❝how do you kill a monster without becoming one?❞
In the last city ruled by man, fish soar in the skies above and monsters lurk in the alleys below. Ten years ago, Jase lost both his legs and his mother to one such monster. However, tragedy couldn't...
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A month had passed.
Jase and Kova would accept cases once or twice a week, but the paperwork that followed prevented them from taking any more. To make things worse, each job seemed duller than the last. Every suspicion was quickly squashed after a blood test and there weren't any more corpses hidden beneath the floorboards.
Jase's fingers ached as he typed information into the hologram in front of him. The letters were beginning to blur together. Jase rubbed his eyes, trying to stay focused but he couldn't even remember what he was supposed to be writing at this point. All of this work and he and Kova were only halfway through Level Two.
"This is demeaning," Jase grumbled.
Kova rose a brow. The cut on his cheek was little more than a thin line now, barely even visible, but his white roots had grown out again. Jase had been pissed at Kova for freezing for a few days, but all of the typing made it easy for Jase to forgive, especially after Kova offered to help. Or just do Jase's work for him.
"It is important to keep records," Kova said.
"It's still demeaning. Why can't they have an AI do it?" Jase groaned, slouching back in his wheelchair. He hated doing tasks that he deemed pointless. And writing records was almost as bad as cleaning.
Why bother cleaning something if it would just get dirty again?
"Stop whining. You were there, not AI," Kova said, turning back to his own work that was actually Jase's. Kova was fast not only in combat but in everything he did. His fingers flew across the keyboard, typing at an impressive rate. He wasn't pecking, like Jase, but he wasn't using the methods they taught in school either. It was some hybrid of the two and it made him the fastest typer Jase had ever seen.
Turning his attention back to his own hologram, Jase grimaced. Just looking at it made his head hurt. Being trapped in an office with practically no one was not what Jase expected when he joined Stingray. He wanted to be out there, talking to people, tracking down Red. Not this. Anything but this.
So Jase decided to attempt to distract himself. "Hey, Kova?"
"Chē?"
"Did you hear about the Smile Attack last night?" Jase asked, his headache softening. Jase liked to talk. He liked to hear other people talk, too. Voices were soothing to him. They helped keep his thoughts from wandering too far.
Kova sighed. "I know there was Attack."
Thankfully, Jase knew more than that. He had been pestering Huraira about it into the late hours of the night.
"Red Riding Hood killed thirty-seven people," Jase said. "An entire floor was dead. No one heard a thing. But they knew it was her because there was a small triangle painted over the elevator button for the floor she slaughtered."
Jase couldn't imagine what it would have been like to find that little triangle. Was the person running late? Had they gone out to grab something at the store? Were they visiting a family member?
