Apotheosis of a Demon - A Monster Evolution Story

65 - THE WHITE DARKNESS LURKING IN THE TOWN

In a run-down district of a certain city in a certain country on Earth, there was an old high-rise building built since the beginning of the 21st century. Its basement housed a store selling personal defense equipment. Jim, the owner, looked at the creaking door and the new customer coming in. He slightly raised an eyebrow.

The customer stayed silent. So did he.

Among the faint sound of jazz music, they looked around the shop in apparent curiosity.

A strange customer, they were. The parka was oversized on their frame, with the hood pulled low to hide their face. They had on a pair of similarly baggy army pants and boots that looked to be clothes for a grown man.

It wasn't the body size of an adult. They looked more like a boy... or perhaps actually still just a kid. In this country, people entering stores like Jim's with that sort of suspicious look were, nine times out of ten, burglars.

Jim couldn't relax, even if they were a kid. In this country, where guns were relatively easier to acquire compared to other first world countries, children could kill adults just by a pull of a finger. No one could have fault Jim for reaching for his gun just because a customer looked suspicious.

"..."

Yet even as he touched the gun hidden behind the counter, he didn't take it into his hand. He couldn't.

He was assaulted by a feeling of severe uneasiness and dissonance. The customer looked thin, their height only a bit over five feet. They looked like nothing more than just a kid. But the strange unease was telling Jim that the moment he held up the gun would be the moment he took his last breath.

"So I heard this place take trade-ins, right?"

"...where did you hear it from?"

Only when the customer first talked to him did he realize that she wasn't a boy, nor a child. And she wasn't even an adult woman — judging from how thin she looked, she was still just a teenage girl.

"On the internet."

The girl waved her phone in front of him as her reply.

Jim hadn't written anything about trade-ins on his shop's homepage. Since she didn't say 'website' but only 'internet', then she must have found somebody's tweet and identified this shop and its location. Concluding that she wasn't a normal customer, Jim lightly leaned on the counter and began to do business.

"What're you offering?"

"These."

The girl placed the goods on the counter. Seeing them, Jim asked, "Can I take a look?"

"Go ahead," she nodded.

"...the newest model used by the military, I see. Already broken in at that. No outside defect. I heard these are only just beginning to be issued? It should be too early for it to start showing up on black markets... where'd you get it from?"

It was the newest handgun model, made by a conglomerate in the arms and munitions industry. The girl was offering two of them. They couldn't have been acquired through any official pathway. Jim attempted a bit of intimidation, but there wasn't a single twitch on the girl's face behind the hood.

In this country, Jim's shop was only one among the numerous stores secretly doing trade-ins behind the counter. There was a yearly cycle of several of such shops being exposed and then revived in some other underground locations. It was the reason why the police had stopped bothering with them, and were generally content to leave them be unless something significant happened.