Witch Hunter

Chapter Seven: Before the Hunt

The mysterious man had given him directions to a particular building where he should begin his search within the next two days.

Aion took that to mean he had been given some time to set his affairs in order and make appropriate farewells. Following this train of thought, he guessed that there was a good chance that he would not be returning from this mission.

Nevertheless, he was feeling invigorated from his conversation with Isabelle the night before. It was only until he had opened up to her that he had realised how much of a burden his jumbled emotions had been. Knowing that she had always considered him a friend had been an unbelievable gift and he suspected that she didn’t even know how much it meant to him. All along he had thought he was alone but he had been wrong. She had been there. His first friend.

As night had fallen, Dortan had taken her daughter home, leaving Aion to try and think about his mission whilst fending off persistent thoughts of Isabelle and the things they had talked about.

“I’ve always thought of you as my friend.”

He smiled. Even now, those words filled him with warmth.

However, he had a task at hand and he was determined not to let his encounter with Isabelle create a weakness in his character. She was important to him, but she was not the purpose of his existence. He had but one purpose; he would find who had killed his parents and then he would destroy them.

To do that, he needed access to the information and power that the Exorcists possessed. This opportunity, in light of his failure during the examination, was almost a miracle.

Rounding a corner he found himself once more in the deserted alleyways of the lower district. It was dark, as the tall buildings blocked out the sun, and the sound of his feet echoed oddly. Praying that he didn’t run into smugglers or thieves, he spied the building that he was looking for. It was, from all appearances, an abandoned warehouse.

He circled around to find an entrance. A sliver of light danced across the footpath, flickering like candlelight. He craned his neck around a wall to find the source and saw a small part of the main road. The sunlight was flickering because a multitude of people were walking past, blocking out the light for a brief moment until they were gone.

All of a sudden, he knew where he was. It was the building he had climbed during the Exorcist exam to escape from Groot. And atop the building had been the nerve-racking encounter with a Tsukage witch.

Aion felt apprehension dawn inside him. Why this building? Coincidence?

Finding the entrance, he kicked his way through the remnants of an old wooden door that had, at one point in time, slid sideways to cover the large loading bay. Damp and time had rotted the wood to the point where the few jagged boards still in place gave way as Aion shouldered through the cracks.

He was greeted by pitch black darkness and almost instantly later, he was assaulted by the most horribly pungent smell of putrid fish. The smell was so strong he came on guard for a split second, thinking himself ambushed in the darkness.

As his eyes adjusted, he wrapped his mouth with his arm to fend off as much of the stench as possible. Several beams of light filtered in through the cracks in the door as well as from the ceiling above. Though none of them were strong enough to pierce the impenetrable blackness, a slight glint caught Aion’s eye.

Hurrying over to the source, he found a small dagger embedded in a nameless old crate with a small piece of folded parchment impaled beneath it. It was positioned so that the small handle was just in within one of the weak beams of light coming down from the ceiling. The fact that it had been capable of reflecting light in the given circumstances meant the quality of the metal was far beyond anything Aion had seen in the lower district.