Takeda drove with one hand on the wheel, the other tapping a rhythm against his thigh. In the passenger seat, Mori watched the road with that same warm smile, unchanged since the apartment.
Kori watched the city pass through tinted glass.
The lower district blurred by in fragments—cars threading through intersections, pedestrians cutting across crosswalks, alleys opening and closing between buildings. Everyone going somewhere. The world continued its business without concern for the sedan carrying a boy with something living in his spine.
The car slowed. Turned. Stopped.
The facility towered upward like a cathedral. Glass and steel and clean geometric lines. Men and women in sleek business attire moved through the plaza below, flowing to and from the mirrored doors in streams that never quite intersected.
Mori opened her door. "This way."
The plaza was busier up close. Dozens of people crossing the space, briefcases and folders and the occasional equipment case that looked heavier than it should.
Most of them glanced at Kori as he passed. Quick looks, professional, the assessment of someone cataloging information without breaking stride. They knew what he was. He could see it in the way their eyes moved—face, hands, posture, gone. Filing him away. Moving on.
The lobby was marble and light, a reception desk staffed by two women who didn't look up as Mori led him past. Elevators at the far wall, polished steel. Takeda had disappeared somewhere between the plaza and the doors.
Kori hadn't seen him go.
"Third floor," Mori said. "Medical wing first, then assessment. Coordinator Hayashi will explain the rest."
The elevator arrived with a soft chime.
Kori followed.
Coordinator Hayashi was a thin man with glasses and the particular energy of someone who had accepted insomnia as a lifestyle choice. His office was small, cluttered with folders and forms, a desktop computer humming beneath stacks of paper that had given up on the concept of organization.
"Kuroshi," he said, not looking up from his screen. "Sit. Talk. Don't touch anything—I have a system."
Kori sat. Mori had vanished somewhere between the elevator and this door. The building seemed to swallow people and produce them elsewhere without explanation.
Hayashi typed something, clicked something, typed again. Then he stopped, leaned back, and actually looked at Kori for the first time.
"So. You're the one who killed a Class C with a weapon we've never seen and a fusion type that shouldn't exist." He didn't sound impressed. He sounded like a man being handed more paperwork. "Congratulations. You've made my week more interesting. I don't like interesting."
He pulled a form from somewhere in the chaos and slid it across the desk.
"Initialization process. Three stages. MRI first—we need pictures of whatever's growing in your spine. Then medical workup—blood, reflexes, making sure you're not about to explode. Then ability assessment, where Sato gets to play with you."
He smiled thinly.
"She'll enjoy that. Try not to let her take anything important."
The MRI room was cold. The machine dominated the space—a massive white cylinder, the kind of thing that looked like it belonged in a hospital or a science fiction film.
A technician waited beside it. Woman in her thirties, purple streaks in her hair, a coffee cup that had been refilled too many times.
"Gown," she said, jerking her thumb toward the changing area. "Everything off. Metal makes the pictures look like abstract art, and I'm not in the mood to interpret."
Kori changed. When he came back, the technician was examining his file on a tablet, coffee cup balanced precariously on top of the machine.
"Spinal fusion, huh? That's new." She sounded like someone discovering a new flavor of instant ramen. "Usually it's hearts. Hearts are boring. Everyone does hearts."
She patted the narrow bed.
"Lie down, don't move, try not to think about how loud it's going to get. Some people find it relaxing. Those people are liars."
Kori lay down. The ceiling was white, unmarked, giving nothing back.
"Forty minutes," she said, already walking toward the control room. "If you fall asleep, I'll be impressed. If you have a claustrophobic episode, tap your foot three times and I'll pull you out. If you manifest your weapon inside my very expensive machine, I will find a way to bill your corpse."
The bed slid forward. The cylinder swallowed him whole.
Hayashi was waiting when Kori emerged, clipboard in hand. The technician had printed something—a series of images, black and white and gray, the interior architecture of Kori's body rendered in cross-section.
"Interesting," Hayashi said.
He held up one of the images. Kori's spine, or what should have been his spine.
The vertebrae were visible, the normal structure of bone and disc and nerve—except where they weren't. Starting at the base of his skull and running down to his tailbone, something else had taken root.
A dense structure, black against the gray of tissue, spreading outward from the spinal column in patterns like cobwebs. Like lightning frozen mid-strike. Like the branches of a tree grown in darkness.
"A true spinal fusion," Hayashi said. "Unprecedented."
Kori looked at the image. The black lines radiating through his body. He'd known it was there—could feel it, sometimes—but seeing it was different.
Seeing made it real.
"Normally," Hayashi continued, "weapon devil hybrids replace the heart. Standard fusion point. The devil's heart takes the place of the human's, becomes the anchor for the transformation." He tapped the image. "This is the first spinal case I've seen. First one anyone's seen, according to the database."
"The first recorded," Kori said.
Hayashi's pen paused. He studied Kori over the rim of his glasses—a longer look this time, reassessing.
"The material composition is also notable. Initial analysis suggests high-density obsidian—volcanic glass, essentially, but structured in ways that don't occur naturally. Similar samples have only been recovered from one source."
He didn't say what the source was.
"Blood work next," he said. "Then Sato. Try to keep all your fingers."
They took his blood. Checked his reflexes. Shined lights in his eyes and listened to his heartbeat and measured his lung capacity. Standard medical workup. The kind of thing any hospital would do, if hospitals regularly processed people with volcanic glass growing through their spines.
The ability assessment was different.
The room was large, reinforced, the walls lined with something that looked like concrete but probably wasn't. Observation windows ran along one side, dark glass hiding whoever watched. The floor was marked with lines and circles, measurements for distances Kori didn't recognize.
A woman waited in the center of the room.
Short hair shaved close on the sides, a scar running through her left eyebrow, arms covered in tattoos that disappeared under her sleeves. She was rolling a knife between her fingers—not a weapon, just a habit, the blade dancing across her knuckles like a coin trick.
"You're the spine guy," she said. "Sato. I do combat assessment."
The knife disappeared somewhere into her jacket.
"Fair warning: I love my job. Try not to take it personally."
Kori said nothing.
Sato grinned. It wasn't a reassuring expression. "Let's see what you've got. Manifest."
Kori raised his hand. "Scythe."
The black material flowed down his arm, encased his hand, sprouted the blade from his palm. Twenty-four inches of darkness, catching the overhead lights and swallowing them.
Sato let out a low whistle. "That's pretty." She circled him slowly, examining the blade from different angles. "Obsidian, looks like. The real stuff, not the tourist shop garbage."
She pulled out a tablet, made a note.
"Retract."
He retracted it. Manifested it again. Retracted. Manifested. Sato watched each time, making notes without looking away.
"Consistent formation, no degradation. Nice." She tucked the tablet under her arm. "The material—you know where obsidian like that comes from?"
"No."
"Two places. Volcanic vents so deep we can't reach them." She smiled again. "Or hell. Same signature. The lab guys get very excited about hell materials. Something about molecular structure."
She waved a hand.
"I don't ask questions I don't want answered."
"Regeneration next," Sato said. "This is my favorite part."
She produced a knife—different from the one she'd been spinning, clinical, precise.
"Hold out your arm."
Without waiting, she drew it across Kori's forearm—a shallow cut, enough to draw blood.
They both watched the wound close. Thirty seconds. The skin knit together, left no scar.
"Not bad," Sato said. "Again."
She cut deeper. Forty-five seconds. Cut again. Measured. Cut again.
By the fifth cut, Kori's head was swimming—the same dizziness from Akane's kitchen, the tank running dry.
"Getting dizzy," he said.
Sato paused, knife still in hand. "Already? That's only five." She sounded disappointed. "Wait. When you heal—are you focusing?"
"Focusing."
"On the wound. Directing it. Or are you just sitting there watching?"
Kori thought about the cuts in Akane's kitchen. The way he'd watched them close, passive, observing.
"Just watching," he said.
Sato's grin came back, wider. She set down the knife. Picked up something else—a surgical blade, the edge catching light like a thread of silver.
"Oh, this is going to be fun." She tested the edge with her thumb. "Don't blink."
The blade came down.
Kori's left pinky separated from his hand at the second knuckle. Clean. Precise. The finger dropped to the floor with a small, wet sound.
The pain arrived—sharp, immediate, enormous. But different, too. Not the lingering ache of damage, but something temporary. Something his body already understood as a condition that would pass.
He looked at his hand, at the stump where his finger had been, and watched.
The flesh throbbed. Once. Twice.
Then it began to grow.
Bone first—white emerging from red, extending outward in a framework that his nerves were already wrapping around. Then muscle, threading itself through the structure, fibers weaving together faster than his eyes could track. Then skin, spreading over the new tissue like water filling a mold, pink and raw and then simply there.
Seconds. The whole process took seconds.
Kori flexed his hand. The finger responded—new, whole, indistinguishable from the original.
Sato picked up the severed finger from the floor. Examined it with genuine delight, then dropped it into a specimen container.
"Now that's more like it." She was practically bouncing. "True hybrid regeneration, confirmed. You weren't running out of juice—you were just being lazy about it. Active versus passive. Focus and you're basically unkillable. Don't focus and you'll bleed out like anybody else."
She looked at him.
"Try not to lose your head. Even the good ones don't come back from that."
Kori looked at his new finger. Moved it.
"Understood," he said.
Sato laughed—sharp and sudden. "I like you. You're not a screamer." She tucked the specimen container into a pocket. "Alright, let's see what else you've got."
Strength testing. Lifting. Pushing. Pulling. Then endurance—running, sustained exertion, the point at which his body finally registered fatigue. Then speed—reaction time, sprint velocity.
"Base fiend equivalent," Sato said finally, scrolling through her tablet. "Strength, speed, durability—normal range for your type. Not special, not weak. Solid."
She looked up.
"One thing that is special, though."
Kori waited.
"Hesitation." She turned the tablet to show him a graph. "We measure the gap between stimulus and response. Threat appears, how long until you move. Most people—even trained hunters—show point-three to point-seven seconds delay. Recognition, decision, action. Normal brain stuff."
She tapped the graph.
"You?"
"Zero," Kori said.
"Zero." Sato's grin was back. "Within margin of error, you don't hesitate. At all. Threat appears, you're already moving. No decision-making, no processing. Just action."
She tucked the tablet under her arm.
"That's rare. Fiends don't even test that clean. Whatever's in your spine rewired something fundamental."
Kori thought about the devil on Sakura Street. The way his body had known where to cut before his mind had finished processing.
"Assessment complete," Sato said.
She stuck out her hand.
"It was a pleasure cutting pieces off you, Kuroshi. Hayashi will give you the boring paperwork part."
She shook his hand with more force than necessary.
"See you around. Try to stay interesting."
She left through a door Kori hadn't noticed, already spinning another knife between her fingers.
Hayashi's office. Same chaos, same humming computer, same stacks of paper. The man himself sat behind his desk, a fresh cup of coffee steaming beside him despite the late hour.
"Results are in," he said. "Sit."
Kori sat. The day had disappeared into tests and measurements, and now the light through the small window had shifted toward evening.
"Classification: Hybrid, Weapon-class, Threat Level B. Potential for A under specific circumstances."
Hayashi took a sip of coffee, grimaced, drank more anyway.
"The spinal fusion is being flagged for further study. Expect to be popular with the research division. They don't get new toys often."
He set down the coffee. Took off his glasses.
"Two options," he said. "I'll give you the speech because I have to, but we both know how this ends."
He folded his hands.
"Option one: containment. You're housed in a secure facility, monitored around the clock, kept under observation until we understand the fusion better. Could be weeks. Could be months. Could be longer."
His voice was flat, clinical.
"Unregistered hybrids fall under strict penal codes. The law allows indefinite detention for assets deemed insufficiently understood."
The words settled into the cluttered office.
"Option two: operational integration. You register as an active asset, work under Public Safety supervision, fulfill missions as assigned."
Hayashi picked up his glasses, put them back on.
"You mentioned a contract condition. Kill all devils, no exceptions. Integration would let you fulfill that condition while remaining monitored."
"Those are my options," Kori said.
"Those are your options."
Containment. White walls, fluorescent lights, time measured in observations and tests. Weeks. Months. Longer.
Or integration. Missions. Devils. The contract's first condition, written into his spine.
Kill.
He could feel it there—the settled weight, the presence that had been silent since the fusion. No voice. No urging. Just the absolute certainty of what he'd agreed to, the terms that couldn't be renegotiated.
All devils. No exceptions.
"Integration," Kori said.
Hayashi nodded. Made a note. The decision had taken seconds.
"You'll be assigned to a specialized unit," Hayashi said. "Housing will be arranged. Briefing tomorrow morning, 0800. Someone will collect you."
He picked up his coffee, drained it, set the empty cup beside three others.
"Welcome to Public Safety, Kuroshi. The pay is terrible, the hours are worse, and the life expectancy statistics are depressing enough that we stopped posting them in the break room."
Kori stood. "Where do I wait?"
"Room 47. End of the hall. There's a cot." Hayashi was already reaching for paperwork. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow you meet the people who'll decide if you're useful or just another file in my cabinet."
The room was small. A cot, a chair, a window that looked out on the city below. Evening had settled fully now, the buildings lit from within, the streets becoming rivers of light.
Kori sat on the cot. Looked at his hands. The same hands that had been tested and measured and catalogued.
Somewhere in his spine, the presence settled deeper.
He lay back, stared at the ceiling, and let the city hum beneath him.
Tomorrow, they would tell him what to kill.
Tonight, he waited.