Chapter Text
“Oba-san, I told you I would be fine. I'm already at the train station.” Suguru lied.
Well, it wasn't entirely a lie. Suguru was technically in a train station, but one that had been shut down ‘temporarily’ ten years ago. Too many deaths and disappearances happened for anyone to feel comfortable approaching the station after that. The kanji 四 or four had been graffiti'd all over the first escalator-turned-staircase in a rainbow of different colors; some more faded than others. Some were sloppily painted while others might as well have been a mural and a stop sign in one.
Suguru chose to leave his suitcases behind up there to keep his movement unhindered. The wide train platform was completely empty. No graffiti covered the walls this deep– or, well, there was one bright neon masterpiece dulled by dust, dirt, and dried blood that looked unfinished. Suguru wondered what the end result would have been when it was finished.
A… goat? Those were horns, right? Suguru almost missed Junko's (affectionately nicknamed “oba-san” by most of the foster children under her care) response.
“You were supposed to be on a train an hour ago, Suguru.” The exasperation in her tone said enough. Suguru grimaced, but didn’t comment on that for a moment.
“Ah, hold on, oba-san. I have to take a picture of something.” And while Suguru did want to take a picture of the half-painted goat-unicorn-sheep, he also knew it was better to allow Junko time to cool off before proceeding with caution. Suguru heard her speaking, but he pretended not to hear as he pressed the button on his flip phone to find the camera. The camera flashed a light on the wall before the picture was taken. He raised the phone back up to his ear once he had enough pictures and once Junko's voice grew quieter through the speaker. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
“Suguru, please just make sure you get on the right train before they stop running for the night. You were only supposed to stop at that station for a few minutes. It's been three hours.” The heat had left Junko’s tone and her voice settled into something concerned and soft that made Suguru smile.
“Oba-san, I promise I won't be out on the street for the night. I'll even call you once I get to the school, okay?” The sting ray cursed spirit he absorbed recently had been very convenient for travel in a pinch. Suguru suspected he would be done with this before the trains stopped running for the night, so he was hardly stressed.
“Okay… You better.” There was an indignant shift to her tone that Suguru knew meant a specific expression with a furrowed brow and the corners of her lips pinching uncomfortably. Suguru let his gaze drift over the station while the comfortable silence settled over them.
Where most train stations had at max three minutes between each train that passed through, Suguru hadn't seen or heard a single train since he descended the steps at the entrance. The stench of rot filled the underground space and only got stronger the deeper he traveled in. He would be tempted to step down into the tracks if he wasn't certain that some trains still sped past this station without stopping. He wasn't in the mood to die by train today.
Between the stench and the cold static in the air, Suguru knew this curse had to be relatively strong. The ten-year gap since this station was operational was a worrying chaos; It had spent ten years accumulating cursed energy, killing, and otherwise being a threat to public safety.
Suguru had heard about the station before. He found himself reading the news more than any teenager his age probably should. Researching the local haunted locations had become both a hobby in debunking the delusions of non-sorcerers simply standing in a dark, drafty building and a necessary step to keep Suguru prioritizing the right curses. Following cursed energy certainly led him to curses, but so many near harmless curses hovered around public spaces the most. He had wanted to take a day trip to visit this station, but it never quite fit into his schedule until he conveniently stopped off at a train station only a short walk away from this one.
If he stopped and killed every fly head that dared to come too close, Suguru wouldn’t have traveled outside of a mile radius from the foster care facility that had become something like a home.
Or, well, Junko and Hana had become something like a home. Many of the other kids and the other caretakers still found him unsettling or too rebellious as a child to more than tolerate him. Things had warmed up when Suguru stopped having “incidents,” but there was always a measured distance there.
Suguru could still vividly picture Hana's most passionate lecture to him. How would he get into a good high school looking like that? The gleam of his metal gauges would surely turn any open door into a revolving one if he kept this up. Surely the earrings would be the cause of the academic world's “inevitable” rejection of him and not his lack of sleep or the fact that he skipped school frequently to “slack off.” In truth, Suguru was always out and about dealing with or healing from curses when he skipped, but if you asked Hana, Suguru didn’t start acting up until he got his ears pierced. When he started painting his nails black, she basically considered him to be a lost cause. Speaking of Hana…
“Did you visit Hana-san this morning?” His question broke the silence in half. Suguru regretted asking it after a couple of seconds of waiting for Junko to fill the dead air in turn.
Except the stench of rot filled the air quicker than she could. Suguru swore he could taste it as it hit his nose. Despite that, his expression was carefully neutral. He walked further down the train platform, but a fumbling sound closer to the tracks had Suguru’s head turning to peer at the raised ledge above the tracks. He couldn’t see the tracks, but they weren’t his highest priority when something unnaturally fast jolted up over the edge. It’s only as it came down upon the tile with a dragging screech before it dug in that Suguru was able to get a look at it.
A single mangled hand, fingers gripping the edge of the train platform. It looked human enough that Suguru might have been tempted to step forward and see if someone was hurt if they weren’t sharp enough to slice through tile and then go even further to embed four of the five into the floor below. A flash and something metal scraped against the tile– its other hand gripping… Was that a scythe? Suguru tipped his head as he watched the bloodied, rusted blade of the scythe scrape the floor before digging in.
Suguru let his eyes drift further down the platform and it was then that he finally noticed the crumbling edges and holes along the edge of the platform.
Static filled the air close to his ear and Suguru paused. He turned his head and peered down at his opened flip phone.
“Ah, the call dropped.”
Shame. Hopefully Junko would assume that the call had dropped due to him going underground. She at least wouldn’t be assuming he was in danger.
Still, Suguru clicked into his messages. He could at least send a message so it would deliver when he got a signal again. As he thumbed over the buttons, he reached his free hand out.
The creature yanked itself up and, when Suguru glanced up, it pulled its upper body up until the rough cut of fabric and bloodied stump at the base of its torso appeared instead of its legs. Its clothes looked something like a uniform from a high school, though Suguru couldn’t place the specific school off the top of his head. Long, matted hair hung from her head. Her face was the worst of it; completely blank with white eyes and blood coating deathly pale skin.
“Hold on, will you?” Suguru asked with an apologetic smile as a pool of black formed underneath the teke teke.
She looked like she wasn’t going to follow such a simple request, already yanking her fingers free and dragging her hand forward along the ground. Black tendrils shot up from the dark mist beneath her and wrapped around her like a net, yanking her hard against the ground. Moves like this weren’t likely to exorcize most cursed spirits, but it would do for now.
It had become as familiar as breathing by now. Suguru learned something quickly after he started actively seeking fights with curses; He wasn’t restricted to generating cursed energy through hits or portals where his hands touched. Suguru could push out cursed energy to generate portals further away from him. They took more cursed energy to form. Cursed energy could travel easily through any type of mass, but pushing it through air was met with the least resistance. Suguru had gotten better at forming portals underground or along the ground, but it was always just a split-second slower than those he formed in the air.
Picking out the specific cursed spirits to summon was trickier. Their cursed energy inevitably settled into Suguru’s own and flowed in tandem, but Suguru had to tweak his cursed energy. Transforming it from his own to the creature he wanted to summon took a second of focus where once it took an hour after getting his second cursed spirit. It was like trying to find the exact right radio signal with several knobs to turn to tune the signals.
Now, more importantly.
Sorry, oba-san. The call cut out when I went deeper undergroune.
Ah, wait.
There. And send. Suguru closed his flip phone and slipped it into his pocket at the same moment that he felt his cursed spirit weaken. As he looked up, he watched the teke teke slash through the thin shadow that clung to her. Suguru quickly dissipated it with another pool of black just beneath it. Once the teke teke was free, Suguru settled back on his heels.
“Thank you for waiting. Where were we?”
Not one for polite conversation, she launched herself forward far faster than seemed possible for a creature so mangled. Suguru could hear her bones crack each time she settled her weight onto one palm. Suguru only just had the time to pull another cursed spirit from the ground beneath him. It held him up just high enough that the teke teke sank her scythe into a large, thick bear. It didn’t harm the cursed spirit with how its body simply opened for the attack when swallowed her hand whole. As he stepped off the front of the panda, when he came down he landed hard on her back with enough force and cursed energy behind it that her arm broke and a dent formed in the ground around her body.
It was underwhelming how easily the creature swirled and formed into an orb in his palm, though Suguru really couldn’t complain about not being in more danger. He could complain about not getting a stronger cursed spirit, though. At least that way, the whole process was still worth it. Suguru sighed and pinched his nose with his free hand. It hardly helped, but the familiarity of the motion settled his nerves.
Suguru was trying to figure out if it would be easier to gather a collection of cursed spirits and eat multiple at once or to do it one at a time as he beats them. “Easier,” wasn’t really the right word for it. It wouldn’t be easier, but he wasn’t quite to the number of cursed spirits he wanted to be at where he could feel more selective about which ones he ate. It felt like every mission left him down a few cursed spirits and only up one.
Still, Suguru brought the orb to his mouth. Suguru hoped it would get easier to deal with these things in time, but each time still left him feeling as nauseous and borderline sick as always. Humans weren’t made to consume curses. He had been born with an affinity toward it, but instincts fought tooth-and-nail with Suguru along the way.
Curses are a plague– guaranteed to kill anyone, sorcerer or not, who made such a poor decision. Though Suguru was immune to the death part, that didn’t mean he could knock these back. Each one hurt going down and he threatened to throw up hours after while the putrid taste still lingered in his mouth. Suguru felt cool sweat prickle at the back of his neck as the nausea set in. The curse disappeared into his stomach, but Suguru still kept his hand over his mouth to keep his dinner down. There likely wouldn’t be any places open for him to get a second dinner if he didn’t leave quickly. His stomach flinched away from the curse, but it only served to make him feel more nauseous.
It wasn’t poison. It wouldn’t kill him. Yet, as his body fought his nauseous stomach and the taste in his mouth he had just gotten out of there the day before, why did it feel like he was swallowing condensed death?
It was only once his stomach had settled into a background nausea that wouldn’t actively try to incapacitate him that Suguru pulled his hand away from his mouth. He patted his pockets on the search for his pack of gum. It didn’t get rid of the taste, but it at least gave him something to focus on. Now, where was–
A sudden release of his own cursed spirit sent a jolt through Suguru. His head turned to watch as his panda cursed spirit slumped and disappeared.
Dammit. That was his best defense spirit.
Suguru’s lips pressed into a firm line and he narrowed his eyes. A pulse of cursed energy had Suguru moving before he fully processed it. He raised a hand and, in a flash, a large hookworm tore through the air from a portal of black moments before something sharp could embed itself in Suguru’s torso. The good news is that worm curses are surprisingly more resilient than you would expect.
It’s then that the rattling and drag of metal against tile hit Suguru’s ears. He turned just in time to swing his foot out and kick another teke teke’s head so hard that it cracked back against the floor. He hopped back and slammed a foot down on a third teke teke’s wrist to get her to drop her scythe.
The buzz of cursed energy in Suguru’s sixth sense hadn’t ceased. He shouldn’t have let his guard down so quickly.
There was a moment of pause before the teke teke under his foot curled into an orb in his palm. See, this was why he sewed deeper pockets into most of his pants. He tucked it into his pocket to be sorted out later. At least a dozen teke teke in school uniforms and some sharp implement clutched tightly in their hands. The weapons and clothes varied, but all of them lacked legs.
It was a constant onslaught then, but Suguru took it all in stride. He pulled cursed spirits out to block attacks he couldn’t move out of the way of and watched as they dissipated moments later. It felt like he was physically grabbing them through the ether when he moved so quickly. He tore his way through the group and watched as his hookworm swallowed at least three of them. He settled back on his heels as the last teke teke close enough to strike curled into an orb just like most of them had. He shoved that one in his pocket along with the others.
With a slow breath out, Suguru walked over to the edge of the train platform just to verify the tracks were clear. His head turned so he could peer down the tunnel that darkened before a light lit up the tunnel to the left. Then he turned his head to peer down the right side of the tunnel.
Well, shit. Looked like Suguru would need to search the tunnels after all. That seemed to be where the curses kept appearing out of. He let out a low hum and dissipated his hookworm. Almost as quickly, a swarm of fly heads appeared from a portal.
Suguru gestured left and right with one hand to the fly heads. “Split up and keep flying through the tunnels. If you find a cursed spirit, let it kill you. If you find any people, turn around and come back.”
And, with that, Suguru watched as the curses rushed down both sides of the train tunnel before turning around. He got two steps away from the train platform before each of the fly heads buzzing with his own cursed energy like a beacon were snuffed out in almost the same second. Suguru’s shoulders tensed and he turned around just in time to drop out of the way of a lunging millipede– if it could even be called that. Large and insectoid along its body, there was an abrupt cutoff where… human legs sprouted from the curse. They were in varying states of decay and the smell of rot was so strong that Suguru’s eyes watered.
Suguru coughed and waved a hand in front of his face as if that would rid him of that terrible scent. He rolled before the millipede slammed down onto the tile where he had just been standing.
“A curse that creates other curses…” Suguru murmured under his breath and, with a jerk of his hand, he watched as his hookworm spirit smashed through the ground and wrapped itself around the millipede. Their long bodies squirmed on the ground while they fought. Suguru waved a hand out and, once the cursed spirit didn’t react at all to the pooling of cursed energy in Suguru’s palm, he dropped his hand once more. “Ah, so we’re doing this the hard way.” A glance at the time on his phone had him grimacing slightly. “I’m going to miss the train at this rate. I better hurry.”
The trains stopped at midnight. It was about a half hour’s walk back to the station he was supposed to be at, so maybe a ten minute flight once he grabbed his bags and summoned his stingray above ground.
It’s about 23:30, so he would need to wrap this up quickly.
As the millipede thrashed with Suguru’s cursed spirit, Suguru swerved and dipped around where they almost slammed into him. They thrashed a little too close for comfort, kicking up tile and dust as they dragged along the ground. He flipped backward and caught himself in a handspring to get back onto his feet.
Suguru gestured up above the two of them and a cloud of black pooled above them. Then he waited.
With narrowed eyes, the dust and wind that the wrestling creatures kicked up nearly blinded him. Suguru coughed and blinked quickly to clear his teary eyes. It didn’t work, but he could still see well enough. The hookworm clamped down on the millipede’s body with sharp teeth and slammed it down into the ground. The force behind it kicked the tile up.
Ah, well, Suguru’s priority hadn’t been keeping the tile intact. If this were a more public area, he might have been more cautious, but this place had only been frequented by the soon-to-be dead for a decade now.
That thought in mind, Suguru curled his fingers and slammed his hand down through the air. The shadow curse from before extended out this time in long, sharp spikes. It tore through both the hookworm curse and the millipede alike. One of its legs was torn off and pinned to the ground on a spike. Suguru grimaced when the millipede still tried to thrash around despite its new injuries.
Well, at least the cursed spirit had been sufficiently whelming. Suguru dipped around a rush of something spat his way that couldn’t be good for him when it sizzled on the tile. The millipede hissed and its many feet moved unnaturally despite being in various states of decay.
Suguru didn’t give the millipede time to spit more at him. He guided the head though, watching the millipede struggle to get to him. He jerked his palm down once more and watched as the shadow curse stabbed down through the millipede to force its head and first few legs to stay pulled taut.
Between the hookworm ripping chunks of viscera and whole pairs of legs from the millipede and the restraints of the shadow piercing through it, all it took was an outstretched hand before the millipede followed the teke tekes it created. It swirled free of the hookworm and formed into an orb that sent static up his palm when it settled into it. It’s only then that Suguru felt the last of the foreign cursed energy in the train station dissipate. He only then dissipated his hookworm in turn.
It seemed he mistook the distant cursed energy pressure of the millipede as residuals from the teke teke. He hovered for a moment to familiarize himself with the flow of residuals as it dissipated slowly from the train station.
Finally, Suguru breathed out a sigh that carried his tension with it. Yeah, he would call that a sufficiently whelming cursed spirit.
Still, it was strong enough that Suguru didn’t feel like proximity would keep it encapsulated for long as it did with most weaker cursed spirits. His lips pinched together a little more, but there wasn’t really a choice on what to do with it next that Suguru could reliably fall back on that didn’t involve consuming it. He pinched his nose, held his breath, and choked down the strongest of the cursed spirits.
It took a few extra minutes of nausea strong enough that Suguru’s head swam before he was able to walk again without feeling like he might trip over himself.
The fly heads reappearing from the other side of the tunnel were a welcome sound to ground himself with. The world was so quiet when people abandoned it and the fly heads, while weak and annoying on the best days, were welcome compared to the terrible taste in his mouth and the lingering thoughts of disgust. They swarmed back just as he was walking back toward the escalators. Suguru rubbed at the dust in his eyes as he moved and wondered if he might have some time to stop for eye drops, his eyes flicking around the cloud of fly heads that buzzed around him when the dust wasn’t painful. Would any drug stores be open this late into the evening? He’ll keep an eye out during the flight. The fly heads disappeared into a portal of black as they drew close enough to him for him to pull their cursed energy back to him.
Suguru found that his cursed energy was often the fuel for the cursed spirits in his possession. He received varying levels of cursed energy back depending on how damaged the cursed spirits were once he returned them to where they belonged. The cursed energy he got from the teke teke and millipede he had consumed helped maintain a good equilibrium, but Suguru could still feel the chunk that so many distant portals had taken out of his cursed energy.
It was late, Suguru had used both cursed and normal energy in spades, and he was tired. He lamented knowing that he inevitably wouldn’t sleep well for a while once he made it to his new school.
As he scaled the unmoving escalators, Suguru felt… weird. Like something was off, but he couldn’t quite place it. Focusing, the only cursed energy in the immediate vicinity was his own and the dispersing residuals of the curses he just exorcized. That much was true, but that didn’t brush the unsettling feeling off. Suguru kept his ears out in the uncomfortable silence.
Maybe Suguru wasn’t as immune to the oh-so-creepy-feeling he often found non-sorcerers would blame on a haunting when they were just unsettled by unknown and perceived danger.
The trek up the escalators was more arduous than he expected it would be and the walk back to where he left his bags felt so much longer than it had going deeper into the train station. One look at his phone to show that it was nearly 23:50 when he reached his bags. Suguru murmured an exclusively verbal curse under his breath and walked faster toward his bags. He rubbed uselessly at his reddened eyes one last time as the tears and dust blurred his vision annoyingly.
The second that Suguru stopped next to his bags might as well have lasted a full minute with the sudden rush he felt; like he was being pulled backward even though he stayed solidly on the ground. He heard the quietest shuffle of feet only a short distance behind him. Tension pulled the hairs at the back of his neck to stand up straight. Almost as soon as his foot brushed the ground for one more step and Suguru slowly settled his weight on it, his body was moving on reflex.
There was something behind him. The presence of uncannily familiar cursed energy. Was it possible to mimic the feel of another’s cursed energy? It was too much of it pooled in a single place behind him far too close for comfort.
Still, Suguru’s foot came to the ground and lifted off of it just as quickly. He twisted around in a split second with one foot kept solidly pointed toward where he had just been facing. The rest of his body twisted as his second foot came up. It was a move that was more reflexive than anything. Moves like that could save a sorcerer’s life if they were fast enough.
This time, Suguru caught a glimpse of white and black before his foot met cheek.
For a split second, Suguru saw eyes widen behind a circular set of sunglasses. Then the other person was a blur of movement as they tumbled with the force and cursed energy behind the kick.
It’s only once their momentum slowed unnaturally quickly and they came back up to their feet that the realization truly set in that that wasn’t a cursed spirit, but another person.
Another person with spiky white hair. He was nearly Suguru’s height. His cheek swelled and was already bruised from the attack. The sharp look in Suguru’s eyes changed from calculated to surprised to apologetic in the time that it took his foot to come back down to the ground. Suguru thankfully hadn’t hit high enough that his shades were broken, but there was enough cursed energy in that kick to put down a curse.
“Shit–” The stranger grunted when his feet skidded along the tiled floor and blood pooled under the skin of his cheek.
The blur of tears forming in Suguru’s eyes from the dust and the constant blinking that it took to keep his vision relatively clear made it beyond difficult to see. He dropped whatever tension that had formed in his body in an instant despite that. Though he could still feel a strangely familiar cursed energy from the other man and he was visually impaired, that wasn’t a good enough reason for Suguru to get violent. He quickly raised his hands up in front of his chest to keep them visible to the stranger with the hope that it would de-escalate a situation he escalated.
… Though, this guy should know better than to approach people without warning in places like this, but Suguru could contain the frustration considering it was more a 30/70 split with him holding the majority of the blame.
The other teen touched his cheek, but nearly winced away when the pain grew to be more trouble than the touch was worth. “That was one hell of a kick. How the hell did you pull that off?” Suguru wasn’t certain if the question was pointed more at Suguru or if the stranger murmured it to himself. The stranger brought his hand down and massaged his jaw. Suguru felt that much worse for the attack.
He didn’t have time to feel bad for long, though. Suguru brought an arm up on reflex to block the kick aimed directly at his head. It had his feet skidding against the tile for a few centimeters, but it did little more than rattle him and shake his bones with the force behind it– Nothing Suguru hadn’t dealt with before. He shoved to get the leg away and took a few quick strides back to put space between them. He held his hands up a little bit further for good measure.
“Wait!” Suguru said sharply and the stranger seemed to pause then. He took advantage of the lull to try to explain himself. “I wasn’t trying to pick a fight.”
A scoff cut through the air. “That’s one hell of a way not to pick a fight. Has that ever worked for you?”
“I’m very sorry,” Suguru said automatically, though there was an irritable argument he forced to stay under his tongue instead of letting it escalate things further. That always seemed to be the case; Burning irritation that he subdued in the name of peace. Suguru bowed. “You surprised me and I have dust in my eyes. I acted without thinking.”
“Your first instinct is to kick whatever surprises you. Seriously?” Something about the tone of his voice had Suguru’s expression shifting into something neutral lest his disdain shine through it. The stranger sounded almost like he was ready to laugh at a joke with a terrible punchline. “You must be one lucky idiot. Is that how you did it?”
The short amount of time that Suguru had before the last train of the day left and he was forced to travel on an uncomfortable stingray with his load of bags was ticking down lower and lower by the second. The easy irritability that came with fatigue combined with the stress from more than just one source was definitely the source of the heat in Suguru’s stomach that bubbled the words out before he had the opportunity to stop them.
“Well, most people are reactive when snuck up on in places like this.” There’s a snippiness to Suguru’s voice as he bit his words out through teeth that did little to stop them from flowing. Suguru leaned up and rubbed the stress headache he could feel budding in the middle of his forehead with his thumb. “Look, I’m sorry for hurting you, but I don’t have a lot of time. Please accept my apology.”
Suguru gave the other teen a curt nod before he turned around to pick up the couple of bags he left behind. He gave one last, tense bow before he started a quick walk toward the exit. The other teen looked relatively unscathed aside from the bruise on his cheek, so Suguru hoped that would be good enough.
Despite his need to get out of there quickly, Suguru looked over his shoulder and paused at the exit to speak. “Be careful down here. There have been a lot of disappearances lately.” And he kept walking.
Though Suguru could feel the cool static of cursed energy permeating through the other teen, whether or not he could use that cursed energy was still up in the air. He took the kick well, but many non-sorcerers could take a hit. He found it was better to err on the side of caution in cases like this. People were more prone to be either terrified or think he was delusional if he so much as insinuated that there was something unnatural going on.
“Hey, hey, wait!” The white-haired man said quickly after Suguru walked out of the train station. He was annoyingly on his tail before Suguru could get so much as a few steps out of there.
The night air was cool in early-April. Suguru let that soothe the warmth generated by all the exercise he put his body through only minutes ago. He frowned and didn’t stop walking, but he did slow his pace if only out of common courtesy. He regretted it almost immediately when the other teen caught up to him.
“I said I don’t have a lot of–”
“You just exorcized the curses in there. What, are you worried I’m going to break my neck walking?” The incredulity to the teen’s voice was something mildly frustrating to hear nagging after Suguru’s heels.
Suguru was caught more by the mention of curses than he was by the obnoxious way this guy spoke.
“Just how weak do you think I am?” There was a shift in his voice that spoke more to genuine anger than anything he had said so far. He sounded halfway between anger and incredulity in an unfortunate mix that Suguru didn’t have the time to unpack right now.
“I don’t think you’re weak.” Exasperation layered Suguru’s tone. Knowing this guy knew about cursed spirits caught Suguru’s attention, but everything else that had happened between them to this point kept him from indulging that curiosity. He rubbed absently at one of his eyes while he spoke. “It’s a common courtesy to wish people well. Do you think everyone who tells you to be safe thinks you couldn’t without the well-wishes?”
“What’s the point of stupid well-wishes? Words don’t do anything other than make idiots and gnats feel better.”
There was so much to unpack there. Suguru felt his brow furrow. “Then why are you whining about something that doesn’t do anything?”
As Suguru spoke, he was already reaching a hand out to pool black mist in the air behind him constrained to a single, thin portal. A moment later, a salmon-colored stingray formed just beside him. He didn’t have time for this and, though he was hesitant to show his abilities to any other sorcerers so abruptly, he couldn’t spare the time to make sure the other was appropriately prepared for it. Without a comment to the personified annoyance beside him, Suguru turned and set his bags on top of the stingray and hopped up himself a moment later.
“Hold on–” The other teenager started, but Suguru didn’t leave him much room to continue.
“Fly up.” It’s a simple command, but the stingray is already moving before he could finish the first word.
Once Suguru was far enough out of reach, he peered over the side of his stingray and offered one last apologetic nod to the black and white blur he hoped to never semi-see again.
“Sorry again.”
And he was gone.