After waiting sometime between hour and eternity, the nurse finally let me into the room. There was nothing particular or special about the patient's room, it was just a regular sized hospital bed with tentative nurses coming in and out every now and then. Everything seemed fine, everything except for the patient. She had a bandage for each of the thousand cuts and bruises she wore. To exaggerate a little bit, she was basically a mummy reincarnated. None other than our beloved Yoshino lay in that bed. The woman with the power to summon an invisible dragon and almost killed us twice with it.

"What do you want?" Yoshino asked without sparing a single glance at me. And she sounded like she would die any moment now from boredom.

"I am not asking anything from you..." yet. But I kept that thought to myself, "please I just want to talk."

"Then please just GTFO. My head hurts," she sighed,

"Fine I will be quick about it." I cleared my throat "I want to make peace and form an alliance with you."

For a moment, the room was as quiet like a tomb, you could have hard a pin drop. Then out of the blue, Yoshino burst out laughing. She was starting to choke from laughing so hard. I was a little afraid that this might be the end of her. But in the end she managed to regain herself and give me a compact look.

"Are you insane?"

"You seemed more like when you tried to kill us."

There was a long pause, when neither of us said anything. But the silence suggest me, trash talking might not just be the case right now. First thing first, we had to straighten out our differences from before trying a more tentative approach would be for later.

"Is that a taunt?" her voice sounded irritated.

"To be honest I was just pointing out the fact...but never mind that what I am trying to say, right now just let us put our past differences behind us and make peace with each other. So are you with me?"

"Sooner or later I will be chopping your balls off and feeding them to the dogs!" she snickered in a pretty gangster fashion. So far from the looks of it, this negotiation is nothing but dead in the water.

"Before you make up your mind, perhaps you should hear what I am about to say."

"Then spit it out, you're wasting my time."

"To be honest I would never been able to defeat you without the help of the Ragnarok twins, this can only mean one thing. No matter how strong you are when numbers are stacked against you, you are going to lose. You are strong I admit, but a major reason why we beat you is because of the strength in numbers. You were all by yourself and there were three of us. The twins ability combined might just be able to end the world...and I beat them. So what do you say, join us or be crushed by us again?"

"Interesting." She sneered, casting a sideways glance at me full of contempt. "But perhaps your granny would take in such a threat. And if you are done spreading your petty lies, you can GTFO now, or do you want me to shove all of them back into your mouth with my bare hands?" she said making a gesture with her hands.

"Fine, it seems nothing I say will convince you then. Here have some soup and calm down." I said, taking an iron container out of my duffel bag that contained the chicken soup I made earlier this morning.

"Do you take me as a dog? I will sooner starve then eat the food of my enemy!"

"Don't make such a fuss about it, I know you hate the hospital food."

She looked like she was about to protest but I quickly cut her off again:

"There is no need to deny the fact, I have the ability to read minds, and your expression just gives your true feelings away too easily. Plus the chicken soup I made will help you heal your wounds quicker. And don't worry, the soup's not poisoned, because if I wanted to kill you, I would have done so already that day while you were crushed under the crane. To be fair, I was the one who called the hospital. If you don't want to drink it, that's fine with me. But know this, it will help you heal quicker, and the quicker you heal, the sooner you can get out of the hospital and fight us again. I will be looking forward to that." I set the container on the table right next to her, then turned around and walked out the door without saying another word.

Afterwards, I headed back towards the waiting area, where I was greeted with a blank stare from Aurora and Aine. When Aurora saw me, she nudged her twin awake. Aine spoke first:

"Let me guess, you failed." Aine sighed with disappointment, before I could even utter a single word.

"I could have guessed. But I have to admit, I am quite surprised that you managed to come out of that room in one piece." Aurora added.

"I don't think she would be able to lift a finger, being wrapped in that amount of bandages." I sighed.

"So what do you plan to do now?" Aurora asked.

"There is nothing we can do. Let's just head back for now."

***

"I am so hungry! Once we get home, I want you to make a feast!" Aine said cheerily, but no matter how cheerful the demand just seemed absurd.

It was about 10 o'clock in the evening, the walk from the sky train station to the mansion was about fifteen minutes ten of them inside a forest. It was already getting dark outside, but the forest added a whole new shade of dark. While we were at the entrance of the forest, I insisted upon Aine lighting a fire to shine the path ahead of us

"No," Aurora said, "the last time Aine did that, she almost burned half the forest down." That was basically the end of the argument.

So for the next ten minutes I was tripping every few steps even with our flashlight. Occasionally I would bump into Aurora who just happened to be in front of me. Every time I ran into her, I got an icy glare that sent chills right down to my bone. And at the same time, a question that has been nagging me for some time now, bubbled to the surface of my thoughts and slipped right off my tongue.

"Please excuse me for asking this, but where did you get your mansion from? How do you pay off your monthly expanses? Because you twins doesn't seem to be like the working type to me, so are you twins like the daughters of a noble or something?"

"How rude of you to ask, but very well, let me satisfy your curiosity." Aurora cleared her throat and then went on:

"Aine and I grew up as orphans. We never found out who our parents were, but I really couldn't care less. Anyhow at that time we were lucky. We were abandoned on the doorstep of an orphanage somewhere in mid-Europe. The cook who found us before the rats on the street. We were raised inside our first orphanage for about 6 years. That was around that time our twin spirits began to awaken. Aine occasionally set other kids on fire..."

"It was their fault! They were the ones who were mean!" Aine protested loudly.

"Yes, and after that all the other kids isolated us, so it was just me and my sister. And when the adults learned the truth they were afraid. They sent us away and threatened to call the police if we stayed any longer. We left that place and attended a dozen more orphanages after that. The longest we stayed was two months, the shortest two days. After that we couldn't go to orphanages they turned us away based on rumours of what we twins were capable of. Whenever we were recognized they called the authorities and we had no choice but to run. One day, we were hungry and alone in a deserted alleyway. A mysterious man came up to us and asked us if we were the twins from the rumours. He offered to buy us dinner. I can still remember that meal. The best meal of our lives. While we were busy eating the man asked us a bunch of random questions. Mostly neither of us had a clue what he is asking. Finally he told us if we came with him he would take care of us. "I will take you to a place, where you no longer have to worry about your next meal and clothing to wear next day. You'll be living in a house with servants taking care of you and allowances whenever you need them," he said. It seemed too good to be even a dream back then. Aine and I took the offer instantly. Turns out everything he said was true. For the next decade my sister and I lived in this mansion being taken care of by a dozen servants every day. Then the servants gradually left, and now you are the only one. Though I am quite grateful our personal tutor left last year, he was quite a nuisance to be honest."

"Yeah! He was old and annoying and smelled funny." Aine called over her shoulder.

"It must been hard, I am sorry to hear about that. I never thought such spoil...I mean cute twins like you two could had such a heavy past." I said with a sympathetic tone and smile. With the darkness we were walking in no one could see my smile. As long the message gets through, it is enough.

"Sympathy coming from you? ...it feels quite uncomfortable, I prefer you stick to your role." Aurora snickered.

It seems the message never got there...

"But we are fine now, Aine and me have put the past long behind us already, we have already moved onto a new life, so worry about yourself no more about us."

I could sense her smiling without even actually seeing her, because deep down my heart I knew she meant it.

"Wait I have one more question, so who was the mysterious man, did you ladies get to find out about it later?" I asked them.

"We have theories, but sadly we do not have mind reading powers like you do, so our best guess is that he is some sort of scientist and we are all part of a big experiment..." Aurora voice trailed off.

"What kind of experiment exactly?" I was curious to find out, and because of my curiosity the right side of me bumped into a tree, leaving me limping and dazzled.

Aurora stopped in her tracks, sighed, turned and faced me and said:

"We asked him about it once and all he said was that we all had a role to play."

"Role? Like a RPG game? Then I guess you two would be the mages, Yoshino would be the warrior, and I would be the support."

"..." silence, utter silence. I could just tell I had F-ed up big time.

"Ok, I am sorry. I won't say that again," I quickly apologized.

"No it's not that. There..." Aurora's voice was filled with worry as she pointed her finger all the way down the road. Sure enough about a hundred meters ahead, a single inhumanly tall figure stood in the middle of the road bathed in moonlight. At first no one moved a muscle, as we all held our breath watching the figure move slowly towards us. It wasn't until it was about halfway here that I got a clear view of it. It was a man mounted on horse top, and everything would have been normal about him if his head wasn't a pumpkin and his horse eyes weren't glowing red. Seeing him reminded me of the headless horseman, so I assume this guy was just one of the crazy fans. But then again, this was the City of Fog, anything could happen here. When it was about thirty meters away from us, I noticed the horseman was holding something in his hand. It made my blood run cold.

It is a halberd. A goddam halberd.

I shined the flash light towards Aine and Aurora, but their faces had already gone pale and they were holding onto each other as if they were glued with superglue.

"Hugging one another is not going to help you know?" I said with rationality and a taint of envy. "I bet it's just plastic or something. But I had to admit, whoever made this costume sure put a lot of effort into it."

The figure swung his halberd against the tree beside him. The tree came down and hit the ground with a hard THUMP!!!

"...Soosoosoo wh-hahat noowow?" the twins voices quivered in fear in perfect union. Man if I ever had a twin, I will never get as good as this. Normally in times of peril like this, I would come up with some genius plan or something, but this time my brain just completely shut me off, leaving me with nothing but pious fears and two whimpering girls.

"Run." I muttered quietly. And thankfully no one had to be told twice.