Chapter-2
Market Area in Kuoh
"Thank you for your purchase" the shop's clerk thanks as Akane was leaving through the shop's automatic door with a new cellphone in one hand and plastic bag in another.
It was evening time in Kuoh, and the market area was bustling with people. Akane is among them, having been shopping for groceries and other items she was going to need back at her apartment. She just had one item left in her list of things she needed to buy and was now heading towards the shop.
All things considered, Akane could not have asked for a better apartment. She really needed to thank Ms. Yamada the next time she met with her. While being small, the Apartment suited her needs perfectly. On top of that, her neighbors were great, as none of them bothered her or tried to welcome her to the complex. It was great. The location was also very conveniently suited to her current needs, since it was near Kuoh Academy, something that she guessed sold Ms. Yamada on renting it out for her. While her school distance from her apartment really did not matter much to her (she could have just easily traveled there from her house in the mountainside to Kuoh in within few seconds) she still appreciated the thought Ms. Yamada put in choosing an apartment for her.
"Good Evening young lady. What can I do for you?" The shopkeeper to the flower shop she had just entered greeted.
"Yes, I want two bouquets made. One mixed with festive Red Poinsettias, White Roses, and Pinecones. The other one I will need with bright White, Pink and Yellow Daisies mixed in with some Yellow Daffodils." Akane gave the shopkeeper her order, who nodded and started preparing the bouquets for her. In the meantime, Akane decided to explore the shop for a bit.
RING! RING! Her new cell phone rang, and stopped her in her tracks. She slowly pulls it out from her pocket, not sure who was calling, considering she just got the number. The number shown in the screen was not from someone she knew.
"Hello?" Akane replied, a little suspicion laced in her voice
"So, you finally left huh.." the familiar charismatic voice of a Fallen Angel Governor General greeted her. "Can't say I'm surprised, but you should have at least called me first" he added.
"What do you want, Azazel?" Akane asked, not even bothering to ask him how he got her number.
"Now, Now, I was just calling to check up on how you were doing? It must have been hard for you to leave your friends behind for your ultimate pursuit for power," Azazel replied with a phony sympathetic tone.
"Don't waste my time, Azazel. Get to the point." Akane remarks, ignoring his snide comments.
"I've got a job for you," Azazel replied after a brief moment of silence, which only made Akane laugh a little.
"I haven't even left the church for a few days, and you are already asking me for favors, Azazel," Akane said in amusement. "Are you really still mad at me for leaving the Exorcist's?" she asked him.
"Miss, should I add a greeting card to the bouquets," the shopkeeper asked, mostly done with the bouquets.
"Well, now I have to jump through fewer hoops to get in contact with you, so that's less annoying, but I am not asking you to do me a favor. It's a job for which you will be paid handsomely," Azazel replied while Akane waved her hand saying "no" to the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper nodded in response, continuing with her work.
"Money is of little use to me, Azazel. I thought you knew that by now." Akane chides him. "If you want me to do the job, you already know my price," she tells him, getting an annoyed growl in response.
"Fine, I will have them moved to your apartment once the job is done. Deal?" Azazel asked.
"Deal." she replied as she swiped her credit card and enters the code in the machine shopkeeper gave her. "So what's the job Azazel?" she asked as she got both the receipt and the bouquets in a plastic bag. The shopkeeper thanks Akane for buying the flowers as Akane leaves.
"Well your job Is to keep an eye on a few fallen angels I have sent in Kuoh," Azazel informs.
"Azazel!" Akane groaned, dreading the mission already. "Please tell me you not asking me to babysit your fallen angels" she asked him.
"No, No, No, anybody else could have done that job if that was the case. No, this job requires your peculiar expertise," Azazel said in a dubious tone, which caught Akane off guard. "My particular expertise? An assassination contract," Akane thought to herself.
"Go on," she replied as she was nearing her apartment building.
"Not over the phone. Get back to your apartment, and a package will be waiting for you in your mailbox." And with that, Azazel cuts the call, leaving Akane alone to wonder what kind of job Azazel had for her that required that many precautionary measures.
Akane's Apartment
She got back to her apartment within 10 min with a black box in one hand and two plastic bags in the other. After locking all the doors and shutting all the curtains in her apartment. she took a seat in her living room sofa, placing the black box at the tea table she tries to find a button the activate it. Sadly, there weren't any buttons present there.
"Goddamnit Azazel! Why do all of your inventions have to be so god damn complicated," Akane growled in frustration, placing the box back at the table unable to find a way to activate it.
"Voice recognition confirmed: -Subject- 03071998 Akane Orimura," A voice spoke from the box, and in a few moments, the top of the box started to move in a circular motion outward. An orb started to rise from the box, stopping when it reached the height that was about double the box's height.
"You are here. Good" said a tall man, who appeared to be in his twenties with an average build, black hair, golden bangs and black goatee dressed in a knee-length dark blue blazer with a light blue dress shirt, a black waistcoat, and a red tie. He wore faded-purple slacks and black dress shoes, which appeared by the side of Akane's sofa. He looked like he was present in the room, but a few flickers present in the image made it clear that it was a hologram.
"So tell me what's so important about this job that you had to go through all this nonsense," Akane asked him, as she picked out a soft drink can out of the plastic bag she had brought home.
Azazel sighed "In the last few months, dead bodies of potential sacred gear users have been found all around the world. And you may think, 'Well, why would I, Akane, care other Sacred Gear users?' Well, most of them have one thing in common; all of them were being followed by fallen angels to some extent," he informs her as the full body scans of dead bodies appeared before her in her living room in the form of holograms, which she decided to check up on. All of them were around the age of 17 to 23, and had no visible signs of trauma.
"Cause of death?" She asked as she takes sips of her drink, scrolling through the dead bodies.
"Well some of them have GSWs, and some of them showed stab wounds," Azazel said as the case file started to separate into three categories. Akane took out a body of a stab victim and placed the hologram near the other body she was recently going through.
"Well this wound is definitely not a light spear wound" Akane remarked as she pointed out the stab wounds. "Whoever killed this guy did a really sloppy job, something a fallen angel would never do as they do tend to go for sweet spots like the larynx, spine, lungs, liver, jugular, subclavian artery, kidney, or heart, not stab their victims repeatedly in the stomach like a moron. yes It works, but it's sloppy."
"So you are suspecting the bodies with no visible trauma present died because they got their Sacred gears extracted," Akane asked him as takes back her seat in the sofa.
"It would explain the cause of death," Azazel replied stroking his goatee.
"So why aren't you tracking those sacred gears? I've been hearing rumor of you building a machine that could track down sacred gears for years now, this report just cements those rumors for me," Akane asks him.
"You really need to learn about keeping your ears to yourself," Azazel says to her, eyes twitching in annoyance. "The machine was made in order to track potential sacred gear users, not sacred gears themselves, and mostly because you can't track down sacred gears individually. After being extracted from their fated user, they start to wither away in somebody else hands until they back with The Law of Cycles waiting for being born with a new user," Azazel explained to her.
"How long does the withering process take?" she asked, throwing away the now empty Soft Drink Can in the dustbin.
"By my estimates, a year and a half. And that are what concerns me," Azazel tells her "All of these deaths were unnecessary, especially because gathering sacred gears is useless if you don't have their user with them. Yes, it's a slow process training them but it wields long-lasting results later on. This, on the other hand, is just a quick gathering of arm and ammunition for a fight that they know will end sooner or later" Azazel explains his concerns.
"Someone gathers arms and ammunition for a possible conflict. For a war," Akane theorized, getting a nod from Azazel.
"That's the same conclusion Baraqiel and I came to as well. Though, seeing the situation at hand, a Mutiny amongst the fallen angels is much more likely," Azazel replies, making Akane massage her head as tries to calm down the headache the situation was causing her.
"Is there someone you suspect as a possible culprit?" Akane asked.
"The Fallen Angels are a family, both in a figurative and literal sense. How can I suspect someone from my own family?" Azazel replied, his voice showing the pain he is feeling suspecting someone from the Grigori.
"Did you at least question the Fallen Angels who have been involved in this cases?" she asked.
"We did, but it produced nothing. None of them knew anything regarding the situation. Now whether they were lying or not, only time will tell" he replied.
"So what do you want me to do here Azazel? From the looks of things, this is some serious Fallen Angels business, and I'm an Outsider to those," Akane asked him.
"These are the Four Fallen Angel agents that are coming to Kuoh Tomorrow" Azazel says, as the profile of those agents appeared in front of Akane. "These are one of the few fallen angels that have been involved in the murders in some capacity. While we do not suspect them, we also have not exonerated them yet," Azazel adds.
"So they are here following a sacred gear right?" Akane asked as she read through their leaders, Raynare, profile.
"Not just any sacred Gear. It's one of the Longinus they have been tasked to follow, study and even recruit if they find him suitable for Grigori," Azazel informs her. "Your job here is to follow them around without being noticed, and see if they are following my order. If they do good it narrows down our search here, but if not you are tasked to tail them until you have enough evidence, and capture them so I and Baraqiel can interrogate them in private and find out who is responsible," Azazel tells her about the task as a pair of glasses with a black frame appeared from the side of the black box.
"Use those glasses to gather evidence on the case. There is a button placed in the frame of the glasses which will let you take photographs of anything you are seeing. Don't worry about the light, the glasses can automatically adjust themselves for a better picture. A copy of all the photos taken will be sent to me directly so you don't have to worry about dropping of the evidence" Azazel informed her as Akane examined the glasses. "The glasses also have some other features that you might find useful in field" he adds.
"Do you have any idea about where they will be staying?" she asks as she put away the glasses.
"No, it's not a high profile mission for them so I don't know where they will be staying. Though there is a high chance they might find a place closer to Longinus user." Azazel answered.
"Okay, so who is the Longinus user exactly, and which Longinus does he carry," Akane asks, thinking about doing a quick survey near the user's location to find all the possible locations they might stay in.
"How the hell would I know that? The machine doesn't tell me the identity of the user. It just lets me know that user lives in Kuoh, and come on, it's a Longinus user. You will know exactly who they are when you find them," Azazel replied, pride of his invention present in his voice.
"Yeah, about that machine Azazel. You are going to destroy that machine as well as burn its plans right?" Akane asked him.
"Hehehe, looks like that has been a popular opinion today. First Baraqiel, and now you," Azazel said in an amused tone.
"Well, you creative sorts need someone to reign you in, otherwise the Frankenstein's monster would become a reality," Akane replied sarcastically. "That machine is a disaster waiting to happen Azazel, you know what will happen if the machine fells into the wrong hands. Destroy it while you have time," Akane warns him. Azazel nods in reply before his hologram disappears.
"The Black Box will self-destruct in five seconds" the message from the box made Akane chuckle. After the five-second countdown was over, the box disintegrated in the tea table.
"He really needs to stop watching those Mission Impossible movies," Akane said out loud in amusement. She got up from the sofa to check what time it was.
"8:00 pm. I guess I should get things done today. Don't know if I will get any free time after today," Akane muttered as she took the plastic with the bouquets inside and left her Apartment.
Co-Author- DxDOnline
Author Note:- If you like how this story is going please a fav, Review and Follow would be much appreciated
