Seven early-warning satellites over the Pacific registered a surge in Draconic Factor resonance. The alerts tripped so fast the sound stacked over itself. In one monitoring center, a shift tech spilled hot coffee down his uniform and didn’t even flinch. Every Kamuy-bearer whose Draconic Factor exceeded the critical threshold felt it. Not fear. Something deeper. Something that bypassed thought and went straight to the soul. Submission. Not to a person. To a presence.
The polished shoes made no sound in the hallway outside his dorm suite. He always walked like that—measured, effortless, like he owned the floor. Felix Marr doubled over in the hallway outside his private dorm suite. It hit him like a twist in the stomach. Sudden. Wrong. His Draconic Factor flared out of rhythm—burning cold, like a skipped heartbeat across the whole nervous system. Sweat poured down his spine.
Every nerve screamed the same word: Retreat.
He stumbled to the bathroom, one hand over his mouth. The door clicked shut behind him. Then—vomiting. Hard. Violent. His knees hit the tile as his body purged something it couldn’t name. Bile. Cold sweat. Tears. He clung to the sink like it was the only thing anchoring him to the present. When he looked up, his reflection stared back. Bloodless. Hair askew. Eyes—wrong.
Something about his Kamuy, Temporal Memory Enhancement, was still spinning. It was a textbook cheat code: memorize a book an hour before the test, ace it, and forget it by dinner. It didn’t matter. He never had to remember anything. He’d already won.
But this time it didn’t forget. His memory didn’t know where to land. His memory kept looping—images crashing into each other. The simulation. The gun. A boy’s face—panicked, pathetic, shoving himself into the line of fire like it meant something. Faces blurred. Events crosswired. He blinked, and couldn’t remember which year it was. What floor he was on. For one sick second—he couldn’t remember his own name.
His lips moved before he meant them to. “...What the hell was that?” Behind him, the world continued like nothing had changed. ButFelix Marr knew something had. Something had seen him. And it hadn’t liked what it saw.
[The Foundry Restricted Zone]
A man stood in a silent training yard, long blade slung across his back. The air was still. But he stopped mid-step and turned toward the sky. The moon was thin and pale above him. The trees didn’t move. But the scabbard on his back was trembling.
[Elsewhere · Rooftop Balcony]
A boy in fine wool stood in the wind, holding a warm glass of wine. He looked like a statue carved from snow. Impeccable. Unmoved.
Above him, the sky was silent—too silent. Clouds curled like breath held in a glass jar, moonlight caught in their seams.
The cold didn’t touch him. It rarely did.
He turned his face slightly, as if offering it to the wind. Not for comfort. Just for proof that he could still feel it.
Somewhere far below—too far for sound, too far for light— something shifted.
Not violently. Not yet. But like a line in the world had just redrawn itself. Like a door, very old and very locked, had just begun to open. And the air rippled. Soft as silk being pulled.
Then— a heartbeat. Or something close enough to pretend.
It touched the bones behind his ribs. Didn’t hurt. Didn’t linger. Just… reminded.
He smiled faintly. As if recognizing an old song playing again after years of silence. As if someone, somewhere, had finally picked up the blade.
“So,” he said, quietly.
“It begins.”
Solan was late to the first official event of the semester. The night before, he and the black blade had completed their first real "recall." It moved like a living thing—turning fluid, shifting into black markings that coiled back into his left forearm, like some cold-blooded creature tucking itself into his bones.
Technically, the moment the blade re-entered his body, he lasted maybe two more minutes. Sleep just... took him. He couldn't even remember if he pulled the blanket over himself. Just a dead drop into sleep that felt more like being... stored. No flashy effects. No divine light. Just a gravitational pull through the spine. As if something had finally accepted him. Or swallowed him.
When he opened his eyes, the room was already flooded with light. He blinked at the clock, then jolted upright. He was still in yesterday's shirt. He jammed his feet into sneakers and was out the door before his head caught up to his body.
Outside, he checked his phone. A text from Matt: "Avoid the dining hall today. Something's up. Half the floor got sick last night. School says it's not the food. No one believes them."
Solan frowned. He'd eaten that weird potato salad last night. The kind that left an aftertaste like old glue. And there was still that low thrum under his skin—where the black blade had returned. Not loud. Just there. Like a wire left plugged in. Coincidence, probably.
He kept walking. But the air felt... denser somehow. The kind that stuck to your clothes. Even the light looked different—too sharp where it landed. And his footsteps echoed like they didn't belong to him.
By the time he reached the auditorium, the opening ceremony had been going for twenty minutes. That president woman—he could never remember her name. Buda... Budapest? She was up on stage, wearing a crimson suit, giving some rousing speech.
Solan slid into a back-row seat near the wall and tried to breathe like someone who'd been there the whole time. The part he caught—like all of them—opened with the sky splitting open.
Winter of '66. Something massive crashed through the clouds and landed in the ocean. They gave it a name long enough to sound official—Draconic Primary Entity—then shortened it to the Dragon, like that somehow made it less horrifying.
It didn't die. It just hung there. Leaking something into the air, the water, into people. They gave that leak a name too. The Draconic Factor. Like a label could make it safe. They always said the world didn't change overnight. Sure it didn't. It cracked. All at once. And no one's stopped pretending since.
Then came the usual history dump. Soviet battlegroup. Alaska incursion. And then, in '72—just as Stabilin started flooding the world—burned-out soldiers and the first Kamuy users carved out their own flagless city-state on the Malaspina coast. But the port stayed warm, and so did the rush: scientists, traders, and drifters from every corner of the globe poured in, chasing what was left of the miracle.
The factory went up first—patched together from old barracks and prefab steel, humming day and night. Then came the warehouses, the bars, the markets selling anything from bootleg stabilin vials to half-legal dragon bone powder. Languages bled together on the docks: Russian curses, clipped American drawl, Tokyo street slang, Norwegian sing-song. The flags on the ships didn't matter—everyone here was after the same thing. And for a while, it felt like the end of the world had decided to park itself in one warm, crowded harbor.
New Elysion. A defection written in concrete. The U.S. called it a "temporary autonomous zone." Solan rolled his eyes. He'd sat through this story too many times. The names changed depending on who told it. Sometimes it was a miracle. Sometimes it was a warning. This version sounded like a eulogy written by a PR firm.
Somewhere in the speech, the President mentioned the Dragon still being out there. He didn't care. Wherever it was now, it wasn't here. And that was enough. Right as the President hit "a refuge of free will," Solan's head thunked gently against the seat in front of him. The applause almost masked it.
"Ow." He jerked upright, blinked once, twice. Tried to smooth out his face like someone who'd been listening. A few heads turned nearby, but no one really looked. He sat back, spine too straight, jaw tight, eyes fixed somewhere above the stage.
But inside, the haze was already rising again—slow, thick, like mist rolling in behind his eyes. A heaviness, not loud, not sharp. Just steady. Inevitable. It was the blade. That quiet, heavy thing now stitched into his bones—settling in. Testing the seams of his body. Like it was folding itself into the blueprint of who he was, and deciding where to rest. Finding its place.
When he got back to the dorm, the cold air was still spiraling low across the floor, as if the ventilation system had decided he was contagious. Solan sat with his back against the bedframe, legs drawn in, hands resting lightly on his knees. His left arm was still humming—quiet, steady, like a charger someone forgot to unplug. He pushed his sleeve up.
The mark was still there. A black line just beneath the skin, thin as calligraphy, curling like a stylized burn along the inner forearm. Great. Step one toward being mysterious: grow your own haunted body art. He laid a palm over it. Cool. Metallic. Almost… patient.
Most Kamuy users didn’t walk around armed, he reminded himself. Other weapon summoners never carried anything. You didn’t see someone queuing for the commuter tram with a halberd on their shoulder.
Last night’s recall made one thing painfully clear: he hadn’t been special; he’d just been late. Everyone else got a kind of built-in briefing the moment they awakened—a blurry operating manual that said just enough: You are an ice-type Physical Manipulation user. You can shape cold. Don’t try freezing your own heartbeat. They knew the outline, not the boundaries. The world didn’t hand out instruction books—just instincts. A sense of direction.
Even Somatic Augmentation types—regenerators, muscle-weavers—woke with a hazy awareness of what their bodies could do. A cut closing on its own. A bone knitting faster than it should. The Kamuy told them, quietly: This is part of you now.
But Solan… what had he gotten? A blade. Full stop. No instinct. No framework. No sense of classification. Nothing that whispered this is the shape of your Kamuy, or even this is safe. Just a weapon that appeared one night, then crawled back under his skin like it had been living there rent-free. He didn’t know which discipline he was supposed to fall under. Somatic? Manifestation? Something in-between? He didn’t even know if any of this meant he had to start taking Stabilin now.
Then, again, nobody really understood Stabilin. Kamuy use didn’t map to dosage—some people burned through their powers daily and needed almost nothing, while others barely activated theirs and still required weekly injections. Draconic Factor levels didn’t predict a thing. Side effects ranged from skin lesions to memory gaps to people who smiled through the day and crumpled into pills at night.
Solan had never taken any. That untouched prescription was the only reason he could afford New Elysion at all—housing, meals, everything. It was his lifeline. But what if that changed? What if the blade really had “activated”? What if next month, a dose became must? He’d lose that income. Need a job. Apply for aid. But would financial aid even cover meal plan?
A slow headache began to press against his temples. He glanced again at the black line. It didn’t glow. Didn’t move. Just lay there like nothing had happened. “…Maybe one more try.”
Not for combat. Just to see if the recall had been a fluke. If the sword would answer at all. He held his breath, focusing on the faint electric seam under his skin, trying to remember the sensation from last night—the feeling of something coiling back into him, slotting into bone as if it belonged there.
A twitch. A pulse. The line lit once—sharp as a nerve firing. And the blade materialized wrong .
CLANG—!
The blade landed tip-down on the floor, rattling the wooden boards. Dust leapt from beneath the bed. Solan stayed frozen, hand still in the summon pose. He stared at the blade. “…At least it’s not blood this time.”
But the exhaustion came immediately—like a trapdoor giving out beneath him. Heavy, full-body, familiar now. His vision stuttered. His limbs turned to wet sand. The bedframe pressed into his spine and the world dulled around the edges.
Please don’t let my Kamuy be some kind of self-targeting narcolepsy.
And then the blade, the mark, the room—all of it folded away into the dark.