The word hit Jeffrey like a blow from behind.
Time moved strangely. The clearing fell away, and the past unspooled in the dark behind his eyes the way it always did when he wasn't fast enough to hold it back.
He had a wife. Soft-voiced. Steady. The only person in his life who had ever been able to temper his hands. Together they had a son — small, thin, too gentle for a world that Jeffrey understood mainly through force.
He had tried to toughen the boy the only way he knew. Harshness. Physical correction. Discipline that looked like fighting because that was the only shape he had for it. The boy would run crying to his mother, and she would come back to Jeffrey with her voice low and her eyes clear.
Don't strike with your hands. That's not discipline — that's just fighting. Look at him. See his strengths.
Jr wanted a dog once. Jeffrey scoffed. A mutt would eat a soft thing like you alive. More tears. More comfort from the only person who could give it.
Then his wife died, and the house went silent.
Just Jeff and Jr, and no one left to stand between them. He tried her way out of grief and desperation — he stopped hitting, he listened — and for the first time, he actually looked.
The boy was brilliant.
His mind moved in gears and sketches and ideas that came faster than his hands could draw them. He invented things Jeffrey couldn't begin to understand, and he forgave his father without being asked, and Jeff grew proud with a ferocity that surprised him. He started hating the name Jr — felt it made the boy smaller than he was.
People came from the neighbourhood to see what was being built in their shed. Flora dismissed him — not eco-friendly, said the nobles, without looking closely. Jr pushed harder. Worked longer. When robbers came for the workshop one night, Jeff drove them off with the savagery of someone protecting something that mattered more than his own life.
Father and son grew close. Bound by sweat and shared work and the particular intimacy of people who have hurt each other and chosen to stay.
Then Jr cracked it. Fully eco-friendly. A breakthrough.
They hadn't celebrated birthdays since the funeral. But this year, they would.
On Jeffrey's birthday, Jr gave him a gift. A utility belt of his own design — sleek leather, a gleaming gold buckle, the kind of engineering that looked simple and was anything but. It transformed at a touch: whip, high-tensile rope, triple-leash, a bristle of defensive spikes. Jeffrey fastened it around his waist and felt something he hadn't felt in years. Useful. Strong. Like a protector again.
He decided to return it.
For Jr's birthday, he'd bring the dog the boy had always wanted. Not just any dog — the most vicious beasts he could find. An old joke between them now, the irony of it. Proof of how far they'd both come from the soft boy who cried and the father who didn't know what to do with tears.
He didn't hunt in Sango's wilds.
He crossed into Gehen.
A no-man's-land ringed by monsters, a place no one entered with a plan to return. Terrors prowled it like storms given shape — creatures like Kazuchi, like the hyenas, things that were not animals but nightmares wearing animal forms. Jeffrey went in alone, with his son's belt and nothing else, and by will and by the belt he wrestled three Terror hounds into submission. The rarest and strongest of them he named Kazuchi. A smaller, strange brown dog followed him out on its own.
They were meant to be guardians.
Proof his son would never be unprotected again.
But Jeffrey came home late.
Too late.
On Jr's birthday, the partnership letter from Flora had arrived. Jr had read it and poured a drink for his absent father and set the letter beside their family photograph and sat down at the table to wait.
He fell asleep smiling.
That night, Blake and his gang came through the window looking for things to take. Jr resisted — his father's son, burning with the pride of it. A single careless blow. The kind that lands wrong by accident and ends things that weren't supposed to end.
Jeffrey came home with three Terrors heeling to their leashes, giddy with it, already imagining Jr's face.
He'll forgive me for being late. He'll laugh when he sees Kazuchi. He'll—
The door opened.
The untouched drink. The letter by the photograph. His boy on the floor.
Something inside Jeffrey broke at a depth that didn't repair.
Tanaka pressed her hand to Jeffrey's shoulder.
"Grace Inversion," she said quietly.
The world flickered. Jeffrey's dominion over beasts — the absolute, bone-deep authority he'd built himself into over years of brutal work — inverted. The connection shattered. The small brown dog let out a single bewildered whimper and bolted into the trees.
Jeffrey snapped back to the present and drove an uppercut into her stomach. Tanaka folded into the mud, gasping.
"What did you do to me?!" he roared, both hands at his head.
Najo forced himself upright. Before he could reach them, Moto and Aemon burst into the clearing — wet, bleeding, climbing-scraped, alive.
Moto didn't stop. He drove a flying knee into Jeffrey's side and put himself between the old man and Tanaka. "Back off!"
They fanned out around him — Moto with his obsidian sword, Aemon with his emotional forms flickering into shape at his flanks, unsteady but present.
Jeffrey breathed hard. Through the noise of his own fury, something threaded through from a long way back.
Don't strike with your hands, Jeffrey.
He reached up and slipped off his black coat.
Beneath it, the belt — sleek leather, gold buckle, the thing his son had made. It coiled into his grip. His wife's voice faded. His son's face stayed.
"Hands are for equals," he said, and his voice had gone somewhere very flat and cold. "You're not my equals. You're children who need discipline."
The belt snapped outward.
CRACK.
It moved like something alive — lashing across skin, hardening into a staff to deflect the sword, coiling around an ankle before the attack it was answering had finished. Jeffrey fought with the economy of someone who has spent years being the most dangerous thing in any room, and they were driven back blow by blow.
Smoke filled the clearing. The belt cut through it anyway, finding Moto's chest by feel. Aemon lunged recklessly and Jeffrey caught him mid-air, the belt becoming a noose, hauling him up and hooking the loop over a branch.
Aemon choked.
Rage and Trust tore at the leather together — tearing, wrenching, not stopping until it gave. Aemon dropped to the ground coughing.
They adapted. Aemon's clones formed a wall while Moto slipped inside the guard and landed a hook that turned Jeffrey's head.
Jeffrey stumbled.
He stood still for a moment, touching the blood at his lip. Behind his eyes, the photograph. The drink. The letter. His boy on the floor.
These aren't my children, he thought.
He let the belt fall into the mud.
Slowly, he rolled his sleeves back — both arms, up to the elbows, the thick scarred forearms that had once dragged monsters out of Gehen by force of will. He raised his fists. The same fists his wife had told him to put down. The same ones he'd spent years trying to replace with something his son had built.
He looked at them across the clearing.
"Now," he said.
Something in his eyes had become very simple.
"We fight like equals."
And with bare hands and a broken heart, Jeffrey came at them again.