"No!" the youngest kids screamed as a log in the fireplace snapped, and they hugged each other with tears in their eyes. Amy sniffed, her fangs chewing the cover she brought closer to her face as if she had been eating her cookies. Munching eased her mind when she got scared or nervous.

The oldest siblings looked at each other with stiffened expressions and gulped. Their grandpa's storytelling abilities surpassed their wildest imagination, filling their minds with images from nightmares.

A short silence spread in the room, and nobody moved. Only shadows danced across the walls. Grandpa Kairo scratched his chin. "Well, well, I guess I overdid it a bit."

"A bit can't describe it even in thousands of years." Grandma Marai shot him a reproving glance. "Couldn't you skip the details?" She crossed her arms, arching her eyebrow. Her fingers dug into her arm. Even though it had all happened many years ago, a light shiver raced down her spine.

"And miss the best part?" His chest shook with his laughter, but he soon coughed as Marai nudged him, her sharp elbow digging between his ribs. "Okay, okay!" He held his aching side, putting his free hand in front of himself in a gesture of surrender. "I'll be more careful next time."

The cat woman narrowed her eyes. "You should be. Your dinner depends on it." An impish spark jumped across her eyes.

"That's a low blow," the old man mumbled.

The oldest, Miles, shivered, rubbing his arms. "How did you escape it?"

Maria shook as a cold shiver tap-danced across her back, and she pulled her cover tighter over her back. The cold never bothered her, but this freezing touch gave her shivers.

"That was tricky. You see..."

The children stopped shivering, pointing their ears toward their grandpa.

¯\_(^_^)_/¯

The bounty hunter gasped for air.

"He's alive!" Arubi shouted.

Kairo grabbed his chest, rolling to the side, assuming a fetal pose.

"I told you the first aid would help," Marai added.

Sweat filled Kairo's eyes, and the heat subdued with each breath he took. The breeze touched his body, and once his breathing had calmed down, his gaze wandered around.

The cavern was gone, replaced by fine sand that tickled his skin, and the sun filled his body with warmth. The boy stared in front of himself, noticing the presence of two people on the edge of his consciousness.

'Was it just a dream?' He moved up, jerking as pangs stabbed his chest.

"Are you alright, my Donut?" Marai asked, kneeling next to him.

Kairo's skin crawled under her sweet voice. He glanced at her, her eyes full of concern wavered. He let out a deep sigh, standing up with his hand over his chest. "What happened?"

"You don't know?" Arubi took a puff off his kiseru.

"Let's just say it's a bit hazy in my head right now." The bounty hunter combed his hair with his hand, making it messier, and a cloud of dust puffing up under his fingers.

"We got out of the worst and met some bandits." The rabbit hid his pipe in the bag over his body, checking the laying bodies. "They were small fries, so no problem, but they captured Marai."

Kairo's eyes narrowed as the flashes of that moment appeared in his mind. The Konketsu's piercing scream echoed in his ears. He stuck his pinkie inside, trying to silence the echo.

Arubi continued, "She gave you a big hug for saving her." A smirk played across the rabbit's face. "A nice, fluffy, bear hug." He tilted his head.

"I... I was so scared and excited," the cat girl mumbled, but Kairo didn't pay her any attention.

Kairo stretched his back with a snap. "No wonder my body is killing me." Something touched him inside of his kimono. 'What's this—' His hand grabbed it, and the cold surface sent shivers down his spine. His body lurched forward, and he paced down the sandy road without waiting for his companions.

"Hey, wait up!" Arubi leaped on Kairo's head. "What's the hurry?"

Kairo didn't hear the question, nor did he listen to Marai's chirping. 'It was real!' He squeezed the crystal in his kimono. 'That Freakazoid!'

¯\_(^_^)_/¯

"Where..." Aum looked around. "Where In The World Is That Twerp?" His roar filled the cavern. He bolted, circling around the columns, searching for his prey. He twisted around columns, crawled through openings, he double-checked under his body, he even opened his mailbox, listing through the spam folder.

With each passing minute, he thrashed across the cavern, cutting the stone like butter. Once he finished the danged fourth round over the area, he stopped, catching his breath. Only thanks to the weekend course in tying knots, he didn't end up in a roll.

Sweat covered his white face as he took a deep breath and muttered, "Is He Gone?" His question hung in the air. "How Did He Do It?" He crawled through the endless tunnels, his legs pitter-pattered against the floor, leaving cracks in the crystals.

"Could He Be A Soul Master?" Flashes of images with Kairo meditating under a waterfall or in a deep cave made Aum smirk. "No Way. He Has No Discipline."

The earwig monster entered a different part of the underground world. The stone turned darker, and the crystals formed complex structures below the high ceiling. Stalactites hung from above, meeting the ground after millennia. Tiny light balls floated in the air like fireflies.

"But Still..." Aum stopped, gazing at his shattered reflection on the crystal surface. He couldn't shake a strange feeling. "The Boy Deflected My Tail." He scratched behind his head plate with his pincers before he continued walking under a waving light spreading across the ceiling like an aurora.

The bubbling river traveled between stone coasts with gems growing in the middle like bushes and trees. White fishes leisurely swam between them. The sparks inside of the crystals grew on the size with their habitats, creating big light shows.

Aum crossed the area without paying it a glance. He had known this place for eons, it was his home after all. He stopped in front of a wall and stared into a hexagonal-shaped crystal. After a few seconds, it turned red.

"Starting face scan," an eerie voice said, and a light row ran across his face.

Aum sighed. This crystal technology gave him a headache.

"Wrong input," the voice said after a few seconds.

"Wait! What?" Aum gasped, clenching his jaws. "This Is The Right Face!"

"Remaining tries – Two." The machine refused his face's grimaces. A big red dot flashed across it, and another one appeared next t it. "Remaining tries – One."

"Oh, Dang!" He plastered his face on the surface, twisting it to its maximum capacity.

"Wrong input."

"No! No!" He panicked, switching his face for wrinkled, brownish one with very long and pointy ears. Aum's eyes now could melt icebergs with the overdose of cuteness.

"Wrong input." The hexagonal panel turned red. "Access denied."

"No! No!" The Face Stealer slammed his face against the panel. He pressed for a minute before letting out his breath.

"Access granted."

He darted away from the machine, his jaw hanging open. The red turned into green. "How...?" He gasped, and his bug legs dangled under his body. The wave of utter confusion and annoyance with a speck of relief washed over him.

"I Hate This," he muttered as the wall next to the hexagonal dissolved. "Guess I'll need To Recalibrate It... Again," he added bitterly. Aum entered slowly, taking the time to clean off every pair of his feet on the doormat. A scratching noise filled the air for ten minutes as he came in.

His eyes checked on every piece of furniture or decoration he owned. The white picture directly before the entrance was off-balanced, the crystals in the corners needed dusting, the rug under him could use changing, and the seventy-fifth pair of cone-shaped bunny-slippers fell from the shelf on his right.

After getting the slippers on his hundredth pair of legs, he continued into the computer room across the hall. After opening the door, he sneezed. "Darvit, I haven't Cleaned Here For Centuries." With a handkerchief, he covered his face while he searched for a switch. The lights gradually lit up, revealing the thick layers of dust resting on the metal floor.

"Darvit," he muttered again into the cloth as his face wrinkled and extended. "That Can Wait." He hid his handkerchief and moved to a big screen covering almost the whole wall. "How This Junk Works Again?" Under it lay a small terminal, its symbols, and buttons hiding under the dirt.

His squinted eyes examined the thick frame of the Liquid Energy Device monitor, finding only one button. "This One?" The switch turned green under his touch, and the screen lit up.

He closed his eyes, adjusting to the unnatural source. "This Better Work," Face Stealer grumbled, biting the inside of his cheek. He waited for the moving circle of dots in the middle to finish lighting up when a window popped up.

Aum narrowed his eyes, reading the tiny text. "What's Up With Dates?" he snapped, biting his lip. The fourth pair of legs rubbed his eyes before he could read the text without any typos. With a bark, he pressed the Yes button. "Just Get On with It!"

A new window appeared, and the computer evaluated the number of updates in the queue. "What? One hundred and fifty?" Aum slammed his face into the monitor, getting a fresh dose of blinding light. "Are You Kidding Me?" He slid down, letting out a sigh, saying under his bug-tired breath, "I Need Coffee Beans With Cream, Marshmallows, And A Spoon Of Hot Water."

Defeated by technology, he crawled into the kitchen, where he kept his sanity in a reasonable state. While most of his body wrapped in one place, he hummed a simple melody, collecting all the ingredients for his brain-saver beverage.

The tailor-made kitchen served him well. All the handles were a perfect fit for his bug legs, so he could open them with any limb he wanted. The water fizzled when he finished grinding the beans. He emptied the coffee powder into the big mug, poured inside a symbolic amount of water with the whole whipped cream cup, adding five marshmallows at the top.

Aum's mouth watered, and he took his drink into the library. It was the last room his home had that doubled as a bedroom. His bug hand touched the switch, and a row of crystals embedded into the wood filled with sparkling balls. The light filled the whole room, spreading like a morning haze.

Face Stealer's face brightened with a smile, seeing the huge shelves full of books he had obtained, and he inhaled the aroma of an old paper. The ceiling hid in the darkness, too high for the naked eye. The spiral staircase with wheels stood in the corner, providing the path to high literature.

His legs dug into the soft carpet, passing an ancient globe showing an actual state of the world, time, and sunlight in every corner of the world. Before Aum laid on the long and curved sofa in the corner, he adjusted books around him, so they were lined up.

"I Needed This," he moaned as he looked around the world of letters, eyeing his pick. From the small table next to him, he took his reading glasses as his pincers brought him Twinlight, the most cliché, paranormen romance book of all time, and he dug every page.

He laid back, tangling his body in a neat ball, and dived into the world of starking love. The huge clocks behind the sofa ticked hours away when a beeping sound came from the computer room. "Now?" Aum growled, his forehead wrinkling. "Just When I Have Gotten To The Juicy Part." He set the book and glasses aside and darted outside.

In the room, the machine finished the whole procedure, and greeted the Face Stealer with new images and opened windows. Getting his way around them would give him a headache for weeks.

"Hello, I'm S.M.A.R.T," a new, female-like voice full of joy said.

"What?" Aum tilted his head, grimacing. The sugar-coated voice gave his teeth cavity.

"I'm Sensitive Mindful Artistic Research Therapist," the voice answered a question Aum hadn't ask. "Your old voice-command app had been updated to the newest version and..." the voice continued, lulling Aum to a catnap. His head swayed back and forth. "Do you agree?"

Aum's head snapped up, bursting the bubble next to his nose. "Y-Yes!"

"Accepted. You can review and change your settings at any time." The window on the screen closed, and a new one appeared with a tiny text and checkboxes.

The mighty monster growled, putting his bug leg on a trackball, navigating the maze of forms. With each miss, he hissed and grimaced, biting his lips and cursing the day he had stolen this device from Megahard Company.

"Yes... Yes. Next!" he growled after each click he had to do when the windows with new information popped up.

S.M.A.R.T.'s voice startled him. "You seem to miss in nine of ten clicks." Aum growled, baring his razor teeth. "Do you wish to activate full voice-command support?"

Aum's eyes widened as his jaw dropped. "You Can Do That? No More Clicking?" His gaze darted toward the touch-ball he used to control the pointer on the screen. The hours of cursing and back pain reminded him of why he hated using this system.

"Affirmative. All you need to do is to specify your command."

Face Stealer's face brightened up that he could be renamed to a firewig. "Finally, An Update I Call Useful." He breathed with a wide smile across his face, promising trouble heading Kairo's way.

"Do you wish to see the manual before activating the function?"

"Yes!"

A document covered the screen, and Aum scrolled down. After a few pages of technical text, he checked how many pages he had in front of himself. "Over Nine Thousand!" He almost choked on his saliva. He double-checked the number, realizing he added a null. "Can't I Try It Without Reading This? It's Too Long!"

"Affirmative. State your command."

"I Want To Find That Twerp!" he spat, unable to wait anymore.

"Analyzing the command. Please wait."

Aum tapped his legs in a Mexican-wave-way, drumming like a pianist across the keyboard. The circling dots hypnotized him into an idle state, blunting his desire for revenge.

All the windows closed, and a new icon on the screen flashed and opened a dialogue. It was almost all white with a long box under a Baagle's logo, the group of maniacs behind the stalking engine with information from the whole multiverse.

"Please, specify your query."

"I'm Looking For That White-Haired Twerp!" Aum barked. His anger boiled inside of him, pushing away the relaxation of past hours.

His words appeared in the box with a few changes: Aim booking for hat wait-heir rat. His jaw dropped as the page moved to results, giving him funny pictures of rats in hats.

"Is this what you searched for?" S.M.A.R.T. inquired.

"No," he deadpanned.

The page returned to the default state, and the voice asked for a new query. Aum spent tens of minutes formulating his command.

"Over Nine Thousand Results?" He faceplanted into the table under the screen. "I Hate Technology," he muttered after a few seconds.

"There appears to be a lot of results," the female voice informed him, stating the obvious.

"You Don't Say," he replied, getting up.

"Do you want to run a filter?"

His heart skipped a beat. "Yes!" he barked, hissing at the end.

A new table appeared across the pictures of boys. "Let's See." Aum eyed each option starting from a name, height, weight and ending with hobbies, bank account, family tree, and foot size. He grimaced at many of them as he had no idea how to fill them.

After a few minutes, he applied his filter, and the system crunched his query. The earwig monster burned a dot inside of the running circle, as angry veins popped on his face.

It took several minutes to reduce the number of results under two hundred. "I Guess I Have To Work Manually From Here." He scanned the first ten results, commanding to show him the next batch. He had spent half an hour doing this.

"That's Him!" He almost slapped his face against the screen as he enlarged the picture. "Find More About This Twerp!"

"Affirmative."

The page loaded Kairo's profile. Aum snickered. "Now, You Are Mine!" His eyes scanned the scarce info. "So His Name Is Kairo, And He Is Fourteen And Three Months Old. Is Slightly Underheight..." he mumbled the rest of the text. "Hmm... No Info About Birthplace. That's Strange." He stayed here for a moment, but he continued forward, not carrying for small details. "Ah, Current Position!"

His face widened with the sinister smile. He had forgotten how useful this system could be when it worked. He chuckled before he burst into laughter. It took Aum a few shocked faces before he realized he had changed the system's theme to neon purple, fluffy, psychedelic puppies.

¯\_(^_^)_/¯

Kairo and his companions arrived in the newest town. Green Tops' streets couldn't compare with Waslan City, but they provided everything from food stalls, pubs, inns, and nightlife, including karaoke. This place's beauty lay in unique architecture as the whole town was built inside of a massive, flat rock.

Many centuries ago, the first settlers dug for generations, creating the first holes inside, spreading across the whole mass like ants. With their hard work, the town gained walls embedded with top-class houses and apartments.

The center part was left with thick masses, offering places for more families or stores to thrive. Each rock had a unique shape and provided up to three floors connected with stairs or ladders spreading above streets adorned with hanging flowerpots. Kairo tilted his head, trying to see the top of the outer walls. He shielded his eyes, noticing people walking across the stone and wooden bridges.

Marai chirped next to him, but he had ignored her since she caught up to them after leaving Waslan City. 'Yet another place to avoid.' He looked around. 'At least here isn't head-on-head.' Since the tourist season hadn't arrived yet, the stream of people venturing into the town didn't clog the wide streets.

Once they had the outer walls behind them, an enormous spectacle spread in front of them. Kairo whistled, and Marai silenced herself. Below a huge cliff lay almost the whole town. Along the upper walls stood stalls and tents, several inns with astonishing views, climbing cacti, flags fluttered in the breeze, and townsfolk walked left and right.

"This is amazing!" Marai meowed, taking in unique beauty. "Why didn't the circus visit this place before?"

While Kairo disliked her presence, he couldn't disagree with her. He walked closer to the railing, glancing down. Small sellers sat on blankets, showing their wares from trinkets, bracelets, necklaces, and small decorative dust collectors.

His skin crawled, as Marai crowed. "It's a fortune-teller tent!" she chirped, clasping her hands. Her eyes sparkled as she stared at the star-and-moon emblem above the green tent standing behind the entrance. "Please, wait!" Only a dust ball remained where she stood, not waiting for the boys to say much a word.

The cloth over the entrance hadn't stopped moving when Kairo snapped his fingers. "Bingo! Let's run into the hills."

"You wanna abandon her?" Arubi barked, smacking the boy's head.

Kairo winced. "She can go on her own. I don't want some chatterbox next to me." He again cleared his ear, knitting his eyebrows in the tent's direction.

"Marai only tried to be nice."

"After causing nothing but trouble." Kairo dug his hands in his pockets. The crystal pricked him, sending shivers and heat into his finger. The heart in his chest drummed faster.

Arubi sighed, rolling his head. "You are the one to tal—"

"I'm done with her!" Kairo yelled before realizing what had left his mouth.

The rabbit ninja smacked him. "Jerk!" He hopped down, landing on the ground. "What's your problem? Is puberty hitting you?"

The bounty hunter inhaled, clenching his fists. A few words danced on his tongue, but he swallowed them, hissing instead. Without looking at his partner, he turned around and headed into the town. 'Dang it!'

The crystal in his palm burned.