpetals were fine.

Thirty-five.

"Time." Kagami’s hand found her shoulder. The right one. It was cold. "Don’t look back."

The barrier dropped.

He grabbed her against his chest and jumped.

Four floors. The fire escape was gone. Twisted metal rained down around them. The building’s face had caved in, concrete and rubble spilling into the street like a gutted animal.

Kagami took the impact in a crouch, Nana’s feet never touching the ground. He set her down. Her legs buckled anyway, but he was already dragging her forward, away from the collapse.

The van was flattened. A slab of concrete had pancaked it into the street, glass and metal scattered in a twenty-meter radius.

Block-leveler. The word surfaced from somewhere. News reports. Military briefings she’d seen on TV.

Half the building was gone. The other half was burning.

"Kagami-san."

"Keep moving."

"Kagami-san."

"What."

"You killed them." She squeezed his cold hand. "And they didn’t die."

He stopped. Looked at her. Really looked, for the first time since the van.

For the first time, something moved behind his eyes.

"No," he said. "They didn’t."

The word settled between them.

"Keep up."

He kept moving. She followed.

Sirens in the distance. People screaming somewhere. Nana couldn’t see them; dust and smoke turned the street into fog.

She counted her steps instead.

One. Two. Three—

Kagami suddenly stopped.

"Keep running, Nana."

She heard the slightest octave in his throat. Something she hadn’t heard before.

"What?"

"End of the block. Crowd. Stay with people." He wasn’t looking at her. "Go."

She nodded. Her legs moved. Her arms held the pot. Her brain had gone somewhere else.

Her footsteps faded into the smoke.

***

Kagami

Now then.

He turned.

They emerged from the rubble behind him. Fatty’s silhouette first, bulk reforming, skin knitting over exposed muscle, steam rising from flesh that shouldn’t be alive. Then Skinny, head tilting at an angle that spines shouldn’t allow.

The geometry on Fatty’s skin was building again. Faint hum. Heat shimmer warping the air around his bulk.

Skinny unwrapped the silk from her face.

No eyes. Just light. Burning white where sockets should be.

"9 seconds, was it? Want to count again?"

"Corpses don’t speak."

People around them had already evacuated. Sirens blared a few blocks down. More than enough time.

It’s a shame. He really did like this suit.

However, some things can’t be helped.

The fat man was whole again. Grinning. The girl beside him, light burning where her eyes should be.

Two regenerators. Block-level firepower. And they wanted the little brat.

"Fatty, level the street."

"Ka—"

Kagami exhaled.

His right arm split open, met by the fat man’s response.

"—boom."