The steam thinned in ragged sheets, peeling back from the battlefield as if the land itself were finally exhaling. What remained was worse than anything the fog had hidden.
Limping, Nishihara stayed close to the medics as they slid Yasui and Ike into the open medical pods — white shells already smeared crimson before they even sealed. Tubes latched onto flesh with soft clicks, auto-needles biting down as the pods began their low, mechanical hum. Yasui vanished beneath translucent plating, her chest rising unevenly as the pod flooded with stabilizing mist. Ike followed — his body barely recognizable beneath bruises, burns, and half-healed wounds, the pod's scanners chirping in sharp protest as they struggled to catalog the damage.
Maeda followed closely behind, shattered glasses remaining on his healing face, the wounds sealing slowly, including that of his mouth — the memory of Kanesaki piercing his tongue still fresh as he silently clenched a fist.
Nishihara stopped, staring forward.
Now that the steam had pulled back, there was no mercy left in the view.
Bodies littered the ground in every direction — some sprawled face-down in the shallow water, others twisted at impossible angles against rocks and shattered gear. Rifles lay abandoned, bent or snapped, fingers still hooked through triggers. Armor had been torn open like tin, ribs crushed inward, claw marks raked so deep they'd carved through bone. Blood pooled everywhere, dark and oily, rippling as boots passed through it.
A helmet bobbed gently in the water near his feet, still attached to a head that wasn't.
The smell hit next — iron-heavy blood, burned flesh, ruptured organs, the sour tang of fear and waste. It clung to the back of his throat, thick enough to taste.
Behind him, a soldier staggered, a wet choking sound tearing out of them as they dropped to their knees. They raised a trembling hand, as if to ward off the sight, then doubled over and vomited into the water. Another soldier rushed to them, gripping their shoulders, murmuring something Nishihara couldn't hear over the ringing in his ears.
He didn't turn.
His eyes tracked slowly across the carnage — counting without meaning. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Too many to number properly. Some had been chewed nearly in half. Others looked almost untouched, faces frozen in shock, eyes still open and staring skyward.
Nishihara's jaw tightened until it ached. His injured shoulder throbbed dully beneath his sheath, but he barely noticed. His hands curled slowly into fists at his sides, nails biting into his palms.
Somewhere out there, in the thinning fog —
Kanesaki and the figure were gone, Yasuko too.
And all of this — all of it — was the cost.
***
By the time Nishihara reached the rock perimeter, the ground had changed color.
What had once been bloodstained wetstone was now streaked with blackened ichor and pale, dissolving tissue as the Alpha Yatzul's corpse continued to break down in on itself. The thing lay sprawled across the basin floor like a collapsed siege engine — six legs twisted at wrong angles, the spiked spine sagging as if its own weight had finally become too much to bear.
The three severed heads were the worst of it.
They were already rotting unnaturally fast, flesh sloughing away in wet sheets, exposing blackened bone beneath. Veins of sickly red light pulsed once, twice, then guttered out entirely as the creature's biology failed without the assimilated cores sustaining it. The air around the body shimmered faintly, heat bleeding off as if the corpse were burning from the inside.
A few soldiers stood guard at a distance, weapons trained on it out of sheer habit, despite knowing it was dead.
Yanagi stood at the edge of the perimeter, arms crossed, blood dried dark along one side of his face. His posture was rigid — captain straight — but his eyes were heavy, shadowed with exhaustion and loss. Horuichi was nearby, sitting on a boulder with his machine gun resting across his knees, helmet discarded at his feet. Sakaguchi leaned against a slab of stone, one arm hanging stiffly at his side where the YNS was still knitting muscle back together.
When the group approached, the talking stopped.
Yanagi turned first.
'…You're alive,' he said, the words sounding almost surprised.
'So are you,' Nishihara replied. His voice was steady, but flat.
Yanagi gave a humorless huff. 'Barely. More of them came, nearly tore us apart.' His eyes flicked past Nishihara, scanning instinctively. 'Where's Yasui?'
Nishihara hesitated.
'Med pod,' he said finally. 'Alive. Ike too.'
That earned a collective release of breath — relief, fragile and brief. Horuichi scrubbed a hand down his face, letting out a shaky laugh. Sakaguchi closed his eyes for a second, murmuring something under his breath that might've been a prayer — or a curse.
Yanagi nodded slowly. 'Good. Then at least it wasn't all for nothing.'
His gaze drifted back to the Alpha's corpse as one of the heads collapsed inward with a wet, sagging sound, dissolving into sludge.
Nishihara didn't answer. His eyes were fixed on the remains, jaw tight.
Yanagi studied him now, really looked at him. 'Something else happened,' he said, eyes moving to Maeda, sitting alone by the cliff edge.
Nishihara met his gaze at last.
'…Yes.'
Before he could say more, a sharp crack echoed as one of the Alpha's limbs finally gave way, collapsing into itself. Soldiers flinched, weapons snapping up — then slowly lowering again when nothing moved.
Yanagi exhaled through his nose. 'We'll debrief when the wounded are stabilized,' he said. 'For now, we hold this perimeter. No one goes back into the fog alone.'
His eyes hardened.
'We can't be sure they're all dead. I've called in a scouting run, pickup arrives in three hours tops, we've just gotta last.'
Behind them, the Alpha Yatzul continued to rot into nothingness — its monstrous form dissolving under the open air, leaving only stains, blackened bone fragments.
***
The waiting stretched thin.
Floodlights had been set up along the rock perimeter, their pale beams cutting through what remained of the thinning fog, casting long, warped shadows across the crater floor. Soldiers sat where they could — on rocks, overturned supply crates, the ground itself — too tired to care about posture, weapons resting across laps or leaning against knees. Med pods hummed softly behind them, steady and mechanical, the only reassuring sound in the aftermath.
Then someone pointed skyward.
'There—!'
Dark shapes cut across the clouds in the distance, angular silhouettes moving in tight formation. Dropships. Their running lights blinked through the haze like slow, patient stars, growing brighter by the second.
A ripple passed through the group — not cheers, not relief exactly, but something close to it. The knowledge that this place would finally be left behind.
Yanagi stood near the edge of the rocks, arms folded, watching the ships approach. Horuichi joined him, helmet tucked under one arm, his face drawn and lined with fatigue. Sakaguchi leaned nearby, posture loose but eyes sharp, while Nishihara stood just behind them, gaze drifting between the sky and the darkened fog below.
Yanagi broke the silence. 'Command's gonna want a full report,' he said. 'Especially about whatever took Kanesaki.'
Nishihara's jaw tightened.
'It wasn't a Yatzul,' he said. 'Not even close. A humanoid—masked. Fast. Adaptive. It fought Yasui evenly, maybe better. And it knew the terrain. Knew us.'
He paused, his jaw twitching as he stared into a small puddle, blood mixed into the water.
'I think it's the same as the one back at the airbase,' he gazed back up to the others. 'Just came in and took Kanesaki... Maybe Yasuko, too.'
Yanagi glanced at him. 'It carried him out?'
'Yeah,' Nishihara replied. 'Like he weighed nothing.'
Sakaguchi straightened slightly at that, eyes narrowing. 'I think I've got an idea of who we're dealing with.'
Yanagi turned to him. 'You sound awfully certain.'
Sakaguchi hesitated, then exhaled. 'Back at base, Kanesaki and I were digging through the archives, old files, mission reports and all that.' He looked toward the fog, as if expecting something to look back. 'There were references to something they called the Masked Reaper.'
Horuichi's finger twitched, his eyes darting to Sakaguchi at the mutter of the name.
'Masked Reaper, you're positive that's what they said?'
Sakaguchi nodded. 'Multiple files, all with the same name.'
'That sicko's been around for years, decades,' Horuichi began, 'Assasinations, terror attacks, fuck, he's rumoured to be the one that killed Kagawa Takemoto.'
Sakaguchi gasped audibly as Yanagi lowered his head slightly.
'He died 14 years back, you sure?" Sakaguchi folded his arms, pondering over the rumours.
Horuichi nodded, eyes closed, almost as though he was remembering the exact events.
'I used to work for a few corps, Merc jobs mainly, just moving cargo and whatnot, but one time...' his voice faded out, eyes blank for a second before he cut back in, '...One time we got to the cargo depot, it was fully guarded and everything... But we go in, and there's just bodies. Bodies everywhere.'
Yanagi's expression darkened, both Sakaguchi's and Nishihara's too.
'We found security tapes; showed this masked... Thing... Just slaughtering them all.' Looking up, Horuichi brushed his thumb over his chin. 'This guy's messed up, that's all you need to know.'
Yanagi's head snapped to face Sakaguchi, arms still crossed, fists clenched tight. 'You're positive that's the same guy?'
Sakaguchi nodded slowly. 'Same movement. Same speed. Same habit of showing up only when everything's already burning.'
Nishihara's hand tightened at his side. 'Then Kanesaki wasn't taken at random.'
'No,' Sakaguchi said quietly. 'He was collected.'
The dropships were close enough now that the low thrum of their engines vibrated through the stone underfoot. Wind began to kick up, tugging at cloaks and loose straps, scattering ash and grit across the perimeter.
Yanagi watched them descend, eyes hard, thoughtful. 'We'll put out searches for Kanesaki and Yasuko, find this mask, and kill it.'
Nishihara looked once more toward the fog, where Kanesaki had vanished.
'Assume them to be rogues,' he added.
Above them, the first dropship angled down, landing struts deploying with a heavy clank as the crater filled with roaring engines — salvation arriving late, as it always did.
Chapter 58 — end