"That brings us to someone else," Rokuya said indistinctly as he chewed his beef. "Obanai Iguro. Ever since I rescued him, the guy's usually had a vicious tongue and found fault with everyone, but this time, he really proved his mettle."
Rokuya set down his chopsticks. Recalling Obanai's desperate battle on the train roof, a flicker of heartfelt respect crossed his eyes.
"Enmu kept hitting him with 'forced-sleep hypnosis' in the real world. An ordinary person would've been finished after one hit, but do you know what he did?" Rokuya looked at both of them and said gravely, "Inside the dream, the moment he realized he'd been hypnotized, he would slit his own throat without hesitation! He used the intense pain that fed back into reality to forcibly break the hypnosis! Just like that, he kept hurtling between consciousness and oblivion, enduring an enormous mental strain and the subconscious agony of having his throat slit dozens of times. He fought his way right up to Enmu's true body and severed that incredibly hard neck bone."
"He slit his own throat to break the hypnosis?!" Kanae and Shinobu gasped in unison.
As experts in medicine and toxicology, the Kocho Sisters understood all too well what that meant. Although he had slit his throat in a dream, under such extraordinarily realistic hypnosis, the brain would fully register the terror of death and the excruciating pain of a throat being torn open. Enduring that pain dozens of times in succession was enough to completely shatter a normal person's mind and drive them insane!
"Yes. That man is even more ruthless toward himself than he is toward demons," Rokuya said with a sigh. "With the fighting spirit and strength he showed this time, Kinoe or Kinoto can no longer come close to defining him.