THE WRAITH OF MAHOUTOUKAROU
By the end of Rafael's first week, the mountain knew his name.
By the end of his first year, the world did too.
It started with a question on a chalkboard.
In the Magitech Engineering club, the room looked more like a workshop than a classroom. Tables were crowded with stripped wands, cracked staves, half-finished ritual arrays, and enough unstable prototypes to make any sane safety inspector faint. Enchanted lamps flickered overhead, flicking between warm and cold light as someone ran diagnostics on them in the corner.
On the front wall, written in neat kanji and English, stood one sentence:
IF YOU COULD DESIGN MAGIC FROM SCRATCH,
WOULD YOU STILL USE A STICK?
Silence met the question.
Dozens of eyes—Japanese purebloods, half-blood technomancers, a few foreign exchange students—turned toward the boy leaning against the front table, arms folded, black bangles gleaming faintly against his wrists.
Rafael didn't wait long. He'd learned early that in magical society, silence was just fear trying to disguise itself as politeness.
"Wands are not sacred," he said. "They're legacy hardware. Good at what they were made for, terrible at everything else. They do one thing: channel and shape spells you've already memorized, if your Latin pronunciation is good enough and your wrist doesn't get tired."
A few students shifted, uncomfortable. Others leaned in.
"CADs," he went on, raising his wrists so Black Storm Howl caught the light, "are an actual interface. They calculate. Optimize. Adapt. They don't just vomit magic in roughly the right direction."
"Wands are tradition," a girl near the back protested. Her wand lay on the table in front of her, polished to a shine. "My family's used the same phoenix-core designs for centuries."
Rafael nodded. "And they've served your family well. No one's saying burn them. I'm asking why you'd willingly choose slower, less precise, more dangerous tools when better exist. Tradition should be a foundation, not a chain."
The club supervisor, a bespectacled man with ink stains on his fingers, cleared his throat. "Mister Raijinko–Redmane, some might say it's arrogant to claim your devices can outperform millennia of wandcraft."
"It would be," Rafael agreed. "If the numbers didn't back me up."
He flicked his fingers. Black Storm Howl pulsed, throwing an illusion into the air—clean blue graphs, percentages, tables. Spell power comparisons. Stability indexes. Core strain charts.
"Standard third-year blasting hex," he said. "Baseline adult wand-caster versus CAD-assisted novice. Same core strength."
The club watched the bars climb. The CAD bar overshot the wand by a clean thirty percent while maintaining lower stress indicators.
"And this is with the limiter on," he added.
Someone swore under their breath.
"What about flexibility?" another student demanded. "Wands can be used for any spell, any time. CADs need spells pre-programmed into them."
"Only if you're lazy," Rafael said calmly. "Pre-sets exist for convenience. But the core architecture can compile spells in real time if you understand structure. Think of it like… dynamic formula rendering. You don't hard-code every spell. You teach the CAD how to think about magic, and it handles the grunt work."
He snapped his fingers. A thin thread of lightning snaked from his wrist, coiling delicately through the air before resolving into a glowing geometric lattice—a spell model. Then it dissolved again.
"Latency is two-point-one seconds," he said. "With practice, it'll drop below one."
The room erupted.
Questions flew. Arguments sparked. Half the club demanded to see schematics; the other half insisted wands were part of their identity, that magic without wood and core felt wrong. A tall boy from an old pureblood family on Sado Island slammed his palm on the table, shouting something about disrespect.
Rafael listened, answered where it mattered, deflected where it didn't. He watched the way the room tilted—not by volume, but by gravity. Even those who hated the idea couldn't un-see the charts.
By the next month, half the engineering club had requested prototype CAD bracelets or gauntlets.
By the end of the term, first-years were quietly asking if they could start with CAD training instead of wand forms.
By winter, the Japanese Magical Education Board sent polite, tightly-worded letters asking if Mahoutoukarou had the infrastructure to implement "supplemental focus devices" in its curriculum.
The Board got its answer when Headmaster Takeda invited Rafael to the Debate Society.
The hall was packed. Debate at Mahoutoukarou wasn't just about rhetoric—it was an officially sanctioned outlet for the kind of ideological violence that would otherwise leak into dueling rings and unapproved curses in stairwells.
Two sides stood facing each other on raised platforms:
Proposition: Adoption of CAD casting as primary curriculum tool.
Opposition: Preservation of Wand-centric Tradition.
Rafael stepped up alone on the pro side.
On the other platform, five students stood shoulder to shoulder, all pureblood, all from families with deep wandlore roots. Their leader, a composed girl with a wand carved from dark cherry and inlaid with gold, looked him up and down as if she'd arrived in a courtroom and found an upstart child arguing case law.
"We begin," the moderator intoned. "Opening argument: Opposing side."
The pureblood girl launched into a polished speech about history, culture, ritual harmonics, how wood and core formed sympathetic bridges between mage and magic. She was good—logical where she could be, manipulative where she needed to be, her words sewn together with the invisible thread of inherited certainty. She spoke of knowing your wand as an extension of your soul.
Rafael let her have the poetry.
When it was his turn, he didn't counter with grand declarations.
He stepped to the edge of his platform, hands relaxed at his sides.
"Everything she said about connection is true," he said. "Humans need symbols. Ritual. We bond to tools the way we bond to people. I'm not asking you to cut that bond."
He lifted his wrists.
"I'm asking you to stop pretending the wood is what matters."
He tapped one bangle lightly. "These don't erase tradition. They refine it. They take what you already do and strip out the sloppiness. Less wasted energy. Fewer misfires. Better safety margins for children whose cores aren't stable yet."
The opposing team scoffed; someone shouted that no mere "device" could understand magic better than a seasoned mage.
Rafael didn't raise his voice.
"In my first week here, the diagnostic array overloaded when I walked into the room," he said. "I didn't cast a spell. I breathed. That alone almost knocked an examiner out."
Murmurs. Distantly, Daigo groaned and dropped his face into his hands.
"If anyone has a right to be arrogant about raw magic," Rafael said, "it's me. I'm not being arrogant. I'm being terrified."
That silenced them.
He took a breath, tracing memory: his grandfather's blood; Seijuro's cooling hand; lightning tearing through the sky because a ten-year-old didn't know how to hold it in.
"I was born with more power than I should have," he went on. "Enough to kill myself and everyone around me by accident if I'm careless. A wand can't tell me when my core is overstrained. It can't adjust output to keep me from burning out. It can't reroute spells mid-cast to compensate for mental fatigue."
He lifted his eyes to the hall.
"A CAD can."
He flicked his wrist. Black Storm Howl hummed. Projections flared—heart rate curves, core stress graphs, all recorded during his own training sessions.
"It monitors me," he said. "It protects me from myself. It doesn't replace my will. It amplifies it."
He let the data hang there until the entire hall was bathed in its light.
"We are not talking about fashion," he finished quietly. "We are talking about survival, efficiency, and responsibility. We owe it to our future students to give them the safest, most precise tools we can build. Not because wands are evil. Because they're incomplete."
When he sat down, the applause wasn't immediate.
It built like thunder.
The pureblood team fought back, of course. They argued spirit compatibility, warned about overreliance on technology, painted dystopian futures where mages lost touch with their instincts. Some of what they said wasn't wrong. Rafael acknowledged it where he could, adapted, refined.
In the end, the Debate Society's scoring crystals lit with the majority vote.
Resolution Passed: Mahoutoukarou would adopt CAD training as a primary curriculum track alongside wandwork.
The Japanese education board didn't so much approve as scramble to keep up.
The ICW sent observers.
Britain sent a politely worded note suggesting this was all very dangerous and shortsighted.
A week later, Hermione's letter arrived.
Rafael,
You started a magical technological revolution and forgot to tell me first. I had to hear from a passing article in an obscure Arithmancy journal that "a certain young prodigy at Mahoutoukarou has demonstrated the viability of device-based casting as a primary focus."
There was a diagram. It looked suspiciously like the sketch you once scribbled on a napkin and then refused to show me properly.
He smiled, reading her indignation. It warmed him more than any praise from a council of elders.
I'm proud of you, she continued. I hope you know that. No matter how many stuffy old men clutch their pearls because you ruined their wand monopoly.
The next paragraph hit differently.
On a far less exciting note… there's a boy here named Ron Weasley. He's Harry's first friend. He's… kind, in his own way, but he can be thoughtless. He said some rather hurtful things about me recently. Called me "a nightmare" and suggested no one would ever really like me because I care too much about books and rules.
I know I shouldn't care. I know he's just being a boy. But it stung. I shouldn't let it get to me, but sometimes it feels like being clever is something to apologize for.
Rafael's jaw tightened as he read.
Heat stirred under his ribs, slow and lethal.
He knew boys like that. Loud, lazy, resentful of anyone who made them feel small by existing. They slapped labels on girls like Hermione because they were too afraid to admit they were intimidated.
He set the letter down carefully, forcing his hands not to curl into fists.
Black Storm Howl vibrated faintly, registering a spike in aggression.
He inhaled. Exhaled. Then uncapped his pen.
Hermione, he wrote. I need you to understand something with absolute clarity.
You never, under any circumstances, apologize for being brilliant.
If anyone calls you a nightmare, it's because they are afraid of waking up and realizing they will never catch up to you. That isn't your burden to carry. You are not too much. You are exactly enough. You are the bar everyone else should be trying to reach.
He paused, considering the next lines, then let honesty win.
If I were there and he said that within arm's reach of me, we'd be having a very educational conversation about respect. As I am unfortunately several thousand miles away, I will instead settle for this: remember that I like you exactly as you are. Book-obsessed, precise, stubborn, and terrifyingly clever.
If anyone can't handle that, it's their loss.
He hesitated, then added in smaller script:
Also, for the record, I find your focus and intensity ridiculously attractive.
He imagined the face she'd make reading that and smirked despite himself.
P.S. If he upsets you again, tell me. I'm compiling a list of people I need to have words with when the Quad Tournament happens.
He sealed the letter with more care than some battle plans.
The next time Hermione wrote back, the ink around certain lines looked faintly water-blurred. She didn't mention crying. She did, however, dedicate a full paragraph to the exact shade of red her face turned when she got to "ridiculously attractive," which amused him all week.
Time moved strangely at Mahoutoukarou.
Days were carved into training, classes, club meetings, and meditation. Weeks blurred into patterns of sweat and spellcraft. Months leapt forward.
By the middle of his second year, Rafael had joined four clubs:
The Martial Circle, where older students circled him like wolves and quickly learned wolves came in storms now.
The Magitech Engineering Collective, which had gone from a niche interest group to the beating heart of the school's modernization.
The Spirit-Weaver Society, where students learned to commune with minor kami and contracted shikigami—apart from Rafael, whose presence seemed to attract things older and stranger than the instructors were strictly prepared for.
And the Debate Society, because apparently seeing him verbally dismantle traditions was entertainment in itself.
His legend grew quietly.
They called him many things—Storm Wolf, Raijin's Heir, Divine Core, Lightning Prince. The name that stuck came later.
It happened on a day that already felt wrong.
Second-year combat class had ended in bruises and smug satisfaction. Rafael had gone a little harder than usual, testing how far he could push Black Storm Howl while keeping his core stable. Instructor Nishikawa had barked at him about restraint even while scribbling notes for new high-intensity training modules.
He showered, changed into a fresh uniform, and found a shadowed corner of the sparring ring's observation deck to sit in while he waited for Hermes—Mahoutoukarou's discreet, ward-woven version of the mundane post—to deliver the mail.
Hermione hadn't written in weeks.
He told himself it was fine. Hogwarts was demanding; she'd said as much. Their second year of letters had been steady at first—her stories about moving staircases and arrogant blond boys, his about lightning drills over the storm plains. Then they'd thinned. Her last note had been rushed, ink blotched, mentioning something about strange attacks at school, petrified students, teachers lying to them.
Then nothing.
Black Storm Howl could calculate a thousand variables per second but it couldn't tell him whether a girl in another country was safe.
He was still scowling at the training grounds when Hermes flickered into existence—a shimmer in the air, a twist of light, then a neat envelope thumping softly onto his knee.
Hermione's handwriting.
He tore it open, heart kicking hard.
Rafael,
Before you panic: I am alive.
He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
I'm sorry for not writing sooner. Things… escalated here. You remember how I said students were getting hurt? It turned out there was a basilisk in the school.
He stopped reading for a second, pinched the bridge of his nose, and then read the paragraph twice more to make sure he wasn't hallucinating.
Yes, an actual basilisk. No, I'm not joking.
I was petrified for weeks. I don't remember it, obviously—it was like going to sleep with a scary thought and waking up much later with everyone looking at you as if you almost died. Harry and Ron—yes, the same Ron—went into something called the Chamber of Secrets and stopped everything. It's… complicated. I'll explain in person someday, but the short version is: I'm fine now. Mostly.
There were ironclad sentences about being "behind on schoolwork" and "frustrated with lost time," but he could read between the lines.
She was shaken.
She had been helpless and she hated it.
His grip tightened on the paper. Lightning rolled under his skin.
A shadow fell across him.
Rafael looked up slowly.
Three boys in first-year uniforms stood in front of him, clearly fresh to the school and still high on the peculiar exhilaration of surviving their first months at Mahoutoukarou. Their posture said temporary bravado. Their tattoos—unfinished, faint—said early-stage Yakuza grooming.
The one in the lead had sharp eyes and a lazy smirk that reminded Rafael very much of Jinka Liu.
"Raijinko-Redmane," the boy said, tone light. "The famous divine heir."
Rafael folded Hermione's letter carefully. "You'll need to be more specific. There's apparently a lot of us."
His sarcasm slid off the boy like water. "My uncle told me a story," the younger Yakuza went on. "About your grandfather. How he died squealing on a dock because he trusted the wrong man."
The world tunneled.
Rafael heard the words. He felt them land. He tasted something metallic—electric—in the back of his throat.
Behind the boy, the second one shifted, suddenly uneasy. "Kaito…"
"What?" Kaito said carelessly. "Everyone talks about it. The great Seijuro Raijinko, cut down by some no-name Kazoku officer. My uncle says it was embarrassing. Says the old man got soft."
Rafael stood up.
He didn't remember doing it. One moment he was sitting, heart pounding to Hermione's shaky sentences. The next he was standing in front of Kaito, close enough to see the faint tremor in the boy's eyelids.
"You should stop talking," Rafael said softly.
Kaito rolled his shoulders, mouth twisting. "You gonna make me, Redmane? With your fancy bracelets and foreign manners?"
His friends flanked him, half-hearted, caught between peer loyalty and the sudden instinct to be somewhere else.
Rafael could have done what he did with Ichiro—three-second takedown, clinical, public. This was different.
The air cooled.
Black Storm Howl vibrated against his wrists, whine climbing pitch as his heart rate spiked.
He thought of his grandfather's hand going limp. Of Jinka's blade. Of Hermione lying stiff and silent in a hospital wing for weeks while a monster prowled halls no adult could control.
"You want stories?" he said. "Let me give you one."
He stepped forward.
He didn't flare lightning. The opposite. He pulled everything in.
His magic compacted, condensed, focused into a single tight field around his body. The ambient light dimmed as if someone had lowered a hood over the world. Shadows deepened. Sound retreated.
It was as if someone had dragged Kaito and his friends into a bubble where only Rafael existed.
Sky Flame suppressed rather than radiated. Apex Zinogre curled in tight, a predator coiling before a lunge. Every instinct Rafael possessed sharpened on the three boys.
Kaito's smirk died. His eyes darted, suddenly not finding the room, the exits, the witnesses—only Rafael, ten centimeters away and very, very quiet.
"Do you know what a wraith is?" Rafael asked, voice low, almost conversational.
Sweat beaded on Kaito's forehead. "A ghost."
"No," Rafael said. "A wraith is the thing that doesn't bother haunting because it's too busy making sure there's nothing left to come back to."
He stepped even closer. The bangles on his wrists didn't glow. They devoured light.
"I was ten when my grandfather died," he went on. "I watched him bleed out because he trusted someone he shouldn't have. I will not listen to children who've never bled for anything mock him."
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't touch Kaito. He just let his magic press down gently, inexorably, like deep water.
Kaito's knees shook. His breath hitched. His two friends swallowed hard, the instinctive animal fear of prey in the shadow of something higher on the food chain.
"You want to earn a name in this school," Rafael murmured, "do it with your own strength. Not with someone else's grave."
The silence held.
Then Kaito's legs gave out. He dropped to one knee, not in ceremony, but because staying upright had become an act of defiance against biology.
"I—" he croaked, then stopped, throat closing on words he'd been smart enough not to say.
Rafael held the pressure a heartbeat longer. Then he pulled it back in.
Light rushed back into the world. Distant shouts from other sparring rings filtered through. Someone laughed, unaware anything had happened.
The boys scrambled away, avoiding his eyes. Kaito muttered something that might have been an apology as he fled.
Daigo appeared at Rafael's shoulder like a storm summoned to watch its cousin work. "What did you do?" he whispered. "You didn't—there was no spell, no visible field, but their faces…"
"I reminded them how small they are," Rafael said.
"That was more terrifying than anything I've seen you do with lightning," Daigo muttered. Then, with a weird sort of admiration: "You just turned the air into a haunted house."
Word spread.
The story warped in the telling, of course. By evening, some kids swore he'd dragged Kaito into a shadow dimension. Others said he'd shut off all senses but hearing and made them listen to their own heartbeats trying to escape.
None of that was true.
What was true was this:
From that day on, when new students whispered about the divine-core boy in Raijin, they didn't just call him Storm Wolf or Raijin's Heir.
They called him Wraith.
The name fit.
He moved like a ghost through the school's power structures: present, dangerous, invisible until he wanted not to be. Teachers relied on him, rivals reshaped themselves around him, and the clubs he joined became gravitational centers.
He wasn't always looming spectrally over terrified juniors, though.
Sometimes he did homework.
Sometimes he argued with Daigo over the best way to integrate CADs into traditional dueling stances.
Sometimes, like on the day of the familiar summoning practical, he annoyed instructors simply by existing.
"Familiars are extensions of your soul," Professor Hoshino intoned, chalk tapping the blackboard. "They are not pets, toys, or weapons. They are partners. Most of you will attract minor spirits—foxes, birds, small dragons. This is not a competition. You get what resonates with your current self, not what you wish you were."
Beside Rafael, a boy whispered, "Bet he pulls an actual god."
"Bet he pulls a paperwork demon," Daigo whispered back. "Something to file all his revolution forms."
Rafael smothered a laugh.
The ritual circles on the floor glowed in softly different colors. Each student took their place, following the instructions—blood pricked on a sigil, a focus phrase, a breath released into the spell matrix.
Most bonded students knelt, trembling, as shapes emerged. A white fox with too-bright eyes. A crow with metallic feathers. A snake wreathed in illusory smoke.
Rafael knelt in his circle, the chalk symbols cool under his palms.
His magic flowed outward carefully. The memory of the Raijin Pillar's storm, of Apex Zinogre's first howl, hovered at the edges of his awareness.
"I don't want something I can't protect," he murmured under his breath. "Or something that can't stand beside me when it matters."
Perhaps the mountain was listening. Perhaps something else.
The air in his circle dropped in temperature. Frost spiderwebbed out from beneath his fingertips, riming the chalk. Students in the nearest circles shivered, breath fogging.
Professor Hoshino's head snapped up. "Raijinko–Redmane, what are you—"
The circle cracked.
Not physically; the lines of power simply strained as if something too large were squeezing through too small a door. A guttural, not-quite-roar echoed in the space between breaths, primal and cold.
Then it appeared.
At first, all Rafael saw was a paw the size of his splayed hand, landing delicately on the stone. Claws like carved ice clicked against the floor. A tail swished, spined with frost-crusted fur.
An infant sabertoothed wyvern-cat, white as glacier snow, blinked up at him with ice-blue eyes slitted like a predator's. Its fangs were already long; its wings, though small, were edged with frost. Tiny puffs of cold mist flurried every time it huffed.
"Ancient… Frostfang… Barioth," Professor Hoshino whispered, blood draining from his face. "That's not… that species is supposed to be extinct."
The little Barioth huffed again, unimpressed with rumors of its demise. It padded forward, nose twitching, then butted its head against Rafael's chest with aristocratic entitlement.
Frost bit through his uniform. He laughed, startled. "Hi."
A thread of magic snapped taut between them—cleaner, sharper than any shikigami contract he'd made in Spirit-Weaver practice. This wasn't a minor spirit bound by paper and ink. This was a living, breathing beast, choosing.
"Raijinko–Redmane!" Hoshino spluttered. "Dismiss it! You can't possibly—That creature will require advanced—We don't have the facilities—"
Rafael stroked the Barioth's fur. It was cold enough to sting, but his divine core adapted quickly, sending warmth to his fingers. The creature rumbled contentedly, closing its eyes.
"I'll build what we need," Rafael said calmly. "You'll have facilities. Enclosure. Training protocols. Unless you'd like me to walk back to the dorm with a legendary apex predator loose on the grounds."
The professor's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
"Do not dismiss it," Daigo whispered fiercely. "I've been trying to summon anything cooler than a fire lizard for three terms. I refuse to be in a class where someone sends back a Frostfang Barioth."
The Barioth blinked and launched itself clumsily onto Rafael's shoulder, curling around his neck like the world's most dangerous scarf. Frost haloed his locs.
Hoshino buried his face in his hands. "I am not paid enough for this," he muttered.
By the end of that week, the Spirit-Weaver Society had a new logo, the Beast-Taming Club had filed three separate requests to borrow Rafael for demonstrations, and the mountain had gotten one more creature to talk to during blizzards.
Rafael sent Hermione a sketch of his new familiar.
Her reply was five pages of excited questions about anatomy, magical biology, and whether hugging a frost beast counted as deliberate hypothermia or emotional support. She also underlined the part where he mentioned "most people can't touch it without minor frostbite" and wrote in the margin, So that means it likes you best.
He did not, under any circumstances, smile at that for an entire evening.
Summer before third year came with a suddenness that surprised him.
Two years had burned themselves into the stone of Mahoutoukarou. Wands had not disappeared, but in every advanced class, CADs glittered on wrists and forearms. Instructors grumbled while quietly requesting interface manuals.
Abroad, some countries watched with interest. Others with suspicion.
Britain, predictably, scoffed.
Hermione wrote about it.
They still act as if nothing beyond their borders could matter, she complained. I told a professor about your CAD work and he dismissed it as "gimmicky foreign tinkering." I am trying very hard not to imagine you dueling him into the floor someday.
Please imagine it anyway, he wrote back. You deserve nice things.
His parents insisted on a vacation before term started—a rare stretch of unstructured time. They chose a lakeside town far from major magical routes, somewhere quiet and green.
It was the wrong lake.
Rafael knew it the moment he smelled the water.
Different country, different trees, different sky—but some things lingered. The sharp tang of oars on damp wood. The sound of fishing line whistling. The quiet patience of old men who preferred time with water to time with people.
His chest ached before he recognized why.
He walked the shoreline alone while his parents checked into the inn. Frostfang—now the size of a large dog and only slightly less inclined to eat people—padded at his side, sniffing suspiciously at ducks.
He didn't expect to see the man again.
Life rarely tied bows that neatly. Jinka "Nezumi" Liu should have vanished back into whatever hole had produced him, fat on blood money and protected by cowards who valued convenience over justice.
So when Rafael rounded a bend and saw a figure on the dock, rod in hand, scarred knuckles steady over the reel, his brain refused to compute what his eyes were telling him.
Jinka turned his head slightly at the sound of claws on planks. His gaze met Rafael's.
Recognition flared.
He went very, very still.
Rafael stared at the face that had haunted his nightmares. Older now, a little thicker around the middle. A long white scar crossed his jaw. He still carried himself like a fighter, despite the fishing rod.
Frost crackled along the dock boards.
"Rafael?"
His mother's voice, sharp and controlled, cut through the haze. She stepped into view, took one look at Jinka, and went as still as he had.
Years fell away in the angle of her jaw.
"Yuki," Jinka said, voice roughened by time, by cigarettes, by a life spent running from his own shadow. "Didn't expect to see you here."
"You shouldn't have," she said.
Her hand went to the hilt of the sword she wore on vacation the way other mothers wore scarves.
"Yuki," Thomas began carefully.
She lifted her free hand, silencing him without looking back.
"This is Raijinko family business," she said. "And Yakuza business. You know the rules as well as I do."
Jinka snorted. "Rules. You only remember rules when it suits you."
"You broke an oath," she said. Her voice had gone flat. Dangerous. "You betrayed your oyabun. You murdered my father. You left my son with blood on his shoes and nightmares in his bones."
She stepped onto the dock. The boards didn't creak.
"I've been looking for you," she said. "I wondered if I'd spend the rest of my life wondering if you'd died quietly somewhere, or if I'd have the pleasure of seeing you again."
Jinka's hand drifted toward the short sword lying beside the tackle box. "You aren't the only one who's gotten stronger in ten years, Yuki."
"Good," she said. "It would be boring if you hadn't."
Rafael spoke for the first time.
"I can handle this," he said.
Yuki's head tilted just enough to look at him. Her eyes were softer than he'd expected.
"I know," she said. "But this part is mine."
He swallowed, throat tight, and nodded.
The rules of their world were simple in some ways, terrible in others.
In magical Yakuza circles, betrayal of the blood was not punished in courtrooms. It was settled in steel and spell, on quiet docks and alleyways, far from anyone who would pretend laws existed to protect the strong from consequences.
Yuki drew her sword. Sunlight slid along the blade. Runes pulsed briefly to life, then settled like sleeping embers.
"Raijinko Yuki," Jinka said, lifting his own blade. "Of the storm-clan. Of the American war-house. You come to avenge blood with blood?"
"Yes," she said simply.
They bowed—not to each other, but to something older. To the lake. To the spirits watching. To the dead man standing quietly between them in memory.
Then they moved.
It was not a long duel.
Jinka was good. His footwork was efficient, his swings clean. He had killed Seijuro not because he'd been stronger, but because he'd been cowardly enough to strike from behind trust.
Yuki did not extend trust.
She extended judgment.
Every step was a lesson Rafael had learned in pieces, now shown whole. Control. Precision. No wasted movements. No anger bled into wild swings; she was past rage, moving in something colder.
Three exchanges in, she opened a line along Jinka's arm. He hissed, retaliated with a sweep that would have taken a lesser fighter's leg. She vaulted it, pivoted, and carved a bright red smile across his chest.
He stumbled, realized too late that he was outclassed, and reached for something dirty—an off-hand spell, a cursed talisman.
Yuki's blade took his throat before the spell left his lips.
He dropped to his knees, eyes wide, hand pressed to the awful red opening that had appeared where his future used to be.
She stepped in close.
"For my father," she said quietly. "For my son."
Jinka gurgled something that might have been an apology or a curse, then tipped forward and met the boards with a final, dull thud.
The lake sighed.
Frostfang prowled forward, sniffing the corpse, then turned away, unimpressed.
Yuki wiped her blade on Jinka's shirt, flicked the last drop of blood into the lake, and sheathed the sword with a click.
Her hands trembled once. Then stilled.
Rafael's heart pounded, a wild thing in his chest. He had been ready to strike, to erase the man who had broken his childhood. Instead he'd watched his mother do it with the calm inevitability of a storm finally reaching shore.
He realized only now that she had been carrying this weight all these years.
She turned back to him.
There was blood on her cheek, a thin red streak where Jinka's blade had caught her in the final exchange. It would scar—it already glowed faintly with healing magic and anger.
She touched it absently, then dropped her hand.
"So," she said, voice steady. "Now you've seen it twice. Death by betrayal, and death by accountability."
Rafael swallowed. "I thought… the rule was that the family judged."
"It is," she said. "I am the family. So are you. We made the call years ago. Today we carried it out."
She stepped close enough to rest a hand against his shoulder.
"Listen to me, Rafael," she said. "The Yakuza world isn't honorable by default. It's just another tool. Some clans use it as an excuse to be monsters. Others treat it like a shield for people the Ministry ignores."
Her fingers dug in just enough to be grounding.
"Our clan—the Raijinko—stand between monsters and the people who can't fight back. Sometimes those monsters wear government robes. Sometimes they wear our tattoos. When blood betrays blood, there's only one law that matters."
She glanced back at the body on the dock.
"We don't let it happen twice."
Rafael looked at Jinka Liu and felt something quiet inside him unclench.
He hadn't forgiven. He didn't plan to. But the endless, looping helplessness of that day on the lake loosened. Jinka was no longer a shadow on the edge of his vision. He was a corpse cooling in the sun, put down by the woman who had never stopped being Seijuro's daughter.
"Do you regret it?" Rafael asked.
Yuki's smile was tired and fierce. "I regret that it took this long."
Thomas, who had watched from the bank with a soldier's stillness, joined them then. He said nothing about the duel. He simply put an arm around both of them and pointed at the horizon.
"Storm coming," he said.
Rafael looked up. Thunderheads were gathering on the far side of the lake, rolling toward them on the wind.
He felt his core answer.
Third year would begin soon.
Mahoutoukarou would have new CAD integration, new training regimes, new expectations. The ICW would send more observers. Britain would dig its heels in deeper.
Hermione would be starting her third year as well, walking into a school that still thought wands were the pinnacle of focus tools and that a Muggleborn girl should be grateful to stand in their draft.
He thought of her last letter, the way she'd described waking from petrification, the awful silence in the gaps of memory. He thought of Ron, reckless and loyal and painfully thoughtless.
He thought of the Quad Wizard Tournament on the horizon, of Hogwarts' Great Hall filled with foreign students and old secrets.
The lake wind picked up. Frostfang shook out his wings, scattering ice crystals into the air.
Rafael lifted his wrists. Black Storm Howl pulsed, restraints humming as if eager.
"Good," he said softly, to the clouds, to the mountain waiting across the sea, to fate itself. "Let it come."