This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and situations are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

karin's chapter

shards

the chase

Running down a suspected summoner wasn't as easy when you need a cane to walk half the time. Especially when you left it in the car. I gritted my teeth and tried to shove the pain aside as I made my way through the crowds of people, pushing them aside.

Misaki glanced at me with concern, her tail and ears hidden behind the invisibility charm she often used when we worked in public. Neither of us were running, exactly, and the summoner we were chasing wasn't aware of our presence just yet. That was likely to change soon enough.

“He's on the elevator,” Misaki observed, gesturing subtly with her shoulder. I glanced up out of the corner of my eye and noticed the man we were looking for standing in one of the glass-walled liftcars. Neither of us wanted to make it obvious that we were going after him. Not all of these people were completely nasty, but Star already told us he was the type who had no problem summoning a stupid specter and releasing it from his binding to create a blood-soaked diversion.

I met Misaki's gaze evenly. “How do you want to play this?”

“We can't risk him summoning something in here with all these people,” Misaki murmured.

“Can you track him?”

“I think so.” Misaki looked pretty confident, so I nodded and took her hand. We pushed our way through the crowd of people and headed for the nearest exit, a pair of heavy double glass doors.

The cool October air was refreshing after all the almost-running inside the mall filled with people and a slightly overzealous heating system. I pulled a cigarette from my pocket and lit it with an absent, practiced motion. The smoke served two purposes; one, it kept people from getting a little too close so that Misaki could cast her finding spell and two, I just wanted one.

We drifted over to the designated smoking area and I puffed as Misaki leaned her back against me. I was only a little taller than her, but the angle and the position of the smoking gazebo was such that it'd be very difficult for anyone to see the telltale glow as she inscribed runic symbols.

Those symbols glowed with reddish-gold light and her eyes flashed with the same energies as Misaki drew upon my own stores of astral energy through the Relic. I felt only the faintest whispering of an intangible perturbation as she completed the casting.

Misaki closed her eyes and I could feel her invisible tail swishing against my legs. Deep in concentration, it'd only be a matter of a few moments before she'd pick up the summoner's presence.

“He's still on the second floor, but I think he's heading up a floor and toward the north parking deck. There's a pedestrian overpass that goes directly from the third floor to the deck.”

“You 'think' isn't good enough.” My lip twisted into a grimace. “How sure are you?”

“Almost completely—okay, completely,” Misaki murmured, her eyes holding a sort of faraway look. “He just stepped out onto the pedestrian overpass.”

I pulled out my phone and woke it from sleep. I traced a complex design onto the lock screen that allowed me to access the secure encrypted communications mode that Star added back when we first started working under her. My thumb tapped the 'call' button and within seconds, I had Star on the line.

“Hey, boss,” I said, keeping my voice casual. “You know that one summoner who thought it was funny to release a devouring specter into the park near a little girl's birthday party?”

Star's reply was terse. “Yes.”

“Well, Misaki and I found him, in a mall, of all places.” I didn't bother telling Star where it was; she already had the location from my phone's GPS and location tracking system. “Get the mall security to lock down the north parking deck. Tell them it's a bomb threat or something.”

There was a short pause. “Got it. Do you need backup?”

“For this little shit? No. We'll take care of him.”

I disconnected the call, not bothering to wait for her response. Star would understand, of course—if we waited any longer, the summoner would make his way out of the parking deck and we'd have to deal with him out in the open. Our options were already limited enough.

“Can you get us flying and invisible?”

Misaki nodded and drew close to me. “Hold still.”

Reddish-gold runes appeared in the small space between our bodies. I felt myself start to grow lighter and hazier as the invocation of flight took effect, but I kept my feet rooted to the ground. The last thing we needed was for random passersby to see the two of us flying like Superman.

Misaki's next spell caused us to fade away into air. I could still faintly see her and myself, a side-effect of the Relic's connection, but a useful one. Now that we were hidden from casual observance, I stepped back away from Misaki and willed my body to leave the ground.

I smiled as the wind whipped my hair back. I'd gotten a lot better at control and maneuvering when flying over the past six months. It was a favorite tactic of Misaki's whenever we needed to get both into and out of trouble for a job, not to mention whenever we just felt like zooming through the air for the fun of it.

Though I wouldn't exactly call what I did today “flight.” More of an extended and boosted leap, I sailed through the air and landed lightly on the pedestrian overpass. Open to the air and elements apparently meant open to flying women with guns and an ancient magic sword, too.

Our boy was nervously fiddling with something—looked like his phone—in one of the smoking corners. I couldn't see anyone else on the third floor, and I smiled tightly to myself as an audible metallic
click
heralded Star's assistance. The doors back to the mall were locked, and I strained to hear the sound of the gates crashing down.

Misaki landed right next to me. We were both still invisible, so neither of us were worried too much about spooking our quarry, but invisibility didn't stop our voices from being audible. It was a shame Misaki could only speak to me telepathically when she drew her spirit back into the Relic, because that would have been fucking handy.

The summoner heard the lockdown, too. His expression went from wary to full-blown fearful. I couldn't blame him, though I wondered if he expected a squad of AEGIS front-line hunters to come bursting in from the roof with assault rifles and flashbangs.

We had him dead to rights, so it was time to earn our pay.

“Do it,” I whispered to Misaki.

The invisibility charm faded away, including the smaller one hiding Misaki's vulpine features. Her small fangs bared in a challenging grin, she planted her feet wide and brought forth her spell-flame.

Our fugitive summoner shrieked in terror as Misaki seemed to just pop into existence only a few meters away, her hands covered in blazing orange-red elemental might. The spell-flame flowed and merged together like a viscous fluid and she gestured violently with both hands. The plasma-like magical energy spread out, blocking off the summoner's only means of escape with a wall of intense heat.

I allowed my invisibility to fade as well, leaning calmly against the wall right next to the man—really more of a kid, honestly. He couldn't have been more than nineteen or twenty, small and not very fit. I lit another cigarette and smiled at him.

“Mind if I smoke?”

Another scream and I caught the scent of something rather acrid emanating from our charge. Well, I couldn't really blame the kid for pissing his pants when faced with a fire-tossing fox spirit. I puffed for a moment on my smoke.

“S-stay back!” The kid scrambled away from me, nearly tripping over the trash can next to the bench he'd been standing next to. “D-don't come any closer, or y-y-you'll be sorry!”

“'You'll be sorry?'” I echoed. “Kid, you really need to work on your threats.” I crossed my arms over my chest and sighed as I glanced over at Misaki. “This is our 'dangerous monster' who bound a devouring specter to brutally slaughter seven children and their parents at a birthday party? This skinny little runt?”

The summoner moaned in terror. “T-that wasn't my fault! I didn't—”

I kicked him in the side none-too-gently. “Not your fault? You summoned a devouring specter in a
public park
. That specter then took the lives of eleven people. How, by all the stars in the fucking universe, is that
not
your fault?”

“Th-the devourer wouldn't obey my commands!”

My eyes narrowed and I kicked him again. He really wasn't helping his case here. “That just means you're incompetent, not innocent. Whether you commanded it to kill or not is irrelevant; you summoned the fucking thing and then it killed people. What the
fuck
did you
expect
it to do? Make you a gin and tonic?”

I turned to Misaki, feeling a headache start to blossom behind my eyes. I really did not need this today. This was completely wrecking my good mood and I was pretty fucking pissed about it.

“What were you even
doing
summoning outside your house?” I demanded. “Aren't you the fourth son of House Achelar? Didn't your family ever teach you
not
to summon shit in public?”

The kid's expression seemed to become even more horrified. “F-Father disowned me! H-he c-c-cast me out and sent people to k-k-kill me!”

I rolled my eyes. Familial power struggles in arcane houses were common. Considering that this nineteen-year-old kid was able to call a devouring specter into the material world and not immediately become its lunch himself? Daddy must have been very, very jealous of his son's natural talent, indeed.

I wanted to be done with this and out of here. I wanted a really big drink. This was more of a pain in the ass than I expected to deal with, especially since the stupid little voice of my conscience was telling me
not
to just shoot him between the fucking eyes and let AEGIS handle cleanup.

I reached behind my jacket to the small of my back and drew my automatic. Thumbing off the safety, I leveled the weapon at the little bastard but kept my finger resting against the trigger guard.

The kid's face went absolutely white. “N-no, please, don't!”

“What do you think, Misaki?”

My wife-to-be regarded the summoner with an unreadable expression. “The case
is
a kill-on-sight order. I don't think there's much to consider here, really.”

“Pretty cut and dried,” I agreed, but the squirmy feeling in my stomach didn't really go away. Killing specters was one thing, but killing people—even really shitty people—was different. So far in our tenure with AEGIS, we'd only killed one person ourselves. Control usually assigned these sorts of cases to the more morally-ambiguous agents. It was just our rotten luck that we happened to run into him by chance.

I shouldn't have hesitated. Misaki's jaw dropped as runes blazed in front of the prone summoner. Wind buffeted me and pushed me back as a shroud of abrasive winds encased his body, protecting him from harm. My gun
was
loaded with MQ rounds and I could break his vortex barrier easily enough, but my hesitation bought him time.

My gun arm shifted, following the desperate summoner as he tried to bolt toward Misaki's wall of fire. I squeezed the trigger and loosed a single round, the malformed crystals of quintessence inside the bullet shorting out his vortex barrier. Through the whipping winds I could see his expression harden.

The barrier faded, released by the kid before the MQ round could cause it to collapse in upon itself. I leaped back, leveraging the last remnants of the still-active flight spell to put some distance between us.

The sinister red-black runes that he etched were obviously a summoning. Misaki's now-visible tail lashed in agitation as a nightmare shape started to coalesce within the summoning field the Achelar created.

I fired again. The summoner howled in agony and stumbled, blood spurting from his knee where I'd hit him. His face was pale and sweaty and he clutched at his wounded leg, moaning in pain. I was reasonably sure he wouldn't be able to go anywhere for a while, so I turned my attention to the bigger problem.

The specter had reached complete materialization and I immediately recognized it as a devouring specter, the same sort he summoned in the park that killed those children. These were not particularly smart but they could spread plumes of miasma that infected living organisms, inflicting awful hemorrhaging wounds that would cause the victim to drown in their own blood.

“Misaki!”

“Already on it,” she snapped and retracted the spell-flame wall; there wasn't any need to keep the summoner restricted with the bullet in his leg. The fire rolled and formed into a whiplike tendril of elemental power. Misaki's mental control over the fire-rope was perfect and it slashed out, encircling the devouring specter's body and pinning its six insect-like claws to its bloated torso.

I shifted my aim and fired three shots as I moved over to stand next to Misaki, each MQ round blasting deep into the specter's body, keeping well away from its head. An MQ round could temporarily 'kill' a specter if it hit a vital location, but I wanted to permanently unmake the thing with the Relic.

The specter roared uselessly, restricted by the ever-tightening and searingly hot tendril of flames. The MQ rounds embedded in its body were interfering with its ability to use its miasma offensively, something that was very good for us. I didn't fancy my lungs filling up with blood and drowning me to death.

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