The sidearm was cold and absolute against Hikari's head.
Raizen saw it and everything inside him went very, very quiet.
Not the Maw. The Maw kept moving - the ceiling fans pushing air, the stew sending up gentle steam, someone's glass knocking softly on wood. But inside Raizen the sound fell away the way snow swallows a road. His breath forgot itself. His body remembered something older.
Now his hands moved before his fear could. For a white flash he saw the wall exploding. He saw her father's feet leaving the ground. He heard his mother's broken voice, urging him to run.
He understood that if he moved too late, he would lose Hikari the same way. The fear didn't make him shake. It emptied him. The boy was gone. What the Rust Room built stood up.
Two things happened at once:
Hikari didn't cry out. She went statue-still. Raizen stepped through the gap.
She couldn't be left to die. Not her.
He didn't move - he arrived.
One blink, and his right hand was already on the pistol, wrenching the barrel off Hikari's skull and straight up, line of fire to ceiling. The guard's eyes widened - there wasn't time for anything else.
Pivot. Raizen spun through the man's lead shoulder, dragged the wrist across its weakest line and folded the elbow, and the arm snapped into a brutal, clean lock-hand trapped, elbow pinned, shoulder captured. He gave the pistol nowhere to live except in his own hands.
Then the lights went out.
Three touches: knuckles tucked under the ear; two fingers stabbing the jaw hinge; a short cruel rake where nerves live. The guard's body fell before his mind understood.
The air in the Maw changed again - like everyone had stepped to the edge of a drop without meaning to.
The weapon hummed as its coil strip brushed Raizen's sleeve, with utmost precision. He rolled it along his forearm so the barrel never pointed at Hikari again. He turned on his heel, and the world inverted: the gun's dark mouth was now on another head. Marcus Valerius.
From the first touch of steel to the sight on Marcus's head, less than a breath had passed. The fiddle in the corner hadn't finished the note it had started.
Everything else finished for it. The tune fell apart. The dice forgot to roll. A spoon chose the exact second to stop stirring because that was the kind of night it was. Marcus didn't jump. He didn't shout. Calm was his talent and he reached for it the way a drowning man reaches for a rope. His hands lifted a measured half-inch off the table, fingers loose. His eyes were careful, as they had been when Obi walked up.
They were not the same eyes. Terror lived behind them now. Not loud. Honest.
"You don't want to do that," Marcus said, and whoever had taught him to modulate tone would have been proud of how smooth it came out.
"I don't want to do a lot of things," Raizen said, and his own voice frightened him. It was flat. Emotionless. Cold.
"Let her go."
Behind him, Hikari exhaled through her nose. She hadn't moved when the barrel pressed in. She didn't move now. Her heartbeat was fast enough for Mina to call numbers and shout about it. Obi's grin went missing. He slid one half-step so his shoulder was between Raizen and anyone who decided to be brave on Marcus's behalf.
"Maybe it would be a wonderful idea to listen to the boy with the gun" he suggested brightly, which was the only brightness left in him.
Marcus didn't glance at his man. He looked at the barrel. At the coil strip. At the steady way Raizen's hands bracketed it. Then he looked at Hikari's wrist. Then he smiled, a professional expression that didn't reach the part of his face that tells the truth.
"Of course," he said softly. "We all want the same thing. No one bleeds in the Maw."
He moved.
Slowly. Deliberately. Two fingers found a flat piece of metal in his vest's hidden pocket. It looked like a thick coin with a notch taken out and a symbol etched in the brass - a lotus, simplified down to a geometry. He brought it up where Raizen could see it.
"On the table," Raizen said.
Marcus obeyed. He set the token by the case's base and pushed. Something inside the case recognized its friend. The bolt that had driven through wood sighed back up in a clean cylinder of motion and disappeared. The case became portable again.
"The cuff," Raizen said.
Marcus's mouth clicked at the corner. "Key," he said, almost apologetic, as if they hated the same inconveniences. He pulled a paper-thin strip from the inside of his pocket watch—no thicker than a nail, cut like a grin. He held it up. Then, he stood up. Slowly. The room tensed - taverns can breathe - but no one interrupted the ritual of a man with a gun asking another to be careful. Marcus stepped with exaggerated economy until he was within reach of Hikari. He lifted the makeshift pick.
Hikari didn't look at him. She watched Raizen instead. He didn't blink.
The pick slid into the cuff's lip. The teeth inside didn't want to be convinced, then did. The steel clicked, once more. Hikari withdrew her hand, flexed fingers to make sure they were all still hers, and slid the case off the table with her other hand.
Marcus stepped back. The pistol stayed with him Raizen like a shadow that had found a reason to be real.
The Maw remembered how to murmur. Not loud. Enough. Someone said, "Neoshima piece," in a tone that meant expensive. Someone else said, "The Loud kid," in a tone that meant that explains it.
"Take it and leave," Marcus said. Still soft. Still polite. Sweat pearled at his hairline anyway. "You have what you came for. We can all pretend this didn't happen."
Raizen's arms felt steady and hollow. The gun felt like a thing pretending to be part of him. The cold inside him hadn't thawed. It had focused. A razor is calm if you look at it the right way.
He unloaded the sidearm with one movement. Every bullet that was once ready to steal someone's life was now on the floor, meaningless.
Then he turned away and started leaving. Obi and Hikari quietly followed.
At the door, Obi's smile came back all at once as if it had been hiding behind the last table. "Stew really was great," he told the barman in a confessional whisper. "Send one to our place. Put it on his tab."
"Obi," Hikari said, soft, warning, not quite a question.
"Right, right," he exhaled. "Leaving."
They stepped out into the Underworks' night. It wasn't a night the way the surface had nights, but it had its own clock: fans quieting, a tram whining somewhere distant, the drip-and-hiss percussion of a city that never slept and often pretended to.
For some time, no one spoke.
Raizen's hands remembered that they were hands and began to shake. Not much. "You okay?" Obi asked without looking, which was kindness.
Raizen stayed quiet, after what happened. He was shocked by his own capability. All that he could feel in that moment was bloodlust. Him, that saw so many people die. Swearing to protect. The feeling of pure bloodlust made him want to throw up. "So this is the cruel world" his thoughts ran through his mind.
He swallowed. "I don't know."
"You moved like… like you stole time," Obi said, and let the compliment sit instead of turning it into a joke the way he usually would.
Hikari matched Raizen's steps without crowding them. Her hand was slightly brushing his. "You saved my life," she wanted to say, but her mouth couldn't move.
They took a turn into a narrower lane. The Underworks' lights stitched along pipes like far-off constellations. Somewhere far behind them, the Maw found a new song out of an old chord.
The gun in Raizen's hand cooled to the touch of his skin. He stopped, just long enough to look at it. His reflection ran along the slide in a dark smudge that could have been anyone's shadow.
Was this what strength felt like?
Was strength something drawn from desire to kill?
Faint memories of his parents flooded his head again, but he couldn't cry. That night was enough. His eyes cried until they were completely dry.
Yet somehow, his revenge felt right. The wish to kill every Nyx… Just made sense.
Was it the calm, perfect cruelty of the motions? The way the fear had turned to a blade with edges? The way his body had answered a world that kept asking the same terrible question with the only answer it seemed to understand?
Or was it just another kind of running, except forward instead of away?
He closed his eyes and saw Hikari, not blinking, the steel against her, trusting him in the space between beats.
His fingers tightened around the pistol. Then, deliberately, he loosened them. He tucked the weapon under his coat where it wouldn't show. His hands felt like tools he hadn't learned how to be gentle with yet.
They moved. Breath counting itself again.
Raizen didn't look back. He couldn't decide if what had stood up inside him when the gun touched Hikari was his strength - or the part of him that only lives to stop loss, no matter what it turns him into.