The Veil struck three places at once: a warehouse where the Guild stored rations for civilians after disasters, a clinic Aya sometimes covered under a false name, and the market they'd already bloodied once.
It wasn't just an attack. It was a performance—measured beats for an audience they meant to unnerve.
Seigi chose the clinic.
It was the worst choice emotionally—and therefore, tactically, the right one. The Veil counted on people like him to follow their hearts. He'd turn that against them.
By the time he arrived, the screams were already braided into the crackle of flames. Emergency strobes painted the street in pulsing red, sirens dopplered past, and heat punched his face before the smoke even reached him. The building was a three-story block of worn brick and cheap glass. The front doors—blown inward. Sprinklers inside coughed more steam than relief. The air tasted of melted plastic, antiseptic, and the coppery tang of panic.
Aya was a streak of motion under a haze of sprinklers—mask strapped, hair tied back. She threw a blanket of compressed air around a child to deflect falling tile and ushered a nurse through a gap that hadn't existed a heartbeat earlier. Her hands shook only after each save, never during.
"Left wing!" she shouted without turning. "They're trapping people with pressure—like an invisible door. Pediatric and recovery are blocked."
Seigi darted for the corridor and collided chest-first with a wall that wasn't there. The slab of air was thick and immovable, stretching between jambs like a pane of invisible glass. His palm slid along it until his skin prickled—there, a seam, jagged like a bad weld. He gripped the thread the way Hana had taught him—less a clench, more a listening—and pulled. The seam buckled. His teeth rattled as the barrier split with a wet pop. Air screamed out like the building exhaled, and three nurses stumbled free, sobbing, half-blinded by smoke.
"Stairwell C is gone," one choked out. "We heard… people… kids."
Seigi nodded once. "Out. Stay low. Right side of the lobby—Aya's got you."
They bolted. He plunged through.
The smoke ahead coiled and reshaped. A masked figure stepped from it, slim, graceful, moving with a dancer's poise. Not Wraith. Someone else. Their presence felt rehearsed, polished, like a stage actor who had practiced being inevitable.
"You learn fast," the voice purred through the mask. "Origin veins always do."
The word origin clawed at him. The note. The watcher by the river. The fire had arrived.
"Leave them," Seigi demanded.
The figure tilted their head, amused. "Do you think you set the terms here? Child, we wrote the language you're trying to pronounce."
A hospital bed tore itself from bolts and surged at him like a charging beast. Seigi didn't try to stop it. He twisted the bed's meaning of forward, bending the thread sideways. Metal screamed against plaster, the frame ricocheted into a vacant exam room, and trays clanged to the floor. The adept's focus fractured—one heartbeat only—but Hana cut in off-line during that breath, her blade so sharp the air itself seemed to hesitate before it. The adept reeled.
Riku barreled through the smoke like a storm unchained. His first punch folded the adept into tile, the second spidered cracks, the third was all fury. Gone was his grin; what remained was raw, old anger given a body.
"Riku!" Aya's voice cut from farther down the hall, sharp with warning.
He didn't hear. Or wouldn't. Fists rose and fell, rhythm a drumline for an execution.
"Enough." Hana's palm flashed, striking his wrist aside—not with force, but with perfect timing. The motion broke his rhythm. Aya was there in an instant, a hand at his shoulder, her glow not healing but grounding. Riku's chest heaved; his knuckles dripped red. Slowly, painfully, he let the adept slide to the floor.
"This is what they are," he spat, breath ragged. "Shadows that kill in the dark. You still think being a 'hero' is enough against that?"
Seigi didn't answer. He couldn't. Because even as the masked adept slumped, sound rose on the other side of the barrier—a coughing fit, small and high, and the thin cry of a child. He moved.
"Pediatrics," he said. "Now."
Hana nodded once, already reading his movement. "Two more barriers on that corridor. One's layered." She flicked her gaze toward the ceiling. "Sprinklers will stall you inside. Take the outer walkway, southeast window—faster and less heat."
They split.
Seigi found the next barrier by feel first—the prickle on his skin, the ache behind his eyes. This one wasn't a sheet; it was a honeycomb of pressure, hexagonal and stubborn. He breathed, hearing Aya in his head: If you can't trust your center, you can't trust the thread. He widened his stance, fingers spread, and pulled—not hard, but even. The honeycomb flexed. The hexagons clicked out of pattern like gears slipping teeth and then—released. He stepped through as the smoke rolled over him.
Three rooms in, he hit heat like a wall. Flames licked the doorway; plastic wiring above sagged like black vines. Somewhere within, a toddler screamed.
Seigi grabbed a damp blanket from a laundry bin, wrapped it around his forearm, and pushed through. He could feel the push of hot air, the draw of oxygen. He nudged the flow—not enough to starve the fire, not enough to turn a hospital into a vacuum—but enough to lean the flames backward, to tilt heat up and away from the floor. The world narrowed to the orange mouth of the room and the high, tearing cries.
"Hey," he said, voice even, detective-calm. "Hey, little guy. I'm coming."
He found them beneath an overturned gurney—a nurse curled over a child, both coughing, eyes slitted against the smoke. The nurse tried to speak, failed.
"I've got him," Seigi said. He lifted the gurney with his shoulder, let the thread borrow his refusal for leverage, and slid the toddler into his arms. The boy's fists gripped Seigi's shirt—tiny, furious. The nurse coughed blood, shook her head when he motioned to carry her too, then nodded toward the door, go. Seigi hesitated the length of a heartbeat—one, two—and then handed her his mask. "Breathe through this. Crawl. Left wall. I'm right behind you."
In the hall, Aya. Sweat stuck hair to her temple; a thin trickle of blood ran from one nostril. She didn't seem to notice. She pressed her palm to the child's chest and the awful, high cough stuttered and softened. The boy's breaths evened.
"You're bleeding," Seigi said.
Aya blinked, confused, and touched her nose. "Oh." She smiled, small and tired. "It happens."
Another crash. The hallway wavered—the floor sagged just slightly underfoot, as though the building took a weary breath and found it hurt to exhale.
"Out," Hana said from behind them, urgency ironed into a calm tone. "Now."
They moved.
Outside, rain finally broke, hissing as it kissed hot stone and glass. Steam curled into the sirens' red-blue wash. Civilians huddled under blankets, coughing but alive. A paramedic hustled the toddler away. The nurse found Seigi's sleeve with shaking fingers. "Thank you," she rasped. "You—thank you." He nodded once, because if he said anything, his voice might shake worse than hers.
A shout from the lobby. Riku chased a second operative through the shards of the blown door. This one moved fast, a flicker of static at the edges of his body—half-phased, like the man Seigi had put down at the safehouse. Riku vaulted a reception desk, tackled him into a rolling cart, and drove a knee into the man's sternum. The operative wheezed and spat a curse. Riku's fist rose.
"Riku!" Hana again. Not a shout—a blade. "Alive."
Riku's gaze cut to her. For a frame of time, nothing in him moved. Then he held the fist at full draw and shook—shook with what it took to stop. He dropped the operative instead and pinned him with a boot, breath sawing.
The lobby's front glass burst outward under a pressure pulse. Seigi swore, shoved three civilians behind an overturned bench, and threw his arm up as the thread wrapped his forearm like a brace. The shockwave bent—split—rolled around them in two sheets that met the far wall and shattered on cheap posters about flu shots.
"Two more inside," Aya said, voice steadier than her hands. "I can hear them."
Seigi flicked his gaze to her. "How many more you can you spare?"
Aya's smile didn't reach her eyes. "Enough."
They went back in.
The third adept tried to pin Seigi with a crosswind in the stairwell—pressure angled to shove him headlong down the flight. He rode the push sideways, caught the handrail, and changed the stairs' idea of down just a hair. The wind skated along the treads instead of through him; he stepped into it like a surfer finding a wave, then kicked. The adept slammed into a fire door and went boneless.
By then, the clinic had begun to sound like a place again. Not a battlefield. Footsteps. Radios. The slap of hurried hands. The last cries softened to sobs.
Outside, the rain did its slow work. Blood thinned into pink threads and found drains. Steam ghosted away. The night started to smell like rain instead of only plastic, smoke, and fear.
Aya sat on the curb, mask torn off, hands trembling—not from terror, but from the unbearable arithmetic of saving more than she lost. Her eyes were wet at the corners but didn't overflow. She stared at her fingers like they belonged to someone else.
Seigi lowered himself beside her and didn't speak. His silence said I saw you. I know what that cost.
Across the street, Riku leaned against a lamppost, dripping rain and blood. He grinned like a fight still hummed under his skin, but the grin was hollow in the middle. His hands shook. He hid it by shaking water from them like a dog.
"You held him," Seigi said, eyes on the street, not Riku. "You stopped."
Riku snorted. "I paused." He scrubbed a wrist across his mouth. "Don't make me noble, Detective. I'm not built for it."
Hana joined them, gaze lifted toward the black sky. Rain streaked her face, turned her lashes glossy. "This was a measure," she said, voice quiet enough to make them lean in. "The Veil was taking our pulse."
Kurogami's voice wasn't here, but Seigi heard the ghost of it anyway: The world doesn't need another soldier. It needs a symbol. He reached into his coat. His fingers brushed the folded note he still carried.
Every thread is paid for. With hope, or with hurt.
He thought of the watcher by the river. The frame turned in his parents' home. The coin with the jagged circle. The masked adept calling him by what he had—origin veins—as if naming it in public stripped him down to the blueprint.
A paramedic tapped Aya's shoulder. "We need you inside for two more." Aya rose, and the tremor in her legs scared him more than any fire. She swayed. Seigi steadied her elbow.
"Don't forget you're human," he said, throwing her own advice back gently.
Aya's mouth quirked. "You first."
She went.
Riku watched her go, then slanted a look at Hana. "We keep playing defense, we'll be dead by New Year's."
"We keep losing ourselves," Hana said, "the Veil won't need to kill us."
"Maybe they're right about one thing," Riku said, shrug-laughing without any laugh in it. "Maybe the world only listens when it hurts."
Hana didn't answer. She didn't need to. The rain did that for her, drumming steady on broken glass.
Seigi pushed to his feet. The building behind them breathed like something exhausted but alive. Sirens receded, new ones arrived. The market and the warehouse would be telling their own stories tonight—victories, losses, bodies, or the lack of them. He would learn those numbers later. He would carry them, too.
Being a hero wasn't enough.
Not when the people beside him were just as close to breaking as the enemies they fought.
He closed his hand around the note until the paper creased hard against his palm. The choice had already been made; the cost was still being tallied.
Thunder crawled across the city like a warning. The night held its breath.
And Seigi knew—the fire wasn't over.
This was only the first spark.