On the Road Again

Shino

"He was teleporting left and right! It was so hard to keep up with him! I don't remember how to teleport..."

"Is that so..."

I listened to Chigira telling me about the fight. From her perspective, so many things had happened while I was standing powerless. She had to take care of a target that never stood in the same place, teleporting himself and the things around him whenever she thought she had a grip on him.

I was interested in how the fight went, and I was happy that Chigira was telling me about it, but everything she told me was completely new, and it made me feel like a little kid reading somebody's thesis. I had no idea what was going on. No, I had no idea all of that had happened right above me.

"And when you started moving, I was so scared that I would hit you by mistake! You really shouldn't do things like that!"

We walked down the busy streets around Minato, trying to blend into the crowd. I was used to keeping myself hidden in plain sight, but the same couldn't be said for the colorful girl next to me.

"And then you started running so quick! Even I had a hard time catching up. I actually thought about blowing everything around me up and taking that guy down with me for a second!"

What she was talking about didn't help our case either. It wasn't odd to think that we were the enemies of the world for now. More than ever, we had to...

"Wait... you almost did what?"

I looked with wide eyes at Chigira, who was walking in front of me, my hood falling off from how quickly I lifted my gaze.

She turned around and smiled with her tongue out. Were she to bonk her head with her fist, the picture would have been complete.

"Look, Chigira... There's something I really need to ask..."

Her smile turned into a curious one, and she looked at me with big eyes, walking backwards and letting destiny decide where her steps landed.

"All of this power—how come you're only using it now?"

My question sounded rude. I didn't intend that, but I couldn't shake the feeling that maybe that ambush back home could have been handled differently.

"Why... you ask..."

Chigira touched her cheek with her index finger, looking upwards with her tongue still out, deep in thought at how to answer my question.

"Well, were I to destroy the building, wouldn't the other residents have gotten mad?"

And of course, her matter-of-fact answer left me both satisfied and curious. To that, she just smiled and turned around, tripping and almost falling flat on the ground, but still pretending nothing had happened afterwards.

"And what about that teleportation thing? How did you keep up?"

Before I knew it, one question opened the dam gates, and I pushed on with another.

"That's... Well... I just flew faster?"

"And how come he didn't just teleport half of your body somewhere else to finish you off?"

"Hehe... He tried, but I'm tougher than that!" she said with a smug smile.

"And how come he didn't do that to me?"

"He couldn't see you. I kept you covered."

"Couldn't he see and hear everything, though?"

"Well... that's... Oh!"

Before she could answer me, Chigira froze in her tracks and looked over to the sidewalk across the street.

"Class Rep! Look!" she started shouting to a girl wearing glasses and a well-kept school uniform.

"I don't need to join any club now! I've made a friend—"

Before the high schooler could catch a glimpse of us, I grabbed Chigira and dragged her with me just as a truck was passing by. I took her to a less busy street, and only then did I take my hand off her mouth. 

She kept making muffled sounds, but those turned out to be nothing more than random noises she was making from her throat instead of actual words.

When she noticed she was free to speak, she shut up. No scolding, no nothing.

"Is that it?" I asked. "Aren't you mad?"

Never did I see Chigira mad at me, but that doesn't mean I wasn't expecting it to happen some day. If anything, her getting mad would have put my heart at ease a little. It wasn't that I was trying to bully her, but I wanted to confirm that she was able to get angry.

Still, she kept her usual smile on, and answered.

"If you've done that, there must have been a reason, right?"

I couldn't help but fall speechless. Why was she trusting me to such an extent? Why was she treating me like that after all I'd put her through?

I believed everyone was a disposable asset, and I had treated her like such many times. Still, she trusted my every action.

"We can't have that... Mister Tanaka~"

Just as my heart felt like it would burst from receiving too much kindness, I heard a voice that made my blood freeze. A familiar voice, but one that shouldn't have spoken my name.

"You can't treat pretty ladies like this... If you want to take out your anger on someone, take it out on me~."

Hearing the way he referred to himself was enough confirmation. My hands trembling, I turned around, repeating only that pronoun. A word I heard way too often.

"Ware?..."

That way of referring to oneself, I had only heard three people use it. One of them was myself when I was a child. Nah, it was me when I was having fun, and that happened more and more recently.

"Chigira, try it with that tree!"

Another one was the woman next to me, who would use it regularly, repeating it so much that it rubbed off of me.

"Shino, give that to me!"

And the third one was the very evil of this world. He was the one ruling over us, and he was my target.

"What? Have you two missed me so much that I've left you speechless?"

That pronoun was a dead giveaway of who the person in front of me was. That weird man who delivered a flower to me turned out to be the same man I had to hunt down.

I never thought someone as important as Tyrant would lower himself to using other pronouns, but this was the first time I'd heard him use "ware" instead of his usual overly-polite "watakushi."  Had he used this pronoun when we met in that apartment, things may have played out differently.

No, I was the one in the wrong. I should have noticed during my last fight, one more piece was amiss, and it concerned out last fight.

That guy wasn't Tyrant.

The man with big eyes had never once used anything but "boku" as his pronoun. Back then, there was no point in hiding his identity anymore, yet I was under too much pressure to notice. He'd fooled me.

No, that's wrong. The one who fooled me wasn't that man. I fooled myself. I wanted to believe that I was this close to killing Tyrant, even if that was a lie. 

In truth, the one whose fight I couldn't even keep up with was nothing more than a creation of the man in front of me—a creation going by the name of Mizaru.

Now, before me stood the real deal, wearing the same smug face as ever, only with a bit more malice painted over it.

"Hm... That's not right... Tanaka fits me better. So then, what should we call you?" he asked. 

I unconsciously gripped my dagger hanging under my coat, but I felt his breath getting faster. He wasn't going to let me draw it.

As much as I wanted to take my distance, I couldn't. Through this new power granted by the elusive Sezaru, I felt something. I felt that, were I to try stepping away, I would be killed in an instant.

Before us, my target looked me in the eyes and grinned.

"How about... Mister Akira Shino?"

And then he spoke my name.