Sun hits salt and stone like a slap. The square smells like broth and wet chalk. The fountain keeps time.
Red cloaks move in pairs, accompanied by stretchers and boards. At each corner, a runner reads the names slowly, so the right hands rise before a sheet is lifted.
"Arash ben Halim."
"Here."
The runner nods; neighbors fall in beside the stretcher without being told. No speeches. Just hands.
At the South Gate, the promise stands open.
A gray-bearded shopkeeper shoulders a cloth bundle. A Red soldier presses a waterskin and a wrapped Tola roll into his palm.
"No levy," the soldier says. "Road's yours."
"Trick?" the shopkeeper asks.
"Breakfast is there." He tips his chin at the cookfires. "Road is here. Pick."
The man stares at both, swallows. "I'll eat. Then think."
"Good," the soldier says, stepping aside.
Those staying line up for stipends. Scribes dip, call, mark. A girl writes her own name tiny in the ledger's corner, grins at no one, keeps working.
On the broken wall, the breach becomes stairs.
"Stone," Moro says.
The mason hands him one. Moro sets it, heel tests, nods once. The mason copies the test, almost correctly, and makes adjustments. Moro's cheek is still cut. He doesn't wipe it—a boy with a too-long practice spear hovers.
"I want to join," the boy says.
"Eat," Moro says.
"I..."
"Eat," he repeats, already reaching for the next stone. The spear clacks away toward the soup line.
In the market quarter, ovens wake. Heat rides low where cooks need it; lanes stay cool—a second-story shutter twitches. Ibara doesn't look up. Wind slides the bolt wide; it thunks into a door plank. The window shuts. He feathers a breeze under a child's scarf so the soap stops biting his eyes. The kid snorts at the tickle and laughs at himself for laughing. Ibara lets the laugh stand.
Down the square way, Shinshō Luna bounces out with a stack of notices hugged like a favorite book, sleeves dusted in ink.
"Morning, class," she chirps at three privates trying to murder a grain sack. "Lesson one: legs, not backs. Lesson two: nobody cuts the soup line. Ever."
She pins sheets where you have to see them twice: oven doors, well posts, the old tax office now full of grain.
Food before gold.
Water before pride.
Children before commands.
"Post a guard?" a private asks.
"If no one listens to the paper, what should we do?" Luna says, in a sing-song sweet tone, then the smile clicks colder. "If someone rips one, bring me the person and the hands."
She almost trips over a ladle, catches it, giggles, and flips it back to the cook.
"Extra credit: return the kitchen's bones to the kitchen."
The cook snorts, tosses her a heel of bread. She pockets it like a thief and continues to organize.
Hammers, ladles, chalk, breath. The city sounds alive.
Then every aura crystal wakes.
Glass throats over doors and stalls fill with presence. Pressure rolls across shoulders like new weather. Heads lift without meaning to. In Dust City offices, caravan tents, back rooms with shutters drawn, people lean closer.
A figure resolves, hooded and cloaked, with torchfire steady behind him. He lifts his right hand. A crimson eye in a golden palm (the mark of the God's Hands, Shinshō) burns faintly across his skin.
Akugan no Ketsumei: First Public Declaration
"You call me evil because I show you what you hid.
You call me mad because I remember what you trained yourselves to forget.
You call us terrorists, traitors, the red-stained fringe of your tidy histories.
Strip the ribbons. Strip the ranks. Strip the oaths sewn into your flags.
What are you when the cloth falls? What remains but the debt you refused to pay?"
(The feed hums; rooms do, too.)
"Do you feel it? That hollow under your feet?
That is not panic. That is memory, crawling back into the light.
The Seeker Association buries truths deeper than relic vaults.
The Guild Congress drinks power and spits out wisdom.
Your nations, dogs of kings, gnaw at borders while forgetting who lit the first flame."
(He lowers his hand. The eye in his palm dims to an ember.)
"We are Akugan no Ketsumei, the blood oath of those who watched too long and saw too much.
I have taken Muti from the bone.
I have listened to the dreams of forbidden gods.
I have stood on the edge of Terragigantus, and I did not blink.
You ask why we rebel.
Because we were never made to serve."
(The frame widens; black banners hang like verdicts.)
"From the Prophet's Crown to the Dust City wall, from the bazaars of Dune City to the siege lines at Sand City, hear me.
Your Truce Lines are ink.
The desert writes its law in bone.
My Shinshō, the God's Hands, do not posture. They do not beg.
When I point, they move.
When they arrive, the argument comes to an end.
You speak of peace? You had peace. You bought it with silence and stacked the bodies underneath it.
You ask for an order? Here is the order: truth first. Then judgment. Then mercy, if it is earned.
I am The Red Prophet, The God Hand.
I owe you no perfume for plain truth."
(He looks into the lens; the Akugan glows once, steady, and surgical.)
"We do not seek your forgiveness.
We offer no peace.
We offer only the truth you dared not utter,
and the price of surviving it."
The crystals dim. The light in the square doesn't.