Black Stained Winter: Chapter 9a - "Spearman's Sisters"

Author's Note: This chapter 9 was written in mistake and thus is non-canon to the story since it is located in a wrong timeline. You can read the correct and canon chapter 9 here. For more information what's wrong with this exact chapter, you could read about it here. This chapter is still online for the sake of completion.

When he opens the door to his room, Ren sees a pair of woman boots still lined up tidily inside near the wall. That’s mean that his older sister is still there.

“Ren, is that you?” A nice and gentle voice of a woman comes from inside the room.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Ren removes his boots, puts it near the wall tidily besides his sister’s boots, and proceed to enter the room. 

Inside, washing her hands on the sink is a pretty woman in a light blue sweater and gray skinny jeans. Her slightly wavy dark brown hair is tied up in a ponytail, showing off her white neck. Her face is framed with her bangs that fall down to the both side of her face. A white framed oval glasses add a refined feels to her looks. She’s Elizabeth, Ren’s older sister.

Ren walks to the bedside and looks at the unconscious young woman. She looks much better than when he left this morning. He was thrown out from his own room by his sister when she decided that she needed to remove the wounded girl clothes to treat her wounds.

“Ren!” Elizabeth looks surprised when she turn her head to Ren as he come in. She sees a long slice wound on Ren’s abdomen. Not just that, there’s also several light wounds here and there. She quickly turns off the faucet and approaches Ren. “What happened this time?” She squats to take a closer look of the wound. Her face shows concern.

“Come on, Elie. This is not that bad.”

“Not that bad? This cut is quite deep. A little deeper and you’d be bringing your insides back home in your bag.”

“Yeah, I was lucky I guess.”

“There’s no such thing as lucky when you run headfirst into stuff that could kill you,” Elie stands and walks to get her bag on the small table, “You sit tight there. I’ll treat it in a moment.”

“Thanks, but I can treat this on my own.”

“Shush! Hear your sister, will you? Or you want me to slap that wound of you and leave you bleeding here to death?”

“Ugh… Alright, alright,” Ren complies to his sister’s order after he briefly recalls the grisly moment when he refused to be treated by her. He walks to the window and sits under it. Elie then sits in front of him with her bag full of medical equipment.

“Now, lie down,” Elie opens her bag and getting prepared to treat Ren’s wound, “ and why don’t you tell me what happened?”

While Elie treat his wounds, Ren starts telling what happened earlier that day. From meeting with Rick and Tama, Tama’s kidnapping, him and Rick went to Gerogom’s place, fought Ignis, and met with Gerogom again. He shows a visible annoyance when he talks about Gerogom.

“You still hate that guy, huh,” Elie asks while finishing her stiches on Ren’s wound.

“He’s the reason Yui’s not around now,” Ren answer is followed with a brief silence.

“Still,” Elie puts bandages to cover Ren’s wound that now already stitched, “Yui is the one who’s willing to go by herself. It’s already 2 years and you still don’t understand it. Or rather…”

Ren turns his head to face the wall, “I don’t want to understand it.” Elie smiles faintly hearing Ren’s answer.

“I understand that she wanted to go. I understand that she’s old enough. But…”

“But you can’t help but don’t want to let her go,” Elie continues Ren’s sentence. He’s surprised a little bit by Elie’s reply and turns his head toward Elie.

“How do you know?”

“Because I felt the same. But I can’t blame a taxi driver who just driving his passenger to their destination, can I? Plus, I’ve learnt to respect her choice.” Elie’s words are followed with silence.

“...I miss her,” the silence then broken by Ren.

“Me too, Ren. Me too.”

They look at each other and for a while don’t speak a single word. The room is filled with a calm silence.

“Done,” Elie finishes her treatments on Ren’s wounds. His long cut on his abdomen is now stitched and bandaged nicely.

“Thanks,” Ren stands and walks to grab some drink, “How is she?”

“Hm? She bled quite bad for a while and her bandages need to be changed constantly,” answers Elie while tidying up her equipments. “But she’s stable now,” she adds, “Although, her regenerative ability is a bit off. She bled way too long and she recover quite slow.”

“Hm,” Ren puts down his glass after drank all the water in it, “It’s not even a day yet, Elie. Plus we don’t have many sample to measure regenerative ability. It looks normal to me.”

“Maybe. Well, at least she’s stable now,” she puts both of her hands on her hip and smiles. She puts all her equipments back on her beige bag.

“You’re going?”

“Yeah, gonna find something to eat before packing my stuff.”

“Ah, the conference, correct?”

“Yeah, I won’t be around for a couple days. Don’t do anything weird to her, okay?”

“Hey, you know I won’t do anything.”

Elie stops at her way when she’s heading out and turns to Ren, “Ah, right. You’ll need change of clothes for her later, right? Why don’t you grab your bag and go to my place? I’ll lend some of my clothes.”

“Is it okay leaving her alone?”

“She’s stable enough. Trust me, I’m an expert,” Elie smiles as she reassure Ren.

“Well, if you say so,” Ren takes his bag from the closet and follow Elie outside.

“While we’re at it, let’s get some lunch. It’s been a while since we had a meal together.”

***

“What happened between you two?” Rick asks Gerogom while walks and take a seat in one empty table. They all now in one of the room inside Gerogom’s lab. The room is quite spacious and has several complicated equipments scattered about that seemingly connected to each other through the numerous cables that crawl the floor and walls. There are some tables on the room on which gadgets, gears, tools, and a lot of stuff rest. The only empty table are the one where Rick sits. Soon after, Tama climbs up the table and sits down in kneeling position near Rick.

On one side of the room, there are a couple of big tubes. Inside one of them, Ignis’s laying down slightly leaning backward. There are probes, cameras, and other mechanical arms surrounding him and moving around.

“Me and Ren?” Gerogom answers while looking at a monitor attached to Ignis’s tube. “Not too much. Without going into detail, I simply opened a portal to the Demonrealm for her sister, Yui. He wasn’t pleased that I helped her sister.”

“And she hasn’t return to Earthrealm?” Tama asks out of curiosity.

“No. Unless she lost her left hand, I would know if she’s in this realm. I put a tracking device on her hand.”

“Wait, why did you do that?” Rick asks.

“Testing my new tracking system,” Gerogom presses some button on the panel connected to the monitor and the mechanical arms start focusing on different part of Ignis, “I designed a tracker that supposedly able to deliver signal from Demonrealm. I hate to say it but I only partially success. I can only detect the signal when a route to Demonworld opens, just like yesterday. I think it’s good news that the tracker still working after spending 2 years in Demonrealm.”

“So you know there was a portal opened last night?” 

“Well,” Gerogom finally turns and face Tama and Rick, “I won’t call those portals.”

“Those?” Rick looks confused, “There’s more of it?”

“Oh yes, indeed. There were at least five occurrence yesterday. And it’s not a proper portal as far as I can see. It’s different and I’m still not sure what caused it,” Gerogom looks intrigued with the topic.

“If we know what caused it, it would help me to find new ways to open portals,” Gerogom continues with a somewhat creepy smile on his face.

“Anyway,” Rick tries to change the topic, “What happened to Tama? You haven’t told me yet.”

“Well, I fixed her,” says Gerogom in a matter of fact manner. He presses several button on a panel attached on the wall. Near that panel, holographic images appears on the wall as if it’s a monitor.

“Fix?”

“You see here,” Gerogom points to an image on the monitor wall, “This is an unknown substance that was found circulating Tama’s body.” The screen shows a glass tube with pitch black gaseous substance floating inside. “I still have no idea what this is, since you two out of sudden barged in uninvited thus preventing me from making a thorough examination on this substance.”

“This black…. ‘miasma’,” he continues, “was corrupting Tama’s very body. I detected the anomaly when my drone was scouting the area. The reading suggested that the corruption was on a quite late stage and threatened her life. Thus I took the liberty to bring her here and extract that miasma.”

“I see. I must give you my thanks then.”

“Oh, no need,” Gerogom casually refuses Rick’s gesture, “I’m happy that I get my hand on this unknown substance. After all, I have no use of your thanks.”

“He also said that when I thanked him,” Tama informs Rick.

“Uh, so why did you suddenly, um…, grow?”

“Ah,” Tama’s ear moving slightly, “That’s because-”

“She used a lot of her life energy to suppressed the miasma inside,” Geregom cuts Tama before she’s able to explain. She shows a visibly annoyed look on her face. “That happened instinctively and she didn’t has direct control of it. To adapt with the lack of circulated life energy, her body regressed to her younger form which needed far less energy.”

“So this is her original form?”

“Yup, yup~!” Tama answers with nods and smile on her face.

“But, how is that even possible?”

Gerogom looks annoyed with Rick’s question, “Obviously, it is because of how the Spirit’s body and metabolism have far more dependency with life energy than most of other races. In her condition, human and demon would be dead before the sun rises.”

“Oh, is that so….” Rick nods in amazement. 

“Now, that’s the exit,” Gerogom points toward the corridor which connected to the front door.

“Uh, what?”

“Well, she’s fixed and I have no of need you and the fox spirit girl, especially you. So, I prefer if you two just start to get going. I need to do examination on the Miasma.”

“What? Really? Just like that? You gotta be kidding me.”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” Gerogom gazes at Rick with very annoyed eyes.

Rick stays still for a second before jumps down from the table he’s sitting on and walks toward the exit, “Let’s go, Tama. We’re not welcomed here anymore.”

“Oh, wait for me, Mr. Hobo.” Tama jumps down and lands gently before following Rick. Soon after they’re already gone from view into the corridor.

“Ah! Almost forgot!” A cute voice can be heard echoing in the corridor not long after Tama and Rick enter the corridor. The voice is followed with the sound of steps and then Tama’s body partially emerged on the door connecting the room and the corridor. She looks inside the room and with a cute smile shout, “Thanks again, mister Gerogom.” 

Hearing the sudden shout, Gerogom reluctantly turns his head towards the door. After giving another smile, Tama returns back to the corridor with echoing steps. Gerogom sigh and then returns his attention to the wall’s monitor. “Finally it’s quiet,” he grumbles while examining the Miasma from the monitor.

“You won’t have any friend if you’re like that,” Ignis, who’s been silent all this time, suddenly speaks.

“If you can’t stay silent there, you’re welcomed to stops the fixing and go home,” Gerogom says it without diverting his attention from the monitor.

“Alright, I’ll keep quiet,” seeing that he still needs the treatment, he decides to keep silent.

“And please excuse yourself from here when the fixing is done,” Gerogom adds with his usual uninterested tone.