Chapter Twenty-Five: I'm Selfish Too

"There should be a slight disturbance in Heaven if you go to the spot behind the castle's garden. It's just past the broken part in the fence."

The teenager's pace never stopped teetering between a brisk walk and a hesitant jog.

He could feel the anxiety starting to take over his mind, and he paused for a few moments, forcing himself to remember the breathing exercises his captain had once taught his squadron and leaning against one of the castle's white-bricked walls as he did so.

If he was to trust Lacia, he would have to walk just a few hundred more metres until he could find the point which she had described. And he knew it was foolish to trust someone who was little more than a stranger, but he'd found himself turning her words over and over in his mind until it had almost driven him insane.

Aiden supposed that he was, in the end, being an idiot, but he couldn't help but worry about the unspoken consequences that—trick or not—could come crashing down on his unsuspecting friends.

The boy was too lost in thought to notice that he was approaching his desired location, and he let out a small gasp as he tripped over what seemed like air at first sight.

It looked ordinary enough, just a spot overgrown with moss and plants that combined together in some mess and somehow managed to still remain pleasing to the eye, but the teenaged boy saw just what the woman had meant in the seconds following that.

"That means that the barrier between the two worlds is weakest there," Lacia had explained. "If you approach it with just the right amount of force and some psychic energy, you could open a small portal for a few seconds."

Perhaps hate was too strong of a word, but the figure—with all her blood-curdling smiles and saccharine tones—had some sort of china-thin sincerity around her.

Still, he couldn't afford to risk anything. Even if it ended up all being a trap, he couldn't see anything that could go very wrong—and with that thought in mind, he unsheathed his sword and brought the silver blade down on the rippling patch of space as hard as he could.

He jumped back, expecting something to happen, and the silence hanging in the air was so still it was nearly delectable—but just as he began to tire of it, a screech filled his ears, and had he not been so transfixed on the blooming myriad of colours before him, he would have made haste to block out the sound.

The gateway was beautiful; a piece of abstract art that he couldn't begin to describe, but he found himself trying to stay away from it. It emanated some kind of ominous aura that made him shy away, as if it promised nothing but evil, but the portal seemed to think otherwise.

As if it was a black hole that devoured anything in its wake, the rip in space dragged him towards its waiting mouth with a ferocious eagerness that he despised, and the screech had turned into some distorted version of a greedy, predatory scream.

And there was nothing but blinding white for the next few moments.

§

"They're guarding the place, so watch out. These guards can be observant at the most inconvenient times."

Fabio inspected the area one final time to ensure that they couldn't be seen from the tree they were balancing on—and then he jumped, landing with the practiced ease of a Litten and aiming a hidden smirk towards the row of armoured men from several feet away.

The sixteen-year-old had to admit that she had never once thought of her friend as someone that could be normal. He always stood out wherever he was, whether it was the gleam in his emerald eyes or the way people would shoot looks of disapproval at his ragged appearance, but she supposed that it was just another facet of his job.

Now, however, his unkept ponytail was tucked into a cap, and the cardboard box was cradled in his hands as if they were the most fragile thing that he had ever touched. Anyone who didn't know him wouldn't be able to see through the ruse.

He waved to them just once before disappearing into the murky pitch-black of the shadows, and they soon heard a series of hollow knocks coming from somewhere below them.

Yan wasn't quite close enough to hear the entire conversation, but the mercenary had explained his plan just hours ago and she was more than sure that she didn't have such a terrible memory.

She and Lillian sat in uncomfortable silence, refusing to tear their gaze off the banter that Fabio was pulling off and not daring to mutter even a word to break the stagnating tension between them. The girl wanted to say something, but Lillian had an intimidating quality about her; one that made her pull back and question her thoughts.

Yan told herself that it was just the stress of everything. That is was just the utter absurdity of the entire situation.

"Hey." It was all she could do to try and look less surprised when the other girl was the first to speak. "In case you hadn't noticed, he's given the signal. We'll have to proceed now."

It was more of a command than a casual statement, and the teenager hid a surprised shudder before clambering down as carefully as she could. She felt the rough bark bite into her hands and it stung, but that was a matter to be dealt with later.

Her partner followed, climbing down with much more ease and experience than she could ever hope for, and the two thanked Arceus that the foliage was just tall enough to block the tips of their heads and allow them to pass through without much fuss.

They ran through the gate just as a wide smirk grazed the blonde's face—and he whipped out a Pokeball, a Dragalge appearing by his side and snorting out a cloud of purple gas while Lillian dragged the both of them back.

"It's not lethal." Fabio's voice broke her out of her reverie, and she dragged her gaze away from the coughing figures on the ground. "It should knock them out and numb their senses for a while, so we can proceed with our plan."

That doesn't mean it won't hurt, she wanted to protest, but she'd known long ago about his merciless ways. He didn't care about those sort of things.

"Oh..." Aiden trailed off as he emerged from the smokescreen of poison, lowering the cloth from his face and taking in a deep gulp of fresh air. "I'm not sure, Fabio. Are you sure they're going to be fine?"

"I've tested this before," the blonde urged, and he ushered the shorter knight into the headquarters before recalling his Pokemon. "There aren't going to be any lasting effects. Besides, they're trained knights like you—they know how to handle pain."

The soldier didn't look all that convinced, but with Fabio's and Lillian's decisiveness, he didn't have much of a say in what to do—and he followed the group in, shooting an apologetic glance behind him as he went.

They stood in tentative quiet for a minute before Aiden realised that he was the one with the directions and that he was supposed to be the one leading them, and he tried to hide an embarrassed blush with his hand as he started walking once again.

"The office is over there," the knight stated, gesturing to a room down one of the place's many hallways and turning one of Fabio's stone Pokeballs over in his hands as he spoke. "I'll keep guard. If I see anyone coming, I'll return your Azumarill to this Pokeball to alert you."

"Alright, then." The mercenary smiled at the other boy. "I'll hold you to that."

He broke into a run, not waiting to see if they were following, and the lock was undone with an ease that a regular human shouldn't have possessed in the first place.

Then again, it was just like she had remembered. The boy simply couldn't be normal in any way.

"Take any records that look like they might be of importance," Lillian ordered. Her voice still had that confident touch that annoyed Yan, like she was some deity that thought she could do everything right, but it wasn't her place to complain.

The pink-haired girl froze for just a second as she heard a whisper call to her. It was fleeting, gracing her ears like a faint rustle of the wind, but it was there and it was urging her to turn around.

It was just a spirit. One of those greyed-out figures that stared with her with those dull eyes of his, as if he found no joy in floating about the human world with no aim for the rest of his lonely afterlife, and she couldn't shake the quiet intensity off her.

She told herself that it was normal to find some sort of ghost just about anywhere. It was, after all, a war-stricken period where people and Pokemon alike weren't safe from death, and she'd often find lost ghosts with amnesia wandering the boundaries of her very shop.

So why was her heart unwilling to calm down?

"Snap out of it." She stifled her yelp, keeping her surprise to the sudden tension in her shoulders, and the black-haired girl glared at her with a displeased expression. "We have a limited time to find what we can, so lend a hand and help me search for documents."

"R-Right," she stammered back, and pulled open the nearest drawer with a shaking hand. She didn't have much to go by—all she knew was that Lillian wanted information about the mystery attacks—but she did pause to grab a paper with those very words scrawled across them.

The entire place seemed to loathe her existence. She could sense the prescence of far too many of those wretched souls, and they all tried to speak at once. It hurt her ears, and she wished they would shut up, but it was when their sentences made sense that she started to listen.

"Why are they here?" one of them hissed in a scratchy tone, and it was as if they didn't know that she could hear their conversations. "They're all going to die if there are humans here. What idiots."

Her breath stilled for a moment, and her hand froze from its position around another stack of reports as a more feminine voice replied. "Don't be so harsh," the other spirit replied. "Humans aren't as aware as us. They won't be able to see it coming. This would be painless for them."

She could feel the dread now, ticking like a timer on a nonexistent bomb within her heart, and the final voice amidst the crowd of phantoms shook the chill in her mind even further.

"Little girl, I know you can hear us." It was a man again, a different one, and his voice was urgent. "If you do not want to die, get out of this place as fast as you can."

She jumped at that, earning a questioning look from both of her accomplices, and her breaths were ragged as she tried to speak.

"It's dangerous," she got out, feeling the heaviness grip her like rigor mortis. "We have to get out. Now."

The whispered voices and disappearing figures, however, were meant for her eyes alone, and all she got from Lillian was a curious expression and a shake of her head. "We haven't been discovered yet," the shorter girl argued. "We're continuing."

Yan's eyes narrowed—it wasn't their fault and she knew that, but she couldn't help but be frustrated by her partner's flippant response—and she snapped at the older girl with a vexed hint in her words.

"Do you want to die?" she uttered. If they weren't going to move, she was. She wasn't about to lose her life to some absurd mission that Fabio had pulled her into.

Without waiting for them to answer, she shook her head in impatience and fled.

The dull thuds her shoes made against the ground filled her ears enough to block out the confused voices that were aimed her way, but she didn't care about any of that. She didn't have the time to listen to what they had to say.

It wasn't as if she liked those spirits. She hated them for wrecking her life, and she would have been so much happier if the cursed ability to see them lay dormant instead of flaring up all the time, but she would have to be grateful for the one time it worked in her favour.

She passed Aiden on the way out, gaze landing on the stone Pokeball in his hand—and she paused in her steps, swiping the sphere out of his hand and clicking the button needed to return Fabio's Azumarill.

"Tell them to get out now," she repeated, pressing the object back into the shocked boy's palm. "Run."

The girl didn't dare to say any more as she resumed her sprint. She had passed the exit now; all she needed to do was get as far as she could from that damned building and return to—

A deafening noise behind her threatened to make her ears bleed, and the rumbling sound rocked the ground so hard that she stumbled from several feet away. She knew that if she looked back she would see nothing but destruction, a yellow ball of fiery flames and a radioactive cloud of gases, but she couldn't bear to watch any of it.

She didn't want to see that she was the only one to survive, that she had avoided a gruesome death just because of a curse that she had tried to reject and run away from her whole life.

After all, she didn't know if she could take it.

Yan forced herself to keep running despite the sobs catching in her throat. She hated the way she couldn't feel her heart beat over the blood in her ears and the burning feeling in her sinuses, but she couldn't find it in herself to stop.

She wasn't an angel, and that was why her friends would die within the span of a few moments. Like any ugly human, she was selfish, and selfishness would drive any sane person to make decisions that saved their sorry selves.

I gave them a warning, the teenager thought as she ran, screaming incomprehensible thoughts at herself in order to make herself feel better. She had no one now to correct her wrongs, she supposed, and it was a natural thing to try and push the blame onto others.

Avis had told her that she was too soft once, that her sweetness reminded her of his brother, and she wanted to laugh at that memory because he had been so wrong.

Her steps slowed as she realised that she was closer to her shop than the ablaze building, and that she most probably looked like a lunatic tearing through the streets like a madman.

She picked out the humble unit with an uneasy restlessness about her, slamming open the door with a little more force than necessary and hurrying to rush upstairs, wanting nothing more than to sleep the rest of the night away and pray that whatever happened was just a bad dream.

A noise at the corner of the shop seemed intent on halting her, though—and while she might have brushed it off as just another spirit on a normal day, her mind was too skittish and anxious to do the same this time.

Yan turned around to meet with the figure of someone who shouldn't have been there because he was dead, but the boy was someone who had a vibrance that the ghosts she'd seen lacked.

Ghosts in the human world were ones who had lost their memories for good and wandered the earth without any purpose at al, but the purple-haired teenager would have appeared as a normal citizen if not for the fact that his back passed through a wall when he tried to back away.

The moment he tried to speak was the moment she screamed.

§

:DD

plot twist: is yan secretly the main protagonist?!

Thank you guys so much for 1.1k reads and 162 votes!! :0 You have no idea how much this means to me <3

As always, votes, comments and critiques are very appreciated °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°