Echoes wandered the town.
The clothes he'd procured a week before were now mere rags, and the police had nearly arrested him as a suspicious character, when all he'd really done was just walk down the street.
He'd been saved by some mysterious boy in a black hat, and managed to escape without hurting a soul.
On the way here from the mountains, he had already been forced to seriously injure six people.
He knew the Manticore was near.
But human towns were built too close together, and the people living in them all seemed to congregate together. He had no idea how to find Manticore here.
As the sky grew darker, he found himself in a back alley, and once more, he collapsed on the ground. This time, there were no people around. The alley smelled of rancid water.
"..."
He looked up at the evening sky, but he couldn't see the stars here. In the mountains, he had been able to see them even in broad daylight.
But he couldn't cry any longer. The boy in the black had told him, "You're chasing something. Cry when you have found it."
This was true.
He could not rest here.
He had to stop the Manticore's slaughter. The Manticore was made from him. It was his child.
She had the power of communication that even he lacked, not to mention the powers that let him blend in with this planet's ecological system. This "transformation power" in particular, could do untold damage to the environmental balance of this planet's primarily human civilization and prevent him from carrying out his main objective.
His objective - he had to fulfill it. That was why he had been created. But the Manticore's existence was a hindrance to his objective, to his decision.
He had to make a decision, one way or the other.
That decision had to be rigorously balanced. Like him, the Manticore was alien to this planet and should not exist here.
I had to dispose of her.
"..."
He staggered to his feet.
There was a scream. A young women had come into the alley and caught a sight of him.
He waved his hands trying to show that he meant no harm.
But he didn't need to.
"What are you doing here?" the woman asked, coming towards him.
It had not been a scream of terror, but simply surprise.
"Oh no, you're hurt! How did this happen?"
On a closer inspection, the woman was still a girl.
Without any reluctance, she wiped the blood from the wound on his head with an expensive-looking designer handkerchief.
The wound itself had long since healed, and he felt no pain from it, but the blood was still there, dried to his skin.
"H-hurt..." he said, trying to explain that it did not need tending. But there were only a few words in his speech for him to talk and he could not produce a phase with meaning.
"What should I do? Call the police?"
"P-police..." was all he could say.
But somehow, the girl understood what he meant from this.
"No police, huh? Okay. Where's your house? Nearby?"
He picked some words from her speech, forcing a sentence.
"No-hou-house."
When he spoke to people, he could only return words they had spoken, so as to not provide them with information beyond the limits of their understanding.
"Homeless? Looks like you're in some kind of trouble."
He nodded.
He waved his hands, telling her to back away from him.
She patted him gently on the shoulder. Body language for "calm down."
"No way, José. I leave you here and I won't be able to sleep at night," she said.
Somehow, she seemed to understand what he wanted to say, even though he could not speak directly.
"Hmm, let me see... For the moment, let's put you in school. There's a card reader at the gate to get in, but I think I know a way back in."
"Sch-school?"
"Yeah, I live in an apartment building, but there are prying eyes everywhere. See? You aren't the only one with problems," she said jokingly, and grabbed his arm, pulling him forcibly to his feet. Then she dragged him after her.
He didn't know what else to do, so he followed her.
'Who was she?' he thought, and almost instantly she answered, 'Me? My name's Kamikishiro. Kamikishiro Naoko. I'm a senior at Shinyo Academy. You?"
"Ah... Ooooh..." he couldn't answer. He was not allowed to provide humans with information about himself.
"You can't talk?"
"Can't... Ta-talk."
"You're talking now. Hmm... They call you Echoes? Strange name. Almost like it was made for me to call you by."
Kamikishiro giggled. She had not yet noticed that she was understanding things that he had not said.
She smiled at him. "Don't worry. I know this kooky girl named Nagi. Anytime there's trouble, we talk to her and she usually takes care of it. Assuming you aren't a bad guy, Echoes," she finished with a wink.
She pulled out a cell phone, thumb flying over the keys, dialing this Nagi person's contact number with a practiced motion.