The northern hills were quiet.
Too quiet.
No wind. No birds. No distant sounds of life. Just the crunch of their boots over dead leaves and cracked stone, each step echoing a little too long in the air. The sun hung overhead like a dying eye, its warmth pale and useless.
Minamoto whistled as they walked, loud and obnoxious, her pack bouncing with each step. "Soooooo… what if we're cursed now?"
Yue rolled her eyes. "Minamoto, we were cursed. Remember that swamp hag? The frog thing? The six-legged centipede you tried to flirt with?"
"It winked at me."
"It had one eye. That doesn't count."
Hayato walked ahead of them, silent. His cloak flared behind him in the soft breeze that didn't touch the trees. His black eyes stared forward—watchful, wary.
He wasn't sure when it started. The pressure.
At first, it was just a headache. Then a strange warmth in his chest. Now, something moved behind his ribs. His flames had been twitchy since the last battle—darker, heavier. It was like trying to hold smoke inside a sealed jar. At night, he'd felt them licking his fingertips in his sleep.
He didn't tell them. Not yet.
"Hey," Yue said, nudging him, "you alright?"
He nodded, eyes still forward. "Yeah. Just… thinking."
Minamoto leaned forward to catch his eye, grinning. "You thinking about that seer lady? Maybe you are cursed. She looked at you like you were already dead."
"She looked at all of us like that," Yue muttered.
The road curved upward into the hills, and the remains of a wooden sign stuck out of the ground, barely hanging on a single nail. Whatever was written on it had long since burned away.
They found the village by nightfall.
Or… what was left of it.
Ash. Charred wood. Bones in the dirt. Whatever had happened here wasn't a demon attack—it was a massacre. Calculated.
Yue knelt by a broken doll near a blackened doorway. "This wasn't days ago… this was weeks ago."
Minamoto squinted at a nearby wall, where something was scorched into the stone. She rubbed the soot off slowly.
It was a symbol: a sun split down the middle, dripping with flame.
Hayato stiffened. His jaw clenched.
Minamoto looked at him. "You recognize it?"
"It's one of my father's marks."
Yue stood. "So… this wasn't a mission. It was bait."
"Yeah," Hayato said, his voice low. "And we bit."
They were being hunted.
He turned to walk deeper into the ruins—then stopped.
Nailed to a tree just beyond the village was a crude piece of parchment. Yue walked past him and peeled it free.
It was a wanted poster.
Of all three of them.
Hayato stood in the middle, shadowed in black ink, his sword drawn and fire raging behind him.
Yue's healing sigil was carved wrong. Minamoto's face looked too pretty to be hers. But it was them. Someone knew their faces.
And they wanted them gone.
Yue's lips tightened. "How the hell did someone know where we'd be?"
No one answered.
Hayato stared into the woods beyond the poster.
Something was watching.
Not from close. From very far. But its presence bled into the trees like venom—slow and heavy. Like a beast so big its very breath shifted the leaves.
He said nothing.
Not yet.
But as Yue and Minamoto argued about what to do next, Hayato felt it again—the warmth in his chest, crawling up his throat.
A second heartbeat.
It wasn't his.