The Intruders

"All right, Gouzi, hurry up and apologize to Eleven."

Maria stood with her hands on her hips, slightly out of breath as she glared at a boy of twelve or thirteen.

Gouzi was the boy's real name. Apparently, the priest who had taken him in as a baby had been a bit of a fool. At a loss over the baby's constant crying, he had found a nursing little bitch to feed him, and she had actually raised the child. After that, the priest had always jokingly called the boy Gouzi, and the name had stuck.

Gouzi looked stubborn too. He held his neck stiff, his little face flushed bright red, and said nothing.

"Gouzi!" Maria grew angry too. "What is everyone at the orphanage to you?" she asked with a stern look.

"F... family."

Gouzi finally lowered his head and answered quietly, reluctance showing on his face.

"So shouldn't you apologize when you hurt your family?"

Maria smiled faintly, patted Gouzi on the head, and nudged him toward Eleven.

Gouzi shuffled reluctantly over to Eleven and forced himself to look up at him.

But what he saw was Eleven's expressionless face. There was no anger, no fear, no expression at all. Eleven simply watched him so calmly, as though it made no difference to him whether Gouzi apologized or not.

An endless sense of grievance welled up in Gouzi's heart, and he burst into tears.

"I won't! I'm not apologizing to him! He said first that I had no dad or mom and was picked out of a trash can! Waaah, he said first that we're all here because nobody wanted us!!"

Gouzi ran off crying, and the other children cried too. Some even stuck their tongues out at Eleven.

Maria immediately felt a headache coming on. She could no longer tell who had been bullying whom. The things Gouzi had mentioned were truly the sort of things one absolutely must never say at the orphanage.

"Did you really say those things?"

Maria crouched in front of Eleven and stared at him.

Eleven thought for a moment and compared Gouzi's words with what he remembered. Finding them much the same, he nodded firmly.

"Ah, how could you say something like that? Aren't we supposed to be family?"

Maria lowered her head and sighed, lamenting her own lack of experience. It seemed that becoming a family wasn't something that could be accomplished with a single sentence.

"Are we family?" Eleven, however, looked up, a different emotion appearing in his eyes.

"Yes, everyone at the orphanage should be one family." Maria sounded somewhat dispirited. "Let's eat first. It's already so late. You can deal with your problem with them tomorrow. Little Eleven, you can sleep in my room tonight."

After dinner, Eleven lay on the sofa in Maria's room. It was the first time he had slept anywhere other than his little flat bed, but he didn't feel excited about it.

Eleven kept thinking back over what Maria had just said, dwelling on the emotion called disappointment that he had just felt from her.

Maria had said they were family, but he didn't know how family members were supposed to get along. Although he had seen the original Eleven's memories, those memories, flashing past like a revolving lantern, couldn't add to his experience in dealing with people. He didn't know why the original Eleven had said those things either, but the emotion coming from Miss Maria made him uncomfortable and made him feel he should do something.

"Looking at it this way, I must have done something wrong," Eleven muttered to himself. "When you do something wrong, you should apologize. Yes, that's right, apologize."

Eleven quietly sat up on the sofa, deciding to find Gouzi and apologize.

Eleven didn't know where Gouzi slept, but that posed no problem for him. Spiritual Perception was a training exercise Eleven had practiced every day in his previous life.

A vast amount of Spiritual Power surged out from Eleven's mind. He didn't know why, but ever since coming here, he had found using Spiritual Power especially easy. Before long, his Spiritual Power had covered the entire orphanage.

Standing beside Gouzi's bed, Eleven quietly considered what to do next. Gouzi was already asleep. Should he wake him by force and then offer his apologies?

Eleven stood silently in the darkness, watching Gouzi, his eyes alone glowing with a faint, mysterious light.

"Boss, are we really going to do this?"

Not far from the orphanage, a group of men crouched in a secluded corner by a wall, discussing things in low voices.

"We have no way out. We can't pay them back, so all we can do is grab some children and hand them over to settle the debt. This is no time to worry about morals or shame!"

"No, I mean, this is that dangerous guild's territory..."

"Tch, just move quickly and it'll be fine. Probably..."

"Once we're inside, work fast. Boys or girls, tie up the younger ones. Two each, and once they're tied up, we run."

In the darkness, the boss pointed at the orphanage dormitory and quietly went over the plan. Then he strode in first.

The dormitory was pitch-black, with beds of all sizes stretching across it. The burly men barged in like bears blundering into a cornfield, blindly feeling their way around.

Eleven was still standing beside Gouzi's bed and noticed the burly intruders at once. He didn't raise the alarm, though. He was just curious: what were these guys doing at the orphanage in the middle of the night instead of sleeping? He could sense waves of nervousness coming from them. Could they have come to apologize too?

Number Two had always been timid, and working in the dark this time made him even more nervous, his nerves stretched taut. Suddenly, he felt someone tug at the hem of his clothes from behind and instinctively turned to look. A small dark figure stood behind him, with only a pair of eyes shining with a faint blue light, flickering in the darkness like will-o'-the-wisps.

"Aah~~~~"

A scream pierced the peaceful night sky over the orphanage.

"Damn it, what the hell is this?!"

The boss paced back and forth angrily, glaring now and then at Number Two, who had his head lowered in apology. Behind him, all the orphanage children, big and small, as well as Sister Maria, had been tied up tightly and thrown on the floor. Eleven was among them, of course.

Unlike Eleven, who still didn't understand what was happening, the other little children were wailing. Older children like Gouzi were backing Maria up, sometimes begging for mercy and sometimes making threats.

Feeling the fear that filled the air around him, Eleven suddenly realized that something bad was happening.

"Boss, we've been completely exposed. What do we do?"

Listening to the clamor around him, the boss grew increasingly irritated, and a violent urge arose within him.

"Take all the children. Kill the nun."

Maria and the children didn't hear the boss's words, but they didn't escape Eleven's perception. The killing intent in particular, that violent emotion, made Eleven feel as though he had plunged into an icy cavern.

So there were emotions in this world that were so cold.

While Eleven was lost in a daze, the boss had already drawn a knife and walked over to Maria. Without a word, he stabbed at her chest as she watched in terror.

Clang~

The boss's knife failed to strike and was knocked aside instead. Though Eleven was in a daze, he had instinctively activated his Spiritual Power. Compared with his body, he could use Spiritual Power with far greater ease and flexibility. Telekinesis instantly condensed his Spiritual Power into a solid form, knocking aside the knife aimed at Maria.

The boss froze for a moment. He had just felt an invisible but irresistible force slam into his knife, and the blade had flown from his hand beyond his control.

Perhaps it was instinct honed by years of fighting, but the boss turned toward Eleven without thinking. When he saw those eyes glowing faintly blue, he became even more certain.

"It was you!"