8 Chapter 8

"What the crap is this kid!?" Curtis shouted at Akagi as she gave him a piggy back.

He hadn't gone far, he was far too weakened and had a lot of grotesque internal injuries.

That tended to happen when one was hit head on by the wind whip, which was basically a mini tornado in the hands of a proper expert.

Luckily for him, Thanis wasn't much of an expert, causing only his collar bones and some ribs to fracture from the impact.

However, this was still something most adult men wouldn't be able to handle.

They'd be too paralyzed by the shock and pain that they'd be left a screaming and sniveling mess on the ground.

Comparatively, Tasha's reaction frightened both women to the core.

Even when he was hit, the kid didn't make a peep.

After all was said and done, he was still able to drag his body out the back door of the tavern and hide himself beside a pile of trash before knocking out.

He was either an old monster masquerading as a child... or something very broken.

"Arthur open up!" Akagi knocked on Arthur's door.

Right before she came back to Tasha and checked his pulse for the 5th time during their short walk to Arthur's office.

...

"Ok, so let me get this straight." Arthur annoyedly asked, metal cup in hand, "besides the fact that his name is Tasha, he doesn't have a hand, doesn't talk much and that he's twelve years old, none of you know anything more about him?"

Curtis's eyes darted around before finally settling into a nod and answering, "Sure."

"What do you mean 'sure'!? Didn't you sign on to be the kid's care taker? And yet you don't know a thing about him?" Arthur asked, downing his drink in one gulp.

"Well... we know he was kept the house of a known war criminal.." Akagi added.

His eyes turned to her, giving her a glare that basically meant that she needed to keep talking.

"Well you know how the military recently apprehended Gil for several dark operations and experimentation." Ritsuko explained, "they conducted a raid in his house after catching him in one of his bases to make a stronger case against him.."

"That's where they found this kid?" Arthur came to his own conclusion. "So what am I looking at? a human weapon? A test subject?"

"That's what we thought too, but besides the scars and the arm, we couldn't find anything wrong with his body or many," she answered, "as far as we could tell, there was no tampering done to his body, he was normal."

"You think normal would allow a kid to fling around level 2 spells willy-nilly?" Curtis pointed out.

"He could've been souped up on Speed, being on those things on long term would push the comprehension and control beyond anyone of his age." Akagi reasoned.

"That would explain everything if he was using a 2nd level spell." Arthur added.

"What's that supposed to mean?" They both asked simultaneously.

Since the fight, Arthur had constantly reviewed everything that had happened.

He'd rarely ever let anything escalate to that point under his nose.

Which meant that...

"There was no casting." He said confidently.

A spell circle had a few functions that culminated in the act what laymen called spell casting, one of which being the drawing and consolidation of mana.

If any part of that process had occurred, not to mention him, the first people who would've noticed were Curtis and Akagi who were closest to the action.

But even they had only noticed that magic was being used once it was already flying right in front of their eyes.

"So... you're saying he has a skill that hides that?" Curtis checked.

"No..." Akagi caught on quick, but maybe she was hoping she didn't, "He's saying that he wasn't doing it at all."

"Haha... so what, you're telling me he's just flinging around level 0 spells?" Curtis actually thought they were pulling her leg, despite everything that happened it was still hard for her to get any grasp of the situation.

But her smirk froze after awhile, if those two were playing a practical joke at this point, then they were awfully committed to it.

Level zero spells were what 2-8 year olds did when they were messing about.

Pushing around mana playfully to conjure minuscule little party tricks.

Ones like making ones hands warm or getting a having a soft breeze blow on one's face were about the limits of it's effect.

Even for an archmage, attempting to do level zero spells was tedious.

With the time and effort they had to put in to generate power to match a level 1, they could already cast several level 3 or 4 spells.

But despite the non-threatening label that came with it, level zero spells were anything but.

Outside the human gene pool anyway...

"So... I guess now we know why Gil kept him around..." Akagi surmised, but then again this didn't help them figure anything out at all. "But what do we do with that?"

"Well..." Curtis's alcohol clogged mind started turning.

...

The human body was a spectacular yet somewhat comical specimen to behold.

If one were to, let's say... punch it so hard that it would dent a solid steel door, break it off it's hinges, before hurtling itself towards thick concrete walls on the other side and ultimately damaging that as well.

It could actually, in contradiction to the thoughts of everyone who saw or imagined it, simply pick itself up and walk away unscathed.

Yet, put it's left foot in front of the right as it took the next step.

And it finds itself stumbling uncontrollably to the ground.

First the knee makes contact with the solid floor, eliciting an anguished cry from the head that was similarly making it's way down.

Clumsily flailing arms fail to stop this predetermined encounter that overall ended in a satisfying bloodied nose and bruised knee, which anyone who has had the pleasure of experiencing could tell you, was quite unpleasant.

The body in question propped itself up after said fall, threw itself backwards so that it was leaning on the wall, looked towards the initial source of it's mishaps, and said as if none of the previous events had happened at all.

"Well, it's nice to see you too Curtis."

...

Black Gate was by no means a tough prison per se.

Compared to other maximum security prisons, with their thick towering walls and mean looking, trigger happy guards, it could be considered paradise.

It's prisoners shuffled freely around the whole establishment and did what they wanted when they wanted, in fact there weren't even cells. Requiring a space only a tenth of the size of prisons at it's level, a lot of it was actually allotted to recreational facilities.

Seeing this, one could wonder if it was actually just a rehab facility with a scary name.

This mostly had to do with it's inhabitants.

When you had a building filled with only half-step arch mages and above, what exactly was the point of bars or a schedule. The worst thing one could do to the inmates here was remove Taco Tuesday.

And yet, if one googled the number one prison in Atlas, they would find this name right upon their screen.

Because while it was very lax in the way it did things, and it's inhabitants were among the most powerful in the world, no one has ever left these walls without a pardon. Alive that is.

So as a prison with this reputation, it did not make a habit of giving another interrogation room to civilians who used the last one, as well as one of it's inmates for punch practice.

But since Vincent was a magnanimous warden, and he didn't want to put more repair costs on top of the prison budget, he would let the Earth Fiend do so just this once.

Reluctantly fishing out a key and opening the door for three of them to enter. "Your previous room is just next door, if you wish to beat him up again please kindly walk the two step distance and repeat it there." He said before leaving.

"I'd want to believe the both of you came here cause you missed me..." Gildar spoke with a smile, patting down his long disheveled hair after the treatment he received previously, "But I'm not in the habit of being in denial, so what do you want?"

"You asked to talk with me." Curtis answered.

"And as I remember, you rejected it." He answered without missing a beat. "And I don't remember people greeting each other with a fist to the face, so either the culture outside has turned pretty bad, or that concussion you gave me is even worse than I thought."

"Enough with the fun and games!" Curtis said, slamming her arms into the steel table between them, crumpling it like a coke can. "You wanted me here, I'm here, you wanna talk or not?"

Gildar stared at her for awhile before giving in, "...Ok.. Fine.. Just give me a sec..." Saying that he suddenly got up and left, to both of their surprise.

It was about 2 minutes before he peeked back around the room door with some files in hand, throwing it onto Curtis and Ritsuko's laps.

"What is this?" Curtis asked before opening them.

"My operations." With those two words, the both of them instantly threw the files onto the ground.

"We're not doing this, if you're expecting a lighter sentence after everything you've done..." Curtis spoke through gritted teeth, veins on her head trying to burst past her light brown skin.

"Let me be a little more specific with you then", he interrupted "those are 'my operations which 'he' participated in."