The Forest That Didn't Move
Cold climbed through Ryo's knees and took a seat in his bones.
He stood in a pine forest where snow fell without wind, each flake changing its mind about gravity. Bells rang somewhere far and very near, like sound traveling through wood. Between the trunks, a torii gate leaned—old cedar, paint faded to the memory of red. A bronze bell hung from its crossbeam. Frost furred the rope.
Ryo breathed out a cloud and watched it choose a direction.
"Okay," he told the trees, because pretending he had an audience made the fear less arrogant. "I'm… not asleep."
The bell answered without moving.
Not a voice—more like the air remembering what it had been asked to hold. His wrist prickled where the birthmark lived. The crescent guard at his hip—just a hilt for now—warmed as if a palm had closed around it from the inside.
Ryo stepped to the torii. His fingers brushed the bell rope. Cold bit deep, clean. Behind the touch, something listened the way counting listens.
"I don't know your rules," he said to the bell, to the world, to whatever had chosen him tonight when it could have been kind and waited. "But if the price is a sentence, I'll pay it."
His breath drew in, four-count. Held. Out. The way his mother had taught him when fevers made the room tilt.
"I won't run when someone needs me to stand," Ryo said, simple because anything fancy would be a lie. "I won't look away when the world cheats. I'll carry what's mine. If I break, I'll break forward."
The bell didn't swing. It sounded—a soft, low note that lived in his ribs. Snow around his boots collapsed in a perfect ring, as if the air had decided to kneel.
On his palm, a half-moon bite bloomed blood. It steamed in the cold and sank invisible into the rope. The torii gate shook once and remembered being new.
A seam opened in the air—thin, polite, precise. Behind it: lanterns at dusk, a slope down into a city that wasn't Serenia and somehow knew him anyway.
Ryo swallowed. "So that's a yes," he told his heart. "Great. We love yes."
The seam quivered.
From the dark behind him, something pressed its face against reality and looked in.
The snow decided to freeze in place.
Ryo turned.
The Kaimon had followed—taller now, joints wrong, mouth a direction instead of a place. It moved without disturbing air. Shadows crabbed backward up the tree trunks to get away.
Pressure rolled over him—Shūha, raw spirit force—enough to make thought cut its hair short and stand at attention.
Ryo's hand found the crescent hilt. Steel didn't leap to meet him; it just waited, asking a decent question: Are you sure?
"Yes," he said again, smaller this time, but true.
"Good," said a voice that belonged to someone who bled and kept moving.
The torii seam flashed. Yua Aihara spilled through, half-falling, sword first. She hit snow, rolled, came up on one knee, and cut a line in the air so clean the Kaimon forgot to be in part of it.
Blood steamed down her side, black veined, wrong. The amethyst eye took inventory. The gold one pinned the monster like an insect on a schoolboy pin.
Yua didn't waste breath on hello. "You made a vow without a handler?" she said, somewhere between impressed and furious. "Fine. Don't die."
The Kaimon lunged.
Yua didn't step back. She stepped through. Blade, shoulder, hip—one unbroken sentence. The cut taught the space what to be and left the monster reconsidering where its limbs belonged.
Ryo moved because she had said don't die and he had already agreed.
He slid to her bad side, shoulder under her weight for an instant that pretended it wasn't needed.
"Seishu rides breath," Yua snapped, not taking her eyes off the thing. "In for four. Hold. Out for four. Keep it from scattering."
"Scattering?"
"Yourself," she said. "Try staying in one piece. It helps."
The torii seam thinned. The forest pressed close like a crowd listening.
Yua glanced at the opening Ryo's blood had bought. "Down the slope," she ordered. "Follow the lanterns. If I fall, don't look back. If you look back, I will find you and make you regret being sentimental."
"You don't know me," Ryo said, and the grin that came with it didn't ask permission. "I'm obnoxious when I care."
"I've noticed," Yua said, and launched herself at the Kaimon before worry got the better seat.
Ryo ran.
The snow gave way under his soles like memory. Lanterns bobbed. The seam widened in front of him, the forest narrowing behind as if it had decided to let only one story through.
He didn't look back.
He didn't.
He only listened for the ring of Yua's blade—clean, exact—and the heavier, hollow hunger that tried to learn her rhythm and kept getting the grammar wrong.
The seam opened like a breath held too long and now allowed to go home.
Ryo stepped through.
The City That Watched Him Arrive
Air changed flavor—resin and rice steam, river and iron. Ryo stumbled onto a cliffside path overlooking a city terraced into rock and pine. Banners wrote soft storms in the evening light. Courtyards shone like warm bowls. People moved with purpose, kimonoed, armed, alive. From somewhere deep, bells marked the hour with notes that knew their job.
The slope switched back. Ryo kept to the lanterns because he'd been told to and because saying yes means doing the part after.
"Don't make friends. Not yet," Yua had said.
He didn't. He saw the herb-seller's smile anyway and the way it recognized him as if dreams had signed him in twice. He saw a fox-mask glide past, sleeve glinting with needle-thin blades. He felt shadows take interest and stay polite about it.
A narrow gate sat half-swallowed by creeper. Waterfall breath cooled the air. He slipped behind it into a hall of wood and incense where tatami had learned patience from feet and blood.
An old woman knelt by a brazier, grinding leaves with a stone. One eye milky; the other knife-clear.
"Close the door," she said without turning. "You're letting the cold see our secrets."
Ryo slid the panel shut. The room exhaled. The old woman's hand never stopped its circle. "Yua Aihara?" she asked the air.
"Present," Yua said, stumbling through the water curtain a heartbeat later, sword tip carving a line on the wet stone to keep the world honest. She didn't collapse. She folded, precise, onto a mat.
The old woman—Hagane Tsuki—set the mortar aside, moved like a tree that had decided to be a person again. She peeled fabric from Yua's side. The wound looked like someone had taught the flesh an alphabet it hadn't wanted to learn.
Hagane clicked her tongue. "You always bring your homework to my floor."
"Saving the Realm syllabus is unclear on extensions," Yua muttered. It would have been funny if the blood wasn't smoking.
Ryo looked away and his gaze found two small medals on Yua's belt—one stamped 特練 (Tokuren), the other a numbered disk, XII-7.
"What are those?" he asked, because when you don't know what to do with your hands you reach for words.
"Ghost work," Yua said. "Special unit. Nests nobody writes down. Breaches that pretend to heal. Numbers because names go missing."
"And your sleeve—Third Seat?"
Her fingers brushed the embroidered 参位, not tender, not cruel—like counting scars. "Lieutenant above me. Captain above her."
Hagane spat in the brazier. The flame approved. "Gentoki," she said, as if cursing and praying at once. "Still owes me chopsticks."
She chuckled to herself knowing how polite and kind that man is.
Silence gathered, honest as snow. Yua broke it with the blunt edge of her job. "Ask the question you're choking on."
Ryo swallowed. "Why me?"
Yua leaned forward until the room had to lean back to make room for how serious she was. "Because the thing that crossed wants you," she said. "Not your block. Not your school. You."
Hagane's good eye caught the fire and turned pearl. "The boy smells like stardust," she said, as if complimenting a stew.
Ryo thought of notebooks with constellations drawn hard enough to tear paper. Of a bench with his mother's name carved on it in house key letters. Of the way the city's reflections sometimes lagged, as if waiting for him to catch up.
Yua grabbed his wrist and turned it over. The birthmark there—awkward, stubborn—warmed under her thumb. "This is a door," she said softly, like admitting something to herself. "And doors invite."
Outside, the bells changed their minds about the hour. The air tightened. Ryo didn't know how he knew, but Serenia had failed to stay whole in exactly the way he feared.
Yua's jaw set. "Hagane."
The old woman nudged a chest open with her toe. Constellations had been carved into its lid by hands that knew stars from memory and stubbornness. She pulled out a folded kimono—midnight blue with storm-threading along the sleeves—and a sheathed katana whose guard was a crescent closing teeth around a star.
She tossed both to Ryo. He fumbled and nearly swore.
"Suit up," Yua said. "If you're going to insist on being human in a bad neighborhood, you might as well dress the part."
Hagane grinned, all root and patience. "She means 'welcome,' but we don't waste words when the sky is rude."
Ryo's thumb brushed the sheath. The metal sighed a note he felt in his molars.
"I was supposed to pick a major next month," he heard himself say, and the room didn't laugh at him.
"Congratulations," Yua said. "Your major is not dying."
Hagane slid a parchment with her foot. An inked thing on it shifted if he didn't stare—beast, hole, both.
CLASS 3: REALITY EATER — GŌSHIN
Ryo's skin tried to step off. The name felt like a hand reaching up through a drain.
The floor shook, so politely it was almost worse.
Yua was already moving. "We're done with talking."
Ryo glanced toward the waterfall's light. "Back there? Now?"
"People don't stay saved just because you want them to," Yua said. "Move."
Serenia — Opened Wrong
They landed on a rooftop near the wound in the sky. Ryo's new kimono had time to be beautiful for exactly one breath.
He gagged. The air smelled like lilies rotting in a machine shop. Streetlights below flickered through colors that didn't exist. People stood mid-scream, mid-hail, mid-laugh, their shadows peeling off and crawling toward the rip over the square like snakes learning to read.
"Dammit," Ryo groaned, looking at the storm-threaded sleeves. "I was going to rock this."
Yua hauled him up by the collar and turned his face toward the street. "Focus," she said. "Feel that weight? That's Seishu. Don't let it use you. Stand inside it."
His birthmark burned under cloth. His heart pounded a drum for something he wasn't ready to invite and couldn't bear to send away.
The rip heaved. A mass shouldered through and found a shape that insulted the idea of shape—liquid shadow, veins of violent red, limbs reconfiguring between animal and absence. It landed on a bank tower. The top floors collapsed into glitter and steel shrieks.
"That's the same—" Ryo started.
"No," Yua said, blade lifting. "That was a scout. This is Gōshin."
The thing tilted the idea of a head. It listened. Then, without a mouth, it spoke.
"Astra… bearer…"
Ryo's wrist flared hot. He tasted metal. A memory he wanted and hated arrived: his mother's hand over his, guiding a pencil between stars.
"Down," Yua hissed. "Behind me."
Black tendrils fired—spears of night learning to be solid.
Yua met them. One diverted with a scream against her edge; two more didn't believe in choreography and punched through her shoulder and her side with a wet, impolite sound. She didn't scream. Her mouth opened and breath left like a blade drawn for someone who deserved it.
The force threw her off the roof and into a billboard. Perfume snowed down with glass. She vanished into the city's grind of lights.
"YUA!"
Ryo staggered to the lip and stopped because falling wasn't going to teach the ground any lessons he wanted it to learn. The Kaimon turned back. Where a face might have been, a vertical grin unfolded, needles closing across a throat it didn't have.
"…Alone now."
Heat shimmered. On the monster's skin, his reflection gathered like oil finds sky.
For one breath, the face that looked back wasn't his.
It was his mother—hair pulled back, mouth mid-instruction, eyes full of a plan no child could have understood.
Ryo's grip crushed the crescent guard. The hilt sang a thin, desperate note.
"Mom—?"
Darkness came up like a tide with a schedule.
It didn't let him choose.
It took him.
🌀 End Of Chapter Two