“What?” I groggily mumbled, pushing Cain and the horror that had become of my phone aside.
“I looked online, and there is an issue with your phone’s battery. Fix it.” Cain stated. “Please.” He then added in his usual deadbeat tone.
I pushed myself up, and took my phone from him. The thing was on 8%, with a text from Etienne I needed to reply to, and three mobile games running in the background. It seemed in between waiting for his lives to recharge in his fruit matching game and auto-playing adverts that gave some in-game currency, Cain had taken to building and defending a city on the back of a dragon, which then went on to battle other dragons…
“Huh, this is actually really fun,” I tapped away on the screen, getting weirdly invested in the game.
“Give it back!” Cain got up on the bed, and tried to yank my phone from me.
“Hey, I’m almost winning this battle, don’t distract-”
It ran out of battery, settling our dispute.
Cain made an annoyed noise, and went off to the kitchen, arms crossed over his chest. I followed him once I found my house robe. It added a much needed layer of warmth in an apartment that was seemingly unable to surpass the outside temperature by more than 15°.
“Did you eat the curry spread for breakfast?” I asked, opening the fridge.
“Uh-uh.”
“The whole half-a-kilo family pack?!” I turned towards Cain, not sure of the appropriate level of concern.
“What?” He asked in turn, genuinely perplexed by my reaction.
“With what?”
“A spoon?”
I blinked at him in confusion, before letting the matter go. He knew that it was supposed to go on bread, or at least I hoped he did. He’d seen me making it in front of him after all…
I made us some mystery vegetable pasta after plugging in my phone. The thing with Cain was that he wasn’t one for small talk, and I didn’t want to bring up anything serious after everything that had happened yesterday, so we spent an hour or so cooking, and eating, mostly in silence.
After lunch, I texted with Etienne. He’d gotten home safe, and much like myself, had passed out from exhaustion and stress. He was up for a date tomorrow though, and was taking suggestions.
“What are you smiling at like that at?” Cain asked, snapping me back to the cold reality of my kitchen. “Did you destroy my Dragon City, or are you texting your boyfriend?”
I looked at Cain, teasing him by not replying, and keeping him wondering about the state of his games. However, I couldn’t help but notice that he was wearing his lion-print sweater. The same one he’d worn yesterday, and the day before.
“The latter.” I eventually replied, “You do know you have other clothes, right?”
“Yes, but they’re ugly, and your washing machine is easy to operate.” He shrugged.
And just like that, I got the perfect date idea.
“We’re going to a shopping mall tomorrow!”
“Don’t you have work tomorrow?” Cain didn’t share my enthusiasm.
“I am calling in sick tomorrow, and then we’re going to the mall.” I corrected myself, as I began typing a half-assed apology for Manon.
Cain made another annoyed noise.
“What?”
“Do you have to drag me to every boring place you go?” He asked.
I looked up from my phone again with a questioning expression.
He wasn’t wrong, of course, and this was something I had already thought of. School would have been an option had he had the need and/or interest for it. But he knew more about this world than most adults thanks to the organisation that had held him captive, and he never expressed any desire to spend time with children his age.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“I’m sorry,” his eyes suddenly went wide with some realisation, “I didn’t mean it like that-”
I quickly interrupted him with a hand gesture, before he could get to the awkward topic of me abandoning him in Canada.
“No, you’re right. We need to sort that out long-term. But the mall will be fun. You can pick your own clothes there, and they have playgrounds and arcades, and nice food…”
He nodded, seemingly coming to terms with the trip.
“Long-term seems like such an abstract concept…” he quietly spoke.
I couldn’t help but agree. In three years Huang was going to discover immortality, and then the world would change forever. Although, without Cain by his side, I wasn’t sure of that was still happening.
“Well,” I quickly fished typing up a text for Etienne, and put my phone asside, “What would you like to do? Later on, I mean. With your rank and class you could be almost anything. Plus you’re smart. With a bit of specialised courses you could go into any technical field.”
“15 isn’t smart.” He scoffed.
It took me a second to realise that he was talking about his intelligence stat, which perhaps proved his point. With an annoyed click of his tong, his ESW appeared before me as a reminder.
Cain
Il/lui/son
12
S+
Shifter
Pluriform
S+ Shift [Ac]
S+ Regeneration [Pa]
S+ Fravashi’s guidance [Ac]
S+ Strike [Pa]
S Beelzebul’s touch [Ac]
S Fear [Ac]
S Prometheus’s liver [Pa]
S Primal hunger [Ac]
S- Shadow puppet [Ac]
S- Phoenix [Pa]
S- Wondering mind [Ac]
luck
250/250
MP
150/150
Strength
16
Dexterity
13
Constitution
19
Intelligence
15
Wisdom
9
Charisma
8
I tried to think back to what he did in his free time in ‘immoral immortality’.
----------------------------------------
“Master and Ennmei are off to their meeting with the Nam heads, they won’t be back before tomorrow.” Yuuto Aikawa spoke as he walked up the paved driveway of the house the group had rented.
Cain was sitting on the porch, still in his combat outfit, and was nonchalantly chewing on something that looked like, but definitely wasn’t grilled fish. Had Yuuto not known better he would have assumed the kid hadn’t heard him, but Cain’s wolf ears twitched ever so slightly, indicating that he was in fact choosing to ignore the man.
The swordsman let himself fall on the wooden porch, beside the kid, as he continued:
“I have taken a quick job. Might even be able to squeeze a second one in before Master returns. I’d like it if you came with, to watch my back.”
The following few moments were only filled with quiet chewing noises.
“Sure.” Cain finally replied, “I don’t have anything better to do.”
Yuuto raised an eyebrow.
“You could read manga or make some pottery. My sisters-”
“Are my age, and are the cutest, smartest, strongest and most perfect girls alive, I know.” Cain interrupted the familiar speech. Yuuto had never once been prompted or asked to talk about his family, but in these past two months, everyone on the team had come to know the two girls, their uncle, and grandma, as their own.
Yuuto shrugged. He was familiar with the shifting moods of teenagers, so he didn’t insist. Instead, he went to grab his blades, and the two were promptly on their way to an abandoned bottle factory in District K.
“Which one are we killing?” Cain asked, hopping off the back seat of Yuuto’s motorbike, and stretching his muscles.
“That one,” Yuuto pointed to a hooded woman, who’d been mingling with the backup generator by the entrance of the factory. She ducked inside as soon as she saw them.
Cain wasted no time, fully changing into his wolf form, and dashing after her.
The metal gates of the factory fell to the ground, as Yuuto sliced them off their hinges, odachi in hand.
Suddenly, before either the man or the child could react, the long conveyors and thin aluminium walls twisted into the shape of a canon. Like the maw of a giant spider emerging from its nest, it looked straight at them while maniacal laughter echoed through the room, following the movement of its components.
“Oh, how cute. They even sent a little boy,” The voice mockingly stated. “Beware, Hunters. Few have fought an A-level artillerist, and none have lived to tell the tale-”
The canon split in half, and the woman behind it froze in shock, as blood dripped from a shallow vertical cut down her entire body.
“Huh, your little toy was harder than I thought,” Yuuto noted, as he shifted his grip over his odachi.
Before the woman could yell, or her clothes, which Yuuto had also sliced through, could fall to the ground, Cain had crossed the distance between them. He threw her to the ground with one hit of his paw, and bit down her neck. Once the wound stopped trying to close around his fangs, he bit harder. Then he let the corpse fall to the ground.
“I guess those 6500000 won (~4.5k USD) are yours.” Yuuto shrugged.
“The group’s,” Cain corrected.
“Well, yes. But you’ve earned them.”
“Who’s next?” Cain plainly asked, briefly changing forms to meet the man at his man at his motorbike.
[https://i.imgur.com/OHMyQo0.png]