Eiríkur left Anteiku before sunrise.
He didn't say goodbye.
No long looks. No lingering words.
Just a note, folded carefully and left on the counter beside the coffee machine.
"Thank you for the calm waters, but I need to understand the storm."
Yoshimura would find it later, read it once, and say nothing. He had seen many leave. Few returned unchanged.
The path led Eiríkur beyond the city — past highways blurred by smog, past shrines overgrown with silence, and finally into the woods where old things still slept.
There, nestled beneath the crumbling remains of a Shinto shrine, was a crypt.
Skorvald waited within.
It was not metaphor. It was a tomb. A structure carved into the bedrock itself, reinforced with ancient wards and heavy stones inscribed with runes. The air inside was heavy with salt, soot, and the faint copper tang of blood old enough to blacken.
Skorvald had begun already.
Training was not ceremonial. It was not patient. It was violent.
"You were given the power of the dead," Skorvald snarled, slamming Eiríkur into the stone wall for the third time that day. "But you do not command it. You leak frost like a cracked grave. You whisper rage. You must learn to roar."
Every day, Eiríkur bled.
Every day, he broke.
And every day, he stood again.
His kagune thickened — not like the elastic strength of a rinkaku, nor the slicing elegance of an ukaku. It was brutal. Heavy. Each strike from his frost-kagune didn't cut — it shattered. It numbed. It froze regeneration for precious seconds. And in a ghoul fight, seconds were the difference between predator and corpse.
He wasn't a ghoul.
He was becoming a revenant.
Far across the city, alarms whispered in CCG halls.
RC monitors in the 12th Ward had picked up something… wrong.
The spikes were massive. Ancient. Unclassifiable.
The data passed through six desks before someone called a name no one used lightly.
Akira Mado.
She was the last of her line. Daughter of madness, but shaped by cold logic. Steel in human form.
She arrived in the 12th Ward with silence. No entourage. No fear.
The first thing she noticed was the frost — thin, clinging to branches and dirt like breath on glass.
She knelt, brushing her gloved fingers across a layer of rime covering half-decomposed ghoul tissue.
It wasn't decaying.
It was preserved. Stalled.
"This isn't natural," she murmured, recording notes into her holopad. "RC disruption consistent with high-level ghoul activity, but localized cryogenesis? No precedent. Not just ghoul behavior. Something pre-modern. Pre-pattern."
She didn't know he was watching her.
Eiríkur had sensed her arrival hours ago.
She moved differently than other investigators — not with brute force, but with method. Her posture. Her footsteps. The way her eyes scanned the horizon like a tactical map.
She didn't come to hunt blindly.
She came to understand.
He watched her from the shadows, silent as frost. Observing the way her mind pieced things together. Analytical. Controlled. But there was something behind the precision — a fracture veiled in formality.
He stepped into view at dusk.
She turned immediately — not startled, but ready.
He stood atop the ruined pillar of the shrine, his black frost-kagune slowly unfurling like a serpent made of smoke and hoarfrost. The cold around him pulsed in waves.
Akira narrowed her eyes.
"RC signature… 7,000 and rising," she whispered. "Half-ghoul. But… this isn't any kagune I've seen before."
Eiríkur's voice drifted down like wind from a glacier.
"You shouldn't be here."
"And you," she replied, "shouldn't exist."
Their words crystallized in the air between them.
Akira's hand moved. Smooth. Efficient.
She drew her quinque — a modified glaive, twin-edged and humming with kinetic charge. The kind designed to split kagunes like paper.
"You have ten seconds before I consider this engagement hostile," she said.
Eiríkur didn't move.
"Do you want a fight," he asked, "or just answers?"
"Both."
They clashed.
Only once.
Akira lunged with surgical precision, her blade spinning through the air with force calibrated for ghoul anatomy. But when it struck Eiríkur's kagune, it halted — not because he blocked, but because the steel froze mid-swing.
Her hands went numb.
She stepped back, breath sharp. "You froze my quinque…"
Eiríkur didn't advance.
"I'm not your enemy," he said.
"But you're not innocent."
"I didn't ask to be made this way," he replied. "But the ones who did it? You know the name."
Akira's face darkened.
"Kanou."
The word hit like a blow. She hated it. And he knew she hated it.
"You want to stop another Kanou," Eiríkur said. "So do I."
She stared at him. Silent. Calculating.
Then she lowered her blade. Slightly.
"…Talk."
Over the nights that followed, she returned.
Not with backup.
Not with a weapon drawn.
But with questions. And gradually — answers.
She learned of Skorvald. Of the virus. Of the Norse remains smuggled into Tokyo. Of the ancient bloodlines. Of the mutation that wasn't just RC-altering — it was memory-bound. Ancestral. Cursed.
She watched as Eiríkur summoned his full kagune — a shifting mantle of frost and bone, like armor from a grave. She saw the toll it took on him. And she began to understand he was not lying when he said he didn't know what he was becoming.
And Eiríkur?
He saw her mind in motion.
How she catalogued everything. How she buried grief under data. How her logic was not coldness — but a shield against the fire of memory.
They were nothing alike.
And yet, under the eye of the winter moon, something began to stir.
A flicker.
Not of warmth.
But of recognition.