BANRI
The last time Banri Enzō held a pen, he wrote his brother's name on a wall in the third district of Serenia so the police would know who to contact if the body they found wasn't breathing.
He was fourteen. Sōma was twelve. The wall was behind a convenience store that sold expired rice balls for half price and didn't ask why two kids with no address came in every night at the same time. Banri had written the name in perfect calligraphy because his mother had taught him that the only thing worth doing well was the thing you did with your hands, and handwriting was hands, and hands were the closest thing to a soul the body had.
His mother had been wrong about a lot of things. She'd been right about that.
'She also said she'd come back.'
'That was the other thing she was wrong about.'
He sat on a ridge overlooking a valley that shouldn't exist. The Hunting Realm's outer ranges had a way of producing geography that argued with itself — valleys that tilted slightly uphill, rivers that ran in directions the slope didn't support, trees that grew at angles suggesting the ground had opinions about which way "up" was and had recently changed its mind.
Sōma was below him, crouching near a creek that smelled like copper, filling their water skins with the specific efficiency of someone who had been doing it for seven months and no longer needed to think about whether the water was safe. It wasn't. Nothing here was. You drank it anyway because the alternative was worse.
"How's the shoulder?" Banri called down.
"Still attached."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what I answered."
'He's lying. The shoulder's bad. He's been favoring it since the ridgeback hit him three days ago. He's not telling me because he thinks if I know how bad it is I'll slow us down to accommodate it, and he's right, I would, and he knows I would, and he'd rather walk in pain than be the reason we lose speed.'
'Idiot.'
'My idiot, though.'
Banri ran his thumb across the circle-and-line tattoo on his right inner wrist. Small. Precise. He'd done it himself with a sharpened bone and ash from a fire they'd built on their first night in the Hunting Realm. Sōma had the same mark on the same wrist. It didn't mean anything to anyone who saw it. It meant everything to the two people who wore it.
'A circle with a line through it. Complete, then divided. That's us. One thing split into two bodies.'
His Kizugami sat across his knees. It didn't look like a blade.
It looked like a pair of gauntlets.
Heavy. Dark iron, seamless, running from knuckle to elbow. The metal had a grain to it — not decorative, organic. Like wood rings in steel. When he wore them, his fists felt like they weighed twenty pounds each and his arms felt like they weighed nothing, because the blade redistributed the weight across his body in a way that shouldn't have been possible and was.
The gauntlets had found him on month two. He'd woken up with them beside his bedroll, sitting in the dirt like someone had set them there during the night. No footprints. No disturbance. Just two pieces of dark iron shaped exactly to his forearms, warm to the touch, humming with a frequency he felt in his jaw before he felt it in his hands.
'Uzuki. The ache.'
'That's what the Hunters call it. The first stage. The blade knows you but hasn't spoken yet.'
'Mine aches in my knuckles. When I make a fist, the gauntlets tighten. When I open my hands, they loosen. Like they're breathing with me.'
'Like they know what my hands are for.'
He hadn't told Sōma about the humming. Some things between a person and their blade were private. Not secret. Private. The difference mattered.
"Water's done." Sōma climbed the ridge, two skins slung over his good shoulder, the other arm held close. His white hair caught the bruised light that passed for daylight in the outer ranges and turned it silver. "We should move. I saw prints by the creek. Big ones. Four-toed."
"Four-toed means a thresh. They don't hunt in daylight."
"Since when does anything in this forest follow rules?"
"Fair point." Banri stood. Slid the gauntlets onto his forearms. The metal hummed. His knuckles settled into the grip channels. The weight redistributed. He felt taller.
'My mother said I'd be big. She was right about that too. Six-three at fifteen and still growing. Big enough that most things in the outer ranges looked at me and decided the calories weren't worth the effort.'
'Not all of them. Not the smart ones.'
'The smart ones waited for me to sleep.'
"Which way?" Sōma asked.
"South. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before."
"You keep saying south like south means something in a place where the compass broke on day one."
"South means away from the thresh prints. That's enough meaning for me."
They walked.
-----
SŌMA
The shoulder was worse than he'd told Banri.
Not broken. Dislocated, then relocated badly, then used for seven days because not using it wasn't an option. The joint was swollen and the range of motion had dropped to about sixty percent and the pain was a constant companion that he'd named Gerald because naming things that hurt you made them smaller.
'Gerald is being particularly unpleasant today.'
'Gerald doesn't care about my feelings.'
'Gerald is, in many ways, the most honest relationship I've ever had.'
Sōma Enzō processed the world through humor because the alternative was processing it through the truth, and the truth of the outer ranges was that everything here wanted to kill you and the only variable was timing.
He was faster than his brother. Faster than most things in the outer ranges, actually. His body was built for it — lean, wired, the muscles of a runner rather than a fighter. When he moved at full speed, the tattoos on his arms glowed faint blue, which was either a feature of how the ink interacted with his energy or the universe's way of giving the things chasing him a better target. He hadn't figured out which yet.
'The tattoos were Mama's idea. Before she left.'
'She drew the patterns on my arms with a pen when I was eight. "Seishu circuits," she called them. "For when you're ready." Then she and Dad walked into the Realm and didn't come back and I got the patterns inked over the pen lines when I was thirteen because I didn't have parents but I had their handwriting and that was going to have to be enough.'
His Kizugami was nothing like Banri's.
Where Banri's gauntlets were solid, heavy, grounding — his was thin. A whip. Braided metal, dark silver, coiled around his left forearm like a sleeping snake. When uncoiled, it was six meters long and moved like it had a mind, which it did, because all Kizugami blades had minds and his was the kind of mind that liked to wrap around things and not let go.
The whip had come to him on month three. Not beside his bedroll like Banri's gauntlets. In a tree. Fifteen meters up, hanging from a branch, catching light like a thread of mercury. He'd climbed the tree to get it and the branch had broken and he'd fallen twelve meters and the whip had caught him around the wrist before he hit the ground, contracting on its own, suspending him four feet above the dirt.
'My blade caught me before I caught it.'
'That's either poetic or pathetic. Probably both.'
It hummed too. Different frequency than Banri's — lighter, quicker, the kind of hum you'd feel in your pulse rather than your jaw. It ached when he was afraid and it ached when he was angry and it ached most of all when Banri was in danger, which was a problem because Banri was always in danger and the ache was therefore constant and the word "always" was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
'Uzuki. Same as his. First stage. The blade knows me. The blade does not speak to me.'
'I wonder what its voice sounds like.'
'I wonder if I'll ever hear it.'
'I wonder if we'll live long enough for it to matter.'
He watched Banri walk ahead of him. The locs swaying with each step. The longcoat moving around him like a second skin. The gauntlets dark on his forearms, the grain of the metal catching the bad light.
'He's worried about me.'
'He's been worried about me since we were kids. Since Mom and Dad left. Since he wrote my name on a wall behind a convenience store so someone would know who I was if they found what was left of me.'
'He carries my name on a wall the way he carries everything. Quietly. Without complaint. Without asking if I'm okay with the weight.'
'I'm not. I never have been. But he doesn't ask and I don't tell him and that's how we survive.'
"Banri."
"Yeah."
"Your left gauntlet is loose."
"I know."
"The strap frayed. Let me re-wrap it tonight."
"I said I know."
"I know you know. I'm telling you anyway because if that gauntlet comes off mid-fight you're punching something with a bare fist and I've seen your bare fist and it's embarrassing."
"My bare fist put a man through a wall last month."
"The wall was already broken."
"It was INTACT."
"We remember this differently."
"We remember everything differently. That's why there's two of us."
'That's why there's two of us.'
'He said it like a joke. He always says the truest things like jokes. As if the truth needs a costume to get past whatever's guarding his throat.'
-----
THE TEMPLE
They found it because Sōma's shoulder finally gave out.
Not dramatically. Not a collapse. He reached for a branch to steady himself on a slope and the shoulder said no with a clarity that Gerald had never achieved and his hand opened and he slid six feet down the embankment into a clearing that shouldn't have been there.
Banri was beside him in three seconds. Hands on his arm, checking the joint, the swelling, the rotation. Sōma let him because fighting it would take energy he didn't have and Banri's hands were gentle when they were scared and his hands were scared right now.
"You've been walking on this for a WEEK?"
"Gerald and I had an arrangement."
"Who is Gerald?"
"My shoulder."
"You named your dislocated shoulder."
"It seemed like the polite thing to do."
Banri looked at him with the specific expression of a man who loved his brother completely and wanted to strangle him equally. Then he looked up. Then he stopped looking at anything else.
The temple was there.
It sat in the clearing the way a tooth sits in a jaw — embedded, old, part of the structure it occupied. The stone was dark. Not painted dark. Dark through and through, as if the material had never known light and had no interest in learning. Four walls. A flat roof. A doorway with no door. Steps that went down.
"What is that?" Sōma said.
"I don't know."
"Is it supposed to be here?"
"Nothing is supposed to be here. We're not supposed to be here."
"But specifically. That building. In the outer ranges. Where nothing survives."
"I see it, Sōma."
"I'm just saying, the forest doesn't let things stand. The forest eats things. That building is standing. The forest didn't eat it. Why didn't the forest eat it?"
"Maybe it tried."
They looked at the clearing. At the boundary where the trees stopped. Not a gradual thinning. A line. Trees on one side, compressed dirt on the other, and in the center: the temple, occupying space the forest had conceded.
'Something lives in there.'
'Not a creature. Not a person. Something older. Something that made the ground it sits on into a different kind of ground. The kind of ground that doesn't answer to the same rules as the rest of this place.'
Banri stood. Walked to the doorway. Did not enter. Looked down the steps into the dark.
The dark was heavy. Not like shadow. Like substance. Like the absence of light had been refined into something that could be touched, held, woven. It sat in the stairwell the way water sits in a well — pooled, still, waiting to be drawn.
'Something is down there.'
'Not something dangerous. Something patient.'
'The difference matters less than I'd like.'
"We should go in," Sōma said.
"No."
"I can see something at the bottom. Metal. There's metal down there, Banri. Metal that's reflecting light from a source I can't identify because there IS no light source and it's reflecting ANYWAY."
"We don't know what that is."
"That's why we go in. To find out."
"Sōma."
"Banri."
They looked at each other. The look. The one that was longer than a conversation and shorter than a breath. Sōma's gray eyes were bright with the specific kind of curiosity that had gotten them into every bad situation they'd ever been in, and Banri's dark eyes were steady with the specific kind of caution that had gotten them out of most of them.
"We go to the first landing," Banri said. "Not the bottom. The first landing. We look. We leave."
"Deal."
They went down.
The stairs were stone. Each step was worn in the center, which meant something had walked these steps before. Many things. Over a very long time. The walls were smooth and unmarked — no carvings, no inscriptions, no signs of who had built this or why. Just stone and dark and the smell of cold air that had been underground for longer than the trees above had been alive.
The first landing opened into a room.
'Oh.'
It was larger than the building above it. That was the first wrong thing. The temple on the surface was maybe four meters by four meters. This room was twenty across and the ceiling was somewhere above them in the dark where the dimensions stopped cooperating with eyesight.
The walls were lined with alcoves. Dozens of them. Each one contained something — a weapon, a tool, an object wrapped in cloth, a box of dark wood, a piece of metal shaped into something Sōma couldn't identify. Some of the alcoves were empty. Some held things that caught the sourceless light and sent it back changed.
'Artifacts.'
'Not random ones. These are placed. Catalogued. Each alcove is exactly the same distance from the next. Someone organized this. Someone came down here, arranged these objects, and left.'
'Or someone is still here and we haven't noticed yet.'
In the center of the room, on a raised stone platform, sat a single object. Larger than the others. A hammer. Not a war hammer — a craftsman's hammer, the kind used to shape metal. The head was dark iron with a grain that Banri recognized because his gauntlets had the same grain. The handle was wrapped in leather so old it had turned the color of bone.
And it was warm.
Not metaphorically warm. Not "the air around it felt different." Warm. Sōma held his hand six inches from the hammer's head and felt heat radiating from the metal as if it had been sitting beside a forge fire for hours.
'That's not possible. This room is underground. The air is cold. The stone is cold. Everything is cold except this hammer which is warm like it's been waiting to be held and it's generating its own heat because waiting is work and work produces warmth.'
"Don't touch it," Banri said.
"I wasn't going to."
"Your hand was moving."
"My hand is always moving. I'm an expressive person."
"You're an idiot with a dislocated shoulder reaching for a mysterious warm hammer in a death forest temple. Put your hand down."
Sōma put his hand down.
They looked at the hammer. The hammer, as far as they could tell, looked back. Not with eyes. With presence. With the specific quality of an object that is more than an object and knows it and has known it for a very long time and is, if pressed, amused by the attention.
'That's a Sōki.'
'That thought came from somewhere. Not from me. From the gauntlets. From the hum. My blade looked at that hammer and something in the frequency changed and the word "Sōki" arrived in my head like a key being placed on a counter.'
'A Sōki is a wound-forged instrument. I know this because my blade knows this. I know this because whatever lives in my gauntlets recognizes whatever lives in that hammer the way a dog recognizes another dog from across a field.'
'They're the same species of impossible.'
Banri stepped back from the platform. His face was the face of a man doing math and not liking the answers.
"We leave," he said. "Now."
"But the artifacts—"
"We leave now, Sōma. We mark this place. We come back with more information, more people, and something that isn't my gut feeling telling me that the things in this room are more dangerous than anything we've fought in seven months."
"Your gut feeling."
"My gut feeling has kept us alive since we were fourteen and twelve. My gut feeling says that hammer wanted us to see it. My gut feeling says nothing in this room is accidental. And my gut feeling says we are standing in someone's library and the librarian isn't home and when the librarian comes home, I want to be somewhere else."
They climbed the stairs. Fast. Not running. Fast. Banri went first. Sōma went second. The dark behind them was patient.
At the top, in the daylight that wasn't daylight, Sōma turned and looked back down the stairs one more time.
'I'll come back.'
'Not for the hammer. For the room. For what those artifacts are. For who put them there and why.'
'For the answer to a question I didn't know I was asking until I saw a warm hammer in a cold room and my blade told me its name.'
They marked the clearing. A line in the stone. An arrow.
They walked into the forest.
-----
Three weeks later, a girl dropped them both in under ten seconds and offered them dinner.
Sōma lay on the ground with his good arm under his back and his bad arm at a new angle that Gerald was going to have opinions about and he looked up at green eyes and dark hair and a blade that was too big for the body carrying it and he thought:
'Huh.'
'That's new.'
"You gonna kill us?" he asked.
"Thinking about it."
"While you're thinking, any chance you've got food? We haven't eaten in two days."
The green eyes studied him. Then studied Banri, who was on the ground next to him grinning the grin of a man who had just been thrown by someone sixty pounds lighter and found it funny.
"I've got dried meat," she said. "It's terrible."
"We've eaten worse."
"You haven't eaten THIS."
She was right. They hadn't. But they ate it anyway, because the alternative was worse, and the girl with the green eyes and the impossible blade sat across from them and watched them eat with an expression that couldn't decide if it was annoyed or interested and had settled on both.
'She's been alone for a long time.'
'I can tell because she eats with her blade in her lap and her back against a tree and her eyes on the treeline even when she's chewing.'
'She's been alone for a long time and she still offered food to strangers.'
'That means something. I don't know what yet. But it means something.'
"So," Banri said, chewing. "Who are you?"
"Nobody."
"Nobody dropped me in six seconds. Nobody is someone."
The green eyes held Banri's brown ones. Something passed between them. Not trust. Not yet. The precursor. The recognition that comes before trust the way dawn comes before morning — not the thing itself, but the proof that the thing is possible.
"I've been out here four years," she said. "I don't have a name that matters."
Sōma looked at Banri. Banri looked at Sōma.
'She's been alone for four years.'
'Four. YEARS.'
'We almost died at seven months.'
'She survived four years alone in a place that eats people and she still offered us food and she still hasn't killed us and she's sitting there with dried meat she hates and a blade that's too big and green eyes that are angry about something that isn't us.'
'I like her.'
'Banri likes her too. I can tell because he's not calculating the distance to his knives. He calculated it the second she appeared. He stopped calculating when she offered food. That's how Banri decides about people — not by what they say, by the moment he stops planning how to fight them.'
"We're heading south," Banri said. "There's a corridor along the ridgeline that connects to the deep border."
"It's not south. It's southeast. And the corridor shifted two months ago."
"You know where it is?"
"I know where everything is. I've been here four years."
Banri looked at Sōma. Three seconds.
"We'll carry the packs," Banri said.
"You'll carry YOUR packs. I carry my own."
"Fair. Which way?"
She pointed southeast.
They walked. Three instead of two. The forest noticed. The forest always noticed when the numbers changed.
'Don't name it. Not yet.'
'But something just started.'
'Something with green eyes and a bad attitude and dried meat that tastes like revenge and four years of surviving a place that was supposed to kill her.'
'I'm going to name it anyway.'
'Hope.'
'I'm going to name it hope and I'm going to carry it carefully and I'm not going to tell Banri because he'll say I'm being dramatic and he'll be right and I'll carry it anyway because carrying things is what Enzō brothers do.'
'We carry names on walls. We carry gauntlets that hum. We carry whips that catch us when we fall.'
'We carry each other.'
'We can carry one more.'
🌀 END OF CHAPTER 37