Zenjiro woke up to the smell of burnt toast drifting from the kitchen, which meant his little sister Yuna was attempting breakfast again.
His eyes felt like they were filled with sand.
One hour. That was all the sleep he had managed to get. He had crawled back through his window at 4:00 AM, washed the black blood off his skin, and collapsed into bed. Now, at 6:00 AM, his alarm was screaming at him to be a normal high school student.
He sat up, his head spinning. His ribs throbbed where the Night Beast had slammed him into the car last night.
How long can I keep living like this? he wondered, rubbing his face. Hunting monsters at night, doing calculus in the morning. Eventually, one of them was going to kill him.
He could hear Yuna humming some annoying pop song downstairs while their mother yelled at her to stop scraping the charred bits into the sink. Just another Tuesday in the Hajidan household.
Zenjiro pressed his hand against his chest, over his heart, and felt a pulse that wasn't quite synchronized with his heartbeat. Something else was moving beneath the surface, rhythmic but separate, like a second circulatory system operating on its own schedule.
"Not again," he whispered to the ceiling.
The pain spiked suddenly. Zenjiro gasped, his back arching off the bed involuntarily. The burning sensation was getting worse. It had been a dull ache for months, but now it felt like barbed wire tightening around his ribs. Lately, especially since last night, the progression had accelerated like someone had hit fast-forward on whatever was happening to his body.
He sat up slowly and fumbled for the buttons of his shirt.
He looked down at what he'd been staring at since he was a child. The blue veins.
That's what he'd called them as a kid. When he'd first asked his mom about them, she'd gone pale, made him promise never to tell anyone, and scheduled an appointment with a specialist.
The doctor found nothing wrong. The doctor had been baffled. X-rays showed nothing. Blood tests were normal. 'It looks like a vascular anomaly,' the specialist had guessed, clearly uncomfortable. 'If it doesn't hurt, we leave it alone. Cutting into it might be dangerous.'
But it did cause pain. And it had been growing for years.
The veins covered his chest in an intricate web centered over his heart. They'd started as a coin-sized cluster above his left ventricle. Now they sprawled across his entire torso, pulsing with his heartbeat but also moving independently, like they had their own agenda.
And this morning, they were spreading faster than ever before.
His phone buzzed with another message from Commander Yuza. "Remedial knife training, 0500 tomorrow. Don't embarrass yourself further. Bring your own Band-Aids this time."
Zenjiro deleted the message without responding. Two months in the Shadow Crane and he'd managed to become their mascot for failure. Last week, he'd somehow tangled himself in his own rope during rappelling practice. Sensei Takeda had actually walked away mid-exercise, just turned around and left. Zenjiro could still see his shoulders shaking, though he wasn't sure if it was from rage or laughter. Both options were equally bad.
He dragged himself out of bed, took a quick shower, put on his school uniform, then stumbled downstairs. The news was playing, but his family wasn't really listening. They were used to it.
"...Shadow Crane operatives successfully repelled a surge of Alimabies in the eastern sector last night," the reporter said, her voice calm. "Citizens are reminded that the streets are safe. The Night Beasts have retreated to the nest. Enjoy your day."
Safe. That was the lie everyone agreed to believe. The city was safe during the day because the Shadow Cranes were terrifyingly efficient at night.
His dad was already gone because the night shift at the northern research facility meant Zenjiro barely saw him anymore. Yuna grinned at him from the kitchen table with a smudge of butter on her cheek.
"Morning, loser," she chirped cheerfully.
"Morning, brat," he replied, ruffling her hair until she swatted his hand away in annoyance.
"Zenjiro, you look like a zombie," Yuna said, sliding a plate of charred toast toward him. "Were you up playing games again?"
"Something like that," he mumbled.
If only she knew. If she knew that the "game" involved tearing the throats out of eight-foot-tall monsters with small daggers, she wouldn't be eating breakfast so calmly.
Mom handed him a plate with slightly less burnt toast than what Yuna had given him. "Don't forget you have that project due today."
"I got it covered," he lied while taking a bite of the dry bread.
Her expression told him she saw right through his excuse, but she was too exhausted to call him out on it properly.
"Zenjiro, you need to take school seriously. You're eighteen now. What are you going to do with your life if you keep drifting like this? Mrs. Tanaka told me her son aced his mock exams. Do you want to be the only one on this block flipping burgers after graduation?" She took a deep breath before continuing. "Most of the neighborhood kids are your classmates. Don't disappoint me by letting your grades slip. Those jealous parents would never let me hear the end of it if you fail."
"Oh, so that's what you're worried about?" He raised an eyebrow at her.
The truth was, he had been trying his best. Two months ago, right after his eighteenth birthday, he joined the Shadow Cranes. It was an underground organization that trained operatives in covert operations and combat techniques designed to handle threats most people didn't even know existed. The recruiter had approached him outside the dojo where he took basic self-defense classes and told him they saw potential in him.
The Shadow Cranes handpicked only elite fighters with proven records.
Zenjiro's claim to fame? Catching a shoplifter once. His speed and what people called his "fierce face" had scared the guy into giving up. The store called it in to the news. When they asked how he'd done it, Zenjiro gave some vague story about tackling him to the ground.
The acceptance letter was still pinned to his bedroom wall, right next to his middle school karate tournament participation certificate.
"The Shadow Crane extends its invitation to Zenjiro Hajidan. You have been identified as having potential for our specialized training program."
He still wasn't sure if his dad had paid them a huge amount of money to get him accepted, or if they simply needed one weak link on the team for some reason.
It had sounded incredible at first, like something out of a movie. The reality was that he was the weakest student they'd ever had.
His strikes were consistently sloppy. During knife training, he'd actually dropped the blade and nearly impaled his own foot with it. The senior members were real operatives who'd supposedly completed actual dangerous missions. They looked at him like he was a lost puppy that had wandered into a wolf den by mistake. Yet, somehow, he was still alive. While better-trained recruits had washed out or been injured, Zenjiro kept surviving. He had six confirmed kills in three months. He'd failed some major exercises, but proved them wrong by tackling the beast in actual combat. He had survived encounters that should have killed him, racking up kills on instinct alone, even if he couldn't remember how he did it half the time.
The bruises from last week's training session still ached under his school uniform.
He grabbed his bag and headed out the door before his mother could continue her lecture. The walk to school was the same routine as always. Fifteen minutes through the residential district, past the convenience store where old man Takeshi always waved at him, across the bridge over the dried-up river, and through the park where the elementary school kids played during recess.
Everything seemed wonderfully normal and routine.
Then he saw the news broadcast playing on the electronics store display window. A small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk to watch.
"Mysterious disturbance detected on Wednesday in Jonakvi Forest. Authorities are asking residents to avoid the northern areas while police and scientists investigate the cause of the seismic activity."
A disturbance in the forest? That must have been what caused the earthquake he felt last night.
The footage showed emergency vehicles with flashing lights heading toward the dense forest north of the city. The newscaster looked concerned but not particularly alarmed. Probably just some geological event that would be explained away in a few days.
Zenjiro felt a strange knot forming in his gut, a primal warning he couldn't explain properly. Commander Yuza's words from the emergency briefing three days ago echoed in his mind. "Stay alert. We've detected anomalous readings from the northern quadrant. If you see anything unusual, report it immediately."
But he ignored the warning feeling. He was too busy being an average, oblivious teenager worried about a stupid school project that he hadn't even started yet. Besides, what could he possibly do about it? He was the washout of the Shadow Crane, the liability that everyone wished would just quit already.
By the time he got to school, the hallway chatter was already in full swing. It was the same topic every morning. THE ALIMABIES.