The wooden rod was not going to help.
Yūta knew it somewhere behind the fear, in that part of the brain that keeps working coldly even when everything else is screaming. A curtain rod against a creature that had just smashed a hospital door with a single blow was not a tactical advantage. It was simply the only thing he had.
So he used it anyway.
"You're not getting near him," he said, and his voice sounded steadier than he expected.
The creature watched him with that single unblinking eye. Then it advanced.
Yūta struck first.
The rod connected with the creature's side with an impact that sent vibrations up his arms to his shoulders. It did not stop it. It didn't even push it back properly. But it made it turn slightly, and that was enough for Yūta to calculate what he needed to calculate.
His father's room was behind him. The creature stood between him and the corridor. If he stayed there, sooner or later one of that thing's blows would land — and the one after that would probably be the last. But if he could make it follow —
He ran.
He ducked under the creature's deformed arm, brushing against it, feeling the displaced air slap against his face, and burst into the corridor. His footsteps echoed on the linoleum in that darkness that still had no rational explanation. Behind him he heard a brief silence — the creature hesitating, processing — and then the sound of something heavy moving at terrifying speed.
It was following him.
Good.
The corridor outside Room 304 wasn't long. Under normal circumstances Yūta walked it in fifteen seconds without hurrying. Running at full speed, with something that should not exist chasing him, it felt endless.
He dodged the first blow on instinct, throwing himself toward the left wall. The creature's twisted arm passed so close he felt the air shift beside his ear. The second strike he anticipated a second too late — he managed to turn, but not fully, and the impact grazed his shoulder, making him stumble.
He kept running.
At some point in the corridor he turned, planted his feet, and swung with all the strength he had left. Not because he believed it would work. But because if he was going to end there, he preferred to end moving.
The rod snapped in two with a dry crack.
The creature did not react. It raised its deformed arm — that huge, crooked limb that bore no proportion to the rest of its body — and struck.
The blow hit Yūta's stomach before he could even process it. The world spun. His back slammed into the wall with a violence that tore the air from his lungs, and suddenly the floor was closer than it should have been, his legs barely responding, a ringing in his ears that was not a good sign.
He tried to stand.
He couldn't.
The creature approached slowly. Without hurry. With the specific calm of something that knew it had already won.
The deformed arm lifted him by the throat with an ease that was almost more terrifying than the pain. Yūta kicked the air, grabbed the arm with both hands, tried to wrench himself free. It was useless. The grip did not loosen a millimetre.
Then he remembered he still had something in his hands.
The two broken fragments of wood. Splintered at angles, the ends jagged and sharp in that particular way wood breaks when snapped suddenly.
The creature had one eye.
Large. Lidless. About twenty centimetres from his face.
Yūta drove both fragments forward at the same time.
The sound the creature made was not human — but not entirely animal either. It was something in between, and worse than both, a kind of wail with too much volume and too little shape, as if the thing were trying to articulate something its vocal cords — if it even had vocal cords — were not designed to produce.
The grip loosened.
Yūta dropped to the floor and stayed there for a moment, knees against the cold linoleum, breathing with the difficulty of someone who had just been strangled. The creature staggered back, thrashing, the two splintered pieces still embedded in what had been its eye.
He stood.
His legs protested. His stomach protested more. His right shoulder, where the first blow had grazed him, protested in a way that suggested tomorrow would bring a bruise the size of a plate.
He stood anyway.
The creature stopped thrashing. The eye — what remained of it, surrounded by a greenish substance that wasn't exactly blood but served the same function — fixed on Yūta with a changed intensity. No longer hunger alone.
Now there was something else.
It advanced.
Yūta had nothing in his hands. Nowhere to run. The wall behind him, the creature in front, and the dark corridor to either side offered no option that didn't end the same way.
He closed his eyes for a second.
Not because he had given up. But because in that second — that single second before the deformed arm came down — his mind did something he had not asked it to do. It showed him images. Mori Daiki with his bag of bread at seven in the morning. Seki Haruto correcting something with his usual patience. Fujiwara Nao glancing at him with that expression that wasn't indifference. His father with eyes closed, hands folded, that warmth that takes time to fade.
This can't be the end.
Not as a heroic conclusion. Just as a fact. Simple. Concrete. Completely unacceptable.
He opened his eyes.
What came next did not arrive from where he expected.
It came from the right, from the end of the corridor Yūta had not been watching, in the form of a man around forty-eight years old, wearing rumpled clothes, hair dishevelled in the way of someone who had not slept well — or had not slept at all — and a smile that had no right to exist in that context.
The man extended his right hand.
From it emanated something Yūta could only describe as light, though it wasn't exactly light — it was denser, more directional, an orange colour that held nothing warm and everything electric. It struck the creature with an impact that sent it flying several metres back, slamming it against the far wall with a crash that shook the entire corridor.
The man lowered his hand.
He looked at Yūta.
"Relax," he said, in the tone of someone commenting on the weather. "I'll handle this."
Yūta stared at him for a moment without speaking.
"Who—"
"Later," the man said, still smiling, turning back towards the creature, which was already getting to its feet.
What followed lasted less time than Yūta would have expected.
The creature charged, its ruined eye burning with rage, moving far faster than something of that size should. The man did not move. He waited. And at the last possible moment, with an economy of motion that suggested he had done this many times before, he pivoted slightly and struck.
A single blow. Right hand. That orange glow wrapped around it as if it were entirely natural.
The creature flew backwards.
It landed at the far end of the corridor and lay still for a moment. Then, in a movement Yūta took a second to interpret, it began to retreat. To move away.
It was escaping.
The man's smile widened slightly.
"Ah, no," he murmured, almost to himself.
This time he extended both hands. Something different emerged — not a strike, but something closer to cords, trails of that same orange power splitting and branching through the air as if they had a will of their own. They wrapped around the creature before it could react, tightening, immobilising it.
The creature pulled. The cords did not yield.
The man grasped the ends with both hands, like someone preparing for a movement he had already calculated, and pulled back with a strength that did not match his appearance.
Yūta looked away just before the end.
The sound was enough.
When he looked again, something lay on the corridor floor that no longer had a recognisable shape, surrounded by that greenish substance that was not quite blood. The man stood in the middle, hands in his pockets, examining the result with the neutral expression of someone reviewing finished work.
Then he looked at Yūta.
"First time you've seen one, right?"
Yūta was pale.
"What — what was that?"
The man considered the question more seriously than Yūta expected, as though searching for the most precise answer.
"An entity," he said at last. "Or a remnant, if you prefer that term. Depends who you ask."
"A remnant?"
"Yes."
"That —" Yūta gestured vaguely at what lay on the floor. "That was a remnant."
"Was," the man confirmed.
Yūta nodded slowly. Then his eyes moved to the corridor windows, where the unnatural darkness was beginning to retreat, and the hospital lights flickered back on with the specific blink of fluorescents regaining power.
The light.
His father's room.
He ran without saying another word.
Room 304 was exactly as he had left it. The blue plastic chair. The window with the curtains torn from the rail. The bed.
The machine still showed a flat line.
Yūta stood in the doorway for a second that felt far longer. Then he entered, sat in the familiar chair, and took his father's hand for the second time that night. It was still warm. Less than before.
He said nothing.
After a moment he felt a hand on his shoulder. The man from the corridor stood behind him, wearing the same neutral expression that was not indifference but something closer to respect.
He said nothing either.
Sometimes that is the only correct thing.
Yūta wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, released his father's hand, and stood.
They called the nurses. The doctors came. There were forms and hushed voices and that quiet machinery hospitals possess for moments like this. The man in the rumpled clothes waited in the corridor with his hands in his pockets, not interfering, with the patience of someone who knew there were things that could not be rushed.
When it was all over and the corridor returned to silence, Yūta stepped out of Room 304 for the last time and leaned against the wall.
"Thank you," he said. "For earlier."
The man nodded.
"How did you know it was there?"
"We detect when one of them appears." The man paused. "And we detect when someone who can see them is in the same place."
Yūta looked at him.
"Someone who can see them?"
"Not everyone can," the man said calmly. "Most people go their entire lives without seeing anything. You see them. That isn't coincidence, and it isn't something that started tonight — tonight was just the first time one was close enough to matter."
Yūta processed that.
"Are there more?"
"Many more."
Another silence.
"There are people who deal with them," the man continued. "Hunters. People who can see them and train to face them, defeat them properly so they can move on. I'm one of them. And you could be as well."
Yūta looked at him for a long moment.
"My father just died."
"I know."
"Tonight I was almost killed by something that shouldn't exist."
"I know that too."
"And you're talking to me about this now."
The man had the decency to look mildly uncomfortable.
"The timing isn't ideal, I admit. But the situation doesn't give me much room to choose when to have this conversation."
Yūta looked at the floor. Then the corridor. Then his hands, which still had a smear of that greenish substance on the back of his right hand — something he had not noticed until then.
"I need time," he said.
"I understand."
"And I need to say goodbye to the people I know."
"I understand that too."
"Tomorrow," Yūta said. It wasn't a question.
The man nodded.
"Tomorrow at six in the evening. Right here." He paused. "And don't be late."
Yūta spent the next morning doing what he needed to do before leaving.
The first thing was calling Seki Haruto.
"I need you to come to the park," he said when he answered. "All three of you."
There was a brief pause.
"Are you alright?"
"No. But I need to see you anyway."
They arrived in less than twenty minutes. Mori Daiki appeared first, carrying a bag of something to eat that nobody had asked for, his expression trying to hide concern behind energy. Seki Haruto arrived exactly one minute later, hands in pockets, with his usual direct gaze. Fujiwara Nao was last, silent, sitting beside Yūta on the bench without speaking yet.
Yūta looked at the park for a moment before talking.
"My father died last night."
The silence that followed was the kind that didn't need filling.
Mori Daiki reacted first, as expected.
"Yūta," he said, and in that single word there were more things than Mori Daiki usually put into entire sentences.
"I'm fine," Yūta said, which wasn't entirely true, but wasn't entirely false either.
"You don't have to be fine," Fujiwara Nao said bluntly.
"I know."
"What are you going to do?" asked Seki Haruto. Not as a practical question, but as the only way he had of asking how are you.
Yūta breathed in.
"I'm leaving. I'm going to live with some relatives in another city. I don't have anyone else in Nagoya, and it doesn't make sense to stay alone in a flat at seventeen."
Mori Daiki opened his mouth.
"What? When?"
"This afternoon."
"Today?" Mori Daiki repeated, his voice rising. "Today today? In a few hours?"
"In a few hours."
"Yūta, that's — you can't — we've lived in the same neighbourhood our whole lives, you can't just —"
"Daiki," said Seki Haruto quietly.
Mori Daiki closed his mouth. Opened it again. Closed it.
"I don't like this," he said at last, calmer but unchanged underneath.
"Neither do I," Yūta admitted. "But it's what it is."
Seki Haruto nodded slowly, looking at the ground.
"Will you be alright where you're going?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
Seki Haruto said nothing more. Which was his way of saying he trusted him, even if he didn't like it.
Fujiwara Nao had been silent, looking at her hands in her lap. When she spoke, she didn't lift her gaze.
"Is this because of last night?" she asked. "Did something else happen besides your father?"
Yūta looked at her for a moment.
"No," he said.
Nao glanced at him from the corner of her eye, that expression of hers that wasn't indifference but too much attention focused on a single point.
She didn't insist. But she didn't look entirely convinced either.
They stayed in the park for a while longer without doing anything in particular. Mori Daiki talked about trivial things with the energy of someone trying to fill silence. Seki Haruto corrected some of them out of habit. Fujiwara Nao stayed quiet most of the time, but she didn't leave.
When it was time to say goodbye, Mori Daiki hugged him with the specific strength of someone who didn't know how to say things with words.
"You'd better write," he said, his face turned away.
"I will."
"Every day."
"Not every day, Daiki."
"Then often."
"Often, yes."
Seki Haruto extended his hand. Yūta shook it.
"Take care," said Seki Haruto.
"You too."
Fujiwara Nao waited until the other two had gone. Then she looked at him directly, with that calm of hers that was sometimes harder to bear than anything else.
"I don't know what happened last night," she said. "And it's fine if you don't want to tell me. But if you ever need to tell someone, you know where I am."
Yūta said nothing for a moment.
"Thanks, Nao."
She nodded, turned, and left without another word.
Yūta watched her walk away until she turned the corner and disappeared.
The cemetery was quiet at that hour of the morning. Few people, light filtering through the trees, the sound of the city fading as though it belonged to another world.
Yūta placed the flowers in front of the gravestone and stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, unsure how to begin.
"I don't know if this does any good," he said at last. "Talking to a gravestone. I suppose I didn't know if it helped talking to you when you were in the hospital either, and I did it for three years. So."
He paused.
"I'm leaving today. I know it's sudden. I know it's probably not the smartest thing to go with someone I met last night in a dark corridor, but… things happened I still don't know how to explain. Things I don't fully understand. And that man seems to understand them, so for now that's enough."
The wind stirred the branches of a nearby tree.
"I wanted to be a doctor. I still do, I think. I wanted to help people. I suppose this is helping people too, just in a way neither of us would have imagined."
He smiled without noticing.
"Mori Daiki is going to write to me every day. Just so you're not surprised if somehow you can hear these things. Seki's going to pretend he doesn't miss me and miss me anyway. And Nao — Nao knows something happened, even though I didn't tell her. She always knew things before I said them."
He breathed in.
"I'll come back. I don't know when, but I will. And when I do, I'll have things to tell you. Things worth telling."
He looked at the gravestone a moment longer.
"Thanks for everything you did. For everything you didn't say but was still there." He paused. "Rest."
He turned. Checked the time. 17:28.
He picked up his backpack from the ground and began walking quickly.
He didn't arrive late.
The problem was that the other man did.
Yūta stood in front of the hospital entrance at 17:58, carrying a backpack that held everything he had decided to take with him — which turned out to be less than he expected. It was now 18:04, and the man in rumpled clothes was nowhere to be seen.
18:06.
18:09.
At 18:11, Yūta saw him appear around the corner, walking calmly, a supermarket bag in each hand.
He stared at him.
The man saw him, raised a hand in greeting, and kept walking at the same pace.
"You're late," Yūta said when he got close.
"I had to do something."
"What something?"
The man lifted the bags slightly.
Yūta looked at them. Then at him. Then at the bags again.
"You were eleven minutes late to the start of my new life because you went to the supermarket."
"I passed by," the man said, smiling without any trace of regret. "And there were discounts."
Yūta exhaled slowly through his nose. He decided he did not have the energy for this conversation after the day he'd had.
"What's your name?" he asked instead.
The man shifted the bags into one hand and extended his right — the same hand that had produced that orange glow the night before, though now it looked completely normal.
"Kato Ginjiro," he said. "Hunter. Forty-eight years old. And yes, the clothes are wrinkled on purpose, don't bother asking."
Yūta shook his hand.
"Amane Yūta."
"I know," said Kato Ginjiro. "I've been following you for three weeks before last night."
Yūta stared at him.
"Three weeks?"
"We had to confirm the eye had truly awakened and it wasn't a false reading. Standard protocol."
"And it didn't occur to you to introduce yourself before a creature nearly killed me in a hospital."
"The protocol says—"
Yūta cut him off.
"It's fine. You can explain later."
Kato Ginjiro blinked slightly, as though he had expected more resistance.
"That's all?"
"I've had a very long day," Yūta said. "I don't have the energy to argue with someone who showed up late carrying supermarket bags."
Kato Ginjiro considered that. Then smiled.
"There are buns in the bag, if you're interested. Still warm."
Yūta walked in silence for exactly four steps.
"What kind?"
"Meat."
"Give me one."
Kato Ginjiro smiled and opened the bag.
Nagoya fell behind them. Ahead lay something Yūta still didn't quite know how to name.
But he had a warm bun and someone who — in his own completely irritating way — seemed to know what he was doing.
For now, that was enough.