His way of thinking surprised him often. When he got to thinking about that entire sheriff's department being made up of cartel members, he didn't know which one, he realized that he had only been looking in the US. There was a lot of empty area near large population centers, so he had been hunting there almost exclusively. It appeared that he may have dealt with all the cells in the states, so he started looking into the news from out of Mexico.
That lead him to be observing a camp thirty miles south west of Orla, Mexico. Forty or fifty individuals, five or six large cargo trucks, and three large prefab buildings. On the surface, it looked like it was a waystation for people trying to go further north, and enter the US illegally. It had been hard enough for him to find a way to get down here, and had sacrificed some poor asshole's Mercedes.
It made sense though. Fairy Tale had started to get into the trafficking business, as well as the exterminate and eat business they were already in. So if they convinced people trying to cross the border to come here, it was easy pickings. With the weird stay in human form on base rule they had adopted, it would be easy enough to take any poor migrant by surprise. It would also explain the news stories about US Border Patrol, and the Mexican Army finding human remains with unusual bite patterns in the bones.
"So, how do you think the girl is going to turn out," a woman with bubblegum pink hair asked beside him.
"What girl," Tekeshi asked in response as he kept his vision on the camp.
The woman just shook her head, "The one that you helped a few days ago."
"Oh, uh, Nalin. By now, they have collected her, and Madonna is probably torturing her with Japanese lessons. Like she was torturing 'Suki with English lessons. I don't see any humans down there, so I should be good to hit them. I wonder if I should wait until tonight, or just go ahead and do it now?"
The woman continued to look disappointed, "For such a fine man you are growing into, you are still utterly dense. I think she had something for you."
"Grandma, I have 'Suki. I have Deesseesdra. I don't need another woman in my life. I don't particularly want another woman in my life. I honestly want to be back there with them," he rolled himself over to look at the sky.
He hadn't been particularly affected by the sun before he had become a demigod, but it appeared that is was now even less of an issue. He, kind of enjoyed being able to act a little like a human, and just enjoy the feel, without the heightened risk of sunburn he used to have.
"I know. You could always give up this vendetta you are on. Nobody would think less of you, and it isn't your responsibility to deal with them. You are seventeen, you should be having the time of your school life with the love of your life. Not lying in a desert in a country whose water invokes the curse of the outhouse jail, as that colorful native put it," she didn't particularly care for the area.
"Grandma, I don't drink water. Blood or tomato juice mostly, it isn't a problem. Also, you aren't even corporeal. You can't get the trots. Though on the first part, if I don't deal with it, someone who can get hurt will have to. I know that you somehow know everything I see and read, and you have seen the news stories where the humans have suffered heavy casualties when they actually find, and assault Fairy Tale cells. They can't do anything to me. Plus, I really want to...," he started to say.
"Tekeshi, she woke up. Let it go. You don't have to hunt her down," his grandmother said.
"So, Akasha Bloodriver, leader of the Three Dark Lords, is saying that I should let the person who not only shot the woman I love, and nearly killed her, but also shot your daughter, my mother, and seriously injured her. No, I want to see that whore in the ground."
"To think, you once loved her."
Tekeshi stood up and walked over to the war machine Buick, "That ship sailed the moment that she told her men to kill me in Osaka. Her life was forfeit when she dropped a load of buckshot in my mother's belly. Her memory, is all that will be left after she shot Utsuki. That psycho bitch won't even have a corpse left when I am done with her."
"I am worried that you may have absorbed more than just Shinso's power. I think that you may have gained some of his instability. I wish I could have been in that valley with you. I would have loved to see Vampiris. I was born long after it was abandoned, not many years before Alucard's kingdom was destroyed. Do you feel that," Akasha turned her head toward the camp.
Tekeshi was in the process of putting on a plate carrier, not that he needed the plates, and turned his head as well, "I think there is more to this camp than you can see. They did something, or... that was a transportation spell. I know that feeling, but it also felt like something with a lot of power interacted with it. This is, interesting."
Tekeshi finished doing up the straps, and picked up his rifle. Checking the magazine he couldn't help but look over at the dashboard of the car. On it was a picture of him and Utsuki, from before they were a couple. It was during the summer vacation at his family's home in Osaka, during his birthday. He was sitting there with The Red Special, the Holy Grail of electric guitars, and Utsuki was sitting next to him as he sang.
His thumb popped the cocking handle in and out of it's lock as he looked at the picture. Was this even really worth it anymore? Maybe his grandmother was right, it was time to go home. Still, if he did, then how many humans would die trying to fight Fairy Tale? He had to keep on.
He sat the rifle down against the side of the car, and picked up a pistol. When did guns become so natural to him? He hadn't thought about it, but since he had taken off on this, he hadn't been using anything but guns and his bare hands. It might have been not having Jakkasu anymore, making him more reluctant to engage close up like he used to.
He put it out of his head, and holstered the pistol on his leg. He needed to focus, not to keep himself alive, but to keep his rationalizations for what he was doing. He was still a kid at the end of the day, and despite having been born a vampire, he hadn't necessarily been raised completely by vampires. He had lived with one of his parents closest friends in Phoenix, Arizona for a decade. He had been poisoned as a kid, and his parents had given him blood to save him, and turned him into a shinso. When his power awoke, it was seen as a better choice to remove him from close to them to protect him.
It wasn't like they had much of a choice. His mother had decided to work for the school, and his parents really didn't like the idea of a nanny raising him. They had originally wanted to send him to live with his, it was still amazing to him to actually know that he had sisters, and their mother. His power awakening like it did, his father sealed his power, and gave him a limiter to control it more, and they sent him to live with two of their friends that had married and moved to the US.
He shook his head. He could think about all of that later. It wasn't like he didn't literally have eternity to think about everything in his life. There would be time for all of that later.
He picked up his rifle again. The camp might have been thirty miles from Orla, but he was only twenty five miles away. It was going to be a bit of a walk, but it wasn't anything he hadn't done before. For some reason, he seemed to like walking around looking like a knock off of The Punisher. Actually, he was pretty much a knock off of The Punisher. He might ought to find a symbol or something. Or not.
The sun was going down around the time he reached the outskirts of the camp. The fact he had reached there unnoticed was either an example of how isolated the camp was giving them a sense of complacency, or just how undisciplined Fairy Tale's soldiers were.
He strode through the camp. Going off the smell, they were at chow. Further more, it didn't smell like everything they were eating, was beef. If he needed any other reason to eliminate all traces of the organization, this was a good one. It might have actually been one of the best reasons that he had to do so.
He found many of the members in smaller prefab building. They were laughing, eating, and he didn't want to know what that one table had going on. He might have been a demigod, but he still had a gag-reflex. A very strong gag-reflex, though some would find it hypocritical for a race that would drink human blood, to condemn those that would eat human flesh.
He reached in a pouch on the front of his plate carrier. He pulled out a small sphere that had a round piece with a lever on the top of it. There was nothing better for a room, than a grenade. He did a quick rough measure of the room before tossing the sphere in, spinning a pin on a ring on his thumb. He didn't bother to duck, he didn't need to, as the device detonated, and shredded the people inside.
He didn't even blink as screams of pain and terror emanated from the interior. He couldn't see the soldiers that willfully followed Fairy Tale's leadership as people, not with the acts they were willing to do. They were simply targets, and targets didn't feel pain.
He stepped through the wall. It was something that only he and his father could do as far as he knew, a modification of what was known as the dimensional sword technique. It was much easier for him now, than it had been in the past. Most likely a result of his change of nature.
He looked at the few that were still alive. They wouldn't be for long, so there wasn't a point to him wasting any rounds on them. Served them better to bleed out. It looked like all of forty one soldiers, so that meant there was up to nine more there.
He felt something grab onto his leg. Looking down he saw what appeared to be a woman, halfway between a human and a snake. A naga. He could tell that she was trying to say something, but a piece of shrapnel in her throat kept her from being able to make any vocalizations. What she wanted to say didn't make any difference to him though. He simply drew his sidearm, and put a bullet between her eyes.
As the body lay there with a pool of blood spreading from its head, he simply looked at it as if it were nothing but an unusual rock. It was a corpse now, and had nothing left to interest him. He holstered the gun and turned his attention to the larger room.
It was truly horrifying to consider what the weapons humans had created could accomplish. A fourteen ounce sphere filled with plastic explosives, had just taken out the majority of the camp, just because they were all together in a single room. Yokai, would never be able to subjugate humans, not when this is what they were capable of.
A sound from another of the prefabs got his attention. Moving through the wall once again he saw two people run toward a truck. Without emotion he brought his rifle up, and fired twice. The bodies kept running for a few yards before the brains realized that they weren't still alive, and they just crumpled.
Tekeshi turned to the building. He wondered if it was the barracks, or the command center. Looking over the corpses, and their lack of clothing, it was most likely the barracks. So he needed to go to the final building to finish this cell off. He swapped the magazine in the rifle as he started walking to the last building.
"God I am tired of this," was all Tekeshi could say as he approached.
The spread of buckshot that hit him in the face barely fazed him. He sighed heavily as he quickly located where the blast had come from, and riddled it with .338 rounds. He saw blood start to run down from the holes left under the window he had fired at. He wondered if there were any more of them that were brave enough to try.
He reached the door. Bringing his foot up, he kicked forward and the entire hollow steel door just shattered. He brought his gun up, scanning for any movement. He didn't care if he got shot, but he didn't plan to leave any survivors to spread the news of him hunting them. Fear was good if you wanted them to make mistakes, but also made it easier to make them do things you couldn't predict.
He sniffed the air, and smelled something acrid, that he didn't want to think about. There were targets here, and they were terrified. His steps were silent on the steel floor, something that didn't make sense with the heavy combat boots that he was wearing. If they could see him, that was probably terrifying them more.
His finger went up to the trigger as his thumb flipped the fire selector over to automatic. There were two rooms. One he could feel three in, and one in the other. A slight smile came onto his face as he raised his weapon about waist high on the room with more targets, and pulled the trigger. Two seconds was all that his weapon fired, but at the end, there was only the one in the other room left.
He tossed the empty rifle off to the side. He had more magazines, but he didn't have to reload to deal with a single individual. He turned to the door. He could hear scrabbling around behind it, like they were looking for something. Tekeshi shook his head as he pushed the door open.
What he met, didn't impress him. A stream of napalm. Months ago, he would have most likely been done for as even an unshackled shino. Now it just annoyed him, but he wasn't about to charge through it, because there was a chance that he might be able to save a nine millimeter round when the guy had a heart attack.
The man's face was just plastered with such fear when he let off the trigger, "No way. How? I... I,,, I, I know I am screwed, but I may have something that could change your mind. You are a vampire, I know the facial features, the teeth and all that jazz. Here, take these papers. We had somekind of vampire relic here just a few hours ago, it was incredibly powerful. I don't know exactly where it was headed, but I can.."
Tekeshi returned the pistol to its holster, and picked up the papers. This seemed like an extremely weird place to have a powerful artifact, but given what he had felt before he didn't have a reason to find the man's words a lie. He looked down at the papers and read them over.
It was something about a stone that was carved in the shape of a human heart, that radiated power in a specific way that was very specific to vampires. They couldn't figure out what it was for, but they were hoping that given its shape, it was something to do with humans, and they hoped that there was someway to use it to further their goals, or at the least, find a way to use it against the humans that were hunting them.
As he read disjointed images started rushing through his head. He tried to ignore it, but it wasn't going to let itself be ignored. Pain assaulted his temples, and his eyes. It was like someone took the top of his skull, and poured molten lead into it. His breath came in spurts, and his vision went blurry as he fell to his knees. This wasn't the first time, but it was the worst that he had been through.
He tore at a pocket on his vest. He could barely function as he finally got the flap open, and pulled a pill bottle out of it. His hands shook as he took the lid off, and dumped several pills into his mouth. The pain kept hammering at him, threatening to make him lose consciousness, until the painkillers kicked in moments later.
"Tekeshi, it's getting worse isn't it," Akasha asked as she appeared sitting in a chain next to where Tekeshi was kneeling on the floor.
"Yeah, I think it will eventually stop. I just have to wait until I have processed all the memories and knowledge that came with Shinso's power," he turned around and fell back against the wall to support himself.
"What are those? I haven't asked, I have tried to ignore it all, but what are those pills," she fixed him with a strong look, a very disappointed look.
Tekeshi closed and opened his eyes several times, "Hydromorphone. My metabolism won't let me get addicted, don't worry about it. As soon as these episodes quit, I won't need them anymore. Feel like utter crap now. At least I don't feel like I have the sun in my skull."
"Tekeshi, Yukari might be able to help you if you go home. What if one of these "episodes" occur, and put you completely out? What if they get a chance to imprison you like Shisno was imprisoned?"
"Grandma, I'm going to be fine. When I'm done, or the road leads me there, I will go home. It just isn't time yet. Just isn't time yet," Tekeshi said as he picked the papers up again.
"I am amazed at both my genius, and the lengths of cruelty that both I and humans are capable of. The mercenaries took many months to track down, and punish. The young girl did not deserve what they did her, and for them to take her life. However, I have also been able to keep her spirit within our world. My experiments have been successful though.
This stone that I found, its shape is too appropriate to what my intentions are. What I am, have been for centuries now, is far beyond what my people are. It allows me to use power, that I am not even truly able to fathom. Power that would insult any god, and steal right from them.
I have stolen from the gods of death. One day this may come back to bite me, but it will not for now. This morning, I was able to revive her. It is, strange to think that I care for a human that wasn't born of Vampir blood. However, her family has served me well, and watching her at play has given me much joy. Joy? I never thought that I would ever get the chance to feel that.
After I lost my mother, I had no one. Though my interaction with her was limited by her prison, I still enjoyed having someone. What little piece of my mind I still have, having someone has allowed me to keep it.
I must work on keeping my mind focused. This, heartstone, is something that can return life to a body, as long as there is still the soul on this side of existence. I wonder though, just how far I could push it. Maybe return form to the disembodied? Maybe, if my sins have gone this far, why should I stop? Why should I stop?"
Shinso's memories ran coherently through his head with the pain damped. This had to be what he been wanting to find. Something that was more important than the destruction of Fairy Tale.