[Michael’s point of view]

With my eyes closed shut, I could not see what was happening around me, but I could hear them… their screams of agony and pain as they got struck down one after another, no matter if they were part of the Yakuza or the JSDF. It made me wonder why they did not just flee from this place or called for backup, but then again, maybe they wanted to but never had the chance to do so.

Rather than thinking that this person came to save me, I thought that I was just the tasty morsel left for the end, to experience a slow, painful, and agonizing death just how everyone else in this world desired. After all, why else would they risk becoming the target of such powerful organizations?

I clenched my teeth and hoped for the madness to come to an end. Everything that happened to me so far was beyond absurd, yet I continued to live through it. Even so, I had to wonder, for how much longer would I still be able to walk upon this world?

“Who-who are you?” my brother asked with a trembling voice.

He’s afraid? But why? I asked myself in a foolish way, almost as if my mind still refused to believe what my eyes had yet to see, but then… I heard the sound of a blade cutting through flesh and then I felt as a warm liquid got sprayed on me.

I flinched and pulled back. Although I did not want to, I opened my eyes, and I bared witness to a terrible scene.

In front of me stood an unknown woman wearing a black leather suit covered from head to toe in blood. In each hand, she wielded a blood-drenched katana. An evil smirk was on her lips, and my brother, the teenager standing in front of her, fell on his knees. It turned out that the red, warm liquid on my body was his blood.

Only now was my mind starting to catch up, connecting the dots with the sounds and slowly coming to accept the truth. Those men and women had been killed without mercy not beaten unconscious…

The woman decapitated my brother with a clean cut. The expression of horror was forever imprinted on his face as his head rolled down to her feet. I looked at it and then saw how it was squished under her boot like a watermelon under the wheels of a truck. I flinched. I was horrified by this sight, but my eyes betrayed my fear and followed the lines of her legs, her hips, bust, until they reached the suave curve of her slightly parted lips.

My heart skipped a beat, and I felt my entire being warming up.

“Michael...” she said with a subtle tone of tantric seduction in her voice.

She smiled and then dropping her swords to the ground with a loud clank, she leaned towards me. Her hand moved around my neck, and my eyes grew big. We locked eyes. For a moment, she remained like this, leaning over me, pushing her chest against me, and just an inch away from stealing my lips.

“I finally... found you...” she said and then pushed forward.

Our lips touched, and my entire body went limp.

The burning sensation of her lips was beyond anything I could have imagined, but there was something else there. The heat, the passion, the attraction for her, all of these sparked up inside me like a summer campfire. She had me captured in her trance, and all I could do was submit to her will.

“Stop!” shouted a soldier behind me as he pulled back the safety on his gun.

Was he aiming his weapon at us? Did he intend to shoot and kill us?

Instead of worry or fear, I felt that I could not care less about what was going to happen next. All I wanted right now was for that kiss to never end.

Although there were no shots fired, I did hear a loud splat coming from behind me.

It was so very strange though, this state I was in. I felt so relaxed, so at home in her embrace. Could there have been anything to express this feeling, this emotion? Probably not.

When she stopped the kiss and pulled back. I felt myself taking a breath of air once more. I did not even realize that all this time I wasn’t even breathing, she was that captivating. I smiled.

“We should go.” she told me and then got up.

I blinked surprised as I looked at her. She picked up her two katanas and slashed through the air only once to clean them up. There was still some blood left on them, so she took the severed hand of a yakuza and wiped them with the clean part of his suit.

It was then when I saw it, the horror scene all around me. The bodies of all those who willed me harm in that alley had been cut into countless pieces. Some were literally ripped apart as if a monstrous creature took hold of them. Blood and insides were spread all over this alley.

Incidentally, I looked back towards the soldier who called out earlier. He was standing on his feet, but only his bones remained. The rest of his flesh was spread behind him in an unrecognizable mess as if something had exploded right in front of him.

I felt my stomach turning. I could not stop it. My half-digested lunch made its way up, forcing me to hurl it out. An eyeball was just a step away from me. Upon noticing it, I hurled again. After I was done, my stomach started to hurt. I was sweating and trembling from the shock.

“Are you alright?” the woman asked with a kind smile on her lips, but the blood on her face and clothes made me clench my jaw and hands.

I did not dare to say that I felt sick because of the sight.

“I’m alri...I’m... I...” I tried to say it, I tried to lie, but I couldn’t.

I looked down horrified and grabbed my throat.

“Don’t lie, just say it. This scene... is disgusting. That’s why you hurled, right?”

Looking up into her dark-green eyes, I asked myself where her kindness came from? How could she be oblivious to all the death around her and still show me an expression like that? I shook my head and tried not to think about it. I doubted it would make sense anyway.

“Yes... I don’t want to be here... so much death.” I replied in the end.

“Mhm.” she said with a nod and then took my hand.

My feet trembled as I got up. I tried my best not to look around me, at this horrific scene of a merciless crime.

“Follow me.” she told me and then pulled me after her.

“W-wings...” I said.

Until now, my mind even refused to look upon them, but now, I could see them. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought they were just a highly realistic prop from a horror movie, but they were as real as me and her, and so were all the dead bodies around us.

Spiked bones were popping out at the joins of her wings, leaving behind her shredded skin. The wings themselves reminded me of a bat, but they were cut and bleeding all over the place. The white bones could be seen here and there, between strips of red muscles and ripped pieces of skin.

There was no sign that their bleeding would stop soon, making it painful just to look at them, but she didn’t seem to be bothered by this, almost as if something as horrifying as this was absolutely normal for her.

“Oh yes! Oopsie!” she said and before my very eyes, she pulled those demonic wings back into her body, just like they did in the movies. The only difference was the disgusting cracking and tearing sounds they made.

“What are you?” I managed to ask after a moment.

She looked into my eyes and then placed the tip of her pointing finger on her chin.

“I wonder what?” she replied.

I raised an eyebrow. She did not want to tell me and there was no way I could pull the answer out of her.

Without any further ado, she led me out of the alley. From there, we made our way towards a nearby metro station. I did not dare to look back as I followed her. I feared that if I did, my eyes would be glued once again to the broken bodies of those men, among them my own flesh and blood brother. The sight was simply too gruesome to behold, yet it seemed to have a positive effect on this woman. For now, she was my savior, but I had to wonder just how long it would take before she fell into the same madness that befell everyone else?

How she killed them and why people on the street didn’t scream at the sight of our blood-drenched clothes, or just pants in my case, eluded me for now. They walked by us as if we were not even there, but as much as I tended to believe that they simply thought us to be cosplayers, our looks were a bit too disturbing and usually, even if they wanted to or not, they would throw disgusted glares at me. Now, they were simply ignoring me completely. That was a first.

“Where are we going?” I asked her in the end as we climbed down on the metro station stairs.

“Hatchobori.” she replied.

“W-What are you going to do with me?” I asked with a clear tone of fear in my voice.

What worried me the most was that I was just an extra kill for a later time, but this whole situation was so strange. Even though I was walking together with a criminal, a murderer who showed not even a single drop of mercy towards her victims, I was not afraid of her. Actually, I felt safe around her, relieved, a complete opposite reaction of what could be thought of as normal.

She stopped in her track and then looked back at me from the corners of her eyes. She smiled or smirked; I could not tell because I could see only half of her face.

“I wonder...” she told me with a soft tone of voice.

I blushed, and she let out a giggle.

My reaction was strange, and it made me wonder why I did such a thing. Because of that, I did not dare to ask any further questions, although a normal human would have asked and probed further to reveal the secret of their fate. In my case, I simply felt that nothing bad was going to happen to me, at least not something worse than those yakuza and soldiers could have done to me.

She didn’t use a card to get past the checkpoint and neither did I. Curious, I looked back and wondered if the device was broken by any chance, but I saw a businessman needing to use his pass to activate the checkpoint. I was certain that she must have done something, but I did not dare to ask what.

“We’re in luck. The next one is ours!” she said with a smile after looking up at the announcement board.

I followed her up to the respected platform and waited for the metro to pull in. Considering the precision of the nihonjin (Japanese people), I doubted it would be late even by a second. What I was wondering about was how we were going to get past the shoving and usual pushing of the crowd? Taking a look back, I shortly found my answer. Everyone around us kept a distance of at least two meters. They did not even seem to notice this strange behavior on their side, walking by and minding their own business as if nothing was wrong.

Looking back at the woman in front of me, I wanted to ask what was going on with their strange behavior, but I did not wish to bother her or appear as being pushy. However, she somehow noticed it and came forth with a question.

“Something wrong, Michael?” she asked.

I blinked surprised and looked up at her.

“N-noth...” I couldn’t lie to her “I’m a little bit worried... why are you doing this? I mean saving me, bringing me with you?” I confessed.

She looked at me for a long moment, showing me only a small smile on the tip of her lips. Her eyes were gentle and locked onto mine. I did not even dare to flinch, not even when the metro came and brought a strong draft with it. In those moments, I kept wondering whether or not she intended to give me a straight answer. I could not help but feel that maybe, through some weird coincidence, I actually offended her with my words.

“Come.” she told me with her usual calm demeanor after the metro came to stop.

We boarded, and inside the wagon, another strange thing happened. Just like on the platform, everyone kept their distance from us almost as if they were restricted to take a single step closer by some kind of an invisible barrier. Looking around, I could see we were actually in a tightly packed wagon, barely anyone had any place to stand, let alone find an empty seat. We were the only two abnormal exceptions in this place. I had enough space in front of me to stretch my legs and not hit anyone and so could the mysterious woman next to me.

At the sixth stop, we finally got off and set foot on the Hatchobori station. That was the first time I ever came here, but it did not look that different from the others; same amount of busy people, same smell.

“So tell me. What happened to you today, is it something that happens often?” she asked as she led me outside.

She walked in front of me, and I quietly followed her.

“No... Usually, they aren’t so mean to me.” I replied softly like a timid little puppy.

“Hm.”

She didn’t ask me anything else until we were on the surface and heading down a path only she knew.

“How many friends do you have?” she asked me.

I blinked surprised at her question.

“Friends? I have none, miss.” I replied.

“Miss? Call me Syliar.” she suddenly told me.

Her name sounded familiar, even though I was 100% sure I had never met her before in my life.

“Syliar-san...” I said.

“Drop the honorifics.” she cut me short.

I nodded and gulped. If there was one thing I didn’t want to do right now, it was to annoy or make her mad, especially when considering the combat prowess she displayed earlier.

“Syliar... why are you asking me this?” I asked, but I kept looking down at the ground.

“I find it strange that you don’t. You are not the type to appear as being either annoying or easily hated. I’m guessing you never had a girlfriend either?” she looked back at me from the corners of her eyes, and I could see her lips curving up.

She smirked or grinned.

“No...” I replied.

Syliar said nothing else and kept walking ahead of me, leading me to a destination only she knew about. The possibility of a kidnapping or another organ harvest crossed my mind, but for some reason, I found them highly unlikely. She was too strange, too different from the lunatics who tried to kill me earlier that day.

For the next five minutes, she did not say another word, and I was too afraid to even ask. Eventually, she was the one to break the silence between us.

“How’s your relationship with your family?” she stopped and looked into my eyes.

I wondered why she asked me this, but all the possible answers rushing through my mind found themselves to be too dark, too grim for my liking. My lips parted, and I wanted to answer, but I did not know what. My parents told me to never tell anyone about how they usually treated me, but when I looked in Syliar’s eyes, I couldn’t find myself able to lie.

“They told me not to tell...” I replied.

“Are you afraid of them?”

Looking down, I nodded.

“There’s no need to worry about them, Michael.” she told me.

Looking up at her, I blinked surprised and wondered what she could mean by that. I thought that maybe she struck some sort of deal with them, and now I was in her care? It wasn’t like they didn’t sell me off already to the army, the yakuza, and some weird suspicious researcher.

“W-what d-do you mean by that?” I managed to ask with a trembling voice.

“I killed them.” she confessed with a cheerful smile on her lips.

My eyes grew big, and my jaw dropped. Her words were hard to believe, but if they were the truth, then I feared of what was to become of me.

“K-killed them?” I asked.

“Technically, they killed each other, but I instigated them into doing it! You should have seen the look on their faces when they jumped on each other like a pair of wild beasts!” Syliar said and then laughed.

Her words sent shivers down my spine, and my body trembled with fear, but at the same time I felt a strange sadness inside of me. I dropped on my knees and looked down at the ground. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. On one side, I was happy to be free of them, but on the other, I was mourning them. Despite everything they did to me, I still held love in my heart for them, an untainted pure love.

“Why?” I asked through my tears.

“Revenge.” she said calmly.

I looked up at her.

“For what?” I asked.

Syliar showed me a small smile and then leaned closer to me. With her pointing finger, she touched the tip of my lips and with a suave look in her eyes, she whispered:

“For you...”

My heart skipped a beat.

“Let’s go.” she continued on her path.

Her words surprised me and confused me at the same time. I didn’t know whether I should believe her or not, but the truth was that, deep inside, I knew I could trust her. It was weird and definitely strange. Everything about that day was abnormal, from the way the people treated me to the fact that my parents sold me and then the appearance of this strange, beautiful woman who could sprout wings from her back. Even so, she was the best lead I had towards solving this mystery and maybe together with this, I would also find the reason as to why everyone so far treated me so harshly despite not knowing a single thing about me. Was it because I was a cursed soul or maybe there was something more to it?

That was why, for now, I had no other choice but to follow Syliar and hope for the best. Although, was there ever going to be a ‘best’ for me?