They had been walking since before dawn. The westward trail sloped down from the scarred ridge into a valley that had once fed a hundred thousand people. Now the valley fed itself—fungus nodded from collapsed roofs, green-black veins had pushed through asphalt, and the Rift's light pooled where rainwater collected in fissures. The Hollow of Brimir lay between them and whatever hope they carried; the path to it crawled with things that did not belong to a sane world.
Shitsubo kept to the front because he had to. It was not leadership, but a calculation—his presence drew threats and kept the vulnerable alive by making himself the magnet. A dozen pairs of eyes followed his shoulders like a compass. Genji walked a hair behind him, blade at rest but ready; Daigo flanked left, an armful of scavenged explosives and a patience that was thin and dangerous. Juro walked the middle ground, quiet, making lists in his head like a tallyman counting bones; he still looked the part of the unruffled skeptic even when the wind smelled of iron.
They were halfway down the valley when the earth sighed.
It was not the quick tear of an overeager groundfall but a slow, purposeful heave—like someone under the world inhaling. Smoke rolled up the slopes. From the gash below, things blurred into view: not beasts, but engineered columns of living rock and remnant muscle, lodged with shard-teeth and mouths that dripped black saliva. Their forms were terrible to look at—Dagon's handiwork—huge torsos shaped like collapsed houses, fingers jointed with rusted iron, faces half-carved in the likeness of people, half-extruded stone. When they moved, the soil obeyed, forming new ridges as if the earth itself were making room for their legs.
They were not scouts. They were settler-soldiers—Dagon's ambition in walking form.
"Ambush!" Genji's shout cracked across the valley. The company spread like a hand opening.
Shitsubo didn't wait for timing or prayer. The curse under his skin flamed like struck tinder. The rune-lines that had been only faint seams along his veins burst bright and hot, the glow throwing black and violet light across his knuckles. He moved with the economy of someone who had been breaking necks for months—strike, withdraw, strike again.
When he hit the nearest construct, it did not fill with blood. It filled with sound—metal wailing in a language of grinding stone. Shitsubo's fist sank through a shoulder of stone that cracked like a slab of pottery. Shards rained down and then settled back into dust. The construct keened and fell, but the motion sent a tremor through the valley. Another rose to take its place.
Genji answered with a different note. The little echo the Rift whispered in him—something like Forseti's stubborn balance—finished his movements, turned wild swings into clean arcs. Where Shitsubo tore with chaotic hunger, Genji cut with aim and economy: tendon, crease, joint. Each strike found a seam in the enemy's heavy design and brought it to bow. The Forseti-echo did not flare like a blaze; it steadied muscles, tuned breath, turned panic into the cold sort of clarity that holds a line.
Daigo exploded forward with a roughness no rune could imitate. He used his shoulder like a battering ram, his improvised explosives sucking the air out of a construct's chest. His approach was simple and human: hurt it until it could harm no more.
Juro watched, not from safety but from observation. He kept tally as they fought—positions, reactions, what Shitsubo chose to break and where Genji found the seams. He called out practical things—supply locations in the next block, a weak brick in a collapsed stairway that might collapse in on the enemy, the angle of an approaching patrol. He tried not to look at the glow that ate at Shitsubo's wrists.
That's when a group of minions—the smaller, quicker types—slid from the wet soil and converged on Juro's flank.
Juro's calm split. He had been right at the center of the group plan; he had the safety of numbers and the arrogance of men who deal with probability. A small pack of Dagon's spawn lunged—stone-skinned hounds with jagged teeth. They meant to tear, to pry, to drag someone into the soil so the larger constructs could rearrange themselves.
Shitsubo saw them and moved like a weather front—fast, certain, ruthless. He did not plan a strike for Juro. He did not hesitate. He lashed out with force that came partly from muscle and partly from the curse that now answered like an animal obeying its master: a brutal palm across a stone muzzle, a foot pinned and twisted, a fist thrown with the focus of someone teaching a child not to touch a blade.
Juro stumbled. One of the smaller constructs snapped at him and grazed across the cheek as Shitsubo swung past. The world constricted into a bright, hot strip of pain. The blow that met Juro's face was not meant to sever with gore; it was meant to stop a mouth that had been mouthy and reckless and dangerous at the wrong time. Shitsubo's hand landed heavy and precise—hard enough to crack bone beneath skin.
Juro's body folded. He hit the rubble and did not rise quickly. For a sliver of a moment the valley held its breath with him.
"Get up!" Daigo barked, yanking Juro aside as a stone-hound lunged for the prone body. Genji's blade sheared the beast, and the world resumed its spirals of death.
When Juro stepped back to his feet he did so crooked, one hand over his face. He staggered to light and touched his eye. His fingers met warmth where no heat should be.
He blinked, trying to marshal the light where there should have been sight. The hand came away stained with something dark but not obviously spilling; the moment was terrible in its quietness. He placed his palm flat to the scar and then drew back, jaw working like a man trying to swallow an unpalatable truth. A thin line of blood wetted his fingertips. He covered the eye reflexively as if to keep the world from knowing.
Genji saw it first: the hollow where sight should have been, a film that would not clear. Daigo saw the tremor pass through Juro's fingers. Shitsubo watched, expression schooled, the slightest tightening around his mouth—neither triumphant nor apologetic. It had been a strike to teach, not to maim, and yet the result was severe nonetheless.
The fight did not pause for consequence. Out in the valley, stone-constructs kept rolling, relentless as a tide. Shitsubo's strike had saved Juro from the immediate threat—he would have been torn to pieces without that blow—but it had broken something else: the mask. The man who had been the calculated voice of reason now had a wound no list could explain away. His bravado, the careful armor of words, had cracked in a way that would not be easily mended.
"You idiot." Juro's voice when it came was raw, like a ledger torn from the spine. He did not shout. He did not shout because he didn't need to. His voice cut to the bone because it was small and precise, and that made the point worse. "You hit me—hard. You could have killed me."
Shitsubo did not look at him. He watched the valley, his jaw working. "You were mouthing off while they circled," he said finally. "You gave them a window. I closed it."
"You teach with a fist," Juro said, swallowing as if some part of him required words to keep his balance. His hand fell away from his ruined eye and the socket stayed dark and wet. "You kill the messenger to make the message travel faster."
Shitsubo's reply was almost a whisper. "Mouths can kill more than fists. Learn which one saves you."
Juro's left eye blinked once, burning. He crouched and steadied himself, the pain doing what his mask had not: making him small and human and terrified. No one cheered. No one made moral pronouncements. They had fought, bled, and the valley hummed with the noise of a fight that had not ended.
The rest of the battle folded into the lessons. Shitsubo, at full visceral height, let the curse spill and rip the larger constructs apart. He didn't only strike: he devoured—feed on the anger and fear around him and turn it into bone-breaking force. Genji's Forseti echo stood beside him, a measured metronome cutting open seams and saving lives. Daigo slaughtered where the gap opened, human grit with a hammering efficiency.
After the last of Dagon's immediate patrol collapsed into dust, the survivors gathered the wounded. Juro swaddled the ruined socket with ragged cloth, his hands shaking. His face was split into angles of pain and calculation in equal measure. He had been taught a lesson, but it was a lesson that would cut both ways.
Genji did not embrace Shitsubo. He walked to Juro and placed a hand on his shoulder, feeling the tremor beneath the other man's heart. "You'll live," Genji said plainly. "You'll learn. But this place will keep scoring us. We have to move, harder, faster."
Juro nodded once. He did not look at Shitsubo, though that was where every eye lay. The man's silence was its own thing now, an absence where arguments went to die. Juro's left hand—now the hand he used to steady a canteen—trembled. He tasted blood in his mouth and the bitter tang of a changed future.
Shitsubo folded back from the cluster and crouched by the fissure, watching the wound in the earth pulse. He had not meant to blind Juro; he had meant to cut the loudness that endangered them all. The consequence would sit between them for a long time. A man's face is a ledger, and now Juro's ledger had a new, undeniable balance.
They moved on because the Rift did not respect grief. The Hollow of Brimir still lay ahead. The valley was strewn with the cost of the encounter—shrapnel of stone, the small pile of dead, one eye soaked in cloth. Juro did not speak much on the march. He looked not at his bandaged face but at his hands, as if checking whether his brain would allow him to continue the ledger he had been keeping.
Later that night, when they camped at the lip of a dry ravine, Daigo and Genji spoke quietly. Juro pretended sleep. Shitsubo sat apart, the rune-stone warm in his palm.
"You taught him precisely what you always teach," Genji said, voice brittle with tiredness. "Lessons with teeth."
Shitsubo did not deny it. "He endangered the group with his mouth. He paid for it."
"And you?" Daigo asked. "Was that justice?"
"He learned something useful," Shitsubo said simply. "And we did not have time for parliaments."
The two brothers heard the note then: it was not cruelty that made Shitsubo strike; it was a calculus as cold as frost. Juro had cost them lives more than once with talk. Shitsubo would not let talk cost them today.
But something else had shifted under the surface. Juro's bravado had always been an instrument; now it was a damaged instrument. Tears—quick, private, for a man who would never show them—might come later. His fear would harden into something else; knowledge of his own vulnerability would seed the decisions he would make when a man offers him a trade: safety for betrayal, or a bargain that saves his life at the cost of another's trust. Shitsubo had not intended to shape Juro's future. He only closed a gap to keep the group alive. Yet the world was spare with consequences.
In the long night, the rune-stone pulsed as if in agreement. The Rift under the valley hummed lower, a distant throat clearing. The Hollow of Brimir still waited beyond the next ridge, and Dagon's teeth were deeper in every rock.
They slept badly. The lesson did not end at dawn