"Come back, Shin'ya."
The voice arrived the way it always did –distant, warm, like something calling from very far away across a long stretch of silence. But this time, Shin'ya heard it differently.
This time, he was almost awake enough to notice.
He tried to hold onto it. Tried to follow the sound back to wherever it came from – who it belonged to, why it felt familiar in a way he couldn't explain. Like hearing a song you hadn't thought about in years and finding that you still knew every word.
Come back.
Come back where?
The voice didn't answer. It never answered. It just faded the way dreams fade – not all at once, but gradually, like light leaving a room.
Shin'ya became aware of his body. Then of the ceiling above him. Then of the fact that he couldn't seem to make himself move.
His arms weren't responding. His legs weren't responding. His eyes were technically open but weren't fully committed to the idea yet. Everything felt heavy in the specific way that came after the kind of exhaustion that went all the way down to the bone.
He lay there for approximately one minute, staring at the ceiling of the guest room, having a quiet conversation with himself about whether getting up was something that was going to happen today.
The door opened.
Footsteps crossed the room with purpose.
Then something connected firmly with his side.
"Get up."
Shin'ya made a sound.
"That wasn't words."
"I'm awake," he managed.
"You're horizontal."
"I'm awake horizontally."
There was a brief pause in which Yuki clearly assessed whether this was a battle worth having. It wasn't.
"Five minutes," she said. "Then we start."
The door closed.
Shin'ya stared at the ceiling for another thirty seconds. Then he got up.
---
Lunch happened somewhere in between – something warm that Yuki had brought without announcing she was going to, which Shin'ya decided to interpret as a gesture of goodwill even if she framed it as operational necessity.
He ate quickly. She ate efficiently. Neither of them said much.
By the time they reached the training hall, Shin'ya had managed to locate most of his coordination.
"The voice," he said, as they were setting up.
Yuki looked at him. "What?"
"Before I woke up. There was a voice." He thought about how to describe it. "Like someone calling me back. It's happened before – first time I woke up here, I heard it. I thought I was just half-dreaming." He paused. "This time I heard it properly."
Yuki was quiet for a moment.
"What did it say?"
"Just – come back." He shrugged, trying to make it seem smaller than it felt. "Don't know what it means. Don't know who it is. Probably nothing."
Yuki's expression was unreadable in the specific way it got when she was thinking about something she wasn't ready to say out loud.
"Probably," she agreed.
They didn't discuss it further. But Shin'ya noticed she'd heard it.
---
Magic training resumed.
The difference between now and a couple of hours ago was subtle but real. A while ago everything had been about proving that he could reach each element at all. Now it was about doing it consistently – the same result, twice in a row, then three times, then five.
Fire was still the most cooperative. He could summon a small flame reliably now, hold it for several seconds, dismiss it cleanly. Yuki had moved past calling it adequate.
"Again," was what she said instead, which Shin'ya had decided to interpret as high praise.
Shadow was still effortless in a way that continued to quietly unsettle him. He didn't mention it. It was just there whenever he reached for it – patient, immediate, like it had been waiting.
Wind had started to feel natural too, though less instinctive than Shadow. More like a habit forming than a homecoming.
The others were improving at different rates. Water had stopped soaking his sleeve, which felt like genuine progress. Earth remained stubborn. Light remained strange.
Electric remained a hazard.
"Away from me," Yuki said, for what Shin'ya estimated was the seventh time.
"That one was almost controlled."
"It hit the same wall again."
"Consistently. That's consistency."
Yuki looked at him with the expression she reserved for things that were technically not wrong.
---
Weapon training followed.
Shin'ya had made peace with the fact that he was not going to beat Yuki. That wasn't the point anymore – the point was to get good enough that fighting alongside her made sense, and on that metric, something had shifted.
He wasn't thinking about his feet. He wasn't thinking about his grip. He wasn't running through a mental checklist of the things she'd told him in the first two days. His body had started to absorb it – imperfectly, incompletely, but genuinely.
He feinted right. She adjusted. He went left and they were locked for two full seconds before she broke it.
Two seconds. That was triple what he'd managed before.
"Better," she said.
"I had you."
"You had two seconds."
"Two very good seconds."
She almost smiled. Almost. It was the specific almost-smile that Shin'ya had started cataloguing because it was becoming clear Yuki had a whole vocabulary of almost-expressions that she deployed instead of the real ones.
He was learning to read them.
"We're close," she said, after they'd run through another set.
"To what?"
"To ready." She set her practice sword against the wall and turned to face him properly. "A Couple of hours maybe 24. 36. And then we go."
Shin'ya lowered his own practice sword.
"For Ketsugai."
"Yes."
He thought about that for a moment. The legendary sword somewhere out there in this world. The ability it would grant – one permanent ability, any ability, the wielder's choice.
His choice, if he got there first.
Not that he would. Yuki had made that clear. But the thought was still interesting.
"What are you going to choose?" he asked. "When you get it."
Yuki looked at him for a moment.
"That's not something I'm sharing," she said.
"Fair."
"What would you choose?"
Shin'ya opened his mouth. Closed it. Thought about it genuinely.
"I don't know yet," he said honestly. "Something useful. Something that makes sense for wherever I end up."
Yuki looked at him the way she sometimes did – like she was hearing something slightly different from the words he was actually saying.
"Wherever you end up," she repeated quietly.
"Yeah."
She didn't press it. Shin'ya didn't explain it. Some things sat better when they weren't pulled apart.
"Rest more," Yuki said, picking up her sword again. "After a while we prepare to leave. The day after, we go."
Shin'ya nodded.
Ketsugai.
He was going to find a legendary sword in a medieval fantasy world with a girl who had kicked him awake this morning and almost-smiled at him twice this afternoon.
Somehow, impossibly, inexplicably — this was his life now.
He picked up his practice sword.
"One more round," he said.
Yuki turned back around.
"One more round," she agreed.
---
To Be Continued