need more jasico fics where jason is a simp and everyone just kinda. stares at him making an absolute fool of himself to make nico notice him

Welcome To Grail Academy - Chapter Twenty-four: Little Secrets

Hari watched out the window of a cafe on the street corner. He was wrapped in a parka, sipping on a warm cup of coffee. Atlas was indeed cold. He didn’t like big cities, they were always so crowded. Too many people, he could barely move. Buildings were too tall, there was no way to be able to see the sky, day or night. The only reason he tolerated Calicem was because, while there were plenty of skyscrapers and towering office buildings, the population was barely 300,000. Everyone left him alone, nobody bumped elbows with him, the idea of personal space actually meant something. Here, the people were loud and obnoxious, and cheap. So, so cheap. Even though they were all rich, upper-class elites, somehow Atlas garnered the reputation for being one of the stingiest places in Remnant. Hari was glad he would only be here for a day.

An old woman pulled the hood of her coat up once she stepped outside her house across the street. She used her scarf to shield herself from the cold as she walked down the block towards a series of shops. Hari saw. He stood up, finished his coffee, and headed out the door.

It wasn’t hard to pick the lock. Despite the cutting-edge Atlesian technology that was installed around every corner, this house seemed to be the only modest building on the street. It was tilted to one side since it had been constructed on an incline, painted a dull sky blue with wood paneling along the exterior. When Hari entered, the house was dark. A layer of smoke settled around the entire building, meeting him at his waist. The windows were open, which helped clear out the smoke. He could smell something burning. Past the living room was a humble kitchen, a bunny hutch by the wall, a stove in the corner, a square dining table with two chairs in the center of the room. The smoke was thickest here, wafting up from a skillet full of burnt and charred remains of what he could only assume was some kind of omelette. Hari flung the cabinet doors to the bunny hutch open, rummaging through it to find anything of importance. He scoured the entire house, being careful to put everything back the way he found it afterwards.

The attic was cramped, with ceilings so low that Hari had to hunch over, lest he hit his head. Dusty cardboard boxes littered the space, and furniture with faded white sheets draped over them that gave the appearance of vague ghosts and spectres. He found a crate full of old issues of The Blue Inferno, a closet that housed a wedding dress with a plastic cover over its hanger, toys that were most likely stored here once the child had grown out of them, and a box of VHS tapes and photo slides. Hari brushed dust off the tapes, reading the labels written in marker on the sides. They were all regular home movies, a baby’s first steps, someone blowing out candles on their birthday, a school musical, a child opening his holiday presents, a science fair, a vacation at the beach, a wedding.  The photo slides were inky and smudged from weathering, but the images were clear enough to tell that they were family photos. A rolled up packet of papers, crinkled and stapled together, rested at the bottom of the box. This was what intrigued Hari the most. It was an old police report, it had photographs attached to its corner. He snatched one of the tapes, a handful of photo slides, and the police report, and stuffed them all into his parka. Hari thought for a long time about cleaning the skillet sitting on the stove with the burnt gunk slowly crusting and sticking to it as he walked past the kitchen. He closed the front door behind him, reversed his handiwork and locked it, and fled the scene.

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The clocktower struck 3 o’clock in the morning when the remainder of EBNY returned to the campus of their school. They tried to be as quiet as possible when they snuck around the corner of the academy entrance and used the foliage of bushes and trees dotting the landscape to hide their shapes. If there were teachers out patrolling during the curfew, they didn’t want to get caught. Soil, now hard and ridged from snow that froze into an icy layer on top of it, crunched under their shoes. The world was different at night, quiet, intense. It made it easy for Esmerelda to notice the shouting in the distance. They were about to sneak back into the dorm building when she heard the yelling. At first, they thought it was because someone had caught them after curfew, and Nico moved faster to pick the dorm hall lock. But nobody was chasing after them, there were no signs of flashlights bouncing from the ground to the walls that gave the impression of running. On the other side of the campus, past the building where any of them could see, Kismet and Pearl were facing off against a trio of much more dangerous trespassers.

“Hands where I can see them!” Kismet roared, his eyes falling on the figure of a woman, well-dressed and hair tied back in a bun, her back turned to him while she worked on something faceted to the door of the clocktower. The butt of his musket rested firmly under his arm, the barrel aimed and ready. The woman did not acknowledge him. She simply waved a hand, sighing out “Take care of them.”

From beyond the shadows stepped Aurum, who cracked his knuckles. Pearl readied herself for a fight, just as Kismet was doing the same. Without warning, Aurum charged forward and swung a heavy right hook into Kismet’s side, a hearty smile on his face. He relished the feeling of his brass knuckles connecting with a worthy opponent, but it seemed tonight was not that night. The professor slid across the academy’s lawn, only stopping himself from falling over completely when he cocked his weapon and fired a shot in the enemy’s direction. It nicked Aurum on the shoulder, and before he had time to react, Pearl was on him.

An alien object quickly spun through the air to imbed itself in the ground, dangerously close to Aurum’s feet and...other regions as it struck down right between his legs. It was about a yard high, the size and shape of a small hula hoop ring, and made of gold. The razor-sharp portion of the chakram was (thankfully) hidden mostly in the snow, but the exposed handle portion of it showed an elaborate pattern of a twisting vine with fairies plucking flowers off it. Pearl glowered at the man, tapping another chakram against her hip. Aurum laughed, tugging the chakram out and tossing it back to her. “Oh, please. Hit me with your best shot!”

Kismet sprinted, gun at the ready. Lolanthe was his target, her figure clear in the moonlight. As the snow settled, he spun the musket around and jabbed the butt into the back of her head. But, instead of collapsing, falling forward, or even reacting to the attack, Lolanthe stood perfectly still. As she did, Kismet watched in horror as the butt of his weapon slowly absorbed into her head. Her body was glossy, and slowly deforming itself, almost as if it was melting around the gun. “Ugh!” He let go of his musket as Lolanthe dripped down into a puddle of hot wax. “What is…” He grumbled, turned around, finding Lolanthe standing a few yards behind him. She pulled a pair of candlesticks from her dress pockets, setting them neatly in the snow upright. It was an odd sight, to be sure. But, the symbols she made with her hands, twisting her fingers through the air, were almost hypnotic. The candles slowly grew and rose, writhing until they matched her height and shape. Even the puddle of wax that his gun was trapped in, moved in the same way. In a few seconds, Kismet was surrounded by four Lolanthes.

The moment Pearl launched off in his direction, Aurum lazily leaned to his right to avoid the blade, and raised his arm just in time for his fist to go straight through the middle of the ring. Then it was just a simple matter of twisting his wrist and turning the chakram to spin the weapon out of Pearl’s hand and letting it topple to the ground. Once her chakram was out of the way, Aurum twirled around on his left heel and knocked her in the back of the neck with his elbow in an attempt to throw her off balance. Pearl ducked down and swept her leg into the man’s shin, toppling him. After that, her attention turned to the chakram that lay dormant in the snow.

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Yorick flipped through an old comic as he sat anxiously on the loveseat in what most considered to be Sable’s office. She had many dens to hide away in on the property, the smoke stacks, the freezer, the observation deck. But she was nowhere to be seen tonight. Yorick took it as a sign that this was a night off from his training, but it didn’t calm him down. The comic he held in his hands was one familiar with him, the series that had launched because of his grandmother’s work as a hunter. He was always fond of the Blue Inferno comics, but it did not cause him the relaxation or rest that it usually did. He read the words on each page, but his mind did not process the dialogue. His brain was too busy screaming at him that something was wrong, and because he couldn’t comprehend what the problem was, the logical conclusion to make was, of course, that the world was ending and this internal panic attack was the universe giving him one final warning. But again, there was the question of what exactly that warning was meant to be.

He had been feeling like this more often ever since that fateful night at the hotel. Something bad was happening. The voice in the back of his head was screeching at him, telling him that there was no future, that he was a fool for sitting idly by with a stupid comic book, just waiting for the end, like a blind sheep. He knew this was not the case, but his anxiety never relented. The voice was especially active tonight, though. The images of a powerful and charismatic caped heroine saving the day, stories that once brought him solace and nostalgia, did nothing but torment him. Yorick stood and made his way to a small opening between two sheets of paper on the wall, where the window was exposed. He watched the floor manager, with his combover and potbelly, packed up his things and left for the night. Rettah and Scarlet gossiped with one another by one of the garage entrances, and Queenie paced back and forth with her hands folded behind her. The door to the office suddenly opened, with Sable and Hari on the other side. Hari held a cardboard box under his arm. “We have a surprise for you.”

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Three students cautiously peered around the corner of a building, to see their mentors under siege. Kismet, already small in stature, and therefore easily susceptible to attack, was immobilized by a prison of waxen maidens, whose bodies melted around his and hardened so that all that could be seen was half of his face, and part of his arm reaching upwards towards the sky, his hand grasping for escape. Pearl grimaced as Aurum lifted her up, both chakrams were yards away hidden in the snow. His hands gripping her wrists, his arm span made it easy to pull her off the ground and restrain her, like a crucifixion.

“You know, this seems really out of our league, so I’m just going to go....” Nico whispered and started to back away, but Esmerelda reeled him back in by tugging on the lapel of his jacket.

“We may not have our weapons,” She hissed, “But this is still our school. We have to help.” Bernard nodded with a grunt, and rose to his feet. Esmerelda and Nico followed suit, but the group’s confidence didn’t last long, for only seconds later, a shroud of darkness consumed their figures. A shadow that blocked out the light of the moon, darkening where they stood. None of them wanted to turn around, every instinct they had were telling them to run, keep running, and never look back. And yet, damned by their duties as hunters, they turned. The mountainous man, whose features were too hidden in the umbrage cast by the hood of his boarskin cloak to give the children any idea of who he could be, flared his nostrils as he loomed over them.

Esmerelda, Bernard, and Nico were thrown across the campus quad with one swift movement of the man’s arm, leaving them to land at Lolanthe’s feet. “Ah, I see you’ve found some unwelcome guests” said Lolanthe, irritated. The man lumbered towards them and mumbled in a low, gravely voice, “More meat.” The comment made Aurum laugh.

But the voice. That tone. Those words. There was a familiarity to them, something that Nico recognized. Nico slowly turned his head around to get a clear view of their attacker, sharing an expression that read shock and excitement. Before Esmerelda was dragged off by Aurum via the back of her coat, before Bernard was pinned down by Lolanthe’s wax copies, and before Nico was clocked in the jaw by the herculean man’s right hook, he squealed out one phrase with glee, “Blitzkrieg Butcher!?”