"Thank you."
Bang.
The world flashed white.
The wall behind him simply ceased to exist.
The shockwave hit him like a freight train, lifting him off his feet and hurling him across the room. He crashed through the opposite wall, plaster and drywall and splintered wood giving way around him and kept going.
Through the next room. Through the wall beyond that. Through a third wall, a fourth, a fifth, his body carving a path of destruction through the hotel like a bullet through paper.
He didn't have time to think.
The world was a blur of white dust and splintered wood and the deafening roar of collapsing masonry. Something inside him pulsed with sudden, desperate urgency, flooding his body with mana, reinforcing his bones, his muscles, his skin, keeping him alive through impacts that should have killed him ten times over.
He crashed through the exterior wall and tumbled into open air.
The harbor sprawled below him, gray water and distant ships and the skeletal outlines of cranes against the afternoon sky. He had maybe two seconds before gravity finished what the explosion had started.
His hand shot out, caught a protruding balcony railing, and wrenched his body sideways. The railing buckled under his weight but held. He swung himself onto the balcony and pressed his back against the wall, gasping for breath.
[Damn it, it hurts, every single bone in my body is screaming]
His ears were ringing. His vision was blurred at the edges. Blood ran down his forehead from a gash he hadn't noticed. Dust coated his clothes, his hair, his skin, turning him into a ghost of himself.
The hotel was burning.
[Is Kira okay?]
Smoke billowed from the hole he'd been thrown through, black and thick and shot through with tongues of orange flame.
Sirens were already wailing in the distance. People were screaming. The city was falling apart again, just like it had during the bombings, just like it always did when witches were involved.
He pushed himself to his feet. His legs held. His arms held. The knife was still in his belt, somehow. His hand closed around its hilt.
A figure stepped through the smoke.
Tall. Ginger hair wild around her face.
Gold eyes blazing with something that was cold. Something that had no name in any human language. She wore the same dark coat from the night before, the same black boots, the same expression of absolute, unwavering focus.
Reina.
She didn't speak. Didn't offer any explanation or warning or ultimatum. She simply raised her revolver and fired.
Hoshimi was already moving.
He tried to dodge but the bullet had changed directions mid air and punched through his shoulder where his chest had been a heartbeat before. He dove sideways, rolled across the narrow platform, and launched himself toward the adjacent building. His fingers found a windowsill, gripped, pulled.
His body followed the momentum, crashing through the glass and into an empty office. Cubicles stretched in every direction, dark and silent and abandoned.
[I need to run. I should worry about myself first]
He didn't stop running.
Behind him, Reina landed on the office floor without a sound.
Her boots made no noise on the cheap carpet. Her breathing was steady, unhurried. She moved through the darkened cubicles, her gold eyes tracking his every movement with the patience of a predator that had already decided its prey wasn't a threat.
Hoshimi vaulted over a desk, kicked through a door, and found himself in a stairwell.
He took the steps three at a time, descending toward the ground floor, toward the street, toward anywhere that might provide cover or escape or some slim chance of survival.
[Damn it]
Reina didn't take the stairs. She simply stepped off the edge of the stairwell and fell, her coat billowing around her, her boots hitting the ground floor landing with a sound like a thunderclap. She was waiting for him when he reached the bottom.
Her fist caught him in the sternum.
The impact drove the air from his lungs and sent him crashing through the stairwell's exterior door, through the lobby, through the front window in a shower of glass and metal.
He hit the street hard, rolled, came up on one knee with his knife already in his hand. Blood dripped from a dozen small cuts where the glass had sliced his skin, he grasped his chest, trying to force his own body to breathe. His chest was healing, he could feel the bone fragments realigning, the muscle tissue weaving itself back together, but it was slower than it should have been.
[How do I beat her?]
Reina walked through the shattered window. Glass crunched beneath her boots. Her revolver was in her hand, but she didn't raise it. Not yet.
[Can I even beat her?]
"You're running," she said. Her voice was flat. Empty.
Hoshimi didn't answer. He pushed himself to his feet and bolted down the street.
She followed.
Not running. Not chasing. Just walking, her stride unhurried, her pace somehow matching his desperate sprint. The city blurred around them, shops and warehouses and the skeletal remains of buildings that had been damaged in the bombings and never repaired.
People scattered at the sight of them, diving into doorways and alleys, their screams swallowed by the thunder of Hoshimi's heartbeat in his ears.
He ducked into an alley. Climbed a fire escape. Ran across the rooftops, jumping from building to building with a desperate agility.
The sword couldn't erase exhaustion.
[I need to run faster]
He could feel her like a cold hand on the back of his neck.
He dropped off a rooftop and crashed through the window of an abandoned factory.
The interior was dark and cavernous, filled with rusted machinery and the ghosts of a city's industrial past. Dust hung in the air like fog, catching the dim light that filtered through broken windows high above. He landed hard on a catwalk, rolled, came up running.
Reina landed behind him. Her boots made no sound on the rusted metal.
He grabbed a length of pipe from the catwalk railing and swung it at her face.
She caught it, bare-handed, her fingers closing around the rusted metal with a grip that was unbreakable. She squeezed, and the pipe crumpled like paper.
Her other hand closed around his throat.
She lifted him off his feet and slammed him against the factory wall. The corrugated metal buckled around his spine. His vision went white at the edges.
[I can't, I can't beat her]
The knife slipped from his fingers and clattered to the floor below.
[She's not giving me an opportunity at all]
Her voice was barely above a whisper. "It'll be easier if you stop running."
His hands came up. Not to fight. Not to push her away. His fingers found her face, her cheek, her jaw, the familiar lines of a face he'd known his entire life and pressed against her skin with a gentleness that seemed to surprise her.
"Mom," he said. His voice cracked on the word. "I love you."
Her grip on his throat loosened, just slightly.
"You think that's going to work?"
She threw him.
His body crashed through another wall—brick and mortar and rusted steel—and tumbled into open air. He hit the ground hard, rolled, came up gasping. The factory had collapsed around him, or maybe he'd been thrown into a different building entirely. He couldn't tell anymore. The world was a blur of pain and dust and the desperate, animal need to keep moving.
He ran.
Through alleys.
Through streets.
Through the maze of the industrial district with its abandoned warehouses and rusted machinery and the ghosts of a city that had been dying long before he was born.
Reina followed.
Always just close enough.
He crashed through the door of a warehouse and found himself in a vast, empty space. The ceiling soared overhead, lost in shadow.
[It hurts to breathe, why does it hurt to breathe? Why is my heart beating so fast? I can hear it. I can hear my heart.]
The floor was concrete, cracked and uneven, littered with the debris of decades of neglect. Moonlight filtered through broken windows high above, casting the space in shades of silver and shadow.
He stopped in the center of the warehouse.
[Please, Excalibur. Wherever you are. I need you.]
His legs were shaking. His lungs were burning. His hand pressed against his chest, against the sword's pulse, against the only thing that was keeping him upright.
Reina stepped through the doorway.
She walked toward him slowly, her boots echoing in the vast space. Her revolver was in her hand. Her gold eyes were fixed on his face. There was no hesitation in her stride.
"Looks like you can't run anymore."
Hoshimi's hand tightened on his knife. His legs steadied. His breathing slowed. The sword's warmth flooded through him, and for a moment, just a moment, he felt something that might have been peace.
[I'm going to die]
The warehouse wall exploded inward.
A wave of blood, crimson and glistening and moving like a living thing, swept through the space between them, forming a barrier that separated Hoshimi from Reina.
The blood solidified, hardened, became a wall of crystalline crimson that caught the moonlight and scattered it into a thousand fragments of red and silver.
Her dark blue hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail.One of her arms was raised, her fingers curled, her mana signature burning with an intensity that made the air itself tremble.
Her empty sleeve was pinned up neatly at the shoulder, the fabric crisp and clean. Her crimson eyes were fixed on Reina with an expression that was neither fear nor anger but something colder.
"Why didn't you tell me you were planning to run away?"
"I would've joined you."
[Lucy..]
"Zenith of Sloth."
"Hollow Verdict of the King's Mercy."