Night.
A bright moon, thin stars.
Footsteps on wet asphalt.
Neon spilling down from the high-rises, straight into his face.
Pedestrians moving thick along both sides of the street.
Cutting against the current of the crowd, dressed in loose summer casuals, Ke Jie walked on with no expression at all.
A little while ago he had left the home he had barely set foot outside of for three years.
Three years is long enough to turn a boy whose father had officially gone missing and had in truth died in the blade-and-sword conflict, a boy who had fallen apart because of it, into a patient, hating avenger.
Stepping out into the world tonight... was not some young man of twenty making peace and reaching for life again.
It was the opening ceremony of a revenge trip three years in the settling, by the son of the Blade King.
"Whoo~"
A light breeze went past his ear.
His eyes swept the surroundings, seemingly at random.
Ke Jie circled the area a few times at an unhurried, easy pace before he finally walked to his real destination.
The doorway of a late-night barbecue joint he had liked to frequent once. From the outside it had not changed at all.
"So the Blade King Empire and the Sword God Dynasty have dropped their watch on me to the lowest level."
"Which is a good thing, really. After all... if I want revenge, I can't very well go about it in the open."
Ke Jie turned it over in his mind as he stepped inside and took his old seat in the corner.
The Blade King Empire and the Sword God Dynasty stood respectively for the Blade Wielders and the Sword Maidens, beings not unlike the magical girls of an anime, and were the two largest extraordinary powers in this world.
Chosen by a Blade Spirit, which stood for the yang force, a boy could transform into a Blade Wielder. Chosen by a Sword Soul, which stood for the yin force, a girl could transform into a Sword Maiden.
Blade Wielders and Sword Maidens fought the Blade Demons and Sword Fiends that human evil twisted itself into. They could draw on the power of Blade Spirits and Sword Souls descended from the famous blades and famous swords of human history: lovely as a fairy tale, and beloved by the ordinary world.
And he, Ke Jie, son of the Blade King, was bound to avenge his father. In all likelihood that would set him against certain people among these so-called Blade Wielders and Sword Maidens, and against the Blade King Empire and the Sword God Dynasty themselves.
In this age of blade and sword, he had not yet been chosen by a Blade Spirit and was no Blade Wielder. As an ordinary person, standing against the extraordinary was very nearly impossible.
Thinking that far.
The light at the back of his eyes dimmed.
Just then.
An unexpected guest sat down across from him.
"Hello! Excuse me, sir, would you mind sharing a table with me?"
The voice was polite and full of energy.
What came barging into Ke Jie's field of vision was... a girl, bright and fresh in her dress, wearing a glacier-blue sundress with a small pink waist bag slung across her body.
Her whole style was crisp and cute, and she had a pair of clear, arresting pale blue eyes, the look in them innocent and childlike.
Her long snow-white hair had been tied into a small lattice braid on each side with deep blue hair cords, which set off a charm and a liveliness all their own.
Ke Jie's first impression was that she was a sight worth looking at.
"All the other tables happen to be full, and I saw there was space here, so... I really am sorry, sir, I may be troubling you for a while yet."
The girl pressed her palms together without waiting for an answer, her face earnest and sincere as she explained and pleaded.
"......"
Ke Jie said nothing.
He only stared at her chest with a strange look in his eyes.
Hanging there was a gold-rimmed bronze badge, its design a set of scales combined with a judge's gavel.
He hesitated a moment before speaking, slowly. "If this is a request from a Sword Maiden of the Sword God Dynasty's Judgment Hall, then naturally I wouldn't mind."
"?!!"
The girl caught where Ke Jie was looking and froze on the spot.
She raised a hand and brushed at the badge, feigning carelessness.
"Sir, this is just a piece of merchandise a friend gave me. How could I possibly be a Sword Maiden?"
At those words Ke Jie's gaze hardened, and his tone abruptly gained weight.
"Is that so? Because as I recall, the 《Blade-and-Sword Joint Governance Act》 states explicitly that even within the Dongshen Region, which belongs to the Blade King Empire, no one may replicate or counterfeit the identity insignia of a Judgment Hall Judicator."
And there he added the telling blow.
"Miss, you must know perfectly well that however far the Sword God Dynasty weakens its watch over a son of the Blade King, there will always be at least one Sword Maiden of the Sheath Tier or above."
He finished.
"......"
The girl, who had been about to patch things over, had nothing left to say.
She only stared, her cerulean eyes going wide.
First she gave herself away entirely by tugging lightly at the badge over her heart with her left hand. Then, as though resigning herself, she stopped hiding at all and let a mild, easy smile show through her helplessness.
"Mr. Ke Jie... you really are impressive."
"I'm very sorry. The Presiding Justice instructed me before she gave me this assignment that I wasn't to admit it straight away. I truly am sorry!"
"My surname is Bai, my given name Wuxie, my courtesy name Lingxi. You may call me whatever you like, sir. I look forward to working with you from here on~"
That was how the girl introduced herself.
"Whatever I like? Then may I call you... the dopey-cute Sword Maiden of the Judgment Hall?" Ke Jie could not help a flicker of the urge to tease, and turned the phrasing back on her, mimicking the way Bai Wuxie spoke.
Ordinarily he had no fondness whatsoever for the Sword God Dynasty's Sword Maidens.
That was not any sort of prejudice about her sex. It was because the one who had most likely killed his father came from among the seven Sword Gods who stood at the very top of the Sword God Dynasty.
And over the past three years, because he had been born the son of the Blade King and yet was no Blade Wielder, because he had outwardly gone to pieces, he had taken cold looks and even humiliation from the Sword God Dynasty's Sword Maidens assigned to watch over him.
Those were not pleasant memories......
However.
Just as Ke Jie expected Bai Wuxie to lose her temper or her composure the way the last several Sword Maidens had.
Bai Wuxie's reaction was nothing of the kind.
"So Master was right after all. I really am not much suited to being a Judicator......"
The dejected murmur came out at once.
Bai Wuxie let her eyelids fall and lifted her fingertips to twine a strand of hair beside her ear.
She had broken through to the Sheath Tier not long ago, and for a manner that had always been kind and irresolute her master had judged her "the little saint who wandered in among the judges."
Still, that flaw was not without its uses. Sometimes it earned her a good name and gentle treatment from other Sword Maidens.
In the space of a breath.
"If that's how you'd like to address me, sir, then of course I won't say anything about it. In a certain sense it even fits. Hah-hah."
Bai Wuxie was back to her original, brimming energy.
"I was joking~ I'll just call you Xiao Bai from now on. How's that?" Ke Jie, thoroughly amused by her reaction, could not help a small, genuine smile.
"Eh? That sounds exactly like the name I gave my cat, however you hear it!"
"You're the one who said I could call you anything. Xiao Bai."
"All right... as long as you're satisfied, Mr. Ke Jie. As an apology for earlier, let me pick up the bill!"
The two of them at the shared table warmed to each other fast.
Past that first small episode, and after each had felt the other out, an early trust of the sort new friends have began to take shape.
Starting from what flavour of barbecue they liked and moving on to how they had grown up and what they had made of it, Ke Jie and Bai Wuxie each found a great many places where they matched and where they resonated.
Setting aside the fact that they both liked their skewers spicy.
One of them was born extraordinary, the son of the Blade King, carrying a heavy halo, grown up under the weight of everyone's expectations, which had earned him the resentment of his peers, and then their coldness and distance.
He had said goodbye to his birth mother early in childhood, and three years ago had taken the blow of his father's disappearance. Since then he had worn the face of a boy who had sunk, to dull other people's attention, lying low and waiting for his chance at revenge.
Ke Jie did not, of course, tell Bai Wuxie that he intended to look for that chance in the dark.
The other was a young lady born into a Sword Maiden house, set back again and again by her own kind and guileless nature and yet never losing sight of it, and after a Sword Soul chose her she had earned a fine reputation in Dongdu for a time.
Because of that same disposition, though, she still drew warnings and criticism from her fellow Sword Maidens and from her master, the Presiding Justice of the Dongdu Judgment Hall, so that in trying to correct herself and failing over and over she wore herself down inside and was left isolated by others.
To put it precisely... what these two had most in common was a heart that, under crushing pressure, longed for a friend its own age who understood it.
Soon enough.
The brief window for talk came to an end.
The time to share a late supper arrived.
"You first, Mr. Ke Jie."
Bai Wuxie extended a hand politely in invitation.
In those cerulean eyes was a relaxed, comfortable happiness, and one faint thread of something warmer.
"Since Xiao Bai is treating, I suppose I'll force myself to accept." Ke Jie nodded slightly and spoke in a cool voice.
And then, all at once.
He was just reaching for a lamb skewer on the table.
"BAM!"
The roof burst open.
What came with it was a voice he did not know, roaring:
"KE JIE!!!"