The exterior of the abandoned depot had that specific quiet of industrial places at the hours when nobody uses them — no sound of machinery, no voices, only the wind moving between the buildings and the distant sound of Misato existing at another frequency.
Kagami was leaning against the outer wall with the cigarette between his fingers and his gaze fixed on no particular point.
Too strong.
It was not a conclusion that arrived with any drama — it was simply a fact he had registered during the fight with the same coolness with which he registered any useful piece of information. The green remnant was not the kind of threat one resolves with a well-placed strike or the right tactic. It was the kind of threat that required time, information, and probably more than one hunter alone in a town in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
What it had said before leaving was still there.
I've seen what I needed to see.
What had it come to see? Him specifically? Hunters in general? And why here, in Misato, in this town that did not appear in any guide and had nothing particular about it except a fourteen-year-old boy who could see things he should not have been able to see?
He exhaled the smoke slowly.
He did not have enough pieces yet to put together an answer worth anything. And unanswered questions were the kind of thing Kagami preferred to leave suspended rather than answer badly.
He heard the footsteps before he saw Yūta turn the corner.
"The remnants?" said Yūta, reaching where Kagami was standing.
"Already dealt with," said Kagami.
Yūta looked at him. Then he looked at the cut on Kagami's left forearm that Kagami had not covered because it was not serious enough to justify the effort.
"What happened?"
Kagami told him. Without embellishment, in order — the green remnant, the threads, the fight, the moment it had said it had seen what it needed to see and had escaped using the other two as cover. The two remnants that had remained, which were weaker and which he had defeated without comparative difficulty. The gap in the roof through which the green one had disappeared.
Yūta listened to everything without interrupting.
When Kagami finished, Yūta was silent for a moment looking at the ground with the expression of someone processing several things at once.
If for someone like Kagami that remnant is strong, he thought, there's a reason for that. Kagami doesn't say that about just anything.
"So it escaped," he said at last.
"Yes."
"And the other two?"
"Expendable," said Kagami. "It used them to cover its retreat and didn't care about the outcome."
Yūta processed that too.
Kagami exhaled the cigarette smoke and looked at him with that calm that was not indifference but something closer to the assessment of someone who has reached a conclusion and is measuring how to communicate it.
"You need to go back to the headquarters in Tokyo," he said.
Yūta looked at him.
"What?"
"Kato said this was just a matter of observing young Sota," said Kagami. "That has changed. There is a remnant completely different from what we expected and it is significantly stronger. I'm not going to involve you in this."
"I don't want to leave," said Yūta.
"I know."
"Kagami—"
"It's not negotiable," said Kagami, in the tone of someone who has made a decision. "What's here is not for someone at your level yet. That's not a criticism — it's a fact."
Yūta looked at him. Not with anger but with something closer to the specific determination of someone who has listened to the argument and has decided they have one of their own.
"I don't want to leave," he said. "And even if you force me to go I'll come back."
Kagami looked at him.
"I made a promise to Sota that I was going to help him," Yūta continued, in a voice calmer than before but no less firm. "That I would be here. That if something happened he could call me and I would come. I can't leave him with that unresolved."
"Sota is going to keep seeing remnants," said Kagami. "Even if you defeat this one. That doesn't change."
"I don't care," said Yūta. "I'll deal with that afterwards. Right now I care about what I promised."
Kagami looked at him for a moment.
Then he smiled — not the smile of someone who finds something amusing but of someone who recognises something they expected to find and had not yet seen entirely clearly until that moment.
"What can you actually do against that creature?" he said.
Yūta was silent.
Not because he had no answer but because the honest answer was that he did not completely know and he knew it. His thirty seconds of mana, the dagger, what Kaito had taught him in four days — all of that had value, but putting it in front of the green remnant that had managed to cut Kagami's forearm was an equation that still did not produce a clear result.
"I don't know," he said at last. "But I'm not leaving."
Kagami looked at him for one more second.
He sighed.
"All right," he said. "You stay."
Yūta smiled.
"But—" said Kagami, before the smile had finished settling. "I'm not responsible for you. If you get into something you can't handle, that's on you. I'm not going to show up to save you from that remnant if you put yourself in the middle of something you're not ready for."
"Don't worry about me," said Yūta.
Kagami looked at him with the expression of someone who has several opinions about that sentence, but decides to keep them.
"Go and find Sota," he said.
Yūta took out his phone and checked the time.
"It's still early," he said. "We can investigate a bit more before he comes out."
Kagami considered that.
"All right," he said. "Did you tell him anything about the remnants?"
"No," said Yūta. "You asked me not to tell him anything yet."
Kagami nodded.
"Good."
He dropped the cigarette and stubbed it out with his foot. Then he looked towards the street that led back to the centre of Misato with the attention of someone calculating where to start.
At the other end of Misato, where the buildings were taller than the town's average and the view reached further, a figure was standing on a rooftop terrace.
The green remnant had its phone to its ear with that specific clumsiness of something that has learned to use it intellectually but has not yet fully integrated the gesture. The wind moved the yellow hair that was not blonde and made the human clothes flutter in a way that in a person would have been normal and in it was slightly wrong.
"There are hunters," it said, in that off voice that sounded like someone who had practised the language more than lived it. "At least two. One appears to be powerful. More than I expected to find in this place."
From the other end of the line came something that did not have the shape of words entirely — more like a presence than a voice, though the green remnant understood it with the specific clarity of something that shares a language that is not the human one.
The message was clear: faster.
"Understood," said the green remnant, in the tone of someone who understands but is not completely in agreement. "Although..." It paused. "I would like to kill these hunters. To see if they transform into remnants like us. It would be interesting."
The response arrived immediately and without ambiguity.
That was not the mission.
The green remnant ran a hand over its head with that gesture it had seen humans make when something frustrated them and which it had adopted without being entirely certain why it worked.
"All right," it said. "Find a place with many people. Kill them. Have them transform into remnants. Bring them."
Confirmation.
The line went dead.
The green remnant put the phone in its shirt pocket with its usual clumsiness and looked at the horizon of Misato with that calculating attention it had developed — not the attention of something observing out of curiosity but of something searching for useful variables.
"Why won't it let me just kill the hunters?" it said aloud, though there was nobody to hear it. "It would be more efficient."
But then.
The mission was the mission.
A place with many people. In Misato, at this hour of the morning — the market had people, but spread out, the square too, but without the necessary concentration, the shops on the main street neither.
It looked further.
And then it saw it.
The two-storey building at the far end of the main street, with the front yard and the lit windows and the distant sound that at this hour was beginning to fill in a specific way — young voices, footsteps, the noise of people who did not yet know that something was watching them.
Misato's school.
The green remnant looked at it for a moment.
Then it smiled with that smile that had too many teeth in the wrong place.
"I think," it said quietly, "I've just found the perfect place."