"Hey, handsome~" the woman started the conversation the moment she was within two steps of distance away from Aza'zel, crossing her arms while striking a pose that highlighted her beautiful clothes.
Not all women had the qualifications to wear decent clothes around these streets, and she was one of the few with such privileges, it seems. Sadly for her, she was presenting her beauty to the wrong guy that day.
"How can I help you?" Aza'zel asked, after taking his sweet time determining that he was indeed the focus of her attention.
The woman didn't seem like she'd mind the wait, a chuckle followed by her cherry-red tongue dancing over the edge of her bottom lip.
"Oh… I haven't formally introduced myself yet, have I? How rude of me, haha…" Laughing to herself in the softest of her thousand tones, she halved the distance between them with a step, enough to reach over and feel the young boy's face.
"Surely you're quite familiar with some tall, robust, and rough yet silly big guy, right? Sigh, Last week I used to call him big brother… Older than me he might have been, but who would have thought his life wasn't that tough after all?"
As she laid out her burdens and thoughts in such a heart-rendering manner, she pulled the confused Aza'zel into her embrace while caressing his nape and back despite the raincoat in between.
"Are you talking about Bulldog?" Aza'zel asked, despite the discomfort he felt with his face at such close proximity to a woman's assets of flesh. If remembered correctly, this was one of the areas on which Rebecca had warned him, time over time, not to so casually touch or approach.
She immediately praised him. "Smart!"
Aza'zel didn't know why, but all of a sudden, his skin crawled with chills as his muscles twitched, his arms stretched and reflexively pushed the woman away by the waist while simultaneously retreating close to the wall.
The woman had a blank, innocent look on her face as she asked curiously, "What's wrong?"
Aza'zel looked up, but all he could perceive were indistinct silhouettes and some more, nothing more than so. "I don't know," he murmured, "I felt uncomfortable right now."
The woman blinked, slowly clenching her delicate fists as the cold, protruding edges near her wrists silently withdrew back into her sleeves. She smiled charmingly and rested her arms behind her back.
The woman's sharp intent, obscured in a veil of charm, receded somewhat. "Haha, interesting. Well, what value is there in the dead anyway? Right? Let's leave the matter of my brother aside, how about we discuss the money you owe me for the loaf of bread first?"
Aza'zel paused, quickly recalling what happened on that day.
"The food wasn't stolen," he empathized. "It was given to me, voluntarily."
She rolled her eyes. "It wasn't his food to give away as he pleases, to begin with… He stole from me, and you're an accomplice. Since he's already dead, I can only settle my accounts with you."
Aza'zel felt speechless. He had many arguments with Caidie back home, but each of them had a sense of reason in whichever rebuke, unlike this novel experience where he didn't know what to respond with.
He didn't know what to say or how to respond, and so he stood there, eyebrows locked behind the cloth.
"What do you want?" Aza'zel asked.
"Haha," she laughed, retrieving the cold, hidden weapons before skipping over to Aza'zel's side and holding his arm, quite intimately too. "Let's go back to one of my places and we can talk, I think I have just the job for you."
Her sudden movements were light, accurate, and had a hint of source energy to them which surprised Aza'zel. He hadn't expected that people could harness finite amounts of source energy despite the lack of source crystals, but he knew that this wasn't the time to question things.
Aza'zel nodded, replying, "If it's about paying for the food, we can talk about it."
His moral compass of right and wrong wasn't broken. He knew when to admit to doing wrong and when to stand on a moral high ground, and no matter what was there to be said, even if Bulldog did or did not steal the wagon, the man was already dead.
Under the circumstantial impasse, Aza'zel decided he might as well pay off this debt.
"What's your name, by the way?" she asked. "I go by the name Wendy, but most people call me Sunflower."
As she spoke, she batted her eyelashes at Aza'zel's side profile, all the while she struggled inwardly to peel back the hood and get a good, close look at his face.
"You can call me Aza," he responded, and after a momentary stiffness from the sudden physical intimacy, he swiftly untangled himself from her vice grip and stood by the side.
"Where do we go now?" Aza'zel asked.
An immature yet cold voice intervened from the side, "You go with me, obviously."
Wendy's eyes flashed with a sharp glint, and her demeanor immediately changed as the woman poised to melt into Aza'zel with affection suddenly turned glacier cold, an austere determination guided her right hand forward.
A palm crowned with the coldest of lights shot swiftly toward Aza'zel's nape the moment the latter turned his head in Saxon's direction. The former sensation of having each cell on his skin quake in terror jolted Aza'zel, a sudden impulse from the depths of his heart urged him to take two steps forward as a step backward would spell certain demise.
"Bullying children again, Wendy?!"
Saxon practically screamed her name, a twister of violent source energy swirled around his figure as his left foot descended on the ground with a thud, his right swinging an arc that smashed away a fist-sized pebble. Air curved around the pebble as it stung with unprecedented accuracy within a range of Wendy's palm.
Clicking her tongue, Wendy retreated, and the pebble severed a chasm between Aza'zel and the woman as it curved and crashed into a wall nearby, directly exploding into bits of dusty powder upon collision.
A split second later, Aza'zel's hood was shredded to pieces, releasing a mass of coiled black hair that whipped in the wind, also revealing his immature face that was flushed red and white at the moment, with a small mouth hanging wide open.
In his stupor, Saxon hurriedly took a step forward and pulled the dazed youth to his side with an unprecedented coldness looming on his countenance. The shock had yet to recede from Wendy's eyes as she took in Saxon's figure, though this was all she could do to downplay the horror in her heart.
"You've hidden yourself too deeply, Sax!" Wendy exclaimed, reviewing the attack from earlier. That was something only the Rakshas could do, at least as far as the people of this forsaken corner of the realm were concerned.
"I guess the rumors are true, you're gunning for a Raksha seat, aren't you?"
Even though she asked this question, she didn't wait for an answer. Instead, she swiftly dove into the crowd of passersby and disappeared, only a silver chuckle lingering behind.
"Fuck!"
Saxon cursed, running his hand through his crimson spiked locks of hair, the healthy eye of his riddled with a spectrum of emotions, most prevalent of them all was an inhumane, ruthless resolve.
"What was that just now?"
Aza'zel finally snapped out from his daze and the imminent brush with death, realizing that the conflict between Rakshas wasn't something as simple as pitiful outlaws playing territorial war.