He crouched down in front of her and studied the wound in her calf.
Red covered everything below the knee, torn muscle exposed, blood still welling from the hole the bullet had punched through.
The round had passed clean out the other side, at least, which spared the trouble of digging it free.
Satoru reached out, fingertips glowing faint white, and touched the wound with a gentleness that held nothing rough in it.
Reverse Cursed Technique.
Active.
Pale light spilled from his fingers across the injury and wrapped around her leg.
Her eyes went wide as she stared down at herself, disbelief flooding them.
The pain that had been carving through her calf vanished between one breath and the next.
She felt the wound closing, watched flesh knit at a speed her eyes could follow, watched new skin spread smooth and unbroken over ground that had been shredded moments before, until nothing suggested she'd ever been hurt.
Her mouth hung open. She forgot to breathe, forgot the fear that had filled her.
Her hand crept down to touch the spot. Smooth skin. No wound. No pain at all. Nothing about it felt real.
A heartbeat, and every injury had gone, without so much as a scar left behind.
Satoru rose, brushed the dust from his hands, and turned his head toward Yasuwaki, still pinned to the ground. Whatever warmth had been in his face drained out of it.
"If I remember right, Seitenshi sent you out here to find Cursed Children, gather them up, and see them properly settled. That was the assignment, wasn't it?"
His voice stayed even, though none of the usual flippancy remained. Each word landed on Yasuwaki like a shard of ice.
Yasuwaki swallowed, throat dry enough to ache, mind racing through excuses, hunting for anything that might sell the misunderstanding.
"Yes. Yes, of course, Mr. Gojo." The nodding came fast, his voice shaking worse now, a grotesque smile forced onto his ruined face. "That's exactly what I'm doing here. It's only that she kept running, so we had no choice but to fire..."
He lied with his eyes open, watching Satoru's expression sidelong as he talked, hunting for the angle that would keep him alive. One hope remained: convince the man this was a misunderstanding, that he'd never hunted anyone, that everything he'd done had been in the name of protection.
To Satoru it all sounded pitiful.
The Six Eyes had shown him everything already. The lies, the malice, the cruelty, every last thing this man had done here.
He had no interest in arguing, or in exposing the fabrication. The sentence had already been passed in his head.
Instead, he drew his phone from his pocket, tapped the screen, and placed a video call to Seitenshi.
She was going to see for herself what her guard captain did when nobody watched.
The ringtone rose through the silent ruins, each pulse of it a death knell against Yasuwaki's ribs.
He fought the invisible weight, desperate to move, to stop the call, to beg. Nothing came. He could only watch the screen brighten.
Satoru leaned against a broken concrete pillar, the phone throwing cold white light across his face.
That glow caught the black lenses of his glasses and cut the lower half of his profile into hard, clean lines.
The mouth that usually carried a lazy smile sat flat.
The air around him pressed low enough to freeze, and the wind circling him seemed to hush.
Then a warm, clear voice came from the speaker.
"Mr. Gojo."
Seitenshi appeared on the screen.
She sat in her sunlit office at the Holy Residence, floor-to-ceiling windows behind her framing the heart of Tokyo.
Documents lay squared on the desk, a fountain pen still between her fingers, just set down. She'd taken the call in a gap between papers.
She smiled at the camera, sweet and open.
Slight as she was, she remained striking as ever.
Satoru's expression didn't shift.
Not even the perfunctory grin he wore for almost everyone. He watched her in silence, the chill around him undiminished.
She caught it quickly.
The smile faded by degrees. Her fingers tightened on the pen, and her breathing went quiet.
Hesitation crept into her voice. "Mr. Gojo, what is it? Has something happened?"
He didn't answer.
A tap of his finger on the screen.
The view flipped.
Instead of his profile, the camera now showed the ground at his feet.
Yasuwaki knelt there on cold concrete, and behind him two men shook just as badly.
Wretched was the only word for the state of him.
His crisp Self-Defense Forces uniform had caught on rebar in the fall and torn wide open, the fabric smeared with mud and blood gone half dry.
A deep gash split his forehead, dark red running down his cheek and gumming one eye shut.
He sagged there like something poured out of a bucket, trembling head to foot, unable to summon the nerve to look up at the lens.
The pair behind him were worse. Faces pressed flat to the concrete, not daring to draw a full breath, shoulders jerking beyond their control.
Seitenshi froze.
Her eyes widened, disbelief written across her face, understanding refusing to arrive.
This was not what she'd expected to find on the other end of that camera.
Yasuwaki had been sent to search for those children and see them settled.
What could possibly explain the state of him?
An attack? A beating from someone? Questions churned through her, and none of them held together.
The angle shifted as Satoru moved his hand.
The camera panned toward a corner of broken wall.
Her gaze followed it, and she found the girl huddled there.
A child no older than six or seven, curled small against cold stone.
Rags hung off her, so caked with filth and blood that no original color survived.
Dark red soaked the leg of her trousers and had stained a patch of concrete beneath her.
Impossible to look past were the crimson eyes.
The mark that belonged to Cursed Children alone.
Fear still filled them, and wariness, the look of a young animal cornered by hunters. She bit down on her cracked lips, refusing to let a single sob out, and her small shoulders shook anyway.
"When I got here, your guard captain was hunting this child."
His voice came through the speaker without a ripple in it, and the cold in it drove each word straight into her.
Her face locked.
She looked at the battered Cursed Child on her screen, then at the man kneeling with his head down, and her mouth opened without producing anything at all.
Nothing had prepared her for this.
Something invisible had closed around her throat, and breathing came hard.
She'd never liked Yasuwaki.
Not the way his eyes filled with flattery and calculation whenever he looked at her.
Not the arrogance he wore in front of ordinary citizens, the contempt he barely bothered to hide.
Not the pitch he forced into his voice, or the way he bent toward whoever held power.
But those had been private feelings, kept behind her teeth and never spoken aloud.
In all this time he'd done nothing that crossed a line.
Her orders he carried out with apparent diligence, and even when he leaned on Kikunojou Tendo's name to get things moving, the work came back done properly.
Security arrangements, the movement of documents, the endless negotiation between departments. The tedious details nobody else wanted to touch, he handled well.
Otherwise, powerless as she was, she'd never have tolerated him this long.
Some pretext would have surfaced and he'd have been replaced.
Figurehead or not, she remained Seitenshi of the Tokyo Area in name, and swapping out a guard captain fell within what she could do.
She'd endured him because in a Holy Residence where everyone treated her as decoration, he was one of the few who at least appeared willing to follow her instructions.
Even if that obedience sat on a foundation of scheming and opportunism.
To make certain this operation went right, she'd called him into the office the night before and gone over every detail with him.
Find the Cursed Children scattered through Tokyo's outer districts, gather them, and move them safely to the temporary shelter she'd prepared in advance.
She'd worked around Kikunojou Tendo's eyes and ears to arrange it, choosing her own nominal guard captain for the task precisely to prevent anything going wrong, precisely so those children wouldn't be frightened worse than they already were.
He'd saluted her, crisp and respectful, and promised in so many words that he wouldn't fail her, that every child would come back safe.
Each syllable had landed with such weight, such apparent sincerity, that she'd let her guard down entirely.
The image on the screen struck her like an open hand across the face.
It tore every comfortable lie she'd told herself into pieces.
Her guard captain.
The man who, under her orders, should have been treating those children well and keeping them safe.
What the camera showed was something else entirely.
Cruel.
Cold.
A man who enjoyed grinding down the weak.
Who drew his pleasure from the terror of unarmed children.
Who would put a bullet in a child incapable of fighting back.
As for why she never questioned whether Satoru might be lying, why one glimpse was enough to convince her completely, the answer required no thought.
He had no motive.
From his first day in the Tokyo Area she'd understood that he stood above every rule this world ran on.
When Civil Security had nothing left to try, he'd casually erased a Gastrea disaster capable of ending the entire city.
With power like that, who could stop him from doing anything he wanted?
Toppling the whole government of the Tokyo Area would cost him a raised hand.
Fabricating a pretext over someone as small as Yasuwaki, staging an elaborate deception, served no purpose whatsoever.
Lying wasn't even necessary.
If he wanted the man dead, he'd kill him.
Nobody in Tokyo could prevent it.
Certainly he wouldn't have placed a video call to lay the scene out in front of her.
Anger rose in her then, past anything she could hold down.
Threaded through it ran disappointment, betrayal, and a helplessness that reached the bone.
Because to see those Cursed Children properly settled, to improve the brutal conditions they scraped by in...