The park was quiet enough that you could hear the swings creak by themselves. Ryo cut across the path, sneakers scuffing gravel, and stopped under the old Sakura.
Someone stood there waiting. Hood down.
Violet and dark blue watched him first—one eye each, bright and steady. The hood fell to her shoulders so the light could finally catch the rest of her.
Hair: jet-black, blunt cut to her collarbones so it didn't snag a blade; a small white streak near the left temple like a scar that healed into color. Brows straight, calm. A faint cut at her lower lip that hadn't quite faded. Left ear: two tiny studs in a line. Right ear: one small ring, no dangle—practical. She wore a crimson-accented kimono tied up so it moved like a uniform, not a dress. The sleeves were shorter than the festival kind, wrists bare, hands taped light where knuckles hit, not showy. Boots, not sandals. A cord hung at her neck with a thin charm no bigger than a thumbnail.
She didn't raise her chin. She let him take it in, patient, like she'd already decided seeing mattered.
He tried to talk and the first sound that came out wasn't words. He swallowed, tried again. "You… uh."
She didn't help him. Not with the smile right away. Not with a tease. She stood still and let him arrive.
"Yua," he said, finally landing on the only thing he had. "That's… you."
That got the smallest lift at the corner of her mouth. "And you're late."
He wheeled around to the bench because it gave him something to do with his legs. She followed and sat without fuss, knees not quite touching his—close enough to say, we're not strangers; not close enough to promise anything she didn't mean.
He glanced sideways like he was checking a painting for the artist's signature. "So that's your face."
"Last I checked." Dry. Not cruel.
"You're not what I pictured." He winced at himself. "That sounded bad. I just… had the eyes in my head. The voice. A hood. And now—" He made a helpless shape with his hands. "—person."
Now she let the smirk happen. It didn't stick around long. "You pictured taller."
"I pictured scarier," he said, and realized as soon as he said it that it was true, and also funny, because she still scared him and somehow it felt fine.
Her shoulders loosened a hair, like she gave herself permission to be off-duty by a thumb's width. "Today is not a hunt," she said. "Show me the human realm like it's good."
He blinked. "Like it's good?"
"You talk about it like it matters." She looked at the playground's chipped paint and the plastic slide and the way the light hit the dust on the surface of the pond and didn't sneer. "Prove it."
They started with taiyaki from the truck that only parked there on Thursdays. Yua watched the hot iron molds close, the batter pour, the steam puff. She didn't reach for hers until the vendor bowed and handed it over with both hands. Then she bit into custard, burned her tongue, refused to show it, and chewed like a stoic cat.
He tried not to laugh. Failed. She shot him a look that promised a bruise if he made it a thing. He shut up and handed her his napkin without meeting her eyes. She took it with a quiet thanks that she didn't voice.
At the arcade, she stood at the entrance like the noise was a border you had to cross right. Kids ran past with tickets trailing. A claw machine hummed. A rhythm game flashed arrows on a floor that had seen too many feet.
"Lesson one," he said, trying to sound like he had any authority over anything ever. "You don't let the claw hustle you."
"You will demonstrate."
He did, with the kind of intense focus that only appears when someone you care about is watching. The claw grabbed a cheap plush and let it go at the lip once, twice, three times. On the fourth, he timed the swing and brushed the prize into the chute with the side of the claw. He had never felt dumber and more proud at the same time.
He offered her the ridiculous shark with a blush he couldn't fight. She accepted it like it was a formal gift at a border treaty, then immediately tucked it under one arm with the speed of someone who collected useful things and left the rest.
At the rhythm game, she planted her feet and watched. Then she stepped into the arrows with the kind of economy that makes even loud things quiet. No flail. No show. Just perfect timing and a clean line. An employee stopped sweeping to watch. A couple of kids clapped badly, all elbows. Yua stepped off the pad and put the shark on its head like a crown and let the kids take a photo without the hood.
"I think I'm bad at this," Ryo said, looking at the scores.
"You are bad at this," she corrected, and somehow it wasn't an insult.
They cut through the daytime market: old ladies with cart bags, a guy shouting about mackerel, runners dodging strollers, someone playing guitar like they meant it. Yua slowed at things he didn't expect: a stack of plates with the same imperfect speckle; a booth with little wind chimes that each had a different voice; a boy teaching a younger boy how to tie a tie with too-short fingers and a wide tongue sticking out.
"Why this?" she asked, tapping the glass of the wind chime with one knuckle. The note fell and hung around their heads.
"Every house has a different summer," he said. "This is how mine sounds."
She looked up at the wire of chimes with a face he'd learned already: the one that file-saves whatever you just said and puts it somewhere near the front.
They shared noodles at the stall on the corner. The broth was cheap and honest. She counted toppings on her fingers like a checklist. He slurped too fast and choked; she pretended she didn't see; he pretended it worked.
They cut through a busier street. The quiet of the park gave way to voices—sharp, anxious, carrying weight. A temporary barricade had been thrown up where the main road sloped down toward Serenia's broken quarter. Soldiers in black-and-white jackets directed people away while emergency crews hauled debris out of cracked alleys. The acrid tang of burnt concrete still lingered.
Ryo froze when he caught sight of the hospital tents, their canvas marked with a medical crest.
He pulled Yua's sleeve without thinking. "Wait. I… I need to know."
She didn't argue. She followed as he broke toward the medic line.
Two stretchers passed—one empty, one carrying a boy his age with his arm wrapped in half a dozen layers of gauze. The boy's face was pale but alive. Ryo's chest eased just enough to keep walking.
At the triage table, a tired nurse looked up, ready to wave him off. Ryo cut her off fast, voice low but sharp. "Kenta Morisaki? Mai Shindo? Did they make it here?"
The nurse flipped through a clipboard, lips moving, eyes darting. She pointed down a row of cots. "Morisaki's stable. Shindo's under observation—burns, but she's breathing. You're lucky."
Ryo's throat tightened. He muttered thanks and shouldered past, his legs moving before his mind did. He found Kenta propped up on a cot, head bandaged but grinning like an idiot, cracking jokes with another wounded kid. Relief flooded through Ryo so fast it stung his eyes.
A bed over, Mai lay still, chest rising shallow but steady, her hand clutched around a charred hair ribbon someone must have saved for her.
Ryo stood there too long. Yua touched his arm, quiet. "You needed to see it."
"Yeah," he said, voice shaking. He dragged a sleeve across his eyes and tried again. "Yeah."
On the way back from the triage tents, Ryo slowed when he noticed a row of names scribbled in chalk across a blackboard propped against a wall. A medic kept updating it, smudging one line, adding another. Some names had ticks beside them, some small notes, some nothing at all.
He searched without thinking, eyes dragging down letters faster than he could process. Then he stopped.
Hiroshi Takeda.
Condition: Critical.
His breath caught. The world dulled to a hum. For a second he couldn't even move his lips, like speaking the name out loud would break something.
Yua caught the change in his stance. "Ryo."
He forced himself to step closer, to ask. His voice came out rough. "Takeda. Hiroshi Takeda. Where is he?"
The medic looked up, too tired to soften the truth. "Third tent, far side. He was caught under collapse. Chest injuries. Burns. We've stabilized him, but—" She shook her head once, clipped. "It'll be days before we know if he pulls through."
Ryo nodded too fast, as if the speed could make it hurt less. "Thanks." He didn't wait for more.
The tent was dim, heavy with antiseptic and sweat. Hiroshi lay there, chest swaddled in white, skin gray under the lamplight. His eyes were closed. His breaths were shallow, each one like a stolen thing.
Ryo's hand hovered above his friend's arm, then settled, careful not to disturb the bandages. "You dumb bastard," he whispered, no heat in it. "Couldn't keep your head down for one day, could you?"
Hiroshi didn't stir.
Ryo stayed until his legs shook. Yua stood at the flap, silent, not intruding. When he finally pulled himself away, he didn't look back. He couldn't.
As they stepped into the night, Yua said it low, so only he could hear. "This is why you stand."
Ryo nodded once, jaw tight. He
carried Hiroshi's ragged breaths with him all the way home.
They turned back toward the alleys. Behind them, Serenia's quarter groaned, smoke still curling where the Maw's bite had scarred the city. Ryo carried the faces with him like weights that somehow made his stride firmer.
When the sun slanted, he finally said the quiet part in a voice that tried not to wobble. "I want you to meet my family."
She wiped her mouth, folded the napkin into a neat square, and tucked it under the bowl. "Now."
"If that's—"
"Now," she repeated, and stood.
Their block had the kind of cracked pavement you learn by heart because you've fallen on it enough times. The Kenzaki place was small, clean, old enough to have opinions about the seasons. The wind chime at the eave had a low voice.
He hesitated on the step. She saw it
She didn't mock him. "I will stand where you put me," she said, simple as tying a boot.
He opened the door. "I'm home."
Shoes clacked in the entry. The smell of simmering soy and ginger. A small missile launched down the hall, socks sliding. "Ryo—!"
Rumi slammed into him at the waist and wrapped him up like a bear with bad technique. She had a band-aid on her chin and a strip of paint on one hand with no explanation. She looked up at Yua with big eyes and said it without fear. "You're pretty."
Rumi was ten, and she lived like every day was a dare.
She had big, bright eyes that mirrored her brother's—warm brown, always moving, never still. Her hair was black like their mother's, but she refused to keep it neat. Most days it was tied in two messy buns that looked like they'd been attacked by pencils and ribbons, and usually had paint or crumbs stuck in them.
Her knees were almost always scuffed. If not from climbing the fence out back, then from trying to race kids twice her size in the alley. She wore hand-me-down hoodies that she drew on with markers, little doodles of stars, cats, and sometimes crooked swords.
Rumi was curious to the point of danger. She asked questions faster than anyone could answer them and had no sense of boundaries when it came to sticking her nose where it didn't belong. She once opened a letter marked "confidential" because she thought the word meant "cool." She called it "con-fi-dent." Kujuro didn't scold her—he just made her copy the word until she spelled it right.
Despite her energy, she was perceptive in ways that hurt—she noticed when Ryo's hands shook, when Kujuro's jaw tightened at a memory, when Yua's eyes looked like she was somewhere else. She didn't always understand, but she always felt.
Yua looked like no one had ever handed her that word without a string tied to it. She bowed the tiniest bow and, after a beat, offered the shark. Rumi took it like treasure and held it up like Yua had just knighted her.
Kujuro Kenzaki came from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. He wore an apron like it had won an argument with him years ago. His face did that thing it did when he decided the room needed fewer lies. He saw Yua's face fully, not a hood and a color. Something behind his eyes went still.
Ryo's voice came soft. "Dad, this is Yua."
Kujuro stood like a man who had already fought too many winters and didn't want to waste movement on the seasons anymore. His frame wasn't broad, but it was built from hard work—shoulders straight, arms corded, the kind of muscle you keep without showing. His hair, brown similar to Ryo, was always tied back low, never neat, strands falling loose around a face carved in stern lines. His jaw was square, lips almost always pressed thin like he was holding words he refused to spend.
The most striking thing about Kujuro was his eyes: a deep steel-gray, sharp but weary, always scanning before they rested. He looked at people in layers, as if measuring not just what they were saying, but the weight they carried beneath.
At home, he wore a plain apron over his clothes, almost comically ordinary against the quiet authority he carried. He cooked without wasted motions, chopsticks moving like tools in the hands of someone who believed order belonged even in small things.
Kujuro's tone was usually dry, clipped—he spoke when words needed to be said, and silence did the rest. Yet beneath that discipline lived a man who softened when he thought no one was watching—fixing Rumi's scarf on cold mornings, pausing to listen when Ryo talked about school, keeping the wind chime outside the house even though it annoyed him because his wife once loved its sound.
Kujuro nodded once, polite. His tone stayed casual, maybe too casual. "Welcome. Eat?"
Yua glanced at Ryo. Ryo knew her answer before she moved. "Yes," she said, and meant it.
They ate at the low table. Rumi had too many questions and asked them all in the wrong order. Yua answered with patience you wouldn't expect from someone who fought monsters in caves: favorite color (black), favorite snack (dried persimmon), favorite subject (map-reading), least favorite (ceremonies).
"You talk like a soldier," Rumi decided.
Yua tilted her head. "You talk like a bell."
Kujuro watched the shape of Yua's hands when she reached for chopsticks and the way she sat on her heels and the way she looked at the clock once and then never again. He didn't ask hunting questions. He asked if she wanted more rice. He tried to learn the rhythm of her yes and no.
Ryo watched all three of them like he had to memorize a good thing before something took it away. He didn't say that. He ate and laughed when Rumi tried to feed the shark a rice ball and almost spilled tea on the tablecloth that only comes out when people matter.
After, Yua helped with dishes like she wasn't a guest. Rumi insisted on drying. Kujuro said he'd mop later. Ryo leaned in the doorway and let the house sound like a summer it hadn't had in a while.
The mood changed on a dime.
Yua set a plate in the rack and went still like a cat when thunder is too quiet to be weather. Rumi kept humming. Ryo felt it next—a pressure at the edge of hearing, not weight exactly, more like a presence measuring the room from outside the window.
Kujuro's hand slid the towel onto the counter. He didn't raise his voice. "Ryo. Rumi. Back room."
Rumi blinked. "Is it—"
"Back room," he said again, gentle and not negotiable.
Ryo took his sister's shoulder and steered. Yua moved to the window in three steps he barely saw. She didn't draw steel; she didn't need to for the way her body handled air.
The window darkened.
Drywall cracked above them, a line running like a fuse across the ceiling. Something heavy landed on the roof. The wind chime outside made one ugly, bent note.
The ceiling broke inward.
Dust and plaster fell in a white sheet. Yua dragged Ryo and Rumi back with one arm while her other hand came up in a guard that put her body between everything and everyone.
A figure dropped through the hole and landed on the table like it was a stage. Mask cracked, one side torn away, scar catching light like something hungry. Short hair, scorched in places. A coat that used to be uniform and got tired of being told how to behave.
The woman scanned the room and smiled without joy. "We meet again, Kujuro."
Kujuro didn't move. He didn't reach for a weapon he didn't carry anymore. He stood like a man trying to keep a storm out of a house that held sleeping people. "Keiko."
Ryo froze. The name made the air colder. He didn't know why yet. He knew enough to hate the sound of it.
Keiko's gaze slid to Yua and stuck there for a beat. Recognition. Calculation. Then to Ryo, who she layered with meanings he didn't have. "The boy. And the hood they've kept in the human room too long."
Yua's stance got small and mean. "Step back," she said, voice calm, because calm is how you buy seconds.
Keiko looked delighted by the command, like getting handed a game she'd wanted to play all week. "You've been busy, Kujuro," she went on, to Ryo's father. "You always were good at pretend."
Rumi clutched the shark so hard its seams complained. Ryo moved her behind him by instinct. Keiko watched the protective gesture and made a face like she'd found the punchline she wanted.
"You should be studying," she threw at Ryo, voice mocking Kujuro's tone from a hundred meals. "Not getting caught up in fairy stories."
Ryo's grip on the doorway whitened. The house felt small for the first time in his life.
Keiko moved without a cue. She slid off the table and crossed the room in a breath. Yua met her with a step and a line, no flair. The exchange was too fast to teach: elbow, heel, wrist, glass exploding, a plate spinning, Ryo's heart in his throat.
Keiko slipped inside Yua's guard like she'd been there before. Two fingers tapped Yua's temple. Not a strike. A switch. Yua's eyes flashed anger, then closed, body doing what nerves demand in places designed for sleep. She crumpled to her knees, jaw clenched, refusing to look broken while her body took the order to rest.
Ryo lunged on stupidity and love. Keiko pivoted and used his momentum to set him down on the floorbrushed into the couch. His head rang. The world went white around the edges and then back in.
Kujuro finally stepped in with the kind of stillness that makes rooms listen. "Enough, Keiko."
Keiko's smile thinned. The scar pulled like a rope. "Say my name like a prayer again and I'll show you what it bought."
Ryo's vision doubled and tripled and then chose one. He pushed up to his elbows. "Dad—?"
Kujuro didn't look at him. He kept his eyes on the woman and the past and the door he'd kept shut so long it learned his hand. "You don't touch them."
Keiko took one small step back that wasn't retreat. "You ran," she said, soft enough that only this room would ever hear it. "You called it protection and went soft under human summers. But the Maw remembers. The Realm remembers. She remembers." A pause. A tilt of the head toward Ryo without looking at him. "And if you won't say it, I will. He was never yours to hide."
Ryo didn't know what she meant. He knew it was supposed to cut. It hit anyway.
Yua forced herself up to one knee, jaw tight, breath steadying. She didn't reach for anything that wasn't there. She didn't ask for help.
Kujuro's hands came up at last, empty, palms open in a way that could be surrender or exactly the opposite. The air around him changed—not with energy he'd promised to keep quiet, but with the weight of a choice he had already made years ago and was about to make again. "Walk away."
Keiko laughed, short and ugly. "You don't tell me where to walk."
She lifted a hand. Ryo didn't see what she meant to do with it. He didn't need to. The house knew.
The wind chime at the eave rang wrong. A shadow came off the roof and folded into the living room without bothering the hole. It wore a hood that made light misbehave. It didn't step so much as decide where to be. For half a second, Ryo's brain ran for Kyōrei and tripped; this wasn't his weight, his angle. This was something else, colder, narrower, threaded different.
Keiko took one look and swore under her breath, a slip that told the truth better than anything she'd said. "You again."
The hood lifted a hand and the room compressed into a smaller shape. Keiko's balance went weird. The floor decided to slope uphill in the wrong direction. Yua used the half-second to get between Rumi and the window and set her stance for whatever came next.
Kujuro moved in the same half-second and ended up between the hood and his kids. Keiko saw that and laughed like it hurt.
The hood didn't say a word. They turned a wrist and space on the far wall tore open like wet paper. A mouth of dark the shape of a door but deeper.
Ryo's stomach fell. He knew that wrong. He didn't know why.
Keiko threw knives that weren't knives. Light hit the hood and got bored. The knives became junk on the floor. The hood pivoted a fraction and placed Keiko like a marker on a board. She slid, hands digging into wood and finding no purchase.
Kujuro took one step toward the tear like he might punch a hole in a season. The hood's head turned a degree, enough to say don't, enough to say I decide who leaves.
Keiko spat toward the floor and missed respect on purpose. "You're still the Realm's dog," she told the hood, and let herself be dragged. The tear swallowed sound. The house breathed out.
Silence arrived sloppy and stayed too long.
Ryo tried to stand. His body decided to be soft. He sank back to the tatami with his mouth open like he had something to say and the air stole it.
Kujuro closed the distance to him in two strides and caught him by the shoulders before his head kissed the table leg. "Ryo."
Ryo searched his father's face for the part that wasn't lying. He thought of the article in the attic he hadn't read yet. He thought of a fallen star over a picture of their roof. He thought of a woman who smelled like summer rain and counted his thumbs when he was too small to be brave.
"Mom," he said, not a question, not a sentence. A leak around a word he'd been holding with his teeth.
Kujuro's face broke in the way men hate to show anyone. "Later," he said, voice flat because if he let it bend it wouldn't stop. "I promise."
Yua's palm landed on Ryo's shoulder—firm, present. He didn't know how she stood again. He didn't know why that made it easier to breathe.
Rumi crawled out from behind the chair with the shark crushed under her arm and climbed into his lap without asking permission from pain or gravity. "You're shaking," she announced, unkind only the way children are honest.
He laughed once, wrong. The edges of the room blurred and slid. His father's hands stayed on him, steady as floor. Yua's hand didn't move. Rumi's weight made his ribs complain and his heart hold still.
It was too much.
The last thing he saw before the dark took him was Yua's face without a hood—violet and gold steady as a traffic light you trust, jaw set, hair messy from plaster, eyes promising something that didn't have a word yet.
He decided to believe it for now.
The house went away.
🌀 End Of Chapter Fourteen