The moment the raft design was finalized, Kato Jun activated his first skill without hesitation, locking his stamina in place for the full three-hour window.
Building a functional raft against the clock—with a dead boar bleeding out nearby and an apex predator likely already picking up the scent—was not a task that left room for exhaustion.
Armed with his iron machete, he launched into a demolition frenzy that would have seemed physically impossible to any outside observer.
“Balsa wood!
We have balsa wood!”
Scanning the riverbank vegetation, Kato Jun froze on the spot, then pumped his fist.
Balsa—also called light wood—was something of a miracle material.
Despite its deceivingly robust appearance, it was extraordinarily light relative to its volume, and its buoyancy was exceptional.
It was precisely what traditional Pacific islanders used to construct ocean-going vessels.
Even better, the trunks yielded to his iron blade with remarkable ease.
What had initially seemed like an hour-minimum construction project was completed in barely thirty minutes through the combined efforts of Kato Jun’s artificially sustained stamina and Yukino’s precise, skilled lashing work.
The resulting raft was broad, flat, and firmly bound together with twisted vine cordage.
“Now we need to determine exactly how much weight it can bear…”
Kato Jun surveyed the pile of riverside stones with a calculating eye.
How do we estimate buoyancy without any instruments?
Yukino stared at the raft, then at the stones, then back at Kato Jun, completely at a loss.
“Granite generally sits at roughly three times the density of water, while fresh pork is approximately equal to water density.
So, we secure the raft in the shallows, load it with stones plus our own body weight, and record exactly how many stones it takes before the deck submerges…”
He pointed to the angular grey boulders scattered near the riverbank.
“The volume of stones that sinks the raft, multiplied by three, gives us the equivalent volume of pork we can safely transport…”
“I see…”
It has the same conceptual elegance as weighing an elephant using a boat and displacement…
Yukino nodded with genuine admiration, and the two immediately set about calibrating the raft’s load limit.
“We can realistically carry about one-third of the total carcass weight…”
After completing the measurement trials, Kato Jun exhaled with mild disappointment.
The balsa raft was good, but not miraculous.
“In that case, the priorities should be the neck cuts, the forelegs, the hind legs, and the tenderloins…”
As someone who had spent considerable time studying culinary arts, Yukino had a clear mental map of which cuts of pork delivered the greatest flavor and versatility.
“Agreed, let’s get to work.”
By the time the butchering was ready to begin, the boar had been dead long enough to bleed out naturally, which was fortunate.
Kato Jun had deliberately delayed the slaughter until now, having packed the bloody head wound tightly with mud and riverbank clay during the raft-building phase to suppress the odor diffusion.
Attracting every scavenger within a kilometer radius while they were still working on the raft would have been catastrophic.
What followed was, by any measure, an extremely challenging operation.
Neither of them had ever processed a large animal carcass in their lives.
Yukino directed the operation with clinical precision—identifying the joint lines, the separation between muscle groups, and the correct angle of each cut—while Kato Jun executed her instructions with the iron blade.
The internal organ removal stage was where even Yukino’s steely composure buckled.
Despite pinching her nose shut with her fingers, the raw, barnyard stench of exposed intestinal contents was on an entirely different level from anything she had encountered in a kitchen.
I genuinely cannot fathom how Kato-kun is enduring this without flinching…
From her position as supervisor and director, Yukino watched the boy’s back with a mixture of awe and sincere respect.
What she couldn’t see was Kato Jun’s sanity meter bleeding steadily downward with every stroke of the blade.
Even with a maximum sanity of two hundred, the psychological toll of hand-processing a five-hundred-kilogram carcass was considerable.
But it was his stamina that never wavered, and his pace that never slowed.
Once the desired cuts were separated, Kato Jun turned to his secondary objective: the hide.
A wild boar of this scale produced a hide of enormous square footage—thick, tough, and highly weather-resistant.
Dividing the skin into four large panels with carefully placed incision lines, he peeled each section away from the underlying fat layer in sequence, until all four panels lay flat on the riverbank grass.
Pigskin cured correctly would yield durable, water-resistant material suitable for footwear, bags, rope reinforcement, and weather-proofing their shelter.
Finally, using a frame of crossed branches bound with vine cord, the two loaded the selected cuts onto the raft in careful, balanced layers.
The final count: approximately one hundred and fifty kilograms of prime pork, secured to the deck.
Had they taken the overland route, two exhausted teenagers fighting through dense jungle with a single iron blade could have carried perhaps fifteen kilograms each at most, while constantly watching their backs for leopards.
The river route had made the impossible merely difficult.
Taking one last, faintly mournful look at the mountain of abandoned meat disappearing behind the treeline, Kato Jun planted his pole in the riverbed and pushed off.
The raft swung into the current.
“Kato-kun…
something is approaching the carcass behind us…”
Yukino’s voice was carefully controlled as she glanced back over her shoulder.
Through the dappled jungle shadow at the riverbank’s edge, a large, spotted shape melted out of the undergrowth.
Long limbs.
Muscular shoulders.
A tail thick as a mooring rope.
It was a leopard.
And it was enormous—closer in scale to a Siberian tiger than anything the spotted cat had any right to be.
“Lucky we didn’t overstay our welcome…”
Kato Jun swallowed quietly, keeping his pole strokes long and steady.
As the current carried the raft away from the bank, the leopard raised its massive head from the carcass and fixed them with a flat, amber stare—assessing, calculating—before apparently deciding that two floating humans on a wooden platform were less interesting than several hundred kilograms of free pork.
“Why is everything on this island so impossibly large…”
Yukino gripped the edge of the raft with both hands, her knuckles pale, eyes never leaving the spotted shape until the river bend placed trees between them.
“The river scent masks ours, and most large land predators won’t enter deep water to pursue prey.
We’re safe as long as we stay on the raft…”
Kato Jun kept his voice steady for her benefit, though the visual of that leopard’s shoulder height had been genuinely unsettling.
The current was gentle but consistent, carrying them downstream without significant effort.
“Kato-kun!
Stop the raft, there are footprints over there—human footprints!”
Yukino’s voice jumped two octaves as she pointed urgently at the soft mud of the far bank.
The impressions were unmistakable.
Bipedal.
Five distinct toes.
The stride width and depth of an adult human being.
He jumped off, crouched beside the tracks, and held his own foot alongside one of the impressions.
Nearly identical in length.
The toe morphology was definitively human.
And yet…
something felt wrong.
The tracks were isolated.
Only a handful of impressions in a very small area, as if someone had stood here briefly—and then deliberately obscured the rest of their trail.
The surrounding mud showed clear signs of having been smoothed and brushed.
Whatever had left these tracks had intentionally covered its path.
Why would a crash survivor go to the trouble of concealing their own footprints?
Unwilling to turn back without answers, Kato Jun pressed forward along the barely discernible trail.
And then he stopped.
The smell hit him first.
Then the sight.
Run.
“Run!”
He turned and sprinted back toward the raft, his voice a controlled but urgent command.
“Why?
What happened so suddenly—”
Yukino barely finished the sentence before Kato Jun reached her, scooped her bodily off the bank in a single motion, and ran the last few meters to the raft with her in his arms.
“What’s wrong?” Yukino asked, her face flushed from the sudden physical contact, though she made no attempt to wriggle free, sensing the genuine alarm in his face.
“Those footprints.
They’re not from survivors…”
Kato Jun drove the pole hard into the riverbed, propelling them into the current with maximum urgency, his jaw set tight.
“What do you mean?
Whose footprints are they, then?”
“In front of where the footprints ended…
there was a pile of…”
He paused, his throat working.
Even for someone who had just spent an hour processing a wild boar carcass with his bare hands, the image of what lay beyond those concealed tracks was something else entirely.
“Human bones.
A large pile of them.
Stacked together.
Green flies everywhere…”
The colour drained from Yukino’s face.
“Human…
bones?”
“Skulls.
Many skulls.”
Kato Jun pressed his lips together, reached into his pocket, and produced the simple bark map.
Without a word, he held it out to Yukino.
She took the twig stylus and drew a small skull symbol at the marked location.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
“Cannibals…”
Kato Jun finally said it aloud.
“People who exist in legends, who consume human flesh.
It seems they exist on this island, and we have just found the edge of their territory…”
“Cannibals…?!”
Yukino’s voice emerged barely above a whisper.
“If there are cannibals…
then the other survivors from our plane…”
Her sentence trailed off.
Her hand had closed around something in her palm—something small and hard she had picked up near the footprints before Kato Jun had spotted the bone pile.
She opened her fingers.
“I found this near the tracks…”
It was a small hair clip.
Delicate, pale blue, shaped like a tiny crescent.
“Let me see that.”
Kato Jun’s voice changed register entirely as he snatched it from her palm.
His face went absolutely still.
“This is Ginko’s hair clip.”
He said it quietly, almost to himself.
He had given it to Sora Ginko as a gift two winters ago, on the day she had beaten him three games to two in their regular shogi match and hadn’t let him hear the end of it.
She had worn it every day since.
“Ginko?”
Yukino’s expression shifted.
“She was my junior in shogi.
We trained together for years.
And it seems she was also on that plane…”
Kato Jun’s hand closed around the clip until the knuckles whitened.
Sora Ginko would never have left that clip behind voluntarily.
It was her most prized possession.
For it to be lying in the mud beside a concealed trail, adjacent to a pile of human bones and the territorial markers of cannibals, meant only one thing.
And the thought of it made his stomach hollow out.
“It’s alright, maybe the clip simply fell from her hair while she was passing through…”
Yukino watched the expression on his face and felt a quiet ache bloom behind her sternum.
She tried to construct a plausible alternative.
“No.”
He just shook his head once. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Ginko would sooner have gone back into a spider colony than left that clip in the mud.
“If she dropped it here, she dropped it because she had no choice…”
The image of the bone pile surfaced again behind his eyes, and he swallowed hard against the rising nausea.
Yukino said nothing more.
There was nothing useful to say.
The river carried them to the sea, and from there they rowed the raft along the shoreline back to camp.
The expedition had been, by any objective measure, an extraordinary success.
A hundred and fifty kilograms of prime wild pork.
Four panels of boar hide.
Fresh water source located.
River route back to camp established.
None of it registered on Kato Jun’s face.
He sat on the beach in the long, amber light of early evening, holding Ginko’s hair clip in both hands, watching the ocean say nothing.
He thought of her relentless, sunny tenacity.
Her determined refusal to resign even in a hopelessly lost position.
The way she would tap his shin with the toe of her shoe when she thought she’d found a move he hadn’t considered.
His eyes stung.
Sasa…
sasa…
Barefoot steps in damp sand, approaching quietly from behind.
Yukino sat down a short distance away without speaking first, letting the silence exist between them without trying to fill it.
Then, softly:
“Kato-kun, dinner is ready.
The pork kidney skewers you mentioned wanting to try while we were in the jungle…”
“Mm…”
He stood slowly.
“Kato-kun…”
Yukino bit her lower lip lightly, searching for words that would be honest rather than hollow.
“Things may not be as terrible as they appear.
Right now, we’re only speculating based on what we found.
The clip being there doesn’t necessarily confirm the worst…”
“Yes.
I know.
Thank you, Yukinoshita…”
“Just call me Yukino.”
She looked away as she said it, the tips of her ears colouring faintly.
“You used my given name twice without permission back in the jungle today, so from now on, we call each other by given names…”
“…Yukino.”
He said it quietly, testing its weight.
She didn’t respond, but her shoulders settled slightly.
Kato Jun stared at the hair clip in his palm for another long moment.
Then he folded his fingers over it and straightened up.
“I need more snake venom.
More arrows.
Stronger cordage.”
Yukino looked at him steadily.
“You’re going after them.”
It was not a question.
“Not only for Ginko.
For us too.
A tribe of cannibals within walking distance of our camp is a threat we cannot pretend doesn’t exist.
Eventually, they will come this way.”
“That’s too dangerous, and the rescue team could still—”
“There may not be a rescue team coming, Yukino.
We both know that.”
His voice was not harsh, just honest.
He placed a hand on her shoulder, and his eyes met hers directly.
“I promise you, whatever I find out there, I will come back.
But I need you to stay here and keep the camp safe.
You’re the only one I trust with that.”
“If you’re going, then I’m going with you!”
Yukino stood up to face him, her chin raised, the familiar steel back in her blue eyes.
She was not a fragile girl.
She held a bow that could put an arrow through a wild boar’s eye at thirty meters.
“No.
You stay here.”
“I refuse.
I’ve already salvaged these from the river—”
She held up the pair of boar tusks she had retrieved during the raft loading.
They were extraordinary specimens—longer and denser than any domestic pig produced, curved to a keen natural edge that rivaled the iron machete.
Sharp enough to split a coconut clean in half with a single downward stroke.
“These are better cutting tools than our knife, and I intend to use them.”
“If you insist on following me into cannibal territory, I will tie you to the cave entrance with rope.”
Kato Jun met her gaze without blinking.
Yukino held his stare with equal force.
Neither of them looked away.
The campfire crackled between them in the gathering dark.
It was the first time, across all the days they had spent together on this island, that they had stood on opposite sides of something.
And neither one of them was prepared to be the first to yield.