Familiar wasn't the word for it. Not even close, and certainly not where those powers were concerned.
He didn't know where Satoru came from. Didn't know why the man carried that kind of strength, or why he'd agreed to help at all.
"Tell me whatever you can. Something like this, if I don't get to ask, it's going to itch at me forever."
Shouma winked, leaning in, curiosity climbing by the second. The stranger the thing, the more he wanted it.
He suspected there were parts Rentaro couldn't say. He asked anyway. People like that didn't come along twice.
"Honestly, I only met Satoru a little while ago..."
He hesitated, then decided to give his senior brother the short version. There wasn't much point hiding it.
The shikigami had already dragged the whole thing into daylight.
By the time he'd covered the meeting and a few of the details around it, Shouma's eyes had gone wide. Beneath the wide brim of her hat, Midori's expression matched his exactly.
Shouma had assumed the two of them went back years. Instead it turned out to be days, and an accident at that, which only sharpened his interest in where Satoru had come from.
Midori tipped her head up, eyes round under the hat. She didn't talk much, but she'd felt what that man carried, and hearing it started with pure chance unsettled her.
"Cursed Energy?"
Shouma repeated it under his breath, disbelief plain. He'd heard the term in old stories and nowhere else. It had never occurred to him that such a thing might exist.
"That sounds like something out of a myth."
He shook his head. Cursed Energy, shikigami, all of it dragged out of legend and set down in front of him, and doing terrifying work while it was here.
"I think we're a bit past debating whether it's a myth, don't you?"
Rentaro watched the tiger still tearing through the treeline and laughed without much humor. The proof was right there, however impossible it sounded.
"If that thing were made of flesh and blood, it would've mutated by now with that much Gastrea fluid on it."
The shikigami finished another circuit and came loping back. Rentaro's gaze stayed on the fluid matted into its coat.
Gastrea fluid ate through anything living. One contact, and infection followed, then mutation, then a new Gastrea where a person used to be.
That coat was drenched in the stuff, and nothing was happening. The strength behind it hadn't wavered by a fraction. Whatever shikigami were, they weren't alive in any sense the word usually covered.
Shouma followed his eyes to the mess smeared across the tiger and made a small sound in his throat.
He knew what that fluid did. Immunity to it struck him as almost harder to accept than the killing.
"The way you describe it, all of us out here are redundant."
The laugh came out thin. Civil Security, the people who existed to fight Gastrea, standing in a field with nothing to do but watch.
"Sounds like one man could've handled this job by himself."
He looked toward Satoru with something close to reverence. That kind of power, those summons. Whatever height the man occupied, it wasn't one Shouma could measure.
"The onmyoji in the old stories called up dozens of shikigami, didn't they? He's shown two. Imagine a few more."
Longing crept into his face. Sorcerers who commanded endless familiars, cutting down monsters with a gesture. Somehow that had walked out of the pages and into the world.
If Satoru could summon more, then Gastrea stopped being a problem. Humanity might finally climb out from under them.
"I don't know what goes through his head. He told me before that this kind of thing didn't interest him much. I only called him because I figured it was worth trying. I didn't expect him to actually show up."
"That's a good outcome, isn't it? Beats bleeding for it."
Shouma ruffled the top of Midori's head, grinning.
She let the hand rest there, smiling softly. Whatever the two of them had, it ran deep.
"Um... Shouma."
Rentaro watched them a moment, then hesitated.
"If I get the chance later, I'll introduce you to Satoru."
"Please do. Meeting someone like that is something to look forward to."
He said it cheerfully, having no idea that the word "introduce" carried a second meaning in Rentaro's mouth.
Under the cover of both shikigami, every operator came off the helicopters without a scratch.
Tiger Funeral moved like a stroke of lightning around the perimeter of the clearing, brown-gold and constant, the wet crunch of claws through bodies rising and falling with no gaps between. Anything that came close died there.
Nue held the sky, circling, sharp eyes raking the treeline, dropping now and then to finish whatever slipped past. Nothing in the descent came near dangerous.
The whole force gathered on the open ground.
It wasn't a large clearing. Loose stone and dead grass underfoot, dense scrub and tall dead trees ringing it in, sunlight coming down in broken pieces through the canopy and scattering across the dirt.
Operators who had landed braced for slaughter now stood shoulder to shoulder like an audience at a show.
Not one of them would have predicted this before takeoff.
They'd left prepared to die. Some had written letters. Some had made peace with never coming home.
The target was a Stage 4 Gastrea, with a swarm of lower-grade ones nesting around it. One mistake and the entire unit was gone.
Instead they'd barely glimpsed a Gastrea before their boots hit the ground. The transport had gone off without a single moment of danger, and the helicopters lifted away.
The rotor noise faded, the shapes shrank, and the last of them slid off the horizon, leaving a faint smear of exhaust that thinned into nothing.
The rest fell to the operators. Extraction came only when they sent the signal.
Everyone understood what a departing helicopter meant. Alone now, whatever waited out there. Nobody looked afraid. With Satoru standing among them, the fear had nowhere to sit.
He didn't dismiss Nue immediately. The shikigami escorted the aircraft partway out before folding into a dark blur and vanishing.
Tiger Funeral stayed, and kept killing.
Its roar rolled low and huge across the clearing, a machine that didn't tire, grinding through whatever the forest still had to send.
"All right, everyone. Let's move."
Satoru dropped out of the air and clapped his hands, smiling.
Nothing in his face suggested a mission with a survival rate. He looked like a tour guide rounding up a group.
Hands in his pockets, stride loose, not a shred of caution anywhere in him, he set off toward the trees ahead of everyone.
"Um..."
A young voice came out of the crowd.
Small, but clear enough to cut through the quiet, and every head turned toward it.
Satoru looked back to find a girl with her hand raised.
Slight build, Civil Security uniform, an expression that gave nothing away, eyes far too calm for a child. Kayo Senju.
She held a tablet and pointed in the opposite direction.
A slim finger tapped the screen, where the target's coordinates sat, precisely the way Satoru wasn't walking.
"Target's that way. You've got the direction wrong."
Flat delivery, no mockery in it. She might have been telling a stranger he'd missed his turn.
"Ha!"
Not a trace of embarrassment. He burst out laughing instead, open and unbothered, as though walking the wrong way were beneath noticing.
"Ah, is that so? Sorry about that."
He pivoted and strode off the other way, arm and leg swinging on the same side, gait gone clumsy in a manner that sat oddly against everything he'd shown them. A few operators hid smiles.
"How awkward for you." Sumire trailed behind him, arms folded, one corner of her mouth curled.
The lab coat, the lazy set of her face, the amusement in her eyes. She enjoyed watching him trip over himself.
"I thought so too."
Betty walked beside her and nodded.
"Hey, could the two of you skip the commentary?"
Satoru turned, the smile still there but the ease gone out of it.
"Wait, you can feel awkward? I always assumed your personality didn't come equipped with that."
Sumire's eyes widened, studying him like a specimen doing something unexpected. Strong, loud, afraid of nothing. Embarrassment shouldn't have been in his range.
"What am I, some kind of freak..."
He rolled his eyes, wearing the injury.
Bickering the whole way, he led the column on toward the target.
The path through the trees ran rough, strewn with stone and weeds, branches scraping across sleeves with a dry rustle. The air held green sap and, under it, a faint rot.
They hadn't gone far before Rentaro caught up.
He'd jogged the distance, breath slightly short, eyes fixed ahead on the white-haired figure.
"Satoru."
"Ah, Rentaro. Nobody got hurt, I take it?"
He stopped, cheerful as ever, though something attentive sat under it.
"Nobody was hurt."
Rentaro shook his head, mouth twisting.
The entire descent had happened inside a wall of shikigami. Not one injury. Not one moment of risk.
"To be more accurate, we didn't even see a Gastrea."
Self-deprecation crept in. The people whose whole purpose was Gastrea had spent the operation as spectators.
"Good."
Satoru's shrug made it sound like the only possible outcome.
"If any of you got hurt, Betty would never let me hear the end of it."
He glanced back at her, teasing.
"Betty isn't that petty." She pouted, chin up. "Though a handful of Gastrea hardly counts as anything to begin with."
The pride in it was total. In her eyes the creatures ranked somewhere below insects.
Anyone else overhearing that exchange would have been floored.
Gastrea were the greatest threat humanity faced. Countless lives ended by them, countless families broken apart. To these two they barely rated as an obstacle.
"On that note, you should've just let him handle this alone. Faster that way. The lot of you could've stayed on the helicopter and gone home."