Editing Internet Shrine Maiden Tsugumi-chan:Volume1 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 7===

Flames gulped down oxygen with a deafening roar.

Yes, flames.

The muscular man who had been standing next to the metal drum (presumably filled with a dead body) had burst into scarlet flame. His flailing arms weren’t the result of the heat or the pain. His eyes had boiled, leaving him suddenly blind.

A few more of the surprised men spontaneously combusted.

These people were dying.

It happened so suddenly the girls seemed to forget to scream.

“Hey…Mugikko, is this some kind of trick too?” asked the gyaru sister, pale and curled up behind cover, not daring to move.

“No!!”



Hee……..hee

:::::Hee <span style="font-size:125%">hee</span>…………<span style="font-size:75%">hee</span>

:::<span style="font-size:125%">Hee hee hee…</span>



They heard laughter.

The hellfire produced female breaths expressing incongruous joy.

This wasn’t like the other burning people.

This one person was clearly enjoying it. Her body shook with joyous laughter. She didn’t seem to feel any heat or pain from the fire. She looked like a long-haired woman in burial clothes. But, while the flames made it hard to tell, a closer look showed her head was extremely long. Vertically. And her waist was twisted all the way around, making the term “hourglass figure” a little too real.

She held a metal object over a meter long in her right hand, but it probably wasn’t a sword or club. It was thinner than an arrow. When heated red by fire, the tool made of two pieces was more reminiscent of something else.

Of red-hot metal fire tongs.

“Is that…a Malign Spirit?”

The straitlaced sister sounded dazed.

She didn’t see this as salvation. Even now, the large men were engulfed in flame and, unable to bear the pain, throwing themselves into the canal. Even though they had to know applying seawater to serious full-body burns would mean death by shock.

A faint, ever so faint, ringing flickered in and out of hearing.

''The Groan.

“Hold on. So the Vanishing Canal case wasn’t just a trick set up by the yakuza, Yahirodono-san!?”

Yuhi screamed right into the online shrine maiden’s ear, but she didn’t respond. She was frozen while staring wide-eyed at that thing. She was sweating profusely and unable to control her breathing. Even she could tell her heart was hammering wildly.

The memory came rushing back.

It appeared in Yahirodono Tsumugi’s mind in brutal vividness.

“No.”

The cause of it all.

The one she was trying to track down.

The giant shrine burning down in real time.

The priest and shrine maidens seeking help and flailing their limbs but failing to escape and being scorched black.

The torii roaring with fire.

And the figure standing calmly below it.

The online shrine maiden tore herself away from the flashback and shouted.

“I’ve finally found you… The worst and most heinous Quadruple Dread Star: ''Hibashi-sama''!!!”