Four days.
Ninety-six hours of silence. Five thousand, seven hundred and sixty minutes of emptiness where Sunny should have been. Megumi had counted them all, marking the passage of time by the shifting shadows that crawled across the rusted metal walls of their shelter, by the drip-drip-drip of rainwater leaking through the corrugated roof, by the grinding ache in his chest that felt too similar to the sensation of shadows dissolving into nothingness.
He had died once. He remembered the feeling of unraveling, of his existence fraying at the edges like old cloth. This waiting felt worse.
In his previous life, Megumi Fushiguro had been many things: a sorcerer, a vessel for the shadows, a boy who commanded the Ten Shadows Technique. He had faced Special Grades, had died and been resurrected, had fought against the King of Curses himself. But here, in this gray and broken world, he was nothing. No cursed energy flowed through his veins. No shikigami answered his call. When the bullies from the eastern blocks came—three boys older than him, with knuckles wrapped in rusted wire and eyes like hollow pits—he could do nothing but curl inward and wait for the impacts to stop.
They had come two days after Sunny left.
"Where's your guard dog, freak?" The largest one, with a scar splitting his eyebrow, had kicked Megumi's ribs. "Heard he finally caught the Spell. Probably dead already. Or wish he was."
Megumi hadn't answered. He had learned long ago that words only invited more violence. But he had memorized the way the boy stood, the angle of his hips, the telltale shift in weight that preceded a strike. If he had curse energy, he would beaten the shit out of them already. Instead, he absorbed the blow, tasted copper, and thought: Sunny would have fought.
And Sunny did fight, when he was there. Megumi had seen his brother—then only eight years old, all bones and desperate fury—launch himself at a man twice his size for stealing their mother's locket. He had seen Sunny bite, claw, use his forehead as a weapon, fighting with the single-minded savagery of a cornered beast. He never won cleanly. But he always made the other person hurt enough that they never came back.
That was the secret of Sunless, Megumi had learned. He wasn't strong. He was just too stubborn to die, and too vicious to be worth the trouble.
Now, at sixteen, Sunny had gone to face the Nightmare Spell, and Megumi was left with nothing but the memory of violence and the crushing weight of his own helplessness.
The morning of the fourth day broke gray and sour, the sky the color of infected wounds. Megumi pulled on his thin coat—patched at the elbows with tape scavenged from construction sites—and stepped out into the outskirts. The slums proper were too dangerous now without Sunny's protection, but the outer rings, where demolished buildings created a labyrinth of rubble and rust, offered opportunities for those willing to dig through filth.
He carried a hooked pole and a frayed canvas bag. His destination was the Trash Heap, a massive accumulation of refuse from the higher districts that spilled over the edge of the city walls like a rotting waterfall. Here, the poor picked through the leavings of the rich, searching for copper wire, intact glass, synthetic materials that could be traded for credits or food chits.
The smell hit him first: acrid, sweet, overwhelming. Decay and chemical waste. Megumi pulled a strip of cloth over his nose—not to block the scent, which was impossible, but to filter the worst of the particulate matter that floated in the stagnant air. He had seen what lung-rot did to scavengers who didn't take precautions. Slow suffocation, coughing up black blood, death in a gutter.
He worked methodically, as he did everything. No wasted motion. He hooked into piles of debris, sifted through the layers with gloved hands, eyes scanning for the telltale gleam of metal or the heavy density of valuable polymers. Around him, other scavengers moved like ghosts, faces hidden behind masks, eyes hollow with hunger. No one spoke. In the Heap, conversation was a liability. Sound attracted attention, and attention attracted predators—both human and otherwise.
By midday, his bag contained: three copper wires stripped from dead electronics, a cracked solar cell that might still hold partial charge, and a handful of aluminum fragments. Pathetic. Barely enough for a day's worth of syntpaste, let alone anything else.
Megumi straightened, his back aching, his hands stained black with grease and oxidation. He looked up at the sky, calculating the time. Four days. If Sunny had survived the initial infection, he would be in the First Nightmare now. Dreaming. Fighting. Dying, perhaps, in some horror-scape of the Spell's design.
The thought made Megumi's hands tremble. He gripped the hooked pole tighter, focusing on the physical sensation. Control, he told himself. Discipline. Emotions were shadows—necessary, but only if directed.
He began the long walk home.
Their shelter sat behind the carcass of a demolished hab-block, a rusted metal shed that had once been a maintenance storage unit. It was invisible from the main thoroughfares, which made it safe, and the surrounding rubble provided multiple escape routes, which made it defensible. Sunny had chosen it specifically for these qualities when Megumi was six and the orphanages had refused to take them both.
Megumi turned the final corner, his boots squelching in the mud, and stopped.
A black PTV sat parked outside their shed.
It was a thing of beauty and terror—sleek, armored, humming with barely contained power. Personal Transport Vehicles were rare in the outskirts, rarer still in this quarter of absolute poverty. Only government officials or Awakened had access to such machines. And government officials never came here unless they were hunting for carriers of the Spell.
Fear, cold and sudden, gripped Megumi's spine. Had they come to quarantine him? To burn the shed as a precaution? He took a step backward, calculating escape routes, even as his heart hammered against his ribs.
Then the PTV's door hissed open.
She stepped out like a blade drawn from its sheath—effortless, dangerous, and impossibly graceful. A woman in her late twenties, wearing a dark blue uniform with silver epaulets that caught the gray light. Her hair was short, raven-black, cut in a severe style that framed a face of striking, aristocratic beauty. Her skin was pale as alabaster, her eyes the color of ice on deep water—blue, penetrating, and currently fixed on Megumi with an expression of mild curiosity.
Three silver stars adorned her left sleeve.
Ascended.
Megumi knew that much, not from personal experience, but from the whispers that circulated through the outskirts.
"Well," Jet said, her voice carrying a lazy edge of amusement. "You look like you've seen a ghost, kid."
Megumi didn't respond. His eyes were fixed on the second figure emerging from the vehicle.
Sunny.
But not the Sunny who had left four days ago. That Sunny had been scrawny, pale, moving with the jittery tension of a starving animal. This Sunny was... transformed.
He stood taller, having gained at least two inches in height. His frame, once all sharp angles and visible ribs, had filled out with lean, wiry muscle that moved with coiled efficiency beneath his skin. His complexion, previously the color of old ash, had shifted to a healthier pallor—still pale, but no longer sickly. The dark circles under his eyes remained, but they seemed less like marks of exhaustion and more like shadows of something deeper, something that had seen darkness and brought pieces of it back.
He wore a simple police-issued tracksuit, but he carried himself differently. Before, Sunny had moved like prey—always aware of exits, always ready to bolt. Now he moved like a predator who had learned patience. Like a shadow given weight.
Their eyes met.
Sunny smiled—that same crooked, defiant grin—but there was a new confidence behind it. A hardness in the jaw. He had gone to hell and carved his way back out.
"Megumi," Sunny said.
Something broke in Megumi's chest. The careful discipline, the rigid control, the walls he had built to survive four days of solitude and helplessness—they crumbled like wet paper.
He ran.
He didn't care that he was covered in filth from the Trash Heap, that his clothes stank of decay, that his face was smeared with grease and grime. He didn't care that the Ascended was watching, or that running made him look like a child, or that his legs were shaking from exhaustion.
He crossed the distance in seconds and collided with his brother, wrapping his arms around Sunny's torso with a force that would have toppled the old Sunny. This Sunny barely swayed, his own arms coming up immediately to encircle Megumi, holding him with a strength that felt like safety.
"I'm back," Sunny whispered against Megumi's hair, his voice rough with emotion.
Megumi buried his face in Sunny's shoulder, smelling the unfamiliar scent of antiseptic and something else—something dark and cold, like stone after midnight. He didn't cry. He had forgotten how, somewhere between his first death and this second life. But his fingers dug into Sunny's back with desperate strength, and his breath came in short, ragged gasps that might have been sobs if he had allowed them to be.
"You smell terrible," Sunny muttered, but his arms tightened. "Like garbage and bad decisions."
"You look different," Megumi managed, his voice muffled against fabric. "Taller."
"I grew up. It happens when you're fighting for your life in a frozen hellscape."
"I don't care."
"I know."
They stood there for a long moment, two boys from the outskirts who had no one but each other, holding on like drowning men to a lifeline. The rain began again, soft and gray, settling on their shoulders like dust.
From the PTV, Jet watched with a small, genuine smile curving her lips. She leaned against the armored door, arms crossed, giving them their privacy but not quite looking away. When she finally spoke, her voice carried that same dry, edged tone that Megumi would later learn was her default.
"Well," Jet said, her eyes flicking from Megumi to Sunny with something like approval. "I was going to ask if you wanted me to file paperwork for a temporary guardian exemption, but I see you've already got the 'overprotective guardian' act down pat, Sunless. Even got the messy hair and the exhausted scowl."
Sunny pulled back slightly, one hand remaining on Megumi's shoulder, keeping physical contact as if afraid his brother might vanish if he let go completely. "He's not a burden, Master Jet."
"Didn't say he was." Jet pushed off the vehicle, her boots crunching on the gravel. She approached them, and Megumi found himself meeting her gaze without flinching. Something in her expression shifted—recognition, perhaps, or the acknowledgment of a kindred spirit. She saw the darkness in him, Megumi realized. The shadows that weren't cursed energy, but something older and more personal.
Sunny looked at Megumi, something flickering across his features. "I promised you didn't I. That I'll come back".
"Promises are just words," Megumi said, his voice dropping to that quiet, intense register that made adults uncomfortable. "But you're here. That's what matters."