“Nagi, come downstairs!
Your father’s home!
Dinner’s ready!”
“Coming, coming!”
As I walked down the stairs, I froze the moment I saw my father.
One of those monsters was perched on his right shoulder, clinging tightly to him like a koala.
It was a chubby creature with smooth orange skin, two small white wings on its back, an enormous head, two blue eyes, and two tiny arms.
“Uh…
Dad…”
“Oh, hey, son.
How was your day?” he said with a tired smile as he rubbed the back of his neck and shoulder.
“Me…
honestly, I’m exhausted.
It’s been a really rough day, and then there’s my shoulder…
I think I’ve got a stiff neck or something.
It’s really tense.
Hurts a little,” he continued as he put his things down and changed into something more comfortable.
My father, Masaro Shirokawa, is forty-four years old.
He’s a tall man with brown hair already streaked with a few gray strands.
He works at a well-known insurance company in a fairly senior position.
Always diligent and positive, he’s someone who takes his job seriously but still finds time to lighten the mood with the occasional joke.
Today wasn’t one of those days.
He looked completely drained and pale.
Obviously, that thing was responsible.
After years of seeing these “monsters,” I’ve learned a few things about them.
You don’t see them every day.
They usually appear in places like hospitals after someone dies, funerals, or accident sites, so I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re attracted to death, sadness, or things like that.
The biggest one I’ve ever seen was about the size of a cow, but it didn’t seem particularly hostile.
The moment I got close, it hid and ran away.
The smaller ones are easy to deal with.
I’ve had to take care of a few before when they got too close to people on the street.
They can be dangerous.
Not to me, but some of them actively try to hurt people or, like this one, seem to cause some kind of discomfort when they stay too close to someone.
“Dad, hold still for a moment,” I said casually.
“You’ve got some lint on your shoulder.”
I pretended to brush something off his shoulder with my fingers, then grabbed the monster by the scruff of its neck and ripped it free with one quick motion.
“Wait for me a second.
I need to grab something from my room.”
My mother finished chewing a piece of the hake she’d made for dinner and said:
“We’ll wait.”
I went into my room with the thing still in my grip and tossed it into the air.
It immediately started fluttering around with its tiny wings, searching for an escape and even slamming itself against the window.
As long as it was trapped inside, there was no chance of it getting away, and I’d rather be alone when I killed it.
I started rummaging through a drawer until…
“There you are.”
A baseball bat.
Hard and solid.
Rumor has it that there are plenty of people in the world who own a baseball bat and/or glove despite never having played a single baseball game in their lives.
I am, indeed, one of those people.
I turned toward the giant orange fly in my room, which was uselessly throwing itself against the window and even hurting itself in the process.
Another trait these creatures tend to share is that they’re not particularly intelligent.
They mostly act on instinct.
“What’s wrong, fly?
Now that you’ve run into someone who can actually kill you, you don’t feel like sitting on my shoulder, huh?”
What the hell would people who hate insects do if they had to deal with something like this?
I fired one of my Chronostasis spheres the moment it reached a part of the room where I wouldn’t break anything if I swung the bat.
The paralysis caught it instantly, freezing it in midair.
I grabbed the bat, drew energy into my arms, let the blue aura flow into it, and brought it down with a sharp swing, smashing the monster apart and killing it.
“Damn.
Maybe I overdid it.”
Whenever one of these creatures dies, its body begins to break apart until it completely dissipates into black smoke.
They contain some kind of purple liquid, similar to blood, but it disappears along with them.
Which is nice.
Means I don’t have to clean my room.
Their insides must work in a more or less logical way, like any other living creature.
The difference is that when they die, their entire body and everything that made it up simply vanishes.
I also discovered something else that’s pretty important: those things can interact with physical objects, and physical objects can interact with them too.
I can hit them normally, but without using that energy, the blows don’t seem to do any actual damage.
It’s only when I use that energy that I can really hurt them.
I don’t like this.
Who the hell knows where that monster latched onto my dad.
Later, during dinner…
“You know,” my father said, cracking his neck.
“I was pretty uncomfortable when I got home, but I’m actually feeling a little better now.”
“That’s good, honey.
If it starts hurting again, use the heating pad I left on the couch.
By the way, do you have any plans for the weekend, son?” my mother asked.
“I don’t have much studying to do, so I’ll get it done quickly sometime between tomorrow and Sunday.”
After dinner, I went out for a run.
Exercise was one of the few things that didn’t bore me.
Running feels pretty damn good when you’re a superhuman who takes much longer to get tired.
Later that night…
I stayed awake until midnight, waiting for my parents to fall asleep.
From what I’d heard, the poker games started in half an hour, so I should probably get going.
I put on a dark hoodie and grabbed enough money to play, along with my phone.
My room is on the opposite side of the house from my parents’ bedroom, and they never come into mine at night, so I can sneak out after midnight, come back before sunrise, and nobody will ever know.
I slowly opened the window without making a sound.
I climbed out, using the outside of the house for support, and left it closed except for a small gap so I could get back in later.
Then I carefully climbed down.
Once outside, I walked to Kurokawa, a nearby late-night cocktail bar.
Clink.
The bartender, a man in his fifties wearing a black shirt with a towel over his shoulder, looked me up and down.
“Kid, we don’t serve soda here.
Turn around and go back where you came from.
Minors aren’t allowed in here.”
I walked up to the bar, pulled out a banknote, and placed it in his hand, making sure he could see I had more.
“I’m here for the game.”
The bartender looked at me and nodded as if he couldn’t care less.
Speaking in code, he told me there was a bathroom behind a door that led down to a basement.
Before I could go down the stairs, a man searched me for weapons.
Only then did he let me into a large room that served as an underground extension of the bar, complete with waiters and several gaming tables.
I sat down at a five-player table.
They were the usual poker tables, covered in green felt.
At the entrance, you had to exchange your yen for poker chips to give the place some atmosphere, then exchange them back when you left.
The place made its money from the drinks and food people ordered while they played.
There were plenty of people inside, all adults and of all different ages.
Fortunately, none of them seemed to care that I was underage.
“Deal the cards!”
Fourth game.
I hadn’t won or lost much in the first three, but I’d figured out the strategy I was going to use.
I looked at my cards: queen and eight.
Playable.
I put in the blind when my turn came.
First round: queen, seven, seven on the table.
A fat older guy smoking a cigar raised the bet slightly.
Two people folded before it reached me, and I called.
The guy to my left did the same, leaving three of us.
The next card was an eight.
Two pair for me.
The guy on my left folded.
A six came out on the river.
Doesn’t change much.
This guy wants me to think he’s got three sevens.
If he does, he beats me.
“All in,” the man said, pushing his chips toward the center of the table, where a considerable pile had already formed, while staring directly at me.
Like any good actor, I’d been showing signs of nervousness throughout the game to make him think he had me, hoping he’d bet big.
“Call.”
The glass of whiskey the man was drinking from obviously reflected the things around it.
Normally, you wouldn’t be able to make out much in that reflection because it was far too blurry.
But with the Shinkeigan’s extremely precise vision, that reflection wasn’t nearly as unclear to me.
Which meant I’d been able to see his cards.
And that, my smoking, drunken friend, is how I knew I should go all in.
As I was leaving the place, I ran into the same guy leaning against a wall, still holding a glass of whiskey.
“Hey, kid.
Next time, I’m not drinking before I play against you,” he said with a laugh.
Whatever.
Drunks…
I headed home with another forty man—400,000 yen—in my pocket.
Another productive day.
Chronostasis and help more people find it!