For Marisa Kirisame, it has been a simple, uneventful day. Until the gap youkai popped out of nowhere, started talked about complicated stuff, and left as quickly as she arrived.
Usually, Marisa would get back to bed, but that one incursion in her house has a special taste. Specifically, the taste of an incident.
While Marisa was preparing for one hell of a ride that would go from the Forest of Magic to the Youkai Mountain after a passage by the Eientei, two men were in the Human Village, locked in a room. The younger of the men was drinking and talking, while the other was methodically disassembling a pistol, carefully watching that each parts was perfectly clean.
"You saw that too, right? What happened?" Frantically said the younger man, while emptying a glass that was full of alcohol.
"That was Reisen. She looks like a bunny, but she is a bunny. And she can make people insane by watching them. Not sure how. She never explained."
"But you were here before, Run Away. Surely you know about these monsters! I mean, fuck, the whole fucking squad was eradicated!"
"I understand your fear. However, you must understand that monsters won't go around revealing what their powers are. I know that girl's power now, but I have yet to find a way to counter it."
He inspected the different metallic pieces, making sure they were all carefully classified. Then, he took out a camera, and started disassembling it as well.
"Come on, you fucking dumbass! You're been here fucking weeks before we arrived, and you're telling me you don't know shit? What the fuck is that place anyway? Why are we here?"
"Since we're in private, I don't mind you not calling me by my rank, but I do mind if you keep disrespecting me. So I will explain myself again, and you will refer to me as Colonel Moran. Am I clear?"
The young man swallowed his saliva, staring at the man more interested in a camera than in his subordinate.
"Yes colonel."
"We're in a pocket dimension. In other words, a closed world. Think of it as an island, cut from the rest of the world. You, as well as the other mercenaries, are here to listen to my orders and do as I say, until I'm out of the picture. If that happens, our employer will give the orders herself."
"But what's the big picture?" The young man hesitated. "Colonel?"
"I don't know. I'm here to investigate, destroy the Hakurei bloodline, bring you in, and obey direct orders from higher authority. The rest is not my problem."
The young man smirked. "So in short, you're just like me, you don't know what the fuck is going on. You just obey the orders, and you're bad at it, since you can't even murder a family. Who was a deserter like you even allowed to take the lead?"
"You should go away, you're drunk."
"And what if I am? At least, I can see things clearly now, it's not like that mess in Cairo, where we were outclassed. At least, back then, we still had a chance. In that fucking place, five of them were killed by two unarmed monsters!"
The colonel froze. "Two?"
"Yeah. The bunny girl, and the other girl who came from the wood and started stabbing Jo- I mean Orange."
Slowly, Moran began moving again. "Tell me more about that man. I didn't noticed him."
"Hu? Well, tall. Wearing some lab coat, and dead. I fucking shot him in the face, and you know what? He just exploded in a cloud of ashes!"
"I remember the ashes. I though the Eientei was on fire."
"The what?"
"The place."
"Oh. So yeah, the bunny girl have us not moving, while that other asshole arrives and drives a knife right in Orange's neck. Can I fucking call him John, already?"
"No. Codename. You're colours. The second squad got worse nicknames. Don't blame me, I'm not the one who decided them."
"That's fucking retarded. So yeah, I see that asshole stabbing Orange in the neck, so I take my gun, and I fucking shot him."
"Interesting. They work together. And yet I don't think they know each other."
"And then he disappeared! Like, pffffff."
"It was magic."
"Hu?"
"I don't see why he would've disappeared like that, therefore it was magic."
"Hu... What are you doing?"
"Who are you talking to?"
"What are you doing, colonel?"
"Modifying a gun. I lost all my stuff when I tried to get the last Hakurei girl. Modifications are mandatory if you want to be efficient."
"You're gonna need a lot of duct tape."
"I'm more worried about the ammo. Except for the crates you and the second squad brought with you, we don't have anything."
"Yeah, about these bitches, what were they doing while we were getting our ass handed to us?"
"You are drunk."
"Of course I'm fucking am, I saw a pal getting stabbed in the fucking neck by a knife, another shooting himself in the face, and the other-"
"I get it."
"-so what were these assholes doing?"
"Investigating the mountain."
"More investigations? I though that was, like, fucking useless, since you investigated and still don't know shit."
"I am interested in the people. The second squad is interested in the place. Unlike you grunts, they're specialists. If they can find a suitable location, things will get interesting."
There was a silence, only interrupted by Moran reassembling the modified pistol.
"So what do I do now?"
"Your whole squad was slaughtered. That means you're out. Relieved of duty. Dismissed. Keep a low profile until everything's over, and you'll be extracted."
"Oh. M'kay."
The drunk young man left the room, with an uncertain walk, leaving the Colonel Gideon Moran, murderer, deserter, and compulsive liar, alone. He managed to reason the kid, but, to be honest, he wasn't sure about anything anymore. So far, he's been following orders from an entity that he could only see after dying, so naturally, he named that entity "God". And now, that woman arrived, claimed she was the one giving orders and that the girl named God was just her underling, and just after that, she had the mercenaries slaughtered. The mercenaries she hired herself.
His hands started shaking. He thought he could rely on his intelligence or his instinct to know what to do, but now, he had the feeling he has been played the whole time.
Maybe, instead of doing the right thing, he was just some undefined entity's pawn.
Maybe he was wrong.
Maybe he was right.
And one thing was sure : he know as much about his feminine employer than the Yakumo probably did. In other words, nothing.
An intense feeling of uselessness and smallness crushed him. He was nothing. Not even a hired gun, since he was unable to kill even a young girl. The tall woman probably considered him less useful than Reisen, or that other ash man. Especially since he got captured by the Yakumo and lost everything, from his weapon to that time-stopping watch that the maid gave him.
"What am I?"