The Guild council convened in the chamber whose ceiling mural suggested the sky without ever being blue. A hundred painted birds wheeled above them, none in flight the same, none ever escaping the confines of plaster. The room was designed to inspire awe—and remind everyone that awe could be painted, framed, and owned.
Cold light slid along a long, dark table scarred by years of elbows and arguments. Stone pillars held the room like clenched fists. Along the walls, glass cases displayed relics: a cracked mask taken in some old skirmish, a baton warped by heat, a coin stamped with the jagged circle. A thin scent of oil and old paper lingered; the air hummed just enough to suggest hidden power lines under the floor.
Councilors took their places in a geometry that said as much as any agenda. Daichi sat near the head, staff leaning against his chair like a sleeping animal. Ren hunched over a handheld array even now, its screen pulsing like a heartbeat he could not stop listening to. Morioka—the quartermaster with the clipped voice and immaculate cuffs—stacked her reports with the neat aggression of a person who hated surprises. Etsuko from logistics rolled a ring along her knuckles when the talk veered toward supply—an anxious metronome. Aya, small and poised, folded her hands. Riku sprawled as if the chair were a dare. Hana remained still, watchful, a quiet hinge in a door everyone had to pass through.
Reports stacked into patterns Seigi recognized: skirmishes that weren't meant to win, but to test. The Veil probing for rhythm, waiting to conduct the whole war like an orchestra. A warehouse hit and abandoned just before a response could coalesce. A signal burst in Shibuya that meant everything and nothing. A rumor that turned into smoke and then into nothing at all.
Kurogami sat like a black flame at the table's head, his posture a lesson in stillness. He spoke seldom and precisely.
"They test us for fracture points," he said at last. "They've found two already: our supply lines… and the boy."
Whispers sparked around the chamber like kindling.
"The detective—" "Origin veins, then? Confirmed—" "Too fast. Too visible—"
Hana's eyes flicked toward Seigi, not accusation, not pity, but awareness.
"I'm not—" Seigi began, then stopped. Because he was. A fulcrum. A target. A piece on the board heavier than it deserved to be. In the back of his mind the note on his desk uncurled again: Every thread is paid for. With hope, or with hurt.
Kurogami's gaze slid over to him in a way that felt like someone laying a blade along a ringing string to still its sound. "This is not condemnation. It is geometry. Vectors converge on you because the world loves focal points. We can use that."
Riku leaned forward, scowling. "You say use the way other people say save."
Kurogami's smile was the kind a teacher gave a student for insolence they secretly admired. "The world is not saved. It is leveraged."
A murmur of unease rippled through the others. Aya's hands were tight in her lap. Daichi frowned, as if tasting something sour. Ren kept his eyes on the flickering readout, as if numbers might shield him from rhetoric. Morioka cleared her throat just once, a sound that said supply lines do not care about poetry. Hana said nothing, her silence loud enough to count as dissent.
Kurogami's voice smoothed again, like silk pulled taut. "We will not be conducted. We will set the tempo. The Veil believes their darkness gives them license. We will show them what light can do when it is focused."
He did not look up at the painted birds when he said it. Seigi did. The frozen wings made his chest ache—the way flight could be captured, posed, and called beautiful.
Kurogami dismissed the assembly with a gesture, and one by one the council filed out. Chairs scraped softly; shoes whispered on stone. Seigi made to follow, but Kurogami's hand lifted—two fingers, delicate as a conductor stopping a note.
They stood alone under the painted not-sky.
"Do you know what I want?" Kurogami asked, his voice conversational, like they were speaking in a café instead of at the heart of power.
"No," Seigi said flatly. He was done guessing at other people's shadows.
"I want this world to stop lying to itself," Kurogami said. "To stop pretending the thread is myth. To stop pretending we are accidents and aberrations. I want law. Structure. Reverence." He stepped closer, his presence like a cold fire that both drew and repelled. "To do that, I need a symbol people will follow—and fear. Someone undeniable. Someone like you."
Images flickered, unbidden: his mother's hands around a steaming bowl, his father's too-loud laugh, a photo frame turned the wrong way on a shelf. The boy in the schoolyard who refused to stay down. Hero Boy. The note, again: paid for.
Seigi's skin prickled. "You want to use me to break the world open."
Kurogami's eyes burned steady. "I want to use truth. You are merely the door. The door opens when pushed."
The words hooked at something deep in Seigi, the way a dangerous current pulled at your ankles even when you swore you were standing firm. For a breath he saw himself as Kurogami wanted him: not a man, but a vector; not a detective, but a hinge. The painted birds stared down, wings forever spread, never landing.
He left before he drowned in the rhetoric.
The corridor outside swallowed sound. Voices from the chamber behind thinned into echoes: Etsuko's brisk inventory; Daichi's low counsel; Ren's anxious, technical murmur. Seigi walked through the antechamber and caught Riku's voice from a side hall, not quite hushed.
"He's not a weapon," Aya said, soft but adamant.
"The world will treat him like one," Riku replied. "Kurogami's just honest about it."
Hana stood near a pillar, as if she had been waiting without admitting it to herself. She didn't move to stop him. She spoke without looking at him, eyes on the not-quite-light above the corridor. "Careful which words you let under your skin," she said. "Some are hooks dressed as blessings."
He nodded; it felt like bowing and refusing to bow at the same time.
He found Sato staring out a narrow window at a slice of city half-hidden by smog. Neon bled into the haze and made it look like the sky was bruising. Sato's reflection hovered in the glass—tired eyes, a mouth that had forgotten how to believe good news when it heard it.
"What would you want?" Seigi asked quietly.
Sato lit a cigarette, let it hang forgotten between his fingers. The ember burned a patient orange. "For you to survive long enough to decide what you want."
He took a breath and let the smoke curl toward the ceiling. "Rooms like that," he added, almost to himself, "make bad promises. They dress power up as purpose and ask you to clap for it."
Seigi looked at him sidelong. "You've heard speeches like his before."
Sato's mouth tilted, not quite a smile. "I've given some of them shorter lives than they wanted."
"Did you ever open the door?" Seigi asked.
Sato didn't answer. He tapped ash into a tray that had been clean when they entered. The ember glowed, dimmed, glowed again. "Pick your words before someone picks them for you," he said at last. "And don't mistake being pointed at for being chosen."
Through the window, a bird crossed a narrow slice of real sky—one wingbeat, then gone. Seigi watched it disappear and felt something like grief for things that could not be painted.
Sato flicked the cigarette out and ground it gently under his heel. "Go home," he said. "Before your head becomes a room like that."
Seigi did.