All of that blood on the floor made my heart skip a beat. She was laid out in the utility closet, with a pool of blood underneath her, and her fingers curled up in a desperate clutch. Her lifeless terrified eyes were locked open, with bits and pieces of her glasses shattered over her face. For a second, I had to brace myself, realizing that my head was swimming the longer I stared at her. Chills, a swelling heat in my throat, the sound of my own blood racing–I told myself to get a grip as I grabbed the frame of the doorway, trying to shove the swarming in my stomach down. I had to keep my head clear and get a handle on this situation.
“Everyone stay back!” I shouted, but my voice was lost in the chaos that had blown up around me.
The hallway was up in arms. Students screamed and rushed about, their faces pale and their paranoia making them crazy. The girl’s body was quickly surrounded by traumatized classmates: some crying, others shrieking in panic. Reina arrived at my side with her face as white as a sheet.
“Call 911!” I barked over my shoulder to anyone who would listen with my gaze still fixed on the girl. Naomi took to my side and slipped into the closet part way, crouching over and checking the pulse along her wrist.
“She’s dead,” Naomi whispered.
One of the girls gasped. “I s-s-s-saw red pooling from under the door! I was scared to open it but something told me I had to-to-to at least check what was inside!”
I spun around to face her, and asked her seriously. “What exactly did you see?” I demanded.
“Nothing! Absolutely nothing!”
She was just a student, probably no older than fifteen. Her knees were shaking, and she was on the verge of collapsing. She looked at me with wide trembling eyes, her bottom lip quivering.
“Are you sure that no one ran out from this hallway?” I pressed her, my voice firm but gentle.
“I didn’t see anyone,” she whispered, tears starting to roll down her cheeks. “I swear.”
From all of the noise around me from the tilted crowd, I gathered that the victim’s name was Isole, a mousy sophomore with no friends, and who mostly kept to herself.
“S-she… she didn’t deserve this!” she stuttered, her hand clasped over her mouth. Naomi came out of the utility closet, the look on her face confirming what we already knew. This was no accident. It was a shadow walker attack….
“All right, everyone, clear the hallway!” I yelled, pushing past the gawking students.
“Please, stand back!” Reina assisted. “We are hunters! For your safety, please exit the building.”
“Hey, what’s going—AHHH!” Ash said as she rushed to the scene with Gun and Felix right behind her.
I furrowed my eyebrows at them. “Where the hell have you guys been?”
“We got held up in the chief executive’s office,” Felix said, while Gun stood right next to him with a troubled look on his face as he raked his fingers through his spiked hair.
“Ahhh, shhiiit….” He grunted. “There’s a fucking shadow walker in the school?”
“I called the emergency line,” Naomi said, while Reina and Ash finished clearing the hallway.
“We need to report this to Hayashi, ASAP,” Felix added.
“He didn’t just drink her blood, he mutilated her.” I whispered under my breath… “Fucking hell….”
++++
Shortly after Felix and his team came, a few faculty members did, too. Unlike the students, they didn’t seem too shocked when they discovered Isole’s body in the closet. The school had a few incidents of something like this recently, just like every other school. Institutions like these were a feeding ground for shadow walkers. In a place where everyone had the same agenda, wore the same clothes, and did the same things, it was easy for monsters to role play with their meals.
It was a scary reality they had to live with every day, but Utoro refused to be subjugated by ruthless flesh eaters.
“You heard what they said. Haruto Nagamagi died the month before with Aiki Pathuga a week prior,” Felix mentioned as we sat around the den table in the dojo. After the emergency at the school, everyone was sent home, including us. Hayashi insisted we not investigate until the corp had more intel.
“Those poor people,” Ash mumbled. “We really didn’t have to deal with stuff like this back home. There were always a few hunters patrolling the campus.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Some schools more than others,” Felix corrected. “Some Xion schools had a few incidents, just not as frequently.”
“Wow, first day of school, and we’re already getting some action.” Gun grunted as he reeled himself and his open designed collar that he altered in his seat, with his arms crossed behind his back. He sucked his teeth irritatedly and let out an exasperated sigh. “This blows. Selfish ass flesh eaters.”
“I feel like we were underused back there,” Reina added, then lifted her head to everyone. “We should have scoped the area at the very least.”
“And do what? Interrogate the entire student body for a suspect?” Felix questioned sarcastically.
“That’s assuming there is only one suspect,” Naomi added.
“She’s right. This could have been a team effort,” I added.
“Or a group,” Felix speculated. “It was best we stayed out of it for now. Until we have more info.”
Gun sighed exasperatedly. “Well, this shit has gotten me in a bad mood. I need a smoke.”
“You’d be doing no such thing,” Hayashi said as he walked in, prompting all of us to turn his way. “You know my rules. No smoking. The smell is undesirable and it ruins the tranquility of our home.”
“Sensei,” I said, getting off my seat. “Did you get word from the corporation?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, are we still going to attend that school as hunters or as students?” Ashley asked in a strained voice.
“Nothing has changed,” he answered the distressed Ashley.
“What do you mean nothing has changed?” Reina shot up off her seat and sassed. “A girl is dead under our watch!”
“Hey, we are all anxious, but we need to sit down and discuss strategies about this,” Felix added, standing up to counter Reina. She was furious with the idea of ignoring it, and frankly, so was I. Even so, I understood both arguments and felt that our best way of approaching this was listening to Hayashi’s perspective. “This issue didn’t stir up as soon as we walked through the doors. It has been a recurring issue. Which means that the problem has been festering and growing for some time . So before we dive head first into solving it, we need to assess the situation entirely. We are in their court, not the other way around. We play the slow and steady game, right Hayashi?”
“Correct.”
“And allow them to take more victims?!” Reina huffed.
“No,” Hayashi countered, his voice calm yet firm. “We aren’t allowing anyone to do anything. As hunters, we aim to prevent that from happening again at all costs.”
“But to do that, we need to understand who we’re dealing with,” Felix added, and then Gun jerked from his seat, upset, walking away from our discussion.
“I need some air,” he said, with his arms casually crossed behind his head.
I knew he wanted to remain tough-skinned about this topic, but it was clear that it was eating something bad inside of him. Same with Reina, but she didn’t know how to keep her emotions tucked in.
“I refuse to let another victim fall prey to these predators,” Reina proclaimed, her voice trembling with raw conviction. Her defiant eyes met Hayashi’s calmly assessing ones.
Hayashi sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose before speaking. “You think we don’t all feel that way, Reina? We are hunters. Our mission is to protect innocents from harm. But rash actions won’t help anyone. I could have sworn you learned that during your evaluation period.”
“I’d rather act than stand by while another life is snuffed out,” she retorted, crossing her arms defiantly.
“We’re not standing by,” Felix interjected.
“Enough agreeing with this madness!” Reina shouted at him. “If the school board had any real sense, they’d shut the school down!”
“And what good would that do?” I turned to her. “Look, Reina, I know that you want to catch the assholes who did this, but what you’re requesting will not solve the problem.”
“No, it will only delay it,” Naomi said as she flipped through her cell phone. “You get the entire student body to hide in their homes and guess what the eaters are going to do? They are going to hide, too. Until they invite everyone back to campus, where their feeding schedule will resume. So what exactly are we solving by dancing around the real issue, here?”
“All I hear is your idea of using innocent lives as bait!” Reina retorted.
“You had a chance to leave…” Naomi said, her voice deepening as she looked up her lashes and glared at Reina. “If you can’t handle the small stuff, then why didn’t you take our invitation to run back home to your mommy and daddy with their fat pockets and sit around and watch your soaps all day?”
That cold comment from Naomi came out of nowhere. I already knew this was going to trigger Reina, so I turned to her, prepared to leap before she reacted.
Reina bristled, her face reddening in anger as Naomi continued, “This is about the lives at stake, not about what you want when you want it.”
“Excuse me?!”
“All those big words,” Naomi continued. “But have you thought about the consequences of our actions? We are part of a system that needs to be balanced. If we overreact, if we show sloppiness and unprofessionalism; we give these eaters exactly what they want: chaos. So quit talking out of your ass about doing the right thing and actually do the right thing and shut up and be patient.”
Reina inched forward, and I moved. Once I saw her fists curl up, I already knew what she wanted to do. So I held her back, Naomi unfazed by her reaction. After I reeled Reina in, I turned her around and tried talking some sense into her. “Come on, relax, Reina,” I insisted. “Naomi’s right, more or less. I wouldn’t have put it in those exact words, but this isn’t the kind of enemy you can just charge at with guns blazing. We need more intel. The more we know, the better equipped we’ll be to face it,” I added, “This is different from the missions we’d been on so far. I know it’s hitting close to home, but we have to stay level headed. Not only for each other, but for the school, too.”
“I can’t!” she cried, her voice shaking. “Time is against us! And if we can’t find the answers we need, then they’ll die!” A single tear shed down her heated cheek, my heart skipping a beat at seeing her so passionate about this.
“Reina?” I whispered, but before I could say another word, she stormed off. “Reina!” I called out, ready to go after her before Hayashi stopped me.
“Let her go figure it out,” he ordered.
Then I turned to Naomi. “Naomi, why did you—”
“She needed to hear the hard truth,” she hissed. “If we keep letting her say anything she wants and steam roll over us, she will never learn. And I’m not the one to sugar coat anything for her.”
“Nero, Naomi,” Hayashi called out to us. “I have a mission lined up for you.”
I turned to him. “What about Reina?”
“She will also be joining you. We brief at 8pm.”