*Genji
As Onii-san and that loudmouth Daigo left, Eiji finally, drunkenly, managed to get himself up off the floor.
He walked, or rather staggered, unsteadily into the room.
As he slammed the flimsy door shut behind him, he took a few more lurching steps, then looked directly at me with his hazy eyes.
I looked back at him coldly, my own gaze hard, and said, my voice low and dangerously quiet,
"If I wasn't in this fucked-up condition right now, you little shit, you would be fucking dead where you stand."
This bastard is really starting to behave just like our fucking Father.
I can't beat the shit out of my old man, but I can sure as hell still beat the living shit out of Eiji if he keeps this up.
I seriously wonder what the hell happened to Onii-san this time around, for Daigo to react to seeing him that way.
He seemed genuinely, overwhelmingly happy to see him alive.
Which is cool, I guess, but it also means something really, really bad must have gone down in whatever Gate they'd entered.
I can't even begin to imagine what the fuck will happen to us, to mom, Ayaka and me, if we ever lose Oniisan for good.
Those fucking blood-hounds, Kuro and Jiro, they will literally make ALL of us sell our literal asses on the block, day in and day out.
Oniisan is the only damn thing holding all of us together, the only one keeping us from sinking completely into misery.
But this fucking fool Eiji here is just plain shit-stupid, and he should seriously thank his fucking lucky stars that Oniisan has the patience of Zenryō na Seishin with him, and that I'm currently too weak to do anything about it.
*Shitsubo
I told Daigo about everything that had happened to me, from me somehow blasting through a solid vine wall in that fucked-up Gate, to the weird 'elf queen' and her midget army, all while we walked down the scummy, familiar streets of Sumiyoshi.
The area was already filled with the usual, inescapable morning stench of old piss, stale shit, and some other indescribable, awful odour that always seemed to emanate from the homeless hobos and the sick, dying people huddled at the sides of the narrow street.
The stinky, yet somehow cool, morning breeze massaged our faces, while we watched the last of the nocturnal glow-frogs retreating hastily back into any dark hole or crevice they could find as the sun slowly, reluctantly, began to climb up into the polluted sky.
"Man, I can't believe you had to scrap hard again, right after that whole crazy shit that went down just 2 days ago…" Daigo was commenting, shaking his head in disbelief, before I interrupted him.
"Wait, 2 days ago?" I asked, genuinely confused, and then said briefly, mostly to myself, "Fuck, it felt much shorter than that… a lot fuckin' shorter."
"Yeah, man. The first big battle with those Flea-gloats, those fuckers tried to blow us hell?
That was 2 days ago," Daigo replied, a flicker of something like sympathy, or maybe pity, in his eyes as he looked at me.
He then added, "…You might have been knocked out cold for a while and simply lost all track of time, you know, with all those explosions and shit… I've heard about some other people experiencing a similar kind of thing after getting their bells rung, and the Conquest District doctors that attended to them just dismissed it as a temporary side effect of a concussion or something like that."
"How many of those people you heard about are still alive, Daigo? Or even mentally stable enough to fuckin' work?" I asked, my voice flat, a grim expression settling on my face that clearly said, 'Don't talk like we both don't know this shit is far from some temporary, minor side effect.'
"Hey, some of them are still walkin' this fucking Earth, alright?" he replied, a little defensively, his gaze shifting to two young kids up ahead of us.
They were already trying to destroy each other's faces with their small, bony fists, right there on the unpaved, muddy road, a road already churned up with the foul, stinking waste overflowing from the nearby clogged gutter.
"And how many of them are still completely fucked, you know, up here?" I said, pointedly tapping a finger to the side of my head.
Daigo's only response to that was a single, humorless chuckle.
We passed by the right side of even more local punks already fighting, or just posturing, on this narrow, crowded road.
Then, he finally said, "Well, at least, I don't think you can get any more fucked up than you already are… not yet, at least," before grinning playfully at me, the asshole.
"It's totally fuckin' downhill from here, man. I can feel myself losing my damn mind already," I said, my eyes involuntarily flicking to those persistent, damn 'things' still hovering at the left bottom of my left eye's vision.
I seriously tried to ignore them, to just block them out, but how the hell could I possibly do that?
I'm always fuckin' seeing them, every waking moment.
We finally got to Daigo's usual neighbourhood, which was situated in the South-most, grimiest part of Abeno.
It took several tens of minutes to get there; I can't really keep up with the exact passage of time today, but I knew it wasn't quite up to a full hour of walking.
Daigo led the way confidently through his familiar, squalid street, towards a particular, bustling area that was densely filled with shabby, makeshift stalls and run-down, open-fronted shops.
The place was already swarming with a huge, noisy crowd of people, both desperately trying to buy and aggressively trying to sell all sorts of questionable goods.
If I remember correctly, Daigo had mentioned this specific place to me once before.
It's the Sunda market… no, wait, he called it the Subaru market, that was it.
This is one of the few, relatively reliable places where people from around here, the dregs of society, can actually get their daily food and patched-up industrial clothes.
We walked deeper through the noisy, chaotic market.
I casually glazed at what the various street peddlers were aggressively selling.
It was no real surprise to see that most of them were hawking assorted Aggressors parts and by-products, marketed as food.
Much of which, on closer inspection, was already visibly rotting, attracting swarms of flies.
There were also some sad-looking stands that displayed ragged clothes (the standard, patched-up, drab attire that almost everyone in these parts wore), dried herbs of 'fuck-knows' origin, crudely made or heavily rusted weapons, cheap nylon bags, worn leather pouches, and other junk.
As we went even deeper into the labyrinthine market, the stalls became fewer and the peddlers we saw grew scarcer, more desperate-looking.
That's because there were mostly rascals, than low life market folks
I turned my head to my right one time and saw a haggard, old woman with one extremely disfigured eye.
She technically didn't even have an eye there anymore; instead, a horrific, puckered scar extended from the empty, weeping eye socket all the way up to the top of her visibly lice-chewed, balding head.
She was laboriously dragging a very big, heavy-looking sack behind her, a sack which was thoroughly soaked with dark, sticky blood, leaving a wet, glistening trail on the filthy ground as she dragged it with all her frail might across the already wet dirt.
The distinct, lumpy shape of the contents of that bag, even from the outside, definitely didn't look like any common Aggressors I knew, or even just their dismembered parts.
And absolutely no one around here would ever waste good, edible meat of that considerable size, not like that (that is, if anyone could even get their hands on such a large quantity of fresh meat in the first place).
And besides, most of the Aggressors I've faced in Gates rarely, if ever, have red-coloured blood like humans do.
(I can't even begin to consider any normal livestock from Old Earth; those kinds of animals cost a fucking king's ransom these days. Most people can only ever dream about seeing them in pictures, much less actually eating them).
The only damn thing that could realistically be in that heavy, blood-soaked bag would be dead humans.
Humans are, after all, the cheapest, most expendable shit down here in the shit parts of the city, something that can be wasted, or disposed of, without anyone giving much of a fuck at all.
At least when Evolves are killed, or happen to die from so-called 'natural' causes in the ghetto, their harvested hearts are still worth some measly shit coins to someone.
The old woman, grunting with effort, finally stopped and let the sack fall.
She just took out a small, grimy bottle from the deep pocket of her ragged, oversized overall as she carefully placed the large, ominous sack near a rusted, makeshift metal container that had a meager fire burning inside it.
A few other destitute-looking people were already gathered around this fire, seeking its warmth.
Then, she uncorked the bottle and gulped down some of its contents before, surprisingly, pouring the rest of the liquid all over the blood-soaked bag.
She definitely didn't look like she liked wasting her precious drink on that sack; the expression of profound regret was clearly written all over her wrinkled, dirt-streaked face.
She then seemed to body-check herself, patting her pockets, and finally pulled out a single, bent cigarette from one of her overall's many patched pockets.
She walked a few shuffling steps over to the container of fire and carefully lighted her cigarette from the struggling flames.
After taking a few deep, satisfying puffs, she generously passed it around to some of the other shivering people that surrounded the makeshift cylinder-container of fire.
When the cigarette eventually got back to her, now much shorter, she took just one final, long puff and then, with a flick of her wrist, casually threw the rest of the almost-finished, still-glowing cigarette butt onto the doused sack.
The sack quickly, almost eagerly, engulfed in bright, hungry flames, like it had forcefully, violently, woken up from a very bad, terrifying dream.
The old woman just turned her back to the now blazing pyre, seemingly unconcerned, and rejoined her pals around the meager fire, patiently waiting for her turn to puff on something new, some other shared narcotic, that one of them had just pulled out from gods know where.
In the midst of that small, indifferent crowd, I just stood there silently for some long seconds, just watching the old whore's actions.
Then I looked at the fiercely burning sack, now a pyre, with a strange, unsettling feeling of slight irritation mixed with a profound, weary indifference.
At that exact minute, Daigo called out to me, his voice breaking my morbid trance, and said, "Yo, Shitsubo, what the hell are you starin' at so hard? I know for a fact it's definitely not some chick, so let's get a fucking move on, alright?" before he casually dipped his hand into one of his own pants pockets and pulled out a fresh cigarette.
He used a cheap, flickering lighter to light the ass end of his cigarette as we continued our walk deeper into the market.
He offered me some of it on the way, a puff or two, but I refused, just like I do any other damn time he offers.
We slowly walked onward until we finally reached a particular, dilapidated shop (with the top right part of its roof conspicuously chopped off, or collapsed).
There were a couple of rough-looking guys just hanging out listlessly at the side of its narrow entrance.
Most of them were obvious cripples, missing limbs or eyes, and sporting faded, prison-style tattoos, which meant they were almost certainly once Mercenary-Guards themselves, now broken and discarded.
Most of them just sat there on old, overturned wooden boxes, playing various makeshift board games with bits of junk and bottle caps as their game-pieces.
While others were just hanging around against the crumbling walls, furtively slipping small, dirty packets of drugs to the twitchy, desperate buyers that walked up to them with downcast eyes.
We walked carefully through this sad, listless crowd of forcefully retired, broken Mercenary-Guards, towards a sizeable, if ramshackle, shop that had a crudely painted wooden sign hanging above its door.
The sign said, in surprisingly neat characters, 'Sweet Sake' (Thankfully, I could actually understand these particular, simple characters).
All of the so-called retired Mercenary-Guards who were just fooling around out front, wasting away, were visibly missing at least two noticeable, significant body parts. A grim testament to their former profession.
Daigo led the way confidently into the dimly lit, smoky interior of the shop