AKAME ASSASINATION (49)
The world after a storm has a certain stillness to it. The air, washed clean of oppressive fragment-pressure, feels thin and honest. The light, when it breaks through the bruised underbelly of the clouds, is sharp and pale, like a blade of glass.
In this calm, Akame flipped open a cheap, water-spotted clamshell phone—a piece of plastic so out of place in his hands it might as well have been a holy relic. He held it to his ear.
A recorded voice, brimming with theatrical, self-satisfied cheer, crackled through:
"You've reached The Blake Hotline! You think this is me, because I paused for dramatic effect, don't you? Well, it isn't! If you're hearing this, I'm either busy harassing my employees—as any good boss should—or I'm dead, and you'll never get to hear my lovely voice again. Either way, leave a message after the… beep! …Beep!"
A long, static-filled silence followed, as if the recording itself was judging him.
Akame sighed, a soft exhalation that held the weight of a thousand such conversations. 'What are you even doing at a time like this?' He closed the phone with a definitive snap, sealing away the echo of his oldest—and only—ally. He slipped it back into the Ziploc bag he kept it in (a habit born of too many unexpected swims) and tucked it into his pocket.
Other concerns pressed in. The man in the purple cloak, with the cross on his forehead and the serene, surgical exorcism. A puzzle piece that didn't belong to any puzzle Akame currently owned. But the man's aura had been… administrative. Not hostile. For now, that was a problem for Future Akame.
Present Akame had logistics to handle. He stepped fully out from the lee of the forest into the clearing and took a deep breath. The scent was petrichor and wet earth, undercut by the distant, coppery ghost of void-ichor. He tilted his head back, his white hair plastered dark to his scalp, and stared up. The clouds were fraying at the edges, and through the rents, spears of true sunlight stabbed down, painting the devastated plain in stark contrasts of gold and deep shadow.
SHOOOOSH!
The air to his left screamed.
Akame didn't flinch; he simply leaned his torso back, a study in casual contempt for Newton's laws. A cluster of jet-black carbon rods, sharp as sin and moving faster than sound, shredded the space where his head had been and embedded themselves in the bark of a tree with a sound like nails driven into stone.
"AKAME SAIKYO!!!"
The roar was pure, undiluted fury. Jericho stood twenty paces away, chest heaving, her leathers torn and stained, one hand still outstretched from her throw. Her eyes burned with a fire that had nothing to do with fragment energy.
Akame turned his head toward her, his movement languid, almost bored. "Yoo," he said, giving a slow, two-fingered wave.
"FIGHT ME! TO THE DEATH! RIGHT NOW!"
He blinked. "Nah. I'm good. Seems like a hassle."
The words didn't just dismiss her challenge; they rendered it trivial. Insignificant. A leaf asking a hurricane for a duel. Jericho's face, already flushed with rage, turned a dangerous shade of purple. Her fists curled, fragment energy starting to sizzle around them in unstable, sparking waves. "HOW DARE YOU, I'LL KILL—!"
THWACK.
A meaty, solid sound. Teddy, having approached with the silent resignation of a man who has performed this duty a hundred times before, brought the flat of his hand down in a gentle-but-firm chop to the back of her head. Her eyes rolled up, the furious light snuffing out. She pitched forward.
Teddy caught her before she hit the mud, hoisted her effortlessly over his shoulder in a fireman's carry—a sack of furious, unconscious potatoes—and offered Akame a sheepish, long-suffering smile. "Sorry about her. She… gets like that sometimes."
"She must really like fights," Akame observed, his tone neutral.
"She must… yeah," Teddy agreed, the understatement of the century.
"What are you gonna do now?" Teddy asked, falling into step beside Akame as he began a slow, ambling walk away from the forest.
"That's an interesting question." Akame watched a shaft of sunlight catch the evaporating rain on a blade of grass, turning it into a momentary prism. "Only one realistic way out of this country now."
"You're going to use the port at the capital." It wasn't a question. Teddy's amiable face grew thoughtful, then conflicted. He stopped walking. "I… shouldn't really be helping you. We're technically supposed to apprehend you. Deliver you to the Vatican."
Both men stopped. They turned to look at each other. Not as hunter and prey, but as two points in a strange, silent equation.
"So you're not going to?" Akame asked.
"Yeah," Teddy said, simple as stating the weather.
"Ok."
The conversation flowed like water finding its level. No drama, no grand declarations. Just a quiet, mutual understanding that the official script was worthless here.
"Can I ask you a question, though?" Teddy's voice was soft, earnest. He was the kind of person who could ask about the weather and make it sound like a philosophical inquiry.
Akame didn't respond verbally, but he tilted his head slightly—an infinitesimal gesture that was, for him, a welcome mat.
Teddy took a breath, his earnestness curdling into something heavier. "Did you… did you really do it? All those people… on the Old Continent?"
The question hung in the clean, post-storm air. It was a landmine of a query. For a liar, it was a trap. For a braggart, a stage. For a monster, a confession.
Teddy was none of those things. He was painfully, almost childishly transparent. He asked because he needed to know, and he would believe the answer he was given, because the concept of deception in others was as foreign to him as breathing water.
Akame looked at him—really looked at him. At the open, unguarded face. The hope and the dread warring behind his eyes. He saw the ghost of another boy, in another life, who asked difficult questions with the same brutal honesty.
"Yeah," Akame said. The word was flat. Empty. No pride, no shame, no remorse. Just a fact, like 'the sky is grey' or 'the grass is wet'. "I did."
Teddy absorbed it. He searched Akame's face—the placid green eyes, the relaxed posture—for a flicker of the monster the files described. He found nothing. Just… stillness. It was, in its own way, more terrifying than any snarling visage.
"That's kind of hard to believe," Teddy finally said, and a small, confused smile touched his lips. It was a smile of cognitive dissonance, of a worldview politely refusing to shatter.
"Why's that?" A faint, almost imperceptible smirk ghosted across Akame's mouth. "I don't look the homicidal type? You're really hurting my feelings here."
"You seem really nice," Teddy stated, as if commenting on a pleasant cup of tea.
"Looks have a tendency to be deceiving."
"Do you have a reason?" Teddy pressed, his earnestness now a gentle, persistent probe.
Akame paused. The truth was a locked vault, buried under leagues of black water and blood-red memories. What bubbled up was the expedient lie, delivered with the flawless, emotionless conviction of a stone. "Not really. I kind of just did it."
Teddy, the human lie detector who couldn't detect a lie if it painted itself purple and danced, nodded slowly. A sigh of acceptance, not of the deed, but of the incomprehensibility of it all. "It's okay. I guess we can't really change the past. And honestly… I'm no good at reading people. But thank you."
He bowed then, a quick, sharp dip of his head. The gesture was so formal, so profoundly decent, it was utterly disarming.
"Why's that?" Akame asked, genuinely curious about this strange boy's calculus.
"Back in the city," Teddy explained, straightening up, "Iman was rude. We accused you of something you didn't do. We attacked you. Thank you. For not killing us back there." He said it like he was thanking someone for holding a door open.
"Does it matter?" Akame's voice was quiet now, losing its edge of dry humor. He stopped walking, hands still buried in his pockets, a statue in the patchy light. "I've done far worse things than assassinate a minister."
"I guess. But… isn't that the past?" Teddy's philosophy was a fragile, beautiful thing. "People always say there's no forgiving or forgetting. Iman is like that. But I believe… regardless of what they've done… people should be given a second chance. A chance to be something else."
Akame stared at him. The sunlight caught the dust motes dancing between them. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, he reached out and placed a hand on Teddy's shoulder. The touch was brief, almost paternal.
"You…" Akame began, then shook his head, a rare, uncalculated gesture. "You remind me too much of someone I used to know." He gave the shoulder a single, firm pat. "Your words are what give you strength. Use that strength to take care of your friends."
"She's actually my step-sister," Teddy clarified, the smile returning, bright and uncomplicated. "Same dad, different moms. And you don't have to tell me twice."
'I can't see the resemblance,' Akame thought, looking from Teddy's open face to the scowling, unconscious visage of Jericho hanging over his shoulder.
"TEDDY!"
A voice, sharp with relief and frayed nerves, cut across the field. Angel was sprinting toward them, her usually impeccable appearance windswept and mud-spattered.
"I better get going," Teddy said, his smile turning apologetic. "I'll do you a favor. I'll lead everyone away from this site. And… be careful. The capital is under full lockdown. Everyone is looking for you."
"I get that a lot," Akame said. "Will do."
Teddy gave one last nod, then turned and jogged toward the approaching Angel, Jericho bouncing comically on his shoulder.
"Goddamn it, Teddy! I was looking everywhere!" Angel skidded to a halt, her eyes darting from Teddy to the slumped form of her teammate. "What the hell happened to her?"
"Long story. Where have you been?"
"I followed a fragment signature behind the huts, there were some wounded locals, I healed some minor injuries over—" Her words died in her throat.
Her eyes, scanning past Teddy, had locked onto him.
Akame was already walking away, a receding figure in the broken landscape. He wasn't looking back. He wasn't emitting any aura, any killing intent, any fragment pressure. There was nothing to sense, nothing to fear.
Yet, Angel froze.
It was a total, systemic paralysis. Not born of magic, but of something deeper—an animal instinct so primal it bypassed all thought. Her breath hitched. Her muscles seized. Her blood seemed to turn to ice in her veins. It was the silent, screaming recognition a gazelle has for the lion that has not yet chosen to chase. It was the understanding of scale. Of being in the presence of something for which you are not even a threat; you are scenery.
Her body refused to move, refused to even breathe too loudly, until that green-eyed gaze was no longer in her periphery, until his back was fully turned and he was just a shape melting into the shimmering heat haze rising from the wet ground.
"Angel… Angel, are you okay?" Teddy's voice, worried and close, finally pierced the static in her mind. He was shaking her shoulder gently. "You stopped mid-sentence."
She blinked, a full-body shudder wracking her frame. The world rushed back in—the sound of the wind, the smell of the earth, the weight of her own limbs.
"Yeah," she whispered, the word scraping out of a dry throat. She cleared it, trying to inject strength she didn't feel. "I'm… fine."
But she wasn't. She had just felt it. Not a threat. Not an enemy.
A condition of the world.
And she had been found wanting.
SOMETHING AT FIRST SIGHT
TO BE CONTINUED!