Never a dull moment with this big lug, is there?
"You're getting slow," she tells him fondly. "Time was, you'd have caught him like a rat by the tail before he even made it to the manhole cover."
Toshi doesn't reply. He never does.
Truthfully, Shimura Nana is a poor judge of speed these days. He could be outpacing the bullet trains, and still she'd be right at his heels without breaking a sweat. Of course, that's not fair to say; she couldn't sweat if she tried. One can't sweat without skin, or breathe without lungs, or get tired without a body.
One can't do much of anything, really.
So she follows, and watches, and her brilliantly witty commentary falls on deaf ears.
Today, her faithful student has chased a criminal down into the sewer system. It's a petty criminal, hardly worth calling a villain, but Toshi never could ignore a cry for help. Unfortunately he's gotten a bit turned around, and there's little she can do to help or direct him.
No, all Nana can do is drift along behind him, as she's done for years, watching as he races and backtracks and finds the right path. The criminal's body is viscous sludge, and he's left tracks in his haste. Not that Nana was otherwise worried. Toshi always finds his way eventually.
The screaming makes her jump. She's been around for a while, long enough to know what's part of her new normal and what isn't. This isn't the scream of an innocent in danger; she knows it isn't, because if it were then Toshi would hear it and Toshi would haul ass straight to the source instead of loping along at the same place, following the patches of goo left by the culprit. This is the sort of scream that nails on chalkboard could only dream of matching, the kind of gut-wrenching noise that feels like screws driven into your ears, the kind that sounds like many voices in one, that shakes walls and rattles windows and becomes the soundtrack of your nightmares for weeks to come.
Not that Nana ever sleeps anymore.
But in spite of Toshi's obliviousness, he's still heading right toward it, and that means that Toshi is heading for something that he might not be ready for. And what kind of watchful ghost would she be if she stood by and let it happen?
In a blink she's ahead of him, following her ears and whatever other senses drive the dead to act. She leaves Toshi behind, and the trail of slime becomes thicker and thicker until she ascends up through a manhole and–
Oh dear God.
The slime villain is there, and he's not alone. Heaven help them all, there are children here. One of them is caught in his grasp, enveloped in slime like he's drowning in a living swamp. His movements ebb and slow, getting weaker and weaker by the second as he loses consciousness. And the other…
The other is still screaming, form shifting and twisting as she howls fit to wake the dead. Only her size and the vague impression of a child-sized nightshirt clue Nana in to the fact that she's looking at a little girl and not some eldritch demon that crawled up from the depths of a fever dream. The rest of her is all writhing, twisting shadows, fingers that stretch like the shadows of branches through a dark window, wild tendrils of black hair, and a face that burns Nana's memory white.
She screams, howls, not with fear but rage, as her spider-claw fingers rake uselessly at the enveloping sludge. She's attacking the villain, not the boy; with a jolt Nana realizes that she's trying to get him free.
And then Toshi is there.
The fight is a blessedly short one, if it can even be called a "fight" at all. In two shakes, the villain is ensnared in a pair of soda bottles, and Toshi is gathering up the unconscious boy and carrying him out into the sunlight. The little girl is calm now, the shadows still, and Nana finds herself looking at a child of eight or nine, all pale skin and thin bones and dark, tangled hair. Her black eyes blink up at Nana, curious but not hostile the way some poltergeists can be. Nana smiles at her, and after a moment's hesitation and a glance toward the still-living boy, the little ghost smiles back.
It's an unsettling smile, to be sure, but a sincere one.
"Friend of yours?" Nana asks. The girl nods. "Ah. That's very loyal of you. Don't you ever get lonely? He'll have a long life to live, you know."
The girl wrinkles her nose with a wry smile, like she finds Nana's words funny somehow.
It's a relief when the boy awakens, and highly amusing when he goes into starstruck conniptions over meeting Toshi. Nana wishes she could sneak up and give her old student bunny-ears, something to show this poor kid that he's the biggest dweeb and there's nothing to be nervous about, but it's not like the boy could see her anyway, so she hangs back.
The girl's fingers are like ice cubes when she takes Nana's hand. She tugs at it until she has Nana's attention, and points to her stammering friend with an eager smile.
"What?" Nana looks at him, but beyond making an adorable fool of himself in front of her student, he isn't doing anything noteworthy.
The girl points, more urgently, but she doesn't speak, and Nana isn't fluent in children, much less ghost children.
"I'm sorry, I don't – oh hell." Toshi takes off then – literally, like a rocket – with the boy clinging to his leg, and it's all Nana can do to keep from laughing herself to a second death as she follows.