The first request came two days later.
Kairo was on the floor doing push-ups when his phone went off. Yuki was lying on the couch above him, head hanging off the edge upside down, watching him with the investment she brought to watching him do anything physical.
"You're at three hundred," she said.
"I know."
"That's a lot."
"Yes."
"I could sit on your back if you want more resistance."
"You'd fall asleep."
"I would not," she said. Then, after a pause: "I might."
His phone buzzed on the floor next to his hand. He glanced at it without stopping. Buzzed again. He finished the set, sat up, picked it up.
She dropped off the couch immediately and landed next to him, reading over his shoulder before he'd gotten through the first line.
Floor 73. Active gate. Berlin, Germany. Breach estimated in eleven days based on accelerated timeline. All local response teams confirmed non-viable. Requesting immediate intervention.
Yuki read it twice. "Eleven days."
"They're panicking. The timeline accelerates when a gate gets to a certain size. Floor 73 is big."
"How big."
"Big enough that eleven days is probably generous."
She looked at the message. Looked at him. "Germany," she said, like she was tasting the word.
He looked at her sideways.
"I've never been anywhere," she said. Not asking for anything. Just saying it.
"I know."
"Six months in Tokyo. Before that, Floor 100 of a video game." She paused. "Germany has things. Historic things. Food."
"We're not going on a date."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive—"
"Eleven day breach window, Yuki."
She looked at the message again. "Fine," she said, in the tone that meant tabled not finished. "When do we leave."
He typed back one line. The response came in four minutes — car outside in two hours, private plane, direct to Berlin.
Two hours. She looked at the apartment and then at him with the rapid calculation expression.
"Bags," she said.
"I have a bag."
"Your gym bag."
"It holds things."
She stared at him. "We are not arriving in Germany with a gym bag."
"The gate doesn't care—"
"I care," she said. "I care what bag you have."
He ordered a bag. Thirty minute delivery. She watched the confirmation with the satisfied expression of someone who had handled something important.
"The robes," she said.
"Yes."
"From now?"
"From when we leave," he said. "We arrive in them. We go in the gate in them."
She looked at the robe hanging near the door, the patterns catching the apartment light. Looked at his. Looked at him.
"We're going to stop traffic," she said.
"Probably," he said.
She smiled, slow and bright, and went to get ready.
They left the apartment in the robes.
The fabric moved differently in the building corridor than it did indoors — caught the air, settled, the patterns doing something in the fluorescent light that made the two people waiting for the elevator on the same floor go very still when the doors opened.
Kairo stepped in. Yuki on his back, chin on his head, her robe draped over both of them.
The two people in the elevator looked at the floor numbers very intently for six floors.
Outside, the car was already waiting — black, government-issued, the driver standing by the door. He opened it without a word, which meant the briefing had been thorough. Kairo handed him both bags before getting in. The driver took them without comment.
Yuki watched the bags go with approval, then settled as they got in and looked out the window as Tokyo moved past.
She'd gone quiet, which with her meant she was taking something in properly.
He let her.
After a few minutes she found his hand where it rested on the seat beside him and stayed there for the rest of the drive without saying anything else.
The people at the airfield gate looked up when they arrived and then kept looking, the way people always kept looking now. Two of them in white robes, white hair, red eyes — her legs off the ground, his arm reaching back without thinking about it, the patterns on the fabric catching the morning light and doing something that had no reference point. Moving like they had somewhere to be and nothing in the world was going to stop them getting there.
Which was accurate.
One of the ground crew said something under his breath to the person next to him. Kairo didn't catch it. Yuki did, from the slight angle of her head, and her expression went briefly, privately pleased.
"What did he say," Kairo said, quiet.
"Something in German. I didn't understand it but the tone was extremely complimentary."
"He was looking at the robe."
"He was looking at both," she said serenely, and tucked her chin back on his head.
The plane was parked at the end of a private strip, small and sleek and government-grey. A ground attendant at the bottom of the steps looked up as they approached and then did what everyone did — looked once, looked again, held the second look slightly too long before remembering what she was supposed to be doing and gestured up the stairs.
Kairo went up. Yuki on his back, the hem of her robe brushing each step as they climbed, the wind on the strip catching both robes and moving them in a way that the attendant below apparently found worth watching because she was still looking when they reached the top.
The door was narrow. He angled through it without ducking, Yuki adjusting her position on his back automatically, shifting her weight, her robe following them inside.
The interior was compact — eight seats in two rows, a small table, overhead panels that hummed quietly. The lighting was practical and flat. Two officials were already seated on the left side, documents spread between them, and they both looked up when the door opened.
They looked at the robes first. Then the hair. Then the eyes. Then the fact that she was on his back inside the plane, chin on his head, looking around the interior with the open curiosity of someone seeing something for the first time.
Which she was.
She looked at the seats. The overhead compartments. The small oval windows along the wall. The panelling, the fold-down trays, the tiny reading lights above each seat. She looked at all of it with the same focused attention she gave to anything she hadn't encountered before, cataloguing.
"It's smaller than I expected," she said.
"Private plane," he said.
"I expected more." She looked at the ceiling. "Still. It's a plane."
He moved to the right side and sat down. She stayed on his lap without discussion, rearranged her robe so it wasn't bunched between them, and leaned sideways to look out the window at the strip outside. The other plane across the tarmac. The low airport buildings in the distance. The ground crew moving below.
One of the officials across the aisle looked at the empty seat beside Kairo. Looked at Yuki on his lap. Looked at his documents.
"Is there a seatbelt concern—" he started.
"No," Kairo said.
"The regulations for passenger safety during—"
"If this plane goes down," he said, without any particular emphasis, "a seatbelt is not going to be the relevant variable."
Yuki nodded seriously in agreement. The officials looked at each other and found something very interesting to read.
A crew member came through to do the pre-departure check and paused for a fraction of a second at the sight of them and then continued professionally, which was the correct call.
The engines started — a low vibration that moved through the floor and up through the seat and into both of them. Yuki went still. Not tense. Attentive. She put one sleeve-covered hand flat on the fold-down tray in front of her and felt the vibration through it.
"That's the engine," she said.
"Yes."
"Both of them."
"Yes."
She kept her hand on the tray, feeling it, and looked out the window as the plane began to move. Slowly at first, taxiing, the strip outside rolling past. She watched the ground. Watched the speed increasing, the strip markings blurring. Watched the moment the nose lifted and the ground dropped away and her hand pressed flat against the window instinctively, tracking the earth getting smaller.
Tokyo fell away below them. The grid of it. The water. The familiar shape of the bay. She stayed at the window with her sleeve-covered hands against the glass and watched until the clouds came up and swallowed everything and there was nothing left below but white in every direction.
She stayed at the window even then, looking at the clouds, the way they moved and broke and reformed.
Then she turned back around and leaned into his chest and looked at the ceiling.
"We're above the clouds," she said.
"Yes."
"There's nothing up here."
He looked at her. "And two people trying very hard not to look at us."
She glanced at the officials, who were deeply committed to their documents. Her ears went slightly pink and she pressed her face into his robe and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
He put his arm around her.
The officials continued to find their documents very compelling.
Somewhere over central Asia she lifted her head. "Tell me about Floor 73."
"Range type," he said. "Coordinated groups. Fast, not individually strong, but they don't come one at a time. Visibility is low — the floor simulates marshland regardless of where the gate opens. Fog, wet ground."
"So you go above it."
"Yes."
"And me?"
"On my back unless I say otherwise," he said. "This one I'm not running at full speed."
She looked at him. "Why."
"Because you need to see how they move before you're in the middle of it. Floor 73 in a coordinated swarm — I want you to understand the pattern first."
She held his gaze for a moment. Something shifted in her expression, quiet and warm. "You're training me," she said.
He didn't confirm it. She didn't need him to.
She put her head back on his chest and he looked out the window at the nothing above the clouds, and somewhere behind them one of the officials very quietly turned a page.
Berlin appeared below them grey and dense and old, the city spreading in every direction, the Spree cutting through it in a pale line. Yuki was at the window immediately, breath fogging the glass slightly.
"It has weight," she said. "Like it's been there a long time and it knows it."
He watched her instead of the window.
She turned and caught him and her ears went pink. "What."
"Nothing," he said.
"You were staring."
"Observation," he said.
She held his gaze for one second and then turned back to the window very deliberately, ears still pink, and he looked back at the city below without adding anything because there was nothing that needed adding.
They were met on the tarmac by three people and a vehicle. One of them started talking immediately — briefing, timeline, cordon perimeter — and Kairo listened without looking at him, watching the skyline.
He could see the gate from here.
A darkness that was too dark, sitting in the middle of the city about three kilometres east, pulling the eye toward it the way gates did. Like looking at a hole in something that shouldn't have holes.
Yuki had gone still on his back.
"That's very big," she said quietly.
"Floor 73," he said. "Yes."
"—local teams standing by at the perimeter, and we've arranged transport—"
"Move the cordon back another five hundred metres," Kairo said. "Now."
The person nodded and got on a radio. Kairo started walking. The vehicle came alongside. He kept walking.
Yuki leaned close to his ear. "Kairo."
"Mm."
"One thing. After. Just one."
He walked three more steps. "We'll see."
She knew what that meant from him. Her grip settled on his shoulders and she looked at the city around them as they moved through it — the architecture, the cold air, the grey sky, everything she hadn't seen before, taking it in with the complete quiet attention she gave to things she wanted to keep.
"It smells different," she said.
"Different from Tokyo."
"Different from anywhere." A pause. "Which is only Tokyo. But still."
The people on the street near the cordon stared when they passed through.
That was normal now — people stared, had been staring since Shinjuku, more after the press conference. But this was different. This was Berlin, people who hadn't seen them in person before, and the robes were moving in the cold German wind, the patterns doing what they did in natural light — something that had no reference point, something that looked like it predated everything around it.
A woman near the barrier said something in German to the man beside her. He nodded slowly, eyes still on them.
A teenager held up a phone.
A small child near the front of the cordon pointed and said something very serious to her father, who crouched down to hear it and then looked up at Kairo and Yuki with an expression that was hard to categorise.
Yuki watched all of it with bright eyes.
"They're not scared," she said quietly.
"No."
"They were expecting something frightening and instead—" she stopped.
"Instead what," he said.
She thought about it genuinely. "I don't know what word to use," she said. "But it's not that."
He kept walking. The gate was fifty metres ahead now, visible in full, enormous, the air around it distorted. The cordon fell away behind them. Just the two of them and the park and the thirty-metre circle of absolute black pulling at everything within range.
The trees along the edge were bent toward it. The ground disturbed. The number on the outside read 73 — not printed, not carved. Just there.
Yuki looked at it from his back.
He looked at it too.
Then he looked down at his right side.
The katana had been in the tower. Floor 90 reward, dropped from the Giant Six-Headed Ox, and it had stayed there — in whatever space those things existed in — because it had never occurred to him to try anything else. He'd used Moon Slash on his own hand for the gates he'd cleared. It had been fine. But a Floor 73 gate was different and something had been sitting at the back of his mind since they'd boarded the plane.
Every ability had transferred when the server crashed. Not copies. The actual things. The katana was a weapon he'd earned in the tower, tied to him, his reward. If anything was going to follow the same logic—
He held out his right hand, palm up.
Called for it. The same internal motion as any other ability. Deliberate. Expecting.
Nothing for half a second.
Then weight — sudden, clean, the grip materialising against his palm from nowhere, the blade following in one smooth line, the full length of it appearing in the cold Berlin air and settling into his hand like it had simply been waiting for him to ask.
Yuki stared at it. "You just—"
"Yes," he said.
"That was in the game."
"Yes."
"You've never tried that before."
"No," he said.
She stared at the blade. At him. Back at the blade. "You tried it for the first time in front of a Floor 73 gate."
"It worked," he said.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "What if it hadn't."
"Then I would have used my hand," he said. "Same as before."
She looked at him for a long moment with the expression she had when something landed in both the impressive and deeply concerning categories simultaneously and she couldn't decide which was winning.
Then she tightened her grip on his shoulders and put her chin back on his head.
"Thirty second grace period," he said. "Stay on my back once we're in. Watch how they move, how they communicate. Watch the fog specifically — it's not environmental, they use it deliberately."
She was quiet, taking it in.
"If I tell you to use your ability, immediately. Don't make me say it twice."
"You won't need to," she said.
He looked at the gate. Felt her grip settle on his shoulders, hands in his robe, her chin finding the top of his head. Katana in his right hand.
He walked in.
The gate swallowed the grey Berlin sky instantly.
Inside: dark, wet, the smell of standing water and something underneath it that was older than anything outside. The ground was soft, marshy, each footstep sinking slightly before finding purchase. Visibility maybe thirty metres before the fog closed in — thick and low and moving in a way that wasn't wind.
Thirty seconds.
He used them.
Detection — 2%.
The ability spread outward and the information came back immediately. Thirty-seven contacts. Distributed in a wide ring at roughly twenty-five metres out. Already in position. They'd been waiting before the gate was entered, the formation set, patient in the way things were patient when they were very good at what they did.
"Thirty-seven," he said. "Ring formation. Twenty-five metres out."
Yuki's chin lifted off his head. Scanning. "I can't see them."
"Watch the fog. Not the shapes — the fog itself."
The thirty seconds ended.
The fog moved.
Not wind. Directed. Deliberate. The ring contracting as the things inside it began closing in — low to the ground, fast, limbs moving in a lateral pattern that covered distance deceptively quickly, bodies staying below the fog line so that what was visible was really just the disturbance they left in the mist.
Six visible through the fog now at the forward edge. The rest still hidden, the sound of wet ground being crossed coming from every direction simultaneously.
Kairo waited.
Yuki was completely still on his back. He could feel her tracking them.
The nearest one hit fifteen metres —
Flash Step.
Sixty percent. Controlled. He covered the distance in under a heartbeat, came down on the nearest one with the katana already in the right arc, one clean diagonal slash from shoulder to hip, and was gone before the sound of the impact reached anything.
He landed on the fog.
Not in it — on it, feet finding the denser upper layer, using it as a surface. From up here the ring formation was visible as a pattern of movement below, the creatures still tracking the position he'd been standing in, adjusting, redirecting toward where he'd gone.
"They're recalibrating," Yuki said. Already watching it. "They communicate through movement — that one just changed direction because the one beside it did, not because it saw you."
"Yes. Remember that."
He dropped back down — controlled, angled, coming in between two of them from a direction the formation hadn't covered — and let the katana come around in a wide arc, Moon Slash running the full length of the blade, the crescent of energy extending three metres out on each side. Both contacts gone before they'd finished adjusting.
He was already moving. Low run across the marsh surface, feet barely touching, the white robe moving with him, the hem not slowing him at all, each step deliberate.
Four more ahead in a cluster.
He went lower — below their strike height — dropped into a controlled slide across the wet ground on one knee, reversed the katana grip mid-motion, came up through the cluster from underneath. Two upward cuts. One of them adjusted its position mid-strike and he redirected before the motion completed.
"How did you see that," Yuki said.
"Shoulder rotation. Half a second before the direction change. Every time."
She went quiet. Filing it.
The remaining contacts were regrouping — the ring formation collapsing inward into a tighter cluster, switching to concentrated press. Twenty-odd of them pulling together into a dense formation, the fog thickening around them, using it as cover for the compression.
He went up instead of forward.
Flash Step — straight vertical, both of them fifteen metres above the marsh floor in under a second. Yuki's grip tightened automatically and then found its balance, her robe trailing below them in the mist.
From here the cluster was completely visible. Twenty-three contacts, tight, looking upward. The fog pulling in around them like a wall.
He angled the descent like a blade.
Came down through the centre of the cluster at speed, katana extended, Moon Slash activating at the exact moment of entry — the energy radiating outward in a ring from the impact point, covering the full cluster radius. He landed in the middle of the resulting silence, one knee on the wet ground, katana extended behind him, the white robe settling around him like it had always been meant to do exactly that.
The fog thinned.
He stood. Turned slowly. Detection mapped the remaining contacts — eight, scattered, the ones that had been at the outer edge when he'd come down.
He moved through them one by one. Not fast — controlled and deliberate, each approach announced a half-second before he made it so she could follow the logic. Each strike clean. The marsh floor was still underneath them, the standing water barely disturbed except near the entry point.
The seventh one tried something none of the others had — going vertical instead of lateral, clearing the fog line, coming down from above.
"Above," Yuki said.
He was already there. One cut, descending, meeting it on the way up.
The last one tried to flank from the right. He felt her shift on his back before she said anything — leaning slightly, weight adjusting.
He went right.
One cut.
Silence.
The fog cleared completely. The marsh was still. The gate on the far side was already fading, the number dissolving, the black circle shrinking steadily toward nothing.
Yuki exhaled slowly.
"The fog," she said. "They thin it when they cluster. It's not a side effect — they're using it to mask the compression. That's why going up worked. You took the tool away."
"Yes," he said.
She was quiet, working through the rest of it. He let her. The gate finished closing — no ceremony, just gone, a park again with bent trees and churned earth and the cold German sky reappearing above them.
He dismissed the katana. It disappeared from his hand the same way it had arrived — cleanly, completely. He looked at his empty hand for a moment.
Something to think about later.
Berlin. Grey. Cold. A city that had been here a very long time.
Yuki looked up at the sky for a moment. Then at the city visible beyond the tree line, the buildings, the river somewhere past them.
"It's after," she said.
He was already walking toward the cordon.
She waited.
He walked three more steps.
"One thing," he said.
The sound she made against the back of his head was very small and very satisfied and she tightened her arms around his neck and looked at the city around them with bright eyes and didn't say anything else because she didn't need to.
He kept walking, the white robe moving around his feet, the patterns catching the pale Berlin afternoon light, the city watching them go.
End of Chapter 20.