Captain Koi found himself at the mercy of receding hope.
The sound of the door shut crashed the deadened atmosphere like a rupture of a vein. Almost instantly, Koi collapsed to the floor, as if knocked down by the built-up intensity.
The whole conversation with the Director kept repeating with excruciating details, amplified by the empty bearing of the room left cold after the heated argument exposed the frail skeleton of his deed.
Amid this raging loop of thoughts, Zun’s voice forced slip in between every silent pause.
“Dad…I had a very long nightmare. In my nightmare, I saw you in total defeat…
“Lord Father seemed to answer my plea. Lord Father was here for once.”
“He took revenge for me…”
Those eyes of his daughter, they seized his pain with a cold, heartless choke.
A familiar feeling dawned on him. One that clung with the greed of every breath.
“I knew it. I KNEW IT!! Everyone’s against me. Everyone wants me to fail. They want me dead and tormented! Even the Lord hates me.”
All the walls seemed to cave in, bending his vision like a breathing muscle constricting into a compact prison cell. Repetitive words came racing from the furthest recollection; in the confines of his mind, the timelines of every memory collapsed into an overlapping occurrence of drunk arguments and bloody disputes.
How cruel is this life to let me bear the fruit of this karma?
The captain leaned forward, almost digging his nails into the concrete floor, and started screaming at the top of his lungs.
“This is not true!! I have not betrayed the Lord!! You all are the ones who forced this on me! All of you! Why am I to blame?!! WHAT’S SO WRONG ABOUT MY CHOICES?!! If we won, wouldn’t you all be praising my courage in changing the script? You are all rushing to blame me now that it has failed.”
Suddenly, the demonic curse on his shoulder pulsed aggressively in response to his aggression. It’s like a painful reminder that he had places in the pits of both Heaven and Hell.
Koi started to tremble painfully as tension built up on the folds of a rising tide and numbed his senses.
In desperation, he shouted over his shoulder, “CHAN, why are you standing there? Don’t you always like to insert your opinion? Tell me what I am supposed to do?! TELL ME RIGHT NOW!!”
…
“CHAN!! I’m calling you!!”
…
“We should go and check the archive file, see what happened to the Captains in the past. Captain Mars, before me, died of an overdose. She wasn’t entangled in any massacre. WAIT, what about the captain before her? He was blacklisted…No, no, no. I am not claiming that insane conclusion!! TELL ME WHAT TO DO, CHANN!! Tell me this is WRONG!”
…
As silence refused to budge, agitation kicked in.
“WHY ARE YOU MAD?!! How dare you give me cold treatment!! You bastard, Chan! Talk to me! Tell me anything! Any jokes! Just one word…just…one more…!”
Like a pendulum in endless motion, his mood swung from self-righteous aggression to pathetic begging back and forth in an extreme arc, unable to hold a break.
“I try so hard….this bitter road I walk, I am all ALONE! None of you deserves me.”
“You will never understand what it feels like…come and kill me if you want! Come and see every shit inside me! You all like to point fingers! Cry at every little action I took! COME AND DO IT YOURSELF!!”
Abruptly, Koi realised he was directing his words at a tall empty vase by the shielded window. The reality chilled his spine.
Chan was already dead. Koi seemed to have forgotten about that in a split second of emotional eruption, thirsting for someone to share the blame.
The silence that followed felt haunting and humiliating.
Koi slipped out a deliberate laugh.
“Oh Lord, I thought you would understand me. That I could score back my innocence. That I still have a chance in life, thank FUCK!”
Koi folded his fingers into a fist. “Damn you! Damn this shitty life and everything promised to me!! I never chose this! I was never prepared for it!!”
In the heat of rage, he stood up and started throwing everything, slamming the writing desk, kicking the boardroom table and punching the wall. Each hit left stains of blood splattering across the surface, infuriating him to hit even harder.
The portrait of the former Captain fell off the wall like a crushing weight of pride and landed right in front of Koi.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
In the photo, Captain Mars looked pale and uninterested. Her whole complexion was dragged down by her hollow cheeks and drugged eyes. But despite her drained look, she was a fit, bulky woman with a fashionable buzz cut. Her defined jawline added to her masculine look, which stood in contrast to her long, feminine eyelashes.
Koi stared for a second and fell to his knees once again.
Familiar words from the past caught up with him and anchored him to an additional weight of emotion. The man zoned out in complete weakness as vision splashed in his mind in shades of colourless light, with forgotten dialogues trying to break into his consciousness.
“Get your shit together—! Don’t be a loser! Man up! You are the best in the team—you have to keep up—you HAVE TO!” Captain Mars shouted.
Like a final explosion of anger, he screamed at the top of his lungs and punched the portrait, breaking the portrait’s glass and bloodied the former Captain’s face in rich redness.
Still, it wasn’t enough. He held onto the frame of the portrait and smashed it on the floor until another sharp pain cut through his cursed wound with such acute intensity, it almost steamed up his ears.
“— Bury this pitiful feeling for good. What are you scared of? Just remember—bad karma can always be replaced by good karma—” Captain Mars’s voice lingered in his mind.
“Any mistakes can be overridden. Limiting yourself to just doing the right thing is foolish. There’s no such rule in life. You won’t achieve shit if you continue that way. Go fix your mindset if you are a real man.”
“If I could achieve something profound, I would have enough goodness in me… The result will speak for itself. Fuck that weak morality.” Koi echoed. “Life was worth it for that purpose. You said so!”
Suddenly, his phone rang with a thundering alarm.
It was Lily calling.
The face of his wife, wrinkled from the heavy baggage of unreceived promises, trembled in his mind.
His hands began to shiver as tears, withheld by pride, leaked down his hollow eyes.
One drop…two drops…they stained the phone screen and left sprouts of what felt like dirty weeds growing down his cheeks, into his tongue and led their way to both of his lungs.
Koi pressed his chest and almost coughed from an urge to gag.
Feeling undignified, he reached out for the hip flask inside the inner pocket of his exorcist coat and gulped down the liquor to his heart's content. After a few more minutes, the ringing of his phone stopped.
A text popped up saying, “I just came back from the House of Glory. The people there want to share their appreciation for your hard work. Please come back home today and take some rest. I will prepare your favourite dish for dinner.”
“…House of Glory.” He repeated.
His eyes flashed for a second as thought whispered through parted lips. “That House…”
Outside the meeting room, along the cold skeletal corridor, a few angels were pacing about, equipped with rolls of scroll papers, weapons and tools to prepare for their daily patrol.
The scent of concentrated coffee and tea mingled in their breath like a dense, moody cloud, gassing each passerby to turn them off from any potential conversation.
Hue strode into the scene past the Angels with swift steps, almost skipping his way toward the meeting room.
In haste, an Angel reached out to grab his arm like a reflex action.
“Koi said not to disturb him unless he calls.” That remark came out like a warning.
Hue cleared his throat in an attempt to shrug off the anxiety. “I know, but I just came back from my visit to Mrs Yang. There’s something I need to report back.”
“Director Kaw just left. We heard a lot of unpleasant shouting. Would suggest waiting a bit for the Captain to calm down. We don’t know how bad the situation is…” The Angel raised her eyebrows and grimaced.
“B-but this is very urgent!”
“You know Captain Koi. It doesn’t matter. His rule comes first.”
Another angel stepped in to add to the pressure, “Calm down, Hue. How urgent can it be? I need to report my morning patrol update, too. And aren’t you on medical leave? You haven’t even fully recovered yet.”
Hue held his stance stubbornly. “Because Mrs Yang told me the Tower is located in the Bay Ballemy town!! Her husband was there because he was looking for the tower!”
Both angels were shocked pale-white, and turned to each other for some sort of implicit clarification.
“You mean Mr Fen Yang? Captain Huang Lee’s team is the one who found his body, and they said he was found dead in a landfill site, not the Tower. There’s no way they would mistake the Tower as a rubbish site. They have been trying to locate the Tower for years now.”
“Didn’t they say he looked wasted? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a crazy man who hallucinated a lot and told Mrs Yang a bunch of nonsense.” The second Angel added.
Hue pressed on with urgency, “Well, I’m not sure about the details. I am not saying Captain Huang Lee’s team is incapable or hiding things from us, but we should definitely tell Captain Koi. Especially because her husband…he…he was likely suffering from a soul trauma, which caused his frantic behaviour and gave him recurring nightmares. I am afraid his trauma is entangled with King Cobra’s demonic energy.”
Hue paused for a while as his own words filtered through his mind with more clarity. Like a hush, he repeated slightly differently, “...no…his nightmare was right! It means it’s a repeated tragedy. Something is messed up! We need to tell the Captain!”
“W-what do you mean?” Both angels asked simultaneously in low stutter, which overlapped their voices in perfect rhyme.
“Don’t look at me as if I am crazy! I am not even sure what I am thinking right now!” Hue yanked his arm free from his colleague’s grip and took a few steps away to put some distance between them. “B-but we need to take action right now.”
Suddenly, a loud crushing sound shook all the restless hearts into a pitching stillness. All of them went silent like submissive sheep until they snapped back and rushed toward the source of the sound.
As they got closer, it became apparent that the sound came from none other than the meeting room. The angels packed together and kicked the locked door while screaming, “What happened, Captain?!! Can you hear me?! Please respond!”
After several attempts, the door flung wide open, allowing the groups to force their way in.
As soon as Hue stepped in, the sound of sharp debris crumbled under his boots spooked him. The room was a dramatic mess with no corner left undisturbed by an expired episode of rampage.
The culprit was nowhere to be found, but the wall facing the outside of the building was torn apart in the center almost like a mouth gasping for air.
“W-what has happened? There is no sign of demonic energy…”
“Where is the captain?”
“Did he just cause this mess and leave?”
“What do you mean? He ran away, right? RIGHT?!”
