After 20 minutes of crying yui wake up The flickering lights ahead weren't ghosts, not this time—just the living. Orange firelight cast jagged silhouettes across the tunnel walls, painting desperate murals of survival. Ren counted twelve. Gaunt figures hunched around a scavenged steel barrel, faces hollowed by hunger and years of too much silence. Some clutched sharpened scrap-metal spears, others hunched over ration tins as if they might vanish between bites. But the man who stepped forward stood still—taller than the others, eyes sharp as flint, a rifle leveled steady at Ren's chest.
A long scar stretched across his cheek like a strike of lightning. Beneath the grime on his wrist, a faded tattoo marked him as one of Ren's own past sins: the GHU insignia.
Ren's gut coiled.
"Stay behind me," he murmured. Yui, clutching Captain Beans like a talisman, nodded. Her golden eyes didn't blink.
The rifle didn't waver. "Kuroda," the man said, like the name tasted sour. "Didn't think you'd crawl back. Thought you'd be running the world by now—with the Argwans at your feet."
Ren raised his hands slowly, palms open, words measured. "The serum wasn't made for this."
"Neither were we," spat a woman from the fire's edge. She held a sleeping toddler whose skin shimmered faintly violet in the firelight.
Yui's voice broke through the charged air like a soft wind. "We're hungry," she said. "Do you have rice balls?"
The woman stiffened, but the toddler stirred in her arms, blinking amber eyes at Yui. A fragile beat of stillness passed. The rifle didn't drop, but neither did it fire.
They called themselves Kagerou—Flickering Shadows. Survivors of the fall, not by strength, but by sheer refusal to die. That night, by firelight that shimmered like the ghosts they carried, Ren heard their stories.
Hiroshi, the scarred man, had once been a GHU officer. He'd refused a direct order from Takeda himself: execute a cluster of infected children during the early outbreaks. He'd fled instead, tattooed the shame into his skin like a vow.
Mika, the woman with the toddler, had been a schoolteacher. Her students had vanished one by one, not into war—but into the earth. Into the Hollowing. She had stopped counting.
Koji was the youngest—barely sixteen. A wiry hacker who once rerouted vending machines to deliver medicine in the chaos. Now he hijacked Argwan drones to spy on their twisted kin, reprogramming them with fingers still too small for the weight they carried.
But it was Hiroshi's daughter, Ami, who shattered the quiet. She toddled over to Yui without hesitation, holding out a porcelain doll with one missing eye. "Wanna play?"
Ren flinched, but Yui looked up at him, waiting. He nodded, throat tight. "Stay where I can see you."
The two girls settled near the fire, small figures against a world that didn't know what to do with innocence anymore. Ami laughed as Yui made Captain Beans "fly" in circles, her voice bright like wind chimes. For the first time in weeks, Ren heard something like peace.
But trust was never free.
Later, Hiroshi shoved a battered medkit into Ren's hands and jerked his head toward a boy lying on a cot nearby, writhing in fever. His leg was blackened from ankle to thigh.
"Argwan shrapnel," Hiroshi muttered. "Our medic's dead. If you're not a liar, prove it."
Ren hesitated. His hands wanted to obey old instincts—cut, burn, sterilize, move fast and hard. But Yui's voice floated back to him, warm and certain: "Papa fixes everything."
He knelt beside the boy. "I need clean water, ethanol… and maggots."
"Maggots?" Mika recoiled.
"They eat the rot. Better than a saw."
The others watched. Suspicion simmered. Hiroshi's jaw clenched, then nodded once.
The operation was slow, tense. No sterile table, no machines, only what they had. Ren worked in silence, sweat pouring, fingers moving like they remembered something older than guilt—something that had once been hope.
Hours later, the boy slept. Fever down. Koji offered Ren a bottle of water and a hesitant grin. "Not bad, Doc."
Ren flinched at the word. Doc. Aiko had said that once, teasing him when he got lost in his lab and forgot dinner. The ghost of her laugh brushed past him like smoke.
That night, while the camp slept and Yui lay curled beside Ami in a nest of blankets, Hiroshi found Ren crouched over a broken water filter, trying to bring some order back to rust and ruin.
"Why'd you do it?" Hiroshi asked, voice low. "The serum."
Ren didn't look up. "For my sister. Sora. She was the first. Patient Zero."
Hiroshi's silence was the heavy kind—the kind that made people disappear.
Ren's voice cracked. "I thought I could contain it. Twist it into something good. Instead… I lit the match."
He looked toward the girls—Yui gently braiding Ami's hair, humming a lullaby only children remembered.
"She's all I have left," he whispered.
Hiroshi lit a cigarette. The ember glowed like a dying star. "We've all got ghosts," he said. "Just don't let yours bury that kid too."
At dawn, Ami found Ren refitting a rusted drone into a purifier. She tugged his sleeve and pressed something into his palm—a single sunflower seed.
"For Yui," she said. "Mama said they grow toward light, even in the dark."
Ren knelt. "Thank you."
Ami's eyes searched his. "Is Yui a monster?"
He looked at the seed. At the weight of it.
"No," he said softly. "She's a promise."
Ami beamed. "Cool."
By nightfall, Ren stood before the whole of Kagerou—Yui beside him, her hand in his. He laid out what he had: antibiotics, salvaged tools, tactical maps, drone schematics—Argwan intel fresh and raw.
"I'm not asking for shelter," he said. "I'm offering truth. And no secrets."
He unclipped the locket from his neck and placed it gently on the table. Inside: Sora's picture, faded but smiling. "This was hers. Yui is mine. All I have left."
Mika reached out and touched the locket, her face softening in a way that made Ren want to cry.
"We protect the kids," she said. "All of them."
Hiroshi stepped forward. Held out his scarred hand. "Welcome to Kagerou