The train into Shimane took just under three hours.
Sumi spent most of it on her phone, switching between three different apps with the restless energy of someone whose brain moved faster than public transport allowed for. Occasionally she'd turn the screen toward Kujo to show him something without context, decide his reaction wasn't sufficient, and go back to scrolling.
Kujo spent most of it looking out the window.
The city thinned out behind them gradually, giving way to smaller towns, then open land, then the particular quiet of a countryside that didn't know anything had changed. Rice fields. Tree lines. Mountains sitting heavy and blue in the distance under a sky that couldn't decide between overcast and clear.
Somewhere out there something was feeding.
Had already fed twice.
He kept that thought where he could see it without letting it pull him somewhere unhelpful. Just a fact. Just the thing they were here to deal with.
The folder sat in his bag.
He'd read it four more times since yesterday.
They got off at a small station that looked like it had been built for a busier era and hadn't quite adjusted to the present one. The platform was mostly empty. A vending machine hummed near the exit. An old man walked a dog slowly along the road outside without looking up.
Ordinary. Completely ordinary.
Kujo had learned that didn't mean anything.
They walked into town along a road that ran parallel to a river, the water moving slowly between banks thick with reeds. The morning was cool and clear, the air different from the city, cleaner, slower, carrying the smell of water and earth and nothing industrial.
Sumi had put her phone away when they got off the train. She walked beside him with her hands in her jacket pockets, her eyes moving across the area in the way they moved in training sometimes, not aggressively, just taking things in. Reading the space.
"Nice town," she said.
"Yeah."
"Shame about the Vyza."
"Yeah."
She glanced at him sideways. "You doing alright?"
"I'm fine."
She looked at him for another second, then looked back at the road ahead. She didn't push it.
They walked for another few minutes, following the path the map had marked out, the region where the energy reading had been strongest. The town center gave way to quieter streets, residential, fewer people, larger gaps between houses.
Kujo was about to say something about checking the eastern edge of the marked area when Sumi stopped walking.
He stopped too.
"What?"
She didn't answer immediately. She was very still, her head tilted slightly, her expression doing something focused and inward that he recognized from the training ground.
"Sumi."
"Quiet."
He went quiet.
A few seconds passed.
Then she said, "There."
She nodded ahead and to the left, toward a narrow road that ran between two rows of houses and curved out of sight behind a community center that looked like it hadn't been used in years.
"You're sure?"
"Something's there," she said. "Can't you feel it?"
Kujo focused. Reached outward the way Erina had taught him to reach, not for his own energy but for disturbances in what was around him, the way a Vyza's presence pushed against the air like a finger pressed against skin.
At first nothing.
Then, faint. Very faint. Like hearing a sound you're not sure you heard.
Then slightly less faint.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I feel it."
Sumi was already moving.
They followed the road as it curved behind the community center, through a gap between two chain-link fences, out into a wide empty lot that might have been a car park once, cracked concrete pushed up in places by years of neglect, weeds growing through every joint.
And there it was.
It was crouched at the far end of the lot with its back to them, lower to the ground than the one at the academy had been, its shape smaller, less defined, like something still figuring out what it wanted to be. The white of its skin was almost grey in the flat morning light. Its movements were slow and irregular, the twitching, distracted movements of something in the middle of something else.
It hadn't noticed them yet.
Kujo's chest tightened. His body registered it before his thoughts caught up, the same deep, instinctive wrongness from before, the sense of something that didn't belong anywhere near ordinary streets and ordinary towns and an old man walking his dog three blocks away.
The creature shifted.
Its head turned.
Found them.
Those black void eyes settled on Kujo and stayed there.
Sumi looked at him.
"Your mission," she said.
"I know."
"So." She put both hands on his shoulders, turned him to face the Vyza, and pushed him forward with a firm and entirely unsympathetic shove. "Go on then."
Kujo stumbled a step.
"Was that necessary?"
"Very," she said cheerfully. "I'll be right here. Try not to need me."
He looked at the creature.
It was already moving toward him.
He went to meet it.
The first exchange was fast and ugly.
The Vyza covered the distance in a lurching sprint that didn't move the way running should move, too many joints involved, its arms pumping at wrong angles. Kujo read the approach, planted his feet, and pushed his energy outward in a directed burst of light that caught it square in the chest.
It stumbled.
Slowed.
Recovered.
He was already moving sideways, circling, keeping distance. The burst had cost him something but not the way it used to, not that sudden plummet toward empty, more like spending from a balance that had more in it than before.
The creature swiped at him and he stepped back, just outside the reach of it, felt the displaced air across his forearm.
Closer than he wanted.
He came back immediately, driving a concentrated beam of light into the creature's exposed side. The impact was real, he could feel it land, feel the resistance of it, hear the sound it made on contact. The creature recoiled, its movements stuttering.
Not much.
But more than last time.
He kept moving. Erina's voice in his head, Sado's voice, don't stop, don't let it reset, keep the pressure. He pushed energy into his legs and felt the difference immediately, his footwork sharper, the gap between seeing something coming and responding to it narrowing in a way that still surprised him when he noticed it.
The Vyza adjusted.
It stopped coming straight at him and started cutting angles instead, trying to get inside his reach where the ranged attacks didn't help him. Kujo gave ground rather than holding it, using the space in the lot, keeping the creature working for every yard. His breathing was elevated but controlled. His energy was holding.
This is different. This is actually different from before.
The creature feinted left and drove right, faster than it had moved yet, and got inside his guard. A claw raked across his shoulder, tore through his jacket, found skin underneath.
Pain flared.
He twisted away from the follow-up and put distance between them, pressing his free hand briefly against the shoulder. Came away with blood on his fingers.
Not deep. Fine.
He looked at the creature.
The creature looked back.
He reached for the light differently this time. Not pushing it outward, not spending it in bursts, drawing it inward first, compressing it, shaping it the way he'd been practicing every morning for eleven days. He felt it resist and kept pulling, felt it build in his hand like pressure behind a door.
It formed slowly.
The edge of it appeared first, unsteady, and then the shape followed, growing out from his grip into something long and defined. His arm ached with the weight of maintaining it. His teeth were set against each other.
The sword held.
He looked at it for exactly one second.
Then he moved.
He drove toward the creature with everything his legs had, energy sharpening the movement, and the Vyza came to meet him, no more circling, no more angling, just direct, the way things moved when they were done being careful.
They collided.
Up close the fight became something different. Less space, less time, no room for anything but reaction. The creature's claw came across, and he took it on his forearm rather than his face, felt the sting of it, kept his feet. He drove the sword into the creature's side and felt it go deep, felt the resistance of it, heard the sound it made.
Green blood across his hand.
The creature screamed, that distorted, wrong sound, and thrashed, trying to pull away. Kujo held on. Kept driving forward, kept the blade in.
Then it broke through, into the core.
The vyza turned to ash, and the ash drifted away.
But he kept going.
Until a hand landed on his shoulder.
Gentle. Steady.
He stopped.
The lot was quiet.
He was on one knee in the cracked concrete, his sword dissolved, his hand pressed to the ground where the Vyza had been. There was ash on his knuckles, grey and fine, already beginning to drift in the light morning breeze.
Nothing was left.
He stared at it.
"It's gone," Sumi said.
Her voice was quiet. Not soft exactly, Sumi didn't really do soft, but careful in the way of someone who understood the difference between a moment that needed filling and one that didn't.
Kujo didn't move for a moment.
Then he sat back on his heel and exhaled, long and slow, and felt the weight of it settle back into its usual place inside his chest, heavy and permanent and his.
Something touched his face.
He blinked.
Sumi withdrew her hand. She looked at her fingers briefly, then at him, and he became aware of the wet on his cheeks that hadn't been there from the temperature.
Sumi crouched down in front of him, so they were at the same level. She looked at him without flinching from it, without performing concern or pretending the moment wasn't what it was.
Then she smiled.
"Congratulations," she said. "First mission. You did it."
Kujo looked at her.
"I lost it," he said. His voice came out rougher than he expected. "At the end. I completely lost my composure."
Sumi held his gaze.
"I know," she said.
She stood back up, brushing concrete dust from her knee.
"Don't apologize for it," she said, looking out across the empty lot. "Just know it happened."
She held out her hand.
Kujo looked at it for a moment. Then took it and let her pull him to his feet.
He turned and looked at the ash on the ground. Already less of it than there had been, the breeze taking it a little at a time.
"Okay," he said quietly.
"Okay," Sumi agreed. "Now let's go home and tell Erina you didn't die. She'll be relieved. She won't show it, but she'll be relieved."
Kujo almost laughed.
They got back to the academy as the afternoon was beginning to become evening, the light going gold and long across the training grounds.
Erina was exactly where Kujo expected her to be, which was wherever she had decided to be, leaning against the outer wall of the main building with a cigarette, looking at nothing in particular. Sado stood nearby.
Sumi reported it simply.
"He did it."
Erina took a long drag. Exhaled.
Looked at Kujo.
"Any issues?"
Kujo thought about the ash on his knuckles. The hand on his shoulder. The water on his face.
"Nothing I couldn't handle," he said.
Something moved in Erina's expression. There and gone.
"Good," she said.
Sado looked at him steadily for a moment. Then gave a single, deliberate nod, the kind that meant more than it looked like.
Later, the academy was quiet.
Curfew had come and gone. The lights in most of the buildings had gone dark. The training grounds were empty and still, just flat packed dirt and open sky.
Kujo sat on the low wall at the edge of the grounds and looked up.
The stars were out properly, more of them than you ever saw in the city, the kind of sky that reminded you the sky was actually very large and very old and had been there for a long time before any of this.
He sat with that for a while.
His shoulder ached where the claw had caught him, bandaged now. His body was tired in the deep way that came from more than just physical effort. His hands rested in his lap, still.
He thought about his parents.
Not the living room. Not the blood. Not the thing that had been crouched over them when he walked in. He let that go for tonight and thought about the other things instead. His mother's voice when she called him for dinner. His father falling asleep in front of the television and insisting he'd just been resting his eyes. Small things. Ordinary things. The kind that had seemed permanent right up until they weren't.
He thought about the Vyza in the car park. The ash drifting away in the morning breeze.
He'd stopped one.
There were more. He knew that now with a certainty that sat differently from how it had sat two weeks ago. It wasn't abstract anymore. It was real and ongoing.
He looked up at the stars.
He didn't make the promise out loud. It didn't feel like something that needed to be said to anyone. It was quieter than that, and more certain for being quiet, the kind of decision that doesn't announce itself because it's already done, already settled, already the thing that everything after will be built around.
Each one he could find.
For as long as it took.
He sat with the stars for a while longer.
Then he got up and went inside.