Frames That Don't Agree
Serenia jittered like bad film.
Ryo blew through a window that behaved like water until it remembered glass had opinions. Shards spun—neon, siren-glare, a flash of his own eyes—before the night swallowed them. His new kimono snagged on twisted rebar; stitches popped; gravity stopped being down and started being toward—tugging him sideways, obedient to the thing that had pushed a hole through the sky.
Sirens tried to howl and came out stretched thin, a long cracked vowel held by a hand. People below froze mid-call, mid-step, mid-scream; their shadows peeled off like old paint and slithered toward the rift.
Move. The voice in his head sounded older than he was. Move. She took worse. Move—
He hit the roof. Air punched out of him. Gold burned awake beneath his left sleeve—his birthmark a hot coin just out of a forge. Jagged light leapt from his wrist and threw shadows that crawled against the wind.
The roof trembled.
Gōshin stepped into view, each footfall a cathedral bell cast from bone. Its shape cheated at being human—veins of violent red flexed under night-skin; a featureless head tilted, studying him the way a microscope does a slide.
An obsidian claw extended—slow, precise—toward Ryo's throat.
It stopped.
Because something else answered the gold first.
When Metal Remembers Your Name
The katana Yua had thrown at him—plain sheath, crescent guard swallowing a star—shuddered where it had fallen. The tsuba bled violet like flame in a windless room. Steel moved without a hand, crossing the space between them as if the air were only a suggestion, and slammed into Ryo's grip.
Steel met skin.
A woman's voice did not pass through his ear.
"Kenzaki… wake up."
White. Black. A field of stars that were not above but around. He stood facing himself—older by a handful of losses, dressed in storm-stitched cloth, bleeding in the places he would if he didn't change something.
Reflection-Ryo cocked his head, mouth iron-twisted. "That it? Going to die where you fell, while she's still fighting?"
The stars folded.
Glass rang.
The claw descended—met not throat, but a blade burning with storm-light. Ryo's body moved like it had always known how. A lean cut rose hip-to-sky. Black ichor sheared free and turned to steam between heartbeats.
Gōshin reeled. Its shriek layered over itself until sound had too many bodies.
"IMPOSSIBLE—"
The severed claw fell apart into screaming smoke.
Ryo slid a foot, put the point between them. His voice didn't sound like his voice.
"Stay away… from my home."
His pupils were slit like Yua's when she fought.
Resonance
Across the district, Yua spat blood onto a street that wouldn't hold still. The city doubled, slid, reattached. Pain wrote its essay without punctuation from shoulder to hip.
Then she felt it—through the ragged link she'd sewn when she yanked a boy between worlds—Ryo's Seishu opening like a door onto weather. The note hit her bones first, then her mouth.
She laughed. It hurt. "Knew it," she said to the night. "Knew you weren't ordinary."
Movement snagged her eye.
The wrist Ryo had cut re-threaded itself, tendrils knitting with wet, impatient sounds. The body refined as it healed—as if bleeding made it smarter. A skeletal mask of charred bone grew across half the faceless face. The other arm thinned, lengthened, hardened into a sword that hummed like a predator waiting.
When it spoke again, the voice carried fewer echoes. Clearer. Hungrier.
"Little star… you shine just like she did."
Ryo's shoulders locked. The phrasing tripped a wire he hadn't known was still live.
"Mom?" The word scraped coming out, ugly with hope.
Gōshin tilted its head, pleased it had found the bruise.
A violet streak hit the avenue like a comet. Asphalt split. Dust jumped. Yua stood in a crater, blade humming past pain, uniform torn to memory. She didn't ask if he was okay. She drove steel into the pavement.
A low wave rolled out. Windows webbed. Gōshin stumbled a step, its stolen shape flickering like corrupted footage.
"Idiot," Yua said through her teeth, blood stringing her lip. "That thing isn't your mother—it's wearing what it ate. Kaimon savor. They don't love."
Ryo's grip tightened until the hilt creaked. The truth slotted the night into colder order. This wasn't random. It wasn't hungry for concrete.
It had come for him, and it had brought souvenirs from someone he couldn't hold except by remembering.
Gōshin raised its sword-arm.
The air thickened. Static crawled over skin. Streetlights popped down the block, shedding sparks like stubborn summer insects. The blade traced a figure eight—the exact sweep from the first diagram on Yua's scroll.
The monster spoke in Yua's cadence and handed it back wrong:
"狩獣式… 壱ノ型—"
"Karyū First Form—" Yua's eyes blew wide. "DODGE!"
The world went black and red and loud.
A City Learns a New Kind of Broken
Impact didn't cross space. It arrived.
An office floor became glitter. A bus peeled like fruit. Pigeons powdered into ash so fast the ash forgot it had been anything.
Ryo moved a beat late—not enough to be safe, just enough to choose his hurt. He shoved a stranger behind an HVAC block and took the edge of the blast across his shoulder instead of his chest.
Down street-level, an elevated tram shuddered on its track. The column groaned. The car tilted, slow first, then with the certainty of a decision made elsewhere.
People in the windows—pounding, praying, staring like the world was a screen that froze if you refused to blink.
Ryo sprinted, didn't ask the next step permission. He leapt to the tram roof, skidded, nearly went off. He jammed the katana between panels as a brace, the way you jam a door that insists on opening.
Metal screamed. For a heartbeat, everything held.
"Don't look at me," he rasped to the faces in the glass. "Don't—look at me. Crawl. Back. Go."
Some moved. Some stared. The car groaned.
"Ryo!" Yua—above, voice made of command and a fear that refused to waste time being afraid. "Leave it. Move!"
He didn't.
A kid had the wrong kind of stuck look—seatbelt jammed, halfway to free. The kid's mother's hands were white on plastic, doing nothing. Ryo had made a promise under a torii gate. He wasn't going to look away while the world cheated.
He yanked the belt. The wedge shrieked a new note.
Gōshin's second sweep came through like scissors through a braid. Maintenance cables unspooled. The torque changed. The katana took weight it wasn't made to know.
It shattered.
The sound was delicate, almost sweet—the way thin glass dies. Constellations of steel glittered, brief, and were gone.
The tram slumped. With terrible grace, it rolled.
Ryo lunged for the child. He caught fabric. Skin. Gravity asked a question he didn't have time to answer politely.
Yua hit the roof beside him—feet braced, blade jammed, body anchoring a weight she had no right left to carry. She shoved Ryo toward the edge and heaved.
"Let go," she hissed.
"If I do—"
"I won't."
He trusted the voice he'd decided to trust. He jumped clear. Yua rode the drop a meter, two, then drove her heel and steel into a seam and kicked off. The car smashed onto the lower tracks, bucked, held at an ugly angle. People scrambled. Someone sobbed thanks to a god who hadn't asked to be congratulated.
Behind them, a building separated itself from upright. It fell onto its own shadow with disciplined patience. A purple headband flashed in a window—Mei?—then dust and steel and a mouthful of silence.
Ryo didn't know if that was worse than knowing.
On the roof, a tourist who had been filming dropped her phone. It spun, slid, fell off the edge. The last frame it sent to nowhere: a boy in midnight cloth blaming himself with his whole face.
The night didn't care. It kept asking its question.
Borrowed Strikes
Gōshin stepped onto the tram line like it had a ticket. The skeletal mask grinned without lips. The sword-arm tasted air.
"狩獣式… 壱ノ型—" it said again, correct and wrong at once—a counterfeit that paid better than cash.
Yua slid in to meet it. Her body took inventory and chose to lie about half of it. Blood slicked her palm. She tightened until the hilt bit back. "Watch," she said to Ryo without turning. "Then forget. You don't copy a corrupted form."
Ryo grabbed at the floor for a weapon and found only the hilt wrapped in silk—crescent guard intact, star half-swallowed and hungry. He closed his fist around empty, and the empty stared back like an invitation.
Gōshin's strike fell.
Yua answered with a line so honest the air didn't argue. Cuts tried to live in the same space. Space objected by leaving. A whole block sighed and became edges.
Ryo staggered to his feet in wind that wasn't there. A tendril snapped for his throat, predictable now in its cruelty. He threw the empty hilt up on instinct— and for a breath-width the missing blade existed. A thin, pale edge of maybe turned the strike aside, then vanished like a dream that remembered him.
The effort made nausea bloom. He swallowed copper, spat, kept moving.
Yua flicked a glance—saw it—looked away. The fight needed the breath more than the praise.
"Hunter," Gōshin murmured, amused by their attention to each other. "Come be counted."
The rift pulsed above the square like an eye under medicine.
The Corner of 8th & Naku
Hiroshi had a talent for arriving where you hoped he wouldn't.
He hit 8th and Naku at a run, nose bleeding, grin in the wrong place. He dragged a crying kid out from under a fallen sign, shoved an auntie into a doorway that admitted being a doorway. He tripped, got up, waved at no one like it would help.
Ryo saw him—three roofs away, through dust and neon. He inhaled to shout. The next wave cut the sky at a new angle and arrived before he could teach his throat the word.
When debris settled, the corner had been rearranged into a problem you couldn't solve by counting. A lamppost leaned on nothing. A kiosk pretended to map streets that weren't there.
Hiroshi lay half-buried in advertising flyers like a kid at the beach. He squinted up. Found Ryo. Smiled, dumb and brave. Lifted a hand. It was the wave you give from a train that leaves anyway.
Ryo stepped toward the edge.
Yua's hand found his sleeve with more strength than she had left any right to own. "No."
"He's—"
"No." Rage wrapped in love, tempered by duty. The kind of no you give because yes would kill you both.
He looked at her. At Gōshin. At the place his blade had been. He did math with seconds and found out how much of tonight belonged to mistakes he hadn't made yet.
He nodded, once. "Okay."
"Good," Yua said, like she hadn't expected to earn it.
The monster, denied their favorite error, picked a new one.
"Payment," Gōshin crooned, and reached.
A tendril snapped Ryo around the waist—fast as a thought, sure as a handcuff. It yanked. Boot soles scraped. Air decided to be a river headed in. Above the square, the rip dilated like a drugged pupil.
"No!" Yua didn't think. She moved. Her blade took a layer of tendril and paid in sparks and skin. She grabbed the back of Ryo's kimono. For a heartbeat he existed between the electrical green of home and the cold-fast taste of the other place.
"Yua—" Their hands found each other. Her grip was iron. His was apology.
"Don't you dare let go," she hissed, gold eye fierce enough to light a street.
"I won't." His eyes said he already had somewhere important to be.
The pull sharpened. The seam tore wider. The street tilted a fraction, like a table nudged by a rude guest.
Something massive and old rang under everything—a bell, or a heart, or a gate remembering its job. A flurry of snow fell—not here—somewhere the wound could see. The air thinned.
Yua's wound stopped pretending. Black bled. Her fingers slipped the smallest amount.
"Ryo!" She poured his name into the space the world wanted.
He had time for one sentence. Not smart. Not brave. True.
"Tell my dad the porch light's on."
Her face did a human thing no monster can rehearse.
Her grip failed.
The space took him.
The last image before the turn: the mask on Gōshin cracking into delight, and, reflected faint in that obsidian, a woman in lilac under a tree whispering, Ten breaths. Be brave.
He didn't get to ten.
Dark closed over his head like water.
The Roof That Chose Witness
Silence made a sound.
Yua lay where the world left her, sword point drawing a shallow line in tar as her hand shook. Somewhere below, survivors crawled out of edges and decided to keep breathing. Somewhere above, the rip blinked.
It opened again.
A second seam irised wide—a thin, exact wound. A figure stepped through wearing an ash-white captain's mantle pinned with black lacquer. He carried a plain blade at his hip the way some men wear truth—without decoration because it doesn't need help.
When his foot touched Serenia, Seishu fell across the roof like first snow.
He looked at the city like a craftsman looks at a broken chair—measuring where to set his tools.
Yua's breath fogged once. "Captain…?" she whispered, out of blood and questions.
The man didn't answer yet. He lifted his face to the rip where Ryo had gone and the monster had smiled.
His eyes were winter.
🌀 End Of Chapter Three