Hellsent

[Kuzuru]

Kuzuru’s bike sat silent at a gas pump. The demon flipped through his phone with one hand and pumped fuel into his bike with the other. A series of snaps and crackles filled the air as the bike’s exhaust pipes cooled and contracted. He had lost track of time. By now the 1000 OM bounty on his head had been verified and made public. No doubt every bounty hunter in the Omniverse was preparing to collect. Kuzuru sighed and pocketed his phone.

His nose crinkled as he got another whiff of the girl’s fragrance. She was all over the damn city, moving through the concrete jungle like it was made of water. No matter how fast he went, the girl was still miles away. It was like playing the world’s most frustrating game of hide-and-seek. There was no release, no climax to be had. Any thrill that he had squeezed out of the chase, if one could even call it that, had evaporated. The mere thought of her escape gave him conniptions.

With a sigh he hung up the gas nozzle and went inside to pay. Once inside he spent a few minutes mulling around the aisles of the convenience store. He grabbed a candy bar that was branded as an “O-bar”. It was covered in a black wrapping and had an artist’s depiction of Omni’s grinning mug on the front. It would do little to fill that insatiable bloodthirsty void in his gut, but a caramel center would do well as comfort food.

The clerk was a balding south asian man, probably Indian, but who knows when it comes to the Omniverse. He sat on a barstool, soaking in the breeze from a desk fan and watching an old CRT television. Kuzuru laid his O-bar on the counter.

“Gas on pump six,” the demon said as he started watching the picturebox.

The clerk nodded and peeled his gaze from the TV. He tapped a few keys on the register and the total appeared on a digital screen. Kuzuru fished out his wallet and started to pay the man, but was stopped as a picture of his own face appeared on the TV. The mugshot was accompanied by a newscaster that was all teeth.

“And this one is for all you bounty hunters tuning in,” the man began, “in an ironic twist of events a whopping one-thousand OM bounty has been placed on Kuzuru, the leader of a relatively new mercenary group known as the Ashen Blades,while our experts say this isn’t the first time a bounty this large has been issued it is a rare case of a bounty being issued by a private party rather than the Empire.”

Kuzuru and the clerk locked eyes for a moment. The pangs of recognition fired off behind the man’s brown eyes. His hand drifted below the counter. Kuzuru’s pupils turned to pinpricks and the hair on his neck stood at attention. Danger, that sort of sixth sense that one develops when exposed to constant conflict triggered alarm bells in the demon’s head. A claxon call that warned him of the sawed-off hiding beneath the counter. A few more seconds and his head would be nothing more than red pulp. A flash of steel erupted from the demon’s forearm. A curved blade sprouted from his flesh and reached across the counter, stopping right over the man’s shoulder.

“You think that bounty will be enough for a new arm?” Kuzuru asked.

The dark-skinned clerk smiled sheepishly and brought his hand back over the counter. He broke the demon’s bill and handed back the change. Kuzuru smiled back and retracted his blade. He munched on his candy bar and walked back to his motorcycle. He threw on his helmet and started his bike. Perhaps this bounty thing wouldn’t be such a bad time after all. And with that thought in mind he headed towards the exit gatr and plotted a course back home.