She ran up thirty-one floors at a quick jog, and was nearly out of breath by the time she reached the top. She had improved a lot since she moved in. Before, she had never jogged on stairs as much as she was supposed to.
The sun was coming up already. They were only at the start of autumn, so the nights were still short. The light got in her eyes, but she ignored it. Once she made sure no one else was around, she started her stretches. It was a bit embarrassing to do in front of people, and after that one time she had caught a fey's homunculus peeping on me, she always made sure to check.
After her stretches, she started on some unarmed katas, or martial arts forms. Those took a while, but she eventually moved on to my standard knife katas, including two knives at a time. It was rare that it became relevant, she I was always very thankful for the practice when it did.
Then she pulled out her sword.
Sword katas always made her feel more relaxed. She felt elegant and in control when she was swinging a sword. Things were simple, the answers were clear. She made some mistakes, but at least she could see that. Not like when dealing with people. She always said the wrong thing, insulted her friends or complimented her enemies.
But swords were easy. Find the enemy and cut them. This is how you block, this is how you feint. This is how you make the killing blow.
Akane's mother hated her sword, hated what she did with it. She married into the Akiyama family, and not for their dying name. She loved Akane's father, although she never liked this part of him either. She liked to remind Akane that it was his honor and his sword that got him killed.
Akane's grandfather, of course, loved her. He was always a bit of the black sheep of the family. More than anything, he hated the fact that they were a ronin house. He never liked samurai in the first place, he would always say, but when the Tokugawa family fell, they should have died with them. It made no sense to preserve a ronin house.
Akane almost believed them. For a long time, she despaired, convinced that honor was dead and that the Akiyama name would die with her.
She didn't believe that any more.
She sheathed her sword without even noticing. She had finished her sword katas by instinct. She was sweating profusely, and finished off her water bottle in one long drink. With nothing else to do on the roof, she headed downstairs at a brisk jog for a shower.
After Akane got out of the shower, she texted Laura. But she was busy too. She was doing something with Lizzy, apparently. It was strange. Akane had always hated Lizzy, both because of the annoying Japanese thing and because of how she monopolized Derek's attention. But she had been warming up to her a little. Yes, she was still annoying and not very smart, but she was clearly genuine. Akane just wished she would talk to her in English.
With no one else to call, she sat down on her bed. What should she do? She couldn't go to a movie alone, and honestly there wasn't anything she was interested in watching. She had forgotten all her books and shows at home, and didn't really want to deal with her mother. If she were interested in anime, she could have looked through one of the billion or so Ling had on her shelf, but she wasn't that bored. Besides, she hadn't actually given her permission, and she didn't want to bother her with asking. She would call Seena, but since she had become a vampire, her schedule had twisted into knots.
Akane slowly realized that there was someone she could call. Her exercise had taken longer than usual, probably because she was so tired, so it was about seven. Flynn would probably be up shortly. Most athletes get up earlier rather than later.
But did she want to? He was still too confusing. He seemed nice enough, and Lizzy kept encouraging her to do something, but she just didn't know enough about him. Could she really trust him?
She was overthinking it. She wasn't asking him for anything important. She just wanted some company for the day. A couple hours, nothing more. It was no big deal.
Ten minutes later, she finally managed to send a short message asking if he wanted to do anything. She had re-written it a couple dozen times.
To her surprise, she got a reply within a minute.
He was busy. Something with friends.
Akane laid back on her bed and sighed. Everyone had friends, people they were doing things with. All she had was Derek, and even he had abandoned her.
She shouldn't be so negative. He had intended to give her the day off as a gift, not a snub. She knew she might as well make the most of it.
She warmed up her laptop and started trawling through the message boards, especially the one that Flynn had said started the Composer meme. She wasn't able to find much—she was hardly a technology wizard. But she did find the first person to use the name “the Composer.” His screen name was “the conductor of the cacophonic steel chorus,” which wasn't a name she recognized. She sent him a private message, out of curiosity more than anything else, asking him where he got the name idea.
She wouldn't get a response right away, of course, so she spent some more time online, checking updates on her favorite sites. The giant alley crawlers they had dispatched were already headline news on the kind of pages that cared about that sort of thing. Obould had written a short blurb on the subject, and promised to publish his results once he was finished dissecting the corpses.
After about two hours of all that, she had enough, and headed out.
It was still pretty early, especially for a college town. There was almost no one on the streets except for a few dozen scattered teachers. Akane left AU without even looking around. There was some stuff to do inside the Springfield wall, but not much. Mostly just the library, which she had little interest in.
She stopped by the intersection where the biters had attacked. It was already bustling again. A few of the stores had boarded-over windows, but their doors were open and customers came and went.
The regenerative nature of Domina City was really amazing. She had never been anywhere else, but everything she had read made it clear that if this had happened in any other city, the entire area would have been condemned.
She didn't bother checking out Triple I. Half of those buildings were ash, and the rest skeletal remains. The burners had been thorough, and trying to capture them had given them a lot of time to play around. Thankfully it was mostly smaller businesses, rather than the massive apartments 'scrapers of the Middle City, but a lot was lost regardless.
“Hey, sweetie, looking for someone?”
Akane glanced up and realized she had taken a shortcut into a dark alley without even noticing. A couple dumpsters were open nearby, and the six ghouls who had been partaking of their contents were starting forward, fierce grins on their faces. They surrounded her quickly, cutting off my escape back to the day lit street.
They were pretty heavily modified. In addition to the nighteyes and the internal cannibalism buff, they had pale skin, large fangs, enhanced jaws, and steel claws surgically bonded to their fingers. These were not homeless people trying to save money on food. They were dangerous predators, who probably killed multiple people a day.
It was like God was trying to cheer her up.
She didn't bother with a warning—she would have just lost the advantage of surprise. She left her bag partially unzipped for exactly this kind of situation. She reached inside and grabbed the hilt of her sword, drawing it out and slashing the closest ghoul without hesitation.
He screamed and stumbled back as blood blossomed on his chest, but he wasn't out yet. As Akane dropped the bag and sheath, she stepped forward and made a great horizontal swing. She separated his head from his shoulders without too much difficulty. The trick was to aim between the vertebrae. It was still hardly easy, but there was minimal resistance that way.
Even before his blood began to fountain, she kicked the corpse away and started at the second one, on her left. His instincts were good enough that he managed to dodge her first blow. He stepped inside her swing and tried to get at her chest with his claws, probably trying to reach under her rib cage and towards her h
eart.
She simply released her katana with her left hand and swatted his wrist. He retracted, the same instincts that had saved him before dooming him now. Now she stepped inside his swing, and plunged her sword into his heart.
She spun away just as one of his companions slashed at her. He ended up hitting his friend's corpse instead, but he just cursed and tossed it aside. But that gave me an opening, and Akane carefully cut his wrist, rendering it useless.
She would have followed through, but two of his allies were coming from behind her to either side, likely hoping they could grab her arms and end this quickly.
A quick backstep left her behind them rather than the other way around, and she got the one on the right in the heart before he even realized what was happening. The one on the left tried to attack while her sword was still in his friend, but she whipped out one of her smaller knives, meeting his claws and cutting into his fingers.
He cried out, clutching his bleeding hand, which left her enough of an opening to withdraw her katana from his companion and stab him from the front.
The ghoul she had injured before, the one with the newly gimp left hand, tried to feint at her a couple times with his right, but she wasn't fooled. This wasn't her first waltz, and she knew what trick they tried next.
Sure enough, when she faked overextending herself, he whipped forward his left hand with all the strength he could muster. He might not be able to flex his fingers with the tendons cut, but there were still sharp claws at the end, and he had more than enough muscles in his arm to propel them with deadly force.
She ducked under the sloppy blow and stabbed him in the throat with the same knife she had used moments earlier. He died gurgling in surprise.
One more. Where was—
She saw him, standing behind one of the dumpsters, moments before he opened fire with a small boxy handgun. Low caliber, but still enough to kill her pretty easily.
But, again, this wasn't her first waltz.
She threw the knife at him and immediately dodged for the dumpster. The blade didn't get him, of course. It was hardly balanced for throwing, and even if it was, killing someone with a throwing knife was harder than it looked.
But it served its purpose, as he tried to dodge and shoot at the same time. His shot went wild, and by the time he managed to get his wits about him, she was already there. She stabbed him in the throat with her blade without a word.
She cleaned her sword, then sheathed it and slung the bag over her shoulder again. She took a few minutes searching the bodies, but as expected they didn't have much of value. She took the gun, though, and the extra bullets the ghoul had on him. It wasn't much, but it was something.
As she collected her knife—undamaged, thankfully—she pulled out her phone and dialed MC.
“Hello, Miss Akiyama,” her fake voice said as warmly as possible. “What can I do for you today?”
“I just killed six ghouls in an alley off Abigail and Celestia,” Akane said, skipping the pleasantries. “The intersection where the biters attacked. Is there a reward or anything?”
“Nothing was posted,” she said. “And no one is reported to have gone missing in that area.”
“Well, if they had been here a week ago, they'd be dead or screaming.”
“Correct. If you would like to send me their pictures, I could check the wanted notices.”
It was a bit grisly work, getting the mug shots of the dead ghouls, but Akane had been forced to deal with far worse in the past. She sent them to MC and waited for her to finish searching.
“The leader had a bounty,” she said after a moment. “Only fifty dollars dead, I'm afraid. But it is something.”
Akane sighed. “Can you have that transferred directly to my account?”
“Certainly. Of course, there will be a six hour wait, in case you are trying to take credit for someone else's kill.”
“Of course. I understand. When will the 'sarian cleanup crew be here?”
“Now,” a voice from behind her said.
She turned to see an older baseline man walking into the alley. He was dressed completely in black except for a red stripe on his hat and white rubber gloves on his hands. He set a large briefcase on the ground.
“I'll take it from here, Miss,” he said warmly. Kind or not, it was clearly a dismissal, but Akane looked around with a frown. Where was the rest of his crew?
He chuckled at some private joke as he opened the case. She saw that it was packed with carefully secured objects she didn't understand the purpose of. There were feather dusters, empty vials, filled vials, and other things. “I'm not actually the cleanup crew,” he said. “I'm the forensic man, here to make sure there was no foul play.” He indicated the mouth of the alley. “So I'm afraid I am going to have to ask you to leave the scene.”
Akane frowned at first, but when she held up the phone to my ear to ask MC, she spoke. “He's genuine,” she said. Her voice had changed slightly. This was the real one. “The cleanup crew will be there shortly. Don't make trouble today of all days.”
“Thanks,” Akane said. She hung up, nodded to the CSI, and headed back to her dorm. She wasn't covered in blood, but her clothes were certainly stained. Thankfully, one of the gifts of the toy maker was a spray can of genetically engineered... something or other that ate away blood, letting her get rid of stains without having to resort to bleach.
Emily stared at her a little oddly as she entered the lobby, but she just shrugged and went back to her magazine. When Akane reached the elevator, though, she spoke up.
“Once you change, head to Laura's room,” she called without looking away from her reading. “She said they needed help rearranging the furniture.”
Akane sighed and nodded, though Emily didn't seem to care. Akane entered the elevator and pressed the button for the ninth floor.
Ling wasn't home, as expected, and neither were Adam or Derek. Fetch quests could take annoyingly long, especially when the MacGuffin could run around. She threw her gi in the hamper—she'd deal with the stains later—and put on some jeans and a loose black t-shirt. It was force of habit. She didn't think she had anything that she wouldn't be able to fight in. She made sure to bring her sword with her. Again, even when she wasn't expecting trouble, things always went wrong.
There were a couple people on the elevator when she got back on. They tried to engage her in conversation, but she found it difficult to even smile politely, so they quickly stopped trying and chatted among themselves. She felt relieved when she got off on floor six.
Laura's room was... number sixteen? Yes, that was right. It was a few yards down the right hallway. The whiteboard was covered in Lizzy's handwriting, inviting people in using about six different languages. Akane sighed and knocked.
“It's unlocked!” Laura called. She pushed open the door.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AKANE!”
She blinked. What?
Everyone was there, even Lily and Flynn. Derek, Adam, Lizzy, Laura, Ling... everyone. There was a large birthday banner hanging from the ceiling, and a small stack of presents on Laura's desk. At least she thought it was Laura's. It was the side with fewer posters, anyway.
“I thought...” She couldn't find words.
Derek stepped forward, grinning broadly, and placed a small paper crown on Akane's head, the kind you would find at kiddie restaurants. “Sorry I had Ling lie to you, but this took a while to set up.” He pulled her into the room gently. “C'mon, you only turn nineteen once.”
She got hugs and birthday wishes from everyone, though she was still a bit dazed. She had never had a birthday party before, not a real one. Before she met Derek, she was always that crazy girl who thought she was a samurai. Even after, pretty much her only friends were Derek, Lizzy and Seena—and she didn't particularly like Lizzy, and Seena was often busy.
“Oh, there's someone else!” Ling said, handing her a phone. Frowning, Akane took it.
“Happy birthday, Akane!” Lori's voice chirped in her ear. �
��Sorry I can't be there in person, but Derek has my present for you.”
“N-no, it's okay, I understand.” She was a little worried about what kind of present a Dagonite would give her, but she put that on hold. “Calling is enough.”
“I'm really busy, so I have to go, but I'll call again later, all right? Have a great day!”
“Thank you,” Akane whispered. Lori hung up.
“The twins were supposed to come too,” Derek said, referring to Simon and Seena. “Not sure where they went off to.”
Akane wasn't really all that upset that she didn't have to deal with Simon today, but she was disappointed that she wouldn't get to see Seena. Oh well. She was sure she had a good reason. She always did.
Lily set up the cake on a folding table. It was a small white-frosted dish with nineteen candles. She spread out the paper plates and smiled at Akane. “Did you want to do the cake first, or presents?”
She was at a loss. She... could barely think. “Presents,” she managed. That way while they were eating the cake, they could examine the gifts she got more closely.
Derek carefully sat her down on Lizzy's bed, where she could see the pile of presents. Everyone else—seven in all—sat on the other bed or stood. Flynn seemed hesitant, but eventually sat down on Lizzy's bed next to Akane. She didn't say anything, but she was grateful. It felt weird sitting there alone.
“The first one is from Lori,” Derek said, bringing over a box. It was heavier than expected. She sort of just sat there for a moment, not really sure what to do.
“You can open it,” Adam said. Quiet laughter rippled through the room.
She blushed and started ripping open the package. It was...
A cell phone?
“She said you told her about how you hate your current phone,” Derek said. “This is a top of the line model. Waterproof, large memory, and it will take a bullet and keep working.”
“I...” Akane glanced around at the expectant faces and blushed again. She put the box to the side. “Remind me to thank her in person later.”
The City of Monsters Page 21