Hina walked three steps ahead, same as always. The plastic bag swung from her wrist, heavy with daikon and tofu and the cheap miso paste she bought because the good kind cost twice as much. Late afternoon light caught the edges of her hair where it had started to fray from the elastic. She needed a haircut. She'd been saying that for months.

"You're quiet," she said without turning around.

Kori watched her shoulders. The way they moved when she walked. She carried tension there, had for years, ever since she'd stopped being his sister and started being his mother and father and landlord and cook and the person who checked his homework and signed his permission slips and sat across from teachers who asked where his parents were.

"Thinking," he said.

"About?"

"School."

She laughed. It was a good sound. "Liar. You never think about school." She glanced back, finally, brown eyes warm in the dying light. "Tanaka-sensei called again. Said you're smart when you try."

"I try."

"You sit in the back and draw in your notebook."

"I'm trying to sit in the back and draw in my notebook."

Another laugh. She shifted the bag to her other hand. The street narrowed ahead where the old shops crowded together, awnings faded to the same bleached green. A cat watched them from a windowsill, orange and fat and utterly disinterested.

"Public Safety called yesterday," Hina said. Her voice didn't change. "They want me to come in for an assessment."

Kori's feet kept moving. Left, right, left. The pavement had a crack shaped like a river delta. He'd noticed it before, walking this same route, but he'd never thought about it until now.

"You said no."

"I said I'd think about it."

"You'll say no."

Hina stopped. The bag stilled against her thigh. Ahead, the street opened into the small plaza where the neighborhood shrine sat, stone torii gate darkened with age and weather. She turned, and in the orange light her face looked older than twenty-three.

"The money would help," she said.

"You'd die."

"Plenty of hunters don't die."

"Plenty do."

She watched him. The way she always watched him, like she was trying to see something he kept hidden. He didn't keep anything hidden. There was nothing to hide. He was eleven years old and his sister bought cheap miso paste and the teacher said he was smart when he tried.

"Come on," she said. "The tofu will spoil."

They walked. The cat on the windowsill had vanished. The light was failing faster now, shadows pooling in doorways and alleys, the sky above the rooftops turning the color of a bruise.

The devil came from the alley beside the shrine.

It moved wrong. That was the first thing Kori noticed—the way it moved, joints bending at angles that made his eyes slide away, refusing to process. It had been a dog once, maybe, or something with four legs and fur. Now the fur was patchy and wet-looking, and the legs had too many segments, and where the head should have been there was only a cluster of fingers, human fingers, yellowed nails clicking together as it scented the air.

The plastic bag hit the ground. Tofu spilled across the pavement, white blocks scattering like dice.

Hina's hand was already moving. The knife appeared from somewhere inside her jacket—not a kitchen knife, something longer, the blade catching what little light remained. Her contract. The Knife Devil. Kori had seen her summon it before, practicing in the apartment when she thought he was asleep, the blade appearing and disappearing as she tested its weight.

"Run," she said. Her voice was flat, calm, the voice of someone who had done this before. "Get to the main street. Find someone. Tell them there's a devil at the Inari shrine."

Kori's legs didn't move.

The devil lurched forward. Hina met it, knife flashing, and the sound when blade met whatever passed for the thing's flesh was wet and thick, like cutting into overripe fruit. The devil screamed—if that was screaming, that high keening that seemed to come from everywhere at once—and one of its too-many legs swiped at her, claws raking across her forearm.

Blood. On the pavement. On her jacket. On the scattered tofu, red soaking into white.

"Kori!" She didn't look back. Couldn't look back. The devil was pressing her toward the shrine's stone steps. "Run!"

His legs didn't move.

His hands didn't move.

His chest rose and fell, breath coming in shallow gasps that never quite filled his lungs, and his eyes watched everything with perfect clarity—the way the devil's fingers-that-were-a-head opened and closed, clicking, clicking, the way Hina's knife caught it across what might have been a throat, the spray of black ichor that followed—but his body had become stone, had become ice, had become something that existed outside of time while the world continued without him.

The devil caught her.

One of its legs, the longest one, the one that bent backward at the second joint, drove through her stomach. Hina made a sound—not a scream, smaller than that, surprised almost, like she'd stepped on something sharp walking barefoot through the apartment. The knife fell from her fingers. It vanished before it hit the ground, the contract broken, the devil taking back what it had lent.

She turned her head. Brown eyes finding him where he stood frozen, useless, a statue of a boy who couldn't save anyone. Her mouth moved.

Run.

The word. Still the word. Even now, even as the devil lifted her off the ground, even as the light left her eyes, the same word, the only word she had left to give him.

The devil dropped her. It turned toward the shrine, uninterested in the boy who stood motionless in the street, uninterested in anything that didn't fight back. It climbed the stone steps on its too-many legs, the clicking of its finger-head fading into the growing dark.

Kori stood there.

The sky finished turning purple, then black. Stars appeared. The tofu had stopped bleeding. His sister's eyes were still open, still brown, still looking at him.

Run, they said.

He couldn't run. He couldn't move. He couldn't even close his eyes.

Public Safety found him twenty minutes later, standing in the same spot, breathing in the same shallow gasps. They killed the devil in under a minute. One of them, a woman with short hair and a tired face, tried to lead him away from the body. His legs finally moved then, responding to her hand on his shoulder, following her like a puppet with cut strings.

He didn't look back at Hina.

He already knew what he'd see.

Akane's apartment was small. Two rooms and a kitchen barely large enough to turn around in, the walls thin enough to hear the neighbors' television through. She cleared out the closet that first week, laid down a futon, hung a curtain across the doorway. Privacy. Or the illusion of it.

"You can stay as long as you need," she said.

She looked like Hina. Same brown eyes, same shape of jaw, same way of standing with her weight on her left foot. Hina's cousin, but Kori had always called her aunt—she was older, had always seemed more like a grown-up than a peer. They'd been close once, before Hina had taken in her brother and stopped having time for visits, stopped having time for anything except working and hunting and keeping a boy fed and clothed and educated.

Kori unpacked his bag. Three shirts, two pairs of pants, underwear, socks. His notebook from school. A photograph of Hina he'd taken from the apartment before they'd closed it up, before they'd sold everything that could be sold and donated what couldn't.

He put the photograph in the closet, facing the wall.

"Thank you," he said.

Akane watched him from the doorway. The same way Hina used to watch him, looking for something hidden. She wouldn't find it either.

"Dinner's at seven," she said. "Do you have homework?"

"Yes."

"Then do it."

She left. The curtain swayed behind her, then stilled.

Kori sat on the futon and stared at the wall and did not do his homework. The light changed outside the small window, afternoon to evening to night. At seven, Akane called him for dinner. He ate. Rice, pickled vegetables, fish. The fish was overcooked, dry, nothing like the way Hina made it.

He ate every bite.

That night he dreamed of the devil. The clicking of its finger-head, the wet sound of the knife, the way Hina's eyes had found him across the darkening street. Run, they said. Run. Run. Run.

He woke at 3 AM, gasping, frozen in his futon, unable to move for seventeen minutes while the nightmare's paralysis slowly released its grip.

This became routine.

Eight years.

Akane tried. She bought him new clothes when he outgrew the old ones. She signed his permission slips and sat across from teachers who said he was smart when he tried. She cooked dinner every night at seven, always something different, never quite right. She didn't ask about the nightmares, though she must have heard him through the thin walls, must have known about the gasping and the stillness that followed.

She kept a cup in the cabinet above the sink. Blue ceramic, chipped at the rim, the same cup Hina had used when she visited. Akane never used it. Never offered it to guests. It sat there, gathering dust, eight years of accumulated silence.

Kori finished high school. He didn't go to university. He got a job at a convenience store three blocks from the apartment, night shifts mostly, stocking shelves and running the register for the handful of customers who wandered in at 2 AM looking for cigarettes or onigiri or something to fill the hours.

He was good at night shifts. The quiet suited him. The fluorescent lights, the hum of the refrigerators, the mechanical rhythm of scanning barcodes and making change. Nothing required him to move quickly. Nothing required him to move at all.

Sometimes devils passed by the store windows. Low-class things mostly, rats with too many eyes, shadows that moved against the light. They never came inside. They never noticed him standing behind the counter, still as stone, watching them pass.

He wondered, sometimes, if they could sense it. The stillness in him. The part of him that had frozen eight years ago and never quite thawed.

Akane stopped setting a place for him at dinner when he started working nights. She left food in the refrigerator instead, covered plates he could heat up when he got home at dawn. They passed each other in the kitchen sometimes, her leaving for work, him returning from it. Brief exchanges. Weather. Groceries. The neighbor's dog that barked too early.

She never mentioned Hina. Neither did he.

The photograph stayed in the closet, facing the wall.

The devil appeared on a Tuesday.

Kori was walking home from his shift, the first gray light of dawn bleeding into the sky above the buildings. The streets were empty, that liminal hour between the last drunks stumbling home and the first commuters heading to trains. His footsteps echoed off the shuttered storefronts, regular as a metronome.

He heard it before he saw it. A sound like tearing fabric, wet and prolonged, coming from the alley beside the pachinko parlor that never seemed to open anymore. He stopped walking. His body went still—not frozen, not yet, just waiting, the way prey waits when it senses a predator nearby.

The woman came running out of the alley.

She was young, maybe his age, office clothes disheveled, one shoe missing. Her face was pale, eyes wide, mouth open in a scream that came out as nothing but ragged breathing. Behind her, the darkness of the alley shifted, rearranged itself, became something with too many limbs and a head that was wrong in ways his eyes refused to fully register.

The devil stepped into the gray light. It was larger than the one that had killed Hina, taller, its body a mass of what looked like burnt wood and exposed muscle. Its head sat sideways on its neck, a human face stretched and distorted, the mouth vertical instead of horizontal, opening and closing with a sound like cracking ice.

The woman fell. Her remaining shoe caught on a crack in the pavement and she went down hard, skinning her palms, her knees. She scrambled backward, still trying to scream, still producing only that thin, useless gasping.

The devil advanced.

Kori stood frozen.

His legs wouldn't move. His hands hung at his sides, useless, fingers slightly curled. His breath came in shallow gasps that never quite filled his lungs. Eight years. Eight years of nightmares and therapy and telling himself it would be different next time, that he would move, that he would act, that he wouldn't stand there watching someone die while his body refused to obey.

The woman's eyes found him. Brown. They were brown, like Hina's, and in them he saw the same thing he'd seen eight years ago, the same question, the same desperate hope that someone would help.

His right foot moved.

It shouldn't have. Nothing in his body wanted to move, every instinct screaming at him to stay still, to not draw attention, to survive the way he'd survived before by being beneath notice. But his foot moved anyway, a single step forward, and then another, and then he was running.

He had no weapon. No contract. No training. He was a nineteen-year-old convenience store clerk running at a devil with his bare hands because for the first time in eight years his body had chosen to move and he didn't know how to stop it.

The devil's head swiveled toward him. The vertical mouth opened, producing that ice-crack sound, and then its arm—if that was an arm, that mass of burnt wood and pulsing tissue—swept out and caught him across the chest.

The world spun. Impact. Not the devil's arm but something harder, the wall of the pachinko parlor, his back hitting the bricks with enough force to crack plaster. He slid down, legs folding under him, and the pain came a moment later, enormous and specific, centered on his spine.

Something was wrong. Not just pain-wrong but broken-wrong, the kind of wrong that didn't get better, that didn't heal, that meant the damage was permanent and final. He tried to stand and his legs didn't respond. Tried to crawl and his arms scraped uselessly against the pavement. The lower half of his body had stopped existing, had become dead weight, meat that used to be his.

The devil turned back to the woman. She was still on the ground, still trying to scream. It reached for her with its too-long fingers.

Kori watched. That was all he could do now—watch, the same as before, the same as always. His body had finally moved and it hadn't mattered, had only gotten him broken instead of frozen, had only added one more body to the street as the dawn light grew stronger.

Something moved beside him.

A cat. Black, small, barely larger than a kitten. It lay against the base of the wall, half-hidden by a pile of garbage bags, its fur matted with something darker than shadow. Its eyes caught the gray light, amber and gold, and they were watching him with an intensity that didn't belong on an animal.

The cat was dying. He could see it now, the wounds along its side, the blood that pooled beneath it, the labored rise and fall of its chest. It had been there the whole time, maybe, wounded and waiting, and now it watched him with those amber eyes and its mouth moved.

Sound came out. Not a meow, not a cry, but words. A voice that was female and ancient and layered with something that made his broken spine vibrate in response.

"Well," the cat said. Blood flecked its whiskers. "This is embarrassing."

Kori stared. Ten meters away, the devil's fingers closed around the woman's ankle. She screamed, finally, a real scream that cut through the morning air.

"For both of us," the cat continued. Its voice was fading but the words came out precise, almost amused. "You—paralyzed, watching another one die. Me—the great and terrible, bleeding out behind garbage bags." A wet cough that might have been a laugh. "At least you have an excuse. Humans break so easily."

"What—"

"No time for existential questions." The cat's amber eyes flicked toward the devil, then back to him. "That thing will finish the screaming woman in seconds. Then it will notice you're still breathing. Then you'll die here, and I'll die here, and this whole embarrassing situation will be someone else's problem." The cat paused. "I've had better mornings."

The woman screamed again. The devil was dragging her backward now, toward the alley, toward the dark.

"Contract," the cat said. "You and me. I rebuild your spine—make it better than it was, actually, I'm quite talented—and in exchange, you kill devils. All of them. Every single one you encounter, no exceptions, no mercy, no tedious philosophical debates about the nature of evil." Those amber eyes found his again, ancient and knowing and, beneath the wit, desperate. "Also, you never speak my name. Ever. That part is non-negotiable."

"I don't know your name."

"Wonderful. Let's keep it that way." Another wet cough. "I'm running out of time to be charming. The universe has a sense of humor, putting us both here—two broken things bleeding out in the same gray dawn. But I'd rather not appreciate the irony from the afterlife." The cat's tail twitched once. "Yes or no, broken boy. I won't ask twice."

The woman's fingers scraped against the pavement, leaving trails of blood. The devil's vertical mouth was opening wider, preparing to bite, to consume, to end her the way the other devil had ended Hina.

Kori looked at the dying cat. At the amber eyes that held millennia of something he couldn't name. Two creatures bleeding out in the same gray dawn. Both about to die. Both offered one way out.

"Yes."

The word came out whole. Unyielding. Final.

The cat's whiskers twitched—something like satisfaction, or maybe just relief. "Good answer."

It moved. Not walked, not crawled—flowed, like shadow becoming liquid, crossing the distance between them in a single impossible motion. It pressed itself against his back, against the break in his spine, and then it was inside him, not metaphorically but literally, black fur dissolving into black smoke dissolving into something that poured into the space between his vertebrae.

The pain was absolute.

His spine rebuilt itself. He felt it happening, felt the shattered bone knitting together around something new, something that wasn't bone at all, something that had been a cat and was now part of him. His back arched off the pavement, a sound tearing from his throat that wasn't quite a scream. The devil in the street turned at the noise. The woman used the distraction to scramble away, finally finding her feet, running without looking back.

Kori stood.

His legs worked. His back was straight, the pain already fading to something distant and manageable. Along his spine, from the base of his skull to his tailbone, he could feel it—her—the cat-that-wasn't, dissolved into the new architecture of his body. No voice now. No presence. Just power, coiled and waiting, and a silence where the wit had been.

The devil charged.

"Scythe."

The word came from somewhere beneath thought, from somewhere he'd never been, as natural as breathing. His arm lifted, palm facing out, and black material flowed down from his shoulder, down his arm, encasing his hand in something cold and hard. A blade sprouted from his palm. Twenty-four inches. Obsidian steel. It caught the dawn light and swallowed it.

The devil's vertical mouth opened. Ice-crack sound. It reached for him with those burnt-wood fingers.

Kori moved.

Not frozen. Not hesitating. Not even thinking. His body knew what to do the way it knew how to breathe, how to blink, how to make his heart beat. The scythe swept up in an arc that felt rehearsed, practiced, perfected over a thousand lifetimes he'd never lived. The devil's reaching arm separated from its body at the elbow. Black ichor sprayed across the pavement in a pattern like spilled ink.

The devil didn't have time to scream.

Kori was already inside its guard. Step forward, blade rising in a diagonal cut that opened its chest from hip to shoulder. The burnt-wood ribs parted like kindling. Step to the left, reversing the blade, severing two of its legs at the joint before they could find purchase. The devil staggered, tried to retreat, and Kori followed without thought, without choice, without the space between intention and action that had defined his entire life.

The final cut took the head. Horizontal. Clean. The sideways face, the vertical mouth, all of it tumbling away from the neck in a spray of black. The body collapsed, and Kori was already turning away before it hit the ground.

Three seconds. Maybe four.

The scythe retracted. Black material flowing back up his arm, disappearing into his skin, leaving his palm unmarked. No blood. No wound. Nothing to show what had just emerged from it.

Behind him, the devil's corpse began to dissolve, becoming ash, becoming nothing. Steam rose from where the cuts had been.

The street was quiet.

Dawn light flooded between the buildings, orange and gold, catching the ash that drifted in the air. Somewhere nearby, a siren was starting—faint, but getting closer. Public Safety dispatch. Someone had called it in. The woman, maybe, or a neighbor woken by the screaming.

Kori looked down the street. The woman was gone, but he could see where she'd run—blood from her scraped palms marking a trail toward the main road. She'd seen everything. She'd watched him stand up from a broken spine. She'd seen the blade. She'd seen what he did with it.

Above him, mounted on the corner of the pachinko parlor, a security camera pointed down at the street. Its red light blinked steadily. Recording.

The sirens were getting closer.

Kori turned and walked in the opposite direction. Not running—running drew attention—but moving with purpose, with the kind of efficiency his body seemed to understand now. He took the first side street, then another, cutting through alleys he'd never noticed before but somehow knew were there. His feet carried him home through routes that avoided main roads, avoided cameras, avoided everything.

Along his spine, that presence settled deeper. Silent. Dormant. Waiting.

The apartment was dark when he got back. Akane had already left for work—he could smell the coffee she'd made, could see the single cup drying in the rack beside the sink. The blue ceramic cup sat in the cabinet above, same as always. Eight years of dust.

Kori stood in the kitchen for a long moment. The morning light came through the window at an angle that caught the edge of the counter, the curve of the faucet, the small chip in the tile beside the stove. Everything looked the same. Everything felt different.

He walked to his closet. Pushed aside the curtain. The futon was still made from that morning, creased where he'd slept. His clothes hung on the rod, three shirts, two pairs of pants. The shelf above held his old school notebooks, never thrown away, never looked at.

The photograph sat on the shelf, facing the wall. Same as it had for eight years. Same as it had since the day he'd put it there, unable to look at it, unable to throw it away.

Kori reached up. His hand didn't shake. His breath didn't catch. He picked up the photograph and turned it around.

Hina looked back at him. Brown eyes, warm in the camera flash. She was smiling, the way she'd smiled when she teased him about school, when she laughed at his jokes, when she walked three steps ahead with a plastic bag full of cheap groceries and a life measured in the space between devil attacks.

He set the photograph back on the shelf. Facing out.

Kori would never freeze again.

The first day, Kori slept. Twelve hours, dreamless, the kind of sleep that erased time entirely. When he woke, the light through the window had shifted from morning to late afternoon, and his body felt strange in ways he couldn't immediately name. Not wrong. Different. Like wearing clothes that fit better than they should.

He lay on the futon for a while, cataloging. His spine didn't hurt. It should have—he remembered the wall, the impact, the absolute certainty that something had broken in a way that couldn't be fixed. But when he moved, when he twisted to test the range, there was nothing. Not even stiffness. Just bone and muscle and something else, something that hummed faintly at the base of his skull when he paid attention to it.

Akane had left a plate in the refrigerator. Rice, pickled vegetables, fish. The same as always. He ate standing at the counter, watching the light change outside the window, and when he finished he washed the plate and put it in the rack beside the cup from that morning.

The blue ceramic cup sat in the cabinet. He didn't look at it.

That evening, he found the knife.

It was in the kitchen drawer, the one that stuck slightly when you opened it. A paring knife, nothing special, the blade dulled from years of use. Akane used it for vegetables, for the small precise cuts that cooking required. He'd seen her use it a hundred times.

Kori held it in his hand. The weight was familiar—he'd used it himself, once or twice, when Akane asked him to help with dinner. But now he was thinking about the wall, about the broken spine, about the way his body had rebuilt itself around something new.

He pressed the blade to his forearm. Not hard. Just enough to feel the edge, the cold line of metal against skin.

Then he pushed.

The cut opened clean. Blood welled up, red and ordinary, and the pain arrived a half-second later—sharp, bright, exactly what a cut should feel like. He watched the blood run down his arm, watched it drip onto the counter, and waited.

The edges of the wound began to close.

Not quickly—not the instant knitting he'd felt when his spine had rebuilt itself. But fast enough that he could see it happening, the flesh drawing together, the blood slowing, stopping. In thirty seconds the cut was a pink line. In a minute it was gone.

He made another cut. Deeper this time. The blood came faster, pooling in the sink, and the pain was more substantial, something that demanded attention. He watched it heal. Forty-five seconds. A little slower.

Another cut. Another. Each one taking slightly longer to close, each one demanding more from whatever was inside him now. By the fifth cut his head was swimming, a dizziness that had nothing to do with blood loss and everything to do with depletion—something being used up, something that needed time to replenish.

He set the knife down. Cleaned the blade, cleaned the sink, cleaned the counter where the blood had dripped. The dizziness faded slowly, over the next hour, and by the time Akane came home he was sitting in his closet, staring at the photograph of Hina, feeling perfectly ordinary.

"Did you eat?" Akane asked through the curtain.

"Yes."

"Good."

Her footsteps moved away, toward the kitchen. He heard her open the refrigerator, close it, begin the small noises of preparing dinner for one. The apartment filled with the smell of cooking oil and garlic, and Kori sat in his closet and thought about what he'd learned.

He could heal. Fast, but not unlimited. There was a cost—not blood, not pain, but something else. Energy, maybe. Whatever fuel the thing in his spine ran on. Push too hard and the tank ran dry. Wait, and it filled back up.

He wondered what else had changed.

The second day, he went running.

It had been years since he'd run anywhere. The job at the convenience store required nothing but standing, and before that—before the convenience store, before high school, before everything—he'd been the kind of child who walked everywhere, who never saw the point of hurrying. Hina used to tease him about it. You walk like an old man, she'd say. Like you've got all the time in the world.

He didn't have a destination in mind. Just out, through the neighborhood, past the convenience store where he was supposed to be working tonight, past the shrine where he'd bought omamori as a child, out toward the river where the joggers gathered in the early morning.

The first kilometer felt normal. Breath coming faster, heart rate climbing, the familiar burn of muscles that hadn't been used this way in too long. He settled into a rhythm, feet striking pavement, arms swinging, the world passing by in a blur of storefronts and pedestrians.

The second kilometer, something shifted.

His breathing steadied. His legs stopped burning. The rhythm became something else—not effort but flow, his body finding a pace that felt sustainable, endless, like he could run to the ocean and back without stopping. He pushed harder, accelerating, and his body responded without complaint. The buildings blurred. The wind pressed against his face. He was faster than he'd ever been, faster than he should have been, and when he finally stopped—four kilometers later, at the edge of the river where the joggers had thinned out—he wasn't even winded.

He stood at the railing and watched the water. Gray-green, sluggish, carrying debris from somewhere upstream. An old man sat on a bench nearby, feeding pigeons from a paper bag. The pigeons didn't look at Kori. The old man didn't look at Kori. The world continued as if nothing had changed.

On the way back, he tested the strength.

A construction site, half-finished, the workers on break. A pile of concrete blocks stacked near the entrance, each one marked with its weight in faded stencil. Forty kilograms. He picked one up, one-handed, and it felt like lifting a textbook. He set it down before anyone noticed.

At home, he did push-ups in his closet until he lost count. Two hundred. Three hundred. The burn never came. His arms didn't shake. He stopped because the exercise had become pointless, not because his body had reached any limit.

That evening, Akane dropped a plate.

She was washing dishes, her back to him, and Kori was standing in the doorway of the kitchen not saying anything, just existing in the same space the way they'd learned to exist over eight years. The plate slipped from her wet fingers—he saw it happen, saw the moment her grip failed, saw the ceramic begin its fall toward the floor.

He caught it.

Not dove for it, not lunged. Just moved, his hand arriving at the place where the plate would be before it got there, plucking it from the air like picking fruit from a tree. The motion felt casual. Natural. Like he'd known exactly when and where the plate would fall before Akane's fingers had even loosened.

Akane stared at him. Her hands were still wet, still holding the shape of the plate that was no longer there. Water dripped from her fingers onto the floor.

Kori set the plate on the counter.

"Careful," he said.

She didn't say anything. Just watched him, the same way she'd watched him for eight years, looking for something hidden. This time, there was something to find. This time, she almost found it—he could see the question forming behind her eyes, the shape of words she wasn't sure how to speak.

He went back to his closet. A moment later, he heard the water running again, the small sounds of dishes being washed and put away.

She didn't ask.

That night, sleep came slowly. He lay on his futon and listened to the apartment settle around him—the creak of old wood, the hum of the refrigerator, Akane's breathing through the thin wall that separated his closet from her room. The world felt different now. Not just his body, but the way he perceived everything around him. Time moved at a pace he could track, could anticipate. The falling plate had been obvious, inevitable, a trajectory he'd understood before it began.

He thought about the devil on the street. The ice-crack sound of its vertical mouth. The way his body had known exactly where to cut, exactly when to move, as if the fight had been choreographed years in advance.

He thought about Hina. About the alley beside the shrine. About standing frozen while the devil's legs bent backward and drove through her stomach.

That memory came without paralysis. He could feel it trying—the old response, the ice in his veins, the body refusing to obey—but it couldn't find purchase anymore. Something had been severed. Rewired. The signal that used to lock him in place now dissipated before it reached his muscles, absorbed by whatever lived in his spine.

He fell asleep eventually. He didn't dream.

The third day, Akane left early.

He heard her moving through the apartment at 6 AM, heard the coffee brewing, heard the front door open and close. Then silence. The apartment empty except for him and whatever else lived there now.

Kori waited an hour, listening to the building settle, making sure she wasn't coming back for something forgotten. Then he walked to the middle of his closet, stood in the small clear space between the futon and the wall, and lifted his palm.

"Scythe."

The black material flowed down his arm. He watched it this time, really watched—the way it emerged from somewhere beneath his skin, the way it encased his hand and forearm in something that looked like obsidian but moved like water. The blade sprouted from his palm, twenty-four inches of darkness that caught the morning light and didn't reflect it.

He held it there. The weight was negligible, balanced, an extension of his arm rather than something separate. He moved it experimentally—a slow arc, a thrust, a defensive position he'd never been taught but somehow knew. His body understood the scythe the way it understood breathing. Automatic. Inevitable.

He turned the blade, angled it to catch the light differently, and saw his reflection in the obsidian surface.

Brown eyes stared back at him. But not his eyes—not nineteen years old, not shaped by convenience store nights and eight years of frozen grief. These were the eyes of a child. Eleven, maybe. Younger. The boy in the reflection stood in a place that wasn't this closet, somewhere darker, and in his arms he held a black cat. The cat's eyes were closed. The boy's eyes were open, brown and lost, and he was looking at Kori with something that might have been recognition.

Kori blinked. The reflection became his own again—nineteen, tired, holding a blade made of darkness in a closet that smelled like dust and old paper.

He stared at the obsidian surface for a long time. The boy didn't come back. Neither did the cat.

Eventually, he retracted the scythe. The black material flowed back up his arm, disappeared into his skin, left his palm unmarked. He sat on the futon and looked at the photograph of Hina, facing out now after eight years of facing the wall, and thought about nothing in particular.

That afternoon, he called the convenience store and quit. The manager asked if everything was okay. Kori said yes and hung up.

Akane came home at the usual time. She made dinner—rice, pickled vegetables, fish, the same as always—and they ate in silence, sitting across from each other at the small table, not quite looking at each other. When she finished, she washed her plate and put it in the rack. She made tea. She sat back down.

"You quit your job," she said.

It wasn't a question. Small neighborhood, smaller building. Word traveled.

"Yes."

She wrapped her hands around her tea cup. Not the blue ceramic one—never that one—but a plain white cup she'd bought years ago, the glaze cracked from heat and use. Steam rose between them.

"Are you going to tell me why?"

Kori looked at her. Same brown eyes as Hina. Same shape of jaw. She'd aged in the eight years since she'd taken him in—gray at her temples now, lines around her mouth that hadn't been there when she'd cleared out her closet and hung a curtain across the doorway. She'd given him a place to live. She'd fed him every night at seven. She'd never asked about the nightmares, never mentioned Hina, never pushed when he went quiet for days at a time.

She'd done everything she could. And she was exhausted by it. He could see that now—the way her shoulders curved inward, the way she held the cup like she needed something to hold onto. Eight years of silence. Eight years of waiting for him to become someone she could reach.

"Something changed," he said.

Akane's eyes searched his face. Looking for what she'd always looked for. This time, she found the edge of it—he saw the moment it registered, the slight widening of her eyes, the way her hands tightened around the cup.

"Changed how?"

He didn't answer. The silence stretched between them, filled with eight years of things unsaid, and Akane's breath caught once before she got it under control.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay."

She finished her tea. Washed the cup. Went to bed without saying goodnight.

Kori sat at the table until midnight, listening to the building settle around him. Then he went to his closet, lay down on the futon, and closed his eyes.

The dream came.

He was standing in a room he didn't recognize. Dark, but not completely—light came from somewhere, enough to see the outlines of furniture, the shape of walls, the floor beneath his feet. It felt like a place that had existed once, a long time ago, before it had been forgotten.

The black cat sat in the center of the room.

It was grooming itself, one paw raised, tongue working methodically through the fur. The same small body, the same posture, but different somehow—more defined, more present, as if the cat that had been dying behind garbage bags had been a sketch and this was the finished painting.

Its eyes were purple. Not amber, not gold. A soft violet that caught the dim light and held it.

Kori stood at the edge of the room and watched. The cat didn't acknowledge him—just continued grooming, paw to tongue to fur, patient and thorough. The silence was absolute, no sound except the faint rasp of tongue against fur, and Kori understood without knowing how that this was the first time, the first contact, the first acknowledgment of whatever lived in his spine now.

The cat finished grooming. It set its paw down, settled into a loaf shape, and closed its eyes.

Kori woke.

Gray light through the window. Early morning. He lay still for a moment, feeling the dream fade, feeling the presence in his spine settle back into dormancy. No voice. No urging. Just the memory of purple eyes and the methodical rasp of grooming.

He got up. Made coffee. Drank it standing at the kitchen counter, watching the light strengthen outside the window. Akane was still asleep—he could hear her breathing through the thin wall, the slow rhythm of someone not yet ready to face another day.

The knock came at 7:15 AM.

Three sharp raps, spaced evenly, the knock of someone who expected the door to open. Kori set down his coffee cup. Walked to the front door. Opened it.

Two people stood in the hallway. A woman and a man, both in suits that didn't quite fit the neighborhood, both with the posture of people who were used to doors opening for them. The woman was older, maybe forty, her hair pulled back severely from a face that had stopped smiling a long time ago. The man was younger, heavyset, carrying a folder that bulged with paperwork.

The woman's eyes swept over Kori—his face, his hands, the way he stood. Whatever she was looking for, she found it immediately.

"Kuroshi Kori," she said. Not a question. "Public Safety Bureau, Shibuya Division. We need to talk about what happened on Sakura Street three days ago."

Behind him, Kori heard Akane's door open. Heard her footsteps stop at the end of the hallway. Heard her breath catch the way it had caught last night, when she'd looked at him across the table and seen the edge of something she couldn't name.

Kori looked at the woman from Public Safety. Her face gave nothing away. The man beside her shifted the folder from one arm to the other, papers rustling.

"Can we come in?" the woman asked.

The morning light fell across the hallway floor, catching dust motes in the air. Somewhere outside, a train was running. The city continued without pause, without concern for the knock at the door or the people asking to come inside.

Kori didn't step back. The door stayed where it was.

"No," he said.

The woman didn't push. She stood in the hallway with her hands visible, her posture easy, and waited. Young—mid-twenties, maybe—with brown hair that fell past her shoulders and eyes the color of sea glass. Emerald, almost. When she spoke again, her voice was soft, the words unhurried.

"Well," she said, "the Shibuya wind is out and I'm freezing. This won't take long."

The man beside her hadn't moved. He stood three paces back, hands loose at his waist, weight balanced. Not threatening. Just ready. The answer to diplomacy gone wrong.

Kori looked at them both. The woman's soft voice, the man's careful distance. Both dangerous. The kind of dangerous that came from practice, from repetition, from years of knocking on doors and knowing exactly what might answer.

Behind him, Akane's breathing had gone shallow. He could hear it, could track her heartbeat through the thin walls of the apartment the way he could track everything now—the drip of the kitchen faucet, the creak of the building settling, the distant rumble of a train.

Another moment passed. The woman waited. The man waited. The hallway filled with the kind of silence that preceded decisions.

Kori stepped back.

The door opened wider.

They sat at the kitchen table—the woman across from Kori, the man against the wall where he could see both the door and the window. Akane moved toward the stove, her hands finding the kettle without looking, the familiar rhythm of hospitality.

"We'll be quick," the woman said. "No need for—"

Akane turned on the burner. The gas caught with a soft whomp. She filled the kettle, set it on the flame, and reached for the tea tin on the shelf above the stove. Her back stayed turned.

The woman watched this happen. Her eyes followed Akane's hands—kettle, tea tin, the measured movements. She'd seen this before.

"I'm Mori," she said, returning her attention to Kori. "That's Takeda. Shibuya Division." She didn't clarify which unit. Didn't need to. "You already know why we're here."

Kori said nothing.

"Three days ago. Sakura Street. Early morning." Mori's voice stayed conversational, almost pleasant. "The footage is interesting. Takeda's watched it four times."

The man against the wall inclined his head slightly. Neither confirmation nor denial.

The kettle began to warm, metal ticking as it expanded.

"The woman who was there—Tanaka, I think—she gave quite a statement. Very detailed. Very... impressed." Mori tilted her head. "She used the word 'beautiful.' Strange choice, given the circumstances."

Akane's hand paused on the tea tin. Just for a moment. Then she continued, measuring leaves into the ceramic pot.

"So," Mori said. "Here we are."

She let that sit. The kettle hissed, not yet boiling. Takeda shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the only sound in the kitchen besides the water heating.

Kori looked at the woman across from him. The soft voice, the patient silences. She wasn't asking questions because she didn't need to. She was giving him space to fill, rope to hang himself with or climb.

"You want to know what I am," he said.

"I know what you are." Mori's emerald eyes held his. "Fresh hybrid. Weapon-class, given the manifestation. Fusion happened that morning—the healing rate makes that obvious." She paused. "What I don't know is the rest. The details."

The kettle whistled. Akane lifted it from the flame, poured water into the pot, set it on the table with three cups she'd pulled from the cabinet. Not the blue ceramic one. Never that one. She stood against the counter, arms crossed, watching.

"Contract conditions," Mori said. "Those matter. Some are workable. Some aren't."

Kori reached for the tea pot. Poured three cups—one for Mori, one for himself, one that sat unclaimed on the table between them. Steam rose in thin curls.

"Two conditions," he said.

Mori's posture didn't change, but something in her attention sharpened. Beside the wall, Takeda's hands stayed loose.

"First: kill all devils."

Silence. The steam continued to rise. Akane's arms tightened across her chest.

Mori picked up her tea cup. Held it without drinking. "All."

"All."

"No qualifiers? No exceptions?"

"No."

She exchanged a glance with Takeda. Something passed between them—the kind of communication that came from working together long enough to stop needing words. When she turned back to Kori, her expression hadn't changed, but the quality of her attention had.

"And the second?"

"I can't speak its name."

"Can't?"

"Don't know it."

Mori studied him over the rim of her cup. The emerald eyes searched for something—deception, evasion, the small tells that liars couldn't help but give. She found nothing. Kori met her gaze without effort.

"A weapon devil that wants to stay anonymous," she said. "That's new." She took a sip of tea. Set the cup down. "What form?"

Kori thought about the blade. The obsidian curve of it, the way it sprouted from his palm. He thought about the black cat bleeding behind garbage bags, amber eyes and dry wit, the ancient thing that had poured itself into his spine and gone silent.

"The cat devil," he said.

The words landed in the kitchen like a wrong note in a familiar song. Mori blinked. Takeda's mouth did something complicated—not quite a smile, quickly suppressed. The tension in the room didn't break, but it bent.

"Cat," Mori repeated.

"Black. Small." Kori picked up his tea. "Had opinions."

Against the counter, Akane made a sound. Not quite a laugh. She was looking at Kori with something new in her eyes—not recognition, but the shape of it. Eight years of silence, and now he was making jokes with Public Safety agents at her kitchen table.

The boy with brown eyes was a stranger to her now. Kori could see it in the way she held herself, the distance that had opened between the person she'd known and the one sitting across from her.

Mori set down her cup. The moment passed, and her face settled back into something professional.

"We'll need to run verification," she said. "Medical screening, registration. Combat assessment, if classification warrants it." She paused, just slightly. "Your sister did the same thing. Years ago."

Kori's hand stopped halfway to his cup.

"Kuroshi Hina. Knife Devil." Mori's voice hadn't changed—still soft, still patient. "We offered her a position four times. She had other priorities."

The kitchen was very quiet. The tea cooled in its cups. Akane had gone still against the counter.

"She was something," Mori said. "Could've gone far, if she'd wanted. But she had someone waiting at home, so." A small shrug. "Choices."

Something moved behind Kori's ribs. Not the thing in his spine—something older, something that had been there before the fusion, before everything. He kept his face still.

"The report from that night mentioned you," Mori continued. "Just a footnote. Younger brother, present at the scene, uninjured." She turned her tea cup in a slow circle on the table. "Uninjured. That's an interesting word for it."

The tea had stopped steaming. Kori watched Mori's hands on the cup, the easy rotation, the complete lack of urgency.

"What she wanted," Mori said, "was to protect people. That's why she hunted in the first place. Did it well, too." The cup stopped turning. "Registration would let you do the same thing. Continue what she started."

Kori looked at his hands. The same hands that had cut himself in this kitchen three days ago. The same hands that had taken a devil apart in four seconds. Hina's hands had been smaller. Always moving.

"Screening takes the day," he said. "Tests. Paperwork."

"Yes."

"And after?"

"Depends on classification." Mori picked up her cup again. "Could be anything. Assignment to a unit. Specialized training. Depends on what the assessment shows."

"And if I don't want any of that?"

Mori drank her tea. Set the cup down empty. The movement was unhurried, considered.

"Then we have a longer conversation," she said. "About responsibilities. About what happens when assets remain unaccounted for." She turned the empty cup in a slow circle. "Liabilities have a way of creating casualties, Kuroshi-san. It's just math. The more variables left uncontrolled, the more people end up in places they shouldn't be."

Kori watched her hands on the cup. The easy rotation. The complete lack of urgency.

"Aren't you the good guys?"

Takeda went still. Not moving away from the wall, not reaching for anything—just the sudden absence of motion, muscles locked into a coil that hadn't been visible a moment before. The man who'd been furniture became something else entirely.

Mori smiled. The same warm smile from the hallway, the same soft voice.

"Of course we are," she said. "Public safety is our number one priority."

The words hung in the kitchen. Kori looked at Akane—still pressed against the counter, arms wrapped around herself, watching him with eyes that didn't recognize what they were seeing. The stranger where he'd sat for eight years. The woman who'd fed him every night at seven and never asked about the nightmares and kept a blue ceramic cup in the cabinet that she never used.

The woman who would be a variable. An uncontrolled element. A liability that created casualties, if he made this difficult.

Mori's smile hadn't wavered. Takeda hadn't moved. The third cup of tea sat on the table, untouched, going cold.

Kori stood.

"Let's go," he said.

Mori rose from her chair, smooth and unhurried. Takeda relaxed—the coil unwinding, the furniture returning. Whatever had been about to happen retreated back into potential.

"You'll need identification," Mori said. "We'll wait."

Kori walked to his closet. Pushed aside the curtain. The photograph of Hina watched him from the shelf—brown eyes, warm smile, the face of someone who'd made choices and lived with them until she couldn't anymore.

He picked up his wallet. Put it in his pocket.

When he came back to the kitchen, Akane was still standing in the same spot. Her mouth opened. Closed. Whatever she wanted to say stayed trapped behind her teeth.

Kori didn't say he'd be back. She didn't ask.

The door closed behind them with a soft click.

Takeda drove with one hand on the wheel, the other tapping against his thigh. Some rhythm only he could hear, steady and patient, the beat of a man comfortable with silence. In the passenger seat, Mori watched the road with that same warm smile, unchanged since the apartment, since the hallway, since she'd first opened her mouth and let the soft words out.

Kori watched the city pass through tinted glass.

The lower district blurred by in fragments—cars threading through intersections, pedestrians cutting across crosswalks, alleys opening and closing between buildings like breathing. The hustle of perpetual motion. Everyone going somewhere. Everyone with somewhere to be. The world continued its business without concern for the sedan carrying a boy with something living in his spine.

The car slowed. Turned. Slowed again.

Then stopped.

The jolt of parking was a sudden contrast to the continuous blur. Kori's hands didn't move from his lap, but his eyes lifted to the windshield, to the building that rose beyond it.

The facility towered upward like a cathedral. Glass and steel and clean geometric lines, the kind of architecture that announced itself without trying. Men and women in sleek business attire moved through the plaza below, flowing to and from the mirrored doors in streams that never quite intersected. Organized. Efficient. The choreography of people who knew exactly where they belonged.

Mori opened her door. "This way."

Kori followed.

The plaza was busier up close. Dozens of people crossing the space, briefcases and folders and the occasional equipment case that looked heavier than it should. Most of them glanced at Kori as he passed. Quick looks, professional, the assessment of someone cataloging information without breaking stride. They knew what he was. He could see it in the way their eyes moved—face, hands, posture, gone. Filing him away. Moving on.

Duty waited for no one.

The lobby was marble and light, a reception desk staffed by two women who didn't look up as Mori led him past. Elevators at the far wall, polished steel, numbers climbing as the car descended. Takeda had disappeared somewhere between the plaza and the doors. Kori hadn't seen him go.

"Third floor," Mori said. "Medical wing first, then assessment. Coordinator Hayashi will explain the rest."

The elevator arrived with a soft chime. The doors opened. Mori stepped inside.

Kori followed.

Coordinator Hayashi was a thin man with glasses and the particular energy of someone who had accepted insomnia as a lifestyle choice rather than a problem to solve. His office was small, cluttered with folders and forms, a desktop computer humming beneath stacks of paper that had clearly given up on the concept of organization.

"Kuroshi," he said, not looking up from his screen. "Sit. Talk. Don't touch anything—I have a system."

Kori sat. Mori had vanished somewhere between the elevator and this door. The building seemed to swallow people and produce them elsewhere without explanation.

Hayashi typed something, clicked something, typed again. Then he stopped, leaned back in his chair, and actually looked at Kori for the first time.

"So. You're the one who killed a Class C with a weapon we've never seen and a fusion type that shouldn't exist." He didn't sound impressed. He sounded like a man being handed more paperwork. "Congratulations. You've made my week more interesting. I don't like interesting."

He pulled a form from somewhere in the chaos and slid it across the desk.

"Initialization process. Three stages. MRI first—we need pictures of whatever's growing in your spine. Then medical workup—blood, reflexes, making sure you're not about to explode. Then ability assessment, where Sato gets to play with you." He smiled thinly. "She'll enjoy that. Try not to let her take anything important."

They walked. Corridors that looked identical to other corridors, doors with numbers that meant nothing, the occasional person in a white coat or dark suit passing in the opposite direction. The building was a labyrinth of fluorescent light and linoleum, designed to confuse or designed by someone who didn't care about navigation.

The MRI room was cold. The machine itself dominated the space—a massive white cylinder, the kind of thing that looked like it belonged in a hospital or a science fiction film. A technician waited beside it, a woman in her thirties with dyed purple streaks in her hair and a coffee cup that looked like it had been refilled too many times today.

"Gown," she said, jerking her thumb toward the changing area. "Everything off. Metal makes the pictures look like abstract art, and I'm not in the mood to interpret."

Kori changed. When he came back, the technician was examining his file on a tablet, coffee cup now balanced precariously on top of the machine.

"Spinal fusion, huh? That's new." She didn't sound concerned. She sounded like someone discovering a new flavor of instant ramen. "Usually it's hearts. Hearts are boring. Everyone does hearts." She patted the narrow bed. "Lie down, don't move, try not to think about how loud it's going to get. Some people find it relaxing. Those people are liars."

Kori lay down. The ceiling was white, unmarked, giving nothing back.

"Forty minutes," she said, already walking toward the control room. "If you fall asleep, I'll be impressed. If you have a claustrophobic episode, tap your foot three times and I'll pull you out. If you manifest your weapon inside my very expensive machine, I will find a way to bill your corpse."

The bed slid forward. The cylinder swallowed him whole.

Hayashi was waiting when Kori emerged, clipboard in hand, expression unchanged. The technician had printed something—a series of images, black and white and gray, the interior architecture of Kori's body rendered in cross-section.

"Interesting," Hayashi said.

He held up one of the images. Kori's spine, or what should have been his spine. The vertebrae were visible, the normal structure of bone and disc and nerve—except where they weren't. Starting at the base of his skull and running down to his tailbone, something else had taken root. Black against the gray of tissue, spreading outward from the spinal column in patterns like cobwebs, like lightning frozen mid-strike, like the branches of a tree grown in darkness.

"Spinal fusion," Hayashi said. "That's unusual."

Kori looked at the image. The black lines radiating through his body, the obsidian architecture that had replaced what the wall had shattered. He'd known it was there—could feel it, sometimes, when he paid attention—but seeing it was different. Seeing made it real in a way that feeling hadn't.

"Normally," Hayashi continued, "weapon devil hybrids replace the heart. That's the standard fusion point. The devil's heart takes the place of the human's, becomes the anchor for the transformation." He tapped the image. "This is the first spinal case I've seen. First one anyone's seen, according to the database."

"The first," Kori said.

"The first recorded." Hayashi set the image aside, made a note on his clipboard. "The material composition is also notable. Initial analysis suggests high-density obsidian—volcanic glass, essentially, but structured in ways that don't occur naturally. Similar samples have only been recovered from one source."

He didn't say what the source was. He didn't need to.

Kori shrugged.

Hayashi's pen paused on the clipboard. He studied Kori over the rim of his glasses—a longer look this time, reassessing. Whatever he saw there made his expression flicker before settling back.

"Blood work next," he said. "Then Sato. Try to keep all your fingers."

They took his blood. Checked his reflexes. Shined lights in his eyes and listened to his heartbeat and measured his lung capacity and asked him to follow a finger and squeeze a hand and answer questions about his vision and hearing and sense of smell. Standard medical workup. The kind of thing any hospital would do, if hospitals regularly processed people with volcanic glass growing through their spines.

The ability assessment was different.

The room was large, reinforced, the walls lined with something that looked like concrete but probably wasn't. Observation windows ran along one side, dark glass hiding whoever watched from the other side. The floor was marked with lines and circles, measurements for distances Kori didn't recognize.

A woman waited in the center of the room. Short hair shaved close on the sides, a scar running through her left eyebrow, arms covered in tattoos that disappeared under her sleeves. She was rolling a knife between her fingers—not a weapon, just a habit, the blade dancing across her knuckles like a coin trick.

"You're the spine guy," she said. Not a question. "Sato. I do combat assessment." The knife disappeared somewhere into her jacket. "Fair warning: I love my job. Try not to take it personally."

Kori said nothing.

Sato grinned. It wasn't a reassuring expression. "Let's see what you've got. Manifest."

Kori raised his hand. "Scythe."

The black material flowed down his arm, encased his hand, sprouted the blade from his palm. Twenty-four inches of darkness, catching the overhead lights and swallowing them.

Sato let out a low whistle. "That's pretty." She circled him slowly, examining the blade from different angles. "Obsidian, looks like. The real stuff, not the tourist shop garbage." She pulled out a tablet, made a note without looking at the screen. "Retract."

He retracted it. The obsidian flowed back up his arm, disappeared into his skin.

"Again."

He manifested it again. Retracted it. Manifested. Retracted. Sato watched each time with the focus of a child watching fireworks, making notes without looking away.

"Consistent formation, no degradation. Nice." She tucked the tablet under her arm. "The material—you know where obsidian like that comes from?"

"No."

"Two places. Volcanic vents so deep we can't reach them." She smiled again, that same unsettling grin. "Or hell. Same signature. The lab guys get very excited about hell materials. Something about molecular structure." She waved a hand. "I don't ask questions I don't want answered."

Kori said nothing. The blade was already retracted, his palm unmarked.

"Regeneration next," Sato said. "This is my favorite part." She produced a knife from somewhere—different from the one she'd been spinning earlier, clinical, precise. "Hold out your arm."

Without waiting for him to comply, she drew it across Kori's forearm—a shallow cut, enough to draw blood, enough to demonstrate.

They both watched the wound close. Thirty seconds. The skin knit together, left no scar, gave no indication that it had ever been opened.

"Not bad," Sato said. "Again. Let's see what you can take."

She cut deeper. The wound closed in forty-five seconds. She made notes. Cut again. Measured the healing time. Cut again. By the fifth cut, Kori's head was swimming—the same dizziness he'd felt in Akane's kitchen, the tank running dry.

"Getting dizzy," he said.

Sato paused, knife still in hand. "Already? That's only five." She sounded disappointed, like a child told the carnival was closing early. "Wait. When you heal—are you focusing?"

"Focusing."

"On the wound. Directing it. Or are you just sitting there watching like it's a TV show?"

Kori thought about the cuts in Akane's kitchen. The way he'd watched them close, passive, observing the process like it was happening to someone else.

"Just watching," he said.

Sato's grin came back, wider this time. She set down the knife. Picked up something else—a cleaner blade, surgical, the edge catching light like a thread of silver.

"Oh, this is going to be fun." She tested the edge with her thumb. "Don't blink."

The blade came down.

Kori's left pinky separated from his hand at the second knuckle. Clean. Precise. The finger dropped to the floor with a small, wet sound.

The pain arrived—sharp, immediate, enormous in a way the cuts hadn't been. But different, too. Not the lingering ache of damage, but something temporary, something his body already understood as a condition that would pass. He looked at his hand, at the stump where his finger had been, and watched.

The flesh throbbed. Once. Twice.

Then it began to grow.

Bone first—white emerging from red, extending outward in a framework that his nerves were already wrapping around. Then muscle, threading itself through the structure, fibers weaving together faster than his eyes could track. Then skin, spreading over the new tissue like water filling a mold, pink and raw and then simply there.

Seconds. The whole process took seconds.

Kori flexed his hand. The finger responded—new, whole, indistinguishable from the original. The pain was already fading, retreating into memory.

Sato picked up the severed finger from the floor. Examined it with genuine delight, then dropped it into a specimen container.

"Now that's more like it." She was practically bouncing. "True hybrid regeneration, confirmed. You weren't running out of juice—you were just being lazy about it." She made a note on her tablet. "Active versus passive. Focus and you're basically unkillable. Don't focus and you'll bleed out like anybody else." She looked at him, still grinning. "Try not to lose your head. Even the good ones don't come back from that."

Kori looked at his new finger. Moved it. Felt it move.

"Good to know," he said.

Sato laughed—a real laugh, sharp and sudden. "I like you. You're not a screamer." She tucked the specimen container into a pocket. "Alright, let's see what else you've got."

Strength testing came next. Lifting. Pushing. Pulling. Sato called out increasing weights with the enthusiasm of a game show host, making notes and occasionally letting out appreciative whistles. Then endurance—running, sustained exertion, the point at which his body finally registered fatigue. Then speed—reaction time, sprint velocity, the blur of motion that his body could produce when he stopped thinking and let it move.

"Base fiend equivalent," Sato said finally, scrolling through her tablet. "Strength, speed, durability—you're in the normal range for your type. Not special, not weak. Just solid." She looked up. "One thing that is special, though."

Kori waited.

"Hesitation." She turned the tablet to show him a graph he didn't understand. "We measure the gap between stimulus and response. Threat appears, how long until you move. Most people—even trained hunters—show point-three to point-seven seconds delay. Recognition, decision, action. Normal brain stuff." She tapped the graph. "You?"

"Zero," Kori said.

"Zero." Sato's grin was back. "Within margin of error, you don't hesitate. At all. Threat appears, you're already moving. No decision-making, no processing. Just action." She tucked the tablet under her arm. "That's rare. Fiends don't even test that clean. Whatever's in your spine rewired something fundamental."

Kori thought about the devil on Sakura Street. The way his body had known where to cut before his mind had finished processing. The way the scythe had moved like breathing, like something that had always been true.

"Assessment complete," Sato said. She stuck out her hand. "It was a pleasure cutting pieces off you, Kuroshi. Hayashi will give you the boring paperwork part." She shook his hand with more force than necessary. "See you around. Try to stay interesting."

She left through a door Kori hadn't noticed, already spinning another knife between her fingers. The observation windows stayed dark.

Hayashi's office looked the same—same chaos, same humming computer, same stacks of paper threatening collapse. The man himself sat behind his desk, glasses reflecting the screen, a fresh cup of coffee steaming beside him despite the late hour.

"Results are in," he said. "Sit. This won't take long, and then you can stop looking at me like I'm keeping you from something important."

Kori sat. The day had disappeared into tests and measurements, and now the light through the small window had shifted toward evening.

"Classification: Hybrid, Weapon-class, Threat Level B. Potential for A under specific circumstances." Hayashi took a sip of coffee, grimaced, drank more anyway. "The spinal fusion is being flagged for further study. Expect to be popular with the research division. They don't get new toys often."

He set down the coffee. Took off his glasses. The gesture revealed eyes that had seen too much and stopped being surprised by any of it.

"Two options," he said. "I'll give you the speech because I have to, but we both know how this ends."

He set his glasses on the desk. Folded his hands.

"Option one: containment. You're housed in a secure facility, monitored around the clock, kept under observation until we understand the fusion better. Could be weeks. Could be months. Could be longer." His voice was flat, clinical. "Unregistered hybrids fall under strict penal codes. The law allows indefinite detention for assets deemed insufficiently understood."

The words settled into the cluttered office like dust.

"Option two: operational integration. You register as an active asset, work under Public Safety supervision, fulfill missions as assigned." Hayashi picked up his glasses, put them back on. "You mentioned a contract condition. Kill all devils, no exceptions. Integration would let you fulfill that condition while remaining monitored. Two problems solved at once."

Kori looked at the man behind the desk. The tired eyes, the cluttered workspace, the efficiency of someone who had delivered this speech to dozens of people before and would deliver it to dozens more.

"Those are my options," Kori said.

"Those are your options."

Containment. A secure facility, white walls, the same fluorescent lights, time measured in observations and tests and the slow accumulation of data. Weeks. Months. Longer. His body housed in a building like this one, his life reduced to a file in someone's cluttered office.

Or integration. Missions. Devils. The contract's first condition, written into his spine, demanding what it had always demanded.

Kill.

He could feel it there—the settled weight, the presence that had been silent since the fusion, the thing that had dissolved itself to save him. No voice. No urging. Just the absolute certainty of what he'd agreed to, the terms that couldn't be renegotiated.

All devils. No exceptions.

"Integration," Kori said.

Hayashi nodded. Made a note. Typed something into his computer. The decision had taken seconds, but it would echo for longer than Kori could calculate.

"You'll be assigned to a specialized unit," Hayashi said, putting his glasses back on. "Housing will be arranged. Briefing tomorrow morning, 0800. Someone will collect you." He picked up his coffee, drained the last of it, set the empty cup beside three others. "Welcome to Public Safety, Kuroshi. The pay is terrible, the hours are worse, and the life expectancy statistics are depressing enough that we stopped posting them in the break room."

Kori stood. Walked to the door. Paused with his hand on the frame.

"Where do I wait?"

Hayashi was already reaching for paperwork, his attention fracturing across a dozen tasks.

"Room 47. End of the hall. There's a cot. Might even have sheets." He didn't look up. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow you meet the people who'll decide if you're useful or just another file in my cabinet."

The hallway outside was empty. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting everything in the same flat white glow. Kori walked to the end, found the door marked 47, opened it.

The room was small. A cot, a chair, a window that looked out on the city below. Evening had settled fully now, the buildings lit from within, the streets becoming rivers of headlights and taillights and the perpetual motion of people going somewhere.

Kori sat on the cot. Looked at his hands. The same hands that had been tested and measured and catalogued. The same hands that had manifested a blade and retracted it and manifested it again while someone made notes.

Somewhere in his spine, the presence settled deeper. Patient. Waiting.

He lay back on the cot, stared at the ceiling, and let the city hum beneath him.

Tomorrow, they would tell him where to go. What to kill. How to be useful.

Tonight, he waited.

The briefing room was smaller than Kori expected. A single table, four chairs, a projector that looked like it hadn't been updated since the building was constructed. Hayashi sat at one end, folder open, reading glasses perched on his nose. Across from him, a woman Kori didn't recognize—older, severe, the kind of face that had stopped accommodating pleasantries decades ago.

"Classification finalized," Hayashi said without preamble. "Kuroshi Kori. Hybrid. Weapon-class. Bonded entity: Scythe Devil."

The words landed in the room like stones. Kori sat in the remaining chair and said nothing.

"Scythe Devil," the severe woman repeated. She hadn't introduced herself. "That's new."

"New but not unprecedented," Hayashi said. "Weapon devils have been manifesting at increased rates over the past three years. Sword, Spear, Rifle—we've documented over a dozen new weapon-class entities in the Tokyo region alone." He flipped a page in his folder. "The Scythe Devil fits the pattern. Blade-type manifestation, combat-oriented abilities, no apparent secondary functions."

Kori thought about the black cat bleeding behind garbage bags. The amber eyes. The wit that had survived even dying. He kept his face still.

"Shibuya Division is taking careful measures," the severe woman said. "The surge isn't random. Something's changed in the ecosystem—more fear, more manifestations, more hybrids showing up on our doorstep." She looked at Kori for the first time. "You align correctly. That's fortunate. Not everyone does."

"Alignment confirmed through contract analysis," Hayashi added. "First condition: kill all devils. That tracks with Public Safety objectives." He closed his folder. "The second condition—name prohibition—is noted but not concerning. Plenty of devils prefer anonymity."

The severe woman stood. "Shibuya will continue monitoring the weapon devil situation. This one"—she gestured at Kori without looking at him—"is your responsibility now, Hayashi. Make sure he's useful."

She left. The door closed behind her with the finality of a period at the end of a sentence.

Hayashi sighed, removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes. "That was Director Yoshida. She runs threat assessment for the eastern districts. Charming woman." He put his glasses back on. "Your handler will be here shortly. Try not to antagonize her—she's one of our best, and I don't have time to find a replacement."

Kori waited.

The door opened.

Mori walked in with the same unhurried pace she'd used at Akane's apartment, the same soft movements, the same warmth in her emerald eyes. She was smiling—not the professional smile from before, but something brighter, almost cheerful, as if she'd just received good news rather than a new assignment to babysit a hybrid who might kill her.

"Kuroshi-san," she said. "We meet again."

Hayashi gathered his folders and stood. "Agent Mori will be your supervising handler for the probationary period. Standard protocols apply. Don't make me regret this."

He left. The door closed. The briefing room was suddenly much smaller with just the two of them.

Mori pulled out a chair and sat across from Kori, that smile still in place. She looked like someone about to discuss weekend plans, not operational parameters for a weapon-class hybrid.

"Three rules," she said. Her voice was light, conversational. "Simple enough that even fresh hybrids can remember them."

Kori waited.

"One: my word is absolute. I'm your supervisor, which means when I say stop, you stop. When I say go, you go. When I say stand in the corner and count to a hundred, you stand in the corner and count to a hundred." The smile didn't waver. "Defiance is termination. For you, that means solitary confinement until someone decides what to do with you. Or execution, if the paperwork is less complicated that day."

She held up two fingers.

"Two: movement restrictions. You're a hybrid now, which means you don't get to wander wherever you like. Travel is limited to approved districts. Any deviation requires authorization seals from Shibuya HQ." She gestured vaguely at the building around them. "Here. Where you are now. Get used to the paperwork."

Three fingers.

"Three: no weapon manifestation without explicit permission. That scythe of yours stays inside unless I tell you otherwise. If I catch you manifesting without authorization, we have a problem. If someone else catches you, we have a bigger problem."

She lowered her hand. The smile remained, patient and warm and completely at odds with the content of her words.

"Do well," she continued, "and you'll be assigned to a permanent squad. Benefits, housing, the whole package. Fail, and..." She tilted her head slightly. "Well. Let's not think about failure."

Kori looked at her. The emerald eyes, the brown hair, the softness that wrapped around something harder. She'd sat in Akane's kitchen and talked about liabilities creating casualties. She'd smiled the same smile while implying that his aunt would suffer if he didn't comply.

Now she was his handler. His leash. The person who would decide, day by day, whether he was useful or a problem.

"Questions?" she asked.

"No."

"Good." She stood, smoothed her jacket, and headed for the door. "Come on, little scythe. Let's go hunting."

The district was new—rebuilt after a devil incident three years ago, according to Mori. Clean streets, modern buildings, the kind of planned development that erased whatever had existed before. They walked side by side, Mori setting the pace, Kori matching it without effort.

"Patrol routes are assigned weekly," Mori said. She wasn't looking at him, her eyes moving across storefronts and alleyways with the automatic efficiency of long practice. "This sector has low incident rates, which makes it perfect for probationary assessments. Nothing too exciting. Nothing that requires..." She glanced at him. "Complications."

Kori walked. The afternoon sun cast long shadows between the buildings, and the streets were busy with people who had no idea what walked among them.

"You're quiet," Mori observed. "That's fine. I do most of the talking anyway." She turned down a side street, narrower, the buildings older here—remnants of whatever had existed before the reconstruction. "Most handlers hate the quiet ones. They think silence means plotting. I think silence means listening."

They walked for another block before Kori spoke.

"What's your contract?"

Mori's pace didn't change. Her expression didn't shift. But something in the quality of her attention sharpened, just slightly, before settling back.

"Direct," she said. "I like that." She turned another corner, leading them into a small plaza with a fountain that wasn't running. "Snake Devil. Class B. Contracted six years ago."

"Abilities?"

"Summoning." She stopped at the edge of the plaza, scanning the space with those emerald eyes. "I visualize a location, speak the activation word, and a snake appears there. Big one. Teeth like this." She held her hands apart, indicating something the size of a car. "It bites whatever I'm pointing at, then disappears."

She turned to face him, that warm smile still in place.

"Shuu," she said, making a chomping motion with her hand. The gesture was almost cute—the sound effect a child might make while playing with toys. "Shuu shuu. Very effective."

Kori looked at her hands. The gesture had drawn his attention to them, and now he couldn't look away.

Her fingernails were wrong.

The thumb and index finger of her left hand had no nails at all—just smooth, healed skin where they should have been. The middle finger's nail was half-grown, still reforming. On her right hand, two more were missing, and a third showed the raw pink of recent loss, the nail bed still tender and exposed.

"The cost," Mori said. She hadn't stopped smiling, but something in her voice had changed—harder, more honest. "Every summon takes a fingernail. They grow back eventually. The cartilage takes longer."

She held up her hands, displaying the damage like a gallery exhibit.

"Six years," she said. "That's a lot of snakes. A lot of shuu." She lowered her hands. "Some costs are visible. Some aren't. I prefer the visible ones. They're easier to count."

Kori looked at her—the smile, the soft voice, the emerald eyes that held something ancient and patient beneath the warmth. The missing fingernails. The cartilage still forming where nails used to be.

Devil hunter.

"Come on," she said, turning back toward the street. "We still have three blocks to cover."

They walked. The patrol route wound through side streets, past shuttered storefronts and narrow alleys where the afternoon light didn't reach. Mori moved with the confidence of someone who'd walked these paths a hundred times before, pointing out landmarks without breaking stride—a ramen shop that served as a dead drop, a parking garage where a Class B had nested last spring, a pharmacy that kept devil-grade medical supplies under the counter.

Then she turned into an alley that wasn't on the route.

Kori followed. The space was narrow, walls rising on either side, the afternoon light reduced to a strip of sky overhead. No doors. No windows. No foot traffic. Just concrete and shadow and the two of them.

Mori stopped at the far end.

His spine ignited.

Every nerve ending fired at once. The thing inside him surged awake, flooding his body with signals—the scrape of grit under his heel, the distant hum of traffic four blocks away, the rhythm of his own pulse hammering against his eardrums. The air tasted like rust and concrete dust. The walls pressed inward, too close, no room to maneuver. Seven meters to Mori. Twelve to the exit behind him. Four stories straight up, no handholds, nowhere to go.

Mori turned.

Her hand was already rising.

Fingers extended. Curled inward. The shape of a claw. The shape of teeth. One eye drifted shut, lazy, almost sleepy. The other stayed open—emerald and bright and fixed on the exact space where his chest occupied air.

Her smile hadn't changed.

Kori's skin prickled. Sweat broke across his palms. His heartbeat filled the alley, louder than it should be, drowning out everything except the blood rushing through his skull. The thing in his spine coiled tighter, tighter—the twitch in her ring finger where the nail was still growing back, the dilation of her pupil, the complete absence of breath in her chest.

She wasn't breathing.

Her fingers locked into position. Pointing at him. Through him. Her head tilted—that gesture, that almost-cute gesture—and something behind her eyes had come unmoored, drifting loose from whatever kept people human.

Kori's hand jerked. The word clawed up his throat—scythe—

The alley contracted. The walls breathed. The strip of sky overhead narrowed to a slit of light that couldn't reach them.

Mori's lips parted.

"Shuu."

The air split open.

Shuu.

No motion preceded it. No shadow. No sound.

One moment the alley was empty—two silhouettes, concrete, the thin strip of sky overhead.

The next, everything shattered.

Thunder without lightning. The crack of displaced air, of reality tearing at the seams. The walls of the alley vanished behind a mass of scale and meat and bone, colossal fangs descending like the closing of a door that had never been open. The snake's head filled the world—building-sized, impossible, its jaws already shut before Kori's nerves finished registering the movement.

CHOMP.

Darkness slammed around him.

Pressure. Wet heat. The stench of copper and rot and something older, something that had been digesting things since before humans learned to scream. His ribs compressed. His lungs emptied. The inside of the snake was muscle and membrane and absolute black, crushing inward from every direction, no up, no down, no air.

He was gone. Swallowed whole. The alley, Mori, the city—erased. Just meat now. Just something being eaten.

His spine shrieked. The thing inside him thrashed against the compression, flooding his skull with signals that had nowhere to go. His hands couldn't move. His legs couldn't move. The pressure was too complete, too total, squeezing him into a shape that wasn't human anymore.

And in the darkness, a voice.

Run.

Hina's voice. The last thing she'd said. The command he'd failed to obey.

Run.

Her brown eyes. Her parting lips. The way she'd turned back to face the devil because he wasn't moving, because his legs had locked, because his body had chosen stillness over survival.

Run.

The word echoed through the compression, through the meat and dark, through eight years of nightmares that had never stopped replaying that moment.

Run.

He couldn't run. He was being digested. He was inside a snake the size of a building and his bones were grinding against each other and his lungs had nothing left to give and—

Purple.

The color bloomed in the darkness like a bruise spreading through black water. Two points of light, distant at first, then closer. Eyes. Not amber like they'd been in the alley behind the garbage bags. Purple now, deep and old and watching.

The black cat.

It sat in the darkness as if darkness were a floor, a room, a place where cats could exist. Grooming itself. Licking one paw with the casual indifference of something that had seen universes end and found them boring. Its fur was the same black as the inside of the snake, indistinguishable except for those eyes—purple, patient, fixed on him without urgency.

It finished grooming. Set its paw down. Blinked once, slow and deliberate.

Then it stood up.

That was enough.

Kori's mouth opened. The pressure crushed his chest, his throat, his jaw—but the word came anyway, clawing up from somewhere deeper than lungs, deeper than breath, from the place where the cat had fused with his spine and dissolved and left only this.

"Scythe."

The blade erupted from his palm.

He cut.

One stroke. Two. Black against black, obsidian against meat. His arm moved—not because he told it to, not because he decided, but because the thing in his spine had stood up and now his body remembered what it was. The blade carved through darkness, through pressure, through—

Nothing.

The snake vanished. No spray of ichor, no parting flesh. One moment it was there, crushing, digesting, absolute. The next—gone. Like it had never existed. Like the two thousand feet of scale and fang had been a hallucination shared by an entire city block.

Kori tumbled out of empty air and hit cement.

The impact jarred through his shoulders, his spine, his skull. He rolled, came up on one knee, scythe still in his grip, slashing at nothing. His heart slammed against his ribs. His breath came in ragged gasps. Adrenaline flooded every nerve, screaming for a threat that had simply stopped existing.

The alley was gone.

Where the alley had been—where two buildings had stood, four stories each, brick and concrete and the small lives of people who had nothing to do with devils—there was sky. Rubble spilled across the street in drifts of shattered masonry. Glass glittered everywhere, catching the sunset light. A car alarm wailed. Someone was screaming, thin and distant.

And Mori danced through the wreckage.

Not walked. Danced. Tiptoeing around chunks of debris like a child avoiding puddles after rain, arms out for balance, head tilted to watch her own feet. The sunset caught her from behind—orange and gold streaming through the dust, silhouetting her against the destruction like some kind of twisted radiant goddess descending to survey her work.

She spun once, light on her feet, and came to rest facing him. Her smile hadn't changed. It had stretched.

"Ahhhhh, Kuroshi-san." The sound was drawn out, savoring. "You disobeyed the first rule. Naughty, naughty boy."

The words dissolved into giggles. Actual giggles, bright and musical, completely wrong against the backdrop of rubble and distant screams.

"But you were already dead, weren't you?" She tilted her head, that gesture again, playful and predatory simultaneously. "Only then did you summon that scythe of yours."

Kori's knuckles were white on the handle. His body was still flooded with the need to fight, to cut, to kill—and there was nothing left to kill. The snake was gone. The threat was gone. Just Mori, dancing in the sunset, giggling about rules.

He weighed his weapons. The scythe in his palm. The words in his mouth.

"This was all a test?" His voice came out harder than he expected. Angrier. "You destroyed half the street."

Mori's eyes widened.

Not with shock. Not with offense. With something else—something bright and hungry that made her emerald irises catch the dying light like a cat's. Her smile crept wider, stretching into a grin that showed too many teeth.

"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, I like that look."

She walked toward him. Not dancing now. Direct. Purposeful. Kori's grip tightened on the scythe but he didn't move, didn't step back, didn't do anything except watch her close the distance between them.

"Ya gonna kill me now?" She stopped in front of him, close, too close. One hand landed on his shoulder—light, almost friendly. The other wrapped around his wrist, around the hand holding the scythe, and guided it upward. Toward her. "Come on then."

She pressed the blade against her own throat.

The obsidian edge dimpled her skin. One twitch and she'd be bleeding. One real stroke and she'd be dead. Her pulse jumped visibly in her neck, rapid, excited.

"Feel that?" Her voice was softer now, almost intimate. Her eyes never left his. "How fast my heart's beating?" She leaned into the blade, just slightly, just enough to make the edge bite. "You excite me so~"

The tilde hung in the air. Sing-song. Savoring.

Crazy woman.

Kori held the blade steady. Not pressing. Not pulling back. Just... there. Against her throat. Feeling her pulse through the obsidian, through his palm, through whatever connected him to the weapon that had grown from his spine.

"You killed people," he said.

"Mm, probably." She didn't sound concerned. "Does that make you want to press harder?"

It did. That was the thing. It did. The contract pulsed in his spine—she was a contractor, bound to a devil, and the terms said all devils, no exceptions. The line between "devil" and "person who uses devils" was blurrier than it should be with her pulse jumping against his blade.

He lowered the scythe.

Mori's grin softened into something almost like approval. She released his wrist, patted his shoulder twice, and stepped back.

"Good boy," she said. "You're learning."

She turned and walked toward the mouth of the ruined street, picking her way through debris, humming something tuneless under her breath.

Kori stood in the rubble and watched her go. His hand was still shaking. Not from fear. From something else—the aftermath of adrenaline, the weight of the choice he'd just made, the memory of her pulse against obsidian.

She'd wanted him to do it. Or she'd wanted to see if he would. Or she'd just wanted to feel the blade against her throat and his anger behind it.

He didn't know which was worse.

The street was worse than the alley.

A woman stood frozen on the sidewalk, grocery bags at her feet, oranges rolling into the gutter. Her mouth was open. No sound came out. Beside her, a salaryman had stopped mid-stride, briefcase dangling from fingers that had forgotten how to grip. A child on a bicycle had fallen over and wasn't getting up—just lying there, staring at the sky, at the space where something had been.

They'd seen it.

All of them had seen it. The snake materializing from nothing—two thousand feet of scale and fang and impossible mass, descending like the sky had grown teeth. One second of existence. Less than one second. A hallucination shared by an entire block, a fever dream made of muscle and bone, there and gone before the brain could finish processing what the eyes had witnessed.

But the destruction was real.

The alley had been narrow. Two buildings rising on either side, four stories each, brick and concrete and glass. Ordinary. Unremarkable. The kind of structures that existed in every district, housing offices and apartments and the small lives of people who had nothing to do with devils.

They weren't there anymore.

Where the buildings had stood, there was nothing. A gaping wound in the city block, rubble spilling across the street in drifts of shattered concrete and twisted rebar. Glass everywhere—glittering on the pavement, embedded in cars, scattered across a radius that stretched a hundred meters in every direction. The rooftops that had kissed the sky were gone. Just gone. Carved away like something massive had descended from above and taken everything in its path.

A car alarm wailed. Then another. A dog was barking somewhere, frantic, endless. Someone started screaming—high and thin, the sound of a mind trying to reject what it had just witnessed. A shop owner stumbled out of his door, looked at the crater where two buildings used to be, and sat down on the curb like his legs had simply stopped working.

Kori looked up.

The sky was visible now. Too much of it. The buildings on either side of the gap leaned slightly, their structural integrity compromised by whatever force had ripped through the block. Dust still hung in the air, catching the afternoon light, turning the destruction into something almost beautiful.

An old man was crying. Standing in front of what had been an entrance to an apartment complex, now just a wall of debris, crying without sound. His hands hung at his sides. He didn't wipe his face.

Two thousand feet. The snake had been two thousand feet of scale and muscle and fangs, descending like a god's fist, existing for one heartbeat, and the city had crumpled around its arrival like paper in a hurricane. These people had watched it happen. Had seen the impossible. And now they were standing in the aftermath, trying to reconcile a one-second hallucination with the very real rubble crushing the cars they'd parked this morning.

Sirens in the distance. Getting closer. A mother pulled her child away from the debris, moving on autopilot, her face blank. A teenager was filming with his phone, hands shaking so badly the footage would be useless. Someone was praying—Kori could hear the words, rapid and desperate, a man bargaining with gods who hadn't been watching.

Mori kept walking. Picking her way through the debris with the same casual pace she'd used on the patrol route, stepping over chunks of masonry like they were nothing at all. The civilians parted around her without seeming to notice her, their attention fixed on the destruction, on the sky, on the memory of something that couldn't have been real.

"Don't worry," she said over her shoulder. "They'll say it was a random devil."

Kori stared at the destruction. The buildings that had housed people. The cars crushed under falling debris. The grandmother still crying soundlessly in front of what used to be her home. The scope of what Mori had done—not to test him, not to prove a point, but just because she could. Because feeding him to a snake meant summoning something that could level a city block, and she'd done it anyway.

In an alley. On a patrol route. In the middle of the afternoon.

The woman with the groceries finally moved. Bent down. Started picking up her oranges, one by one, placing them back in the bag with the careful precision of someone whose mind had gone somewhere else entirely.

Mori glanced back at him. That smile still in place. Those emerald eyes bright with something that wasn't quite human.

"Coming, little scythe?"

She raised her hand to brush hair from her face. Casual. Automatic. And Kori saw it—the ring finger of her right hand, the nail bed raw and pink where a nail had been minutes ago.

One fingernail.

That was the cost. Two buildings erased. Dozens of lives upended. A crater in the middle of a city block, rubble and glass and the screaming of people who'd just watched the impossible. All of it—the two thousand feet of scale and fang, the destruction that would take months to clear—purchased for the price of one fingernail.

The cartilage was already forming. In a week, maybe two, the nail would grow back. And she could do it again.

She was a monster.

Not like the devils. Not like the things that crawled from fear and hunger and the dark spaces of human imagination. She was something else—something that wore a soft voice and a warm smile and could erase two buildings full of people just to see what a new hybrid would do. Something that paid for apocalypse in fingernails and called it a fair trade.

There was no going back.

Kori understood that now, standing in the rubble, watching Mori wait for him with patient emerald eyes. This was the world he'd stepped into. Not the world of Class D devils and routine patrols. The world where people like her existed—people who could level city blocks for the cost of a manicure, who smiled while civilians wept in the wreckage, who tested new hybrids by feeding them to snakes the size of skyscrapers.

There were levels to this. And he had just glimpsed how far up they went.

Kori stepped over the rubble and followed her toward the sirens.

Behind him, the woman finished collecting her oranges. Stood up. Walked away in the wrong direction, bag clutched to her chest, not looking back.

Somewhere in his spine, the cat had settled back down. Satisfied. Patient.

Waiting for the next time it needed to stand.

The ramen shop was small, tucked between a closed pharmacy and a pachinko parlor with half its lights burnt out. Evening had settled over Shibuya, the neon just starting to flicker on, salarymen loosening their ties as they spilled from office buildings into the night.

Two hours since the crater. Two hours of walking patrol routes like nothing had happened, like Mori hadn't erased two buildings and swallowed him whole, like the sunset hadn't caught her dancing through rubble like a goddess made of destruction.

Mori pulled him through the entrance by the wrist, her fingers light but insistent, steering him toward the counter stools like he was a child who might wander off. Eight seats, a grill behind the counter, steam rising from pots that had been simmering since morning. The owner glanced up, saw their suits, saw something in Kori's face, and said nothing.

"Two spicy miso," Mori said. "Extra egg on mine. Ahhh, and gyoza? Yes. Gyoza."

She settled onto a stool, patting the one beside her. Kori sat. The vinyl was cracked and warm from whoever had been there before.

The grill hissed. Eggs cracked onto the flat surface, whites spreading and crisping at the edges. Mori's eyes widened—actually widened, bright and delighted, like a child watching fireworks.

Monster.

She had danced through rubble at sunset. Guided his blade to her throat. Smiled while civilians screamed in the distance. And now she was bouncing slightly on her stool, watching eggs sizzle, making a small pleased sound in the back of her throat.

"I love this place," she said. "The broth here, Kuroshi-san, you have no idea. They simmer the pork bones for sixteen hours. Sixteen." She held up her hands, fingers spread, like the number itself was miraculous. "Most places do eight, maybe ten if they're serious. But sixteen? That's dedication. That's love."

The bowls arrived. Steam curled upward, carrying the smell of miso and chili oil and something deeper, richer—the sixteen hours of simmered bone rendered down to essence. Mori broke her chopsticks apart, rubbed them together once to smooth the splinters, and lifted a tangle of noodles to her lips.

She blew on them. Gently. Patiently. Her breath stirring the steam.

Then she ate, and her whole face changed. Eyes closing. Shoulders dropping. A soft "mmm~" that came from somewhere genuine, somewhere that had nothing to do with snakes or scythes or the destruction they'd left behind hours ago.

"So good," she murmured. "So, so good."

Monster.

Kori's hands were wrapped around his own bowl. The ceramic was hot—almost too hot, the heat seeping into his palms, his fingers, the bones beneath. But his hands were cold. Cold despite the broth. Cold despite the steam. Cold like they'd been inside the snake, inside the dark, inside the pressure that had crushed his ribs and squeezed his lungs and—

The smell hit him.

Not the ramen. Something else. Something underneath. The deathly musk of the snake's throat, the wet copper stench of something ancient, the membrane walls pressing against his face, his chest, his—

"The gyoza here is also excellent."

Mori's voice cut through. She was talking again, chopsticks gesturing, completely at ease. Her thigh was pressed against his under the counter. When had that happened? She was close—too close, angled toward him on her stool, her knee bumping his, her elbow brushing his arm when she reached for the chili oil.

"Kuroshi-san, you have to try the gyoza with the—oh, they do this sauce, it's soy and vinegar but also something else, I've asked and they won't tell me, I think it might be—"

She kept talking. Mundane things. The sauce. The owner's daughter who sometimes worked weekends. A different ramen place in Shinjuku that wasn't as good but had better seating. Her voice was light, melodic, filling the space between them like she was afraid of silence.

Or like she enjoyed the sound of her own words.

Her eyes kept finding his. Emerald bright, catching the overhead lights, bleeding into his gaze every time he looked up. She'd lean in when she made a point, her shoulder touching his, her hand landing briefly on his forearm to emphasize something about noodle thickness or broth clarity.

Anyone walking by would think they were a couple. The closeness. The touching. The way she looked at him like he was the most interesting thing in the room. Two coworkers unwinding after a long shift, if you didn't look too closely at his eyes.

Kori hadn't touched his ramen.

The broth sat in front of him, steam still rising, surface gleaming with chili oil. His hands were still wrapped around the bowl. Still cold. His chopsticks lay untouched on their rest.

"You're not eating."

Mori had stopped mid-sentence. Her head tilted, that gesture, watching him with something that might have been concern or might have been curiosity or might have been the same clinical interest she'd shown in the alley.

"No appetite?"

Before he could answer, her chopsticks were in his bowl. She twirled them expertly, catching noodles and a slice of pork and a perfect half-moon of egg, lifting the tangle toward his face.

"Ahhh," she said. Her mouth opened slightly, demonstrating. Like feeding a child. Like training a pet.

The noodles touched his lips. She pushed, gentle but insistent, and they were in his mouth—hot, rich, the spice hitting the back of his throat.

"Chew."

He chewed. Mori watched, her eyes practically bouncing with each movement of his jaw. That same smile. The same smile she'd worn in the alley, in the rubble, with her pulse jumping against his blade.

Debris. Glass. Death. Cries. Dust. Monster. Snake. Devils. Debris. Dust. Run. Freeze.

Scythe.

Kill. All. Devils.

The noodles were good. He could tell they were good, somewhere distant, somewhere that wasn't drowning in the memory of being swallowed. The broth was rich. The pork was tender. The spice built slowly, warming from the inside.

His hands were shaking.

"Kuroshi-san."

Mori's voice was softer now. She slurped another bite from her own bowl, casual, unhurried. Her thigh was still warm against his.

"You're shaking."

He looked down. She was right. His hands, still wrapped around the bowl, were trembling. Small tremors running through his fingers, his wrists, up into his arms. The ceramic rattled faintly against the counter.

Mori reached over. Lifted noodles from her own bowl. Held them toward him again.

"Eat."

He ate. She watched. Slurped another bite of her own. Wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

"Don't worry," she said. Her smile was warm. Genuine, almost. The smile of someone who had done this before, seen this before, sat beside shaking handlers and broken assets and people who had just learned what this job actually meant. "Everyone's a little shaky on the first day."

First day.

The patrol. The rules. The alley. The snake. The two thousand feet of scale and fang, the buildings erased, the civilians screaming, the blade at her throat and her pulse jumping and "you excite me so~"

First day.

Mori finished her bowl. Drank the broth directly, tipping it back, throat working as she swallowed. Set it down with a satisfied sigh.

"We should get back," she said. "Hayashi really does hate late reports."

She stood. Stretched. Left money on the counter without counting it.

Kori looked at his bowl. Still mostly full. The broth had stopped steaming. The noodles were starting to swell, absorbing liquid, losing their texture.

He stood. Followed her toward the door.

The owner didn't say goodbye. Didn't look up. Just kept wiping the counter, kept tending the grill, kept existing in a world where people in rumpled suits came in shaking and left the same way.

Outside, Shibuya hummed with nightlife. Neon reflected off wet pavement. Somewhere across the district, cleanup crews were still working the crater—the missing buildings, the witnesses who swore they'd seen a snake the size of a skyscraper for exactly one second before sunset.

Random devil attack. Casualties pending. Investigation ongoing.

First day.

Kori followed Mori back toward headquarters, his hands still cold, his body still shaking, the taste of spicy broth sitting wrong in his stomach.

This was the job. This was what he'd signed up for. This was Public Safety.

Monsters feeding monsters while the city cleaned up after them.

Director Yoshida's office was on the fourth floor, corner unit, windows overlooking the plaza where Kori had walked in yesterday not knowing what he was. The door was already open when he arrived. Mori was already inside.

She turned when he entered. Her eyes caught the morning light—emerald bright, shining with something that looked almost like joy. Like a girl seeing her favorite puppy scurry through the door to greet her.

"Kuroshi-san~" she sang. "Good morning, good morning."

Yoshida sat behind her desk, severe as she'd been in the briefing room. The same face that had looked at Kori like he was a problem to be solved. She gestured to the empty chair beside Mori.

"Sit."

Kori sat.

The office was sparse. Desk, chairs, a filing cabinet, a single plant that looked like it had given up on life months ago. No photographs. No personal effects. Just the tools of administration and the woman who wielded them.

"Agent Mori's preliminary report," Yoshida said. She didn't look at the folder in front of her. Didn't need to. "Initial patrol. New district route. One incident."

One incident. Two buildings erased. Dozens of civilians traumatized. A crater that would take months to clear.

One incident.

"How did yesterday go?" Yoshida's eyes moved to Kori. Gray and flat, like stones at the bottom of a still pond. "Were you compliant? Did you follow the three rules?"

Kori opened his mouth.

"He behaved really, really well."

Mori's voice cut in before he could speak. She was leaning forward slightly, hands folded in her lap, smile warm and earnest. The picture of a proud handler reporting on her charge.

"Followed instructions perfectly," she continued. "Didn't manifest without permission. Stayed within the patrol boundaries. When the incident occurred, he responded exactly as trained." Her eyes flicked to Kori, just for a moment. Bright. Amused. "A model first day, really."

Yoshida's gaze moved between them. Lingered on Mori. Lingered on the smile that hadn't wavered.

"The incident," she said. "The new district. Two buildings collapsed. Witnesses report a large serpentine entity manifesting for approximately one second before disappearing."

The words hung in the air. Weighted. Yoshida knew. She had to know—she'd seen Mori's contract file, seen the cost, seen what "shuu" could do. The destroyed buildings weren't a mystery. They were a question she was choosing not to ask.

Mori kept smiling.

"Random devil attack," she said. "Unfortunate timing. But Kuroshi-san handled himself admirably under pressure."

Yoshida looked at her for a long moment. The silence stretched. Kori could hear the ventilation system humming, the distant murmur of the building going about its business four floors below.

Then Yoshida looked down at her folder. Made a note. Closed it.

"Assessment acknowledged," she said. "Kuroshi Kori. Hybrid. Weapon-class. Compliant asset."

Compliant.

He'd drawn his scythe without permission. Broken rule three. Held the blade to his handler's throat and considered—genuinely considered—pressing it through. And now he was being filed as compliant.

"His placement paperwork will be processed immediately," Yoshida continued. "Until a permanent assignment is determined, he remains under your supervision, Agent Mori."

Mori's smile deepened. Something shifted behind her eyes—satisfaction, maybe. Possession.

"Of course, Director."

"Dismissed."

They stood. Mori first, then Kori, following her lead like he was supposed to. Like a compliant asset would. They walked to the door, footsteps soft on the thin carpet, and Kori felt Yoshida's gaze on his back the entire way.

She knew. She had to know.

Some things weren't worth prying at. Some monsters were more useful left unexamined.

The door closed behind them.

The hallway was empty. Morning light streamed through windows at the far end, catching dust motes, making the air look thick and golden. Mori walked ahead, humming something tuneless, her steps light.

"You lied."

She stopped. Turned. That smile still in place, head tilted, waiting.

"You lied to Yoshida," Kori said. "Covered for me. I drew my scythe. I broke rule three. I—"

Her hand moved.

Fast. Faster than he expected. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist and pulled—not hard, just insistent—guiding his hand upward, toward her. Toward her neck.

She pressed his palm against her throat.

The same place. The same skin where his blade had rested, where obsidian had dimpled flesh, where one twitch would have opened her from ear to ear. He could feel her pulse beneath his fingers. Rapid. Excited.

Badum. Badum. Badum.

She leaned in. Close. Too close. Her breath warm against his cheek, her eyes filling his vision, emerald bleeding into emerald until there was nothing else.

"Where's the fun," she whispered, "in losing my little scythe~?"

A shiver ran up his spine. The thing inside him stirred—not in warning, not in threat, but in something else. Recognition, maybe. One predator acknowledging another.

Mori's pulse jumped under his palm.

Then she leaned closer still. Her lips brushed his ear. Her voice dropped to something private, intimate, meant only for him.

"Today we patrol the harbor district. Ōi Wharf." Her fingers tightened on his wrist, keeping his hand pressed to her throat. "There's a devil there. Been feeding on dock workers for three weeks. Class B. Maybe higher." Her pulse quickened. "Very, very bad."

She pulled back just enough to meet his eyes. That smile. That hungry, delighted smile.

"Won't you kill it for me?"

Kori's hand was still on her throat. Her pulse still racing under his palm. The contract pulsed in his spine—kill all devils—and for the first time since the fusion, the demand felt less like a burden and more like a promise.

"Yes."

Mori's smile stretched wider. She released his wrist, patted his cheek once—light, affectionate, proprietary—and turned back down the hallway.

"Good boy," she called over her shoulder. "Meet me at the east exit in ten minutes. And Kuroshi-san?"

She glanced back. Emerald eyes catching the light.

"This time, you have permission."

She walked away, humming again, leaving Kori alone in the golden hallway with his hand still raised and the ghost of her pulse fading from his fingertips.

Permission.

The scythe stirred in his spine. Patient. Eager.

Finally.

The drive to the docks was an eternity.

At least it felt like it. The city blurred past—buildings, intersections, the slow crawl of morning traffic—and Kori sat in the passenger seat with his hands in his lap and the memory of her throat still warm against his palm.

The way it had felt. The warmth. The pulse jumping beneath skin. And when she'd swallowed—that small motion, involuntary, the muscles moving down—it had reminded him of the snake. The walls pressing in. The darkness swallowing him whole.

He flexed his fingers. Tried to shake the sensation.

Beside him, Mori was giddy.

There was no other word for it. She sat angled toward the window, watching the scenery change as they left the city center and headed toward the bay. When the first glimpse of ocean appeared—blue water catching sunlight, clearing over the windshield like a promise—she made a small sound in the back of her throat. Pleased. Excited.

Class B Devil. Not like the Drain Devil from the first patrol, that pathetic thing of wet hair and milky eyes. Not like the Claw Devil that had killed Hina eight years ago, Class C, something an experienced hunter should have handled alone.

This was real. An actual threat.

Kori didn't know if the tightness in his chest was fear or anticipation. Didn't know if the building pressure behind his ribs belonged to him or to the thing coiled in his spine, stirring at the promise of violence.

Mori glanced over. Caught him looking.

"Excited?" she asked. That smile.

He didn't answer.

She laughed, soft and delighted, and turned back to the window.

Ōi Wharf was industrial. Cranes. Shipping containers stacked like children's blocks. The smell of salt and diesel and rust, the cry of gulls circling overhead. The kind of place where people disappeared and no one asked questions.

The workers had been evacuated.

Public Safety tape stretched across the entrances, yellow and black, fluttering in the sea breeze. Two policemen stood at the main gate—young, tense, hands resting on holsters they both knew wouldn't matter. Their eyes tracked Kori and Mori as they approached. Took in the suits. The confidence. The way Mori walked like she owned the place and everything in it.

Neither officer said a word.

Their silent gaze said enough. Handle it. Please. Before anyone else dies.

Mori ducked under the tape. Kori followed.

The wharf stretched ahead—warehouses, loading bays, the skeletal shapes of idle machinery. Empty. Quiet. The kind of quiet that pressed against the ears, that made every footstep too loud, every breath too obvious.

The hangar was at the end of the row. Largest structure on the wharf. Doors rusted half-open, darkness pooling beyond like something liquid, something alive.

Kori felt it before they reached the threshold.

Dread. Heavy and thick, settling into his bones, his blood, the spaces between his thoughts. Power seeping from above, from the darkness of the ceiling, from whatever clung to the rafters and waited. Hungry. Patient. Large.

Class B. Bat Devil.

A monster in its own right. The kind of thing that required Public Safety teams, coordination, casualties factored into the operation cost. The kind of thing that had killed experienced hunters, that had fed on dock workers for three weeks while the system processed paperwork and allocated resources.

Mori stopped at the entrance. Gestured with one hand—after you—and leaned against the doorframe to watch.

Kori stepped into the darkness.

The dread intensified. The power pressed down, trying to freeze him, trying to lock his muscles, trying to trigger the response that had killed his sister eight years ago.

But he'd seen monsters. Real monsters.

His eyes didn't flinch.

"Scythe."

The blade erupted from his palm. Black. Hungry. Ready.

But the attack didn't come.

No dive of pure malice. No swing of claws. No shriek of a beast defending its territory. Instead—

"My oh my."

The voice rolled down from the darkness above. Low. Guttural. Old in a way that had nothing to do with years. It vibrated through the hangar floor, through Kori's bones, through the scythe humming in his grip.

"Finally... something interesting."

A rumble followed. Deep and rasping, shaking loose dust from the rafters. Laughter. The thing was laughing.

Kori held the scythe taut. Behind him, at the entrance, he could feel Mori's gaze—emerald bright, intent, watching.

Silence stretched.

Then: a long, wheezing sniff. The sound of something ancient drawing air through passages that weren't meant for breathing, tasting the space, tasting him.

"I know that smell."

Two red orbs flickered to life in the shadows above. Massive. Glowing like coals banked in ash. The silhouette behind them was vast—wings folded, body hunched where the ceiling met rusted metal, clinging to the rafters like it had grown there.

"Death."

The word hung in the air. Heavy. Certain.

Kori's grip tightened on the scythe. The thing in his spine stirred.

Those red eyes blinked, slow and deliberate.

"I have a proposition."

Movement above. Not an attack—a shift. The massive shape unfurled slightly, and something else became visible in the nest of twisted metal and debris. Small. Pale. Huddled against the devil's bulk like a child seeking warmth.

Humanoid.

Antennas rising from blonde hair the color of sunrise at its peak. Skin bare and trembling. Eyes—soft, blue, terrified—staring down at Kori through the darkness.

A fiend. Moth, from the look of it.

"I've been protecting her," the Bat Devil said. "Weeks now. She stumbled into my lair half-dead, running from your kind." The red eyes narrowed. "Hunters. Public Safety. Whatever you call yourselves these days."

The Moth Fiend pressed closer to the Bat Devil's hide. Shaking. Silent.

"She poses no threat," the devil continued. "Weak. Harmless. Couldn't kill a man if she wanted to. And believe me—" another rumbling laugh "—she doesn't want to."

Kori's thoughts caught on something.

Kill all devils. No matter what.

She was a devil. The fiend was a devil. The contract didn't distinguish between threatening and harmless, between hungry and hiding. The terms were absolute.

"She's a devil," Kori said. His voice sounded strange in the vast space. Flat. Testing. "No matter what. She is a devil."

The Bat Devil was silent for a moment. Then it moved.

It descended.

Slow. Deliberate. Wings spreading to catch the air, lowering itself from the rafters to the center of the hangar floor. Sunlight seeped through gaps in the walls, falling across its form in broken shafts, and Kori saw it clearly for the first time.

Massive. Ten feet tall at least, hunched. Wings spread wide—forty feet across, blotting out the shafts of light, turning the hangar into twilight. Hide thick and coarse like charcoal burnt twenty times over, cracked and seamed with something darker than shadow. Its face was almost human—if humans had been designed by something that hated them. Fangs lined its jaw, crooked and yellow, each as long as Kori's forearm.

It settled onto the concrete. Folded its wings. Those red eyes found his.

"This devil," it said, "has been hunted for weeks. Chased from district to district." A pause. "She stumbled into my lair because she feared death at the hands of you people."

The words landed like stones.

"You call this 'protection'?" The Bat Devil's lip curled. "Evacuations. Tape. Reports. Three weeks late."

Kori held its gaze. The scythe hummed in his palm. The contract pulsed in his spine. Behind him, Mori watched in silence.

"She is still a devil," he said. "Like you are. No different. No less."

The Bat Devil's mouth stretched. Not quite a smile. Something older than smiles.

"Then kill me."

Kori blinked.

"You heard me, boy." The devil spread its arms—massive, leathery, blocking the light. "I've lived long enough. Fed well enough. Three weeks of dock workers was more than I expected, honestly. Sloppy of your organization to let it go on this long."

It took a step forward. Then another. Close enough now that Kori could smell it—copper and rot and something ancient, something that had existed before humans had words for fear.

"You may kill me," the Bat Devil said. "But spare the girl."

The Moth Fiend made a sound above. Small. Broken. A protest or a prayer.

Kori stood in the center of the hangar with a devil offering its life and a fiend trembling in the rafters.

Behind him, Mori was biting a nail. Unable to hide her smile.

He weighed his weapons.

Then spoke.

"Permission to exterminate?"

Mori's answer came out more of a giggle than a decree.

"Granted."

It was not like the first devil he killed.

This was exhilarating. The angle of the blade planted into flesh, the purple splashes that followed. The squelch of obsidian against old-age bone. Resistance that gave way—not like the snake, not like being compressed and helpless. This time the flesh parted for him. Forty feet of wingspan folding, crumpling, falling.

What was the difference, Kori thought. As he watched the Bat Devil bleed a pool of finality. Its eyes—those red, old eyes—diluted of life upon the arc of his blade.

The core of his spine. Reaffirming.

His scythe was given purpose.

Kill. All. Devils.

Kill.

All.

Devils.

He couldn't say whether it was the swiftness of it, or the absence of violence compared to the day Mori's snake had swallowed him whole. Or whether it was her warm fingers entwined with his as she delivered her report to Yoshida—how Kori Kuroshi had dispatched the devils beautifully, amazingly, compliantly. Or perhaps it was the blue, lifeless eyes of the fallen, staring up at him in mute judgment, unblinking even in death—

—the cost of everything.

He dreamed that night.

The black cat napped. Curled in the darkness like darkness was a bed, a home, a place where cats had always belonged.

Its ear perked. Eyes opening just the faintest—purple hues, ancient, staring. Staring beyond even where he stood.

Before he could follow its gaze, he woke.

The next morning brought a revelation.

"Class A," Yoshida said. She didn't look up from the file. "Revised classification. The Bat Devil's age—centuries of accumulated fear—placed it well above initial estimates."

Kori sat in the same chair as before. Mori beside him, her thigh warm against his.

"A monster in its own right." Yoshida closed the file. Her gray eyes lifted, found his. "Experienced hunters have died to lesser threats."

A pause. The ventilation hummed.

"How was it?" Yoshida asked. "Your first real kill."

Kori opened his mouth.

"Ahhh, Yoshida-senpai, you should have seen it—" Mori leaned forward, hands clasping together. "The way his scythe moved. No hesitation. None. The devil was still talking and then—" She made a slicing gesture, smiled wide. "Beautiful. So, so beautiful."

Yoshida's gaze stayed on Kori. Waiting.

"And the fiend?" Mori's voice pitched lighter. "Crying for mercy, ne? Poor thing."

She giggled.

The blue eyes. Staring. Silent.

He blinked.

Yoshida watched him a moment longer. Then her attention shifted to Mori.

"The people upstairs are interested."

"Of course they are~"

"Kuroshi remains under your supervision. Indefinitely." Yoshida's voice flattened. "He is an anomaly. We don't rush decisions about anomalies."

Kori blinked again.

"Understood."

He wasn't sure which of them had said it.

It became routine.

Another devil. Weaker. Class C, maybe D. It crawled from a storm drain in Meguro, all matted fur and too many eyes. The scythe moved. It died. Mori clapped her hands twice, delighted.

Ramen after. Steam rising. Her smile across the counter, chopsticks lifting noodles to her lips, that soft sound she made when the broth was good.

His hands had stopped shaking.

Another patrol. Shinjuku this time, the neon bleeding colors across wet pavement. Nothing. Hours of nothing. Mori filled the silence with observations—that building used to be a love hotel, that alley had a Class B nest last spring, that salaryman was definitely cheating on his wife.

Her shoulder brushed his when they walked. Casual. Constant.

Another devil. Stronger this time, Class C, something with too many limbs that had been picking off homeless in Ueno Park. It shrieked when he cut it. The sound echoed off the trees. Blood sprayed across his suit jacket.

Mori watched from a bench, legs crossed, smile never wavering.

"Beautiful," she said after. Her fingers found his collar, adjusting it, brushing away something that wasn't there. "So beautiful, Kuroshi-san."

Her fingers lingered.

Ramen again. Different shop, same steam, same smile. She ordered for him now. Knew what he liked. Spicy miso, extra egg, the way he'd eaten it that first night when his hands wouldn't stop trembling.

His hands were steady now.

Another patrol. Rain this time, the city gray and dripping, umbrellas blooming on every corner. She walked close enough that they could share one. Her arm looped through his. Anyone watching would think—

It didn't matter what they'd think.

Another devil. Weak. So weak it barely counted. A thing of rust and rot that had been feeding on fear in an abandoned factory. One stroke. Done. The scythe hummed, unsatisfied. Hungry for something more.

He was hungry for something more.

Her hand on his knee during the briefing. Yoshida talking, something about quotas, about expectations, about the people upstairs. Mori's thumb traced circles on his thigh. Slow. Patient. He lost track of what Yoshida was saying.

Kill.

Another devil.

Kill.

Ramen steam.

Kill.

Her fingers in his hair. They were in the break room. Empty. Late. She'd been talking about something—a contractor who'd died badly, the way his body had looked after—and then her hand was in his hair, twisting the strands, tugging gently.

"You're tense," she murmured. "Always so tense, little scythe."

Another devil. Another patrol. Another report filed, another form signed, another day marked off on a calendar he'd stopped looking at.

Blood. The spray of it against concrete, against his hands, against the blade that drank it in and asked for more.

"Good," Mori said. Always after. Always watching. "Good little scythe."

Kill.

Her lap.

It happened between one moment and the next. One second she was beside him, talking, laughing at something he hadn't heard. The next she was there—weight settling onto his thighs, her body warm and close, her face inches from his.

"You looked cold," she said. That smile. Those emerald eyes, swallowing the light. "Can't have my scythe getting cold."

His hands didn't know where to go. She guided them. One to her hip. One to the small of her back. Her fingers returned to his hair, playing, twisting, tugging in a rhythm that matched something he couldn't name.

"There," she breathed. "Isn't that better?"

Kill.

Ichor on the blade, black and steaming.

Kill.

Her breath against his neck, warm, steady, the pulse of her approval.

Kill. All. Devils.

The words in his spine. The only words that mattered. The purpose that filled the space where something else used to be.

How many days?

Her weight on his lap became familiar. Expected. She'd find him—break room, office corner, the back seat of the car between patrols—and she'd settle onto him like it was where she belonged. Like he belonged under her. Her fingers in his hair. Her lips brushing his ear.

"Such a good little scythe," she'd whisper. "Such a good, good boy."

He killed what she pointed at. He sat where she placed him. He let her hands go where they wanted and he stopped asking himself what it meant.

How many weeks?

Another devil. Blood.

Another patrol. Her shoulder against his.

Another night. Her weight, her warmth, her fingers, her voice.

He dreamed.

A boy stood in darkness. Small. Eleven, maybe. Brown eyes too wide, legs locked, mouth open around a word that wouldn't come.

He woke before he could see what the boy was looking at.

Ecstasy. Hers. His. Both.

The blur swallowed everything. Days into weeks. Kills into numbers. Her touch into expectation, into need, into the only warmth he remembered how to feel.

He stopped counting.

The phone lit up.

Unknown number. He let it ring. Twice. Three times.

Picked up.

"Kuroshi-san?"

A woman's voice. Familiar but distant, like a song from childhood through static.

"It's Akane."

Akane.

That name seemed familiar. He'd almost forgotten.

"Ehh, are you there, Kuroshi-san? I hope this isn't a bad time." Rummaging sounds through the speaker. Papers shuffling, something falling, a muffled curse. "It's a miracle, y'know? Most of my calls go straight to voicemail these days."

Kori opened his mouth to respond.

The voice that came out wasn't his.

Or—it was. It had to be. The vibration in his throat, the air passing through his lips. But the sound was wrong. Unfamiliar.

"Y-yes."

"HOH!"

He heard her practically spring up. Something clattered in the background.

"Did you hit puberty again? You sound much different now... ah."

She laughed.

"Did you need something, Akane-san?"

Silence.

"I figured you wouldn't be coming back for a while." Her voice had shifted. Softer. "So I cleaned out your room."

More rummaging. Slower this time. Deliberate.

"I found something you might want. I know it's hard being a devil hunter and all—Hina always told me all about it, ah."

Hina.

"It's a picture," Akane said. "Of you two. From before."

Kori's hand tightened on the phone.

"I thought... I thought you might want it. That's all."

Silence again. Longer this time. He could hear her breathing through the speaker. Uneven. Waiting.

"Kuroshi-san?"

"I'm here."

Still that strange voice. Still not quite his.

"Ah, good. Good." More rummaging. Something being set down. "You know, I could just mail it. The picture. I don't know why I called, really. Habit, maybe. Hina always said I talked too much on the phone. 'Just text, Akane, it's faster.' But I never listened."

She laughed again. Shorter this time.

"How are you? Are you eating enough? The food at those government places is always terrible, isn't it? Hina used to complain about the cafeteria. Said the rice was always cold."

Hina. Again. Woven through sentences like she was still part of the present tense.

"I'm fine."

"That's good. That's good."

A pause. He could hear her swallow.

"It's a nice picture," she said. "You're both smiling. You were maybe... nine? Ten? She's got her arm around you. You're holding something—I can't tell what. A toy, maybe. Or a book."

He didn't remember the picture. He didn't remember smiling.

"Do you want me to bring it to you? Or I could mail it. Whatever's easier. I don't want to bother you. I know you're busy. Devil hunting. Important work."

She was rambling now. Filling the silence he wouldn't fill.

"I could come," he said.

That unfamiliar voice.

"To pick it up. I could come."

Silence.

"Oh." Her voice cracked on the word. Just slightly. Just enough. "Oh, that would be... yes. Yes, that would be nice, Kuroshi-san. That would be very nice."

He didn't know why he'd said it. Didn't know if he meant it. Didn't know if he was allowed to leave, to go somewhere Mori hadn't pointed him, to want something that wasn't kill or comply or her warmth on his lap.

But he'd said it. And Akane was crying now—quietly, trying to hide it, failing.

"Whenever you're free," she managed. "No rush. Whenever you're free."

"Okay."

"Okay."

Neither of them hung up. The line stayed open. Breathing. Waiting.

"Kuroshi-san?"

"Yes?"

A long pause. He could hear her choosing words, discarding them, choosing again.

"Never mind. I'll... I'll see you soon."

The line went dead.

Kori sat with the phone in his hand. The screen dark. The room quiet.

From before, she'd said. A picture from before.

He couldn't remember what before felt like.

He walked out of his room.

The hallway stretched long and fluorescent, the same hallway he'd walked every day since they'd placed him here. Shibuya Public Safety HQ. Temporary housing for assets awaiting permanent allocation. A room with a bed and a window and nothing else.

The conversation lingered. The phone felt heavy in his pocket. Heavier than the concrete weights in the gym. Heavier than the scythe.

Rule two. No travel outside approved districts without authorization. All movement must be approved by supervising personnel and logged with headquarters.

He went to the main hub.

Workers typed endlessly at their desks. Devils. Civilian deaths. Hunter deaths. The cost, the price—all of it translated to words, paper, numbers in columns. A woman had lost her husband last week. A man was filing for property damage. Two children sat in plastic chairs, waiting for someone to tell them where they'd go now.

Kori approached the desk.

"Short visit," he said. "My aunt's house. Retrieving something."

The clerk didn't look up. Fingers on keyboard. Eyes on screen.

"Name?"

"Kuroshi. Kori."

A pause. The typing stopped. The clerk glanced at his file, at whatever flags it contained, at whatever notes had been added over the weeks of compliance.

"Duration?"

"A few hours."

More typing. A stamp. A form sliding across the counter.

"Sign here."

He signed. The clerk was already typing at the next thing, stamping the next document, processing the next request. Kori was approved and forgotten in the same breath.

He walked toward the exit.

The glass doors towered ahead. He'd walked through them dozens of times—with Mori, always with Mori, her hand on his arm, her voice in his ear. But now they seemed larger. The sunlight beyond them brighter. The distance between here and there impossibly vast.

He was nervous.

Why? No devil's presence. No dread pressing down on his bones. Just glass and sunlight and a world he hadn't walked alone in weeks.

His thoughts drifted to Akane. The way her voice had cracked. The way she'd spoken of Hina. A speck of light in an ocean of waves.

And he was swimming.

"Little scythe."

He stopped.

Pink, pressed lips. The smell of olive drenched in apricot. A hand that wrapped around his own, fingers sliding between his like they belonged there.

His eyes lifted. Met the green.

"Where you off to?"

Silence.

People passed. Devil hunters returning from patrol. Parents filing for devil damage insurance. Death insurance. A child crying somewhere. The endless hum of bureaucracy grinding lives into paperwork.

A suspended moment. Her smile no longer a smile. Her question no longer a question.

"To visit my aunt."

"Why?"

"No reason."

"Always a reason."

"I got permission."

Her smile flickered. Just for a moment. Just enough.

"I'll go with!"

Then—for the first time since the little boy died in that alley—

"No."

"No?"

"No."

He didn't remember shoving her arm away. Didn't remember the way her fingers slipped from his, the way her lips pressed thin and turned ghostly white. Didn't remember the sound she made—if she made any sound at all.

But he remembered the sun.

The way it warmed his face as he walked through the glass doors.

He kept walking.

The train was quiet.

Mid-morning, midweek. Salarymen had already filed into their offices. Students were in class. The car held only a few passengers—an elderly woman with a shopping bag, a young mother with a sleeping toddler, a man in paint-stained clothes nodding off against the window.

Kori sat with his hands on his knees. Watching the city pass.

He hadn't taken a train alone in weeks. Hadn't gone anywhere without Mori beside him, her shoulder brushing his, her voice filling the space between stations. Now there was only the rattle of wheels on track. The automated announcements. The silence of strangers sharing a metal box hurtling through the morning.

His reflection stared back from the window. Dark hair. Brown eyes. The face of someone he used to know.

The train slowed. His stop.

He stood. Walked to the doors. Stepped out onto a platform he hadn't seen in—how long? Weeks. A month. Longer. Time had become unreliable.

The neighborhood looked the same. Narrow streets. Small houses pressed close together. Laundry hanging from balconies. A convenience store on the corner where he used to buy popsicles in summer, back when summer meant something other than patrol routes and the weight of a blade in his palm.

He walked.

Left at the shrine. Right at the vending machines. Straight past the park where children were playing—their laughter strange and distant, like a language he'd forgotten how to speak.

Akane's house was small. Concrete and wood. Unremarkable. The kind of place that existed in every neighborhood in Tokyo, housing lives that would never make the news.

He walked to the door. Green paint chipped at the corners.

He stood there.

The door was painted green. Chipped at the corners. A small nameplate read KUROSHI in faded characters. His name. Hina's name. The name of people who had lived here, once.

He raised his hand to knock.

Hesitated.

The door opened anyway.

"I saw you from the window," Akane said. "You were standing on the street for five minutes."

She looked older. Not dramatically—just the accumulation of years he hadn't been watching. Gray threading through her hair at the temples. Lines around her eyes that deepened when she smiled. She was smiling now. Trying to.

"Come in, come in. I made tea. Well, I made tea an hour ago. I'll make more tea."

She stepped aside. He stepped in.

The apartment was small. Two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom. He knew this. He'd lived here for eight years. But it felt unfamiliar now—like a photograph of a place rather than the place itself.

Shoes off at the genkan. The same slippers she'd always kept for guests, though he wasn't sure he counted as a guest. The same calendar on the wall, two months behind. The same clock ticking above the kitchen doorway, slightly fast, always slightly fast.

"Sit, sit." Akane gestured toward the low table in the main room. "I'll bring the tea."

He sat.

The cushion was the same one he'd sat on for eight years of dinners, homework, silence. Faded blue. A small tear in one corner that had been there since before Hina died.

Since before.

The room held ghosts.

Not literal ones—he knew what real devils felt like now, the press of their presence, the weight of their fear. This was different. This was the indent in the cushion across from him where Hina used to sit. The bookshelf still holding her paperbacks, spines cracked, pages soft with rereading. The window she'd stare out of when she was thinking, watching the street below, waiting for something that never came.

Akane returned with tea. Set a cup in front of him. Sat across the table, in the indent, in the ghost.

"So," she said.

"So."

Silence.

She lifted her cup. Blew on it. Didn't drink.

"You look different," she said. "Not bad different. Just... different. More..."

She trailed off. Searching for the word.

"Solid," she decided. "You look more solid. Like you're actually here." A small laugh. "You always seemed like you were somewhere else, before. Even when you were sitting right in front of me. Like part of you was... away."

He didn't know what to say to that. So he said nothing.

Akane drank her tea. Set the cup down. Picked it up again.

"The picture," she said. "Right. I should—let me get it."

She stood. Went to the bedroom. He heard drawers opening, closing. Something falling. A muffled curse.

He looked around the room.

The bookshelf. Hina's books. He stood without meaning to. Crossed to it. Let his fingers brush the spines.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. She'd read it three times. Said it made her feel less alone.

Norwegian Wood. Dog-eared at page 156. She'd never finished it.

A small figurine on the top shelf—a cat, black, ceramic. He'd given it to her for her birthday when he was nine. Saved up coins for months. She'd laughed and put it on her shelf and never moved it.

It was still there. Dusty now. But still there.

"Found it!"

Akane emerged from the bedroom, holding something small. She paused when she saw him at the bookshelf. Her expression flickered—something passing through, too quick to name.

"I never moved her things," she said. "I kept meaning to. Every year I'd say, this is the year. I'll box them up. Donate them. Something." She looked at the books. "But then I'd think, what if she needs them? What if she comes back and her books aren't there?"

She laughed again. That same laugh—too bright, too quick.

"Stupid, right? She's not coming back. I know that. I've known that for eight years. But the books stay."

Kori looked at the black cat. The dust on its head.

"It's not stupid," he said.

His voice. Still unfamiliar. But closer now. Closer to something he recognized.

Akane crossed to him. Held out the photograph.

"Here."

He took it.

He knew this photograph.

It had sat on his shelf for eight years. Facing the wall. Unable to look at, unable to throw away. The night before he'd left for Public Safety, he'd finally turned it around. Faced it. Faced her.

And then he'd left it behind.

Small. Wallet-sized. The colors slightly faded, the edges soft with age.

He'd only seen Hina when he'd looked at it. Brown eyes warm in the flash. Her smile—the one she wore when she teased him, when she laughed, when she walked three steps ahead with groceries in hand.

But there was more.

He was in the photograph too. A boy, nine or ten. Brown eyes too big for his face. Skinny. Holding something—a book, a manga. He couldn't make out the title.

Hina's arm was around him. Her summer dress was blue with white flowers. They were both smiling.

He'd never seen himself in it before. Eight years of the photograph facing the wall, and when he'd finally turned it around, he'd only had eyes for her. For what he'd lost.

He hadn't seen the boy. Hadn't seen the smile. Hadn't seen the way he leaned into her arm like the world was a place where people stayed.

"It was at the summer festival," Akane said. She was standing beside him, looking at the picture too. "The one near the river. Hina took you every year. She said you liked the goldfish game, even though you never won."

The goldfish game. He almost remembered. The flash of orange in cloudy water. The paper net dissolving before he could scoop anything.

"She won for you," Akane continued. "That year. Scooped three in a row. The guy running the booth looked so annoyed." A real smile now. Small but real. "She gave you the biggest one. You named it... what did you name it?"

Kori shook his head. He didn't remember.

"Something silly. You were always naming things something silly." Akane's smile faded. Not into sadness—into something softer. Memory. "She talked about you all the time, you know. When she'd come visit. 'Kori did this, Kori said that.' Like you were the most interesting person in the world."

Kori looked at the photograph. At the boy who had been interesting. At the sister who had thought so.

"She was proud of you," Akane said. "I don't know if she ever told you that. She wasn't good at saying things like that out loud. But she was. So proud."

The words landed somewhere in his chest. Somewhere that had been closed for a long time.

"I never—" he started.

Stopped.

Started again.

"I never thanked her."

Akane was quiet.

"For raising me. For giving up—" His voice caught. That unfamiliar voice, breaking on words it didn't know how to carry. "Public Safety wanted to recruit her. She was good. Really good. She could have—"

"She could have done a lot of things," Akane said. "She chose you."

"She died because of me."

There it was. The thing he'd never said out loud. The thing that had lived in his chest for eight years, growing heavier with every breath, every silence, every moment he didn't let himself look at it directly.

Akane didn't flinch.

"Kori."

His name. Not Kuroshi-san. Not little scythe. His name, spoken by someone who had known him when it meant something.

"Look at me."

He looked.

Her eyes were wet. But her voice was steady.

"You were eleven years old. A child. You didn't have a weapon, you didn't have training, you didn't have anything except a sister who told you to run." She reached out. Took his hand. Her fingers were warm and dry and nothing like Mori's. "Children freeze. That's what bodies do. That's what human beings do when they're terrified. It's not a choice. It's not a failure. It's just—"

She stopped. Swallowed.

"It's just what happens."

"She told me to run."

"I know."

"I didn't run."

"I know."

"She died."

"I know." Akane's grip tightened on his hand. "I know, Kori. I've known for eight years. And I've spent eight years not saying this because I didn't know how, because every time I looked at you I saw her, and I couldn't—"

Her voice broke. She pressed on anyway.

"I blamed you. For a long time. Not out loud, not even to myself, but somewhere underneath. I looked at you and I thought, why did he live? Why did she die? It wasn't fair. None of it was fair. So I made it your fault because I needed it to be someone's fault."

The room was very quiet. The clock ticking, slightly fast. The sounds of the neighborhood drifting in through the window.

"But it wasn't your fault." Akane's voice was barely a whisper now. "It was never your fault. You were a child. You were her child, really. She raised you. She loved you. And she would be—"

She stopped. Tears were falling now, tracking down the lines around her eyes.

"She would be so angry at me. For letting you think it was your fault. For not saying this sooner. For being such a coward that I couldn't look at a grieving boy and tell him it wasn't his fault."

Kori stood very still. The photograph in one hand. Akane's grip on the other.

Something was cracking. Something that had been frozen for a long time.

"I'm sorry," Akane said. "I'm so sorry, Kori. I should have—I should have been better. I should have been what you needed. And I wasn't. I was just—I was grieving too, and I didn't know how to grieve and raise a child at the same time, and I—"

"You kept me."

The words came out before he knew they were there. That unfamiliar voice, saying something true.

"You kept me. You didn't have to. You could have given me to the system. To foster care. To anyone. But you kept me."

Akane stared at him.

"Of course I kept you." Her voice was raw. Confused, almost. Like he'd said something impossible. "You were Hina's. You were hers. I couldn't—I couldn't let her—"

She couldn't finish. She didn't need to.

Kori looked at the photograph. The smiling boy. The sister's arm around him.

"She'd want you to keep this," Akane said. "The picture. She'd want you to remember what it was like. Before."

Before.

Before the devil. Before the freeze. Before the silence that stretched between them for eight years, filled with guilt and blame and things they couldn't say.

Kori put the photograph in his pocket. Carefully. Like it was made of something fragile. Something that might break if he held it too hard.

"Thank you," he said.

Akane wiped her eyes. Laughed—a wet, broken sound.

"Don't thank me. I haven't done anything worth thanking."

"You called."

She looked at him.

"What?"

"You called," he said again. "You could have mailed it. You said you could have mailed it. But you called."

Akane was quiet for a long moment. The clock ticked. The world outside continued, indifferent to whatever was happening in this small apartment between these two people who had failed each other and were trying, finally, to stop.

"I wanted to hear your voice," she said. "I wanted to know you were still in there. The boy she raised. The boy she loved." She reached up. Touched his face. Her palm against his cheek, warm and dry. "I was afraid I'd waited too long. That you'd be gone. That there'd be nothing left but the—the hunter. The weapon."

Her hand dropped.

"Is there?" she asked. "Is there anything left?"

Kori thought about the blur. The weeks of kill and touch and compliance. The voice that had become a stranger's. The body that moved when Mori pointed.

He thought about the sun on his face. The word he'd said at the glass doors. The train ride alone, watching the city pass, sitting with his own silence for the first time in weeks.

He thought about the photograph in his pocket. The boy who had smiled. The sister who had been proud.

"I don't know," he said. "I'm trying to find out."

Akane smiled. A real smile. Small and sad and something else—something that might have been hope.

"That's enough," she said. "That's enough for now."

They drank tea.

Not talking about anything important. Just tea. The weather. The neighborhood gossip. The convenience store on the corner that had changed owners twice since he'd left. Small things. Normal things. The kind of things people talked about when they were learning how to be in the same room again.

Akane made lunch. Rice and pickled vegetables and miso soup—the same lunch she'd made for eight years, the same lunch Hina used to make before her. He ate. She watched him eat. Refilled his bowl without asking.

"You're too thin," she said. "Aren't they feeding you?"

"They feed me."

"Not enough, apparently."

He almost smiled. Almost.

After lunch, she showed him the boxes from his room. His old clothes, too small now. School notebooks he didn't remember filling. A collection of rocks he'd gathered from somewhere, for some reason, the meaning lost to time.

"I didn't know what to keep," Akane said. "I kept everything. In case you wanted any of it."

He looked through the boxes. The artifacts of a childhood he'd lived through without noticing. A rubber ball. A broken watch. A drawing—crayon on construction paper—of two figures holding hands. One tall, one small. Me and Hina, written underneath in a child's careful letters.

He took the drawing. Folded it carefully. Put it with the photograph.

"You can take anything you want," Akane said. "It's yours."

He looked at the boxes. At the life they contained. At the boy who had lived here, in this apartment, with a sister who loved him and an aunt who tried.

"Just these," he said. "For now."

"Okay." She smiled. "For now."

The afternoon passed slowly. The light through the window shifting, warming, fading.

Akane talked about Hina.

Not the death. Not the devil. Just—Hina. Stories Kori hadn't heard, or had heard and forgotten. The time she'd gotten lost in Shinjuku and called Akane crying from a payphone. The boyfriend she'd had for three weeks before deciding boys were more trouble than they were worth. The way she'd sing in the shower, off-key and loud, not caring who heard.

"She was terrible at cooking," Akane said. "When she first started taking care of you, she burned everything. Called me every night asking how to make rice. Rice! I said, Hina, it's rice, you put it in the pot and push the button. She said the button was confusing."

Kori listened. Holding the pieces. Trying to fit them into the shape of a person he remembered only in fragments—the weight of her hand on his head, the sound of her voice saying his name, the way she smelled like soap and something floral, something he'd never been able to identify.

"She figured it out," Akane said. "Eventually. By the time you were six or seven, she was making proper meals. Bentos for your school lunch. She'd wake up early to make them. Said she wanted you to have something nice to open."

He remembered the bentos. The rice shaped into faces. The vegetables arranged like flowers. He hadn't known she woke up early. Hadn't known it was hard for her. Hadn't known anything, really, about what it cost her to raise him.

"She never complained," Akane said, as if hearing his thoughts. "Not about you. Never about you. About money, about work, about devil hunting—yes. But you were never a burden to her. You were the reason she did any of it."

The light was golden now. Late afternoon. The clock ticking, slightly fast.

"I should go," Kori said.

Akane nodded. She'd known it was coming. They both had.

"Will you come back?"

He thought about the doors. The stamp on his permission form. The woman waiting for him—or not waiting, maybe, but watching. Always watching.

"I'll try."

"That's enough." She stood. Walked him to the genkan. Watched him put on his shoes. "Kori."

He looked up.

"Whatever happens," she said. "You were hers first. Remember that."

She touched his face. Her palm against his cheek.

"She'd be proud of you. I think. I hope."

He stood. The photograph in his pocket. The drawing beside it. The weight of them almost nothing. The weight of them everything.

"I'll remember."

Akane opened the door. The hallway stretched beyond, fluorescent and ordinary.

"The goldfish," she said suddenly.

"What?"

"The goldfish. From the festival. You named it Sunny. Because it was orange like the sun." She smiled. "You cried for three days when it died."

Sunny.

He didn't remember. But he could almost feel it—the grief of a child who had lost something small and bright. Who hadn't yet learned that loss was the shape of the world.

"Thank you," he said again.

"Come back," she said. "When you can. I'll make dinner. Something better than rice and pickles."

"Okay—"

He'd felt earthquakes. Japan's tectonic plates thrashing against one another like angry beasts beneath the earth. Earthquakes that lasted seconds, moments, then gone. The floor shaking, the walls groaning, and then stillness. Normal. Expected. The price of living on unstable ground.

But earthquakes aren't followed by thunder.

This much he knew. This much was certain.

The sound came from everywhere and nowhere—a crack that split the air, that turned the hallway fluorescent lights into strobing chaos, that made Akane's eyes go wide with something older than fear.

And then—

Mass. Impossible mass. Scales and teeth and a shape too large for the space it occupied, there and gone in the same heartbeat, a second of existence that tore through wood and concrete and the woman standing in the doorway waving goodbye.

Kori saw her.

Her mouth open. Her hand still raised. Her eyes finding his.

Then nothing.

The shape vanished. The thunder stopped.

Half the house gone. Pipes spraying. Wires sparking, dying.

Where the door had been—nothing. Just sky. Orange and gold bleeding into purple.

Kori stood in the doorway that was no longer a doorway. His hand still in his pocket. His fingers still touching the photograph.

He folded the photo. Tucked it into the pocket of his suit.

Turned.

She stood behind him. Unscathed. Backlit by the dying sun. Dust settling around her like snow.

Emerald eyes. An all too familiar smile.

His hand fell to his side. Palm out.

The scythe followed.

It was almost funny.

Mori knew how he fought. She'd watched every kill, every patrol, every swing of the blade she'd given him permission to wield. She knew the way his scythe glided down as if guided by something divine—the arc, the angle, the precise moment when obsidian met flesh. She knew he stepped forward with his left foot to favor his right arm. She knew the predictable beauty of his form.

Close combat. That's what he was.

So she kept her distance. Fifteen feet. Twenty. Enough space to speak a word.

She raised one hand. Lips parting.

He threw the scythe.

The blade spun through the air. End over end. Catching the dying light.

Her eyes tracked it. The scythe. The boy. The scythe. The boy. Her fingers twitched toward him—but the sun gleamed his silhouette, and the blade was already crossing the distance.

She couldn't do both.

Her body moved. Weight shifting. Feet finding placement.

The scythe whizzed past. Close enough to feel the displaced air.

She turned back to the boy.

His hand was already over her mouth.

"Sh—"

The sound died against his palm.

Green met brown.

Behind them, the scythe clattered onto cement.

Kori blinked.

The hue of silver and obsidian reappeared at his other palm. Raised against her throat.

The green eyes widened.

She leaned into it. Bright red catching the edge of the blade.

And for the faintest of a moment, he considered it.

He didn't.

The blade turned. The pommel found her temple. The green eyes rolled back and she crumpled—boneless, silent, just a woman bleeding on cement.

Kori stood over her.

The scythe dissolved. Black receding into his palm, into his arm, into wherever it lived when he wasn't holding it.

She looked smaller like this. Unconscious. The smile gone, the emerald hidden behind closed lids. Just a woman in a rumpled suit with blood matting her hair. He could see the place where the pommel had struck—already swelling, already bruising. Human. She was human.

Somewhere, sirens were already wailing.

He could run.

The thought arrived old and familiar. The shape of a boy who had survived by being still, by being beneath notice, by not being there when the questions came. Eight years of practice. Eight years of disappearing.

He didn't.

He sat down on the cement. Close enough to hear her breathing. The evening air was cooling now, the sun bleeding out behind the buildings, the sky turning colors he didn't have names for.

The ruin gaped beside him. Half a house. Pipes spraying weakly. Wires sparking and dying. The smell of dust and copper and something else—something chemical, something that burned the back of his throat.

No body.

He kept coming back to that. The snake had taken her whole. There and gone in the same breath. One moment Akane was waving goodbye, hand raised, smile on her face. The next—nothing. Not even blood. Not even a scrap of the dress she'd been wearing, the slippers she'd put on to walk him to the door.

Nothing left to bury. Nothing left to hold.

His stomach turned. A wave of nausea rolling up from somewhere deep, somewhere that had been holding itself together through adrenaline and violence and the pure animal need to survive. Now there was nothing left to fight. Now there was just half a house and a woman breathing beside him and the absence of everything else.

Or was that his spine?

The thing at the base of his skull thrummed. Not pain—something else. Something that felt like rage, or grief, or both twisted together until he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Angry. Awake.

The sirens grew closer.

Red and blue flickering at the edges of his vision. Voices calling out. Footsteps on pavement, on stairs, picking through rubble.

Kori didn't move.

He watched the sky change colors through what used to be his aunt's home.

Public Safety arrived in waves.

First the responders—uniforms, flashlights, the efficient choreography of people trained to manage disaster. They moved through the rubble like water through cracks, checking for survivors, marking hazards, speaking into radios in clipped professional tones.

Then the investigators. Suits. Clipboards. Cameras that flashed and clicked, documenting the destruction from angles that would later fill reports no one would read.

Then the others. The ones who didn't introduce themselves. Who looked at Mori's unconscious body and then at Kori and then at each other with expressions that meant things he wasn't supposed to understand.

Someone wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. Gray wool. Scratchy. He didn't remember being cold, but his hands were shaking. When had that started?

Someone asked if he was injured. He said no. They checked anyway—penlight in his eyes, fingers on his pulse, questions about pain and dizziness and when he'd last eaten. He answered. The words came from somewhere automatic, somewhere that didn't require him to be present.

Someone asked what happened.

He told them. Flat. Sequential. His aunt. The snake. The house. The fight that lasted seconds. He didn't mention the photograph in his pocket. He didn't mention the goldfish named Sunny or the sister who would have been proud. Those weren't for reports.

They wrote it down. All of it. Pens scratching on paper, tragedy compressed into boxes and checkmarks and signature lines.

Mori was loaded onto a stretcher. Still unconscious. Still breathing. A medic checked her pupils, muttered something about concussion protocol, something about keeping her under observation.

No one handcuffed her. No one read her rights. She was lifted carefully, almost gently, and carried to an ambulance that had no markings on its side.

Kori watched the doors close. Watched the lights fade down the street. Watched until there was nothing left to watch.

"Kuroshi-san."

Yoshida. Gray eyes taking in the scene—the rubble, the blood on the cement, the boy sitting where a door used to be.

"Come with me."

He stood. The blanket fell from his shoulders. Someone behind him picked it up.

He followed her to a car. Black. Unmarked. She opened the door for him. He got in.

The drive back was silent. City lights sliding past the window. People on sidewalks, living their lives, unaware of the house that had been torn apart across town. The radio was off. The only sound was the engine and the road and Yoshida's hands on the wheel.

Kori watched the city pass. His reflection stared back from the glass—dark hair, brown eyes, blood on his collar that wasn't his.

He looked away.

The office was fluorescent and humming. The same desk. The same chair. The same stack of forms that materialized whenever something needed to become official.

Yoshida set them in front of him.

"Incident report. Witness statement. Handler incident form."

She slid a pen across the desk. He picked it up.

The forms asked for details. Time of incident. Location. Nature of threat. Actions taken. Casualties. He filled in the boxes one after another. His handwriting was steady. That surprised him.

Nature of threat: Contract devil. Snake manifestation.

Actions taken: Incapacitated handler. Awaited response team.

Casualties: One civilian. Kuroshi Akane. No remains recovered.

No remains recovered. Four words. Administrative. Final. The sum total of a woman who had kept a kettle warm every morning just in case, who had stored boxes of his childhood in her closet, who had touched his face and said she'd be proud of you, I think, I hope.

He signed his name at the bottom.

Yoshida collected the papers. Her eyes moved across them, checking boxes, verifying details.

"Agent Mori is being placed under stationary review."

Kori looked up.

"This isn't new." Yoshida's pen tapped the desk. Once. Twice. "Her methods. Her... enthusiasm. It's been noted before."

She set the pen down.

"But this crossed a line. Civilian casualty. Unsanctioned action. An asset's family member." The words were clinical, bloodless. "There will be consequences."

Consequences. The word hung in the air. Hollow.

"What kind of consequences?"

Yoshida met his eyes.

"The kind that get decided above my clearance level." A pause. "There are leashes among leashes, Kuroshi-san. And bigger monsters among devils. Mori answers to people who answer to people who don't exist on any organizational chart. What happens to her depends on what they decide is... manageable."

Manageable. Not just. Not right. Manageable.

"And if they decide she's still useful?"

"Then she'll be useful somewhere else. Doing something else." Yoshida's expression didn't change. "Far away from you."

He should have felt something at that. Relief, maybe. Satisfaction. Instead there was only the hollow space where feeling should have been.

"You're being reassigned," Yoshida continued. "New handler. New division. Effective immediately."

"What division?"

"That's still being determined. You're... complicated, Kuroshi-san. Not everyone wants a weapon-class hybrid on their roster. Not everyone can handle one." She gathered the forms, tapped them against the desk until the edges aligned. "But someone will take you. Someone always does."

He nodded. There was nothing else to do.

"Is there anything else?"

"No. You're dismissed."

He stood. Walked to the door.

"Kuroshi-san."

He stopped. Hand on the frame.

"For what it's worth. I'm sorry. About your aunt."

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Somewhere in the building, a phone was ringing. Somewhere else, someone was typing—keys clicking in the endless rhythm of bureaucracy continuing despite everything.

"Thank you," he said.

He walked out without looking back.

The hallway stretched long and empty. The same hallway he'd walked a hundred times. To assessments. To debriefings. To patrols that started with Mori's hand on his arm and ended with blood on his blade.

It looked different now. Or maybe he was different. The fluorescent lights seemed harsher. The walls closer. The doors that lined either side—offices, break rooms, storage—felt like they were watching him pass.

He kept walking.

Past the hub where workers typed endlessly at their desks. Past the vending machines that hummed in their alcove. Past the window that looked out over Shibuya, the city spread below like a circuit board, lights blinking in patterns that meant nothing.

His room was at the end of the residential wing. Third door on the left. The same door he'd walked through every night for weeks, coming back from patrols, from kills, from Mori's warmth and Mori's praise and the blur that had swallowed everything.

He opened it.

The room was the same. The bed. The window. The walls that held nothing, displayed nothing, gave nothing back.

He closed the door behind him. Stood in the dark for a moment. Then reached for the light.

The switch clicked. The room filled with weak yellow glow.

He crossed to the bed. Sat on the edge. The springs creaked beneath him—the same creak they'd made every night, the small sound of a place that was his but had never felt like home.

The photograph was still in his pocket.

He took it out. Carefully. The creases from folding it were visible now—white lines crossing the image, cutting through the summer festival, through the smiling boy, through the sister's arm.

But it was intact. The faces were still there. The colors still held.

He looked at it for a long time. At the boy he'd been. At the sister who had raised him. At a moment frozen in paper and chemistry and the strange alchemy of photographs—a moment when things had been simple, or at least simpler, or at least not this.

There was a table beside his bed. Small. Wooden. Empty except for the lamp that sat on its corner.

He set the photograph there. Propped it against the lamp's base. Facing him.

Not on a shelf. Not turned to the wall. Not displayed for anyone else to see.

Just there. Where he could look at it. Where it could look at him.

He lay down. Still in his suit. Still in his shoes. The ceiling stared back—white, blank, the same ceiling he'd stared at every night while Mori's touch faded from his skin.

He closed his eyes.

He dreamed.

The black cat was there. Same as it always was. Small and dark in the endless nothing, a shape made of shadow sitting in a space that had no floor, no walls, no sky.

Usually it watched. Usually it stared with purple eyes at something beyond him, something he could never turn fast enough to see. Usually he woke before anything changed.

Tonight was different.

The cat stood. Stretched—front legs first, then back, the slow luxurious movement of a creature with nowhere to be. Its eyes found his. Purple and ancient and full of something he couldn't name.

It padded toward him. Unhurried. Deliberate. The nothing rippled around its paws like water, like the space itself was acknowledging its passage.

It reached him. Sniffed his ankle. Made a small sound—not quite a meow, not quite anything else.

Then it curled around his feet.

The purr that came was low. Too low. A sound that vibrated through the nothing, through the floor that wasn't there, through his bones and into the place where his spine met something else.

The cat's eyes stayed open. Purple. Unblinking. Fixed on his face even as its body curled tighter, warmer, pressing against him like it was trying to climb inside.

He didn't wake.

He slept the rest of the night.

That morning, the summons came from somewhere different.

A few floors higher than usual. Not Yoshida's office. Not the debriefing rooms or the assessment halls or any of the spaces where his life had been translated into paperwork and permission slips.

The hallways didn't feel strange anymore. The fluorescent lights didn't hum any louder or softer than they always had. He walked past doors and windows and people in suits who didn't look at him, and it felt like walking down a path that had always been there. Waiting. Paved before he'd taken his first step—before the alley, before the fusion, before any of it.

Inevitable.

The elevator climbed. Numbers ticking upward. Fifth floor. Sixth. Seventh.

Higher than he'd ever been.

The doors opened.

This hallway was different. Quieter. The carpet was thicker, the lights warmer, the air carrying something faint—not perfume, not cleaning solution. Something older. Something that made him think of incense in temples he'd never visited.

He walked to the end. Stopped at the last door on the left.

The nameplate was simple. Black letters on brushed steel.

RINNE.

No title. No department. Just the name.

He raised his hand. Zero hesitation.

Knock. Knock.

"Come in."

His hand on the stainless steel handle. The door swung open, gray eyes looking him up, then down, then up again.

The office was large. Windows along one wall, overlooking the city—Shibuya spread out below, morning light catching glass and steel, the endless churn of traffic and pedestrians and lives being lived.

A desk sat near the windows. Mahogany. Old. The kind of furniture that had weight, history, the quiet authority of things that had existed longer than the people who used them.

Behind the desk sat a woman.

She was eating.

A bento box open in front of her, chopsticks moving between compartments—rice, pickled vegetables, a slice of fish, something wrapped in seaweed. She ate the way some people breathed. Constant. Automatic. Her chopsticks never stopped moving even as her eyes lifted to meet his.

Gray eyes. Not the flat gray of Yoshida's—this was different. Layers. Like ash settling over ash, like smoke that had forgotten how to rise.

"Kuroshi Kori," she said. The chopsticks paused. "Please. Sit."

He couldn't.

For the first time since the fusion, he couldn't.

His tongue went dry. Something in his bowels shriveled, contracted, pulled away from the surface of his skin. A beautiful decay setting in—the body knowing what the mind refused to name.

Monster among monsters.

Yoshida's words tiptoeing across his ears.

"Ah, don't be shy." She set the chopsticks on the table. The smile never wavered. "Sit."

The chair legs dragged against the marble floor.

He sat.

"You've been difficult to place, Kuroshi-san. A month of deliberation. Meetings I wasn't invited to, reports I had to request personally." She picked up her chopsticks again. Found a piece of fish. "A hybrid with full cognitive function. A contract that demands the death of all devils. Dangerous, but compliant. Compliant, but dangerous."

She ate the fish. Half of it. Set the rest down.

"It's only natural that I see you myself. Finalize things."

"Agent Mori's actions were... regrettable." A pause. "She has been set for re-evaluation."

Kori's jaw tightened.

"Is that the look they talked about?" A giggle. "No wonder that crazy bitch was so into you."

She pushed the bento toward him. Just slightly. An offering.

"Eat. You look thin."

His mouth was already open. His throat was dry, but he reached for the chopsticks anyway. Picked up a piece of the fish she'd left behind. Put it in his mouth. Chewed. Swallowed.

Familiar feeling.

Rinne watched him eat. The smile didn't change.

"I've read your file." She leaned back. "Scythe hybrid. Kill. All. Devils." The words played around her lips. "Is that what you are, Kuroshi-san? Just a scythe?"

She tilted her head. The gray didn't blink.

"Either way. You're interesting. Very, very interesting."

She folded her hands on the desk. Long fingers. Immaculate nails.

"I've created a new division. Division 0. Small. Experimental. You'll be stationed there permanently." She watched him chew. Swallow. "Two others. A fiend—fire. And a devil contractor who will serve as your supervisor. Her costs have made her... particular about who she works with."

She smiled.

"Your individualities will flourish. Your teamwork will be demanded. Perfected." Her eyes moved to the window, to the city below. "Weapon devils are escalating across Japan, Kuroshi-san. We need people who can handle what's coming. People who don't fit anywhere else."

She looked back at him.

"People like you."

He set the chopsticks down. The fish sat heavy in his stomach.

"I have a request."

The smile flickered. Just for a moment.

"Oh?"

"I want to see Mori." He paused. "And her file."

Silence.

The office held its breath. The incense smell thickened.

"Why?"

"Because I'm asking."

Rinne studied him. One second. Two. Five.

Then she laughed.

Not a giggle this time. A real laugh—warm, full, the sound of someone who had just found something unexpected.

"You're more interesting than I thought, Kuroshi-san."

She picked up her chopsticks. Found the last piece of fish. Ate it whole.

"I'll arrange it."

He left the office with a folder in his hands. Transfer papers. Housing assignment. A visitation approval stamped with Rinne's signature.

And beneath it all, a personnel file. Thin. Classified. A name on the cover he'd never seen before.

Moriko Nakajima.

The hallway stretched ahead. Warmer lights. Thicker carpet. The faint smell of incense fading as he walked toward the elevator.

The elevator arrived. The doors opened. He stepped in.

This time, he pressed down.

B1. B2. B3.

Lower than he'd ever been.

The doors opened to concrete. Gray walls, gray floor, gray light that came from somewhere overhead and touched nothing warmly. The air was different here—damp, metallic, carrying sounds that didn't belong to anything human.

A guard station. Two men in uniforms that had no insignia. One of them looked at the approval form. Looked at Kori. Looked at the signature.

He picked up a phone. Dialed. Spoke three words.

Hung up.

"Done."

The gate buzzed. Opened.

Kori walked through.

The hallway stretched long and lined with glass.

Behind the glass: cages. Cells. Containment units that hummed with something more than electricity. And inside them—devils.

Some stared. Eyes tracking him as he passed, pupils dilating, mouths opening to show teeth that weren't meant for smiling. Some were dormant—curled in corners, shapes barely recognizable as anything at all. Some weren't all there. Pieces missing. Limbs that ended wrong. Faces that had forgotten how faces worked.

This was where devil hunters came to make contracts. Where power was purchased. Where the desperate and the ambitious knelt before glass and offered pieces of themselves in exchange for pieces of something worse.

Kori's eyes stayed ahead. Unyielding.

The hallway turned. Turned again. The cells changed—fewer devils now, more empty space, more silence. A different kind of containment.

A different kind of prisoner.

The ward for people like Mori.

He stopped at the last cell.

She was chained to the wall. Wrists bound in something that looked like iron but hummed like the cells behind him. Her suit was gone—replaced with something gray, shapeless, institutional. Her hair hung loose around her face, unwashed, the shine stripped away.

Her eyes were dull. Staring at the floor. At nothing.

Then they found him.

Green.

The emerald returned—bright, alive, hungry.

"Ahhh, my little scythe."

She smiled. The pink was gone from her lips. Dry. Cracked. Parted around words that came out rough, unused.

Leash among leashes.

"I knew you'd come."

Kori stood on the other side of the glass. The folder in his hands. The taste of fish still on his tongue.

"Moriko Nakajima."

The green eyes trembled.

"I forgive you."

He didn't wait for her to speak.

He turned. Walked back down the hallway. Past the cells. Past the glass. Past the eyes that tracked him and the shapes that stirred.

The elevator doors closed behind him.

B3. B2. B1. Ground. Second. Third.

Rising.

He stepped out into the lobby. The fluorescent lights. The workers at their desks. The ordinary machinery of Public Safety continuing around him like nothing had changed.

The folder was still in his hands. Transfer papers. Housing assignment. The names of people he'd never met.

Division 0.

He walked toward the glass doors. The ones he'd walked through when he said no. The ones that led to the sun.

But he had asked for something. And she had given it.

And he had given something too.

That was new.

That was his.