"You led me to this coffin-sized passageway." He stands taller, emboldened by the sunglow warm on his black suit. "Then you don't recognize me?" He plays offended, but his smile bares too many teeth to be convincing.
My armature tingles, my aura beating at the same pace as my heart. "I remember you," I say but honestly, I remember fragments of him: The screech of his metal detector when he waved it over my armature, the deep rifts of his scowl, the embarrassed fuchsia of his ears when I mentioned birth control to escape to the bathroom. Scowling-Guard.
"No…? Would you like a hint?" he says. He shares the tiniest glimpse of his Nen signature. It drums against mine and—wallahae, I do recognize it. A name, imminent, on the tip of my tongue but the visual mismatch—
"Haven't I told you that looks can be deceiving?" His voice changes, scaling up mid-sentence from a gruff baritone to a water glass tingling tenor. Nen plays my metal armature bones, like wind through the reed-comb of a harmonica, everything below my wrist no longer mine. He spreads his arms, presence undulating, and his Nen yawns over the alley, a perfume with notes of antiquated poise and glints of mischief—I twist away, hugging my tingling armature against my chest.
"For fuck's sake—Omokage?!"
"Bingo!" he says, his true tall willowy silhouette shadows over me. "I worried I had made so little of an impression on you that you wouldn't recognize me."
Then where would you find the joy in pranking me? "You have a mole with Fisherman and Odara?"
"I told you. I have eyes everywhere." He taps his eyebrow ridge and dink! go the delicate glass eyes.
My skin breaks out into goose flesh. "I hate it when you do that."
"Speaking of eyes," he says. "That moppet of yours."
"Moppet?"
"About ye high." He dangles a hand at mid-thigh. "An explosion of white hair—"
"Killua—What about him?"
He swoons, ribald, and I want to punch him in the teeth. "I would have approached sooner, but I was far too smitten with his eyes. I could meticulously labor with paint and glass for a thousand years and never capture the transcendental beauty, the je ne sais quoi. That you can only find in nature. The grievance of an artist like me."
"The eyes you make are already beautiful," I say, but he shakes his head, rare for Omokage but I still hesitate to put Omokage and modesty in the same sentence.
"You know how pearls are made, Safra? Imitation is also beautiful, but it can never match the nacre of pearls birthed in an abalone shell. How I wish I could scoop those eyes out of their shells—"
"What are you doing here, Omokage?"
Somehow his smile spans wider. "I came to warn you."
Before I ask, I already know the answer. "If your mole is here… then Odara is here."
"Bingo!"
"I need to tell the others, Danchou—"
"He already knows," he says. "He's notified the others, but I asked to pay a personal visit."
A simple phone call would've cramp his style, I bet.
"You were guarding me that night so you allowed my escape." My gut sinks at the thought that I might not have been as clever as I thought.
He sniffs. "My dolls, I may use as voyeurs, but they live independently as you or I do. So his folly in letting you escape was all his. I wish I had been watching. I didn't find out until Danchou told me. He says you were so proud of your escape."
Was that flippancy his or Danchou's? I instead ask: Had the other Spiders known Omokage had been at the Flower Girl? Doll-Omokage beamed, relishing that they hadn't, and "Not even Danchou knows the identity of all my moles. I think he prefers it that way."
To my urgent question, what is Odara's plan? Doll-Omokage, disinterested, waggles his hand. "I'm an eavesdropper. Not a mind reader. But Danchou says relax. This city isn't Odara's turf and mafia are touchy about territory. You're safer inside the city limits for now and can continue your frolic in Heaven's Arena. You disobeyed Danchou's last set of orders, should you not want to disappoint him again you ought to obey this one." He steps down, an urge of his to undulate and claim more space.
"Stay on that step, Omokage," I warn.
Already down one step, he takes another because far away, Omokage is the divine puppeteer, not me, and I can't control where he moseys around.
"Omokage, don't—"
"Safra, you couldn't hurt this doll." I can do nothing before his heel lands heavily as a log on the one cobblestone he shouldn't have. He glances at my one ungloved hand. "I can sense your Nen in your bare hand—"
The sunglow reaches my eyes. "It's not in my hand."
Vital understanding quakes in his features and for a moment, a phantom of Omokage in his doll's face, realizing, too late, the error he has made—
BOMPH!
Shalnark and Franklin attuned they were to my antics in Meteor City, are again already half aware of what happened when I return and head first to my stash of TNT sickness pills.
"Tweeter is abuzz with reports of what seems—" Shalnark skims his feed again, screen glowing blue in his huge eyes. "An explosion near the high street. Could have been a power main popping, a gunshot, but we knew it was just you, Miss Explody-Hands."
"One of Odara's guards was a mole, huh," says Franklin.
"Not anymore," I say, recalling how Omokage's Nen doll burst like an impacted water balloon, where there should have been obliterated bone, blood, and lacerated organs was nebulous Nen. It spattered, slicker than oil but no sooner than when it made contact on the alley walls, my arms, and uwagi, it evaporated like steam, leaving no stain or impression. What that was left of him, grasped between two flagstone corners, were two oblong glass balls, cracks now ruining the intricately painted irises.
Sympathy tugged at me, telling to discard them respectfully, even though they were made of glass. For a moment, until my Nen took ownership again of my armature. Instead of sympathy, a foreboding stole over me, with a visceral urge to crush the glass balls with the weight of my foot. What else happened to his Nen or eyes after that, I can't say because I fled as the crowds were careening to pinpoint the ear-splitting commotion. The eyes may still be there, irises and pupils pointing up crossly to the sky.
"Don't feel bad," says Franklin, cupping my head in a way I've grown to appreciate.
"I don't," I say to their surprise. Not after how Omokage toyed with my hand.
Though I haven't eaten properly since snail curry with Netero and Beans, the fresh memory of the Nen doll's hot bursting chased away my appetite. Instead, I visited the Hunter's Tavern with Shalnark and Franklin and solicited the hunters Ging recommended ("Should I mark these as urgent requests?" asked the boxy barman). Shalnark wrapped an arm around my shoulders to anchor me close as soon as the final request cracked into digital shards and disappeared into cyberspace. He said with a firmness I wouldn't dare question, "They won't steal you away this time."
Shalnark and Franklin upon our uneventful return to reality asked if I'd accompany them on a stroll through town. I declined, citing I'd had "more than enough excitement for one day." Between Omokage, Killua, my matches, Netero and Beans, Ging, and not sleeping the night before searching through a sewer—the day is a slurry and I don't even know what time it is. At my request that Shalnark contact me immediately if a Hunter answers my inquiry he says, waving me off, "Relax."
I drench my consciousness in Mien, working to unravel the tangles of stress when some twenty minutes later, the elevator dings, and in walk Feitan and Phinks.
Feitan says nothing, refusing to greet or be greeted, a ghoul gliding into the corridor toward the bedrooms. Puffing a cigarette, Phinks heads straight for the balustrade. The man, a drill sergeant yesterday morning, now slack against the patio door with unglad eyes.
I debate asking but I know the posture of one deep in his thoughts. I gather myself and soften my steps towards my room—
"Saw your pops today," he says, catching me before I'm out of earshot, with a clear vocal quality as if he had been pressed to say it aloud for a while.
I turn around. "Watch another match?" The air outside blows cool but pinches my nose with sewer mildew that must still linger somewhere on my clothes.
Phinks shakes his head. "He was getting off the elevator when I was walking towards it. Gave me one heck of a measuring look, top to toe," he says, cigarette pointing between two fingers up then down as if mimicking the motion my dad's appraisal. "And he said that I look—" He jabs his chest—"Like a street fighter."
He pauses, questioning me to confirm or deny. I sigh, suffering to even begin to explain my father's sense of humor. He prefers the burn style of mentorship and I have a feeling Phinks would have flourished with that style whereas I bristled at each remark. People think they can throw down in fisticuffs, but their untrained bodies tell on them: their crooked wrists when they throw a punch, aim weaving, sloppy stance that leaves vital points undefended, the split-second hesitance unseen in a fighter who has repeated the action some thousand times. Somehow Paba took one glance at Phinks and spotted one of his own. And I'm not sure how that makes me feel.
"Couldn't figure out if it was an insult or what," says Phinks. "So I said something smart-aleck asking if he has ever thrown a real punch in a fight with real stakes? With only his bare knuckles without pillow-soft gloves doing all the work for him?"
I snort a laugh, and at the same time, realize that now paba knows I told Phinks (if not the others) about him. "What he say then?"
"Your old man laughed, like in spite of himself." Phinks shuts his eyes to relish the swell in his chest, certain whatever 'test' of banter paba had placed him under he had passed. Of course, a smug smile plasters across his face—one I'll forgive.
Franklin had brewed cold tea and said I could help myself. In the kitchen, I pour a glass and remember the Heineken cold in the fridge and fetch one for Phinks. His Adam's apple bobs, the thank you he probably means to say swallowed before he can utter it. Or perhaps he perceives the gesture as my gratitude towards him.
"He train all of you?" Phinks asks.
"Me and my sister." Not Huan for obvious reasons.
"Bet you enjoyed that," he says with a lilt of sarcasm.
"Enjoyed going to school with welts on my knuckles, no I did not."
"You bully anyone?"
The thought of me at the top of the social hierarchy punching down makes me laugh aloud. "The opposite," I say. "You would think they would know better than to pick on the kids of the neighborhood boxer." A few boys would sneer and antagonize me, hur hur, do you have four Gortese grandparents, Jung?"
"What happened?"
The story feels safe to tell and I think Phinks would be the last person to admonish me for it. "Three boys in my brother's class would pick on him." For what I don't say, and I'm glad Phinks doesn't ask.
"You pummel the three of them?" he says, schadenfreude goading in his voice.
"Just one. I picked one. Left myself open to the other two, but I got one so bad he'd think twice before picking on my little brother. And the other two would feel lucky I hadn't picked them that day," I say. "What about you?"
According to him, much of his and Fei's development had been in tide with one another. "Feitan talks a lot of shit about being small and fast. And sure, when you're as fast as him now speed makes a difference. But me? I'd rather be the bigger guy in any fight."
Yet how true is that when Feitan said Phinks chose to compromise between speed and bulk. "I reckon you respect his outlook a bit more than that."
A cynical snort. "You think? Well, it's not mutual at the moment."
"What happened with Feitan?"
"Too long to tell," he says, cutting himself off with a swig of his beer. "And don't try and change the subject. When you socked that kid. You liked being able to protect your little brother, right?"
I'm not gonna say no, but I sense where he's headed and brace for it. "Is that why you allowed this detour?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Was it for my sake or your curiosity about my dad?"
"Pft. It was to train you. And I wouldn't have bothered training you in Enhancement if your pops hadn't done half the job for me."
Another moment Phinks clearly has amnesia and misremembers calling my abilities hopeless. "You've probably been hit in the kisser one too many times during those street fights."
"Well, no one taught this street fighter. No one to point out my errors; I have the boxer fractures to prove it. Having a dad who cared enough to teach you couldn't have been that bad." He let it slip last second; a whisper of envy. However small he expressed it in scale, it plainly astounds me.
First the deadbeat and now him? "Even streetfighter-you would resent having his will imposed on you."
His mouth opens, then the lightbulb flickers on in his mind, something I can't see aligning perfectly into place. "Pft. I knew it. Knew it. Ever since you said the other day—makes total sense—"
"What makes sense?"
"Your dad awakened your Nen, didn't he?"
It unmoors me to hear those words, especially out of Phinks' mouth. That trauma should not be spoken of or conjured here. It belongs on a sickle island in a Northern town, contained in a single room where a daughter and father are on the brink of destroying each other. How I screamed at him for what he did to Huan. "What he tell you about that?"
"Told me nothin'. Wasn't hard to figure out. He's a Nen user. You said your Nen wasn't awakened in prison and the only thing you hate as much as your dad is having Nen abilities. Funny, because without 'em, you wouldn't be here, in a position you could help those you left behind."
For the second time that day, I have nothing to say about my father that bears repeating. My undying anger towards him remains undying and needs not even the tiniest morsel of justification, not from Ging and not Phinks. "Right there'd be no Safra here for you to treat like gum in your hair."
I leave Phinks to the company of his cigarette, ignoring his scorned scuff.
Whatever it is, my opponent wants it as bad as I do. One of the few contenders I've seen who doesn't dwarf me in height or width. With gloves like mine and pigtails, I imagine her as I was not even twenty minutes ago fixing my ponytail in the mirror, yawning from sleeping three hours. Yet she is nearing the 200s as I am and I dare not underestimate her.
She circles me. Her eyes occasionally avert down, because she knows I'm trying to read her. She charges and I grapple with sloppy hits, blocking them with ease. This is going to be easier than I thought—mistake! Too late and the sloppy hits are a distraction, a cover for a precise blow to my cheek.
"Sorry," she says then leaps back, leaving me to comprehend what just happened. I've suffered way harder impacts yet my cheek stings. The four points where her knuckles hit pulse, wah wah wah.
The referee grants her one critical point and the roar of the crowd worsens the wah wah wah now drumming my skull. My opponent, now fuzzy, smears into three. I cannot take another hit like that and win.
"WHAT A START, FOLKS?!" cries the announcer. "FREECS IS STRUGGLING TO RECOVER AFTER WHAT APPEARS TO BE A DEVASTATING HIT! HAS FERRA DONE IT AGAIN AND ENDED THE MATCH IN ONE BLOW?!"
Even my opponent watches me with concern as I stagger like a drunkard. "Wasn't even that much." The words she mouths.
The referee, usually hovering at the arena edge, charges to the center and throws down his arm for a time-out.
"OH MY FOLKS! A SUDDEN HALT BY THE REFEREE! WHAT COULD BE THE CAUSE FOR THIS INTERFERENCE?!"
"Show of gloves! Here!" He orders us. My opponent squawks, but the referee is staunch. He supplies two strips from his pocket then rubs one across my gloved knuckles and the other on hers. A tearing of plastic strip in his hands, I can't 100% tell because his fingers are soup. My strip turns green like a traffic light and hers red. Condemning roars and boos from the crowd and announcer and I'm standing between the bells of two trumpets and my sight explodes with white.
"Victory by Match Termination! Nanashi!" The ref's arm slices through the air. Three arena personnel haul my opponent away. Before I go pancake on the tile, the referee catches me by the arm.
He guides me with ease and kindly explains to me (an ooey-gooey voice like moist cake that's so warm to listen to, I wonder if he thinks about it sometimes) that everything is going to be OK but that I will be physically and mentally disturbed for the next few hours. Rubbed into my opponent's gloves were traces of a neurotoxin. Apparently it could reduce even the most neurotypical adult into a babbling bag lady. Unfortunately for everyone I know, I'm already halfway there.
Without knowing how or when it happened, I'm strapped to a gurney. Gurney=hospital admission and hospital admission means days or weeks when I can't go home and the question is only ever met with the elusive answer 'when you feel better'. The squeal of the belts fastening and locking quickens my heart.
"Try to relax," they say but I'm trying to tell them there's been a mistake. I woke up fine, I was fine twenty minutes ago, I was minding my own business and have no business being in a hospital where they'll take my shoes, my clothes, where I can't talk to my sister or brother, where it takes four fully grown men to restrain me because I'm a 'strong kid'.
The gurney wheels spin underneath and then inexplicably, Shalnark and Franklin are here, peering at me from above.
"What are you two doing here? There's been a mistake. Don't let them take me to the hospital whatever you do—"
"Safra," says Franklin, slow and steady. "You're back in Danchou's suite."
Without my noticing, I had been unstrapped from the gurney and placed on one of the immaculate couches in Danchou's suite. I begin to explain everything, only to be silenced by a swift jab at my upper arm, accompanied by my body rushed with nen pins and nen needles and my consciousness being scooped out with a spoon.
Shalnark smoothes the back of his hair. "Sah, you know brass knuckles, Franklin," he says. "Well her opponent used chemical knuckles. She got away with it her last few matches, but hmmm—" Shalnark plucks a chocolate ball from his Choco-Robo box. "Maybe Safra is allergic and the toxin hit her quicker than normal and the ref figured it was too close to be a coincidence."
Franklin nods.
"She'll crash in a few hours. But in the meantime." He clicks fast keys on his phone. My lids roll down my eyes like curtains, sleep sucking me into its darkness. "Take a nice long nap."
"Keep that needle in her arm," says Franklin. "Make sure she doesn't swallow her tongue."
Abiji's ability to enter dreams, she used it on me at camp. A voice, like a warm blanket, draped over me and I didn't fight when she said, Relax. I know what's happening to you. Delirious, so delirious and confused. All this aura leaking out of your gaping nodes like a broken tap. Tsk tsk, who flipped on this faucet and then left you like this?
A mark of her distinguished teaching abilities, she taught me how to use Ten in my sleep, guiding my frenzied mind with serene images of flow: the cascade of a waterfall, the gentle morning dew of a leaf. She explained the basic concept of Nen, aura, how I had undergone a baptism, and my open mind accepted it all with painless ease. I awoke to birdsong and Abiji at my bedside, the surrealism of the dream clinging to me.
"You're no longer dreaming," she said with a solid shake of my shoulder. "That's why I try to caution myself from using Lucid Dreams too much. The recipient can lose sight of what's real and what's not."
My aura as I then knew to call it, a vaporous second skin that I could sense and conceptualize, whereas before it would evaporate, and I would weaken by the second.
"Your mind is pliable when you're asleep," said Abiji when I asked why she had waited until the middle of night. "If I had approached you in daylight, and said, ha, kooky words to you like Nen, aura, hocus pocus, you would have sicced the guards on me. What irony for me! I said I would never awaken another's Nen and one, awakened, falls into my lap, HERE of all places."
She lifted my frock and examined the fern shaped scar under my shoulder blade. She traces a finger and doesn't say anything for a long time.
"What's wrong?" I ask.
"He used his Hatsu to awaken you," she said, her tone muted with emotion I can't place. I stir at the word 'awaken'. "What? Do you object?" I don't answer. "Well you don't have to listen to me and I suspect you won't, but had your father had been contemptuous, malicious, or any shade of spiteful, that baptism would have scattered you into pieces."
Even in my toxin fueled dreams, the past diffuses, and Abiji Nha joins the apologist ranks of Phinks and Ging.
Barred from entering the arena for no less than ten days on the account of injury. It's 3 pm and I'm still horizontal on the couch. I came down around 1:00 but have done little more than roll over.
"Any word from the Excavation Hunters?" I ask Shalnark who checks his phone yet again.
"It hasn't been twenty-four hours yet." Hold your horses he means, but it's not like we have another twenty-four hours to twiddle our thumbs. Meanwhile, it's a wash with my dad.
"I'll contact Phinks," says Franklin. "Let him know we can move our plans to leave earlier."
"Second day he's gone missing," says Shalnark, airily in passing.
Bet paba figured something like this would happen as it always did with his cursed middle child. "Amari, your dark hair, dark eyes, you're so cute," he'd say in his stupid voice. "Safra, your eyes were supposed to be green, I could tell, but they have no color in them. You have gloomy, gloomy ghost eyes." I bet he'd laughed at what Phinks said. I'd even bet he'd train him, cuff his shoulder after a hard day of training, and say "You take to it like a duck to water. Unlike my second daughter. When training she's more like a fish out of water."
I startle Franklin and Shalnark. "We are not going anywhere yet." With a kick, I propel myself upward. Stars circle my vision as I go from horizontal to vertical. Standing up, my noodle legs wobble as I grope the wall.
"Where you going?" asks Franklin.
"Screw the arena! I don't care if I have to kick down or blow up his front door, I'll challenge him now."
AN: I originally intended for her to scrape her way into the 200s, but would mean events going according to her plan, and where's the fun in that?
It's been too long to leave you on that last cliff hanger and Omokage is a troll/creep.
Ngl, it's been a difficult few months and writing didn't come easily (quarantine fatigue). Long stretches of time when a writer can't write are scary as I'm sure you creatives out there can relate. I had another idea for another cameo in the fighting scene (you can probably guess who, your first guess, yes, THAT one) wrestled with that for a while, but realized thematically it didn't fit. Kill your darlings, they say, let nothing be sacred, they say. I still have one more cameo planned for this arc that is theme-appropriate.
Safra's patience for anyone who defends her dad is the breadth of a hair so she's mega stubborn atm. One of the joys of 1st POV, not everyone perceives as Safra does and will have different opinions. I'm excited for what's next 😎
MANY THANKS to those who reviewed since the last update! Your kind words kept me going when writing became difficult! Thank yous to Bisque-Ware, xxANIES, Sayuri Tamano, albany. Sr, litlle. mysteries, rairiimakufui, LinIsSleepy, Bioyoshi, SKMF, AwkwardBlackCat, xSiriuslyPadfoot, Gabriel1901(Holy smokes you reviewed EVERY chapter 😭), Choking. On. Marshmallows, and Grizzmon.