"Is it finished?" Saigai's voice came across the phone in a calm yet cold tone into Juniper's ear.
"Consider it done, but one of them got away. I got the other two here." Juniper smiled as he knelt down closer to the corpse in front of him. His eyes were slowly and casually admiring the mangled body below as it lay there on the floor in a pool of its blood.
"Got away? How could a mere mortal evade you?" Saigai scolded Juniper with his question. He was not sure how someone who did not even cultivate themselves could evade someone as skilled as Juniper. The man was known as a phoenix among society for his power and skills and yet he had let a single girl escape his grasp. It almost felt like a cruel joke to Saigai.
"Well, I had a bit of a delay because another interrupted my hunt while I was searching for her." Juniper thought back and recalled the ninja Vail who had gotten in his way yesterday. The man was determined to protect the innocent girl when he realized the girl was being hunted by him. There was no logical reason for the man to get in his way but for some reason he had. He was certain he had never seen the man working for Duan Cai so he could not fathom the reason he would protect Iris.
"Was he one of Duan Cai's pawns?" Saigai's voice seemed to be pondering the idea but Juniper already could not agree in his mind with that thought.
"I don't think-" Juniper began to respond but was cut off.
"Regardless of who they are if they get in the way just put an end to it. I don't care who the hell they are." A loud rumbling sound came through the phone.
"No problem!" Juniper smirked at the thought of killing. Hunting others was something that he loved doing regardless of who they were.
After responding to Saigai he did not wait any further to find out if the man had more to say to him he hit end on the phone call. He was in a hurry to hang the thing up because he hated phones and wanted to put the thing down as soon as possible. Considering his line of work he had to use it to keep in contact with different people but the less he had to actually use the thing the better he felt about it.
"Gyak! Gyak!" A slight coughing noise came from one of the corpses in the room.
Juniper slowly walked over to the body. The woman seemed to be fighting for her life with everything she had in her will to survive. Opposite of her body was the husband who had long ago stopped breathing. A faint look of disappointment swept across Juniper's face at the thought that the woman was still managing to hang onto her life after he had already wounded the woman to such a degree that most normal humans would have already long died.
THWAMP!
Juniper's sword impaled itself into the wooden floor beside the woman's face. Her eyes were shedding tears like waterfalls as he entire body began to tremble. He slowly knelt down next to the woman and tightly grasp her by the back of her head with her hair. Jerking her head up closer to his own while smiling with a hauntingly kind smile on his face he let out a delighted sigh.
"Well good morning to you there ma'ma bear." His voice was warm and yet every fiber of the situation did not match up with the warmth he was so easily displaying.
The woman let out a weak shriek as she tried to force herself free from his grasp. His hand was too tight on her short white hair as he violently yanked her back. As his grasp released her frail body tumbled onto the floor.
"You wouldn't happen to know where your daughter would have run off to would you?" Juniper slowly plucked his sword out of the floor and admired it in his hand while his mind puzzled over where the girl could have run off to. He did not really find the requirement in asking for the girl's location but he felt joy in toying with someone and loved the sense of fear he felt from someone before they died.
"N-No!" The woman cried out as tears streamed down her face. The only thing she was happy of in that moment was the fact that her son and daughter were not there in the clutches of such a crazed man. Her daughter had escaped but at the same time her husband had already given his life in order to protect them. In her heart she could only prey that her children would be okay in the end and yet the beast before her was still nonchalantly asking for her daughter as if he was simply requesting a favor.
"Well, It doesn't matter even if you don't tell me." Juniper slowly knelt down on one knee before the woman with a bright smile on his face. A red flame seemed to be enveloping around the man as his eyes gazed deep into her own. "All your struggling will be in vain at the end."
That night in a small neighborhood a loving home was erased from the city. For the average mortals among the city it was taken as an accident as the home burst into flames. There was no known survivors as two charred bodies were pulled from the building. The couple's children Duan Cai and Iris were only two known to have escaped death that night. It was a story that shook the local news the second it began to flood out from reporters. Nobody could find the missing daughter Iris for further questioning but when it came to Duan Cai nobody could even get close enough to him. It did not take long for the news to spread that Duan Cai was staying at Inferno Nexus mansion from that point on.
It was like the local vultures had found some gold and wanted to flood to it. Duan Cai's silence in the matter of his parents was something that every local reporter could only question. They had not seen or heard a thing about what Duan Cai planned to do going further with the situation. His parents had just burnt to death in a fire and his step sister, Iris, was missing. Was Duan Cai worried about her? Was he mourning his parents and simply not leaving the mansion he was somehow connected to? What was going on with him? And where was the missing sister?