A paramedic is never really off-duty, and Aiko proved it as she pulled a bag of EMT equipment out from under her sofa.

“C’mon, we need to go check in anyone’s hurt,” she said to her cambion girlfriend who was busy dialling the fire department.

“Fire department? A bungalow just exploded one minute ago. Whole building is in flames, chance of fire spreading high. Take note that fire appear to be magical in nature. Address… Aiko, I need an address!” Xiaoye called out to Aiko.

“Tell them my street address and across the church!”

“The bungalows on Woodlands Street One, across the church!”

“Did they get it?” Aiko asked as she locked the door behind her before rushing for the stairs with Xiaoye.

“They know where it is, ETA five minutes,” Xiaoye replied.

The flames were getting bigger. Neighbours were fleeing their houses as Xiaoye and Aiko dashed across the road towards the burning house, where a distraught woman was screaming for help.

“Ma’am, ma’am, are you all right?”

“My husband is inside! My husband is still inside! I can hear him screaming!” the woman cried as she grabbed Xiaoye who was trying to calm her down when, by sheer luck, a familiar pick-up came to a halt next to them.

“Holy shit, Xiaoye, what the hell happened?” Tom asked as he, Rendal, Lucas and Inna emerged from the pick-up truck, staring at the flames in shock.

“What the hell are you roasters doing here?” Xiaoye asked.

“Night fishing with Inna- There’s fucking violet flames coming from the house and you’re asking me that? Has the fire department been called?”

“Yeah, she called them, but I don’t think whoever’s still alive in there is going to last five minutes,” Aiko said when everyone saw a bloodied arm smack against a window on the upper level of the burning bungalow.

“Fuck, we’re getting him out. Inna, stay with Aiko. You three blokes help me out here.”

“We’re not trained firefighters,” Rendal protested, but Lucas had grabbed a garden hose, soaked himself and was wrapping his flannel outer shirt around his face.

“Tom, Rendal, soak the surrounding area to try and limit the spread of the flames. I’ll go get whoever’s up there,” he said before he began smashing every window on the first floor of the bungalow, allowing air to flow freely.

Rendal hesitated, but Tom grabbed the garden hose and began doing what he was told. Meanwhile, Lucas checked the front door before standing one side and giving it a good kick, moving his leg back behind cover just in time to avoid a minor backdraft.

“Shit! Lucas, wait up,” Xiaoye called out to the Nobody, but the latter had already entered the burning bungalow, prompting her to turn to Rendal.

“Give me your jacket.”

“What? Use your own, this one cost me a hundred and twenty dollars,” the half-elf protested.

“I’m not walking into the flames with just my bra and jiggle physics DLC, now give me your jacket,” Xiaoye said, her eyes starting to glow.

“Just give it to her, you motherfucker!” an irate Tom screamed at his cousin as he struggled to soak as much of the surrounding area as he could with the garden hose’s pathetic spray, prompting Rendal to quickly take his jacket off, soak it and toss it to Xiaoye, who wrapped it around her face before running in after Lucas.

“Xiaoye, be careful!” Aiko called out to her while holding a frightened Inna in her arms.

Thanks to the unnatural colour of the flames licking away at the walls and ceilings, the interior of the bungalow now had an eerie atmosphere. Xiaoye crawled on all fours to avoid the smoke, following the trail of frozen debris to find where Lucas had gone to. As she carefully made her way up the stairs, she could hear moaning from one of the rooms, which had its door frozen and broken off the hinges. Inside was Lucas, tending to an injured man. Xiaoye could not see how bad the man’s injuries were due to the smoke and the flames’ glow, but Lucas was on his butt carefully moving the man out of the room.

“Lucas, how bad?” she asked loudly.

“Very bad,” the Nobody replied without even turning around, concentrating on getting the man out of the room, finally succeeding in doing so after what felt like an eternity.

Now Xiaoye could see why Lucas had to be so careful: The magical flames had wrecked havoc on the man’s chest and one of his arms, and both his legs were clearly broken. No doubt Lucas knew that he might cause severe injuries to the man if he had just lifted him up without care.

“Ceiling’s about to come down,” Lucas observed as he stared at the ceiling, which Xiaoye was hearing some creaking from.

“We really need to go.”

The two managed to get the injured man to the bottom of the stairs just as one portion of the ceiling came crashing to the floor, prompting the usually unflappable Xiaoye to shriek in terror: Just because she’s a cambion doesn’t mean she was immune to fire, a lesson she learnt the hard way many years ago during World War Three when she came across a flamethrower-wielding American soldier while fighting in Singapore. Thankfully, normal flames do not leave burn scars on her kind, but the pain was so intense, she momentarily lost her mind. She could only imagine how bad it was for this injured man she and Lucas were moving out the door at the moment.

By now, Tom and Rendal had managed to rally the neighbours into helping with their garden hoses and pails of water even as fire engines arrived on the scene. An orc took charge of the scene immediately, barking orders to his men as Xiaoye and Lucas moved the injured man to the back of Lucas’s pick-up truck with Aiko and the others following. The man’s wife, upon seeing his condition, nearly fainted in despair, but Rendal and Inna quickly escorted her aside to try and calm her down.

“Chief, where’s the ambulance?” Tom asked the orc firefighter.

“It’s been delayed! There was a major accident on the highway nearby!”

“Shit, thanks. Xiaoye, ambulance won’t be arriving so soon! What do we do?”

“Are those towels?” Aiko asked as she noticed some towels stored in Ziploc in the backseat of the pick-up.

“Yeah, why?”

Now the tanuki was taking charge, grabbing the towels and pulling them out, spreading them across the back of the pick-up truck.

“Put him on the towels,” she ordered.

“Hang on, shit, how do we get him up? Easy now, easy… Done,” Tom said as he, Lucas and Xiaoye managed to put the injured man where Aiko wanted him while the paramedic began pulling out all sorts of portable medical equipment from her bag.

Under the clear light, Xiaoye nearly threw up at the sight of just how bad the burns on the injured man was: He looked like he had been partially cremated, exposed muscles were already starting to swell, parts of his organs and bones were visible and, by her estimate, at least sixty percent of his skin was gone along with half the hair on his scalp.

“Is there ice? The towels are heating up, we need to keep them cool. But no pouring water over this man’s wounds, it’ll make them worse,” Aiko said.

“Lucas, can you use your abilities to cool the towels down?” Xiaoye asked.

“Lucas? Who is that?” Aiko inquired, looking confused.

“He’s right next to you.”

Now that Aiko had been informed of Lucas’s presence, she had a nasty shock at seeing the tall police officer suddenly on her left, causing her tanuki ears and tail to pop out, but to her credit, she quickly regained her composure.

“He’s the Nobody you told me about, Xiaoye?”

“Aye, and he’s got the freezing touch.”

“Okay, Mr, er, Mr Lucas, are you able to regulate how cold your touch is?”

“Yes.”

“I need you to keep the towels cool, but not too cool or he’ll have a cold shock response. You guys need to keep his burnt limbs above his heart level while I try to do something for his chest.”

“Yes, I’ll try my best.”

In the current chaotic situation, it was a good thing that Lucas could not feel emotions, otherwise he would probably be panicking like the rest of them. Lucas placed his hands on the towels, using his freezing touch to cool them slightly and alternating between them every three seconds.

“Fuck, his phone’s partially melded into his hand, like his clothes,” Tom said with disgust and pity as he carefully lifted the man’s broken legs.

“Should we take his clothes off?” Xiaoye asked.

“No! Don’t, you ripped his skin off too,” Aiko warned, horrifying both Xiaoye and Tom.

The man was trying to tell them something, but with his throat and jaw so badly burnt, all he could make was gargled moans. However, he somehow managed to find the strength to use his right hand to point at the phone that clearly needed to be removed surgically from his left hand. Following his finger, Xiaoye glanced at his phone and noticed something on the screen.

“Lucas, Tom, look. The glyph on the phone,” she said to the other two.

“What’s that? Some kind of weird wallpaper?” Tom asked.

“No, that is the same glyph that whoever tried to burn Weijin and Amirah last night used at the carpark,” Lucas replied.

“Same arsonist? You mean this guy is one of Haxe’s targets? I thought Haxe was only targeting Zura99?” Tom asked.

“Well, this is either to get to her, or he’s not exclusively hunting just her.”

By now, the ambulance has finally arrived, and the injured man was loaded into the ambulance with his wife following. Meanwhile, the firefighters have managed to put out the flames and were currently securing the site to try and identify the source of the fire.

“What a messed up night… And here I thought we would be helping Inna find something fun to do,” Rendal said as he joined his family, Xiaoye and Aiko.

“Never mind that, think about how many reports we have to write…” Tom retorted.

“Er, Lucas, uncles, I hope I’m not imagining things, but I’m sensing a faint magical trace from this burnt house to someone in the gathered crowd?” Inna suddenly said, prompting Xiaoye to turn to the moh shuvuu.

“You can sense magical trace?” she asked.

“Yup. We spirits can sense a trace, helping us figure out who casted a spell and where he cast it from, helps us track prey down,” Inna replied.

“I remember a detective mention that many arsonists like to go back to the scene and watch their handiwork… Don’t tell me the arsonist is in the crowd right now?” Tom asked.

“The trace is getting weaker rapidly…” Inna said when a vehicle suddenly passed them, which caused her to suddenly say, “The trace is gone.”

“A bit of a coincidence for that car to pass by just as Inna lost the trace,” Xiaoye commented.

“Actually, I just noticed something. That car that passed us, it looked like it had been parked nearby for quite some time,” Aiko pointed out as she gestured at a now empty parking space.

“Shit, did anyone see its brand and license plate?”

“No, just its model. Grey hatchback, brand name Togaro,” Lucas replied.

“License plate?”

“Sorry, I failed to see it in time.”

“Hey, Xiaoye, see that street camera up there? Maybe we can use it,” Rendal suddenly said as he pointed at a surveillance camera attached to one of the street lights.

“Yeah, good idea. We can use that. Can’t believe Haxe just showed up and burned someone without warning… It’s just not typical hacker behaviour…”

Haxe was on the move again.

As a precaution, he never stayed at a motel or bed-and-breakfast longer than two days. He has to remain on the move until he saved up enough to get a fake passport from the black market and a ticket out of France.

Currently, he was having a simple lunch of croque madame with a side of quiche at a local café in Dol-de-Bretagne, and he planned to leave the place by the end of the week. One of the foreign criminal organizations had accepted a job request from him, wanting him to help set up a security system in their local branch’s hideout. Easy money, and they had also promised not to conduct their business in front of him so that he would not end up a liability.

But then there was still the problem of this fake Haxe operating in Singapore. He had just finished his lunch when the afternoon news began reporting of an arson attack in that country that left a local computer security expert with third-degree burns over seventy-five percent of his body. Haxe winced at the severity of the injury, but the news story did no0t end there. Apparently, Singapore’s police force were now warning their civilians to be careful of a certain glyph and to stay very far away from it. Haxe shook his head, but then his ears perked up when he heard that the glyph on the screen was similar to the one used to try and murder two police officers earlier this week.

It was the fake Haxe again, and this time around, he appears to have successfully claimed a victim. The real Haxe felt his anger rising. This imposter had no idea what he or she had done to him, but Haxe intends to make them pay for screwing him over.

First, he went to check his bank account. Good, he now had enough money to get a new, forged passport. Even better, the payment from his next job would have helped him secure a plane ticket out of France, and he already had a good idea where to go in order to deal with this imposter Haxe.

He was going to Singapore.