They moved toward it.
The pressure in the air grew heavier with every step, pressing down on Kujo's chest like something physical. He could feel it against his skin, against the inside of his lungs when he breathed. Like the atmosphere itself had changed composition.
He didn't know how the others kept walking at the same pace.
Erina moved like she was heading somewhere mildly inconvenient. Sumi had gone quiet; her earlier energy settled into something more contained. Sado walked with the same unhurried steadiness he did everything, his hands loose at his sides.
None of them had tensed. Not visibly.
Kujo had tensed enough for all of them.
Then they came around the edge of the training field and he saw it.
He stopped walking.
It stood in the open ground ahead of them, roughly humanoid in shape but wrong in the specific way all Vyza seemed to be wrong, slightly too tall, its proportions off in ways that were hard to pin down individually but impossible to ignore together. Its skin was the white of something that had never seen sunlight, flat and texture less. Its hands ended in claws that curved like a bear's, thick and dark at the tips. Drool hung from its jaw in thin strings, dropping to the dirt below without it registering.
A single horn rose from the center of its forehead.
Its eyes were the worst part. Black, completely black, not dark irises but voids where eyes should have been. They moved to the group without the creature's head moving, tracking, fixing, and when they landed on Kujo, they stayed there.
Like they had found what they were looking for.
His stomach dropped.
A Vyza.
The word was new, but it already felt like a category for something ancient. Something that had been here long before he knew it existed.
Slowly, the creature turned to face them fully.
Kujo glanced at the others.
Erina hadn't changed expression. Sumi was looking at the creature with the mild focus of someone assessing a problem. Sado had simply stopped walking and was watching it, patient and still.
Not one of them had flinched.
Not a single twitch.
Kujo swallowed.
How do they do this every day. How do you ever get used to something that looks like that.
"How did it even get through the barrier?" Erina said. Her voice was the same as always. Faintly irritated, like a schedule had been disrupted.
"Not sure," Sumi said.
Erina looked at the creature for another moment, tilting her head slightly.
"Doesn't look particularly strong," she said. "Low energy reading."
A beat of silence.
Then her gaze slid sideways to Kujo.
"Why don't you go and give it a try."
Kujo turned to look at her.
"What?"
"You heard me."
"There is absolutely no way that I—"
"Sumi and Sado will step in if it gets out of hand," she said, already sounding bored with his objection. "Think of it as practical experience."
Kujo looked back at the creature.
It was still watching him with those empty black eyes. Still drooling onto the dirt. Still carrying the particular stillness of something that was waiting rather than idle.
Every instinct he had was pointed in the same direction.
Away.
His legs shook slightly.
He stepped forward anyway.
The distance between him and the creature closed slowly. Each step felt wrong in a way he couldn't entirely account for, the ground was solid under his feet, but his body didn't seem to believe it. The air tasted like metal and something underneath metal, something animal and close. His heart was hitting his ribs hard enough that he was aware of each individual beat.
He tried to summon the light.
He focused the way he had in the living room, reaching for that same feeling, that surge of heat that had come from somewhere he didn't understand. His hand flickered, a weak pulse of illumination that came and went in less than a second.
Then nothing.
He tried again.
Nothing.
The creature moved.
It was simply beside him. No warning, no readable buildup, just gone from one position and present in another, and then its claws connected with his ribs and the world went sideways.
Pain detonated through his side. He left the ground briefly, hit it again stumbling, managed to stay upright by pure accident rather than any kind of skill.
He stood there for a second, breathing hard.
He looked down.
His shirt had torn along his ribs, three clean lines through the fabric. Blood was already welling up through the gaps, dark and immediate.
He pressed a hand against it instinctively.
Real. That was real.
He pulled his hand away.
The creature was watching him again from a few feet away, patient, giving him time he hadn't asked for. Its head tilted slightly, the horn catching the light.
Kujo forced his breathing to even out.
Fine.
He pulled the energy harder this time, demanding it instead of asking. His hand responded, a beam of light that shot forward and connected squarely with the creature's chest.
He felt it land.
Something loosened in his chest for just a moment, a brief flush of something that wasn't quite pride but was close to it.
He had done it. He had actually—
The Vyza barely moved.
It rocked back half a step and then righted itself. Looked down at where the light had hit. Then looked back at Kujo.
The small warmth in his chest dissolved.
The creature came forward again, faster this time, sharper, like the first exchange had given it something to calibrate against. Kujo moved back but not fast enough, it was already inside his reach, its claw swinging toward his head with a speed that left him no time to process.
He shut his eyes.
The impact came.
But the force didn't.
He opened his eyes.
Sado had appeared between them, one hand wrapped around the creature's forearm, stopping the swing completely. His feet hadn't shifted. His expression hadn't changed. He was holding back something that had just crossed the room in a fraction of a second and he looked like he was holding a door open.
He released.
Stepped back without a word.
The Vyza snarled, reorienting.
Kujo's legs were already moving. He put distance between himself and the creature and stood there, chest heaving, trying to think.
"Never drop your guard like that," Sado said from somewhere behind him.
Kujo nodded without turning around, his eyes staying on the Vyza.
He was bleeding. He was exhausted already from barely a minute of this. His light hadn't done anything worth mentioning. And the creature had barely acknowledged any of it.
He needed something different.
His mind went back to the daydream. The blade of light he'd imagined, sharp and clear and shaped by his hands. At the time it had been fantasy, something for a version of himself that didn't exist.
He reached for it anyway.
The light responded differently this time. It gathered slower, heavier, pulling from somewhere deeper. His arm ached with the effort of holding it as the shape formed, a sword, rough edged but recognizable, its glow unsteady but real.
He stared at it.
It was heavier than it looked. Not physically, his arm held the weight fine, but in some other way he couldn't articulate. Like it was drawing something out of him just by existing in his hand. Like maintaining it was costing something he couldn't fully afford.
A grin crossed his face despite all of it.
He charged.
The Vyza was still off balance from Sado's intervention. It didn't move fast enough.
Kujo swung.
The blade connected cleanly with the creature's arm, and the arm came away. Green blood sprayed outward in a wide arc, hitting the dirt, hitting Kujo's shirt, steaming faintly where it landed.
The creature let out a sound that wasn't quite a scream, distorted and wrong, and lurched sideways.
Kujo didn't stop. He stepped into the gap and drove the blade into the creature's stomach.
The Vyza's remaining arm swung back at him, slower now, less precise.
He ducked under it.
"The heart!" Erina's voice cut through from behind him. "Go for the heart!"
The creature was still lurching, its balance broken, its momentum carrying it exactly where Kujo needed it to go.
He set his feet.
Pulled back.
Drove the blade forward toward its chest.
The sword shattered.
Not cracked, not failed, shattered, fragments of light bursting outward in every direction and dissolving before they hit the ground, gone as instantly as they had formed.
Kujo's vision blurred at the edges.
His arm dropped.
His energy was simply gone. Not fading, not draining, gone, like a container that had been full and was now completely empty, nothing left at the bottom. The fatigue arrived in its place immediately, filling every part of him at once, his legs, his chest, behind his eyes.
He threw himself backward on instinct, just clearing the creature's reach as it swiped toward him, and went down on one knee.
He stayed there.
A cough tore through him, violent and sudden.
He spat.
Blood hit the dirt between his hands.
He stared at it for a moment.
Then his head dropped slightly.
"...Damn it."
He tried to stand.
His legs didn't cooperate.
He tried again.
Nothing.
It was over. He knew it with complete clarity. Whatever he had to give, he had given all of it. There was nothing left to pull from.
"Finally."
The voice came from his left.
He turned his head.
Sumi was stepping forward, rolling one shoulder like she'd been waiting in a slightly uncomfortable chair. The casual ease was back, but it sat differently now, it wasn't boredom exactly. It was the ease of someone who had been deliberately holding back and had just been given permission to stop.
She was smiling.
Not the grin from earlier. Something quieter than that, more focused. The smile of someone in their element.
Kujo watched her, unable to do anything else.
She said something under her breath, too quiet to catch. Her hands moved slightly, a small precise gesture.
Fire appeared in the air in front of her.
Not the chaotic, spreading kind. Nothing like what Kujo would have imagined fire to be in someone's hands. It was shaped from the moment it existed, a bow, clean and exact, the flames holding their form with the steadiness of something solid. An arrow formed against the string, drawn back in the same motion, its tip burning white at the center.
The way she stood, the way her weight was distributed, the way her eyes had locked onto the creature with a focus that had no softness in it, this was someone who attacked and didn't stop.
She released.
The arrow crossed the distance in an instant.
The impact was not small.
The explosion punched the air outward like a fist, heat rolling across the training ground in a wave, the sound of it arriving a half second after the flash. Kujo turned his face away, felt the warmth on his cheek, heard the ground crack where the fire touched it.
Then silence.
He turned back.
The Vyza was gone.
In its place was a pile of ash, loose and grey, already beginning to shift at the edges where the air moved through it.
Just like that.
Kujo stared at it.
She had ended it in a single movement.
He turned that over slowly, his mind too tired to do much else with it.
His hand found the ground. The dirt was cool and solid under his palm, and he focused on that, the specific temperature of it, the texture, the realness of it, trying to hold himself in the present for another few seconds.
He didn't manage it for long.
The edges of his vision darkened.
Narrowed.
And the cool dirt under his hand was the last thing he felt before he stopped feeling anything at all.