Pride Goeth Before Destruction

When Kira awakens, she finds herself at a fuzzy version of home.

She is sitting at a candle-laden dining table, a bowl of plain rice and cabbage chunks in front of her. Her mother sits at another end, her father across, both perpendicular from their daughter. The side her grandmother would have occupied is empty.

Kira isn’t even certain her grandmother is real here beyond acting as a point of reference. That’s the thing about dreams: you can play house with most of the details. Maybe in this one she can have a man’s body instead.

Let’s try it out.

Kira. He. Not she, but him.

He is sitting at the candle-laden dining table. He is staring at a bowl of plain rice and cabbage chunks. He is finding his father’s lack of cooking skill ultimately disappointing and wishes the man would spend less time consuming war stories, and more time perusing cookbooks. His mother and father sat eating their meagre supper unaware that anything about their son had changed.

It feels like eating sweets. Nice and all by itself, but you wish another’s hand fed them to you whilst reaffirming how much you were loved, are loved, will be loved. Your name and your identity from their lips. Any detail lacked tangibility until two people agreed on it.

And, like sweets, dreams are fleeting.

---

Kira woke with the taste of vomit on her bloody tongue. The loose sack still over her head was soaked with her fluids and had strained her solids to form a chunky-textured crust on her cheek.

Her ribs were sore, and when she shifted positions – discovering her arms and legs were tied in the process, restricting the shift to more of a quarter roll – the rush of blood filling her ribs with pins and needles informed that she’d been lying on the ground for a long while.

She felt more bruises than a grocery store apple after an extended stint as a basketball.

The ground was cold, hard, and unusually smooth, as if polished.

No light shone through the sack, indicating it was either a thick material or not yet day, or that she were indoors and beyond reach of sunlight. Given the knife’s edge of light at the very bottom edge of her peripheral vision, if she pushed her eyes downward until it hurt to do so, the latter was probably the case.

Little else could she discern, though occasionally she picked up a metallic clinking noise that sounded far away, or impressions from scraps of a hushed conversation.

Had she been granted a view of the location where she was held captive, Kira would have been pleased to know she was mostly correct.

The Pride had shacked up in a warehouse belonging to a well-known producer of steel, its employees sent home with full pay and an apology describing an unprecedented drop in machine functionality and subsequent safety concerns, earning the Don and the Lieutenant privacy while they worked, each other alone for company, dissecting the events that had led them here by the light of alchemical lanterns.

They’d left Kira near a large brown bloodstain in the center of the warehouse floor, confident she’d give no trouble in her state, and wheeled in their supplies: the blackstone box brought to them, now open; samples taken from Arata’s ritual site, for research; the wrecked corpse of a van, its bodies cleared out to make room for the ne’er-do-wells inside.

A cage had also been installed containing a tied, gagged, and shivering Allie, one ear up and listening to a conversation that prevented her attempts at rest.

“…She said the box had simply appeared,” the Lieutenant said, pulling another opalescent shard from the van’s wall with a pair of tongs. She deposited it into the nearby crate with a hundred others. “I had my doubts, but now I don’t know what to think other than we’ve left the realm of magic you and I have come to know.”

Resting his aged body on a chair he’d found in a dusty corner of the warehouse, suit jacket hung on its backrest, the Don folded his arms in thought. Despite burning down a neighborhood and working out pieces of artifact buried in metal, his suit had remained pristine. “Several of my contacts in Hokkaido specialize in ritual studies. With their knowledge added to your own, perhaps, we can confirm this hypothesis together.” Massaging soreness from his lower back, he let out a slow exhale.

“All due respect, Boss, my last time meeting those contacts are the reason I can safely say we’re out of our league. What about the Ireland girl? Or the scholar down in Timbuktu with the pet iguana? Fresh perspective couldn’t hurt.” She wiggled serpentine, sliding into the corner on her back for a better grip. “Any traces on Arata?”

“The boy has gone underground. We’ve secured his home, however. All of his supplies, as well. His days are numbered. In the meantime, I’ll have messages sent to my stateside connections alongside others outside the country.” Hand to his mouth, the Don spoke quickly to the talons. The gold filigree responded by shivering. “I’ve pulled men from the ritual site for expanding the search teams.”

“Once the work here is finished up, I’ll head out and join them.”

Running a hand through grey-dusted roots, the Don shook his head. “The perimeter can be reduced further. I’d prefer you by my side until this is over.”

“Boss…”

“That is an order to be obeyed, not questioned. I have weighed the risks.” He lifted a hand to the necklace he wore and tapped a finger to the diamond set inside. “Miss Ishikawa wanted this. It stands to reason that Arata shares in that need.”

“This,” the Lieutenant started to say, face drawn – purely from the strain of twisting a shard more deeply embedded than the rest, she told herself – and with tongs in an awkward grip, “isn’t about me failing to capture him the first time, right?”

The Don picked up his own set of tools and readied himself again, back no longer troubling him as it did. “We may not have grasped the scale of the threat posed to the Pride had you not. You failed, yes, though I will not hold this failure against you.”

“Bet she wants something of yours held against her!”

A guffaw followed the vulgar comment, echoing off empty space of the warehouse and its few shining machines. In a flash the Lieutenant was out of the van with master key loaded, and the Don taking point towards its source.

Kira’s head snapped up too at the familiar voice.

His own master key spinning in hand like a drummer’s stick, Arata stepped from the shadow of a rolling mill, the shiny blue surface practically painting an arrow overhead. He was all smiles as the Don’s fireball roared towards him bright and raging.

Heat washed over Kira, the ground rumbling from the fireball’s impact, metal screeching as supports melted before collapsing under their own weight.

When the dust settled, a sphere of orange light remained long enough for those with eyes to soak in the sight before it dissipated, revealing Arata unharmed, sweater-sleeved arm ruddy with fading light. His smile remained. “I can see why you made your own portable shield,” he said. “Super convenient for moments like these, and way, way, easier to forge than you’d told me.”

“How did you get through the perimeter?” The Lieutenant asked, ignoring the jab.

“I got methods.” Picking his way through the molten wreckage of the mill, he strolled over to cooler air. The Don and Lieutenant matched his movements together, rotating around an invisible circumference. “Been learning these last few days like you wouldn’t believe.”

“As have we.” The Don replied, now standing above a nervous Kira. “Of you and your allies we now know much, Mr. Ogata.” He reached up to brush away some metal fragment his attack had tossed into the air and now irritated his cheek, palm surreptitiously positioned in a way to cover his moving lips. “Kira has been of great use since delivering herself into our hands,” he tacked on once finished.

“Nah.”

“Shall I demonstrate?”

“That you’ve gotten nothing? Go on ahead.” Arata started to laugh now. “Kira’s a bad listener, but a tough nut. If she’d really gave up anything, you’d be shitting yourself.”

Although she was blind, Kira was dimly aware someone was moving close to her, and getting closer. She could smell mint and heavy breathing. Presence of the Don drove out what little twinge of pride Arata’s edged words had provided.

She felt the elastic of her necklace lifting away from the back of her neck, and Arata’s laughter ceased.

“Lieutenant.”

An ear-chilling noise buzzed to life. Heat passed overhead. Kira froze as the cord suddenly went slack, an unexpected kick to her ribs making her writhe in pain and detaching the golden necklace from her skin completely. An abyss opened in her stomach. Burns gnawed on her throat. Pits opened up under the tightening skin where her cheeks had been.

She hadn’t the life to scream. Only a pathetic groan escaped her lips.

“I used to respect you, sir, but that’s low. That was mine you just ruined.”

“As if you’re not intending to ruin a lot more than one little piece,” said the Lieutenant.

“You’re right,” Arata said. “I’m here to ruin the both of you.”

He raised his arms to the warehouse ceiling, eyes cast there to the shadows, black as night, electric lights installed but kept off in the presence of wielders. The first beams of dawn had yet to draw over the skies. Windows in the flat, boxy hat of the building were slightly ajar.

“We were family, but you took Kira and tried to use her as leverage, and that made you both my enemies. I know you like your fancy-ass sayings, so I’ve learned one to succinctly sum up how much you fucked up: ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ And Gramps…”

The shadows began to move, full of birds wrapped in dark fabrics made invisible by the gloom, taking up every available space among the rafters and support beams. Painting a starry sky with their drawn swords. Thirty bodies to each of the Pride’s two.

“…you got some sneaky-bitch enemies.”

Sack over her head, hunger consuming her, Kira does not witness death descending.

The Lieutenant held them off for a long, drawn out moment, her master key flashing, muscles pumping as she pulled in one Falcon by the shoulder and shoved her blade through their heart before seven others pierced hers.

Flames from the Don’s hands had barely started to spurt before a cold knife touched his breast, and a new, bleeding hole found there when he looked down. Arata’s arm was trained at him, some strange wiry apparatus wrapped around it, a thin barrel under the forearm heated to glowing. He stumbled backwards, brain taking its time to catch up with the fact his heart had been disintegrated. Where at last the Don crumpled was atop the dried bloodstain, his own pooling in a great crimson circle spreading to cover it up.

In one swift strike, the heads of the Pride were slain.

“Alright, boys! Nice job! Nice damn job!” Clapping for his temporary allies, Arata directed them to the remains of the artifact they’d lost. The blackstone box he informed them of too – “For your troubles,” he’d said, pocketing the Don’s diamond necklace before the Falcons thought about looting the bodies.

Just one more matter needing attending to.

---

Shaking hands touched Kira’s neck. Without a word they drew the severed ends of the elastic cord to the back of her throat and tied them together, giving the gold a curt little yank to ensure a snug fit against her throat, before departing just as silently. She felt heat at her hands and then her feet slice through the ties binding her.

Free from bodily torment, she was able to strip away the sack after her savior had gone.

She’d have to thank Arata later, for of course only he would know how important the necklace had been – still was.

There was still one matter, one the Falcons (where had they come from?) had yet to attend to. Lifting the Lieutenant’s master key from the lacerated corpse, she ignited the blade to slash Allie free from her prison. Something was causing the vulpine girl to panic, making the task of removing her bonds a test of dexterity around the quivering body.

A string of words assaulted Kira’s ears as her gag fell smoking away, and each one amped the crackle of static in her brain up another notch, up and up and up and up and up and up until all she heard was blaring noise of the world falling to pieces, her friend’s lips moving without discernable sound.

Convincing the Falcons of Allie’s alliance to their cause, she left her to the care of hands untroubled by the weight of understanding, by knowledge clicking together like puzzle pieces, and took off in pursuit of the boy with an indeterminable headstart.