Void by Shin Towada

Author:Shin Towada [Towada, Shin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Ficion
ISBN: 9781421595382
Publisher: VIZ Media
Published: 2017-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

V

Asa woke the next day just past noon, having fallen asleep at some point, to find Uta and Tsumugi next to her. She sat up with a start.

“Ah, you’re awake,” Tsumugi said, as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

“Urgh …” Asa nodded, feeling slightly off-kilter.

“We’re going out. Get yourself ready,” the old woman told her.

“Huh? Isn’t it kinda early to go shopping?”

“We’re going a bit farther today.”

“Farther?” Asa asked, tilting her head.

Tsumugi nodded. “Yes,” she replied. “We’re going to see an old friend of mine.”

They wound up taking the subway, eventually arriving at a hospital in the 8th Ward. Yomo’s words from the night before crept back into Asa’s mind. Yujiro Utsumi. He’d been hospitalized in an 8th Ward facility.

As the approached the automatic doors to the hospital, Uta stopped and said, “I’ll wait here. I kind of stand out.”

Asa was flustered. “Should I wait here with you, then?” She didn’t stand out as much as Uta did, but she still stood out.

“No, you come with me. Just remember to hide your face,” Tsumugi said.

Asa pulled her hood up and headed into the hospital.

Tsumugi led her to one of the patient rooms. “Here,” she said. A nameplate reading Yujiro Utsumi hung by the door. Inside, a man somewhere around his seventies was sleeping. There were intravenous tubes and various other pieces of medical equipment connected to his body. The sight brought a quietly pained expression to Tsumugi’s face, the likes of which Asa hadn’t seen before.

“Old lady, is this guy …?”

“Yes. He’s my former lover. And the man who commissioned the mask in that photo.”

“Huh? Wait, so is this guy a Ghoul?” But Asa had never heard of a Ghoul receiving human medical treatment.

“No, he’s human,” Tsumugi affirmed for her. “But you could perhaps consider him a Ghoul all the same.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

Tsumugi silently reached out with a wrinkled hand to touch Yujiro’s face. When he showed no response, she closed her eyes tight. “He would eat people,” she said.

Asa’s breath caught in her throat. “A … a human who … ate other humans?”

“Yes. You could call him a connoisseur of human flesh, I suppose. And he raised Ghouls to help him indulge in his desires.”

At each and every turn, this story was getting harder to comprehend. Asa listened, perplexed, as Tsumugi went on. “He would have them kidnap young women and then butcher them. And if his cannibalistic ways were ever discovered, his plan was to pin all the blame on the Ghouls he’d raised, and flee.”

The tale was starting to make Asa’s head hurt as she attempted to follow along, but then she suddenly remembered the mask. “So then you made that mask for one of the Ghouls this guy was raising?”

Tsumugi nodded to affirm. “I fell in love with his unconventional, bold demeanor, and so I helped him without telling another soul. However, one of his Ghouls was killed by a Ghoul investigator, and so it seems that the existence of the mask got out.

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