บท 90: Haze
*Skkk*
*Skkk*
The sound of axes on grindstones filled the air.
"Mmmph! MMMHH!!" A woman struggled against the ropes that bound her. Her struggles were futile; the coarse hemp rope only clawed deeper into her skin with every breath.
She looked beside her, tears wetting her eyes. Her husband was bleeding profusely from his scalp, having lost too much blood to maintain any hint of consciousness.
Them and half a dozen other strangers were bound onto a thick wooden pole, somewhere in the district filled with abandoned warehouses.
This district, despite being only twenty percent of Section 12 by size, was where nearly forty percent of crime took place.
And for good reason, too. After a sudden and sweeping reform on manufacturing licences, nearly all the official manufacturing agencies vanished without a trace, leaving only those that were willing to break the laws behind.
Within a few years, this was all that was left. A desolate place with dangers lurking in every shadow.
Dangers including this.
Within her peripherals, the woman could see a dozen men grinding their axes razor sharp for their ritualistic bloodbath.
Each and every one of the axe wielding men had blade scars and bullet wounds riddling their exposed arms and necks.
Branded upon, no, etched roughly into each of their napes was a scabbed outline of an axe's head.
The men laughed and cheered as the woman's face paled with fright.
"Drinks, drinks! Bust out the drinks!"
"We'll be drinking soon enough! Make margaritas out of their blood!"
The woman struggled harder on the ropes, clawing at them with her fingernails. Even the pain of her fingernails tearing off didn't slow her down. In fact, that only motivated her to scratch with even more ferocity.
"Enough! Let's get this started!" Their leader, the physically largest of the group, stood up with a roar that echoed for hundreds of meters.
The men walked closer with terrifying grins.
...
Asher's head shot up as he heard a roar echoes from the distance.
'A roar...? They've started.'
His gaze sharpened as he looked toward the sunset, the direction where the noise came from. The Axe Gang, an Urban Myth class Syndicate, bordering on Urban Legend. They reportedly do a crude ritual every few weeks or so, leaving behind a trail of headless, drained corpses.
The Hana app told him this information, as well as a few characteristics of their presence. Like a deafening, recognizable roar signalling the start of the massacre.
He rushed forward. The dimness of the echo told him that the roar probably came from over a hundred meters away.
"Hup!" Asher leapt upward, latching onto a warehouse wall and bringing himself to the roof. He could hear vicious laughter from a dozen meters in front of him. Intuitively, he knew the Axe Gang's ritual would be held outside.
Running to the other end of the warehouse, he looked at the scenery below.
Eight victims had been tied to a large wooden pole, by a dozen or so Axe Gang members. The victims that were still conscious were writhing and squirming against their binds.
'Now which E.G.O should I use...'
Fairy Queen? Cherry Blossoms?
Asher looked at the struggling figures below.
...
"Wha?" The attention of the Axe Gang members was brought to a little boy, who appeared on top of the wooden pillar they set up. The boy's outfit flickered between a blue set and a pink set of armor, eventually settling on the more feminine one. White and pink powders surfaced on his body, and a cherry etched fan appeared in his right hand.
A few of the more aware victims rose their heads as well.
"Who's this?!" The leader shouted, carelessly flinging his axe toward the boy. Though careless, the man's throw still contained deadly precision and speed, fast enough that no normal human could even follow its movements.
The boy simply leaned forward, dropping from the pole just as the axe whizzed over his head.
With a soft clop of his wood-block sandals, he landed on the floor.
"Greetings," he bowed. "My name is Asher. Mind your manners by the way~ It'll make your deaths a whole lot less painful."
Asher smirked, a hint of a crazed smile crossing his face.
"Boss, I recognize this fella. All our brothers in the Rust Skulls died cuz'a him!"
One of the members shouted out, though it was clear he was more excited for vengeance than stricken by fear. It seemed like most of the other members also shared the same sentiment. Such a small, girlish Fixer, who would take such a frail-looking threat seriously?
The boss narrowed his eyes.
"Oh, really? I swear I've seen you somewhere else before..." The man squinted his eyes to better examine the feminine boy's face, swearing to himself that he saw this same face at least once before, a time separate from the annihilation of the Rust Skulls.
While their boss was deep in thought, the dozen men surrounded Asher, still talking and joking with each other.
"Hah, wasn't there another Grade 7 that came to us alone?"
"Yeah, and we sliced 'er to bits!"
They ran their fingers across their axes in anticipation. A few of them snuck an extra look at Asher's soft features. The boy's rippling pink kimono only excited their imaginations.
"Oi, leave 'im alive for a bit! I want to see the flesh beneath!"
"I call second!" The Axe Gang members called out one by one.
The grin on Asher's face widened as he witnessed them treating him as if he wasn't even in front of them.
"I'm disgusted!" He smiled. "One more word and none of you will exit this place alive~!"
The boy giggled and muttered to himself, working himself up for the confrontation. The aroma of cherry blossoms slowly grew as Asher sunk into the influence of the Cherry Blossoms.
"Hah, even those people over there?" The man pointed to the people strapped to the pole. "Why, tha-"
The man's head fell to the ground, dead before he even realized what happened.
In the shocked silence, Asher twirled his fan again. This time, the gleam of a knife could be seen behind it.
The boss froze as he realized where he recognized this boy's face. It was from that video he saw in the morning...
He didn't have time to show his subordinates before this moment.
"This is the kid that killed a fucking Capo!"
His men began to laugh, until they realized that their boss was being dead serious. But by that time, it was already too late.
The air turned pink. The Axe Gang members coughed and choked on the grainy, pollen-filled air. As they breathed in the pink haze, all of their orifices began to stream out blood.
They writhed and convulsed on the ground as Asher picked each of them off with a slice across the neck. Otherwise, not a single other physical wound was inflicted in the entire confrontation.
Soon, only the leader of the Axe Gang was left. The haze purposefully faded around him, allowing him to breathe normally. He stammered and shivered as Asher stepped toward him with slow, rhythmic clops of his sandals.
"My name's Hansen, man. I'm sorry, bro. M-My men didn't know who you were!"
Asher didn't respond, instead sitting on one of the corpses to bring himself to eye level.
"Give me a reason why I should let you live."
Hansen sighed in relief, scouring his mind for anything he could use.
"I know Hook Office, man. T-Two of their Fixers used to be from my Syndicate-"
"I... Don't care! Two more chances."
Hansen gulped.
"I-I- Kurokumo-!"
"Don't care~"
"Thum-!"
Hansen looked down as he felt a sharp pain in his chest. Asher twisted his knife handle-deep into his flesh, tearing through his left lung. The boy took out his knife, doing the same procedure on his right lung as well.
*Gurgle*
The man pleaded with Asher as he slowly choked on his own blood. So many questions were contained in the dying man's eyes.
Asher simply grinned.
"I just felt like it! You're gonna have lots of fun choking to death, 'kay~?"
The man hacked out a mouthful of blood. Every time he tried to breathe, the agonizing feeling of liquid straining through his windpipe forced him to cough again.
But this only made his natural urge to breathe even more desperate, as what little air was left in his lungs were forced out.
An agonizing minute followed, a battle between instincts. The instinctive response to choking, and the instinctive urge to breathe.
Each cycling to the other to create the most torturous minute of the man's life.
All while Asher grinned above him. A sweet smile.
Hansen finally lost consciousness after what seemed like an eternity of suffering. As his vision faded to black, he felt the most cathartic sense of relief in his entire life.
The grin on Asher's face slowly faded as he stood up. He looked around him, a frown touching his lips. The victims he meant to save were giggling uncontrollably behind him, their minds shattered by the pure pleasure the vaporous hallucinogens brought them.
"System?" Asher tentatively whispered. He glanced at Hansen's corpse below him.
"...Ego takeover? How often will that happen?" As Asher conversed with the System, he snapped a picture of the field of dead bodies below him, switching to the Fairy Queen E.G.O as he did so.
"Varying severity..."
The unnerving giggles behind him slowly faded, followed by moans of pain.
"Who needs help! Anyone hurt??" Asher tore off some relatively clean fabric from the bodies below him, rushing to the pole to dress the wounded.
A woman's hand scrabbled to a male beside her, whose face was slowly losing color. Despite having torn out her own fingernails, she didn't make a single noise of pain.
"Damn..." Asher did the best he could to wrap the cloth fabric strips across the man's head, but the blood flow had already slowed to a dangerous trickle.
"Anyone else with serious injuries?" With no one coming forward, Asher began to bind the woman's hands as well, cutting each person's ropes to free them.
Asher inhaled a deep breath.
"I'M HERE!!"
Startled by the loud noise, some of the people Asher saved tried to flee. He tried to convince them otherwise.
"Hold on, don't go! Someone's coming who can heal you-!"
"You didn't have to shout so loud, I was right around the corner." The air shimmered, revealing a lightly panting girl. Asher smiled as he looked at her.
"But what if you were farther away? Quick, this person's lost too much blood."
Sophie nodded, laying her hand on the man's chest.
...
"Thank you so much!" The eight newly healed victims of the late Axe Gang surrounded Sophie, thanking her with frightening zeal. Each of them chimed in, each with their own thanks to give the small, expressionless girl.
On the other hand, not a scant thanks was given to Asher, who stood by the side with a wry grin. He could understand it, after all. He didn't know what kind of drug-induced hallucinations his Cherry Blossoms gave them, but he was reasonably sure they didn't appreciate it.
He should really get a grip on his E.G.O's, he thought.
"What Office are you two from??" Asher's attention was brought back to the woman who clawed her fingernails off, whose name he later learned was Megumi.
"Chimère. We just recently put up a few dozen flyers on Dawn Street."
As the victims rushed for more questions, Sophie leaned back, uncomfortable at the amount of words that barraged her.
"We have to leave now. It will be night soon."
Sophie grabbed Asher's wrist, pulling him away as she couldn't bear to continue the meaningless conversations.
Asher grinned as Sophie's hand led him away.
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