"Come here, you demon!" Screamed a chubby boy, sweat dripping from his face as he ran down a dirt path between two of the school buildings.
I turned around and saw that Kenji was starting to slow down, and when I looked forwards again I saw that I had almost made it to the main school building.
However, although Kenji had started lagging behind, his two goons that followed him everywhere were unfortunately in much better shape.
They quickly overtook Kenji, and in just a few more seconds they were upon me.
"Got you, Yoikai!" shouted one of them.
I felt the collar of my school uniform snag as he roughly pulled me backwards. The other boy was twice my size, and two years my senior. He threw me to the ground like I was a coin he was tossing into a fountain.
I flew a few feet to the side and smashed my head onto a rock next to the path. My vision swam and I cried out in pain when I rolled over.
Kenji had walked up to me now, and his two goons had dragged me up from the ground to face him.
"My grandma told me that you were a devil. She says that anyone that looks like you is dangerous!" he explained, still huffing heavily from the short run.
"He definitely runs like a devil." Snickered the boy who had thrown me.
"We're doing the community a service by putting you in your place." added the other boy.
The boys all shared a little laugh at that.
I tried to look Kenji in the eyes, but my left eye stung with blood from a cut in my forehead. All I could think of at this moment was my utter hatred for him.
Suddenly, Kenji struck me in the gut with a pudgy fist. I felt all of the air rapidly leave my lungs as I collapsed into a heap on the ground, gasping for breath.
***
I opened my eyes to the blinding light of the morning sun. Wincing, I turned over to the side in a futile attempt to stave off the brightness.
'I really need to get some blackout curtains.' I thought to myself, cursing the light that ended my blissful sleep.
I tried to sleep for another few minutes, but eventually decided it was pointless as I groaned and sat up. Looking around my new room, I saw the same unopened boxes with various labels scattered around in the same places they were yesterday.
The room was a modest size, with my bed taking up a third of the space without even having the rest of my furniture unloaded.
Having recently moved from the greater Tokyo prefecture to the much smaller town of Takayama in the Gifu prefecture, I had yet to fully unpack my boxes.
To be completely honest, I had barely done much of anything yet.
I of course managed to put up my several posters of American supermodels, as that took priority over anything else I owned. Waking up to the sight of several busty women in bikinis tended to make your morning better.
"Kane! Get down here to eat!" shouted my father, apparently from the kitchen judging by the sound.
'He couldn't even bother to come to my door.' I chuckled to myself ruefully.
I stood up from the bed and stretched out my limbs, yawning as I took a look in the small mirror on the wall.
I was only 16, but in this past year alone I had grown at least 10 centimeters (4 inches). I now stood at an impressive 185 cm (6'1"), almost as tall as my father. After years of martial arts training, my muscles were honed to a state far beyond what you'd expect from the average teenager.
My hair was white and curly, reaching down to just below my ears. My strange hair started whitening when I was just a boy, and has been the source of endless harassment my entire life.
When I was younger I used to be embarrassed by my hair, but I had eventually grown to accept it. After all, I had never seen anyone else with pure white hair. Didn't that make me special or something?
I also leaned into the mirror a little closer once I started to see the tell-tale signs of a pimple forming on my pale skin.
"Damn." I muttered, deciding to take a shower after I finished unpacking my clothes.
Truthfully, I was also dreading the visits from our neighbors, who would undoubtedly be investigating the new family who had just moved into their small town.
Takayama was several times smaller than Tokyo, and I've heard stories that the older folk here tend to be.. close minded to say the least.
Although I appeared foreign, I was actually born and raised in Japan. My parents moved to the Kanto region because of a job opportunity my father had. Eventually, he was promoted to a higher position at his company and was moved to Tokyo.
To put it frankly, since the recent economy has been falling straight to hell, he had gotten laid off.
'My pops spent 18 years at that company just to be thrown away like some trash.' I thought to myself, clenching my teeth bitterly.
My father never fully explained what he did for work, and whenever I asked he just explained that there was too much yellow tape for him to go into details. I just knew that he was the assistant to some powerful bigshot, and that it paid the bills.
Well it used to, I guess.
I knew that there was nothing I could do about it though, and that I was now forced to live in some backwater prefecture with no opportunities.
There was no way I was going to get some fancy university invitation to get out of here either, since my grades were utter garbage.
The only thing that I prided myself in was my physical ability.
Don't get me wrong though, because I was by no means slow or stupid. I just honestly hated the entire dynamic of school.
If I put my mind to it, I knew that I could become a straight-A honor student, but I would much rather spend my time after school in a kickboxing gym.
I had already made my bed, I would just have to lay in it now. Most of the classmates I had gone to school with were already enrolled in prodigious universities, leaving me as the only one not accepted into a single university.
It's not my fault that whenever I studied I could feel my life expectancy dropping.
The thing I'll miss the most from Tokyo, besides the girls, were all of the martial arts gyms. From what I could tell Takayama had nothing in terms of gyms, to say the least about kickboxing or MMA, I didn't even know if the town had a single regular gym.
I sighed, resolving myself to just start my morning workout routine after I had eaten.
I opened my door and went down the hallway to the kitchen.
I found my father and my mother sitting at the dining room table. I saw that my mom had made Tamagoyaki, one of my favorites.
Yawning, I took a seat at my side of the table, grabbing my chopsticks and promptly digging into my food.
For some reason the food tasted even better than it usually did. As I ate the food I could feel my sore body almost rejuvenate, who knew cheesy eggs could taste so good.
They always say that a mother's cooking was the best thing in the world, but I could have sworn it wasn't normally this delicious.
My mother watched me eagerly, she always loved to watch me eat her food. She was Japanese through-and-through, and I had always wondered what my dad had done to end up with such a beautiful woman.
Looking across the table, I saw that my father was seemingly lost in thought, not touching his food at all.
He was much darker skinned than me with a broader build, but he was only a few centimeters or so taller than me now. That didn't mean I would fool myself into thinking that I could beat him in a fight though.
Although my father looked rather serious, he was actually a really good guy. He was also the main reason I had gotten into martial arts.
When I was younger I used to get beat up all the time, and when my overworked father noticed he had immediately started teaching me how to fight.
He used to say, 'Never run away. If you're going to get the sh*t kicked out of you anyways, you might as well go down swinging.'
I was halfway finished with my plate when I heard my father's deep voice from across the table.
"So it's about time I tell you both about why we're really here." he said.
This confused me, "Didn't you get fired from your job?" I asked bluntly.
My father clicked his tongue in annoyance, "I didn't get 'fired', well, in a way I did. But that's besides the point."
He continued, "Do you remember my boss?"
"You mean Mr. Tanaka?" asked my mother.
My father nodded, "Me and that bastard had come to differences, and I decided to leave the company."
My mom frowned, "How come you said you got laid off then?"
I heard my father sigh, "Truthfully, I haven't been telling you the truth about my job at all. Now that we're in the clear, I think I should fill both of you in now."
I had absolutely no clue what my father was going on about, but I said nothing. This was too interesting to interrupt with any jokes.
"I told you that I worked for an accounting firm, but my company actually specialized in the procurement and containment of different artifacts and supernatural items."
Now I couldn't help myself, "What the hell does that mean? Is stuff like that even real?"
My mother cleared her throat, "Kane! Watch your mouth!"
Father shot me a dirty look as well, but I was far too invested in this conversation to care.
I saw my mother turn to my father in consternation, "Explain this better to us, dear. I don't understand what you're saying."
My father sighed, "I don't even know where to start. If you weren't aware, an average of 219 people disappear in Japan alone each day. This is not even taking into account the rest of the world."
"The news would suggest that the majority of these are from suicide, or even gang abductions, but the truth is far more sinister. Many people stumble upon things they are not supposed to, and others are forcibly drawn into it."
At this point I didn't know if my father had gone crazy or not, but he wasn't the type of man to joke about such things. Why would he tell us all of this if it wasn't true?
Father continued, "The gist of it is that my organization operated under strict rules of secrecy. They even have precedence over the government in some places."
"The reason I didn't tell you the truth of what I really did was because I figured even our home wouldn't be safe from surveillance. Especially at the clearance level that I was at." he finished.
I sucked in a deep breath, I had no idea that my dad had such a cool job. I was still a bit skeptical though, and he was clearly leaving out a lot of important details. However, this didn't sound like something you could even make up.
At this point I was unable to resist asking, "So, what led to you falling out with your boss?"
Father looked at the two of us grimly, "In recent years, my 'company' discovered an underground vault filled with some type of miraculous liquid. The higher ups were calling it the 'Fountain of Life', or youth, or something like that."
"This liquid was able to do wonders, it could bring the near-dead back to life, prevent aging, you get the gist. Before we knew it the organization was selling this liquid for hundreds of millions of dollars a dose."
Mother seemed to realize something, "Was this when you had gotten that promotion a few years ago?"
My father nodded, "That's right. With that increased level of power and influence the organization began to take a bigger stage in the world. As the organization grew, they gave me increasingly more dangerous and frankly ridiculous missions. Eventually, my boss assigned me a task that went against my moral compass."
I wondered what the task was, and as I wasn't one to mince words I said the first thing that came to my mind.
"Did he ask you to kill someone?" I asked with wide eyes.
A dark look passed over my father's eyes, "Something even worse."
"Either way, I told that a*shole to stuff it and handed him my resignation the next day."
Now things were starting to make more sense, but I still had many questions.
My mother asked one of them for me, "Why are we out in the middle of nowhere, though? Couldn't you still find work in one of the neighboring prefectures?"
Father chuckled bitterly, "My boss wasn't the type of man to leave any loose ends. I know far too much for the organization to just let me leave. I figured I bought some time by getting as far away as I could, and I pulled some strings to hide our trail."
I could see that my father looked sad, it was as if he had already resigned himself to the inevitable.
"All these measures only bought us temporary peace. It's only a matter of time before the organization finds us." he eventually said after a long moment of silence.
My mother said nothing, she was pale and seemed to have been struck speechless.
'Oh great, looks like I won't even make it to seventeen. I'm going to get killed because my dad had a job too cool for his own good.' I laughed inwardly to myself in bitter sarcasm.
Suddenly, my father bent down below the table and retrieved a large black case.
'Where was he even hiding that thing?' I wondered.
The case was metallic in appearance, and it was closed off by several latches alongside the edges.
"Luckily, I was able to snag myself a souvenir." said my father nonchalantly.