Capítulo 28: Two Souls Bound
To say that Detective Ashihara Riku and the rest of the RCPD had their work cut out for them was a massive understatement.
'…Good grief.'
Those were the detective's thoughts as he inspected the narrow street en route to the Furukawa residence that had evidently become the site of a slaughter.
'…It's hard to believe a 17-year old kid really did all this.'
Shugo told him about the encounter, but the kid was oddly sparse on the details beyond that. And when Riku attempted to press him, all the kid said in response was that a dozen well-dressed gangsters – likely the same ones who'd tried to kidnap Taro – had tried to finish the job their friend had started earlier that day.
"Damn near managed it, too," said the teen over the phone, the tenor of his voice worryingly calm considering what he was saying. "I'm just lucky I made it out in one piece."
'Yeah, lucky you,' thought Riku grimly, his eyes darting all over the grisly crime scene before him as he recalled Shugo's report. 'These guys, not so much.'
As Riku examined what was left of the gangsters Shugo had encountered last night, he counted no less than eleven dead gangsters strewn throughout the alley, their cold, dead hands still clutching swords and guns of various kinds. Of those, the first three had been relatively lucky. From what the detective could tell, each of them had taken precise strikes in the head, the heart, and across the neck, with the end result that they were granted relatively quick and painless deaths compared to their peers.
'As for these others…'
One of them was riddled with bullets all over his upper torso, indicating that the teen had somehow managed to restrain him and use him as a human shield. One had been stabbed right through the heart, while another had been impaled in the neck. Yet another of the dead miscreants bore a stab wound right in the middle of his forehead, as well as a dark purple welt over his left eye socket that was still visibly swollen.
I't's like a scene from one of those slasher movies…!'
Finally, the last four had been dealt the most gruesome and brutal ends of all.
'Honestly, Shugo, just what the fuck did you do!?'
The first looked to have been all but disembowelled. The second had been slashed twice – across the eyes and across the windpipe – and had died desperately clutching his own neck in an ultimately ill-fated attempt to stop himself bleeding to death. Another of his compatriots had been sliced vertically from his right shoulder right down to his nether regions, and the hardened lawman could only wince as he imagined the man's agony in his last moments of life. Finally, the last of the bunch had had his face slashed open from cheek to cheek, before being ran right through his throat.
'You've got some explaining to do, kid.'
Back when they'd encountered and apprehended that wife-beater just a week ago, Riku had reprimanded Shugo for the no-holds-barred beatdown he'd inflicted. The detective had escorted the woman to his car, only to come back just in time to find the teen about to take one last, savage swing at the perp that could very well have left him paralyzed from the waist down. At the time, it was all he could do to confront the younger man on whether it was his handiwork or his partner's. At the time, Riku had accepted Shugo's reluctant admission that it had ultimately been his doing, however much his partner may have influenced him.
'What've you gotten yourself into?'
All the same, it wasn't until now that he saw just what that kid and his spectral partner was capable of. Between the blood, the gore, and the identical looks of horror and agony frozen on each of the corpses' faces, it wasn't until now that Riku saw what Shugo and his so-called 'angel of wrath' was capable of when she was the one in control – and when Shugo himself was in no condition to rein in her darker impulses.
"Oh, Shugo," he whispered quietly. "Just who have you been cohabiting with?"
The longer the detective considered the state of the bodies he'd just examined, the worse the implications became. While every one of those criminals had been massacred in increasingly violent and vicious fashion, all of them had been dispatched in ways that strongly indicated that their slayer knew how to wield a sword and kill people with it. 'She's good, I gotta say.'
And if Shugo's partner was capable of all that, Riku knew that it wasn't out of the question that the same held true for their enemy. In that case, that meant the city of Rakuen was now host to not one, but two vengeful spirits who were more than capable of bloody murder, on top of quite literally frightening people to death.
'…Wonderful.'
'Just wonderful.'
One way or another, Riku knew that things just couldn't - and wouldn't - end well.
------
"Arise, child."
Shugo sat bolt upright in his bed, his eyes fluttering open at his spectral partner's words.
"We have much to discuss."
A look outside told him it wasn't even daybreak yet. The clock on the lock screen of his smartphone read 4:35 AM, which was disconcerting in light of how he'd gone to bed at a quarter before 2 in the morning.
Shugo was naked from the waist up, his bloody shirt having been discarded in a pile on the floor to the right of his bed. When he got up to have a look at himself in the mirror, he saw that the wounds inflicted by the shower of bullets that had buried themselves all over his body had fully healed, leaving no evidence whatsoever.
'…I'm lucky to be alive.'
At the same time, Shugo saw that there was a rough, jagged scar, halfway between his wrist and elbow joint, where Harusaki Ayumu had impaled him with that silver-coated tanto. He wondered whether-
"Unfortunately, you are correct," the spirit interjected before he could finish the thought. "I healed the damage, but the scars inflicted by silver will forever remain."
'…Yeah, I was afraid of that.'
"More importantly, there is something you should know."
The teen sighed as he headed over to the kitchen, opened his fridge, and reached for one of the cans of soda that were standing on the top shelf, which he then popped open so he could take a quick draft.
"What's up?" Shugo hesitantly asked; while part of him was almost afraid to receive more unwelcome news, he also determined that not knowing would be worse. "Is this where we discuss what my heroic second wind last night cost me?"
Shugo paused for a reply as he tried to recall last night's encounter. He'd felt himself get back to his feet, having all but risen from the dead. Next thing he knew, he'd been reduced to a spectator as his body began to move on its own. From that point, all he could recall were brief, but vivid flashes of violence and gore. At any rate, he knew enough to know that those guys wouldn't be bothering him again.
After several seconds had passed and still no answer came, he went to the dining room and sat at the table.
"Recall my words," she finally said. "Up until now, it has been enough for me to simply remain with you as your guardian and partner – as your armour, shield, and sword, all at once. However, the silver that disrupted our connection required me to take direct control over your body so you could regenerate and survive. If nothing else, take comfort that the vermin who very nearly succeeded in killing you lived just long enough to know their folly."
'I knew it.'
An uncomfortable silence fell as the upstart avenger struggled to take those words in. Up until now, he'd gone out of his way to avoid killing as much as reasonably possible; even when he'd mauled the wife-beater in that alleyway, Shugo had only meant to beat him to within an inch of his life. While he hadn't been control this time around, there was no escaping the fact that those criminals had still technically died by his hand.
More importantly…
"Okay," he replied in a small voice after several moments. "And the risk you mentioned?"
Once again, her answer wasn't immediate. Well, that's not disturbing at all.
"What was the catch?" Shugo repeated, a note of urgency and panic creeping into his tone. "I'm not ungrateful for you saving my life for the nth time, but I need to know-"
She eventually did respond at the teen's prompting. But when she did, there was a sort of hesitation in her voice that Shugo had only recently begun to hear from her.
"Your mortal form was never meant to house more than one soul," she admitted, the teen taking in her words the same way he would a bucket of sub-zero water that had been forced down his throat. "And just as you now know that it is not necessarily beyond the capabilities of a mortal body to contain two souls bound so closely together, you must also realize that there are dangers involved."
"Okay, what dangers are we talking here?" Shugo prompted her further. And when she didn't respond right away, he pressed on. "I'm the one risking my life each time I get out there, so the least you can do is tell me-"
"While taking direct control of your body and linking my soul to yours as I did allowed me to snatch you from death's grasp, there was every possibility of me inadvertently burning your soul away instead-"
"-Which means we shouldn't count on it happening again a second time," inferred Shugo.
"Indeed."
"What happens if we try it again?"
"The longer and more frequently we bind ourselves directly to one another, the greater the danger grows," the spirit elaborated. "It would be entirely to your advantage were you to hone your fighting skills beyond the rudimentary combat capabilities you have demonstrated thus far. Even deadlier foes await us from here, and if nothing else, you would become less likely to find yourself in this predicament moving forward."
"Did this happen with any of your previous contractors?" Shugo asked, changing the subject.
"Only you," she answered; from the hint of mild amusement the teen detected in her words, she clearly knew he was only asking her that question because he wanted them to discuss something less morbid. "The one who came before you was killed instantly, in a manner that would have made my intervention impossible even if that recourse had been known to him. As for those who came before, only one of them died an untimely death – and all because of his own inability to fulfil his end of our contract."
'…Damn.'
Shugo took a deep breath as he went back to his bed and laid back down while digesting everything his spectral partner had told him. It wasn't until now that he fully understood her warning against his overreliance on the powers she had granted him. Not only had recent events had made it apparent that not only were there enemies who could resist his nightmares, her explanation just now also told him that the overuse of those powers was a potential source of danger in and of itself.
"Twice now have I saved you from an untimely demise," she reminded him, albeit in an unusually gentle tone of voice than he'd become used to coming from her. "You would do well to take better care of yourself, Shugo. I may not be able to save you a third time."
The teen sighed as he closed his eyes. Between the enormity of the revelations that had just been dumped on him, his inability to do much about them at the moment, and everything else he'd already gone through in the past two weeks, it was all the teen could do to try and get some rest.
"…Just one more thing," Shugo mumbled, letting out a soft yawn as he turned to lie on his side. "If you're calling me by my name now, the least you could do is tell me yours. Y'know, if you don't mind."
No answer came. Not that he expected it, anyway; it was a personal question, after all-
"…Kurona," she whispered in his ear.
"Hm?"
"When I lived, they called me Kurona Gozen."
"Mmkay," Shugo managed to mumble before he finally drifted off to sleep.
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