Dawn came not with light, but with a cessation of noise.
The pounding rain stopped. The howling wind died.
An eerie, thick silence descended, broken only by the drip-drip of water from the lodge eaves. Then, fog rolled in. Not a gentle mist, but a dense, cold, white blindness that swallowed the world.
Ren stood at the lodge door. The keeper looked past him into the blank whiteness. Her scowl had deepened into something like dread.
"Fool's errand," she muttered, not to him, but to the fog. She met his eyes. "Path will be a slick of mud and who-knows-what. But you'll go."
He nodded.
He walked into the fog. It was like stepping into cold milk. Sound was muffled. Sight was gone after ten feet. He walked by memory, by the feel of the stones under his boots.
The journey took twice as long. The world was a ghost.
Then, the fog began to thin.
The first thing he saw was the old willow tree at the turn-off to the Oshiro farm.
It was wrong.
The willow was a skeleton sheathed in bone-white chalk, its branches frozen in a silent scream against the grey sky. Ren's fingertip brushed a twig. It snapped like a dead man's finger.
He ran.
The Oshiro farm's fence was gone. In its place were jagged spikes of bleached stone. In the pasture, the two dairy goats stood mid-graze, transformed into perfect, matte-grey statues, a dusting of white ash on their backs.
He turned the last corner into Yomi's Hollow.
And stopped.
The village had been bleached of life.
The thatch was the color of old bone. The wood was pale as sun-bleached driftwood. The vibrant garden plots were now expanses of crushed white dust.
But the people were solidified.
Old Man Shirai sat on his step, a stone cup frozen an inch from his lips.
Masaru the blacksmith was a mountain of grey granite, his hammer forever held at the peak of its swing.
The Fujita twins were caught in a sprint, their stone faces locked in silent, laughing screams.
His eyes snapped to his own house. The door was shattered inward.
A wet, choked gasp tore from his throat. He ran.
"MOM!"
He plunged into the gloom.
They were in the center. A final tableau.
His mother, on her knees. One arm a stony arc over Savy. The other stretched toward the shattered door, her fingers reaching for the path home.
Rina crouched before them, a kitchen knife in her petrified grip, its tip snapped off. She had died facing it.
Mill pressed against her mother's back, her small stone hands splayed, her wide eyes fixed on the window—the escape route.
Beneath them, curled into the smallest possible ball, was Savy.
A fortress of love, turned to granite.
Ren fell to his knees. The air left his lungs. A high-pitched whine filled his ears. His vision swam. He shook, a violent tremor wracking his frame. He tried to breathe and choked on nothing.
A low, subsonic HUM vibrated up through the floorboards, into his bones.
The sound of the engine.
His head turned. Through the shattered door, in the center of the bleached square, stood the source.
A Kaiju.
A jagged monument of rock and amber light. Its smooth, white mask-face was tilted. A thin beam connected it to Old Man Shirai's statue, drawing a stream of glowing golden sand from the stone man's open mouth.
Feeding.
The shaking in Ren's body stopped. The whine vanished. Replaced by a perfect, white-hot silence.
He stood up.
He walked out of his house, into the square. His steps crushed the brittle white dust.
The Kaiju's head turned. The harvesting beam winked out. The slit in its mask brightened, coiling with violent energy, focusing on him.
In a place of deep shadow and older stone, a consciousness observed through its creation's eyes.It reclined on a throne of intertwined, petrified roots, fingers steepled. Its form was elegantly lean, draped in robes of grey and dried rose-red. Its hair was the colour of tarnished silver, long and perfectly still. Its most striking feature was not its sharp, aristocratic face, but its eyes—they were closed. Sealed shut by smooth, flesh-like lids, as if it had never opened them.
An echo, the consciousness thought, perceiving Ren. A pulse of life in the hollow. A flaw in the finish.
The Kaiju fired.
A beam of grey, crystalizing energy struck Ren in the chest. The petrification magic crawled over his tunic—and fizzled, cracked, fell away in dead, brittle flakes.
The consciousness on the throne went preternaturally still.
…Nullification?
It focused its perception, trying to sense the boy's magic, his life force. It sensed… nothing. A perfect, silent blank. A hole in the world.
Ren's voice tore the silence, raw and shattered.
"WHY?!" he screamed, the word tearing his throat. "LOOK AT THEM! LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID! WHAT DID THEY EVER DO TO YOU? WAS IT FUN? DID IT MAKE YOU FEEL STRONG? TO TURN CHILDREN INTO DUST? TO TURN MY MOTHER TO STONE? **WHY?!"**
The consciousness listened. The rage, the grief, the words—they were meaningless noise. But the power behind them… the power that had made a void where its magic should be… that was a cipher. A question it had not been asked in a long, long time.
A faint, almost imperceptible tilt of its head. Interesting.
Then, it felt them. Distant, but closing fast. Vibrations in the fabric of ambient mana. Not the weak signatures of peasants. These were disciplined. Potent. Organized.
Hunters.
A ripple of cold displeasure moved through the still form on the throne. It had been a ghost for years. A story told in whispers. This… exposure was an affront. The anomaly was not worth the light.
With a final, dismissive flick of its will, it sent one command through the fading link to its creation: Cease.
Then it severed the connection, withdrawing its awareness back into the perfect, planned darkness.
The Kaiju shuddered, the amber light in its core guttering like a candle in a sudden draft as the guiding intelligence fled. Its movements became jerky, mechanical. It took a grinding step forward, its programming reduced to a single, mindless imperative:Destroy the Null.
A sound like a shrieking comet tore the sky.
A streak of crimson light impacted the square between Ren and the Kaiju with a concussive THUMP.
From the crater, Captain Heihachi rose. His winter eyes took in the scene: the bleached horror, the grey statues, the boy in the circle of dead earth, the advancing Kaiju. His gaze caught for a fractured second on the stone family in the doorway.
"Back up," he rasped.
He turned. What followed was not a fight. It was demolition.
He stepped inside the Kaiju's swing, his grey sword punching into a seam. CRACK. Amber sap gushed. He took the backhand on his vambrace, skidded, used the momentum to drive his blade into its hip. The leg buckled.
The Kaiju charged in a final, lurching rush.
Heihachi dropped, braced, and as the stone head passed over him, he drove his sword up into the glowing slit.
The light died.
The creature froze.
Then, it crystallized. A web of cracks erupted across its body. From every crack, from its wounds, a silent, beautiful storm of black and crimson rose petals erupted. They swirled in a slow vortex, blotting out the ruins, brushing Heihachi's scarred face, before a phantom wind gathered them and swept them away into the sky.
Nothing remained but a faint, cloying scent.
Heihachi stood alone. A single black petal was caught in his hair. He crushed it to dust.
He walked to the Komura house, stopping at the circle's edge.
"You lived here."
Ren nodded, broken.
"The evacuation order was yesterday noon. The wardstone should have sounded."
"There was no bell," Ren whispered.
Heihachi's eyes narrowed. He looked at the intact wardstone, then back at Ren. He saw the shattered boy, the void where magic had died against his chest. He saw a victim. And an anomaly.
"Haru."
A younger knight appeared with a slate. Another held a small, milky-white crystal—a diagnostic charm.
"Mark him," Heihachi said, his tone flat, procedural. "Sole survivor. Yomi's Hollow. Status: shock, minor exposure." He nodded to the knight with the crystal.
The knight stepped forward.
Heihachi's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
"Infirmary protocol," he said, the words final. "Get him to the wagon. Gently."
The two knights in short black-and-crimson cloaks guided Ren away. He climbed into the dark wagon, his satchel clutched to his chest. The canvas fell.
Darkness. The lurch of motion.
Outside, a low mutter: "Petals."
A weary reply: "Log it. Don't ask."
In the rattling dark, Ren uncurled his fist. Inside was Mill's river stone and the crumpled, mud-stained blue ribbon, still sealed in its paper.
He held them. He held them long after his hands stopped shaking, and he held them still when the tears, silent and endless, finally began to fall.