That night, the three of you finally had time to breathe.

It had been a day that packed in more than enough—meeting Isao Shinomiya, and then the whole ruckus with Gen Narumi, captain of the First Division.

A title that sounded far more put-together than the person it belonged to. You still weren't entirely sure how someone like him ended up leading the strongest division in the Defense Force. It wasn't that he seemed incapable—just... not what you expected. If anything, the disconnect between his reputation and his actual personality made the whole interaction feel faintly ridiculous in hindsight.

But once schedules cleared and the dust finally settled, there was no question about how the evening was going. You, Kikoru, and Kafka were going out. A reunion, a celebration, both at once. Your promotion to platoon leader wasn't something they were going to let slide without marking the occasion.

Before you left, you pulled out your phone and shot Konomi a text asking if she could swing by and check in on Odi since you'd be home late. Her reply came fast

Can I just bring him over to mine instead? I'll keep him company

You didn't have to think twice.

Sure

Odi in Konomi's hands was never something you worried about.

You drove the group to a restaurant—somewhere comfortable, nothing too stiff. The kind of place where the food was good and the noise settled at just the right level, enough to fill the space without drowning anything out. Dinner slipped into an easy rhythm, conversation flowing without effort, the three of you falling back into something familiar.

Somewhere in the middle of it, you floated the idea of the two of them getting assigned to your platoon, mostly to see what they'd do with it.

They turned it down just as quickly as you brought it up, their response edged with that same competitive streak you'd come to expect.

If anything, they made it clear they had no intention of staying on your level—they'd outrank you if they could, or at the very least, climb alongside you. It wasn't rejection, not really. You knew they didn't hate the idea of working closely with you. That part didn't need to be said.

Kikoru stuck to her usual and didn't drink since she was still underage—but you definitely did. More than you probably should have, but after being forced onto sick leave by your Vice Captain, Ashiro, and Konomi like you couldn't be trusted to function, you figured you deserved it.

You tried to get Kafka to join you for more than a single drink, but he only allowed himself one beer, stubbornly sticking to the fact that he had duties the next morning. You didn't push too hard after that, just told him you'd drink on your own instead.

That should've been the end of it.

Except it wasn't.

At some point, Kikoru and Kafka exchanged a look—the kind that didn't seem like much unless you knew them well enough to recognize it. And unfortunately, you did. The problem was that by then, you'd already had too much to drink that the recognition came a few seconds too late.

You should've seen it coming the moment Kafka started refilling your cup without being asked.

It started subtly. Their questions eased into the conversation like they weren't building toward anything in particular, light and unhurried, the kind of thing you'd let pass without thinking. Then, slowly, they started steering things in a very specific direction.

Your Vice Captain got mentioned.

Of course he did.

They brought up the rumors—about you and Hoshina passing out together in the lounge—and just like that, their interest sharpened. Kikoru leaned in slightly, clearly unimpressed with how little you were giving, while Kafka, on the other hand, looked far too entertained for his own good.

"So?" Kafka prompted, dragging the word out as he wiggled his eyebrows. "You and the Vice Captain are still young, you know. Gotta enjoy that youthful romance while it lasts."

Kikoru didn't even bother hiding her curiosity, watching you expectantly like she was waiting for something worth reacting to.

You didn't give them the satisfaction.

"Nothing like that," you replied, voice flat, vague on purpose. You didn't even pause before adding, "though I guess it's hard for you to understand when you're already past your prime."

You shifted the focus. Because if there was one thing you were absolutely not going to do, it was entertain whatever narrative they were trying to build.

So instead, you leaned harder into your drink, using it as both a distraction and an excuse. One glass turned into another, and somewhere along the way, you started exaggerating it—letting your movements loosen more than necessary, letting your words blur just enough to sell it.

If they wanted entertainment, you'd give them that instead.

It worked. Mostly.

By the time you were done, though, the downside was unavoidable.

Even if you hadn't been as far gone as you pretended to be just to dodge their questions, you were still in no condition to drive back to Tachikawa Base.

Your thoughts felt slower, your balance slightly off, and even the lights around you seemed a little too soft at the edges. They dragged you out of the restaurant and toward the nearest hotel, ignoring any half-hearted protests you made along the way.

At that point, you didn't really have a say in it.

The next morning, you still woke up before seven out of habit.

Your body hadn't gotten the memo that you were off duty. Your head, unfortunately, had.

The dull, throbbing ache settled in the moment you opened your eyes, pulsing just enough to make you reconsider every decision from the night before. You stayed there for a second, staring at the ceiling, letting the weight of it catch up to you before finally pushing yourself upright with a quiet exhale.

You were still in yesterday's clothes. It wasn't exactly comfortable for sleeping, but it wasn't uncomfortable either.

You didn't have anything to change into anyway.

After a quick rinse and an attempt to make yourself feel at least a little more clean, you headed out, planning to grab a hangover drink first, then stop by a store to pick up groceries. Something simple—breakfast, maybe a proper hangover soup if you had the patience for it.

That plan lasted about ten minutes.

The headache didn't ease with movement. If anything, it settled in deeper, a slow and persistent pressure that sat behind your eyes and made thinking feel like more effort than it had any right to be. By the time you passed a small family-style restaurant, the decision made itself.

You stopped walking, looked at the door, and went inside.

Warm air greeted you first, followed by the low hum of conversation, the occasional soft clatter of dishes, the distant sound of something being plated in the kitchen. Around you were early office workers easing into their mornings, picking through simple meals before the day properly began.

A server brought water and a menu without much fuss. You ordered without much deliberation and settled into the wait.

For the first time in a long while, things felt still.

It was a strange thing to sit with. A normal morning — the kind where you woke up without an alarm pulling you out of sleep, without a schedule already running in the background before you'd even opened your eyes.

No training to get to. No reports waiting. Just a table, a glass of water, and time that belonged to no one in particular.

It wasn't uncomfortable. Not unfamiliar either. But it felt distant in a way that took a moment to place, like something you'd known well once and had since lost the rhythm of. Sitting there surrounded by ordinary morning sounds, you felt oddly out of sync with all of it — a little removed, watching it from slightly outside yourself.

Maybe taking sick leave wasn't such a terrible idea after all.

It wasn't until the food arrived that the headache finally began to loosen its grip.

Somewhere between the first and third bite, the pressure behind your eyes dialed back just enough that you could think in full sentences again. You ate without rushing, and for a few minutes, that was enough.

Then you noticed the glances.

It had been gradual enough that your foggy head hadn't caught it at first. A look held a beat too long from the table across the room, someone leaning slightly toward the person beside them, a brief pause in conversation near the window.

You set your spoon down and let it settle.

Right. The promotion.

You straightened in your seat more out of reflex than intention, suddenly very aware of your posture, your hands, the way you held your chopsticks.

Your normal morning had developed an audience.

Though thankfully, it didn't go further than that. A few glances, nothing that crossed into intrusive, nobody approaching the table. You kept your composure, finished your meal at an unhurried pace, and signaled for the bill.

The staff member who came over looked young — university age, running a side job alongside a full schedule if you had to guess. He processed the payment, and then just before stepping away, he thanked you. For your service in the JAKDF. No fuss to it, just genuine.

You thanked him back and meant it.

You settled the bill, stepped outside, and started walking — not aimlessly, exactly, but without any real urgency. Your car was still parked near the restaurant from the night before, and you figured the walk there would do you good. Let the food finish its job, clear your head the rest of the way before the drive.

The plan after that was simple enough. Ariake Maritime Base first to say goodbye to Kikoru and Kafka in person, then back to Tachikawa. A slow day off with nothing scheduled and Odi waiting at Konomi's.

You missed him already.

Your mind wandered as your feet did. Kaiju No. 7.2 kept pulling your attention back—pecifically, what you were going to make out of it. How you'd work it into something that fits your hands and your style. The tail was the obvious starting point, that long tapered edge sharp enough to make any blades look polite. Maybe you'll figure something out.

The thought settled into something that felt almost like satisfaction, and you were smiling faintly by the time you found a bench in a small park wedged between buildings—a quiet pocket of open space that the city had somehow left alone.

You sat. Let your legs rest. Stayed with the thought.

Then movement caught your eye.

Two students had stopped a few meters away, both of them gone very still in the way people do when they're trying to confirm something without being obvious about it. You caught them looking, tilted your head, and smiled—waiting to see if they needed something.

They turned to each other instead. The girl leaned slightly toward the boy, said something just under her breath, and you caught just enough of it.

"That's Y/N L/N, right?"

A/N: Pausing here for a second. English really doesn't have a clean equivalent for the kind of respectful formality that Japanese honorifics carry naturally, and frankly it shows. These two are absolutely addressing Y/N with proper deference, the way you'd expect from students speaking to a recognized war hero or something. Ms. L/N technically works and also technically sounds like a school receptionist reading off an attendance sheet, so. Just know the respect is there. We're moving on ✌️

The girl's words hung in the air just long enough for you to catch the nerves underneath them. They clearly wanted to approach but hadn't quite talked themselves into it yet, so you made the decision for them.

You shifted on the bench and offered them a seat. "Would you two like to sit down?"

The boy startled, then nodded quickly. "Ah — yes, thank you," he said, already reaching sideways to tug the girl along by her sleeve.

They crossed the distance but ended up stopping just to your side rather than actually sitting, standing close enough to talk with that small remaining buffer still intact between them and full commitment.

A beat passed. They exchanged a glance.

"We're actually running a bit late for school, so we can't stay long — but, um." the boy started, then decided the fastest route was the direct one. "She wants to join the defense force."

He jabbed a thumb sideways at the girl, getting it out like a confession.

The girl shot him a brief look, then turned back to you and pulled herself together.

"It's been my dream since elementary school," she said, more steady than her expression suggested she felt. "I do track and field, so I don't think my physical condition is too lacking.

She paused briefly, then added, "You came in through the last recruitment and already made platoon leader—I thought if anyone would know what it actually takes, it'd be you, Miss. Was it difficult to get in?"

You looked at the two of them for a moment.

Ambitious kids, both of them, even if only one was doing the talking. They were young, looked close to graduating high school if you had to guess. They were hovering at that particular age where everything still felt both urgent and wide open, uncertainty and ambition intertwined.

It was a little strange, realizing these bright kids were looking to you for answers. There had been a time you could barely hold yourself together, let alone guide someone else forward. And now, you'd come further than you ever expected.

You opened your mouth to answer. Then the ground lurched.

Of course. Things never stayed this calm for long.

You were on your feet immediately, catching the students by their arms as the tremor rolled through hard enough to throw them both off balance.

Pigeons scattered overhead, something toppled behind you, and a low groan ran through the buildings nearby.

The first thing that registered wasn't the panic and screams. It was the silence from your phone.

No alert. No emergency notification, no government broadcast. Your phone screen was perfectly functional, it just had nothing to show you. Which meant either the seismometers had failed to flag anything, or the signal had never made it out of the disaster management bureau at all.

That second possibility was the one that sat wrong.

Emergency communications didn't just go quiet on their own. The only thing that could swallow an entire warning network before a single alert reached anyone was a kaiju emergence—certain types, on surfacing, put out interference powerful enough to kill radio signals, cellular networks, and broadcast systems all at once. A clean blackout. No warning, no window, no time for anyone to prepare.

You led the kids to the mainstreet and looked up, scanning the skyline for anything large enough to see at a distance. Nothing.

Then the road split open in front of you.

The crack ran fast and jagged, and in your peripheral vision the buildings along the street began to tilt, foundations giving way all at once as the earth underneath simply stopped holding. You grabbed both students by the arms. "Run!"

They went, bolting in the opposite direction with the blind momentum of people who didn't know where to go but understood they needed to move.

They didn't get far enough.

A section of sidewalk buckled and thrust upward directly in their path. The girl hit the uneven edge wrong, her ankle rolling out from under her, and the fall carried her forward into the broken concrete. Her shin caught a sharp fractured lip on the way down and the sound she made—verbally and physically—told you everything before you'd even fully processed what you'd seen.

The boy dropped to her side immediately, hands reaching, not sure what to do with them. Tears welled in both their eyes before either of them fully registered the open fracture on her leg.

"I've got her," you said.

"Yes.." He stepped back without argument, choking back tears.

"This is gonna hurt. I'm sorry." You crouched down, being unable to give her any time to prepare before you got your arms under her and lifted.

She winced sharply, a short bitten sound escaping through her teeth as her leg shifted with the movement. You adjusted your hold and ran—your own body protesting with every stride, your recovery still unfinished, your injuries not far enough behind you—but you ran anyway.

Then you heard it.

Underneath everything. Underneath the crumbling and the screaming and the deep structural groan of the city folding in around you. Something rhythmic was coming up through the ground, felt as much as heard — dense and percussive, a thumping that repeated and overlapped, thousands of impacts stacking on top of each other in a pattern too consistent to be debris and too widespread to be anything happening at the surface.

Something was moving below you. A lot of somethings. All at once, all in rhythm, growing louder by the seconds.

Your stomach dropped.

Underground type. A colony.

"Hey," you said, keeping your voice steady despite the pace. "You'll be okay. Can you reach your phone? I need you to dial the kaiju emergency line and put it on speaker for me."

"I — I think it fell," she said, voice tight. "When I tripped, it —"

"I've got it." The boy was already pulling his phone out before you could turn to him, fingers fumbling badly enough that he nearly lost it mid-stride. He got it open anyway and held it up without being asked.

The moment the line connected, you didn't wait for pleasantries.

"This is Y/N L/N, Platoon Leader of Third Division. Reporting active kaiju emergence, underground colony type at central Shinagawa. There's widespread structural collapse across multiple city blocks." You threw a quick glance over your shoulder before pushing forward. "Large scale sinkhole formation, significant civilian casualties, multiple confirmed falls into ground ruptures. Colony appears to still be surfacing—"

The ground disappeared beneath you.

"Shit—!"

Pain shot up your leg as it dropped into a sudden break in the pavement. You lurched forward on instinct, your knee slamming into a jagged edge of exposed infrastructure.

The girl yelped and tightened her grip around your neck. You pulled her in close, consciously twisting your body to take the fall so she didn't have to, crashing your side into the sharp uneven debris.

Beside you, the boy had gone down to all fours, crawling, face drained of colour and expression completely frozen as though he was expecting death.

The operator's voice crackled through the speaker. "Platoon Leader?! Please get to safety — troops will arrive in—"

The phone slipped from the boy's grip and vanished into the shifting debris. The sinkhole swallowed all three of you before you could form a reply.

You dropped fast, one arm locked around the girl, the other shooting out to catch the boy by the wrist and wrench him in. The walls tore past — dirt, rock, jagged concrete that caught your back and shoulder and arm on the way down. You pulled them both against your chest and curled around them, taking whatever the walls gave you. You didn't let go.

Then beyond the clouds of dust and falling debris, through the blur of the drop, you saw them. The kaijus. Camponotus.

You made the decision before you finished processing what you were seeing.

"Hold your breath!"

You shoved both teenagers into the wall of loose debris as you fell, forcing them into it so the cascade of dirt and rock and broken concrete coming down around you would bury them naturally. You pressed yourself in after them, letting the falling earth do the work — not fighting the collapse but using it, letting it swallow all three of you whole as it came down.

You'd take being buried over being seen. At least you had a chance of surviving the odds of being crushed. But getting caught by a Camponotus was guaranteed death, those mandibles making short and thorough work of anything they closed around.

You squeezed your eyes shut against the falling dust and held your breath, bearing the searing drag of friction burns and concrete edges catching your skin as the earth folded in around you while you fell.

Then, the falling stopped.

The first thing you did was find the others in the dark. You reached out and located them by touch, checking for responses, and didn't move on until you were certain both of them were conscious. You helped them shift into something less agonising than how they'd landed, then turned your attention to yourself, slightly breathless.

Your ribs reported back immediately and it wasn't good news. The fracture you'd been carrying had compounded — you knew what a fracture felt like and you knew what this was, the way each breath arrived shallow and sharp and shot through with a deep radiating sting that a fracture alone didn't produce. Punctured lung. Small puncture, most likely, given that you were still upright and thinking clearly. Small punctures were survivable for several hours if you kept your head.

You noted it and moved on.

Your hand went to your chest pocket. Officers often carry their comm' device on their person regardless of duty status, a habit drilled in deep enough that it stuck even on days off. It was still there, thankfully.

You fished the earpiece out and slotted it on, then listened.

Static. No signal this deep and buried.

You could only hope it was emitting enough to give your location away to anyone scanning from above. For now the job was straightforward — keep two civilians alive and find a way out.

You drew in a slow breath to steady yourself and immediately regretted it. A burn tore up the back of your throat and your body responded before you could stop it, coughing hard, each convulsion wrenching viciously at your chest. You clamped your hand over your mouth and held still until it passed.

You reached down and tore a strip from the hem of your shirt, the white fabric coming away dark with blood, and pressed it over your nose and mouth.

"Cover your mouths and noses," you said, keeping your voice low.

The girl immediately reached for her sleeve. Her hands were shaking too badly — she grabbed at the fabric twice and couldn't get a grip either time.

The helped her. He took the hem of his uniform jacket in both fists and tore it apart in one clean pull, then held the larger piece out to her without a word.

You watched them get it sorted and turned back to face the dark.

Ant-type kaiju in an enclosed underground space—Formic acid vapour most likely. It made sense. Not fatal at this concentration, but it would keep the throat burning and trigger coughing, and every cough spent oxygen that the three of you couldn't afford to waste.

The vapour was manageable. The oxygen was the real trouble.

You pulled out your phone and checked the screen. It had cracked along one corner but the flashlight still worked. You swept it across the space and took stock of what you had.

The cavity stretched roughly eight to ten meters across, similar in length, walls uneven and irregular the way collapsed earth always was. One side bulged outward, the other narrowed. Nothing symmetrical, nothing clean. Just whatever shape the ground had decided to fall into.

You did the math quietly.

No expert knowledge in cave diving, but you didn't need it for basic oxygen estimation. A space this size gave you somewhere between two to four hours before CO2 buildup became genuinely dangerous under normal conditions.

But the conditions given to you weren't normal.

Two teenagers running on fear and adrenaline meant faster breathing, shallower and less efficient. The formic acid vapour meant coughing fits, which burned through air faster than almost anything else. Stress on top of that leads to poor breath control, elevated heart rate, the body working harder than it needed to.

You narrowed it down to one hour.

One hour before the air became a problem, if you somehow kept things controlled.

That wasn't a lot of time.

You turned away from the kids and faced the wall, sweeping the flashlight slowly along the surface like you were assessing something. You weren't. You just needed a moment without being watched.

The frustration came up fast and you let it, briefly. It felt unfair in a way that was almost childish, and you were aware of that, and it didn't make it feel less true.

You had just walked out of a fight with No. 7 a week ago — barely, and not without cost. You were supposed to be on sick leave. You were supposed to be spending the day doing nothing, picking up your dog, existing quietly for once. Instead you were at the bottom of a sinkhole with a punctured lung, no suit, no weapon, and two teenagers who had nothing to do with any of this and were now dependent on you to get them out of it.

On the field you'd always had people around you who could take care of themselves (with the exception of Maori Naoya). Trained soldiers, officers, people who understood the weight of the situation and could carry their share of it. This was different. This was worse. No matter how guilty you felt for carrying this feeling, it was the truth.

You reached down and pressed your hand against your side, fingers finding the fractured rib and applying just enough pressure to make the pain spike clean and sharp.

It worked. Your head cleared. You held the pain for a second, then let go.

You had wanted to be the adult that hadn't existed for you when you needed them. And those two kids were sitting behind you right now, scared and hurt and waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

You turned back around, walking to their sides and crouched down to their level, angling the flashlight away from their faces before you spoke.

"Okay," you began, keeping your voice steady and quiet.

"I'm going to tell you what I know. The air in here isn't great. These tunnels were made by those kaijus, so there's some irritants in it, which is why your throats burn. Keep the fabric over your mouths. As for oxygen—" you kept your expression calm and your pause short, just enough to choose your words carefully without giving them time to read into the silence, "—we have enough. As long as we stay calm and keep our breathing slow and easy, we're not in any danger on that front."

You watched them process it. And it was clear they both wanted to ask how long. You could see it sitting right behind their eyes, the question forming and then retreating, because some part of them already understood that they were afraid of the answer. You didn't give them the chance to work up the courage to ask it.

"The tunnel had to come from somewhere," you continued. "There's an opening on either side of us that got buried when we came down. The blockage is probably thin — we fell through it, after all. That means people above ground can dig through it. And they will."

Silence settled for a moment.

Then the girl's face crumpled, and the boy's breath hitched, and they both came apart at roughly the same time at the flicker of hope you'd given them.

The boy pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, shoulders shaking. The girl didn't make a sound — tears just ran down her face in two clean tracks, her expression frozen somewhere between pain and shock, her injured leg held completely still like she'd decided not to acknowledge it existed.

You let them have a moment. Just a moment. Your heart tightened.

You reached out and placed a hand on each of their heads, smoothing their hair back the way you might with much younger children. Gentle, unhurried, like you had all the time in the world.

"Hey," you said softly. "I need you both to do something for me. Breathe slowly. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Crying takes a lot out of you down here, and I need you both at full strength, alright?"

It wasn't a scolding. You made sure it didn't sound like one.

"What are your names?"

The girl swallowed hard. "Nazuna," she whispered, her voice sitting right at the edge of breaking.

"Hayate," the boy said, barely above a breath.

"Nazuna. Hayate." You said, committing their names to memory, "Okay. Good."

You held your phone out to Hayate. "I need you to hold this for me and keep the light steady. Can you do that?"

He took it with both hands and nodded, gripping it a little too tightly, which was fine.

You turned to Nazuna.

"I'm going to look at your leg now. I have to, so we can make sure it stays stable until help arrives." You pulled the fabric from around your waist — the v-neck sweater you'd tied there earlier — and folded it into something that would serve as cushioning. "Before I do, I need you to take a piece of your shirt and bite down on it. It's going to hurt and I'd rather you have something to bite than nothing."

She understood. She gathered a fold of fabric from her collar with shaking fingers and got it between her teeth without being asked twice.

You worked quickly and as carefully as you could — tearing the fabric from her pant leg, assessing the fracture, binding it enough to immobilise it and slow the bleeding without shifting the bone further. You kept talking as you worked, not because you had anything urgent to say but because silence would let both of them sit inside their fear, and you couldn't afford that right now.

"You see the earpiece I'm wearing?" You didn't look up from what you were doing. "Every JAKDF officer carries one, on duty or off. When it's turned on, it transmits a constant signal revealing location data. The defense force knows exactly where I am right now, even down here."

Hayate's light wobbled slightly as he shifted to give Nazuna's hand a light squeeze, offering her some support through the pain she was experiencing.

"They're coming," you said, simply and plainly, because you needed it to land as a fact and not reassurance. "Our job right now is just to make sure we're in one piece when they get here. That's it. Stay calm, breathe slowly, and let me do the worrying."

They nodded.

You secured the last of the binding on Nazuna's leg and sat back. She exhaled slowly through her nose, eyes wet, the fabric still clenched between her teeth.

"You were going to ask me about the recruitment exam," you said.

Nazuna blinked. Then, slowly, she reached up and wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing a streak of blood across her cheek without noticing. She let the fabric fall from her mouth and nodded once.

You shifted to sit facing both of them and tilted your phone so the flashlight aimed up at the ceiling, diffusing the light across the space evenly. Softer that way. Less like a torch shining in the dark and more like something almost ordinary.

You took a breath—carefully, shallowly—and started talking.

You walked them through the written examination first and how to study for it.

Publicly available information, you explained, released by the government specifically to keep civilians informed. Kaiju taxonomy, behavioural patterns, recorded tendencies across different species and categories. Past appearances, documented incidents, how they were handled. Evacuation protocols, compensation structures, the legal framework that had been built around kaiju emergencies over the years.

You spoke slowly and kept your voice level, the same tone you might use to brief a junior officer—calm, measured, nothing in it that suggested the ground above you was crawling with Camponotus or that the air you were breathing was slowly getting worse. You paused between points and looked at them, reading the tension in their shoulders, the set of their jaws.

They were still scared. Of course they were. But their eyes were on you, and that was something.

You mentioned the paid preparatory materials offered by the government—more restricted content, internal operational structure, the roles and general duties of officers across different contexts. On-mission conduct, off-duty responsibilities, training cycles.

Hayate shifted slightly. "How do you learn the rules for when you're actually on a scene?" His voice came out hoarse and quiet, but the question was there, formed and specific. "Like — how to report in, how to communicate with higher ranks while it's happening."

You looked at him for a moment. He was fiddling with the hem of his uniform sleeves.

"Field communication follows a structure," you said, and let a small smile through—genuine, quiet, because he was engaged and focused and that meant your approach was working.

"They teach you this once you're in, but there's no harm in knowing it a little early." You kept going. "When you first report in, you lead with your name, rank, and division—always, even if the person on the other end already knows who you are. Then location, then the situation in order of urgency. Most critical information first. You don't editorialize and you don't speculate unless you're directly asked for an assessment."

You paused for a short breath. "When you're speaking to a superior on the field, you keep it short and factual. They're managing more information than you can see from where you're standing, so you give them what they need and you wait for instruction. If you have a recommendation, you state it once, clearly, and then you defer."

Hayate absorbed that. Some of the rigidity in his posture had shifted into something more like focus.

You continued.

The physical assessment came after the written portion — a general screening, you explained, designed to establish baseline fitness and endurance. Not to find the strongest candidates, but to filter out those who weren't yet at the level required for active service. Passable for someone who trained consistently and took it seriously.

Nazuna's eyes moved to you at that. You caught it for a brief moment before moving on.

If you passed the first two, the final round was the live encounter. Controlled conditions, synthetic combat suits, a simulated operational environment with actual kaiju contact. The closest thing to the real thing that a recruitment process could offer without putting untrained candidates in genuine danger.

And by the time you finished, some of the tension had gone out of both of them—not all of it, not even most of it, but enough that their breathing had slowed and their eyes had stopped darting to the walls. You had given them something to hold in their heads that wasn't the dark and the weight of the earth above you, and it had worked, at least partially.

Then the quiet came back.

You let it sit, because you'd run out of things to say and you knew it, and filling silence badly was worse than letting it be. Somewhere underneath the stillness you were doing your own accounting—the oxygen, the time, the static in your earpiece that hadn't changed—and keeping all of it carefully off your face.

It was Nazuna who broke the silence.

"If my leg doesn't heal right—" she started, then stopped. She looked down at the binding on her leg and never lifted her gaze. Her voice was quiet but it was steady, which told you she'd been sitting with the question for a while before she said it out loud. "I won't be able to do track anymore. And if I can't pass the physical—"

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.

You lifted her head with a hand, held her gaze and answered her directly, because she deserved that.

"There are other ways to serve," you said, offering her an encouraging smile. "Research, for one—kaiju biology, behavioural analysis, taxonomy. That work matters. It shapes how officers operate in the field, what suits and weapons get developed, how encounters get handled when kaiju technology and biological understanding comes into play. It's possible, only that you'll need to follow a more academic path."

You paused. "Or operations management. The people coordinating response efforts from command, managing communication between divisions, making decisions about resource deployment in real time—that's not a lesser role. Some of the most critical calls in a kaiju emergence never happen anywhere near the field."

"In fact, I was an operational leader before I transferred to the front lines." You tapped your temple with your index finger, the gesture deliberately light and a little playful — the kind of thing that didn't come naturally to you but that you'd watched work a hundred times in the hands of someone who did it effortlessly.

Someone who could walk into the worst possible atmosphere and somehow make it breathable just by being himself. You didn't have his easy confidence or his particular brand of warmth, but you understood the function of it well enough to try, and right now trying was what mattered.

You missed him, quietly and suddenly, in a way you didn't have the space to sit with.

So you kept talking.

You told them about the researcher path first—that before you'd ever set foot on a frontline, you'd been at Izumo Lab. The work there required a STEM background just to get through the door, and from there you paid into JAKDF-run courses that went far deeper into kaiju taxonomy, territorial patterns, and behavioural psychology than anything a general officer would ever be required to know. Competitive field, you told them honestly.

The courses cost money, the standards were high, and the people applying were serious. But if you performed well, the doors it opened were worth it—internships at kaiju tech companies, placements directly inside JAKDF research labs, work that shaped how the entire defense force understood and responded to emergencies.

Nazuna was listening carefully, you could tell, even through the pain. Her breathing had slowed and her eyes had found a focus.

You moved on to operational leadership, because that was the other road. Data analysis and interpretation formed the backbone of it—the entrance assessment wasn't testing physical ability or combat instinct, it was testing how fast you could absorb information under pressure and form a coherent strategy from it. Reaction time, judgment, decision-making with incomplete data.

And passing that was only the beginning. You needed on-the-job experience before anyone would give you a real voice in command—a minimum of five kaiju emergences as an active participant before you were considered anything more than a trainee with potential.

You encouraged questions and they came, tentative at first and then with more confidence, Hayate asking about the data analysis component and Nazuna asking what daily work inside a research lab actually looked like.

You answered everything thoroughly and honestly, and when you reached the end of an answer you found a way to extend it, pulling in adjacent details, small examples, anything that kept the conversation moving forward.

You were aware of what you were doing. You were also aware of why, and you didn't let yourself think too hard about the alternative—the silence that would rush back in the moment you ran out of things to say, and what would be waiting inside it.

Time moved differently in the dark. You weren't sure how much of it had passed when you glanced at your phone and the battery read seven percent.

You turned the flashlight off.

The darkness that followed was immediate and complete. You heard both of them go still in the way people do when a fear they'd been holding at a distance suddenly closes in. The absence of light made the space feel smaller, the air heavier, the sounds of your own breathing louder than they had any right to be.

Your chest ached with every inhale now, the punctured lung making itself known in ways that were getting harder to breathe around. You'd been talking for long enough that the effort of it was starting to show in ways you couldn't entirely hide from yourself, even if you could hide it from them.

You decided to stop.

But before you did, you asked them quietly, "Do you both feel a little calmer now?"

A beat of silence. Then Hayate said, "...Yeah."

Nazuna didn't say anything, but she nodded — you caught the small movement of it even in the dim light of the dying phone screen.

That was enough.

"Good," you said. "That was the point. I needed you both calm enough to do the most important thing right now, which is rest and breathe carefully. In through your nose, slow and shallow, out through your mouth. The air isn't clean so every breath counts—don't waste them."

You kept your voice soft and even. "We're going to sit quietly now. That's all. Just rest."

You didn't tell them about the oxygen. You didn't tell them about your ribs or your lung or the way each breath was costing you more than the last one had.

You shifted until you were sitting between them, your back against the wall of the cavity, and you reached out on either side and found their hands in the dark and held them. Nazuna's fingers closed around yours immediately, tight and cold. Hayate took a moment longer, like he was deciding something, and then his hand found yours too.

The three of you sat in the dark and said nothing.

After a while you pressed the side of your phone once, just enough to light the screen without wasting the battery. An hour and ten minutes. You'd been down here for an hour and ten minutes in total — the talking had eaten up most of it, which had been the point.

But the silence that replaced it now left you with nothing to do except count the minutes, and counting the minutes left you with nothing to do except think.

The panic came in quietly at first, the way it always did before it didn't. The rational part of your brain knew that rescue operations took time, that signals got crossed, that a colony emergence on this scale would be pulling resources in every direction at once. You knew all of that.

But you also knew that an hour and ten minutes underground with a punctured lung and two injured teenagers and air that was getting staler by degrees was not a situation that left a lot of room for patience.

... What if no one was coming?

You reasoned through it methodically. Kikoru and Kafka was here. And they would look for you—that wasn't a question, that was a certainty.

And Captain Narumi, whatever you thought of him personally, was not a man without morals. He was Captain of the First Division for a reason and that reason was that he showed up when it mattered.

But what if the numbers didn't work out in your favour. What if command looked at the scale of the emergence and the casualty projections and decided that a few people unaccounted for underground were an acceptable loss against everything else happening above it.

The thought sat in your chest alongside the ache of your ribs and you couldn't push it all the way out.

You really missed Hoshina. Okonogi and Ashiro too—all three of them, the specific and particular knowledge that if any of them knew where you were, they would already be moving. Not because it was strategically sound or operationally justified but simply because it was you, and that would be reason enough. You knew that the way you knew very few things with absolute certainty.

You didn't have that certainty about Narumi. Not yet.

But you had it about Kikoru and Kafka.

'I trust Kikoru and Kafka.'

Sitting still stopped being something you could do.

You eased your hands free carefully, making sure both of them stayed settled, and got to your feet. The darkness was total without the flashlight but you moved along the walls anyway, palms flat against the surface, feeling your way slowly. You were looking for softness. A give in the earth that suggested recent collapse rather than settled ground — something that hadn't fully compacted yet, something that might be shallow enough to work with.

You found it about two meters to your left.

Your palm pressed in and the wall gave, a small cascade of loose soil crumbling away under your fingers almost immediately. You stopped and held very still for a moment, reading it. The material was light, unsettled, the kind of debris that hadn't had time to compact yet. Your fingers worked into it and the first few scoops came away fast and easy, and something in your chest loosened fractionally with it.

Then you paused to check your progress.

The small hollow you'd cleared was already filling back in. Fine soil trickling down from above in a thin, continuous stream, the wall slowly reclaiming the space you'd just opened. Still shifting. Still settling. Not stable.

You pushed deeper anyway, past the loose layer, looking for something more solid to work against.

You found it almost immediately. The loose debris gave way abruptly to dense, compacted earth—the kind that had been sitting under pressure for long enough to fuse into something close to stone. Your fingers went from pulling out handfuls to barely scraping the surface. The progress didn't slow. It stopped.

You became aware of your breathing then. Faster than it should have been, shallower, your chest working harder without your having noticed the shift. You made yourself stop and stand still and think.

If this section was holding back more debris rather than simply blocking a passage, breaking through it wasn't an opening — it was possibly a trigger. More earth coming inward. The chamber getting smaller. The air getting worse faster than it already was. And Nazuna and Hayate were sitting directly behind you.

You pulled your hands back and let the wall be.

You went back to your place between them and sat down and said nothing. There was nothing to say. You'd done the assessment and the assessment had come back with an answer you didn't want, and now the only thing left was to wait and trust that someone above ground was moving faster than the air down here was running out.

Waiting was harder than the digging had been.

But then, Nazuna who spoke up, her voice small and uncertain, like she wasn't sure if what she was experiencing was real.

"My head feels... heavy. Like there's pressure in it."

A beat of silence. Then Hayate said, "Mine too," quietly, like he'd been waiting to see if she'd say it first.

Two of them, unprompted, describing the same thing. That wasn't anxiety alone.

The CO2 was building.

You couldn't talk—not properly, not at length, every word spent oxygen you couldn't get back. So you found their hands again in the dark and you rubbed the backs of them instead, slow and uneven, varying the rhythm deliberately. Enough sensation to keep their attention anchored. Enough irregularity that they had to focus on it rather than drift away into deep sleep.

It bought you some time. Not enough.

They started to shift. Small movements at first, restless and confused. Then Hayate made a sound that wasn't quite a word and Nazuna's grip on your hand went tight in a way that had nothing grounded in it anymore.

"Nazuna." Nothing. "Hayate."

"...huh." Hayate's response came back slow and wrong, like he was hearing you from very far away.

"Nazuna, can you hear me?"

She turned her head toward your voice but her answer, when it came, was just your name— slurred slightly at the edges, delayed by a beat too long.

You turned the flashlight on and used the last of its battery to check their eyes.

Still responsive. Both of them were still conscious, but the margin was narrowing and you could feel it narrowing in your own chest too — the familiar weight of CO2 accumulation settling in despite every effort you'd made to control your breathing from the start. Trained or not, the air was what it was.

You did the math without wanting to. Once they went under, you had 3-4 minutes before you followed.

You had to act now.

You got to your feet and went back to the wall.

This time you didn't feel for softness or test for stability. You picked a point and started digging straight through, and you counted seconds in your head as you worked — not to track time precisely but to keep your mind running, to give it something to hold onto besides the tightening in your chest and the growing weight behind your eyes.

One. Two. Three. Your fingers drove into the earth and pulled back. Again. Again.

Fifteen. Sixteen...

The strategy was simple because it had to be. You weren't trying to dig yourself out — not yet. You were trying to punch a hole small enough that the dirt couldn't fill it back in before air could get through.

One opening. Enough to breathe. Then you'd work on the rest.

Dirt packed under your nails and stayed there. Your knuckles caught the edge of something hard — concrete, a rock, you couldn't see — and you worked around it without stopping. The loose layer came away fast at first, same as before, and same as before the hope that came with it was brief.

Your fingers hit the denser compacted mass underneath and the progress ground down almost to nothing, each handful costing more than the last.

The skin across your knuckles had split somewhere in the process without you noticing, and the dirt was getting into it, and you noticed that even less.

Your heartbeat was climbing. You felt it in your ears before you felt it in your chest — that particular acceleration that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with your body beginning to make calculations of its own.

Your palms were scraped raw, bleeding in thin lines where the concrete edges had found them, but your hands were still moving so you let them.

You pulled your phone out and used the flat edge of it to cut into the surface, scraping back what your fingers couldn't grip. It wasn't efficient. It was what you had.

Then past the dense layer, something changed.

The resistance dropped. The earth under your fingers went loose and fine and crumbling — light enough that it shifted at a touch, the kind of debris that hadn't had anything pressing down on it. The outermost layer, maybe. It had to be.

Except every handful you cleared fell straight back in. Fine soil raining down into the hollow the moment you pulled your hand out, the gap sealing itself before the air could find it. You dug faster and it filled faster.

The numbers in your head kept climbing.

You couldn't reach any further. Your arm was in, to the shoulder, and there was still a layer between you and whatever was on the other side. Your lungs were telling you in increasingly direct terms that the air you'd exhaled wasn't being replaced with anything useful.

You took your phone and pushed it through ahead of you as far as your arm would reach and shoved.

Ten. Nine. Eight. The count in your head went the other direction now, running down instead of up, and you held what was left in your lungs and pushed harder. Seven. Six. The dirt shifted and compressed and pushed back.

Five. Your vision was narrowing at the edges. Your arm was shaking.

Four. There was genuinely no way to know if there would be anything worth breathing on the other side— But you had to exhale. Three. Two.

'Shit. I can't breathe.'

The wall cracked.

Light came through first — pale and thin and immediately blinding after so long in the dark. Then the air followed, a slow flood of it pushing through the gap, and you inhaled before you'd made the conscious decision to.

It didn't feel like relief. It burned.

The oxygen hit your depleted lungs like something caustic, dizziness spiking so hard and fast that the ground tilted under you. Your hearing dropped to a muffled ring. Your vision tunnelled down to the crack of light in front of your face and nothing else. Your legs stopped holding you up.

You went down but you didn't let yourself go far — hands clawing into the dirt, dragging yourself back up toward the opening, toward the air.

Because down meant away from it, and away from it meant not breathing, and not breathing meant the count resumed, and you were absolutely not doing the count again.

'Breathe.'

You had to remind yourself. Your body had forgotten the sequence somewhere in the last few seconds and needed the instruction.

You inhaled. Too much, too fast — the acidic air mixing with the fresher air flooding in and hitting the back of your throat like you'd swallowed something burning. Your body tried to cough and found there wasn't enough air yet to cough with. Your throat convulsed against nothing, suffocating on the act of trying to clear itself, your vision going white at the edges while your hands stayed buried in the dirt and held you in place.

Then the air won.

It came in steadily enough that your lungs could finally do something with it, and the coughing broke properly, and you stayed there on your hands and knees in front of the gap you'd made and just breathed until breathing stopped being an active effort.

When your hands were steady enough to trust, you turned back and found Nazuna and Hayate in the dark. You pressed your fingers to each of their necks in turn.

Pulses. Both of them. Faint but present and continuous.

You exhaled and went back to the opening.

You pressed your ear close to the gap and listened.

It was quiet.

Nothing moving, nothing shifting, no sound of anything alive on the other side of the dirt. Just still air and the faint, distant noise of the world above.

You started digging again.

Your hands moved on automatic, the rational part of your brain already offline and something more stripped-down running in its place — the part that didn't weigh odds or calculate margins, that only understood through and out and up.

The gap widened by degrees. Dirt rained down your arms and into your collar and you kept going until the opening was wide enough to fit your shoulders.

And then you went through it. Getting out was worse than digging.

Every surface you gripped shifted. Your fingers found purchase on a concrete edge and it crumbled. You found another. The wound in your side pulled with every reach upward, a hot, tearing sensation. Your ribs moved wrong when you breathed. They had been moving wrong for a while.

You climbed anyway.

Stepping and dragging, hauling yourself over broken concrete and packed earth, staring up at the opening above — a rough, jagged circle of grey sky that was so much larger than the dark you'd been sitting in. Your ears were still ringing. The world tilted when you moved too fast and steadied reluctantly when you slowed down.

The sky got closer.

You stared up at it and your eyes burned. You let them, because there was no one here to hold it together for.

The tears came quietly. A welling, sudden and complete cry that spilled over before you'd made any decision about it. You didn't try to stop it. You didn't have the energy. You didn't have a reason to.

Somewhere in the back of your mind you understood that this was allowed. That you had just survived something you weren't supposed to.

You had been at the bottom of a hole in the ground with a punctured lung and two unconscious teenagers and air that was running out. And you had done it without the suit, without a weapon, without anyone who could take something off your hands or stand between you and the worst of it.

The suit that usually compensated for everything your body couldn't do on its own—you didn't have it. You had been entirely, completely human down there, in every limitation that implied. There had been a window, somewhere in the digging, where you had genuinely understood that you might not make it out.

Your chest hitched. A small, pained sound that wasn't quite a sob because you didn't have the air for a real one. The tears ran down your face and you let them. Your hands were shaking, you noticed distantly. They'd been shaking for a while, probably.

'I never want that again,' something in you said. Not the composed, professional part. Something older and more honest than that. 'I never want to be that small again.'

You pressed one hand over your mouth, the other bracing against broken concrete, and held still until it passed.

And then you couldn't go any higher.

Your legs gave out. Not a collapse, exactly, but a slow and final refusal. You slid back against the dirt wall and sat, and the pain you'd been filing away came back all at once, and you couldn't move.

Your legs gave out. Not a collapse, exactly, but a slow and final refusal. You slid back against the dirt wall and sat, and the pain you'd been filing away came back all at once, and you couldn't move.

Every breath was a negotiation. Short and shallow, because deeper than that cost too much — a sharp, grinding wrong feeling deep in your chest that told you clearly, in terms that required no medical training, that something in there was no longer doing what it was supposed to do.

You sat with it. You didn't have a choice.

You reached up and found your earpiece. Tapped the sequence by feel — the manual connection, JAKDF network. Opened your mouth.

Nothing. Your throat tried and your lungs wouldn't back it up. The CO2 still sat behind your eyes as a dull persistent weight, your thoughts arriving a half-second late, the edges of your vision soft in a way that had been getting harder to ignore. The headache had settled in somewhere at the base of your skull and wasn't moving.

You let the earpiece transmit what it could and dropped your hand.

Time passed without marking itself.

Then shapes gathered at the rim above you.

You looked up through blurred vision and watched them — several officers, moving with the quiet efficiency of people who knew what they were doing. You tracked them without moving, without the energy for anything more than watching.

One came over the edge.

He descended fast and controlled, his weapon driven into the dirt, using it to manage his momentum down the wall. He crossed to you and crouched, and you looked at his face.

Captain Narumi. Not Kafka or Kikoru.

You didn't have the strength to wonder about that. You let it sit.

His eyes moved over you—a single assessing glance, quick and practiced. And you looked at him the same way you always catalogued the people around you, automatic and involuntary, and what you found registered even through your foggy mind.

Dried blood clung to the corners of his eyes, dark and cracked against his skin — and beneath it, fresh streaks still followed the same paths, slow and unsteady as they traced down his face. It had smeared faintly along his cheekbone, like he'd tried to wipe it away at some point and forgotten.

You didn't need to ask to understand what that meant. He'd pushed his numbered weapon past what was safe.

What you didn't know was why—what forced him to this state.

But there was a more urgent matter at hand. You opened your mouth.

"Civilians." Barely a voice. "Two. Still inside."

"Where?" Narumi asked, voice slightly hoarser compared to your memory.

You moved your eyes toward the wall behind you. The direction you'd come from. The most your body had left to give in place of pointing.

He didn't confirm that he understood. He simply moved.

His weapon stayed in hand as he crouched down beside you, and you felt the world tilt as he hauled you up and over his shoulder in one motion — his free arm locking across the back of your thighs to keep you in place.

The shift in position drove a sound out of you before you could stop it, something between a gasp and a clipped cry, pain flaring white-hot from your side as your body folded over him. Narumi paused. Threw you a glance and allowed one moment of stillness before he straightened and leapt.

The ground beneath him was already giving — loose rock and broken concrete shifting downward with every step, the debris field sliding like it couldn't decide what shape it wanted to hold.

The air quality changed and the darkness below you fell away as you reached the ground.

He set you down beside a general officer with the same absence of ceremony. No words exchanged. Just the transfer of your weight from his shoulder to someone else's hold, and then he was gone — dropping back down into the dark before you could register that he'd left.

The air was quiet. Unnaturally so.

Not the quiet of something winding down. Not the held-breath stillness of a fight finally reaching its end. It was the other kind.

Dead and flat and total.

You had expected movement. Medics cutting through the crowd, officers coordinating the wounded, the low mechanical noise of equipment being hauled into position. But there was none of that. The officers around you stood without urgency, without direction, and the stillness of them made something tighten in your chest — a feeling you didn't have a name for yet.

They were watching you.

The first division officers, the ones nearest to you, stood without speaking. Watching the confusion settle into your expression as you struggled to stand straight. Watching you try to make sense of the atmosphere and come up empty.

Your adrenaline hadn't finished with you yet. It pushed up through the exhaustion and gave you just enough — enough to lift your head, to draw a breath that caught halfway, to look at the faces around you.

"What happened?"

You already didn't want to know.

Some of them choked back a sob. Others didn't move at all, expressions blank in the specific way that meant the shock hadn't finished processing yet. Someone nearby closed their hand into a fist at their side.

The officer supporting you opened their mouth. Their lips shaped a sound before their voice broke around it.

"Number 9..." They couldn't finish.

Someone else did it for them, voice threading through barely steady enough to carry the words.

"The Chief—"

She stopped there too. And they didn't have to say anything more. The tone told you everything words couldn't.

You told them to take you to Kikoru.

They did.

She hadn't crumpled. That was the first thing you saw. Her back was still straight, shoulders still set, still carrying the shape of someone who hadn't stood down — only her legs had given out beneath her, and so she was on the ground like that, composed from the waist up and collapsed from the waist down. Still on guard. Still holding herself together out of sheer refusal and denial, even now.

Something pressed in tight against your throat.

Kafka was beside her in his human form, and when he heard you approach he lifted his head. His eyes found yours for just a moment. Then he stepped aside without a word.

You pushed off the officer supporting you, ignored the way your body immediately registered its objections, and crossed to her—lowering yourself to her eye level.

Your hand — bloodied, scraped raw, dirt still packed into the lines of your knuckles — came up slowly and found her cheek. You held it there. Then you pulled her in, one arm around her back, your other hand settling at the back of her head. You didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that wouldn't ring hollow, and you knew that better than most.

You just stayed there. Your hand moved slowly, smoothing her hair, again and again, steady and unhurried, the way you'd learned meant more than words usually did.

You had been underground not long ago, convinced no one was coming. Convinced the air would run out before anyone reached you. You had been so afraid, so certain that what was happening to you was the worst thing happening — and the whole time, this had been unfolding up here. The real thing. The thing you'd felt faint echoes of as a child and never wanted to feel again.

You had cried. Down in that dark, you had pressed your hand over your mouth and cried.

The thought sat in your chest now like something shameful.

You held her tighter, briefly, and then let the grip ease back.

After a while — long enough that you'd lost track of how much of it had passed — you spoke. Quietly, close to her ear.

"Let's get you treated."

You took her arm and helped her up. She let you. That alone told you something about the state she was in, because the Kikoru Shinomiya she usually presented herself as did not let people carry her weight without a fight. Now, all she looked like was an empty shell.

You guided her slowly toward the perimeter, where the ambulances were stationed at the edge of the battle zone, their lights throwing pale colour across the ground.

The medic staff let you lay her down without question. They recognized her — you saw it happen, the small shift in their expressions when they placed her face against the name against the day's events. They gave you the space.

You made sure she was settled and then moved to step out. Give her room. Give them room to work.

Her finger hooked yours.

Just that. Just one finger, barely any pressure, but deliberate. A small, wordless thing that said don't go more clearly than she could ever let say out loud.

You understood. You turned back and sat down on the bench opposite her, close enough that she could still feel you there.

The pain in your side was loud now. Not the manageable background kind — the kind that had started making itself impossible to ignore somewhere around the third breath you'd taken sitting still. You noted it and set it aside and kept your face even.

She didn't need your pain right now. She needed your presence.

You had been here before — not in this exact shape, not in this particular loss — but in the texture of it. The kind of silence that settles in when someone who was just there a moment ago is suddenly, irreversibly not anymore.

You knew what it did to the architecture of a person. How it didn't destroy you from the outside but from the inside, quietly and completely, rearranging everything you'd built around that fixed point until nothing sat level anymore.

You knew it, and you didn't say so, because Kikoru didn't need to know that right now either.

What she needed was simple, even if it wasn't easy. She needed someone to stay. Someone who wasn't going to flinch or fall apart or ask her how she was feeling.

Someone whose only job in this moment was to remain — composed and present and steady, an unmoving thing in the middle of everything that had just stopped being certain.

That was what adults were for.

Not the ones who swept in with answers or absorbed your grief into their own, but the ones who simply refused to leave. Who understood that their steadiness wasn't for themselves — it was something they held on behalf of someone else, a borrowed calm that said you don't have to hold this alone right now and meant it.

You had needed that once. You knew, with the particular clarity of someone who had gone without it, exactly how much it cost when it wasn't there.

So you stayed. And you did not break down. And you did not look away.

Only when they took her away for treatment, away from your line of sight — did you finally stop.

You made it out of the ambulance. That was as far as you got.

Your legs went first, and then the rest of you followed.

You hit the ground and stayed there, your body breathing in the rough, wrenching way it had been trying to since somewhere deep underground — the kind of breathing that had nothing controlled left in it.

The staff around you reacted immediately. Voices, movement, hands reaching toward you.

They hadn't known.

Of course they hadn't. You had been walking, guiding—functioning in all the right ways to comfort someone who just went through loss.

There had been nothing, no obvious collapse in how you held yourself. The rib fracture didn't announce itself. The lung didn't show.

So no one had suspected.

They got you onto a stretcher and the assessment came fast. Internal bleeding. Punctured lung. The notes on your file already had injuries listed that hadn't finished healing — and you had spent the last several hours digging through compacted earth with your bare hands, hauling two civilians, climbing out of a sinkhole, and then sitting in a pressurized environment while your body quietly fell further apart.

Your lung had been patient with you.

It was done being patient.

You were awake before the ward had fully come to life, lying in the hospital bed staring at the ceiling while the early morning sounds of the building moved around you — the soft rhythm of trolleys in the corridor, the distant murmur of a shift change, the particular quality of silence that existed only in places built around the management of other people's pain.

You asked to be discharged before the attending physician had finished their morning rounds.

They said no. Gently at first, then more firmly when you didn't take the first answer. A punctured lung required monitoring — standard protocol, another twenty-four hours minimum, non-negotiable.

You negotiated anyway.

You told them you understood the risk and were prepared to sign whatever they needed you to sign. You offered to cover the full cost of the treatment out of pocket and asked, while you were at it, if anyone on staff could help you source a change of clothes, because you were not leaving in a hospital gown and your own had been unsalvageable. The physician looked at you for a long moment with the particular expression of someone deciding whether continuing to argue was worth the energy. They discharged you.

One of the nurses knocked on your door not long after, a folded set of clothes in her arms. She was close to your size, she said. She'd thought you might need them. When you reached for your wallet she shook her head.

She said it was her way of saying thank you. For the work. For the two students.

You thanked her and meant it, and you changed, and you left.

You didn't go to Kikoru's room.

You knew where it was. You knew she was in it, had been in it since they'd brought her back, the door closed and presumably staying that way for the foreseeable future. You knew all of this and you stayed away on purpose.

Not yet.

The worst thing you could do right now was knock on that door. Grief in its first hours was not something that wanted company — it wanted space. Room to move around in, to take up its full shape without an audience.

The instinct to reach for someone in pain was genuine and good and often exactly wrong, and you had learned that the hard way from both sides of it.

What Kikoru needed right now was time to actually register what had happened. To let the fact of it become real at its own pace, because that process couldn't be rushed and it couldn't be helped and the only thing that could go wrong was if someone interfered with it before it was finished.

If it went wrong after — if the processing curdled into something that closed her off or drove her somewhere too far inward — that could be addressed. That was what the people around her were for. But right now, the most useful thing you could be was nearby without being present.

So you stayed. Stuck around Ariake Maritime Base.

You sat in the lobby for a while, watching the base move through its morning at a diminished pace. The atmosphere was subdued in the way that only happened when a loss had run through an institution all the way to its foundations — not loud, not demonstrative, just quieter than it should have been. People carrying themselves with a slight additional weight. Eyes that didn't linger the way they usually did. The particular way a community looked when it was still deciding how to hold something too large for any one person.

You walked the perimeter of the base in the afternoon. Slow, because your body made anything faster a considered choice, but deliberate. You watched faces. Took stock.

You passed Kafka once near one of the outer corridors.

He looked, at a glance, like himself — the determined posture, the readiness in his face to produce a smile at a moment's notice. It was a good performance.

You recognized it as one because you understood the effort it took to sustain it, the specific kind of exhaustion that came not from feeling nothing but from holding something carefully out of sight so that the people around you had one less thing to worry about.

Kafka asked where you were staying.

You told him you'd checked into a hotel. That you were coming back to the base during the day. That you wanted to be around in case Kikoru decided to step outside.

He nodded, accepting the answer at face value, or pretending to. You didn't push on his end and he didn't push on yours, which felt like the right call for both of you.

In truth, you hadn't gone to any hotel after dark.

You'd found the shared space below the dormitory building and you'd sat there. Not pacing, not doing anything in particular — just sitting in the place closest to her that you could be without being in her way. The night was quiet and mostly uneventful and Kikoru didn't come out.

You stayed until morning.

You hadn't sent word back to the Third Division. Sick leave meant no obligation to report your whereabouts, and you were using that fact as a technicality without guilt. You weren't ready to return yet. The reasoning didn't need to be more complicated than that.

Your phone filled in the gap.

Kikoru called to check in on you. Her voice was flat in the way that had nothing to do with composure, the careful even tone of someone who had decided that functioning was the only available option and was executing it deliberately.

You told her you were fine, kept it brief.

Hoshina called separately. He didn't lead with your injuries — he knew better. Instead he simply asked where you were and if you were safe. You told him Ariake.

Ashiro sent a message. You confirmed your safety with her.

The second day repeated itself.

You hung around the same spot below the dormitory building and watched the base breathe around you in its muted, diminished way. Kikoru didn't come out. You didn't knock. The hours moved and you let them.

By the second night you needed to move.

You weren't sure what time it was when you finally got up — somewhere past midnight, the base reduced to its skeleton crew.

You pulled your jacket tighter and walked without a particular destination, just the steady rhythm of your own footsteps and the night air coming in off the water.

The smell reached you before anything else did. Salt from the bay, clean and sharp underneath everything—Underneath the smoke and burnt concrete drifting in on the wind from the direction of the attack site, the particular acrid residue of a city that had been broken open and was still smouldering at its edges.

It clung to the back of your throat the way it always did after an emergence. The cold sharpened it. The breeze off the water pushed it through in slow irregular waves, carrying it far enough inland that even standing here, several kilometres from the worst of it, you couldn't quite escape it.

The lights along the waterfront sat low and still. Somewhere in the distance, past the dark outline of the buildings, a thin column of smoke rose and dispersed against the sky.

You walked, and the smoke smell followed you, and you let your mind stay empty for a little while.

You almost didn't notice him.

He was coming from the opposite direction, unhurried, hands sunk into the front pocket of a hoodie that had clearly been pulled on without much thought — dark sweats, no insignia, nothing that marked him as anything other than someone who couldn't sleep.

Narumi Gen.

He saw you at roughly the same time you noticed him. Narumi didn't break stride.

"Why are you still at Ariake?" He asked it the way someone asks a question they already suspect the answer to, mild and unhurried, hands still in his pockets. "And at this hour."

You considered answering. Then, politely—because it genuinely wasn't his business and the hour was too late for anything that required more effort than this—you redirected.

"Why are you up, Captain?"

He looked at you for a moment. Then instead of answering, he said, "Do you have a place to stay?"

The pause before you responded was probably enough for an answer.

He studied you for a second, something shifting faintly in his expression — less curiosity, more the look of someone doing mental arithmetic and arriving at an unsurprising conclusion. He clicked his tongue. Then his hand came out of his pocket and he tossed something toward you in a short, underhand arc.

You caught it on reflex.

A JAKDF ID card. His.

"Use it," he said. "Each dorm building has a community lounge on the third floor. Same building as that kid."

You turned the card over in your fingers and understood what he was doing — access to the building, a lounge to rest in, a floor up from Kikoru's room. Close enough. Out of the cold.

The laugh came before you could think better of it. The first one in two days, quiet and genuine, loose in a way that surprised even you.

"Why does your ID card have access to a women's dormitory building?"

Narumi stared at you. It was a brief stare. The kind that arrived slightly delayed, like it needed a moment to confirm that you'd actually just said that.

"Because I'm the captain of this division." The flatness in his voice suggested he found the question about as reasonable as being asked why the sky was above the ground. "I have access to everything."

"This specific access seems like something you shouldn't need, though."

"It's coded for all non-restricted living quarters." There was a faint edge to his tone, the kind of impatience that came from having to explain something he clearly thought should be obvious. His chin tilted up just slightly as he looked down at you, a trace of arrogance slipping through. "Male, female—it doesn't matter. Injuries, alarms, inspections. I'm not getting locked out because someone decided a door needs a gender. This is basic."

"That's a reasonable explanation."

"'Cause it is." the look he gave you seemed to ask Are you dumb?

"I was still right that it's not something you should need to use." You insisted.

"Do you talk to all of your superiors like this," Narumi asked, combing his bangs back with a slow and cocky drag of his fingers, gaze settling on you with open, unhidden challenge, "or just the ones who outrank Hoshina?"

At least he'd used your Vice Captain's name. You noted that without comment.

The honest answer was simple—you treated your superiors exactly as well as their conduct earned. And Gen Narumi hadn't exactly set a high standard. Declaring his disinterest in your Vice Captain was one thing. The way he'd dismissed him outright was another.

Still.

He had hauled you out of a hole in the ground, and later showed up at midnight in a hoodie to hand you his ID card without being asked. You guess that was a reasonable start, but it wasn't enough to make you adjust your attitude for his sake.

He held the rank of captain. You'd give him that much.

"I conduct myself in accordance with the respect my superiors uphold," you said pleasantly.

Narumi clicked his tongue. But his expression didn't say much — just the look of a man who had picked something up, found it strange, and set it back down without making a thing of it.

Under normal circumstances you suspected he might have had something to say about it — something pointed, delivered with the particular energy of a man who was used to a room adjusting to him when he walked into it. But the last two days had happened, and the weight of them was still sitting on the base like a low ceiling, and he apparently didn't have the bandwidth to be dramatic about one officer with an odd attitude problem.

He let out a short breath.

"You know what," he said, "I'll have my ID back."

"I apologize. Sincerely, and with full awareness that it probably doesn't sound like it."

"Then why say it at all."

The speed of that answer told you more than he probably intended it to.

You glanced down at the card in your hand, turning it once between your fingers, and decided to leave it there. You'd had your fun pushing at him, but there was a time and place for that—and this wasn't it.

"Don't you need this though?" you asked instead "Is it actually fine to give it to me?"

"I've got spares." There was a trace of irritation left in his voice, like he hadn't quite let go of your earlier attitude yet. "Just return it before you head back to Tachikawa."

"Understood." You tucked it into your jacket pocket and wasted no time. "Good night, Captain."

You turned—

"Also."

—And stopped.

"My bad," he said, "if I hurt you. The other day."

The other day. It took you a moment — and then it placed itself. The pit. His arm across the back of your thighs, one hand occupied, the way being hauled over a shoulder had driven the sound out of you before you could stop it. The brief pause before he'd kept climbing.

He didn't need to apologize. You'd understood it immediately, even then — one hand on his weapon, unstable ground, no clean way to manage the ascent while also managing you. He'd done the only thing that made practical sense. The pain had been incidental.

You turned back just enough to look at him over your shoulder.

"No apology necessary, sir." You kept your voice even, perfectly earnest, let the timing do the work. "I appreciate being retrieved in one piece."

You walked away.

"This woman—"

Behind you, after a beat of silence that lasted just long enough to be satisfying, you heard a sharp exhale, edged with a lingering annoyance and just a hint of disbelief.

You didn't turn around.

You were outside the dormitory building before the morning had fully arrived, the air still grey and cold, the base quieter than it had any right to be for a day like this.

You waited.

The funeral was scheduled for late morning. You had thought — had let yourself believe, perhaps more than was reasonable — that the occasion might be what drew her out. That whatever Kikoru was working through alone in that room might yield, just enough, to the weight of the day. That she would appear in the doorway and you would fall into step beside her without needing to say anything about it.

She didn't come.

The ceremony was held at the base grounds, formal and precise, the kind of occasion that the JAKDF executed with the same discipline it brought to everything else. Officers in full dress. The national flag. The ordered silence of people who understood that grief, in a public context, had a shape and a structure and you held it together until you were somewhere private enough to let it come apart.

You stood and watched and thought about how you had spoken to him. Once. One conversation, short and brief. Isao Shinomiya had been alive then, fully and completely, and now he wasn't, and the distance between those two states was so absolute and so sudden that your mind kept sliding off the edge of it without being able to find a grip.

You had barely known him. The ache was still there anyway, small and genuine, sitting just below the surface of everything else. If it hurt this much from where you were standing, you couldn't begin to reach the edges of what it felt like from closer in. From Kikoru's heart.

Your eyes moved across the gathered faces. Platoon leaders, head researchers, operational staff — all of them holding themselves in their own particular way, each carrying the same weight at a different angle. Akira Kurusu stood near the front, still and straight, his expression composed into something that had clearly cost him a great deal to arrange. He had spent years as something close to a personal operational lead for Shinomiya, moving in the same orbit, thinking in the same direction. You wondered what it felt like to have that axis simply removed.

You glanced toward the front. The back of Narumi's head. Straight-backed, unmoving, facing forward. It was well known — the kind of thing that moved through institutional memory the way certain facts did, quietly and without needing to be repeated — that Isao Shinomiya had shaped him. That the man standing there had been built, at least in part, by the one being honoured.

You looked away.

The three-volley salute came in sequence — sharp and clean and final, each crack of sound cutting through the cold air and settling into the quiet that followed. An old tradition. A pause in battle to retrieve the fallen. A signal that the fighting could resume.

You thought about that for a long moment.

The ceremony eventually ended.

You and Kafka found each other without planning to. You stood together for a moment in the dispersing crowd and the look that passed between you said everything that needed saying.

She didn't come.

You checked her room first. An officer in the corridor told you she'd seen Kikoru head out sometime before the service ended. You and Kafka exchanged a glance and moved without discussing it, because there was only one place that made sense.

You were right on the first try.

The door to the Director General's office was slightly ajar, a thin line of light falling across the corridor floor. Kafka slowed beside you and looked at the door, then at you.

"You go," he said quietly. "Two people might be too much."

He didn't say you were closer to her. He didn't need to.

You stepped forward. You were about to push the door open when her voice came through the gap — low and unsteady, threaded through with something she was clearly fighting to keep out of it.

"He's probably still trapped in there." A pause. "I'll mourn after we defeat Number 9."

You went still.

Then another voice. One you hadn't expected.

"Shinomiya." Narumi. Measured, direct, no softness in it and no cruelty either — just the plain, unadorned weight of someone who knew exactly what they were doing. "I'll make you the strongest after me. You'd better keep up and show results." A beat. "I'll overlook your absence from the ceremony."

The silence that followed lasted only a moment.

"Yes, sir."

Kikoru's voice. Clear and certain and completely, unmistakably herself — the particular quality of it that you had come to recognise as the sound of her deciding something and meaning it all the way through.

You exhaled slowly and stayed where you were.

A moment later the door opened and Narumi stepped out. He saw you immediately, and then Kafka just behind you. He didn't say anything. His eyes met yours — a brief, even look, long enough to land — and then he turned and walked away down the corridor.

You watched him go.

Then you glanced back at Kafka.

The ceremony had undone him somewhat — you'd seen it, the way grief moved across his face in unguarded moments, honest and unperformed in the way Kafka was honest about most things whether he intended to be or not. But standing here now he looked different. The grief was still there underneath, but what sat on top of it was something quieter and considerably more dangerous. Set. Pointed inward at something he hadn't finished with yet.

He met your eyes and didn't say anything. He didn't need to.

You offered him a small smile — not the kind that asked anything of him, just the kind that said go — and he returned it briefly, then turned. Kafka's footsteps picked up pace down the corridor in the direction Narumi had gone.

You stood alone in the quiet hallway and let the silence settle around you.

She was okay. Not unbroken — that wasn't the right word for it and probably wouldn't be for a long time — but she was okay in the way that mattered right now. Oriented. Facing the right direction.

Kikoru Shinomiya had taken the worst thing and turned it into something she could carry forward, and she had done it faster and with more clarity than most people managed, and you were not surprised, and it still struck you somewhere unguarded to witness it.

She was stronger than you. You thought that simply and without envy, just as a plain fact.

You turned and walked back down the corridor, through the building, out into the pale afternoon light.

Your car was where you'd left it at the edge of the base lot — somehow intact, having stayed just outside the emergence zone. You'd found it still parked near the restaurant from that night, driven it back yourself in the aftermath when the roads had cleared enough to allow it.

You crossed to it without hurrying. Got in and sat for a moment with your hands in your lap.

You didn't start the engine right away.

For the past few days you had been keeping everything at a careful distance — your own fear, your own grief, the particular texture of what it had felt like to be at the bottom of that hole with the air running out and no certainty that anyone was coming. You had set it aside because there had been someone who needed you to, and that had been reason enough.

But Kikoru was okay. Kafka was moving. Narumi was — whatever Narumi was, he was handling it.

There was no one left who needed you to hold it together now.

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