[Ikki just grunts at the first part. Not about that Ace but about his father, huh? Ikki has his share of the shadow of a father obscuring everything else. He won't abandon Athena and the others, but he will never stop thinking that none of them would have ever even moved a finger to get involved in all that if it hadn't been because of their father forcing that fate on them. Not that they would have even existed in the first place without that man's scheming but still...]

And the death of that man represented that? Curious that the people in your world would consider the death of a criminal a bad omen for their lives. Or did it actually have some kind of symbolical meaning? Like burning down a flag being a declaration of war or something like that.