Chase Me ✔️

Chapter 2

||> The Threat <||

The moon rose, along with the twinkling stars and the darkness was painted across the sky.

Underneath Garu's roof, he lay there by his bed, exhausted with his thoughts on the events that happened earlier.

His mind recalled back to the Goh-Rong Restaurant where he and his friends found Pucca scurrying around the costumers' tables. The work her three uncles put in was full of effort, even she herself gave up everything just to give justice to her uncles' hard-earned work.

Although, it was truly surprising. The boy would never thought that the once reckless and childish Pucca would risk herself to work inside the noodle house.

It was very new to him. She changed a whole lot — a good one that is — over the past few years that he hasn't seen her.

Garu — in between Ching and Pucca's talks — might've been silent, but he wasn't that inattentive to see her current situation. After finding out the whole truth behind her sudden absences with them and under different circumstances, he felt the same level of worry that both Abyo and Ching felt — even though Ching's worry was in a higher level.

Pucca sure did outworked herself for too long, they were right to give her a rest from all of that. She was too young to handle all of it, and to think that she was dedicated to help her uncles — it was amusing.

She was too selfless for the world. He knew that the world doesn't deserve to have a person as she.

His train of thoughts stopped when he felt a short pain coming from his back. In his reply, he sat up from his bed and tried to stretch out the pain, and in each stretch he heard his bones crack that signalled the ease afterwards. This pain was actually caused by the little get-together they had.

Ching had decided to show Pucca some of the new techniques that they've learned in Kung-Fu while she was away. And by some — she meant all of them.

Since Ching was the one who said so, she was also the one who was left standing. He and Abyo were already tired out after they showed Pucca half of their new techniques. And Pucca laughed at this but at the same time, she was impressed — and that was all that mattered.

Her smile.

Her laugh.

Just thinking about those small features of Pucca made Garu smile to himself, too. It really has been long since he had last seen her like that.

Happy and free.

He saw her like that before, and thankfully he still saw that until now.

The three of them really missed her, especially Ching.

And he admits it to himself — he missed her very deeply, too.

After a while of reminiscing, a picture of Pucca and her smiling face ran across his mind. But then, he paused when another memory hit him that caused him to rush over to his bedside table and open the drawer.

Once he had pulled the drawer open, he came face-to-face with a neat set of thick papers and a few small booklets.

He pursed his lips before he grabbed the booklets first and held one by its spine and shook the booklet side to side. When nothing slipped off, he went onto another one and repeated the same process. But much to his disappointment, the thing he was looking for was nowhere there.