The night bled into Osaka with sirens still cutting through the air like knives. Shitsubo had not slept. Sleep felt like surrender—something soft, something human—and every part of him was coiled too tight for that. He had been walking for hours, his boots dragging across streets smeared with soot and dried blood, keeping his head down while military trucks patrolled the neighborhoods.
The Rift hadn't closed. Everyone knew it by now. Official broadcasts spun lies about "containment" and "evacuation procedures," but the air itself stank of truth. It was in the way civilians whispered about monsters in alleys, how smoke curled from blocks that hadn't stopped burning, and how shadows seemed thicker than they should be.
Shitsubo carried the stench of it with him, in his clothes, under his fingernails. The Vafthrúdnir's Insight had twisted his eyes further—he now saw things even in the daylight. Faint traces of mana, little veins of corruption stretching from the Rift and seeding into Osaka like an infection. And tonight, it pulsed harder, as if something below the surface had stirred.
He should have been home. Arita and Odo probably hadn't noticed his absence, or maybe they had and drowned it in liquor and fists. The thought didn't sting anymore. Instead, it rolled over him like background noise.
He turned down an alley where an abandoned pachinko parlor leaned against a half-collapsed ramen shop. The perfect place to be unseen. The city smelled of rot, but in this pocket, it was worse—like the alley itself had begun to ferment.
Shitsubo's breath hitched. The Insight whispered.
Something waits here. Something that should not be.
He moved slow, each step deliberate, and then froze.
A figure was kneeling in the dark, shoulders trembling as if suffocating. The first thought was another survivor. But then he saw the eyes—two pale blue lights in a face smeared with ash. The figure's mouth opened, and no sound came out.
The world bent around them.
Suddenly, Shitsubo's own hearing vanished. No distant sirens. No buzz of lamps. No rustle of his coat. His pulse thudded inside his chest, but it was trapped there, locked in silence.
The figure raised its head, and the air crystallized. Shitsubo staggered back, his hand flying to the knife on his belt. But the figure didn't attack. Instead, its jaw trembled and a wave of unbearable pressure rolled outward.
> [Trial Detected: Authority of Víðarr, The Silent One]
Survive without voice. Endure the crushing weight.
Shitsubo's vision blurred. He couldn't even curse. It wasn't just silence—the trial was erasure. He clutched his throat, choking on sound that refused to exist. Every instinct screamed at him to howl, to breathe fire back into the world, but the system wanted his surrender.
His knees buckled. The weight pressed harder. His chest screamed for release, his vision flickered, and a darker thought crawled into his skull. If I give in, I won't die. I'll just fade.
That was worse than death.
Shitsubo smashed his head against the wall, trying to drag noise back into existence. Blood slid down his temple. He bared his teeth and imagined the laughter he'd been denied as a child, the screams he'd buried during the Rift's opening. He imagined Genji's voice, Daigo's rough laughter, even Odo's drunken roars—things he had sworn to despise.
The weight cracked.
A pulse of white fire rushed out of his chest, not a sound but the shadow of one. The kneeling figure evaporated into ash.
> [Trial Survived]
You have received: Authority of Víðarr (Silent Resilience).
Mortal wounds may be endured without death.
You cannot be silenced; silence will become your armor.
Emotion will fade. Words will rot on your tongue.
Shitsubo collapsed, coughing, though no sound left his throat. His hands trembled. The pain receded, but not completely—the world still felt muffled, like cotton stuffed in his ears.
When he finally staggered back into the street, the system's cold text burned across his vision.
Emotion will fade.
He laughed, though it was broken and voiceless. Maybe that wasn't a punishment. Maybe that was the gift he needed most.
---
By the time dawn dragged itself over Osaka, he found himself standing in front of his family's house. The paint peeled from the door, the windows smeared with grime. For a moment, he considered walking in, seeing Arita slumped on the couch, seeing Odo half-conscious in his chair. He didn't. The silence inside him told him what he already knew: nothing in that house mattered anymore.
Instead, he turned and walked toward the district where the Rift light pulsed like a false sunrise. He didn't have a plan yet. He only had the new silence humming under his skin, and a sense that he was still just scratching the surface of something meant to unmake the world.
Somewhere, in the stretch between two ruined towers, the air shivered. Shitsubo froze.
A figure stepped out. Tall, foreign, with robes stitched in black threads that shimmered like wet ink. Hung Chu.
The boy's expression was carved from stone, his eyes glowing faintly green. Behind him, bones rattled—literal bones, clawing out of the ground as if Osaka itself was coughing up the dead.
"Date," Hung said in a calm, almost bored tone. His Japanese was sharp, practiced. "You've changed."
Shitsubo tilted his head, his throat burning with words that refused to leave. Silence, his new gift, stretched like a veil between them.
Hung Chu smiled faintly, raising a skeletal hand as the corpses straightened behind him. "Good. It wouldn't be fun if I had to crush the same coward I used to know."
The silence inside Shitsubo pulsed like a second heartbeat. For the first time, he welcomed it.
The Rift behind them hummed louder. And Osaka held its breath.