Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter eleven

We walked into the building, carefully treading through the wreckage. I could guess by the state of the house and the drafts coming in through building the current state of our dear sub executive. I found a piece of wood lying on the ground and scooped it up before Chibi could notice.

We found Randou on the mansion's second floor, about where the grunt from earlier was evicted from the building, judging by the hole a few feet from him anyways. Everything around the man in the room was in shambles. The explosion had caused parts of the wall to peel away, the ceiling thighs were on the ground, the wires exposed. Corpses littered the ground, laying on a bed of broken decorations that used to hang on the walls. The blood splattered on the ground made the scene seem like an abstract painting.

The sub executive shivered violently. "So cold. The drafts make it three times colder..." he said. The ability user mumbled something about wanting to be a cicada nymph so he could spend the rest of his years below ground. Something about there not begging any wind or something, I didn't catch all of it as the man trailed off.

So I was right then, huh.

"Rough day, huh, Randou?" I asked, stepping towards the man sitting in the chair, huddled in front of the fire. "Here, I got you some wood for the fireplace." I handed over the wood that I grabbed on the way up here.

"Thank you, Dazai. I'm so glad that this mansion has a fireplace. I might've thrown myself into the fire otherwise just to warm myself up."

I watched as Randou wrapped his blanket tighter around himself before grabbing the wood from my outstretched hand and throwing it into the fire in front of us. The flames roared powerfully, like they'd been lit by Heaphestust himself.

I stepped back to go and stand by the oddly staring redhead. He leaned over to me and spoke at a tone that was slightly lower than what seemed to be his average. "Yo, bandages, where'd you find that wood?"

I glanced at the boy before taking the chance to lean in and whisper into the other boy's ear. "It was one of the building's studs," I whispered nonchalantly.

"I have a good idea why you were attacked, Randou," I said, dipping down to pick up a ruined book from the floor and tossing it into the fireplace. "It was to get people talking, to spread more rumors. If a Mori supporter like you were to die in an explosion, it would get people talking more about the old boss's motives. We checked the GSS captain's car on the way here. I actually found a set of instructions for how to stage a black explosion."

"A black explosion..?" The man asked, shivering with his entire body.

"I don't really get how it works myself," between dropping out of school at fourteen and the instructions being completely in Japanese, a language that I can speak pretty fluently but am still struggling in some specialized areas to read and write, the words went mostly over my head. "We'll need a specialist to look into it for us later. But apparently they were going to use the chemicals from a sodium lamp to create a reaction that makes fire look black, like they do with fireworks," I explained, flipping through the manual. "A really cheap attempt if you ask me. Not only did they fail to kill you, their entire group that they sent got taken out."

"Lemme get this straight," the hot head threw a hand onto his hip with a disbelieving look painting his face. "These GSS guys tried attacking this man here," he pointed at Randou, "pretending to be Arahabaki in order to get the Mafia to turn in on itself, but failed?" He sounded like he thought it was the most stupid idea someone could've had. Not my theory, but their plans.

There probably was too much planning, not enough head on violence for Chibi to be happy.

Randou had been here since the old boss's reign, but he didn't become a sub-executive until I helped Mori take over last year. The old boss had apparently treated the ability user poorly during that time, so it made sense for people to believe that the man was Mori supporter or at least a supporter of the current system and be targeted.