Which was what happened today.
“Maybe you should consider leaving the police program,” Tifa told her after pounding her into the sparring mat.
Kazekiri could do nothing but grit her teeth in shame.
It was fortunate that Instructor Monica had her own nurse’s office. Since most people who took officer courses received injuries at some point in time, their instructor made sure she was well-stocked on healing patches and salves. After taking a shower, Kazekiri had the instructor apply the salves and patches to her chest, arms, and thighs, where she had received the most punishment. The bruises, large and splotchy purple marks, would vanish by tomorrow morning.
“You should probably think about getting some more practice in outside of class,” Instructor Monica said as she applied a healing patch to the inside of Kazekiri’s left thigh where Tifa had kicked her. It was embarrassing. Kazekiri was only in her underwear, a white bra and panties, but she knew this was necessary. She didn’t want anyone seeing her bruises.
“I would, but combat lessons cost money,” Kazekiri said. “I don’t have the money necessary to pay for a personal instructor.”
Kazekiri was attending Atreyu Academy on a scholarship. In fact, the house that she and her brother lived in were being paid for by the government. They were essentially investments. The government paid for them to attend school, her primary and university for Keiichi, and also the residence they lived in. Once they graduated, they would be given jobs and expected to pay that money off.
This was also why Kazekiri worked part-time for the police. Not only would she automatically become a police officer without needing to attend the Mars Police Academy, but it helped pay off the debt they were incurring.
“I suppose that is true,” Instructor Monica said. “And academy instructors cannot show favoritism toward one student. However, I believe you know someone who excels in combat that you can ask. I’m sure he’d be happy to help you.”
He?
Kazekiri wasn’t sure who Instructor Monica was talking about. Alex? Surely not. Alex was indeed a talented fighter, but he was destructive and reckless. She didn’t think he’d be able to properly teach her how to fight.
School soon came to an end. Kazekiri met up with Gabrielle and the others and walked out the front gate. Alex and Nyx were there to walk home with Alice, Ariel, Gabrielle, and Michelle. They stood by the gate.
If she didn’t know any better, she would have said that Alex was troubled by something. His brow was furrowed. She couldn’t really figure out what his gaze meant, but she thought he looked frustrated, or maybe contemplative.
“Kazekiri!” Gabrielle suddenly hugged her. “I’m gonna miss you! We should get together after my date!”
“Um, okay.” Kazekiri tried not to squirm. She was getting used to Gabrielle’s spontaneous bursts of affection, but it still made her uncomfortable. “You have a good, um, date with Prince Arthur.”
Gabrielle paused. It wasn’t for long, but it was enough to see the hesitance in her new friend. The fact that Gabrielle’s smile threatened to break told Kazekiri all she needed to know. The girl really didn’t want to do this.
“I’m sure I will,” Gabrielle said softly.
Goodbyes were made, and Gabrielle soon left with Alex and his large group, while everyone else went their separate ways. Kazekiri took a shuttle to the residential district. Keiichi wasn’t home, but that didn’t surprise her since he had school until late today. Fortunately, while he was the type to dine and dash, not even he was dumb enough to miss school.
Since her brother wasn’t home, Kazekiri decided that it was the perfect time to take a bath.
Their shower room was small, but it was still divided into two separate rooms—the changing room and the shower room. The changing room was just a tiled room with a toilet, a sink, and a rack to fold up clothes on. The shower room was literally just a tiled floor with a tub and a detachable shower head.
After filling the tub with hot water, pouring in some bubbles, and cleaning her body with a shower, Kazekiri let herself sink into the warmth of the tub. She closed her eyes and leaned back. The scent of bubbles, lavender and lilac, calmed her nerves and did a good job of soothing the aches and pains from her spar.
As she was relaxing, a sudden beep made her jerk. She raised her left wrist and stared at the blinking light on her IDband.
IDbands came in a variety of types. Each type generally had a different function, and once someone had an IDband, they could buy ones with extra features and aps or transfer all of the information to the new one.
The one that Kazekiri had featured a text message-based communication system. She preferred texts to calls. Texting was easy, required very little thought, and was mostly used to send short messages. Since the only person who knew her IDband’s registry was her brother, he was also the only one who texted her.
She turned on her holographic keyboard and screen, selected the inbox application, and opened the latest message, which was from an unknown sender. Kazekiri felt a jolt ripple through her.
It was not Keiichi.
It was Alex.
His message was simple: “Are you free this Saturday?”
Kazekiri tried to still her racing heart. She wasn’t excited or happy that he was texting her. Certainly not. She was just curious to know why he would ask something like this, and she most definitely wasn’t expecting Alex to ask her out on a date.
“I am not doing anything that day. Why do you ask?”
“I wanted to know if you’d like to meet up with me? I promised you that we would go out again.”
He remembered…
Kazekiri covered her face with her hands. Her cheeks were not red. She was not blushing. It was… yes, it must have been the heat from the bath! She’d obviously been in too long and was getting light headed.
She stood up, drained the tub, and went into the changing room. Grabbing a towel, she dried herself off before wrapping one towel around her torso and the other around her head. Then she made her way up to her bedroom, locked the door, and threw herself stomach first on the bed.
She looked at the message again.
Alex wanted to see her.
She was not giddy.
“I don’t mind—”
She stopped typing, thought for several seconds, and then deleted her message and started again.
“I don’t have anything better to do, so I guess I could—”
No, no, no. That was no good either. It made her sound rude.
Kazekiri frowned and rolled onto her back, kicking her feet against the mattress as she stared at the message she’d half-typed and tried to think of what she should say. She didn’t want to give Alex the impression that she was happy to spend time with him. That said, she also didn’t want him to think she didn’t like spending time with him. Middle ground. She wanted to give him the impression that she did like spending time with him, but that it wasn’t a big deal if she didn’t.
“I am not doing anything that day.” She typed slowly, carefully choosing each word. “I don’t mind meeting up with you.”
His response came quick. “Thank you. Would you like to meet by the statue of Marcus Denantien?”
“Sure.”
“Great. I’ll see you tomorrow around thirteen hundred hours. Bye.”
“Have a good evening.”
As the conversation ended, Kazekiri let her hand fall back onto the bed. Her heart was racing. She tried to regain control over it, get it to slow down, but it thumped in her chest, an unstoppable force that she could feel trying to beat its way out of her ribcage.
Unable to remain calm, Kazekiri stood up, donned a pair of yellow pajama bottoms and a tank top, left her room, and went to the kitchen. She would make a quick dinner and eat before her brother came home from school. As she opened the door to the kitchen, she paused when her vision was filled with Keiichi digging through the fridge and munching on whatever he found.
“Oh, Sis,” he greeted. “
What’s up? Was school good?”
“School was fine. What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
She frowned at him. “I mean shouldn’t you be in class?”
Keiichi looked at her like she had said something stupid. “Um, class ended almost twenty minutes ago.”
“What?” Kazekiri gazed at the nearest clock. It was almost nineteen hundred. Had she really spent that much time texting with Alexander? “O-Oh! I see. I must have lost track of time. A-anyway, stop scarfing food down in front of the fridge. You’re gonna make our bill run high.”
“Who cares? The government is paying for everything.”
“And we’ll eventually have to pay back everything they’re paying for. Move away from the fridge.”
“Fine. Fine. Ha… you really have become a stickler for the rules.”
Kazekiri ignored her brother’s insult and went to the fridge, grabbed a container filled with the leftover curry she had made the night before, and then went over to the heating unit. While she waited for the food to heat, Keiichi watched her. She could feel his eyes on her.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s nothing.” Keiichi smiled, which she did not like. “I just couldn’t help but notice that you look really happy for some reason. Did you talk to that Alex guy you like so much?”
“N-n-no! Of course not! Why would that make me happy?”
Keiichi shrugged. “I don’t know, but I figured Alex was the only reason you’d be smiling that widely.”
What was he talking about? Smiling widely? Kazekiri wasn’t smil—
She froze as she turned her head and caught her reflected in the mirror hanging over the sink. Stretching her face from ear to ear was a wide, large, and happy smile. How long it had she been smiling? Why hadn’t she noticed? Why was she smiling so much? It couldn’t be Alex, right? No, surely not. She wasn’t happy to see him tomorrow. Her heart wasn’t beating for him. It was just… she felt pumped from her spar with Tifa! Yes, that was it. Her spar.
“Alex and I are going on a date tomorrow,” Keiichi said in an approximation of her voice. His smile was quite sly. “That’s what you’re thinking, right?”
Kazekiri felt like her face might explode. “I am not! Shut up!”
Keiichi’s laughter filled the air and mixed with Kazekiri’s shrieks.
CHAPTER 4
WHAT I WANT
Saturday. The day that Gabrielle was going on a date with Prince Arthur. It was the one day Alex wished he wouldn’t wake up for. Part of him had been hoping this whole thing was just a nightmare, but it wasn’t. This was real. It was really happening.
A massive explosion shook the ground as several hands slammed into the earth, causing the ground beneath his feet to shake and rumble. The hands, earthen creations made from alchemy, attacked Alex without pause, shooting forward and attempting to squash him. He leapt back. One hop. Two hops. The hands missed, but Nyx, who was kneeling on the ground several meters away, simply creating more hands behind him.
Alex had discovered early on that Nyx had been going easy on him all this time. She didn’t need to be close for her alchemy to work. She only had to be in physical contact with whatever she was transmuting, and since the ground was all connected, she could be meters away and still make whatever she wanted, anywhere she wanted.
However, the hands were merely a distraction.
Gritting his teeth as Nyx suddenly appeared right in front of him, sword in hand, arm swinging, Alex created a blue shield in front of him to block her. It was a flat shield. Very basic. He didn’t have time for anything else.
Nyx’s sword met the shield.
The shield shattered.
Fortunately, the shield provided him enough protect to get out of the way before she could slice his head off. Alex used the time he spent leaping backward to create two whips, one in each hand, which he attacked Nyx with. He sent the right one out first. It cracked against Nyx’s sword, which snapped in half. Alex sent the other one at Nyx’s face, but his sparring partner snapped off another armband, transmuted it into a sword, and cut his whip in half. She then knelt down, placed one hand on the ground, bent her knees like a coiled spring, and launched herself at him.
The scent of dirt invaded his nose as Nyx’s sudden assault kicked up gravel all around them. Nyx, two swords in hand, swung them in a never-ending stream, a ceaseless assault that kept him from counterattacking. She was fast—faster than anyone else he knew. Her arms were blurs. What’s more, it wasn’t just her arms that he needed to worry about. Her hair came alive and attacked him as well.
Alex did his best, fending against her relentless attacks. He’d had to convert his Aura of Creation into a shield. This time, instead of simply creating a barrier, he created armor that went on his forearms and shoulders. He tried condensing the aura to make it more durable. It worked, but it was hard to concentrate when Nyx was so busy slashing into his armor.
Chips broke off. They were repaired. More broke off. Alex repaired them again. Over and over it happened. He did his best to keep pace with her, but his muscles were beginning to ache. His strength was fading.
“You could always use my power…” a voice whispered seductively.
No, thanks.
“Come on. You know I’m better than that stupid Angelisian.”
Again. No, thanks.
“Alexander is aware of your vile nature, Asmodeus. There’s no way he would use your power.”
“Tch!”
Alex was so busy focusing on the voices that he never noticed the wall behind him until he had slammed into it. He only had one second to comprehend his situation. Then it was all over.
The last thing he saw was Nyx’s blade filling his vision.
Then he died.
The simulation was set to end after one of them was “killed,” and so with his death, the world around them reverted back to the white tiles of the simulator. Alex sighed as he slumped onto the ground. Nyx had created a wall behind him, which he’d run into, and then she had impaled him through the heart. Instant death. He hadn’t even had time to feel it.
“I can’t believe I was killed again.” He placed his hands behind him and leaned back. “You really are good.”
Nyx stood before him, not opting to sit, though she did look down at him. “I have been an assassin for over ten years now. You have nowhere near as much experience in combat.”
“Yeah, I suppose you have a point.” Alex paused. “But really? Ten years?”
“That is correct.”
“Then… do you mind if I ask how old you are?”
“I will be nineteen three months from now according to your calendar.”
Two months? Right now it was the middle of June, so that meant her birthday was in September. That was good to know. Now he could plan a birthday party for her. Given what he knew of her, this would probably be the first birthday party she’d ever had.
It was only after he thought of throwing her a birthday party that he caught the rest of what she said.
“Wait. You’re nineteen?”
“Yes.”
Alex needed a moment to take that in. Nyx looked young. At first glance, she didn’t seem any older than Alice, who was 14 years old. She wasn’t short, but she was about the same height as a teenager, and her body was thin. Her breasts were modest, bigger than his sister’s but smaller than Jasmine’s. What’s more, she had a young-looking face with a small nose, soft lips, and big eyes. He had honestly assumed she was a child assassin.
Well, if she’s nineteen, then it meant she became an assassin when she was nine years old, so I guess she still is a child assassin.
“Are you… using alchemy to keep your body that size?” he asked.
Nyx shook her head. “My body stopped growing around three years ago. Rhea told me it’s because of the nanomachines inside of my body. Once my body grew to a certain point, the nanomachines stopped the aging process.” She paused before adding, “I could pr
obably make my body grow if I transmuted myself, but it’s easier to move in a smaller body, so I just keep it like this.”
“That’s interesting.” Alex raised his left hand and bit his thumb. “So the nanomachines stop you from getting older. Does that mean you’re immortal?”
“I do not know,” Nyx confessed. “Not even Rhea knows, and she’s the one who created me.”
“Created? You mean gave birth to?”
Nyx shook her head. “No. I mean created. I was created in an artificial womb by combining hundreds of billions of nanomachines with the cells from several of the most powerful Grecian fighters alive. I have no mother.”
“Oh…”
Looking at Nyx, her expressionless face and emotionless eyes, made Alex want to cry. She had no mother, no family. He didn’t think she would want his pity. Even so, he felt horrible for her. While Nyx didn’t seem to care one way or the other, he believed that was because she had never known the warmth of a family. Alex promised himself that one day Nyx would come to understand what having a family meant.
Alex took a shower before Nyx. After getting dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he went down to the kitchen and cooked breakfast for everyone—or he would have, except Michelle was already cooking something.
“Erm… Michelle,” he greeted awkwardly.
“Good morning, Alexander.” Michelle greeted him with a smile as she craned her neck to look at him. She was standing in front of a pot, which sat on the nuclear oven, stirring it with one of his automatic stirring spoons. “Breakfast is almost ready. Please sit down at the table and I’ll serve you some.”
“Uh, okay.”
Not sure what else he could do, Alex trudged over to the table and sat down. He watched Michelle as she continued stirring whatever she was making. The girl was still wearing her sleepwear, pink shorts that barely covered her thighs and a pink shirt with small sleeves. She’s thrown a white apron over it.
It felt weird just sitting there. Ever since he and Alice began living on their own, Alex had done all of the cooking. Sure, Karen Kanzaki and a few others had cooked when they first started living on their own, but Alex had learned quickly and was soon preparing all of their meals. He somehow thought it was wrong that someone else was doing his job.
A Most Unlikely Hero, Vol 6 Page 12
