The briefing felt almost ordinary, which made Seigi more alert than any alarm.
They met at the long metal table in the Guild's undercity: Hana with her slim file and unbothered calm; Aya in a light vest over her cardigan, first-aid kits clipped snug at her waist; Riku with his boots on the table again, flicking a knife end over end like he'd made peace with gravity by bullying it.
Hana slid a satellite image between them. "Suspected Veil staging point," she said. "Abandoned rowhouse off the old canal. Patterns suggest short-haul logistics—people in, people out. If it's a safehouse, it's a shallow one."
"Meaning?" Seigi asked.
"Meaning if we kick it, it either caves immediately… or collapses on purpose." Hana's gaze held his for a breath. "Recon only. No heroics."
Riku grinned. "You heard the lady. Recon." He made the word sound like a dare. "In, peek, out. If it's nothing, we stash snacks on the way back. If it's something, we eat snacks on the way back."
Aya checked Seigi's wrist tape and glanced up at him. "Call if your breath changes."
"My breath?"
"The way you breathe when you're pretending you're fine," she said, matter-of-fact. "You pick up speed and hold too much at the top of the inhale. I'll hear it."
Seigi huffed a laugh despite the knot in his chest. "I didn't know my lungs were this public."
"They are to medics," Aya said, gentle smile flickering. "And mothers."
Riku pointed the knife at Seigi without looking away from Hana's map. "You flinch, I mock you. You overreach, I mock you. You get me killed—"
"Riku," Hana said mildly.
Riku's grin softened into something like sincerity. "You won't get me killed," he said, and it landed like a promise. "Because you'll listen when it counts."
Above them, Kurogami leaned his forearms on the mezzanine railing. He didn't speak. He didn't have to. Seigi felt the weight of his expectation like a hand between his shoulder blades: not pushing, just there, reminding.
Hana closed the file. "Comms on low power, no transmit unless necessary. No signals if you can help it—this district echoes too many ways."
"Which is spy-speak for: try not to be loud," Riku translated, bouncing to his feet. "We can be loud later."
"Recon," Hana said again, because repetition sometimes keeps men alive.
"Recon," Seigi echoed, because he wanted to be one of those men.
---
They took the city on foot: side streets where laundry lines faltered like prayers, stairwells that smelled of fried batter and old paint, a pedestrian bridge with chain-link sides that held love locks and promises neither metal nor language could truly secure. Riku talked the whole way, a stream of nonsense and needling, keeping Seigi's mind from calcifying around what-ifs.
"You ever notice how every abandoned building is actually ten thousand spider kingdoms with a mortgage problem?" Riku asked, ducking under scaffolding.
"Please don't make me think about mortgages," Seigi said. "I have enough existential dread."
"That's the spirit," Riku said. "Dread keeps you humble."
They cut along the canal, where the water moved with the slow assurance of something older than the city itself. Ahead, the district sagged into disrepair: shuttered shops, spray paint bloomed in color riots across concrete, the occasional neon sign still fighting for relevance against emptiness.
The safehouse hunched at the block's end like a bad tooth. Boarded windows, a doorway with its top hinge blown out long ago and never fixed, the faint slouch of a building that had learned to lean because no one told it not to.
Seigi's detective mind began its quiet arithmetic: prints in dust, a mug ring on a sill, a curtain's edge cut at an angle by someone who owned a knife but not patience. Beneath that math, something else hummed—the thread, flicker-faint, like a wire in winter that only sings if you tilt your head just so.
"Empty, huh?" Riku murmured, fists flexing, the grin thinning to something useful. "Yeah, right."
They slipped inside, breathing with the building. The air felt wrong. Too still. Too arranged. The kind of silence a stage wears when the audience is seated and the actors haven't decided if they want to be seen yet.
"Kitchen left," Seigi whispered, because whispering felt like respect here. "Living room, center. Narrow hall—two doors. Footprints fresh, then… nothing. Like someone erased a last step."
Riku nodded once. "I'll take the nothing."
He drifted toward the hall, noiseless as a man his size had no right to be. Seigi stepped through the kitchen threshold and found the mug—coffee still warm, steam a ghost clinging stubbornly to the rim. He touched the counter and felt the faintest tremor run through his bones, not from his hand but from the air itself, as if the room had just exhaled after holding its breath for too long.
The thread tugged. Seigi listened.
From the living room came the smallest scrape: leather against floor. Not a shift. A signal.
"Riku," Seigi said, barely sound. "Left."
Riku pivoted and caught a punch meant to break his neck. The wall took the rest of it, cracking like ice under a sudden weight.
Everything happened at once; everything happened slow.
Figures erupted from the dark: four—no, five. Their movements had the clean brutality of men trained to make violence the answer to any question. Aether warped the air around them in flickers and ripples: one bled shadow into a blade that dripped night; one clapped and turned sound into a sledgehammer; one flickered in and out of existence like a bad signal finding only the ugliest parts of itself. Two more circled low, perfect mirrors of each other, the kind of synchronized that makes you think of brothers or experiments or both.
Riku moved first, not because he was rash—though he was—but because he knew his gift: meet force with more. He slammed into the nearest shape, took a knife across the ribs like an insult, and introduced the man's back to the support beam with a crack that made dust fall in sheets. "Come on!" he roared, wild grin bright and wrong and absolutely necessary.
Seigi's world narrowed to angles and breath. The static-flicker winked into being at his flank, knife already carved into the space his throat would occupy. The thread tugged again—not a voice, not words, just a push toward a timing he didn't know he knew. Seigi twisted, caught the wrist before steel became blood, and threw the man across his own momentum. Floor met body with the intimate sound of pain that people invent poetry to avoid describing.
The shadow-blade sang near Seigi's head, close enough to feel the temperature of it. He ducked on instinct and felt the slit of air part above his scalp; plaster gave up another inch of itself to the ceiling. He swung back without thinking. Power gathered at his knuckles like heat miraged from summer asphalt—too fast, too much, a newborn storm. He drove his fist down—
Riku vanished from where Seigi's fist wanted to be, instincts and bruised experience snatching him aside. The blow landed in the floor with a report like thunder under concrete. The old house inhaled dust, coughed splinters, remembered earthquakes.
For a heartbeat, Riku's and Seigi's eyes met across a spray of grit. Riku's grin had edges now. "Watch it, Hero Boy!" he barked, elbowing another attacker into the kind of sleep you don't set an alarm for. "You miss me again, I'm putting you down next!"
"Fair," Seigi said, and meant it.
The sound-shock operative clapped. Force hit Seigi's ribs like a truck christened with the word Consequence. The wall took him the way a surf takes a rock: utterly and on schedule. Air left his lungs in a way that felt personal.
Listen on the inhale. Move on the exhale. Hana's note flashed through his head with stingingly neat penmanship. Aya's voice braided over it: Power without control isn't strength. Don't let the thread own you.
He pulled a breath from somewhere uncooperative and found balance in the middle of it. The next clap came. He reached—not with muscles but with that other thing that had lived under his skin since the schoolyard—and the shockwave bent. It lengthened, softened, re-decided itself around him. He stepped through it, surprised to find his feet exactly where he'd asked them to be. One of the Veil operatives staggered to his knees, blood bubbling at his lips. His eyes fixed on Seigi, wide with something between fear and awe.
"Origin-born…" he rasped, before Riku silenced him with a vicious elbow.
The word clung to Seigi's thoughts even as the battle raged on, sharper than the ringing in his ears.
His fist went into the man's gut with a noise Seigi had only heard in butcheries. The operative folded around the blow like paper surrendering to wetness.
The synchronized pair came at him low, fast, knives kissing light. Seigi let the thread lift one heel the half-centimeter it wanted; the first blade skimmed past his calf with the intimacy of a rumor. He stepped into the second man's space, changed what his momentum meant by sheer, stubborn insistence, and tossed him—not hard, just wrong—so he slammed into his brother mid-stride. They tangled, elegant violence unraveling into a clumsy knot.
Riku, bleeding from three new places and delighted about it, met the shadow-blade with his forearm, took a slice he'd feel tomorrow in exchange for the joy of driving a hook into the man's jaw today. "Tell the Veil to send more interesting toys!" he crowed, then added to Seigi, "Not actually, though!"
Seigi caught sight of the static-flicker pushing himself up, knife trembling in a hand that couldn't decide if it existed. Seigi stepped over, wrapped the thread around the man's stuttering momentum like a leash, and dragged him fully into being just long enough to introduce him to the shadow-wielder he'd been reaching for. They met with a thud that made the floorboards consider a different career.
And then—quiet, the brittle kind that comes after windows break and before sirens.
Dust hung in tilted beams of light. The ruin creaked, settling around its new wounds. Riku's chest heaved; his grin faltered at the edges where pain announces itself. Seigi stood very still and took inventory: blood in his mouth (his), ache in his ribs (shared), the thread still humming (alive).
At his feet, a photo spilled from a torn jacket pocket. Two children. A cake. Frosting in a shape that tried for a rabbit and landed somewhere between cloud and apology. Candlelight touching faces that did not belong to operatives or enemies or shadows.
Seigi's stomach turned. His knuckles remembered the sound they'd made two minutes ago and decided to feel bruised about it now.
"These were people," he said, and his voice surprised him with how raw it came out.
"This is what they are now," Riku said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His smile had put away its teeth. "Shadows that kill in the dark. You still think being a 'hero' is enough against that?"
Seigi didn't answer. Not because he didn't have one—because he had too many and none of them fit in his throat. He set the photo gently on the man's chest like it might weigh less there.
Footsteps scuffed outside, light and quick. A code knock: two, then one, then two spaced apart. Seigi's body eased before his mind did.
Hana slipped through the doorway, Aya on her shoulder like a second thought made necessary. Hana's gaze measured the room in a glance: bodies, debris, the specific violence of walls that have taken punches meant for flesh. Aya's hand flew to her mouth, not to stifle a sound but to steady herself for the work she had to do.
"Report," Hana said, voice even. To anyone else, it would have sounded cold. Seigi heard the tightness in it like a thread pulled too far through eyelets.
"Five," Riku said, flexing his left hand to see if it would talk back. "Shadow trick, clap trick, glitch trick, and the Twins Knife." He pointed with his chin. "We were recon. They were welcome committee."
Aya was already on her knees beside the sound-shock operative, fingers at the neck. Her brow furrowed. "Alive," she said, relief and conflict warring in the single word. She moved to the next. "Alive." The next. "This one's—" She didn't finish. She closed the man's eyes with two fingers like a blessing and then went on.
Hana crouched at a wall where the plaster had sheared down to old brick. She brushed dust aside with her sleeve and found what she was looking for: a mark no larger than her thumbnail, etched into the mortar with something sharp. A circle split by jagged lines.
"Veil sigil," Seigi said, swallowing.
"Old," Hana replied. "But re-traced recently." She straightened, eyes moving to Seigi's hands, then to the crater where the floor had expressed its opinion of his punch. "How many times did you reach for it?"
"Enough," Seigi said.
"Too many," Riku added cheerfully, then winced because smiling hurt. "But the second one was beautiful. The shockwave bend? Chef's kiss. I would kiss you, but Aya would disinfect my soul."
Aya didn't look up. "She will," she said, and pressed her palm to Riku's side. Light bled softly between her fingers. His breath hitched as skin knit toward something more whole. "Hold still."
Hana stepped close to Seigi, close enough that the dust on her sleeve brushed his arm. "What did it feel like?"
He exhaled. "Like arguing with a river and accidentally persuading it."
Hana's mouth tilted, the faintest thing. "Good. Next time, persuade it on purpose." She studied his eyes for a beat too long. "And remember to breathe."
From the street, somewhere far enough to be a problem later and near enough to be a problem now, a siren complained about being necessary. Seigi's body went police before his mind could go Guild: scene, evidence, statements, chain-of-custody. He looked at Hana. She was already shaking her head.
"We're not here," she said. "Not officially." She flicked a glance at Riku, who knew the choreography: he wiped down surfaces he'd touched too dramatically, unspooled a thin line of powder across the entry to muddle prints, set a wedge to keep the front door from latching closed all the way so the first on scene would assume forced entry. He moved like a man who had made messes before and learned how to hide them without lying to himself about what he was doing.
Aya squeezed Seigi's shoulder—quick, warm. "You're breathing too high again," she murmured.
He let the air fall deeper. It surprised him by obeying.
Hana's phone buzzed once against her hip. She read the message without moving her face. "Two minutes," she said. "We split. Riku, north alley. Aya, with me. Seigi…"
He met her eyes. "With you," he said, because it felt like the right answer and the only one he wanted to give.
They moved. The safehouse shrugged them off like a bad memory trying to become a worse dream. Outside, the alley's night air tasted like iron and mildew and the faint sweetness of something flowering stubbornly in a cracked pot across the way.
At the corner, Seigi paused and looked back through the broken window. He could just see the photo where he'd left it, a bright square of something true on a floor that had forgotten how to hold anything clean.
Hana touched his sleeve, brief. "You can't carry all of them," she said, not unkindly.
"I know," he said. It hurt to say it. He needed it to.
Riku loped past, energy already rebounding into something that looked like invincibility. Aya glanced back once, the light around her hands gone but not forgotten. The siren's wail became a neighborhood away.
They took the canal road, footsteps syncing without trying. Seigi's chest still ached where the shockwave had written its name. His hands still remembered the river that had decided to listen. His mind held too many pictures and not enough answers.
This was his first true blood—the kind that doesn't come out of shirts or dreams. It sat under his skin and waited to change him.
Riku bumped his shoulder on purpose. "You didn't fall," he said.
Seigi let out a breath that almost tasted like relief. "I didn't."
"Good," Riku said. "Now learn how to not break the floor when you miss me."
"I'll practice," Seigi said.
Hana didn't smile, but the corner of her mouth did something it hadn't done at the start of the night. Aya's hand ghosted near his elbow like she'd catch him if he forgot gravity again.
They walked until the city's ordinary noises claimed the street back from the extraordinary. Seigi looked up at a slice of sky and thought of his childhood promise, the one that tasted like blood and laughter and stubbornness. Heroes don't stay down.
Being a hero wasn't enough.
He would have to become more.