RESIDUE

The first failure wasn’t violent.

That bothered Rin more than if it had been.

They were walking through a suppressed district near the eastern rail line—narrow streets that smelled faintly of diesel and wet stone, old infrastructure layered with thick spiritual anchors, historically stable. Rin had used this area for years. Everyone had. This wasn’t supposed to happen here.

Akiro felt it first.

It was subtle. Too subtle for a person who didn’t sense magic—but he did now. Like static crawling under his skin, a quiet itch in the back of his skull. His chest tightened with the premonition that something was wrong.

He stopped mid-step.

“Rin,” he said, voice quiet but sharp.

She turned instantly. “What?”

“The air… it feels wrong.”

Rin closed her eyes, reaching outward with practised precision, fingertips twitching in patterns only she could read. For a second, nothing happened. Then her brow furrowed.

“That’s not possible,” she muttered.

The suppression lattice flickered—not visibly, not dramatically—but the pressure shifted in ways that made the back of Akiro’s neck prickle. Like a room losing insulation, leaving the walls shivering. Magic was slipping through, thin threads barely contained.

Akiro swallowed hard. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“No.” The single word hit like ice.

He followed her silently as they tracked the disturbance. It led to a narrow alley wedged between an abandoned clinic and a locked subway access door. The air smelled of rust, damp concrete, and something sharper—something like iron and paper burning.

Residue clung thicker here than anywhere they’d been. Akiro’s mark burned faintly beneath his skin. The sensation was almost tactile, like his veins were tingling with static.

“That’s recent,” Rin said, crouching to inspect the warped seal etched into the pavement. Her fingers hovered over the fissures, tracing the lines as if she could read them with touch. “Someone forced power through suppression.”

“Who?” Akiro asked, a tremor creeping into his voice.

She hesitated.

“Unbound?” he pressed.

“Or someone learning,” she said quietly, almost to herself.

Akiro didn’t like that. The implication that someone else—someone untrained, someone dangerous—was experimenting with raw magic in suppressed districts made his stomach knot.

A sharp pain flared behind his eyes. He staggered, vision swimming for a second.

“Hey,” Rin snapped, grabbing his shoulder and steadying him. “What is it?”

“I—” He winced, pressing a hand to his temples. “I smelled smoke. Like burning paper.”

She froze. “That’s… not here,” she said slowly, her voice tight.

“I know.”

They locked eyes.

“That’s residue memory,” she said at last. “The cost is leaking into your perception.”

Akiro let out a dry laugh. “So now I get VIP seats into other people’s crime?”

“Echoes,” Rin corrected, her tone clipped. “Not hallucinations.”

“… That doesn’t make my situation any better.” He rubbed his eyes, trying to clear the burn behind them. “Ha, my own mistakes haunt me visually, an added special effect. Don’t you think?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, Rin began reinforcing the failing lattice, moving faster than humanly reasonable—hands painting sigils in the air, her voice low and precise, layering symbols over broken ones. Her movements were tense, less confident than usual. Akiro noticed it, and it made him uneasy in ways he couldn’t articulate.

“Let me help!” Akiro shouted.

Rin was hesitant.

“You can hold the edge,” she said finally. “But don’t touch the centre.”

He nodded and crouched near the perimeter. His hands hovered, trembling slightly as the air around him thickened, pressure pressing at his chest. The faint pulse of his mark beneath his skin mirrored the lattice’s instability, and he felt uncomfortably aware of how thin the line was between control and chaos.

While they worked, the city seemed to breathe differently. The buildings leaned closer together, shadows pooling in ways that weren’t natural. Every narrow window, every cracked brick, felt as though it was listening and not watching. Listening.

“Rin,” he whispered after a moment. “How many suppressed districts are there?”

She didn’t answer immediately, just continued her careful, layered movements. That was answer enough. He shivered.

He wanted to say something else, to break the tension. His voice came out quieter than expected: “I hate this.”

She didn’t look at him. “I know.”

“Then why do you keep doing it?”

“Because if I don’t, no one will,” she said.

He opened his mouth, closed it, then muttered: “Feels like we’re always too late.”

The lattice flickered again, and this time Akiro felt it more intensely. The pressure pushed at his chest, sharp and cold, like knives made of static. He dropped to one knee.

“Breathe,” Rin said.

“I… I can’t…” His voice cracked. Panic threatened to overtake him, sudden and raw.

She crouched next to him. “Yes, you can. Focus. On the seal, on me, on anything. Just anchor yourself.”

He did, clinging to her presence as though it were a lifeline.

The residue curled and twisted above the cracked pavement like smoke caught in a jar. Akiro realised the true weight of what Rin had meant when she said, 'If you stop now, the system doesn’t stop with you.'

“Someone was here recently,” Rin said, pointing to a faint trail in the residue, glowing dimly blue. “They forced through the lattice. If they had been careless…” She didn’t finish.

“…We’d be dead,” Akiro supplied.

“…Yes,” she muttered, her hands tracing the edge of the alley in intricate patterns, reinforcing, shielding, containing.

Minutes passed like hours. His chest ached, but he stayed on his knees, eyes fixed on her hands as they moved with methodical precision.

When Rin finally leaned back, exhaustion pressed against her like gravity. She looked at him sharply. “You felt that too?”

Akiro nodded. “I think my brain tried to file it under Tuesday mishap.”

She gave him a look. “It’s not funny.”

“I didn’t say it was,” he replied, trying for lightness. His throat burned. His hands trembled. “Just… a comment on how much my life now feels like a minor inconvenience to the universe.”

She exhaled through her nose, a brief smirk tugging at her lips. “You’re remarkably unhelpful under stress.”

“Remarks noted,” he said weakly.

For a moment, silence fell between them. The only sound was the faint hum of the suppression lattice and the distant rumble of a train. Akiro flexed his fingers. The mark on his arm was pulsing again, faint but insistent. He realised he could feel every echo of the lattice’s strain, every whisper of magic struggling through suppression.

“I… I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he admitted quietly.

“You don’t have a choice,” Rin said. Her voice was softer this time, almost human.

“I do,” he said, voice trembling. “I could run. I could hide. I could—”

“—And die anyway,” she finished for him.

The air shifted again. He flinched. Somewhere deeper in the city, a suppressed shrine trembled.

“Rin,” he said, panic rising. “Are the Wardens aware?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet. But if the lattice continues to fail…” Her voice trailed.

“…Then it’s public,” Akiro finished.

Rin didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she placed a hand on his shoulder—brief, grounding, human. “We hold it until we can’t.”

“I don’t even know if I can do that,” he whispered.

“You have to,” she said firmly.

Akiro closed his eyes, leaning into the faint pressure of her hand. His mind spun with fragments of memory—of Kaito, the Unbound, of past failures, of things he could no longer remember clearly.

And through it all, the residue whispered.

It had noticed him.

Somewhere out there, someone had forced magic through where it wasn’t meant to be. That someone—or something—was learning. And Akiro understood then: they were not the only ones unstable. Not by far.

He opened his eyes, the city stretching wide beneath the lattice, quiet but watching.

“Rin,” he asked, voice trembling slightly, “what if we fail?”

She didn’t answer. She never had easy answers. Instead, she lifted her hand, drawing a final sigil in the air, pressing the lattice back into compliance.

“Then,” she said at last, voice low and steady, “we do it again. Until we can’t. And even then… someone will pay.”

Akiro nodded, trying to steady his shaking hands. The weight of that promise, and its inevitability, pressed into his chest. Exhaustion, dissociation, fear—they were all temporary. The consequences, though… those would last.

Far beneath the city, old shrine seals trembled.

And somewhere in the shadows, someone—or something—watched.