Endless

4. The Occult

Detective Naomasa Tsukauchi has seen some weird stuff in his day. He's met serial killers who worship the intestines, men who think money is all that matters, and had actual conversations with most of UA's class 1-A.

What he's seeing now, it takes the top spot. That's a lie, the intestine worshipers are definitely higher than this, but it's a close second.

He was in charge of the raid on an illegal quirk-fighting ring whose organisers recently kidnapped four UA students and lost two escapees— a young girl by the name of Nu, and a young man called Alex. The raid had gone without a hitch. Considering the recent escapes, there were concerns that the ring would pack up and run. It seems, though, that whoever was in charge is an idiot because everything was still there, right where they expected it to be.

There are a lot of new faces packed into jail cells tonight and one of them will be the creep who owns the office Tsukauchi's currently standing in. It's covered in books. Books and diagrams and data tables.

There's a thick tome set up in a proper display case but it's written in some ancient language Tsukauchi can't even make a guess at, on top of the case though are six books all entitled 'translation' with a number attached. He hazards a guess they're a translation of the display book and takes a look at the one labelled as the first. It's filled with some kind of ancient religion. He hasn't read much but he can already tell there are two gods, one of light, one of dark. Except, they're called 'Son' and 'Daughter' rather than 'god' and 'goddess'.

It's not a religion he's ever heard of, but there are so many out there that it's not a surprise he's unfamiliar with it.

There are more than a few officers in here with him, everyone seems to have picked something to read. They're all in gloves and the proper protective gear to make sure they don't contaminate the scene. Pictures have been taken of everything in its proper place before they started disturbing it. Crime techs will be all over this office just as soon as they've finished with the quirk-fighting arenas— there are two, one open and one cage— it could be a while, there's a lot of blood.

An officer drops the book they're reading, the sound of it hitting the floor grabbing everyone's attention, and then the blur as she runs through the door keeping their focus. The door closes behind her, but they can all hear her throw up.

"What happened?"

There's a group of three officers standing nearby to where she was, reading notebooks similar to the one now on the floor. They all look to each other, trying to pass off the responsibility of explaining to the next person over. "These books," one of them says, a man with the head of a tabby cat that Tsukauchi's worked with a great deal before; Sansa is his name, "they sound like the ravings of a madman. They talk about rituals and ceremonies performed on a Son and Daughter and most of it sounds hypothetical. But there are photos."

Tsukauchi feels his own stomach churn. Sansa's fur is visibly standing on end.

"He was experimenting on humans he thought were-" Sansa shakes his head, one hand coming to his chin as he swallows hard, as if trying to hold in the need to throw up. "I don't even know. But they're kids, one of them doesn't even look ten yet."

Tsukauchi knows about Nu, even got to meet her for all of five minutes on Sunday just so he could say they had no chance of getting anything out of her when she couldn't understand a word they were saying. It was a formality more than anything else, the police wouldn't try to bother her unless she suddenly learned Japanese or they discovered she spoke a different language perfectly. He knows about Alex too, had a very short conversation with him that essentially amounted to, "They used Nu to make me come quietly, the foolish girl, and then they poisoned me. No, I don't know, because I was poisoned. No idea, I was poisoned. You know, I'm not sure, can you guess why? Yeah, I was poisoned."