Read Online Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel by Mizuki Nomura - Free Book Online
Authors: Mizuki Nomura
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made by the Phantom, and he descends into madness.
This voice did not belong to a person.
It was the voice of an angel! The voice of a monster! It was the dirge of the masked man who lived straddling heaven and earth—the Phantom!
It dug its fingers into my soul, and I lost all composure at the diabolical singing that slowly closed in around me. My throat burned, I couldn’t breathe, and my fingertips started to get numb.
Oh no—I was having an attack.
These had plagued me often after Miu jumped off the roof, and sweat broke out over my entire body, as if the Phantom’s voice had called it forth. My head whirled, and hoarse, reedy breaths escaped my throat.
My knees buckled, and I fell to my knees on the cold pavement.
The singing became a sly chuckle. It sounded like a man’s voice, like a woman’s voice, like a young boy’s laugh, and like a young girl’s laugh.
Inside of my eyelids rose the image of Miu, wearing a middle school uniform and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she turned to me with an empty smile, then fell away backward.
That image repeated again and again like a kaleidoscope.
“It’s not that you don’t notice.”
“You just don’t want to know.”
A voice flecked with poison accused me.
“You’re just pretending not to see it. You hurt her and chased her to her death. You’re a murdering hypocrite.”
No—no—no.
My entire body quaked, and the intervals between my breaths grew markedly shorter.
Miu fell away.
Fell away—
After a little while, I guess I lost consciousness.
When the ring of my cell phone woke me, I was lying on my stomach, my arms and legs thrown out, in a dark alley that smelled like rotting food.
A lighthearted Western song I liked played from the pocket of my coat.
I lifted my stiff body and got out my phone with frozen, numb hands and looked at the screen.
Ryuto…
“Oh, Konoha. You got a computer on where you are?”
Ryuto said it out of nowhere in a hurried manner.
“Sorry, I’m outside. I’ll get back in about an hour, though,” I answered, resting a hand on the wall of the alley as I got to my feet unsteadily.
Feeling was slowly returning to my skin and to my heart. Had that singing been a bad dream? I felt like I was standing on the boundary between illusion and reality, and my mind was still a little clouded.
“Oh. Then I’ll send ya the file. Take a look when you get home.”
“What did you find?”
“I actually tried lookin’ for Yuka Mito a little myself. I thought I might be buttin’ in, but if ya don’t solve your problems before Christmas Eve, that’s bad news for me.”
Ryuto dropped a bomb that blew away the cottony mist billowing up inside my brain with that one.
“Yuka’s been on a members-only site since this summer under the name Camellia. She’s got customers there. Looks like she mighta been an underage escort.”
As soon as I opened the door to my room, I started up my computer without even changing my clothes first and opened the file Ryuto had sent me. The homepage of a shady website trooped down the screen, along with a user agreement and girls’ profiles.
Ryuto had told me, “They noticed the unauthorized access and locked me out partway through, so I couldn’t see everythin’.
“The Camellia that’s number sixteen on that list is Yuka.”
I felt a fraying anxiety rising up in my chest, and holding my breath, I scrolled down the screen.
No. 16 Name: Camellia.
The instant my eyes fell on those words, my throat clamped tight and I felt dizzy.
The words of Mito’s classmates resurfaced in my mind, alongside a numbing pain.
“I saw Mito get into a car with a man in a black suit before! He had his arm around her, and it looked really fishy, and he called her Camellia.”
No…it had to be a coincidence!
No matter how I denied it, my anxiety remained, and my heart pounded almost painfully fast.
I read through the profile without so much as blinking. The
This voice did not belong to a person.
It was the voice of an angel! The voice of a monster! It was the dirge of the masked man who lived straddling heaven and earth—the Phantom!
It dug its fingers into my soul, and I lost all composure at the diabolical singing that slowly closed in around me. My throat burned, I couldn’t breathe, and my fingertips started to get numb.
Oh no—I was having an attack.
These had plagued me often after Miu jumped off the roof, and sweat broke out over my entire body, as if the Phantom’s voice had called it forth. My head whirled, and hoarse, reedy breaths escaped my throat.
My knees buckled, and I fell to my knees on the cold pavement.
The singing became a sly chuckle. It sounded like a man’s voice, like a woman’s voice, like a young boy’s laugh, and like a young girl’s laugh.
Inside of my eyelids rose the image of Miu, wearing a middle school uniform and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she turned to me with an empty smile, then fell away backward.
That image repeated again and again like a kaleidoscope.
“It’s not that you don’t notice.”
“You just don’t want to know.”
A voice flecked with poison accused me.
“You’re just pretending not to see it. You hurt her and chased her to her death. You’re a murdering hypocrite.”
No—no—no.
My entire body quaked, and the intervals between my breaths grew markedly shorter.
Miu fell away.
Fell away—
After a little while, I guess I lost consciousness.
When the ring of my cell phone woke me, I was lying on my stomach, my arms and legs thrown out, in a dark alley that smelled like rotting food.
A lighthearted Western song I liked played from the pocket of my coat.
I lifted my stiff body and got out my phone with frozen, numb hands and looked at the screen.
Ryuto…
“Oh, Konoha. You got a computer on where you are?”
Ryuto said it out of nowhere in a hurried manner.
“Sorry, I’m outside. I’ll get back in about an hour, though,” I answered, resting a hand on the wall of the alley as I got to my feet unsteadily.
Feeling was slowly returning to my skin and to my heart. Had that singing been a bad dream? I felt like I was standing on the boundary between illusion and reality, and my mind was still a little clouded.
“Oh. Then I’ll send ya the file. Take a look when you get home.”
“What did you find?”
“I actually tried lookin’ for Yuka Mito a little myself. I thought I might be buttin’ in, but if ya don’t solve your problems before Christmas Eve, that’s bad news for me.”
Ryuto dropped a bomb that blew away the cottony mist billowing up inside my brain with that one.
“Yuka’s been on a members-only site since this summer under the name Camellia. She’s got customers there. Looks like she mighta been an underage escort.”
As soon as I opened the door to my room, I started up my computer without even changing my clothes first and opened the file Ryuto had sent me. The homepage of a shady website trooped down the screen, along with a user agreement and girls’ profiles.
Ryuto had told me, “They noticed the unauthorized access and locked me out partway through, so I couldn’t see everythin’.
“The Camellia that’s number sixteen on that list is Yuka.”
I felt a fraying anxiety rising up in my chest, and holding my breath, I scrolled down the screen.
No. 16 Name: Camellia.
The instant my eyes fell on those words, my throat clamped tight and I felt dizzy.
The words of Mito’s classmates resurfaced in my mind, alongside a numbing pain.
“I saw Mito get into a car with a man in a black suit before! He had his arm around her, and it looked really fishy, and he called her Camellia.”
No…it had to be a coincidence!
No matter how I denied it, my anxiety remained, and my heart pounded almost painfully fast.
I read through the profile without so much as blinking. The
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