Ren stood in the middle of what had once been the atrium. His eyes followed the remains of everything that had given way under the fight, feeling somehow alien to it even when he had been one of the main actors at play.
A section of the main roof bent so far down that it touched the floor, gaining balance for the rest of the structure. Underneath, several statues lay in pieces with their headless torsos scattered around the field. They were probably the ones Shiori couldn't revive due to their broken build. All the while, the other Kagemonos, the ones who did chase and attack them throughout the maze, were now gone, disappeared in clouds of smoke.
Ren hadn't yet finished sorting through any of it in his mind when Kagami slowly approached him from a ledge on top of the bent roof.
"We need to move. It's about to get dark," she said.
Ren then looked at the sky. Kagami was right. The light was starting to dim, and experience had taught him that night brought no good things in this place.
Her gaze dropped to the strip of cloth in his hand. The one he had received earlier from the bandaged man.
"Be careful with that, I mean it," Kagami reinforced. "He might not have attacked, but there was corrupted magic within him as well."
Ren looked at the bandage once again as it moved faintly in the wind. He wasn't dismissing Kagami's warnings, but he wouldn't throw away any clue at that point. Reading the environment had been one of his few consistent skills, due to a life where survival often depended on noticing what others didn't. This was a whole new level of it, sure, but the principle was the same.
He folded it and slid it into his pocket.
"I still don't understand what Shiori was to this place," he said.
Kagami kept her eyes forward as she formulated a response for him.
"Shiori was a corrupted witch. Corrupted magic gives an unpredictable amount of power to the witch wielding it. Reiji must have known that. He's been corrupted by magic in some ways, too, even though I can't say to what degree."
Then, after a pause during which she seemed to envision it.
"But we're getting closer to finding it out."
Ren then glanced toward the shadowed tunnels they had come from before arriving at the edge of the atrium. They were just that, too dark and dangerous to anticipate any hidden dangers within them. They were also too humid and uncomfortable. Not a good fit for a shelter.
"The tunnels we came from aren't safe, I think. We should find someplace else for the night."
"We should. I'll get a better view from higher up," she added, and with one light push, she jumped on the side of a broken wall that was still standing.
Ren followed her movement, impressed by her elegance as her paws landed on difficult surfaces.
Suddenly, though, a thin wisp of violet smoke curled upward from his hand. The Akariwake ring was waking up once more. It was faint, but he felt it clearly on his finger, stirring with its threads and particles all following the same unseen direction.
He was surprised by it. The ring hadn't reacted since the moment they had crossed paths with Shiori out on the garden level.
"The ring..." he said, without finishing his remark.
Kagami saw it too, up on her ledge.
"Shiori must have been blocking it. She must have known what the ring was for..." Ren added as he was studying the outline of the ring on his finger.
"You're thinking like a witch again," Kagami replied, amused.
Ren looked at her, attempting to look somewhat irritated. "You would know."
"I do actually," she simply replied.
The trail of violet smoke led through gaps in the vegetation, and through them, Ren could barely see shapes or maybe structures of some kind. They looked smaller from a distance than the atrium was, but better preserved and untouched by the earlier blasts.
"Maybe it's leading us somewhere we can stop for the night," Ren said, with his gaze fixed in the distance as he tried to make out the shapes of the structures beyond the trees.
The trail went deeper beneath the trees. As they walked, the branches reached low and snagged against their shoulders and limbs as they passed. It was getting darker by the minute, too, so Ren tried to be efficient about his pacing.
A fallen tree blocked the way ahead. Ren stepped forward, conjured his blade, and with a clean motion, he split the wood in two even halves, pushing them to the side until he built a clear path up ahead once more.
A few moments of silence passed during which both of them were lost in their own thoughts. Thoughts of Naraku, of their Pact and... of home. An elusive concept for both of them. For Ren, the lack of sleep and the weight of exhaustion pushed him to speak out loud, as if giving voice to his thoughts might keep him from sinking too deeply into fear or weakness.
"Was it like this with Reiji, too?" he asked all of a sudden, allowing his blade to draw back into the Pact Glyph, then fade within it entirely.
Kagami's place slowed slightly, almost imperceptibly. But Ren noticed it.
"What do you mean?"
"This... all of this... Fighting the bad guys. Trying to fix the balance when it's gone. This."
She took a few more steps before answering, considering how to compress decades of history into a single phrase Ren could make sense of.
"In a way, yes. But our enemies then weren't like this. They were..."
She didn't manage to finish her sentence. A clearing opened before them soon afterwards. Ren slowed as he stepped into it, adjusting his eyes to the sudden change.
In the center stood a building made entirely of stone. It had two tiers, each set back from the one below, with a low roof on top. It was quiet around it. No birds, no wind, or sound of trees or water. It felt eerie in a way, but it also looked safer than any other place they had seen around the area.
Kagami stopped beside Ren, with her gaze fixed on the building.
"It's a Respite," she explained as she recognized it.
"Right, I remember these... This is good, right?"
"For a normal Pact trial, yes. But this..." and she paused for a moment before continuing with her remark. "All trials are marked as true trials before they're ever used, and Respites are built in acknowledgment of that. They embody a higher force. But this shouldn't have been possible since my banishment. Unless..."
Ren figured out the pattern immediately.
"Unless someone has taken your place."
She gave no reply to Ren's words or reacted in any other way, for that matter. Whatever it meant to her, she preferred to have it sealed within her for the time being. Without another word, she crossed the clearing toward the Respite.