Sitting at the low table by the sliding door which opened onto the veranda, I waited for Heihachi and Cho Kururugi to come back.
The whole evening slipped by and the whole night also, but neither of the two returned.
The sun was rising when the door to our room opened.
I jerked to my feet instantly and saw that it was Heihachi.
'Heihachi! Where were you? I was dead worried!'
The dark-haired boy looked upset.
'Yeah, I'm sorry for having spent the whole night outdoors,' he told me, scratching the back of his head, and averting his eyes. 'I'm off to sleep.'
He moved up to one of the three futons I had set on the floor and he lied down on his side onto it.
'But-' I began to say but he pulled the quilt over his head, cutting me dead.
I stood there for a minute, unsure about what to do.
Something was definitely troubling him, but what?
I was also growing increasingly worried about Cho, who hasn't come back yet.
There was no way that I could sit there idle and continue to wait for her return. What if something bad happened to her?
Can it be- Can it be that she has decided to accomplish the mission on her own?
I decided to go look for her around of the village.
I opened my mouth to inform Heihachi that I was going out to look for Cho but then, said nothing, knowing that he was in no mood to listen.
Making my way through the village, I asked all the people that I came across if they had seen the ginger-haired girl, but no one seemed to have noticed her.
As I came across of the local bar, I saw an old man brooming the front porch.
The bar was probably the only place that remained opened till late at night. I wondered if Cho had been there.
'Excuse me, sir!' I called at the old man, accosting him.
He paused to look at me.
'Wouldn't you have seen a girl of around my age with mid-length wavy ginger hair by chance?' I asked him, timidly. 'She was clothed in a short kimono and white leggings. She doesn't live around here and was probably asking questions about a well.'
'Yes, indeed!' he replied. 'She came to my bar last night and she asked me a few questions about the dried well of the orphanage.'
I almost sighed in relief.
'Would you mind recounting to me what you told her, please?'
After he had told me all about it, I concluded that Cho had gone to the orphanage to accomplish the mission on her own, just like I suspected.
'Alright. Thank you,' I said to the man and began to hurry away, heading for the orphanage, my stomach twisting with dread.
I hoped that nothing bad happened to the girl.
Being aware of all the atrocities that had happened in this place, the abandoned orphanage looked even more gloomy to me.
I began to make directly for the well at the back of the large building; on my guards.
It was utterly silent all around; even the surrounding forest was disturbingly calm.
As the well came into view, suddenly, my body became very heavy and I felt very sleepy.
I rubbed my eyes, trying hard to stay awake, but in vain.
My eyes closed on themselves and when they opened up again, I realized that I wasn't lying on the grass in the backyard of the orphanage, but I was in a cold, dark, confined place.
'You're finally awake!'
'Cho?!' I exclaimed in astonishment, sitting bolt upright and staring at her face in the dim light. Are we-
I stared up at the large bright hole high above head, becoming frantic.
'We're at the bottom of the well,' she confirmed my fright. 'And don't ask me how you ended up down here! I don't know. I sank into a slumber for a small while and when I woke up, you were here!'
My expression turned awkward as realization of what happened, fell upon me. 'I- I had a sleep attack,' I mumbled, ashamed of myself.
'Well, bravo!' she muttered, sarcastically.
I noticed the rope at our feet at that moment and lifting my eyes onto the girl, I realized with stupefaction that she was injured at her ankle and it was no petty wound; the bandage she had made around her ankle with a piece of cloth had become red with blood.
'You're wounded!' I gasped out in shock, automatically reaching out for her ankle to examine it.
She slapped my hands away before I could, snapping at me with venom, 'Don't touch me with your dirty hands!'
Feeling gut-punched, I lowered my eyes, putting my hands down in my lap.
I guessed that the rope must have snapped when she was descending down the well to recuperate Yukiryo's bones. The ginger-haired girl didn't seem to be bleeding anymore; it was the most important.
Getting to my feet then, I took out my phone to see if there was any signal.
'You won't find any signal here. I've already tried,' she grumbled, making a small sign at me with her cellphone.
I closed my cellphone, an uncomfortable silence settling between the two of us, until she asked, abruptly, 'How did you find me?'
'When I saw that the sun was rising and you still haven't returned, I became extremely worried-'
'Who do you take yourself for?' she interjected, bitterly. 'I forbid you to worry about me!'
She turned her face away, angrily.
After another long minute of silence, she demanded, irritatedly, 'Did you warn that guy- the animal man- where you're going?'
'No...'
'Great! We're gonna stay here and die of starvation! After all, it's what that yōkai wants!'
I didn't find myself at the bottom of the well on my own. I was convinced that somebody had brought me down here. And something told me that the rope Cho had used didn't snap on its own. It was definitely the work of the Kyōkotsu and its intention was obviously to have us die a slow painful death trapped where we were.
'Heihachi will notice our disappearances and he'll start to look for us,' I said to her, in a murmur, trying to reassure her.
When I left the ryokan, he had just gone to sleep. It won't be until several hours when he'd wake up that he'll notice that Cho and I are nowhere to be seen anymore. He might think that we're gone accomplishing our mission and might wait for us to come back. It may not be until tomorrow that he begins to search for us.
I sat down across of Cho against the rampart of the well, pulling my knees up against my chest and resting my chin over my arms.
Apart from waiting, there was nothing else that we could do.
I wonder if Heihachi paid any attention at all to what the mission is all about. He was so distracted…
Hours ticked by and the sun changed direction in the sky.
'You know, I was thinking about Yukiryo,' said Cho Kururugi, out of the blue, shattering the silence between us.
I looked up at her.
'You know the story, don't you?' she asked, giving me a glance.
I nodded in answer.
'Those children weren't her own, she didn't really know them, and yet, she defended them. She died while trying to protect them.'
She smiled with melancholy.
'You know, for my parents, all that has always mattered to them is money. We're not a good example of what a family should be like. My dad used to be a workaholic and inevitably, one day, he had a burn out. He started to drink heavily and very quickly, he lost his job. I was a child when this happened. He would spend his whole day in front of the television at home.'
Her expression filled with sorrow.
'My mom began to see another man at that time. The latter was an old wealthy man! My dad knew about it but he simply didn't care, as long as there was money entering the house.'
She frowned at the ground, her voice turning into a mumble, 'That guy with whom my mom was going out with... he was a big pervert! One day, when I was around ten, he tried to touch me… '
My eyes went wide at her, my throat tightening.
She trembled slightly at the memory. 'I was so scared. I told my mom about it. I thought that she would protect me and never see him again, but she simply made, as if, she didn't hear anything. When my dad learnt about it, he reacted in the same way.'
Her frown deepened.
'Whenever that man would visit us, I would hide under my bed. For years, I had to put up with it until he died of an illness when I was thirteen.'
She paused, her eyes empty.
'Every time my mom would talk about the kind of man that he was, she would say a lot of good things about him; she would praise his character. It hurt me a lot. One day, I couldn't take it anymore and I reproached her about not having protected me from the real pervert that he was! Do you know what she replied?'
She looked up at me.
'She told me that I was an ungrateful person; he gave us food and clothing, he sent me to school, I should be forever indebted towards him for that.'
She swallowed the lump in her throat, and I did the same.
'I was fifteen when I acquired my weapon,' she informed me, then. 'It is generated from its possessor's soul. This ability is passed down genetically within my mom's bloodline. It's shape differs depending on the owner. Mine, has the form of a hand-fan, which can grow up into a harisen, like you already know. Many choose not to develop this ability, like my mom. Playing the righter of wrong and running after monsters around the country, not for her!'
'If my parents accepted that I join the organization, it was only under the condition that I send them money every month. All that interests them is the money that I can bring them. When I became adult, I continued to send them money by duty. Today, this money, is the only thing that binds us.'
She fell silent, becoming melancholic again.
My heart was so heavy. 'It's so...'
'It's so stupid, right?' she snorted.
'No. It's really sad,' I whispered.
She stared at me for a minute before she turned her face away, muttering to herself, 'I must be going crazy! I don't see how else I would talk about such a thing with you!'
I knew that she wished she was trapped with anybody else in this world other than me and I couldn't blame her for it.
We both became quiet after that and I gazed up the mouth of the well.
The sky had taken a shade of orange by now. The day was about to come to an end.
'Are we- Are we going to die here, Shun Shutsuki?'
Her voice cracked and I stared at the ginger-haired girl, puzzled. She was scared; I could read it on her face.
'No,' I told her with conviction, as she began to cry. 'We're not going to die here.'
I jerked to my feet and groped at the rampart of the well to see if I could escalate it but it just didn't seem to be feasible.
'I need to try something before I grow weak. We also need to get your injury seen as quickly as possible for risks of infection.'
I had an idea abruptly.
My Godai Shakujō! What if I…
I activated it, putting my idea into action on the spot.
Mentally controlling the five shakujō, I caused them to plant themselves horizontally into the rampart of the well to form a sort of ladder. I tried to budge them with my hands to check if they were well impaled; they didn't move a centimeter.
'I think that it's going to hold.'
But since there were only five, I was going to need to mentally retrieve the shakujō at the base to plant them further up to continue to build the ladder gradually as we climbed.
That was the most delicate part. The whole idea rested onto my capacity to control each shakujō individually.
I checked this out immediately.
Concentrating myself properly, I visualized each shakujō separately from one of another. The faces of Sui, Hi, Chi, Fū and Kū flashed up in front of my eyes. I tried to move only the two shakujō at the base to plant them above the one at the summit.
It happened with success!
'Yatta!'
I owed this to Hatsu. Thanks to the spell he had used in Tsukiyama, I could finally view each of my shakujō separately from one another. After our trip to his home town, I had continued to practice all alone.
'What are you going to do?' Cho asked me and I turned to face her, giving her a comforting smile.
'Don't worry! I'm not going to leave you all alone here. We're getting out of here together.'
Turning my back onto her, I got down onto one of my knees in front of her.
'I'll carry you piggy-back!'
'Are you really serious?' she asked, astounded.
'Come on! Get on my back!'
She hesitated for a minute before she sent her arms around my neck and I picked her up. The girl made her weight.
'Alright! Hold on tight, okay? I'll have to use my hands to climb. If you let go of me, you'll fall!'
From the corner of my eyes, I saw her nod.
'Forgive me Chi, Kū, Hi, Sui and Fū. I'm going to have to step over you. I promise that it's the first and last time,' I said, apologetically and began to climb up the improvised the ladder I had made, carefully.
I knew that it was going to be all but a piece of cake. I had to maintain my Godai Shakujō activated and shift their positions time and again, not to forget that I had to support Cho's weight as well as my own.
I was also scared that the ginger-haired girl's muscles would grow tired and that she would let go of me.
We were half-way to the top when, out of the blue, I felt a sting of pain in my eyes for a second that caused me to shriek and one of my hands to slip. Fortunately, I caught myself instantly.
My heart was fluttering though, and I could hear Cho's breathing having hitched up.
'I'm sorry,' I apologized for the scare. I was probably abusing too much of my ability.
'Are you alright?' she asked.
'Yes. Yes, everything's alright. I'm going to make it.'
'I don't think that you should continue...' she trailed off, her tone concerned.
'It's okay. We're almost to the top.'
I continued to climb and at last, we reached the mouth of the well and stepped into the open.
I sank on all my fours on the grass, trying to catch my breath, my eyes tired and hurting me due to the exertion.
Out of the blue, the pain hit me very fiercely and shrieking out, I held my eyes with my hands. It lasted for a few seconds. And when I pulled my hands away to look down at my wet palms, I realized with horror that what I had believe to be tears flowing down my cheeks was, in fact, blood!
'Shun...'
Another more violent wave of pain crashed over me without any warning, and I slumped onto my side on the floor, holding my bleeding eyes, screaming.
'Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!' I heard Cho call at me, frantically. 'What's up with you?'
The pain didn't pass this time, overwhelming me, and it went on intensifying turning into pure agony until I couldn't hold it anymore and I blacked out.
Thank you for reading!