The darkness of the floor below was not total.
There was enough light filtering from somewhere Yūta could not identify to make out the outline of the walls, the old wooden floor, and the swarm of cockroaches surrounding him in a semicircle that was closing slowly with a patience that was almost more unsettling than if they had charged all at once.
There were many of them.
Yūta looked at them one by one — or tried to, because there were too many to count and the semicircle kept closing. Then he looked at the dagger in his right hand. The short blade, nothing special, borrowed. Then he looked at the cockroaches again.
And he smiled.
"I can handle you," he said quietly, as though confirming it to himself more than saying it to them. "Even if only for a moment."
He closed his eyes for half a second. Not searching with urgency but with the calm Kaito had taught him — the image of the river, the mana flowing without anyone pushing it, expanding on its own if one lets it. The noise of the cockroaches moving around him existed but fell to the background, and in that space he found what he was looking for.
His right hand began to glow.
That orange that still felt strange to see on his own body — not the warm orange of something living but something more electric, more concentrated, like energy that has been compressed for a long time and finally finds a way out.
Yūta opened his eyes and launched himself.
The first strike landed before the cockroaches had finished processing that he had moved — straight, with the right fist charged, into the centre of the semicircle. Three cockroaches disappeared from the impact. Not scattered, not pushed back — they simply ceased to be whole, the green blood spattering the floor in a radius Yūta barely had time to register because he was already turning towards the left flank.
A charged kick swept that side of the semicircle with a force that made the floor creak beneath his feet and sent four cockroaches into the wall with enough speed for the impact to be final. Yūta followed the movement without stopping, using the momentum of the turn to bring his right fist round again — this time against the largest cockroach, the one that had stayed still in the centre watching, and which received the blow with a crack that was not the sound of the walls but of something that has armour and the armour gives way.
Five seconds.
The mana went out.
Without warning, without any prior signal, without giving him time to do anything about it — it simply ceased to be, like a flame that runs out of fuel at the exact moment you need it most.
Yūta lowered his fist and looked at his right hand for the half second he could allow himself.
The cockroaches still standing — and there were quite a few — reorganised with that silent coordination that made them more difficult than their size suggested. The semicircle reformed. The antennae moved in synchrony.
"Fine," said Yūta, and raised the dagger.
What followed was longer and more disorderly than the previous five seconds, but Yūta did not stop. The dagger was short but it was enough if he knew how to use it — and what he lacked in technique he made up for with constant movement, never staying still in any one spot long enough to be completely surrounded.
He kicked one into the right wall. He used the dagger in a low sweep to cut the front legs off two that were advancing together from the left — without front legs the coordination broke and the ones behind them trod on them without meaning to, generating chaos on that flank that Yūta used to advance rather than retreat.
Three charged at the same time from the front.
Yūta jumped back, let them collide with each other under the momentum of the charge, and brought his elbow down on the one left disoriented in the centre before the other two could recover.
One caught his right shoulder with its mandibles.
The pain arrived immediate and concrete — not paralysing but sufficient for the arm to respond half a second slower than usual. Yūta grabbed the cockroach with his free hand, tore it off with a force that surprised him to have, and threw it against the wall with all the specific fury of someone who has just been bitten on the shoulder.
He heard a tear.
He looked down without stopping moving.
The rip along the left side of the suit was long — the material hung in a useless strip that moved with every step. Then he heard another tear when he dodged badly and a cockroach passed too close to the right sleeve.
"This cannot be happening," he said, through his teeth, without stopping fighting. "They made me this suit for combat and I've ruined it on the very first mission I do." He said it with considerable feeling.
The last cockroach attempted a direct leap at his face.
Yūta deflected it with his left forearm — the impact resonated all the way to his shoulder — and finished it with the dagger before it touched the ground, with a short, precise strike that had nothing elegant about it, but worked.
He stood still.
He looked around.
The floor below was silent except for the irregular green dripping from the cockroach bodies and his own breathing, which was more laboured than he would have liked to admit. His right shoulder protested. His hands too, though less so.
He looked up at the hole in the ceiling through which he had fallen.
I wonder how Kagami is getting on up there, he thought.
Above, something resonated with enough force for the floor to tremble slightly beneath his feet.
The fight between Kagami Ryo and the insect remnant was not what Kagami had expected.
Not because the remnant was faster or stronger than calculated — though it was — but because it was doing something no remnant Kagami had ever faced had done before.
It was learning.
The first time Kagami increased the gravity in the area around the remnant, the creature went down on one knee as the amplified weight crushed its structure against the wood. Seconds passed. The remnant fought against the pressure with that disproportionate strength it had and eventually stood, but it cost it something.
Good. It worked.
"Die," said the remnant, in that double voice that sounded like two frequencies at once. "All of you... will die."
Kagami looked at it.
"Can you actually speak?" he asked, drily.
"Die," the remnant repeated, and charged.
It seems it can only repeat 'die'…
The second time Kagami used the gravity the remnant stabilised in three seconds rather than ten. It kept advancing, slower, its movements forced by the extra weight, but advancing.
The third time it kept moving almost normally.
It's adapting, thought Kagami, cancelling the gravitation and changing tactics before the remnant had finished processing that the pressure had disappeared.
The exchange that followed was frantic in a way Kagami had not anticipated. The remnant attacked with speed and force simultaneously — not one or the other but both at the same time, in combinations that varied each time, as though it were testing different responses to the same situations to find which one would open a defence.
"They will die... all of them..." it repeated between blows, in that voice that had too many layers to be only one thing.
Kagami blocked a right hook with his forearm and answered with his elbow to the remnant's side. The creature absorbed the impact by turning with it — a response it had not used before, learned in real time from the previous exchange.
Kagami stepped back half a pace. He measured the distance between them.
This remnant is far stronger than the cockroaches before. And not only that — it's thinking.
The remnant advanced again with that combination of speed and force, and this time it added something new — a change of direction mid-movement that would have worked against someone who anticipated in a straight line.
Kagami did not anticipate in a straight line.
He waited until the distance was exactly what he needed and then altered the gravity in the space between them — not over the remnant but in the specific area separating them, reducing the gravity at that point until the remnant lost traction on the floor at the exact moment its weight was committed to the step.
The remnant shot forward and upward simultaneously, off balance, its arms searching for something to hold onto in the air that was not there.
Kagami concentrated the reddish mana in his right fist with the focus of someone who knows they have one good opportunity and is not going to waste it.
The blow landed directly at the centre of the creature's torso while it was still in the air with nothing to compensate — with all of Kagami's force plus the concentrated mana, no altered gravity this time, only pure impact against something that had nowhere to absorb it.
The remnant screamed.
Not the double sound from before — something more primal, more involuntary, the sound of something receiving more damage than it expected to receive.
It landed against the far wall and stayed there for a moment, the armour on its torso visibly fractured and something dark seeping through the cracks.
Then it stood.
And charged again.
The second assault was more desperate than the first — faster, but less precise, like something that is no longer calculating but reacting. Kagami read it in the first step and moved sideways, letting the charge pass beside him, and drove his elbow into the remnant's back as it went past.
The creature stumbled.
It looked at Kagami.
And on that face that should not have been capable of recognisable expressions, something appeared that was.
Fear.
The remnant stepped back one pace. Then another. Its hind legs sought the direction of the darkness with the specific urgency of something that has calculated this fight is not going to end well for it.
"No," said Kagami.
The remnant tried to run.
Kagami increased the gravity in the entire area around the creature at the same moment he charged towards it — the combination of amplified weight and his own speed generated a pressure on the remnant that had no way out in any direction. The armour that was already fractured gave way first — then what was beneath the armour, and Kagami's final blow arrived with all the force available directly at the fracture point.
The insect remnant collapsed.
Not with light. Not with the calm of something crossing to the other side. With the specific sound of something ending before it has finished saying what it had to say.
Kagami lowered his fist.
He walked to the hole in the floor and looked down.
Yūta looked up when Kagami's silhouette appeared at the edge of the hole.
"Amane," said Kagami. "Are you still alive?"
"Yes... I've already defeated them," said Yūta, gesturing at the floor with a sweep that took in all the green wreckage around him.
"And the remnant upstairs?"
"Already dead," said Kagami. "Come up. We need to find the others."
He extended a hand downward. Yūta took a run-up, jumped, and Kagami pulled him up with an ease that was a reminder that the difference in level between the two of them remained considerable.
Once Yūta was up, Kagami looked at him. Not at the ruined suit — though it was difficult not to notice it. At his hands.
"I felt something from below," he said. "Faint, but there. Can you use mana already?"
Yūta smiled.
"Yes. But it only lasts a few seconds."
"Kato didn't tell me anything about that."
"Kaito taught me," said Yūta. "In the garden training."
Kagami processed that with the same silence with which he processed everything. Then he looked towards the corridor extending to the right with a concentration that was not the same as before — narrower, more directed.
"Either way," he said. "We need to find the others. I can feel a powerful presence fighting somewhere in the temple."
Yūta nodded. Then he looked at the suit.
The rip along the left side was quite long. The right sleeve hung from what was technically no longer enough thread to be called attached.
"Kagami," he said.
"What?"
"Do you think they'll tell me off about the suit?"
Kagami looked at him for exactly one second.
"Stop talking nonsense," he said, and began to walk.
"I was only trying to ease the tension," said Yūta.
Yūta followed him.
In the north wing of the temple, Ishida Taro was bleeding.
Not much — enough for the split lip to remind him with every movement that the second round had started worse than the first. The floor of the new room bore the marks of the previous fight — the outline of where he had landed when the knee strike had sent him into the wall, splinters from the floor where the knives had ricocheted after passing close.
The grey figure stood on the other side of the room.
Still smiling.
The knives turned slowly around its fingers with that calm that was in reality something else — not calm but calculation, the same silent assessment of something that measures and waits and does not launch itself until it knows the launch is worthwhile.
Ishida had the chains ready. He had not thrown them yet — he had them formed, coiled around his forearms, waiting. Because he already knew that throwing them without precision only gave the remnant the opportunity to break them again, and he did not have infinite mana to keep forming them indefinitely.
This time had to be different.
The figure watched him.
Ishida watched it.
And then the figure smiled wider, threw the knives, and the second round began.