Cross and Conflicts

CHAPTER XXIII: Trace

It was bizarre: the way he died without the two officers who guarded him noticing. 

 Zard, the reptilian defeated by Aeon and the detainee who hadn’t yet spent more than twenty-four hours in a jail cell in the Intramuros Police Headquarters, suffered a death which tremendously baffled the officers who tended to the crime scene. 

 His body was twisted in a morbid fashion like a piece of laundry that was wrung with unnatural force, and he looked worse than the driest dead branch in any forest.

 “Would you look at that?” 

 “Yeah, man, it looks like his whole body was squeezed to death. Yieeh. Creepy.”

 Came the dialogue between the lieutenant’s colleagues from in front of him. It’s estimated that the reptilian passed away around nine in the evening, and his body was already in a state of rigor mortis.

 “So, what do you think, sir?” asked Sergeant Sawali at his side, but somehow he already has an idea as to what was in his senior’s thoughts.

 Aeon heaved. This was very unexpected and very confusing—well, all of the incidents around him have been like that. He thought that this happened since he wasn’t able to monitor the detainee while he was occupied piecing things to figure out where Sister Lita and Noumenon were.

 As far as the initial investigation is concerned nonetheless, it looks like Zard died on his own, and there was no foul play—yet not to the lieutenant who highly considered the latter. To him, it isn’t impossible. In the first place, there’s the inclusion of a victim who’s not a hundred percent human. That’s why it would be plausible that someone also less human did the deed. 

 He’s already seen proof of the abnormalities of this world when he chanced upon characters with extraordinary abilities back at the hospital: the man who’s similar to a water buffalo, the woman who can make sheets of paper move and Zard with lizard qualities, the one whom he fought and the one lying lifeless with his eyeballs almost popping out of their sockets.

 Furthermore, he thought of the motive behind this if his surmise is correct. The two companions of the deceased kidn*pped Noumenon and Sister Lita; on the other hand, he managed to take Zard down and brought him here in their headquarters where he continued to refuse to answer where the two had taken them. 

 Unconsciously, he proceeded to scan the vicinity he was in. He hated his mind when his eyes went over to the officers with him. Right there, he realized that they would qualify as his suspects. Who among them would silence the reptilian detainee? Why? And who among them hides his or her “Divinity?”

 However, there was too much on Aeon’s hands at the moment. First, there’s the real identity of the notorious vigilante ‘Cross’; second, the a*******n, and now this. How he wished he could divide himself into three and be there personally at each of these cases. 

 “Sergeant,” he suddenly called the policeman to his left and thought that he doesn’t necessarily have to have his body divided when he has men he can trust. 

 “Yes, sir?”

 “I’d like you to oversee this till the end.”

 The sergeant nodded. “Don’t worry, sir. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

Dawn, the following day, Aeon who would have still been sleeping to temporarily escape from his troubles was summoned to the estate of Vice Mayor Manica Diamond. A scavenger happened to discover the ravaged condition of the politician’s house that he called the Intramuros police through a payphone.

 “Sir, believe me, just the other day this house was still big and beautiful,” the old man said. He seemed afraid to be around the police, but there was determination in his eyes that he was telling the truth. “But look at it now. It’s a total wreck, and that’s bothering me.”

 “Why, sir? It could have been caused by a natural phenomenon,” a junior police officer said, “A tornado perhaps.”

 “No, sir.” The scavenger begged to disagree. “I live close by; I haven’t seen a tornado pass.”

 There was much more to unravel after the old man’s narrative, particularly when the police discovered the corpse of a woman affiliated to sisterhood.

 Alarmed, he desperately defended himself. “Sir, believe me! It wasn’t me. I just found her. It wasn’t me! I tell you. It wasn’t me!”

 The officers then delivered him relief since no one from among them pinned the crime on him. He couldn’t possibly own a gun, and he has a perfectly good alibi.

 Initially, Aeon thought that he necessarily didn’t have to be called here. Later, he was prompt to rectify that.

 Sister Lita was alone lying on what was left of the lawn of the estate. Her eyes were closed, but there was the bloodied hole between those. If it wasn’t for the ugly bullet wound, she would only have seemed to be sleeping at peace. Her body was straightened; it was apparent that she was made to lie flat this way. Her arms rested down to her hips, and on one of her palms, the lieutenant found a silver ring.

 Using a gloved hand, Aeon picked up the ring and raised it over his head. It glinted in the ray of the rising sun, and it made him remember the owner—the novice he had been also looking for.

 The lieutenant lent a hand to search for another corpse—one that belonged to a woman in her mid-twenties with chocolate brown hair. However, aside from Sister Lita’s cadaver, there wasn’t that of another female among the dead buried under the piles of rubble; nonetheless, they died in the same way as his colleague, Danny Buhisan. There were also sheets of paper stuck all over their beings. He clenched his fists. In his mind, there really yet won’t be an end to the crimes of the woman who can manipulate paper.

 This then solves one of his wonderments—about where the two Sisters were taken; on the contrary, there were new ones that arose: where was Noumenon, and how is the vice mayor of Intramuros involved in this huge mysterious mess?

 He stared at Sister Lita’s remains being zipped inside a huge body bag. He recollected what she told him at the hospital corridor: “‘Diamante’ is Noumenon’s real surname.”

 There was only one renowned person he knows with that surname. Aeon may have to visit the mayor of the city.