Hina walked three steps ahead, same as always. The plastic bag swung from her wrist, heavy with daikon, tofu, and the cheap miso paste she bought because the good kind cost twice as much. Late afternoon light caught the edges of her hair where it had begun to fray from the elastic.
She needed a haircut. She'd been saying that for months.
"You're quiet," she said without turning around.
Kori watched her shoulders. The way they moved when she walked. She carried tension there, had for years, ever since she'd stopped being his sister and started being his mother, his father, his landlord, his cook. The person who checked his homework, signed his permission slips, sat across from teachers who asked where his parents were.
"Thinking," he said.
"About?"
"School."
She laughed. It was a good sound. "Liar. You never think about school." She glanced back, finally, brown eyes warm in the dying light. "Tanaka-sensei called again. Said you're smart when you try."
"I try."
"You sit in the back and draw in your notebook."
"I'm trying to sit in the back and draw in my notebook."
Another laugh. She shifted the bag to her other hand. The street narrowed ahead where the old shops crowded together, awnings faded to the same bleached green. An orange cat, fat and utterly disinterested, watched them from a windowsill.
"Public Safety called yesterday," Hina said. Her voice didn't change. "They want me to come in for an assessment."
Kori's feet kept moving. Left, right, left. The pavement had a crack shaped like a river delta. He'd noticed it before but never thought about it until now.
"You said no."
"I said I'd think about it."
"You'll say no."
Hina stopped. The bag stilled against her thigh. Ahead, the street opened into the small plaza where the neighborhood shrine sat, its stone torii gate darkened with age and weather.
She turned, and in the orange light her face looked older than twenty-three.
"The money would help," she said.
"You'd die."
"Plenty of hunters don't die."
"Plenty do."
She watched him. The way she always watched him, like she was trying to see something he kept hidden. He didn't keep anything hidden. There was nothing to hide. He was eleven years old, and his sister bought cheap miso paste, and the teacher said he was smart when he tried.
"Come on," she said. "The tofu will spoil."
They walked. The cat on the windowsill had vanished. The light was failing faster now, shadows pooling in doorways and alleys, the sky above the rooftops turning the color of a bruise.
The devil came from the alley beside the shrine.
It moved wrong. That was the first thing Kori noticed—the way its joints bent at angles that made his eyes shy away, refusing to process. It had been a dog once, maybe, or something with four legs and fur. Now the fur was patchy and wet-looking, the limbs a sprawl of too many segments.
Where the head should have been was only a cluster of yellowed, clicking human fingers scenting the air.
The plastic bag hit the ground. Tofu spilled across the pavement, white blocks scattering like dice.
Hina's hand was already moving. The knife appeared from somewhere inside her jacket—not a kitchen knife, something longer, the blade catching what little light remained. Her contract. The Knife Devil. Kori had seen her summon it before, practicing in the apartment when she thought he was asleep.
"Run," she said. Her voice was flat, calm, the voice of someone who had done this before. "Get to the main street. Find someone. Tell them there's a devil at the Inari shrine."
Kori's legs didn't move.
The devil lurched forward. Hina met it, knife flashing, and the sound when blade met whatever passed for the thing's flesh was wet and thick, like cutting into overripe fruit. The devil screamed—if that was screaming, that high keening that seemed to come from everywhere at once—and one of its segmented legs swiped at her, claws raking across her forearm.
Blood. On the pavement. On her jacket. On the scattered tofu, red soaking into white.
"Kori!" She didn't look back. Couldn't look back. The devil was pressing her toward the shrine's stone steps. "Run!"
His legs didn't move.
His hands didn't move.
His chest rose and fell, breath coming in shallow gasps that never quite filled his lungs, and his eyes watched everything with perfect clarity—the way the devil's finger-head opened and closed, clicking, clicking, the way Hina's knife caught it across what might have been a throat, the spray of black ichor that followed—but his body had become stone.
Run. Go get help.
The words existed somewhere outside of him, sounds that meant nothing, shapes his brain refused to process. His sister was fighting for her life ten meters away and he stood and watched and his legs would not move would not move would not—
The devil caught her.
One of its legs, the longest one, the one that bent backward at the second joint, drove through her stomach. Hina made a sound—not a scream, smaller than that, surprised almost, like she'd stepped on something sharp walking barefoot through the apartment.
The knife fell from her fingers. It vanished before it hit the ground, the contract broken, the devil taking back what it had lent.
She turned her head. Brown eyes found him where he stood frozen, a useless statue. Her mouth moved.
Run.
The word. Always the word. Even as the devil hoisted her skyward, even as the light left her eyes, it was the same word, the final desperate gift she had left to give him.
The devil dropped her. It turned toward the shrine, uninterested in the boy who stood motionless in the street, uninterested in anything that didn't fight back. It climbed the stone steps on its too-many legs, the clicking of its finger-head fading into the growing dark.
Kori stood there.
The sky finished turning purple, then black. Stars appeared. The tofu had stopped bleeding. His sister's eyes were still open, still brown, still looking at him.
Run, they said.
He couldn't run. He couldn't move. He couldn't even close his eyes.
Public Safety found him twenty minutes later, standing in the same spot, breathing in the same shallow gasps. They killed the devil in under a minute. One of them, a woman with short hair and a tired face, tried to lead him away from the body.
His legs finally moved then, responding to her hand on his shoulder, following her like a puppet with cut strings.
He didn't look back at Hina.
He already knew what he'd see.
Akane's apartment was small. Two rooms and a kitchen barely large enough to turn around in, the walls thin enough to hear the neighbors' television through. She cleared out the closet that first week, laid down a futon, hung a curtain across the doorway. Privacy. Or the illusion of it.
"You can stay as long as you need," she said.
She looked like Hina. Same brown eyes, same shape of jaw, same way of standing with her weight on her left foot. Hina's cousin, but Kori had always called her aunt—she was older, had always seemed more like a grown-up than a peer. They'd been close once, before Hina had taken in her brother and stopped having time for visits.
Kori unpacked his bag. Three shirts, two pairs of pants, underwear, socks. His notebook from school. A photograph of Hina he'd taken from the apartment before they'd closed it up.
He put the photograph in the closet, facing the wall.
"Thank you," he said.
Akane watched him from the doorway. The same way Hina used to watch him, looking for something hidden. She wouldn't find it either.
"Dinner's at seven," she said. "Do you have homework?"
"Yes."
"Then do it."
She left. The curtain swayed behind her, then stilled.
Kori sat on the futon and stared at the wall and did not do his homework. The light changed outside the small window, afternoon to evening to night. At seven, Akane called him for dinner. He ate. Rice, pickled vegetables, fish. The fish was overcooked, dry, nothing like the way Hina made it.
He ate every bite.
That night he dreamed of the devil. The clicking of its finger-head, the wet sound of the knife, the way Hina's eyes had found him across the darkening street. Run, they said. Run. Run. Run.
He woke at 3 AM, gasping, frozen in his futon, unable to move for seventeen minutes while the nightmare's paralysis slowly released its grip.
This became routine.
Eight years passed in that apartment. Akane tried—she bought him new clothes when he outgrew the old ones, signed his permission slips, sat across from teachers who said he was smart when he tried. She cooked dinner every night at seven, always something different, never quite right.
She didn't ask about the nightmares, though she must have heard him through the thin walls.
She kept a cup in the cabinet above the sink. Blue ceramic, chipped at the rim, the same cup Hina had used when she visited. Akane never used it. Never offered it to guests. It sat there, gathering dust, eight years of accumulated silence.
Kori finished high school. He didn't go to university. He got a job at a convenience store three blocks from the apartment, night shifts mostly, stocking shelves and running the register for the handful of customers who wandered in at 2 AM looking for cigarettes or onigiri.
He was good at night shifts. The quiet suited him. The fluorescent lights, the hum of the refrigerators, the mechanical rhythm of scanning barcodes and making change. Nothing required him to move quickly. Nothing required him to move at all.
Sometimes devils passed by the store windows. Low-class things mostly, rats with too many eyes, shadows that moved against the light. They never came inside. They never noticed him standing behind the counter, still as stone, watching them pass.
He wondered, sometimes, if they could sense it. The stillness in him. The part that had frozen eight years ago and never quite thawed.
Akane stopped setting a place for him at dinner when he started working nights. She left food in the refrigerator instead, covered plates he could heat up when he got home at dawn. They passed each other in the kitchen sometimes, her leaving for work, him returning from it. Brief exchanges. Weather. Groceries. The neighbor's dog that barked too early.
She never mentioned Hina. Neither did he.
The photograph stayed in the closet, facing the wall.
The second devil appeared on a Tuesday.
Kori was walking home from his shift, the first gray light of dawn bleeding into the sky above the buildings. The streets were empty, that liminal hour between the last drunks stumbling home and the first commuters heading to trains.
He heard it before he saw it. A sound like tearing fabric, wet and prolonged, coming from the alley beside the pachinko parlor that never seemed to open anymore.
He stopped walking. His body went still—not frozen, not yet, just waiting, the way prey waits when it senses a predator nearby.
The woman came running out of the alley.
She was young, maybe his age, office clothes disheveled, one shoe missing. Her face was pale, eyes wide, mouth open in a scream that came out as nothing but ragged breathing.
Behind her, the darkness of the alley shifted, rearranged itself, became something with too many limbs and a head that was wrong in ways his eyes refused to fully register.
The devil stepped into the gray light. Larger than the one that had killed Hina, taller, its body a mass of burnt wood and exposed muscle. Its head sat sideways on its neck, a human face stretched and distorted, the mouth vertical instead of horizontal, opening and closing with a sound like cracking ice.
The woman fell. Her remaining shoe caught on a crack in the pavement and she went down hard, skinning her palms, her knees. She scrambled backward, still trying to scream, still producing only that thin, useless gasping.
The devil advanced.
Kori stood frozen.
His legs wouldn't move. His hands hung at his sides, useless, fingers slightly curled. His breath came in shallow gasps that never quite filled his lungs.
Eight years. Eight years of nightmares and therapy and telling himself it would be different next time, that he would move, that he would act, that he wouldn't stand there watching someone die while his body refused to obey.
The woman's eyes found him. Brown. They were brown, like Hina's, and in them he saw the same thing he'd seen eight years ago—the same question, the same desperate hope that someone would help.
His right foot moved.
It shouldn't have. Nothing in his body wanted to move, every instinct screaming at him to stay still, to not draw attention, to survive the way he'd survived before by being beneath notice.
But his foot moved anyway. A single step forward. Then another. Then he was running.
He had no weapon. No contract. No training. He was a nineteen-year-old convenience store clerk running at a devil with his bare hands because for the first time in eight years his body had chosen to move and he didn't know how to stop it.
The devil's head swiveled toward him. The vertical mouth opened, producing that ice-crack sound, and then its arm swept out and caught him across the chest.
The world spun.
Impact—not the devil's arm but something harder, the wall of the pachinko parlor, his back hitting the bricks with enough force to crack plaster. He slid down, legs folding under him, and the pain came a moment later. Enormous. Specific. Centered on his spine.
Something was wrong. Not just pain-wrong but broken-wrong, the kind of wrong that didn't get better, that didn't heal. He tried to stand and his legs didn't respond. Tried to crawl and his arms scraped uselessly against the pavement.
The lower half of his body had stopped existing. Dead weight.
The devil turned back to the woman. She was still on the ground, still trying to scream. It reached for her with its too-long fingers.
Kori watched. That was all he could do now—watch, the same as before, the same as always. His body had finally moved and it hadn't mattered, had only gotten him broken instead of frozen, had only added one more body to the street as the dawn light grew stronger.
Something moved beside him.
A cat. Black, barely larger than a kitten. It lay against the base of the wall, half-hidden by garbage bags, its fur matted with something darker than shadow. Its eyes caught the gray light—amber and gold—and they were watching him with an intensity that didn't belong on an animal.
The cat was dying. He could see it now, the wounds along its side, the blood that pooled beneath it, the labored rise and fall of its chest. It had been there the whole time, maybe. Wounded and waiting.
Its mouth moved.
Sound came out. Not a meow, not a cry, but words. A voice that was female and ancient and layered with something that made his broken spine vibrate in response.
"Well," the cat said. Blood flecked its whiskers. "This is embarrassing."
Kori stared. Ten meters away, the devil's fingers closed around the woman's ankle. She screamed, finally, a real scream that cut through the morning air.
"For both of us," the cat continued. Its voice was fading but the words came out precise, almost amused. "You—paralyzed, watching another one die. Me—the great and terrible, expiring behind garbage bags." A wet cough that might have been a laugh. "At least you have an excuse. Humans break so predictably."
"What—"
"No time for existential questions." The cat's amber eyes flicked toward the devil, then back to him. "That thing will finish the screaming woman in seconds. Then it will notice you're still breathing. Then you'll die here, and I'll die here, and this whole embarrassing situation will be someone else's problem."
The cat paused.
"I've had better mornings."
The woman screamed again. The devil was dragging her backward now, toward the alley, toward the dark.
"Contract," the cat said. "You and me. I rebuild your spine—make it better than it was, actually, I'm quite talented—and in exchange, you kill devils. All of them. Every single one you encounter, no exceptions, no mercy, no tedious philosophical debates about the nature of evil."
Those amber eyes found his again. Ancient. Knowing. And beneath the wit, desperate.
"Also, you never speak my name. Ever. That part is non-negotiable."
"I don't know your name."
"Wonderful. Let's keep it that way." Another wet cough. "I'm running out of time to be charming. The universe has a sense of humor, putting us both here—two broken things bleeding out in the same gray dawn. But I'd rather not appreciate the irony from the afterlife."
The cat's tail twitched once.
"Yes or no, broken boy. I won't ask twice."
The woman's fingers scraped against the pavement, leaving trails of blood. The devil's vertical mouth was opening wider, preparing to bite, to consume, to end her the way the other devil had ended Hina.
Kori looked at the dying cat. At the amber eyes that held millennia of something he couldn't name. Two creatures bleeding out in the same gray dawn. Both about to die. Both offered one way out.
"Yes."
The word came out whole. Final.
The cat's whiskers twitched—something like satisfaction, or maybe just relief. "Good answer."
It moved. Not walked, not crawled—flowed, like shadow becoming liquid, crossing the distance between them in a single impossible motion. It pressed itself against his back, against the break in his spine, and then it was inside him. Not metaphorically but literally—black fur dissolving into black smoke dissolving into something that poured into the space between his vertebrae.
His spine rebuilt itself. He felt it happening, felt the shattered bone knitting together around something new, something that wasn't bone at all, something that had been a cat and was now part of him.
His back arched off the pavement, a sound tearing from his throat that wasn't quite a scream. The devil in the street turned at the noise. The woman used the distraction to scramble away, finally finding her feet, running without looking back.
Kori stood.
His legs worked. His back was straight, the pain already fading to something distant and manageable. Along his spine, from the base of his skull to his tailbone, he could feel it—her—the cat-that-wasn't, dissolved into the new architecture of his body.
No voice now. No presence. Just power, coiled and waiting, and a silence where the wit had been.
The devil charged.
"Scythe."
The word came from beneath thought, natural as breathing. His arm lifted, palm facing out, and black material flowed down from his shoulder, encasing his hand in something cold and hard. A blade sprouted from his palm. Twenty-four inches. Obsidian steel. It caught the dawn light and swallowed it.
The devil's vertical mouth opened. Ice-crack sound. It reached for him with those burnt-wood fingers.
Kori moved.
Not frozen. Not hesitating. Not even thinking. His body knew what to do the way it knew how to breathe. The scythe swept up in an arc that felt rehearsed, perfected over a thousand lifetimes he'd never lived.
The devil's reaching arm separated from its body at the elbow. Black ichor sprayed across the pavement.
The devil didn't have time to scream.
Kori was already inside its guard. Step forward, blade rising in a diagonal cut that opened its chest from hip to shoulder. The burnt-wood ribs parted like kindling. Step to the left, reversing the blade, severing two of its legs at the joint before they could find purchase.
The devil staggered, tried to retreat. Kori followed without thought, without choice, without the space between intention and action that had defined his entire life.
The final cut took the head. Horizontal. Clean. The sideways face, the vertical mouth, all of it tumbling away from the neck in a spray of black.
The body collapsed. Kori was already turning away before it hit the ground.
Three seconds. Maybe four.
The scythe retracted—black material flowing back up his arm, disappearing into his skin, leaving his palm unmarked. No blood. No wound. Nothing to show what had just emerged from it.
Behind him, the devil's corpse began to dissolve, becoming ash, becoming nothing. Steam rose from where the cuts had been.
The street was quiet.
Dawn light flooded between the buildings, orange and gold, catching the ash that drifted in the air. Somewhere nearby, a siren was starting—faint but getting closer. Public Safety dispatch. Someone had called it in.
Kori looked down the street. The woman was gone, but he could see where she'd run—blood from her scraped palms marking a trail toward the main road. She'd seen everything.
Above him, mounted on the corner of the pachinko parlor, a security camera pointed down at the street. Its red light blinked steadily.
Recording.
The sirens were getting closer.
Kori turned and walked in the opposite direction. Not running—running drew attention—but moving with purpose, with the kind of efficiency his body seemed to understand now. He took the first side street, then another, cutting through alleys he'd never noticed before but somehow knew were there.
Along his spine, that presence settled deeper. Silent. Dormant. Waiting.
The apartment was dark when he got back. Akane had already left for work.
Kori walked to his closet. Pushed aside the curtain. The futon was still made from that morning, creased where he'd slept. His clothes hung on the rod—three shirts, two pairs of pants. The shelf above held his old school notebooks, never thrown away, never looked at.
The photograph sat on the shelf, facing the wall. Same as it had for eight years.
Kori reached up. His hand didn't shake. His breath didn't catch. He picked up the photograph and turned it around.
Hina looked back at him. Brown eyes, warm in the camera flash. She was smiling, the way she'd smiled when she teased him about school, when she laughed at his jokes, when she walked three steps ahead with a plastic bag full of cheap groceries and a life measured in the space between devil attacks.
He set the photograph back on the shelf. Facing out.
Kori would never freeze again.