The cavern swallowed sound, then fed it back mean. Melt ticked. Dust drifted. Yua lay in the thin pool of her own breath, eyes closed, blood finding the path of least resistance.
Ryo didn't feel the run in his legs. He only felt the break in his chest.
Kyōrei stood over her with the hood low, energy laid across the room like a hand over a mouth. The line of steel in his fist looked simple, honest, final.
Ryo's voice broke before his feet stopped. "Yua—!"
Kyōrei didn't flinch. He pressed the edge to the notch above her collarbone. A coin's weight. Enough to promise.
Ryo hit him bare-handed.
No technique—just need. He swung for the face, the ribs, the heart. Kyōrei leaned left without hurry. Ryo's knuckles cut dust. The counter came quiet: a palm on the sternum. Pressure folded. Ryo left the ground and met the stone with his back. Air abandoned him.
He rolled, got up on stubborn, and came again. A knee. A hook. Another. Kyōrei took them the way a heavy door takes weather—small creak, no shift. He answered with a step that wasn't a step and a short line across Ryo's cheek. The sting made the world honest.
Ryo didn't stop. He grabbed for the wrist holding steel. Kyōrei let him touch it, then rolled the joint and poured weight into Ryo's elbow from a place weight shouldn't pour. The pain flashed white. The arm quit.
Kyōrei's heel found Yua's sternum
and settled. Light. Enough to disrespect breath. Enough to crack something in Ryo that didn't have a name.
Ryo's voice went low and ragged. "Move."
Kyōrei looked at him the way an empty chapel looks at prayer.
"You want truth in the place where you prefer stories," he said, voice steady enough to be cruel. "Fine. A Maw gate opened in your city. Your street split. Your market boiled. Your homeroom became smoke and alarms and hands that couldn't find each other. The Hunters who knew waited—because a late rescue photographs better than a warning that saves the ungrateful."
Each word landed like a heel. Ryo swayed. He tried to swallow. Nothing moved.
"Your friend at the ramen stall dragged two people out. One lived long enough to ask for a mother who didn't arrive. The other didn't make a sound." Kyōrei's energy barely changed. "This is how law chooses love."
Ryo reached for something that wasn't there and found the floor with his knees. Heat flashed behind his eyes, then burned forward. It scalded the back of his throat. His breath shook like a rope that had held too much.
Kyōrei lifted the blade from Yua's skin and angled it up, as if offering the room a clean end. "If you want a prettier version," he said, "ask your captain."
Ryo broke. Soundless at first, then not. It came out of him wrong, like a laugh torn sideways. He held his face with both hands so it wouldn't fly apart. A note slipped free anyway—small, cracked, a child's. Then a sob that didn't care who heard. He hated it. He couldn't stop it.
Kyōrei studied him with a soldier's quiet. "Cry," he said, and didn't make it an insult. "But pick something when you're done."
He set his foot harder on Yua, just enough to steal a breath. The steel angled to finish what it had started. Ryo saw the line it meant to draw. He reached for anything.
Nothing answered.
Then the world brightened.
It started under the ribs, where promises live. Not fire—pressure turned inside out. Seishu drew in on itself like a breath held too long and then flashed. The light wasn't wide. It was true. A clean color no one taught him. It tore through his bones like a bell rung in marrow.
The cavern peeled away. The air thinned to something that knew his name. Darkness cut, not to harm, to reveal.
He stood in a place that felt like standing in his own pulse. Not a field, not a room—the single step before you step. Waterline stillness. Snowpack hush. His breath left him and came back a little better than he gave it.
At his feet: a hilt with no blade. Plain. Wrapped the way poor hands wrap—tight, neat, careful. The guard held a chipped nick where someone else would have thrown it away. He knew it like he knew a scar on his palm.
No voice spoke to him. No spirit announced itself. The world made room.
He reached. The leather warmed like skin that was allowed to be warm. His fingers fit with an ease that felt like memory he hadn't earned yet.
He lifted.
Steel grew out of the quiet with the clean line of something that had been waiting to be simple. No glow. No thunder. Just a blade that existed because his hands finally understood what they were for. The weight settled along his forearm and asked for nothing but honesty.
He held it up. Light kissed the edge and didn't stick. He tested the grip with a half-turn, and the turn came back like a nod. If there was a name, it didn't matter yet. He didn't need poetry. He needed a tool that wouldn't lie.
The place breathed with him once more. Then it was gone.
The cavern slammed back—iron, heat, drip. Kyōrei's blade hung in the air mid-argument. Yua's chest rose small under a heel that had forgotten how to forgive.
Ryo stood between them with the hilt in his hand and the blade where it belonged. No aura curtain, no halo. Just a presence that fit the shape of the room and made it reconsider what it thought it could move.
Kyōrei's head turned a fraction. Under the hood, something like satisfaction and worry shook hands.
"The blade heard you," he said, as if delivering news he'd expected and dreaded. "Good."
Ryo didn't answer. He stepped once and the room accepted the step. The puddle at his toes leveled like glass. Dust settled. The cavern's breath adjusted to his.
He angled the blade low along his thigh, unshowy. The edge made the air straight.
Kyōrei took his foot off Yua's chest. Not concession—calculation. His pressure folded over itself into a tighter, harder thing. He wanted to measure the new line.
Ryo put one heel back behind the other, set the blade at guard, and let Seishu gather to the size of purpose. It didn't flare. It focused. The aura wrapped his wrists and made the bones feel like they finally lived where they should.
Kyōrei moved first.
A quiet rush. A bent line. He aimed for the shoulder Ryo had given him last time. Ryo let the cut exist, then slid a half-width and took it on the flat, moving as if he'd trained for ten winters with this steel instead of breathing it for the first time. The clash didn't spark. It stopped. The room listened.
Kyōrei adjusted angle. Ryo adjusted intention. Small. Neat. Body like a sentence with no extra words. He thrust, a short thought aimed at the hinge of the hip. Kyōrei turned and let it shave cloth, not skin. Pressure rose. The puddle behind Ryo tugged. He set his back foot deeper and denied the tug its pride.
They traded not-flourishes. Two craftsmen comparing tools by using them. Ryo's grip bled where Kyōrei had cut the web, and he realized he liked the sting. It kept him honest. He kept the blade where it looked least impressive and most inevitable.
Yua lay still. Her breath made the smallest fog. It was enough to keep the room from being a grave.
Kyōrei's eyes marked it. He cut for the time she had left.
Ryo saw it and moved. Not fast. Right. He met the line early and rolled it into the stone with a firm hand and a plain wrist. Kyōrei's pressure bucked as if shocked that the floor declined to help. Ryo didn't celebrate. He bought a breath and spent it on placing his body between steel and her.
Kyōrei's mouth tightened like a stitch pulled. "This is the part where you trade your life for a story," he said, almost kind. "The Realm has a shelf ready."
Ryo breathed through his teeth and let blood settle warm in his palm. "No shelves," he said, voice small and flat. "Just people."
Kyōrei smiled without humor. "Then stand for them and see who writes the next page."
He came with a cut that felt like heavy weather. Ryo let the new blade do what it was shaped to do: reduce storm to lines. Edge met edge; weight turned; force bled off into harmless angles. The blade hummed in his hands like a straight answer.
Kyōrei stepped back half a pace and shifted everything again—the kind of change a man makes when he admits someone else exists. His pressure narrowed to a thread that tried to sew Ryo to a spot. Ryo cut the thread with a simple reposte that didn't land and still made the point.
They circled. Dust made halos around boots. Melt kept time. In the corner, Gōshin watched with the dull, frightened devotion of something that wanted instruction on how to be human and was getting a debate instead.
Kyōrei told the room that the law had never saved a life; people had. Ryo didn't argue. He held the blade level and proved he would be one of those people.
Kyōrei drove again, faster now, lines stacking. Ryo failed small twice—one nick to the shoulder, one to the ribs—then succeeded big once. He brushed Kyōrei's wrist and felt bones shift. Not broken. Warned. Kyōrei's hood twitched like a nod he didn't give.
The moment stretched thin. Choice lived inside it.
Kyōrei's eyes softened for a heartbeat, a man seeing an old road. "You could follow me," he said, tone even. "Break the story before it breaks you."
Ryo's answer didn't climb. It settled. He lifted his chin a finger-width and let the words fit the room.
"I protect them. My city. My friends. Her."
He let the blade point toward the floor because promises shouldn't need edge to stand. His stare went flat, not empty—decided. "You want me to forget that? I won't."
Something in the cavern agreed. The drip slowed. The cold deepened. Even the dust waited.
Kyōrei's energy shifted again, not heavier—truer. He set his stance the way men do before they break something they didn't want to. His blade drew a small circle in the air, reverent.
"Then keep standing," he said.
He vanished forward.
Steel and air met. Light snapped white off straight edges. The chamber's breath broke in half.
And for the first time since the Maw reached for him, Ryo met a cut that should have ended him—and did not.
🌀 End Of Chapter Ten