Chapter 6: Chapter 6: Decisive Fight
Sally’s room was a regular young girl’s room. With everything cute and in shades of white and pink. The room had been set up and it seemed nobody touched anything ever after. It even smelled like naphthalene.
‘Ok. Where do I start?’
Kai heard some really loud rumbling noises, which seemed to come from the next room.
‘Ok. This is where I start.’
Kai left Sally’s room and tried accessing the next room through the corridor. But there was no next room. Sally was the last one. Then the house ended. The corridor led to a turn with a large window with a view to the outside.
‘Funny…’
Kai went back to Sally’s room to ensure he didn’t hear the noise wrong. The rumbling was still going on.
‘It really sounds like it is coming from the nearest place, right past the wall.’ Kai thought. ‘Wait… Past the wall? Don’t tell me…’
Kai went all the way to the wall near the bed and pulled the bed to the side. The wall had a crack. Cracks are normal and may be caused by water leaks or something, but they seldom formed a very geometric shape like that. The crack almost looked like it was drawn by hand.
‘I see…’
Kai thought that maybe he should try and break the wall to see what lied beyond.
‘Oh, if I’m wrong the lady is going to kill me…’
Trusting his gut, Kai put the tip of his fingers in the crack and applied strength to try and lift the wall up, something which would only be possible if the wall was very thin on that spot.
But he was right. The wall was really peeling off, revealing a place inside the wall, which could fit a small child or an awkwardly crouching adult.
So it might be snoozing inside there. The thing must have pulled Sally inside and… Oh well… I guess the ma’am won’t be seeing her again if that much time has passed.
Kai made sure his body covered the exit so that the thing wouldn’t escape, as he was pretty sure it realized he found its hideout.
“Hound ghost thing…. Now how do I catch you?”
Kai stopped to think.
‘The last time it was afraid when I threatened it with my energy blast or whatever the hell that is. But it wasn’t afraid of the move itself, it was more frightened by the intensity. I think it feels the energy, just like I feel its presence as I did down there when I entered the house… Maybe if I pretend I’m going to use my powers it becomes scared and does some stupid things?’
With the last few attempts, Kai started learning he couldn’t just use his powers every time he wanted. Some prior warming-up was necessary. He concentrated and breathed deeply.
‘In that strange dream I pictured what I wanted to do and my body did the rest. I also dodged its attack in the school in the same way. Is it how this works? In this case… I should picture myself releasing energy for no reason…’
He heard the thing tapping its paws energetically, rushing to the entrance.
‘It sure does behave like a rat, huh?’
It tried skipping past his legs through the very hole in front of him. Even though Kai’s mind was ready, the body wasn’t. he couldn’t help but shake at the sight of that weird thing covered in spikes running at the base of his feet. It took the opportunity to squeeze and run away, but not before he kicked its torso with the strength he had gathered.
‘Take that you little sh*t!’
He noticed the thing staggering with the impact. But it kept running anyway. It looked far slower than it did the other day. Probably due to its wounds.
“AAahhh! What is that?” Kai heard Sally’s mother scream coming from downstairs.
‘She can see that…?’
He rushed down to the parlor, where the madam was.
“Where did it go?”
“I don’t know… One minute it was there and in the other… It wasn’t. What’s…”
Before she finished the sentence, Kai went straight to the fireplace.
‘If she saw it, it must have tried to run away from here. The door and window are closed. The next opening is…’
He heard the creature tapping the paws to the sides of the interior of the chimney. It seemed to be struggling to climb the walls.
Kai inserted his hand and tried releasing the wave upwards. It was very more likely he’d get a hit than a miss, due to the size of the chimney compared with the size of the thing.
The ‘ghost’ dropped down right above his hand, letting out a moaning noise. He then pulled its body out of the fireplace and proceeded to knock it down until it stopped moving.
‘There.’
The madam watched everything with a terrified expression, unable to react properly during the whole scene. It took several minutes and cups of water for Kai to explain to her what was going on.
Kai wasn’t the type to try and hide the truth since he understood it made things only worse. He called the mother to the room, showed the opening in the wall, and suggested the obvious outcome of the ghost-Sally relationship. Of course, rather than using phrasing like this, instead, he acted the most compassionate he could.
Sally’s mother spent most of the time trying to contain her tears, but in the end, she felt thankful to Kai because he solved the case in the end. She never asked why he knew about the monster or how he discovered the crack in the wall led to an opening. Some things are probably better left untold.
As a token of gratitude, she offered him a thousand dollars in cash before he left the house.
“It’s not much, but…”
“Madam, you don’t really need to. I was also friends of Sally, it hurts for me knowing it too, you know…”
“Take it, I insist…”
“Well…”
On the verge of accepting and not, Kai embraced the cash and guarded it in his pocket.
‘I’m not sure whether this sensation is guilt or what. But… It shouldn’t hurt accepting, right?’
After proper salutations, Kai left the house and walked to his, with a lot on his head.
‘Funny. I thought this would be one of those situations where I somehow don’t manage to beat the thing on my own and Aimee shows at the exact time to give me a hand, but she didn’t show up during the whole event… Wasn’t she heading to Sally’s place as well? Why would she let those news on the floor of her… Huh… Of the house on the address, she gave the library?’
‘…’
‘To be honest there a lot of things I still don’t understand…’
‘I wonder where Aimee is…?’
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone