The road out of Jujutsu didn’t so much begin as continue — the same packed dirt that ran through the village square just kept going, past the last fence post, past the field where old Mr. Taka’s goats grazed, and out into country that didn’t know Nagi’s name.
He walked it at a normal pace.
There wasn’t any other way he knew how to walk.
*Mom’s probably still standing at the shelter,* he thought, and didn’t look back to check, because if he looked back and she wasn’t there it would feel like something, and if he looked back and she was, that would feel like something too.
He looked back anyway.
Just once.
The village was already smaller than it had any right to be this early into the walk — a smudge of rooftops behind a stand of trees, the kind of small that made the last eight hours of his life feel like they’d happened to someone else.
He turned back around.
“Eight days on foot,” he said, to no one.
“That’s a long flow.”
By midday the sun had climbed high enough to put a shine of sweat on his forehead, though he didn’t let it slow him.
Normal pace was safe pace.
There was no prize for arriving early and no one waiting at the other end who’d notice the difference between six days and eight — the letter hadn’t specified, and Nagi had never been the type to rush toward things he didn’t yet understand.
He found a stream around noon, knelt, and splashed water over his face.
His reflection blinked back at him from the moving surface, distorted and calm.
“Still tastes like home water,” he murmured, and didn’t examine why that mattered to him.
He stood, adjusted the bag on his shoulder, and kept walking.
*Kingdom of Rings is waiting,* he thought.
*Entrance exam.
Whatever rank they throw at me, I’ll handle it chill.*
The Kingdom of Rings tested for real power, his mother had said.
Gods, demon lords, SS ranks.
Nagi turned the words over in his head the way he turned over most things — without much urgency, like they belonged to a different, larger conversation he hadn’t been invited to yet.
The road narrowed as the afternoon wore on, the trees on either side growing closer together, tall enough now to lay long shadows across the dirt well before the sun was anywhere near setting.
Nagi noticed the shift in light before he noticed the sound — a faint thump-thump in the underbrush to his left, then his right, then somewhere behind, like something pacing him without committing to a direction.
He didn’t stop walking.
He’d learned a long time ago that stopping was usually the wrong first move.
They came out onto the road four at a time — low, lean shapes with fur the color of wet ash and eyes that glowed a dull, wrong red, the kind of red that didn’t belong in an animal’s face.
Forest wolves, touched by something darker than nature had intended.
D-rank, if he had to guess.
Nothing that should trouble someone who’d spent his whole childhood outrunning worse for fun.
The lead wolf’s growl rattled low in its throat.
Nagi stopped.
Looked at them the way he looked at most inconveniences — flatly, without alarm.
“Annoying,” he said.
He took a slow breath.
His eyes narrowed, just a fraction.
*Sixty seconds,* he thought.
*That’s all I’ve got right now.
Better make it count.*
The world went thin around the edges the way it always did, the way it had done since he was eight years old and first learned that if he pushed hard enough, everything else seemed to slow down to make room for him.
He moved.
The first wolf never saw the hand that caught it across the ribs — Nagi was already past it, a blur of motion and displaced air, close enough to feel the *crack* of speed breaking against itself.
The second one lunged with its jaw wide and closed on nothing, because Nagi was behind it now, sweeping its legs out from under it with a motion so casual it barely qualified as a kick.
The third came at him low and fast and he simply wasn’t where it expected him to be, sliding past in a smooth arc and tapping the top of its skull hard enough to send it tumbling into the brush.
*Flow with it,* he thought, somewhere underneath the blur, in the quiet place he always retreated to when his body was moving faster than his thoughts could keep up with.
*Don’t force more than a minute.*
The world caught back up to its normal speed all at once, the way it always did — like a held breath finally let go.
He was standing in the middle of the road again.
Three wolves down, dazed or unconscious, one having decided somewhere in the last few seconds that this fight wasn’t worth finishing and vanishing back into the tree line.
Nagi’s chest rose and fell harder than it should have for a fight that short.
Sweat had broken out along his hairline.
“…Fifty-eight seconds,” he said, mostly to himself.
“Close.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and looked down at the wolves scattered across the dirt.
“Sorry about that,” he told them, not particularly loudly.
“Go find easier prey next time.”
One of the wolves’ heads dropped with a soft thud against the ground, like it had heard him and simply didn’t have the energy to disagree.
He made camp for the night beside the road, on a fallen log that looked like it had been serving this exact purpose for other travelers long before him.
His mother had packed rice balls — three of them, wrapped tight in cloth, still faintly warm somehow, though that had to be his imagination.
He ate slowly, watching the forest settle back into its ordinary quiet now that the wolves were gone.
*Speed helps,* he thought, *but tiring after one minute still sucks.
Kingdom exam probably has people who can go way longer.
AA rank.
SS rank.
Gods and demon lords stuff.*
He looked up.
The sky had gone the deep orange of a sun that meant to set properly, without hurrying about it, streaked through with high thin clouds that caught the light like something on fire from a great distance.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, mostly to the sky, mostly to himself.
“I’ll just keep flowing at my pace. One step, sixty seconds when I need it.”
He believed it when he said it.
He always did.
He stood, slung his bag back over one shoulder, and kept walking — a small figure on a long road, moving toward a horizon that hadn’t earned its shape yet, carrying a limit he’d never once thought to question.
Sixty seconds.
He’d always assumed that number belonged to him.
He had no way of knowing yet that it might belong to something else instead — something that had simply been letting him borrow it, one minute at a time, for reasons no one had ever bothered to explain.
*End of Chapter 2*