PAGE 1
Dawn in Lavrito was a grey, hesitant thing. It did not break; it seeped through the coal-smoke and river-mist, illuminating a scene of quiet upheaval.
A crowd had gathered at the central kiosk, not for the morning headlines, but for the paper plastered over them. The print was still damp, the ink smelling sharp. It was a new wanted poster.
The face upon it was a girl's. Determined jaw, eyes that held a challenge. The artist had rendered a subtle, fiery corona around her clenched fist. The text was stark:
YOKUSHI KIZUMOTO
WANTED FOR SEDITION, ARSON, AND ASSOCIATION WITH ENEMIES OF THE STATE.
PRIME ELEMENTAL. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
BOUNTY: 55,000,000 KEITH
A low murmur moved through the crowd like a cold current. Fifty-five million. A fortune that could buy a town. A sum that turned citizens into hunters.
"A Prime Elemental…" a shopkeeper whispered, making a warding sign with his fingers. "I heard she burned down the east barracks single-handed."
"That's the Commander's daughter," a washerwoman muttered, her voice thick with pity. "The poor lamb. What's she mixed in?"
A child pointed a grubby finger. "Is she a witch, Mama?"
The mother slapped his hand down, her eyes wide with superstitious fear. "Don't look! Don't even say it!"
The poster was not just paper. It was a verdict. A sentence. A shift in the very air. The fugitive was no longer a rumour; she was a commodity, and her face was now etched into the memory of every hungry soul in the district.
PAGE 2
Inside the jailhouse, the air was thick with a different fear—the metallic scent of blood and the sour stench of terror.
The Grinders huddled in their cell, nursing not just bruises from the previous day's battle, but a deeper, chilling dread. The Sheriff's body lay under a sheet in the corner. No one had dared move it.
The branded man—the one who had given up the cave—clutched at his throat. The black, serpentine sigil burned against his skin like a brand from a cold iron. It pulsed with a rhythm that was not his own heartbeat.
The door creaked open.
He did not enter with sound. He entered with a silence that swallowed the room's scant noise. Goggles and a bandana hid his face, but his skin was the colour of a thing that has never seen the sun. Pale. Bloodless.
Naziri.
His gloved fingers touched the sheet over the Sheriff. A calculated slice. A fresh, dark well of blood seeped forth. It did not pool. It rose, defying gravity, drawn into a swirling sphere above his open palm. It churned, darkened, solidified—becoming a long, cruel spike of crystalline crimson.
He turned his goggled gaze upon the cell. "Location. A final time."
The branded man sobbed, pointing a trembling finger at his own marked throat as if it could answer. Another thug, broken by the silent horror, screamed it. "CAMBRIYORD CAVE! SHE WENT TO THE CURSED CAVE!"
Naziri's head tilted. A predator assessing spent prey. With a flick of his wrist, the blood-spike dissolved. It streamed through the bars like liquid smoke, wrapping once more around the informant's neck, sinking deeper, the black mamba brand seeming to constrict for a terrible second before settling.
"Acknowledged," Naziri rasped, his voice the sound of dry leaves in a tomb. "The mark is a covenant. My masters feel your pulse. They will find you if you flee. Speak of this, and it will be your last breath."
He was gone. The silence he left behind was heavier, more suffocating than before. The branded man whimpered, feeling the phantom coils tighten with every panicked beat of his heart. He was no longer a prisoner of the town. He was a beacon. Bait. A delivered message.
PAGE 3
The foothills of the Blackstone Peaks were a place of angry geology. Jagged spines of rock clawed at a sky the colour of bruised slate. No birds sang. The wind did not whistle; it hissed through stone teeth.
Before the gaping maw of Cambriyord Cave, Yokushi brought Lucy to a halt. The dread was a physical weight in her stomach.
"It's… too quiet," she murmured.
Hanzuri dismounted, his boots crunching on gravel that was too uniformly black. He did not look at the cave. He looked at the absence around it. The lack of lichen. The way the light seemed to bend away from the entrance.
"This is not a place," he stated, his voice flat. "It is a wound. The earth here is sick." He adjusted his monocle, the glass catching the dull light. "The energy is not latent. It is crafted. Contained. We are walking into a snare that has already sprung."
Yokushi swallowed, her throat dry. She summoned a small, defiant flame to her fingertip. "Then let's not keep it waiting."
They left Lucy loosely tethered to a skeletal birch and stepped into the dark.
The air within was not cold. It was void of temperature. It stole the warmth from Yokushi's flame, making it gutter weakly. The walls were not rough stone. They were smooth, geometric, angled with a precision that spoke of intelligence, not erosion. A corridor carved by design.
And on the walls, the story began.
PAGE 4
It started as faint etchings. Then spiralling scripts in no language Yokushi knew. Then, the murals.
She held her flickering light high, her breath fogging in the unnatural chill. The first mural showed eight robed figures in a circle, their hands outstretched towards a central, faceless form. Beneath it, a single word was carved with violent finality: END.
The next showed a landscape of bones—a giant, kneeling skeleton, mountains of skulls. A lone, long-haired warrior stood before it, weaponless.
"Hanzuri-san…" Yokushi whispered, her voice swallowed by the stone. "What is this? A history? A prophecy?"
She turned.
Hanzuri stood motionless a few paces back. He was not looking at the mural of the warrior. His gaze was locked on a small, intricate symbol nestled in the corner of the 'END' carving: a stylized 'M', formed from a broken chain.
His breath hitched. A sharp, pained sound.
A vision, not of sight, but of sensation, assaulted him:
The cold of divine iron on his wrists.
A council of shadows, their judgements echoing in a void.
"The seal must hold, Executioner. For eternity. The memory must be erased."
And then—Yokushi. But not as she was. Eyes like polished frost, her father's revolver in her hand, the flame on her finger not a tool, but a torch to burn the past. Walking towards him not to save, but to sever. To fulfill a sentence.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drum against the silence of the cave. The geometric walls seemed to pulse, to close in.
His knees buckled. He collapsed to the hard floor, a dull crack echoing as his monocle struck stone.
PAGE 5
"HANZURI-SAN!"
Yokushi's flame nearly died.She was at his side in an instant, hands on his shoulders. He was cold, so cold.
"Look at me!What's wrong?"
His eyes snapped open. They were wide, unfocused, the grey irises seeing through her, past her, to the vengeful phantom of his vision. He flinched from her touch as if burned.
A moment. Two. The cave breathed around them.
Slowly, the terror in his eyes banked, replaced by a weary, bottomless frost. He pushed himself up, his movements stiff. He would not look at the mural.
"An old ghost," he said, the words gravel in his throat. "The walls here… they remember. Do not study them. Do not speak of them."
They pressed deeper, the geometric silence pressing in. Above, at the cave's sunlit entrance, Lucy waited, a patient silhouette against the grey sky, tethered to the skeletal birch. Yokushi's foot caught on a loose stone…
He straightened his coat, a gesture of pure, forced control. The subject was sealed. But the silence between them now hummed with a new, unspoken fear.
Before Yokushi could form another question, her foot caught on a loose stone. She stumbled back, her light dancing wildly.
And a human skull, placed neatly on a small ledge, grinned at her from the shadows.
She screamed. The sound was swallowed, then thrown back in a distorted echo.
The floor beneath her gave way with a sigh of crumbling stone.
---
PAGE 6
The world became a roaring, vertiginous slide. Yokushi tumbled, a cry torn from her throat, down a slick chute of flowstone polished by centuries of dripping water. There was no stopping. Only falling.
She landed with a jarring thud on soft, dry sand, the breath knocked from her lungs. A second later, Hanzuri landed beside her in a controlled crouch, his coat flaring around him.
The chamber they found themselves in defied all logic of the cave above.
The floor was smooth, veined marble. The air was still and warm, carrying a scent of ozone and old paper. Lanterns of frosted glass glowed with a soft, perpetual light, illuminating shelves carved into the living rock, stuffed with books, scrolls, and strange brass instruments. In the centre of the room, upon a chair fashioned from a single, massive crystal geode, a young man looked up from a heavy tome.
He had a scholar's messy hair, sharp, inquisitive purple eyes, and wore a travel-stained green coat. He closed his book with a definitive thump.
"Oh," he said, his voice calm, almost amused. "Company. And through the back entrance, no less. How… inelegant."
Hanzuri was on his feet in an instant, the revolver from Yokushi's stolen coat now in his hand, aimed with unwavering precision. "Identify. Now."
The man stood, brushing non-existent dust from his sleeves. "Hajin Mozart. Former Chief Tactician, Third Benghazi Artillery Legion. Currently… an independent researcher." His gaze, analytical and piercing, slid from Hanzuri to Yokushi, who was pushing herself up, sand in her hair. "And you are a significant outlier. Mizuri was the last registered Prime Elemental in Benghazi service. You are not Mizuri. Your flame signature is… purer. Untrained."
"Yokushi Kizumoto," Hanzuri answered, his voice a low warning rumble. "Daughter of Kizutami Shinkai."
Hajin's eyebrows lifted. A spark of genuine, clinical interest ignited in his eyes. "The fallen Holy Commander's heir. Carrying his fire. The poetic symmetry is almost too perfect." He stepped forward, ignoring Hanzuri's gun, and offered a hand to Yokushi. It was calloused, but not from a sword-hilt—from tools, from pages, from intricate work.
Yokushi, against her better judgement, took it. His grip was firm, dry, assessing.
"You live here?" she asked, gesturing at the impossible library-lair.
"I utilize it," Hajin corrected. "Cambriyord is not a cave. It is a focus. A failed attempt to harness a ley line of… dissonant energy. Its geometry is a puzzle. I have merely solved enough of it to arrange the pieces to my advantage." A faint, proud smile. "The skull was a directional deterrent. Most who see it turn back. You… slid."
PAGE 7
Yokushi's fear crystallized into a flash of anger. This man had terrified her, nearly gotten her killed, and he called it a 'directional deterrent'? A jet of flame, unbidden, erupted from her fingertip and shot past Hajin's head, close enough to singe a few strands of his hair.
The academic calm shattered. The playful light in Hajin's eyes vanished, replaced by a sudden, fierce intensity. He turned slowly to Hanzuri, his voice dropping, all pretence gone.
"Leader," he said, the word heavy with meaning. "That. The control, the primal heat… that is the variable our models were missing. The catalyst."
Hanzuri's expression did not change, but the air in the room grew colder. "Your models?"
Hajin gestured around his chamber. "The study of the crafted energy. The Shinja Clan's old contracts with forces beyond the Empire's understanding. I have been piecing it together. Hiding from those who would use it to build better shackles." He looked back at Yokushi, a strategist seeing a new piece on the board. "Your fire isn't just a weapon. In the right locus, with the right resonance… it could be a key."
"We require an exit," Hanzuri stated, holstering the revolver. The discussion was over.
Hajin nodded, the tactician reasserting itself. "One path. The way you came is… unstable now." He led them to a tunnel at the rear of the chamber, which ended in a sheer drop into blackness. A sturdy, woven-hemp slide was anchored to the edge, disappearing into the void. "My express route. It bypasses the upper maze entirely."
Without a word of warning, Hajin sat and pushed off, sliding into the darkness with a faint whirr of rope.
Yokushi peered over the edge, her stomach lurching. "You cannot be serious."
Hanzuri placed a hand on her back. "We are out of time." He pushed.
Her scream was long and heartfelt as she plummeted down the chute, Hanzuri following a second behind.
PAGE 8
They landed in a heap in a wider, more natural cavern, the air cool and damp. Before them, lit by shafts of grey light from fissures high above, stood Hajin's masterpiece.
It was a stagecoach, but unlike any that rolled on imperial roads. Its body was patched together from polished wood, reinforced leather, and sections of what looked like old boiler plating. The wheels were strong, spoked with cured bone-wood. Hitched to it, munching placidly on a tuft of cave moss, was Lucy.
"You built this… down here?" Yokushi breathed, her anger momentarily forgotten in awe.
"Polymath," Hanzuri murmured, the word not quite an insult.
Hajin shrugged. "Resources are limited. Ingenuity is not." His sharp eyes went to the light from above. "The day is waning. And your presence has undoubtedly tripped several of my perimeter alerts. We must depart."
"I'll get Lucy ready," Yokushi said, moving towards the horse.
"No," Hanzuri's voice stopped her. He was staring at the highest fissure, his head tilted as if listening to a distant frequency. "The alert is not for the future. It is for the present. They are here."
A cold knot tightened in Yokushi's chest. "The hunters?"
"And others. The new bounty has a wide net." He turned to her, his gaze absolute. "You will take the coach with Mozart. I will draw them off and rendezvous—"
"Like hell!" Yokushi's whisper was fierce. "Your 'rendezvous' last time ended with you in a coffin! We go together. Now."
For a second, something flickered in Hanzuri's eyes—not anger, but a grim, reluctant respect. He gave a single, sharp nod. "To the mouth. Quickly."
PAGE 9
Yokushi scrambled onto Lucy, urging her the short distance to the cave's main entrance. The fading daylight was a shock to her eyes after the perpetual gloom.
At the mouth, she saw them.
Not just a few hunters. A cordón. A mix of hard-eyed bounty hunters in mismatched gear and a squad of Lavrito militia in dust-blue uniforms, their rifles looking too clean, too new. One of them was unrolling a fresh wanted poster, her face glaring back at the cave. The bounty had made them bold.
Lucy sensed the tension, her ears flattening. As Yokushi leaned to grab the reins more securely, a militiaman pointed. A shout rang out.
Lucy startled, rearing up with a whinny. Yokushi, caught off-balance, was thrown from the saddle. She hit the rocky ground hard, the impact driving the wind from her lungs in a painful gasp. The world tilted. She began to slide, gravel skittering away under her, towards the cliff edge that dropped away from the cave mouth.
Not like this. Not after everything.
The thought was clear,cold. She clawed at the ground, fingers scraping on stone, finding purchase on a stubborn root. She hauled herself back from the edge, chest heaving.
She looked up. The militia was advancing, fanned out. Lucy stood a dozen paces away, trembling.
Yokushi pushed to her feet, pain lancing from her ribs. She moved slowly, hands up, speaking in a low, soothing tone to her horse. "Easy, Lucy. Easy, girl." She grabbed the reins, mounted in one smooth, painful motion, and kicked.
She did not ride towards the militia. She rode back into the swallowing dark of the cave.
PAGE 10
She found Hanzuri and Hajin by the makeshift coach. Hajin was hastily loading a small trunk of instruments and books.
"They're at the mouth," Yokushi gasped, dismounting. "Militia. Bounty hunters. A dozen, maybe more."
Hanzuri's face was a mask of cold calculus. "Then we do not go to the mouth." He moved to the coach's driver seat. "Mozart. You know the mountain. Is there another egress?"
Hajin nodded, slamming the trunk shut. "One. A goat path on the western face. Steep. Dangerous. It will not hold a concerted pursuit."
"It will hold long enough." Hanzuri gathered Lucy's reins, hitching her to the coach with swift, practised knots. "Inside. Both of you."
The coach lurched as Hanzuri cracked a makeshift whip. It rolled forward onto a narrow, crumbling ledge that wound away from the main chamber, into a side tunnel Hajin had cleared. The path was a nightmare of tight turns and sheer drops, the coach's wheels skittering on loose scree.
They emerged onto the mountainside, the late afternoon sun casting long, accusing shadows. The path was a mere scrape on the cliff face. Below, a valley floor lay hundreds of feet down.
BOOM.
The shot came from above and behind. A militiaman, perched on a higher outcrop. The bullet struck the right rear wheel with a sound of splintering wood and shrieking metal.
The coach slewed violently, tilting towards the void. Hanzuri fought the reins, muscles straining, but physics was a law even he could not override. The rear axle snapped. He was thrown from his seat, tumbling down the steep, rocky slope beside the path.
The coach groaned, teetering on the edge. Inside, Yokushi and Hajin were thrown against the walls like dolls.
Through the crazed window, Yokushi saw Hanzuri's still form. And the glint of his monocle—the right lens a spiderweb of fractures.
From the cracks, a thick, tar-black fluid began to well, seeping down his temple like a tear of pure shadow.
PAGE 11
On the ridge above, the militiaman whooped, reloading. Three more hunters appeared, scrambling down the rocks, their eyes fixed on the prize—the crippled coach, the vulnerable fugitives within.
Hajin kicked the door open. "We have to—"
"Stay back."
The voice was Hanzuri's,but it resonated from the stones themselves, layered with a depth of power that made the air vibrate. He was pushing himself to his knees.
He turned his head towards the advancing hunters. The black fluid traced a horrific path down his cheek. He did not wipe it away.
Slowly, with the grim solemnity of a priest performing a last rite, he crossed his arms over his shoulders. He took a breath—a sound like a bellows drawing in all the light, all the sound, from the immediate world.
Then, he flung his arms wide.
What erupted was not an attack. It was an unmaking.
A wave of silent, absolute darkness exploded from him. It had no heat, no cold. It was pressure, a gravitational anomaly that shoved Yokushi and Hajin back into the coach as if struck by a giant's palm.
In the space that pressure created, a form coalesced. It was the jagged silhouette from the attic, given full, terrifying agency. A thing of sharp angles and screaming silence. It moved not through the air, but through the substance of shadow itself.
It was among the hunters in the space between heartbeats.
There was no drama. No clash. Only effect.
SLASH. CRUNCH. RIP.
Bodies were not cut; they were unraveled. Limbs were flung in impossible directions. One man was lifted and folded around a jagged rock with a wet, final snap. The spirit did not fight. It deconstructed. And then, its task complete, it dissolved back into the swirling dark around Hanzuri.
The unnatural darkness retreated, sucking back into him. The ordinary gloom of the mountain twilight returned.
On the slope, four broken shapes lay still.
Hanzuri swayed. His eyes, the one behind the broken glass now fully black from lid to brow, rolled back. He collapsed face-first onto the stones.
PAGE 12
Silence, broken only by the moan of the wind and the creak of the dying coach.
Yokushi stumbled out, Hajin behind her. The stench of blood and voided organs hit her, making her gag. She forced her eyes away from the carnage, towards Hanzuri.
Hajin was staring at the scene on the slope, his brilliant mind scrambling for a logical framework. His face was pale. "What… what was that? An explosive? Concussive force? The angles of dispersal are all wrong…"
Yokushi looked at him, her own horror reflected in his confusion, but for a different reason. A cold, absolute certainty settled in her gut.
"You…" her voice was a dry whisper. "You didn't see it?"
Hajin turned to her, his purple eyes wide with analytical frustration. "See what? There was a pressure wave. Then… structural failure of the hostiles. I didn't see a projectile. Was it sonic? Psychic?"
He hadn't seen the spirit. The guardian beast. The price of the covenant.
The truth was a lonely, freezing cell closing around Yokushi's heart. She was the only one who saw the monster. The secret was hers alone to carry.
She didn't answer him. She knelt by Hanzuri, her hands trembling. The black fluid was still oozing, viscous and slow, from under the shattered monocle. It smelled of ozone and old graves. She tore a long strip from the hem of her cloak—the red coat he had given her—and pressed it gently to the wound. The fabric soaked through instantly, the red darkening to an ugly purple-black.
"We need a doctor," she said, her voice now frighteningly calm. "Someone who understands things that are not… natural."
Hajin, shaken from his clinical reverie, nodded. His eyes were on the black-stained cloth. "Bastovelo. Three days south. It's a cesspool. A haven for deserters, forgotten nobles, and… back-alley surgeons who don't ask questions. They might have someone who's seen… this."
Together, they lifted Hanzuri's limp, heavy form into the wrecked coach. Hajin assessed the broken axle with a glance. "It will hold. For a while. But we cannot stop."
He took the driver's seat, gathering the reins. His hands, for the first time, were not steady.
Yokushi climbed inside, settling Hanzuri's head on her lap. The black seepage was slowing, but his breathing was shallow, his skin cold as marble. She looked at her own hands, at the faint, dormant warmth that lived beneath her skin.
The flame that lit his borrowed candle.
The candle was now guttering in a howling wind.
The crippled stagecoach, pulled by a weary horse, lurched into motion, leaving the carnage and the cursed cave behind. It descended the treacherous mountain path, carrying its three occupants—a genius who had seen his world's logic break, a living ghost bleeding shadow, and the girl whose fire was now the only thing keeping the dark at bay—into the gathering storm of night, towards a city of outcasts and last chances.
PAGE 13
The forest swallowed them whole. The stagecoach, a wounded animal, lurched over roots and through veils of hanging moss. Inside, the only sounds were the groan of wood, Lucy's labored breathing, and the ragged rhythm of Yokushi's own heart.
She stared at her hands, clenched in her lap. The tremor in them was fine, constant. Not from fear of the chase. From the poster. Her face, rendered in stark ink, a price attached to her life. It made it real. It made her a thing to be collected.
"Damn it," she whispered, the words swallowed by the dense, green dark. She grabbed a fistful of her own hair, the pain a grounding spike. "I'm wanted. Officially. They'll never stop."
Hajin, guiding Lucy with subtle shifts of the reins, didn't turn. "Fifty-five million Keith turns every man into a hunter, and every shadow into an ambush. We are no longer fleeing soldiers. We are quarried game."
Hajin's eyes never left the path. "We cannot stop. But we can at least not starve." He jerked his chin towards the back of the coach. "Use the villagers' gifts. The cheese, the bread. Eat. You will need the strength."
He veered onto a narrower track, a deer run barely wider than the coach. The canopy thickened, plunging them into premature twilight. A hundred yards ahead, a massive old pine groaned, shivered, and collapsed across the path with a sound like a breaking spine. Dust and needles bloomed into the air.
Hajin reined Lucy to a halt. His eyes, purple and sharp, scanned the silent, sun-dappled woods. Nothing stirred.
"A coincidence?" Yokushi breathed.
"In this business, there is no coincidence." He backed the coach up, the wheels protesting, and took a fork to the right.
The new path sloped downwards, the air growing colder. A deep, instinctual wrongness settled in Yokushi's stomach.
"Hajin, this way… it feels—"
BOOM.
The explosion was not loud. It was deep, a pressure that hit their chests first, then their ears. It came from the left, showering their coach with dirt and shredded leaves. Before the echo died, a blur of motion flickered from the right.
Hajin jerked back. A throwing knife hissed past, opening a thin red line on his cheek before thudding into the seat-back beside him, vibrating with a metallic hum.
From behind, the sharp, flat cracks of rifle fire. Muzzle flashes winked in the gloom. The bounty hunters had herded them.
Yokushi's mind went cold and clear. The revolver. Hanzuri's coat. She lunged across the unconscious form, her fingers finding the familiar grip in the deep pocket. She checked the cylinder. A single, brass-kissed round winked back at her.
"God's own luck," she muttered.
She cracked the coach's side window. A bullet immediately spiderwebbed the glass, a shard nicking her palm. She didn't cry out. She dropped below the sill, yanked the window down, and thrust the revolver out blindly.
She did not aim. She poured her will, her fear, her rage into that one shot. Burn.
The gun did not kick. It thrummed.
The bullet left the barrel not as lead, but as a compacted star of orange-white fury. It struck the ground between two hunters and detonated.
The world turned to sound and fire. A sphere of annihilation bloomed, swallowing men, trees, and light. The concussion wave hit the coach like a giant's palm, rocking it on its axles. When Yokushi dared look back, the forest was an inferno, a roaring wall of flame that had become their unintended rear guard.
Hajin stared at the holocaust in his rearview mirror, his face a mask of stunned calculation. "A… controlled tactical burn. Good." He snapped the reins. Lucy bolted forward, away from the heat.
Yokushi slumped, her hand throbbing. She ripped a long strip of linen from a book's binding on the floor. With her teeth and her good hand, she fashioned a tight, crude bandage. The pain was a welcome anchor in a world spinning into madness.
PAGE 14
Their reprieve was measured in minutes.
The deer run ended abruptly at the lip of a sheer, rocky incline. Lucy's hooves skidded on loose scree. Hajin hauled back on the reins, but momentum was a law even he could not repeal.
The world tilted.
The stagecoach tipped, then plunged over the edge. It was not a fall, but a brutal, cartwheeling descent down a slope of jagged stone and thorny brush. Yokushi was thrown against the roof, then the wall, the world a cacophony of splintering wood, screaming metal, and her own swallowed cries.
Hajin was ejected from the driver's seat, a ragdoll in a brown coat, rolling and tumbling down the mountainside.
With a final, sickening crunch, the coach slammed broadside into the trunk of a gnarled, ancient pine. The impact drove the air from Yokushi's lungs. She lay stunned, a constellation of sharp, glittering pain blooming across her arms and side—shards of window glass embedded in her skin.
Silence, broken only by the groan of settling wreckage and Lucy's panicked whinny. The horse stood a dozen yards downslope, her harness torn, eyes rolling white.
Hajin picked himself up, his coat torn, blood smearing his temple. He surveyed the wreck—the shattered wheels, the cracked axle, Hanzuri's still form visible within.
"My apologies, Yokushi," he said, his voice flat. "The variables of the slope were… miscalculated."
Yokushi pushed herself up from the wreckage. A storm of sharp, stinging pain lit up along her right arm and side—dozens of shallow, glittering cuts from the window glass. Her palm, where the bullet had grazed it, throbbed with a deeper, hotter ache. She was painted in a lacework of red, but nothing poured; the wounds were superficial, a brutal scoring. Lucy stood a dozen yards downslope, her harness torn, eyes rolling white.
Hajin's eyes, ever-analytical, swept the debris field. They landed on a coiled length of heavy rope, part of the shredded rigging. He moved, not with despair, but with the focused energy of a new problem presenting itself.
He retrieved the rope, tested its weight. From the wreckage, he salvaged leather straps, a broken hinge. On his knees in the dirt, his hands moved with swift, precise certainty—tying sailor's knots, weaving a makeshift harness, lashing the broken coach's frame to Lucy's torn rigging. It was ugly, brutal engineering, but it held.
He pulled a brass pocket watch from his vest. "12:40 AM. We walk from here. The horse pulls. We guide."
It was a funeral procession for a machine. The patched-together contraption lurched and scraped its way down the mountain path, a testament to stubbornness. High above on a wind-scoured cliff, a crow watched. Its eyes were not black, but a deep, liquid red. It followed their progress for a long moment, then let out a single, rasping shriek that was swallowed by the vastness. It took wing, flying not towards Bastovelo, but deeper into the black heart of the peaks.
PAGE 15
1:20 PM
Bastovelo did not welcome. It absorbed.
It rose from the valley floor like a growth of brick and iron, veiled in the perpetual exhalation of a hundred factory stacks. The air, even at the gates, carried the metallic tang of forges and the sour sweetness of chemical runoff. Electric streetlamps, already glowing in the afternoon gloom, cast hazy haloes on wet cobblestones. The people here moved with a hunched, purposeful anonymity, faces hidden by scarves and the brims of dull hats, their shadows long in the industrial haze.
Hajin guided their pathetic conveyance through the towering iron gates. No guard questioned them. Their dishevelment marked them as just another piece of the city's refuse.
Yokushi peered through the cracked window. This was not a refuge. It was a different kind of maze.
"Here." Hajin's voice was muffled as he passed a worn, grey scarf through the broken window. "Your face is the most valuable thing in this coach. Hide it."
He then hauled Hanzuri's limp body over his shoulder with a grunt of effort. A passing laborer, seeing the blood and the pallor of death, wordlessly took Hanzuri's legs. Together, they staggered towards a narrow building wedged between a smokestack and a boarding house. A faded sign showed a snake wrapped around a rod—the universal, desperate symbol for a back-alley medic.
The inside smelled of antiseptic and old blood. The doctor was a man in his fifties, with the weary eyes of one who has seen every way a body can break. He asked no names. He listened to Hajin's concise, fabricated tale, his gaze doing a quick, professional triage. It lingered on Hanzuri's shattered monocle, then dropped to the chest wound. The doctor's weary eyes narrowed. He leaned closer, not in horror, but in clinical curiosity. There, in the stark electric light of the clinic, the ghostly luminescence beneath Hanzuri's skin was faintly visible—a slow, rhythmic pulse, like a dying star seen through fog. It had no source, no infection. It simply was. The doctor said nothing, but his movements became even more deliberate, as if handling a radioactive isotope.
"The operating room is in the back. For him." His voice was gravel.
The doctor... turned to Yokushi. He took her bleeding hand with an air of detached efficiency. "Gunshot graze. Contaminated." His words were clinical notes. He cleaned it, dug out the lead fragment with cold steel forceps, and stitched it with two precise knots.
Then his eyes flicked to her arm and side, glinting with embedded glass. "Hold still." With the same methodical speed, he used the tweezers to pluck out each visible shard, dropping them into a metal dish with soft pings. The process was swift, painless compared to the deeper ache in her hand.
He wrapped both areas in clean, tight bandages. "The glass was shallow. The bullet was not. Do not use the hand for two days."
"You will wait outside," he stated, not asking.
In the stark, white-tiled hallway, the dam broke. The adrenaline that had been holding Yokushi upright evaporated, leaving her hollow and shaking. She stared at the floor, seeing not tile, but the inferno, the crashing coach, the crow's red eyes.
Hajin did not touch her. Instead, he moved—not towards her, but to block her view of the operating room door. A deliberate, tactical repositioning.
"Your respiratory rate is elevated. Your pupils are dilated." His voice was low, analytical, yet it lacked its usual detached clip. "This is a standard stress response. You are not malfunctioning. You are human."
He paused, as if the last word was a clinical term he rarely used.
"He will live," Hajin stated, the certainty in his voice absolute, forged from data she didn't have. "Your role is to ensure you do the same. Do not let the shock of the hunt degrade your primary function: survival."
It wasn't comfort. It was a strategic reassignment of her focus—from Hanzuri's fate to her own. And in doing so, he gave her the only thing that could steady her: a new mission.
She managed a tiny, brittle nod. It was not comfort, but it was a thread of logic to cling to in the drowning silence.
PAGE 16
They emerged into Bastovelo's acid-tinged air. Hajin rolled his shoulders, a man shedding one tension for another.
Outside, Hajin stretched, his eyes scanning the labyrinth of brick and smoke. "First time in this particular pit. I need to move. Acquire supplies. Gather data. I will return by three o'clock."
Yokushi grabbed the rough wool of his sleeve. Her grip trembled violently. "I'm coming with you."
He stopped. Looked at her hand, then at her face—not with annoyance, but with a swift, tactical assessment. He saw the fear of being left alone with the silence and the bloodstained coat.
He didn't pry her hand off. Instead, he placed his own hand over hers on his sleeve—not a hold, but a firm, brief press of acknowledgement. A silent signal: Message received.
"You cannot," he said, his voice low. "You are a high-visibility asset. Your face is on posters. Your fire is in your eyes. In this city, you would be a beacon drawing every cutthroat and informant from here to the river."
He slowly withdrew his hand, the contact breaking. "Your post is here. Guard him. It is the more vital mission. You are the only one he trusts."
The logic was a cold, unshakable wall. She deflated, the fight leaving her.
From Hanzuri's coat, she pulled the empty revolver and pressed it into Hajin's hand. "At least… get rounds."
He nodded, a quick, sharp gesture of a task accepted. Then he was gone, dissolving into the river of grey coats and shadow.
Yokushi retreated to the clinic's hard wooden bench. The silence of the waiting room was absolute, a vacuum that began to fill with the ghosts of the day—the gunshots, the screams, the boy in her dream. Exhaustion, heavier than any blanket, pulled at her. Her eyes, scratchy with smoke and unshed tears, fluttered shut.
PAGE 17
The Dream
She was standing in a forest, but it was wrong. The trees were pillars of charred bone. The sky was a scab of molten red. The air was thick with ashes that tasted of salt and old copper.
Bodies lay contorted in the mud, not just dead, but… unmade. Their stories erased mid-sentence.
A child's weeping cut through the silence, sharper than the crackle of distant flame.
She found him in a clearing. A boy, knees deep in black soil, cradling the head of an old woman in his lap. Her eyes were closed, a smile of profound peace etched on her face, a brutal contrast to the ruin of her stomach. The boy was wiping blood from her cheeks with a trembling, too-small hand.
"Please…" the boy sobbed, not looking up. "Help her…"
Yokushi took a step. The boy lifted his head.
Her breath froze. The eyes. The set of the jaw beneath the childhood softness. It was him. Hanzuri. Drowned in a terror so vast it had no bottom.
Before she could move, a sound like a dying mountain echoed through the burning woods. From the treeline, shapes emerged. Not men. Things of rusted iron and jagged purpose, moving with a single, horrific intent.
She ran. She snatched up the boy—he was light, a bundle of sticks and terror—and fled. The forest melted around her, geography betraying logic. She burst into another clearing, and the child was gone from her arms.
In the center of the clearing, Hanzuri—the man—lay on his back. A wound, not from a bullet, but from something clawed and terrible, parted his chest. His breath bubbled wet and pink at his lips.
"HANZURI-SAN!"
A presence manifested to her left. A figure of faint, silver light. No wings. A crown of twisted thorns dug into its brow. Its body was a tapestry of scars that gleamed like fresh cuts. A wingless angel. Its voice was the wind through a crypt. "Do not touch him. The covenant is not for you to mend."
Dizziness, swift and swallowing. The scene dissolved.
Now she was on her knees, arms bound behind her by chains of cold, living shadow. Before her, a monster paced. It was a sculpture of corded muscle and hatred, skin etched with glowing red tattoos, in each hand a blade forged from solidified darkness. Its breath, hot and smelling of open graves, washed over her. It raised a blade—
Yokushi woke with a strangled gasp, her heart trying to batter its way out of her ribs. The clinic clock ticked loudly in the silence.
3:12 PM.
Hajin was late.
PAGE 18
A fist of cold dread closed around her stomach. She burst out of the clinic door, into the murky afternoon light. Her eyes raked the crowded street—the vendors, the workers, the shrouded figures. No flash of green coat. No mess of tactical genius hair.
"Hajin?" Her call was swallowed by the city's drone.
A shadow fell across her. Not from the clouds.
A spear, longer than a man was tall, its head a cruel curve of black steel, embedded itself in the cobblestones between her feet with a CHUNK that sent sparks flying.
The street erupted into chaos. People screamed, scattering into doorways, overturning carts.
On the ledge of a factory roof opposite, a figure sat casually. Goggles reflected the sickly streetlamp glow. Scarves hid the lower half of his face. Asuro Naziri.
He dropped from the ledge, landing in a silent crouch. He rose, retrieving his spear with a fluid twist. He approached, his movements economical, utterly devoid of wasted motion.
"Yokushi Kizumoto," he said, his voice distorted, metallic. A vocoder. "You will come with me." He extended a gloved hand. It was not an offer.
She took a step back, her bandaged hand curling into a fist at her side.
"I advise against resistance." He took another step, the spear's tip lifting slightly.
Before he could take a third, the ground at his feet erupted.
A hand, perfectly formed from packed sand and gravel, shot from the cobblestones and clamped around his ankle. It yanked. Naziri's balance vanished. The sand-hand lifted him into the air and slammed him down onto the street with a crushing impact, once, twice, before hurling his body like a doll through the plate-glass window of a nearby pawn shop.
Shards rained down. For a moment, silence.
Then, a figure stirred in the wreckage. Naziri stood, shrugging off splinters and dust. A crack webbed one lens of his goggles. He looked past Yokushi, his gaze fixing on a figure leaning against a lamppost across the square.
Hajin Mozart. A faint trail of smoke curled from a fresh cigarette in his lips. At his feet, the cobblestones still quivered, grains of sand rearranging themselves into calm patterns.
Naziri planted his spear, the sound a definitive clack on stone. He rolled his shoulders, neck bones cracking like pistol shots.
"So," Naziri's filtered voice rang out. "The desert-rat tactician is here too."
He settled into a low, ready stance, knuckles white on his spear's haft.
"Prepare yourself. Today, your calculations end."
EPILOGUE
Rain fell on the high hills in a relentless, grey curtain. It drummed a lonely rhythm on the sodden roof of a solitary hut, perched on the edge of nothing.
Inside, firelight fought a losing battle against the damp chill. The walls were bookshelves, crammed with volumes whose spines were cracked and titles faded to ghosts.
A young woman sat on a rough-hewn stool, holding a sheet of paper. It was damp at the edges. A wanted poster. Yokushi Kizumoto's face, rendered with unsettling accuracy, stared out from the gloom, the words PRIME ELEMENTAL bold beneath.
"Do you know her, Garry?" the woman asked, her voice quiet.
Footsteps sounded from the deeper shadows at the back of the room. Slow, deliberate. A man emerged into the firelight. He was tall, wrapped in a long coat that smelled of ozone and distant storms. His face was lined, not with age, but with a fatigue that was centuries deep.
He took the poster from her hands. His eyes, a colour that seemed to hold the last light of a dead star, scanned it. He traced the line of Yokushi's jaw with a calloused thumb.
"Yoku…shi." He let the name hang in the damp air, a key turning in a long-locked door. A slow, profound sadness settled over his features, followed by the grim acceptance of an old soldier seeing the first flare of a battle he knew was coming.
He looked from the poster to the woman, and then to the fire, as if seeing the future reflected in the flames.
"So," he said, the word final as a tombstone settling. "It has begun."
He crumpled the poster slowly in his fist, but the gesture held no anger. Only inevitability.
"The true chaos has finally begun."
THE END.