Water dripped.
Cold and rhythmic, it tapped against the silence of the abandoned reservoir like the second hand of a countdown. The air smelled of damp stone, mingled with a lingering trace of sickly sweet blood-from the woman who called herself L.
She had escaped. Carrying the almost conceptual wound the notebook had inflicted, she had melted into the darkness. Her warning still rang in my ears: "Before it devours you completely... we'll meet again."
The deal was off. The fleeting possibility of an alliance had been torn apart by the notebook's savage autonomy.
I stood where I was, without immediately giving chase-that would have been pointless, and dangerous. My gaze fell on the Death Note in my hand, now "quiet" again.
It was closed. Under the glare of my high-powered flashlight, its black cover absorbed every ray of light, looking darker and deeper still. The azure ice-crystal mark in the corner of the cover seemed a little clearer than before, like a cold eye watching me in silence.
A conceptual attack.
Tearing matter apart from a distance. This had gone far beyond the original rule of "write down a name, and they die." After devouring the energy of the Core of Harmony and stealing a trace of "nourishment" from the Ancient God in Greenland, the notebook's "evolution" had taken a terrifying leap.
It was no longer merely a weapon. It was an awakening... living thing, with a will and desires of its own. And I was only its temporary vessel, a tentacle through which it seized more "nourishment."
Assimilation. That was the word the woman had used. The notebook was trying to make me part of itself-or, rather, digest me.
The sensation of my right arm being forcibly controlled still lingered, a nauseating sense of something foreign lodged in