Zeka looked at the group chatting about something he had never heard about before.
"By the way, we left Liora behind and had no time to search for her. Has anyone seen her?"
Akari spoke, her eyes darting between Zeka and Genseki as the closest ones to her. Zeka's guilt climbed through his body as he tried to avoid her gaze. Genseki looked at Zeka for a brief moment before turning to look out the window.
"No, no one saw her, but she must be alive, I'm sure."
Zeka twitched at his words; his hand reached for his own arm, fingers shaking, as if he could throw the guilt out of his skin. He looked uncomfortable with the fact that she was missing. Why did it have to be her... Why did I freeze in place? Why am I... useless to her...
Zeka thought quietly, asking himself many questions until his mind started to feel overwhelmed, before he collapsed on the floor. Genseki tapped his shoulders. Zeka looked at him with the corner of his eyes, noticing the smile. He turned his head to take a better look. "It's okay, she will be fine, I promise," Genseki said, trying to calm Zeka down, and Zeka finally took a deep, relieved breath, thinking he might actually be right.
Hayato, meanwhile, was pacing the hallways, trying to find something to entertain himself with. His body was too energetic compared to what happened earlier; he looked at one of the doors that was filling the mansion and decided to open it. It was just a storage room that looked very old and had many spiders in its corners. Yikes, that's old. He said to himself as he noticed an old drawer in it. The smell of damp wood hit his nose. His legs hovered over the wood, and he was about to enter the room and check what the drawer had inside, but someone's voice cut through his thoughts.
"Do you guys know anything about why people want to use us? I mean, aren't they afraid of what we could do?"
Hayaru asked, catching his brother's attention. Hayato looked at the drawer for a moment before closing the door and turning back to the group.
"Well, you don't know what our ancestors did before us?" Akari spoke, and the hallway suddenly became quieter than it had been. All of them said in one voice, "No," except Zeka; he didn't say anything. He found the conversation more complicated to understand.
He looked around for a brief moment, taking a deep breath that caught Genseki's attention. "She'll tell a story," Genseki whispered to him as Zeka nodded and now at least knew what the context was.
"Around a thousand years ago, a being with nine arms appeared on Earth, falling from the sky. People believed it was an angel, or at least that's what they thought. The being had a very weird shape; rumors said he had nine arms, possibly more, but we only know he appeared in Japan. Another rumor said that he mixed his arms with humans to give something like 'powers,' which is what we use now."
Zeka looked at his hand and made a small fire, staring at it. This is what people are afraid of?
"But he vanished as if existence decided to delete him. This being has kept people confused ever since, and Japan had to lock itself off from the world so no one else could get involved. At first, everything was fine; there was a small leak from their powers. People looked at them but felt weird every time they passed one of the nine people who got fused with the arms of that being. But when those nine realized they got the power to do whatever they wanted, they decided to ruin it..."
Genseki's expression was unreadable; he didn't react, but he looked away, losing interest in the conversation. Was he wrong? Or is she lying? He turned back to her, waiting for her to finish her speech.
"The first power users decided to use the power gifted to them however they pleased, by a being we don't even know. They ruined Japan since then; people lived in fear at that time; it was terrifying to normal humans, and soon they became kings. People worshiped them for being chosen to use their power; they believed they would protect them from any danger or spare their lives if they viewed the nine users as gods, but soon people understood it was just fear, and they decided to fight back, only to be wiped out in a second, and the first users were known as the Bloody Pantheon. This is where everyone finally realized how strong they actually were, and since then they made organizations and armies just for us- imagine..."
Akari took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a beat before looking back at them again.
"So we are getting hunted for something only our ancestors did?"
Hayaru asked, and Akari quickly corrected him. "It's not just our ancestors; many generations also caused destruction. They were just the first people to do it."
Zeka looked at her; a sudden question came to his mind, and when he was about to ask, Hayaru cut him off.
"If it was really only in Japan, then why is your hair blonde and you look completely different than us? You're supposed to be Japanese if that history was really only in Japan."
Akari's arm twitched at the sudden question; for a moment, she looked paralyzed. She had to answer, but she didn't even know why she was different. And Genseki stepped in.
"Maybe one of the travellers was chosen, maybe her family just went outside of Japan, or maybe just genetics."
Genseki immediately defended her, looking at Hayaru's eyes as if he had just asked the wrong question.
When the tension rose, Zeka immediately turned around and walked away; the question he was about to ask had already been answered, and he didn't need more complexity of what was going on. But before he even walked further, he spotted someone outside the window, something wrong behind the invisible curtains.
When he tried to see what it was, he found someone standing behind the trees. From how dark it was, it was impossible to know what it was or what it looked like, but Zeka didn't have a good feeling about it.
A sudden, violent earthquake hit. Zeka recognized the sensation immediately—his eyes darting toward the group before his head even turned, but they were only reacting to the sudden shake. Nothing much happened afterwards; Zeka was relieved, but when he looked outside the window again, the feeling of someone standing there suddenly vanished.