Riding and searching.

“Are you sure this’ll work?” Ishtar asked Aoi, shouting as loudly as she could to make herself heard.

She was currently riding with her on her motorcycle, sitting behind her with her arms around her waist. They weren’t riding too quickly, but the helmets and the wind made it so she’d have to yell. Also, Ishtar knew it wasn’t really the time, but she still enjoyed holding Aoi and pressing her own boobs against her back. Simple pleasures.

“She should’ve gotten the message already,” Aoi shouted back. “Now we have to wait for her to contact us back. Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but please get back to searching.”

“Yeah, yeah…”

They were riding around the city, aimlessly, as was Ishtar’s original plan. They figured it was better than just sitting on their thumbs, waiting. With Aoi driving, Ishtar closed her eyes and searched the area around her for the faintest hint of her own power, ignoring the faint signal coming from Aoi herself. Her search radius was approximately 20 meters, adjusting it slightly when passing by taller buildings to check them thoroughly. It was a relatively slow search, and in a city this big, it would take weeks, months to find him. The others were right to come up with an alternative plan.

According to Belphegor, the usual way for underworld agents to hire mercenaries is to contact an organization called The Office. Most mercenaries looking for proper work are registered with them, even if they have their own office.

The Office works as a liaison between mercenaries and those looking to hire, serving as a way for mercenaries to maintain their privacy while also being able to be found. The Office also sells services to mercenaries, such as weapons, maintenance, one-use spells, information and other things. They’re, allegedly, a neutral party, never picking sides and hoping to offer their services to everyone. As such, asking them to sell them information on Helga Cooper would be useless. The best they could do was leave her a message with them and hope that Helga would answer. Of course, she wouldn’t do it until she was ready to… receive them.

Ishtar instinctively placed a hand over the pocket of the brown leather jacket she was wearing. The pocket had a button to keep it closed, and she did not dare open it while riding the bike. After all, inside was their ace-in-the-hole.

Old man Belphegor agreed to help, in his own way. He explained how humans had made their own little advancements in magic, and one he particularly liked was the use of quartz crystals to store spells. The crystals are particularly abundant, so while they do require treatment and refining to serve as catalysts, they found a way to cast a specific spell into it and store it for anyone else to cast upon breaking.

It was no wonder Belphegor was drawn to the technology, but it was also more than that. The old man understood magic on a more fundamental level and applied his own idiosyncrasies to the process. Applying the condition that he would not interfere directly, the spell he had given them was large, powerful and smart. Single use, but Ishtar couldn’t imagine they’d need more than that.

Aoi and Ishtar continued riding through business districts and residential areas until they reached the outskirts. Fewer buildings around, so easier to search, but even so…

Aoi stopped the bike by the side of the road, a kilometer away before reaching the highway proper. She took off her helmet and shook her head to let her hair flow. “Nothing?”

Ishtar followed, taking off her helmet and shaking her head. “Nothing. It’s… always possible I missed a spot, but…”

“Our best bet is still to allow ourselves to fall into Helga’s trap, but I don’t think searching is useless while we wait,” Aoi told her. “So don’t get discouraged. It would be great if we find him like this, but we’re not without options.”

“I know. I just…” Ishtar sighed heavily and stepped out of the bike. “You know, since coming to this world, my memory and my sense of the passage of time got all messed up. I know I possessed other people. I know I **** them to do some pretty awful things. They were all… expendable. If you’d found me then, you definitely would’ve been justified in labeling me an evil spirit and getting rid of me.”

“I WAS looking for you, you know?” Aoi said, chuckling softly. “Followed the trail of disasters, hard as it was. Well, Nanami did, until she eventually found you in Will.”

“I… also thought of Will as expendable at first. Even when we started talking and working together, I still thought I’d bail on him the moment things stopped going my way. But then without realizing it… I assumed I’d just stay with him forever. I was fine with how things were, and the only reason I wanted a body of my own was so I could ride him until we were both seeing white, which would probably be after 48 hours of straight fucking. By Inanna, I was looking forward to that.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll happen,” Aoi said, trying to reassure her.

“It may not,” Ishtar said. “And this is the first time that possibility has ever crossed my mind. For so long, it felt like a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’, but the moment Helga tore us apart… Aoi, I feel like I’m missing an arm or a leg. Or something inside me, like my stomach or my heart, yet I’m still walking. I’m not just being sentimental here. When we were separated, something broke. He’s part of me now, and I won’t ever be whole again unless I find him.”

“You will. We will. I promised I’d walk with him, and those weren’t empty words.”

Ishtar smirked. “He’s grown very fond of you, you know? You’re the one who understands him the most. You and Nanami. The other girls try, but they don’t really understand the weight of so much power and the effect it has on your mind.”

“No, I still don’t understand him enough,” Aoi said. “I… pushed to train, to learn to control that power and make it his own. I never stopped to consider how it might be affecting him.”

“Don’t worry too much about that. He knows it was necessary, and while Johana told him that one time is true, Will does enjoy the feeling of getting better at things. He likes training with you.”

“...” Aoi allowed herself a small smile.

The two women took a moment to relax and breathe. In just a moment, they’d go back to the city, drive through different roads and resume the search. That was the plan… until Aoi got a call from Amelia.