Shinma Niko

And from the looks of it, these same thugs have found themselves a new victim. What could she do in the moment? Come out and take them all on? Niko shook her head. On top of being physically exhausted, at this very moment, she did not have the heart to do such a thing. Staying hidden behind a wall while another is in trouble was not the most chivalrous thing to do either and--

Oh. 

Oh, that's right. Aside from numbers, in this very city, there was another indicator of power that was much, much stronger than numbers.

"GYAAAAA--!!!!" Still hidden in the alleyway, Niko gave her best impression of a maiden in distress and screamed her heart out. "A DEMON!!! HELP ME!"  She wasn't much of an actress but at this point, a victim terrified of demons was not the most difficult image to visualize yet.

Upon hearing the the sudden yelling, the startled thugs exchanged glances at each other in bewilderment.

'D-Demons?!'

     ”Do you wish to live?” 

She swallowed slowly, repeating the question a few times inside her head. It wasn’t the first time she had thought about this question. Right after her parents had divorced she had wanted nothing more than to vanish, to feel nothing, to just be gone. Despite everything, she had lived through that. When things had been difficult she hadn’t given up. This time… This time too she wouldn’t give up.

She reached for her cell phone and chose the only right option. She chose to live. Suddenly the mascot of Nicaea spoke again. 

     "You chose to live!"           “The Demon Summoning App has now been downloaded."                "Good luck~☆"

As if to have awoken from a nightmare, Ami’s eyes flew wide open. The back of her head hurt an awful lot, but that wasn’t her top concern for now. Her sight was still a little blurry and it was hard to focus on her surrounding, but there was one thing she had come aware of the moment she had opened her eyes again.

The lady who had tried so hard to protect her was laying on the ground, not moving in the slightest. The monsters were gathered around her and seemed ready to strike, to give the last blow. Knowing that it couldn’t end like this, Ami somehow found the power to get up and ran towards the other in a last attempt to save her. 

"Get away from her!" Ami screamed at the top of her lungs. She had no plan, she had nothing except for the cell phone in her grasp which she thought to had dropped before, but that didn’t stop her from moving forward. Nobody was going to die for her sake anymore!

Suddenly, a bright blue light appeared and Ami felt a weird sensation in her arm. The demons which had been about to strike stopped midway and turned their heads towards the light. When the light died out the shape of a little girl got recognizable. Well, little girl? Just one glance was enough to see this was no human. Somehow her long purple hair served as wings. As if that wasn’t odd enough, ice appeared out of nowhere when she raised her hand. Ami watched in terror as the ice pierced one of the monsters. 

There was no time to think about how this could be happening or why the little girl wasn’t attacking her. Ami had to get to the lady and get them both out of here right now. As she ran the last bit of distance, more ice appeared and pierced the monsters. The mosters were still very alive, but they turned all of the attention to the little girl now. Ami didn’t watch as a fight between the monsters and the little girl started. She only had eyes for one person at that moment. 

When Niko turned her attention the other way, she witnessed the blond girl rushing to her aid, or at least, that was probably the intention even though the injured arm was the one connected to the shoulder that the girl was shaking. She gestured the other to cease and hopped right back onto her feet. They had to escape and it was now or never. Niko turned around, attempting to catch the girl's hand to make sure that this time, for certain, they would run to safety, but the process came to a halt when she noticed how the cellphone the other held in her hands was still shining brightly. "Your cellphone..!" If she recalled, didn't the bright flash from earlier emit from that device? 

As unnecessary as it most likely was, Niko took out her cellphone from her coat's front pocket and miraculously, she found exactly what she wanted to see: a n illuminated screen despite being in sleep mode. The interface showing was as familiar as it was strange to her. Nicaea was the application that Niko installed just earlier that afternoon and that she coincidentally taught the same blond girl how to do the same.

What if Nicaea would let her do something just as exceptional?

"Wait, wait, wait..." Niko let go of her grip and concentrated her efforts to fidgeting on the keypad, answering whatever it was that this app needed. The two girls should have been running, but Niko justified her actions with her curiosity and her faint envy. At the same time, the ice demon that the other summoned was holding off the beasts just fine... for the moment.

“L-Listen! You really should let me go, because I can—” Ami cut her own sentence off. The reason this was so frustrating was because there was actually nothing she could do to save either herself or the other. Ami hated this. She didn’t want to count on anyone else but herself! 

It was then that she noticed the danger up ahead, but it was already too late. Before she could even scream a warning, they found themselves surrounded by those monsters again. The woman, protective as she was, pulled Ami behind herself. Ami felt all the color leave her face when she realized she was letting someone else become a shield of flesh. 

She crushed. Was she then really good for nothing?! There had to be something she could do, anything. Desperate for some kind of weapon, she went through her pocket, but the only thing she found was her mobile. It would have been too fortunate if she happened to have a pocket knife with her, of course. Thinking she could at least use her mobile as a hard object to throw at those monsters, she took her mobile out of her pocket, but out of habit she flipped it open. 

Before her eyes could scan the screen, something hard hit her head. It must have been one of those monster, perhaps one they hadn’t seen coming from behind. However, it didn’t matter because everything had went black for Ami already anyway. The last thing she heard was the sound of her mobile hitting the ground. 

For some time, everything stayed black. Just as Ami started wondering if she had died and if this was death, the screen of her mobile light up in the darkness. There she saw what seemed to be the mascot of that Nicea site and it seemed to be… talking to her…?

     ”Thank you for signing up for Nicaea!”            “At this rate you’re going to die…”                ”But if you would like you can be given one more chance!☆”

Catching the first muscle twitch in the first attacker, Niko gave a push at the delicate girl with her back before launching herself forward to the enemy. With a little bit of chance, the other girl would finally catch on and run for her life instead of dwelling in a death trap. Niko couldn't care less about herself, now that she had taken a very short time to do a before-death introspection. The second beast lunged at her and she only dodged at the very last moment to save her the effort of closing the distance between them by herself. Her punch landed on the side of the beast's arm to divert the attack. 'Too far,' she had intended to aim for the elbow joint but at the very least, she succeeded in dodging that one. It was a beginner's mistake to not taking into account the length of the demon's limbs which were almost twice as long as a regular man.

It wasn't much the right time to think about life and death when envisioning the professional competition matches she secretly studied behind her parents' back could prove to be much more useful. Then again, it wasn't the right time to think about her small attempts at deviance either. It was a funny realization for her, knowing that she didn't mind dying, but that she minded the possibility of these monsters not dying before her.

Her weight shifted from one light foot to another, her way of feinting in front of the enemy. Once the two before her had their attention wrongly pulled to her fists, Niko scored a kick to their calves strong enough to throw them off balance. When another attack came at her, the girl evaded to the side and it was when she took a moment to look at the scene at the distance that she realized her grave mistake. One, two... The third demon that had evaded her had the blond girl within grasp. Frustratingly, all this was now too far from Niko's reach. She didn't know who to direct her anger at anymore. Was it to the demons who tried to kill her or was it to this girl who only moved an inch when she pushed her earlier?

She hadn’t much time to be happy about that, because while running away the other got mad at her. Most likely she deserved getting such a treatment after almost getting herself killed, yet she couldn’t help but feel a little hurt by those words.

“I’m really sorry! It’s just t-that…” Ami said, her voice shaking. This was bad. Now that she had been saved she felt the fear of being killed again. “Y-You shouldn’t have come to save me. Now they are after us both!”

Because she was this weak she had dragged someone else in the mess. It wasn’t her fault that those monsters had appeared, but if this person would die now it would be Ami’s fault. She had to stop this. 

"Are you seriously saying that at a time like this?" Running through this terrible terrain was already a hard task in itself and it became even more so when the other girl was starting to pull back from her. The demons could catch up to them anytime soon, so it was outrageous to waste their breaths on something so trivial. Buying time so she alone could escape... Ridiculous. "C'mon, get your--"

A loud thud. 

She was trapped. The moment Ami realized that, she felt like she was already dead. Those things, those monsters, loomed over her. She had seen them before, but now that she was able to have a look at them from nearby she knew for sure this was the end. Those things were beasts. The only things which made them slightly come across as human were the bats inside their hairy claws and the fact that they were walking on their hind legs.

There were three of them in total. Ami thought there had been more of them casing her, but maybe that had only been her imagination. Three of those monsters or a hundred of them, it didn’t matter. She was done for anyway. She had nowhere left to run and she had lost sight of that girl Nana long ago. Ami just hoped Nana would be save. At least she should be save.

“S-Stay away!” Ami cried out as those monsters surrounded her. “I’m warning you! Don’t… Don’t come any closer!”

This was it then. She had told herself she wouldn’t die today, not because of those creatures or the absence of warm sunlight, but the situation she had found herself into now was hopeless. At the very least she would struggle until the very end. Even if it was more than clear she was going to die here, she wouldn’t go without having tried to stay alive. 

It was then that she heard a voice. A shriek. Frantically, the girl scanned all around her, hoping to catch that voice again, but all there were were beast-like growls ringing through the air. Against her better judgement, Niko carefully moved towards the foul source.

And there she was, the blonde girl from earlier today. Against the girl's futile provocation, the demon suddenly raised its mace up high, which fired a signal for Niko, the observer, to jump into the scene. Almost as if acting on reflex alone, she dashed forward and threw a kick up high, aiming at the monster's arm. Having lost its momentum, the weapon failed to hit its target. As the beast and its kind wouldn't forgive the two humans so easily, Niko changed her course and quickly grabbed the other girl by the arm to flee from the scene. She didn't care if the other wasn't ready or if she would have to drag her on the ground, anything would be much rather than seeing more human blood spread out to warm the cold hard ground.

Ami’s lips twitched into a crooked smile as she let her gaze go over her surroundings. The park always had been a hot-spot for youngsters, but today there seemed to be an incredibly high amount of them… in pairs.

“There are way too many couples here…” Ami snarled, but not loud enough for anyone to hear. She couldn’t stand the sight, yet she made no attempt to leave. “First the heat and now this.”

The heat was almost unbearable, but it felt like nothing compared to the heat at home. The air-conditioning had broken recently, so whenever Ami had some time to spare you could find her outside, hiding from the sun under the cool shadows of a tree and watching the people around her life their daily life.

Ah, finally, a convenient space was spotted. The girl hurried to one of the stone benches, accidentally making direct eye contact with the blond girl across occupying the same bench. Niko sat down as her body was already on the move, but she took a moment, staring straight ahead. This felt a little strange, meeting someone in the eyes and then choosing the seat right next. She could swear it was all due to coincidence, but there was no way to control the judgement of a stranger. The worst she could do now was to do as if nothing had happened and they will both go on their merry life without ever meeting again.