Ishida Taro gave a nod of his head.
Not with words — with the specific gesture of someone who has decided that if he is going to lose this fight it will not be for not having tried with everything he had. The chains were ready on his forearms, coiled and taut, waiting for the exact moment.
The grey figure smiled.
Ishida threw the chains.
They shot out in two simultaneous arcs — one towards the creature's right flank, one straight at the torso, calculating that if it dodged one it would find the other. The grey figure moved with a speed that did not correspond to that muscular, dense body — it turned, broke the first chain with a forearm movement that had too much force to be purely physical, and dodged the second with a lateral step that took it exactly where it needed to be to close the distance with Ishida before the chains finished dissipating.
Ishida saw it coming and readied himself.
The close-quarters exchange that followed was short and brutal and came out in favour of neither of them cleanly — Ishida blocked three strikes and connected two, the grey figure absorbed both with a solidity that suggested the damage was real but manageable, and the creature's fourth strike passed over Ishida's block and pushed him back two steps.
It was not that Ishida was weak.
It was that this remnant was different.
Ishida moved back, gaining distance, and looked around with the coolness of someone who instead of panicking looks for variables. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the available angles. The room gave him nothing he did not already have — no useful objects, no favourable geometry, nothing that changed the equation.
He went back to the chains.
He formed them faster this time, throwing them in a wider pattern to keep the remnant at distance while he thought. The creature dodged or broke them with that same infuriating ease, but at least it could not advance freely while the chains were in the air.
Mana is not infinite, thought Ishida. If I keep this up without finding a real opening, at some point the chains will stop forming on their own.
The grey figure opened its mouth.
And then it spoke, in a voice that was not its own — in a voice that was exactly that of the dead man from the previous corridor, with the same weak and desperate urgency:
"Help… please…"
Ishida stopped.
Only a second. Only the time it took his brain to process that that voice was coming from where it should not come from, from a mouth that was not the right one, from a creature that should not have been able to do that.
It was enough.
The knee strike came straight to the stomach with the full force of the grey figure and no warning whatsoever — and the air left Ishida's lungs all at once, along with something redder that he did not quite want to process. He moved away with one hand on his stomach and the other trying to form chains that came out weak, shorter than before, with less density in the energy composing them.
His vision began to blur at the edges.
The knives appeared in the air.
Ishida raised the chains as a shield — the impacts came in series, one after another, each one resonating against the chains with a metallic sound that was not the sound of metal but of energy against energy, and Ishida pushed with what he had left to deflect all the knives at once and gain a second of space.
He ran at the figure.
He drew out the last chain he could form with the strength remaining to him and threw it around the creature's neck — the grip held, the remnant felt the pressure, and for a moment it seemed it was going to work.
The grey figure took his head in both hands.
And threw him.
Ishida landed and did not get up immediately. His arms responded, but with a delay that was not a good sign. His legs too, but the world still had that haze at the edges that would not go away.
The grey figure laughed.
Not with the sound of something celebrating a victory — with something slower, more satisfied, like something that is enjoying the process. It approached slowly, without hurry, took Ishida's head between its hands with a delicacy that was worse than violence because it suggested it had all the time in the world.
Ishida could not move.
The knives returned to the creature's hands.
This is as far as I go, thought Ishida. Not with drama — with the specific coolness of someone who assesses a situation and reaches a conclusion they do not like, but accept. The chains won't form anymore. I was weak. I wasn't enough.
The knives rose.
Ishida closed his eyes.
The screen went black.
Five sparks. Five times the sound of metal against metal in rapid succession, each one in the exact space where a knife should have arrived.
Ishida opened his eyes.
Kagami Ryo was standing in front of him, with Kaito's dagger in his right hand and the five deflected knives on the floor around him. The grey figure had stepped back two paces and was looking at him with an expression that for the first time was neither smile nor calculation but something closer to the assessment of someone who has just encountered an obstacle they did not expect.
"This remnant," said Ishida, in the voice he had left, "is too strong."
"Don't worry," said Kagami, without taking his eyes off the figure. "Amane."
Yūta was already beside Ishida before he had finished saying the name.
"Take him," said Kagami. "Find the other two."
"Understood," said Yūta, nodding.
He put Ishida's arm over his shoulders and they began to move towards the corridor. Yūta looked at Kagami once before turning the corner.
"Good luck," he said.
Kagami did not respond. He was already looking at the grey figure.
The dark corridors of the temple were no easier to navigate with someone leaning on his shoulder, but Yūta did not slow his pace more than necessary.
Ishida walked with the rigidity of someone using concentration to compensate for what the body can no longer manage on its own.
"That remnant was different," said Ishida, after a moment. "From the ones I saw in training. Its laugh. And then it started speaking in a human voice to try to draw me in."
Yūta processed that as he kept walking.
"Kagami will beat it," he said. "He already fought another powerful remnant before. The insect up above spoke too, or something like it. Kagami noticed as well — he found it strange. I think this is more serious than it looked."
Ishida glanced at him from the corner of his eye.
"Another remnant that spoke?"
"Yes."
Ishida said nothing for several steps.
"Better we find the girls," he said at last. "And wait for Kagami."
"Yes," said Yūta.
Tsukino heard the footsteps first.
She stopped in the middle of the corridor and raised a hand without saying anything. Shirogane halted beside her, fans already open, watching the darkness ahead.
"Get ready," said Tsukino, quietly. "Someone's coming."
The two drew their weapons at the same time.
From the darkness ahead two figures emerged — one supporting the other, with the hurried pace of people who need to get somewhere before something changes.
Shirogane lowered the fans.
"Amane, Ishida," she said, with something in her voice she did not entirely try to conceal.
Then she saw the state Ishida was in and the relief changed shape.
"What happened to him?"
"He ran into a powerful remnant," said Yūta, helping Ishida lean against the wall. "It left him like this."
"Kagami is fighting that remnant now," added Ishida.
Tsukino looked at the corridor they had come from.
"We have to help him."
"We would only be a hindrance to him," said Ishida, with the calm of someone who has assessed the situation and reached that conclusion without liking it, but accepting it. "Better we wait here and let this play out."
Tsukino tightened her grip on the axe.
She said nothing more. But she did not put it away.
The grey figure and Kagami Ryo looked at each other from opposite ends of the room.
The grey figure had stopped smiling when Ishida left. Not because the situation had turned in its favour — but because something in it had registered that what it now had in front of it was different from what it had faced before.
Kagami read it in the posture. In the way the knives stopped turning with that unconcerned calm and held still, ready.
This remnant is strange too, he thought. Even stronger than the insect.
He tightened his grip on the dagger in his right hand.
"I'm sorry, but I can't allow you to kill anyone else," he said, evenly.
And he ran.
The grey figure responded with the knives — not one but all of them at once, from different angles, calculating that at least one would find a way through somewhere.
Kagami activated the gravity in the area around the knives in flight — the reducing field deflected them downward before they arrived, driving them into the floor instead of into him.
The grey figure set its jaw.
It charged.
The exchange that followed was faster than the previous one with Ishida and more brutal than the fight against the insect. The grey figure fought with the knives at medium range — not throwing them, but using them as extensions of its arms, with a precision that gave every movement multiple simultaneous angles of attack. Kagami responded with the dagger and with localised gravity shifts — not the wide area but specific points, the creature's right foot at the moment of the step, the left arm at the moment of the strike, destabilising without spending the mana of a full field.
The grey figure adapted.
Not as quickly as the insect — but it adapted.
Kagami changed tactics.
He let a blow through — absorbed it on the left side, letting the impact land in order to gain the closing distance he needed — and drove the dagger in with both hands, straight into the creature's stomach, with all the force available plus the reddish mana concentrated in the blade.
The grey figure went still.
A thick purple blood began to seep around the dagger.
Kagami pulled it out and drove it in again. The grey figure tried to grab him — Kagami increased the gravity over the creature's arms before they reached him, pressing them downward with a weight they could not compensate for.
The exchange continued — strikes, gravity, the dagger used not as a ranged weapon but as a tool of direct contact, every movement of Kagami's calculated to allow no space for recovery.
The grey figure retreated.
Kagami advanced.
The final blow came when the creature had nowhere left to go — the gravity increased across the entire area around it pinned it against the floor, and Kagami used that second of immobility to reach the neck with the dagger and finish what he had started.
The grey figure's head fell.
Kagami stood over what remained, breathing with more effort than usual, his left side protesting where he had deliberately let the blow through.
He looked at the remains.
"The other remnant," he said aloud, though there was no one to hear him, "had a superior bone structure. Like a cockroach's. More resistant than expected for something of that level."
He paused.
"This one was stronger than it. And both of them spoke."
He did not finish the thought aloud, because the room interrupted — the darkness that had been in the walls since they entered the temple began to recede, slowly, like something dissolving when it loses the point that was sustaining it. The shadows gave way. The old wood became just old wood again. And the light coming through the cracks in the tall windows was ordinary light, from an ordinary afternoon, with no layer over it that made it feel different.
The temple became a temple again.
All four of them saw it at the same time.
The door that had disappeared when they entered was there again — not open, not broken, simply present, as though it had never stopped being there.
Shirogane let out the breath she had been holding without noticing. Yūta ran a hand over his face with something in his eyes that did not quite become tears, but came close — the specific relief of someone who had been fairly convinced for a good while that this could have ended very differently.
Tsukino lowered the axe. She said nothing, but her posture changed in a way that said everything.
Ishida looked at the door. Then at the corridor from which Kagami was coming.
No expression.
Nothing beyond the direct observation of someone who registers what is happening and does not need to add anything on top of it.
Kagami appeared along the corridor with his usual unhurried pace, slightly slower than normal, the left side of his suit stained with that purple blood that was not his, though not entirely clean either. He had a cut on his right cheekbone that was not serious, but was visible.
He looked at the four of them.
"It's over," he said. "We're going back to headquarters."