The neighbor had once described Matsuzaemon's power like this: drop ten thousand nuclear bombs on his head and it still wouldn't kill him.

Ma En understood what a nuclear bomb could do. Which was precisely why he found the claim so hard to swallow. Rationally, emotionally — a situation in which "the most destructive weapon human civilization has ever produced cannot kill this thing" simply did not exist within ordinary understanding. If it existed anywhere, it was in a fantasy novel, not the real world. In the real world, the scenario of "sufficient to annihilate humanity but insufficient to destroy a monster" felt particularly devoid of credibility.

The impression of Matsuzaemon in Ma En's mind had become correspondingly unreal. What he'd heard from others painted Matsuzaemon as nothing more than a person — unremarkable in his work or his ideas, nothing distinguishable about him in the human landscape. And yet from the neighbor's mouth, this inconsequential figure had been stripped of every human internal quality — as if everything others saw was nothing but his skin. Only the neighbor claimed to know what was underneath.

The neighbor was one person. The others were many. In terms of numbers alone, in terms of logic, Ma En couldn't persuade himself to simply and completely believe this one man. He knew — of course he knew — that if the neighbor's version was the truth, he had to trust it, and that the accumulated bizarre events around him had already provided more than enough corroboration. He knew all of this.

And yet the knowing did nothing to help the believing.

He was caught in a genuine impasse. No amount of evidence the neighbor could produce would dissolve it. He could search for inconsistencies in any set of evidence if he was determined to. And ignoring the inconsistencies, abandoning his common sense, setting aside the basic human confidence in the strength of human arms — and believing that "Matsuzaemon is genuinely this kind of monster" — he felt he simply could not do this.

What he wanted, he realized, was specific: he needed to physically see a conventional weapon, something powerful by ordinary standards, fired at Matsuzaemon. The result of that confrontation would tell him everything he needed to know. Nuclear weapons weren't available, and no country would drop them on its own city to kill a population that looked and lived no differently from ordinary humans. But a real firearm, a real target — that was the kind of evidence that would close this gap.

Ma En pressed his fingertips to his temple. In the damp darkness of the forest, he felt the back of his shirt already soaked through.

How to kill Matsuzaemon? If practice confirmed he truly was a monster conventional weapons couldn't kill — if nuclear weapons really couldn't end him — what exactly did the neighbor intend to do? What was this "one percent chance" built on, and at what cost? And Ma En, who had agreed to assist in this plan with no clear view of where it led — what would be asked of him?

Would the old version of himself have been thinking these thoughts? He asked himself this and received no answer at all.

"Friend — you said killing Matsuzaemon has a one-percent chance. How did you arrive at that number?"

"A feeling."

The neighbor said the last thing Ma En had wanted to hear. And yet — what could he say? In this bizarre and uncanny situation, if it had been him, he might not even have been able to claim "one percent" with that much confidence. His own conviction that he still had a chance had never been based on careful, rigorous assessment. He'd simply felt it.

Because he believed there was still a chance, he believed there was still a chance.

"Can you walk me through your plan?" Ma En asked.

"No. Not yet. You're still full of doubt. Doubt will make you slow — it will make you weak." The neighbor said with weight. "From here, I'll work through your doubt, one piece at a time. I think you're a fool, my friend — but I hope you're not actually a fool. I'd like to be surprised."

He pointed to his own ugly head, his voice going heavy: "I know it's hard for ordinary people to accept all of this. Even when you put the frightening, the terrible, the unbelievable directly in front of them, all they do is wail and moan, stick their backsides in the air, and bury their heads in the ground. You can't do that. To work alongside me, you have to first transform your conventional worldview — see this world from an angle that exceeds the current universal assumptions about what's real — see yourself within it. People might call you mentally ill. But when all of this is over, you'll be glad you made that choice. Because it's the only thing that will let you survive."

The words hit Ma En's mind like a hammer. They seemed to carry something beyond persuasion — something that made the world go slightly sideways. He felt dizzy, and the dizziness was clearly not physiological. It came from somewhere deep in the information processing of his mind, rising up from underneath. Like a spell — already rooted in his skull, already sprouting, without him noticing when it had been planted.

He raised his gaze slightly, and saw the neighbor standing on a rock, gesturing as if delivering a speech to the whole of creation — that enormous, inhuman, hideous body radiating passion like a volcano's eruption. When he swept his arm outward, Ma En had the distinct sensation that the entire forest was responding to him.

The dark forest seemed to spin like a toy in his hands.

Ma En felt sure he had entered a hallucination. He pinched his own arm, hard — and could not break free of the sensation. It was as though he'd taken some strange drug, his nervous system no longer entirely under his own control. He couldn't even determine whether he was still standing or had collapsed. His soul felt as if it had separated from his body, taking up some elevated vantage point, ascending toward the neighbor.

In the next moment, an enormous fear descended — and swept his entire consciousness.

When his awareness reconverged on the self, he found his hands and feet were trembling.

The neighbor seemed to have spent the burst of force now; his breathing was labored. But Ma En felt the whole episode had been so hallucinatory, so unlike anything ordinary, that — even as the fear lingered in him — a fierce anger rose up alongside it. The anger was at himself, at his own helplessness, at having had to receive all of this without any capacity to respond.

If he only knew more — if he could arm himself more thoroughly — how could it have come to this?

Every form of training he'd done — mental, physical — felt grotesquely overstated, pathetically small, worthless against the real thing.

He didn't think his performance represented "the limit of human ability." But because this had happened to him, he could feel it clearly: this was his personal limit.

"Do you understand? My friend — you must do as I say!" The neighbor's voice reached him.

Ma En's face was slick with cold sweat. He nodded, instinctively. The neighbor's ugly face shifted into something that might have been relief. Ma En didn't know how he could read the man's expression across the dark gap of the night forest, but he felt certain he'd read it correctly.

Even as he nodded, a ferocious silent alarm was going off in his mind: something is wrong. This version of the neighbor, and this version of myself — both of us are wrong.

Wait. We came here to do something. What was it again?

He rubbed his throbbing temple, and his gaze drifted sideways, settling on the young man's body lying off to one side.

Right. The body.

"Ha... good. I knew you could manage it. You're my best friend, you know that." The neighbor's breathing was more unsteady now than it had been throughout the strenuous physical exertion of the night. He was soaking wet, his speech blurring at the edges, the words struggling to form clearly. "You're really my best friend. Don't worry — we'll succeed. Just do what I say. If you can't figure something out, don't think too hard — just hand it to me... to me, to me, to me..." He seemed to repeat the phrase several times, but as it repeated, the voice became murkier and murkier, until it was unclear what was even being said.

He had decided just this morning to stop doing the mental math problems and self-diagnostic tests. Right now, he badly missed them — as if only those things could give him even a small measure of reassurance.

When he came back to himself, he felt the neighbor had done something to him — yet he couldn't accuse the man directly. He couldn't even understand how it had been done. What he did know was that he was probably lucky it had been him. Anyone else might not have even registered the "doubt."

The more he thought about it, the more certain he became: this had been an invisible confrontation. What the neighbor had done was something like hypnosis — but far more powerful than any conventional hypnosis.

Even knowing this, Ma En had no impulse to blame or resent the neighbor. The situation had developed so suddenly he'd had no preparation, no defense. But this wasn't entirely unexpected, either. This man — whether analyzed physically, physiologically, or psychologically — was far from safe. He had never been safe.

You couldn't expect a monster not to bite.

This isn't a warm and gentle fairy tale.

Ma En steadied himself. The pained expression on his face gave way to a pale, thin smile. He let the smile show, openly, facing the neighbor — and whatever expression was on the neighbor's face shifted in response. The air went tight again in an instant.

"You're... smiling at what?" The neighbor's voice went dark.

"Laughing at myself." Ma En's voice was level and genuine. "You were right. I'm a fool. I won't overthink things anymore. If you have a plan, I'll do everything in my power to support it. Because you're the one who understands the situation—"

Before the neighbor could respond, Ma En's voice came again: "Don't disappoint me."

The neighbor made a sound — teeth, air, something between a hiss and a word.

"...You're a difficult person," he seemed to mutter.

"Weren't you going to show me more?" Ma En gestured at the body. "Can we handle him now?"

The neighbor seemed to snap back to himself. He nodded and said: "Right — we can't waste any more time."

Ma En looked up. Through the thick canopy, the moon's position had shifted considerably. He'd left the hotel in the small hours; by now another hour had passed... less than three hours to dawn.

"Are we going to bury him under this tree?" Ma En asked, guessing — maybe the neighbor wanted him to witness a tree-monster conversion. But even a dead body, not a living person?

"No. This tree has already been used." The neighbor picked up the body and started back the way they'd come. "This tree has already changed. Probably many of the others around it too. They work from a center outward, utilizing the trees in expanding circles. We need to go further out, find ones that haven't been used yet..." His voice had come back to clarity.

But after only two steps, he stopped. He seemed to hesitate.

"What is it?" Ma En followed, asking.

"I forgot — just burying him isn't enough." The neighbor said. But Ma En had a hard time deciding whether he'd truly forgotten.

"There are additional steps?"

"Yes... no, I'm not certain... I really don't want to go to that place." The neighbor hesitated, which was rare.

"The cemetery?" Ma En guessed.

The neighbor's emotional state seemed to destabilize again, but this time Ma En could read it clearly: what was in it was fear. Pure fear.

"You've never done this before — turned a body into a monster." Ma En felt he'd struck on something true. The neighbor's behavior had been strange in a specific way, and yet his voice had shown no irritation at being challenged. Ma En suspected that was because the fear in him simply outweighed the embarrassment. Whatever step was making him hesitate, whatever he couldn't confirm with certainty, was something he considered genuinely dangerous.

Ma En didn't push. After a while, the neighbor finally spoke: "I told you — these monsters worship the Matchmaking God."

"Yes."

"They've performed ceremonies at the cemetery over there. Offerings to the Matchmaking God. You know what's in that cemetery? A shrine. People say it was placed there to suppress the evil energy of the dead — but that shrine belongs to the Matchmaking God. Think about it — does the Matchmaking God suppress graveyard evil? You've seen it in the nightmare. Does something like that suppress anything? What is it doing there, while humans make offerings to it and monsters perform ceremonies around it... terrifying. It's truly terrifying."

The missing step must be—

Before Ma En finished the thought, the neighbor said it: "Perhaps before turning the body into a monster, we need to worship the Matchmaking God at the shrine." As he said it, the enormous body gave an involuntary shudder.

Ma En's brow furrowed. He answered with flat certainty: "No. We can't do that. That's too dangerous. If the Matchmaking God is real—"

He hadn't finished speaking when the neighbor fell into a trance, muttering in a blurred monotone: "No — I should let you see. Otherwise you won't believe. Yes, I need to show you. Show you what it's like, show you how they become monsters. Show you, show you..."

"No! Snap out of it, friend!" Ma En shouted immediately. "This doesn't make sense. There's no reason to do something more dangerous just to prove something that doesn't matter right now!"

But the neighbor's body was already releasing the vines. In Ma En's eyes, the tendrils seemed to carry an emotion of their own — visibly agitated, bright with a kind of terrible anticipation. The situation was slipping off track, sliding toward something dangerous. Ma En turned and ran.

Even with his speed — faster than most — the vines were faster still. Within a breath, they came from behind and from all directions, falling like a net, wrapping around him just as they had when they'd left the apartment. He struggled, but unlike the first time, he was actively fighting this. He had no room to fight at all.

He was hauled into the air together with the young man's body. He could see the neighbor's enormous body shuddering, hear the man's murmuring — syllables Ma En couldn't parse, in something that didn't quite sound like any language he recognized, with a primordial coarseness and something darkly wrong about it. It made him think of the creatures' sounds in the nightmare.

"Yes, yes, yes — that's it, I understand now..." The neighbor's voice clarified slightly, but the words were the ones Ma En least wanted to hear. "I'll take you there. Show you something ordinary people never get to see in their entire lives. Then you'll believe me. You have to trust me — more and more and more. I'll show you how they become monsters."

"Damn it — you fool — come back to yourself!" Ma En fought and shouted. "I do trust you! Can't you trust me? You're destroying the trust between us right now!"

"No, no — you just don't understand yet. I'm not angry at all... heheh... I'm not angry." The neighbor let out a neurotic giggling sound, and it hit Ma En with a sharp sense of déjà vu. He'd heard this sound somewhere before.

In the dim moonlight and the deep dark, the forest finally made noise. When Ma En heard it, he felt the forest had "come alive." But compared to this sound — which was just like wind through tree crowns, like insects calling in the vegetation, the perfectly ordinary sounds of nature — the deathlike silence from before had felt more reassuring.

Many things had become active at once. But Ma En felt less and less that this was natural activity. It was as though everything hiding in the dark — in the earth and the plants and the wood — was turning a malicious, contemptuous grin on him. The grin of something mocking insects that had overestimated their own reach.

The malice of the forest was proportional to its size. Against this scale of malice, Ma En felt as small and exposed as a human being standing alone against a natural disaster.

He'd understood for a long time that what they were doing carried real danger. But now, he could no longer avoid admitting it: the danger here was deeper and heavier than he'd imagined or believed. Without knowing it, he'd been standing at the very edge of the cliff.

Before he could act on anything — before he could actually do anything — he might end here...

The thought surfaced in his mind without invitation. He banished it in the next moment with a deliberate, forceful act of will.

Bound, unable to move — he told himself one thing: do not panic.

Calm would not necessarily save him. But beyond luck, nothing was better than calm.

He almost regretted leaving the briefcase behind in Room 3. Then, without thinking, his hand moved to his pocket. The paper ball — the strange paper that had once saved his life inside a nightmare — was still there.

The mood that had plummeted finally lifted, slightly. His luck wasn't entirely gone.

Even if he couldn't count on the paper ball working in the waking world the way it had in the dream — right now, it was the only thing on him that could possibly matter.

Possibility.

Possibility still exists.