SAIKON Chapter 13: The Honest Blade

Read chapter 13 of SAIKON by SoraIkigai on NovelPedia.

Ryo had never seen Yua run. He'd seen her move, that clean economy she used crossing a training floor, every step spent like it cost her something. He'd seen her walk fast. He'd seen her react, the blur of a hand catching something off a shelf before the thing finished falling, her body answering before her mind bothered to. He had never seen this. She went through the pre-dawn streets at a speed his eyes lost between buildings. Not a sprint. Something past it, something that treated the ground as a suggestion, her feet brushing concrete for fractions of a second before throwing her forward again. The katana rode bare in her right hand, blinking gray light through the gaps between buildings. Her hair streamed back like a torn flag. Ryo ran after her with everything he had, legs burning, lungs raw, and lost ten meters a block anyway. The compression training let him hold the pace longer than he could have a month ago. It didn't close the gap. The distance between a civilian at his limit and a Second Kamon Hunter moving with purpose wasn't a thing training crossed. It was a thing generations crossed. 'She's scared.' The thought came between breaths, unwanted and certain. He'd spent weeks learning her, not the way a student learns a teacher but the way one person learns another, off the small things. The set of her shoulders when she was thinking. The half-beat she always added before correcting him, because she chose her words. The smile she still swore she'd never given. He'd never seen her shoulders locked forward like this. Bracing. The posture of someone walking back into a thing they'd felt once and prayed never to feel again. 'She's not reacting to a threat. She knows this one. She's met it before.' She rounded a corner and was gone. He cut through a lane so narrow his elbows nearly took the brick, and came out four blocks from the school to find her stopped in the middle of the empty street. Not waiting for him. Stopped because she'd hit something. She stood with the katana low at her side, staring at the school two hundred meters off. Doubled over with his hands on his knees, tasting copper, Ryo looked too. It was the same building he'd walked into every morning. Same gates. Same courtyard. Same rooftop above the tree line, black against a sky going from coal to slate. "Yua—" "Don't move." He froze. Not at the order. At the voice. It was the one from the Spider, the one with everything unnecessary stripped out of it, the one that belonged to a girl who'd been running Hunts since she was fourteen and had walked out of every one. "What is it?" "The roof." She hadn't blinked. "Reach for it. Tell me what you feel." He closed his eyes and pushed his perception outward the way she'd taught him, the awareness expanding past his skin in a slow sphere. He was bad at it. On a good day he got ten meters and the information came through smeared, like reading print underwater. He reached. And hit a wall. Not a physical one. His awareness widened, widened, and then stopped dead at a clean line, the signal cut to nothing. Not static. Not interference. Nothing. The feel of a surface that drank every bit of light that touched it. "Something's around the roof," he said. "I can't read past it. It just ends." "It doesn't end. It's been ended." She said it the way a doctor corrects a patient who called a fracture a bruise. "Someone deployed a Koga on the school. A signature art." "A what?" "A Koga. The second tier of Shukon, the Hunting Soul. Most of us fight by strengthening the body or sharpening the blade. A Hunter who reaches Koga grows one signature art instead, unique to them, and this one's art doesn't hit you. It rewrites the space you're standing in, and then the space hunts for the user." Her jaw worked once. "Every art like this has a quarry. A thing it's built to catch. Until it has what it came for, it just holds, and it holds against anything that comes at it from outside." "You can break it." "No." Flat. No softening. "Hit a K