When I got to my apartment, Mizuki was still sound asleep on the bed. Weirdest of all, she was sleeping soundly in her leather jacket riddled with outward spikes, and those ripped jeans that struggled to contain her thighs in those torn gaps. Despite those questions, I was feeling too full to care at the moment. Thus throwing myself beside her on the mattress, I let myself be drifted off to sleep as well.
For a spell, I felt as if I was being pulled into a dream, however, as that moment passed I found myself wasted on the mattress with rhythmic knocks on the door to our apartment. Unsure who it was, I turned to Mizuki who was already sitting upright. From the look of things, it seemed I'd fallen asleep for the briefest moment and pulled back out.
"Oi, someone's at the door," she warned, her eyes locked at the entrance.
"I'm not blind…" Still feeling a bit dreamy, I pulled myself up before correcting the sentence. "I meant deaf."
"Yeah yeah, who cares? Just check who it is," She retorted, getting off the mattress herself.
"And keep your guard up, I don't wanna go hunting for another master just yet," she added, although I had no clue why she used the term 'master' instead of the more apt word, 'prisoner'.
Walking over to the door, I clutched the doorknob with my fingers and slowly cracked open the door. The moment I tried to peer out, my hand began to burn as if it were in a furnace. In utter agony, I let it go and instinctively stepped away from the door.
"Aghhh! Fuck!" Grabbing my wrist with the other hand, I looked at my burning fingers with the doorknob's melted iron sinking into its flesh. Jerking my hand around vigorously, I managed to get the molten melted off of my fingers, but that didn't help with the excruciating pain.
"I told you!" Mizuki exclaimed as she zapped behind me through flight.
Turning to the sound of the creaky door opening, I noticed a familiar face standing in front. It was the very girl who'd been stalking us from across the crossing before I ran into Akane and ended up in the hospital. Seeing her walk in was worrying on its own, but what shocked me, even more, was the suited phantom of charcoal skin following right behind her.
Like veins in the body, he had flames visibly coursing through his skin. His stone eyes the color of ruby flared up as he glared at me, and in that dark suit lined with red around the edges, he looked like a nightmare in the package of a wet dream.
"Ifrit…" Glancing back over her shoulder, the tomboyish girl called out to her phantom. "Help me here."
The moment she said those words, the phantom's eyes began to glow even brighter, and as the girl turned her head back to me, I noticed her eyes were giving off a similar skin-burning flare.
"Ready to die?" She asked, smirking.
"What the fuck do you want from me?!" I grunted, still trying to recover from the pain my burned hand was putting me through.
"Your life," she said, moving closer to me.
"Mizuki!" Turning to my back, I tried to get her help. "Do something!"
Shying away from my eyes, she looked away as if she was helpless in the situation.
"I can't, it's up to you to save yourself," shifting her gaze to the phantom named Ifrit she added more. "Just be thankful he's in the same boat as me. Had it been him you were facing you'd be ash by now."
"Damn you, you bitch!" With teeth gritted shut, I was fuming with rage and yet I had no clue as to what my next move should be. Turning back to the girl, I took deep breaths to calm myself before trying to talk to her. "Wait, there must be something I can-"
Like the wind, she moved so fast in my direction my eyes couldn't catch it. Even as her burning fingers wrapped around my neck, my mind struggled to catch up with what was happening.
"Oh, there is something you can do for me…" Smiling at me with her face inches from me and her hands boiling the blood in my veins, she let out a chuckle as if it were a joke. "Die!"
Following her words, my whole body burst into flames. The pure agony raining on me shut my mind in an instant. The last thing I felt were the delectable smell of roasting flesh, and the burning of hair until every bit of it disappeared. Flopping lifeless to the ground, I was truly done…Or at least that's what I thought.
"Damn it, a failure after all," Mizuki muttered to herself.
"Time you return to the netherworld sister," warned the raspy voice of Ifrit.
"Shut the fuck up charcoal!" Mizuki shot back.
As the sound of Mizuki's steps going past my body echoed in my ears, I felt myself regaining control once again.
"Too bad he didn't put up a fight," squatting right by my head, the tomboy grabbed my smoldering head and pulled it up to look at me in the face. "I was hoping my first hunt would be more…exciting? Ehhh, I guess I was hoping for too much."
Looking right into my eyes, the girl had a wicked smile riding on her lips. It reminded me of something, something I'd tried my darndest to forget. Those memories of my mother smashing my head with beer bottles, those memories of my father beating me to a pulp because he was angry at my mother…I'd buried it all up under a false pretense to preserve my sanity. After all, how could I have lived with those memories when my family couldn't care less if I died or lived after those beatings?
"No more…" I spoke, vowing to myself to never let another person who hits me go unpunished.
"What the fuck?!" The sudden words uttered by a dead man had the girl let go of my face and stumbled down on her butt.
Rising to my feet with my skin still shriveling up from the flames, I leaped for the girl's throat while she tried to crawl away from me on the floor.
"Ifrit!" She called.
"What kind of monster did you luck out on, sister?" Instead of responding to his master's call, Ifrit turned to Mizuki with his eyes widened in shock.
"Fuck you!" Screaming at the top of my lungs, I squeezed her throat as hard as I could.
The sound of her thrashing feet and her screams for help sounded like a sweet melody, especially when the crumbling of her throat chimed into the cacophony. Desperately reaching for my face, she engulfed my body in flames once again, but at this point, I couldn't care less for how crippled I would be so long as I got to watch the lights in the bitch's eye go out in front of me.
"Akira stop!" Mizuki demanded, but why the hell would I listen?