Crystal shards ripped from his back in a violent spray.
Kaito stumbled, shoulder slamming into damp brick. His own kagune—dark, sinuous, hungry—lashed out at empty air. Purging. Rejecting. The stolen RC cells from the Aogiri recruiter were poison his biology couldn't process.
**SYSTEM: Foreign RC Cell Assimilation Failed. Purging Detected.**
**RC Cell Concentration: SSS Threshold Exceeded (Stabilizing)**
**Kagune Integrity: 87% (Fluctuating)**
He spat. Coppery phlegm hit concrete and sizzled. "Not compatible. Or just weak."
The strong devour the weak. Some things were just rotten.
The spasms left a hollow ache in his marrow. His kagune retracted, but the skin along his spine felt raw. He could still feel the ghost-impulse of that ukaku's structure. A blueprint scanned, copied, then violently scrubbed away. A cellular memory.
He pushed off the wall. The warehouse was a hollow shell. Shadows and rust. He needed to sleep. He needed to not dream.
A shoe scraped gravel.
He didn't turn. His senses painted the picture. Light steps. Ready posture. The scent of a ghoul—autumn leaves and ozone. Ukaku user.
"You're making a lot of noise," a voice said. Young. Female. Wary aggression. "And a mess."
Kaito turned his head.
Touka Kirishima stood at the alley mouth, school uniform pristine, blue hair framing a sharp frown. Violet eyes fixed on the crystal shards embedded in brick around him. Hands loose, but she could have her kagune formed in a heartbeat.
"Nature," Kaito said, voice rough. "Energy in, waste out."
"That waste brings doves. Who are you?"
Her gaze swept over him. Torn dark clothes. No gang marks. The chaotic RC aura that felt 'off.'
"Nobody. Passing through."
"Bullshit. I saw the end with Nishiki. That messed-up kagune." Her eyes narrowed. "You're the unstable freak."
The word bounced off him. He'd heard it before. Last life, for his obsession. This life, for his flesh. The irony was almost funny.
"Nishiki should worry more about Kimi," Kaito said, casual.
Her composure cracked. A slight eye-widening. A minute jaw-tightening. He'd named a human. A human a ghoul like Nishiki should have no connection to.
"What did you say?" Voice low. Dangerous.
"The strong devour the weak. But some connections make you weak. They're targets. Yamori knows that."
Another flinch. At the name. Yamori. It meant nothing to her now. But the way he said it—a fact, a coming storm—landed with weight.
"Who the hell are you?" A single step forward. Fingers twitched. "How do you know these things?"
He could fight her. Short. His body was unstable, aching, but he was SSS-rated. She was strong, not on that level. Not yet. Pointless. Noise. A deviation.
He looked past her into the city dark. "Yamori. Big. Likes pliers. Aogiri. He's coming to the 20th Ward soon. To recruit. Or break people for fun. He'll hear about a feisty, independent ukaku user. He'll like the challenge."
He started walking. Parallel. Skirting the wall to leave. A live wire, sparking. Away before he shorted out.
"Why tell me this?" She didn't block him. Body coiled, tracking him.
"Because the Rabbit shouldn't get caught in that trap. Not again."
The words were out before he could filter them. *Not again.*
Silence. Heavy.
Her hand came up. Almost touched her neck. A subconscious gesture of unease. Rabbit. Her Anteiku codename. How could a stranger know?
He'd said too much. Past-life knowledge bled out. The insulation was gone. The voltage was talking.
"Stay out of my way, Kirishima. Watch your back."
He melted into deeper shadows of a service alley. He didn't look back. He felt her stare burning where he'd been. Confusion. Anger. Dawning, cold fear.
He'd shaken her. Planted a seed. A risk. If it kept her from Yamori's workshop, from the trigger that forged a vengeful weapon… calculated.
The image of her, young and alive and *whole*, flashed. Followed by the monstrous form of Dragon. The scale was absurd. Saving one to save millions. The math was clear. The morality was fog.
He reached a storm drain and slid down into damp darkness. Only then did his control slip.
His body convulsed. He choked on the vibration. His kagune erupted again. Not attack. Chaotic, painful metamorphosis. The purge wasn't over.
**SYSTEM: Adaptive Analysis Complete. Partial Schema Retained.**
**Kagune Type: ANOMALY/Predator-Type (Evolutionary Path: UNSTABLE)**
**New Trait Acquired: [Residual Crystallization] - Kagune can temporarily manifest brittle, low-density crystal shards upon impact. Efficiency: Poor. Control: Volatile.**
Partial schema retained. His body tried to eat the ukaku, failed to digest, but stole a page from its blueprint. A useless, volatile page.
He laughed. A dry, hacking sound echoing in the pipe. Not a power-up. A side-effect. A cancer. His kagune was adapting, but not in a way he could direct. Learning from everything it consumed. Mutating toward some unknown, chaotic end.
He was not just hunting threats. He was becoming one.
***
Touka didn't chase.
She stood frozen for a full minute. *Rabbit. Not again. Yamori.*
Her heart drummed frantic against her ribs. She forced her breathing to slow. Idiot. Freak. Who did he think he was?
But he knew. He knew *things*.
She turned on her heel. Walked. Then ran. Feet carrying her not home, but toward the quiet, warm light of Anteiku.
***
The café was closed, main floor dark. She went around back, up the fire escape, into the private quarters without knocking.
Yoshimura sat in a worn armchair, reading under a soft lamp. He looked up. Old eyes missed nothing. She breathed hard. Smelled of adrenaline and another ghoul's chaotic RC scent.
"Touka," he said, closing his book. "You're disturbed."
"There's a ghoul. A man. Nishiki was right. He's… wrong. His kagune is wrong. It spasmed. He purged RC cells like he was sick."
Yoshimura listened. Expression placid. "Did he attack you?"
"No. He talked." She crossed her arms. Defensive. "He knew about Nishiki and Kimi. He called me 'Rabbit.' He warned me about someone named Yamori from Aogiri. He said… 'not again.'"
The manager's finger tapped once, slowly, on the book cover. A *bumbu* of profound, hidden concern. "He used a codename known only here. He spoke of a future event as memory."
"He's a threat. Unstable. He'll bring doves down on us."
"Perhaps." Yoshimura's gaze looked through her, into some distant, troubled past. "An unstable, powerful ghoul with knowledge he should not possess. A kagune that is anomalous." Pause. "It brings to mind other anomalies. The kind that create legends. And tragedies."
Touka stiffened. "You don't think…?"
"The One-Eyed King is a story. The One-Eyed Owl… was a reality." Voice soft, carrying decades of weight. "A reality that defied all understanding of ghoul biology and motive. This individual… not a Washuu plant. Their creations are cleaner, as Nishiki noted. This is something else. Something more organic. More unpredictable."
He looked at her. Eyes kind but grave. "You will not engage him, Touka. Observe, if you see him again. Keep your distance. A ghoul who knows the future is either a prophet or a madman. Both are dangerous to touch."
She wanted to argue. To say she could handle it. But the memory of the man's eyes stopped her—exhausted, haunted, piercingly aware. He hadn't looked at her like prey or enemy. He'd looked at her like a piece on a board. A piece he was reluctantly moving out of danger.
It made her skin crawl.
A short, sharp nod. "Fine."
As she left for her room, she didn't see Yoshimura's hand tighten slightly on the armchair. His thoughts a thousand miles away. On a lost child. A promise that doomed the world once before.
***
Deep in the sewers, Kaito's convulsions ceased.
He lay on his back in cold, shallow water. Staring at the dripping concrete ceiling. The backlash was over. Foreign cells expelled. His own RC levels stabilized, though the SSS rating was a permanent, screaming scarlet in his system display.
He felt hollowed out. Clean, in a sterile, dead way.
**SYSTEM: Purge Complete. Baseline Re-established.**
**Warning: Adaptive Cannibalistic Protocol has logged structural data from [Ukaku-Type: Shard-Spray Variant]. Integration is possible with higher-grade biomass.**
**Suggestion: Seek compatible high-density RC source for stable assimilation.**
"Compatible high-density RC source," he muttered to the dripping dark. He knew what that meant. Stronger ghouls. S-rated. SS-rated. The kind that shaped the story.
The Owl. The Dragon.
His kagune wasn't just a weapon. It was a student. A hungry, amoral student. And it wanted to eat its way up the curriculum.
He sat up. Water sluiced off him. The internal conflict was a cold war in his chest. The gamer's mind saw the data. *Seek compatible high-density RC source.* A quest prompt. A path to power to face end-game bosses.
The man, the *ghoul* living it, felt only revulsion. He was already a monster. Now he was a monster designed to devour other monsters. To become a mosaic of stolen parts. Where did that end? What was left of *him* when his body was a patchwork of consumed horrors?
He had to hunt tomorrow. The list of names was longer. Aogiri agitators. Clown associates. Seeds of the future dragon.
He stood. Water dripped from his clothes. A weapon, mutating in its scabbard. A prophet of ruin, trying to rewrite an apocalypse he'd already read.
His own body was the first chapter he was losing control of.
He climbed out of the drain, back into the long night. The hunt wasn't over. It was just changing shape.
***
The city above was a distant rumble. A world of streetlights and oblivious humans. Down here, the only light was the faint, sickly green of bioluminescent fungus clinging to wet pipes. Kaito moved through the tunnels, a map of the undercity etched behind his eyes from weeks of using it as a highway. He knew which drains led to which wards. Which passages were used by ghouls for discreet movement. Which ones were CCG surveillance blind spots.
His stomach twisted, a deep, biological hunger that had nothing to do with human food. The purge had burned through his reserves. He needed to feed. The thought was mechanical. A system alert. *Fuel required.*
But the other hunger, the one tied to the **Adaptive Cannibalistic Protocol**, was quieter. A whisper. It wasn't about sustenance. It was about acquisition. It wanted to taste something stronger. To dissect it. To learn.
He stopped at a junction. Three tunnels branched off. One smelled of stale water and rats. One carried the faint, greasy scent of a ghoul's recent passage—a low-level binger, probably living off suicides in the park. The third smelled of nothing. Just cold stone and age.
He chose the third.
He walked for twenty minutes, the silence complete save for the drip of water and the scuttle of unseen things. He was looking for nothing. Or maybe he was letting the Protocol look for him. His kagune lay dormant under his skin, a coiled, attentive snake. Testing the air he breathed. Analyzing the minute RC cell traces left in the environment like ghostly footprints.
A memory surfaced, unbidden. Not his. A flicker from the consumed Aogiri recruiter. A face. A ghoul named Hige. Not powerful. Not important. A messenger. But he had a kagune. A rinkaku. A regenerative, whip-like thing. The memory was of Hige bragging in a shitty bar about how he'd taken a quinque strike to the gut and knitted himself back together in minutes.
The Predator-Type had tasted that memory. It had filed the rinkaku's structural data away. It was curious.
Kaito leaned against the tunnel wall, closing his eyes. He could almost feel the blueprint. The way the RC cells would align for flexibility, for rapid cellular regeneration. His own kagune shifted under his skin, a sympathetic twitch. It was trying to simulate the pattern. To practice.
He slammed a fist against the concrete. The pain was sharp, clarifying. "Stop it," he growled, to his own flesh.
The twitching subsided. For now.
This was the new normal. Every encounter, every feeding, wasn't just consumption. It was education. His body was a relentless scholar of monstrosity. He was its library, and every ghoul he met was another book to be devoured, its contents added to the shelves whether he wanted them or not.
He pushed off the wall and continued. He needed to find a target from his list. A specific one. An Aogiri tree member who was supposed to be scouting the 20th Ward for easy converts. A low-priority name in the grand scheme, but a thread. Pull the right threads, the tapestry might unravel.
But the thought felt thin. Theoretical. The Dragon wasn't a tapestry. It was a landslide. Was he really going to stop a landslide by plucking pebbles?
His system display flickered, a persistent notification he'd been ignoring.
**Mission Log: [Prevent Catalytic Tragedy: Kirishima Touka / Yamori] — STATUS: SEED PLANTED. OUTCOME PENDING.**
**Mission Log: [Neutralize Aogiri Expansion: 20th Ward Cell] — STATUS: IN PROGRESS.**
**Mission Log: [Assimilate High-Density RC Biomass for System Stabilization] — STATUS: CRITICAL. PRIORITY ELEVATED.**
The last one glowed amber. A warning. The purge had cost him. His SSS-rated cells were ravenous. They demanded quality fuel. The weak stuff, the average ghoul, would barely maintain him now. The Protocol and his basic survival needs were starting to align. A dangerous convergence.
He wasn't just hunting for the future. He was hunting for lunch. And his lunch menu was getting exclusively gourmet.
A sound echoed down the tunnel. Not water. Not rats. A hum. A vibration through the pipes. Machinery. He was near a maintenance access point for one of the city's smaller electrical substations. A place no one went. A good place for a certain kind of ghoul to nest.
He slowed. His senses stretched out. There. Faint. Beneath the ozone tang of electricity, a meatier scent. Ghoul. And not the weak, binger scent from the other tunnel. This was denser. Richer. A main course.
His mouth watered. His kagune stirred, not with predatory intent, but with academic interest. It was already sampling the air, trying to guess the kagune type from the RC signature.
Kaito felt a cold knot in his gut. This was it. The first step on the new path. He wasn't just hunting a target. He was selecting a meal based on nutritional density and educational value. The line between mission and feeding, between hunter and consumer, was dissolving.
He moved toward the scent, silent. The hum of the substation grew louder, a constant, industrial drone. A yellow warning light from a service grate up ahead cast long, stark shadows. In one of those shadows, something shifted.
Kaito's vision adjusted. He saw a figure hunched over a junction box, fingers tipped with sharp, metallic-looking claws prying at the metal. An electrical ghoul? Someone trying to siphon power for some reason? The figure's kagune was partly manifested—a thick, cable-like appendage tipped with a glowing, bulbous end that was pressed against the wiring. Stealing juice. A weird, niche feeding habit.
The figure was SS-rated. He could feel the pressure of its RC cells. Not a name on his list. An anomaly. A random encounter.
His system pinged.
**Target Analysis: Ghoul. RC Density: High (SS-Threshold). Kagune Type: Koukaku (Electro-Conductive Variant). Biomass Compatibility: HIGH. Assimilation Potential for [Residual Crystallization] Trait: MODERATE. Suggestion: Engage.**
It wasn't a suggestion. It was a demand. From his own biology.
The ghoul sensed him. It turned, the glowing tip of its kagune lifting from the wires, casting a blue-white light over its face—a man with scarred skin and eyes that crackled with static. "Who's there? This is my tap."
Kaito didn't answer. He stepped into the pool of yellow light from the grate. He saw the ghoul's eyes assess him, then widen slightly at the chaotic, oppressive aura he emitted.
"You… what are you?" the electrical ghoul hissed, taking a defensive stance. Its koukaku kagune fully manifested, forming a jagged, conductive shield crackling with stolen current.
Kaito's kagune erupted from his back. Not the smooth, controlled release he aimed for. It was a pained, jerking motion. The dark tendrils lashed the air, and where they struck the wet wall, they left not just cracks, but a spray of faint, brittle crystals that shattered on impact. *Residual Crystallization*. The useless, volatile trait.
The electrical ghoul stared at the crystals, then at Kaito's kagune, confusion overriding fear. "What the hell is that?"
"A problem," Kaito said, and moved.
The hunt was on. But it didn't feel like a hunt. It felt like a harvest.
***
He climbed out of the drain, back into the long night. The hunt wasn't over. It was just changing shape. The taste of ozone and burnt meat was still on his tongue, and his kagune was quietly, insistently, reviewing the new data on conductive tissue. He was a live wire, sparking in the dark, and every other monster he touched was just another circuit waiting to be completed, or consumed.