The Black Cat Café opened at eight.
Henrietta Brenner had the door unlocked, the coffee on, and three cats fed before the first regular patron arrived. She moved through the café's opening routine with the unhurried warmth of someone for whom this sequence of small, specific tasks was its own form of meditation — the grinding of beans, the arrangement of chairs, the soft thud of the door swinging open to admit the morning air and whatever the morning chose to bring with it.
She was wiping down the counter when the bell above the door rang at eight-twenty-three.
She looked up.
Sieg came in first.
Behind him: Nyx Harrow, chain whip at her hip, violet eyes already moving across the room with the comprehensive inventory of someone who assessed spaces as a habit. Serena Whitaker, green eyes carrying the particular quality of someone who had been awake all night and had organized the experience into something functional. Ayaka Daidoji, brass-plated gloves, the subdued energy of someone whose usual brightness had been redirected entirely toward a single point. Nadia Burns, white hair and composed pale eyes, the Viper's Coil leader carrying herself with the compact authority of someone who had decided something and was not revisiting it.
Henrietta looked at Sieg.
She looked at his face — the golden eyes with their usual flat, working attention, and beneath it something that was not visible to anyone who hadn't known him since before the academy, a quality of direction so total that it had simplified everything around it to either relevant or not.
She set down the cloth.
"Sit down," she said warmly. "I'll get coffee. You look like you've all had an interesting morning."
They sat. Nyx took the corner position. Nadia sat at the table's end with the composed stillness of someone comfortable in unfamiliar spaces. Serena's hands folded on the table immediately. Ayaka looked at the cats with the expression of someone who would, under any other circumstances, be delighted by them.
Henrietta moved through the café with the easy efficiency of long practice, placing cups, filling them, returning the pot to its station. A Maine Coon materialized on the counter and she redirected it to its tree with the reflexive patience of a woman who had made this redirect approximately nine thousand times.
She settled across from Sieg with her own cup.
"Now," she said. "What's happened?"
Sieg told her.
He did it the way he did everything — without decoration, in sequence, with the specific details that mattered and without the ones that didn't. Yumi Hasegawa. The Hasegawa family debt. Takeo Takeuchi. Daichi Hoshikawa of the Hoshikawa-gumi. The arrangement. The mansion. The seventy-two hour window.
Henrietta listened.
She listened with the warm, attentive composure she brought to all conversations — the café owner's specific quality of making whoever was speaking feel entirely heard, the expression of someone genuinely present with what they were being told.
When Sieg mentioned Yumi's sacrifice, something happened.
It was brief. It was not visible to anyone who hadn't spent significant time reading the specific register of things that moved beneath Henrietta Brenner's warm, unhurried surface. Serena Whitaker, who missed nothing, caught the edge of it — a flicker in the kind eyes, a quality that was not the warmth and was not its absence but the thing that existed below both of them, the thing that the warmth covered the way deep water covers what lies at the bottom of it.
Rage.
Clean and old and immediately, completely controlled.
It was there for one second and then it was not there, returned to wherever Henrietta kept it, and the warmth resumed so naturally that anyone who had not been watching the specific moment would have missed the transition entirely.
She set her cup down.
She looked at Sieg.
"Do you need my help?" she said.
Sieg nodded.
Henrietta stood up.
She walked to the far wall of the café — the one with the bookshelves, the shelves that held the small collection of worn paperbacks and the ceramic cat figurines that had been a feature of the café's décor since it opened and that patrons occasionally picked up and examined with the mild interest of people handling charming objects without any particular awareness of what they were handling.
She reached the third shelf.
The black cat figurine — seated, self-satisfied, wearing the expression of an animal that had never once doubted its own judgment.
She pressed her thumb against the base.
The bookcase swung inward.
The staircase descended into light.
Serena went still at the top of it for exactly one second — the second required to update her model of the situation with a piece of information that was not new so much as confirmed, because Serena had been running the math on Henrietta Brenner since the first time she had heard the surname and had filed her conclusions in the category of things she was not yet certain enough of to act on.
She was certain enough now.
Ayaka made no sound.
This was, by this point, the reliable indicator of something that had genuinely surprised her.
The basement was long — longer than the café above suggested was possible — and clean, and lit with the quiet efficiency of a space that had been designed to function rather than to impress. The weapons cache along the left wall was not the weapons cache of a hobbyist or a collector. It was the weapons cache of someone who had, at various points in their life, needed specific instruments for specific purposes and had maintained them with the meticulous care of someone who understood that the difference between a well-maintained weapon and a poorly-maintained one was sometimes the difference between coming home and not.
Blades in varying configurations. Sidearms, disassembled and stored with their components organized. Technical equipment whose purpose was not immediately obvious but whose quality was. Two locked cases that Henrietta did not open, because their contents fell outside the scope of the current operation and there were things, Sieg knew, that she kept for reasons she had not yet explained.
The intelligence wall occupied the right side.
Corkboard, dense with documents, photographs, connection lines in three colors. Screens above it, dark now but present. A server unit. Filing systems physical and digital, organized with the same precision as the weapons opposite.
Nadia Burns stood at the entrance to the basement and looked at the wall and said nothing for a moment.
Then she said, carefully: "How long has this been here?"
"Long enough," Henrietta said, with the pleasant non-answer of someone who had decided what she was sharing and what she wasn't.
She moved to the intelligence wall.
She pulled a folder from the right-hand filing system — not searching, reaching directly, the motion of someone who knew exactly where everything was because they had put it there.
She spread the contents on the central table.
Maps. Photographs. Annotated documents. The kind of comprehensive territorial intelligence that took months to compile and required the kind of access that a cat café owner in the city's western district should not have had, and which Henrietta had with the same quiet, unhurried completeness she brought to everything.
"The Hoshikawa-gumi's operational territory," she said. "Current as of last week. The northern warehouses — here, three locations, the middle one is their primary cold storage operation, the other two are distribution. The port facilities — two berths, here and here, the eastern berth handles the majority of their import activity. The establishments in the entertainment district —" she indicated without elaborating on the establishments' nature, which did not require elaboration "— six locations, four active nightly, two used for specific arrangements. The mansion itself is here." She placed a finger on the map's northern section. "Former private estate. Purchased eleven years ago. Three walls, two guard rotations, twelve personnel minimum on-site at any given time, higher during sensitive periods."
The table absorbed this.
Serena was looking at the map with the green eyes that filed everything, cataloguing detail with the systematic precision of someone who was going to use every piece of this information and wanted all of it accessible.
"How," Ayaka said. She had found her voice again, though it was operating at a lower register than usual. "How do you have all of this?"
Henrietta looked at her with kind eyes and a warm smile.
"I've been in this city a long time," she said. "And I had a very good teacher."
She looked at Sieg briefly when she said it — the look of two people sharing the same reference, the same name, the same long history that existed before either of them had needed to be in a room like this for reasons like these.
Sieg looked at the map.
He looked at Nyx.
"Get this to Sable," he said.
Nyx was already reaching for the relevant documents.
The plan took forty minutes to build and was not complicated because the best plans were not complicated — they were clear, which was different.
"The Hoshikawa-gumi's strength is concentration," Sieg said, standing at the map with the flat, working attention he brought to tactical problems. "They have significant personnel at the mansion and they have the legal and financial infrastructure to weather most kinds of pressure. The mansion itself is defensible. If we hit it directly with insufficient force, we lose people and we don't get Yumi out."
He pointed at the map's distributed locations.
"So we don't hit the mansion first. We hit everything else. Simultaneously, from different directions, with no coordination visible between the attacks."
"Daichi won't know if it's one organization or several," Serena said.
"That's the point. He'll spend time trying to identify who's attacking and why before he commits to a response. In the meantime he pulls personnel from the mansion to protect his operations."
"And while his attention is distributed —"
"The strike team goes for the mansion."
Nadia looked at the map. "You'll want the factions hitting locations appropriate to their capabilities. Grey Scythe for the port facilities — long sight lines, distance work. Crimson Dagger for the warehouse district — they understand infiltration and they move quietly. Viper's Coil for the entertainment district."
She said the last part with the composed neutrality of someone who had made an assessment and was delivering it without editorializing.
"And Scarlet Bloom," Sieg said.
"The distribution routes," Serena said immediately. "The vehicles moving between locations. If we cut the logistics chain, the disruption compounds."
"Yes," Sieg said.
"Timeline?"
"The disruption starts at ten PM. Daichi will need forty minutes minimum to assess the situation and begin redirecting personnel. We hit the mansion at midnight."
"Strike team composition," Nadia said.
"Myself. Anyone who volunteers."
Nadia looked at him across the table.
"Viper's Coil," she said, "will handle the entertainment district and contribute two to the strike team. Amy and Kirika."
"I'll go," said Nyx.
She had been standing at the table's edge since they had descended, chain whip coiled, absorbing the plan with the patient, unhurried attention she brought to information she was going to use. She said it the same way she said everything — once, with complete meaning, without elaboration.
Sieg looked at her.
He nodded.
"The mansion has Mamba and Widow on-site," Serena said, with the careful tone of someone delivering a fact they wish were different. "Based on Mio's account, they're professional level. Possibly above."
"I know," Sieg said.
"That changes the —"
"I know," Sieg said again, in the tone of someone who has filed the information and has not been stopped by it.
"Then equipment," Henrietta said.
She was already moving to the weapons cache.
Henrietta worked through the cache with the focused efficiency of someone who knew its contents by memory and was selecting for a specific operation rather than a general capability. Body armor, lightweight and fitted — the kind designed for people who needed to move rather than absorb. Sidearms for those who used them. Flashbang grenades, three sets. Communications equipment, compact and encrypted.
Serena and Ayaka were watching the process with expressions that had moved past surprise and into a more complex territory — the specific quality of people who had received significant new information about someone they thought they knew and were in the process of integrating it.
"She's done this before," Ayaka said, very quietly, to Serena.
"Yes," Serena said.
"Like — specifically this. Not just owning the things. The —" Ayaka gestured at the selection process, the practiced efficiency of it. "She knows exactly what she's doing."
"She does," Serena said, and her voice carried the quality of someone confirming a conclusion they had reached some time ago and had been waiting for the evidence to make visible.
Nyx had moved to the wall's far end.
She had done it with the silent, sideways drift of someone whose attention had been caught by something peripheral — the specific movement of a person, or a cat, whose eyes have found something across a room and whose body has begun following without the decision reaching the conscious level first. She stood at the wall's end section, looking at a mounted display case.
Inside the case: a dagger.
It was not large. Its blade was single-edged and serrated, the serration not decorative but designed — each tooth geometrically precise, angled to catch and hold. But the blade's most distinctive feature was its construction: segmented, with articulated joints running its full length, each segment connected by a mechanism that allowed the blade to extend and flex. In its collapsed form it was a compact, heavy-handled dagger. Extended and activated, the blade would move like a whip — a serrated, bladed whip that combined the reach and speed of a flexible weapon with the cutting geometry of a knife.
The case's small label read, in Henrietta's handwriting:
Chimera's Tail.
Nyx looked at it.
She looked at it the way she looked at things that had caught her attention completely — with the still, total focus of someone for whom the world had briefly simplified to a single object.
Sieg came to stand beside her.
He looked at the dagger. He looked at Nyx. He looked at the chain whip at her hip — the flowing, redirecting weapon she had trained with since before Fallen Grace, the weapon that required an understanding of space and momentum and the full three-dimensional geometry of the field around her.
He opened the case.
He took out Chimera's Tail.
He held it out to her.
Nyx looked at it for a moment.
She took it.
The motion with which she turned it in her hands — testing the weight, finding the balance point, running her thumb along the mechanism that controlled the extension, extending it two segments and retracting it with the practiced certainty of someone whose hands understood weapons as a language — was the motion of someone for whom the object had been waiting and who had found it.
She looked at Sieg.
She nodded.
It was a small motion and it contained, in its smallness, something that was not just acknowledgment. It was the specific nod of someone receiving something from someone they trust — not the polite receipt of a gift, not the professional acknowledgment of a resource allocation, but the quiet, settled exchange between two people who had been in the same alleys on the same evenings and had arrived, without ceremony, at the same wall.
Sieg looked at her for a moment.
Then he turned back to the table and put on Natalya Kirinova's overcoat. He did not close the buttons.
"Ten PM," he said. "Everyone moves."
At ten o'clock that evening, the Hoshikawa-gumi had a bad night.
It began at the port.
The eastern berth's security team encountered, over the course of eleven minutes, a series of problems that began with the loading crane's control system failing and escalated through three separate incidents that each appeared, to anyone assessing them individually, to be the work of a different kind of adversary — different methodology, different targets, different apparent motives. Vera Krauss did not need the credit. She needed the confusion, and the confusion she produced was comprehensive.
The warehouses in the northern district reported three simultaneous intrusions at different entry points. Each intrusion was handled cleanly and left behind a specific kind of disruption — the cold storage unit's temperature controls compromised, the distribution records of the middle warehouse accessed and partially destroyed, the third location's loading dock rendered non-functional. The Crimson Daggers moved through the Hoshikawa-gumi's logistics infrastructure the way water moved through cracks — quietly, from multiple directions, leaving damage that compounded.
The entertainment district produced, from Daichi Hoshikawa's perspective, the most alarming reports of the evening, because the entertainment district was where the Hoshikawa-gumi maintained its most profitable and most sensitive operations, and the disruptions there were the kind that were expensive not just financially but reputationally — the kind that, if they continued, would produce a specific category of problem that money was less effective at solving than most problems. Amy Edgeworth and Kirika Matthews moved through the district with the composed, unhurried efficiency of people who had done thorough preparation and were executing against it.
The distribution routes, between all of these locations, encountered Scarlet Bloom.
Scarlet Bloom, operating without Yumi, operated differently than Scarlet Bloom with her. Serena Whitaker ran the route operations with the tactical precision of someone who had spent two years as a second-in-command and had always understood, with complete clarity, exactly what she would do if she were in charge. Ayaka Daidoji operated on the ground with the focused, physical effectiveness of someone whose cheerfulness had been entirely redirected into the work and whose brass-plated fists were, in this context, entirely sufficient.
The disruptions were reported to Daichi Hoshikawa's operational center in a cascade that began at ten-twelve and had not stopped by eleven.
The reports were varied. The apparent perpetrators were varied. The methodologies were varied. The targets were varied.
Daichi Hoshikawa, who had not survived forty years in his profession by being slow, recognized within the first thirty minutes that the variety was the point — that he was being shown chaos specifically so that he would not immediately identify the organizing intelligence behind it. He recognized this.
He still had to respond to each individual incident.
He still had to pull personnel from the mansion.
The forty minutes Sieg had estimated became fifty-five, because Sieg had built the estimate conservatively and Daichi was better than the conservative estimate. The fifty-five minutes cost nothing. They had seventy-two hours.
At midnight, the strike team moved on to the Hoshikawa mansion.
The room they had given her was not a prison cell.
This was the specific, deliberate quality of the Hoshikawa-gumi's hospitality — it was comfortable, well-furnished, appropriate to the status of someone who was going to become part of the family rather than someone who had been taken against their will, and it was locked from the outside and had windows overlooking an interior courtyard with no accessible ground-level exit. The distinction between a comfortable room and a cell, in practice, depended entirely on whether the door opened from the inside.
It did not.
Yumi had assessed this within the first ten minutes and had spent the subsequent four hours doing what she did when circumstances were unfavorable and action was not the available option — thinking, with the focused, comprehensive attention of someone who was not in the habit of waiting passively for things to improve.
She was sitting at the room's window when the first scream reached her.
She went still.
Not the stillness of fear. The stillness of someone who has been waiting for a specific kind of signal and has just received something that might be it.
The black and red kimono she had been provided moved around her as she stood — the fabric was excellent quality, chosen by someone who had considered what she should look like rather than what she should feel like, and she had been ignoring the symbolism of it for four hours and had no intention of doing so for much longer.
The door to her room opened.
Takeo stood in the corridor.
He had the expression of a man who had been woken from sleep that had not been restful and who had arrived at her door because he did not know where else to go, which was, Yumi recognized, entirely consistent with everything she knew about him.
"Something is happening," he said.
"I heard," she said.
"Multiple locations. The port, the warehouses, the — Daichi is —" Takeo's composure was not holding well under pressure, which was also consistent. "Someone is attacking the Hoshikawa-gumi's operations. All of them."
Yumi looked at him.
She said nothing.
"You know something," Takeo said.
"I don't know anything," Yumi said, which was technically accurate — she didn't know, she suspected, and suspicion and knowledge were different things that she was not going to conflate in front of her father at midnight.
From somewhere below, Daichi Hoshikawa's voice reached them — not the words, the quality of it, which had shed its smug entitlement entirely and had become something rawer and more functional, the voice of a man who was managing a situation he had not anticipated.
Takeo moved toward the window at the corridor's end.
Yumi followed.
The corridor's window overlooked the mansion's front approach — the gate, the drive, the exterior wall with its guard positions. In the courtyard below, Daichi Hoshikawa stood with Mamba and Widow, issuing instructions with the focused urgency of a man who had identified that his perimeter was no longer the reliable thing it had been two hours ago.
"Lead the defense," Daichi was saying to Mamba and Widow. "Everything we have on the walls. I want —"
The gate exploded.
Or rather — the gate's lock exploded, which was a more targeted and less destructive event than it sounded, producing a concussive impact that buckled the gate's hinges and sent the defenders at the entrance stumbling backward with the disoriented urgency of people who had been expecting an attack and had not been expecting it to be that immediate or that loud.
Three objects came through the gap in rapid succession.
They were small. They made a distinctive sound when they bounced against the courtyard stone.
The Hoshikawa defenders had, collectively, approximately one second to process what the objects were before the flashbangs detonated.
The courtyard became, for the defenders, a world of white light and the specific, comprehensive disorientation of senses that had been struck simultaneously and were temporarily unavailable for navigation.
Two figures came through the gate.
Nadia Burns moved with the composed, unhurried precision of someone who had done exactly this in exactly this configuration and for whom the defenders' disorientation was a tactical fact she was working with rather than a dramatic element she was performing for. She moved through the courtyard with her katana, finding the specific points that ended each defender's ability to contribute to the situation, clean and efficient and entirely without ceremony.
Nyx Harrow moved differently.
Chimera's Tail was extended.
The first time Yumi had seen Nyx fight had been in the courtyard during Specter Pain's invasion, and she had registered Nyx's chain whip with the combat appreciation of someone who understood the weapon and its applications. What she was seeing now was different in kind — the serrated blade at the end of Chimera's Tail moved through the disoriented defenders with the specific, geometric elegance of a weapon that had found its user, the extension and retraction controlled with a precision that suggested Nyx had not merely picked up a new instrument but had immediately understood its language.
The courtyard's defenders went down.
Not all of them — Mamba and Widow had not been caught by the flashbangs, having been inside and behind cover when the detonations occurred, and they were already moving, repositioning with the professional efficiency of people whose entire function was to be ready for exactly this kind of incursion.
Yumi watched from the corridor window.
Her hands were on the sill.
Her heart was doing something that had nothing to do with the fighting below.
Because through the gate, behind Nadia and Nyx, walking through the smoke and the settling dust of the blown lock and the disoriented courtyard with the same unhurried, flat, entirely unbothered quality that she had first seen in a training hall and had not once seen leave him regardless of what the situation produced —
Sieg Brenner walked in.
He was wearing Natalya Kirinova's coat, like a cape blowing through the wind.
The long dark fabric moved around him with the settled authority of something that had been passed from one person to another as a statement and which he was wearing in the precise spirit in which it had been given — not as a costume, not as armor, but as a fact. Behind him, the Nightblade Academy Prefect pin caught the mansion's exterior lights.
He walked into the Hoshikawa mansion.
At the window above, Yumi Hasegawa went still.
The specific, complete stillness of someone who has been holding something at a distance for a very long time and has just had the distance removed without warning.
Then it arrived — not from anywhere she had invited it, not from any decision she had made, simply from the accumulated weight of everything that had been building since a training hall and a moving like water and the first morning that anything at Nightblade Academy had felt like it was genuinely worth her attention.
The wild smile.
The real one.
The one that had been there since the beginning, underneath all of it, that the afternoon light through the annex windows had caught and that she had not been able to name until now, standing at a window in a kimono she hadn't chosen in a house she hadn't agreed to enter, watching Sieg Brenner walk through the gate she had been waiting for someone to walk through.
Takeo, beside her, looked at his daughter's face.
He had his answer.
Yumi was already moving.
"Where are you going?" Takeo said.
"To help," Yumi said, without slowing down.
"The door is locked —"
"Not for long," Yumi said, and took out the throwing knife she had kept in the kimono's inner fold for four hours, because Yumi Hasegawa went places prepared or she did not go, and she tested the door's lock with the focused, practical attention of someone who had been thinking about this for four hours and had a very clear idea of what she was going to do the moment conditions changed.
The conditions had changed.
Below, in the courtyard, Mamba and Widow had found Sieg.
Mamba came first.
He moved the same way he had moved at the mansion — direct, fast for his size, the heaviness weaponized rather than carried. The distance between them closed in two steps and the impact he delivered was the same impact he had delivered to Mio, the one designed to stop forward motion by addressing the physics.
Sieg was not Mio.
He had the complete map of Mamba's movement that Mio's account had given him — not detailed in words, detailed in the way Sieg processed tactical information, which was as a spatial model updated in real time by everything he observed. Mamba led with the right shoulder, transferred his weight earlier than his size suggested he would, and recovered to the left. The impact, redirected rather than absorbed, moved past Sieg at an angle that put Mamba's momentum to work against his own follow-through.
Mamba stumbled.
He had not stumbled at the mansion.
Widow arrived from the left on the beat Mamba's stumble created — the same gap she had used against Mio, the same precise insertion into the space that attention had vacated. The pressure point strikes came in the same sequence: shoulder, nerve cluster, the left arm's shutdown.
Sieg's left arm did not shut down, because he had stepped inside her reach by the second strike's delivery point, and inside her reach the pressure point sequence required a spacing that was no longer available.
"Amamiya Kishin-Ryu," Sieg said, with the flat, informational quality of someone identifying a variable.
He applied it.
Widow was better than Mamba in specific ways that the Kishin-Ryu was specifically designed to address — precision opponents who mapped the body as a system of vulnerabilities were opponents whose own precision became a liability when the system they were mapping was being used to map them back. Three pressure points, in the sequence that the Kishin-Ryu had spent forty years refining.
Widow went down.
Mamba had recovered.
He came back with the specific quality of someone who had revised his initial assessment upward and was adjusting accordingly — heavier commitment, different angle, the force now weighted toward conclusion rather than setup. It was the better version of his attack.
Sieg met it with the ninjato.
The exchange that followed was not long. Mamba was strong and he was trained and he was professional. He was also fighting someone who had been trained by Thanatos, whose forty years of refinement were encoded in every technique Sieg had learned, and who had three months at Nightblade Academy's most dangerous opponents as additional preparation. When it ended, Mamba was on the courtyard stone, his face smashed in the ground.
Sieg stood in the courtyard.
He looked up.
Yumi came out of the mansion's side door.
She had dealt with the lock. She had dealt with the two interior guards she had encountered on the way down, using the throwing knives she had kept and the specific, focused competence of someone who was extremely motivated and had been waiting for an opportunity. The kimono's hem was slightly torn from the staircase, which she had not paused to address.
She came out into the courtyard.
She stopped.
Sieg was standing ten meters away in Natalya's coat, ninjato at his side, looking at her with the golden eyes and the same expression he always had — flat, working, the direct attention of someone who has assessed the situation and has found it currently satisfactory.
Around them: Nadia moving through the courtyard's remaining defenders with focused efficiency.
Nyx, Chimera's Tail extended, the blade catching the mansion's lights as she secured the perimeter. The sounds of the disrupted city beyond the walls, the distant evidence of four factions doing their part.
"You're wearing a kimono," Sieg said.
"I'm aware," Yumi said.
"You're also bleeding." He indicated his own forearm.
She looked down. A cut from the interior staircase's edge, shallow but present. She had not noticed it.
"I'm fine," she said.
"I know," he said.
A beat.
The courtyard continued its resolution around them — Nadia's systematic efficiency, Nyx's perimeter work, the settling dust of the blown gate.
Yumi looked at the coat.
She looked at the pin.
She looked at him.
"You came," she said. Not accusatory, not surprised. Simply saying it, the way you say something true that you need to say aloud.
"Seventy-two hours," Sieg said. "We have sixty-eight left."
"That's not what I —"
"I know," he said, for the second time. In the same register. The one that was slightly larger than the words.
Yumi Hasegawa looked at Sieg Brenner for a moment.
Then she looked away, because she was in a courtyard in a torn kimono with a cut on her arm and there were still operational matters to address and this was not the moment for whatever the moment was going to be when she finally addressed what her heart had answered in the vehicle.
"Daichi," she said. "He's still inside."
"Yes," Sieg said.
"Mamba and Widow are down."
"Yes."
"What happens now?"
Sieg looked at the mansion's main entrance.
"Now," he said, "we finish it."
He walked toward the door.
Yumi, after exactly one second, walked beside him.
Not behind him. Not following. Beside him, with the specific, unbothered ease of someone who had decided where they were going and had found the correct position for the walk.
Nyx fell in on the other side.
Nadia completed her circuit and joined them at the entrance.
Four people walked through the door of the Hoshikawa mansion.
Behind them, the gate was open.
Nightblade Academy was behind it.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)