The forest held its breath. Word spread: something ancient had been stirred. The air tasted wrong, metal and rain before the storm.
Rei's wound throbbed. He could still feel the ghost of the Enso burst in his limbs. Shira bent over him, pressing cloth to the cut.
"We should move," she said low. "They'll be back, and worse."
But before they could leave, the world folded.
Four presences collapsed into the clearing like falling stars. No fanfare. No names. Only power so vast the ground itself groaned.
They did not speak. They did not need to.
An invisible hand closed around Rei's chest. Time snagged. One of the presences tilted the world and Rei's breath arrived late, as if he watched his own life lag by the width of a heartbeat. Another touched the air and color bled away; leaves went grey, then ash. The third pressed the earth into a small hill; trees creaked and bent as if seas of iron pulled at their roots. The fourth's gaze was a throat of black, a hunger that ate light.
Shira's eyes narrowed. "They're here."
The first presence moved like a brandished future, instant slashes of possible outcomes, and one cut ricocheted through Rei's arm, opening wounds that weren't there a second ago. Pain tore him open.
"You should not be." A voice, not heard but felt, resonated. It did not ask. It stated.
Rei's Enso answered. It surged. He felt it like a living thing, screaming at the world. For a fleeting instant, the same flicker of power that had erupted during the hunters' fight flared again, hotter, brighter, a burning spear forming at his palm.
One of the presences moved. A single, casual gesture, and the spear was snuffed. Not by force. By decree. The world swallowed the energy as if it had never been. Rei's body convulsed; a rib cracked.
Shira gripped his shoulder. Her voice was a knife. "Get up. Run."
But Rei couldn't move. The presences laughed without sound. The hunters, those who had retreated, arrived at the forest edge now with fresh fear in their eyes. The gap between hunters and these figures was a chasm.
Shira knew the truth in a single glance. "They erased Hurukoya," she said softly. "They don't just fight. They unmake."
Rei's voice was torn. "Why me? Why my Enso?"
She squeezed his hand. Her voice broke for the first time. "Because it's not Enso. It's something they buried, something hammered into our line because it could threaten them."
A presence stepped forward; the air around them bent into a blade. The clearing split. Rei tried to breathe. The world became small.