Harem Sync: Divine Edition

Chapter 114: Baptism (12): Rats .

A skull mask, its fist still clenched in the direction from which it had come.

"How did you get here..."

**CRACK.**

Just the two of them now, Haru and the hooded figure.

..

The figure spat out fine, gray-colored dust, dispersing in a cloud.

Haru instinctively stepped back, closing his eyes, holding his breath.

When he stopped backing up and opened his eyes:

The room was empty.

"Idiot," Haru thought to himself, pulling out a potion and drinking it.

The hooded figure arrived in a room, where he found his partner knocked out on the floor, briefcase open beside him, vials scattered about.

"Shit."

He ran to the next location.

Second room, another hooded figure on the floor, and silence.

"Damn it, I knew this job wasn’t for me. Of all days, on my first day on the job..."

He ran to the third one and found him on the floor as well.

His hand outstretched. "Hide me..." he murmured weakly.

The guy hesitated; staying was risky. He heard footsteps approaching.

"Shit."

He went inside the overpass, climbed up quickly, crouched down, but heard from below:

"Heat up the overpasses!"

He felt the heat begin.

"I’m screwed."

He went down through a specific spot, a corridor he knew.

"I need to hand this briefcase over to the owner and get out of here. I don’t want to be responsible for any of this," he thought as he ran.

And when he opened the door to the last room.

Haru was there.

Punching the supposed owner against the wall, fists that burst into flames, Valtherion, shortly after, drying the blood on his hands.

Haru let the man fall and turned slowly.

The skull mask emitted the sound of heavy breathing.

He began to walk.

The hooded man’s heart stopped. "How did he get here?"

Haru had stood still in the room for a moment, looking at the knocked-out rookie on the floor.

thinking about the path the rookies had taken to get there.

"Right. Left, left. Left. Right."

He closed his eyes.

"I know that path."

The memory came effortlessly, from the nights before.

The hallway where he had whispered "go right" to a frightened rookie.

The utility room he pointed out from a distance when the Chinese man wasn’t looking.

"The informant didn’t discover the safe routes."

"I taught him."

"Every time I helped someone in secret... I was building their map."

He wasn’t a lone traitor. It was a network, rookies selling information to one another. Someone who had spent the entire night being hunted by them.

"The source is in room 217, but first..."

He didn’t need to follow the hooded figure; these were his own routes, and he knew exactly where the other points were.

[Shadow Steps]

Vanished into the shadows

<>

The ice ball flew out frantically, without any calculation, just thrown.

Haru blocked it with the back of his hand, deflecting the attack.

"What the hell am I doing?" the hooded figure thought as he watched. "Trying to take on a veteran."

The hooded figure threw the briefcase forward as a distraction, then leaped out, shattering the window.

A light rain was starting to fall outside, the kind that gets you wet without making a sound.

He ran across the courtyard, darting between buildings, and looked back. No one.

"It worked."

He looked ahead.

Haru was there, standing still, waiting, as if she’d arrived first.

The rain falling on the mask, running down her chin.

"My God. What have I gotten myself into."

The hooded figure blinked, once, just once.

And Haru was holding his neck.

He hadn’t run, hadn’t jumped, he was just there, as if time had frozen in the middle.

[Time Stop]

"Tell the truth," Haru said. [Mind Whisper]

The hooded figure felt the thought enter his mind, like an inevitable certainty.

"I’ll tell you who gives the orders. I’ll tell you everything."

...

Haru opened the window, soaking wet, his uniform clinging to him, his hair dripping, the expression behind the mask of someone who had resolved something they didn’t want to have to resolve.

Golden was sitting on the bed reading; he looked up.

"Slacker."

Haru closed the door.

"So it was you all along."

Golden closed the book slowly, unhurriedly, without surprise. The gesture of someone who knew the conversation was coming.

"It was so obvious..." Haru continued. "Do you know what kind of trouble you’ve gotten yourself into?"

Golden stood up.

"And you know it." A different voice, without his usual casual tone. "You’re a fucking traitor. Why are you wearing a mask? So people won’t know what you’ve been doing to them?"

He pointed.

"And you’re going to call me guilty for answering questions?"

"You’re ruining an academic tradition."

"Tradition." Golden laughed, short, humorless. "You call it tradition when it suits you. Yesterday it was survival. Today it’s tradition?"

"It’s not the same,"

"It’s exactly the same thing. You helped freshmen in secret. I sold routes to them. Where’s the moral difference?"

"The difference is that I didn’t charge them."

"Oh." Golden spread his arms. "So the problem isn’t what I did. It’s that I profited."

"The problem is that,"

"That I broke the upperclassmen’s game?" he cut in. "Just like you ruined it when you sidetracked that rookie on the first day? When you whispered the corridor to the freshman who was about to get caught? When..."

"I wasn’t selling information..."

"You were building their map..."

..

The two staring at each other, rain pounding against the open window, water seeping slightly onto the windowsill.

Neither was entirely right.

They both knew it.

"Son of a bitch." Golden threw a punch.

Haru took it, turned his face away from the impact, felt the corner of his lip split open.

He stood still for a second, then slowly pulled his face back, repositioned himself.

"Feel like getting baptized a second time?" he said. "I’ll do you the favor."

Neither of them summoned anything.

There wasn’t enough mana with the Nelumbra still in the air, and even if there were, this wasn’t the kind of fight that called for magic.

It was the other kind.

Golden went first, a short combination, two-handed, testing the distance.

Haru blocked with his forearm and shoved, not a strike, a shove. Creating space.

Golden used the space to move around him.

They were too similar.

Almost the same height, same build, same background, neither from any specific school; both had learned by fighting, not by training. Which meant they both had the same weaknesses in the same places.

Golden went for the body, fast, without telegraphing it.

Haru ducked to dodge, accidentally taking the top of his skull into Golden’s chin.

**CRACK.**

Both of them stepped back.

"Shit," Golden said, rubbing his chin.

"It was an accident," Haru said, rubbing his head.

They went at it again, this time more carefully, more calculated.

Golden had the advantage in base, more solid, harder to knock down.

Haru had the advantage in speed, not by much, but enough for his timing to beat Golden’s in quick exchanges.

Three minutes of a real fight, the table tipping over, a chair breaking, a small mirror shattering, and neither of them had a clear advantage.

Just equal exhaustion.

They stopped, not by agreement, but because they both reached the same limit at the same second.

Heavy breathing. Haru with a split lip. Golden with a swelling eye.

They stared at each other.

Golden smoothed his hair back, a gesture so casual it was almost offensive given the context.

"Close the window when you leave, you bum."

...

The checkpoint was empty.

The newbies had vanished, or been captured, or escaped, or passed out in some hallway no one had checked yet.

The Chinese guy was sitting in a chair tilted back, a book open on his lap, a flashlight lying low beside him.

Completely at peace with the night.

Haru stopped at the entrance and looked at him.

"It was you."

The Chinese guy didn’t take his eyes off the book.

"I was what?"

"That you told Golden to tell me."

He turned a page.

"Prove it."

Haru stood still for a second, then sat on the floor leaning against the wall, because his legs were tired and there was no other chair.

"I don’t need to prove it," he said. "I just needed to tell you so you’d know that I know."

The Chinese man closed the book and looked at Haru for the first time during their conversation.

"Do you know what’s most interesting about tonight?"

Haru waited.

"You uncovered the network. You neutralized the nodes. You identified the source." ... "But you didn’t turn in Golden."

Silence.

"Why?" the Chinese man asked.

Haru looked up at the ceiling.

"Because he wasn’t wrong."

The Chinese man stared at him for a long moment, then picked up the book again.

"There is a hierarchy," he said in a voice that stated something that had always been there. "Prey. Hunter. Observer."

The Chinese man opened the book to a random page.

"The prey flees. The hunter pursues. The observer understands both."

..

"You said it yourselves: if you’re going to betray, at least live well afterward," he said. "Golden lived. You understood. I observed."

He glanced sideways at Haru.

"The tests start in a little while," he said, returning to the book. "I hope I’ve taught you something by then."

"Don’t fail."

The rain outside grew heavier.

Haru sat there for a few more minutes, listening to the sound of the water on the roof, feeling his split lip throb, thinking about the

hierarchy.

"Prey. Hunter. Observer."

"Where do I fit in?"

He didn’t answer; he stood up and went to his room.