SSS Awakening : I can Adapt to Everything-Chapter 33: Stage

Hide turned.

His torch swept the room in a full arc — pillars, walls, the exposed rebar of an unfinished ceiling, the open skeleton of a building.

There was no one around here. No person or even shape. Just the voice arriving from every surface at once, already fading back into the quiet.

"Show yourself," Hide carefully said.

A sound came to his right. Hide instantly turned and saw the same Joker mask, against the wall, leaning on the exposed concrete with one shoulder. Both hands in his pockets.

"There," he said pleasantly. "Better?"

"What are you trying to do? Why are you helping me?" Hide asked.

The Joker tilted his head. "What makes you think I’m helping you?"

"You came to me first, just after I awakened and gave me a goal, along with instructions."

"Hmm." The Joker pushed off the wall and took two steps. He arrived on Hide’s left, out of nowhere. "People who want to hurt someone definitely can deliver instructions first as well," he said cheerfully. "It’s considerably more theatrical."

Hide turned to face him. Kept the torch down.

"Then what are you?"

"A concerned party," the Joker said. He took a step back and began moving in a loose circuit around the room’s edge. "Uh, someone who likes your life situation and decided to get involved. At some personal inconvenience, I should add. we clowns have to actively look for stages to perform you see."

"What do you know about my father and my mother," Hide got to the main question straight.

"Do you actually believe your mother’s death was a coincidence?" the Joker asked back.

"It is according to the official details..."

"Is it?" The joker interrupted.

"I don’t believe it was, that’s why I am here. Don’t play with me." Hide sneered.

The Joker stopped moving. He was on the opposite side of the room now, his back half-turned, looking at one of the pillars as if reading something written on it.

"Your mother," he said, "was one of the finest Gate researchers of her generation. She published three significant studies on anomalous gate behavior before she was twenty-six. She was attached to the government’s internal research division for six years." He paused. "Do you know why she left?"

"She wanted a quiet life."

"She told you that?"

"..." Hide was silent, and deep in thought for a long time. "No."

"Hmm." The Joker turned from the pillar and looked at Hide across the room. "She was a researcher, inside the government division learning things that governments prefer to keep inside. And then she left. And went to Area 17 — which is, let’s note, not adjacent to where she grew up, not where her family was, not where her colleagues were. It is, in fact, a relatively obscure residential district with low gate activity and below-average monitoring presence." He spread his hands. "A quiet life. Yes."

Hide said nothing.

"Now," the Joker continued, beginning to move again. "suppose you were a government that had a very good researcher who knew some things you would prefer she didn’t know. What would you want to do?"

"You mean the government murdered her?"

"Oh no no, why would I say something against our government." The joker did some movements with his hands. And then laughed. "Obviously she died due to a gate accident. A gate researcher dying in a gate accident."

"Prove it."

"I can’t prove it here," the Joker said. "That’s rather the point of the arrangement."

Then he suddenly vanished and hit Hide.

The strike hit on his shoulder, rotating him. Hide turned with it, already catching his balance, and the Carapace came up over his hands without a conscious decision. Black scales rose from knuckles to elbow.

"What the hell are—"

The second hit came from behind. Knee to the back of his left leg, not hard enough to buckle but enough to make him step forward to catch his weight, which put him two feet further from where he’d been standing.

He turned and saw the Joker some steps away, hands back in his pockets, watching him with an happy expression — if an expression could be read through a mask.

Then the Joker arrived at his left within the blink of an eye. Hide brought his arm up to block. The block landed. The Joker’s arm connected with his forearm, the scales taking the impact.

Hide’s blocked arm against the Joker’s extended one, the flame rose in his right hand throwing light between them.

He was fast.

Hide threw a right. Scales-covered fist, driven from the shoulder, aimed at center mass.

The Joker wasn’t there anymore. He had stepped to the left and the punch went through air and Hide’s momentum carried him forward two steps before he caught it.

He was facing a pillar now. He turned around and saw that he was further from the center of the room than he had been.

The Joker appeared at his left.

Another hit came to his shoulder and Hide moved with it, but moving with it took him two steps to the right, and the right was—

The window or rather an opening where a window would eventually have gone, the frame in place but no glass installed yet.

It was a part of the whole wall, open to the night air, the elevated walkway trams visible in the distance beyond it. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Hide gritted his teeth, realizing that he had been moving toward it. The joker’s attacks were in order to put him in this place.

He was now, only one step from the opening.

The Joker appeared in front of him and placed his palm on Hide’s chest.

"What are you trying to do? Is this why you called me here? You asshole." Hide hissed, but didn’t move. He was just one push away and the Joker was faster than him.

The flame in Hide’s palm lit the space between them.

"Last thing," the Joker said quietly. "A hint about your father."

The cheerfulness had gone.

"He is not in this world."

Hide looked at him in confusion and the next moment, he found himself falling down from the window.

’Not in this world? Does that mean he is dead?’

"Fuck you! FUCK YOU!"

The open air of the night outside the building hitting him all at once as gravity found him.

’I got tricked. Shit, I shouldn’t have come here.’

He rolled, facing down and brought his arms up, Carapace-covered hands in front of his face, the scales hardening further as they activated more fully.

The delivery road below was coming up, he was going to hit the delivery road below the main street. Then suddenly, he felt that the air had changed.

It was dense and it became harder to breathe. The next thing he saw was dark point in the atmosphere barely the size of a fist, drawing the ambient mana toward it, that was visible as a faint distortion in the air around it.

A gate was forming here.

Now.

The dark point expanded in the last half-second. It went from fist-size to a tear in the air large enough to swallow a person, the inside completely dark with no destination visible.

Hide hit it and he was swallowed whole by the gate.

--

On the first floor staircase, where the landing met the first flight of stairs to the second floor, Fuu sat.

He had not been there by plan. He only followed Hide to see where he was going.

He had arrived at the factory building two minutes behind Hide, and moved up the staircase, but he stopped the moment he heard the voices of two people talking.

And now, he was covered in sweat. face twisted in terror and both his arms against his mouth trying to stay as hidden as he could.

’I should leave,’ he thought. ’I should leave right now. I should report this, hell why did I even come here.’

Then the silence above was broken by some footsteps and he froze. And listened as the footsteps went far and then disappeared.

Then he unfolded himself from the stair and moved, fast and quiet, for a person of his size. He walked to the window opening on the second floor that looked out over the delivery access below.

A gate was visible from here.

Where Hide had been, there was nothing.

Fuu stared at the gate with his mouth was open.

’He—’

’The gate—’

’Did he just—’

A sound came from behind him. Then something kicked his butt and pushed him off the edge of the building.

The Joker tilted his head slightly.

"If you want to follow someone," he said pleasantly, "follow them to the depths of hell, fatty."

He had time, in the fraction of a second before the gate found him, to form one complete thought.

’I should have stayed on the couch.’

And then the gate swallowed him as well.