Author's Note:Someone watches them train this entire chapter. You'll think it's Red Lightning. You'll be wrong. The watcher is mentioned in Chapter 4—go back and find the detail that doesn't fit.
POV: Kaito Endo
Word Count: ~1,950
Twenty-eight days left.
Kaito woke up at 4 AM to his hands glowing in the dark.
Not the greenish-blue of his usual manifestation. Black. Pure, light-eating black with edges that pulsed dark red like dying embers.
He stared at it for five full seconds before the panic hit.
The substance was responding to a dream he couldn't quite remember—fragments of fire, screaming, blue eyes watching through flames, and underneath it all a guilt so crushing it felt like drowning in concrete.
Make it stop make it stop make it stop—
The black substance retreated. Greenish-blue returned. Then nothing. Just his normal, non-glowing hands trembling in the pre-dawn darkness.
Kaito grabbed his phone. 4:17 AM. Too early to text anyone. Too late to pretend he'd sleep again.
He pulled up the group chat's message history, reread last night's midnight honesty hour. Ayumi admitting she'd forgotten her father's voice. Akira's six-hour intangibility because nobody noticed he'd left. Takeshi's guilt disguised as heroism.
And Kaito's own confession about needing to be strong enough or everyone would die.
The black substance had appeared right after typing that. Color-shifting in response to emotional intensity, fear made physical, subconscious truth bleeding through.
Your power reflects who you are at your core.
Great. So at his core, he was darkness and guilt and the desperate need to control things he had no business controlling.
Fantastic. Really healthy.
His phone buzzed. Text from Takeshi.
Takeshi:Can't sleep either?
Kaito:Substance went black again. Fully black this time. Woke up with it manifested.
Takeshi:How long?
Kaito:Five seconds before I forced it back to normal.
Takeshi:That's progress. Last time you said it shifted and you dismissed it immediately. You're learning to control the corruption instead of just running from it.
Kaito:Or the corruption's getting stronger and I'm losing the ability to suppress it.
Takeshi:Glass half empty at 4 AM. Nice.
Kaito:Realistic.
Takeshi:Meet me at the shrine. 5 AM. Before the others. We need to test something.
Kaito stared at the message. Private training? Just the two of them? That felt... significant. Like Takeshi had noticed something specific and wanted to address it without audience.
Kaito:Fine. But if this is an intervention I'm leaving.
Takeshi:It's not an intervention. It's an experiment. Trust me.
Trust. Right. The thing Kaito was spectacularly bad at.
But he got dressed anyway, slipped out of apartment 403 before his aunt woke up, walked through Tokyo's empty pre-dawn streets where the only company was salary workers stumbling home from all-nighters and convenience store clerks restocking shelves.
The shrine looked different at 5 AM. Less like their claimed territory, more like the abandoned religious site it actually was. Moss-covered stone. Torii gate half-collapsed. Trees pressing in from all sides like the forest was trying to reclaim what humans had temporarily borrowed.
Takeshi was already there, sitting on the shrine steps, two coffees from the nearby vending machine waiting.
"You're early," Kaito said.
"Couldn't sleep. Figured I'd make it productive." Takeshi handed him one of the coffees—black, no sugar, somehow knowing Kaito's preference without asking. "How are you feeling?"
"Tired. Scared. Wondering why my power is turning evil-looking and if that means I'm fundamentally broken." Kaito took a sip. Too hot, but the burn felt grounding. "The usual."
"Your power isn't turning evil. It's responding to suppressed emotion." Takeshi set down his own coffee. "You said you can't remember what you were dreaming about when the black substance manifested?"
"Fragments. Fire. Screaming. Blue eyes." Kaito's hands tightened on the paper cup. "And guilt. So much guilt I couldn't breathe."
"Blue eyes," Takeshi repeated quietly. "Like Sora's blue eyes?"
The name hit Kaito like a physical blow. Sora. The psychological warfare specialist from another team. Blue eyes that had appeared in Kaito's nightmares for weeks now, always watching, always knowing something Kaito couldn't quite remember.
"Maybe," Kaito admitted. "I don't know. The dreams aren't clear enough."
"Okay. Here's my theory." Takeshi stood, moved to the center of the courtyard. "Your black corruption isn't random. It's triggered by specific emotional states—fear of inadequacy, guilt about something you can't consciously remember, the desperate need to control everything because chaos feels terrifying. Your power is trying to tell you something and you're suppressing it so hard it's manifesting as color corruption."
"So what do I do? Therapy? Meditation? Confront my childhood trauma?"
"You let it out in a controlled environment." Takeshi's shimmer activated, creating his reversal field. "Summon your substance. Don't fight the black corruption. Let it happen. I'll contain any overflow, reverse anything dangerous. But you need to stop suppressing and start processing."
Every instinct Kaito had screamed that this was a terrible idea. Letting the corruption manifest fully? Deliberately embracing the darkness instead of fighting it?
But his hands were already glowing. Greenish-blue mist coiling between his fingers.
"Just to be clear," Kaito said, "if this goes wrong and I accidentally kill you, I'm blaming your terrible psychology degree."
"I don't have a psychology degree. I'm seventeen." Takeshi smiled slightly. "But noted. Now stop stalling and manifest."
Kaito closed his eyes.
Thought about the dream. Fire and screaming and blue eyes watching through flames. Thought about the guilt that lived in his chest like a second heartbeat, present but unexamined. Thought about being eight years old and something terrible happening that he couldn't quite remember but knew had broken him fundamentally.
The substance responded.
He felt it shift—greenish-blue darkening to deep blue, then navy, then black. The edges pulsed red like warning lights, like his power was screaming danger while simultaneously pulling him deeper.
"Keep going," Takeshi's voice cut through. "Don't stop. Let it fully manifest."
The black substance grew. More volume than Kaito had ever created, spreading across the shrine courtyard like living shadow. It moved differently than his normal manifestation—less controlled, more organic, almost hungry.
And underneath the fear, underneath the panic of losing control, Kaito felt something else.
Relief.
Like he'd been holding his breath for nine years and finally exhaled.
The black substance solidified into a shape. Not a barrier. Not a weapon. A figure.
Humanoid. Child-sized. Features indistinct but somehow familiar in a way that made Kaito's chest hurt.
"What is that?" he whispered.
"Your Shintai's preview," Takeshi said quietly. "The early manifestation of your soul made physical. It won't be complete until you go through the Herald's trial, but this is... this is a glimpse."
The black figure turned to face Kaito.
It had no eyes, no mouth, no defining features. But Kaito knew it was looking at him. Knew it was seeing everything he'd tried to hide.
Then it spoke.
Not with a voice. With feeling. Emotion transmitted directly into Kaito's mind in a way that bypassed language entirely.
You're still running.
The words—thoughts—feelings—whatever they were, hit like a truck.
"From what?" Kaito asked out loud, voice cracking.
From the truth you've known since you were eight years old. From the fire. From what you did. From why the blue eyes were watching.
"I don't remember—"
You do. You just won't look at it.
The black figure began to dissolve, the substance losing coherence as Kaito's control wavered between holding the manifestation and dismissing it entirely.
"Wait—" Kaito reached out without thinking. "Tell me what I did. Tell me what I'm running from."
But the figure was already gone. The black substance evaporating back to greenish-blue mist, then to nothing.
Kaito stood in the shrine courtyard breathing hard, hands trembling, feeling like he'd just run a marathon through his own subconscious and lost.
Takeshi dismissed his reversal field and moved closer. "You okay?"
"No." Kaito sat down hard on the stone steps. "What the fuck was that?"
"Your power trying to communicate. Your subconscious pushing against nine years of suppression." Takeshi sat beside him. "Whatever happened when you were eight—whatever that guilt is about—it's core to who you are. And until you confront it, your power is going to keep corrupting. Getting darker. More unstable."
"So I need to remember something I've deliberately forgotten for nearly a decade."
"Yeah."
"That sounds terrible."
"Probably will be." Takeshi took a sip of his now-cold coffee. "But suppressing it is clearly worse. The corruption is spreading. Eventually it'll manifest during combat when you can't control it. Better to deal with it now in a safe environment."
Kaito wanted to argue. Wanted to say he'd just suppress harder, control better, force the black substance down through sheer willpower.
But the relief he'd felt when it manifested fully... that had been real. For five seconds, he'd stopped fighting his own power and just let it exist.
And it had felt like coming home to a place he'd forgotten existed.
"I don't know how to remember something I've blocked out," Kaito admitted quietly.
"Then we find someone who does." Takeshi pulled out his phone. "Sora. The blue-eyed psychological specialist. He's the one appearing in your dreams, right? The one who was 'watching' in your nightmare?"
"You want me to talk to an enemy essential who specializes in psychological warfare about my repressed childhood trauma." Kaito stared at him. "Have you lost your mind?"
"Possibly. But think about it—if Sora appears in your dreams, if his blue eyes trigger your guilt response, that means he's connected to whatever you're suppressing. Either he was there when it happened, or his ability is resonating with your trauma." Takeshi met his eyes. "And if he knows what you're running from, maybe he can help you stop running."
"Or he could use that information to destroy me."
"Yeah. That's also possible."
They sat in silence while dawn crept across the shrine grounds, turning shadows from black to grey to the muted colors of early morning.
Other essentials would arrive soon. Ayumi and Akira for morning training. Maybe other teams claiming their own territories. The secret supernatural world waking up alongside the normal one.
"I'll think about it," Kaito said finally.
"That's all I'm asking." Takeshi stood, stretched. "For now, let's focus on something we can control. The others will be here in twenty minutes. We should work on that four-person combo before—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
Kaito felt it too. Essence signature. Close. Watching.
Not Red Lightning's aggressive electricity. Not Hayato's dramatic flames. This was something else. Something cold and analytical and uncomfortably familiar.
Blue.
Kaito spun toward the tree line, substance manifesting instinctively. "Someone's here."
A figure stepped from the shadows between two trees.
Blue eyes caught the early morning light.
Sora smiled. Warm. Friendly. Completely at odds with the ice spreading through Kaito's chest.
"Good morning," Sora said pleasantly. "I hope I'm not interrupting. I just wanted to introduce myself properly." He tilted his head slightly. "We have so much to discuss, Kaito. About fires. About screaming. About blue eyes watching through flames."
He knows.
The thought hit with absolute certainty.
Whatever Kaito had forgotten, whatever he'd been running from—
Sora knew.
And he'd been waiting nine years to tell him.
[To be continued in Chapter 13...]
Author's closing note:Go back to Chapter 4. Ayumi's manifestation scene. Her mother's bedroom door. Reread that section. Notice anything about the timeline? About who could have been watching from outside? The answer's been there since the beginning.
Sora just showed up alone. No backup. No aggression. Just... talking. What's his actual goal here? Drop theories 👇
Add to library if this hooked you. The truth about Kaito's past is coming and it's worse than you