The Null Hypothesis, Part 4
The bat swung over Murasame's head as he frantically tried to avoid it. It ended up smashing everything on the shelves and counters, leaving Murasame to be left untouched. Quickly, Murasame realized that there was no way he could win the fight by constantly throwing himself out of harm's way, especially with how bad the consequences were if he were to fail a single time.
An attack of that caliber came down while Murasame rolled away, shattering the tiles beneath their feet. Murasame's head was spinning, just from seeing that, as he stumbled up to his feet.
"Is that all you can do!?"
"C-Crap…!"
The masked man was wildly swinging.
If the attack hadn't hit its target, it would stir up far more commotion and disturb Murasame's concentration. As if it wasn't already broken into pieces by the situation, Murasame tried his best to keep his head on his shoulders, but that was proving to be a real challenge in itself.
All he could do was play defensive and dodge; he was barely pulling that off as well.
The bat was swinging way too close at him for comfort as Murasame bounced around the room, trying to escape the masked man's range. Even though the room was spacious for a hospital, it wasn't enough space for a proper fight. Although, it might not have mattered in Murasame's case, someone who was vastly misusing the space that he was in.
Just like how a broken clock was right twice a day, the bat finally managed to hit its first collision with Murasame. The pain reverberated through his shoulder, but Murasame softened the blow as much as he could by not fighting against the momentum in allowing the attack to carry him away.
It didn't change how painful it was.
"Grah!" Murasame stumbled over a window, but managed to drag himself out of the way. A second later and he would have been thrusted by the baseball bat.
The window pane took the hit, shattering into pieces into the outside, but the masked man quickly pulled back and performed a counterclockwise swing to smash Murasame's head in. An instinctive duck saved Murasame as the wall suffered the hole in its drywall. With the chance he had, Murasame flung himself forwards to push the masked man away from him, but the masked man hadn't been so open.
He pulled back his baseball bat and slammed the handle down on Murasame's shoulder, causing him to fall straight down on his stomach. The masked man stumbled backwards, trying not to fall over, before striking the ground once more. Another roll came out from Murasame, albeit slower than before, as he tried to resist the pain screaming in his body.
Murasame lifted himself up onto his feet through sheer grit and started trying to fight back, only to realize it was his throwing arm that had been affected by the shoulder slam. He could still spin the weighted end using his wrist, but throwing it served more of a problem.
The masked man swung once more overhead, but Murasame sidestepped the attack. He flicked his weighted end to try and catch the bat as it came down, hoping to let the descent do the work of wrapping the chain around it for him. Thankfully, it worked, but it didn't exactly continue as he planned. The man's strength overwhelmed Murasame, making the restriction of the bat feel redundant. If anything now, Murasame made it easier for the masked man since they were practically tethered.
As if Murasame was like the weighted end, the masked man pulled away with his bat and started swinging Murasame around the room. He crashed into the standing shelves, some of the chairs, and the expensive equipment before the masked man launched the spin right into a wall.
The chain rapidly unraveled as Murasame flew right through it, bouncing into the next room. Coughing from all the dust stirred up from the hole, Murasame tried standing back up, but he felt a tug from the chain. With one motion, Murasame was pulled right into the original room with the masked man prepared to slam down his bat.
Murasame bit down on his lips to wake himself up a bit, giving him enough attention to jump over the masked man as the punch missed its mark. The transition of his position allowed him to start unraveling his chain from the bat, releasing Murasame's mistake from going any further. Though being on his backside now, Murasame finally had his first chance to strike with his sickle—it would have been a hit if the man hadn't been so fast.
His weapon was knocked away with the bat and through the split second decision, Murasame decided to preemptively duck. It was a good prediction as the bat bounced back to narrowly graze against his head. The timing allowed Murasame to forcefully retreat, but to where?
The best place Murasame could figure out was at the bed.
He flung himself over there and before his skull could get smashed in, he flipped over the bed to allow the bat to meet its metal frame. It was extra time for him to use the tethering chain to pull his sickle back into hand, but he needed to throw himself out from his barrier when the masked man leapt over and crushed the ground where Murasame was just at.
What exactly was he doing though? Buying extra time constantly? And for what? To buy more time on top of that? Was that truly the limit of what Murasame could do in a fight for his life?
"You're quite the cockroach, aren't you? Sliding all over the place like a bug!"
Murasame would love to make a witty remark to snap back at him, but he was literally focusing all of his energy on not dying at the moment. He took the brief relapse to catch his breath, scouting over to where the boy was. The entire time, he had been hiding behind a chair, avoiding the fight, but there was only so much that could be done here.
"You really… want to get a hold on that boy, don't you…? Must be… really important…"
"Like we would know anything. All we know about the boy is that it's our job to take him and give them to the higher-ups, but that's about to be the least of your concerns now."
Of course. The masked man truly did have a point and Murasame knew it.
The masked man rushed Murasame down, swiping left and right. Murasame blocked as much as he could, given that words weren't even getting through to the masked man. There was no way that he could get the man's guard to to lower, not even by a sliver. Murasame needed to catch him off his game in order to act, but what could that answer be? Thinking, thinking, and thinking…!
Murasame instinctively tossed the weighted end at the masked man to get him to move away, but it missed its target entirely. That opened himself for the man to slam the bat's head into Murasame before he could figure something out.
"Grah!"
Murasame's body stumbled backwards into the wall as the masked man closed the gap, grabbing Murasame's jacket. Whatever sliding he was doing, it didn't matter, since Murasame's body was pressed up against the wall. His feet weren't even touching the ground, causing his only option to be to squirm.
"F-Fucking hell…"
"A word of advice." The man lifted the bat for a finishing hit. "The next time someone asks you for something, I'd suggest that you consider the situation you're in before doing it, especially when you can't do anything about it otherwise."
Murasame was praying for a miracle. His lack of skill was holding him back and while he always loved to dispute it, he was being forced to see how weak he was against someone with the intent to take him down. The blood in his mouth was prone to be a reminder in the future.
However, he noticed something moving in the corner of his eye.
The boy climbed out from his hiding place and moved towards the weighted end that Murasame had missed with. He wasn't sure what the boy was thinking, but from the moment he picked it up and started spinning it to replicate what he must have seen from Murasame, the plan of action was clear.
And while Murasame wasn't so keen to be protected by the person he was trying to protect, he was literally down for anything to happen, as long as he made it out.
"Get away from Mister Murasame!"
The boy launched the weighted end, crashing it into the masked man's head. The impact caused the masked man to falter and he released Murasame. There wasn't any time to waste, so Murasame fired off a hasty kick to draw some distance between them.
The masked man was still standing though, recovering from the head trauma and quickly.
"Why'd you little…!"
They had to end it now.
"Kid! Lend me some help!"
"Huh!?"
"Punch him as hard as you can!"
"R-Right!"
Murasame leapt forwards as the boy ran. closing in, they pincered the masked man in between them. They pulled back their arms at the same time and with all their might, they threw their arms forward.
Murasame's fist sunk into the man's mask, causing it to fly off.
The boy's fist sunk into the man's stomach, pushing his arm rather deep.
The pair kept going until the twin motions flung the man off his feet as gravity knocked him right down to the ground. The attack was certainly not fatal, but for Murasame, knocking them unconscious was the best thing they could do at the moment.
"Ahh…" Murasame gasped. "Ahh, fuck this… All of it… "
"Mister Murasame? Are you alright?"
"Y-Yeah… That bastard, uh, got a lucky hit, that's all…"
"Of course he did. It looked like you had that fight in the bag!"
Not that Murasame didn't appreciate the belief, but he wasn't sure what the hell the boy saw.
Regardless, Murasame felt the need to take a minute to catch up to his heart rate, but their punches weren't anything too special. It wouldn't take long for the man, who was unmasked now, to wake up. He was unmasked now, but that didn't get Murasame anywhere. The man looked like some generic street thug, posing as someone he isn't.
Murasame searched the area for a bit. Through the rubble of the room, he found some gauze bandage rolls. These things were probably durable, especially if wrapped with multiple layers, so it should have been enough for Murasame's intentions.
"What are you doing?"
"Tying him up a little. Making sure he won't follow us."
"That's smart idea."
"That's because I'm full of them."
Murasame noticed that some of his own blood was being absorbed into the bandages. While it might have been important to figure out where the source was, it might have been better to leave it to his imagination while the adrenaline was still running at mach speed.
"Alright, now with that out of the way… Urgh, crap…"
His arm still felt like shit.
That slam against his shoulder was no joke, but staying around here won't make things any better.
"We have to find a way out of here…"
"Huh? Why? Didn't we just deal with the bad guy?"
"Are you dumb or something?" Murasame tried rolling his shoulder to see if that would ease the pain, but that only made it worse. He kept his line of thought though. "There's no way that one guy managed to get here by himself, especially if he was only wielding a metal bat."
"So you're saying there's more of them!?"
"I can bet all my money on it. We're on the sixth floor, right? There would have been ample time for security to stop a single guy from approaching us. The only way for them to have not been able to do that is if they were already busy dealing with other bastards like him."
The boy shuddered as he looked at the unconscious man.
"That man… Didn't he say that he was here for me…?"
"I'd like an answer for that," Murasame grumbled. "Are you sure you don't remember anything?"
"I'm sure! I can't remember anything from before you saved me!"
"Maybe you were already on the run from these bastards before you fell into the river…"
"That might be the case," the boy whimpered, "but I can't imagine what might have happened for them to want to hunt me down like this."
The boy grabbed onto Murasame's jacket. "You've got to help me, Mister Murasame! If someone can help me, it has to be you!"
"U-Uh… Let me see..."
Murasame was not in the best position to be helping others, much less himself. Somehow, in seeing how panicked the boy had been, Murasame felt comparable rational enough to consider his options. Lucky for him, he knew someone that might be able to swing on by and take down all of these grunts. He pulled out his phone, but he immediately saw that there hadn't been any signal.
"What…? Are they using some sort of EMP or a jammer?"
"What's that?"
"It's… Ugh, never mind. It's not important."
Not for the kid to know, but it was important in the sense that there wasn't going to be any outsider contact until this whole ordeal was finished. Murasame can only hope that civilians have noticed something going on within the hospital, but that was strong optimism at play.
He walked over to check out the mask, picking it up for a bit. It was nothing that he would ever recognize, but it looked distinctive enough that it would belong to some kind of criminal organization. If he can get to the police, this might be useful to give to them for supporting evidence. Maybe that investigator guy might have a use for it if he gets this case too. Murasame pocketed the mask as he stood back up.
"I might as well help you out. We can get help if we leave the building, but we can't afford to alert any other bad guys. Stick close to me while we move. Don't do anything unnecessary."
Murasame walked over to the door and peeked outside. There was someone down the hall that had a similar mask on. Coming across another one of those goons would spell trouble for Murasame, so the best choice in the dilemma was to sneak out. It was far easier said than done though.
Scouting the hall, there was another corridor further down away.
"Stay quiet while you move as well. Don't attract any attention."
The boy nodded, sweating a bit. "Right."
Murasame slowly opened up the door to provide some cover for their movements. Sticking close to the wall, he kept looking over his shoulder and timed a brisk walk with the boy as the masked individual looked away. They ducked around the corner and luckily, no one was there. Although, there were a few nurses on the ground who were hopefully unconscious.
A group of masked enemies turned down from the end, causing Murasame to drag the boy into the nearest room. They weren't noticed as the group walked right past them, but if they were to keep stumbling around without a concrete plan other than to "escape", then it was bound to be a recipe for trouble.
Seeing that they came into something like a storage room, Murasame wondered if a certain something had been against the wall. He stood up and glanced around until landing his eyes on a piece of laminated paper on a pinboard. Murasame yanked it off the board.
"Just what we need."
The boy dipped his head in to see what Murasame was holding. "What is that?"
"A map. It'll tell us the exact layout of the hospital. I'll use this to plan our escape route."
Murasame crouched down and started studying it.
He needed to consider where the enemies could possibly be, but if they were hunting for the boy, the likely candidates would be a scout of the patient rooms. They would have to roam around the main halls and while Murasame expected them to leave no stone unturned, they probably don't have a heavy need to put too many people in the employee's only portions of the hospital. It is composed of a few hallways and connecting rooms for themselves, but they lead over to the back stairwells. There was the possibility of using the staff elevator, one for bringing up and down supplies without congesting hospital traffic, but if anything happened while they were there, or if anyone noticed the moving elevator, they would have practically cornered themselves.
He traced an outline of the best possible route they could take.
"This is where we're going?"
"For now, at least." Murasame noticed a few more maps, likely for each floor. "The stairwell should take us to the first floor pretty easily and then, it should be a straight path to the ambulance drop-off zone as the closest exit. That is, if we don't encounter anyone at the wrong place and the wrong time."
"I would have never been able to decipher such a complex picture! There's so many lines scattered everywhere, it makes my head dizzy."
"I'm pretty amazing, so this is nothing!"
Smirking a bit, Murasame stuffed the map into his jacket as he peeked outside.
After confirming it was clear, they quickly moved out and followed the designated path. The door to the employee's area had been down the hall, so they slipped inside. They passed through a couple doors without meeting too many problems, but just as Murasame was thinking it was going great, there were two masked individuals blocking the way by standing guard there. Their backs were turned to them, so they didn't immediately see the pair.
"Ah, shit," Murasame whispered to himself. "That's not good."
"Do we try to go another way?"
"There's only this one spot to get to the back stairwell." Murasame quickly took out the map for a moment. "The only other option is to use the public staircase, but something tells me that they've got that all locked down as well. We would have to navigate the main halls without detection too."
Murasame glanced back at the two guards.
Their backs were turned against them, so if Murasame could quietly approach them, he'll have the first strike advantage. Though, that would only hold true for one of them, since the other one would immediately be able to react to the ambush.
And he was already pretty tired out from fighting one of those masked assailants. There had to be a way to distract them enough to make their way to the stairs. At the very least, if he could find a way to displace them without arousing suspicions, that would have been great.
Luckily, he chose to pick up the mask of the guy who attacked them.
"Stay at the corner, kid. Whatever happens, don't move until I call for you."
Murasame tucked the boy behind a chair and while he wasn't entirely hidden, it would be enough that if someone were to pass on by quickly, they wouldn't notice. He then cleared his throat a bit before putting on the mask. He couldn't believe he was trying to do this, but it was a lot better than outright fighting through them with force.
"That guy said they didn't know much about the boy, right...? Let's hope he wasn't bullshitting."
He rushed out to the two guards, trying to sound as tired as he could.
"Y-You two…! We need back-up!"
"Back-up?" One of them spoke up. "What do you mean? It's only one boy, isn't it?"
"Y-Yeah, that's what we all thought!" Murasame exaggerated his waving hand. "Apparently, the higher-ups failed to mention that the kid is really strong."
"Tch," the other guard clicked his tongue. "Of course, there had to be a catch. I thought it was weird that they assigned a lot of guys on this mission to retrieve one boy from a defenseless hospital."
"So what? He's wiping the floor with everyone?"
"I didn't believe it for a moment either, but when I saw it for myself, I knew I needed to find back-up as quickly as possible. I'm going to head down to the other floors to tell the others that we found the kid, but we're running into that roadblock. Do you mind lending a hand to keep the boy in one place?"
The two guards looked at each other.
"Are you sure? You should know that we can't really leave the post here. We were assigned to make sure no one suspicious comes up or down the floors until the objective is done."
"Objective?" Murasame scoffed. "Hey, we're going to lose the objective of the whole thing if we don't get as many guys on the kid right now!"
"You know, I think we should probably help out," one of the guards nodded. "The sooner we capture the boy, the sooner we can get out of here."
"I see someone is making sense here!" Murasame pointed back from where he came from. "We encountered the kid around Room 6012, but the fight might have moved away from there by a bit."
"Alright, let's go."
The two guards ran off into the rooms and after he heard their departure without any commotion, Murasame walked back to check that the boy was left untouched. Murasame removed his mask, feeling like he shaved a few years off his life.
"How did you get them to leave!?"
"I'm, uh, just that brillant."
The entire time, Murasame was hinging on a prayer that they wouldn't suspect anything.
"With that out of the way, we should be able to make it to the first floor. Though, the entire idea that they have guards posted at the stairs is uncomfortable. We might actually run into more guards at the bottom in similar positions." Murasame rolled his neck. "Though, there's no point in hanging around here. They're going to realize they've been deceived pretty soon."
With a nod from the boy, the two of them went down the stairs in a brisk manner, but it was on the fourth floor where they met up with a problem.
"Huh?" A group of guards had been climbing up at the same time. "Wait a minute. Who the hell are you!? Wait, that's the boy we're looking for! Hey, get them!"
"Shit! Seriously!?"
Murasame broke through the doors of the fourth floor, pulling the boy along with him. Shortly after, the masked assailants crashed through the doors right after them. He even blasted right through the guards for that floor, surprising them for enough time to pass by.
"Pick up the speed! We can't sneak around anymore!"
"Y-Yes, Mister Murasame!"
Murasame slid into the main hallways with the boy right behind him. Unfortunately, the bad guys were right on their trail. Frantically, Murasame grabbed the floor plans, flipping over to the fourth level's layout. There wasn't much that they could do to get out of this situation though. No matter what he thought about, none of them had a good plan to succeed, especially with the enemies right behind them.
As they went down, he noticed that there was hospital equipment on trolleys left deserted. It probably wouldn't do any good, but Murasame started knocking them over to slow down the masked group. It caused a few of them to stumble and lose momentum, but there were a handful that were able to dodge it while keeping their speed.
"If only we could just throw these at them!"
"You need them to be thrown?"
The boy slid over to one of the trolleys and grabbed the handle. With one cycle, the boy twisted his body and tossed the trolley into the masked assailants. They didn't expect that to happen, so they were knocked down by the makeshift projectile.
"You can do that!?"
"They're not too heavy, right?"
Murasame wasn't too flabbergasted, but he felt like he was dreaming a bit. Or maybe, it was more akin to a nightmare.
Just who exactly was this kid...?
More urgently though, it gave Murasame more time to read the floor plans.
"This way can't work… They probably have bastards stationed over there… And like hell, we can't go the way that we came from… Huh?"
He then noticed that the third floor's layout had been larger than the fourth's. That would mean there was a roof by one of the sides of the fourth floor, right? Murasame lined up the maps, figuring out that they were already close to one of the windows that should have given them easy access to the roof.
Tucking the maps back, Murasame stopped at the destination and cracked it open. It was a bit too tight, so desperate times called for desperate measures. He threw his weighted end to smash the window open, cleaning out some of the broken glass with his sickle before leaping through.
"Come on! We're taking a detour!"
"Okay, I'm right behind—Ouch!"
"Hey, what's the hold-up!? We need to lose them!"
"I-I'm coming!"
The boy managed to get through the window as they both ducked to make sure their tracks were lost. Murasame poked his head over to make sure that the masked assailants had passed right by the unsuspecting hiding spot and once they did, Murasame felt his lungs collapsing from relief.
"How many people are in this fucking organization of theirs…?" Murasame glanced over to the boy. "Can you still keep up…?"
"O-Ouchies…"
"What's wrong? Something happened?"
Murasame widened his eyes to see that the boy injured himself on the sharp glass. His hand was bleeding profusely with a shard stuck inside and from the looks of it, the boy was in heavy pain.
"You should have been careful!"
"I-I'm sorry. I was trying to go quickly and I…"
"You have to be kidding me…" Murasame wished that he brought the gauze with him, but in his defense, it would have been impossible to predict an injury like that. "Well, we have to pull it out."
"Isn't that going to hurt more!?"
"Would you rather keep it inside of you!?"
"N-No…"
"Shut up for a bit then!"
Murasame grabbed the shard with both hands, careful not to cut himself, and tugged hard. The boy was crying as Murasame heaved one last time to pop it right out. While that was all done, Murasame wasn't sure what to do about the blood.
"I-It hurts so much…"
"You're not dead yet, so suck it up. This pain is probably better than what those bad guys have planned for you, so look at it like that."
"I-I…" The boy sniffled. "I guess that's a good thing…"
"Now then, what can I use to plug it up…?"
The only option here was clothing, but he didn't want to ruin his jacket with someone's blood on it. If he asked the boy to take off his shirt, it might have been the effective solution that would make everyone happy, but as Murasame delegated on his choices, he saw something strange before his eyes.
The wound seemed to be closing itself as he pondered.
"What the…?"
Before his very eyes, the bleeding stopped and all that remained of his injury was the blood that was spilt. Murasame didn't know if what he saw had been some kind of trick, but the boy looked as if he was still grasping in pain. Though, it might have been hard for the boy to pretend in the first place.
"Where did the wound go…?" Murasame asked.
The boy croaked. "I don't know… but it still hurts a lot…"
"I shouldn't have expected a different answer…" Murasame sighed.
Between the raid and the boy's recovery, Murasame wasn't sure what was going on, but there wasn't any time to stop and think. He checked his phone once again to see if he could catch any signals, but nothing showed up on his phone. Their objective remained to be escaping the hospital.
"Can you still move?"
"I… I think so."
"Alright, we'll keep going on then. You can push through the pain."
The boy grimaced, but as if Murasame's words were a form of encouragement to him, the boy took a deep breath and stood up by Murasame's side. although, all Murasame's intention had been was to make sure he wasn't being slowed down by any capacity.
He was already taking a hit by taking the boy along for the ride.
"... Right. I'll try. Please lead the way, Mister Murasame."
Why was he putting himself up with this mess again...?