This choice: Continue reading "School for Demons" • Go Back...Chapter #46School for Demons, Chapter 22 by: Seuzz   Hayato screamed, but Gorou-puppet clamped a hand over his mouth. Hayato's eyes bulged and rolled in their sockets as Sota pushed his face into the club president's.
It was his face, Sota knew, though he also somehow knew that his own face was dangling behind his head like a flap of loose skin, like Yuuna's face was dangling like a flap of loose skin too. For a moment only he failed to understand what was going on.
Then he understood, and put it out of his mind.
"I am going to devour you, Taniguchi Hayato," he thundered at the luckless boy in a voice that was like a whole freight train being tossed into the whirling blades of the most gigantic power turbine ever conceived. "Just as I devoured Sugawara Momoka, and Ota Gorou, and Ueno Akiko, and Ishida Yuuna! I will make you my puppet, as I made them my puppets! I will wear your skin, Hayato, and then I will have your looks, your intelligence, your cunning, your cruelty, and your arrogance! I will be you, Taniguchi Hayato!" Sota thundered.
But Hayato said nothing. He only rolled his eyes and frothed. He didn't understand a word Sota said, for Sota was shouting at him in the language of Hell.
So Sota simply raised his finger and jabbed it into Hayato's throat.
This time, as his last victim collapsed and deflated, Sota felt and tasted the meat and juice as it gurgled through him, pouring over his tongue and down the back of his throat. It was like molten honey, or the melted fat and juices of the most succulent steak. It was wine, it was semen, it was blood, it was the most delicious soul he had ever swallowed.
And then it was gone.
"Ah!" a voice exclaimed behind him, and he turned as a shrouded figure come squirting out of him. It gathered itself and pulled back its hood. Its face was a skull with razor-sharp fangs and curled horns coming out of the cheekbones. Sota understood instinctively that he too now had a face like that—the face he had shown Hayato.
"Yes, that's the stuff," the demon said, and it made a smacking sound even though it had no lips to smack. "As good as I knew it would be. I gave you a taste of it as it went through you, Sota. Wasn't it intoxicating?"
"Yes," Sota growled. "I need more! You filled yourself with it, but I want—"
"Filled?" The demon laughed. But this time it was no terrible tenor to it. It was a tiny sound, like a single pebble rattling inside the hollow hull of a beached freighter. "There is no way to fill such as me. To fill such as us, Sota. Look." The demon opened his mouth, showing an illimitable void beyond. "It goes through us and is gone. For a flash only we feel it and taste it, the soul that a mortal possesses. But we demons are hollow, we are negations, we are a hole that is infinitely deep and so can never be filled, can never hold so much as a proton though we swallow the universe. For that reason, we can never possess for more than an instant what mortals, even after they die, will possess for eternity."
The demon sighed. It was like the sound of a paper cup scraping across the asphalt of an empty parking lot.
"And now I am a demon too," Sota said.
"Yes," the demon said, "you now have nothing but hunger and intellect. That is what a demon is, an intelligent, conscious hunger. Do not blame me, though! I played according to the rules. Mostly you did it to yourself. To become these students you had to slice off pieces of you own self one hunk at a time. I merely collected your soul as you chopped it up and threw it away. If you had rejected me and left yourself in my power, I could have nothing worse than devour you, sending your soul to whatever is on the other side of death. But you have no soul now, and so can never go there yourself. You can only stay here, and clothe yourself in the skins you have stolen. The only soul you can have is whatever stains you scrape off their insides."
"And what if I don't want to stay here as a demon?" Sota asked.
"Then only Hell is open to you. But if you want my advice—and you have done me a good turn by letting me taste five delectable souls as they slipped through and out of me, so I will give it to you—you will try to stay up here as long as possible. The demons in Hell are much too strong for you, and though demons to demons taste like dusty bones, they would swallow you lickety-split if they could. And the skins I left you are warm enough. With these five you could really turn this school into an antechamber of Hell itself."
"Is that what you meant," Sota asked, "when you said I probably wouldn't make them into friends again?"
"Yes. They have made this school a Hell for others because they have made their club into a Hell for themselves. The more you make them hate each other, the more they will make this school a hateful place, and the warmer it will be for you.
"But brrrrrrr!" The demon shivered so hard it almost dissipated entirely. "I must hie from here before I freeze myself solid. Stay warm and damned, Sano Sota!" it exclaimed, then wound itself up into a spinning wheel of smoke and vanished.
* * * * *
Sano Sota stood and stared thoughtfully at the spot where the demon had vanished. Now possessed of nothing but intellect and hunger, he felt none of the emotions that he thought he should. No despair, no horror, no terror, not even a vague melancholy. I am a demon now, he thought. I've got to stay warm.
Instinct moved him, and he poured out of his skin to become a pillar of smoke in the middle of the basement. The skin and clothes of Ishida Yuuna, still with the skin of Sano Sota inside them, fell in a heap to the floor. Sano bent over them and snorted down the skins' throat. They swelled up and stood up as Ishida Yuuna, but with Sano Sota's head. Sota pulled Yuuna's face up and over Sota's so as to hide it fully.
Then, feeling the freezing pinch of the howling Plutonian ice sheet onto which he was exiled, he whirled and dove into the hollowed out skin of Taniguchi Hayato. The world spun, and when it had righted itself he found himself standing on his feet in the body and uniform of the president of the Elite Funtime Club.
"Nngh," he said, and pushed a crick out of his neck by spinning his head three hundred and sixty degrees and releasing it. "That was a really shit thing to do to me, Yuuna."
"Blame Momoka," Yuuna snarled. "She's the one who found that fucking book!"
"I only found it," Momoka said timidly. "I didn't mean—"
"Didn't mean, didn't mean!" Akiko mimicked her. "You dripping cunt! Cut the innocent act, we all know you're a scheming, evil little bitch who—"
"Yeah, well who's the one who picked that fucker Sano as a victim?" Gorou's face twisted into a snarl. "Fuck! Anyone else, anyone who wasn't already into fucking black magic wouldn't of—"
Through none of this could the lips, tongue, jaw or larynx of Taniguchi Hayato be seen to move. Even when all four of the other members of the Elite Funtime Club began to jabber and scream over each other did his mouth move. And this even though he, with a gleaming eye, was the ventriloquist working all of them.
He put a stop to the arguing, finally, by grabbing Yuuna by the throat and jamming his other hand into her mouth. His fist muffled her screams as he grabbed a hunk of loose flesh and ripped it from her. He flapped it open as she fell back and threw a murderous glare at him. "Son of a bitch!" she yelled. "That hurt!"
"It was supposed to," he retorted as he studied the empty skin of Sano Sota. "Here." He held it out to Gorou. "Put it on."
"The fuck?"
"I said put it on!" Sota—or was it Hayato? He realized now that he would have to move between his various bodies if he wasn't to lose himself completely inside one of them—seized a hank of Gorou's hair and pushed his head into the wall. "It was fun cursing that little shit to death, but he didn't stay dead, did he?"
"What happens to me?" Gorou stammered, "while I'm being—?"
"Who's going to miss you?" Akiko sneered. "I sure as fuck won't."
"That's right," Hayato said. "You're expendable, like your trashman father. If we need you back, we'll peel it off you and puff it up again."
"So why can't we do that now?"
He doubled over from the blow to his solar plexus.
"Because I am Taniguchi Hayato," howled the demon who possessed the mouth of the student of that name, "and I am the president of the Elite Funtime Club, and you will respect me! You will do it because it is hateful and unnecessary! I am Taniguchi Hayato, and this is what I say! Besides," he added, "this way you can go with Momoka."
"I can?" Gorou's voice turned hopeful.
"That's right. And together Momoka and you as Sano Sota will use your skills to bring the friends you make down here. As Sota you will use that book she found to tempt them into—"
The demon turned his stolen face to the ceiling and grinned. From a certain angle, his teeth looked very long and very sharp, like steak knives.
"Remember what our friend told us before he went back to Hell," the demon said in a voice that was like a knife being drawn across a whetstone. The words were in a language that, if spoken in a strong enough tone, would have made the walls bleed. "We must get them to damn themselves if we're to get any food around here.
"And I am starving!"
* * * * *
To continue investigating the room: "Disposing of Lucy"   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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