Editing City Series:Volume3b Chapter 8 (section)

===Part 5===

Fei stood alone in the noisy night.

There was not a hint of light in the vicinity and he was entirely surrounded by the roaring of the wind.

His right arm was slowly regenerating. It had only been Tuned into shards of glass, so it would naturally return to normal given enough time.

The dust-like shards that had scattered on the ground and in the wind started floating over toward him and gathering around where his right arm should be. Their temporary transformation ended and they began retaking their original form, so they burst out into the shape of the arm.

The process should have produced the quiet murmuring of his Live, but it was drowned out by the surrounding wind.

It took a few breaths before the arm returned to normal.

“…”

He remained silent.

The eyes behind his mirrorshades watched his arm regenerate.

Even the Custom Body lining of the arm had returned and the damage from the knife had vanished.

He looked to his feet where a large knife sat on the exposed rock of the ground.

He slowly picked it up in his right hand.

He frowned a little while staring at the blade.

He slowly looked around, but no one else stood there but him.

There was, however, another figure lying at his feet.

It was Rin.

She lay face-up and simply looked like she was asleep.

Her sunglasses had fallen away somewhere, revealing her peacefully closed eyelids.

Her face had gone pale. The blood that should have colored it had flowed out through the slash running halfway through her well-formed neck.

She had not customized her entire body.

That was the difference between her and Fei and that was why she had died.

She was no longer moving in the slightest.

“…”

Fei dropped the knife next to her.

The blade dropped first and it stabbed into the exposed volcanic rock instead of bouncing off.

It almost looked like a gravestone.

He then removed his mirrorshades and sat down next to her.

His face was as expressionless as ever.

“…?”

He asked her something, but there was no response and she did not move.

The dead did not move.

But that definition was suddenly overturned.

“!?”

Rin’s body jumped up and turned toward Fei with abnormal speed.

Her bloody body forcefully embraced him.

For a brief moment, Fei saw two small mole-like holes on her neck, slightly above the wound from his fatal attack.

Fei knew what those holes were: the marks left from a vampire’s fangs.

That female detective’s subordinate had been an immortal young man.

She embraced him and her hand held the knife he had stabbed into the ground a moment earlier.

And she gave a shout.

“Word Accel! Oh, you Lives with an Octave of 12,000!”

Her shout was loud enough to overpower the blowing wind.

The thick knife was a Device and it faithfully amplified Rin’s Live.

“Lu.”

It began as a quiet sound. It was a monosyllabic sound of motion. It had a warm orange Word Color and an accurate three-beat Tempo.

Rin stabbed her blade into Fei.

The Device plunged into the back of his neck to reach the device controlling his modified Brain Bios.

The blade tip tore into the device which had caused him to lose his memories and emotions.

At the same time, he wrapped his right arm around Rin and stood up.

His right hand was stabbed into her back.

The Hard Nails of that hand were entering her body through her back.

“!”

To defeat a vampire, one had to tear out their heart.

Fei was doing that now.

Rin’s mouth opened wide and she shouted something.

The roaring wind swallowed it up, so who could say if it had been her Live or a scream.

But a moment later, something else escaped her mouth: blood.

She coughed up a fist-sized clump of blood which stained Fei’s shoulder.

Strength immediately left her and her entire body trembled a little in his arm.

The Device fell from her hand.

“…”

Her upper body fell limply toward Fei and there was no strength in her eyes.

Fei’s right hand was buried in her back up to the wrist.

His hand was trembling slightly.

One or the other of them muttered something and Fei pulled out his hand.

Rin collapsed to the ground.

Even as her body doubled over, she could still move.

She held a hand to the hole in her back and looked up in front of her.

Fei stood there.

He was looking up into the sky while holding the inner corners of his eyes with the hand he had used to skewer her.

“…?”

He lowered his hand as a look of resignation and confusion filled Rin’s face.

He went limp and stopped moving while still staring up into the sky.

Rin briefly saw tears on his face.

But that was an illusion.

The blood on his hand had simply dripped down his cheeks.

Regardless, he had stopped moving.

He silently stared up into the sky, so she lowered her head in his place.

She spoke some words that were drowned out by the wind.

Her lips moved again and again to repeat the same words.

There was no light in the vicinity.

The only sound was the blowing of the wind.

The only two people there had stopped moving.