The corridors of Misato's school were empty.
Not in the way they are empty when there are no classes — but in the way they are empty when there should be someone and there is nobody, which was a difference Yūta had learned to recognise since the temple on the outskirts of Tokyo.
He ran.
His footsteps resonated against the linoleum with that specific clarity of sounds in enclosed spaces where there is nothing to absorb them — too clear, too alone. The classrooms on either side had their doors closed and their lights off. The aligned lockers showed no movement. The windows at the end of the corridor let in the afternoon light at angles that did not correspond to any hour when a school should be this quiet.
Where is everyone?
The question arrived with the additional weight of what it meant — because if the remnant's dome had trapped everyone inside and the corridors were this empty, that meant everyone was in some specific place, concentrated, which was not an image Yūta wanted to finish constructing mentally.
Sota, he thought.
And then, almost immediately afterwards, he thought of Kagami waiting outside unable to enter — with the cigarette and the calm and the inability to do anything because the dome would not let him through — and something in that gave him an additional urgency that was not exactly fear but something closer to the determination of someone who does not want to prove that the decision to stay had been a mistake.
I have to handle this myself because if I don't, he thought, it means he's right that I shouldn't be here. And he's not right.
The thought did not finish.
The strike came from the left — from a door that was slightly ajar and that Yūta had registered peripherally but had not processed fully because he was looking ahead.
The impact threw him against the right wall of the corridor with enough force for his shoulder and head to arrive at the same time and for the world to spin for a moment before his feet found the floor again.
Yūta spat.
Red.
He looked to the side.
The remnant that had come out of the half-open door was the deformed kind — large, with arms too long for the body's proportions, with that density of something that has grown with more than it should have. Its eyes were the pupil-less, iris-less kind that Yūta already knew but which did not become easier to look at with practice.
"Are you the one sealing the school?" said Yūta.
The remnant made a sound.
Not words — not fragments of words like some of those they had encountered in the temple. Only a distorted sound that had the shape of a response, but not the content.
"Fine," said Yūta.
He drew the dagger.
The fight in the corridor did not have the structure of the previous ones — there was no space to manoeuvre broadly, no columns or favourable geometry, only the width of a school corridor and two bodies moving through it with all the limitations that entailed.
The remnant had the advantage of size — the long arms reached further than Yūta could anticipate cleanly, and in a narrow space that was more of a problem than in open ground.
Yūta activated the mana.
The purple appeared in both hands with that consistency he had worked on in four days of training — not explosive but constant, the flow Kaito had taught him to maintain without releasing everything at once. The strikes that followed had the weight necessary for the remnant to register them — they did not stop it completely, but they forced it to respond, to reposition, to be unable to simply advance in a straight line.
The remnant tried the same lateral strike it had used before — Yūta anticipated it this time, moving inward rather than outward, passing under the long arm and responding with his elbow to the side of the torso with the mana concentrated at the point of impact.
The remnant grunted.
It stepped back half a pace.
Yūta followed — two quick strikes with the dagger to the side where the elbow's impact had found less resistance, using the mana before the remnant could recover.
Twenty seconds of mana.
The remnant changed tactics — instead of attacking it tried to use its body as mass, simply advancing with all its weight, forcing Yūta towards the end of the corridor where there would be even less space.
Yūta threw himself to the right, towards the wall, and used that surface to change the angle — he pushed off the wall and launched himself forward instead of backward, passing alongside the remnant and ending up behind it.
Thirty seconds.
The mana went out.
Yūta had the dagger and what Kaito had taught him about moving without the mana, which was more than he had had before the four days, but still less than he would have liked to have at this moment.
He continued.
Without the mana he was slower, but something had changed in recent days — a reading of movement that did not depend on power but on attention, on having spent enough hours in front of something that hit him to learn to anticipate before the strike arrived.
The remnant charged.
Yūta moved to the left — the long arm passed where his head had been — and the dagger found the remnant's neck in the follow-through, with all the force available and the correct angle.
The remnant went still.
It dissolved.
Yūta lowered the dagger. The corridor fell silent except for his own breathing which was louder than he would have liked. His left side remembered the initial strike against the wall. The taste of copper was still in his mouth.
He heard something from the far end of the corridor.
Voices. Crying. The sound of something that did not have the shape of words but which he recognised all the same because it was the sound of people in a space where they do not want to be.
He ran towards the gymnasium's double doors.
The gymnasium had that artificial light of afternoons when the sun no longer comes through the tall windows properly. In the right-hand corner were the students and Teacher Okazaki — huddled together, still, with the specific stillness of people who have understood that moving has consequences. Two deformed remnants guarded them from the flanks.
In the centre of the gymnasium stood the green remnant.
And in front of it, separated from the group, were four children.
Toma Inoue was on the left side — with that posture of his, shoulders slightly forward, his head looking for someone in the group to exchange a glance that said everything was going to be all right, even though nobody quite believed it. Masa Shirai was to his right, with that stillness that in him was not calm but processing — looking around with the eyes of someone searching for a variable, an exit, something to change the equation.
The other two were a year younger. Sota did not know their names.
The green remnant looked at them with that calculating attention it had.
"I hope you become strong," it said, with the smile that had too many teeth in the wrong place.
Teacher Okazaki was on the floor. Not unconscious — crying, hands clasped and lips moving in something that did not quite reach articulated words, the kind of prayer that comes out when no other option remains.
"Toma!" Sota shouted from the corner.
Toma looked at him. And in that second — that single second when their eyes met — there was something Sota had not seen before on Toma's face, which always had energy for everything and never seemed to run out of answers. Fear. The real kind, without disguise.
"Sota, don't—!" Toma began.
One of the deformed remnants placed itself between Sota and the centre of the gymnasium before he could move.
The threads came from the green remnant's fingers.
Sota opened his mouth.
Masa Shirai looked ahead with that expression of his — neutral, processing, searching for the variable until the last moment.
He did not find it in time.
The four children fell.
The two younger ones dissolved — not in the way remnants dissolve when a hunter defeats them, but in another way, faster, more final, from which nothing remained except the empty space where they had been.
Toma and Masa did not dissolve.
They stood up.
But the ones who stood up were not Toma and Masa. They had the same bodies — the same height, the same clothes, the same hair — but there was nothing in their eyes that corresponded to what had been there a moment before. Eyes without pupil. Without iris. The white surface that erased everything that Toma Inoue had been with his energy for everything and Masa Shirai with his silence that said more than words.
"No," said Sota, very quietly.
Then louder.
"No!"
The deformed remnant pushed him back against the corner wall. Sota did not even feel it. His eyes were fixed on the two figures in the centre of the gymnasium that had his friends' bodies and looked out with eyes that were not theirs.
"It seems only two were useful to us," said the green remnant, looking at the space where the younger ones had been. "What a shame."
The gymnasium's double doors opened completely.
"Amane!"
Sota's voice came out before he could think it — not the shout of someone calling for help but the shout of someone who has been holding too much for too long and can no longer hold it alone.
Yūta was in the doorway with the dagger in his hand and the mana still active from the corridor. He looked — at Sota, at the corner, at the two deformed remnants keeping guard, at the green remnant in the centre, at the two figures with Toma and Masa's bodies looking straight ahead with white eyes.
"It's all right," said Yūta.
His voice sounded calmer than he was.
"Amane," said Sota, in the broken voice of someone who does not know how to say what they have to say. "Those two — the two over there — they're Toma and Masa. They're my friends. It killed them and turned them into that."
Yūta looked at them.
The bodies of two fourteen-year-old boys with eyes that were not theirs.
Something moved in his chest that was not fear or urgency but something closer to the fury of someone who has seen something that has no possible justification and has decided that it does not matter what it costs to respond to it.
His voice sounded calmer than he was.
The green remnant turned towards him with its usual calm.
"Ah," it said. "The hunter." It looked behind Yūta, towards the doors. "And your companion?"
"I'm alone," said Yūta, with another look as though it were nothing.
Then he looked at the gymnasium floor where the two children had fallen.
The empty space.
Something moved in his chest — not the fear he had felt in the alley the first time, nor the urgency of the temple. Something closer to the fury of someone who has seen something that has no possible justification and has decided that it does not matter what it costs to respond to it.
He moved his feet towards the green remnant.
The two new remnants — those who had been children less than two minutes ago — stepped in front of him before Yūta had covered half the distance.
Yūta looked at them.
Then he looked at the green remnant behind them.
"Everyone," said Yūta, without taking his eyes off the green one. "Get out."
Nobody moved.
"Get out," he repeated, this time directed clearly at the students in the corner.
One of the two deformed remnants guarding the corner repositioned itself, blocking the way to the doors.
The green remnant smiled.
"I have no intention of letting anyone go," it said. "And I look forward to seeing what happens to a hunter when they die. Whether they transform or not. It's an interesting question I have had for some time."
Yūta looked at it.
Then he looked at the two remnants that were Toma and Masa, now standing between him and the green one with the posture of something that acts on instruction rather than its own will.
They have nothing to do with this, he thought. They didn't ask for this.
But if he did not stop them they were going to kill the ones in the corner. Sota. The teacher. The other students. And the green remnant would still be there either way, with that smile, waiting to see what happened.
There was no good option.
Only options.
Yūta activated the mana.
The fight with the two new remnants was the hardest Yūta had had — not because they were stronger than the others he had faced before, but for a completely different reason that had nothing to do with power.
They were small.
They had the bodies of the Toma and Masa who had existed less than ten minutes ago, with the proportions of someone who has not finished growing, and even though what was inside them was no longer what had been there before, the outside was still what it was.
Yūta fought with more care than the situation allowed him. Enough for each exchange to cost more than it should — dodging when he could have attacked, looking for the least final angle when the most final was the correct one.
The first hit him in the right side with enough force for the shoulder to start protesting again with more intensity than before. The second tried for the arms — more coordinated than he had expected for something that had just transformed — and Yūta blocked with his left forearm feeling the impact from wrist to elbow.
He continued.
The mana ran out. He continued without it.
The mana came back. He continued with it.
When it was over he was in the centre of the gymnasium with his knees slightly bent and the dagger in his right hand and the silence left by two empty spaces where something had been before.
He looked at the floor.
He said nothing.
There was nothing to say that would be sufficient for what had just happened and Yūta knew it and stored it in that place where things are kept that do not yet have words.
Then he looked up at the green remnant.
"I swear," he said, "I'm going to kill you." Not with drama. With the specific certainty of someone who has made a decision from which there is no turning back.
The green remnant looked at him with something that on a human face would have been appreciation.
"Interesting," it said. "Though I don't think you can." It gestured towards the two deformed remnants that were still guarding the corner. "Those ones were apparently not prepared to fight. A shame." It paused. "These two are."
The two deformed remnants separated from the corner and advanced towards Yūta.
The green remnant walked towards the corner where the students were.
"Don't touch them," said Yūta through his teeth.
The green one stopped. It turned towards him with that smile.
"If you manage to kill those two," it said, "I'll fight you myself." It paused. "And then I'll kill everyone."
The two deformed remnants reached fighting distance.
Yūta looked at them.
Then he looked at the corner — at Sota, who was looking at him with that expression that had too many things inside it, and at the others, and at the teacher still on the floor.
He found the river.
He found it.