[ 1991 ]
“Hey, baldie,” William said, not opening his eyes.
“If you could choose a Kamuy, what would you take?”
“If it comes,” the young monk said, “it comes.”
“Tch. Boring.” William tilted his head slightly. “You’re supposed to be impressive. So let me ask you something useful. That actress—Miho Nakayama. Ever been to your rundown temple?”
“She came once.”
“Didn’t stay long.”
The beads rested untouched in his sleeve.
“Oh? And? Did she wear kimono?”
“Yes.” A pause. “She wore kimono.”
Another pause, smaller this time. “She did not disturb anything.”
“Oh. Quiet. ” William repeated the word, tasting it. “I like that.” He grinned to himself. “Alright. Decided. Once we save the world, I’m becoming a professional kimono photographer.”
“Then please,” the monk said, “continue living.”
“What are we eating next?”
“Tofu.”
“Fuck off. I’m not eating temple food.”
William Grasse said it lazily. He lifted a finger and scratched the air, as if brushing away a mosquito.
Night pressed down over the canyon, thick as molten iron. Wind moved along the ridgelines, choked by tens of thousands of breaths. Each time it reached the crowd, it shattered into thin, cutting strands of cold.
William lay on a flat stone halfway up the slope, his back against the chill of rock, hands folded behind his head. Above him, stars blinked out one by one, swallowed by the silhouettes of other people.
Awakened from more than a hundred countries stood along the canyon walls. Tens of thousands of them. Every one stopped at the same distance—exactly three hundred feet from the black sphere at the valley floor. A single figure knelt before it.
The crowd was silent. Not from understanding. From instinct. Some held their breath. Some clenched their fists without knowing why. Most simply stood there, rigid, as if forced into a place that did not belong to anyone.
No one had told them where to stand. No one was giving orders. They had walked here, stopped without thinking—and one step further made the skin crawl, like crossing an invisible edge.
William knew it too. He just didn’t bother sitting up.
He let the back of his head stay pressed to the cold stone. Beside him, the monk sat cross-legged, calm as if he were at the gate of a temple at dawn.
The black sphere below was still as a dead thing, yet it pulled the landscape inward, turning the valley into a well. It gave off no light. Only now and then, its surface caught a hard reflection from the night, tricking the eye into seeing the white of something watching.
William shifted lazily, draping one leg over the other.
“You’re not going to sit up and look?” the monk asked.
“Look at what?” William said. “All the same.”
The sound came first. Then the ground took a blow. A dull impact—like steel colliding—detonated in all four directions at once, as if the night itself had been clenched by four massive hands.
Then light. Not one kind. Dozens.
Fire snapped upward like banners torn loose. Lightning cracked the sky like ropes being whipped apart. Shockwaves rolled up the slope carrying dust and grit, stones flung outward as if struck by invisible hammers. Someone screamed. Someone else reacted on instinct and loosed their Kamuy. Others didn’t even know what they were doing.
The canyon tore open.
Columns of Kamuy—light, flame, ice, pressure—erupted skyward all at once. There was no wind, yet the air churned as if armies were charging through it. Fear ignited everywhere at the same time.
William lifted one shoulder from the stone, like a man dragged awake. He stood.
Unhurried. He brushed dust from his trousers and stepped forward, passing through the crowd. He didn’t know anyone. He didn’t look at faces. He only raised his hand as if pushing open a door.
The first punch landed.
The air shattered like glass. A skull collapsed backward with a blunt, hollow sound, the face folding in as if its support had been pulled away. The neck twisted into something wrong. The body crumpled. Blood didn’t spray far; the black sediment underfoot drank it in almost immediately.
The second punch fell.
The ground trembled lightly. That was when the people nearby understood.
More Kamuy detonated. Pillars of fire roared up. Lightning ripped through the air. Someone tried to run and was flipped end over end by a shockwave. Someone else fired blindly, power spiraling out of control, light bursting from their palms like broken lightning. A summoner tore something open—an enormous serpent, hundreds of feet long, clawed its way out of the earth. Another spread wings, rose, and was crushed a second later by a massive hand closing in midair.
The third punch landed.
The monk brought his palms together. “Amitābha.”
William struck again. Clean. Short. No technique.
Force fell in a straight, hard line. A neck snapped the instant it met his fist. The body slid down the slope. The air collapsed for a heartbeat. The skull burst as if it had met the front of a speeding train, the head reduced to a blurred mass flung aside. The body dropped to its knees, convulsed, then fell back.
More light flooded the canyon.
Flames licked along the rock walls. Lightning scattered. The earth split. Around the black sphere, chaos rose like a parade without banners or formation—only noise, only power. Sword light shaved an entire ridge clean away. Screams, sobs, curses, detonations folded into one another. The sky blazed white, then vanished under shadow the next instant.
William walked over the growing pile of bodies, flicking blood from his shoe.
“Hey,” he called out, voice carrying easily. “You hear that, monk?” He grinned, looking around at the madness.“Everyone’s cheering for a brand new day.”
He tilted his head back, eyes tracking the beams tearing the sky apart.
“They’ll need a name for this,” he said. “For everything after.”
The monk did not look at the dead. He answered without pause.
“Miracle.”
William’s right fist struck into his left palm. Once.
“Post-miracle society,” he said.
“That works.”