The Rescue

When I woke up, I noticed that something was out of place. I was in a completely unknown room. It was not a comfortable place like my home, on the contrary, it was a nightmare. I was locked in a dirty room with little light. There was a metal door near me, it had a barred window through which you could see a little into the corridor. But there was no one, everything was quiet.

I was scared, I didn't know where I was and I didn't know what they were going to do to me. But one thing was for sure, whatever it was, it was not good for me.

As I looked around the room, I managed to see the silhouette of someone.

It was that of a girl, sitting quietly watching what I was doing. When she recognized me, she approached me and I could see her school uniform. When I came closer to see who she was, I could see that she was Haru Yamamoto. She was the granddaughter of Officer Yamamoto who helped me find my daughter Maria. But why was she here with me?

She was as frightened as I was because neither of us knew what was happening. Only now we were trapped in a strange place.

"Mrs. Adelis, are you here too?"
"Do you know what this place is?"
"What are those gunmen planning to do?" the poor girl asked.

I thought for a moment about how to answer her, since I didn't even know for sure what was going on. But looking through the door I managed to see some armed men passing through the corridor, they were wearing good military equipment in addition to assault rifles, they looked more like a patrol of soldiers, so this was not a simple case of kidnapping. This was a well calculated plan, because if they have such good means, they must know who I am. So I could only imagine that these must be I.S.C. men who managed to find me.

"Everything is fine, don't worry"
"Soon your grandfather will come to save us"
"We just have to wait until he arrives," I told the girl, trying to make her feel better.

But the truth is that I was completely panicked. The Alliance won't notice my disappearance until tomorrow, and I can't say how long it will take them to investigate. Haru's grandfather is undoubtedly a smart man who will surely search for Haru even if he has to go door to door throughout the city, but what could the police do against what was basically an elite army holed up in a warehouse? There was only Cesar, who noticed my disappearance and knows that we are probably in the warehouse that Tamamo mentioned, but they are only two people and no matter how much experience they had, they could win against so many enemies and without help from anyone. At best, she might be able to give the police clues as to where to look, but how will the inspector take it if someone as strange as her leads him here?

I was still thinking about the situation when the metal door slammed open. The patrol of soldiers pushed someone into the room and quickly closed the door. After that, two of them were left guarding the door while the other two were guarding the corridor, leaving us no way to escape. But what could I do? I'm just an ordinary woman. I've never trained in my life, and I've only used a pistol a couple of times at a shooting range, just because my work with the Alliance required me to know how to use it. Besides, I have to protect this girl who is by my side. I can't do anything stupid that could get us both killed.

I turned around to see who was being pushed into the cell. And to my surprise, it was someone I knew. She was the fruit of my husband and I, she was my precious daughter, Maria. After recovering from the fall, she looked around and saw my face. She was just like I remembered her, just like my little girl that I raised. And as soon as she saw me, she started to cry unconditionally and ran to embrace me.

"Mom is you?" My beautiful daughter said to me
"Is it you, right?"
"I'm very sorry about all this"
"Everything that is happening is my fault"
"If I hadn't told you that I saw you in one of the pictures in the cafeteria, this wouldn't be happening to you!"

"It's not your fault"
"All this is happening because it had to happen"
"No one is to blame for this"
"Just calm down"
"Do you know what's going on?"

"I worked for the I.S.C. so I could pay for the hospital and go home"
"They asked me to watch someone"
"But yesterday, when I went to a restaurant and I saw you in a photo, I told them that I wanted to leave work to look for you."
"They were very angry because I did not pay the debt, so they locked us here."
"If only I had done what they asked me to do, this would not have happened."

My poor daughter Maria was clearly mistaken about what was really going on. But I don't think that telling her what was really at stake would do anything but make her more worried. The only thing she could do right now was to hug her and protect those girls, even if it cost me my life.

After a few moments, both Haru and Maria calmed down a bit, and I began to see that we could get out of this situation, or at least prevent it from getting worse.

All I knew was that this was probably the warehouse of the stall where Maria was hiding and that there were a lot of armed and trained men around. We were on what appeared to be one floor down because there were some stairs behind a door in the hallway. In the unlikely event that we were able to get out of a room under the floor, I still did not know if I would be outside or if I would have a way to escape.

My only viable option was to wait until an Alliance or police unit arrived to rescue us. All we had to do was hold out for a day or two and hopefully we could be rescued. But what if they took us somewhere else?

No one would know where they could take us, not even Cesar and Tama could know where the I.S.C. could take us. And with a large number of resources at their disposal, taking us out of the country is another possibility. And maybe their goal is not to kidnap us, but something worse.

I couldn't stop thinking about all the bad things that could happen at any moment, every moment that passed only drove me more and more to despair, despair that I couldn't show in front of the girls.

But suddenly something strange happened outside in the hall. Another gunman has just arrived. But it seems that he was lost, because his companions started to ask him to leave the place. But the new soldier continued to play dumb and started to check the door bars, his companions went and asked him to stop, but just when the man looked at the bars of our cell and looked into my eyes, he stopped. His partner put his hand on his shoulder and started to push him to get him out of here. But the man was not moving.

The next thing I can describe is chaos. In a matter of seconds, the armed man, who had been acting strangely, pulled a rather rare spear out of nowhere, as if he had had it all along. And with it, he took a deadly stab at the soldier behind him. Next on his list was the other soldier who was also near the door. The one with the spear, still impaled on the body of the first, lunged at the hapless guard.

The last two remaining soldiers raised their weapons to shoot the strange man. But he responded by throwing some papers, he threw them with force, and as strange as these papers looked, as soon as they made contact with the armed men, they were engulfed in a blue fire so strong and deadly that their poor men could not even utter a cry of pain as they were burned alive in a matter of seconds.

I couldn't believe what had just happened, I was completely horrified to see how four people had just lost their lives so violently, so quickly, so easily. I wanted to throw up just to see such demonstrations of evil.

The strange man turned to knock on the door and opened it strangely quickly and silently. When I saw him after the door had opened, I hugged the girls tightly and tried to protect them by standing in front of them. As soon as the man saw us, he smiled and as if by magic, a lot of smoke came out of him. It was as if they had dropped a bomb, but the smoke was also strange because it dissipated at the same rate as it came out.

The next thing that happened, I did not know how to take it. Well, where was the monster that had just killed four men like nothing was now a rather strange girl. It was Tamamo, my son's wife, who now stood at the entrance, still wearing the same school uniform as Haru. And on her face was her usual smile, as if everything that had happened the moment before had been some kind of fun game.

"I finally found you"
"Don't worry, darling will come to save you soon"
"I will protect all of you here until she arrives," the mistress of the moon said.

"Tamamo are you?"
"What are you doing here?" I asked her because I still couldn't believe who she really was.

"Yes, it's me"
"Your beautiful daughter-in-law who has come to save you.
"Just like in those superhero movies!"
"Isn't it great!?" said the girl in her usual playful tone.

"Is Cesar coming to save us?"
"And how are you going to do that?"
"Are the police here yet?"

"I don't know"
"Darling said she didn't really have a plan."
"That we'll just make up what to do on the way."

I couldn't believe it, Tamamo shows up to save us first, and just when I'm hoping to get out of this situation, she tells me that my idiot son came here without a plan. That she just wanted to improvise on the fly. But I was still gathering my strength to say how stupid the plan was, when suddenly there was a bang right upstairs. It looked like a car had just run over the driveway and everything in front of it.

Seconds later, the sounds of gunfire from all sides filled the place. It was absolutely terrifying to hear a large number of gunshots, and at the same time there were more screams of pain, which increased with each of these outbursts of death. But I think my greatest anguish now was knowing that it was my son who was now causing the gunfire that could be heard above. The gunshots stopped for a few seconds, but immediately they were heard again, each time the closer they were.

Tamamo moved away from our door and stood behind the door leading to the ladders, spear in hand, preparing to attack the next unfortunate person who passed by. As the number of shots seemed to diminish, someone ran and opened the door where Tamamo was waiting, and without hesitation or a second's hesitation, she threw her spear straight at his head. The soldier who received the blow did not even know what had happened to him. And as if nothing had happened, Tamamo took the same position as before.

It was annoying to listen to the shots ringing and ringing in spite of the time. But the number of participants kept decreasing. And at the same time, I was afraid that they would stop ringing, because with every shot I could hear, it meant that my son was alive, so I was afraid of everything.

The girls who accompanied me were even worse because they did not understand what was happening. Haru seemed like she just couldn't take it and fainted, while my daughter Maria was also scared, but she tried to control herself a little. In vain, because from here I could see how much she was shaking.

Suddenly the door of the staircase was hit several times. And although the sound of the shots had not stopped, it was Tamamo who decided to open the door this time. Just so that a moment later she looked like a completely white girl fighting hand to hand with another soldier. The fight was fierce as I could see the two of them trying to kill each other as quickly as possible. The white girl tried to finish reloading her gun, but before she could, the soldier kicked her, knocking the gun out of her hand. Then the soldier took a knife out of one of his pockets and tried to hurt the girl. But that turned out to be his mistake, because it looked like my son wanted him to do just that. Well, as if it were a dance, she snatched the knife with a simple movement, then with a single movement the girl in white wounded him in the right arm, with the next movement she cut a good part of his leg, passing the knife from one hand to the other he stabbed the right side of the torso, continued an attack on the chest just where the heart would be, and as if it was not different, with the same knife then buried it in the soldier's throat. Letting him fall with a terrible noise. Without wasting a second, after killing the man in such a horrible way, she picked up her gun again and started shooting through the door she had just passed.

"Get ready because we're leaving right now," the girl in white said.

"Cesar?"
"Are you really thinking of rescuing us like this?"
"There are still soldiers out there, you are putting us all in danger!"
"Not just me, Maria and Haru are here too!" I shouted at them

"What the fuck!?"
"What is she doing here?"
"Well, it doesn't matter, I've already messed it up, so there's no other option"
"I'll go from first, Tama from second, you from third, and Maria, I want you to carry Haru"
"There's a car upstairs, it's a little damaged, but we can use it to get out of here.
"Mother, I want you to take the gun from that soldier and help me in any way you can.

"We can't go out in the open like this, they will kill us," I told her the crucial flaw in her idea.

"Don't worry, I got that covered."
"But if we want to get out alive, you have to do exactly what I tell you, literally."

Immediately after she finished speaking, she took a step back and, as if by magic, pulled a huge, broad sword out of the ground. It was so ridiculously large that it looked even larger than the girl holding it. Moments later, the girl grabbed it by the hilt with one hand and held her gun with the other. Then she began to march slowly but surely forward. Tamamo followed her as if it was just another game.

I couldn't stay behind, not now. If my son was right about anything, it was now or never. So I took a pistol from one of the dead soldiers, the only thing I knew how to use, and told Maria to follow us. She trusted me, took her classmate and followed me.

As we walk through the warehouse, I notice that my son seems to have done this many times before. Well, I see her checking every corner she goes through with the sword she uses as a shield facing forward. Occasionally I could hear a few shots ricocheting off the shield and how she stopped and reacted with her pistol, silencing her enemies shortly after. Walking down a corridor, there was a door on the side, and we couldn't tell if someone was hiding there. So she told Tamamo that she would walk until she passed the door, after which Tamamo would have to enter the room and kill whoever was there while protecting the hall with the shield. A moment after she realized what he had said, Tamamo stood behind her and patted her on the shoulder, indicating that she had completed her task and could continue.

On our way to the exit, I noticed that despite the occasional shooting between Cesar and the soldiers. The number of bodies did not match what we had found. They were from before, from the first shooting, because they were scattered everywhere. She had killed most of them on her way down, while Tamamo was protecting us, she had done this massacre first to make our exit easier now that she had to protect us.

Looking at her, I could see that there was no fear or nervousness on her face, only concentration. She was just a warrior with a mission to get us out of here alive. Everything else she was was not important to her at that moment. When she ran out of ammunition, she did not hesitate for a second and concentrated only on keeping the shield straight to defend us. Without even looking back, she quickly gave orders to her wife on how to surround the soldiers, and then she told me to give her my pistol. She didn't even turn her head, she just reached back with her right hand and waited for the gun to be handed to her. And when she received it with the same seriousness, she fired at the soldiers, trying to create a distraction for Tamamo to act.

It struck me that even compared to some of her enemies, she did not even blink when she fired. No matter how close the gun was to her ears, it was just another routine for him. I understood then that this was what she had been doing all these years. Killing anyone who got between her and her target. Just another day at work. And I was afraid of her, how she did not show the slightest emotion, even when she killed someone just one meter in front of her. I had thought about how the war had changed her, and the war I had fought until recently. How, in one way or another, I was partly responsible for it. And like me, unlike her, when I organized an attack from the safety of my headquarters, it was my son who had to fight and kill for every meter of terrain on the map I had marked.

By the time we reached the truck at the entrance, only a few minutes had passed. But they were the longest and most terrifying minutes of my life. Without waiting for anything, we all entered and Cesar started the car, she quickly put it in reverse and after driving a few meters, she turned the car to be able to go forward.

But as if it were a cruel joke of fate, a moment later police cars appeared right in front of us, forming a kind of barrier with their cars. One of them was Haru's grandfather, Inspector Yamamoto, who immediately took out a loudspeaker and warned us to get out of the car with our hands up. I thought I was finally saved, because if she could talk to him, this whole parade would finally be over today.

But the next thing that happened was completely different from what I thought would happen. Cesar grabbed her gun and started shooting at the cops without hesitating for a second what she was doing. We all put our heads down as a precaution and Cesar put the pedal to the metal and seconds later I could feel us hitting a patrol car. But the car didn't stop and after the impact it started to accelerate. Cesar then raised his head and started driving the car as if his life depended on it, which it did.

After a few minutes, we were on a highway with a wrecked car and several police cars chasing us. I was at a breaking point, because one moment I was seeking help from the authorities, and the next moment I was trying to escape from them.

"Cesar, what the hell did you just do?"
"They're the police, they were just rescuing us!"
"You're just making things worse!" I complained to him.

"What are you talking about?"
"Didn't you see it too?"
"Why did the police come so quickly?"
"It's not natural for them to come and act so quickly, even when there are hostages."
"They were waiting for us!"

" Moron!"
"Haru is Inspector Yamamoto's granddaughter!"
"The Inspector found out that her granddaughter was missing and went to the warehouse to look for her!"
"The police are on our side!"

"I didn't know that!"
"And what do you want me to do now, stop the car and tell them I'm sorry I shouldn't have shot them?"
"That's not going to end well for me!"

"So you want to spend your whole life running from the police and living like a criminal?"

"That will only happen if I let the police catch us."

"And how do you plan to keep someone as relentless as the inspector from catching us?"

"This is the time when everyone gets off work"
"I plan to drive until I find a train or subway station and we'll get there."
"We'll lose the police if we take trains and hide in the crowd".

After a few minutes of an exhausting chase on the highway, Cesar managed to get enough distance from the patrols and find our way to escape. A subway station. So she stopped the car and we all got out immediately to run towards the entrance.

But right now we didn't have the money or the time to pay for the train ticket. So, following Cesar's example, we all just said jump over the machine at the entrance. But right after that, one of the guards at the station tried to stop us for what we had just done. But the girl in white decided to go after him, and with a few punches, she managed to knock him out and hide him behind an expanding machine without people noticing what she had just done.

After that we took about two secure trains without noticing where they were going, we only got on the ones that were full of people. We ended up in an unfamiliar part of Tokyo and decided to take a taxi home. We decided to leave Haru, who was still unconscious, at the White Moon Cafe and ask Saeko to take her to a police station instead of us.

By the time we got to our house, it was dark and I couldn't believe what had just happened. I was in my house with a goddess watching TV and my son was taking a bath as if nothing had happened today.

My daughter Maria was also at home, as I wanted her to be, but she was as shocked as I was that she didn't understand what had just happened. So I asked her to wait until tomorrow to explain what had happened. After that everyone went to sleep, and since Maria still didn't have a room, I decided that she would sleep with me tonight, hoping that it would calm her down about what had happened today.