The dawn after the duel came gray and bitter.
Smoke hung in the streets like cobwebs. The ruins of buildings wore their wounds openly, jagged ribs of concrete piercing the morning air. The corpse of the Stone-Walker remained where it had fallen—half flesh, half stone, all wrong. Its cracks still oozed faint violet light, pulsing like the faint echo of a heartbeat.
No one dared touch it.
The survivors huddled inside the shelter, not daring to breathe too loud. The barricade lay splintered where Shitsubo had walked through it. No one bothered fixing it. What good was wood against the things outside—or against the one inside?
Shitsubo sat by the remains of the fire, his shirt torn and caked with blood, his pipe across his knees. He hadn't spoken since the fight. He didn't need to. The silence around him said enough.
Even Genji hadn't approached yet.
---
It was Natsumi, of course, who broke the quiet.
Her voice rose sharp and brittle, brittle enough to snap bone.
"Last night proved it. He isn't one of us. He brought that thing here."
A murmur rippled through the group. Some nodded. Others kept their heads low, too afraid to choose a side.
Daigo pushed off the wall. His jaw worked like it was chewing glass. "He also killed it. Did you see anyone else step outside that door?"
Natsumi's face flushed red. "And what did we gain? The monsters retreated, but they'll come back. Stronger. For him. We are meat locked in a cage with a predator. Every day we keep him here, our chances rot."
Her words struck deeper than Daigo's defiance. Hunger and fear carved deeper truths than loyalty.
Shitsubo finally lifted his eyes.
The Insight traced Natsumi's face in glowing cracks. He saw where her cheekbone would split under pressure, how her voice would wheeze if he pressed his hand against her throat.
He closed his eyes again before the hunger urged him further.
---
Genji finally spoke, his voice trembling but sharp.
"He's my brother. Without him, I wouldn't be here. None of us would. He fights when no one else will."
"Then maybe he should keep fighting," Natsumi snapped. "Out there. Away from us."
The silence that followed was worse than screaming.
Because for the first time, no one argued with her.
---
Later, when the group split into chores, Daigo crouched beside Shitsubo.
"You can hear them cracking, can't you?" he muttered.
Shitsubo didn't answer.
"You don't need the Insight to see it. They're a rope pulled too tight. Won't be long before someone cuts it."
Shitsubo stared at the broken barricade. "Let them cut. Ropes only bind the weak."
Daigo frowned, but said nothing more.
---
By nightfall, the mutiny sharpened its teeth.
Three men approached Shitsubo while he was checking the street from a shattered window. They didn't carry weapons openly, but their fists clenched like hammers itching for nails.
Natsumi stood behind them, her eyes alight with the zeal of someone convinced she was doing holy work.
"We've decided," she said. "You're leaving."
Genji darted between them, arms outstretched. "No! He saved us—he saved all of you!"
One of the men shoved him aside, hard enough that his ribs hit the wall.
Daigo reached for his knife, but two others blocked him.
Shitsubo didn't move. His pipe hung loose in his hand, his body too still to trust.
Natsumi sneered. "You can walk out, or we'll drag you out. Either way, the door opens."
Her words echoed against the shelter walls like a hammer on coffin wood.
---
For a moment, Shitsubo almost let them.
He almost stood, almost walked out into the night to meet whatever waited. It would be easier than this. Easier than watching his brother's face break under betrayal. Easier than holding back the hunger that whispered to him, whispered how easy it would be to silence them all.
But then the Rift pulsed.
A vibration deep under the city, rolling through the bones of every survivor, knocking tools off shelves and prayers out of mouths.
The air outside shimmered.
And with it came a sound—not the shrieks of Aggressors, but the grinding, wet groan of something much larger.
The mutiny froze mid-breath.
Natsumi's bravado cracked as her voice dropped to a whimper. "What is that?"
Daigo's face turned ashen. "Not Aggressors. Something worse."
Shitsubo stood.
The Insight burned in his eyes, and through the walls he saw it—saw the shape moving beneath the streets, a shadow wrapped in stone and water, its limbs twisting like roots through the city's bones.
Not the Stone-Walker.
Something higher.
Something closer to the Rift itself.
And a name slipped unbidden into his mind, carved there by hunger and prophecy alike:
Dagon.
---
The shelter shook as the ground split. Pavement burst open in the street outside, fountains of dust and shattered pipe spraying skyward.
From the wound crawled a hand too large to belong to men, fingers carved of rock and wet soil, veins pulsing with faint blue light. The hand gripped the road and dragged a body upward—colossal, hunched, more shadow than flesh, its skull crowned with jagged shards like coral dragged from a nightmare sea.
Its eyes burned pale. Not hunger, not fury—something colder. Calculation.
The survivors screamed.
The Aggressors answered, swarming out of the alleys, their shrieks rolling into a chant.
The name echoed from their throats, broken but united:
"Da…gon… Da…gon…"
---
Natsumi collapsed to her knees. Her mutiny, her fury—all turned to ash in her mouth.
Genji clutched Shitsubo's sleeve, his voice shaking. "We can't fight that. No one can."
Daigo drew his knife anyway, jaw clenched hard enough to crack teeth. "Then we die trying."
But Shitsubo…
Shitsubo stepped forward.
The hunger in his chest pulsed harder than the Rift itself. The cracks in the world lined themselves for him, showing every fracture in the earth, every weakness in the monster rising from below.
He felt its gaze fall on him, heavier than mountains.
And then he heard it.
Not through ears. Not through sound.
Through marrow.
"Blood-marked child. You bleed, yet do not break. You fracture, yet do not fall. You are mine."
Shitsubo raised his pipe. Splintered, bloodstained, pathetic against a god.
But his voice did not falter.
"I belong to no one."
The air split with a roar.
Dagon pulled itself fully into the street, shaking the city like a drum. The Aggressors shrieked louder, claws slamming the pavement in rhythm.
The survivors inside the shelter sobbed and prayed.
And Shitsubo stepped onto the cracked road to meet the thing that claimed him.
---
For a moment, silence held.
The god of stone and soil studied him. The Rift itself seemed to lean closer, its glow bleeding brighter between buildings.
And then Dagon's hand came down.
A shadow big enough to crush ten men at once.
Shitsubo didn't run. He didn't kneel. He raised his pipe and roared back.
The impact split the street open, throwing dust and fire into the sky.
The city screamed.
And the war for Osaka began.