“Red Umbrella, Broken Light”

The lanterns were still flickering when Reina turned. Not all at once—just enough to make the world feel unreliable, like a thought that kept slipping before it could finish forming. Light stretched, snapped back, stretched again. The plaza no longer resembled a place meant to exist. It felt like a scar that had been reopened too many times, edges raw, refusing to seal.

She stood in the center of it. Or she thought she did. Movement cut through the corner of her vision. Reina pivoted instantly, crimson blade snapping up, boots skidding slightly on stone slick with blood that wasn’t all hers. Her stance was wrong, too open on the left, ribs screaming in protest—but instinct overrode pain. Another wraith—No. Human. A boy.

Roughly her age. Tall, lean, shoulders drawn tight as if holding himself together through will alone. He held a blade that refused the lantern light entirely. It didn’t shine. It didn’t gleam. The glow along its edge was thin and cold, like a boundary line drawn by something that didn’t care what crossed it.

Kazu was bleeding. So was she. For half a heartbeat, they locked eyes. No recognition sparked there. No relief. No unspoken understanding. Just calculation. Weapon. Posture. Breathing rate. Injuries. Still standing. That was enough. The wraith between them chose that moment to rise. It tore itself out of the pooled shadow at their feet, limbs unfolding at impossible angles, its scream sharp enough to scrape along bone and lodge behind the eyes. The sound fractured the air.

They moved at the same time.

Reina lunged forward, blade sweeping wide in a brutal horizontal arc meant to cleave, to overwhelm. Kazu stepped in not toward her, not away but through the space the wraith occupied. His strike was narrow. Economical. Almost gentle. Her blade tore through the creature’s upper mass, ripping shadow loose in a violent spray. His cut severed the anchor. The wraith didn’t explode. It came apart.

Shadow peeled from shadow. Structure failed. The sound was wrong like fabric tearing too close to the ear, amplified, intimate. Black fluid splashed across the plaza stones, steaming faintly where it landed.

The thing collapsed inward and vanished.

Reina landed hard, knees bending to absorb the impact. Pain flared up on her side, white-hot and nauseating. She didn’t look at him. Neither did Kazu. They separated immediately, instinct carving distance between them. No attempt to align. No instinct to cover each other’s backs.

They were not a team. They were two disasters that had arrived at the same location. For a fraction of a second longer than necessary, Reina registered his breathing. Too controlled for someone bleeding that much. Not steady— disciplined.

The thought irritated her. It meant he wasn’t panicking. It meant he wasn’t predictable. It meant he’d survive long enough to become a complication. Across from her, Kazu noticed the way she favored her left side. Not consciously. Not as strategy. Just a quiet note filed away by something older than thought. Pain shaped people. It bent them. And she was bent but not broken.

The wraiths noticed. The hesitation they’d shown earlier evaporated. They advanced in pairs now. Not rushing. Positioning. One dragged itself low across the ground, shadow smeared thin like oil. Another clung to the remains of a collapsed light post, limbs coiling, body folding in on itself to strike from above.

Reina felt the shift before she consciously registered it. Her grip tightened.

“Of course,” she muttered under her breath. “You adapt.”

The low one lunged for her injured side. She twisted—slow. Claws tore in, shredding fabric, skin, deeper. Pain detonated along her ribs. Her breath left her in a sharp, involuntary gasp. She didn’t scream. The sound died in her throat, swallowed by muscle memory and something meaner. Screaming wasted air. Air was time. Time was blood.

Her vision tunneled for a split second, edges dimming, the lantern light smearing into red streaks. She tasted copper. The pain tried to pull her inward—tried to make the world smaller. She refused.

Refusal burned hotter than fear.

Her blade snapped upward in a reflexive cut— Crimson Solace: Rising Wake—severing the wraith’s arm in a burst of red light. Shadow splattered her face, warm and wrong. The creature shrieked, sound vibrating through her skull. She drove forward anyway, shoulder slamming into its core, ignoring the agony screaming through her nerves. Her blade plunged in, twisting hard.

Crimson Solace: Heart Rend. This time it died properly. 

Shadow collapsed, soaked into the cracks between stones, leaving nothing behind but a chill that crawled up her spine. Reina staggered. Her breathing turned ragged. Blood ran freely now, soaking into her sleeve, her side, dripping from her fingertips. She planted her foot. Forced her shoulders square. Lowered her blade. And whispered the name again.

“Crimson Solace: Afterimage Severance.”

The world folded. Not visually— internally. Her blade moved in layers, each strike overlapping the memory of the last. The first cut missed deliberately. The second traced the ghost of the first. The third landed where the wraith would be not where it was. Time snapped shut. Two wraiths froze mid-motion as crimson fault lines traced across their forms.

A heartbeat later, they split apart, lanterns shattering as their remains hit the ground. Reina dropped to one knee. The ground felt too far away when she hit it. Or maybe she was already falling before her body caught up. Her heartbeat slammed against her ribs like it wanted out. Each pulse sent another wave of heat through the wound in her side. Her fingers spasmed around the hilt, threatening to loosen. Don’t.

She pressed the blade into the stone to anchor herself. The vibration traveled up to her arms, grounding her just enough to stay conscious. The lantern hovered closer. Too close. Its warmth crawled over her skin like hands she hadn’t given permission to touch. Blood spilled from her mouth this time, splashing dark against the stone. Her hands shook violently, muscles spasming as the backlash hit.

Across the plaza, Kazu was losing ground. A wraith slammed into him from the side with enough force to lift him off his feet. He hit the ground hard, breath driven from his lungs, vision flashing white as stone cracked beneath his shoulder. Weight pinned him. The wraith loomed overhead, face splitting into a suggestion of a mouth. Kazu raised his blade. Too slow. Another shadow lunged from behind, claws already descending—

The weight vanished in a burst of black fluid. Reina stood over him, blade dripping, chest heaving. She didn’t offer a hand. Didn’t even look down. She was already turning back into the fight, as if he were nothing more than a variable that had briefly corrected itself.

Kazu dragged in air, coughing once, then twice. Pain flared through his side when he moved, sharp, insistent, anchoring him to the present. He pushed himself up anyway. There was no time for anything else. Kazu’s hands shook as he stood. Not from fear— from adrenaline bleeding off too fast. His body wanted to fold, to sit, to reassess. He forced it upright anyway, jaw locked so hard it hurt.

Pain sharpened his awareness instead of dulling it. Every sound came in too clear. The scrape of shadow. The wet impact of something collapsing behind him. His own breath rasping, uneven.

He adjusted his grip on the blade without looking. It adjusted back. The balance shifted minutely, accommodating damage, recalculating. The realization sent a chill through him. They fought like that. Never together. Never far enough apart to be isolated.

Reina drew attention like blood in water aggressive, violent, loud. The wraiths lunged for her again and again, dragged by momentum, by the sheer density of her presence. And every time they overcommitted, Kazu was there. He didn’t slash bodies. He cut structure.

A precise line severed a wraith from the ground it clung to Null Divide— shadow unraveling as if gravity itself had been revoked. Another thrust pinned a creature’s outline to the dying glow of a shattered lantern, Anchored Silence — freezing it just long enough for Reina to tear it apart.

They never acknowledged it. Never spoke.

They orbited the battlefield like opposing blades in the same mechanism never touching, never syncing, yet somehow never colliding. It wasn’t teamwork. It was mathematics. Variables collided. Distance. Timing. Blood loss. Reina burned space. Kazu erased it.

Where she forced motion, he ended it. Where he stalled structure, she destroyed what remained. Neither led. Neither followed. The rhythm emerged on its own, ugly and efficient. And with every exchange, the wraiths grew slower. Not weaker. Careful. That was worse. And the equation was bleeding them dry. Kazu misjudged one angle. Just once.

He widened a cut too far, ambitious, angry and his blade hesitated. That was enough. Something sharp punched into his side, driving deep, lodging between muscle and bone. Pain exploded through him, white-hot, blinding. He cried out despite himself.

The sound embarrassed him more than the pain. His teeth clamped down immediately, cutting it off. Blood filled his mouth, he wasn’t sure whose. His vision swam, shadows doubling, lantern light streaking sideways. He forced himself to focus on the line of light along the blade. Still there. Still sharp. As long as that line existed, so did he. His grip slipped.

Nearly.

He clenched his teeth and tore the blade free, blood pouring down his leg. The wraith recoiled, shrieking, and he finished it with a brutal downward strike that left his vision swimming. The ground around them was unrecognizable now. Stone fractured. Lantern posts lay shattered. Wraith blood coated everything, thick and viscous, staining the plaza in colors that did not belong to the human world.

Lanterns dimmed overhead.

Some went dark entirely. Then —between one breath and the next they felt it. Not an attack. A presence. Reina’s blade paused mid-swing. Kazu’s eyes lifted. High above the broken plaza, on the edge of a collapsed structure, stood a figure holding a red umbrella. Perfectly still. Watching.

No lantern hovered near them. No wraith approached. The umbrella tilted slightly, as if adjusting against a wind that didn’t exist. And then— The wraiths were gone. Not retreating. Not dying. Just… erased. Silence slammed down.

The absence of noise was almost violent. No screams. No tearing. No whispering guidance from lanterns pretending to care. Just breath. Reina’s came uneven, hitching on pain she no longer bothered hiding. Kazu’s burned on the way in, worse on the way out, each inhale scraping against something raw inside his chest.

Neither lowered their weapon.

Survival had not taught them how or when to stop yet. Reina stood swaying, blood dripping steadily from her wounds. Kazu leaned heavily on his blade, chest heaving, every breath burning. Slowly, cautiously, they turned toward each other. No words.

Just two strangers, battered and bleeding, standing in the aftermath of something that had failed to break them. Somewhere above, lantern light flickered weakly. The red umbrella figure was gone. The plaza felt too exposed without the wraiths. Too open. Like something vast had stepped back instead of leaving.

Whatever watched from above had seen enough. For now. The world held its breath.

And for the first time since the 25th Hour began— Nothing moved.