April 24
Sunday
Morning
Sunny
The bath at the public house opened at six. By six-fifteen Akira had already come and gone.
Yongen-Jaya was quieter on Sundays. The dry cleaners on the corner hadn't opened yet. The elderly woman who walked her Shiba Inu past Leblanc every morning was right on schedule, the dog's nails clicking softly against the pavement. Two streets over someone was frying something that smelled of sesame and soy, and the smell followed Akira halfway to the station before the breeze took it.
Back at Leblanc, Morgana was sitting upright on the counter.
"You know what day it is," the cat said.
"Sunday."
"Sunday," Morgana confirmed, with the gravity of someone announcing something important. "The shopping program."
Akira came around to the television. The screen was already cycling through its pre-show graphics, a cheerful jingle, rotating item displays, the kind of presentation designed to make the viewer feel they were getting away with something.
Two sets on offer. The first a Spring Awake bundle. Caffeine patches, wide-eye drops, a handful of recovery capsules. He selected it and the order was placed, to arrive in a few days. The ¥5,980 barely registered. Two weeks ago he had arrived in Tokyo with ¥40,000 to his name and had been careful with every yen. That felt like a different life.
Morgana watched him with quiet satisfaction.
"Ready for today?"
"I've been ready."
"I know. I just like hearing it."
Akira paused on his way to the stairs. The crossword puzzle book sat on the leftmost table, open to a new page. He read the clue.
A.K.A. sweating sickness.
He wrote Influenza in the grid, set the book back, and went upstairs to water the plant on the shelf. It had grown considerably since he had started giving it proper nutrients. He added fertilizer and wiped the leaves clean with a damp cloth.
Simple things. The kind that took no calculation.
. . .
Morning
Sunny
The train to Shibuya was half-full. Akira had a seat and his book open. Reckless City, Tokyo, picked up from the second-hand shelf near the cinema three days ago and still unfinished. The characters kept sliding away whenever his mind pulled back to the pitching session two nights ago. The way the ball had left his fingertips at 155 kph and felt like nothing at all. Like breathing.
He had been good at baseball since he first picked up a glove. The kind of natural that coaches noticed immediately and parents over-invested in. There was something quietly uncomfortable about it that he had never resolved. His teammates at Yokohama Kouhoku had ground their way to competence through early mornings and split fingers and iced shoulders. He had simply arrived and been better.
He closed the book and watched Tokyo pass the windows instead.
At Shibuya he got off and made his way to the Underground Walkway. The drink stand was where it always was on Sundays. A handwritten card: Beauty Aojiru. ¥5,000.
He looked at it for a moment.
He had never struggled to make an impression. People noticed him before he opened his mouth. His parents had relied on it at social functions, dressing him well and placing him in front of the right people and expecting him to do the rest. He had always done the rest.
What he was less reliable at was simpler. Ann's tears on his shirt the week before had surprised him, not the fact of them but the way he had moved to hold her without thinking. The way it had felt like the right thing not because he had calculated it but because something in him had simply responded.
He did not yet have a name for that. He was only beginning to recognize it as something worth paying attention to.
He passed on the drink and kept walking.
. . .
Morning
Sunny
The booth in the corner was already occupied when Akira arrived.
Ann's voice reached him before he had fully spotted them. "Hey. Over here."
Both blondes were already settled in. Ann with a half-finished glass of water and her bag on the seat beside her. Ryuji with his phone face-down on the table and the particular expression of someone who had been sitting with his thoughts longer than was comfortable for him.
Akira slid in next to Ann and checked the time.
"I would say sorry I'm late, but I'm ten minutes early."
Ryuji opened his mouth. Closed it. The math clearly wasn't adding up for him in a way he felt was fundamentally unfair.
Ann hid a smile behind her water glass.
"Your grades aren't that bad right?"
The continued awkward laughing and blushing confirmed Akira's guess.
"Okay, at least tell me the subjects you need help with."
"Ummm…Math, Social Studies, Science, English, Japanese…"
"Ohh! Same for me!"
"…That's all the classes…"
"No, I'm pretty confident in PE, Art, and Home Ed."
"Same here!"
"…"
Akira stared blankly at the two, his eyes shifting from confusion to resignation.
. . .
The booth had its study session quality by the second hour. Notebooks spread across the table, pencil shavings, three half-finished glasses of water. The particular atmosphere of someone explaining the same algebraic concept for the fourth time and finding reserves of patience they did not know they possessed.
Ryuji's difficulty was not unintelligence. His mind moved fast and laterally, jumping to conclusions by feel rather than working through structure. He just needed the structure shown to him properly once and it would hold. The complication was Ann, who kept second-guessing herself mid-calculation and erasing, which caused Ryuji to glance over and erase too, which meant they were resetting each other in a gentle loop.
"So if we substitute the value given, move all the variables to the other side, then the answer is…"
"23?"
"Yes."
A faint sound of satisfaction from Ryuji's side of the table. Ann copied the solution into her notebook carefully, her handwriting slightly too large for the lines.
Outside the window a group of middle school kids in soccer jerseys moved past in a loose cluster, one of them kicking an imaginary ball into the curb. A delivery truck idled at the intersection. The kind of Sunday that had no particular weight to it. Ordinary, unhurried, entirely unaware of itself.
While Ann and Ryuji continued to finish their assignments, Akira set down his pen.
He had been watching them without meaning to. Ryuji's phone was face-down on the table, which meant he was trying not to check it, which meant he had been thinking about tomorrow since he woke up. Ann's handwriting had gotten smaller over the last hour, the careful loops tightening into something more controlled. She always wrote smaller when she was concentrating on not thinking about something.
Neither of them had brought it up. They had come here to study, nominally, and they were studying. The morning had the ordinary quality of a Sunday that had nothing particular to recommend it. Outside the window the city went about its business. The delivery truck had moved on. A pigeon landed on the window ledge, considered its reflection, and left.
Akira looked at his cup for a moment.
Then he looked up.
"Everyone."
Ryuji raised his head. Ann's pen stilled.
Morgana went very quiet inside the bag.
"…Let's grab karaage on Monday. I heard there's a place near the station with a limited-time lunch deal."
The restaurant noise continued around them. A server cleared a table two booths down. Someone's phone buzzed twice and went to voicemail. The Sunday afternoon kept moving, entirely unbothered.
Ryuji's brow furrowed. He opened his mouth and closed it again. Ann's expression did something careful and slow, the way a face looks when the mind is working quickly behind it.
Then the cipher clicked.
It arrived on Ryuji's face first. Not as sudden understanding but as something quieter, a stillness settling where the confusion had been. He looked at Akira. Looked away. Looked at the table.
"…Yeah," he said, after a moment. "Yeah, that sounds good."
Ann had gone back to her drink. Her voice when it came was even. "I've been meaning to try that place."
Neither of them said anything else.
Morgana regarded Akira with the look of someone who had understood from the first word and had simply been waiting for the other two to arrive.
The restaurant kept its Sunday rhythm. A child at the next table knocked over a glass of juice and burst into tears. The server came back. The afternoon light through the window hadn't changed at all.
. . .
"Why now?" said Ryuji carefully. "The place has been there a while."
"The deal's limited. We've been ready for a while now, and tomorrow everyone's got somewhere to be. It lines up."
Ryuji turned that over. "And who calls ahead?"
Morgana shifted inside the bag. Ryuji and Ann both glanced down without meaning to.
"He has a way of getting places without being noticed," said Akira. "The reservation will be in by lunch."
Ann considered this. "And we go separately? Different routes to the place?"
"Five minutes between each of you. You know the order."
She nodded slowly. "What about after?"
"I'll send word when I'm done with my other thing. Don't head over until you hear from me."
Ryuji tapped his finger against the table once, thinking. "And when we get there, the deal will already be on the table?"
"That's the idea."
"So we just walk in and take it."
"We walk in and take it."
Ryuji sat back. Something in his expression settled, the restless quality of the morning finally going still. He looked at Ann. She looked back.
Neither of them said anything.
The server arrived with four iced vanilla lattes and set them down one by one.
"Thank you," said Akira.
"You're very welcome. Let me know if you need anything else!"
She left. The table went quiet in a different way than it had been quiet before. The cipher had done its work. What remained was just the four of them sitting with the weight of what Monday meant, and the restaurant going about its Sunday completely unaware.
Ann turned her cup slowly in her hands.
"…We'll have to get the share for our other friend too."
Nobody needed to decode that one.
Ryuji looked down at the table. Morgana was very still.
Akira held her gaze for a moment.
"We will," he said.
Ann nodded once and went back to her drink.
. . .
Ryuji pulled out his phone a few minutes later. He opened a blank note without explaining why and his thumbs hovered before he started typing. The focused crease between his brows made him look briefly less like the restless track dropout and more like someone with something to prove.
{He'll pour everything into it.}
{I know. That's why I gave it to him.}
It took him a while. When he slid the phone across the table the draft was rough, blunt, a little clumsy, and entirely Ryuji. It named Kamoshida's crimes without naming the author. It promised retribution. It had the word "bastard" in it twice.
Akira read it without expression. Ann leaned over to see.
"Take out the second 'bastard,'" said Akira.
"Which one."
"The redundant one."
"They're both—" Ryuji stopped. "…Fine."
"The rest works. He needs to feel like he's already caught."
Ryuji blinked. "Yeah?"
Akira handed the phone back without elaborating.
Something in Ryuji's shoulders loosened imperceptibly.
Morgana gave a small satisfied sound from inside the bag. "You know, for a group of amateurs, you've handled this remarkably well."
"Don't jinx it," said Ryuji.
"I'm not jinxing anything, I'm simply—"
"Jinxing."
"I am observing—"
"Jinxing, dude."
Ann pressed her lips together to suppress a smile. Akira said nothing, but something in his expression shifted, barely, briefly, before returning to its usual quiet.
{You're fond of them.}
{Don't start.}
{I'm not starting anything. I'm observing.}
{Then observe quietly.}
. . .
Afternoon
Cloudy
The afternoon moved without urgency. They finished their drinks. Ryuji revised the card twice more before Akira gave a final nod. Ann reviewed the cipher one last time, mouthing the substitutions quietly to herself. Morgana ran through the castle layout under his breath, each Safe Room and corridor recited with the flat precision of someone filing a map into memory. A habit that had started somewhere around the third Safe Room and never quite stopped.
By the time they stood to leave the restaurant had grown louder around them, filling with the early dinner crowd. The morning sunshine had softened under a spreading layer of cloud that wasn't quite grey and wasn't quite white. The kind of sky that felt like a held breath.
Outside, foot traffic had picked up along the covered walkway near the crossing. A middle-aged couple argued quietly over a department store bag. A student in an Aoyama Gakuin uniform walked past with headphones on, eyes forward. The city had its own Sunday pace and could not have cared less about what had just been settled on the pavement outside a family restaurant.
The four of them paused at the station entrance.
Ryuji looked at Akira. He opened his mouth once, pressed it shut. The thing he wanted to say was too large and too simple at the same time.
"Tomorrow," he said finally.
Ann's eyes moved from Ryuji's face to Akira's. Something passed through them that she didn't put into words either.
"Tomorrow," she confirmed.
Morgana looked between them and then up at Akira, something unreadable in his blue eyes.
Akira picked up his bag.
"Get some rest. All of you."
He didn't wait for a response, slipping into the crowd before the train announcement finished echoing off the platform walls. Behind him, he heard Ryuji say something to Ann to which she gave a short, surprised, genuine laugh.
Akira didn't look back.
. . .
Afternoon
Cloudy
He had time before the bathhouse opened for the evening session.
The Yongen-Jaya streets had their Sunday afternoon quality. Quieter than a weekday but never empty. The hardware store near the alley was doing steady business. Two doors down a woman was repainting the sign above her small restaurant, the kanji getting a fresh coat of red that dripped slightly at the corners and didn't seem to bother her.
Akira turned toward Leblanc.
Inside, a single customer sat in a booth with the quiet, closed-off posture of someone who came to cafés not to think about things. The television in the corner was running a panel discussion about public surveillance infrastructure. Akira clocked it and went upstairs.
He finished his social studies essay at the desk. A response on legislative power structures that came out longer and more precise than Ushimaru would expect or appreciate. He kept it measured anyway. Then he sat for a while with the homework done and the room quiet around him.
From downstairs, the faint sound of Sojiro talking to the customer. Not the words. Just the cadence. Even, unhurried. The sound of a man who had spent years learning how much warmth a stranger needed and had long since stopped fighting the instinct to give it.
{Are you trusting Morgana to put up the cards?}
{Yes and no. I plan on attaching Pneuma to the cards just in case.}
{Cautious. But until you're certain, it's the right call.}
The Pneuma-modified phone sat beside the homework. He had sent a single character to the string-of-digits contact three days ago and received a response the same evening. Whoever Ali Baba was, they were fast and careful. He was running out of logical reasons not to make more direct contact. The question was what to ask for first and whether doing so before Kamoshida was resolved would complicate things unnecessarily. He filed it for later.
{I'd like to fully trust him. I just feel as though I'm being nudged toward a certain direction, and I'm not sure who's doing the nudging.}
Kippōshi was quiet for a moment. The customer downstairs laughed at something Sojiro said. A short, genuine sound that seemed to surprise even the man who made it.
{Tomorrow will answer some of it.}
{Some of it,} Akira agreed.
The clouds outside had settled in fully. Flat and even, the kind that didn't threaten rain but made the city look like a watercolour that hadn't quite dried.
He sat with that for a while.
. . .
Evening
Cloudy
The public bathhouse was quieter in the evenings than the mornings.
Sunday evenings had the medicinal bath, a special seasonal mixture the owner rotated by month. Akira had discovered it on his first Sunday in Yongen-Jaya by accident and had gone every Sunday since. Partly the heat working into his shoulders and upper back. Partly the rarity of sitting somewhere without performing anything for anyone.
He stayed in the water longer than usual. He thought about the Koshien quarterfinals the summer before. The last inning, count full, stadium at a volume that felt physical. His shoulder had been fine. Everything had been fine. The summer after was when the trial happened and after that it wasn't baseball season anymore.
He dressed, exchanged a nod with the older man who had apparently decided Sunday evenings were also part of his schedule, and stepped out into the dark street.
The shopping arcade had its night face on. The dry cleaners was running. Two middle school boys were playing a card game on the step outside the pharmacy, one already down to his last card. The convenience store smelled of oden every time the door opened.
Akira picked up an energy drink for the morning and went back to Leblanc.
Sojiro was wiping down the counter when he came in. The customer had gone. Two chairs were already up on a table.
"You were out late."
"Sunday bath special."
Sojiro set the cloth aside. The corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, before he gestured toward the stool.
"Sit. One more lesson before I head out."
Akira sat. Sojiro moved around the counter, pulled out the equipment without looking, and began. He didn't explain the steps this time. He just did them, slowly, and expected Akira to watch.
The coffee that came out was better than anything Akira had managed on his own. He drank it slowly, paying attention.
"The curry recipe," Akira said.
"What about it."
"When."
"When you can make a cup that doesn't embarrass me."
Akira held his gaze. Sojiro held it back. Then the older man turned and started cleaning the equipment, and something about the set of his shoulders suggested he was not entirely displeased with how the evening had gone.
Akira finished his coffee and went upstairs.
. . .
Night
Cloudy
After the bathhouse, the attic was quiet. Morgana had lasted approximately four minutes after dinner before curling into his bed, tail tucked, already dreaming of whatever cats dream about.
Akira spread a cloth across the desk and began working through his baseball gear. The glove first. He worked the conditioner into the leather in slow circles, paying attention to the pocket and the lacing. Broken in just enough, no more. He folded it around a ball and set it aside to hold its shape overnight.
The bats next. He had two, both maple, both weighted to his preference. He ran a dry cloth along each one from knob to barrel, checking the grain with his fingers. Tight grain took contact better and lasted longer under the kind of velocity he generated. Both were fine. He applied a thin coat of pine tar to the handles, measured and even, then stood each bat upright against the wall.
Cleats after that, spikes checked individually, dried and brushed clean of the dirt from Saturday's practice. Cap last, brim set where he liked it. He repacked everything with the same care he had unpacked it, zipped the bag, and set it by the door. That was tomorrow handled.
He reached into his pocket space and pulled out the overcoat. The weight of it settled differently in his hands than ordinary fabric would, dense with something that wasn't quite physical. He laid it flat across the desk and smoothed it out, then did the same with the rest. Hilt, blaster, the suit itself folded neatly alongside.
The Metaverse had a way of labeling things. When he absorbed a Shadow, information arrived with it: origin, nature, strengths, what it feared. Items found in the Palace came with similar annotations, faint impressions of what they were and what they could do. He had grown accustomed to reading those impressions the way a person reads a room. Quickly, without making a production of it.
He turned the hilt slowly in his hands. There, pressed into the grip so subtly it functioned as texture rather than design, was a five-petaled outline.
He set it down and picked up the blaster. Same location. Same mark.
He ran his fingers along the inner lining of the coat until he found it stitched into the fabric at the left breast. Monochromatic thread on monochromatic cloth, invisible unless you were specifically looking.
He hadn't been looking. Now he was.
{You already knew.}
{I did. It seemed unnecessary to mention until you found it yourself.}
{The laptop.}
{The same symbol. Any object you mark with Pneuma deeply enough will carry it. It is not something I placed there deliberately. It is the shape your soul leaves on what it touches. The signature of your will.}
Akira held that thought for a while. Outside, a car turned into the alley below and its headlights swept briefly across the ceiling before it moved on. The city had a sound at this hour that was quieter but not silent. A low continuous hum, like something being held rather than stopped.
He set the coat down and reached back into his pocket space for the combined Will Seed.
The Metaverse's description had been immediate and precise. Crystal of Lust. Skill accessory. Grants Diarama to the equipped user, a moderate restoration of one ally's health. Clean, functional, exactly what the description promised.
What the description hadn't conveyed was the texture of the thing itself. The way it sat in his palm with a weight that didn't quite match its size, or the faint warmth it gave off that had nothing to do with temperature.
{The description is accurate as far as it goes. But descriptions tell you what something does. They don't tell you how.}
{Agreed. And the how is what interests me.}
He extended a careful thread of Pneuma toward the Seed. The contact was immediate and unusually clean, like pressing your palm to glass and finding it warm on the other side. He held it steady and paid attention to what was happening at the boundary rather than what he was pushing through it.
There. The Seed wasn't adding anything. It was filtering. The Pneuma passing through it arrived at its destination without the usual dispersal, the minor inefficiencies that accumulated the further it traveled from his body.
{It's not a source. It's a medium.}
{Precisely. The distortion Kamoshida's cognition created had a residue. Even extracted, the Seed carries an echo of that concentrated belief. Pneuma run through it inherits that focus. The healing function the description names is simply what happens when that focused Pneuma is directed at a living body.}
{So Diarama isn't the ceiling. It's the default output when no specific intent is applied.}
{That would be my reading.}
{And if I could reproduce that filtering property in an object through Pneuma alone, brand it with a specific function the way I branded the weapons with range, it would behave the same way.}
{In theory. The difference is that the Seed's refinement is passive. It requires no maintenance from you. An object you empower with Pneuma requires continued investment, at least until the mark stabilizes.}
{The way the quince stabilized.}
{Yes. That took time and repetition. This would be no different.}
Akira stored the Seed and held the coat for a moment longer before returning it and the rest of the gear to the pocket space. He looked at the baseball bag by the door. The glove folded around the ball, the bats standing against the wall, the cleats dry and ready.
He filed the question away. Tomorrow first. Then the palace. Then this.
{Your voice sounds different lately.}
A pause. Longer than usual.
{Different how?}
{Clearer. Earlier it felt like hearing someone speak through a wall. Now it's direct. Present.}
The lamp on the desk cast a circle of yellow light that didn't quite reach the corners. Morgana's breathing from across the room was slow and even. Outside a train moved somewhere in the city, its sound arriving several seconds after the vibration through the floor.
{You are more certain of yourself than when we first spoke.}
A beat.
{Not arrogant. Certain. There is a difference. When a man knows what he stands for, the thing that stands with him grows to match it. I am not separate from that process. I am part of it. As you become more fully yourself, the channel between us widens.}
{So there's no ceiling.}
{Not one I can see from here.}
Akira lay back. The ceiling was the same ceiling it had always been. He had cleaned the dust from its beams the first night. He knew every water stain and groove in the wooden planks from hours of lying exactly like this, thinking things through.
He returned the bats carefully to the bag, set it by the door, and turned off the lamp.
The room went dark. The city kept its low continuous sound outside.
Tomorrow: a game. Then a heist. Both prepared for. Both asking something of him.
He was not afraid of either question.
{And the curtain rises.}