Off a Familiar Path, Chasing My Problems

She’d felt despair before. What wrapped her in a bear hug now was a relative, possibly twice-removed, but no less impactful when entering a room.

Kira was aware of her legs moving in repetitive motions, eyes picking out obstacles in the hallways to weave left of. It was as though she’d blown up a bubble around herself and packed it with soft feathers. An amorphous pillow held her upright made from “huh.” She didn’t walk so much as roll through the hallways, driven by the weight of her head falling forward without the will to pick it back up.

Beneath her the car engine growled, weather beyond its metal shell having worsened since eyes were last laid. Her backpack of funds sat crushed between knobby knees.

“Huh.” she said aloud to no one. Her mother replied. Words of advice. Affirmations that all things happen for a reason, she could try again later, this was an experience meant to be learned from. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Blah.

The interview crumbled at the onset. Shocked by the absence of study material organized the night before, Kira had stumbled on her own name and never regained her footing. Easy questions flew over her head. Definitions previously recitable in sleep were lost, recesses left in her mind when she reached to pull them. The multitude of physiologies she’d awoken to, inhaled, and rustled with each exhale had been replaced with rainbow-tinted blobs whose shapes were without consistency, labels in English and hiragana erased and replaced with an impression of what was once Cyrillic.

Kira reached a hand into her pocket. Fingers curled around a cylinder of cold metal, she drew out the Don’s talon and started at the token in her palm. Touch-and-go traffic bumped it to move, catching diffracted light through the icy globe around Shinjuku with each twitch. It came to rest as the car did, brought to halt by a surge of foot traffic in the crosswalk.

Kira started to feel a secondary emotion well up through the numbness encapsulating her. Arata’s smug face appeared as a ghost in the windshield. Him and his stupid ponytail. Had she the strength – and the bloodthirsty thief – she’d have taken it in hand and spun him around and around until he suffered the same bubbling nausea his necklace could do nothing for. She tried to conjure animosity for Allie, but the effort only produced another Arata in the crowd and a tinge of despondence. She hadn’t lied to the Don entirely. Searching for a singular individual in the urban sprawl of Shinjuku was just over the threshold of impossible for one person to accomplish.

I could strip down and stroll naked through the city. Surely that would drum up enough attention.

Past the point of care, Kira slumped bonelessly into the car seat to watch the crowd go by. Oppressive weather had done little in reducing the number of bodies out and about on shopping trips.

They carried bags and sacks. Boxes and petite plastic containers. One had a backpack with a railway worker’s insignia stamped on its side, and her eyes followed their gait up to the black ponytail bouncing along in the frigid wind – which hadn’t been as cold as she’d previously thought, once she was out in the thick of it. Her mother’s cry of surprise barely registered. Rage melted every flake in a two-meter radius.

“ARATA!”

The wielder turned at her shout, eyes searching up and down as he drew conclusions on events transpired since last they’d spoken. How she’d gone against his pleas. And he ran, the crowd parting, shouting, as Kira threaded the path made in his wake.

It only took a second to recognize her error.

Fury had given her the necessary boost to begin pursuit but would only take her so far. Already he had gained too much distance, his legs eating up meters while what little endurance she could extract from starved limbs flagged. Muscles burned, heart beating on her chest no longer with hands but with a shovel, senses hyperaware as exhaustion pressed in. She’d taken her pack of funds to nail him with a well-aimed throw but it would fall short to let fly now. Before long he’d disappear again.

Kira let herself trip. She fell upon the ice slick road with both hands, feeling the stockings foisted upon her tear at their introduction to friction. Her eyes watered as at least a layer of skin went too.

“Ow…” she moaned, waiting for a kind heart. “Help.”

An elderly lady responded almost instantly, and held out her hand for Kira to take. The wielder stared up at the softened face wrinkled like a prune by age and a life worth living, face circled with a fur-lined jacket. A billboard rose into the sky behind her. Amber light bathed the old woman in holy glow, corporate jingle woven from sullen inspiration and an imposing deadline serving as her hymn: a muscle relaxant pill in the shape of a butterfly.

“Sorry, grandma,” she whispered, snatching the old woman’s hand. Magic cascaded through the air in a haze thick as summer heat. Behind the woman the billboard’s advertisement divided down the middle, its music devolving into noise while the circuits reeled from the change magic wrought upon those natural laws it relied so heavily. Unable to survive it simply ceased in a shower of sparks pouring upon Kira and her prey like rain. Innocents caught unaware by the chaos screamed, their personal devices suffering the same fate.

The elder stiffened, stood up straight, old disused joints popping.

“Make that shit stain pay,” growled the wielder, her next target found before the woman had gone: a tall man maybe a few years older than Kira was. By the dark patches in his clothing, he’d gone out for a lengthy jog. His skin was shiny with sweat, and his body stout – just what she needed.

Kira licked her lips. “Help me,” she begged, forcing helplessness into her tone and outstretched hand.

Further ahead, carried far from the scene on learned legs made sturdy by a life of criminal interest, Arata slowed his pace, conserving energy. Aware of the girl’s limits he knew he needn’t burn himself outpacing her. Distance was required rather to demoralize the one who’d defied his wishes and gone home, and with her completely out of sight there no longer was need to waste precious energy.

Whistling aloud, he dropped to a comfortable stride. He stopped – confident the danger was far, far behind him – giving his shoulders a quick rotation and to stretch his neck, healthy melody of cracks produced by the exercise.

An impact like a cannonball sent him sprawling.

It hit him square in the lower back. He felt another, pleasurable crack as physics made a parabola of his spine. The one his face made hitting the concrete, less so. Patting below his still pointed nose for blood he turned, vision a galaxy, and saw a drawn, sagging face atop his rear: an old lady, hair greyer than storm clouds.

“You got a screw loose there, Granny?”

Like a worm, she inched over the backpack that had acted like the crumple zone of a car, protecting him, and wrapped arms like iron bars around his waist. Unnerving as her strength was, a certain degree of respect was due elderly women, and Arata hesitated to shove the frail body away.

In his moment of pause, he glimpsed the crowd she’d sprung from parting like the Red Sea before Moses.

Only this Moses rode a frightfully human steed, one dull, colorless heel hanging off her foot, furious eyes hungry now that her target was in sight. The steed shared in her grim rictus, slobber flying from spread lips. He charged through the crowd with Kira clung to his back, skeletal arms around the muscular neck feeding a perpetual collar of magic.

Arata was pounding cold pavement before Granny hit the ground, slathered palm shaking loose slime that had come off her face. The human steed soared over the supine body, blinded to any desire but his rider’s own determination.

And by that desire was the gap narrowing. Arata ducked through innocent packs of citizens and weaved around corners, he whipped out his master key and sliced through signposts, threw them backwards to create tripping hazards, sought out any traces of ice that might trip up two stacked people with their awkward center of gravity and leapt over the impediments, anything his brain could formulate to create obstacles for his inexorable pursuers.

But he was only a human running on human fuel, and such actions wasted stamina in trying. Often more than their worth. Kira’s steed guzzled magical sugar cubes by the truckload brought by a convoy stretching out past the horizon.

An alley in sight, he quickly kicked off a stone planter box for a ninety-degree turn into the passage blocked partway down by a wall-to-wall fence, all metal links and slats taller than him. Easy enough for an adult to climb, but impossible for two together.

It had to be: there was a quaint little playground on the other side, and you couldn’t have the children joining bodies, imaginations wild with dreams of complementary mechs combined to form a larger one, intent on fleeing into nearby traffic. His younger self, all scraped knees and bandages, would be so proud.

He leapt into its embrace, scrambling up the wall like it was an impossibly tall lover. Frozen metal bit his hands. Gritting teeth against the hurt, he crested its throat just as Kira rounded the corner, falling onto a pillow of snow.

Something shattered underfoot.

Arata gasped, breath forced from his lungs. At least two points of pain registered in his brain. Possibly three. Risking a glance backward, he sought to judge just how much time he’d have to cry.

His brow crinkled. The steed was moving at full speed, Kira’s wild expression unchanged even as the fence approached. Haze like summer heat enveloped them in a chrysalis of power. Sure, the man had muscles and was infused with magic, but he was still a man. Nothing could alter that part.

She wasn’t going to try… was she?

Digging fingers into the steed’s neck, determination snapped something within the man’s mind. Sinking low, he leapt towards one wall, kicking off the stone with strength born of hearing the cries of children trapped beneath a fallen tree before converting the momentum into a reverse somersault through the open air. One arm snapped down when his body ran perpendicular to the fence, his and Kira’s heads pointed towards the ground, and he corrected course – in Arata’s direction.

The image of a Western superhero, he hit the ground crouched, knees absorbing both the weight of impact and sheer implausibility of an act that – had Arata been more versed in modern media – he would have promptly called “anime bullshit.”

Still not finished, Kira’s steed let her fall back and away, his hands descending to Kira’s ankles before taking her into a graceful spin around and around and around and around and around, building centrifugal force before launching his wielder towards the gaping other. She crashed into him, meager force multiplied by physics – still not a lot, but enough to send them both crashing. So did the steed in a quivering heap, now free from control.

Arata felt laughter bubble up inside of him, pure and uncontrollable, and the wind rocked with his raucous mirth. A shadowed face surged up into view, blood smeared from a cut lip that still split the dark with gleaming white.