--- Back outside Neoshima ---
The man knelt without a word.
The whisper kept replaying, quiet but impossible to silence.
"You failed your family once. Don't fail again."
He didn't know what that voice was - or why it spoke to him.
Only that it knew too much.
More than he wanted to remember.
His mechanical arm whirred, sliding beneath the boy as if he weighed nothing. Raizen folded over the cold metal, limp, a dead weight cradled like something that still mattered.
The man's other arm, scarred yet steady, hooked under the girl. Her golden hair spilled over his shoulder.
He rose in one smooth motion.
Ahead, the city wall loomed - a sheer expanse of metal and steel. But here, between roots and steel, the wall had a secret.
A thin seam, almost invisible.
The man shifted his load, adjusted the weight of the two bodies without strain, then lifted his mechanical hand and pressed his steel fingers against the metal.
Something inside the wall clicked.
The seam opened, just enough for a man carrying the last pieces of a broken village.
A narrow passage yawned in front of him, cold air sneaking out. He stood still for a single breath, listening. No footsteps. No Wardens.
He stepped through.
The door sealed behind him with a final, quiet sound.
Old bulbs burned a low orange glow along the tunnel. The light left more in shadow than it revealed. The air was heavy with oil, rust, coal smoke stenches.
Somewhere far below, unseen machines hummed like a buried heart.
The tunnel sloped downward, turning from patched metal to smooth stone.
Then, all at once, it opened.
The Underworks opened like a whole new world under Neoshima - an undercity for the unwanted. A place for those who couldn't find one.
Pipes and vents ran in every direction, tangled like veins. Scrap bridges stitched one level to another. Chains drooped from the unseen ceiling, holding lamps that flickered and buzzed like tired fireflies.
People moved everywhere.
Cloaks hunched against cold. Barefoot kids running between stalls that sold scraps of food, nearly broken tools and knives that had seen too much.
Voices braided into a constant murmur - bargaining, swearing, laughing, crying, all layered together until it became the sound of survival.
Life. Hard, ugly, stubborn life.
The man walked through it at an even pace, boots knocking on uneven stone. He did not raise his voice or his head.
He did not have to.
Eyes found him anyway. The iron arm. The scars. The eyepatch. The way he carried two unconscious bodies without a flinch.
People stepped aside before they realized they were moving. Some looked away fast. Some watched for too long. Nobody got in his way.
Next to a leaning street lamp, a cluster of kids huddled with their hands out. Their clothes were three sizes too big and two winters too thin.
"Please, sir... just a coin... anything..."
A woman in the shadows quickly stepped in, trying to hush them, throwing nervous glances at the man as if fear could protect them.
He stopped.
His shadow fell over the kids. They shrank on instinct when they saw his face and the steel arm. For a few seconds he simply stood there, as if deciding whether the world still deserved kindness.
Then his real hand - flesh and scarred - dipped into his cloak.
A coin flashed in the weak light. Real gold. Not alloy, not scrap. The kind you didn't see twice
He flicked it.
One boy snatched it out of the air, eyes going wide. He held the coin to his chest like it was something holy.
By the time he thought of saying thank you, the man was already gone.
To those kids, that coin was weeks of food. Maybe months, if they were careful.
The Underworks changed as he walked deeper. The market noise thinned. Lamps grew fewer.
Symbols stained the walls - crude sigils for gangs, claw marks, prayers half rubbed away.
Doorways appeared where there shouldn't be doors, stitched together from scrap.
He stopped at one of them.
A reinforced metal door. Not pretty, but maintained. No gaps in the frame. No rust on the hinges.
He unlocked it with a thick key from inside his coat. The bolts slid back. The door opened.
Inside was a small, tidy room. Iron walls, patched with older plates. A workbench crowded with tools and the opened guts of weapons.
A single mattress in a corner. Along one rack, blades of every length rested, clean and sharp.
The bulb overhead flickered once, then turned on.
The man laid Raizen on the mattress. He, but did not wake.
Then, he lowered the girl beside him. Her breathing was shallow, but steady.
He stood there for a long moment, simply watching.
No one would have been able to read his face.
The mechanical arm whirred as he flexed it. Then he pulled a chair to the workbench, set his elbow down, and began to pull the prosthetic apart.
Screws. Plates. Cable tendons that flashed silver in the dim light.
The rhythm of work settled over the room, steady and precise.
Time in the Underworks did not move the way it did above. No sunrise. No sunset. Only the hiss of pipes and the tired buzz of the bulb.
After a few hours, Raizen suddenly gasped his way back to consciousness.
Pain found him first.
His arm burned. His chest ached with every breath. His body felt like it had been crushed under something heavy for too long.
For a heartbeat, he was back in the village. Smoke. Fire. Screams. The Nyx.
His eyes finally focused.
A ceiling. Not sky. Not clouds. Thin pipes ran across it. Somewhere out of sight, air hissed through vents. The smell of oil and metal pressed in around him.
He turned his head, slowly.
The girl lay close, still asleep. Her face was turned toward him, hair fanned over the pillow. Her chest rose and fell in slow, small breaths.
Her face was too close.
He looked away fast, heat catching in his cheeks.
Alive.
That one word anchored him. His muscles loosened a fraction.
He tried to sit up. Pain screamed across his ribs and arm. He grunted and fell back, teeth clenched.
The man sat at the workbench, filling the room just by existing in it.
Coat off. Scars running across his face, caught by the light. The eyepatch covered more than just the missing eye - it swallowed half his cheek on the same side as the iron arm.
Metal parts lay arranged in clean lines on the bench. He was fighting with a tiny screw that did not want to go in his place yet.
A soft creak from the mattress made his head tilt. Just a bit.
He gave the screw one last chance to behave, then let it win, put the tools aside, and turned.
His gaze met Raizen's. Dark. Steady. Measuring.
Raizen's throat went dry. The fear that had gone quiet in the village came back all at once. Words crowded his tongue and refused to move.
The man's eyes flicked to the girl. To the fresh bandages on Raizen's chest. Then back to his face.
For a fraction of a second, something old moved in his expression - a memory, sharp and unwelcome.
Then it was gone.
"I'm surprised you're still alive, kid" he said.
His voice was deep. The kind of deep that made people sound small.
"But that is what matters right now."
He turned back to the bench.
Raizen looked at the bandages on his arm and chest properly this time. Someone had cleaned the wounds, wrapped them tight. Someone had pulled him out of the dirt and given him another chance to breathe.
His body wanted to sink back into the mattress and vanish. His mind refused to let him. His head spun with questions, each one louder than the last.
He dragged his gaze around the room, searching for answers on the walls.
That was when he saw the map.
It covered almost an entire side of the room. Paper layered on paper. Streets, tunnels, scribbled notes. Pins stabbed into it in clusters. Black-and-white photos. Faces with red Xs drawn over them. Names crossed out.
Strings of red thread connected points into something like a web.
One word appeared again and again, written in a sharp, practiced handwriting.
Moirai.
On a small shelf under the map, a framed photo sat alone. The glass was cracked, the break running straight across the woman's face, stealing the details.
Raizen looked away.
The man's voice came again, low.
"Rest. You will need your strength. Tomorrow, you will understand more than you might want."
The words settled heavy in the cramped room and did not move.
Raizen glanced at the girl one more time. Her breathing stayed slow and even. Something in his chest eased.
For now, he let his head drop back against the thin pillow, pressed a hand to his forehead, and forced a tiny, shaky smile that no one saw.
Darkness moved in at the edges of his vision. This time it did not feel like the village night. It felt softer. Not safe, but… Less dangerous.
He let it take him.
"Raizen..." he whispered, almost without meaning to. As if reminding himself he still had a name.
"My name is Raizen."
The man did not turn, but he answered, trying and failing to hide a smile.
"I'm Takeshi."
His eyes closed. His breath slowed.
But the whisper didn't leave him alone. It curled up from the dark, into his mind again.
Do not fail her...
Or I will choose someone else.