Having just made himself a path, Araki ducked to past under the doorway and stepped into the hall beyond. It seemed that the rest of the house had in fact avoided any signs of the massacre that had happened the previous night; the smell of death followed him rather than being already present. The decor was also mostly intact unlike the foyer that had been utterly trashed with only a few fallen or broken pieces to reflect the proximity of the fight. It was a bit odd he concluded as he walked from room to room and tried the doors. Some were locked, others swung open freely, but none managed to bar his way. If anyone cared about the fact that he was breaking down doors, well they could complain to someone who cared. Each room he entered was as pristine as the others, untouched.
He supposed that whatever monsters had attacked the estate had little reason to go rampaging through the house for the simple sake of destruction if all its residents had fled or clashed with them. Araki didn’t believe he would come to an answer anytime soon so he simply shrugged his shoulders and closed his eyes to focus. At first he had been more concerned with the fact that the Seyours had been slaughtered, but after he had begun to explore and think, the sensation had become more noticeable. It was barely more than the ephemeral tug he had felt in the morning, but it was more than anything else he had, and so he closed his eyes to focus.
Ultimately it was futile. He could feel the ‘connections’ but an attempt to grasp and understand them, so to speak, was impossible. They simply existed and there wasn’t anything he could do with or to them. It also didn’t help that when he tried to focus, Araki found his ‘sixth’ or magical sense literally lighting up with all matters of things he didn’t understand. All around him, he could feel odd energies lingering and if he could ignore those then he was hit with unnatural sensations that made him wince or his skin crawl. It was simply impossible for him to make heads or tails of beyond the fact that whatever magics had taken place here were beyond him at the moment. With nothing really solved and only more questions unearthed Araki grumbled a bit in annoyance as he decided to continue exploring the mansion. It was a large building after all and he had only gone down one hall, there might still be much to find.
“Well this is more like it,” he muttered as he turned the corner and saw the signs of battle and destruction appear once more. It began about half way down the hall away from him. What little of the carpet that hadn’t been burnt was completely shredded and the damage was similar all around. Great claw marks had been gouged out of the blackened walls and anything that might have once hung on them were little more than ash in the wind by now. A pungent smell lingered in the air, though Araki barely noticed it as he walked forward to investigate. His eyes scanned about and quickly focused on a gleam amongst the blackened debris. Freeing the piece, he frowned at what he held in his hands. It had a thin blade that was bent ever so slightly, and it was almost completely covered in ash. Araki could tell it wasn’t made of Talentium, but beyond that not much. When he tried to wipe away some of the ash on the blade, it came off as a sticky mess that made the hybrid sigh. He flicked his hand to get the bloody mixture off, and looked at the weapon once more in consideration. It was the only weapon he had found so far, which was a bit odd. The corpses he could chalk up to being devoured, but the Talentium weapons he had seen the Seyours with? Those were all strangely absent. Curious, but not something Araki had time to think about given how the mansion suddenly shook. “What now,” he growled out as he clutched onto the piece and dashed outside.
He noticed ‘Riley’ rather quickly, seeing as he nearly bowled him over as he ran past the burnt out doorway. The building shuddered again and his eyes narrowed before he glanced around and realized, no Fion wasn’t in sight. “So where’s Fion? I’m assuming he has something to do with what’s happening to the house.” He couldn’t be sure since the man in question wasn’t around, but Araki figured it had something to do with a lot of people he knew being dead.
