Part 7: Shattered Bonds!
Haruto remained frozen on his knees, his hands trembling violently as he stared back and forth between Kaito's motionless body and his sister. Tears blurred his vision. "Kaito... Ayame..."
Haruto reached out with trembling, blood-stained fingers, desperately trying to bridge the small gap between himself and Kaito. His twin lay face down on the freezing cobblestones, a dark pool of blood steadily creeping toward Haruto's knees.
"Kaito... please..." Haruto sobbed, his fingernails scraping raw against the rough stone as he dragged his knees forward. "Open your eyes! Kaito!"
He managed to press two fingers against Kaito's arm, but the cold, lifeless stillness of his brother sent a spike of absolute terror straight through his heart.
STEP.
The heavy, iron-shod boot slammed down directly in front of Haruto's vision.
The tall Hunter loomed over him like a mountain of cold iron, his face obscured by the shadow of his hood. Without a word of hesitation, the man didn't just swing his trench blade—he delivered a vicious, heavy-booted kick directly into Haruto's side.
BOOM!
The impact sounded like a heavy sack of wet grain rupturing.
The sheer brute force lifted Haruto completely off the ground. He flew sideways through the narrow alley, his body crashing hard into the stone wall of the warehouse before violently slamming face-first onto the wet pavement.
CRACK!
Air exploded from Haruto's lungs in a sickening, breathless gasp. Two of his ribs splintered under the shockwave. White-hot agony flared across his chest and torso, so blindingly intense that his vision flickered to complete black for a terrifying second. He rolled onto his back, gasping like a drowning boy, clutching his side as fresh blood welled up in his mouth and dripped down his chin.
"Weak little filth," the Hunter spat, stepping over Kaito's limp body and raising his heavy blade for a downward strike straight into Haruto's chest. "You're next, brat."
Haruto couldn't move. He couldn't even draw enough air to scream. He could only stare up through a haze of tears and blood as the steel blade began its swift descent.
WHOOSH.
A sudden, violent pressure burst through the alley.
The ambient, raw Ryūki in the surrounding air didn't just flow—it was violently dragged inward. Unrefined, unstable energy roared like a rushing river into Ayame's vessel via an forced, instinctive Shūryū.
Deep within her mind, the beast bared its razor-sharp fangs. It didn't waste time on Seiryūka to refine the energy, nor did it bother routing it through nonexistent pathways or a structured Kyoten. It used the sheer, chaotic torrent of raw Ryūki like a furnace, forcibly drawing the heavy tranquilizer toxin out of Ayame's bloodstream and burning it away within its own dark, ancient presence.
"You wanted me to take control," the beast's voice echoed through the dark void, sharp and murderous. "Fine. Then let me handle the poison too."
In the real world, the flickering, broken aura around Ayame instantly transformed.
Her heavy, poison-induced paralysis vanished. The staggering drag in her muscles dissolved as raw, unrefined Ryūki violently flooded her nerves. Her breathing locked into a terrifying, silent rhythm.
The Hunter raising his sword over Haruto felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He froze, turning his head just in time to see Ayame.
She was standing tall, every bone and muscle aligned in lethal perfection. Her eyes burned with a dark, predatory light that held zero human warmth.
The beast didn't give them a second to think.
Ayame blurred forward, kicking off the cobblestones so fast the air cracked like thunder. Before the Hunter could even begin to pull his blade back, she appeared directly in front of him.
THWACK!
Her palm strike, driven by concentrated Shūkiryūka using raw Ryūki, slammed squarely into the Hunter's chest. The man's heavy iron armor caved inward with a sickening crunch, and he was hurled backward thirty feet down the alley, crashing through a wooden cart before falling motionlessly into the dark.
Ayame stood right in front of Haruto, shielding his broken body from the remaining Hunters.
Haruto, clutching his shattered ribs and coughing up blood, looked up at his sister's back in sheer, trembling awe.
The beast tilted Ayame's head slightly, looking down sideways at the battered, bleeding boy.
"Stay down, little fragile thing," the beast growled through Ayame's throat, its voice echoing with a double layer of dark power. "Let me finish these bugs."
Haruto lay on his back, clutching his crushed ribs, every shallow breath dragging a jagged blade of fire across his chest. Blood trickled down the side of his jaw, warm and thick, pooling against the cold cobblestones.
He forced his neck to turn.
A few feet away, Kaito lay face down in the dark. Still. Entirely still. No rise of his shoulders. No sound. Just a dark, widening puddle creeping across the pavement, reflecting the flickering embers of distant fires.
Haruto's pupils dilated until his eyes were almost entirely black.
The sound of the wailing village sirens faded. The clashing of steel and the growling of the Hunters vanished into a hollow, echoing ringing.
No... not again...
A sudden, violent crack tore through Haruto's mind, and the present shattered.
A pair of cold, motionless hands lying on a tatami mat—his father.
A gentle face swallowing hard in the flickering candlelight before fading into ash—his mother.
Enruto falling into the shadow.
Kazuki's voice cutting short, swallowed by the dark.
Uncle… Guren... Misaki's father... face after face, voice after voice, dragging into an inescapable, bottomless abyss.
The memories violently overlapped, bleeding into the narrow alley until past and present were the exact same nightmare. He wasn't standing in the alley anymore—he was standing in a graveyard made of everyone he had ever loved.
"You couldn't save them," a phantom whisper echoed inside his skull, overlapping with his mother's dying breath and the sound of Kaito's blood dripping onto stone. "You were too weak. You were just a child. You watched them die. Now it's their turn."
Haruto's chest heaved in frantic, ragged gasps. Air refused to enter his lungs. His vision blurred, swimming with red and black spots.
He looked at Kaito's lifeless form. He looked up at Ayame's back—her small, blood-splattered body pulsing with that terrifying, unnatural aura as she stood alone against the darkness.
I'm going to lose them too.
The thought didn't just cross his mind—it drove a freezing stake directly into his heart. The instinct to protect, the desperate wish to be strong, the promise to stay together—all of it shattered beneath a tidal wave of pure, primal horror.
I can't watch this again. I can't be the one left behind.
Something fundamental broke inside Haruto. The noble child who always tried to stand tall vanished, swallowed whole by an ancient, blind survival instinct.
Haruto scrambled onto his hands and knees. Agony exploded in his shattered ribs, but he didn't even scream. He didn't think about where to go, which alley was safe, or where the police were. He just needed to be away. Away from the iron stench of blood. Away from Kaito's still body. Away from the sight of another person dying in front of him.
He threw himself forward and ran.
His boots slapped frantically against the wet stone as he bolted down a dark, unmapped side street, stumbling, gasping, completely blind with panic.
Ayame—the beast—stiffened as the boy's presence rapidly moved away. Ayame's head snapped toward the dark alleyway, her lavender-violet eyes wide.
"HARUTO!"
Her real voice ripped through the monster's growl—a desperate, cracking plea.
Haruto heard it. The voice slammed into his ears, but it didn't sound like a call for help—it sounded like a death rattle. It sounded like another name about to be carved into a tombstone.
He didn't stop. He pushed his broken body harder, tearing deeper into the suffocating darkness of the deserted streets, running blindly into the night.