While Aya was sitting on a bench outside of the school and listening to a lot of nothing, Narino and Kanton arrived at the school.

They walked towards the entrance when they saw a shadowy figure sitting on a bench, Kanton commented

"There's someone here so late? I'm a bit scared, you never know what people can do"

It's seemed as though Narino's half-a.s.sed complaining had some kind of impact because Kanton would normally specify humans in a quote like that. So Narino nodded in satisfaction and said

"It seems like you've learned, at last. But I don't think we need to worry necessarily, the body shape kind of looks like it could be some student."

Kanton pondered a bit and said

"Narino, you're so naive. You never know what humans could d-----"

Narino shouted

"You haven't learned anything! Are we gonna need to have some extracurricular cla.s.ses?"

Kanton shrunk down a bit and said

"No, ma'am."

Because of the strange amount of volume that Narino decided to use, a contemplating Aya heard recognizable voices and turned her head towards the heard direction.

When she stood up and walked a couple of meters to get a proper view, she saw two of her friends standing in front of the school discussing things.

Some questions were raised in her mind but she wasn't sure what to do exactly. But she decided to follow her curiosity and approached the two.

Narino and Kanton got surprised when they noticed Aya arise from the shadows to greet them. An awkward silence stemming from not really knowing what to say followed until Aya broke it to ask her initial question.

She asked

"What are you two doing here? I thought you two went home."

Narino looked at Aya and said

"I could say the same thing about you. Kanton started to really doubt that Kenjiro's intentions were bad so he rushed here to question him."

Aya felt an impact at the connotation that Kenjiro actually didn't mean anything bad, but just had unfortunate wording and questionable ethics. Once she heard those words being said to her, a path of further reasoning opened up. Perhaps he was just tired and generally worn out and that wasn't the best time.

But it was an undeniable fact that the ground ethics behind Kenjiro's mindset were really strange and unhealthy. But he didn't mean anything bad by it, instead, it was so radically towards the self-hating side that it almost came off as close-minded and narcissistic. Aya had hyper-focused on thoughts concerning why Kenjiro would dislike or hate them so much after only a couple of days together, she realized that she had been focusing on the wrong thing the whole time.

Aya lit up at the new theory that formed in her head, she decided that she wanted to try it out immediately.

She said

"I know!"

She then started running towards the exit, Narino turned around with confusion and said

"Where are you going!?"

Aya smiled and yelled

"To Kenjiro!"

Kanton and Narino looked at each other in absolute confusion, and in that confusion, they somewhere made the decision to follow along and ask what was going on later.

…

I saw a blurry figure in front of me suddenly take a right turn after a block of buildings 20 meters away from me.

The last thing seen before the blurry figure disappeared was a short glimpse of blue hair swinging to the left thanks to the power of momentum. Before I had seen that, there was still a possibility that it could've been someone just running out in the night, but that blue hair confirmed the thoughts that they actually were running towards the spot that was written. This was my chance, if I didn't manage to steal Sora back, I had to take the beating.

I turned that corner and saw the shadowy figure ahead of me. From his build and general body-shape, I would've guessed that he was a 30-year old or something. I was in such a hurry when I left that I didn't think of upgrading the stealth skill that was available, because of this the man ahead of me made a mental note of something he heard.

Takachu looked behind himself briefly and got an instant adrenaline rush when he noticed that there was someone running after him. He looked forward again and ran forward desperately.

"s.h.i.+t! Running isn't my specialty! Where's that Satos.h.i.+ runt when you need him?"

He looked behind himself briefly again and saw that the person behind him had now gained speed and was relatively close to him. Takachu panicked and looked around his surroundings for solutions to his problem.

When he looked towards a building a couple of meters in front of him, he saw an entrance to some sort of restaurant and turned his body towards it.

I picked up on this change of body movements and noticed the entrance he was inching towards. He probably wanted to go in there and lose me by running in a tight area. That man was a bit lucky in that a.s.sumption because, aside from being bad at everything, I was especially bad at making quick turns, making tight indoor s.p.a.ces quite hard to navigate. That was amplified by the speed I was going with at that moment. Because I would have to cancel my own momentum all of the time in order to not crash into something. I looked around my surroundings for a solution to my problem. I locked my eyes onto something that would help me and I smiled a bit.

Takuchu quickly entered the building and ran towards the kitchen of the restaurant.

*TMP TMP*

When Takuchu heard that sound, he panicked even more and ran faster towards the back-door of the kitchen. The customers and staff of the restaurant reacted badly to Takuchu's sudden interruption and confused chatter opened up. The staff started yelling at him to stop. They were also quite worried since he was literally holding a girl in his hands who was struggling. He had used another one of his b.a.l.l.s to keep her from screaming, but anyone who took a glance could tell that something wasn't right. Takuchu, who was surprisingly agile for someone his age, managed to escape all of the problems and neared the exit with a sense of confidence. He hadn't heard those exaggerated footsteps, meaning that this route slowed the man down. Takuchu got proud of his mind games and ran out of the exit.

Suddenly, a large shadow swept by him and stopped right next to him. Takuchu almost received a heart attack due to the sudden reveal. He looked back into the restaurant and noticed that the man wasn't behind him at all.

The man standing next to him inched forward quickly and managed to grab a hold of Takuchu's hands.

Takuchu immediately activated his fight-or-flight instinct and tried to back away.

I grunted a bit when I saw that shady man's quick movements which allowed him to back up a little bit. But I was still holding his wrist, like I wanted to.

The man stared at me completely dumbfounded for a couple of seconds and was trying to figure out what had just happened.

It took him a second or two, but when he finished scanning my appearances and noticed the lonely bare feet against the cold pavement, he realized what I had done.

He looked at me in distress and said

"So you threw your shoes into the restaurant to create the illusion of you chasing me? Tch, I don't have time for this. Who are you? What's your objective?"

Sora looked at me with a surprised smile and could all of a sudden speak again

"Kenjiro! You came to rescue me? Help m------"

but it didn't take long until she was silent again, after some sort of ball hit her. I was taken aback by her sudden silence and that created an opening for the man. He suddenly pulled back his arm which caused me to follow his motions, I started falling towards him. He smacked his lips lightly and kicked my left hand's wrist so that I would let go. He said

"Kenjiro, the guy that we're supposed to meet by the docks? Why are you here, did you really think you could take care of me before we even arrived at that place?"

I didn't let go of my hand so I took the opportunity to do my own hand-pulling, which caused him to move towards me. I then lifted up my leg to kick the side his left leg. But the man noticed my intentions and lifted his leg so that I missed and threw my leg into nothing. The man used the momentum of lifting his leg to kick my wrist once again. This time, he closed his eyes shortly and looked at me sympathetically. This time, the pain was so shocking that my hand opened up, and the man backed up quickly. He said shortly

"Sorry, I have to complete my mission. Please surrender quietly at the docks, I don't want to make a bigger deal out of this than I have to."

He then turned around and started sprinting again.

I was on my way to faint and could feel all energy collapse in my brain causing me to only desire sleep and resting.

But that desire wasn't lonely within me, somewhere deep within myself there was a desire to find out what I had done wrong. To find out how to fix it all, and strangely enough a desire to win. A desire I had never even expected to have within me. The idea of it residing inside of a self-spiting person as myself was hard to believe. But those desires suddenly came to the foreground when I thought of Sora's feelings in this matter, and why she even was kidnapped. Everything that was wrong in her life at this exact moment was caused directly or indirectly by me. The guilt and shame of that really made deep wishes that were buried under tonnes of layers of self-hatred and self-doubting. At that moment, I suddenly rose up again from half-sleeping. I was ready to do this no matter what.

I started sprinting with all my might towards that man. But my general energy was still quite low, so my speed had been reduced. But only slightly. Only slightly.

Takuchu ran away from that alleyway with a confused mind. He felt that his duty was to fulfill this mission and was prepared to do almost anything. But he didn't like a lot of the things he had to do. Especially when it came to hurting other humans. He understood that it all was for the good of the company in the end and that no one would get permanently injured, hopefully. But every time he hurt someone, his heart broke into several pieces. He had done it so many times in the span of his career, that it was almost routine to him. He reminisced about his time back in the gang, when a couple of circ.u.mstances led him to a career in crime. He had felt miserable for his whole career in the gang and it wasn't until he had met Kurohito that everything turned out better for him. The work itself was less brutal, and there was an end goal that he enjoyed working towards. But these sort of missions that he had to do sometimes still went against his heart and he started to question everything a bit.

Takachu continued running and after a long interlude of silence, heard those heavy footsteps behind him again. This time they were a lot heavier and rougher, which led to more turmoil within Takachu. But he couldn't afford to be distracted right now, so he started thinking of ways to complete the mission and avoid conflict.

…

"I suppose we'll have to come back with that suitcase another time"

Kori said while cleaning his hands of dirt.

He then went into a room in the mysterious building they were in to obtain the materials they were after. He walked into the room and saw two suitcases on the table, he walked up to them and inspected them.

Biharu crept up behind him and said

"Be careful, maybe there's some sort of Indiana Jones trap behind it."

Kori shrugged and grabbed both suitcases at the same time, indicating that he didn't care.

Luckily Biharu's delusional comparisons to movies were wrong and nothing happened at all.

After searching a bit around the building, they found a door that looked like an exit out of there. After some small antic.i.p.ation together, they opened it up and walked out to the rough wind blowing in their face. They looked around a bit whilst trying to figure out where they were.

Kori slowly said

"Why are we at the docks?"

Biharu looked back into the building towards the group of unconscious bodies that laid on the floor and said

"So much for the diplomatic endeavors…"