Chapter 14: The Aberrant Aberrant

  Ace barely dodged the spiked orbs that rained down on them. They pierced through the ground where he had sat mere seconds ago. Leonhart brandished her guns and fired at the orbs with Imbued bullets, letting out a battle cry.

  Everyone stood back to back, keeping eyes on every possible position their attacker could attack from. Sweat dripped onto Ace’s hand, and he tightened his grip on his staff. The fog thickened and swirled around them. From within the tempest emerged the boy they saw in Ace’s vision. He supported himself on an unbroken crutch. On his head sat a black knit cap with white pom-poms hanging down on either side. He was a bit taller than Ace remembered, perhaps a lot older as well. Leonhart aimed and shot at the boy, but the bullets sliced through thin air.

  “I s-swear that was a direct hit!” Leonhart exclaimed with a shaky voice.

  “Fog clones,” Jude replied. “He must be hiding. There’s another one on the left!”

  As Ace’s eyes adjusted to the new lighting, he saw that dark tendrils were framing the boy’s face. His eyes were glassy and unblinking. Then, a red slit tore open across his knit cap as it inflated itself. “So there are more of you.”

  “Object possession,” Jude said. “Aim for the cap!”

  The possessed knit cap smirked, and two smaller slits opened up above its mouth. The white pom poms moved as if they were its hands. “I’ve waited for too long for you to ruin my plans,” it declared. “When he thought he killed those numbskulls, it gave me what I needed to reach my true form. This boy was a bit troublesome at first. Whatever that was in the alley nearly killed me, but he got even stronger!”

  Multiple clones emerged all around them. They let out a crazed cackle and lashed out at them with thin, needle-like tendrils. Ace ducked, finding refuge by staying low. Shots rang out as Leonhart gunned down the tendrils.

  “Shit!” Leonhart cursed as she reloaded. “Wrong day to bring the revolvers!”

  “You got anything better in that trunk of yours?” Ace covered for Leonhart as she recovered. Multiple Ollies sprang forth and scrambled all over the place. The tendrils were dumb enough to give chase, and this bought them more time.

  Leonhart ditched the guns and whipped out a collapsible Gatling gun. She was about to blast a volley of bullets. Ace pulled her down, pushing down the weapon. “Don’t shoot blindly! You might hurt him!” he hollered.

  “He’s right,” Jude let out a frustrated sigh as she tipped her head back to squirt eyedrops into her eyes. “I have a gist of where he’s at, but I need more time. This fog is messing with my sight. Fuck!”

  “What do we do?!” Leonhart pulled on Jude’s arm as the trio broke into a run away from another barrage of spiked orbs unleashed by the phantom. Ace leapt out in front of Jude and Leonhart, batting them away. Before the orbs could land on them, Ace thrust his right palm out.

  “Vision Multiplicity: Ollie!” Another dozen yapping dogs materialised, and he was ready with his next command, “Fetch!”

  Multiple jaws snapped down on the orbs. “We need to buy Jude some time for her eyes to recover,” Ace said quickly. “We need to find the real him and rip that hat off his head.”

  Jude pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes and grunted. “Trace goddamit!”

  Leonhart cocked her gun, ready to fire, but Jude’s answer came in hot and full of confidence. “I found him. He’s about two hundred meters ahead,” Jude said. “Leonhart, do you have stun grenades?”

  “Yes!”

  Jude snatched a stun grenade from Leonhart’s hands and sprinted ahead. Ace and Leonhart followed suit, hot on her heels. Jude quickly twisted her body, deftly dodging the vines and orbs. She ripped out the pin and hurled it into the fog.

  The trio crashed onto the ground and squeezed their eyes shut. Light flooded the whole network as the stun grenade detonated.

  The fog dissipated immediately – their cue to get up and seize the boy. Leonhart and Jude piled on him and pinned down his arms. Jude hooked a leg across to keep his leg from kicking. “Ugh, he smells like shit!” Leonhart remarked.

  “Now, Ace!” Jude exclaimed.

  Ace raised his staff and was about to bring it down when the phantom’s voice changed. Its mouth slanted downwards. “Please! I just wanted to see my son again.”

  Ace froze for a moment. The phantom’s mouth curled upwards. “Now die!”

  The phantom sent a blast of Cursed Essence directly to his side. The white balls of fuzz became sharp claws, piercing through his body. Out of instinct, Ace snatched the boy’s arm with his left arm. His staff clattered on the ground next to him as they went down.

  ===

  His young heart was thus extinguished. The blood in his veins grew cold. And all strength had gone.

  Faith had been extolled by his fall into the arms of death.

  ===

  Ace awoke and found himself in a classroom.

  W-what’s happening?

  The last thing Ace remembered was the phantom’s strike, its blade driving through him. Yet when he patted himself down and lifted his shirt, his body was untouched. His gaze swept the room – there, at the back of the classroom, stood a white, faceless figure. It had no eyes, only fist-sized hollows where they should have been, yet he felt its gaze fixed on him.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “We meet again.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My identity is of little importance,” the white figure said, crossing its arms. “Not here, not now.”

  “I was trying to exorcise the phantom just now…” Ace trailed off, struggling to process how he wound up in his old classroom in the blink of an eye.

  “Why did you hesitate?” the figure went on, leaning against the door.

  “The phantom suddenly said that it had a kid. It only wanted to see -”

  “As problematic as your answer is, it is what I want to hear.”

  The gleaming smile returned, and the figure tapped against the door. Ace approached it carefully. That door led to a smaller room, a room between two classrooms that sometimes served as a storeroom or a private room for project discussions.

  Ace approached the door and rested his hand on the doorknob.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “I can feel it. Someone’s there.”

  “The moment you open your hearts, you will gain knowledge of the unknown. Are you truly up for this?"

  "Yes."

  The figure smirked, “Go on ahead. I hope you will be able to keep those doors closed, though. I won’t be able to be here to keep maintaining it.”

  “Why is there another room?”

  “Don’t know but I can tell you who it is if you consider it to be a ‘who’ rather than a ‘what’.”

  “What do you mean by ‘who’?”

  “Someone you never knew but has seen you through your life’s triumphs and tribulations. It’s funny how this is neither caused nor created – it just happened,” the figure explained. “Are you interested in the ‘what’?”

  Ace raised his eyebrows but decided not to say anything. He stepped into the small room and quickly opened the other door to the next classroom, which was conspicuously empty.

  Huddled in the corner of the room was the woman in the Vision.

  Upon seeing Ace, the woman pressed herself against the wall. She hastily adjusted her plain blue hospital garb that had slid off her left shoulder from the sudden movement.

  “I-I’m not here to hurt you!” Ace reassured her.

  “Where am I?” asked the woman.

  Ace opened his mouth to speak, but no answer came out. He turned to seek help, only to find that the figure by the door had vanished.

  “You! You’re the one trying to stop me from taking over the body!” The woman pointed an accusatory finger at him. “I was so close to expelling whatever he had that kept me from doing it!”

  “Listen to me.” Ace sat down slowly, raising his hands in front of him to show her that he meant no harm. “Do you know whose body you took over?”

  The woman shook her head. “He had a missing leg. A missing right leg, in fact,” Ace said.

  “My son was also born without his right leg,” the woman reminisced, loosening up. Then, her eyes widened. “It can’t be! You’re lying!”

  “I’m not! I don’t have a reason to!” Ace reached out and grasped her wrists. “You couldn’t see his face as you were perched on his head, that was why.”

  “I would have known his voice!”

  “How many years has it been since you last saw him?” Ace asked quietly.

  “I–” The woman turned her palms towards her face. Her hands trembled as she tried to count the bygone years. She let out a broken sob and buried her face in her hands. The windows to the room darkened and the floors trembled. “I wasn’t there to watch him grow.”

  “He has grown a lot,” Ace reassured her. “He has kept you in his heart even though you weren’t there. You don’t have to worry about him.”

  “You don’t get it! There’s nothing for me! I have to stay here!” the woman beseeched. “All these years, there was nothing! Nothing!”

  Ace swallowed hard before making his offer. It felt like the right thing to do. His thoughts returned to the snake-like phantom around his father’s neck. Who could say what it might have become if the memory erasure had never taken place?

  “You can stay here if you’d like.”

  “Really?”

  Ace nodded. “What is your son’s name?” he asked gently.

  “Kazuya. Kazuya Aiuchi.”

  “And yours?”

  “You can call me Miho.”

  “Miho-san, we can both watch over Kazuya.” Ace reached out a hand toward Miho. “You can tell me all about him.”

  When Miho took his hand, Ace instinctively drew her into an embrace. She sobbed quietly into his shoulder.

  Ace shut his eyes as the Cursed Essence surged into the room, its dark waves swallowing them whole.

  ***

  Jude could not believe her eyes.

  The Cursed Essence was being drawn from the phantom through its arms by Ace, tearing through the sleeve of his jacket. Though the jacket had been enchanted to protect against direct attacks, the overwhelming surge of Cursed Essence shattered its defences. The dark energy gathered into a small black orb just above Ace’s forearm. At the same moment, tendrils of white light emerged from his skin, slithering forward until they reached the crippled boy, wrapping around him in a gentle embrace.

  As soon as the tendrils ran out of length, the dark orb took root within Ace’s arm. The exchange sent out a gust of wind that nearly blew them back.

  When the dust had settled, Leonhart wasted no time in tearing the loosened knit cap from the boy’s head. Bullets shredded the cap as she made sure that nothing of it remained.

  Jude gently peeled Ace away from the boy. He remained unconscious even as she called his name over and over while applying pressure to his wounds. She directed her attention briefly to the boy, who was breathing shallowly. Whatever rags he wore were stained a deep red – Ace’s blood. Anger, then guilt, rose in her tightening throat.

  “Jude! Leonhart!” Felix’s voice came from behind them. He froze when his eyes fell upon Ace.

  Jude struggled to find the right words to explain the situation. “He was injured by Cursed Essence! His arm! It absorbed it!”

  “Save the details for later! We need to send Ace and the boy for treatment!” Felix gathered Ace in his arms. “Jude, Leonhart. Carry the boy. Use the Beacon to get back to the Sanctum. I’ll go on ahead first!”

  Felix launched forward, propelled by the scrambled jets of flames strategically placed around his lower body for stability and speed.

  But Jude had a foreboding thought that it might be too late. The oddity that she had long detected in Ace, though never quite certain enough to mention, had vanished.