"Elizabeth, what do you want."
"It is Zafira," the woman corrected.
"Okay, Zafizabeth, what business do you have." Zelaine collected herself and said with sincerity.
A question mark appeared almost visibly over Zafira's head.
"Is Mr. Ngamba here?"
From inside the office Ngamba heard his name, stood, and saw her. He crossed the room immediately and came to the door, his usual composed expression wavered a bit.
"That is an acquaintance of mine. I will speak with her."
The room went quiet. Everyone had clocked it and nobody said anything.
"I see," Zelaine said, her voice completely flat and entirely serious. She stepped aside.
*A previous client, most likely.*
Mavine, for her part, had already assessed the situation, found nothing further requiring her attention, and was heading back inside.
"Okay, bye, see you again," she said pleasantly to Zafira on her way past.
Zelaine watched her go and then looked at the back of her head with genuine confusion.
"Did you make friends with her?"
Mavine's eyes lit up when Cale pushed the snacks on the table toward her, but she did not stay long. She took what she wanted and slipped away to her room, leaving the adults to their business, which was the correct assessment of the situation and she knew it.
Inside, Aninke sat with his cup , his expression flat, the morning having gone considerably differently than he had anticipated.
"Those two have a real knack for completely ignoring me," he said, to nobody in particular.
Outside at the entrance, the conversation had a different weight entirely.
"So your sister may still be alive."
Ngamba said it carefully, not as a statement, leaving room for her to correct it.
"I do not know anything for certain," Zafira said. "But a message came to me saying she is alive and that someone at a hospital knows about it."
"Have you traced the number."
"It was a burner phone."
Ngamba was quiet for a moment, turning it over.
"One thing is fairly certain. The hospital mentioned in the message is almost certainly where her body was found. And whoever sent it would most likely be linked to the one who conducted the post mortem."
If that was right then the next stop had already determined itself.
"So help me," Zafira said.
"You are a police officer yourself, why do you need our help."
"The case was closed and since I am the victim's sister they will dismiss anything I bring forward as personal feelings. They will not reopen it for me."
Ngamba's eyebrow moved.
"So you want us to investigate illegally. That is what you are saying."
"Bingo."
Zafira gave a thumbs up with complete sincerity.
"Not doing it."
"I will pay you."
"I do not want to go to jail."
"Then be discreet."
Ngamba looked at her for a long moment and arrived at a different conclusion entirely.
"Let me speak to the old man first and I will text you."
Zafira went quiet. The silence had a different quality than the ones before it.
"I know it does not make sense," she said. "But I desperately want my sister to be alive."
Ngamba knew it was intended as emotional leverage. He also could not find a way to argue against it and that was its own kind of problem.
*Ughh.*
He went back inside and walked into a situation he had not been prepared for.
"I am telling you, any Godzilla one shots Cloverfield, and you cannot convince me otherwise."
Zelaine, standing directly in front of Aninke, making her case at full volume with no signs of stopping anytime soon.
'What is happening in here.'
****
"What a magnificent spectacle, isn't this!"
Leishna's laughter rang out across Inumaki, sharp and bright, carrying over the roar of the battle below.
She sat perched on her flying sword a hundred meters above the central square, silver hair catching the torchlight and the falling snow around her, the bronze demonness statue directly below her casting its long shadow across the altar stone where Atiya had been bound minutes ago.
From up here the whole village was visible, the sloping rooftops of the wooden cabins, the enclosed farms at the outskirts, the main roads converging at the square, all of it now lit in the orange glow of spreading fires.
"Enjoying your little sideshow, little girl?" Kallar sneered, floating forty meters to her north above the row of priest residences.
The meteorite split apart mid-flight, duplicating into multiple pieces that scattered and curved toward her from different angles simultaneously, lava orbs firing alongside them in a continuous relentless barrage.
Leishna moved through it, dodging what she could, deflecting and destroying the rest with swords that materialized and vanished in the same motion, the deflected lava raining down across the rooftops of the eastern residential row and setting three of them alight immediately.
"You defeated me eons ago, I give you that!" she called out, a sword intercepting a lava orb to her left without her looking at it. "But I am stronger now and you have gone back on something you promised all those years ago!"
"Huhhh!"
"You have become human, you can now strive for Ascension 4, that was the extent of our deal was it not?"
Something shifted at the edge of her senses, coming from her right flank, fast and already close, cutting in from the direction of the outer fence line on the village's western edge.
*He used a decoy.*
She understood it a fraction too late.
The meteorite struck her clean from the right and she was sent flying westward, crashing through the wall of the first house on the residential road that ran parallel to the fence, tearing through it and through the next house behind it, splintering wood and stone scattering across the snow covered road as she tore through the row and came to a stop inside the third building, half buried in the collapsed interior wall.
"Uggggh, persistent one, aren't you."
She grunted and was already moving, leaping clear of the wreckage and back onto the road before the dust had finished settling.
Heat rose from the ground beneath her feet. Yai circles erupted across the village floor in a wide spread pattern, covering the central square, the roads branching from it, even the snow packed ground around the altar, and lava shots burst upward from each one simultaneously, a forest of fire columns forcing her off the ground and into the air above the western residential row.
She flew up fast and looked above her.
Kallar had covered that too. He had repositioned while she was in the wreckage, moving south and high, now floating above the village's southern edge near the farm enclosures, lava orbs descending from that angle and closing the gap between her upward escape and the ground assault below, boxing her between two layers of fire with the outer fence line behind her and the burning houses to her right.
"He has learned to respect women, I am proud of you."
The main reason he had lost to her before was the arrogance, the misogyny woven into every tactical decision he made, the blind spots it produced. He was not making those same mistakes now. She noted it without dwelling on it.
Silver portals opened above and below her simultaneously, swords launching through each one and intercepting Kallar's attacks from both directions, the collisions producing explosions that rolled through the village in overlapping waves, the force tearing through the western road and the farm enclosures beyond it, the enclosed yai farms that had fed the village for centuries catching the blast and crumbling inward.
Twelve swords materialized around her without portals, summoned directly, positioning themselves at perpendicular angles with her at the center above the ruined western row, the village square visible two hundred meters to her east, the statue still standing at its center amid the destruction spreading outward from it in every direction.
The twelve swords began rotating, building speed, the sound of them cutting the cold mountain air rising into a continuous high pitch as Kallar assembled his next sequence of attacks from his position above the southern farm line.
Both of them prepared at the same time.
"I have to admit, your power is kind of messy....lava, magma, it is just so chaotic and unpredictable." She tilted her head, hovering above the western road, the burning farm enclosures behind her throwing orange light across her silver hair. "Almost like me, would you not say?"
She paused as though genuinely considering it.
"But I have a better idea. Let's make this fight a little more artistic."
She moved.
For the first time since the fight began she launched herself toward him, crossing the two hundred meters between the western road and his position above the southern farm line at a speed that closed the distance before Kallar had fully processed that she had left her spot.
He had never seen her take the offense herself first, not in either of their previous encounters. She had always waited, goofed around, let his yai bleed out while she looked for the gap in his approach.
Not this time.
The twelve swords collapsed inward as she moved, flattening and widening into discs, spinning at the same furious speed they had been building, and she drove them forward ahead of her toward Kallar's position above the southern edge of the village where the collapsed farm enclosures spread out below him in a wide field of wreckage.
"Flame Blanket."
A coat of lava materialized around Kallar, dense and continuous, and he repositioned it directly in front of him as a barrier, the molten surface shifting to meet the angle of her approach across the gap between them.
The rotating discs met the blanket and stopped.
They did not go through. Not one of them, the spinning edges finding no purchase against the lava coat, the force dispersing outward and sending waves of heat rolling across the southern farm ruins below without breaching the barrier itself.
Leishna pulled back, drifting to a stop thirty meters from him above the collapsed enclosure line, and regarded the blanket from her new position.
She settled back onto her sword.
"Hoh."
A genuine pause.
"You have really gotten stronger."
Kallar stepped sideways and came in from a low angle, jumping up and driving his left fist directly into Leishna's face before she had tracked the movement.
It connected clean.
She flew sideways toward the northern road, crashing into the row of wooden cabins lining it, the impact caving in the front wall of the nearest one and sending her skidding across the snow packed floor inside before she hit the far wall and stopped.
"Hahahaha, it felt really good punching you, bitch."
He did not wait. He came after her immediately, crossing the distance to the northern road at speed, closing on the collapsed cabin with his body still wreathed in residual heat from the Flame Blanket.
Leishna appeared in front of him.
Not from the cabin, not from the direction she had gone. Simply in front of him, one meter out, stepping into his path above the snow covered road with the northern fence line twenty meters behind her and the burning central square visible at the far end of the road to the south.
"Fine. Let us engage in a sweet physical dogfight."
Both of them threw at the same time.
Their fists met between them and the shockwave rolled outward in every direction, blowing the remaining walls of the nearby cabins flat, scattering snow and timber across the northern road, the force reaching the fence line and cracking the posts along a twenty meter stretch.
Both of them were pushed back several meters, feet dragging across the snow, and both of them came forward again immediately.
"I will melt that smug look off your face, you little rat." Kallar lunged, a haymaker loaded with the weight of molten rock swinging in a wide lethal arc across the road between them.
Leishna did not move back.
She leaned, her spine bending to an angle like a seasoned gymnast, the glowing fist passing close enough to singe the silver tips of her hair, the heat of it washing across her face as it went by.
His momentum carried his arm past her and she went in rather than retreating, springing upward, knees tucking into her chest and snapping out like a whip, her boots catching him squarely in the throat above the northern road.
Crack. Thud.
He stumbled, his footing breaking on the snow, and she had not landed yet. She hooked her legs around his neck while he was still off balance, using the mass of his frame as a pivot point, swinging her body around and locking in above him.
"Up we go, magma boy!"