The right arm of the remnant was a sword.
Not metaphorically: it was an edge, it was force concentrated in a blade that did not have the thickness necessary to be called anything else. And it moved with the specific fluidity of something that is not an external weapon but an extension of the body, without the preparation time that a weapon one picks up and puts down requires.
Kana dodged it.
Not with margin. Grazing, with the precision of someone who has learned that margin is a luxury and what matters is that the edge does not find what it is looking for.
She responded with her left elbow to the remnant's side, with the mana concentrated at the point of impact, the kind of strike that against a remnant at this level does not end the fight, but does provide information.
The flow on the right side is denser, she registered. Concentration of mana in that area. Probably related to the arm transformation.
The remnant turned. The sword came in diagonally from above downward, forcing Kana to move to the right to get out of the angle. She responded with her left palm to the forearm of the sword, not to block but to touch, for Kana's mana to find the remnant's flow at that point.
It found it.
Irregular.
More chaotic than a hunter's, with a concentration that was difficult to read fully because the remnant's body did not work the same way as someone who had learned to manage mana, but in the way something uses it without having learned to.
Difficult.
But not impossible.
"What are you looking for?" said Kana, moving to maintain the distance.
The remnant looked at her with its pupil-less eyes, still, too clear for something that spoke with such certainty.
"Do you really think I'm going to tell you?" it said.
"No," said Kana. "But asking costs nothing."
"The other remnant didn't tell you either, I imagine," said the two-metre one, with something that in a human would have been amusement. "The one from the town."
Kana looked at it.
"No," she said. "It got annoyed that I asked."
"Because it's a stupid question," said the remnant, charging again.
The sword came from the right this time. Kana turned inward instead of outward, passing under the angle of the blade, and responded with her right palm to the remnant's right shoulder, with the mana seeking the flow at that specific point.
She found it.
High concentration.
The node from which the mana was feeding the arm's transformation.
She blocked it.
The remnant's right arm changed. It did not return entirely to being an arm, but the sword lost its edge for a second. The blade that had been definitive became less precise, and the remnant noticed it with the expression of something that has received information it did not expect to receive.
"Interesting," it said.
"What are we to you?" said Kana, repositioning herself. "Why attack the headquarters?"
"You are nothing to us," said the remnant, in the tone of someone stating a fact. "That is the problem. Hunters act as though they have authority over what happens to remnants. Over when we exist and when we do not."
The right arm finished recovering and the sword returned.
"We are superior. And yet you come to tell something superior when it may exist."
"That is not what we do," said Kana.
"Isn't it?" said the remnant. "What do you call what you do, then?"
Kana did not respond immediately.
The remnant charged with the speed it had, faster than two metres should be able to move, with the blade seeking Kana's torso from below upward.
Kana threw herself to the left, let the blade pass beside her, and responded with her right palm to the centre of the remnant's torso. The point where the flow of mana was densest. The hardest place to block and the most important if she could manage it.
The contact was enough to feel it.
The block lasted less than two seconds. The time it cost the remnant to recover the flow was visible in how its eyes changed expression in that interval.
"I don't know," said Kana, answering the question in the time the block gave her to speak without the remnant attacking. "But I do know that killing people who have nothing to do with this is not superior. It's just killing."
The remnant looked at her when the flow came back.
"Hunters are not people," it said. "They are an obstacle."
"And the people in the town," said Kana. "Were they also obstacles?"
"They were inferior beings in the path of something superior," said the remnant, with that conviction that was not cruelty but something harder to fight because it believed what it was saying. "The world loses nothing with them."
The remnant looked at her.
"What is your name?" it said.
Kana blinked. Her expression shifted slightly at the question.
"Why do you want to know?"
"Because if I'm going to kill you," said the remnant, with the calm of someone not boasting but saying what is going to happen, "I prefer to know what to call you while I do it."
"You're quite confident," said Kana.
"Sufficiently so."
Kana observed it for a moment.
"All right," she said. "Mizushima Kana."
The remnant looked at her.
"Kana," it repeated, as though testing the weight of the name.
"And I don't suppose you have a name," said Kana.
The remnant smiled.
"That is what you always say."
"Remnants don't have names."
"We do," it said, with something between correction and pride. "I've already demonstrated it by asking for yours."
Kana did not respond.
"I am Gareki."
"Gareki, is it," said Kana, with a slight smile. "Then let's begin in earnest."
The second part of the fight was different from the first.
Gareki had learned.
Not everything, but enough.
It knew that Kana needed contact to use what she used, so it moved in a way that minimised the moments when she could touch without the blade arriving first. The sword changed angle more frequently, without repeating patterns, without the consistency Kana had been reading.
Harder to anticipate.
Kana adjusted.
Instead of looking for the large points — the shoulder, the centre of the torso — she started looking for the small ones. The wrist when the blade completed the arc and had half a second of maximum extension. The elbow when the arm changed direction. Minor points that did not block the entire arm but destabilised it enough to open the next angle.
It was slower.
But it worked.
Gareki stepped back two paces after Kana found the wrist for the third time with that small block. The blade lost its axis for a second, and that second was enough for Kana to reach the shoulder with the mana concentrated in the strongest strike she had used until that moment.
The sound was different from the previous ones.
Gareki went down on one knee.
The sword held. The arm did not yield completely. But the knee on the ground was information about the state of the remnant's mana flow in that moment.
"You are better than I expected," said Gareki, from the floor.
"I know," said Kana.
"That doesn't change what we are," said Gareki. "What we are after. What is going to happen."
"No," said Kana. "But it changes what happens today."
Gareki looked up.
The right arm changed shape once more. Not the sword, but something different. Shorter, more concentrated, the kind of edge that does not need length because it operates at close range with all the density of what it has available.
It charged from the floor.
Kana waited for it.
She did not move backward.
She moved forward.
She used the close distance that the new blade required to operate as the same space where her power was most effective. And when the two were close enough for the blade to be a real threat, Kana's palm found the centre of Gareki's torso.
The block was longer this time.
Not two seconds.
Four.
Five.
Long enough for Gareki's mana to be interrupted in a way that affected not only the arm but something more central, more fundamental.
The blade disappeared.
Gareki was left with an arm that went back to being an arm. Not a sword. Not a weapon. Only the arm of something that without the mana active was less than it had been a moment before.
Kana felt the cost in her hand.
Not pain exactly.
Something deeper.
Like putting one's fingers into a current too strong and the current having tried to take them. Her wrist trembled once. Barely. Enough for her to notice.
But she did not stop.
She struck.
Not with the mana concentrated in a single point, but with everything she had available in that moment, distributed in the way Kana distributed things when she no longer needed to measure them but simply use them.
Gareki fell.
Not on one knee this time.
Completely.
It lay on the corridor floor of the headquarters with its pupil-less eyes looking at the ceiling and something in its expression that Kana could not fully classify. It was not fear, not the acceptance of someone who understands what is coming, but something closer to the attention of something that is still processing even in this moment.
"Hunters..." said Gareki, in the voice that remained, "will never understand."
Kana looked at it.
"No," she said. "Probably not."
Gareki smiled faintly.
"You are only delaying the inevitable."
It dissolved.
Kana lowered her hand.
Her fingers were trembling.
Not much.
Enough for her to close her fist and wait a second before opening it again.
She looked at the empty space where Gareki had been. Then she looked at the corridor that continued ahead, with what she knew was in it, with what she knew was happening at the entrance where she had left the children.
"I have to keep going," she said, to nobody.
And she kept going.
At the entrance, Sae was looking at the sky with the expression of someone thinking about several things at once and having no way of resolving them with the sky.
"How is she doing?" she said.
"Kana is the strongest person I know," said Nori. "She'll be fine."
Ikeda was listening from where he was leaning against the wall with his eyes closed most of the time. Not sleeping, simply resting what the body was asking him to rest.
Sae and Nori looked at Ginjiro and then at each other, as though understanding that someone had to speak to him.
Sae approached Ginjiro.
"Are you all right?" asked Sae.
"Yes," said Ginjiro. "I was just thinking."
"Are you thinking about your parents?" she said.
Ginjiro did not respond immediately.
"Aren't you?" he asked.
Sae looked towards the gate.
"All the time," she said.
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable.
It was worse.
It was honest.
"I trust that they're all right," said Ginjiro at last, in the tone of someone who has made that decision and is holding onto it. "They're with Ryuichi. With other hunters. They'll be fine."
Sae looked at him for a moment.
"Yes," she said.
"Yes," said Nori.
The silence that followed was the kind that exists between people who share a worry and have agreed, without saying so, that saying it aloud does not help.
It was Ikeda who noticed it first.
Not with words. With a change in his breathing, in his posture, in the way his eyes suddenly opened with something that was not the exhaustion from before but something more urgent.
Ginjiro followed the direction of his gaze.
The figure was about twenty metres from the gate, walking towards them with the unhurried pace of something that is not in a hurry because it already knows how what is about to begin will end. The metre-fifty one. Light green, with the cuts from previous fights, with the single eye that found the three children with the same attention with which it would have found anything else in its path.
It stopped.
It looked at them.
"Are you hunters?" it said, in that voice of its.
The three looked at each other.
"He's the one who left my companion like this," said Ikeda, in the low, urgent voice of someone who wants to give information without drawing more attention. "Get away. Run."
"Where to?" said Sae, in the same tone.
There was no useful answer to that and all four of them knew it.
"If you don't answer," said the remnant, with that calm, "it makes no difference to me. I'm going to kill you anyway."
Ginjiro activated the mana.
Nori did the same.
Sae a second later, with eyes that had that mixture of fear and determination that Kana would have recognised from the previous fight in the town.
Ikeda tried to get up.
"Stay down," said Ginjiro, without taking his eyes off the remnant.
"You're children," said Ikeda. "You can't..."
"Stay down," Ginjiro repeated, in the tone that was not that of a ten-year-old but of someone who has made a decision and has no space for anyone to change it.
The remnant observed all three of them with something that was not exactly curiosity but the registration of an unexpected variable.
"Interesting," it said.
And it charged.
It was different from what they had faced in the town.
Not in kind, but in scale.
The deformed one in the town was strong but predictable, with a slowness that had given them time to coordinate. This one was fast in a way that did not correspond to its size, with movements that changed angle before any of the three had finished reading the previous one.
The first strike arrived before Ginjiro could block it fully. The mana absorbed part of the impact, but the rest sent him back two paces with his arm protesting from wrist to shoulder.
Nori came in from the side.
The remnant turned towards him without stopping, with that fluidity of something that has enough to handle more than one threat at the same time, and the strike that reached Nori was enough for his legs to decide that the floor was an option.
Sae launched a burst of mana directly at the centre of the remnant.
The remnant absorbed it.
Did not dodge it.
Absorbed it, with the density of something that has enough for that not to be a problem.
Ginjiro went back in.
Ikeda from the side, with legs that were not responding well, but arms that still had something, threw a strike at the remnant's flank that landed but which the remnant registered with less consequence than it should have had.
All four kept going.
The remnant looked at all four of them with that single unblinking eye, and in that eye there was something Ginjiro interpreted not as amusement but as something closer to the assessment of something determining how much more time it wants to invest in this.
"It doesn't come straight on," said Nori, breathing quickly. "It changes the angle before the strike."
"Can you read it?" said Ginjiro.
Nori gritted his teeth.
"Not in time."
The remnant raised its arm.
The strike that came next had the speed and force of something that is no longer measuring but simply finishing, and all four of them saw it coming and none of them had enough available to do something fully effective about it.
Ginjiro stepped in front of the others.
Not from calculation.
From the same instinct that had made him turn back from the road when Kana had told them to go.
The strike did not arrive.
Something stopped it.
A hand, with the mana active, with that density of someone who has been using it for decades and does not need to activate it fully for it to be sufficient, caught the remnant's arm before the impact had finished forming.
The figure behind that hand was a woman.
Not very tall. With dark hair that had the specific disorder of someone who has been fighting. With a wound on her side that was not new but had not been tended to yet. With eyes that looked at the remnant with the direct assessment of someone who has just arrived and already knows exactly what they are looking at.
"Are you all right?" she said, without taking her eyes off the remnant.
Ginjiro looked at her.
He took a second to process what he was seeing.
The hair.
The posture.
The way she held the remnant's arm with a firmness that was not effort but simply what it was.
"Mum," he said.