Chapter Text
Angela Yumei Wei-Leonetti, that’s my name. Or was my name? I’m not really sure what tense I should be using because, while it is my name, it’s also not anymore, but it’s still the name I associate with myself. It sounds confusing but it also makes sense given the context.
I was born to Wei Chun (Wei being her last name and Chun being her first name) and Diego Leonetti. The daughter of a runaway Triad member (who was part scientist, part assassin) and a Hitman freelancer. There was no way I would have grown up to be anything but a hitwoman, especially with my pedagogy.
Not just anyone could break free of the Triad as Mom did, and while Dad wasn’t Reborn, he was still on Futa De La Stella’s ranking of the Top 100 hitmen/hitwomen in the world.
I learned how to do parkour and ballet before I could remember. As for weapons, I was taught how to use my first knife when I was five, I was seven when I started learning how to handle a handgun, I was taught how to use a Jian sword when I was nine, and poisons were added into my curriculum when I was ten. Numerous acting skills were drilled into my brain as well as any other skills that would help with my future as a hired killer.
It wasn’t until I turned twelve and bloodied my hands enough that I started learning how to use my Flames. I had a Mist primary with Rain and Sun as a close secondary and tertiary respectively.
I was determined to master them. All three of them in order to make my parents proud of me, and I use all three of them at a job-ready level by the age of sixteen.
I didn’t have a normal civilian life and, if any civilian child went through what I went through, they might have developed PTSD or something, but it was my normal. My happy childhood.
It didn’t last. Death in the underworld is more common than drugs at a rave in America. Dad was the first to go, I was just eighteen. He lived a very long life, well into his forties, practically a fossil by mafia years but he was done in by a double-crossing. Mom was next to go just two years later, sabotage in her lab that caused the substances she was working with to blow up, she was too slow to slow it down or make a barrier.
Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have the same luck with longevity as my parents. I died at twenty-seven when my client decided he didn’t want to pay me, a freelancer, after managing to get a better hitman on his permanent payroll and had me killed.
Well, as freelance as someone can get while being someone that was a part-time Varia member.
It was a shoot-out, with some Lightnings and Rains protecting the scum but I mowed a good half of them down before a lucky Storm got a bullet between my eyes. I made sure my body burned with my Dying Will Flames, hoping that I’d take a few more down with me before the Vindice came to put them out.
The standard procedure to prevent the breaking of Omerta but damn annoying in this case.
I let myself whiteout in a literal blaze of indigo, blue, and yellow flames, burning as brightly as I could as my last hurrah.
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With a gasp, I opened my eyes to a world that would have been pitch black if it weren’t for the bright little stars all around me.
“Well… this isn’t the afterlife I imagined…” I muttered, walking towards the brighter little stars, “I was expecting something with a little more… fire and brimstones. Maybe even seeing Mom and Dad again if I was lucky…”
I got closer to one of the stars. It was different from all the other stars. It was small, dull, and green, almost sad looking. If a star could look sad. I don’t know why but I was drawn to it. However, I was suddenly sucked into the star and the next thing I knew, I was a ghost hovering over a little boy around three years old.
The little boy was clearly an orphan, from how he was dressed and how he held himself, he couldn’t have been anything else. I have seen his type in the slums too many times to count. Dead eyes with all their hope sucked out of them. Only living to survive because death was too scary while also just waiting for the sweet release of death from a world that only served to hurt them.
Children in the Mafia were cherished, but only if they came from families of power. Orphans have to claw their way up through all the dirt, bloody their hands until they can’t tell the colour of their skin is anything other than red, and carve their names into the underbelly of the world in order to get recognized.
Never pity an orphan child with a certain look in their eyes, they don’t need or want it. Normal orphans want pity, hope, a family, and other things like that but there are those who would never let someone have power over them again. And helping them would seem to them like a scheme to get them to bend.
Best to leave them alone and let them deal with their own problems.
“Where the hell am I?” I muttered, taking my eyes off the kid as I looked around.
It seemed as if I was in ancient China, with the fabric of the people’s clothing, the architectural style of the buildings, and the Chinese-looking characters on all the buildings. They look familiar enough that I could recognize a few words but it clearly wasn’t the Mandarin or Cantonese I grew up learning.
I tried to walk further, to scout out the area, but there was some kind of invisible barrier that stopped me from getting further away. After a bit of trial and error, it became apparent that I was stuck within a ten-meter radius of the little boy I was hovering over when I first arrived in this world.
“Hey, kid. Can you hear me?” I asked in Mandarin before repeating it again in Cantonese, floating down and snapping my fingers in front of his face.
He couldn’t hear or see me.
“Maybe this is for the best.” I said out loud, just to hear my voice and reassure myself that I wasn’t mute, “If our writing is this different, there’s a chance that our spoken language is different enough that we won’t be able to communicate properly.”
It was easy to fall back into my mission mindset. Analyze the situation, find out what I can currently do, find the parameters of the mission, figure out how to best achieve the objective, then execute the plan.
From what I could tell, I was transported to some strange world after my death (not a Mist Illusion, no one in Varia’s Mist Division, part-time or not, could be stupid enough to fall for a Mist trap) and, for whatever reason, my ghost/soul was tethered to the little boy in front of me. The world itself seems to be either Ancient China itself, meaning time travel, or an alternate universe entirely. As for the boy, I can’t go too far from him or else I’d run into some invisible barrier.
It’s so frustrating having so little information. However, it’s what I have to work with for now.
“Okay…” I breathed out as I closed my eyes and called for my flames.
Within seconds, a single ember of foggy indigo, light blue, and bright yellow flames appeared on my pointer finger, middle finger, and ring finger respectively. I sighed with relief when I was about to get them to show up.
I wouldn’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have my flames. They were literally parts of my soul-given form.
However… whether they worked on people in this strange world is another question. I could already tell that no one could see, hear, or sense me so I wonder if it was the same for my flames as well.
“Let’s start off small… Rain Flames it is.” I muttered, looking around to find something or someone I could use my Rain Flames on that won’t seem suspicious.
Then I spotted a wet towel on the windowsill that was dripping water in the alley. The towel itself was very dirty but the dripping water was all I needed. I surrounded the towel with a soft glow of flames and smiled when I saw the water droplets slowing to a crawl and then stopping completely.
I moved on to Sun Flames. I spotted a small flower growing at the edge of one of the buildings at the back of the alley. The little boy still wasn’t doing anything except staring off into space with those dead eyes of his so he shouldn’t realize anything. I wrapped the flower in a ball of Sun Flames and watched with satisfaction as it started growing.
Finally, I was confident enough to use my Mist Flames. As childish as it is, I would have been completely crushed if I wasn’t about to use my Mist Flames. It might have even pushed me to Discord.
I created a small black cat and it crawled toward the butchery. I made sure to make it look like it was trying to steal a piece of meat. As expected one of the employees quickly grabbed a broom and shooed it away. I made my cat hiss at the employee and dart into an alleyway before dropping the cat construct.
“Now, maybe I can talk to the kid,” I said as I tsked in displeasure, I hate Mist Telepathy. It was a headache to pull off.
Maybe I could substitute it for just a disembodied voice only the kid could hear? It’s much easier but it might make the kid seem like a crazy person. Well, from what I could tell, society is already ignoring him so no one would bat an eye if he started talking to the wind. They might even expect it.
Hey, Kid. I projected, Can you hear me?
Nothing. No response.
Did, did my flames not work? It can’t be, it worked on the butchery employees earlier, maybe it’s just this boy?
Excuse me, can I have a chicken? I projected to the butchery employee who shooed away my cat, copying the order from the woman in front of me.
That way it could be explained away as the butchery just hearing an echo.
However, still no response. Just to check my flames were still working I made a fly and had it fly around. It got swatted away by the employee so they do work, but why doesn’t it work for me?
Before I could contemplate anything more, another little boy appeared. He was older than the first boy, though not by much, and was an orphan as well, though with slightly better rags and somewhat healthier.
The older boy said something and held out a shaky hand to the smaller boy who took it. And the next thing I knew, the world started spinning.
When the world stopped moving, I was in a dark room with a disgusting man yelling at the older little boy, calling him Yue Qi, about bringing another mouth for them to feed.
I glanced around the room and it didn’t take a genius to know that I was in a human trafficking ring. A child trafficking ring to be exact.
I’m starting to have mixed feelings about Yue Qi. On the one hand, he brought the little boy off the streets and to a place where he presumably would be able to get food to eat. On the other hand, he brought the little boy into a human trafficking ring where he could be bought and sold at a moment’s notice.
“Fine!” The man yelled, “The brat can stay but his food is coming out of your share!”
“T-Thank you, sir.” Yue Qi bowed, keeping a tight hold on the smaller boy.
“You. Brat.” The man said, pointing to the smaller boy, “You’re now called Shen Jiu. Do your part or else. Now scram, all of you.”
All the children ran away, into their rooms, and I followed the little boy, Shen Jiu, as he got shepherded by Yue Qi into a little room. In that room, Yue Qi apologized for bringing Shen Jiu here but he promised to keep him safe.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Yue Qi.” I said as I floated down and sat by the bed they were sharing, “And don’t just accept promises like that, Shen Jiu, the world doesn’t work like that.”
These two children should have already known this.
However, I couldn’t linger on this thought for long. I had to think about my own situation. Or rather, rethink.
From what I could gather, I was right to think that my ghost/soul is tied to Shen Jiu but I was also wrong in thinking I would just be watching over his life. It seems like he already lived his life and I was just watching it happen like in a movie. Or rather, a Mist Movie since I could somewhat interact with the movie.
Maybe I’m watching the memories of this child? That’s why I can’t directly interact with anyone in ways that would change his memories but I can still use my flames. Maybe, when I was walking in that void of darkness and stars, all those stars were some kind of video record of the lives of people who died and I was just unlucky enough to accidentally fall into one of those recordings?
“It makes sense…” I muttered as I looked at Shen Jiu, “I guess I have to wait until you die and then I can move on…”
A small, less jaded side of me wishes that it will take a while before I return to that dark void of stars, if only so that it means that the life of this small child won’t be cut too short.
The world spun again and this time, more than just a few hours passed. Shen Jiu grew a bit, which signalled a time skip. Does that mean I’ll only be watching the core memories, or at least the memories Shen Jiu thought were important in his life? It feels like it.
I floated up to the roof of a building and sat down to watch whatever memory will play out today. Chances were that the memories won’t be pretty, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen, done, or experienced in all my years in the Mafia.
The world of a Mafioso and the world of orphans living on the streets are worlds that are forever drenched in blood, misery, and death. Shen Jiu is destined to live a hard life, it’s only a matter of how bad it will be.