I’d gotten on Reina and Gun’s case about going to our first day of school, and now I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t as thrilled about it after what’d happened with Reina back there. Being quiet throughout the breakfast Felix and Ash made had everyone questioning me, and they insisted I was acting a bit off. Normally I was a chatterbox around the new fam, but I couldn’t push myself to utter more than a few sentences during our meal.

Not forgetting my motto, I wanted to forget about the incident as I navigated down the halls of my new school. Maybe the lava puke and the close faint spells was the onset of another meta, and the blood thing was a side effect of it. This had nothing to do with anything else, not with getting a dark meta ability, and definitely not with being a—

“Monster!” a girl said as I stepped outside the building and toward the campus field. She looked animated as she reenacted something across my right shoulder, her friends giggling at her joke. I was taking a quick tour of the school, her loud shout snapping me out of my daydream.

“You seem out of it this morning,” Sophie said, as I held my phone in my hand with her concerned face staring at me. We were on a video call, Sophie having suggested I call her so she could tour the school at the same time I did. Reina and Naomi had separated from me a few minutes ago, and we were going to regroup soon. “Are you nervous?”

I sighed, scratching the back of my head anxiously. “Just jittery.”

“From what? Talk to me.”

“There’s a lot developing at the same time, you know? But I’ll get a hold on things.” I smiled, trying to make her feel better. “I always do.”

“Do you need me to come over there, Nero? Because you know I will.”

I snorted. “I’m happy you’re still looking out for me, So, but I’ll be alright. I promise.”

She frowned. “I miss being there for you.”

“You never stopped being there for me,” I reminded her with a smile. “Talking to you every day is like home away from home.”

“Is that my nugget?” I heard mom hollering from afar.

“Yes mom…” Sophie said with a playful hint of jealousy and irritation in her voice.

“Oh, how is my baby?” she screeched. “I want to say hi! Pass me the phone!”

“If he wanted to talk to you, too, he would have called you,” Sophie jested, before my mom tackled her phone.

I laughed.

“Quit hogging the line!”

“Hey! I wasn’t done talking to him!” They fought, their banter putting a bigger smile on my face.

“Hey sweetie!” Mom sang, her arm leaning on Sophie’s head to tame her.

“Hey Mom!” I beamed.

“How’s my boy doing out there in the big city? You're staying out of trouble, I hope.”

I smirked. “Of course, Mom. You raised me right.”

“That’s good to hear! You’re getting real adjusted out there, aren’t you? I’m happy for you, nugget,” Mom’s cheerful voice continued to pour through the phone, instantly lifting my spirits.

“Sure am. It’s my first day at International. Check out this huge campus,” I said, lifting my phone over my head and giving her a quick scope. I could hear her hollering over my head, and Sophie squawking at her about busting her eardrums.

“It looks beautiful, Nero! Sure seems fancier than Acadia.”

“I haven’t been here long, but we’ll see about that!”

“I hope you have an amazing day at school, you hear?”

I nodded. “I will, Ma. Don’t you worry about that.”

“Now tell me, have you been eating properly? It looks like you’ve gotten skinnier. I worry about you not getting enough protein in your diet. Now I don’t want you losing weight over there and starving yourself!”

I snickered. “I’m not. After I got paid, I started budgeting again, and I haven’t cut down the cost of food. It’s going to take some time before the money I wired to you guys gets processed. But Mom, this is the beginning of a new life for the both of you.”

“Nero, you didn’t have to split your first paycheck with us….”

“Stop with that, Mom. The both of you deserve it. I don’t want you feeling sorry for me.”

Tears pricked her eyes as her lips quivered. “Thank you, nugget. You have no idea how much we appreciate it.”

Mom continued to talk to me for a few minutes longer, asking about my contracts and my transitioning with the lifestyle. I assured her everything was fine, and I asked her the same questions. Finally she let me go, blowing kisses through the phone before passing it back to Sophie. She had to go to work, and once she left the apartment, I asked Sophie for the truth.

“You know she likes to keep her secrets,” she said, giving me a judgmental look. “Just like someone else I know.”

“She does it because she doesn’t want us to worry.”

“Still doesn’t make it a good habit. She’d been coughing more lately, but she swears she’s okay. I know she gets these episodes, maybe I’m just being paranoid now that you’re not here.”

“Is she happy?” I asked her seriously. “It feels like she’s putting up a front for me.”

Sophie smiled sweetly. “She’s happy, Nero. She’s happy that you’re happy. And that’s the honest truth.”

“I miss her and her energy,” I admitted. “Once I get situated and gain sponsors, I’m heading over there to visit.”

“You coming over will be like ten Christmases!” she beamed. “And you know how I feel about my favorite holiday!”

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I moaned. “God, you got me thinking about your famous hot cocoa….”

“Yeah, yeah, and the Tiramisu, too.”

“My stomach misses you dearly, So.”

“Naturally. Your stomach and I are married, after all.”

We laughed.

“On a serious note, though. I did look over the website you gave me.”

I sighed objectively. “I only gave it to you because you were relentless about forking it over.”

“You wanted to brush it off! But I thought it was important.”

“It stopped feeling like a big deal after Felix made that comment about it.”

“Well, it is a big deal! Because when I went to look for it, it was gone.”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “Gone?”

“You heard me right. The domain doesn’t exist.”

I didn’t get it. “What do you mean the domain doesn’t exist? I literally just looked at it a few hours ago.”

“I know, that’s what’s so weird. When I typed in the url you gave me, it said the site couldn’t be found. I tried a few times just to be sure.”

A looming feeling had my head jumping to conclusions, none of which were any good. This could only mean two things—that someone caught wind of hunters browsing that website, or it was removed because some shit was about to go down.

“Are you sure you got the right link? Maybe you mistyped it.”

“I copy and pasted it, Nero. And then I double-checked it.”

“Maybe they’re doing maintenance on the site or something.”

“Then why would it say the domain couldn’t be found? Domains don’t just up and vanish within a few hours, especially with something like this. It should at least have a ‘temporarily down for maintenance’ or a forwarding link to a new address. But I did find a trail, though. Sort of like a sister site, a wiki of sorts.”

“What did it say?”

“Something along the lines of the origin of shadow walkers. Long story short, they are demons.”

My body wasn’t ready for the bad news as I felt my throat dry up the moment she confirmed it.

“Apparently, something opened the door to a bunch of demons from another place to cross over into our world. From the translation I whipped up, this place isn’t on earth. It might be an entire world or even a realm.”

“Translation?”

“Yeah, the entire wiki was in some sort of code. But I stayed up all night working bits and pieces. The translation isn’t perfect, and there are major chunks of detail missing. According to the wiki, these demons are called ‘shadow walkers’ because they can blend into shadows. Shadows represent the lack of light within their souls that died out from evil deeds and evil misfortunes. They possess decayed and rotting bodies by infusing their spiritual essence inside these vessels. When inside a vessel, something about their spirits being in a foreign vessel morphs their appearance and alters their memories.”

“A foreign vessel? Wouldn’t all vessels be foreign to them?”

“I think it translated to foreign. Again, I’m not sure.”

“What are you telling me, Sophie? That these demons are people? What else is capable of evil deeds?”

“On a mythological level, plenty. There are all kinds of evil imps and goblins and whatever.”

“What are the chances that these shadow walkers are actual people who have died, and who have been banished to hell? What if that other place is the nether realm or something?”

“Here, I have these symbols that I took snapshots of. Sending them over now.”

In a few seconds, I got a notification, I opened the images Sophie had sent over, studying the strange symbols. Underneath these symbols, she drew letters, some paired, others not. She went into detail trying to decipher the code, but these symbols… they were unlike any language I had seen before, all sharp edges and looping curls. Squinting, I could start to make out patterns in between them, the shapes suddenly shifting in front of my eyes.

It was starting to give me a migraine, as if my brain was working puzzle pieces together…

“This looks like some kind of ancient language,” I murmured to myself, before looking away from it completely. If these shadow walkers really were human souls banished to a dark realm, it would make sense that they’d have their own form of writing….

“It goes on, Nero. This place they came from is described as the cycle of fury. A place of constant strife and suffering. There was also something crazy that caught my attention, and I think it read ‘recipe for disaster.’ The rest of the page wouldn’t load. I even tried refreshing it, but I was never able to go back to it. The site freezes up every time and—”

“Sophie,” I called out to her in a hushed and serious voice. “Don’t try searching for that website anymore. You hear me?”

“Huh? Why, I was just—”

“It’s not a coincidence that this site went down when we started looking into it. We are getting into something dangerous here. This language, these shadow walkers, the mysterious website going down… it’s lining up perfectly. At first I thought that there was a possibility of something bad happening. But the more we talked about it, the more I realized that it might have been Ash and me who triggered the site to disappear. We accessed that website from within the dojo. The admin has access to IP addresses. Are you catching me so far?”

“So you think the admin squashed an entire website on a hunch that hunters caught wind of it?”

“Not even hunters, the VII, too. Think about it.”

“More reason to keep digging, Nero,” she said, her comment making me hold my breath. “If these shadow things really are lost souls, maybe there’s a way we can help them. Or at least, send them back. A place of constant strife and suffering… it could be that these souls have been tormented for so long, that they forgot how to be human. If we are basing it off the fact that they were once human, of course.”

Sophie’s theory was starting to seem less far-fetched, though it raised even more disturbing questions. If hell truly existed, exactly how many of these lost souls were among us?

“You don’t actually believe all of this stuff, do you?”

I churned my face at her. “Do you?”

She went quiet for a second before she admitted, “I don’t know… I have to consider the possibility, don’t I?”

I looked over both of my shoulders and walked further away from the scattered students in the front yard. “Listen to me carefully, So,” I continued to whisper. “Promise me that you’ll drop this, okay? Don’t look into it anymore.”

“But—”

“I’m serious. Since you tried accessing that website after it shut down, you can be a target.”

She gasped. “A target? Nero, you’re creeping me o—”

“You need to be,” I said seriously. “Because whatever the fuck this is, it’s serious. If this admin was cautious enough to tank an entire domain, there has to be something real big behind it.”

Sophie stared at me, her eyes wide. “You really think I could be in danger just for looking at a website?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but everything about this feels off. The cryptic language, the talk of lost souls— this goes way beyond some random internet conspiracy theory. Someone went to a lot of trouble to cover their tracks.”

Her face turned grim. “Oh my god… then the possibility of all of this being real….”

I glanced around the yard again before lowering my voice further. “Let’s keep this between us for now. I have your word?”

“Yeah….”

“Delete the images off your phone and clear your browsing history. And remember, don’t try going back to the website.”

“All right. I promise.”

“Hey,” someone said behind me, the sensation of a hand on my shoulder making me jump.

I flailed and pivoted around, my heart lunging against my throat.

“Calm your brakes; it’s just me!” Reina hissed.

“God damn it, Reina! You didn’t have to sneak up on me like that!”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, pardon me for your paranoia!”

I let out a shaky breath and rubbed the spot where my heart should’ve been. “Damn, you scared me half to death.”

“Hmm?” Reina tilted her head and noticed Sophie on my phone. “Who is your friend?” Reina waved at her just as Naomi walked toward us. “Good morning! My name is—”

“Oh, I know who you are,” Sophie hissed, already getting hostile. “We are not on a friendly basis, you self-loving, pink-bow-wearing, wannabe fox-trot Barbie!”

Reina winced. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’m glad you still like poking your nose where it doesn’t belong, because I got a few choice words for—”

“Heh! Okay. Ta-ta for now, Sophie! Luv ya! Bye!” I cut her off, then hung up the phone, Naomi smirking behind Reina.

“That was awfully rude of her,” Reina said, offended. “I barely said five words to the girl and she attacked me. The rudeness of some people.”

“Yes, the rudeness,” Naomi mocked sarcastically. “Anyway, I made my rounds.”

“Your rounds?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

I chuckled. “Naomi, this isn’t a contract. It’s school.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said flatly. “All locations have potential to be a hunting ground. It’s up to us to protect all of these students….”

“Boy, I really do hope we aren’t the only talent on campus….” Reina considered.

“Maybe,” I said, looking out to the field again. “After all, we aren’t back home anymore, where a small percentage of our population were meta-humans. If Utoro is short on hunters, then naturally, they’d be short on metas.”

“And any one of them could be shadow walkers….”