The blade woke.
Felix Marr doubled over in the hallway outside his private dorm suite.
It hit him like a twist in the stomach—sudden, wrong. His Draconic Factor flared out of rhythm, burning cold, like a skipped heartbeat racing through his nervous system. Sweat broke down his spine in a single rush. Every nerve screamed the same word: Retreat.
He stumbled into the bathroom, one hand clamped over his mouth. The door clicked shut behind him. Then vomiting. Hard. Violent.
His knees hit the tile as his body purged something it couldn’t name. Bile. Cold sweat. Tears. He clung to the sink like it was the only thing anchoring him to the present. When he looked up, his reflection stared back. Bloodless. Hair askew. Eyes wrong.
Something in his Kamuy was still spinning.
Temporal Memory Enhancement. A textbook cheat code. Memorize a book an hour before the test, ace it, forget it by dinner. It didn’t matter. He never had to remember anything. He’d already won.
But this time it didn’t forget. His memory didn’t know where to land. It kept looping—images crashing into each other. The simulation. The gun. A boy’s face—panicked, pathetic, throwing himself into the line of fire like it meant something.
Faces blurred. Events crosswired. He blinked—and couldn’t remember which year it was. What floor he was on. For one sick second, he couldn’t remember his own name.
His lips moved before he meant them to. “…What the hell was that?”
Outside the bathroom, the hallway remained quiet. Footsteps passed. A door opened. Someone laughed, then didn’t.
The world continued as if nothing had changed.
Felix Marr knew better. Something had seen him. And it hadn’t liked what it saw.
Seven early-warning satellites over the Pacific registered a surge in Draconic Factor resonance. The alerts tripped so fast the sound stacked over itself. In one monitoring center, a shift tech spilled hot coffee down his uniform and didn’t even flinch. Every Kamuy-bearer whose Draconic Factor exceeded the critical threshold felt it. Not fear. Something deeper. Something that bypassed thought and went straight to the soul. Submission. Not to a person. To a presence.
[ Cargo Vessel · Gulf of Alaska ]
The sea was in a bad mood.
The freighter pushed slowly along the Alaskan coastal route, its hull rising and falling in the swell like a slab of iron being pressed into water again and again. The wind came in hard—too hard to feel natural—laced with salt and ice grains, striking the deck and knocking hollow sounds from the metal, each impact emptier than the last.
Cargo Hold Three lay at the deepest level. Almost no one went down there anymore.
The lights were kept permanently dim. Power cables snaked along the bulkheads, emitting a low-frequency hum, like a breath sustained and deliberately restrained. Reinforcement brackets were embedded layer by layer into the steel plating, every joint locked, every angle calculated in advance.
The coffin was there. Black. Upright.
Its edges were polished too cleanly, like an object that had been wiped down again and again. No markings on the shell. No serial number. No warning labels.
Then a threshold was crossed. A circuit written in the Dragon’s ichor quietly closed. Muscle fibers contracted by reflex. Once.
Inside the coffin, a visual organ that had remained in absolute stasis unfolded passively. It opened behind a fixed obstruction of iron, bolted in place long before the body was sealed. Eyelids lifted. No light entered. No focus adjusted. The optic nerve sent signals into empty space. There was nowhere for them to arrive.
Nothing awakened. No awareness formed. Only a structure that had once been shut was reopened.
The coffin continued to rise and fall with the ship. Locks held. The route remained unchanged.
Ocean and waves struck the hull. Steel rang with its familiar sound.
[ The Wilds · Unknown ]
The wilds opened under the sun—wide, calm, and implacable, like bone polished smooth by time.
Wind skimmed the ground and lifted fine sand into slow-drifting veils that moved through the light. Far out, the horizon sagged under heat shimmer, rising and falling in a way that barely convinced the eye.
Drakespawn were spread across the wild country in packs.
Their sizes varied: some were lion- or tiger-sized, muscle lines clean, bodies low as they moved; others were taller, backs ridged and lifted, scales catching the sun in uneven, darkened flashes.
They weren’t scattered in panic.
They fanned out, roamed, and held position according to an order no one could quite see.
In this place, they were the native weight of the land.
Then the one at the center moved.
It was drakespawn as large as a low hill, its bulk settled between sand ridges, its shadow swallowing nearly an entire slope. It raised its head and roared—low and heavy, rolling through daylight—shuddering the ground. The rest of the packs halted on instinct.
The roar carried. Then snapped off halfway through its own echo.
The shadows along the dunes began to change.
Sunlight stayed brutal, but in one region darkness gathered on its own, density increasing, outline pulling itself into shape. It didn’t climb out of the earth. Light simply curved away from it.
Something took form inside the black. Enormous. Structurally unstable. Its limbs unfolded with the wrong proportions—then corrected, as if the body were negotiating its own geometry. It didn’t block the sun, yet the brightness around it shifted, like reality had been re-labeled.
No roar. No announcement.
The hill-sized drakespawn stopped moving altogether. Its head lowered. Its breathing slowed. The massive body went still, as if waiting for something that hadn’t arrived yet.
On the crown of the shadow-formed creature sat a withered figure.
Gaunt—almost only bone and outline—wrapped in an old monk’s robe. The cloth stirred slightly in the daylight wind, but made no sound.
The whole scene held, motionless, beneath the sun.
The wilds kept breathing. The wind kept moving.
And something far older, built for hunger, slipped back into the world’s accounting.
[ Coastline · Japan ]
The coastline was painfully bright.
Salt crusted the seawall. In the distance, waves stacked and broke apart again and again. A vending machine stood by the roadside, outdated, its light tube glowing an unhealthy blue.
A decommissioned radar tower rose near the shore. The concrete had been bleached by salt wind; the metal railings rusted through. The radar dish no longer turned, fixed at an angle that would never update again.
William Grasse leaned against the railing. Below him, the sea churned. He held a can of coffee. It had been hot when it dropped from the machine. Now it was cold.
He took a sip. Stopped. “…fuck me.”
Too sweet. Not coffee—more like the idea of coffee diluted and bottled again as a drink.
Then something slipped. A calibration in the air shifted by one degree. Not sound. Not vibration. More like a layer of background noise quietly removed.
The sea still reflected light. The clouds did not move. Nothing appeared to happen.
William drained the rest of the coffee in one go, crushed the empty can in his hand, and tucked it into his bag. He leaned back against the railing again.
Waves struck the rocks in steady intervals—almost deliberately so.
He lifted his gaze toward the horizon. Waited a second. “Well. About time.”
The radar remained silent. The sea kept rolling.
The world looked perfectly aligned.
On the other side of the Pacific, moonlight spilled in through the open balcony doors, pale and thin, cutting the room into quiet planes of shadow the Foundry never quite slept through.
Damien Vale stood just inside the threshold. The interior lights were off. He hadn’t bothered turning them on. At his waist hung the blade. No scabbard. No covering. Too long. Exposed steel, suspended from a simple harness like something that had outlived the idea of protection.
Nagamitsu. The name belonged to a different age. A different kind of war. Long before the Dragon’s ichor ever found its way onto its surface.
Now the steel was red—as if the color had been accepted into the metal itself, threaded through the grain, impossible to wash out. Moonlight slid along the blade’s length and came back wrong—dull where it should have gleamed, dark where it should have shone.
The sword trembled, just enough to be unmistakable.
Damien’s left hand settled on the tsuka. The pressure arrived.
Beyond him, on the balcony, the boy stood in the open air. Fine wool, cut clean. The night wind moved around him without disturbing a single line. Moonlight washed over his shoulders and face, pale enough to make him look unfinished, like a statue waiting for the final strike of the chisel.
Above the balcony, clouds had drawn close, folding inward, moonlight caught along their seams as if the night itself were holding its breath. No wind crossed the open space. No sound carried up from the city below. The silence was restraint.
Something shifted with intention.
A line in the world being redrawn.
The air moved, soft as silk pulled free.
The tremor ran through Nagamitsu again. Sharper this time.
The boy tilted his head a fraction, offering his face to the moonlight, only to confirm the sensation had reached him.
It had.
A heartbeat passed through the space behind his ribs.
His expression changed—so slightly it could have been mistaken for nothing at all. As if an old song had found its way back into the world. As if someone, somewhere, had finally remembered how to hold a blade.
Inside the room, Nagamitsu stilled.
“Finally,” the boy said.