Takemura Itsuki

I turned my head right and looked at the empty street lined with shops that had their doors opened, just like the dozen of cars that stood on the highway. On the right of the street was a shop, quite far away from us, on fire. “What are we gonna do now?” Haruto asked as he stood behind me, looking on my back peeking out.

“The shit’s escalated a lot, to be honest. Running all this while behind your mom really got us quite far from our original destination,” I said seriously.

“Sorry, pal,” He replied.

“Nah, it’s okay.” I then turned back at him and said, “Now look. We need to get that sacred shit like we’re told, right? It’s a little far, and a lot of destruction has happened too. So, I think it’d be best to run the whole street. I think that we should run all this way, but by being on the footpath so that we’re close to the little lanes to run away from their sight when something happens.”

“But don’t you think that we, like, are relying on the little lanes between the houses and shops a lot?”

I shrugged. “What else can we do? If we get in their line of sight, we can just run inside a lane. If they even broke it up to find us, we’d be gone, right?”

“Yeah,” He nodded. “So that’s the reason why…”

“Then let’s go,” I said and turned my head back on the opening behind me. I stepped out, turned right, looked at the fire on the right side of the street, and then started running. Haruto was running behind me as we ran down the empty street full of shops with the interior broken and disarranged due to the commotion which was here just a few minutes ago. Our feet moved to and fro speedily as they patted on the ground. My chest was moving up and down in exhaustion, and my arms were full of sweat by that time. My hair was dripping sweat, and sweat was all over my forehead.

“Never in my entire life I’d run so much, man! But this time’s sprint was different from the other ones throughout this episode. This time, we had the finishing line of the marathon in front of us, and we both were desperately tryna be the ones to cut that shit. This time, we were running to the evil itself as fast as we could. This time, we were running to the end of this whole shit. And that’s what I was thinking when I was running in that empty street. It’s been just about an hour, but it felt like a whole day because of how exhausted we were at that time. It was gonna end soon, but what was gonna happen now? How will it end? Or, more importantly, how the hell were we supposed to end this? That was the question in our heads.”

***

The shop on fire was just on our right, and we both were breathing our lungs in and out as we moved our hands and legs and ran. The monsters behind that lane on fire were still fighting, and as I turned my head up right, I looked at the backside of the head of one of them angrily punching the other one in its front. But, as a punch came on his face, he stepped backward, and then suddenly the one on its front jumped onto him and held him by his legs around his waist. He grabbed his neck through his hands and started squeezing his neck tightly as he looked at it in rage. The one on top of them suddenly slit the other one’s neck in two. CHEK! The red blood rained down at the shops as I had my head turned up and was looking at the whole scenario. My eyes opened wide as I looked at the rage of the last surviving beast. “Damn, man…” I whispered. The dead body of the beast, upon which the victor still stood, suddenly started falling down on the street. The earth below our running feet trembled a little and I looked at the cloud of dust rising up and the sound of some cement broken up as the body of that beast fell down on that street the other side. The whole area was silent after that. It was only the patter of our running feet that was there. In that pin-drop silence, I had my shocked eyes still to the roof of the shops on our right. “W-Wait, it’s not getting up?” I thought. “Assistant,” I commanded. “Show me the map.” The hologram of the map appeared in front of my eyes. I observed the map and looked at the white two dots running down the street. The red dot was on our left just a dozen of shops away, and there were two yellow dots just on the right of us. One of them suddenly started to fade and it disappeared. I then turned my head to the front, and the map disappeared. As I ran in the empty street in front of Haruto, I pointed my hand frontward at the brown-colored brick-themed coffee shop just some steps away from us on the other side of the street. In a cursive font, the words ‘Coffee Café’ were written. As I pointed at it, I said, “That café… is where the gem is.”

Haruto smiled as he looked at that café. “It’s small, but is surrounded by big shops, ain’t it?”

I then noticed that there was a three-story shop just behind that one-story café. “Yeah.”

Haruto grinned. “At last, we’re this close to success.”

“Yeah,” I smiled too as I looked at the coffee shop. “Just five more minutes, and all of it will be over.”