Axle was relieved. All he had to do was tell her that he didn’t want to continue, and she would let him go. Eien was less relieved. He was still in the running for the beating; it seemed to be an inevitable fact. At least he could get out of it if he wanted to. And he wanted to. What was the point of getting your ass handed to you every day? He was also annoyed that he owed Inchi a favor and hoped it wasn’t too terrible.

Sure enough, after Axle came back, beaten bloody from his sparring match, he told Eien that she didn’t ask him to come back.

“She just stared at me. For the longest time, Sho. Like she knew I was gonna say that. Then she just walked away.” Axle still had a broken arm after the encounter. The infirmary was good about fixing things, but he was advised to avoid putting it to strenuous use for at least a day.

“It seems it won’t stop until she finds someone like Inchi, but more pain resistant,” Eien said, looking out at the other guys in the bunk house.

“No kidding, I remember now, we didn’t see him for a while after his last bout.”

“Should I get out of it as soon as I can?”

“You think if we all start doing that, she is gonna catch on?” They were silent for a moment.

“I’m fodder anyway,” replied Eien, “As long as you’re around, I don’t have to worry.”

—

“I don’t want to do this anymore.” Aino tossed some more of the man into the toilet, flushing it down. She glanced at him through the open door but did not stop what she was doing.

“I just wanted to protect my sister. I did everything for her. She’s gone. My family is gone.” Aino picked up a weird piece of bread with her free fingers, taking a loud bite.

“And now, my home is gone. And I’m stuck here with you.” Aino flushed down the last of the man. She was keeping his eyeballs in a sour-smelling jar she emptied from the fridge. The rest of him was officially gone apart from the smell and the bodily fluids soaked into the floor.

“I don’t want to kill people, Ai. I never wanted that.” Aino washed her hands, drying them on her pants.

“I don’t know what you were training me for, but surely…it can’t be you mean to make an enemy of everyone?” Aino started pressing buttons on the weird machine with a screen at the back of the room.

“Can you just…just stop moving around for a moment and listen to me?” Aino turned her eyes towards him, tilting her head a bit, her face flat and eyes cold.

Eien was too tired to feel anything other than numbness, but a flame of irritation caught in his mouth.

“You always just do what you want. You never asked me if I wanted to go with you, to leave Beldam. You drag me out here, promise me freedom, and I find myself here, stuck, with you, in this shitty apartment with a stinking dead man on the run from whoever runs this shitty hole of a city.”

He sighed, resting his head in his hands again.

“You know, I still haven’t processed everything yet. I haven’t had time between the fighting, running, and watching,” he continued, “I’m wondering what your end game is. What is the point? Where are we going? We got to the edge of the map, found a similarly shitty place, and now you’re mucking around in a dead man’s apartment after s-slaughtering the one lady who seemed like she could help us.”

He caught a strong whiff of blood.

Aino was right in front of him, crouching, staring.

He gritted his teeth and continued, “Look, I trust you. You’ve saved my life before, but I can’t keep trusting you if you don’t tell me things.” Aino stared at him. He stared back at her, right into her fucking yellow eyes.

There was a moment of silence, broken by a sputtering of the toilet finishing filling back up.

“Okay,” she replied, grabbing his arm. He pulled away from her, but she peeled back the flap of skin on his wrist and connected his pith with her own.

“W-wait!” Eien said, but his mind disconnected from his body, and he was sent elsewhere.

—

Where?

What?

Was he still in the apartment? Why was everything black? What did that bitch do?

Panic set in, and he started trying to move, to scream, to grab, anything to feel his own body again.

“Stop moving, you’re making this difficult.” Who was that? Eien felt himself turn around, his eyes focusing on something white amongst the black nothingness he found himself in.

“But it hurts!” Another young, female voice.

“I told you it would, but it’s better we do this. It’s pretty much your only chance.” The first female voice.

“I don’t want to do this.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

The whiteness turned away, and something red caught his eye. He felt himself helplessly drawn to it.

“How many are there?” A man’s voice.

“There are five. We can send one to each city. It will balance out the load.” A woman’s voice.

“Isn’t that unfair? They aren’t all the same.”

“No, but they all are the strongest of each lot.”

“Cities in sector A to E will definitely be at a disadvantage, especially compared to the ones in sector P to T.”

“I don’t know about that. Fire might be pretty destructive, but air can be tricky,” she replied.

“Even among the tests between them, she was always the weakest.”

“You haven’t seen her full potential yet.”

“Maybe, but I have to look at what we have now, not what we will have later.”

“Fine. If you want, I’ll put in military protocol five in that sector only. Just so you feel better about the odds.”

“That will work,” the man said.

Eien was pulled away again. A blue light. But this light had a picture with it.

There was a young Aino, somewhere around eight years old? Seven years old? Her white hair was neatly done in a braid and dressed in a white hospital gown. The blue light expanded, stretching out a picture to include other similar looking girls in white hospital gowns. Their body structures were all the same, but their hair and eye color were different.

Aino was first, then a girl with blue hair and purple eyes, a girl with gray hair and green eyes, a girl with orange hair and red eyes, and finally a girl with green hair and pink eyes. The picture stopped, allowing Eien time to focus on each one, and each of their expressions. Aino looked dead like always, but the other girls had faces ranging from fear to anger. Who…so…

It clicked for him. Of course there were others besides Aino. And, of course, there were other cities besides Beldam. Of course, there was more out in the world than he knew.

Of course, she was going to look for the others.