Chapter 26-
When dinner was done, Ansel collected their dishes and took them to the kitchen, where he placed them in a rudimentary sink. Feeling grateful, Sonsee offered to wash them herself.
“Don’t worry about it, ma’am, you’re guests,” he kindly declined.
Sonsee was somewhat taken aback, as she’d never been called “ma’am,” before, even by the schoolteacher who had taken her in. When she recovered from her surprise, she noticed something else peculiar.
“Where’s your water to wash the dishes?” she questioned him.
Wordlessly, he reached for a faucet above the sink and turned the handle. Cold water poured out, shocking her.
“What?” she asked in a frenzy. “Where did that come from??”
Janna noticed the commotion and looked over to see what the young woman was reacting to.
“Is that indoor plumbing??” she joined Sonsee in disbelief.
Ansel reacted to their amazement with a relatively mundane expression.
“Did you install that yourself?” Janna pressed. Sonsee found her enthusiasm to be endearing.
“I did, in fact,” he replied.
“You must be an incredible engineer to have done that yourself!” she praised him whilst he washed their bowls and spoons.
“Sometimes I am…” he smiled to himself.
“Huh?” Janna questioned. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing, really,” he answered. At about this time, he had finished cleaning the dishes and was drying his hands.
“Well, it should be about time to turn in,” he announced, walking over to the chest by his own bed. He opened it and produced several thick straw mats and blankets. Laying down the mats first, he covered each of them in a blanket for comfort, and then placed an additional blanket on top to be used as intended.
“You know,” Gallow began. “You really didn’t have to do this much for us.”
Ansel smiled at him.
“Of course I did, you’re my guests,” he assured him.
While the mats weren’t quite the same as a full bed, each of them had their own, and they were fairly comfortable to boot.
“It’s been a long day,” Sonsee stated. “We should get some rest.”
In agreeance, each of them flopped to their mats, and Ansel turned out the gas light on the counter, shrouding them in darkness.
As soon as they hit the floor, the four of them realized just how exhausted their bodies were, especially Sonsee, who had been through an intense battle just that day. Within ten minutes, a peaceful quiet had filled the air and sleep was imminent.
---
Dashing through the wilderness, leaping off of rocks and swinging off of branches, all with an incredible stealth, was Eroh Cidic. His netted clothing was tailored specifically to make the best use of his ability, but its breathability also meant that he could feel the exhilarating rush of the wind on his skin. His lithe, muscular form was trained for these kinds of tracking missions, and he was very adept at killing while he remained unseen.
“Let’s see,” he strategized. “If they’re in some kind of house- it’s probably a cabin of some kind- then it’s a closed space. This should be a cinch!”
He finally arrived at the true mouth of the valley and quickly found the tallest nearby tree, scaling it in seconds.
“Let’s see…” he thought, scouting out the area. “Sunset Valley… this place is a couple square miles, so it’ll take me a minute to find them…”
He looked to another tall pine tree and easily leapt the distance to continue his scan.
“If I wanted to build a shelter…” he spotted a river running through the land. “Perfect,” his black lips curled into a grin and he leapt away.
---
Gallow was roused from his sleep by a soft noise in the dark. At first he felt the urge to simply turn back over and return to unconsciousness, but he noticed something peculiar about the sound. In the first place, he’d spent a moment trying to figure out why he’d woken up at all, and his ears picked up the distinct rhythm of crying.
“Hm?” he groaned, opening his eyes. It didn’t do him much good in the dark, but it helped him orient himself enough to realize that the sound came from the mat to his right.
“Bleech?” he asked in a low, tired voice.
All at once, the noise was stifled.
“Bleech?” he repeated, sitting up. A moment of silence passed before he said anything more.
“I know you’re awake, do you want to talk about something?”
Slowly, the boy sat up without looking at him.
“I don’t want to wake anyone…” he whispered.
Gallow contemplated the right thing to do. A short time later, he quietly closed the door of the cabin and looked over to Bleech, who was leaning on the wooden railing of the front porch, staring at the ground.
“So…” Gallow began, turning to lean himself against the wall beside the door. “How are you doing?”
“I’m alright,” Bleech replied curtly, still refusing to make eye contact.
“Bleech,” Gallow responded knowingly. “If you’re crying, you aren’t alright.”
The boy didn’t say anything. Gallow could see that he wasn’t going to just open up.
“Do you think I haven’t cried before?” he added.
At this, Bleech raised his gaze to meet Gallow’s. They shared a silent moment of connection. He looked off into the wilderness before he said anything back, but it wasn’t like deliberate avoidance of before, he was earnestly collecting his thoughts.
“My dad used to work on the railroad, I didn’t see him much. One time when he came to visit- I think I was maybe eight or nine years old- I wanted to ask him something.”
Gallow listened intently to his story.
“I’d gotten into a fight with one of the older kids in town, I got roughed up real bad. He put his foot on my back and said:
‘You’re not a man!’
“I don’t know why, but that made me cry. I went home and my mom cleaned me up; when my dad came home from seeing some of the other men in town, she told him what happened. It was evening-time, and he took me out to the yard behind our house for us to eat together, just the two of us. I asked him, I said:
‘Dad, what’s the difference between a boy and a man?’
“And he took a second to chew his food, and he said:
‘A boy cries when he doesn’t know what to do, a man cries when there’s nothing else to be done.’
“Way back in the distance, he saw something move. He got up to get his shotgun and told me to get inside, it looked like a person. When he came back in, he told me there was no one there, and he must have just been seeing things. Later, I realized that was the first time I used Treachery.”
Gallow thought about the significance of this moment to Bleech.
“Gallow,” he looked back at the young man, his brow furrowed. “If a Vocation is our calling, why did I gain mine then? Why can’t I stop crying, Gallow?” His lip quivered as he asked his next question.
“Why did I use it to help that-” his breath gave out, it was too unbearable for him to think about. “Help that man- Warren Roseraid??”
Gallow looked him directly in the eye when he answered.
“I don’t have the answer, Bleech. If I’m being honest, I don’t even know the meaning of my own Vocation.” He raised his right hand and peered down at the Navigator sigil. “I couldn’t tell you if it’s something set in stone or decided by you.”
Bleech sighed and looked back down.
“What I can say,” he continued, prompting Bleech to snap his attention back up. “Is that I don’t think you’re a bad person.”
“Warren killed everyone I ever knew,” Bleech shot back, almost angrily. “And I helped him, because he manipulated me into thinking he was some kind of savior-type. Do you think that sounds like a good person?”
Gallow didn’t know if he should ask what was on his mind, but decided that he needed to know.
“Was your father in the town when they attacked?”
Bleech’s jaw quivered, his face reddened.
“Yeah,” his voice cracked as he looked away. He knew that if he tried to say any more, he would only break down; he focused all of his power on holding back his tears.
“I’m sorry…” Gallow felt a stinging guilt in his stomach. The last thing he wanted to do was make this boy cry, and there was still a feeling of blame for Warren’s crusade that needled the back of his head.
Bleech reached into the sack he kept by his waist at all times, loosening the string and reaching in. He pulled out a small silver locket without a chain and opened it up to reveal a paper moon.
“This is the only thing I have to hold on to of him…”
“Did he make that for you?” Gallow asked.
“Yeah.”
“Bleech…” the boy gazed back at Gallow. “Whenever you think things like that, like you’re a bad person, I want you to think of that paper moon. Even if you aren’t the person you want to be, you can always look back on that.”
…
……
“Thank you, Gallow.”
They shared a moment of silence under the moonlight. Crickets chirped steadily through the night, the breeze was calm.
…
Gallow coughed, as did Bleech. The gunman suddenly keeled over in a fit of coughing and grabbed his stomach.
“What the- what’s happening?”
From above, lurking in the branches, Eroh quietly enjoyed the sounds of their choking.
‘Little spider, weave your web,
What will you catch tonight?
Little spider, what was left?
None who tried to fight…’
“I need to close in,” he thought. “If they aren’t all affected together, those two might alert the others before my passive element can kill them…”
Gallow stepped towards the door in a panic. Behind him, something hit the ground, rustling the grass. He turned around to see the dark form of Eroh Cidic, whose grin was illuminated by the moon.
“Gallow!” Bleech choked out, also moving for the door.
Eroh reached toward them with one of his long, thin fingers.
“[LULLABY]!!” he called in a raspy voice. A thin stream of clear liquid shot out from the tip of his finger.
Gallow didn’t know what his enemy’s ability was, but he was fast enough to instinctively dodge the oncoming attack. Using Navigator, he quickly jumped away, grabbing Bleech and moving him out of the way as well. The stream hit the door a few feet from them, burning a hole through it in seconds. After the hole, about two inches in diameter, had been made, the liquid remained, dripping down from the top of the orifice.
“Sonsee!! Ansel!!” Gallow yelled in an attempt to wake them up.
“Pointless!” Eroh called again in the same raspy voice which seemed to shout and whisper at the same time. The assassin lunged at them, his arm outstretched, the back of his hand furthest forward.
“His hand!” Gallow realized. “He wants to touch us with it for a reason!”
With the last of his breath, Gallow used Navigator to leap over the rail of the porch and into the grass, still holding Bleech. He stood up and tried to focus on Eroh, but his vision was getting blurry from lack of oxygen.
“Gallow,” Bleech looked up at him with determination in his eyes.
“They’re finished!!” Eroh realized with glee, leaping atop the railing.
---
Eroh Cidic arrived into this world a healthy child. His mother, however, would die without warning only months later. The autopsy revealed that the cause of death was an infection in her birth canal which had gone unnoticed. The doctors assumed that this infection was simply the result of poor hygiene during her delivery, a perfectly reasonable conclusion at the time.
What they did not realize, however, what no one would realize, was that it was not an infection at all, it was a poison which was generated by the baby as it left the womb. All that this newborn had to remember his mother by was a song she sang to him in his crib. One evening, when the boy was older, he came back home singing this song to himself quietly, a bag in his hand. His father heard the melody and became alarmed.
“Where did you hear that?” he asked his son.
“Mother used to sing this to me, of course…” the boy replied, and returned to his room.
An hour later, the father was still unable to get this out of his mind. How could someone remember the words and melody to something they’d heard before they even knew how to speak? His son couldn’t have been older than four or five months when the man’s late wife had sung it to him.
Standing up from his armchair, the father walked through the dark house to his son’s room, where the glow of a lantern was visible beneath the crack of the door. He heard his son repeating the song to himself, quietly from within the room.
‘Little spider, weave your web,
What will you catch tonight?
Little spider, what was left?
None who tried to fight…’
Without knocking, he threw open his son’s door.
His jaw dropped.
What he found was the sight of the boy, hunched over on his bed, holding the decomposing corpse of a cat in his hands. The body was in various stages of decay, the places where bone was exposed gleamed white in the lamplight, bits of dead muscle and flesh were slowly sliding off; fur seemed to be sticking to the melting tissue. One of the eyes was missing, leaving only a dripping trail from the socket which was not yet dried.
The father was speechless, he had never before witnessed such a horrific, stomach-churning sight.
“Father…” the boy said. “You see my talent?”
A heavy mist appeared in the room, the father’s vision dimmed. He dropped to his knees before collapsing to the floor and losing consciousness.
This was Eroh Cidic’s Vocation: Lullaby. His soul was corrosive and vile; where a typical human body was composed of 70% water, his was only 10% water and 60% a mix of various toxins and acidic substances.
It’s unknown when Eroh realized that he was in possession of such an ability, or when he understood its true nature, but it is certain that this had a profound effect on his mental state. He was always told his mother’s cause of death, and likely knew that it was his doing. Still, he felt no guilt, and, in fact, embraced his Vocation as a gift. To be born with a heart that pumped poisons might traumatize most other people, but Eroh thought that it was a perfect match for him. He was ready and willing to accept that he was someone who would kill everything around him.
When he was discovered by The Tiger, he was a homeless vagrant by choice, living nomadically around the limbo-like flatlands in the North.
It was a day dominated by a gray overcast. The light was dim, despite being only about noon, and illuminated the whole world evenly. Eroh had been wandering about the interregional roads after deciding he’d gotten as far as he could with his body count in the previous town. Experimenting with his ability, he administered alcohol to a homeless man, then poisoned him with an extremely powerful, festering toxin and sent him shambling into a bar. According to plan, the man collapsed onto the floor and simply fell apart. By the time the patrons had the sense to leave, Eroh’s poison was already in the air and had entered their bloodstreams through their lungs. He counted at least twelve men rushing out of the bar and decided to skip town, confident in at least twelve more kills.
Now, looking for another opportunity, he walked for some time along the road. After some time, he saw a town off in the distance. A stream ran in the direction of the town, obviously a major water source. Grinning, Eroh knelt down by the water and held out his hand, slowly lowering it to the stream.
Before his fingers could touch the surface of the water, he heard a noise from behind him.
A boot hitting the ground.
He whipped around. This was his first meeting with The Tiger. He would learn later that he was being tracked for days prior to this, as The Tiger assessed his abilities. In just a few moments, however, he learned that his Vocation was nearly useless against this mysterious actor.
The Tiger brought him into the elite Fang Team and gave him not only a degree of security, but the opportunity to take on a real challenge in his kills. He had clothing specially made to allow his skin to breathe while he produced poisonous gases from his pores. It was discovered that one of the few substances he could not melt was galvanized steel, and these garments were likewise produced by weaving together the metal using experimental, state-of-the-art methods.
While he was distrusted by his comrades, he earned their respect and fear, and he shared the common adoration for their leader. Some may have considered it a new home, and while Eroh would never go that far, he graciously accepted the benefits that came with being part of a larger whole.
A sick man, a passionate man…
---
Eroh leapt from the railing, his arm reeled back, ready to swipe for the final blow. He soared through the air and closed in on his targets, Gallow and Bleech’s terrified expressions became defined as they grew swiftly closer. He brought his claw down directly onto Gallow’s face, piercing his flesh.
“Die, little gnat!!”
Suddenly, Gallow and Bleech disappeared, and Eroh fell through them to land hard on his knees.
“Wh-what?!”
The assassin brought his leg up so that his foot was planted on the ground. He turned around to see his targets behind him. Rapidly, his mind began racing, trying to figure out how they had pulled this off. Gallow’s Vocation was relatively known to him, but there was no intel regarding the boy’s ability.
“Gotcha!” Gallow sputtered. “[NAVIGATOR]!!”
His spirit body burst from his form with a jolt of energy, aimed directly at Eroh.
“Eh?” he thought, before abruptly feeling the strength of Navigator’s ethereal punch. The experience was unlike any he’d undergone before, he lacked any kind of spiritual sight and thus could not even make out what had struck him. His spirit was dislodged from his physical form, throwing him into a daze and knocking him around.
In his panic, he quickly produced more poison gas, waving his arms about wildly in a blind attempt to stir the air around. His whole body was numb, and all he could see were swirling stars.
“Great work, kid,” Gallow choked out, before collapsing.
“Gallow!” Bleech cried, before finding himself falling to the ground as well.
In a few moments time, Eroh’s soul was able to re-align with his body, and he took stock of the scene.
“Good, they’ll be dead in minutes,” he noted. “Now I just have to finish off the rest quickly enough to-”
“Hey,” a gruff voice cut him off. Eroh’s attention snapped to the direction of the interruption.
“I don’t like visitors in my valley, much less disgusting ones like yourself.”
In the doorway of the cabin stood Ansel, axe in hand. His other hand was held up, though it appeared empty, until, suddenly, a painting materialized in it from nothing.
Eroh’s eyes widened. For a moment, he was in awe of the power exuded by this man. His battle instinct returned, however, when he heard his next words.
“[OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES]”