The night hadn't ended. It had simply stretched thin.

Max stood on the compound's north wall, shoulders hunched against the predawn cold. The fog had retreated from the immediate area, but the forest still pulsed with something unseen – slow, alive, too patient to be wind. The stone samurai at the gate stood immobile below, their blades still humming faintly with the residue of warded power.

Chloe climbed the last steps to the rooftop, barefoot, a blanket clutched around her shoulders. Her eyes were sunken, the skin under them bruised with insomnia. She didn't speak at first – just stared at the trees like they might answer a question she hadn't dared to ask.

"I couldn't sleep," she said quietly.

Max didn't look away from the trees. "Didn't expect anyone to."

She leaned on the stone railing. "It whispered again. The fog. Same voice. Same name."

Max's jaw tightened. "Mine."

Chloe nodded once. "It didn't sound angry. Just... familiar. Like it already knew you."

Below, Liz's stasis pod gave a brief flicker – red light pulsing unevenly beneath the layered seals. Ferron appeared moments later, rubbing sleep from his eyes with one hand and clutching a brush and seal-paper in the other. He knelt beside the pod and began muttering old words, painting swift glyphs in ochre ink.

"She's not stable," he said without looking up. "Something in the ambient soulfield is reaching for her. Probing. It's not strong enough to breach containment. Yet."

Max turned to him. "Is the house still sealed?"

"Yes," Ferron said. "The guardians hold. But wards repel intrusion, not observation."

Chloe glanced at the gate. "So they could see us last night. All those things. Why didn't they come in?"

Ferron finished the glyph and blew gently across the paper. It ignited in blue flame and vanished into the pod's outer layer. The light stabilized.

He looked at her.

"Because this place is marked. But it's not invisible."

Max spoke quietly. "They saw us. And walked past anyway."

The weight of that landed hard. Chloe pulled the blanket tighter.

From below, the sliding door creaked open. Victor stepped out, fully geared, shirtless despite the cold. His skin rippled with slow transformation – horns rising, arms thickening, his back bulging as the full weight of the chimera settled in. His face hardened, less human now.

"I'm going out," he said. "I need to see it with my own eyes."

No one argued.

Victor vaulted the wall like a ghost, landing in the grass without a sound. Max watched him vanish into the trees, mist curling at his heels.

Ten minutes passed.

Then twenty.

He returned just as the horizon began to grey, his body still altered – scales twitching, claws flexed. He climbed the wall and dropped down beside them, panting softly.

"Tracks," he said. "All through the eastern valley. I counted nine kinds."

Chloe frowned. "Animals?"

"Some," Victor said. "But not normal. The footfalls were uneven. Like broken bones walking. And some… looked human."

Ferron knelt. "Anything else?"

Victor nodded. "There was a pattern. Like a stampede. But wrong."

He wiped his hands on his pants, leaving streaks of earth and ash. "I've studied herd behaviour. Migration routes. Panic responses. Stampedes form from threat-response cascades. But these… they weren't fleeing. They were herding something. Channeling it. Others gave chase. Something hunted. Something ran."

He paused.

"And some just watched."

Max didn't move.

Victor's voice lowered. "Whatever we heard last night... it wasn't random. That was a hunt."

Dan knelt beside the wall. He didn't say anything for a long time. His eyes followed a long streak in the dirt – thin, curved, like something had dragged its limbs across the stones.

"It's happening again," he murmured.

Max turned. "What is?"

Dan stood slowly. "Something like Chengdu. I can feel it." He looked toward the valley. "And if it's starting here, we're already late."

He looked around the group, face drawn, voice steady.

"I need to help them."

"No one's stopping you," Alyssa said from the stairwell, arms crossed.

Dan's voice was quiet, but firm. "We don't know what's happening in the city, but… I keep thinking about Chengdu. About what we saw there. What we almost became."

He looked down at his hands. "If something like that's starting here – if people are hurt, scared, lost – I need to be there. I can help. I have to try."

He stood abruptly, grabbing his pack. "I'm going into the city. Now."

Alyssa groaned, pushing up from the floor. "Seriously? It's barely light."

Dan didn't stop moving. "That didn't stop anything last time."

She rolled her eyes but reached for her gauntlets anyway. "Fine. But you're not going alone. Someone's gotta keep you from getting yourself killed."

Dan gave her a grateful look.

"I didn't say I liked it," she muttered, strapping her gear on. "Let's just go before I change my mind."

Max nodded. "Okay. We'll split up at sunrise."

Chloe looked between them, her mouth a thin line. "That wasn't an attack last night."

"No," Ferron said, his gaze drifting toward the trees. The fog had returned – thinner now, curling along the forest floor like smoke that refused to fade.

"It wasn't random either," Max said. "Whatever it was… it passed us by. On purpose."

Ferron nodded. "And next time, it might not."

The group fell quiet. The weight of what they didn't know settled like ash in their lungs.

Max's voice cut through the silence. "The sooner we find Hana, the sooner we get Liz back. If this is anything like Chengdu… we don't want to be caught flat-footed again."

In the distance, something howled.

Not a wolf. Not a man.

Something in between.

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…………………

The morning light bled grey across the paper windows, pale and watchful. The hearth had gone out hours ago, and no one had relit it. In the centre of the room, Ferron knelt on the tatami with a strip of parchment unrolled before him. Ink bled into the rice paper as he scratched out a crude map of Kyoto with an old calligraphy brush.

"This is the old north district," he said, circling a cluster of symbols. "Last known contact with Hana-sama was here – beyond the old shrines near Kurama. She was working to fortify the mountainside before communications dropped."

Max stood over his shoulder, arms folded, eyes tracing the route. "She'll have moved since then."

"She always does," Ferron muttered. "But she leaves signs. Soul-touched markers. We'll find her."

Max nodded. "Then that's where we go."

Ferron looked up. "Three groups. No contact until sundown. We regroup here."

Max turned to face the others. "Ferron, Ying, and I will move north into the forests. If Hana's out there, we'll find her."

Without a word, Ying stepped to Max's side. No hesitation. No glance at the others. Her presence was quiet, sharp. A blade already drawn.

Max continued. "Dan and Alyssa – take the city's outskirts. People might be hurt. Look for survivors, signs of what that wave was. But don't linger. If it's too quiet, move."

Dan nodded at once. "We'll help who we can. But we'll be careful."

Alyssa's jaw tensed. "I don't like leaving Chloe."

"I'll be fine," Chloe said quickly, before anyone could speak. "Safer if we're not all clustered. We'll be targets either way."

Victor clapped a hand on Chloe's shoulder. "I'm staying too. This place is old, but fortified. Anyone comes for Liz, they're getting a bullet buffet."

He turned, grinning faintly, and hefted one of the Institute's modified rifles from the crate in the corner. "Actually – sixty-five soulforged bullets. Wanna carry one for luck, Chloe?"

She glanced at the gun, then shook her head. "No thanks. Tensō's quieter."

Victor grinned. "Suit yourself."

They stood there a moment. No one said goodbye. No hugs. No speeches.

Max adjusted the chain on his back, its weight grounding him.

Chloe looked at Alyssa. Their eyes locked – just for a second. Enough.

Then the group split.

The door slid open. Wind carried the scent of old trees and something faintly metallic. The forest waited.

And Kyoto exhaled.

…………………

The trees grew older the deeper they walked.

Not taller. Not thicker. Just… older. The bark peeled in long spirals like memory trying to escape. Branches knotted together into arches, obscuring the morning light. The trail, such as it was, had long since vanished beneath moss and fog.

Ritual talismans fluttered in the wind.

They hung from branches and nailed posts – handmade, weatherworn, each scrawled in ink too old to read. Paper charms stitched with fox fur. Rope wards tied in spiral knots. None bore Institute marks. These were ancestral. Talismans born from desperation, not doctrine.

Max stopped beside one tree. Blood had soaked the paper charm nailed there. Old, rust-brown, dried in streaks.

"Ferron," Max said, voice low.

The exorcist knelt beside the base of the tree. His fingers brushed the moss. Then the earth.

"Tracks," Ferron murmured. "Fresh."

Max crouched. "Fox?"

Ferron didn't answer. Ying joined them, eyes narrowed. Her pistols stayed holstered, but her hand hovered.

The prints were clawed, light, almost playful. But too wide. Too symmetrical. They weren't moving through the forest.

They were circling.

A rustle overhead. Then: laughter.

A child's laugh. Light. Ringing. Carried on no wind.

All three of them froze.

It didn't come again.

Ying exhaled slowly. "We're being watched."

They walked on.

The path curved through a rise of black pine. Statues began to appear – carved from stone, some human, others animal, each half-sunk into the ground or wrapped in roots. One figure bore nine tails. Another had no face. One, cracked down the middle, wept something red down its cheeks. Not paint.

Ferron paused before that one.

"Yokai," he said. "Not demons. They aren't from Hell. They don't make Contracts. They were born here. Shaped by belief. By stories."

Max examined the stone face. "They're real."

"They're real enough." Ferron's eyes scanned the fog. "My family used to hunt them. When we still had numbers. Before the Institute. Before exile."

Ying glanced at him. "I thought your clan was spiritual. Not militant."

"We were both," Ferron said. "The Sōhon-ke trained two branches – keepers and killers. My bloodline failed at both."

"My father taught the blade. My mother, the seals. I disappointed both."

He kept walking. The silence returned, heavier now. Like the forest resented being remembered.

Max caught up beside him. "You said this Hana-sama is powerful?"

Ferron nodded. "She's the youngest prodigy we've ever had. More skilled than anyone in three generations. She mastered the binding rite at sixteen. And she's the first in my clan in over a century to successfully soul-bind a guardian."

"A demon?" Ying asked.

"No," Ferron said, almost reverent. "A bear."

Max blinked. "There it is again. You keep bringing up this bear."

Ying frowned. "Bear?"

"You'll see," Ferron replied.

And then they passed under a shrine gate.

It had collapsed – half-rotted, one post cracked at the base, the crossbeam hanging by vine. But the moment they stepped beneath it, the forest changed.

The light dimmed. The birds fell silent. The scent of incense twisted to something metallic.

Ahead, the trees parted into a clearing.

And the air no longer felt like Earth.

Max's hand found the chain on his back.

Ferron's voice was barely audible.

"Something's close."

…………………

The clearing opened like a wound.

Trees receded into a ring of trampled earth, as if something too large had landed here and bent the world beneath it. At the centre stood a lone figure, hunched and trembling. It wasn't still. It twitched. Shoulders rising in jerks. Limbs shifting out of sync. The fog bent unnaturally around it – curling close, like it was being breathed.

Ying raised a hand, silent.

The figure turned.

It had once been a woman.

Scraps of a dress clung to her form – white silk, torn and soiled, streaked with red. The fabric hung in strips, caught in the knotted protrusions that had erupted from her back. Her spine jutted through pale skin like cracked stone. Fingers ended in black claws. Her face – half-beautiful, half-broken – was smeared with dirt and blood. One eye remained human. The other was sunken, glowing faintly gold.

Her mouth twitched open. Not in speech.

In hunger.

She roared and charged.

It was not a human charge. It was a stampede – four-limbed, low to the ground, fast enough to make the dirt hiss. Max reached for his chain.

But Ying moved first.

She blurred forward, faster than any normal soldier should've been. Her blade flashed once, silver arc catching the creature across the ribs – drawing black blood. The Yokai didn't slow. It hit her mid-step.

The sound was thunder in flesh.

Ying's body was flung backward like a doll in a hurricane. She slammed into a tree trunk with a sickening crunch, bark splintering around her. She dropped in a heap, unmoving.

The Yokai wheeled back toward Max.

Max's chain whipped free, glowing with Soulfire but the creature never made it.

Ying moved.

She was kneeling now, arm limp, ribs cracked, one eye already swollen shut. But her left hand still gripped a pistol.

She fired. One shot.

The round struck the Yokai between the eyes.

It didn't scream. It didn't stagger.

It simply fell.

The body crumpled forward in a heap of muscle and bones that cracked in the wrong order. It lay still. Black ichor pooled beneath it, soaking into the dirt.

Ferron rushed to Ying's side, dropping to one knee. "Don't move."

"I wasn't planning on it," she muttered, blood running from her mouth.

Max approached the creature cautiously. His chain pulsed in his hand. But the Yokai was dead.

And up close, he saw the truth.

The dress hadn't been torn randomly. It had been a wedding dress.

The face – distorted as it was – still held fragments of a woman's youth. Of hope. Of something human that had been devoured, twisted, and remade.

Max looked up. His voice came low.

"She was turned."

Ferron's jaw tightened. "Recently."

Max looked back at Ying – bloodied, one arm limp, one eye sharp.

"You're hurt."

She gave a small smile through gritted teeth. "But alive."

Max nodded.

"You killed a Yokai."

She looked past him to the corpse. "I saw its eyes," she said quietly. "It wasn't madness. It knew what it was doing."

Ferron didn't speak.

He just stood slowly, his eyes on the body. The soil around it steamed.

"She didn't die," he said. "She was rewritten."

They were silent.

Then Max turned to the edge of the clearing.

"We keep moving."

…………………

The forest held its breath.

Far above the clearing where Max, Ferron, and Ying stood over the broken yokai corpse, a different silence settled. Heavier. Intentional. The kind of stillness found only in places where things had learned to wait.

A pair of eyes blinked open in the dark.

They gleamed gold through a lattice of tangled branches, framed by a crude mask shaped like a fox's skull – bleached white, cracked along one cheekbone, and too large for the face beneath it. The figure didn't move. It didn't need to. It was only here to watch.

And it wasn't alone.

To the left, barely visible, another set of eyes blinked open – these dull and soft, like dying coals. A child's whisper flickered through the leaves. Giddy. Eager. Like a lullaby sung backward.

"He's here," the voice sang.

The figure with the fox mask tilted its head.

"The firewalker," another giggled. "He burns inside."

A third yokai child clung to the trunk of a withered tree, legs twisted like spider limbs, face blank except for two slits where eyes might have once been. From its crooked hand hung a talisman – old parchment, bloodstained, its ink still wet. The sigil was smudged, but recognizable.

Ferron's clan mark. Hana Seineru's ward.

The child let it drop. It fluttered through the air like a feather – and landed in the mud far below.

Behind them, something stirred.

Not rustling. Not steps. A presence – vast, languid, and deep as hunger. The branches behind the children bent under no weight. Mist coiled and thickened, forming shapes that didn't hold, then reshaping again.

Nine tails. Slow. Weightless. Trailing smoke that didn't rise.

A soft, melodic laugh spilled through the canopy. It was beautiful. Familiar. And entirely wrong – like hearing your mother's voice from the bottom of a well, twisted by echo and depth and something else. Something watching you breathe.

"She's close," one of the children murmured, eyes unfocused.

Another whispered, "No… she's dreaming still."

They leaned into each other, twitching like birds on a wire, heads cocked as if listening to music only they could hear.

And then—

"All of them will belong."

The fox-masked watcher turned its head back toward the forest below.

Max's team had vanished into the mist.

No movement. No noise. Just the faint trail of footprints – and the scent of soulfire lingering in the trees.

The children said nothing more.

When the forest finally went still, only the fox mask remained – perched on a gnarled branch, unmoving.

Its eyes still glowed.

And it was facing the direction Max had gone.

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