Chapter 252: The Corrupted Boy

Ishiki landed safely on the building and then ran towards the point where the person was shooting from.

The person was at the center with a sniper, as soon as he saw Ishiki. he abandoned his sniper and ran towards the stairs that went down.

Ishiki followed through and reached the fourth floor in time to see the far window — an empty frame, long since glassless, overlooking the building’s narrower rear face. On the windowsill, for just a moment, the sole of a shoe.

He crossed the room in four strides and leaned out and saw that the person had jumped down.

Ishiki jumped behind it and then suddenly the person in front of him was no longer there and instead there was a rock.

Ishiki spun and saw that, on the far edge of the railing, crouching with one hand on the metal frame and one foot already extended over nothing, was a figure in a red hoodie.

Baggy jeans, dark sneakers worn through at the right heel. Hood up, and

half a face, turned in partial profile, watching him from above with an expression that took a moment to read.

The veins on the left half of his face were dark, standing out from the skin in thick raised lines, and the eye on that side caught the storm’s grey and fractured it wrong, three pupils cycling asynchronously where one should have been.

The face that surrounded the corruption was still a child’s face.

’He is just like Kenji,’ Ishiki thought immediately. ’He is fighting the corruption as well.’

The boy held his gaze for one more second.

Then he was gone from the rooftop, Ishiki summoned, the Wind’s Embrace and the wings flared open from Ishiki’s shoulders before his mind had fully finished the decision.

He went up as well.

But as soon as his figure reached past the building’s wall and then suddenly a shot came from the building.

It was clean and almost silent — suppressor doing its job, the only sound was a faint mechanical percussion and the air displacement of a passing round. It hit him in the right shoulder, punching through the coat and the skin below with the particular, strange sensation.

He winced and rotated in the air, changing his course. But by the time he again looked on the rooftop, there was no one there.

He scanned down immediately, Ghost Blade stretching its range, and found the figure at ground level — already moving fast through the ruins, red hoodie a brief flash between two collapsed walls before the debris field swallowed it again.

’He swapped,’ Ishiki realized. ’or something like he switched positions.’

He checked his shoulder.

The coat was torn at the entry point, the skin beneath already closing by the Divine Blood. Sealing the wound before the bleeding could become a problem. He probed the site with two fingers.

No bullet.

It had passed through cleanly. The wound was already a raised line of new tissue rather than an open hole.

The boy was running south through the ruins.

’He’s fast. The skill is fast.’

He folded the wings and dropped straight down into the ruins after him.

After a bit of struggling through the maze like structure of the ruins, he finally caught the boy three streets over.

Not by running faster — the boy was quick enough that straight pursuit through the debris field would have taken longer than he had patience for. He caught him by going over instead of through, using Wind’s Embrace to clear two blocks of rubble in the time it took the boy to navigate them on foot, and then landing directly in his path.

The boy skidded to a stop.

They were in a narrow street, both sides walled by collapsed buildings, the only way forward blocked by Ishiki and the only way back a long run through open ground.

The red hoodie was pushed back now, both hands empty — the sniper rifle still on the terrace — and the full picture of his face was visible.

Young.

Whatever number Ishiki had estimated from a distance, the reality was younger. The bone structure was still rounding out from adolescence, the jaw not yet set, the features of someone who had not finished growing into themselves.

Sixteen at the absolute outside. Possibly fifteen.

The left half of his face was a map of corruption.

The dark veins reached from the jaw up through the cheek and into the temple, thick and branching, the skin between them a shade too pale where the blood had been displaced. The left eye’s three pupils were all open now, giving the gaze a depth that the rest of the face — still almost entirely a child’s face — had no business containing.

He was breathing hard from the run.

His right hand was shaking slightly.

Ishiki stood two metres away, Aether Blade held at his side, not raised.

He looked at the boy for a moment.

Then he said, simply: “Sit down before you fall down.”

The boy’s three-pupil eye narrowed.

“I’m not going to sit—”

“You’ve been running since before this fight started,” Ishiki said. “Your hands are shaking. Sit down.”

A long pause.

The boy sat down against the wall. Not compliantly.

Ishiki crouched to his level.

“How old are you,” he asked slowly.

Nothing.

“What’s your name.”

Nothing.

“Who sent you.”

The three-slit eye moved to him. Held. Then moved away again, focusing on the middle distance.

Ishiki waited.

He had learned, a long time ago and in worse places than this, that silence was frequently more effective than pressure. Most people, especially young ones, found silence more intolerable than direct confrontation.

Seventeen seconds.

“It doesn’t matter,” the boy said. His voice was low, careful with the deliberate flatness of someone controlling more expression than they wanted to show.

“Humor me,” Ishiki’s voice was a little stern now.

Another pause.

“The Boss sent me.”

Ishiki kept his voice level. “Kenji sent you?”

The boy’s jaw tightened by a fraction. He did not confirm it. He did not deny it.

“He sent you to do what, exactly,” Ishiki said.

“Keep you busy.” The words came out flat. “And kill your people. Slow you down.”

“Slow me down from what.”

Nothing.

“From what,” Ishiki repeated.

The boy looked at a point somewhere past Ishiki’s left shoulder. When he spoke again, his voice had changed slightly — a fracture in the careful flatness, something underneath it that had less practice being concealed.

“So the Boss can plant the seed,” he said. “That’s all I know. If he plants the seed i would be free from the corruption.”

Ishiki was still.

’Plant the seed.’

“And you believed him,” he said. “That if he plants whatever he’s planting — you get free of this.” He gestured briefly at the left side of the boy’s face.

The three-slit eye came to him.

“He said we would be free.” The boy’s voice was quiet now. Stripped of the flat control. Just a statement of something believed hard enough to act on, hard enough to do what he had done today to earn it. “He said once it’s done, all of us would be free.”

’All of us.’

’There are more of them.’

Ishiki looked at him for a long moment.

The boy was watching him with an expression that was trying to be defiant and landing closer to tired. The shaking in his right hand had spread slightly to his forearm. The corruption veins on his left temple were darker than they had been two minutes ago — the exertion of the chase, whatever the position-swap skill cost him, all of it feeding the thing that was slowly rewriting his biology from the inside out.

’He’s losing ground to it faster than Kenji did. Or maybe Kenji was just better at hiding it.’

Ishiki exhaled once, quiet.

“I’m going to—”

The boy moved.

He was fast — faster than his exhaustion had suggested. The position swap activated: the boy and something behind Ishiki exchanged places instantaneously, and suddenly the narrow street contained only Ishiki crouching in empty air where the boy had been.

He was already turning.

The boy had swapped to a position behind him, and was already running.

Ishiki did not pursue.

He summoned Sorrow’s Edge instead, and threw it towards him.

Not at the boy’s body for a killing throw, not aimed at anything vital. At the space the boy had to pass through to keep running. A warning, or a test, or something between the two that he hadn’t entirely decided.

The boy heard it coming.

He turned, raised his right hand to deflect it and in process he tried to catch it, his palm closed around the blade.

What followed was not instant.

For the space of one full second, nothing visible happened.

The boy stood with his hand around Sorrow’s Edge, and his face was entirely still, it was the flatness when a person had not registered what was happening to them.

Then he made a sound.

A short, airless exhalation. Then he started vomiting, violent and sudden, his body rejecting everything in it without his permission or participation, and the scream came with it.

He threw the sword away.

It clattered across the broken paving, the purple flame unchanged and indifferent.

The boy was on his hands and knees, both arms shaking badly now, the corruption veins on the left side of his face no longer dark — they were black, and spreading, crossing the bridge of his nose, threading down toward his jaw, reaching for the right side.

It was accelerating.

His nose tickled with blood.

Whatever equilibrium his body had maintained between itself and the corruption, grabbing Sorrow’s Edge had broken it

“Make it—” he managed, between one shaking exhale and the next. His voice was barely recognizable as the careful, flat voice from sixty seconds ago. “Make it stop—”

Ishiki was already crouching beside him.

He picked up Sorrow’s Edge from where it had landed.

He looked at the boy’s face — both halves of it now, the corruption advancing second by second, the three-slit eye wide and the right eye equally wide, both of them fixed on him with an expression that had no more defiance in it at all.

Just pain, and the particular terror of feeling your own body becoming someone else’s.

He said nothing.

He put one hand briefly on the boy’s shoulder, the part of him that was still sixteen years old and shaking in the ruins under a storm sky.

Then he made it quick.

[You have Slain a Level 27, Adept Human]

[You have received 1500 Data Fragments]

He did not use Sorrow’s Edge’s flame.

When it was over, he stood and looked at the body for a moment — the red hoodie, the baggy jeans, the worn sneaker with the hole at the right heel. The corruption had stopped advancing the instant the boy had stopped. It covered most of his face now, frozen there, but the rest of him was intact.

He did not erase the body, he had taken away his future and the only thing the boy could get was a proper burial, he would not take that away too.

He went and picked up the sniper rifle from where it had fallen, ejected the magazine, cleared the chamber, and set it against the wall beside the body.

“Rest… within me.”

Then he straightened, looked up at the stormy sky and gritted his teeth. ’Plant what kind of seed Exactly?’

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