Kagami

The knight fought it.

The Maw erupted from the stump in eight tendrils and the biomass along Kagami’s spine split wide. It reached from shoulders and ribs and the base of his skull while Will-O-Wisp detonated in the left palm and lightning threaded through every tendril until the cemetery was white light and noise.

Ezra knelt in the koi stream with his hand underwater and his eyes closed.

The tendrils swung for him and the air around his body refused to carry the impact. Biomass whipped past his head and cracked the headstone behind him. His hair didn’t move.

Get off me.

The knight was talking to the thing peeling it from Kagami’s spine.

I’ll kill the boy. I’ll burn this body before I—

The pull started in Kagami’s feet and climbed followed by the biomass in his legs shuddering. The Maw retracted in a convulsion. The Will-O-Wisp snuffed and the lightning died along the tendrils and then the knight came loose.

Six months it had lived between his ribs.

The separation was sudden and total.

Kagami’s jaw locked. His vision went red. The biomass along his shoulders went rigid, then soft, then fell away from his body in sheets.

I AM THE SENESCHAL OF THE SEVENTH—

Ezra closed his fist in the water.

The scream cut.

The tendrils dropped. The Maw collapsed into dead tissue along his ribs. Kagami’s body hit the grass on both knees and the stump caught him before his face hit the dirt.

A figurine bounced off the center of his chest and rolled to a stop against a cracked headstone. Six inches tall. Red as arterial blood. Armored in miniature with the visor down, shoulders plated, gauntlets curled into fists.

Tendrils sprouted from the back in thin crimson filaments, motionless. One foot forward, mid-stride, frozen in the act of walking somewhere it would never reach.

Ezra pulled his hand from the stream and dried it on his coat. He walked to the figurine and picked it up between thumb and forefinger. Held it to the afternoon light.

“The Crimson Knight.” He turned it once. “Seneschal of the Seventh Threshold. Third of eight.” He put it in his coat pocket and buttoned it shut. “Hello again.”

Kagami put both hands on the grass. The left was his. The right was biomass reforming from the stump in black fingers that moved when he told them to.

The Maw was gone. But when he flexed the new hand, biomass crawled from his spine on command.

His skull held one voice. Past the tree line, sirens. The buildings he’d hit. The people inside them.

He stood. The koi stream was still running gray. He walked into it.

The water hit his ankles. His shins. His knees. The gray current pulled at him, faint and residual, Kharon’s work bleeding through the stream bed.

Take me too.

The gray bled out of the water in slow ribbons, returning to clear, and the current went flat around his legs. Ankle-deep at its center. Six inches of water with nowhere to go.

“You don’t get to leave.” Ezra’s voice from the bank. “That’s not how this works.”

“Open it.”

“No.”

“I killed her.”

“You did.”

“He’s gone. It was me.”

“Most of it.”

“Open the passage, Ezra.”

“There’s no passage open, Kagami-san.” Ezra sat on a fallen grave marker with his coat buttoned over the pocket where the figurine rested. “There’s a stream. You’re standing in a stream.”

Kagami looked down. His reflection looked back. Black biomass arm. Blood on his jaw. His own face, and nothing behind it.

He walked back to the bank and sat because his legs gave out.

“You stopped the experiments,” Kagami said.

“I did.”

“The Bureau finished.”

“Someone did.” Ezra ran his thumb along the edge of the grave marker. “The woman with the red eyes, I think. I was already gone by then.”

“The Cube was mine. The amplification sequence was mine. The knight fusion was mine.”

“Then why did you stop?”

Ezra looked at him. Same look he’d given the ghost fire when Kagami held it for four seconds and didn’t pass out.

“Because I saw your blood turn.”

“Black.”

“Gray. At first.” He pulled his hand back from the marker. “The biomass was replacing the biology faster than the body could adapt. Twelve months at that rate and there’d be nothing left of you to extract from.”

The burned plots smoked between them. Tamei, the headstones read.

“So you left.”

“I left the fusion incomplete. The Bureau didn’t.” Ezra’s jaw tightened and released. “I don’t know what they did to you after that. The Men Upstairs sent someone to finish it and they finished it well.”

“But extraction was always the endgame.”

“You fused it into my spine so you could rip it out.”

“Yes.”

“And then you grew a conscience.”

Ezra looked at the Tamei headstones. “Then I grew a conscience.”

“The power stays,” he said. “Whatever the Bureau welded onto the core is fused to your tissue. Permanent. The knight’s identity was riding on top. I removed it.”

“And took it with you.”

“The Crimson Knight is a weapon of considerable value. I wasn’t going to leave it in the dirt.”

“What about me?”

“You’re a weapon too.” Ezra met his eyes. “Difference is, nobody’s holding your leash anymore.”

“You and Nami.” Kagami opened and closed the biomass hand. “She told you to make it quick. Her words, through your mouth. She trusted you with that.”

Ezra adjusted his coat.

“Is that what this is? You and her?”

“Huh.” Ezra picked up the two halves of his broken stick and looked at them. “She’s older than me by six years. I’m just a big flirt.”

He set the halves on the grave marker.

“OG,” Kagami said.

Ezra waited.

“You sat in that chair. You counted eleven seconds.”

“I did.”

“She was mine.”

“She was.”

“And you let me kill her so you could measure the hooks.”

Ezra stood and brushed ash from his coat.

“I won’t apologize for that. The measurement saved your life. Three seconds or less and the extraction would’ve killed you. Eleven gave me room to work.”

He walked toward the tree line. “The Bureau will come looking for the knight. They’ll find you instead. What you tell them is your business.”

He’d reached the gap in the wall where the path led to the neighborhood street. Smoke from the collapsed buildings drifted past him.

“The graves.” Kagami looked at the burned plots. “You were maintaining them.”

“Somebody had to.” Ezra didn’t turn. “Now somebody else will.”

He stepped through the gap and the smoke took him.

Kagami sat between the Tamei graves. Both plots burned black from heat he’d thrown without looking.

His chest was hollow where the knight had lived. His ribs held the shape of it still, the way a fist stays clenched after you’ve dropped what you were carrying.

He tried the trick.

Time’s up.

Three seconds passed. The pressure didn’t retreat behind his eyes. The voice didn’t fold back into the spine. Just three seconds, the same as anyone else’s.

Time’s up.

Four seconds.

Five seconds now.

The count kept going because nothing stopped it.

Sirens announced itself past the tree line.

Wind carrying ash.

Underneath all of it, Kagami heard his own heartbeat. He’d heard it before, between the knight’s words, in the gaps. It had been background while the real noise occupied the room.

He sat between his parents’ graves and listened to it beat.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep