Soul Spark

17 - Soul Crystal Retrieval

“Strangely enough...the city doesn’t look like it’s in awful shape.”

“Beware you guys, something happened to the voidflames. They got more guns and probably even brains and muscles now too.”

“Got it.” Sakuto said. “We’re landing now. I’ll let you know if we find the crystal.”

The dragon descended upon the city, slowly making its way towards the very address that saved Sakuto’s life. Carefully scanning the surroundings, Sakuto was surprised to find little to not presences scattered around - nor were there any soldiers actively fighting in the area. All he felt was select presences, looming around the area, thankfully, far enough away from Fedor’s old home to pose any issues.

They approached the house and made the landing. Carefully getting out, they entered the house.

“Ugh, can I take these off?” Hiroshi said, complaining at his layers of facial clothing used to conceal his face.

“Nope. Too risky.” Sakuto said.

“But he’s feeling uncomfortable!” Yumichi stood up for his friend.

“Well, feeling uncomfortable is probably better than feeling dead.” Sakuto said. Ichika slightly nudged him with her elbow. “Sorry, I meant...we don’t know if it’s really safe here.”

“I don’t sense any presence nearby, except those of ours. And...”

“Hiroshi’s presence is growing surprisingly higher by the hour.”

They made their way to the top floor.

“This is the place...” Ichika said, in slight disbelief. It was surprisingly...clean. She wandered around, failing to process the area as the same as the one she rushed into months prior.

“Fuck...” Sakuto took a deep breath. “Please don’t tell me this place was cleaned up.”

“Nah, there have to be some crystals laying around here. I...” Ichika said, quickly walking over to the small table. “I...took one from here.”

And to her surprise, there weren’t any crystals there anymore.

“Alright, it’s okay. Keep it calm.” Sakuto said, withholding a panic attack. “There’s no way this was his entire storage. The guy said he had other patients, so surely there’s some laying around here, right? We just gotta search the place. Turn the whole thing upside down.”

“Yeah, let’s...let’s do just that.” Ichika said, walking over. She started picking up and displacing every vase, book and alcohol bottle she could find, frantically looking through every nook and cranny.

“You kids, you do the same.” Sakuto told Yumichi and Hiroshi. “We’re all getting busy.”

“Come on...maybe not in a public place, but a hidden compartment or a safe...gotta be some somewhere.”

“Please...”

He wandered around, doing the same as Ichika. He looked into the bookshelf where we once found a stash of alcohol, it gave him some hope - but alas, no crystal was found there. He started knocking around on the wall and even poking holes in it with thin shadow needles, trying to find a concealed storage unit. He briefly looked out of the window and carefully observed the windowsill.

And while he and Ichika were busy searching for their last hope, Yumichi and Hiroshi got some time for themselves.

“You...wanna start looking?” Yumichi innocently asked.

“I don’t know.” Hiroshi grunted. Something changed not only about his presence, but also his general expression. He looked like he always had something on his mind. Maybe the occasional heartaches were bothering him, or maybe the reality of the world’s predicament began looming over his mindscape with especially grim colors.

“Hey, I’m sure we can find it!” Yumichi smiled. “I’ll look around in-”

“You’re trying to find a weapon...to kill my dad.” Hiroshi said. “That’s...messed up.”

“Oh, sorry...” Yumichi said. “But, we gotta find it. Big sis knows what she’s doing.”

“Hey, what would you do if people were plotting to kill your big sis in front of you, and asking for your help while doing that?” Hiroshi asked. Seeing Yumichi’s slightly scared face and lack of response, he sighed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, but...you understand me, right?”

“If that happened, I’d be with big sis helping her, not those people.” Yumichi said, walking away, even a bit offended. He got busy searching, leaving Hiroshi alone.

“And you think I have an option? Everyone wants me either dead or hostage...” Hiroshi thought, swiping his foot on the floor.

“Only dad tried to treat me like an actual person.”

“Maybe he was bad at it, but...that’s how people are, right? They make mistakes, they try to become better and try their hardest...”

“I know dad loves me. And all of this...it’s because he wants me to be there, with him. Not with these people, not with any of these other criminals...but with him.”

“Damn it!”

In a fit of rage, he stomped on the floor. But instead of the expected hard response, something changed in the floor’s structure. More specifically, the small area his foot struck moved a little, revealing an opening. Hiroshi wanted to bow down, but something stopped him.

“Maybe...if I don’t tell them about it, they’ll think that there’s no hidden compartment here. They’ll think that their weapon doesn’t exist.”

“And then, if I can convince them, they’ll get me to my dad, and I can talk to him...I can tell him that he doesn’t need to do all of this, that I’m safe.”

He nervously looked around. Unfortunately, however, Sakuto interpreted his nervous gaze as him wanting to say something.

“What? Did you find something?” Sakuto said with desperate excitement. He approached Hiroshi and, on his way towards him, stepped on the other side of the moving part.

He bowed down and pushed on the plank harder, revealing a small, dark area inside. And in there...

“There it is...” Sakuto said, grabbing a soul crystal. It was, for the better or the worse, the only one left in the house. “Ichika! I got one!”

Unlawfully taken from NovelFire, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Fuck...that’s good.” Ichika sighed in relief, rushing to him. “Hiroshi, did you find it?”

“I-”

Yumichi didn’t congratulate him, he only looked at him, still a little offended.

“Captain Jian, do you copy?” Sakuto tapped his earpiece. “We’ve secured a soul crystal. We’ll try to look around if there’s any others left here, but...we have it. We fucking have it.”

He looked at the object in his hand. It looked exactly the same as he remembered it, a little shiny, a little intimidating. It reminded him of both himself and the time he had to use it on his late friend.

“Excellent. We are still working on accessing the network.” Jian replied from the other side of the earpiece.

“We’ll move closer to you. We might need to make a stop at Warsaw, exhaustion’s getting to us. We’ll reunite and think of a proper confrontation plan.” Sakuto said, tapping on his earpiece again and terminating the connection.

The words ‘proper confrontation plan’ alerted Hiroshi.

“No, you need to...listen to me...”

“Even though I can’t say it...”

“I have to be the one confronting him. Or, just...talking to him. Come on. Please.”

“Let’s search some more. High chance we find another hideout like this one.” Sakuto said. “This time, don’t spare to break the floor or the walls. No one lives here anyways.”

“Sakuto.”

“Hm?”

“There’s a presence nearby.” Ichika said, summoning her kunai. “There’s a group of them approaching us.”

Sakuto summoned his own blade. He peeked outside of the window, seeing nothing. He listened to his senses more, locating that the group is now likely on the first floor...and for some reason, they were choosing to stay here.

The group of enhanced voidflames was creeping up on the soulfuls, slowly approaching the staircase leading to the top floor. But as soon as they peeked their heads...

A pair of sharp shadow tentacles pierced the voidflames' heads, killing them almost instantly.

“Ichika, we gotta leave.” Sakuto said. And just as Ichika nodded...

The window and its adjacent wall was blown open. As the smoke and dust settled, Sakuto raised his head to see two more enhanced voidflame squads pointing their weapons at him. These weren’t ordinary weapons, the voidflames also wielded grenade launchers and even sniper rifles...

“Ichika, the kids!” Sakuto yelled before quickly manifesting a shadowy shield in front of him, absorbing the incoming gunfire. He felt something uncomfortable bite his ear, it was a high caliber sniper rifle wielded by a voidflame. He immediately turned his attention to it and, shadow stepping right behind it, was surprised to see that the voidflame was trying to fight back. It swung at Sakuto, who, evading the punch in surprise, crushed its head with just one shadow-imbued punch.

He manifested a machine gun out of his shadows and sprayed it at the voidflame squads, but they quickly took cover. Sakuto, summoning his blade, shadow stepped towards them and started slashing and remotely decapitating away - despite the enhancements, they were still no match for him.

But his true worry was elsewhere.

Ichika, on the other hand, was in a much more complicated situation. She could take care of herself perfectly fine, but the kids, on the other hand...

“Yumichi! Where are you?!”

Following the confusion and an attempt to shield themselves from a potential second explosion, Hiroshi made the call to hide on the other side of the house. Thanks to his sheer luck, there weren’t any voidflames covering that area...just yet. Yumichi, next to him, was given hope when he heard his sister’s cries.

“Come, fast, let’s get to big sis!” Yumichi told Hiroshi.

“It’s not safe there. I’m staying here.” Hiroshi objected. “You can go if you want to.”

“It’d be better if you went. Maybe I can try doing something...”

“No way! I’m not leaving you here alone!” Yumichi said. A strange presence surrounded him, it looked like it was starting to snow.

And to his horror, two voidflames with assault rifles wrapped around the house and came face to face with them. They pointed their rifles at them, and the snow intensified...

“Yumichi!!!” Ichika screamed, as she, sensing his position, leapt over the house and to the other side. The sight that she saw, however, wasn’t disheartening or horrific. It was strange, and strangely hopeful.

It was a pair of dead voidflames, and a Yumichi, now with a much stronger soul presence, holding onto a snowball.

“Yumichi?” Ichika asked, quickly approaching him. He held his hands and touched the snowball, it felt sharp, imbued with soul prowess. “You-”

He sensed a squad of voidflames approach them from the side.

“Stay the hell away from him!” Ichika yelled in an almost primal fit of rage. She struck the ground with her kunai and released an ice blast almost five times larger than the house itself towards the voidflames. They were buried in the ice.

Sakuto, sensing the quake and flare-up of soul presence, sweeped around him with a sharpened shadow tentacle and went towards Ichika.

“Sakuto, look...” Ichika said, fascinated. “Yumichi has a soul expression now...”

“I just threw a snowball at him! Just like when we used to play around in the snow, big sis!” Yumichi tried to explain himself, thinking that he was guilty of something. “I just...felt like I could do it, because, they, they were gonna hurt my friend!”

“Good news. We’re all at least somewhat combat capable now.” Sakuto said. “We gotta get outta here before-”

Another grenade flew their way. Sakuto, noticing it, quickly forged a shadowy tentacle to punch it away - that’s the first thing that he thought of. It ended up detonating not too far away from them, still not being the greatest experience for them, especially for Hiroshi.

“Great, am I the only one who can’t fight here?” He asked himself, looking around.

“There!” Hiroshi said, pointing at the rooftop of a building in the distance. “I see someone, it’s probably the one responsible for the rockets.”

“Got it.” Sakuto said. He clasped his hands, and from them, a shadowy arrow came and struck the exact building. Once the roof area was damaged enough, Sakuto sent a pair of devastatingly destructive slashes at it to confirm its destruction.

And at that moment, another rocket struck the house, destroying large chunks of it.

“Sakuto, we might wanna leave.” Ichika said.

“No. We gotta find if there’s any other crystals here.” Sakuto said. At that moment, yet another rocket struck them, and this one was dangerously close to Hiroshi. In fact, it did damage his left arm quite a bit.

Paired with that, gunfire was picking up pace.

“I really doubt there’s any more left. Let’s go now before Hiroshi ends up wounded because of this.” Ichika tried to convince Sakuto.

Sakuto took a look at the ruins of the house, trying to use the little seconds he had in order to find at least something that resembled a crystal. While Ichika formed a dome of ice around them, Sakuto used shadow tentacles to swipe the debris away, in hopes of seeing at least something.

But then, he looked at Hiroshi, who seemed to be in pain. He really didn’t want to risk his life.

“Come on, we’re getting outta here.” Sakuto said. He started feeling a light headache. “We’re moving to Warsaw.”

The shadow dragon broke through the ground and the ice cover, grabbing all of its passengers and flying off. Ichika fired off icicles in retaliation, picking off any of the voidflames that were unfortunate enough to get struck by them. And Yumichi kept throwing snowballs at the ground, despite missing them, it at least showed that he was getting more and more comfortable with using his ability.

“Ichika, watch the ground. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have tracking rockets or some shit.” Sakuto said, taking deep breaths at a time. “We gotta get some rest, all of us. And make our way to the rest of the team.”

“It’s a shame we only managed to get one of these things...” Sakuto said, observing the crystal in his hand before burying it deep inside his uniform. “But even that might just be enough.”

“As long as he doesn’t know about it, as long as it catches him off-guard...”

“That’s what Mukawa must’ve thought too, right?” ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡᴀɴᴛ ᴛᴏ ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴏʀᴇ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs, ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ ᴠɪsɪᴛ Novᴇl_Fire(.)net

Disagreeing with himself, he shook his own head.

“Nah. This has to work.”

“Ichika, once we get there, you gotta help me with something.” Sakuto said.

“Hm?”

“I thought of a method that’ll let us fight together with much better synergy.” Sakuto said. “And it might just be the way to get an opening to stick this crystal in Kaito’s face.”

Hiroshi heard that expression. Slowly and surely, he was starting to have enough of it.