Ayla remained silent throughout the ride home. The meeting with the Outers had unsettled her in a way she could not cleanly understand.

Kenji noticed it. He did not interrupt the silence. He drove the long route back through the Inner Walls and let the wind carry whatever was forming behind her helmet without asking her to share it.

For a monster like her, the thirst to grow stronger never stopped until the body itself stopped. The principle sat at the foundation of her existence. It was the first rule she had learned.

The Outers had violated the principle. Ayla turned the violation over in her mind for the entire ride, and she could not relate to their reasoning.

A Bronze-rank Crusader added a hundred years to their lifespan. A Silver-rank received three hundred. A Gold-rank could live for five hundred. They had been presented with that simple path, yet they refused it.

Their traits were not bad. Iron Will. Wind Walker. Life Link. Pyromancy. Any of the four, with the right discipline and a willingness to bleed, could have reached Bronze in a few years.

The lifespan alone would have justified the climb. The wealth, the prestige, all of it sat at the end of a short staircase they had decided not to walk.

For what. To live a short, mundane life peacefully. Ayla could not find the appeal of that life, no matter how much she tried to.

The bike pulled up outside the Hayashi gates. The estate guards opened the inner door without comment. Kenji rolled the bike to the side of the courtyard and killed the engine.

Ayla swung her leg off and stood on the gravel. She watched him park the bike. He removed his helmet and shook his hair back into something approaching its usual shape.

"Will you quit Running too?" she asked in a low voice.

Kenji’s head turned toward her. Surprise crossed his face for the briefest second, then settled. "Why should I?"

Ayla considered the answer. She stared at him with genuine confusion. Kenji read the look on her face. The brief surprise had returned to something sharper.

"Everyone walks a different path, Ayla. That does not mean they are abandoning growth. It only means the growth they want is different."

"Different growth?" her brows furrowed.

Kenji’s voice cooled. "You can’t understand it. Because you aren’t a human and you can’t be a human." He turned and walked into the house.

Ayla stood on the gravel for several minutes after he disappeared from her sight. The wind caught her hair. The courtyard guards pretended not to look at her.

A bird crossed the open square of sky above the estate and disappeared behind the eastern wing. She did not move.

The dissatisfaction in his voice had been clear. The reason behind it was not.

She replayed the morning. The bike ride. The wind. The Outer Walls. The hostile faces. The child in the doorway. The pastry Mia had pressed into her hand. The way the four Outers had smiled when they recognized her, and the way that smile had thinned as the conversation continued.

She had filed each smile as warmth. Now she revisited each one and found something she had missed.

The smiles had been brief. The eyes had moved sideways more than they had stayed on her face. Kael had finished his tea quickly. Sora had not refilled hers. Elara had looked at the road behind Ayla’s shoulder twice during the goodbye.

Jaxon had picked up Mia and held her close to his chest the moment Ayla had turned to leave.

Ayla bit her lip. If they had remembered the chamber on the platform, she could have read their evasiveness as fear. Fear was a clean emotion.

But she had erased the memory. To them, she was the savior of the Apocalypse run. They had no reason to fear her. They had every reason to be grateful.

And still, they had been exhausted by her. Now Kenji was showing the same thing.

Was she this unlikable? She bit her lips as she walked into the house.

*

* *

Kenji walked fast through the corridors and reached his room without slowing. He shut the door behind him hard enough that the frame shook. He locked it.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

He paced the carpet twice and then dropped onto the bed face down. Her question echoed against the inside of his skull, and the answer he had given her echoed louder.

’Will you quit Running too.’ ’Why should I.’

He pressed his face into the pillow. The memories he had spent sixteen years stacking behind sealed doors began to leak through the seams.

A tunnel break. A monster tide spilling into a city that had not yet learned how to repel one. The smell of fire and the smell of blood. A two-year-old boy hiding behind a marble pillar in the foyer of a house he no longer recognized as his own.

A small body torn apart in a corridor by something that had eight legs and a mouth where its face should have been.

Tears moved down his face into the pillow. It had happened sixteen years ago. Old York had not been stable then. His father had only just taken the role of mayor.

The household had been simple. Father. Mother. Him. His twin sister. Her name had been Aiko.

The catastrophe had been coordinated. Hundreds of tunnel runs had failed across a single hour. Monsters had flooded every district at once.

Millions of citizens had died inside the first night. His father and mother, both new to their respective ranks at the time, had defended the city with everything they possessed.

They had nearly stopped the wave. Then the central tunnel had opened in the middle of the city square.

The catastrophe had not been an accident. It had been a terrorist attack. A faction that had wanted Damien Hayashi removed from office had paid a Crusade-side smuggler to coordinate the breaks.

The household at the city centre had been the target. Aiko had died in the corridor outside the kitchen. Kenji had watched it from behind the pillar.

The two-year-old version of him had watched and remembered and never spoken of it again, not to his mother, not to his father, not to the therapists Sarah had hired in the years afterward.

He returned to himself slowly. The pillow under his face was wet. His back was drenched in sweat. The room was cold.

The catastrophe had broken him. The trauma had rooted itself somewhere his conscious mind could not reach.

On his awakening day, when every other student in the queue prayed for a powerful trait, Kenji had prayed for failure. He had wanted no awakening at all. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

He had wanted to walk out of the chamber a normal citizen, to live a quiet civic life, to never be required to step into a tunnel and look a monster in the eye.

Fate had handed him an S-plus. He still remembered how the condition to activate his trait chilled his heart.

[Condition: Die]

He had chosen the Red tunnel for his first run because the Red tunnel was the path most likely to let him survive without ever activating the condition of his trait.

He had wanted to register as a Crusader in name, to collect the badge, and to live the Inner Walls life his trauma allowed. Nothing more.

The newspapers had called him a coward. He had let them, simply because he feared death.

He sat up slowly on the bed. The trauma resettled into its sealed places. He wiped his face with the heel of his palm. The genuine answer to Ayla’s question appeared in his mind.

’Would I be any different from those four Outers, if my trait did not force me to return.’

He looked at the answer.

"No."

Even with an S-plus trait, he would have quit. He would have taken the registration badge and sat behind a desk in a city office and lived a long, quiet life next to his mother and father, and he would have been content with the smallness of it.

He had quit in his head long before he ever met Ayla. The loop had simply refused to let him quit in his body.

He thought about the look on her face when Kael had said the words. It had not been disdain. If it had been disdain, he could have ignored it. It had been confusion. The clean, uncomplicated confusion of a creature that had never considered the option.

Quitting did not exist on her shelf. Resting did not exist on her shelf. Settling did not exist on her shelf.

Would she be the same, if she did not have his trait riding inside her, pushing her forward?

He thought of her on the day she had introduced herself in the tunnel. He shook his head. She would never quit. She would climb until something stronger than her decided otherwise.

And now, there would be no such existence for that.