Kogarashi Mountain was the smaller of the two peaks east of Serenia.
It was not a mountain in the Hunting Realm sense. It was a hill that called itself a mountain because the city of Serenia had decided, four centuries ago, that the place where their festival lanterns were lit deserved a word with weight. The locals called it Kogarashi after the cold wind that crossed the plateau every November, which made the lanterns flicker like stars trying to remember how to be stars.
It was the place a boy named Ryo Kenzaki, a boy named Kyou Ren Ametsuchi, and a girl named Yua Aihara had spent the last day of their summer together.
It was the place the boy named Kyou Ren had asked the boy named Ryo what kind of Hunter he wanted to be.
It was the place the boy named Ryo had answered.
It was the place the girl had not spoken at all, because she had not yet learned how to say what she wanted to say to people she was beginning to love.
It was, today, the place they were going to settle it.
-----
Ryo sat at the kitchen table at six in the morning.
Kujuro had made breakfast. Rumi was eating quietly, the way she ate when she had decided not to be the one who spoke first. The lamp was on. November light through the window was still gray.
He had not slept.
He had not tried.
He had spent the night on the rooftop with the new blade across his knees and the spirit beside him.
Not speaking.
The spirit had understood that some nights were for the breath of the person beside you and not the words.
Now he was at the table, and he had to do the part he had been dreading more than the fight.
"Pops."
"Mm."
"Rumi."
"…"
"I'm leaving in twenty minutes."
Rumi did not look up. She finished her bowl. She set the chopsticks across it the way Kujuro had taught her, parallel, even.
Then she got up. She walked around the table.
She put her arms around her brother's neck from behind. She pressed her cheek against his hair.
She did not cry.
She had decided on the way around the table.
Crying was a thing that would make him carry one more weight to the mountain.
She was not going to do that to him.
"… Big brother."
"… Yeah."
"Win."
"… I will."
"Promise."
"… I promise."
She held on for nine more seconds. Then she let go. She walked back to her seat. She picked up her chopsticks.
Kujuro looked at his son.
Kujuro did not say what he was thinking.
Kujuro had stopped saying what he was thinking about most things since his wife had died, because saying things out loud had not turned out to be how he loved his children.
Loving them was sitting with them. Loving them was making breakfast. Loving them was being the man at the table when they came home.
He nodded once.
Ryo nodded back.
The conversation was complete.
-----
Mei was at the canal by seven.
She had not been told where to be. She had simply known. She handed him a folded piece of paper.
"What is it?"
"The list of the twelve Kawagoe scholarship students. I wrote their names down."
A pause.
"I want you to know what they look like, and what they're studying, and what they want to be. So that when you fight him today, you're not fighting for an idea. You're fighting for twelve specific kids who haven't eaten lunch in six days because the system was slow."
"…"
"And so when you come back, you can ask them how they're doing."
He read the names.
He nodded.
He folded the paper and put it inside his coat, against his chest, where the cold from his pact had settled hardest.
She did not hug him.
She did the small two-finger half-salute Kyou Ren had once started doing to Tsubaki. Mei had watched it once and had decided to use it for moments that would have been hugs from people who hugged.
Ryo returned it.
She walked away.
-----
Hiroshi was at the West Bridge plot.
He was kneeling next to the row Mrs. Kazami had marked with the small red ribbon. The dead tomato plant was still there. The live tomato plant was still there. The cabbages were beginning to head up.
Yuna was beside him. Six. Mismatched mittens. Bomber jacket too big for her, draped around her shoulders, the cuffs in her hands.
Ryo crouched.
"Yuna."
"Hi, Kenzaki-niisan."
"Hiroshi told you what I'm doing?"
"He told me you're going to win a fight."
"… I'm going to try."
"You're going to win."
"… You sure?"
She nodded the way six-year-olds nodded when they were sure of things adults had taught them not to be sure of, and the adults were wrong, and Hiroshi was helping her stay right.
"Hiroshi-niisan said. So you will."
Hiroshi made a small sound that was either a laugh or the close cousin of one. He stood. He clapped Ryo on the shoulder. He did not say anything. He did not have to.
Ryo nodded.
Yuna held her arms up.
He picked her up. He hugged her once. He set her down.
He left.
-----
Satoshi was on the bench at the courtyard.
Ami was beside him. Eighteen, small, patient, with her violin case across her knees. Satoshi had brought her. Satoshi had not brought a girl to the courtyard before.
Satoshi did not stand.
"Kenzaki."
"… Satoshi."
"You came."
"I said I would."
"Mm."
A pause.
"Ami."
"… Yes?"
"Play him something."
She lifted the case. She opened it. She took out the violin. She tuned it for thirty seconds, the way she had been taught, with her ear close to the wood, listening for the note nobody who was not her could hear.
Then she played.
Not the Brahms. Something older.
A short piece in a minor key, eight bars long. The kind of thing a violin teacher gave to a student who had reached the level where the technique had stopped being the point and the meaning had started being the point.
It was a small piece. It was not difficult.
It was beautiful.
It lasted ninety seconds.
When she lowered the bow, Ryo was crying without sound.
Satoshi looked at him.
"That was for you, Kenzaki. From all three of us."
"…"
"Mei picked the piece. Hiroshi wrote her the note about which moods you were in this week. I told Ami when to play it."
A pause.
"We figured out a way to be there with you that didn't require any of us to be there with you. Because we knew you'd say no if we asked. So we didn't ask."
"…"
"Go win your fight."
Ryo wiped his face.
He nodded.
He walked east.
-----
The rogues met him at the edge of the city.
All three. Banri with the apple knife. Sōma with his hands in his coat pockets. Tsubaki with Wagamori on her back, the cloth wrap loose because she had stopped tying it tight around strangers.
They did not stop him.
Sōma said, "Mean the question, Kenzaki."
Banri said, "We'll be at the apartment when you come back. There'll be soup."
Tsubaki said nothing for a moment.
Then she said, very quietly, "… Don't lose."
He nodded at all three of them.
He kept walking.
The cold around his figure had grown visible enough that the people on the street stepped aside without being told.
-----
Theron Brandt was waiting on the path that led up Kogarashi.
He was not waiting for Ryo.
He was waiting for the older man walking up from the western side of the mountain.
The one in the dark grey coat with the silver clasp at the throat.
The one whose stride had not changed in the forty-three years since Theron had last seen him.
Shinrō Takaori.
They stopped twenty feet apart on the path. The November wind moved between them. Neither of them moved their hands.
"… Brandt."
"… Takaori."
"You look old."
"You look about the same. Which is somehow worse."
"Mm."
A long quiet.
"This is your boy."
"… Mine, in the way the word has come to mean. Yes."
"Mine is on the other side of the mountain. He's going to win, Brandt."
"… Possibly."
"He has to. The thing he wants to build cannot be built by a corpse."
"…"
"And yours."
"Mine wants to break what your boy is going to build. He believes the breaking is the only honest gift he has left."
"…"
"I don't agree with him. I also don't have the right to stop him."
"… No. Neither of us does."
The two men looked at each other for a long moment.
Theron spoke first.
"This isn't our fight, Takaori."
"… It isn't."
"They have to settle this with their own hands."
"They do."
"And whichever one of them walks down the mountain, we step aside."
"We step aside."
"…"
"It's a strange thing, Brandt. Watching your student become the lesson you were never able to teach the world."
"…"
"I'm proud of him. I'm afraid for him."
A pause.
"And I'm not allowed, today, to be either of those things in a way that helps him."
"… Mm."
"That is what teachers earn in this realm."
"That is what teachers earn in any realm."
They walked, the two of them, side by side, up Kogarashi to the lookout at the top.
The festival lanterns were not lit, because it was not festival season. The plateau opened to a flat ring of yellowed grass and grey stone.
They sat down on opposite sides of the ring.
They did not speak again.
-----
Kyou Ren walked up the eastern path.
The new coat was the dark indigo that had become his, with deeper navy lining at the sleeves and a faint gold thread woven into the inner hem in the shape of his clan's old sigil.
He had put the sigil back into the lining the night after the Hakushin. Theron had asked him if he wanted to wear his name again.
He had said yes. But only on the inside. Where the world had to earn it before they saw it.
The pale steel of his blade was at his hip.
The dark cord-knots on the hilt caught the late-morning light.
The gold fractures in his irises were quiet but present.
He stopped at the western edge of the plateau.
Ryo was already there.
The frost around his figure was visible from twenty feet. Not heavy. Not theatrical. Subtle. The grass under his boots had whitened in a circle three feet across. His breath misted thicker than the November air alone could explain. His right hand was bare and trembling.
Kyou Ren saw the frost.
Ryo saw the coat.
Neither of them said hello.
Kyou Ren's first words were quiet.
"… You wear cold the way you wear everything else, Kenzaki. Like you're trying not to let it touch you."
"…"
"And you wear the gold like you're proud of it."
"… I am proud of it."
"…"
"You should be."
The wind moved across the plateau. The dead grass bent.
The two boys stood twenty feet apart. The air between them had the particular charge of two weather systems meeting and choosing, for the moment, not to break.
Kyou Ren spoke.
-----
"Kenzaki."
"… Yeah."
"I am going to say three things. I would like you to let me finish them. After, you may say what you wish, and we will begin."
"… Okay."
He drew a breath.
"The first is about Hunters."
A pause.
"I have come to believe that Hunter is the worst word in our language."
"…"
"It sounds like a calling. It is a sentence. It is what the system names the children it has used hardest, so that when they are broken, the breaking can be called dignified."
"…"
"WE ARE NOT HUNTERS! WE ARE THE USED! AND THE SYSTEM THAT CALLS US BY THE BETTER WORD IS THE ONE THAT WROTE BOTH!"
A flash — the back row of the classroom, six weeks ago, two boys at desks no one had assigned them, a coin moving across knuckles.
"The second is about children."
"…"
"There are no Hunters. There are only children of war, who grow up, and forget that they were children."
"…"
"The system relies on the forgetting. It cannot survive in a world that remembers."
A pause.
"Yua remembers. Theron remembers. I remember."
"…"
"THAT REMEMBERING IS THE ONLY WEAPON THE SYSTEM HAS NOT FIGURED OUT HOW TO TAKE FROM US!"
A flash — the autumn festival on this same mountain five weeks ago, three teenagers under a paper lantern, the girl looking at the sky, the boy with the gold eyes pretending not to watch her watching, the boy with the brown eyes laughing at something the girl had not said.
"The third is about you."
"…"
"Kenzaki. I have walked many corridors in my life. I have stood next to many people."
"…"
"There has been one person in seventeen years who looked at me on a sidewalk in an intersection and said must be lonely and meant it."
"…"
"There has been one person who caught my bag the day my mother died and said I'm here and stayed."
"…"
"There has been one person who has called me brother in the way the word is supposed to mean."
A flash — an intersection five weeks ago, two boys, one of them with a bag falling, one of them catching it.
"That person is you."
"…"
"AND I AM ABOUT TO SWING A BLADE AT YOU!"
A long quiet. The wind moved.
"Because the only friend I have left is the only person in this world I cannot save with words."
"…"
"Words are how the world has been failing him. Words are what his ideology is built out of. Words are what he uses to make his vision sound possible."
"…"
"I cannot reach him through words. The world has filled his ears with words for seventeen years, and the words have only made him softer."
A flash — Kogarashi this same plateau, three weeks ago, the boy in the brown jacket saying I want to be the kind of Hunter the system doesn't expect.
"So I'm going to use the only language he has not yet been spoken to in."
"…"
"I am going to break the vision of the Hunter he wants to be. On the grass between us. With the blade I grew out of my own blood."
A pause.
"And I am going to make the breaking the loudest sentence I have ever spoken to him."
"…"
"Because the world is not going to break him kindly. The world is going to break him cruelly."
"…"
"And he is going to bleed under that breaking, and the bleeding is not going to teach him anything. Because he will be alone in it."
"…"
"And the only person who would have stayed beside him in it is the person currently walking toward him with a blade."
"…"
"THAT IS THE LONELINESS, KENZAKI! THE LONELINESS OF BEING THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN BREAK THE DREAM… OF THE ONLY FRIEND YOU HAVE!"
"…"
"I have carried that loneliness for three weeks. I am going to put it down, today, on this mountain, with you. And I am going to make it count for something."
A flash — two weeks ago, two boys at the rogues' kitchen table, Banri pouring tea, the steam rising between them, neither of them speaking, both of them at home in the silence.
"That is my third thing."
He drew the blade.
The pale steel rang once. The gold along its length brightened. The cord-knots on the hilt caught the wind.
"Now you may say what you wish."
-----
Ryo was quiet for a long moment.
He looked at Kyou Ren. The new coat. The old eyes. The blade he had grown out of his own blood.
The boy who had once asked him must be lonely and meant it, and now stood across a plateau with a sword.
He drew his own blade.
The frost climbed the steel. Not the borrowed cold of the spirit's lend. His. The cold he had earned by carrying her power for six days and not setting it down.
He spoke.
"Kyou Ren."
"… Yeah."
"You're wrong."
"…"
"Not about the Hunters. Not about the children. You're right about those. You've been right about them since the day we met."
"…"
"You're wrong about me. You're wrong that breaking my vision is the only gift you have left. There is one more. The one you've been refusing to give me for three weeks because you've decided that giving it would mean failing me."
"…"
"You can stand next to it. You don't have to break it."
"…"
"You can stand next to the kind of Hunter I want to be."
"…"
"AND YOU CAN BE ONE TOO!"
A pause.
"And the two of us together can be the proof the world has been refusing to believe in."
"…"
"That's the gift, Kyou Ren. That's the one I want from you. And I'm going to fight you for it."
"…"
"Because I am not going to let you walk away from the version of yourself that gets to be my brother on the other side of this."
A pause.
"That version is in there. He's the one who caught my bag."
"…"
"I'M GOING TO DRAG HIM OUT! WITH THIS BLADE! THE SAME WAY YOU SAY YOU'RE GOING TO BREAK MY VISION WITH YOURS!"
"…"
"And one of us is going to be right by sundown."
"…"
The wind dropped.
The plateau was very still.
The two boys stood twenty feet apart on Kogarashi Mountain, in November, with two blades drawn.
The air between them was not the air of enemies.
It was the air of two boys who had decided the only way to remain brothers was to settle, on this grass, what kind of brother each of them was going to be from now on.
-----
Two boys on a mountain.
One in indigo with gold beneath the lining. One in a coat too big for him with frost under his boots.
One with a blade he grew out of his own blood. One with a blade that had been left to him by a girl he was beginning to love.
One who had decided that the only honest gift left was breaking. One who had decided that the only honest gift left was refusing to let the breaking be all there was.
Two boys who had been brothers for the only weeks in their lives that had ever felt like home, in a city that had not asked for them, on a mountain that had once held their last warm day.
The wind across Kogarashi was the wind that gave the mountain its name.
It was the cold wind. It was the wind that came when the lanterns were not lit. When the festival was not in season. When the sky had thinned enough that the year's first true winter was beginning to be visible at the eastern edge of the world.
This is the day the wind learned both their names.
This is the day the city below would later say it heard, three kilometers away, a sound that no instrument could record.
A sound that no witness could describe except to say that it was the sound of two children of war finally meeting on the field they had been walking toward since the day they met.
This is the day the system that called them Hunters would find out what the word meant when two of its used decided to use it back.
THIS IS THE DAY SAIKON BEGAN.
🌀 END OF CHAPTER 81