Journey of the Son of Ares

"Ca- We need help! Come over here, now!" Balgair's screams reached all the way to the area behind the mansion, where Cade had gathered all the fearful servants and unconscious guards.

Cade's jaw tightened, and she turned immediately after the screams traveled to her ears. She hesitated for a moment before facing the servants and saying with a deep voice, "If even one of you moves, you all die."

She then proceeded to cross the few hundred-meter distance, with every step creating depressions in the ground.

'What could it be? Why would they need help?' she thought as she came closer and closer to the mansion.

Then, instead of going around, she loaded up power into her legs and jumped over the entire building, barely touching the roof. When she came back down, her momentum carried her a couple tens of meters forward, despite her feet scraping on the ground. The bottoms of his shoes probably lost a centimeter or two in the process.

After managing to stop in place, she turned around, her hood coming off. The mansion doors were open, but there were no noises that suggested an ongoing fight.

Cade lunged right in with a single thought. 'Please be alive.'

Her feet scraped against the red carpet in the entrance hall of the mansion as her eyes jumped around, finding what she was looking for in an instant.

Her companion was on his knees, his hands and head hanging limply, a puddle of blood underneath him. "Re— Rey!" she yelled as she rushed to his side. She raised his head in order to see his eyes. What she saw was not something she had expected to see yet in many years to come. The vibrancy in his eyes had been wiped away.

She froze for a second or two. Aurelius didn't let out a single sound, and it didn't seem like he had anything he wanted to say. It looked like he wanted nothing. They were the eyes expected to be seen when gazing into the eyes of an old man on his deathbed, with his faulty memory having wiped any notion of life from his world.

Cade turned her head to the side.

There were two men lying close together, one seemingly temporarily unconscious, the other permanently so, with a hole in his chest. It had been the lengthened compression that killed him. But the edged of the wound seemed rough. The work of an amateur. It had been Balgair.

Cade turned to the only other remaining victim.

He had his eyes still open, looking at his hand like he was holding something invisible there. He had a hole in his torso as well, and naturally, he lay in a puddle of blood like the others. However, there was something in the blood. Something black.

'The guard used an enhancer!' Cade realized. 'That's why Balgair called for help.'

She took a look at the wound in the guard's stomach area. It was also rough around the edges, but the shape was irregular. She looked at Aurelius right forearm, which had not a single spot that wasn't covered in blood.

Her face went loose before a frown formed. "Rey, look at me," she said as he looked into the eyes of Aurelius, who seemed to look through her and through everything else. She shook Aurelius slightly, but his expression didn't change.

She snorted and slapped Aurelius so hard that the sound echoed in the hall and probably outside as well. Aurelius' body leaned to the side. He would have fallen over if Cade hadn't kept him upright. However, Aurelius' expression hadn't changed. The only change was that the red mark appeared in an instant.

She looked at him and pursed her lips before slapping him again and again. His cheeks turned dark red fairly quickly, but she didn't stop. Instead, she increased the power with each slap. It continued for almost a minute when Aurelius' expression broke.

His eyes narrowed as tears built up. His lower lip shook profusely as the corners of his mouth twitched downward. He leaned his body to the side, wanting to lay down. Cade held him still. He started to slap and claw at her hands, but she didn't let go.

"Rey, Rey, calm down, breathe, breathe," Cade said softly.

"No," Aurelius whispered as tears streamed down his cheeks. "Don't touch me," he said, cracks in his voice.

Cade frowned. "Please, Rey. We can't do this now. We have to get out—"

"No!" Aurelius burst out, pushing Cade back hard enough to collapse her balance and make her fall onto her back.

Cade got up immediately with her head tilted, concern ridden all over her eyes. "What is it? This isn't all because you killed him, right? What happened."

Aurelius averted his eyes, looking down at his left side. He picked up something. His left hand had a bad cut on it, which Cade only noticed now. He then handed Cade a pocket-sized piece of paper with dried blood on it.

Cade looked down at it with horror. On the piece of paper, there was a pair of tall stick figures. One had long strands of noodle-like hair, and the other had short, spiky hair. In between the two stick figures, there was a smaller stick figure with long hair and a wide smile.

Cade breathed deeply through her nose for a while before she saw through the paper that there was writing on the other side. She flipped the piece of paper, and her horror grew.

On the paper was a short message made with clumsy handwriting: "Happy Father's Day to the best dad in the world."

Cade looked up at Aurelius, whose tears seemed to have no end. Furthermore, he was covering his mouth with his bloody left hand while his body convulsed like he would throw up at any second.

Cade shook her head slowly as she bit down on her lips. After a bit of thought, she moved and not long after, Aurelius was in her arms, knocked out.

Her gaze hardened as she looked upstairs. 'Just a bit more, and it'll be over.'

***

The safe was nowhere to be found. Cade and Balgair had searched everywhere. Behind every painting, in every closet, and under every desk.

"Our time's running out," Balgair said solemnly as he started feeling hopeless. "What do you want to do?"

Cade turned around and looked at him. She had her balaclava on, but he could imagine what her expression must have looked like just from the painful look in her eyes. "I don't know. We can't let it all be for nothing. I tied Aurelius with hyperwire, but I'm afraid he'll hurt himself if he regains consciousness while we're still here. Let's keep looking for a while longer. If we still can't find it, let's give up and leave."

Balgair stomped down, a curse word slipping out, "Shit."

Then his mouth and eyes widened. 'That sound?' The floor shouldn't make that kind of sound when stomped on.

He looked at the floor of the head office room they were in. Unlike other rooms in the mansion, this one didn't have the normal red carpet. It was a wooden floor with a detachable large carpet with white, red, and gold flowers and other symbols all over it.

Balgair turned to Cade, who seemed to have figured out the same thing.

Balgair hurriedly walked to the edge of the carpet before lifting it up. And there it was. A square-shaped hatch on the wooden floor. Cade squatted down and opened the hatch with her fingers, and the door to a safe was revealed.

Balgair smiled with relief and rolled up his sleeves.

Cracking the safe didn't take long. The Boerlows had put their trust in their hiding spot for the safe and hadn't seemingly thought much about the safe's security.

However, when they got the safe open, they found only a fraction of what they were supposed to.

Balgair dug through the safe. "What? There are only three thousand gold banknotes here. Where's the rest?"

Cade looked down with disappointment. "Maybe we overrated their financial situation."

"No, it can't be this bad. It can't. Let's look for another safe."

"Do you think we have the ti—" Cade was saying when the sound of the gates opening came into her ears.

Balgair grunted and started shoveling the banknotes into a bag.

In the meantime, Cade went down to the first floor. She took a look at the gates and confirmed that her ears hadn't fooled her. She then took the unconscious Aurelius into her arms at the entrance of the mansion before jumping up onto the second floor.

Balgair had managed to get all the banknotes into the bag, and he stood up, looking at Cade for advice.

Cade exhaled and tried to clear her mind. "I'm going to take Aurelius with me. He needs treatment and can't get it on his own. You can take the banknotes with you. Take them to that guy you know and get them exchanged. We'll meet in two days at the bridge, like we planned."

Balgair nodded before turning and breaking through the window at the back of the room. Cade jumped after him, and they proceeded to run in opposite directions.