Chimera wasn't sure if it was getting used to being more or less human or if it had discovered heretofore unsuspected and vast stores of patience, but as long as Soma continued to supply it with mana, it was more or less content to follow him along his winding path to nowhere. The days turned into weeks, however, and then months, and Chimera began to doubt that Soma intended to completely fulfill his end of the bargain. The clear solution was to simply drain him of mana entirely and move on to the next wizard, but Chimera found itself unable to follow through.
"I blame you for this, Nitoh Kosuke," it said one evening, watching Soma sleeping off Chimera's latest mana extraction. It would be so easy to simply reach over, while Soma was completely unaware of anything at all, and yet Chimera couldn't do it. Even with the sense of Kosuke inside its borrowed skin all but gone, some impressions held fast. Kosuke's affection for Soma was the strongest of those, and Chimera found itself stroking Soma's hair instead of draining him dry.
Appreciation for aesthetics of objects visible through human eyes was another holdover; once in a while, Chimera thought it could almost hear Kosuke's voice exclaiming at what it could see. The ocean had the effect more often than anything else, although Chimera had never been particularly drawn to the water. The pounding of the waves against the shore was a rhythm that was somehow energizing and soothing at the same time; when Chimera finally figured out that the sound was reminiscent of a human heartbeat, it felt that it should have recognized the similarity far sooner. Even knowing the source of the emotional association didn't stop the sound from having the same effects, though, and Chimera spent more time than it would willingly admit just listening.
Soma ran up against the boundaries of what Chimera considered acceptable, though, edging over them and then slipping off into the distance on the day that he apparently decided that the most appropriate course of action was to watch the eastern seaboard without moving for far longer than Chimera had thought a human body would tolerate. If it didn't move, it got restless and sore. Soma, however, hadn't so much as twitched while the sun slowly tracked its path overhead. That was the first day Chimera openly expressed its doubt and frustration, which had the effect of a brief increase in Soma's determination.
The sense of purpose Soma radiated started slipping away almost immediately after Chimera had made a note of the effectiveness of direct communication, and Chimera had to amend its internal notes to something along the lines of Soma is going to do whatever he wants anyway. Still, Chimera was exploring the human experience, and as much as it didn't want to be exploring said experience forever, it was beginning to find value in the knowledge it was accumulating. It was therefore not quite ready to write Soma off as a loss.
Chimera had to revise all of its assumptions, however, when Soma started following the butterflies.
The first sighting was after they had crossed yet another prefectural border, an unassuming line in the middle of nowhere, much like everywhere else they'd gone, surrounded by trees and mountains and not much else. Soma had pulled the bikes off the road at what might have been a park and might just have been a coincidental flat area next to the road with some conveniently placed rocks. Chimera had gone wandering through the trees in the late afternoon sunlight, watching the light filter through the needles and breathing in the crisp scent. He'd returned to find the bikes both parked near the road and no Soma.
"Soma Haruto!" Chimera called.
The wind rushing through the cedar trees was no kind of answer, sounding like a long drawn-out sigh. Chimera rolled its borrowed eyes and prowled around the bikes to see if there was any indication of where Soma had gone. There was none. It called out again, receiving the same kind of non-answer, but on its second walk-through of the small area, something glinting on the ground caught its eye.
"What?" Chimera bent over to pick up the ignition key for Soma's bike, lying discarded in the beaten-down grass. "Careless even for you," it said, but it had a general direction now, and walked a few steps farther.
Soma was standing all but hidden behind an outcropping of the same stone that littered the possible rest area, feet nearly hanging off the edge of a six-meter drop-off. He was looking intently at something. Chimera leaned over to see a dry streambed winding along the forest floor and more of the same trees that they'd been driving through for months; nothing in the scenery that seemed worthy of the attention Soma was apparently lavishing on it.
"Soma Haruto," Chimera said again, and Soma turned slowly toward him.
"It's gone," he said sadly.
"What?" Chimera felt strongly that its vocabulary had been sorely restricted, and it wasn't pleased.
"Didn't you see the butterfly?" Soma said, and Chimera sighed. It hadn't noticed any showy insects, but to be fair, small non-furred examples of local fauna hadn't been anything that had been considered worth noting before.
"No," it said, and had to steady Soma as Soma appeared to notice how close to the edge he was standing. "Perhaps you should pay more attention to your feet and less to flying pests, Soma Haruto."
"It was beautiful," Soma said softly, and that was the last Chimera heard about butterflies for that particular evening.
Chimera had nearly forgotten about the insect by the time it found Soma staring at nothing again two days later. This time the sun shone brightly down from almost directly overhead, and Soma had chosen a fairly busy road. The tanks on both bikes had just been filled, and Soma was almost smiling after carrying on a short conversation with a pair of strangers about nothing particularly important when he froze. Chimera looked around for the threat, even though Soma's body language didn't specifically say danger, but there was nothing. It looked back to find Soma holding out a hand with the index finger carefully extended.
As Chimera watched, Soma pulled his hand back slowly and turned it back and forth. He'd never done that before; Chimera looked around again for something else out of the ordinary, but the only unusual thing was Soma staring at his own hand with an expression of wonder.
"Look," Soma said, glancing up at Chimera with a smile. It was light and open, free of the invisible weight that had been dragging at Soma since they'd set out. It was completely unnatural, and it set Chimera's borrowed teeth on edge.
"At what?" Chimera said harshly, and Soma's face fell.
"Ah," he said, eyes tracking something vanishing into the distance that still wasn't there as far as Chimera could tell. "It's gone again."
"You're supposed to be fulfilling your obligations," Chimera said. "To the living and the dead."
Soma's lips thinned and he pulled his helmet on with jerky motions, not waiting to see if Chimera was following before he started his bike and pulled out into the steady stream of traffic. Chimera was more than adept at handling his own machine at this point, and caught up without difficulty. Soma's recalcitrance and resentment at having his dereliction of duty pointed out chafed, though, and Chimera declined to speak to Soma for the remainder of the day. Given that Soma wasn't speaking to him either, it was both more and less awkward than Chimera had expected. It told itself that it didn't care.
The third time Soma mentioned the butterfly was when Chimera truly felt that the situation had gotten out of control.
Dusk and true dark fell earlier in the mountains than in the space around Tokyo, and more than once Chimera had found itself following Soma down pitch black roads lit only by their headlights and a dim impression of stars overhead before they found somewhere to sleep if they were lucky, and pitched Kosuke's tent if not. Chimera had resigned itself to the tent, which wasn't in and of itself unpleasant; it was that pitching the tent meant a lack of access to running water. Chimera had found an entirely new appreciation for running water in the months since it had found itself the sole occupant of Kosuke's body.
Chimera was glad, at first, when Soma pulled his bike off the paved road they had been following onto what looked like a dirt track going precisely nowhere; it assumed that Soma knew where he was going, and that there would be somewhere to stop at the end of it. Several minutes of following a trail that wasn't all too clear in the gathering dark began to make Chimera annoyed, and then slightly nervous when Soma showed no signs of stopping.
Making a decision, Chimera pulled its bike around Soma and forced him to halt. It thought for half a second that Soma was just going to run it over, but Soma stopped with bare millimeters to spare.
"What the hell are you doing?" Soma demanded.
"What are you doing?" Chimera asked. It was pitch black under the trees now, and all it could hear was the idling of his own engine. All it could see was the ill-defined cones of light thrown off by the two headlamps, neither of which illuminated Soma particularly well. It didn't help that Soma's headlight was nearly shining directly in Chimera's borrowed eyes. "There's nothing out here!"
"Don't you see them?" Soma gestured around at shadows and trees and the faintest hint of snow.
"See who?" Chimera snapped.
"Them!" Soma gestured again, pointing in one direction and then another as though pointing at specific examples of whatever it was he thought he saw.
Chimera narrowed its eyes and climbed off its bike. It pushed up the visor on Soma's helmet, but Soma's face looked perfectly normal. "All I see," it said, slowly and deliberately, "is trees. We should return to the road."
"I can't," Soma said, ignoring the first half of what Chimera had said. "The butterflies – someone needs me. I have to go." He swung a leg over his bike to stand on the ground, putting the bike between him and Chimera, and turning off the engine.
"Hey!" Chimera shouted, genuinely startled as Soma ran off into the darkness, chasing something only he could see. "This is not what I signed up for," it muttered to itself, but it couldn't very well just leave Soma out there. It turned off the engine on its own bike, reaching over to flip off Soma's headlight almost as an afterthought. It had learned the hard way that the lights drained the bike's battery.
With only its own headlight for illumination, Chimera rooted through its bag and Soma's for what it thought it might need to subdue Soma until he regained his senses, and to not freeze to death in the snow that was now beginning to fall in case it couldn't track Soma down quickly enough. Switching off its own headlights left Chimera effectively blind for several seconds, until its borrowed eyes compensated for the lack of light as much as possible. Chimera's own senses helped a little, too, in that it knew in which direction Soma had gone and helped it see enough not to trip over its own feet in the dark.
Muttering imprecations to itself, Chimera fixed the location of the bikes in its mind and noted the direction Soma had gone in order to not get completely lost, and followed. It could hear Soma ahead of it, faintly, crashing through what little underbrush there was, and it could see evidence of Soma's passage in the disturbed loam at its feet. It could also tell that the falling snow would obscure those tracks sooner or later, making it an inappropriate method of finding the bikes and the road again.
Chimera moved as silently as it could, leaving as little trace as it could. Periodically it bent a branch or wedged a rock in such a way that it had visual verification of its path, but in a way that wouldn't lead anything straight to his escape strategy. It occurred to Chimera that it was perhaps being slightly paranoid, but in its long experience, things that showed themselves to one individual and not another were never benevolent. It also had to consider that Soma had been broken, somehow. The thought made it sad, and Chimera pushed it away.
The sounds of Soma's passage had faded away while Chimera wasn't specifically listening to them, but Chimera could still see where he had gone; the trail, such as it was, led to a division – one way led upwards, the other down. Chimera couldn't tell which way Haruto had gone.
The path upwards skipped across the first outcropping of rock Chimera had seen since they'd pulled off the road, and if the road itself continued in the same pattern, the path would eventually intersect it. Perhaps. It looked almost inviting, as if it were the safer option, the option that would lead Chimera back to where it wanted to go, back to light and warmth and other people. Chimera growled, deep in its throat, and looked at the path leading downwards.
It was steep, and if Soma had followed it, Chimera wasn't sure that he could make it safely without the enhancement that Chimera's senses gave it. Human eyes alone would have a great deal of trouble navigating the downward path. The falling snow thickened briefly, sending prickling chills ghosting across Chimera's exposed skin, and it took a deep breath and closed its borrowed eyes.
A vague sense of magic radiated upwards from Chimera's left, from the path leading downwards. Chimera cleared its mind, recognizing a faintly seductive note to the impression of magic and actively blocking it out. Chimera opened its eyes again, glancing at both paths once again. The sense of safety from the upward path had faded, and the downward path was smoother than Chimera had initially thought. It could see half of a footprint in the downward path as well, filling with snow. Soma had gone that way.
Chimera picked its way down the path, careful to pay attention to both where it had gone and where it was going; it had no desire to inflict damage on Kosuke's body. The path wound down farther than Chimera would have guessed, ending in a small platform of bare rock. Wind swirled across it, removing the snow as soon as it fell, leaving the rock unevenly damp. Soma was nowhere to be seen. Chimera dropped to a crouch, moving forward and peering over the edge.
The rocky platform was only a meter or so high, but the thickness of the trees and the dark of the starless night contributed to the impression of height. Chimera could barely make anything out at all with its borrowed eyes, but its innate senses let it see the path through the trees that Soma had most likely followed. Chimera let itself down from the platform quietly, and crept between the tree trunks.
The trees were close together, closer than Chimera had seen before, covered with sticky sap. It avoided touching them as much as possible, focusing so much attention on the narrow gaps that when a clearing opened up, Chimera stumbled into it.
A small building stood at the center of the clearing, visible even in the murk. It was dilapidated, clearly abandoned for a significant amount of time, but its windows were intact even as its front door hung off its sliding track to lean against one wall. The thatch of its roof – and most of the buildings Chimera had seen were tiled, making the thatch stand out even more – was uneven, with more than one clearly visible hole. The sense of magic was strongest here, although Chimera could still barely feel it. Soma was standing halfway between the edge of the trees and the building, one foot in front of the other as if frozen in place.
Chimera walked up to him, carefully and quietly. "Soma Haruto," it said, pitching its voice low.
Soma's face contorted, briefly, and then he finished the step he'd been taking, stopping in a perfectly natural pose. "I think we should stop here," he said, not quite brightly but with more enthusiasm than he'd shown for a night's resting place in weeks.
"I think we should return to the bikes," Chimera said, not standing between Soma and the building. It didn't want to turn its back to it, and ended up somewhat off to Soma's side. Soma didn't turn to look at Chimera; his gaze was fixed on the door for all of that the rest of his mannerisms were perfectly relaxed.
"I have a feeling," Soma said. "Someone here needs me."
"Someone here wants to eat you," Chimera muttered. Whatever was in the building felt wrong, and Soma wasn't operating at his best. Regroup and return was the order of the day, or regroup and get as far away as possible.
"I have to help," Soma said. "They led me here for a reason."
Chimera squeezed its eyes shut briefly, and then stepped between Soma and the building to take Soma by the shoulders. Kosuke and Soma were precisely the same height, letting Chimera easily look Soma in the eye. Soma still wasn't meeting his gaze, was still fixated on the door as though he could see it through Chimera's borrowed head. "There are no butterflies," Chimera said anyway. "There were never butterflies. We need to go."
Soma blinked, focusing on Chimera for the first time. "I can't leave someone behind if they need help," he whispered, and leaned forward to kiss Chimera lightly on the lips. "It'll be okay, Chimera. I'll protect you."
"That's not what I'm worried about," Chimera muttered, but Soma had stepped around it and onto the porch surrounding the building, and Chimera might as well have been shouting at nothing for all Soma appeared to hear. "I should just leave you here," Chimera said, but Soma didn't appear to hear that either, standing in front of the door with his head tilted ever so slightly to the side as if listening to something else, and Chimera stepped onto the uneven wooden slats.
The sound of the wind vanished, leaving a silence so profound it almost made Chimera's ears ring. More than the silence, what led Chimera to freeze absolutely still as if it were prey was the sight of literally hundreds of butterflies. They covered the building, perching on every inch of its uneven walls, wings moving gently. Chimera could see clearly, even in the dim light, that the butterflies were white shading to a deep blue at the very edges of the wings. The blue was the only color Chimera could see; even the butterflies jointed bodies and legs were white, and the curved antennae also.
A ripple ran across the gathered insects, and with a tiny jolt, Chimera saw that it had been slightly mistaken. The butterflies' pinprick eyes were a rich and inexplicably horrifying yellow. Chimera bit down on the challenging growl that wanted to rip out of its throat. There was a sense of long-lost familiarity about the veritable sea of insects, overlaid with a tinge of wariness, and Chimera felt it should tread cautiously until it remembered exactly where it had seen something like this before.
The memory refused to surface, and Chimera snarled. It stepped closer to Soma, intending on shielding him from the ill effects of whatever was going on, but Soma stubbornly remained between Chimera and the door. The butterflies rippled again, wings spreading fully outward before closing to reveal undersides that were just as brilliant white as the top. The unnatural coloration set Chimera's teeth on edge.
Soma, before Chimera could say anything, turned a brilliant smile in Chimera's direction and squeezed Chimera's borrowed hand briefly. "It's going to be okay," he said again, as if Chimera was the one who needed reassuring, and stepped inside the building. Chimera ran after him, skidding to a halt in an empty hallway with Soma nowhere to be seen.
"I'm not playing this game," it said. The hallway was longer than the building, in perfect condition with the floor polished to a high gloss, and lit by natural light coming from skylights overhead and windows behind Chimera. "Cease and desist."
The hallway refused to budge, sitting innocently and quietly with not a single butterfly in evidence, warm as a spring day with no sign of the snowy night outside. Chimera threw back its head, losing patience, and howled the challenge it had declined outside; there was no point in holding back now.
Walls flickered under Chimera's barrage of sound, the noise bouncing back and around until Chimera could barely tell the difference between its own voice and the dissonant echoes, and then snapped into view as a dirty entrance hallway with a ledge leading upwards. Chimera did not remove its shoes before stepping onto the rough floor.
Soma was still nowhere to be seen, but Chimera could feel the raw sense of his magic. Soma had transformed and was fighting something. Chimera ran toward him, only to come up against a dead end. The wall was flimsy, and Chimera shattered it with very little effort, only to find that Soma wasn't on the other side. It could still sense him, and went through hallway after hallway, wall after wall without ever feeling as though it was getting closer. It could feel Soma's magic fading, though, feel the start of the telltale flicker that heralded Soma running out of mana.
"Idiot," Chimera muttered, not sure whether it was referring to Soma or itself.
It was in a square room, window on one side that should have looked into the heart of the building but instead showed a moonlit grass-covered plain. Chimera dropped to the floor, sitting cross-legged, and closed its borrowed eyes. It should have known better, after the shenanigans with the fork in the road outside and the butterflies, but it was so much closer to the source of power that it hadn't been able to separate what was coming from outside.
The feel of the room dropped away as Chimera centered itself, withdrawing its senses and its energy to the boundaries of its borrowed skin. Once it had cleared its own projections, it turned its attention to the outside. It could still clearly feel Soma, fighting and reaching the end of his rope, mana somehow bound up in a metaphysical box, but it could also feel the thing lurking at the center of the building.
The creature – it might have been human once, but it certainly wasn't human now – was tangled in the building and in something else almost in the same way that Chimera itself was tangled up in Kosuke, and it almost felt sorry for the creature, except that the creature had chosen to entangle Soma and therefore Chimera itself in its machinations. Chimera had no pity for a poorly chosen fight.
It opened its borrowed eyes, seeing a short corridor with rough walls, and a set of stairs going upwards. The building had had a high enough roof to support a second floor, Chimera remembered, and it stood smoothly. The wooden supports that held the building up groaned alarmingly as Chimera slowly climbed the stairs, creaking under the strain of the conflict Chimera could now hear going on above its head.
The top of the stairs was covered by a trapdoor, and Chimera got as close as it could without opening the door. It preferred to give the creature as little warning as possible, although it suspected it was a moot point. It could feel Haruto fading, leaving more of the creature's attention free to watch Chimera.
The door opened easily, Chimera ducking away as it cleared the doorway and rolled to the side in a single smooth motion. It wouldn't have been able to pull it off, when it had first found itself stuck in Kosuke's body, but it had gotten more comfortable in the intervening months. That level of harmony was the only reason Chimera wasn't still standing on the stairs when they were hit with a bolt of pure power. It came up on its feet, roaring at the creature, but the creature was nowhere to be seen.
Only Soma was visible, wearing green and surrounded by a raging wind, until Chimera looked up. Suspended from the peak of the roof something that might have been human; its body was bluish black and hard, wrapped in a chitinous shell and bound at each joint by thread or wire. Growing things curled around the wires, wrapping the body and extending into the ceiling, colored the same bluish shade of black until it was hard to tell where the vines ended and the body began. Only the eyes stood out, inhumanly wide and pure white with a dot of blue in the center. They looked mad.
Lightning flickered out from Soma to the creature in the ceiling, crackling along its skin and crawling up into the roof. The thatch smoldered, bits of orange flame failing to catch and dying into tendrils of smoke. Butterflies rained down, wings scorched, filling the air with the scent of burning.
Chimera could see now that the creature in the ceiling was a Phantom, or had been a Phantom. It hadn't broken free of its Gate. The Gate had held onto it, but instead of subsuming it into the Underworld, the Gate had changed around its Phantom. It had hibernated in a cocoon until it had hatched, obscene hybrid unable to fully inhabit one world or the other, Phantom stuck in a decaying human body. Its name echoed through the air, syllables Chimera couldn't hear with its ears. Nausea swept over Chimera at how narrowly it had escaped a similar fate, one that might still catch up to it if it didn't get free.
The creature – Calyptra – was starving, Chimera could now see, its Phantom side unable to break free to harvest mana until it had halfway consumed itself in a cycle of destruction that hadn't broken with the energy he could see it pulling out of Soma. The cycle only moved faster, the creature's skin becoming more and more brittle as Soma desperately tried to protect himself and break the human soul free at the same time.
Chimera didn't think Soma realized the Phantom had already eaten what remained of the Gate, and that there was nothing left to save. It tried to knock Soma away from the thing in the ceiling, only to bounce off of his shield of wind and dent the nearest wall.
"Soma Haruto!" Chimera tried to shout, but its voice was lost in the howl.
It tried again, with the same results; it didn't think Soma was even aware that it had entered the fray, focused on the Phantom as he was. With the echo chamber of tainted mana, Chimera wasn't surprised. It took a deep breath and summoned strength, sacrificing speed in the process, and finally managed to knock Soma out of his shield. Soma skidded across the floor, armor dissolving.
Chimera stood over him, discarding strength and gathering the Chameleo whip to repel the snake-quick strikes Calyptra sent downwards while Soma was vulnerable. "We need," it started.
"Fire," Soma interrupted, pushing himself to his feet. A bruise was forming along his jawline and he favored his right leg, but his movements were quick and sure as he scanned a transformation ring. "We need to use fire."
Chimera nodded, blocking Calyptra's next round of strikes with the whip. One nearly made it past, and Chimera crushed it beneath its boot. The Phantom howled, voice painful for all that it was thin and insubstantial, and it was all Chimera could do not to clap its hands over its borrowed ears.
"Now!" Flame roared past Chimera from behind, and Chimera added its own fire to the mix. Calyptra shrieked again, vines shriveling in the heat and wires holding it to the ceiling crisping to ash. Free for the first time in what must have felt like forever, Calyptra fell to the floor. It stood, still burning, and Chimera poured more fire onto it. It rippled, tainted mana falling away and dissolving to show a proper Phantom core. Chimera plunged its borrowed hands into the center of the inferno to grab the newly born Phantom by the throat. Calyptra struggled, wide eyes growing wider as its wings fanned the flames, as Chimera consumed it bite by bite.
The roof was burning, smoke filling the air as Chimera dropped what remained of the Phantom. Soma barreled into it from behind, knocking it through the wall and on a gracefully controlled trajectory onto the snow-covered ground below. It was a softer landing than Chimera had expected, although it could already feel the bruises. Soma groaned underneath it, and Chimera helped him to his feet.
"Can we go now?" it said.
"One more thing," Soma replied, and switched to blue.
The Phantom was gone, but the building continued to burn. Soma poured water on it, damping the flames until there was nothing left but hissing steam and smoke rising from a skeletal and charred framework. The clouds had cleared away, leaving a nearly full moon to illuminate the clearing, and Chimera could see the start of true dawn off to the east. "Now?" it said, when the last of the orange light of fire had faded.
"Uh huh," Soma said vaguely. "Going would be good." He stubbornly clung to consciousness all the way back to where Chimera had left the bikes, finally passing out only when Chimera had gotten Kosuke's tent set up in a bid to keep them both from freezing to death until Soma could get back on his bike and ride.
Chimera was jarred out of an uneasy half-sleep by Soma returning to the tent; it didn't necessarily need to sleep, but it had found that at least a little went a long way toward keeping his borrowed body functioning at peak efficiency without burning through excessive amounts of mana. Today, Chimera had chosen to sleep out of boredom as much as anything else, knowing from experience that Soma would need time to recover from the mana he'd poured into the fight with the not-quite-dead Gate. Soma kicked off his boots at the entrance to the tent and crawled back under the sleeping bag Chimera had spread out. Shared body heat went a long way toward reduced mana expenditure as well.
"That was a Gate," Soma said, shivering slightly and pressed against Chimera's side as if for warmth, although he didn't feel cold to Chimera.
"It used to be a Gate," Chimera corrected. "What we saw was an abomination." Not that it had stopped him from eating it, once the Phantom had been properly born.
"Have you ever seen anything like that before?" Soma had a note in his voice that Chimera wasn't sure it liked, one that implied that Soma had found a new windmill at which to tilt.
"No," Chimera said, which was the truth. It had never seen a Phantom fail to properly form from a Gate; either the Gate fell into despair and the Phantom was born, or – rarely – the human suppressed the despair and gained the ability to learn how to use its own mana. A Phantom stuck halfway between its Gate's Underworld and the real world didn't happen, or it hadn't before.
"I have to look into it," Soma said.
"No," Chimera said again. "You're under contract."
"People could get hurt," Soma argued. Chimera couldn't see his face; Soma's voice was slightly muffled by Chimera's shirt. "This is what I do, Chimera."
"You made a promise to me," Chimera said. "And to Koyomi."
"I have to help the living," Soma said. "Just give me a little more time." He paused long enough that Chimera thought he'd fallen asleep again. "It might help you too," he added finally.
Chimera decided that Soma being perceptive about the similarities between Calyptra and Chimera itself while half asleep was annoying, and that there was a better than even shot that Soma wouldn't remember the conversation when he woke again in any case; he usually didn't remember waking mid-recovery. "Fine," it said. "Take as much time as you need."
Soma started to say thank you, but didn't get past the first syllable.
Much to Chimera's annoyance, Soma not only remembered the conversation upon waking but had hung onto his newfound determination to take up a new crusade. Chimera tried to talk him into at least using Teleport to get to wherever he wanted to go, but Soma claimed it used too much mana for too little gain. Chimera shrugged; it knew exactly where the road was. Soma led them through the narrow local streets to a larger road, and yet another road, and finally to a highway. The sight of so much traffic surrounded by artificial light almost felt like culture shock, given how long Chimera had been following Soma around the middle of nowhere.
Chimera half-expected Soma to stop longer than it took to fill the gas tanks, but as soon as the bikes had been refueled, Soma aimed his bike at the highway again. He went for several hours without either stopping or making sure Chimera was following, attention seemingly completely focused on getting as far as possible in as little time as possible.
For its part, Chimera assumed they were headed for Tokyo either because the White Wizard – Fueki, it thought the man's name had been – had had a great deal of research collected regarding magic and its history, or because Gates tended to be drawn toward large concentrations of people. The reason Wiseman, when acting as Wiseman and not the White Wizard, had sent his Phantoms out to find Gates in Tokyo and nowhere else was a simple case of efficiency. The higher the number of people per square kilometer, the higher the chance of finding a Gate, and not just because there were more people readily available.
Gates migrated from areas of low-density population to population centers, and Tokyo was the highest concentration of all. Wiseman could have gone to Osaka, or Nagoya, or Fukuoka – the percentage of Gates in each of those areas was high as well – but Tokyo, despite the irritating likelihood of opposition, had the best probability of finding and using Gates. Soma hadn't stopped all of Wiseman's attempts. He hadn't even come close.
Chimera made a bet with itself as to whether or not they would make it as far as Osaka before Soma decided to stop for the night, after considering the probability of Soma not stopping for the night at all. It lost both bets when Soma pulled off the highway in Hyogo, driving somewhat aimlessly before stopping in front of a hotel that looked both as if it had been constructed in the last century and as if it had been cleaned and maintained at some point within the last several days. Chimera kept its mouth shut on any comparisons to where Soma had insisted they sleep in the past.
Checking in to a hotel that wasn't run by an octogenarian keeping records in a paper notebook was far less frustrating than Chimera was used to, requiring only a little basic information plus payment and identification from Soma. Within just a few minutes, Soma was handing a second key to Chimera and wearily carrying his bag down a hallway. The building, having multiple stories, even had stairs, which Soma bypassed entirely to stand in front of an elevator. Chimera blinked; it didn't like the claustrophobic boxes, although whether that was its own preference or a holdover from Kosuke, it wasn't sure. Kosuke had always taken a great deal of delight in running up and down stairs, and the memory wasn't as painful as it could have been.
Soma, for his part, moved with very little energy. His face was flushed pink, despite the lack of exertion, and Chimera suppressed a sigh. At least, this time, it had something resembling a city to explore while Soma finished replenishing his mana stores and his physical stamina. It left its bag on one of the two beds in the room and was out the door before Soma had gotten more than a few steps into the room.
The city Soma had chosen to stop in was overlooked by a multi-story castle, lit up for the night but closed when Chimera wandered in its general direction. It considered climbing the walls out of curiosity – when it had last seen buildings like this, they had been in use for completely different purposes than the current state of tourist attraction – but ultimately decided against it. Chimera circled the building again anyway, for the sense of nostalgia for a time before it had been locked in a belt.
The city was quiet, no Gates that Chimera could sense for all that it had enough population to attract at least a few. The late hour was likely to blame, Chimera thought, but the act of walking around felt good, and it had gotten enough mana out of the abomination to last for a while. It wondered briefly if the corruption of the transformation process had affected the mana it had eaten, but there seemed to be no ill effects. Chimera stopped for a while on a public bench, feet curled up underneath it, and sank into itself just to make sure.
The attempt at introspection was interrupted – granted, when it was nearly over, or Chimera would have been far more annoyed – by a tired official telling Chimera that public benches were not for sleeping. Chimera chose not to dignify the statement with a response and returned to the hotel. The stairs were narrower than it would have liked, but it still took joy in running up all six flights. Its bag was right where it had left it, and Soma was curled into a ball on top of the other bed.
Chimera frowned. Soma hadn't gotten under the blanket, and he didn't usually sleep in such a contorted positon. It turned the light on, and Soma flinched. His face was still flushed. Curious, Chimera touched it to find it warmer than usual. "Soma Haruto," it said, poking Soma in the shoulder.
"It's cold," Soma said, curling tighter.
"You're warm," Chimera told him. "If you're cold, try getting under the blanket."
Grumbling, Soma wriggled into the bed without at any point extending his limbs. It seemed to be much more effort than it was worth, but Chimera wasn't going to pass judgment. Once under the blanket, Soma looked no less miserable. "It's still cold," he said.
Chimera touched his skin again. "You're not cold," it said. "You're definitely warm."
Soma blinked at him, looking dismayed. "Maybe I caught a cold," he said, which made absolutely zero sense whatsoever.
"Go back to sleep," Chimera said, but the unusual behavior was somewhat disconcerting. It wasn't worried, it tried to tell itself, it just needed to make sure its assets were in the best possible condition. The justification didn't quite ring true, even in the privacy of its own thoughts, and Chimera went for the next best method of not dealing with the possibility that how it felt was changing – distraction.
Remembering that Kosuke's phone was not only a phone, but also a source of information, Chimera plugged it into the wall. The hazy memories it still had weren't much help in figuring out exactly what to do to get the device to divulge its information, but Chimera was nothing if not persistent. And bored. The information Chimera got out of the device, however, was conflicting and confusing, and left Chimera with more questions than answers.
"You are all crazy," it said to Soma, who by this point was dead to the world again and didn't defend humanity in the slightest. Chimera sighed, stole Soma's wallet, and went to the front desk to extend their stay by another night. The clerk, having checked them in to begin with, didn't bat an eyelash at Chimera returning with its traveling companion's documents. He also provided an aggressively excessive amount of tea when asked, his demeanor unpleasant enough that Chimera was sorry he wasn't a Gate and could therefore not be eaten.
By the time Soma crawled out from underneath his blanket, looking more miserable than the night before, Chimera was sitting on the bed opposite and staring at him with a pile of supplies.
"What?" Soma said, voice thick.
"You are not fulfilling the contract, Soma Haruto." Chimera pointed at the still-warm cup of tea next to the bed. "You are not functioning at optimal levels. You cannot assist me if you are not functioning at optimal levels."
Soma looked at Chimera as though Chimera was the one acting irrationally. "What?" he said again.
"Exposure to temperature extremes along with excessive physical stress has adverse effects on human physiology," Chimera said. Soma wasn't drinking the tea. It put the cup in his hand. "You should take measures to repair it."
"What have you been reading?" Soma asked, finally taking the cup but not drinking from it. Chimera held up Kosuke's phone. Soma groaned, burying his face in his free hand. "I'm fine," he said.
Chimera stared at him steadily, without blinking, and reached out to verify that Soma's skin was still warmer than normal. Soma batted his hand away, nearly spilling the tea in the process, and Chimera growled. Soma stopped struggling and drank the tea, letting Chimera poke at what it would.
"We have to check out," Soma said, but at least he'd emptied the cup. Chimera handed him a bowl of something that was supposed to be helpful in regaining health, although the runny white mess didn't look appealing to it in the slightest. Soma made a face at it, and Chimera glared.
"Tomorrow," it said.
"What?" Soma put the bowl on the nightstand, trying to pretend he was doing no such thing.
"We check out tomorrow. You," and Chimera stabbed a finger toward Soma, "just. Be human. Fix whatever's broken."
Soma ducked his head, shoulders shaking, and it took several seconds for Chimera to figure out that he was laughing. "Thank you," Soma said finally.
Chimera didn't bother answering, rolling its eyes instead and sprawling on the other bed. There wouldn't be much delay if it was lucky, it told itself, and if not, it always had the option of recruiting Mayu or solving the problem on its own. Somehow. Neither option seemed nearly as appealing as they once might have, and Chimera found itself watching Soma surreptitiously from under its borrowed eyelashes and wondering exactly when it had gotten so attached.