The ridge before them smelled of crushed stone and old blood. The air tasted like iron, and every gust carried the grit of a city being ground into new shapes. Where Osaka had been a map of streets and signboards, the zone ahead was a geography rewritten—furrows of cracked earth, low ridges of blackened rock that looked lifted and laid down by hands with no respect for sidewalks. The Rift's teeth had chewed the ground and spat it back in ugly formations.
They stopped at the top and looked down.
The survivors clustered in the hollow behind Shitsubo as if the man himself were a small weather of protection. He had not wanted the consensus reached the night before—he'd played along because he would never be stupid enough to walk lonely into what Dagon claimed as territory—but he played along now with the same flatness he had when taking a wound. He honored no vows he had not carved for himself. He'd told them so. He'd told them he would fight, but he would never do so out of obligation to their hopes.
That fact sat between them like a knife.
"It's worse than the scrapers said," Daigo muttered, scanning the drop below through the smears on his glasses. He kept his voice low. He'd learned to keep it low around things that traveled the air by intent. "The soil is… wrong. Not just torn."
Genji's torchlight jittered over a slab of slate that had a smear of pale, fleshlike growth along the seam. Genji swallowed, jaw tight. "We go down, we go slow. The Hollow—Brimir—remains the goal. If the dwarven routes are still intact, we follow them. Otherwise we do what we have to." He looked to Shitsubo for the last piece of permission.
Shitsubo met his brother's eyes without warmth. "You heard the pact. You keep me where I am needed. I don't lead parades." He said it flatly, like a fact to be catalogued. "And if this place tries to make saints of you, I'll burn the scripture. Understand that."
An old man with a voice like gravel—Itaru—spoke up, more to the group than to Shitsubo. "We've come too far to split now. If the Hollow of Brimir is north, and the lights of Namba are a rumor, the only way to know is to move. We can spare scouts, we can spare time. But we don't waste manpower on ego."
The youngest of the sisters, Maru, shook her head. "If we find Brimir, do we risk running into Dagon's outposts? He builds settlements. He takes what he wants. He takes people."
"He's already taken people," Nare said. Her voice had the small, brittle steadiness of those who have seen too much. "We saw transplants the other night. Half-stone, eyes bright like coals. Children who weren't children anymore. If Dagon is right there, and Brimir is his next meal—" She stopped.
A quiet fell. Even the wind seemed to be listening.
Juro stepped forward, not loudly, because loudness was child's work, but with the careful measure of a man who had rehearsed every sentence. He had been arguing long enough to know where the edges of people's patience lay. He spoke now with the same scalpel calm that had cleaved rumor nights ago.
"We have three options," he said. "One: push toward Namba and find out if the lights are real. Two: push for Brimir along the dwarven routes—more likely to be stable, but more likely to be known and, therefore, watched. Three: route around Dagon's immediate territories and try to find a place to hold long-term—unlikely, because there are no more safe long-terms in Osaka."
He laid them out as if writing a ledger, not as inviting fate. "None are good. Each carries cost and probability. We pick by minimising that cost."
Shitsubo didn't argue the list. He had argued strategy on countless nights in his head and cut through less thoughtful plans like old rope. What he hated was the moral pleading wrapped into it, the way people asked to be saved as if it bought them survival.
"Which will keep you breathing longer?" he asked Juro.
Juro let the question hang, then answered evenly. "Probably Brimir. The dwarves made the earth into warrens. If intact, you can defend it with less manpower. But it will be contested. Dagon's vanguards have been observed near the old forges—stone-shifters that can turn foundation into prison. Risk of AN encounter is high."
"High," Shitsubo said. "Meaning we'll shed blood. Fine." He spat the last word and there was no halo of pity around it.
Daigo cut in, voice low. "There is another matter. If we go near Dagon to push him—"
Juro's gaze flicked to Shitsubo, then to Daigo. He said, "We do not push Dagon. We move through or around his control nodes. We aren't hunters with enough teeth to bite the god." His hands kept their controlled stillness, but the reader of faces might have seen the little dots of sweat at his temple, a man who rehearsed courage in tiny, repeated rituals.
Shitsubo gave a humorless bark of laughter. "You think you teach me caution? I will show him what caution looks like." He meant it like a dare. He also meant it like instruction: Juro would learn the lesson not by theory but by witnessing a man who took what he wanted and paid nothing for it but the weight of his own choices.
Genji watched his brother and noticed the thin seams revealing themselves. He saw something shift behind Shitsubo's eyes: not uncertainty, not the softening of a man who would be guilted into submission, but a small, almost gleeful cruelty at the idea of making the weak watch their own shrinkage. The brother had always been a protector in Genji's memory; now he moved like a blade who found the edge of the whetstone.
"You're impossible," Genji said. He did not say it with reprimand. It was a factual observation: Shitsubo was not to be bargained with by the currency of affection.
Juro conceded the plan they engineered in low voices: Brimir was the priority, with a secondary, light scouting toward Namba if feasible. And, if they stumbled into Dagon's outer nodes, evade, report, and move on. Everyone agreed, more by exhaustion than belief.
They descended.
— — —
The old forges were the first sign; ruins with hollows not natural. The architecture was dwarf enough that the stones sat in unnatural order—seats for the dead, pillars with engravings of blood and hammer. Where things had once been warm with forge-fire, there were cold veins of mineral that pulsed faintly; the Rift had baptized the place with its corruption.
They moved like the living step through shrines to something else—each member of the small company carrying a compact of the world that had been. Nare moved with a kind of reverence. Itaru walked as though he had come home and disliked the welcome.
Then the scream came. Not a creature's long wail but a human sound altered: a ragged, broken thing—half-cry, half-animal—snapped from some lower corridor. The group froze. The light shivered against the wall. It is a bad idea to scream in Dagon's domain; sound travels and unbinds things that should stay sealed.
Shitsubo's hand went to his pipe before anyone realized he had moved. He did not whisper. He was not a man given to whispers; he moved like an argument finally addressed.
They rounded a corroded antechamber and found a half-formed Transplant hunched in the ash—a woman, her face puckered with stone growths along the cheek, eyes like little coals. Her hands were hand-shaped rocks that clicked when she tried to pull herself up. She looked at them with the vacant desperation of something that once loved and could no longer remember why.
"You see this," Juro said, voice thin as paper but not breaking. He had seen Transplants before; whatever resolve he'd acted with had been rehearsed in the thought of this. "This is Dagon's work. He seeds the city with them—halfformed citizens, half grave. They take people, they put a piece of their earth into them, and they become something else."
The sisters shut their eyes. Maru turned away. Nare knelt, hand trembling over the woman, then drew back. There is a humane impulse that does not die easily, even after the world does.
Shitsubo did not turn to kill the thing. He didn't need to. It would die of its own contradictions, or shame, or Dagon's command. He stepped forward and, deliberately, took one of the rocks the Transplant had dropped—small, warm with a terrible, cold life—and held it in his hand.
Juro watched him. In Juro's eyes there was an observation that had nothing to do with sympathy; it was anatomy. He watched the way Shitsubo's fingers closed around the stone and how the air seemed to shiver in the immediate vicinity as if in recognition.
"You always take," Juro said. "You take the thing that will feed you. And then you look at the others and call it casualty." There was no moral outrage in his tone—only an empirical reading.
Shitsubo's eyes finally focused on him, flat and black. "If your life matters that much, you should have learned not to hand it to anyone," he said. The words were a lesson and a command both. "I am not here to serve your souls. I am here to teach you something harder: how little anyone else will do for you when the world tilts."
Juro's face flickered—micro-expression for those who read. That was the crack Genji would later see in his mask. It was the moment where his measured calm thinned and, for a split second, his fear showed in brittle lines along his mouth. Daigo, who watched faces the way boys watch weather, saw it too: Juro's hand trembled as if he wanted to reach for the stone himself and could not.
"You show me what?" Juro asked. The voice was smaller but still steady. "That people must fend for themselves? That we should worship no leader and trust no plan?"
Shitsubo's grin was not kind. "I show you that the world does not negotiate. It takes or it gives. If you think your careful talk will keep you safe, you will be wrong. If you think faith in me will save you, you will also be wrong. My lesson is simple: either carry the weight yourself, or learn what it is to be hollow."
Genji stepped between them, eyes burning with a brother's instinct. "Damn both your philosophies," he said. "We need each; we need reason and force. Stop making this about you two."
Juro looked at Genji, swallowed something fierce, and nodded. The recognition of need—the honest, ugly logic of survival—settled on him again. He would not throw the match, not tonight. He had his reasons for that, ones he did not voice.
They moved deeper.
— — —
When the outer nodes of Dagon's territory opened like sickly flowers, the sky hummed in a different key. Rocks moved with the deliberate slowness of tides, reshaping passages. Aggressor scouts—more deliberate, plated like armored beetles—stepped from shadow. Their armor scratched like knives in the air.
Shitsubo stepped forward and killed without flourish. He had the look of a man who had long ago removed the moral calculus. Killing, to him, was a craft, like striking at a tendon until the beast could no longer stand. He worked his pipe and blade like a man who believes the world is a ledger and he is only settling accounts.
Juro did not flinch when men fell. He might have flinched inside, but the outward motion of his face never broke. Daigo watched his hands—how they moved to help a fallen survivor or to drag a body out of the path. There were micro-choices. Juro made them. That small competence kept the line of people breathing.
After the skirmish, as they corralled the survivors, a low bell tone of victory sounded not in jubilation but as relief: they had not died that moment. The Hollow of Brimir was now a gleaning target, a justification for further risk. Juro's logic had the practical victory of routing out an ambush. Shitsubo's methods had the efficacy of blunt instrument. Both had value. Both had cost.
They gathered the dead and the wounded with a grim, efficient compassion. No hymns. No prayers. Only the working and the steady breathing of those who had survived.
When the blood had been tended and the map reconstructed in quiet scraps by lamplight, Shitsubo approached Juro.
"You thought you could wear your words like armor," he said. No hiss of triumph. No sermon. "You have a mask. You practice bravery in dry runs with words. Fine. Let it crack a little, Juro." He turned that small cruelty into instruction. "See how brittle it is. Watch how fast people bend when you show the seam."
Juro's jaw tightened. A flicker crossed his face—self-loathing, or strategy recalibrating. For a heartbeat he looked nearly human in a way he rarely permitted.
Genji and Daigo were there and both saw it. Daigo saw the mask crack the same way a man sees cracks in a bridge: with an acknowledgement that bridges can still hold, but not forever. Genji saw the fissure and felt something like betrayal mixed with sorrow—is that what it means to watch one's world be documented by another man's study?
"You won't teach me about mercy," Juro said at last, voice rougher. "And I won't teach you about restraint." He swallowed. "But we will make choices. We will see who pays for them."
Shitsubo tilted his head, studied him for a breath, and for once his answer was not merely a slicing sentence but a smaller, quieter thing. "Good," he said. "Then learn what it is to feel fear and use it. Not to whine, not to run. To use it." He turned away like a man who could not waste more breath on instruction.
They set their watch. The rifts hummed. Dagon's territory breathed like a throat opening.
At night, in the shallow safety of their circle, the survivors slept fitfully. Juro sat alone, hands steepled, eyes open. The mask had not fallen. It had simply been chipped at the edges by the reality they had stepped into. Genji watched him from the other side of the fire and noted, quietly, the tremor at the corner of Juro's lips when he let his face fall from practice to human for the smallest of moments.
Shitsubo did not sleep. He sat at the fringe, pipe in hand, the rune-stone cool in his palm. He had not agreed to their consensus in heart; he had only accepted terms because he was practical, because he could see the map better than many. He had taught the lesson he intended—do not mistake the sword for salvation. Let Juro recalibrate. Let him fear. Let the mask fissure. Let them watch.
The lesson was already at work. Juro's mask was thinner in the eyes of those who saw the cracks; Genji and Daigo both registered the change. A minor victory for Shitsubo—one he would count in the quiet where no one tallied his sins.
Below them, Dagon's influence crept. The land watched. The city listened. And on the ridge, the small band of survivors drew breath and crossed the threshold, each carrying their own weight—and their fears—into the new ground.
They would learn, slowly and bloody, what sacrifice meant. Shitsubo's lesson would not be the only one taught.