Wisteria Eyed

53

Again, not my fault that I ain't used to wearing them. Two months ain't enough to get used to such troublesome shit.

Not that I wore those glasses properly in those two months either.

"Here! Here!" The Kasugai Crow declared as it started circling above us, "Here!"

Sanemi silently looked around us before turning to the crow, "And what's the mission? How many demons are here?"

I frowned as I wondered what made him question that before I felt it at the edge of my consciousness: the coiled auras of the demons.
And yes, there was more than one.

I immediately closed my eyes and concentrated on my surroundings, noticing for the first time how eerily quiet the area was and no, it was not the silence one may come across while travelling at night.

No, it was the type of silence that one could only find when exploring a haunted house.
And the feeling of multiple demons with little to no human lives around only made that feeling worse.

A loud, gut-wrenching scream of a woman interrupted my thoughts, making both me and Sanemi rush towards the source.

I could hear my heartbeat in my ears as I felt the demons around us; if the number of auras I felt was right, then we had about five demons in this area only, which was much more than a village this small should have.

'Demons don't usually band together,' I watched Sanemi jump on the demon attacking the human female inside a house, that demon's jaw still gripping the female's shoulder before Sanemi stabbed him and separated them somehow, 'Which means that these demons came here as they are and not as a group. That also means that there is a high chance they were looking or targeting for something or someone.'

That, or they were newly converted and were running around to find the nearest human possible.

I bent down to check the condition of the victim as Sanemi handled the rogue demon on his own, my mind assessing her wounds instantly as I noticed most of them were almost too severe to be treated.

The worst part was that a portion of the flesh of her neck and shoulder was already torn out, damaging the majority of her nerves along with her Subclavian Artery which only worsened her bleeding and put her into an epileptic shock. The only way to stop her bleeding was to treat her damaged artery but it was torn out in a way that would be impossible to treat even with an integrated surgical replacement.

In short, there was nothing I would be able to do for her except make her death a little less painful.

I silently took out a vial from my satchel along with an injection and injected the liquid into her bloodstream through the vein in her neck, giving her a last act of mercy as the painkiller in the poison gradually settled into her bloodstream. I silently observed how her body slowly calmed down and her face settled into a more peaceful expression.

"May your soul rest in peace," I murmured a silent prayer for her soul while bowing my head and apologising for not being able to do anything else for her.

The worst thing, however, was that I felt oddly numb as I laid the dying woman's body back on the ground. I couldn't even mourn for her properly as she deserved to be done so.

It was, as if, I was used to death now.
And the idea of that scared me a little.

"Is she...?"

"Yes," I replied blankly as I got up and turned around to find Sanemi looking down at the woman, "There was nothing that could be done. A major artery in her shoulder region was damaged, which would have caused her to die from blood loss in a few hours, if not from the pain of her nerves being severed open."