Chương 24: An Old Friend
「 You have 5 seconds. 」
The deep ravine on the edge of the valley was fatally far.
Yet, as the winds screamed in his ear and told him how close the deal was, Azuma stared at the masked man.
He was unable to move his gaze from the shadow that was now too far to be clearly seen.
The fires behind him spread and raged wild, but the man didn't do anything and he too watched Azuma as if they had secrets to share and moments to relive.
There was something strangely familiar about him.
Something frighteningly familiar.
Azuma was snapped out of his trance when he fell over a sticky soft surface.
「 1 」
The soft voice coldly declared and Azuma hastily got back on his feet.
'Stop!' he mentally shouted at himself.
In that small moment of his fall, it was as if he was detached from reality and thrown back to the unpleasant incoherent memories of the past.
And yet he remembered nothing new.
Azuma didn't dare to breathe as the mist thickened, and he barely registered his surroundings. There were dense vines beneath his feet but he couldn't stop and worry about them.
A shelter pod was in front of him, and at that moment, it was all that mattered.
His body was growing numb, and each step was getting heavier.
There were deep claw marks on the door of the pod, and the locks were broken.
Azuma entered the place, feeling a sharp nervousness settle within his heart. He clumsily grabbed a fallen rod, pulled out some copper wires, and created a makeshift lock.
"Can you access the system here?"
「 I have. The safety shield can be repaired and activated in two minutes. 」
"There can't be ramen," Azuma mumbled as he scanned his surroundings and eased a little when he found no seeker ravished to death.
Maybe the dweller of the capsule managed to escape.
The place had a simple interface, there was a tiny steam shower that could only fit one slender person.
There were three large and round windows, one of them was on the roof, one of them was on the left and worked as a broken system screen, and the last was on the right.
It was behind a narrow bed that was inlaid in the wall, and from that place, Azuma had a beautiful view of the endless cliff which met a river of dimly lit stars.
He could only wonder what sort of creatures dwelled in those depths and it filled him with fascination and fear.
The window was soon fogged by the mist.
Inhumane wild roars and shrieks were barely heard. In the poisonous mist, the abyssal beasts were the most active.
There were five more hours remaining for the mist.
Azuma took a steam shower and dumped his clothes in the washer.
Despite the shelter pod being simple, it was badly littered with all sorts of random things. There were some artifacts, some broken tools, and clothes that were mostly soiled.
「 Security shields are activated, Azuma. But they might be terminated abruptly. This is an unregistered shelter pod. 」
"Stolen?"
「 Precisely. 」
It must have belonged to a rogue hunter.
The hunters were usually not allowed in the central parts of the Abyss. These areas were more dangerous, but also a haven of all the kinds of things Genesis sought.
Azuma wrapped a thin blanket around his waist and tried to find something better to wear.
But the few shelves were jammed, and the only other clothes he found were two pairs of undergarments a woman wears.
Azuma glanced at the five-minute timer of the washer and decided to wait and hope that the unbearable stench of his clothes gets removed from the steam and soap alone.
As the immediate danger subsided, he was left with a strange feeling of emptiness. He didn't know what to do, and how to feel about the masked man he had seen.
Why did it feel he was missing something very important?
His eyes landed over an obsidian tablet and Azuma decided to distract himself.
The tablet was broken.
And so, he opened it and realized that it belonged to a seeker. The symbol of the seekers was there, and the insides were too complicated for Azuma to understand.
He could not repair it but he found a memory chip.
After some time, he had successfully connected it to the Neuralink system by entering the chip code and waiting for ten minutes because of the Abyssal environment that often caused technologies to lag and sometimes fail.
『 Micro SSD Chip Successfully Connected! 』
There was nothing inside.
Besides a long list of countless voice logs.
The oldest of them was from a year ago.
『 Playing 6125056 — 5:10 Minutes. 』
There was dull static noise and Azuma sighed as he watched the hazy Abyss outside. The audio might have been broken since the tablet was in a pretty bad condition.
The distant opening of the Abyss now carried a deep blue sky. It was slowly turning lighter as the hues of morning spread—scarlet, lilac, mystic blue, and heavenly gold.
Azuma had never seen a sky that beautiful and it was ironic how the skies right above Abyss were so surreal when the same Abyss had covered most of the earth under endless darkness.
And then his heart skipped.
He heard the audio play a voice that made the time slow down.
『 …It is my first descend in a year and though they say I was here before, everything feels unfamiliar. It's new, strange, beautiful, yet frightening. 』
Shiro.
He tensed up and he didn't know why.
Her voice made his breaths controlled, and a mixed feeling of hot and cold-brewed inside. It sounded as if she was close, right beside him--animatedly telling a story as she loved to do.
『 But everything feels the same way. 』
The audio broke once again and this time Azuma couldn't remain still. He felt a lot of things, but there was no one emotion he could understand.
He changed the file and played and replayed them until he found something better. Most of them were corrupted and Azuma was tired after an hour.
He couldn't bring himself to stop the dull static, and he had little hope of finding something useful inside the logs.
But if there was something in there that could give him clue about her, Azuma was ready to listen to the silence of those logs forever.
The desperation he felt made no sense.
But neither did anything.
His thoughts were getting strange as the mist softly faded and his eyes grew heavy.
The barest flicker of light in the sky seeped through the darkness of the Abyss and though it was too little to dim to the dark, it seemed to be getting embraced within the alien ecosystem of the Abyss.
The dawn and light people could rarely see in the world outside was abundant inside the Abyss.
It spread through the illuminating wildflowers and entered the huge crystal rocks. The rays of the sun, which didn't even appear in the sky, filled the amber fragments and seeped into the mysterious cracks of the caverns.
Azuma's eyes were closed to see the ethereal shift and then the voices returned in the audio clip.
This time it was someone different, an older woman who had asked some questions.
『 No, I know everything from the past. There weren't many things worth remembering, to be honest… but… well, I remember an old friend. 』
The other voice asked, 『 Was everything okay? You don't seem well. 』
There was a long silence and then Shiro chuckled. It was hard to tell if the subtle tension in her voice was from grief or nervousness, or something unknown.
『 No. 』
A pause.
『 Everything was fine. 』
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