SSS Awakening : I can Adapt to Everything-Chapter 32: Northern District

The coin left behind for Hide by the Joker suddenly disintegrated into dust and left behind a message that played in hide’s mind six times before it stopped.

Tonight, come to northern district. Grid 8. Behind the commercial block and into the factory building. Second floor. 9:50 PM and not a minute late.

Then His own thoughts returned to him, ordinary and unannounced, and the space in his head where the repeating voice had been was just empty again.

Hide stood on the pavement of Area 5 with his palm open. Where the coin had been, there was a faint residue of warmth on his skin and a small scatter of grey powder on the ground that the next breeze immediately took apart and dispersed.

He closed his hand and let out a sigh of relief, then he became aware of a sound behind him.

He turned and saw that Fuu was on the ground.

He was on both knees on the pavement, his three bags and Hide’s one bag dropped around him in a loose radius, his face pointed downward at the ground. His shoulders were tight. His jaw was visible from the side and it was locked. His hands, planted on the pavement, had gone slightly white at the knuckles.

His expression, what was visible of it, was the expression of a person who had just experienced the worst kind of fear they had ever known.

’He looks like he’d been hit.’

Hide blinked.

’What happened to him?’

He reviewed the past thirty seconds. And remembered that when the coin disintegrated, there was this ferocious and untamed presence around him.

’Could it be that... he felt it as well?’

Hide looked at the fat boy on ground with a dubious expression.

Fuu, very slowly, raised his head and looked at Hide.

The fear in his face was genuine and he was terrified out of his pants. It was good thing he didn’t piss himself.

He was looking at Hide the way a person looks at something they’ve just measured against a new and much larger scale, and found that their previous measurements had been wrong.

’That was him,’ Fuu thought as he gulped though his dry throat. The thought had arrived fully formed the moment the pressure hit, the moment the ground came up and his knees took over from his legs. ’That came from him. What... what kind of monstrous aura was that? It was vicious as if it would tear me apart.’

A shiver ran through his body even as he thought about it, he had been right in his judgment to not go against this monster. If he could he would like to apologize for all the things he had said to Hide over the course of last 2 years.

But that was the thing, he couldn’t.

He had felt the presence of S-Rank Exterminators before. At exhibitions, at public events, where his father had brought him to as a guest. But this one was way too vicious and ominous than any of that.

It had felt like standing at the edge of something that had no floor.

Fuu’s eyes moved to Hide’s open hand, palm-up and empty, completely relaxed at his side.

’He didn’t even look like he was trying.’

Fuu’s jaw tightened. His knees were still on the pavement. Every cell of his body that had ever held an opinion about its own dignity was screaming at him.

He was a D-Rank Exterminator. He had a Two-Star talent. He had been top fifteen percent of his year group. He had never, in eighteen years, knelt on a public pavement before anyone.

He stood up and picked up all four bags — three of his, one of Hide’s — and in one smooth motion he bowed, with his bags hanging from both shoulders.

"I apologize," he said, stiffly. "I let the bags touch the ground. That was careless."

He straightened and looked somewhere to the left of Hide’s face.

Hide looked at him, dumbfounded and lost.

’_Does... does he think that was me? He thinks I did that.’

Hide almost laughed, but he controlled himself.

A pause in his internal processing.

’...Hm. That’s a good thing, no need to clarify.’

Then he turned and picked a direction. "Follow me."

Fuu followed, without question like an obedient puppy.

Area 5 at street level was different from what they saw from the airbus. From up above, it had looked deliberate and large-scale, the architecture of a place that had planned itself.

On the ground it was more complicated than that. The streets ran on two levels in most districts — the ground level where pedestrians and delivery units moved, and the elevated walkways at third-floor height connecting buildings across open air, with trams threading between them like a slow and very punctual river.

The robots on the lower level were mostly a small hexagonal unit sweeping the pavement fifty meters ahead, a taller narrow model standing beside a street food stall and passing orders back to the kitchen inside.

The air was different too and the mana density was comparatively lower.

Fuu, carrying four bags, was looking around and at the same time, he was trying to look like he wasn’t looking around.

They found the hotel district after twenty minutes of walking — a strip of mid-range accommodation near the main tram station, the kind of hotels that served Exterminators in transit and government personnel on temporary assignment.

Hide stopped at one.

It had a facade that was neither glass-and-chrome ambitious nor concrete-and-apology budget. It had a clean frontage with four visible floors above street level, a small automated check-in display beside the entrance.

A sign above the door showed the room rate in blue digits. They were not too cheap, nor expensive.

He walked in.

The check-in process took four minutes. The automated desk system scanned both their rings as identification.

The machine asked if they would be requiring a separate room. Fuu’s face lit up, he would be able to get rid of this monster in his room at least.

"No," He heard Hide say.

The system processed this and Fuu was left with his mouth open, about to say yes.

"One room, two occupants confirmed," it said. "Primary guest: Volter Hide. Companion: Noel Fuucerious."

Fuu’s eye twitched, but he swallowed his anger and continued with it.

The room was on the fourth floor — accessed by an elevator that moved in absolute silence.

The room itself was a good size. A window facing the elevated walkway with the trams visible through it. A desk with a built-in charge panel. A wardrobe that opened when you stood in front of it. A bathroom with a door that detected occupancy and frosted the exterior panel automatically.

And a bed.

And against the wall beside the wardrobe, a couch.

Hide walked in and sat on the bed, pulled out his communicator and opened the Area 5 district map, and began locating the northern district.

Behind him the room door opened and then closed behind Fuu as he entered inside the room, panting.

He set the bags down beside the wardrobe, straightened and looked at the bed who was sitting on it looking at his communicator.

Then he looked at the couch.

I, Fuu thought,’ am the one who paid for this place. Why do I have to sit on a couch while that monster sits on the bed.’

"You need something?" Hide asked.

A creep ran down Fuu’s skin and he sat on the couch with a smile. "No... no, I was just... you know straightening my back."

"Good." Hide turned back to his Communicator and Fuu sighed.

The couch was actually comfortable. This made it worse somehow... ’But who in their right mind would want to object that monster.’ He quietly accepted it.

The room’s environmental system, keyed to the primary guest profile, dimmed the lights by thirty percent when Hide shifted his weight back on the bed and lay down with the communicator above his face.

Fuu sat in silence for a while and then went and showered. The bathroom door frosted correctly when he closed it. The water pressure was excellent. He stood under it for longer than necessary because it was the one place where he was free.

When he came out Hide had not moved. Still on the bed with communicator above his face.

Fuu settled on the couch again and laid down with his face staring at the ceiling.

Hide was in deep thought, looking at his communicator map. ’Grid 8. Northern district of Area 5 is the old industrial zone, partially decommissioned.’

He had found it, the place he was supposed to be visiting.

They were served a decent lunch with a desert, for which Hide said that he would be paying and the happiness on Fuu’s face was apparent.

After that everything went quietly and at 9:17 PM, Hide got up.

Fuu was asleep on the extended couch, one arm over his face, his enormous frame somehow compressed into it.

Hide picked up his jacket from the chair, put it on quietly, and let himself out of the room.

The elevator descended in silence. The hotel lobby had three staff members on the night shift and none of them looked up when he came through. The street outside was quieter than it had been during the day.

He walked towards his destination and did not take the direct route. He took the longer one. He changed three trams and moved through several complex ways.

By the time he reached the edge of the northern district he was reasonably confident he had walked clean.

The northern district changed character gradually. The smart buildings fell away in density as the decommissioned zone began.

Some buildings were empty. Some had been repurposed with varying degrees of success. The street lighting here was present but sparser.

Grid 8 was at the end of a road that had been a commercial delivery route and now mostly wasn’t.

The commercial logistics building was dark and locked, its shutters down, a small amber service light above the main door the only indication that anyone had been here today. Behind it, visible over the roofline from the right angle, the upper floors of a larger building stood against the night sky.

That was the building he was going in. It was an unfinished factory skeleton with three floors and construction material stacked up.

Hide stood outside it for a moment.

He was not afraid, exactly. He was honest enough with himself to acknowledge that this situation produced a particular kind of heightened alertness that was adjacent to fear.

He had come here because the alternative was not knowing.

He pushed the door open and went in.

The ground floor was construction rubble and old equipment with the cold close smell of a space that had been sealed and not aired for a long time.

His communicator’s torch lit a narrow corridor of visibility ahead of him, the shadows in the room pulling back to the walls as he moved.

The stairs were at the far end were intact. He went up.

The first floor landing. More of the same — the building’s bones visible, a large open space that had been partitioned at some point and had most of those partitions partially removed. The torch moved over the walls and found nothing.

The second floor.

He put his foot on the first step of the second flight.

He came through the landing onto the second floor and raised the torch. It was a large empty room with several pillars.

He stood in the entrance of it, listening.

The building was quiet, until a voice echoed from all around.

"I am glad, You’re on time."

The voice came from his left.

And his right.

And directly above him, from the ceiling.

From the wall ahead.

From behind.

Simultaneous, from every surface, as if the room itself had decided to speak.

"I must say," the Joker’s voice continued, from everywhere, with the same cheerful warmth it always carried, "I had perhaps a five percent doubt that you’d come."

A pause.

"Welcome to the true Area 5, dear."