Now, let us wind the clock back a little.
And what of Yasutaka, while Kana was up there getting herself surrounded?
"Probably... she's gonna come after me..."
As far as Kana was concerned, this whole defeat was Yasutaka's fault, every last bit of it.
Once she knew there was no escaping, it was plain as day where she'd aim her final shot.
And Yasutaka, battered as he was right now, would go down easy.
But Yasutaka pulled a talisman from his robes, and at the sight of it Mōha let out a low growl.
"That's..."
"Mani's shikigami. Borrowed it before I left."
So saying, he held Mani's talisman before him and shouted.
"Come forth, Medea!"
Fwoooomm...
The usual spider-woman appeared, bare from the waist up, as beautiful as ever.
And what did Medea do next?
Softly...
she wrapped her arms around Yasutaka.
"Too bad I can't feel anything."
He said it with perfect calm, right as she sank into his body...
Mōha's eyes went wide at the sight.
"You don't mean—!"
"Only works when I've borrowed her from Mani, you know... becoming a Shiki-Oni."
A spider's pattern rose across Yasutaka's skin.
Now, a Shiki-Oni is the warrior form an onmyōji can take. By letting a shikigami possess him, he transforms into a fighter who can throw fists as well as spells.
Ordinarily an onmyōji leans toward the sorcerer type, ill-suited to brawling, but by taking a shikigami into himself he can, so to speak, fight as a battle-mage of sorts.
And that was exactly what Yasutaka had just done.
That said, his body was still wobbling on its last legs, so there was really only one simple thing left for him to do.
"You really came, huh!"
He thrust his hand toward Kana as she came diving down at him and blasted her with thread!
Fwiiiiiiish...
A torrent of thread came spewing out of Yasutaka's hand!
"Whaaat?!"
In an instant Kana was bound up tight in the thread.
And the moment it happened, she let out a scream of pure horror and thrashed wildly!
"GYAAAAAAAH!!!!"
The thread might as well have been red-hot wire, the way Kana writhed and screamed against it.
Plop. Plop. Plop...
As she thrashed, her heads began dropping off, one after another...
Yasutaka froze at the sight.
"What? Why?"
"I don't want to! I don't want to diiiie!!"
Kana's body was cinched and sliced apart by thread squeezing in from every direction, while Yasutaka just stood there watching with a look of utter bewilderment.
And then...
"...Ugh..."
Her last head was sheared away, and what remained of her body, shredded now to ribbons, came tumbling down.
"Whoa!!"
The two of them scrambled backward in a panic.
Splat, splat, splat...
Piece after shredded piece of her body hit the ground and burst apart, turning into slabs of raw meat.
"...I see... the thread's this powerful because it's thread... I completely forgot..."
Yasutaka had only meant to bind her, but he'd clean forgotten that thread could just as easily turn into a lethal weapon.
Knowing a thing in your head and getting it right in the heat of the moment are, as it turns out, two very different matters.
Yasutaka broke into a cold sweat, staring at what was left of Kana, now nothing but meat.
"Now I finally get it. Mani only ever tied people up a little... I never imagined it could end up like this..."
"Good thing your fiancée isn't the type to kill people for no reason."
And so Yasutaka breathed a sigh of relief, the charge of attempted murder against Mani cleared once and for all.