——This is seriously bad.
Feeling the hard ground press against his face, he realized he had collapsed face-down.
His entire body was limp, and sensation had already fled his fingertips.
All that remained was a searing heat centered in the middle of his body—the kind that made him want to claw his own throat out.
——Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot.
The instant he opened his mouth to scream, what spilled out wasn't a cry but a clot of blood.
He coughed violently, spewing up the very source of life that had surged into his throat. Blood frothed at the corners of his mouth in thick, gurgling waves. Through his blurred vision, he could see the ground stained a deep crimson.
——Ah, so this is all my blood.
The amount of blood was enough to soak his fallen body. He'd heard that blood made up roughly eight percent of a human's total mass, and losing a third of that was life-threatening—but at this rate, hadn't he already lost all of it?
The vomiting from his mouth had stopped, but the cause of the 'heat' that seemed to burn through his entire body was still very much active. His hand, barely able to move, drifted toward his abdomen—and upon feeling something impossible there, he understood.
——Wait, my stomach's been split open.
No wonder it felt hot. He'd been mistaking 'pain' for 'heat.' The sharp laceration tore nearly clean through his torso, held together by a single layer of skin at his waist.
In short, it seemed he had come face-to-face with what one might call the 'game over' of life.
The moment he grasped that, consciousness began draining away at alarming speed.
Even the 'heat' that had been forcing him to writhe moments ago dissipated somewhere into nothing. The unpleasant sensation of blood, the feel of his own hand against his insides—all of it was swept away as his fading consciousness took its final leave.
The only thing left behind, denied the companionship of his 'soul,' was his body.
With his last act from his vanishing mind, he moved that body just slightly. His neck, tilting upward.
Before his eyes, a pair of black shoes pressed into the floor—that carpet soaked in fresh blood—sending tiny ripples through the crimson.
Someone was there. And that someone had most likely been the one to kill him.
Strangely, he felt no desire to look upon that person's face.
He had no memory of being so much of a fence-sitter that he'd refuse to even glance at his own killer, but his mind held not the slightest curiosity about who that person was.
All he wished for was this and nothing more—that she be safe.
"——Baru?"
It felt as though he had heard a voice like the ringing of a bell.
Given that he couldn't tell where his ears ended and his nose began, it was far more likely to be a product of his fading hearing.
And yet, even if it was merely his memory reconstructing that voice, it was impossibly soothing and stirred something deep within his heart.
And so— "—!"
A short scream erupted, and the carpet of blood welcomed yet another participant.
The body that collapsed was right beside him, and there lay his own arm, stretched out limply.
A powerless white hand tangled with his blood-soaked one.
It was all just coincidence, surely.
Yet he could have sworn the faintly trembling fingertips had curled back around his own.
"…t me"
He seized the throat of his consciousness as it drifted away and wrenched it back by sheer will, buying himself a sliver of time.
Both the *pain* and the *heat* were distant now—nothing more than the futile howling of a losing dog thrashing in vain.
But even so— "I will… I swear—"
—I will save you.
In the next instant, he—