Chapter [VI]

IT WAS ALREADY dark when they left the house. Quezon City shimmered in the blue hush of night, its streetlights blinking like tired eyes, its alleys caught between silence and smog. The four of them moved without speaking much, the weight of the night dragging behind them like fog. Gray walked at the back, his hands stuffed into his jacket, still feeling the sting on his knuckles from the earlier fight. Lola Basyang moved slower than the rest, her breathing shallow, and her steps cautious, almost fragile. She insisted she didn't need help, but Gray kept an eye on her just the same.

They passed through quieter barangays, past sari-sari stores shutting their rolling gates and tricycles humming low under flickering lamps. Eventually, they reached the banks of the San Juan River, where the concrete gave way to soil and the smell of the city was replaced by something older, murky, stagnant water laced with the scent of wet leaves and rust. The river looked like it had been forgotten by the world. Dark, sluggish, it moved without purpose. Just when Gray was about to make another sarcastic remark, Ishmael raised a hand.

Ishmael muttered something. He stepped forward, lifting his right hand into the air, his fingers unfurling like a spider crawling from sleep. Then he began to move them as if writing on something unseen. Tracing lines, curves, strokes in the air with eerie precision. As he did, the words of the spell left his mouth in a voice that sounded older than him, maybe older than any of them.

"Sumambulat ang anino sa ilog ng liwanag."

The air buzzed faintly, like a plucked string. In front of them, the river began to glow. One by one, glowing Baybayin characters bloomed on the surface of the water, reflecting back the lines Ishmael drew in the air. The writing shimmered golden-white, rippling with the current as if the river itself remembered something ancient. Gray's eyes widened, but not in awe.

"Oh great. Magic graffiti. Should we call MMDA or nah?" he said, grinning sideways.

But then, Gray noticed something else. The amulet around Ishmael's neck, a dark stone encased in bone and bound with brass thread, had begun to pulse. The same glow from the river was humming within it, throbbing in time with each syllable of the spell. He wasn't sure if the air around them had gotten colder or if his nerves were just trying to convince him to bolt.

As the last of the Baybayin letters faded, sinking slowly into the river as if drawn down by unseen hands, the water began to stir.

At first, it was subtle: a ripple, then a sharp vertical rise. A shape emerged from the depths, not with violence, but with the graceful insistence of memory surfacing. The tip of a boat's sail broke through, golden and soaked, followed by the hull, which seemed too large to have been hiding in such narrow waters. It rose fully into view, glistening with dew, its sail stitched in intricate patterns. It was a paraw. The vessel looked untouched by time and completely out of place.

Gray raised an eyebrow, whistling low. "Okay. Now that's an entrance. Very 'Lord of the Rings: EDSA Edition'."

The boat settled near the edge without a splash. It simply waited. Lieutenant Montenegro helped Lola Basyang onto the paraw first. She groaned a little under her breath as she boarded, her knees stiff. "I'm not as young as I used to be," she mumbled, mostly to herself. Gray climbed on after her, careful not to trip, though he almost did. He caught Ishmael grinning.

"No judgment," Gray said. "Just waiting for the hospitality snacks. Is there a bar in this magic boat?" No one replied. The paraw began to move on its own, cutting cleanly through the water. There were no oars, no engine. Just wind. Except there was no wind. The current obeyed something else.

Lola Basyang settled beside Gray, her hand over her chest, her breathing more labored now. Montenegro sat across from her, adjusting his cap and watching the shadows on the shore slip past. Ishmael sat near the front, watching the river ahead like a hound picking up a scent.

"Where are you taking us?" Lola Basyang finally asked, her voice sharp but worn.

"To the himpilan," Montenegro said, his voice low, respectful. "Our base. It's safer there. For him."

Gray rolled his eyes.

The river began to bend, and the boat picked up speed. Whatever magic powered it also knew when to stay quiet. Even Gray fell silent, if only because the cold air against his cheek felt like something watching. A chill that didn't belong to the river. Eventually, they reached a narrow bend in the river that brushed against the outskirts of La Mesa. Trees loomed around them, taller, older. The moon hung low, reflected in the water like an eye. The boat stopped without a sound.

They disembarked onto a barely visible trail, soft soil and old concrete overtaken by creeping moss. Gray half-carried his grandmother, who had started wincing with every step, her joints stiff, her breath hitching. Montenegro supported her other side. They followed the path for about five minutes. The trail became a slope, then steps carved crudely from rock. Overhead, the canopy was thick, blotting out the moon, and the silence of the woods pressed against them like a blanket. Then, abruptly, the forest parted, and they stood in front of a small, two-story café nestled at the base of a hill.

It looked like it had once been part of some long-forgotten ecopark project. There were fairy lights strung across the porch, but only half of them worked. The windows were tinted, dusty. A crooked sign above the door read the name of the cafe.

Gray stared at it. He blinked. Then he said, "This is it? Your secret base? A café?" He read the name again. "You've got to be kidding me. Olympian Café?"

Montenegro gave him a look, then walked up the steps and knocked twice, sharp, deliberate. The door opened. Warm light spilled out, along with the faint scent of brewed barako and incense. Gray muttered, "I swear to God, if this turns out to be a coffee shop full of wizards, I'm moving to Canada."

The door creaked open with the weight of old hinges and unseen secrets. The moment they stepped inside, the scent of brewed barako and cinnamon curled into their nostrils, warm and sharp, cutting through the exhaustion that clung to them like dust. The Olympian Café was bathed in a golden glow, dimmed hanging lights swaying overhead like miniature suns trapped in orbs of amber. 

The walls were painted in aged ivory, textured to resemble ancient plaster, as if the café were a forgotten ruin dusted off and reborn. Paintings of Greek gods, Apollo with a guitar, Artemis sipping espresso, Zeus scrolling through a menu, lined the walls with both reverence and absurdity. Corinthian columns, clearly made of wood and painted to look like marble, supported nothing but ceiling fans. There was even a statue of Athena, perched in the corner, wearing a barista apron.

Gray blinked once, then twice. "Is this supposed to be a joke? A mock to the Greeks?" he muttered, half under his breath. "What's next, Socrates with a frappé?"

Behind the counter stood a small woman with features so precisely balanced she looked like she'd stepped out of an old oil painting. Her skin had that soft golden brown of late afternoon sun, and her eyes, almond-shaped and bright, flicked up from her phone. She wore a crisp white polo tucked into a plaid skirt, and her long, jet-black hair was tied into a high, practical ponytail. She looked maybe thirty, but something in her posture suggested she carried more years than her skin allowed.

Her eyes lit up when she saw them. "Good evening! Table for four?" she began with a smile, but then her gaze landed on the policeman behind Gray, and everything about her paused.

Her mouth opened slightly. Her breath caught. "Gavin?" she said, almost a whisper. "Gavin Montenegro? Diyos ko, after all these years..." She came around the counter, laughing with disbelief as she wiped her hands on her apron. "You brought friends, too!" She glanced at Gray and Lola Basyang with curious warmth. "What brings you here?"

Before the lieutenant could answer, Ishmael cut in sharply. "Trisha," he said, his voice low and deliberate, "we need to close the café early tonight. We need somewhere safe to talk."

Trisha's face shifted. The joy in her eyes faded like sunlight behind storm clouds. She looked around the room, empty, thankfully, and her smile turned tight, professional. "Understood," she said quietly. With a flick of her wrist, she turned the café sign to CLOSED, then dimmed the lights a notch lower. The gentle hum of the espresso machine ceased.

They all sat down at a round table near the back, beneath a mural of Hermes texting on a golden cellphone. Lola Basyang exhaled as she lowered herself into a chair, her legs trembling slightly from the walk. Gray stayed standing for a moment, his arms crossed.

"Okay," he said at last, raising an eyebrow. "I hate to break the mythical ambience in here, but can someone please—please—tell me what on earth is going on?" He gestured around them. "Like, I beat the crap out of a demon or something, I haven't eaten dinner, and now I'm in a Greek cosplay café talking to cops who do magic. So yeah, explanations would be great."

The room fell into a hush.

Montenegro and Ishmael looked at Lola Basyang. Not with pressure, but with recognition. As if this wasn't their story to tell. As if the truth, however old or painful, was hers alone to say.

Lola Basyang's hands rested in her lap. They were trembling, barely, as if her body remembered a fear her words had yet to express. She looked at Gray, really looked, and the years seemed to stack behind her eyes like shadows.

She began slowly, almost a whisper. "...There are things about our world that you were never told. Things I hoped you'd never need to know." She looked down at her hands, then out the window, as if searching for a time long buried. "Bathala is real," she said at last. "And so are the old gods. Mayari, Apolaki, Lakapati, the rest of them. The stories we used to tell, the epics, the legends, they weren't just stories. They were memories. They wandered our archipelago before time was time. They lived beside humans. Loved them. Even bore children with them."

Gray opened his mouth, but no words came. He sat down, hard.

"That's how the anitos came to be," she continued. "Half-god, half-mortal. Too powerful to stay among men... but too human to be gods. So the gods made a choice. They decided it was no longer good for humans and anitos to share the same land. The world was torn in two: the Sangkatauhan, for humans... and the Sangkanituhan, where they cast out the Anitos. Along with the others. The halimaws." She stared into the shadows. "The world forgot us. And we forgot them."

Gray's throat felt dry. He rubbed his temples, trying to understand. "So what... the Greek gods? The Egyptian gods?"

Trisha, who had been listening silently, leaned forward with her chin on her hand. "Oh no," she said with a smirk. "They exist, too. Just... elsewhere. The Greeks have theirs. The Egyptians have theirs. In fact, the north has Kabunian, the south has their own pantheon, and we Tagalogs have Bathala and the others. They all exist."

Gray frowned. "You do realize how messed up that sounds, right? None of their stories add up. Some say the world was made from saltwater and sky. Some say from chaos. Some say a turtle carried us."

Trisha shrugged, brushing a stray lock of hair from her cheek. "When gods walk the earth, logic doesn't always follow. If Bathala's real, and we've seen enough to know he is, then who are we to say the others aren't? They each had their own myths, their own truths."

Gray leaned back, blinking, then gave her a dry look. "Right. That clears everything up. Thanks, Yoda."

He dropped his head into his hands. Somewhere deep inside, something was starting to crack. Not in a loud way. Not in the way buildings fall. But in the quiet way a guy realizes the world he's known was never his to begin with. And for once, nobody had a joke to answer that silence.

Because no one in the room was laughing. Not Trisha, who still watched the window like it could suddenly open up into something ancient. Not the weird stranger Ishmael, who sat calmly with his arms crossed around his chest. Even Lola Basyang kept still, hands resting on her lap, her gaze not just far away, but centuries deep.

There was no debate. No raised eyebrows or "come on, really?" grins. The gods were real. The stories were real. The rules of the world had shifted, or maybe they had always been like this, hiding behind the thin fabric of reality, waiting for someone like him to tear through it.

And Gray... he just sat there, quiet, feeling that slow, unfamiliar pull. A feeling like being a jigsaw piece forced into the wrong puzzle for years, only now realizing that the picture around him never matched. He thought of his Lolo. The strange training. The discipline. The unspoken urgency. The way his old man would look at him sometimes, not as a kid, but as something preparing for a war no one else could see.

He thought of his mother, faceless still, just fragments and rumors and love that left too fast.

Then he thought of himself. The thief, the runner, the punch-first kind of guy who never asked why the walls were closing in. Who never wondered if maybe he wasn't meant to walk normal paths because his life wasn't meant to be a normal one.

Who the hell was he, really?

Trisha poured herself a cup of lukewarm coffee from behind the counter and returned with it cradled in both hands like an offering. Steam coiled gently above the rim, catching the golden café lights as she lowered herself into her seat once more. Her expression shifted, no longer playful, but curious, cautious, edged with a little worry.

"Well then," she said with a wry smile, her voice warm but grounded. "Now for the real meal." She leaned her chin on one hand, the steam drifting past her cheek. "Your turn to feed me something, Gavin. I've waited years to hear what would drag my captain out of the grave." She glanced sideways at Montenegro with the faintest trace of tension beneath her joking tone.

Lieutenant Montenegro didn't blink. He simply took a long breath and placed both forearms on the table, as if anchoring himself to the world. "There was an incident. A motorcycle crash on the Aurora underpass. At least that's what it looked like. I looked into the kid involved," he nodded at Gray. "When Ishmael and I went to the Sandoval residence, that's when we caught up with this one here who fought off an aswang." His eyes flicked to Trisha's.

The word dropped with weight. Even in this safe, dim café, it was like saying fire in a forest. Gray didn't find the mood to snicker this time.

Trisha's expression shifted instantly. Her casual posture stiffened. She slowly turned her gaze to Gray, her eyes narrowing as if trying to reconcile the lean, bleeding-lipped boy in front of her with the impossible story she was hearing. "You knocked down an aswang?" she asked, disbelieving. "By yourself?"

Gray leaned back in his chair, arms stretched behind his head, wearing a grin that was all swagger and bruised pride. "Well," he said with a shrug, "I've always had a thing for punching people who growl at me. Guess it works on monsters too."

Trisha burst out laughing. Sharp, surprised laughter that echoed off the café walls. It was the first real laughter anyone had heard in hours, but she was the only one doing it. Montenegro and Ishmael remained grim. Lola Basyang didn't even twitch. "You're cocky," Trisha said between chuckles. "I like that. It means you're stupid enough to survive a few near-death encounters."

Gray gave a short mock bow from his chair. "My life motto, thank you."

She turned serious again almost instantly, like a light switching off. "Still," she said, eyes scanning the room as if mentally drawing connections between unseen threads, "this aswang angkan was a bit bold for this attack."

Montenegro looked up. "More than just bold."

Ishmael nodded in agreement, the line of his jaw tightening. "No, not just a bit bold," he said, voice low and steady. "All my anino years, I've never heard something like this in Sangkatauhan. Not in the open."

That thought stretched out into silence. Thick and solemn. No one moved. Even the air seemed to pause in its drift, curling around the legs of the table like it was listening too. Outside, the sound of the wind brushing against the windowpane was the only thing brave enough to speak. Inside, their breaths had become still, uncertain.

Gray's eyes flicked to his grandmother again.

She hadn't spoken since her revelation. She sat, hands clasped tightly in her lap, lips pressed into a line, her face unreadable, but the look in her eyes said everything. It wasn't just disapproval. It was dread. It was the look of someone who saw the past catching up like a shadow with a knife in its hand. She didn't want this. Not again. Not for Gray. Before he could ask, before the stillness could rot into grief, a sound came.

A knock. Soft. Deliberate.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

It came from the front door of the café, slow and heavy like knuckles made of stone tapping wood. Ishmael and Lieutenant Montenegro glanced at Trisha. She shook her head. "No, not a customer. Not at this hour. Not here." The room froze. Trisha was already rising. No one said a word. The knock had barely faded when she began to move.

She didn't say anything. Her lips were tight, her shoulders squared as she stepped away from the table and toward the café's entrance, the soles of her shoes almost silent on the hardwood floor. Her apron, still tied neatly at the back, fluttered slightly as she moved. The overhead lights flickered ever so subtly, as though something in the room had shifted just by her growing caution. She stopped a foot away from the door.

Outside, nothing moved.

The café's glass door was smudged faintly from the inside, and beyond it lay only shadows and the faint golden glow of the lone streetlamp out front. A breeze passed through, barely stirring the potted oregano plant beside the threshold. Trisha leaned closer and peered through the glass. "We're closed," she said, loud enough to be heard, calm enough to pass as casual, but there was an edge in her voice like something buried beneath her tongue was ready to spring.

A voice came from outside. "Just a pancake, please."

It was male. Light. Almost polite. But something about it slid under the skin like a whisper too close to the ear. "I said we're closed," Trisha repeated, a little firmer this time. Her fingers twitched slightly near her waist where she'd tucked a small blade earlier.

Then, nothingA silence descended. Not the silence of pause or retreat, but the silence of something exhaling just before it strikes.

Trisha's eyes widened. In one smooth motion, she dropped, a practiced duck, fast as instinct, and then—CRASH!

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Glass exploded inward as bullets ripped through the front door in a hail of blistering metal. Shards cascaded across the room like stinging rain. Chairs splintered. Cups shattered. The air became smoke and panic and gunfire. Gray hit the floor before he could think, diving behind the nearest couch, his ears ringing from the sudden burst. Ishmael was already muttering something, the amulet in his neck began shining again.

Lola Basyang shrieked, her body curling small beside the counter, her breath wheezing through clenched teeth. Montenegro dove toward her, shielding her with his arm as more bullets tore through the air. And Trisha was gone from the entryway, vanished behind the bar with the grace of someone who'd done this before.

In seconds, the café transformed from a sanctuary into a battlefield.