The world returned to its usual hum, indifferent to the tremors still echoing in Rakan's chest.
The alarm had gone off at the same time it always did. The cracked screen blinked red with numbers he knew by heart. His blanket tangled around his legs, the familiar dull ache in his back from sleeping on one side too long — it all screamed routine. Normalcy. That awful, stubborn thing. But when he stared up at the ceiling, the light looked different. Dimmer, maybe. Or maybe his eyes were still somewhere else.
Yesterday — was it really just yesterday? — he had stood in a place no map would mark, facing a man who bent reality like it was paper, who laughed too loud and smiled too wide and saw through him like glass. Mazanka.
Now he was back in a life that didn't know what to do with that kind of truth.
He sat at the breakfast table while his mother moved about the kitchen, humming a song that had no name. The smell of toasted bread curled in the air, warm and heavy, but Rakan could barely taste it. He chewed without feeling the food pass his throat. Every scrape of the butter knife, every creak of the cupboard door — it all sounded far away.
"Did you sleep well?" she asked, her voice honeyed with concern.
He nodded, slow. "Yeah."
She gave him that look — the one only mothers knew how to give. Not suspicious, not worried, just… searching. Like she could feel something had changed in the air around him, but didn't know what. Maybe she thought it was puberty finally kicking him sideways, or that he'd had a fight at school. He didn't know how to tell her that he'd stood face to face with a mystery wrapped in a patchwork man and tried to grasp something invisible that hummed beneath his skin like a second heartbeat.
His mother's voice floated from the kitchen.
"Don't forget your lunch."
He muttered something resembling thanks, barely hearing her.
He didn't tell her anything. Didn't even know what he could say. "Hey Mom, turns out there's an entire secret world hidden behind the seams of this one, and a half-mad weirdo with a dangerous smile and a single freak eye decided I'd make a good test subject."
Yeah. Right.
He left early.
The streets were the same. The cracked pavement near the corner store. The old man who always cursed the pigeons. His classmates texting dumb memes in the class group chat. But Rakan walked through it all like he was moving through fog, like every step was a half-second out of rhythm.
And yet, somewhere in that odd stillness, something called.
It wasn't loud. Not even a whisper. But it was there. A tug beneath his ribs. A thread brushing against the inside of his skull, flickering in and out of focus. Ka'ro. His Ka'ro.
God, he couldn't get used to this.
He stopped at a vending machine near the park — the one he always passed but never used. His hand hovered over the coin slot, fingers ghosting the plastic buttons. And then he saw her.
A girl. Maybe his age. Standing just across the street.
She looked weird, dressed weirdly. Not in any uniform he recognised from his own school or any school for miles. Something old, cult-like.
She wasn't doing anything. Just standing there, something clutched too tightly in her hands, as if her grip was the only thing holding her to this world. Her eyes flicked up — not at him. Through him. Like she wasn't looking at a boy, but at the shape of his outline.
He blinked. And she was gone.
Vanished.
Not a step taken. Not a sound made. Just gone, as if she'd never been there.
Rakan spun around, scanning, heart hammering. But the street was empty, only the rustling leaves and the bark of a dog far off cutting the silence. He stood there for a long time, breath short, palms sweating.
What the hell was that?
He shook it off. Kind of.
He forced himself through the day — half-listening to lessons, nodding at classmates, laughing when expected. But his mind replayed everything. The training. The whispers in the wind. The girl with no name. His own breath in that forgotten building as Ka'ro tried to awaken in him, twisting, coiling, resisting.
And Mazanka.
That bastard.
He could hear him now — the way he shrugged off time like it didn't apply to him, the ridiculous grin, the sharpness hidden behind lazy words. The way his expression had shifted when Rakan asked about the eye — that fleeting shadow in his smile. That giggle that didn't fit on a grown man's face.
That smug idiot and his riddles.
That damn glint in his eye.
The way he had laughed when Rakan almost figured something out, only to knock him down a peg again.
"Ka'ro isn't about force," Mazanka had said, dancing out of reach, "It'sabout tuning. You're trying to rip it open like an old vending machine. You gotta coax it. Like a cat. Or a very tired god."
Rakan had wanted to throw a chair at him.
He clenched his jaw.
He hated how curious he was. How much he wanted to see him again. To ask more. Learn more. Fight more.
There was no going back to normal. Not really. The world might look the same, but he wasn't the same boy who'd walked through it. And somewhere, behind the curtain of this quiet little life, something was watching him.
Something that didn't belong here.
And maybe, just maybe, neither did he.
In Literature, he watched the dust in the light instead of the board.
In Math, his fingers itched to pull at something that wasn't there.
In PE, his movements felt sharper, less human, more alive.
It wasn't that the world had changed.
It was that he'd seen beneath it.
Evening came like a slow unraveling. The sun had long vanished behind the ribs of rooftops, and the sky was a bruise of purple and ink. Rakan walked the long way home — not because he needed to, but because something inside him wanted to stretch out the silence. Delay the inevitable. Delay returning to a world that refused to see what he now knew existed under its skin.
The streetlights buzzed as he passed them. A flickering halo blinked out, then sparked back to life above him. He glanced up. Just faulty wiring, probably. Still, his steps quickened.
When he finally pushed open the door to his apartment, the warmth hit him like a blanket. The scent of miso and soy, the low hum of the TV in the living room, a mother's tired footsteps moving from room to room like clockwork.
"I put your dinner in the fridge," she called out, not turning. "Reheat it if you're hungry."
"Yeah. Thanks," Rakan replied, shrugging off his shoes.
He sat at the table, the glow of the kitchen light humming above him. His hands were still in his lap, unmoving. He hadn't realized until now that they were trembling. Just slightly. As if his body knew something he hadn't admitted yet.
The girl.
She hadn't just disappeared.
She had slipped — like fog through cracks. Like she didn't obey the same rules as everyone else. And there was something else he remembered now, something that hadn't hit him until he sat still enough to feel it: when she looked at him — or through him — he'd felt a tug. The same tug he felt when Mazanka had drawn Ka'ro out of him. Subtle. Brief. Like a thread brushing the edge of his soul.
He stood abruptly, the chair legs scraping the floor.
He needed air.
He didn't tell his mother he was going out again — didn't know how to explain that he felt like something was circling him. That staying still made it worse.
He retraced his steps.
Back to the vending machine.
Back to that corner by the park, where trees whispered in the breeze like they were gossiping secrets he wasn't allowed to know. He stood under the streetlamp, waiting.
Nothing.
No girl.
No strange sensation.
Just the quiet.
But it wasn't empty quiet. It was the kind that felt full — bloated with something unseen, like the silence between heartbeats right before a nightmare begins.
He narrowed his eyes, scanning rooftops, windows, even shadows on the far side of the road.
Still, nothing.
Then, the faintest crack of movement.
He turned sharply — but it wasn't her.
It was a shape.
Perched high, almost lost among the folds of a rooftop. A silhouette sitting in stillness, too deliberate to be casual. Not moving. Not hiding either. Almost… watching.
Rakan's breath caught.
He blinked once.
Twice.
Gone.
Again.
His heart thudded in his ears as he backed up a step. A stupid part of him wanted to yell, to challenge it — but the wiser part remembered Mazanka's words. Power was patient. It slithered. It tested. It didn't always strike in daylight.
He stood there for a moment longer before finally turning back home. This time, his steps were brisk, sharp against the pavement, his ears tuned to every rustle, every whisper of wind that didn't belong.
Across the street, from the rooftop where she'd knelt in stillness, the girl watched him go.
He walked like prey, but something in his Ka'ro had pulsed against hers — faint but rising. That was dangerous.
She stood, the wind pushing strands of hair across her cheek. Her appearance had already shifted — the cover of the night faded into a new form, into her Kenshiki robes and the air replaced by something more precise tucked under her arm, her blade.
Rakan hadn't noticed.
But she had noticed him.
But she had seen it in his eyes — that hungry look, the way he chased after a mystery too big for him, too real.
She whispered to herself, into the night's frigid air. "He's feeling it now. The pull. He's already tasted Ka'ro."
A pause.
Her eyes flickered to the distance, towards the flickering lights where Rakan had disappeared.
Mazanka…
She clenched her jaw. The mere thought of the one-eyed traitor caused a flicker of anger deep inside her. That man was a stain — a relic of chaos that had no place in the order of things. She had been raised to believe in the purity of the Kenshiki. Discipline. Honor. Power. All of it was meaningless if you didn't follow the rules. And Mazanka? He had broken them all.
Taking him down, capturing Rakan — it would be the perfect opportunity to prove herself. She would show Kurosawa that she could control even the chaos of Mazanka's world.
Rakan was just the first piece.
She moved with precision, silently stepping back from the edge of the rooftop. Her body, honed by years of training, knew how to melt into the night. She descended swiftly, cat-like, her feet barely making a sound against the tiles of the building. Her mind already raced ahead, calculating the next move. She would track him. Monitor him. Wait for the right moment to act. And if he refused to comply?
She would handle that, too.
Rakan, unaware of the eyes upon him, turned the corner of the street just as a heavy weight settled into his chest.
A crackling silence filled the space between his thoughts, and he halted, looking around quickly, his senses alive. Something… shifted. He couldn't place it. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled with the faintest trace of awareness, but when he looked around, there was nothing. Nothing but the faint glow of the streetlights, the hum of city life beyond the alley he'd entered.
Am I going crazy?
He exhaled slowly, shaking his head. He'd been too much on edge lately, the weight of everything pressing down on him like a constant storm cloud.
But as he started walking again, he couldn't shake the feeling that he wasn't alone. That someone — or something — was watching him. The sensation was subtle but insistent, a lingering presence he couldn't escape.
Meanwhile, the Kenshiki followed from a distance.
Her steps were quiet as she navigated the alleys, her eyes never leaving his form, watching how he moved — almost like a predator herself. It was easy to track him now; his Ka'ro had left an imprint in the air, faint but distinct. He was dangerous. The perfect mix of raw power and untrained impulse. She could feel the ripples of his unease in the air, the way his Ka'ro flared in brief, volatile bursts, as if it were still a storm brewing inside of him.
Soon enough, she thought. Soon enough, you'll see just how much you don't understand about what you're becoming.
Her mind snapped back to the present as she crouched in the shadows, watching Rakan walk further into the darkened streets. The city, once familiar, now felt like a labyrinth. Every corner, every flickering streetlamp seemed to whisper secrets, teasing at the edges of her awareness.
Her hand twitched again. She could feel it now — a deep desire for something more. To claim her place. To prove that she was capable of so much more than what she'd been shown.
She took a deep breath, a quiet smile curving her lips. Patience.
The game had only just begun.
From the shadows, Mazanka watched. He leaned against the edge of a rooftop, his posture casual, relaxed, his arms folded loosely across his chest. The grin that tugged at his lips was not one of amusement — it was something sharper, more knowing.
He knew she was there.
Her presence, faint but undeniable, had been like a breeze through the trees. He'd known the moment she'd started tailing him, the moment she'd set her eyes on Rakan. There was no escaping it. And honestly? He was more amused than concerned. She wasn't as subtle as she thought.
His eyes glinted as he watched the girl from above, a faint laugh bubbling in his throat, though he made no sound. The idea of her thinking she could outwit him? A joke, really.
But there was more to it than that, wasn't there? He knew her intentions well. She was following the same old path — the one that had led him away from everything he knew. Ambition. The same ambition that burned so brightly within him once upon a time.
Her mentor—that old bastard, Kurosawa, had been his own guide once. The irony wasn't lost on him. But the little Kenshiki didn't know that, did she? She had no idea that the same man who had taught her everything was the one who had taught him too. He could almost taste her anger from up here, thick and cloying, the way it tangled with her desire to prove herself.
I'm not worried, he thought with a entertained chuckle. She's playing checkers. I'm playing Taikyoku shogi.