[Remi POV]
Hazenoki was late. As usual.
Remi crouched in the shadow of a collapsed stairwell, patience wearing thin, running through the routine for the hundredth time — scout, spot, signal, let him do the loud part while she handled the quiet one.
It worked. Mostly. When he actually showed up.
She liked taking the targets directly to Reggie more. At least she didn't have to wait around here for hours.
"I'm so hitting that explosion freak if he doesn't show up today." She murmured to herself with irritation building as time passed.
If it were up to Remi herself, she wouldn't be wasting her life here in this abandoned city, where the few souls she could find were highly dangerous psychopaths.
She would have been living a life of luxury. Having a rich boyfriend, getting pampered by him, and she would just buy new clothes and jewelry, showing them off on social media. Going on long vacations and travels. Enjoying her life while she was still young and beautiful.
Alas, it wasn't up to her. She just had to get caught in all this madness.
'If not for Reggie, I would have died long ago…' she sighed…
'So, I have to do my best to bring as many people to my Reggie as possible so we can win this stupid game and get out of here ASAP…'
She poutingly ran her hands over her body. 'This damn explosion freak, I'm getting out of the shadows because of his tardiness.'
Folding her hands under her bosom, she huffed and was about to go into another tirade about her difficult life when suddenly her ears twitched.
'Someone's coming?'
Her first thought was, of course, Hazenoki. The bastard was finally here; however, there was something different.
Isn't he too quiet?
'That pyromaniac couldn't possibly be this quiet without reason, can he?'
Remi had a hard time believing that.
So instead of shouting her lungs out at him for making her wait for almost half a day, she sneaked around to see who this person exactly was, only to find a new face.
'Fresh meat.' Her eyes sneakily narrowed with a knowing smile appearing on her face.
Her fingers had already curled with anticipation, cursed energy gathering into her hair, mapping out exactly how she'd lure him three streets over where they could box him in properly.
'No, he looks pretty weak, maybe I can take him out myself…'
She slowly gulped at the building tension, her heartbeat slightly rising. Even she wasn't so naive as to think that she was strong.
She wasn't, she wasn't supposed to be. She was supposed to be pretty, not strong. It was her man's job to be strong for her. Take care of all the problems for her.
Remi, at least, had felt like this for a long time in her life. It had always been like that. Men around her took care of problems for her.
So, when it came to fighting, it wasn't her job to begin with. However, she too had cursed energy and she too had a technique, no matter how weak it was.
She could take down an opponent if her first attack landed. She just had to make sure that she landed the hit.
Then even Reggie had to agree that she was useful and worth protecting. Right!
'You can do it, Remi. Focus.'
Cursed energy rolled off her body, slowly gathering into her hair. And just when she was about to move out, her eyes caught…
#BOOM.
A glass-shattering explosion echoed from where that boy was standing. She had to take cover; otherwise, her beautiful face might get scarred.
"That idiot." She cursed.
It was that explosion freak, Hazenoki. Just as she was about to take that boy down, he had shown up and blown the place apart.
'That was MY mark, you absolute—'
She'd nearly screamed it out loud again. Days of scouting and she found no one, and now that she finally spotted a lamb to slaughter, that Hazenoki just waltzed in and turned her careful setup into a demolition site, scattering her target halfway across the block.
No…
This won't do. She had to complain about him to Reggie. This was cheating. She saw him first.
That boy was her target. Whether she used her technique to take him down or lured him in with her beauty, it was her choice, but that pyromancer had no right to take her target away from her.
She'd almost marched off to Reggie to complain. Almost.
Until she actually watched the boy survive the explosion.
'He survived?'
Not only survived, he was fighting back.
Remi couldn't help but feel her back sweat up as she watched the boy dodging all of Hazenoki's attacks one by one.
'B-but how? How is that possible?'
He wasn't using a technique.
Or — if he was, it was subtle enough that even her mostly untrained eye couldn't catch it. Just raw movement, instinct, and an infuriating amount of luck, dodging things that should have taken his head clean off.
Her hair, earlier charged with cursed energy, slowly deflated as her breathing grew harder and her chest rose up and down, wondering what would have happened to her if she had attacked earlier.
Her hands pressed against her soft chest to control her racing heart as she gulped, but her eyes never left the boy from her place.
She had at least learned one thing: learning about the enemy's technique and power was the most critical part of her job. Learning how strong the target was and how his or her technique worked was essential to lure them in and then assault them.
However, the boy showed nothing, as if he didn't have a technique to begin with. Remi, for her part, couldn't believe someone could fight so well without a technique.
For a second she even thought the boy lacked a cursed technique to begin with, though that assumption was quickly thrown out when he finally did pull something out. It turned out to be some kind of hair-blade technique.
A hair-related technique like hers…
'Then how? Why is he so strong with such a weak technique?' She couldn't get it.
The boy's technique was only slightly better than hers in that it gave him flight, as much as she noticed, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just as unremarkable a technique as her own.
Practically a joke next to Hazenoki's Explosive Flesh.
And yet.
He was winning. Actually winning, against a man who threw grenades made out of his own body parts and could even heal later.
Remi's competitive streak, buried under weeks of exhaustion and scavenging, twitched awake for the first time in a while.
'That's not fair…
'He isn't supposed to be this strong…
Something inside her seemed to snap.
'Fine. If Hazenoki's going down anyway, might as well take my shot while he's distracted.'
Maybe out of jealousy or to validate her own usefulness, the earlier tension and fear were forgotten.
She hadn't planned to attack the boy directly — not really. But watching him stand there afterward, breathing hard, clearly running on fumes, the opportunity was right there.
So she took it.
One sneak attack, right at his heart.
And she failed.
Spectacularly.
The boy dodged her by what she felt was a hair's margin. She wasn't even sure whether to call him lucky or illegal by the way he moved.
And then came his hold on her. The boy looked rather slender by his build, but the second he grabbed Remi and pushed her back against a wall...
Her breathing went into overdrive. She was pinned under him so firmly that she couldn't even move an inch.
Fear shot through her.
So, she did what any girl would do, shout, struggle, and go for the balls.
In hindsight, driving her knee into a man's most sensitive real estate mid-hostage negotiation probably hadn't been her smartest move.
The tightening of his grip that followed, to the point she felt her bones almost cracking under the pressure, not just from the grip but also from the cursed energy, was evident enough that she was right.
So, it was a miracle that he hadn't killed her for it.
Then Hazenoki got back up. How come that bastard couldn't have gotten up a bit earlier?
Remi had genuinely believed that punch had ended him — she'd seen the black lightning, felt the pressure of it in her back teeth.
Another question, what was that black lightning? Wasn't the boy's technique those helicopter blades in his hair?
Though, ultimately it didn't matter, because the moment she saw Hazenoki up and grinning wider than before, and this time his eyes weren't on the boy at all.
They were on her too.
'Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…'
She hadn't fully processed what it meant when the boy pinning her down said "Shit," while looking down at the blood on the floor.
But even Remi knew she was dead by the way the blood was glowing bloody murder. As if death was very much written there on the floor by that blood.
'I'll swear if I survive I'll kill that psychopath.'
She closed her eyes in sheer panic, expecting pain which never arrived. Then, the next second, she found herself being crushed against the same boy's chest, the floor beneath them detonating into a crater of light.
While both she and that boy were thrown away like rubble, she couldn't help but hold onto him for dear life until she actually realized she was alive.
Alive and flying.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING—" She hadn't meant to sound that hysterical. She just — heights. She hated heights. Her stomach dropped somewhere around the second building they cleared, and she'd clung to him with a desperation that had nothing to do with dignity and everything to do with not dying.
He hadn't let go. Not once, even when she hit him midair, even when she screamed at him to put her down. Looking back — annoyingly — that had probably saved her life. If he'd actually listened to her, she'd have been a smear on the pavement three streets back.
'I think I'm starting to like the rogue types after this…' Her taste in men wasn't the best thing about her; her track record could have easily proven that. However, this newfound interest in bad boys with protective streaks and a habit of ignoring her nonsense seemed like a definite improvement.
When he finally set her down and more of those explosive teeth came screaming their way, taking out almost half of her perfectly maintained hair.
'Damn that explosion freak…'
She hadn't even thought about what to do, as if her body already knew. She once more folded herself into him, buried her face against his ruined shirt, and made herself as small as she could.
'Okay… he is not my man, but he did protect me. And feel me all up while carrying me earlier. He could take responsibility to save me, right… right?'
It was far-fetched as logic goes, but who cared about logic when nukes were getting thrown at her?
Just as she thought both of them were goners by how that bastard Hazenoki was throwing explosions their way, she was once again surprised by how the boy protected both of them.
He used the wind created by his hair blades to push back most of the projectiles.
Okay, she took back what she had said about his technique earlier. It wasn't as cool as Reggie's technique, but it was still useful…
While the boy was busy protecting both of them, and God, she prayed he was successful, she realised that her hands felt something.
His back. Warm — too warm, wrong-warm — under her hands.
She pulled back enough to look, and the words died somewhere in her throat.
His entire back was gone. Burned to nothing, skin peeled away in a mess that should have had him screaming, should have had him on the ground, and instead he was standing there like it was a mild inconvenience, telling her to hide.
He'd taken that. For her. A stranger whom she had tried to gut about eight minutes earlier.
Her lips pressed tightly.
'...Okay. Maybe he is a bit cool.' At least to her slightly younger self who loved the idea of one day a knight in shiny armor coming to take her away in his arms.
By the time he went back after Hazenoki, something in her had already decided.
Whatever this was — guilt, survival instinct, or her sheer righteous womanly fury at that explosive bastard for almost blowing her pretty ass up. — she wasn't just going to hide and watch.
She slipped down behind the rubble, circled wide, and when she got close while that boy was distracting the explosion freak in his crazed state.
As she got close enough, she said the first thing that came to mind — something sharp and mocking about him losing to a "weakling," anything to make Hazenoki's head turn half an inch.
It might or might not have had something to do with the crazy bastard's dick size. A lady like her shouldn't concern herself with such matters, but the important thing was that it worked.
She saw the boy move — faster than anything should move in that state — and for one heartbeat she actually thought, stupidly, hopefully, that maybe this would just end clean.
It didn't.
The blades came down, and what followed wasn't a fight anymore. It was closer to butchery, precise and merciless, and over far too fast for something that violent.
Those hair blades cut the poor bastard down like he was meat on a chopping board.
Remi turned away before her stomach could finish deciding what it wanted to do about the sight, one hand pressed hard over her mouth.
'...Right,' she thought numbly, staring at anything that wasn't the ground in front of her.
Tears seemed to fill her eyes all of a sudden. The roller coaster she went through during the last ten minutes was more intense than the last few days of living in the Tokyo Colony.
"I Hate This Game."
xXx
A/N : Wondering why I wrote an entire chapter about her ? I'm asking myself, I today... thought I'll saw what she saw and complete it in around 200 or 300 words and continue the story, but somehow, I don't know how, when I got up, it was as long as an entire chapter.
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