Kujo's eyes opened slowly.
The first thing he saw was the ceiling.
He stared at it for a moment, his mind completely blank, the way it is in those first few seconds before the world catches up with you.
Then it did.
Everything came back at once.
His eyes snapped wide. He pushed himself upright —
Pain tore through his body and slammed him back down.
He lay there, breathing hard, staring at the ceiling again. His chest heaved. His ribs ached with every inhale.
He turned his head.
The living room.
The blood on the floor, wide and dark and dried at the edges now.
His parents.
Still there.
Not moving. Not breathing. Exactly where they had been when the world stopped making sense.
"No..."
The word came out broken before he could stop it.
He reached toward them, arm extending slowly across the floor.
Then stopped.
His hand hovered there.
He couldn't make himself close the distance.
Like if he touched them, it would finish becoming real. Like some part of him was still holding onto the half second before he knew, the last moment where it could have been anything else.
He stayed like that for a while.
The room was completely silent.
That same heavy stillness from before, the kind that didn't feel like quiet so much as the absence of everything that should have been there.
Then, a faint crackle.
Kujo's eyes moved.
There was smoke in the air. A thin trail rising slowly from somewhere to his left, curling upward and dissolving into the dark.
He followed it.
The woman stood a few feet away.
She hadn't moved. Hadn't made a sound. She was just there, like she had been the entire time, standing with a cigarette between two fingers, the faint orange glow of it casting just enough light to see her expression.
Which was nothing.
Completely unbothered. Like the room she was standing in was any other room. Like the bodies on the floor were furniture.
Kujo stared at her.
His mind tried to put words together and came up empty for a moment.
"...Who..."
His throat was dry. The word barely came out.
The woman took a slow drag from the cigarette. Exhaled. Smoke drifted lazily through the air between them.
"Name," she said.
Kujo blinked.
"What?"
She looked at him directly. No impatience in it, no warmth either. Just the expectation of an answer.
"Your name."
Kujo hesitated. His brain was still trying to catch up with the fact that he was awake, that this was real, that she was real.
"...Kujo," he said finally. His voice came out quieter than he wanted. "Kujo Akiyo."
The woman nodded once.
"Erina Mimura."
She said it the same way she'd asked for his, flat, efficient, like exchanging information rather than introducing herself.
Kujo looked at her properly for the first time.
Tall. Composed. Her posture completely relaxed, one hand in her pocket, the cigarette held loosely in the other. She hadn't looked at his parents once since he'd woken up. Hadn't looked at the blood on the floor, the ruined wall where the creature had been thrown, any of it.
Like none of it registered.
She flicked ash to the floor without a second thought.
The silence stretched.
Kujo's hands tightened slowly against the floor beneath him. His eyes drifted back to his parents despite himself. His chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the pain in his ribs.
"...What was that thing?"
His voice shook on the last word.
Erina didn't look at them.
She took another slow drag.
"A Vyza."
Kujo stared at her.
She exhaled, like that word was supposed to land somewhere and she was waiting to see if it did.
"...That's not an answer," he said.
"It is," she said. "You just don't know it yet."
Another drag. She seemed to be deciding something, measuring out how much to give him.
"They feed," she said finally. "On energy. Human energy."
Kujo waited.
She didn't continue.
"That's it?" he said. "That's all you're going to—"
"For now." She cut him off without raising her voice. "You're not ready for the rest."
Kujo's jaw tightened.
"Try me."
Erina looked at him for a long moment. Her expression didn't change exactly, but something in her gaze shifted slightly, like she was recalibrating.
Then she continued.
"Humans produce energy constantly," she said. "All of them. Every moment. Your body generates it. Your thoughts generate it. Your emotions." She gestured vaguely in his direction. "All of it."
Kujo's brow furrowed. "That doesn't make any sense."
"It doesn't have to make sense to be true."
"And these things — the Vyza — they're drawn to it?"
"Yes."
"Then why haven't I ever—" He stopped. Tried again. "Why don't people know about them?"
Erina took a slow drag.
"They blend in," she said.
Kujo went still.
"What?"
"To your world they look like normal things," she said. "Animals. Objects. People, sometimes." She exhaled. "They don't show their true form unless they're feeding. It's not efficient otherwise."
Kujo's mind worked through that slowly.
"So that thing..." His eyes moved toward the far side of the room without meaning to. The dried blood. The marks on the floor where the body had fallen. "...It was just here. Walking around. Looking like something normal. And then it—"
"Yes."
One word. Final. No softening in it.
Kujo's stomach twisted.
"And nobody stopped it."
A beat.
"They never do," Erina said.
The room felt smaller suddenly. Tighter. The walls hadn't moved but the space between them had.
Kujo's hands were trembling. He hadn't noticed until now. He pressed them flat against the floor.
"Why," he said quietly.
Erina didn't answer immediately.
"Why them," he said. The words came out before he could decide whether he wanted to ask. "They didn't — they never did anything. They were just—"
He stopped.
His throat had closed around the rest of it.
Erina was quiet for a moment.
Then she took one last slow drag and crushed the cigarette under her foot.
"Wrong place," she said.
A pause.
"Wrong time."
Kujo looked up at her.
"That's it?" His voice rose slightly despite himself. "That's your answer? That's all you've got?"
Erina met his gaze.
"What else do you want me to say, kid?"
The question landed without cruelty, but without cushioning either. Flat and honest in the way that hurts more than anger would.
Kujo's breath came out uneven.
"I—"
Nothing followed.
He looked down. His hands had curled into fists without him deciding that.
"...They didn't do anything," he said. Barely above a whisper. "They didn't deserve—"
He stopped again.
The silence that followed was the heaviest kind. The kind that doesn't offer anything.
Erina let it sit for a moment.
Then —
"You fought back."
Kujo didn't look up.
"...What?"
"Against the Vyza," she said. Her voice was even. Matter of fact, not cold exactly, just steady in a way that had no room in it for softness. "Most people don't. Most people freeze or run."
Kujo's jaw tightened slightly.
"I didn't have a choice."
"You did," Erina said.
He finally looked up.
Her eyes were on him, direct and unmoving.
"You had a choice," she said. "You just didn't take it."
Kujo held her gaze, not sure whether to argue.
"And more than that." She paused. "You used something. Power that wasn't there before."
The memory came back immediately. Uninvited and vivid.
The heat rushing through him. The light gathering in his hand. The explosion that threw the creature across the room.
"That wasn't..." He shook his head slightly. "I don't even know what that was. I didn't do that on purpose."
"Doesn't matter," Erina said. "It happened."
"What happened?"
She looked at him steadily.
"You awakened."
The word sat in the air between them like it had weight.
Kujo stared at her.
"Awakened," he repeated.
"Power," she said. "Yours. It was always there; it just needed a reason to surface."
Kujo looked down at his hand slowly.
His fingers were still trembling slightly. His palm looked completely normal. No light, no heat, nothing that would suggest what it had done an hour ago.
"I don't understand any of this," he said quietly.
"I know."
"Then explain it."
Erina studied him for a moment. Something moved across her expression — brief, unreadable — and then she straightened.
"Get up," she said. "We're leaving."
Kujo blinked.
"What?"
"You're not staying here."
"I'm not leaving." He said it immediately, his voice, unsteady but certain. "I'm not just walking away from—"
"You'll die."
The words were quiet. Not dramatic. Just stated.
Kujo went still.
Erina had already turned slightly toward the door.
"You think this ends here?" she said, not looking back. "You awakened. That changes what you are to them."
"What does that mean?"
She glanced back at him over her shoulder.
"It means you're a target now," she said. "A real one. More energy than an ordinary person. More worth hunting."
Kujo's stomach dropped.
"More will come," she continued. "Maybe not tonight. But soon." Her eyes met his directly. "And next time there won't be anyone to step in."
The room felt colder.
Kujo's gaze moved to his parents one more time.
He looked at them for a long moment.
Everything he wanted to say sat in his chest with nowhere to go.
Then he looked back at Erina.
"What do I do?" he asked.
His voice was quiet. The anger had gone somewhere deeper, settled into something heavier and slower.
Erina held his gaze.
"Come with me," she said.
A pause.
"Or stay here and die."
She didn't say it like a threat.
She said it like a fact she had already made peace with on his behalf and was waiting for him to catch up.
Kujo looked at his parents one last time.
Then he got up.