The morning of the departure, Yuma woke up before the sun.
Not because he couldn't sleep. Just because it was that morning and his body had known before he did.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. Looked at the room in the grey light of early morning. The window that looked out over the garden. The arena below. The marks still visible in the stone from there, the cracks, the burn marks, the places where something real had happened.
He looked at them.
Then he got up and packed his things.
The tactical vest folded carefully. The gloves in their pouch. The sneakers. A few clothes. The notebook in which he had started writing things down without really knowing why, observations about his techniques, thoughts that came at night, phrases he didn't want to forget.
He closed the bag.
In the room next door, the muffled sounds of Enji doing the same thing. That way of packing methodically, checking twice, taking his time even when there was no need to.
Yuma smiled slightly.
He picked up his bag and stepped into the hallway.
Enji was already there. Bag on his shoulder. Goggles on his forehead.
They looked at each other for a second without saying anything. There was nothing to say that wasn't already obvious.
They went downstairs.
Everyone was there.
Yuma stopped at the bottom of the stairs and took a moment to look. Kazuho near the fireplace, arms crossed. Haruki beside him, hands in his pockets, without a tool for once. Alfred in his usual place, notebook closed. Lucien standing back. Mira, Edwyn, Solène, Gaël in a line. Jules and a domestic near the kitchen.
Everyone.
The silence lasted a moment.
Then Gaël spoke first.
"Take care of yourselves and get stronger. Strong enough that people hear about you."
Solène crossed her arms.
"Next time we fight, it won't be the same. Be ready for that."
"Is that a goodbye or a threat?" said Yuma.
"Both."
Mira stepped forward.
"Take care of yourselves," she said. "And come back in one piece."
Edwyn nodded once without adding anything.
Lucien bowed. Briefly.
Jules, from the back of the room:
"Goodbye, Master Yuma. Goodbye, Master Enji."
The domestic beside him nodded, looking at them with a gentle expression.
Alfred stepped forward.
"I have noted many things since your arrival. Progress. Mistakes. Moments that deserved to be kept somewhere even if no one else would ever see them."
He paused.
"This notebook will continue to exist long after you are gone. Everything you did here is in it. And it will not leave."
He bowed slightly.
Then Haruki.
He didn't step forward immediately. He stood there for a second, hands still in his pockets, looking at Enji with an expression that wasn't often seen on him, not the blacksmith focused on his work, not the older brother who teases. Something more raw than that. Something that was having trouble finding its shape in words because Haruki was not someone who usually searched for words.
He took his hands out of his pockets.
"Yuma," he said first. "You arrived here in a way that was anything but ordinary, I remember it. And you arrived with artifacts that allowed me to progress in my own work. It's because of that that I was able to create what you're wearing now. Make good use of it."
Yuma nodded.
Then Haruki turned to Enji.
The silence between them lasted longer than the others.
"Enji."
His voice had changed. Not much. Just enough for everyone in the room to notice.
"When you came back the first time after the tournament, I said nothing. I didn't know what to say. I was your older brother and I didn't know what to say to my little brother who was suffering in the room next door."
He paused briefly.
"Those two months you were away with Yuma, when you told me you wanted to become a hunter again and you chose your artifacts, I worked on your equipment every evening. Not because Father asked me to. Because it was the only way I had of doing something for you from a distance. Every piece I forged, I was thinking of you."
He stopped again. Breathed.
"The goggles. The vest. The gloves. It's not just equipment. It's everything I wanted to tell you and didn't know how to say."
Enji looked at his brother.
"Haruki."
"Don't say anything. Wear them well. And come back."
He stepped back before anything else could be said.
Then it was Kazuho.
He stepped forward with that direct sobriety that was his own. He looked at Yuma.
"You arrived here without anyone expecting you. And you leave behind something this house hadn't had for a long time. Life. Noise. People who fight for something. Thank you for that. You will always be welcome here. Now and after."
Then he turned to Enji.
"My son. I watched you grow up in this house. I watched you before the tournament. I watched you after. The months when you were here without really being here. I didn't know what to do at that time. I am a blacksmith. I know how to work metal, not silences. So I let time pass hoping that would be enough."
He glanced at Yuma for a fraction of a second.
"It seems that time was not what was needed."
He came back to Enji.
"Take care of yourself."
Enji took a moment.
"Yes," he said.
Said in a way that meant he had heard everything else.
The silence settled.
Everyone had said what they had to say. Something remained in the air, not discomfort, just a moment waiting to be concluded before it closed.
Yuma and Enji looked at each other.
A second at most.
Then Yuma looked at everyone in the room, Alfred, Lucien, Mira, Edwyn, Solène, Gaël, Jules, the domestic, Haruki, Kazuho, and said what had been true for a while but hadn't yet been said out loud.
"Our dream," he said.
His voice was calm. Not loud. But clear.
"Is to be the strongest team in the world."
Enji said it at the same time.
Not planned. Not coordinated. Just the two of them having had the same thing in mind long enough for it to come out simultaneously.
"The strongest team in the world."
The silence that followed was different from the previous one.
Something about the way it had been said, without boasting, without performance, with the absolute simplicity of things one truly believes, made the phrase larger than it might have seemed.
Haruki lowered his head.
Alfred opened his notebook and wrote something. No one had asked him to open it again.
Kazuho looked at the two boys.
Nodded.
"Then go," he said.
They picked up their bags and walked out into the morning light.
Erymis was already awake, the merchants, the first voices in the streets, the smell of bread from somewhere. They walked toward the station side by side without hurrying.
"Two days on a train, that's going to be long," said Yuma.
"Yes. But it'll be faster than on foot."
"First class, it'll be the first time for me. And you?"
"I've already traveled first class."
Yuma looked at him.
"Obviously."
"It's comfortable. You'll see."
"Great. I can't wait."
They kept walking.
"Do you think Reishin will be at Vantarcity?"
Enji thought for a moment.
"He'll be there," he said.
Yuma looked at him.
"I hope so. Because with him everything is complicated."
"I know. But he's still the one who told us to come."
The Erymis station was tall and wide, with metal and glass vaulting above and the platforms stretching toward the horizon. People everywhere. Noise. People going somewhere.
They got on the train. Found their seats. Window for Yuma, he had checked the number first and Enji had let it happen without comment.
The train pulled away.
Erymis slid past the window. The rooftops. The streets. The Aetheria Workshop somewhere in it all, invisible from there but present in memory. Then the city gave way to countryside and the sky took all the space it wanted.
Yuma watched the landscape go by without saying anything.
Vantarcity. The test. What was coming.
He thought about everything that had happened since he had left Bourg-Éclat two months earlier. Two months. It felt both too short and too long. Too short for everything that had happened. Too long for someone who had grown up in a place where every day looked like the last.
He closed his eyes.
The train rolled on.
Two days.
And after, what was coming.
In Bourg-Éclat, the days resembled one another.
That was one of the fundamental properties of this village, the days had always resembled one another and nobody had ever found a serious reason to change that. The same stone houses. The same paths. The same faces that were sixty or older.
Two months had passed since Yuma left.
Two months was short in a place like Bourg-Éclat. But Yuma's absence was felt in a way that was not proportional to the duration. The village was quiet. It had always been quiet. But now it was quiet in a different way, like a room from which something had been removed without being able to quite identify what it was.
Yoma Sekyhiro was making his rounds of the village as he did most mornings.
He passed in front of Fernand's house. Fernand had his hat over his eyes and his hands on his knees.
"Fernand."
"Yoma."
He continued. The well. The gardens of Marguerite and Robert. The main square with its stone bench.
He sat down.
Footsteps on the path. Marcel sat down beside him without asking.
"Yoma."
"Marcel."
They looked at the village together.
"Since the kid left," said Marcel. "It's not the same."
Yoma nodded slowly.
"The village is very quiet."
"Too quiet."
"We never said too quiet in our lifetime with the past we've had."
"That's true. It feels strange when that's exactly why I retired."
A silence.
"Do you remember the time with the well," said Marcel.
"Which one."
"The one where he claimed it was because of a fox that he fell in."
Yoma closed his eyes.
"There was no fox. He just fell because he wasn't paying attention."
"He looked so convinced there was a fox."
"He always looked convinced. That was the problem."
They laughed. Not loudly. Sincerely.
Then something changed.
Not a sound. Not a light. Something in the air itself, a presence, massive, sudden, that crossed all of Bourg-Éclat in less than a second. The walls. The ground. The air in their lungs. Everyone in the village felt it in one way or another. Fernand raised his head from his doorway. Marguerite's tomatoes seemed to tremble in their patch.
A colossal quantity of mana.
Not aggressive. Not deployed. Just there, like someone entering somewhere who doesn't bother to make themselves small.
Yoma stopped laughing.
He knew that energy. The way you recognize a voice heard hundreds of times, in its texture, in its warmth, in that way of occupying space.
He stood up.
Marcel was looking at him.
"I think he's finally back," he said softly.
Yoma was looking at the village entrance. The path coming from the south.
"That kid," he said.
No visible tenderness. No indifference either.
"He still loves making an entrance."
He started walking.
A man appeared on the path.
He walked like someone going somewhere because that was where he was going and for no other reason. Not a glance at the surroundings. Not a second of hesitation. Tall, with something in his gait that immediately said what he was, not constructed arrogance, something more fundamental. The quiet and absolute conviction of a man who has never had a serious reason to doubt himself.
His eyes swept the village.
Found Yoma.
"Yoma."
He changed direction toward him without slowing down.
Yoma kept walking toward him without slowing down either.
They met in the middle of the path. Face to face.
The man raised his right fist.
Yoma raised his right fist.
They punched each other full in the face at the same time.
A gust crossed the path in both directions. Dust rose. Leaves moved. A shutter slammed. Marcel held his hat with both hands.
The man worked his jaw.
"The old man is still in shape."
Yoma looked at the man with that complete, calm attention.
"The kid is too."
The man smiled. Just enough.
They started walking side by side toward the edge of the village. Without having decided to.
The village watched them leave. Fernand. Marcel. Marguerite standing in her garden. No one said anything because there was nothing to say that was on the level of what they had just seen.
The houses gave way to fields. The fields to open plain.
"Where is Yuma," said the man.
"He left to become a hunter, you idiot," said Yoma.
"He finally turned sixteen for his awakening?"
"You don't even know your own son's age," said Yoma with resignation.
"Hahahaha. Kids grow up fast these days."
"Truly. I wonder what I missed in your upbringing," sighed Yoma.
Yoma looked at the man from the side.
"I heard you created a guild."
The man didn't slow down.
"Yeah. It was finally time, wasn't it."
"How did it happen."
"A few unexpected circumstances."
"That's all you have to say."
"That's all I have to say for now."
Yoma nodded slowly. With this man it had always worked that way, he gave what he wanted to give and not a line more. Insisting had never changed anything.
"I wonder what affinities that brat ended up with," said the man.
"It doesn't matter which ones. With what he is, he'll be good regardless. That kid has more talent than you and me combined."
"And the training he went through will give him explosive growth?"
"That's true. I'm looking forward to seeing it."
The man held onto that. That particular silence of someone turning information over in their head without sharing it.
"That kid, when he's strong enough, we'll be able to fight for real. And it's going to be incredible. I can't wait."
Yoma looked at his son with tiredness and amusement mixed together.
"All you ever think about is fighting."
Then after walking for a while, the plain opened up before them.
Wide. Flat. Nothing but grass and sky and the horizon far ahead.
The man stopped.
"It's time."
Yoma stopped across from him.
"It's time."
Yami took the cube from his jacket. Small. Perfectly smooth. A color that shifted slightly depending on the light. Something in its surface said it was ancient in a way that recently made objects were not.
He held it in his palm.
Looked at it for a second.
A fraction of a second on his face, imperceptible if one wasn't looking at exactly the right moment. The memory of a hand that had placed this object in his.
"Mom gave it to me," he said.
Simply. Without elaborating. Without waiting for a response.
He activated it.
The vibration spread from the cube in all directions. The ground. The grass. The air. And the dome began to form, at first almost nothing, a faint distortion in the air, then more and more present, more and more solid, transparent and real, spreading in a perfect circle and rising toward the sky until it closed above them.
Inside the air was different. Denser. More charged. What was going to happen here would stay here.
The cube disappeared into Yami's pocket.
He turned to face Yoma.
And took his position.
Yoma turned to face Yami.
And took his.
The same style in two different bodies. The same origin in two lives that had taken different paths. One who had built everything. The other who had received it and pushed it further.
Face to face.
The wind passed one last time over the grass around the dome.
Then stopped.
End of Chapter 21