He didn't remember most of the walk home. One second he was standing at the river with his whole hand wrapped around a thing that used to be a rock, and the next he was already fumbling his key into the apartment door.
What the hell is this? A coin? And what's with the belt?
He'd tried to take the belt off twice on the walk back. It wouldn't budge, not a finger's width, like the buckle had welded itself shut somewhere between the river and here.
The door wasn't even shut behind him before Akemi rounded the kitchen corner, dish towel still in hand.
"There you are. You missed lunch."
"Not hungry."
"It's one o'clock, Hikaru."
He was already past her, headed for the hallway, one hand jammed in his pocket around the coin like letting go of it might do something worse than whatever it had already done.
Kirara looked up from the couch, remote balanced on her knee.
"Where'd you even go? You've been gone since sunrise."
"Just walking."
"For six hours~?"
"Yeah."
Tsukiko didn't say anything from her spot at the table, but her eyes tracked him the whole way down the hall, the kind of look that clocked the fist in his pocket and filed it away without asking about it out loud.
"We still need to talk about the festival," Akemi called after him, already reloading a different argument entirely. "The Nakamuras said the red set still..."
"Later."
"You always say later."
"Then it's still later."
He didn't slow down for that one either. His door shut behind him a half second before Akemi could get the next sentence out, and he stood there with his back against it, staring down at his own fist like it might finally explain itself if he glared hard enough.
It didn't.
He dropped onto the edge of his bed and finally opened his fist. The coin sat there in his palm, dull gold, warm like it had been sitting in a pocket all day instead of five minutes.
Okay. Let's actually look at you.
He turned it over once, twice, running his thumb along the rim.
Some kind of jagged pattern cut into the edge, like teeth on a house key blown up ten times too big.
He'd never seen metal do that before, not on any coin, not on any belt buckle either.
The belt was the real puzzle. He went at the buckle again, both hands this time, digging his fingernail into every seam he could find. Nothing gave. Then his thumb caught on a groove near the underside, so small he'd have missed it if he hadn't already run his finger over that exact spot twice.
He pressed it.
The buckle popped open on its own, clean and quiet, no resistance at all.
There you are.
He pulled the belt free, and the strap didn't come loose so much as it went somewhere. It slid backward into the buckle itself, folding in on some hinge he couldn't see, until the whole thing sat in his palm no bigger than a deck of cards.
...Huh.
He turned the compressed buckle over, checking every side for a seam, a hinge, anything that explained how a full-length strap had just disappeared into a block of metal the size of his hand.
He found nothing. No screws, no welds, no manufacturer stamp, nothing that looked like it came off any shelf in any store he'd ever walked into.
This isn't from here. It's not from anywhere I know.
He set both pieces down on the bed in front of him and just looked at them for a while, coin on one side, folded belt on the other.
So how'd I get you, exactly.
He walked it back the only way he knew how. Light, first. A lot of it, more than anything he'd ever stood under, bright enough to burn straight through his eyelids. Then the coin was just there in his hand where a rock used to be, and the belt was just there on his waist where nothing used to be at all.
That's it. That's the whole story. Light happened, and now I've got alien hardware in my bedroom.
He almost laughed at himself for that word. Alien. Like he was twelve years old again, watching some late-night show about lights in the sky, except this time the lights had landed directly on him and left souvenirs.
Or I imagined the whole thing. Heat stroke. Low blood sugar. Something. People see stuff that isn't there all the time.
He looked down at the coin again, solid and heavy and very much still on his bed.
People who imagine things don't usually walk home with the hallucination still stuck in their hand.
He dragged both palms down his face and exhaled through his fingers.
Great. So either I'm losing it, or I'm sitting on something that fell out of space. Fantastic options. Really glad I get to pick between those two.
"HIKARU. Trash. Now, before the truck comes."
Akemi's voice cut through the door like she'd been standing on the other side of it the whole time, waiting for the exact second he'd gotten his thoughts halfway sorted.
He shoved the coin and the folded belt under his pillow on pure reflex, like his sisters were the kind of threat that could see through fabric, and went to go be a normal person for a while.
Chores turned out to be the easiest thing in the world to lose himself in.
Trash first, then the dishes Kirara had "forgotten" to do for two days straight, then the laundry Tsukiko always left half-folded on the couch like the job finished itself if you just walked away from it long enough.
His hands knew the motions without asking his brain for help, which suited him fine, because his brain had nothing useful to offer today.
He hauled the trash bag out to the chute at the end of the hall, tossed it down, and heard it hit bottom three floors below with a satisfying thud.
Okay. One thing handled today, at least.
He turned back toward the apartment and stopped dead in the hallway.
Suddenly, the belt sat on the little side table by the door. Buckle closed. Full length, not folded down into that compact block anymore, just lying there like it had never left.
...I put you under my pillow.
He walked over slow, like it might bolt if he moved too fast, and picked it up. Same weight. Same warmth. Same jagged teeth along the buckle's rim.
Kirara. Has to be Kirara. She's messing with me, she found it, she's having a laugh.
He didn't actually believe that, not even a little, but it was a better thought than the alternative, so he held onto it anyway.
He carried the belt back to his room, shoved it in his gym bag this time instead of under a pillow, zipped the bag shut, and buried it at the bottom of his closet under a pile of shirts he never wore. Then he went to fold Tsukiko's laundry like a normal person with a normal Tuesday.
He got through exactly one shirt before he glanced up and found the belt sitting on top of the laundry pile, coin resting right beside it like the two of them had wandered over together to watch him work.
He stood there holding half a folded shirt, staring at it, and felt something crawl up the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the heat.
Nope. Nope, that's. No.
He grabbed both pieces, marched them straight back to the trash chute, and this time he didn't bother being gentle about it. He shoved the coin and the belt down the chute together, listened for the thud, and didn't wait around to feel good about it before heading back inside.
He made it as far as the kitchen.
The coin sat on the counter next to the rice cooker. The belt lay coiled beside it like it had walked there on its own two feet.
He set down the dish towel he'd been holding, very carefully, like sudden movements might make this worse somehow.
I threw you down three floors. I heard you land.
Nothing answered him, obviously, because it was a belt and a coin and neither of those things had a mouth, but the not-answering felt worse than if it had.
Okay. Okay. New theory. I've officially lost it. This is what losing it looks like. Nobody tell Akemi, she'll make it a whole thing.
Nyxara dropped onto Earth's surface without a sound, boots meeting packed dirt at the exact angle she'd already calculated on the way down.
No stumble. No correction needed. That was one task handled correctly before she'd even started counting.
She stood there a moment, taking the world in the way she took in any assignment: fast, total, and without a shred of curiosity beyond what the job required. Dim skyline. Thin atmosphere by Coalition standards. No orbital defense worth naming, no ships, nothing that had so much as registered her arrival.
Class-3. Of course it is.
She'd expected worse, honestly.
Class-3 mudballs usually came with more noise, more panic, some local authority scrambling to explain a light in their sky. This one hadn't even bothered waking up.
Vox Lacerans landed beside her half a second late, wings folding shut with a metallic hiss that carried farther than it should have in this much quiet. He always landed half a second late. She'd stopped commenting on it years ago; the correction cost more time than the delay itself.
"This is the world," Vox Lacerans said, head tilting at the skyline like it had personally disappointed him. "This entire, unremarkable world."
"Confirmed."
"I expected more of a challenge, frankly. A resonance this strong, surfacing after centuries of silence, and it lands on..." He gestured one wing at the horizon, distaste folded into the motion. "This."
"The signature doesn't care what it lands on." She was already reaching for the tracker, no interest in extending a conversation that wasn't moving the task forward. "It only cares that it's found."
The device unfolded across her palm, gold lines tracing a slow circle as it searched for a heading. She watched it work, patient in the specific way patience looked on her, which was less like waiting and more like a held breath with somewhere better to be.
Suddenly, the readout spiked. Held. Dropped. Spiked again somewhere else entirely.
Her jaw set half a degree tighter than it had been a second ago.
"It's not settled."
"Bad readings?" Something in Vox Lacerans's tone suggested he found the malfunction personally entertaining. "Or is your equipment simply outmatched?"
"My equipment doesn't malfunction." She closed her hand around the device, done arguing with it for now. "The bearer does. New bonds run unstable in the first cycle. It'll settle, or it won't, and either way we don't wait around to find out which."
Vox Lacerans's wings clicked once, restless, already angling toward the closest cluster of lights on the horizon.
"So we hunt it down the old way."
"You hunt it down." She turned the device back over, marking the coordinates it kept circling back to no matter how many times it lost the signal. "Find the bearer. Retrieve the Key intact if the bearer cooperates."
"And if the bearer doesn't."
"Then the bearer stops being relevant to the outcome." She said it the same way she said everything, flat, already three steps past the sentence and onto the next task. "Anything standing between you and the Key is a delay, not an obstacle. Handle delays the way you always handle them."
Vox Lacerans's beak curved into something that wasn't quite a smile, mostly because his face wasn't built for one.
"Now that," he said, "is a job I can enjoy."
"Enjoy it quietly." She tucked the tracker away, eyes already fixed on the coordinate that kept pulling brightest before it scattered again. "We're not authorized on this world, which means the faster this ends, the fewer questions anyone has to answer for it. Mine included."
He didn't argue that part. He never did, not when the order came framed as efficiency instead of restraint.
She looked out at the skyline one more time, cataloguing it the way she catalogued everything: not for what it was, but for how quickly it could be finished with.
Whatever's out there, it has no idea what just landed on top of it.
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