5:30.
The training ground was cold in the way that only early morning manages, not the sharp cold of winter but the still, settled cold of a world that hadn't warmed up yet. The sky at the edges was just beginning to lighten, dark bleeding into pale grey from the east, the sun not yet committed to arriving.
Kujo stepped outside expecting empty space.
Instead he found Sado.
Already there. Already still. Arms crossed, weight balanced, expression doing nothing in particular. He looked like he had been standing there for a while and had no strong feelings about it either way.
Kujo stopped in the doorway for a moment.
"...I forgot it was sparring day."
Sado looked at him.
"I know."
Kujo stepped out fully, letting the door close behind him. He rolled his shoulders once, felt the familiar pull of muscles that had been worked hard every day for nearly two weeks.
"Give me a second."
Sado said nothing.
Which meant fine.
They started without ceremony, the way they always did.
No signal, no countdown. Sado simply moved and Kujo moved in response, settling into the rhythm of it the way you settle into something that has become familiar without you noticing when that happened. Two weeks ago this had felt like being thrown into deep water. Now it felt like, not shallow water, not exactly, but water he had learned to move through rather than just sink in.
Something was different this morning though.
He felt it within the first exchange.
Sado came in with a straight strike toward his ribs, fast, no telegraphing, the kind of clean economical movement that had been ending their exchanges before Kujo could properly register them for the entire first week. Two weeks ago he wouldn't have seen it until it had already landed. A week ago he would have seen it and still been too slow to do anything about it.
This time he read it.
Not cleanly. Not without effort. But he caught the shift in Sado's weight a half second before the movement committed, that small redistribution that meant something was coming and told him which direction, and he moved with it, slipping outside, letting the strike pass close enough that he felt the air disturbed by it against his arm.
Sado's fist connected with nothing.
Kujo turned into the gap and drove his elbow toward Sado's shoulder.
Contact.
Not hard. In a real fight it wouldn't have mattered. But it landed, and the moment it did both of them went still, just for a second, both registering what had happened.
Kujo blinked.
Sado looked at his shoulder. Then at Kujo. His expression didn't change in any dramatic way, but something moved through it, a small, deliberate shift, the way a door opens just enough to let light through before settling again.
Then he moved back into position.
They kept going.
The energy was responding better too. Every time Kujo reached for it, it came, not instantly, not without effort, but consistently, reliably, a glow that built and held without demanding his entire focus just to maintain it. He pushed it into his movements the way Erina had drilled into him over the past week, not projecting it outward in bursts but letting it run underneath, sharpening his reactions, adding weight and speed to what was already there.
It wasn't much yet.
But it was there every time he called it. That was new.
They went for another twenty minutes. Kujo landed nothing else. Sado redirected him four more times, twice sending him to the ground, each time waiting with the patience of someone who had nowhere more important to be while Kujo got back up.
When Erina called time from the edge of the field Kujo bent forward with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, his lungs working through the cold air in long pulls. Sado stood straight across from him, barely winded, his breathing even and unhurried.
Kujo looked up at him.
"That was better," he said. It wasn't a question.
Sado studied him for a moment, the same way he studied most things — quietly, without rushing the assessment.
Then he nodded once.
"It might finally be time," he said.
Kujo frowned slightly, still catching his breath. "Time for what?"
Sado turned and walked toward the door.
Kujo straightened, watching him go.
"What does that mean?"
Sado didn't answer.
He just walked inside and let the door close behind him, leaving Kujo standing alone in the cold morning air with a sentence that didn't have an ending attached to it.
He stood there for another moment.
Then he went to shower.
He was still turning it over when he reached the dining hall.
It might finally be time.
Time for what, exactly. Time for something specific that Sado had already decided and wasn't explaining. Time for the next step of something, whatever that meant. Sado operated on his own timeline and shared it when he felt like it and apparently this morning he didn't feel like it.
Sumi was already there.
She was sitting sideways in her chair the way she sat when she'd been there long enough to stop caring about posture, one leg hooked over the armrest, phone in hand. A bowl in front of her that she'd been picking at. She glanced up when he came in with the look of someone who had been expecting him.
"You look confused," she said.
"Sado said something."
"He says something every day."
"Something weird. Vague. He just walked away after."
Sumi considered this for approximately one second.
"Yeah, that tracks," she said. "Eat first. You'll think better."
Kujo sat down and ordered and decided she was probably right.
They ate in the quiet that had started to settle naturally between them over the past two weeks, the kind that didn't need filling.
Sumi finished first, pushed her bowl to the side, and looked at him.
"Hey," she said. "What's your goal?"
Kujo looked up.
The question landed in an unexpected place. Not because it was a strange thing to ask, it was a reasonable thing to ask, but because sitting there with his chopsticks halfway to his mouth he realized he didn't have an answer ready. Not a real one. He'd been moving forward, training, getting up every morning at five, pushing through every session, but he hadn't put it into words. Hadn't needed to until now.
He set his chopsticks down.
Thought about it properly for the first time.
"Help as many people as I can," he said slowly. "Kill as many Vyza as I can before they do to someone else what they—" He stopped. The sentence had somewhere it was going that he wasn't ready to follow it. He cleared his throat. "That's it. That's all of it."
Sumi looked at him for a moment. Her expression was quiet and steady, the way it got sometimes when she set the performance of it aside.
Then she nodded once. Like something had been confirmed rather than just heard.
"What about you?" Kujo asked.
She leaned back slightly. Looked at the ceiling for a moment, like the answer was up there somewhere and she was checking it was still where she left it.
"Keep anyone I care about from getting hurt again," she said. Her voice came out even, smooth, like a sentence she'd shaped over a long time into something she could say without it catching. "Other than that..." She shrugged. "I don't really have one yet."
Again.
The word landed quietly.
Kujo let it sit. Didn't pull at it.
"That's enough," he said instead. "That's a real reason."
Sumi looked back at him. Something moved behind her eyes, brief and there and then gone.
"Yeah," she said. "It is."
The dining hall went quiet around them for a moment, just the background sounds of the room, distant conversation, the clatter of something in the kitchen.
Then Kujo glanced at the door.
Then back at his food.
"So, what did Sado mean, do you think."
Sumi picked her chopsticks back up.
"Honestly?" she said. "Probably exactly what it sounded like."
They were still sitting there when the door opened.
Erina came in first. Cigarette already going, held loosely between two fingers, smoke trailing behind her like she'd been walking with it for a while. She moved through the dining hall without looking at anything that didn't need looking at.
Sado came in behind her, hands in his pockets, expression the same as it had been at five thirty this morning.
Kujo straightened slightly without deciding to.
Erina reached their table, pulled out the chair directly across from Kujo, and sat down without asking. She set a thin folder on the table between them and slid it toward him with two fingers.
"Your first mission," she said.
She said it the way she said most things. Flat, direct, no inflation around it.
Kujo looked at the folder without touching it yet.
"Shimane Prefecture," Erina continued. She tapped ash to the side without looking for anywhere particular to put it. "Western Japan. Low population. A Vyza has been tracked in the area for the past five days." A brief pause. "Two people are already dead."
The ambient noise of the dining hall seemed to pull back slightly.
"Low energy reading," she said. "Newly manifested, most likely. Weak, for now." She held his gaze steadily. "The longer it feeds the stronger it becomes. Find it. Kill it. Don't let it feed again."
Kujo looked down at the folder.
He opened it.
A map. A marked region. A rough energy reading and what it indicated about size and type. A timestamp from the last confirmed sighting, five days ago, which meant it had either moved or gone to ground since then.
That was everything.
He looked up.
"When do I leave?"
"Tomorrow morning," Erina said. "Early."
Silence settled over the table.
Kujo closed the folder. Laid his hand flat on top of it.
Beside him, Sumi leaned over and pulled the map out without asking, looking at it with the focused expression she reserved for things that actually required her attention.
"I'll go with him," she said.
She didn't look up from the map when she said it. Didn't frame it as a question or a suggestion. Just stated it, the way you state something that was always going to be true.
Erina glanced at her briefly.
"I know," she said.
She stood. Tucked the chair back in. Walked toward the door with the same unhurried certainty she did everything.
At the door she stopped.
Didn't turn around.
"Don't die," she said.
Then she was gone.
The dining hall felt slightly larger in her absence.
Kujo sat with his hand on the folder, Sado quiet at the edge of the table, Sumi still studying the map with her chopsticks resting forgotten beside her bowl.
He thought about Shimane Prefecture. About a low energy reading that was getting stronger every day it wasn't stopped. About two people who had already run out of time waiting for someone to show up.
He thought about his parents on the living room floor.
He thought about how he had been completely useless the first time, and how eleven days of everything he had given to training had to count for something, had to have moved him far enough forward that this time would be different.
He thought about how he didn't actually know that yet.
He closed his hand around the folder.
"Okay," he said quietly.
Sumi turned the map slightly, tracing something with her finger.
"We should leave by six," she said. "Beat the morning traffic."
Kujo nodded.
Tomorrow, then.