Kakine parked the scooter beside the curb and cut the power, the motor winding down with a faint whine.
He stepped off and folded the stand out of habit before looking up at the building.
Gara no Dō stood quietly under the streetlights, its windows dark except for the faint glow spilling from the upper floor. From the outside, it still looked like an ordinary, slightly run-down office building.
Each footstep echoed softly against the concrete, too loud in the empty night. By the time he reached the door, his earlier calm had completely faded, replaced by a tight knot of unease in his chest.
He stopped in front of Touko's office door and raised a hand. He knocked on the door a few times, the sound echoing faintly down the empty hallway.
Kakine waited. Just as he was about to knock again, a voice drifted through the wood.
"Come in." He hesitated for half a heartbeat, then pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Kakine took a seat in front of Touko's. "Alright, no need for pleasantries, let's get straight to the point." She said before, taking a photo and showing it to him.
The photo showed a small, humanoid figure hovering in midair, no bigger than a child's hand.
It glowed with a soft, golden light, its body semi-transparent, as if it were made from condensed sunlight rather than flesh. Thin, delicate wings extended from its back, shaped like elongated leaves or shards of crystal, shimmering faintly at the edges.
Its limbs were slender and slightly too long for its size, giving it an uncanny, doll-like appearance. The face was smooth and almost expressionless, with faint, indistinct features that blurred together under the glow. Where its eyes should have been, there were only dim points of light, flickering weakly.
Around it, faint motes of energy drifted through the air like dust caught in sunlight, suggesting a constant leak of mana.
Touko studied his face for a moment, then sighed softly.
"These aren't real fairies," Touko Aozaki said. "They're artificial familiars. Homunculus-adjacent constructs."
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk.
"Someone made them by stitching together spiritual cores and human remains. Bone fragments. Nerve tissue. Sometimes even parts of the brain. Then they wrapped it all in a mana framework and gave it a pseudo-personality."
Kakine's eyes narrowed. "So… they're alive."
"In the worst way," Touko replied. "They can think. They can feel. They can learn. But they exist only to absorb prana and reinforce themselves. If they're left alone long enough, they start hunting people."
She tapped the photo again.
"These fairies were found at Reien Girls' Academy," Touko continued. "It's a boarding school. My apprentice attends there."
She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms.
"Someone was experimenting with them. Tried to use them as tools and lost control." Her lips twitched faintly. "Typical."
She tapped the edge of the photo with a finger.
"I sent my apprentice in to clean up the ones inside the campus. But a few slipped through the perimeter."
Kakine frowned. "And those are the ones still loose."
"Exactly," Touko said. "They followed the ley line flow out of the school grounds." She turned on one of the stacked televisions, pulling up a crude map of the surrounding area.
"Which led them here." A red circle blinked on the screen.
"An elementary school. Three blocks away."
Kakine's expression stiffened. This wasn't any elementary school, this was the school he was attending.
"…You're kidding."
"I wish," Touko replied flatly. "There aren't any people now but they're picking up on human patterns. They are currently waiting for them to enter and feast."
"So I have to kill them all before the end of the night?" Kakine asked.
"Exactly."
She stood up, grabbing her coat from the back of her chair.
"We move in an hour. Before the kids show up for morning activities."
I put my hand in the air, signaling her to stop. "I'll just finish this off myself."
Touko's eyebrow arched. She turned fully, studying him with that sharp, assessing gaze. Children often wanted to prove themselves to adults, sought acknowledgment from their betters. It seemed Kakine was just as eager.
She took off her jacket and tossed it back on the chair.
"Alright. But don't blame me for any consequences ."
Kakine merely scoffed, waving a hand as he turned toward the door.
"Please. It's just some familiars."
He walked out without looking back and slammed the door.
Touko watched him go, then reached for her cigarettes. She lit one, blowing smoke at the ceiling.
"Confident little brat," she muttered.
She sat down, took another cigarette from her packet and began lighting it.
Kakine rode to his school in no time. The streets were empty this late, streetlights still glowing against the dark sky, and his electric scooter hummed quietly beneath him as he coasted to a stop at the curb.
He killed the motor and stepped off, looking up at the familiar building.
He crossed the empty playground, the swings hanging motionless in the still air, and approached the main entrance. Locked, obviously. The janitor wouldn't show up for a few hours.
Kakine placed his palm against the door.
Structural Analysis.
Blue lines flickered beneath his skin as information flooded back. Metal frame. Reinforced glass panel. Lock mechanism, standard pin-tumbler design, six pins, nothing fancy. He traced the internal components in his mind, memorizing every groove and spring.
Then he pulled his hand back and raised it, palm up.
Gradation Air.
Prana flowed from his circuits, condensing in the air above his hand. Metal formed from nothing brass, precisely shaped, cooling rapidly as it took form. A key dropped into his palm.
Kakine examined it for half a second, then inserted it into the lock.
It turned smoothly. The door clicked open without any issue. He pushed through and stepped inside, letting the door close softly behind him.
Kakine reached into his pocket and pulled out the dagger with runes etched upon the blade he made for himself. Inside one of his pockets he clutched an azoth dagger his grandfather gave him.
Kakine received this dagger after inheriting the crest. They were given to apprentice magi after they inherited all the knowledge of their masters. The blade was smooth, well-maintained, but the hilt showed wear, faint scratches, slightly darkened metal where countless hands had gripped it before his. Generations of magi in the Kakine lineage had used this same dagger to channel their prana, to cast their spells.
The main reason he brought the azoth dagger was a simple reason. The new blade he spent so much time working on was tied to his element. And his element was a complication he hadn't fully solved yet.
When Sougen first tested him and announced the result, "unknown imaginary number element," Kakine had expected questions. Those questions came in forms of tests and different spells. It turned out that his element didn't squander his talent with his family's magecraft, so he just overlooked it entirely.
"That won't interfere with family magecraft," he'd said simply. "As long as you can perform our family's spells, your element is irrelevant. If anything, an undefined element means you're less locked into specific approaches and more free to try things at a different angle. But keep your element a secret from everyone, even your closest friends in the future. I'll tell anyone that asks that your elements are the 5 basic elements."
Later, alone in my room, I'd dug through my grandfather's library himself. Found old texts on elemental theory. Cross-referenced with the limited information on imaginary numbers I could access at the library.
The math comparison was useful. Imaginary numbers like √-1 didn't exist on the real number line, but they were real in calculations. I applied this concept to my element while shifting the rules a bit and came to an astonishing conclusion.
My element was X. It existed, but it wasn't fixed to anything. Fire was fire. Water was water. My element was whatever value I assigned to it at the moment. Just like how I could shape my dark matter into any material I wished, I could shape my element into anything I could comprehend.
This aligned with how personal realities worked as well. Inside of Academy City, espers imposed new rules over the existing world using physics. Dark Matter didn't exist anywhere in nature, it existed because I wrote an equation in my brain and my personal reality projected it into reality.
But from what I squandered up, this means that in theory, I wasn't bound to any element at all. I could wield any form of magecraft I comprehended, unrestricted by the limits that constrained other magi.
That was why I had brought the Azoth dagger.
The blade I had spent so long crafting was bound to my element, and my element was still defined as X.
Most magi in the Kakine lineage aligned with Earth. Their tools, spells, and crests were all built around stability and material control.
But in the end, it worked in his favor.
Dark Matter itself was a material without a fixed definition, something he could shape into anything he understood. It fit his element perfectly. A variable shaping a variable.
And it wasn't just magecraft. His AIM Diffusion Field had always been like this. It didn't help him understand the world as it was, more of it helped him understand the world as it shouldn't be.
Negative mass, Self-defining matter and Energy without a source. Things that only existed in equations, paradoxes, and contradictions.
Kakine exhaled slowly and stabbed his dagger into the floor, while clutching the azoth dagger in his pocket.
"Consume."
Prana surged through his circuits and spilled into the ground beneath his feet. Invisible sigils spread outward in a silent ripple, sinking into the concrete like ink into water.
The floor responded.
A lone golden fairy froze midair.
Then the surface beneath it twisted.
The concrete softened, darkened, and folded inward, forming a shallow vortex. It was as if the ground itself had opened a mouth.
The fairy let out a thin, distorted cry as it was dragged down. I didn't plan on killing all these fairies though, I would carry a few back to research on them. These weren't actual fairies but familiars created out of someone's body parts. Familiars that had their own conscience and were capable of conscious thought.
Once I found a way to get my dark matter back, I'd find a way to create these types of familiars using it.
Kakine moved down the hallway, footsteps silent. The classrooms on either side were dark with desks stacked with chairs on top and chalkboards wiped clean. He moved past the school library and heard a faint noise coming from there. He retraced his steps to the library and when he went in he saw it.
A faint golden glow, drifting between the bookshelves. Kakine booked it to the fairy without any hesitation, but the fairy had already noticed him. It spun in the air, its dim face twisting into something alert. The motes around it sharpened.
The thing shot toward the window in the attempt to escape from him, but Kakine was faster then it. He crossed the room in three strides, grabbed a textbook from the nearest shelf, and hurled it. The book clipped the fairy's wing mid-flight, sending it spinning off course. It crashed into a bookshelf, scattering papers, and hit the floor with a faint thump.
Before it could rise, Kakine was there and his hand closed around it. When he grasped it the thing felt rather cold, it was like it was trying to freeze his skin off. Kakine held on to it and ran a quick structural analysis on it.
The fairy's form unfolded in his perception. It was a lattice of woven mana and its core was made of condensed spiritual matter. And beneath that, something else, faint traces of organic material. Cells. Tissue. Touko was right. Someone had built these things from actual body parts.
It was rather fascinating but he had to put these things down. He had one trapped already, no need for another one. With that he grabbed his new dagger, activated his circuits to fill it with prana and stabbed it. As the dagger made contact with its flesh, the fairy dissolved into golden particles.
He did this for 2 more hours, hunting throughout the school and killing any of these creatures he found. Except that one he found at the start, he kept that one trapped for research.
After those 2 hours, the school was silent again.
No more golden glows drifted through the halls. No more distorted cries echoed between the classrooms. Whatever had been hiding inside the building had either been destroyed or captured.
Kakine stood alone in the center of the hallway, exhaling slowly. "Alright," he muttered. "That should be all of them." He turned and headed back the way he came, retracing his steps toward the spot where he had trapped the first fairy.
The concrete there was still warped slightly, faint traces of mana lingering like scars.
His gaze shifted to a nearby recycling bin. After a brief hesitation, he walked over and flipped the lid open. Inside were empty bottles, crumpled worksheets, and discarded lunch wrappers.
…Great.
He grimaced and reached in anyway. After digging around for a moment, his fingers closed around a clear plastic Ziploc bag. He pulled it out and inspected it. It still looked clean if you just ignored the crumbs lingering on the inside.
"Tch…" he clicked his tongue quietly. "I'm definitely washing my hands after this."
Carefully, he unfolded the bag and crouched beside the distorted section of floor.
With a controlled pulse of prana, he loosened the containment spell just enough for the trapped fairy's dim light to seep through. A weak golden glow surfaced, flickering like a dying flame.
Before it could reform, Kakine snapped the bag around it and sealed it shut. The light thrashed briefly inside the plastic, then stabilized, reduced to a faint shimmer.
He double-checked the seal, then slipped the bag into an inner pocket of his jacket, layering it between talismans and insulation sheets.
Standing up, he wiped his hands against his pants with visible disgust. "…Yeah. Definitely washing them."
With one last glance down the empty corridor, Kakine turned and headed for the exit.