Clouds Full Of Doubts And Questions

When he saw the eye blinking, Akira immediately made a step back: how the hell could a corpse move?! However, that was when what should have been an inanimate object started moving, putting itself to sit, before looking around the room, looking at the faces of the three men inside it before locking on Akira’s one. That was when she smiled, a smile that, even though this time was much clearer, reminded Akira the one he saw on the mask of that hitman that night. In the meanwhile, the coroner had dashed out of the room, while Heinrich, after screaming something like “Waaah, how is a dead body moving!? We are all going to die!”, fainted in an angle of the room, leaving Akira alone with that unnatural creature. That was when the body dashed, trying to hit him. While he was still a bit disoriented by what just happened, he had no problem avoiding her animalistic attack, but then, when she surpassed him, the body suddenly turned at an incredible velocity and started going full force against Akira another time. This time Akira didn’t avoid it, but prepared to take the impact, then threw a kick at where her face should have been. However, while the area he hit with the kick was where the neck was located, the head had turned down and now was looking at him with an entertained smile right under his feet. Then, she picked his leg and threw him away, making him land against a wardrobe made of something that reminded him of a metal, because the hit he took when he landed against hit was painful as heck. When he lifted his head, he saw her coming at full speed, her hand made in a punch, which should have probably landed on his face. However, he rolled laterally and her punch landed against the wardrobe, which should have made her feel the same pain he felt. However, after that happened, the body turned like nothing happened. “It is really true that dead people don’t feel anything, uh?” thought Akira, before he had to avoid another hit by that supernatural being. Then, while he was still avoiding her hits, trying to find something with which to defend himself in that room, as he thought that his punches would have probably been useless in that occasion, he asked himself if that creature was also able to speak: it should have, considering that it could move, no? So he asked her a simple question about what happened at the villa:

“Why did you want to kill Priscilla?”

When he asked her that, the body started laughing, with a distorted laugh that made Akira’s blood freeze in his vein. However, she said nothing, she just looked at him and laughed. Then, the body started attacking him again, modifying its pattern casually, trying to break through his guard. However, in the meanwhile, Akira had seen a scalpel lying on a lonely table near him and so he tried to make the body attack towards that position, so that he could get near it without making it suspicious – if a dead body still had a brain with which to think. When he got near it, he immediately picked it up after a missed attack by the walking body and then put it deeply in her waist. However, that was a body, and, as he observed before, it didn’t feel pain, so he wasn’t surprised when he saw her eyes looking down at him, an entertained yet dead expression in them: how the hell could he kill a zombie? By chopping her head down? However, he hadn’t to do no one of these actions. Suddenly, while she was taking the scalpel out of her body and was looking at him, her entertained expression turned into a painful one, and her body started to burn all of a sudden. Spontaneous combustion? In a dead body? When he saw that spectacle, Akira remained speechless, while the screams of agony that the body was giving off made it feel like she was burning alive and like she had acquired again her sense of pain. Then, slowly, her body started to carbonize, while her screams filled the room, a demonic sound that wasn’t pleasant for the ears. That continued until her body had become only a pile of ash, taking away the sound of its diabolic presence and also taking away the only proof and usefulness that the body had for Akira. Then, the fire continued burning for a while, even though the corpse now had become only nothing more than mere dust, before extinguishing itself alone, leaving only a bad smell of burnt meat in the room, which, being underground, had no possibility to make that smell go away easily. When that magic yet hellish spectacle ended, Akira voiced aloud what his mind was thinking in that moment.

“What… the fuck… just happened?”

He had been assaulted by a zombie, he saw it feel no pain when he hit it with a scalpel and then heard its screams of pain while being burnt alive without anyone or anything in the room that could have caused that to happen. It was only correct to say that what Akira just saw should have been impossible: it wasn’t the first impossible thing he ever saw since he had arrived there, but still, that beat them all, even Priscilla’s resurrection. Trying to process what happened before his eyes, he tried to wake up an unconscious Heinrich, who, however, didn’t react in any way, then, ignoring him, he got out of the room. Meanwhile, outside of the room, the coroner was standing there with some guards, who he probably called when he escaped and who immediately entered the room when Akira got out of it, seeing only a pile of ash and an unconscious Heinrich, a fact that, notably, seemed to be pretty normal for them. So much that, when they saw him like that, they laughed and said that he finally saw a real ghost, which probably was why he blacked out. However, what they found in the room was dissatisfying, so they interrogated Akira, asking him what happened and, when he told them what he saw, they looked at the pile of ash, then back at him, then asked him to leave, without telling him anything else, apparently believing to him. Probably the coroner told them what happened, so it wasn’t that hard for them to believe to another strange thing in that not exactly normal story. Still, before leaving, he stopped by the room in which he looked at the case proofs and took down the personal information of the witness that saw the assassin talking to a man, now his only lead. Then, he got out, under the look of the painted lady who saw him off like he was one of the black masses she was trying to keep out. As he got out, he stopped a bit, inhaled some fresh air and then thought about that crazy fight: how could a body resurrect like that? The only person he saw resurrecting someone was Meilìs: did that mean that someone else with that same power was involved? Then, an idea came to his mind: was the assassin human? The medical report stated that she had the same body and organs of a human, but what if they modified her? She had an unnatural mark in her iris, so that was a possibility to take into consideration: but, how did they do that? Akira knew that that world hadn’t the knowledge necessary to even try and act on DNA or to biologically modify a human: so, what, was that only a particularity of hers? But, could the human body really naturally have a so particular iris as they described to him and he saw drawn not so well on the medical report? Questions filled his mind: however, he had no proof on which to even try to answer them, which made all of that only a useless mental exercise. Still, he had another thing to do, which could have helped him in his work or made it more difficult, if not even impossible. He needed to question the witness, and for that motive started moving towards the eastern outskirt of the town, the one from which he first came into that city. He needed various minutes to get there and, when he arrived in front of the building he was searching, he reviewed the note he took before leaving the guards offices:

Jeremia Traszbà

Rue Fakta-Valajian, Winewood inn

It didn’t surprise him that he would have arrived to an inn – considering that the witness was said to be drunk when he saw the scene he described -, but he was surprised by the building itself: it was a tidy and clean place, which emanated a sort of familiar vibe, like it was a warm place for a beer and a chat, and, compared to the rest of the area – a conglomerate of houses and of streets that weren’t even remotely considerable a bit tidy -, it came off like a place that you can encounter in an in-zone of the city, not in the outskirts. He entered the building, and what he saw just confirmed his ideas: the inside was big, with a lot of tables and chairs that seemed comfortable even at a first glance, and the line of alcoholics behind the counter showed that that was a quality place, with some of the best alcoholics Akira had tasted in that world. Behind the counter stayed a well-built man, higher than Akira, with a bald head and visible muscles all over of his body, who was cleaning some glasses, probably getting ready to open the local. When he saw him entering he addressed him with a firm yet somewhat gentle voice, like he invited him to respect what he was saying.

“Sorry, but the local is closed now. If you want something to drink, you will have to come back in a few hours”.

“Oh, I am actually here for another matter” replied Akira, looking all around the place while he said that sentence. “Is Jeremia Traszbà here, perhaps?”

“Right in front of you, sir” replied the colossus, making a little bow, then asked “What business do you have with me, sir?”

“I am here because of a deposition you did for the guards, regarding the failed assassination of Priscilla Natò. Do you remember?”

“Oh, That! Yeah, I do: the guards tried to get everything they could for me, like I was a criminal. I didn’t like the way they acted” replied the man, looking at him with a glacial glance, then asked “Are you with them? In that case, I would like to make things quick: I don’t like to have to do with those of your species”.

“No, I am not one of them: I was instructed by Priscilla’s family to follow the case on my own, that is why I came here” replied Akira, in order to make the guy relax, then added “I am here to hear what you saw that night with your own mouth. As much as you, I don’t really appreciate the guards, so I am here, trying to do what they should have done: solve a case”.

After saying that, Jeremia emitted a small yet cold laugh, probably agreeing about the guards’ part, but still continued to look at Akira with cold and suspicious eyes, then slightly nodded and asked him what he needed to know.

“All of the things you can remember about that evening” replied Akira. Jeremia scratched a bit his head, thinking, then sighted and decided to help him by telling what he saw.

“That evening was a moment of full work: normally, it is the day we get the most clients, and so me and a girl who helps me stayed behind the counter for the majority of the evening, struggling to keep up with the clients’ orders. Then, she told me to have a pause and I went out, enjoying a bit of the cold breeze of the evening. That was when I saw a girl that corresponded to the description the guards gave me talking with someone, on the angle of a street near here. I didn’t see the other person, but I heard his voice: it was surely the one of a male, not too deep yet also not a falsetto. They were talking in a language I have never heard, and it seemed like they were fighting. Then, the girl went away, in the opposite direction to this local. But I didn’t see the male leave: it seemed like he wasn’t even there for a sec. Just for curiosity, I got near that angle, and I saw no one. Then, I returned to the bar and worked until deep in the night. That is all I remember”.

His description of what he saw was exceptional, so much that Akira asked him why the guards wrote that he was drunk when he saw that.

“Ah! That is because I drank two beers, just to give me a charge to arrive at the end of the day. They think that two beers can make a man go down like a kitty: oh, how wrong they are. Only because they can’t sustain two beers they wrote that I was drunk: just to show how efficient they are, uh?” replied Jeremia, laughing.

“Is that all you can say me about that evening? Nothing suspicious happened, apart from that?” asked Akira, wanting to focus on the whole evening rather than only on that moment.

“Hmm, something suspicious… oh, yeah, I heard some drunkards talk about a possible invasion of Budkieryn, considering that the relationships between our countries have rapidly deteriorated in the last years, but those talks are something that I have heard for ten, fifteen years or so. Still, they were talking about troops being seen between the mountains… it seemed like they had some sort of evidence about what they said. If that were to be true… I really hope not to be here when they arrive”.

Akira agreed with his statement. During his studies he read about how Budkieryn treated the losers in their war, and they weren’t merciful at all: they treated civilians, especially females, like objects or slaves and had no problem killing someone just because they replied badly to them or because they were too slow in what they were doing. In a few words, in war they were like the representation of a demon: not that that didn’t also apply to them when they weren’t in war. They were considered a cruel civility, with a primitive and archaic culture that made life difficult for the many people there that weren’t willing to share it: in fact, the number of Budkieryn immigrants in Noràkjaele was higher than the number of those coming from any other country.

“Is there anything else that comes to your mind?” continued asking Akira, trying to get something else out of him.

“Sorry, kiddo, but, apart from the money I made that evening and the ton of work that I had to do, these are the two strangest thing that come to my mind”.

“And in the following days? Or in the precedent ones? Any other thing worthy of being mentioned?”

Jeremia thought deeply for a bit, then shook his head.

“Nah, sorry, nothing else comes to my mind” replied.

Akira tried asking some other question, trying to stimulate his mind so that he could tell him something else, but he obtained nothing new from him. Then, as a thanks for answering to his questions, he ordered a beer, even though the local was closed, then thanked him for giving him a bit of his time and went outside. He got nothing new from that discussion, except for the talk about an eventual Budkieryn invasion, which meant that he had to investigate on his own and try to find a new lead, even though he started thinking that that case was really impossible to resolve. The few leads that there were led to nothing, the assassin seemed to have appeared from the sky, nobody ever tried to replicate that act… there was nothing that indicated that there was someone else apart from that assassin behind that event. But then he thought about the body of the hitman that burned itself down to ashes, about the words she said to him when she left… all of this created a mess in Akira’s mind, which really didn’t help him in reordering his ideas. Still, it seemed that, if he hadn’t found anything else during the course of his personal investigation, that case was really at a dead end. Which also meant that he had nothing to report to Giorgio and that he continued having seeds of doubt in his mind: was that attack really aimed at Priscilla? At that point he was highly doubting it, but, still, no incontestable evidence existed to make him say that. When he lifted his head towards the sky while thinking about all of that, he noticed that the sky was starting colouring itself black, with clouds that announced an imminent rain looking down at him. Seeing that, he started hurrying to the Natò residence, but, in doing that, he bumped into a person with a mantel and a hood, probably wanting to protect from the imminent rain. When that happened, he excused himself, but then that person got near him and pronounced a phrase which he didn’t understand, but that his mind automatically translated.

“Akira Demoni, the rain is coming: why don’t you head home and relax for the time being?”

When he heard those words, he turned in surprise towards the mysterious figure, only to catch a glimpse of its smiling face, a glimpse that made him question his entire day: it was the face of the hitman, of the corpse that burnt in front of his eyes in the morgue, a face that should have been destroyed by fire. However, the figure surpassed him and, when he turned around, wanting to stop it, that mysterious individual wasn’t there anymore: no one was on the street, he was alone. He looked around, wanting to see if he really was alone, then he looked at the black and raging sky, which in the meanwhile had started to produce sinister sounds. Was his mind starting to play bad jokes to him? Maybe the pressure of all that happened to him since he first arrived there was getting to his head, and maybe those were the words that his mind wanted to say to him. Still, he really felt like he needed rest, so he decided to follow those mysterious words and relax – not after having tried at least to found something else about Priscilla’s case. And so, he started returning home, while the black clouds were becoming even noisier and noisier and his mind was wandering in hypothetical territories, sinister sounds accompanying his exit from that scene.