Serenia held its breath.
Ash drifted.
The square waited on two blades.
Ryo set his feet where the street dipped. Ground under him. Breath steady. Blade low, point forward. His cut would be simple.
Kyōrei stood loose. Hood back. Scar bright. Energy thin and mean, stitched through the alleys. A blade carried like a sentence he'd say once.
They moved.
Steel met steel—clean ring, then nothing. Their auras pressed the air flat. Dust jumped, settled. They blurred. Tiles cracked under heels.
Ryo cut short. Kyōrei answered shorter. Ryo met him with tight parries, hands low, chin down. The blade hummed a plain yes in his grip.
"Still standing," Kyōrei said.
"Still enough," Ryo said.
They vanished and reappeared, blades clashing.
High—check.
Low—deny.
Turn—tap—reset.
Kyōrei shifted the street under Ryo's ankle with a whisper of energy. Ryo fed it into a pivot and skimmed Kyōrei's sleeve. A red bead. Kyōrei's eyes noted it, nothing more.
The square buckled with them. A statue lost its face. A banner tore loose. The cracked bell rolled three steps and sulked.
Kyōrei pressed. Straight lines, no waste. He tried to break Ryo's stance, not his body. Ryo refused to be stylish. He made boring answers look good.
They cut past the ramen stall. The sign was half-hanging. Kyōrei's gaze flicked there and back. "He dragged two out," he said. "He bled here."
Ryo kept moving. "He's not done."
Kyōrei smiled with only one side of his mouth. "You say that like the world cares what you say."
"Then I'll make it care."
They hit hard enough to shake soot from window frames. Steel flashed, died. Words got chopped.
"Duty."
"People."
"Order."
"Names."
"Honor."
"Her."
Kyōrei moved faster. Ryo didn't chase speed; he cut it. The blade trimmed angles. Sparks flew. Frost ate them as they were born.
They crossed the center of the square and the city finally spoke—wood groaning, brick settling, a thousand quiet failings. The world was tired. Their fight didn't ask permission.
Kyōrei slipped a thrust toward Ryo's throat. Ryo shaved it away and answered with a jab at the ribs. Kyōrei deflected, calm, then stepped in close.
"Listen," he said, voice even inside the blur. "You don't understand the burden. Hunter is a weight. Law, the rope. You carry both or they drag you."
Ryo's blade scraped his guard. "I carry people."
"People get you killed."
"Then I die on time—not on cue."
Kyōrei didn't argue. He drove. Ryo took two shallow cuts—shoulder and ribs—paid the toll, stayed centered. When Kyōrei tried to pin his shadow, Ryo set his heel and told the pin no.
They clashed through a shopfront. Glass sang, then quit. Paper fluttered around them—old prices for things no one would buy.
Kyōrei's eyes warmed a fraction. "You're better when you don't talk."
Ryo breathed and agreed with his body. Quiet. Clean. Grounded.
They met in the middle again. Blade hit blade. The air collapsed between them with a dry thump. A dust-ring punched out and slapped the walls.
Ryo didn't blink. Kyōrei didn't blink. Ash hung like a held breath.
Then Kyōrei changed the hour.
He stepped close enough for stitches and let the blade hang. No feint. No pretty draw. His voice dropped into that low place where real things live.
"You don't even know your past," he said. "Not the whole of it."
Ryo's jaw locked. "Don't."
Kyōrei didn't stop. "You don't know what your mother did so you could play at standing here."
The street tilted under those words. Ryo's grip tightened. Something hot stood up in his chest.
"Say her name right," he said, voice thin, shaking.
Kyōrei watched a flash cross Ryo's face and decided to be cruel. "You don't even know which name is hers."
Ryo moved like a fuse lit. Fast. Hard. Wrong.
No shape. Just need. He threw cuts you only throw when you want pain to go away. He hunted the face, the scar, the heart. Every step forward leaked guard. Every swing gave information.
Kyōrei slid around it. Calm. Efficient. He gave ground in a way that looked like control. He let Ryo spend himself and bought answers.
"Good," Kyōrei said, almost bored. "Keep coming."
Ryo came. Feet loud. Breath ragged. Blade bright and angry in his hands.
Kyōrei stopped deflecting and started placing. A thumb on the flat here, a touch to the wrist there. Energy gathered in neat threads and pulled at all the places Ryo forgot to watch when he was twelve.
Ryo swung too wide. Kyōrei stepped inside the arc and let the air take Ryo's elbow out of line. Ryo corrected with grit. Kyōrei filed the correction away for later.
"Burden," Kyōrei said, voice steady as a metronome. "Means picking who gets to live when your hands can only carry two. Means standing in a doorway while someone screams behind you and counting seconds out loud so you don't break. Means hearing names and choosing silence because the law needs clean lines."
Ryo cut at the voice. He hit wall, air, cloth. Not skin.
Kyōrei didn't stop. "Means telling truth so late it looks like mercy. Means lying early so panic doesn't eat the street. Means being the villain on the way to the funeral."
"Shut up," Ryo spat, eyes wet. He swung harder. That made it easier to miss.
Kyōrei looked almost sad, and then not. "And it means this."
He vanished forward.
Ryo saw only a sleeve and a wrist and a blade that didn't look like it moved. Kyōrei's hand landed on the Higanju's flat—two fingers and a thumb, light as rain. Energy folded in a clean wedge. It wasn't force. It was understanding.
A crack started near the guard.
Ryo felt it as a small pain in his teeth. He tried to pull back. Kyōrei let the blade move an inch, then set it again, different angle, same wedge.
Another crack. The sound was dry. Honest. The kind that tells you a thing is showing you its age.
Ryo tightened his grip until his knuckles burned. He drove Seishu into the steel the way a man breathes into a fire. The blade answered—it always had. It tried.
Kyōrei's eyes didn't change. He slid his blade under, lifted a fraction, and set weight where the two cracks met.
The blade broke.
Not a dramatic shatter—no explosion, no scream of spirit. Just a blade that had just learned his hand saying not yet and being told no. The edge split near the center and ran to the tip. The top half slid down and hit the stone with a noise Ryo will hate forever.
The light in Ryo's face went out.
His hands held what they could.
It wasn't enough.
Kyōrei's pose was simple, cruelly clean—hand on Ryo's broken steel, his own blade held like a pen finishing a signature. The image burned itself into the street, into the ash, into the season.
Ryo's breath caught. His chest hurt in that place where vows live. His city flickered behind his eyes—the ramen stall, the school gate, the hill he ran as a kid. All of it looked back at him like he'd dropped it.
Kyōrei gave him the smallest shake of the head. Not pity. Instruction. "This is the burden," he said. "Knowing what you are not ready to carry—and letting it break in your hands anyway."
Ryo stepped in with half a blade and a grip that bled. He looked mad and young and honest and wrong.
Kyōrei let him swing once. Twice. Three times. The broken edge scraped. Sparks died fast. Ryo's technique frayed. He attacked the person, not the problem.
Kyōrei dodged without hurry. He cut Ryo at the forearm—shallow. He cut him at the ribs—shallow. He tapped the knee with pressure and made it complain. He herded, not hunted. He wanted Ryo to see the shape of losing.
"Stop talking about her," Ryo said, voice breaking. "You don't know anything."
Kyōrei's face went careful. "I know enough. Enough to tell you that when you learn it, you'll hate me less and the law more."
Ryo lunged. Kyōrei faded and let the boy's own anger carry him past. The broken tip sparked on stone.
Kyōrei sighed once. It sounded like closing a door. "Enough."
He drew a line across Ryo's chest that would ache for a year. He took the shoulder—clean. Ryo staggered. He kept coming.
Kyōrei slid in, set his blade against the last piece of steel in Ryo's hand, and pushed down with the weight of a truth. The blade snapped again. The stub clattered away.
Ryo stood there with an empty hilt and blood running down his wrist. His ribs heaved. His mouth was open like the world had gone thin.
Kyōrei's energy folded the square into a quiet place. He stepped in close enough to see the exact color of Ryo's eyes.
"Your city can't lean on you yet," he said, low, clean. "Not like this."
The cut that followed was not petty. It was not messy. It was final enough to drop a body without turning it into a message. Diagonal, hip to shoulder, set to empty the legs of strength and the head of noise.
Ryo's body obeyed gravity. He fell forward and caught himself on one hand—just enough to make it hurt more. His head hung. Blood tapped ash. He stayed there, trembling, not from fear—from the weight of being late.
The square listened.
Kyōrei stepped back and let the air rise. He didn't put his blade away. He didn't look satisfied. He looked like a man paying exact change.
Behind them, the cavern mouth breathed a thin, cold breath. Far below, water ticked. Somewhere past the broken school gate, a door banged in the wind and did not close.
Ryo's fingers closed around nothing. He forced them open. Closed them again. He pressed his palm to the street and remembered what it felt like when the ground promised to hold him.
It did not lie. He was the one who slipped.
Kyōrei turned his face toward the ruined lanes. His voice came without weight. "Learn what you are. Learn what she was. Then come argue again."
Ryo didn't answer. He couldn't. He pressed his forehead to the stone because looking up hurt more.
Ash drifted. The bell stayed silent. The city waited on a boy with no blade.
Kyōrei's shadow slid across the square and then was gone, folded into alleys that had learned his steps.
Ryo listened to the place he loved breathe wrong and knew, like a bruise, like a brand, like a fact you don't quote, that today Serenia could not lean on him.
He held that truth the way you hold a cut you earned. Tight. Quiet.
And the blade went quiet with him.
🌀 End Of Chapter Twelve