The snow hadn't stopped in hours.
It didn't fall right anymore. It hung in the air, drifting unnaturally slow around the figure walking below.
"Visual confirmed. Subject is active," Phantom-7 whispered, peering through the scope.
The glass had cracked earlier from a burst of static when he tried to tag the target with an Arts-based tracker. It fizzled out in his hands.
Interference.
Always interference.
The man was just standing now, watching something the operators couldn't see. Slender. Wrapped in an old black coat.
Katana slung lazily over one shoulder. No urgency. No direction. Just... drifting.
"He's talking to himself again," Phantom-7 muttered. He tapped the audio line, scrambled. Useless.
And then she appeared again.
The girl. The thing.
Floating a meter off the ground. Pale limbs.
Tattered black dress. Her presence didn't cast a shadow, it devoured them. Like cursed light bending around her.
She hovered beside him, brushing his sleeve gently. Almost tender. He flinched. Looked away. Whispered something again.
"Are we looking at a... shikigami?" came a second voice on comms, Operator Duskshade.
"I can't tell for sure" Kal'tsit's voice replied calmly over the encrypted channel. "But if it's just like what that man said, it could be a shikigami, yet, she look too... human..."
Phantom-7 swallowed.
He remembered Graymark screaming during his detainment, about a boy who couldn't die, about a force that fed on love, about a copy technique that stole everything.
Now that boy was standing at the edge of a ravine, overlooking a half-buried village.
There were no corpses.
Just an unnatural silence.
The same kind the medics described when Graymark's loop failed to undo his broken arm.
No one had gone into that village in hours.
No one would.
"He hasn't killed anyone for two days," Duskshade said.
"Because no one's been foolish enough to speak to him," Kal'tsit responded.
They watched as the boy knelt.
Pressed a hand into the soil. Closed his eyes.
The girl beside him flickered, just for a moment, and every cursed sensor in the region shorted out.
Phantom-7 backed away from the scope. Slowly. "We need to fall back."
"No," Kal'tsit said. "Stay. Observe. Do not engage."
A pause.
"Because if he's starting to remember who he was... Terra may not survive who he becomes."
...
The snow fell wrong here.
It didn't drift like it used to in Japan.
It didn't sting the skin, didn't melt against his neck, didn't crunch underfoot the way he remembered.
Here in Terra, snow hovered like ash, suspended in the air just long enough to feel unnatural, then sinking slowly, like it had forgotten how to land.
Yuta crouched at the edge of the cliff, eyes scanning the half-buried village below.
The buildings were shattered inward, roofs caved under the weight of rot and time, half-eaten by originium veins and something else, something unseen but suffocating.
He placed his hand in the snow beside him, letting his fingers curl against the dead ground.
The layer was shallow, but he pressed harder anyway, until his nails split the frost, until his knuckles ached.
He didn't feel the cold.
It didn't register anymore.
There was only that low hum, cursed energy thrumming in the air like distant thunder, too constant to be acknowledged, too familiar to be feared.
It wrapped around his limbs, buzzed beneath his tongue.
It felt heavier here.
Wilder.
The kind of cursed energy that came from buried fear and forgotten sins.
The kind that didn't come from sorcerers, but from the land itself.
He knew he was being watched.
They'd been following him for hours, maybe longer.
Rhodes Island scouts, probably two of them, one on the ridge and another hidden in the trees.
Not bad at suppressing their presence, but not good enough to go unnoticed by someone like him.
Their movement patterns were clean, their cursed signatures artificially muted, Arts users trying to behave like sorcerers.
They wouldn't approach. Not yet.
Just watching.
That was fine.
Let them watch.
Let them observe the aftermath.
They always came late, always arrived to a silence they couldn't explain.
He didn't leave bodies anymore.
Just cursed remains.
Stains too deep to cleanse.
Sounds too warped to understand.
He didn't do it on purpose.
It just happened.
Like everything else lately.
Beside him, Rika hovered without a sound.
She no longer walked. No longer clung to his side like a frightened child.
This new form, this shikigami-like body, was quieter, more composed.
Her pale limbs hung weightless in the air, and her tattered black dress drifted like smoke around her legs. She didn't speak, hadn't in days.
But she remained near, always near, like gravity had changed its mind and decided he was still worth orbiting.
Yuta didn't know what she was anymore.
Not a cursed spirit, not exactly.
Not Rika Orimoto, not entirely.
Something in between, shaped by the unnatural fusion of cursed energy and this world's twisted leylines.
Originium and pain and memory and love, melted into something that wore her face but didn't carry her warmth.
Still, she reached out gently, brushing the sleeve of his coat with fingers that never quite touched.
Her eyes, those familiar, infinite eyes, watched him not with affection, but with a kind of mirrored sorrow.
Like she was waiting for him to say something she couldn't.
He kept his gaze on the village.
It had been alive once.
Dozens of people, miners, refugees, children.
He'd heard rumors about strange deaths, about whispered voices and hallucinations that drove people into the mines even when there was nothing left to dig.
That was the curse.
A thing swollen with despair, born from the fear of obsolescence, from being buried alive by the very work meant to feed your children.
He found it two nights ago.
He didn't fight it.
Didn't even draw his blade.
Just walked into the central pit where it pulsed in the dark, and let it come for him.
He remembered its shape, half-formed, shrieking through a dozen voices that weren't its own.
It tried to overwhelm him with sound, with grief, with echoes of names it couldn't remember.
He stood there and let it scream.
Then he reached out and crushed its throat with cursed energy alone.
No struggle. No effort.
He killed it because it was there.
Because it reminded him of himself.
There was no joy in it.
No satisfaction.
Just the briefest flicker of resistance, then silence.
He hadn't spoken a word since.
He stared at the ruins now, but saw only a mirror of his own reflection: fragmented, meaningless, half-buried in a place he had no reason to belong.
"This place doesn't belong to me," he said aloud, voice barely above a whisper. It was the first thing he'd spoken in over thirty hours.
His breath curled in the air, faintly tinged with black static.
Rika didn't answer.
He didn't expect her to.
"I think... the longer I stay here, the more I forget what love felt like."
No reply.
She just floated there, eyes fixed on him, or maybe through him.
Sometimes, he thought she was trying to remember too.
But maybe there was nothing left to remember.
He looked at his hands.
There was blood on them again. Faint, almost gone, but still there. He hadn't noticed. He never did anymore.
"But you're still here," he said, quieter now. "Even now."
She flickered, just for a moment.
Not like a glitch, more like a candle's last breath of flame before snuffing out.
She hovered closer. Her fingers brushed the air again, grazing the outline of his wrist.
He didn't pull away.
Yuta stood, slowly.
His joints cracked with the motion.
His body was almost fully recovered now, cursed energy flowing without interruption, reinforced without thought.
But there was something deeper that hadn't healed.
Something that felt more and more like it never would.
He turned from the ruins. Snow crunched under his boots now, only now, as if the ground was remembering sound again.
Rika drifted beside him, silent and steady.
He didn't know what Rhodes Island wanted.
Didn't care.
Maybe they thought he could be reasoned with.
Maybe they thought he was still human.
Maybe they believed they could contain him, or understand him, or explain him.
They were wrong.
"I'm not a hero," he said quietly.
The snow continued to fall.
"I'm just someone who lived too long after everyone else died."
And somewhere behind the trees, they kept watching, trying to make sense of a man who no longer knew what he was.
...
The trees grew thinner near the ridge.
Lappaland moved through them like a ghost, her boots muffled by the thin veil of snow.
She didn't bother masking her presence.
If he was who they said he was, if even half of what Graymark described was true, then she knew damn well she wasn't sneaking up on him.
And still, she came.
She hated being told to wait. Hated the way Kal'tsit's voice always dripped with restraint, with that cold logic that said observe, report, do not engage.
That wasn't how she lived.
That wasn't how Terra worked.
You didn't survive by watching monsters from a distance. You survived by pulling the trigger before they opened their mouth.
But she hadn't drawn her gun.
She stepped past a dying pine, and the world opened into a clearing.
There he was.
He stood at the edge of the cliff, back turned, tall, motionless.
Snow clung to his coat, but he didn't seem to notice.
Next to him hovered something wrong, something shaped like a girl, something that looked like it might've once been human, or maybe never was.
Her dress moved like water. Her eyes didn't blink.
Neither of them moved.
But Lappaland knew they'd heard her. Felt her.
Still, she spoke.
"I thought you'd be taller."
His shoulders didn't flinch, but she felt the curse energy rise in the air like heat.
Not anger. Not warning.
Just presence.
It rolled over her skin like razors dipped in ice water.
Her breath hitched, reflex, not fear.
Yuta turned.
His face was quiet. Hollow-eyed.
Not empty, but not exactly alive either.
There was a calm to him, but it wasn't the good kind.
It was the kind you see in people who've already decided how you're going to die.
Lappaland tilted her head.
"You've been killing things out here. Not just beasts. Not just infected. Curses. Ghosts. Stuff that doesn't belong in Terra." She paused.
"Like you."
He looked at her, eyes unreadable.
"...And?"
She shrugged. "Rhodes Island thinks you're dangerous. Wants to know what you are, where you came from. Thought I'd ask first."
Silence.
Then, softly, his voice, low, measured, tired.
"I don't remember how to explain it anymore."
That stopped her.
There was no arrogance. No denial.
Just... admission. Flat. Honest.
Like he'd already had this conversation with himself a hundred times, and stopped expecting answers.
"You have a name?" she asked.
"Yuta Okkotsu."
It sounded foreign on his tongue. Foreign even to him.
"And her?"
He glanced at Rika.
"She's... something I couldn't let go."
That made Lappaland blink.
Not at the answer, at the way he said it.
Like she was still holding something dead in her arms and pretending it could come back.
A wind swept through the clearing.
Neither of them moved.
"You don't smell like a killer," she said after a beat. "But everything around you says otherwise... Alright, enough chatting, let's get straight to the point"
"...What?..."
"Hope that checkpoint dude was right about you" She draw her blade and go straight for a strike.
Yuta parried her with his katana, cursed energy reinforced, sharpen his weapon, boosting his awareness.
"...Of course..."