Chapter 4: Seek, and destroy

The impertinent flame was always within him, beating like a war drum, to the rhythm of his self-centered heart. Even before he managed to sneak away with his new gang, to usurp the shining shell that was tearing his entire family apart; that cursed treasure he stole by breaching the security of his father's laboratory during the days he had been a refugee in the Land of the Rising Sun.

— Alberto! What are you doing? — Anton Asim Al-Nasr*, a bald, thirty-something Arab scientist, stood up the day he discovered his son having fun with three other Nippon children between six and eight years old, wearing wooden masks and blue kimonos. Lying next to the sacred artifact that the doctor had been assigned to decipher, they demonstrated an extraordinary skill that allowed them to sneak into his secret chamber, filled with advanced computers, meters below the fortress mansion that kept the Al-Nasr family hidden and safe for several months.

— Anton-sama*! — The little thieves shrieked as they dropped their loot: an ultramodern suit of armor made of something resembling obsidian. The suit that had so bewildered the devastated scientist. All the children stopped, all except him, his own son, dark-skinned like his father, who looked at him defiantly and began doing pull-ups with the device's head, as if it were a soccer ball.

— Easy, old man. This thing is pretty tough —. He kicked the stylized helmet, like a motorcycle helmet. It bobbed up and down, a black so opaque it would completely erase the face of whoever wore it, performing the acrobatics he had learned from his sensei, the master of the house that had taken them in. — One, two. Up! — He cackled, finally catching his father's attention after months, to throw the helmet, which landed on his big head, which back then had no feathers.

With his prank, Asim Nasr changed everything. A void slept in the helmet, infinite as deep space, waiting for the right fool to feed it with the ardor of his heart.

— Impossible... It works! — The professor gasped as he watched the suit's helmet swallow his little boy's head, leaving, in place of the mischievous boy's face, two lines of slits in the shape of the letter V, lighting up in oxide copper where his mouth used to be, to burst into a painful fiery smile. With a guttural cry, Nazz transformed into a black Halloween pumpkin, with no trace of his eyes, with that forced laugh mocking the one who had left everything for his secrets; the same absent father who now lunged to tear him from his child's head, seething with the anger of a thousand hells.

The smell of burning skin, along with the agony of the rebellious son, filled the laboratory for what seemed like an eternity, until the father's calls ended and his struggles gave way. The shadow of a little girl began to repeat his name, with great haste and concern.

— Nazz... Asim-kun*, snap out of it! — She said, shaking him. The seven-year-old's silhouette transformed into that of a troubled thirteen-year-old, dragging him back to the present, hours after he had been attacked by that creature that had pretended to be his little snake friend.

— Vane, is that you Vanessa? — Despite the night and the foliage, he recognized her with great emotion, unable to believe the straw-legged Nippon woman he was seeing. Owner of a hybridization similar to his own, with straight, short, white plumage with black tips, like layered hair. Her irises were vermillion, as were a pair of feathers sticking out like whiskers on her pale cheekbones.