F Grade Healer Becomes Strongest Biomancer-Chapter 76: Ghost Fire

Kagami

Ezra uncrossed his legs.

The stick had been leaning against the desk beside him. Dark wood, weathered at the grip, taller than a cane. He picked it up the way someone grabs an umbrella on their way out.

"Eleven seconds, Kagami-san." He stood. "You hesitated."

"Killed your dove."

"She wasn’t mine." Ezra looked at OG’s chair. At the tangerine juice drying on her fingertips. He looked away. "She was always yours."

The tendrils hardened down Kagami’s forearm and biomass locked across the knuckles.

"You think that resolves your sin?" Kagami said as he readied into stance.

"No, it does not."

Kagami closed the distance.

Ezra tapped the stick on the floor and the office disappeared.

Kagami’s foot hit grass. Afternoon light came from cloudy skies and wind replaced the sickly coffee aroma, carrying the drone of a highway overpass somewhere beyond the tree-line.

Temple grounds. Small, overgrown at the edges, with stone markers in crooked rows. A bucket and rag sat next to a faucet nobody had turned on in weeks. Two fresh plots near the back wall still had dark dirt. They were surrounded by a river. Koi fish in the clear stream, one black one white.

Ezra stood four meters out with the stick planted between his feet.

"I picked this place out just for you. You were quieter then. Now you’re silent as can be."

He’s already mourning. Hit him now.

Will-O-Wisp came out in three orbs of ghost fire. Not the candle flame it had been the first time he’d cast it at the beginning of Integration.

Ezra sidestepped the first and caught the second on the flat of the stick. He let the third graze his coat, then brushed the singe mark with two fingers. The stray comets fell into the river and boiled the surface and stayed boiling.

"You always overcharged that one. Same windup. Even back then."

Lightning came next. S-grade current that split the air white. The stick caught the bolt and the wood held when it should have exploded. Current ran down the grain and grounded through Ezra’s heel into the temple dirt, and his fingers trembled from the discharge even though his stance didn’t move.

"D-grade handwriting. S-grade ink."

Kagami closed again, faster this time. The arm split wide with Consuming Maw forming along the forearm, biomass reshaping into jaw and teeth where skin used to be. Ezra parried the first tendril with the stick and ducked the second. The Maw snapped shut an inch from his ribs and caught his coat instead, tore through the fabric. Ezra twisted free and jammed the stick between them.

"That’s new though. Bureau actually succeeded."

He wasn’t countering. He was reading the Maw, watching it branch and reform, studying architecture he hadn’t drawn. Kagami pressed and Ezra gave ground in measured steps, redirecting stick against biomass.

"The Cube was mine, though. The amplification, the bonding sequence." He shoved Kagami back. "They kept going after I left."

"You stopped?"

He’s lying. He played god with your body.

"I tried." That was the first hard breath from Ezra. "And the Men Upstairs sent someone to finish it. I don’t know what they did to you after that, Kagami-san. I really don’t."

Kagami looked at his own arm. The Maw was receding, teeth folding back into biomass. The pattern he’d never questioned because it came from his spine and his spine was the one thing that kept him upright.

"I didn’t want to watch you lose yourself."

"You’re six months late."

The biomass blew open and Will-O-Wisp erupted from both palms in seven orbs that blanketed the temple grounds. The first one was shot without thought, sailing wide and into the buildings across the horizon. The explosion shook the ground even that far away and caved six more buildings twice over.

"A hundred or so just died," Ezra said.

"A thousand more to pull your spine is a favorable outcome."

Headstones cracked from the heat. His spell, the first one he’d ever learned. The one Ezra had clapped for when Kagami held the flame for longer than four seconds and didn’t pass out. He pressed on with more tendrils.

Ezra hopped through mist, stick carving arcs through the smoke while the Maw reached from Kagami’s spine and shoulders. He was pressing with everything the Bureau had welded onto him and the garden burned around them both.

The stick cracked across his jaw and put blood on the grass between headstones. Kagami spat and closed again. The Maw caught Ezra’s shoulder and Ezra grunted, pulled free, brought the stick down on Kagami’s wrist hard enough to numb the tendons.

They separated with ghost fire burning in rings around them. The two fresh plots were on fire.

Ezra looked at them and then at Kagami. He tapped the stick on the ground and the garden folded.

Water came up ankle-deep. Brown and warm. The sky was too wide, too gray, and the horizon was a wall of motion with tides flowing inward from everywhere. It smelled like salt and sewage.

Thousands of people were screaming.

And above it all Nami hung in the current with tides blazing off her shoulders. Brown hair, green eyes.

The water climbed his thighs. Bodies bumped against him in the current alongside a bicycle and a stroller. Will-O-Wisp sputtered in his right palm like a birthday candle, D-grade garbage that couldn’t light a campfire let alone stop a Champion from drowning a quarter million people. He had screamed her name and the water ate the sound. Nami never turned. The tides kept pulling inward and Kagami stood waist-deep in a mass of bodies more than it was water with that birthday candle in his fist.

Ezra stood on the water with his stick across his shoulders, dry.

"This is what you were."

The water reached Kagami’s chest.

"This is why I put it in your spine."

Kagami’s hand went under and the Will-O-Wisp died.

"Because you were standing right here doing nothing. And she was up there doing everything."

The screaming stopped. Nami hung frozen mid-tide. Kagami breathed, chest-deep with his hands empty and the knight core humming in his spine.

"Thank you."

Ezra looked confused for once.

"For the core. The fusion. All of it." Kagami lifted his right hand out of the water and biomass crawled down the forearm. "Without this I’d still be standing here. With it I can kill the man who put it in me."

The Flood collapsed and they were back in the burning temple grounds. Ezra stumbled backward for the first time.

Kagami pressed with Will-O-Wisp from both palms and lightning arcing off the biomass. Ezra parried and redirected and the stick cracked against Kagami’s ribs, his jaw. But the gap was closing. Each exchange Ezra slowed by a fraction while Kagami burned hotter.

A tendril caught Ezra’s leg and pulled. He went down to one knee. Kagami’s left hand closed around the stick and the Maw hovered an inch from Ezra’s throat.

Ezra looked up with blood on his lip and didn’t let go.

"She told me to make it quick. Before you lose yourself completely."

"Corpses don’t talk." Kagami closed the distance once more, anticipating Ezra’s shrouded teleport, catching him by the throat. The tendrils swung for the decapitation—

Before it could make contact, Kagami’s arm had fallen to the grass.

[Kharon’s Spite]

Kagami dropped to one knee, blood pooling out his stump. The blood was black, no longer human. How long it’d been, he didn’t know.

"When did you...?"

"Does it matter?"

The Maw trembled. The biomass along Kagami’s shoulder was twitching in involuntary contractions and his vision doubled. His left eye went dark for half a second and Ezra’s stick connected his chin because his arm was on the floor and not blocking for shit.

Time’s up, boy.

Let me steer.

Ezra stared down at him, seemingly having won.

Kagami didn’t give a shit.

For the first time, the tendrils crawled up his neck and he let it.

Finally.