The silence was wrong.
Kaito stood at the edge of the rycrit field, one hand pressed against the ancient bark. The morning had been ordinary—the hum of insects, the distant lowing of shaaks, the rustle of long grass in the warm breeze. He had been practicing, not drawing on the Living Force, but aligning his frayed spirit with its immense, patient rhythm. The scaffold held. For the first time since the lab, he had felt something resembling stability.
Then the hum began.
It was a low, sub-audible vibration that came through the soles of his feet before it reached his ears. It was not organic. It was the sound of engines, vast and geometric, violating the atmosphere. The gullipuds in the nearby copse fell silent mid-chirp. The shaaks in the distant pasture lifted their heads, then bolted as one, a tide of panicked flesh.
Kaito turned toward Theed. On the horizon, geometric shadows blotted out the sun. They descended with a terrible, slow inevitability—landing craft, angular and cold. From this distance, they looked like falling tombstones.
A fist of cold dread closed around his newly solid heart. He was already running, his body moving before his mind could form the plan. The farm. He had to get to the farm.
He crested the low hill that looked down on the Trailer homestead. His breath caught.
There were eight of them. Tall, skeletal, made of some pale, hard material. They moved with a jerky, mechanical precision that was utterly alien. He had no name for them. They formed a loose cordon around the yard. Two more stood at the foot of the porch steps.
Tef was on the porch, his broad frame placed squarely between the machines and his family. Lena stood behind him, one arm around Mara's shoulders, pulling her close. Mara's face was pale, her eyes wide with a fear she couldn't comprehend.
One machine's voice was a tinny, filtered rasp, devoid of inflection. "You are to be relocated for your own safety. Compliance is mandatory. You will come with us."
Tef didn't move. "We're not leaving our home."
"Non-compliance will be met with pacification. This is your final directive."
Kaito was two hundred yards away, hidden in the tall grass at the field's edge. There was no cover, no time for stealth. Every instinct, every fiber of his Soul Reaper training, screamed at him to close the distance. To interpose. To be the boundary.
He didn't think. He acted.
Reiryoku, sluggish and foreign in its new channels, surged. He focused on the space beside Tef, on the porch. The technique was as natural as breathing: shunpo. The world was supposed to blur, the distance to collapse into a single step.
His body remembered the motion. The universe did not comply.
It was like trying to sprint through solidified gel. The air tore around him with a sound like ripping canvas. His spiritual energy, braced and scaffolded, refused to flow correctly. Instead of a seamless transit, he was violently catapulted. He lost all control, a leaf in a spiritual gale. The farmhouse, the machines, the family—all whipped past in a nauseating streak.
He saw the thick trunk of the old feed-store tree a fraction of a second before he hit it.
The impact was a hollow, wooden thunderclap. White light exploded behind his eyes. A sharper, wetter crack echoed in his skull. Then, nothing.
---
Consciousness returned as a slow, sick tide.
The world was a tilted, blurry painting. Sky. Grass. The side of the barn. A pounding, rhythmic agony centered on his forehead pulsed in time with his heart. He tried to lift a hand, and a fresh lance of pain shot through his neck.
He lay still, breathing through the nausea. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth.
Memory filtered back, cold and sharp. The machines. The family on the porch.
He forced his head to turn, gritting his teeth against the vertigo. The farmyard was empty. The machines were gone. The family was gone.
Only signs remained. Trampled grass. A single, discarded child's shoe—Mara's, bright blue—lying on its side by the water pump. The lingering, acrid smell of ozone and heated metal.
Gone.
A cold, clear purpose cut through the pain in his skull. They are gone. I must follow.
He pushed to his feet, swaying. The world tilted. He needed his gear. The thought was a compass needle.
As he stumbled toward the silent farmhouse, a memory surfaced, not as a dream, but as a sharp, physical recollection—his body remembering a different first time.
He was sixteen, standing in the austere quartermaster's hall of the Shin'ō Academy. The air smelled of incense and old paper. The officer, a stern man with a scar across his cheek, placed a bundle before him on the polished wood.
"Kageyama," the officer said. "Your provisional scores are adequate. You are hereby granted the uniform of a probationary member of the Gotei 13. Do you understand its meaning?"
Kaito, young and trying to mask his trembling pride, nodded. "It is a symbol of duty, sir."
"It is not a symbol," the officer corrected, his voice like a file on stone. "It is a tool. A statement. The black is not for mourning, boy. It is for clarity. It tells the spirits you are not of the living world, nor are you of the dead. You are the boundary. The white obi is the line you draw. The hakama are for freedom of movement, because your duty will require you to go where others cannot. When you wear this, you are not a boy from the Rukongai. You are a function of the cycle. You are a Soul Reaper. Now. Put it on."
His fingers, clumsy with nerves, had fumbled with the unfamiliar ties. The black cotton was stiff, new. The weight of the kosode on his shoulders felt immense. When he finally secured the white obi, pulling it tight around his waist, a profound shift occurred. The nervous boy was cinched away. What stood in the polished mirror was something else: a defined purpose. A clarity of role. The uniform didn't hide him; it revealed the part of him that had chosen this path. It was armor not against blades, but against ambiguity.
The memory faded, leaving the ache in his head and the silence of the ransacked farm. He pushed the door open.
His bundled shihakushō lay in the corner where he'd left it, a stark, foreign shape in the warm, wooden room. He knelt, his movements deliberate despite the pounding in his skull, and unwrapped it.
The black fabric was no longer stiff, but worn soft. It smelled of Naboo grass and sun, not incense. This time, his fingers did not fumble. He shed the simple gray tunic—the garment of a patient, a ward, a man being built—and slipped into the kosode. The weight was the same. The meaning was transformed.
He was not reclaiming an old identity. He was applying a principle. Clarity. Purpose. The boundary. He was not a citizen of Naboo to be relocated. He was not a lost experiment. He was the function that would move between the lines of the invaders, the sharp edge that would cut their hold.
He wrapped the obi, pulling it tight with a firm, practiced jerk. The last of Kaito the amnesiac farmhand was cinched away. What remained was resolve, focused to a single, burning point: Find them.
Lastly, he took up the asauchi. The plain sword felt like an extension of his own skeletal structure, a piece of himself that had been missing. He slid it through the obi at his left hip.
He stood. The figure in the room's small mirror was a dissonant image: the grim uniformity of Soul Society framed by the sunlit, woven textiles of the Trailer home. He was a wound in this peaceful space. A necessary one.
He turned his back on the mirror and walked out of the farmhouse, not as a survivor fleeing, but as a warden reporting for duty.
---
The road to Theed was a river of panic.
Civilians streamed past him, their faces etched with terror, hauling belongings in carts or simply running. Strange wheel-less vehicles overloaded with people whined past, kicking up dust. The air was thick with shouts, crying children, and the ever-present, growing thunder of distant energy weapons.
Kaito moved against the current. He kept to the treeline, his black robes making him a shadow among the dappled light. His head throbbed with every step, a brutal drumbeat. The scaffold of Naboo's Living Force felt strained, stretched thin by his injury and the psychic shock of the invasion. He could still lean on it, but it was like bracing against a wall that was itself trembling.
His first objective was information. He needed a pattern, a destination. The machines had said "relocation."
He found his first clue in a burning orchard. A large, blocky transport vehicle, marked with a geometric insignia, was parked haphazardly among the smoldering trees. A dozen of the skeletal machines were methodically rounding up a family of farmers, an old being with a long neck and sad eyes, and his human grandchildren. The machines' movements were laughably rigid, their coordination poor. But there were twelve of them, and their weapons were very real.
Kaito did not announce himself. He observed from the cover of a smoke-wreathed hedgerow. The machines moved in pairs, their glowing eye-pieces scanning in predictable arcs. They communicated with short, status-report bursts. They were automatons. They had patterns.
As two machines marched their prisoners toward the vehicle's ramp, Kaito moved. He didn't run. He walked, a silent, dark shape flowing through the smoke. He closed the distance to the nearest unattended machine in six silent steps.
It was standing guard, its back to him, weapon held stiffly.
Kaito's asauchi left its sheath without a whisper. There was no dramatic flourish, no battle cry. He simply extended his arm and drew the blade across the back of the machine's neck.
The sensation was profoundly strange. The blade did not meet the resistance of metal. It parted the outer casing, the internal cabling, the hidden mechanisms, as if they were layers of spiritual residue. There was a clean, severing shink. A brief, pathetic fizzle of dying power. The machine's head tilted, then toppled forward, its body collapsing into a lifeless heap of components.
It felt nothing like cutting a Hollow. There was no release of spirit, no cleansing. It was deletion. Erasure.
The second machine turned, its single eye glowing. "What!"
Kaito was already inside its guard. A downward diagonal strike sheared through its torso from shoulder to opposite hip. The two halves of the machine peeled apart, spitting sparks, and clattered to the ground.
The remaining machines by the vehicle whirred in confusion. "Contact! Unscheduled hostile!"
They raised their weapons. Kaito dropped into a crouch behind the vehicle's bulky engine housing as searing red bolts of energy sizzled past. His mind was cold, analytical. Ten targets. Poor marksmanship. Confused command chain.
He didn't fight them. He disabled their system. He didn't know what a hydraulic line or a repulsor coil was. He saw tubes and glowing conduits. He cut them.
A quick slash severed a thick, fluid-filled tube on the vehicle's undercarriage. Viscous liquid sprayed out. Another cut to a cluster of humming, brightly lit components caused a sharp pop and a shower of blue sparks. The vehicle settled onto its base with a groan.
"Vehicle disabled," a machine reported stupidly.
"Prioritize hostile elimination!"
They began to advance, clumping together in their confusion. Kaito waited until the first three were in line. Then he moved, not with shunpo, but with the accelerated, ground-eating stride of a Soul Reaper. He passed between them, his asauchi a silver blur. Three quick, precise strikes—a leg joint, the arm holding the weapon, the central glowing eye. They fell, not destroyed, but crippled, twitching and sparking on the ground.
The remaining machines' programming seemed to short-circuit. They hesitated, firing wild shots. Kaito used the chaos. He ducked under a blast, came up behind a machine, and severed a thin, antenna-like protrusion on its head. It began spinning in a circle, firing randomly.
In less than a minute, the unit was neutralized. A few machines lay in pieces. Most were disarmed and hobbled, chattering inane error messages into the smoky air.
Kaito walked past their twitching forms to the alien family. The old being's large eyes were wide with a mix of terror and awe. The children huddled behind him.
"The city," Kaito said, his voice rough from disuse and smoke. "They take people to the city?"
The being nodded shakily, a slow movement of its long head. "Yes. Theed. The main square. You… you are not one of the peacekeepers."
Kaito didn't understand the term. "No." He pointed west, away from the road. "Caves. In the hills. Go. Hide. Do not use the roads." He remembered Mara's lesson about the frisk-frog caves.
He didn't wait for thanks. He was already moving, vanishing back into the smoke before the being could form another word.
---
The outskirts of Theed were a nightmare of noise and light. The elegant cream-colored buildings were scarred with blackened burns. Machines marched in squads down the picturesque boulevards. The air crackled with bolts of red energy and the screams of the wounded.
Kaito became a ghost in the city's corpse.
He moved across rooftops, through alleyways, down drainage channels. He was a scalpel, not a hammer. He did not engage patrols head-on. He sabotaged. A single, precise cut to the joint of a leg on a large, walking transport machine left it stumbling and blocking a narrow street. He severed bundles of brightly colored wires on machine command posts, plunging them into confused silence.
He freed prisoners where he found them, in looted shops, in walled courtyards, in the backs of stalled transports. His method was always the same: swift, silent elimination of the guard machines, then terse, vital instructions.
"Main spaceport. Many machines. Avoid."
"They are gathering people in the huge open square. Do not go there."
"The water tunnels are clear. Move south."
And always, the question: "A family. A farmer, his wife, a girl of twelve. Seen them?"
The answers were shakes of the head, or vague, frightened negatives. He stored every data point. Not in the main square. Not on the north road. Not in the warehouse district.
His asauchi was the only thing in this chaos that made perfect sense. The energy bolts he had to avoid, his speed and reflexes were still superior, but his flesh could not withstand a direct hit. But machine armor, vehicle plating, fortified metal doors, they offered no more resistance than rice paper to his blade. He cut through locked gates to create escape routes. He sheared the weapons from machines before they could fire. The blade never dulled. It never resonated with this world's energy. It simply divided, a principle of absolute cut made manifest.
During one such intervention, freeing a group of artists barricaded in a sculptors' guild hall, he experienced something new. He had just cut down a heavier, more solid-looking machine that was pounding on their reinforced door. As his blade passed through its central mass, he felt a faint, fleeting ping in his spiritual senses. It was not a soul. It was the echo of a purpose, a programmed directive violently erased. A ghost of intent, hollow and artificial, snuffed out without a sound. It left a cold, oily aftertaste in his perception. This was not cleansing. This was disposal.
He was a wound-tender in a world that only understood blunt trauma.
The deeper he pressed into the city, the heavier the resistance became. He was tiring. The scaffold groaned under the sustained effort. His head wound wept a slow trickle of blood down his temple. He needed to find them soon, or he would become just another body in the rubble.
He found his sign in the Mercantile Quarter.
He was crouched on a high balcony, overlooking a small square where a dozen battle machines had cornered a mix of Naboo guardsmen and civilians. The guardsmen were putting up a fierce, doomed fight. It was a trap about to close.
Then, a new presence entered the battlefield.
It was not mechanical. It was a vibrant, luminous torrent in the Living Force, moving with a grace and power that made Kaito's makeshift scaffold feel like a child's crutch. A tall man with a brown robe and a stern, focused face stepped into the square. In his hand, a blade of pure, humming green energy grew to life, a solid beam of light.
Kaito stared, his analytical mind briefly overwhelmed. What is that?
The man moved like water flowing around stone. Machine energy bolts bounced away from him, some ricocheting back to destroy their sources. His green energy blade was a vortex of controlled power, disassembling machines with efficient, elegant sweeps. Where Kaito was a silent scalpel, this man was a sweeping, radiant force of nature. He didn't hide. He announced his presence with every movement, drawing fire, shattering formations.
Kaito watched, mesmerized and sobered. This was power. This was a connection to the energy of this world he could only mimic by leaning against its outer walls. This man fought with a certainty that came from being an inseparable part of the universe's fabric. Kaito fought as a stranger, using borrowed tools and sheer, stubborn will.
As the last machine fell, the man stood amidst the wreckage, calm as a pond. He spoke to the guardsmen, his voice carrying even over the distant weapons-fire. He was a beacon. A fixed point in the chaos.
Kaito looked from the green-bladed man to the smoking ruins of the city, to the streams of prisoners still being herded toward the city's heart. A man with that much power, who announced himself so boldly, would be at the center of the storm. Where the fight was thickest, where the invaders would concentrate their prisoners for control. He was a magnet for conflict.
The thought was a cold ember igniting. He didn't need to search every street. He needed to understand the enemy's logic. Their processing point. Their strongest hold. The man with the green blade, by his very nature, would be drawn to it. To break it.
Kaito would not follow him as an ally. He would use him as a lodestar. A living, breathing divining rod pointing toward the heart of the darkness.
He melted back from the balcony edge, his black robes blending into the deepening shadows of late afternoon. His path was clear now. He would move parallel to the green blade's advance, a shadow to his light, a silent warden cutting the binds the machines left in their wake. The trail would lead to where they were taking everyone.
It would lead to Mara, Lena, and Tef.
He dropped into the alley below, his asauchi still gleaming with a faint, otherworldly sheen, and began to move, a ghost following a sun he did not understand.