The sun was doing that thing it did in autumn where it gave up around four thirty and just went straight to orange, like it couldn't be bothered to ease into it. Hikaru had the belt on under his hoodie, buckle cool against his stomach, and for once nothing in the apartment was trying to kill him or teach him a lesson about it.
Kirara was upside down on the couch, legs hooked over the backrest, phone held above her face like gravity was a personal insult.
"Neee~ Hikaru."
"No."
"You don't even know what I'm gonna say."
"I know your voice when you want something. That's the voice."
She let the phone drop onto her chest and rolled her head back to look at him upside down, hair pooling on the cushion.
"Go get me ice cream."
There it is.
"Get it yourself. You have legs. I've seen you use them, mostly to kick me."
She said it like it was a diagnosis.
"I'm comfortable. You're already standing."
"I'm standing because I was leaving the room."
"Exactly. You're already in leaving mode. I'm just redirecting the leaving."
He stared at her for a second, mostly to make sure he'd heard that correctly.
"That's not a rule."
She kicked one foot lazily against the couch arm.
"It's my rule now~ The good kind, the chocolate almond kind, not the weird green tea one Aki keeps buying because she thinks it's 'refined.'"
"Buy your own weird green tea opinions."
She gestured at herself, sprawled and doing absolutely nothing that looked tragic.
"I would, if I had legs that worked, but see, tragically. Convenience store's like four minutes away. You'll be back before the sun even finishes being dramatic about setting."
She's not wrong about the sun.
"Ask Tsukiko."
"Tsukiko's asleep. Or pretending to be asleep so nobody asks her for anything. Smart, honestly, wish I'd thought of it first."
"Ask Akemi, then."
Kirara sat up so fast her hair stayed horizontal for a second before catching up to gravity.
"Akemi will come back with a fruit cup and a lecture about my blood sugar. You're literally my only option here. This is a Hikaru-shaped problem."
"I'm not a vending machine."
She was already digging through the couch cushions, coming up with a crumpled bill she held out like a peace offering that wasn't actually one.
"No, vending machines don't complain this much. Chocolate almond. Two of them. One's for you, don't act like you don't want one."
"I don't want one."
"You're already reaching for the money."
He looked down. His hand had, in fact, already reached for the money.
Traitor.
He snatched the bill before she could take it back and turn this into a whole negotiation.
"This doesn't mean anything. I'm going because it's four minutes and I want to leave the house, not because you asked nicely."
"I didn't ask nicely at all, so, sure, let's go with that."
"Shut up."
"Love you too~ Get the good sprinkles if they have them."
He was already pulling his shoes on at the genkan, hoodie zipped over the belt. He told himself the whole way out the door that this was purely a logistics decision and had nothing to do with the way she'd grinned at him right before he caved.
The walk down was uneventful in the specific way only four minutes of sidewalk could be, streetlights just starting to flicker on early against a sky that hadn't fully committed to dark yet. The convenience store hummed its usual fluorescent hum, the same bored clerk behind the counter who'd rung him up a hundred times before and never once looked up from his phone to prove it. Hikaru grabbed two chocolate almond bars from the freezer case, found the good sprinkles Kirara wanted stocked next to the cheap ones nobody bought, and paid with her crumpled bill plus the extra hundred yen he was pretending he wasn't spending out of his own pocket.
He was three steps from the door, bag swinging off two fingers, when the automatic doors slid open on their own and something that had no business existing walked through them like it owned the place.
Golden eagle head, too symmetrical to be real, seams running along the beak where metal met feather.
A lion's body underneath it, fur catching the fluorescents wrong, some kind of metallic sheen underneath that shouldn't have been there.
Wings folded tight at its sides, but even folded they looked less like feathers and more like a stack of knives waiting for a reason.
Somebody's really committed to this cosplay.
It had to be. Fifteen feet of costume work, maybe some kind of promotional stunt for a new game, except the thing moved wrong, joints clicking under the fur in a way no rented suit could fake, and the eyes glowed faint amber like something was actually running behind them.
Its voice came out layered, too many textures stacked into one sound, savoring the moment like it deserved an audience.
"There you are. I've hunted three nights for a signature this faint, and here it is, wrapped around a boy who can't even feel it. Almost an insult, honestly, that something of mine took this long to find something so small."
"...Sorry, what?"
"Don't waste my time playing dense, boy. I am not accustomed to repeating myself, and I dislike the practice immensely. Hand over the Starseed, and I'll even let you keep the ice cream while you do it."
Hikaru looked from the eagle head to the bag of ice cream in his hand and back again.
He held the bag up like it was evidence for a case nobody else was hearing.
"Are you messing with me right now? I don't have time for this. I just bought ice cream."
He shouldered past it, or tried to. A hand closed on the front of his hoodie and hurled him sideways into the nearest aisle, shelves buckling under his back, cans and bagged snacks raining down around him as he hit the floor.
Pain lit up his spine in one clean line, sharp enough to steal the breath out of him.
That actually hurt. That's not a costume. Costumes don't throw people.
The clerk was already up from behind the counter, phone half raised.
"Hey! You can't be doing that in here! I'm calling the cops, I swear to god!"
The creature didn't so much as turn its head. It opened its beak and screamed, one clean shriek that rattled the freezer glass and dropped the clerk where he stood, phone clattering out of his hand.
Okay, that's definitely not standard cosplay behavior.
It stepped over spilled chips toward him, wings clicking open an inch at a time, savoring the drama of it.
"You'll want to stop struggling. Hand over the Starseed. I'd rather not scuff myself on someone this beneath me, but I will, if you insist on making me ask a third time."
He wasn't handing over anything he didn't even understand yet. Whatever this thing wanted, the way it asked was answer enough.
Hikaru drove a hard right into its jaw the second it stepped close enough. The impact rattled up his own arm and did nothing else, the beak barely turning under the hit like he'd knocked on a door.
He followed with a knee, then an elbow, years of forms collapsing into pure reflex. The thing absorbed all of it standing still, fur barely shifting where fist and knee and elbow landed.
Its voice came out delighted rather than bored, like the whole exchange existed purely for its own entertainment.
"Futile. I'm a Sable Beast. Do you understand what that word is supposed to mean to a creature like you? You're a human throwing hands at a god. Know your place, and maybe I'll remember to be gentle."
Whatever a Sable Beast was, this one clearly ranked itself somewhere above human and wasn't shy about saying so.
Is that fur or skin? Whatever it is, it's not budging. New plan.
He whipped the ice cream bag up and hurled both bars straight into its glowing eyes, plastic wrapper and all. It reared back with a screech, claws swiping blind at the air, and Hikaru was already moving, vaulting the fallen shelf and bolting for the door.
"You DARE."
The screech came out distorted, half fury and half something closer to genuine offense. Suddenly wings snapped wide behind him, blades unfolding with a metallic shriek of their own, and the beat of them lifting off the floor chased him out into the street.
Wingbeats closed the distance behind him fast, and Hikaru cut sideways on instinct, a talon swipe missing his shoulder by the width of a shirt seam. Another pass came low, and he dropped into a slide that scraped his palms raw on the pavement, coming up already running again.
A woman on a bicycle swerved and went down screaming.
Two guys outside a ramen shop had their phones up before their brains caught up to what they were filming.
Somewhere behind him a kid was crying, and that sound did more to his gut than any of the actual hits had.
There's too many people here. I need to find somewhere secluded.
He cut down a side street he half remembered from a shortcut, past a shuttered laundromat, into the dead-end lot behind it where nobody parked and nobody walked, concrete cracked and empty under a single dead streetlight.
He'd barely cleared the corner when a hand closed around his ankle mid-stride and yanked. The ground came up fast and hit him harder, air punching out of his lungs in one ragged burst as his back met concrete.
It came down on him before he could get his knees under him, a claw raking across his forearm where he'd thrown it up to block. Hikaru swung back anyway, a wild hook that caught nothing but air, and a second swipe sent him rolling across the cracked concrete.
Get up. Get up.
He got up. He swung again, aiming for the joint where wing met shoulder, and the impact barely registered against fur that felt more like plating than flesh.
It didn't even stagger this time, just backhanded him into the laundromat's shuttered wall hard enough to rattle the metal.
It circled now, unhurried, savoring it like a performance it had rehearsed.
"The Starseed. Hand it over, and I'll let history remember this as the night you were merely humiliated, instead of the night you were erased."
He spat blood, dragging himself upright against the wall.
"I don't have your... whatever you're calling it. I don't even know what that is."
"Then you'll die not knowing, and I'll die not caring. Fitting, honestly. Poetic, even. You should be thanking me."
I don't have anything for this. I don't have anything left.
He wanted, more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life, to have something, anything, that could put this thing on the ground the way it had put him there three times already.
The belt at his waist answered like it had heard him.
Suddenly, heat bloomed against his hip, and gold light split the dark of the lot wide open, a column of it slamming into the creature mid-stride and sending fifteen feet of lion and eagle skidding backward across the concrete in a shower of sparks.
Hikaru stared down at his own stomach, at the buckle he'd forgotten was even still there, glowing steady and patient like it had been waiting the whole time for him to actually need it.
Something warm pressed into his palm. He opened his hand and found the coin sitting there, no longer flat, no longer just a shape under his skin, edges lifting and lengthening into teeth, a dragon burning itself into both faces in cream and bronze.
On the belt, a socket he'd never noticed before pulsed once, waiting.
"Do I... put it in here?"
Nobody answered him. Nobody needed to.
The thing was already peeling itself off the ground across the lot, wings snapping back into shape, and whatever window this was, it wasn't going to stay open long enough for him to keep asking questions.
His hand found the kumihimo cord at his wrist without him telling it to, hair pulled back into a tight ponytail in one motion, the same motion from three nights of practicing this in the dark of his own room without knowing why.
The Key found the socket like it had always belonged there, teeth-first, sinking home.
CLICK
He twisted it, hard, the way his whole body seemed to already know how to, with no idea what he was actually asking for.
Please do something. Please do anything.
The air around him answered instead of him, bending, heat shimmer crawling up from the cracked concrete like the whole lot had forgotten what temperature it was supposed to be.
Gold light erupted from the buckle, not a flash but a cyclone, stardust spiraling up and out and swallowing him whole, and somewhere inside it he felt more than saw the armor start finding him, piece by piece, patient, certain, like it had been waiting this whole time for permission.
Boots and greaves locked over his shins first, bronze veins of light threading through metal that didn't feel bolted on so much as remembered.
The chest plate sealed over his ribs with a low resonant hum, vibrating through his sternum, and underneath it something old and golden stirred awake, warmth spreading outward from the center of his chest, recognition instead of sensation.
Gauntlets climbed his forearms, sealing at the wrist with a soft final click of their own.
The helmet came last, a dragon-maned crown descending slow, deliberate, the faceplate sliding shut like a breath finally let go after being held for three days straight.
CLANK
The cyclone collapsed inward and vanished, and the lot went quiet, gold light dimming down to a low steady glow along every seam of the suit.
The creature had gone still across the concrete, wings half-spread, frozen mid-recovery.
Hikaru rolled his shoulders once, testing weight that settled onto him like it had always been his to carry, and for the first time all night, standing there in the dead-end lot in full armor with a dragon's helmet on his head, he didn't feel like he was losing.
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