By the time they were done, the sky had gone fully dark.

Yuto straightened up and rolled his shoulders back. His spine cracked in a satisfying sequence from bottom to top, like a row of dominoes falling correctly. He looked at the two bags sitting between them on the ground. twelve cores, twelve heads ,and then looked at Shiny, who was standing the way he always stood, which was perfectly still and showing no particular evidence that they had just spent several hours in a forest being attacked by things.

"We can leave," Yuto said.

"Okay," said Shiny.

He reached down and picked up both bags without being asked, one in each hand, and that was the end of that.

They made their way back through the gate as the last of the evening light finished disappearing, the city shifting into its quieter, dimmer version of itself. Yuto had clocked the pawn shop on the way in, sign hanging above a counter dense with the accumulated evidence of previous transactions, and he led them toward it now, Shiny falling into step behind him with both bags like it was a perfectly ordinary thing to be carrying.

The man behind the counter looked up when they approached. His eyes went to the bags first, then to the contents as Yuto set the first one open on the counter, and something moved briefly across his expression. A small, involuntary recalibration.

"All from tonight?" he asked.

"Yes," Yuto said.

The man looked between them. "You two a team?"

Yuto felt the cringe arrive before he could stop it, but he kept his face where it was. "He’s my summon."

The man looked at Shiny. Shiny looked back at him with the expression he used for everything, which was no expression at all, two dark eyes returning the gaze with complete equanimity. The pawnbroker was a professional, and professionals didn’t visibly react to things. But somewhere in the part of him that was still just a person encountering a novel situation, he was clearly forming opinions.

He sorted through the loot without further comment.

Cores at two silver each. Twelve wolfhound heads at one silver apiece. Yuto did the arithmetic in his head and ran it twice because the first answer felt too good to be trusted.

Thirty-six silver.

Three times what he’d been carrying into the gate. Three times the careful, quietly anxious amount he’d been managing life on before today.

He pocketed the coins and felt the weight settle against his leg and had to actively stop himself from doing anything with his face that he would have found embarrassing afterward.

Being an Ethereal, he thought as they walked away from the stall, was genuinely, objectively cool.

He dismissed Shiny as they stepped further into the street, sending him back to rest. The bags went with him. Yuto walked alone, hands in pockets, coins solid and real against his fingers, thinking idly that he should get something nice for Gina. She’d been doing a lot with very little for a long time and now he could actually manage it.

Three men stepped out of the dark and arranged themselves around him with the practiced ease of people who had rehearsed this.

"Hear that?" one of them said to the others, nodding at Yuto’s pocket. "Jingling."

The one in the center looked him over with the slow, confident appraisal of someone who had already decided how this ended. "Don’t know how a shabby little brat like you ended up with coin like that," he said. "But we’ll be collecting it."

Yuto stopped walking.

He looked down at himself with some honesty. His clothes had, objectively, seen considerable use. The jacket was structurally sound but the overall impression was perhaps not one of prosperity. He turned this over briefly.

"Being called shabby isn’t particularly kind," he said. He glanced at his sleeve. "Although. New clothes. I should get some after this."

One of them made a sound that was almost a laugh. "After this?" He stepped closer, shrinking the circle. "You won’t have money after this." A pause, placed for effect. "Might not even have a life."

Yuto looked at him. Then he looked at all three of them, one at a time, in no hurry about it.

"I’m giving you one last chance to leave," he said.

They laughed. Genuine, easy laughter. The kind that came from having done this before and always being right about how it went.

The one on the left moved first.

Yuto’s sword was already in his hand.

He moved through them the way Shiny had moved through the wolves, without cruelty, without any particular feeling attached to it, just efficiently, and in a short amount of time all three men were on the ground. Wounded in ways that would hurt considerably and heal eventually.

He hadn’t killed them. Something in him refused that step when it came to people, drew a line he wasn’t ready to cross regardless of what they’d intended, so he hadn’t. They were unconscious. They’d stay that way for a while.

He stood over them for a moment and thought about what this meant. Even the weakest Ethereal was something categorically different from a person who wasn’t one. The gap wasn’t just strength, it was in the way the body moved, the way it responded. He had barely exerted himself.

He put his sword away and walked on.

The clothes shop was still open, warm light pooling out into the street. He spent more time than expected inside, not from indecision but because he’d decided to actually do this properly for once. He bought for himself first, things that fit, things that were clean, things that didn’t lead with their own age. Then he bought for Gina, which took longer because he kept second-guessing himself and then deciding he wasn’t going to second-guess himself and then doing it anyway.

The fragrance shop was harder. He stood in front of the options for longer than was strictly necessary, smelled several things, made a decision, changed it, made it again. He left with something the shopkeeper had assured him was popular, which was either a useful data point or completely meaningless depending on the shopkeeper’s motives, and he chose not to think about it further.

Food last. More than usual, more than he’d let himself buy in a long time, and he loaded himself down with the comfortable, unfamiliar weight of it.

He counted what was left. Sixteen silver.

He walked home feeling, possibly for the first time in a long while, like someone who had things managed.

The house appeared at the end of the street the way it always did, with a kind of structural apology, leaning slightly into its own impermanence as though aware it was one bad season away from a significant conversation about foundations. Yuto stopped in front of it and looked at it properly.

He was going to make more money. Enough to move. Enough to put Gina somewhere that didn’t produce a quiet background hum of guilt every time he thought about it. He filed this away and knocked.

Silence. Soft movement inside. Then the door opened, just a crack, cautious the way doors in this part of the city had learned to be.

An eye appeared in the gap.

Then the crack widened and the door swung open and she was smiling ,fully, immediately, without any attempt at composure and she came through the doorway fast and wrapped her arms around him before he’d finished processing that she’d moved.

"Yuto."

His heart did something embarrassing.

She was genuinely beautiful in a way that reorganised the immediate environment slightly in her favour. Oval face, jade-black hair in a clean bob sitting perfectly against her jaw, a sleeveless dress, arms that were slightly muscular in the way that came from actual use rather than intention. She held him with a warmth that was entirely unself-conscious.

Her arms pressed the bags between them and Yuto...

He coughed.

"I enjoy this," he said, "but you’re going to flatten the food."

She pulled back. Her eyes went to the bags and then came back up to his face and the smile shifted into something more searching. "How did you afford all of this?"

Before he could answer, her expression changed. Her eyes went wide. "Did you... Yuto, did you awaken?"

"Yes."

She made a sound that started as a word and dissolved into pure noise and threw herself at him again with an enthusiasm that was going to leave marks, and he let it happen because she was happy and that was worth a bruise or two.

Then she pulled back.

The joy was still there but it had been filed neatly behind a frown he knew very well, the particular one that meant she was happy and also had something to say about it.

"Why did you go hunt?" she said. "You awakened and just went hunting? You didn’t come here first?"

"We needed the money," Yuto said. He shrugged, which he was aware was not the correct response to the expression she was wearing but was the honest one.

Gina’s frown sharpened into something with real feeling behind it. She reached out, grabbed his arm with a grip that left no room for interpretation, and pulled him through the doorway.

"You’re in trouble," she said.