Meteor City didn't sleep. It churned, rusted, fumed, and bled especially at the scrap yards on the city's jagged edge. Here, under the jaundiced light of an oil drum fire, two gangs squared off, their brawl echoing through piles of ruined appliances and twisted rebar.
Kaito stood in the shadows of a half-melted vending machine, hands buried in his pockets. His bruises were mostly healed. His hunger was a dull companion now, never sated but no longer blinding. The threads at his fingertips pulsed like nerves before a storm.
He watched as the fight broke out a clash of old enemies, fists swinging, pipes clanging, curses flying. Boys and girls alike, desperate for the scraps that meant another day's survival. To the onlookers, it was chaos. To Kaito, it was an opportunity a canvas.
He'd learned the cost of his vow, and the price of ambition. Now he would see what the threads could truly do.
He reached inward, feeling for that edge between worlds, the place where chance and willpower blurred. Aura gathered at his hands delicate, fine, not a shield but a net.
He wove his first thread as one boy lunged at another with a wrench. The thread nudged the boy's foot just a finger's breadth to the side. The swing missed, wrench slamming into a metal cabinet instead of flesh. Sparks flew. The boy stumbled, confusion twisting his face.
A second thread spun out as a girl raised a brick overhead. It caught in her sleeve, and the brick slipped, crashing to the ground harmlessly. She cursed, scrambling for another weapon.
A third thread darted across the battlefield, brushing a rusted beam that one fighter tried to vault. The beam shifted at the last moment. He tumbled headfirst, rolling away from a punch that would've broken his nose.
Each act was subtle a minor accident, a moment's hesitation, a near-miss. But Kaito felt the toll instantly. Each thread pulled a piece of him outward, thinning his aura like butter scraped over too much bread.
He staggered against the vending machine, heart racing, sweat prickling at his scalp.
Don't overreach. His vow pulsed, warning him.
But the brawl was intensifying, and the chaos threatened to spill toward him. Kaito forced himself to focus. He couldn't save everyone, couldn't tip the whole fight without breaking he had to choose. Precision, not force.
He let three threads go slack, pulled them back, and sent a single one flickering to the fight's center. There, the biggest boy a brute with a tire iron roared and charged a smaller girl pinned against a fence.
Kaito's thread looped the boy's ankle. The tire iron missed. The boy crashed into the fence, bounced back, and went sprawling as others dogpiled on top.
That was it. No more.
Kaito cut off the rest, aura retreating to a whisper around his hands. He was left panting, knees shaking, but the scene was changed the gang's momentum shattered, the smaller fighters scrambling away, nobody seriously hurt.
He drew back into the shadow, swallowing bile. He felt the old, tempting pull If I just pushed a little further, I could end this… make them scatter… make the scraps mine…
But the vow bit him for even thinking it. Pain shot through his ribs, dull and sudden, like a warning bell. He gritted his teeth, refusing to test the edge.
From somewhere in the yard, a girl shouted, "Did you see that? The iron just slipped from his hand!"
Another boy muttered, "Luckiest day of her life. Or someone's cursing us."
A third, more scared than angry, whispered, "There's a spirit here. A ghost."
The words made Kaito's lips curl into a half-smile. Ghost, shadow, curse whatever they called it, it was his doing. He watched as rumor took root, as the older fighters eyed the shadows with new suspicion.
It was power but it was attention, too, and attention was dangerous.
As the fight broke, the scraps claimed, and the victors limped away nursing bruises, Kaito lingered just long enough to catch his breath. The threads inside him felt stretched thin frayed at the edges, hungry for rest. But he felt something else, too: a new sharpness, a control he'd lacked even days ago.
He'd threaded the chaos. He'd learned the cost: spread too thin, and the power turned on him; hold too tight, and nothing changed. But walk the line thread the edge and the city would bend, however slightly, to his will.
He stepped into the alley, letting the city swallow him up, the rumors of a ghost whispering in his wake. Meteor City was vast, its storms only beginning. But Kaito felt ready, his threads now part of his very blood a new edge in a city of blades.