Chapter Text
They passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn.
It loomed from the fog like the ribs of a long-dead god—its great towers rusted hollow, cables sagging with time, its once-fiery paint stripped to bare metal and weeping streaks of mossy green. Vines snaked along the steel like veins through a corpse. Beneath one arch, a lone seabird spiraled, then vanished into the pale mist, as if swallowed by the breath of something ancient.
No one spoke.
They were still cradling the echoes of last night’s celebration. The party had been loud, fierce, and foolish—the kind born at the edge of fear, where laughter comes too easily and sorrow waits just outside the lantern light. Chrome and Gen had brewed something acidic and wild, sharp enough to make them forget they were sailing into the unknown. For one night, they’d pretended they had arrived somewhere worth arriving.
And now, morning had come to collect its debt.
Kohaku stood at the bow, spine unbent but breath shallow, the wind threading through her hair like fingers through unraveling silk. Her grip on the railing was firm, not for balance but for discipline. She refused to sway—even as her head pulsed with the consequences of joy.
Behind her, Senku stood silent. He hadn’t drunk beyond a token sip—" a biochemically idiotic use of ethanol, " he’d muttered—but something about him felt just as raw. His hands were in his pockets, his eyes fixed on the bridge as though trying to calculate how many centuries it had taken for the world to forget what humanity once built.
Near the mast, Gen lay sprawled in theatrical defeat, one arm draped over his eyes, a canteen cradled like a relic. His tinted glasses were pure affectation—there was no sun, just a bleached, grey sky and the hush of water slapping against the hull. Chrome sat beside him, head bowed to the rail, still and pale, like a boy hoping the ocean would take pity on him.
“Landfall, ” Ryusui called out, voice far too crisp for a morning like this. It cut clean through the fog, confident as ever. “ At the edge of the world! ”
From above, Homura’s voice floated down—clear, clipped.
“ There are statues .”
Silence dropped like a stone into the sea.
Eyes turned toward the cliffs beyond the tree-choked shore. And there they were—half-buried in green, nestled between roots and stone. Statues. Dozens. Maybe more. Some upright, some toppled, all caught in their final, frozen moments. A woman with her arms around a child. A man with one hand raised to shield his face. A figure mid-leap from a rock that no longer existed.
They did not look like survivors.
Gen pushed himself upright, moving slow, like everything suddenly weighed more. His smile came late—thin, brittle.
“ Well ,” he said quietly, “ so much for hoping .”
He didn’t have to explain.
That whisper had followed them every mile across the sea. Maybe someone made it. Maybe another kingdom rose from stone. Maybe America had its own flames burning in the dark. Maybe, for once, the answer wouldn’t be just us.
But the bridge stood alone. No towers. No ruins. No welcome.
There was no city to greet them.
Only trees.
This had once been San Francisco. That much they knew. But it bore no resemblance now. Forests had claimed the streets, swallowed the land whole. What hadn’t been uprooted had crumbled to dust. Nature had rewritten the map—new rivers, split cliffs, entire hills risen where there had once been glass and steel. Civilization had been erased so completely it might never have existed.
Only the bridge remained, rising from the earth like a defiant scar.
Gen’s voice was softer now.
“ We told ourselves stories. Kingdoms of the west. Parallel people who remembered fire. Songs sung in languages we never taught them .” He exhaled and looked up, the wind tugging at the corner of his coat. “But this… this is the same silence. Just wearing a different face. ”
Kohaku said nothing. Her gaze hadn’t moved from the shore. She hadn’t spoken at all that morning—not since waking half-wrapped in her own blanket, Ryusui’s coat draped over her shoulders, the bitter taste of drink still in her mouth and the memory of dancing still warm in her chest. Laughter echoing. Chrome trying to balance on a barrel. A world that, for one brief hour, had felt alive again.
Senku exhaled, sharp and low.
“ We’re not here for hope ,” he said. “ We’re here for answers .”
But his voice lacked its usual edge. It rang hollow, as if the words were scaffolding—something to cling to in a place where everything else had already fallen.
Behind them, the ship creaked as the sails dropped. The water stilled.
And ahead, the forgotten continent waited, silent as stone.
The crew began to scatter—some to the ropes, some to the barrels, Chrome muttering about needing dry land before his stomach declared mutiny. Gen slinked off with the practiced grace of a man seeking a dark corner in which to dramatically recover. Even Ryusui, forever starbound, gave them a moment, his footsteps fading below deck.
Senku stayed.
So did she.
Kohaku hadn’t moved since they’d first glimpsed the cliffs. The statues still clung to the edge of the world like ghosts watching them come ashore. Her jaw was tight. She hadn’t blinked in a while.
Senku slid a hand into the folds of his coat, pulled out a small glass vial. No words. Just the soft clink of glass against glass as he turned it over in his palm. The liquid inside was golden, viscous, catching the light like honey drawn from some ancient hive.
He offered it, the gesture quiet.
Kohaku glanced only once. “ What is it? ”
“ Fermented pine sap and orange peel, ” he said. “ Technically, a degenerate byproduct of Gen’s last experiment. Not dangerous. Probably .” A beat. “ Good for nausea .”
Kohaku looked at the vial for a moment, then took it wordlessly. She didn’t drink, but she held it, staring at the way the liquid curled inside like it had a pulse.
“ I thought I’d feel something ,” she said finally. Her voice was low, half-buried in the mist. “ When we landed. When we saw the shore .”
“ You do feel something ,” Senku replied. “ It’s just not what you expected .”
She turned toward him then, eyes flint-bright but unfocused. “I kept thinking… maybe there would be people. A flare in the distance. A voice. Something. And now they’re just stone. The same as everywhere else.”
Senku didn’t answer immediately. He leaned on the railing beside her, close but not touching. The salt wind caught the edges of his hair.
“ The world doesn’t owe us signs, ” he said. “ Doesn’t owe us survivors, or answers that make sense. ” He looked out at the cliffs, the trees rising from the bones of the old world. “ All it owes us is the truth. Whatever it is. And we’ll dig it up, piece by piece .”
Kohaku let out a slow breath. “ You’re very good at saying the right things .”
“I’m not ,” he said, not quite smiling. “ But I am good at saying the true things .”
They stood like that for a while—just two outlines against the fog. The wind tossed the mist around them, sea and silence and ghosts.
Then Senku added, voice almost casual, “ You were dancing last night .”
A flicker of something crossed her face. “ I don’t remember that. ”
“ Liar ,” he said, and this time, he did smile—just barely, just enough to be seen if she was looking.
Kohaku didn’t answer. But after a moment, she unstoppered the vial, took a small sip, and grimaced.
“ …That’s awful .”
“ Welcome to science .”
She made a sound halfway between a scoff and a laugh, low in her throat.
Then her hand found the railing again. Not clenched this time. Just there. Steady.
“Let’s find the truth, then, ” she said, eyes sharp again. “Whatever’s left of it.”
Senku nodded once.
“No matter how deep it’s buried .”
They didn’t speak. None of them did.
The ocean wind had quieted, as though reluctant to cross the threshold between water and land. Even the waves seemed to hush themselves against the shore, curling inward like whispers. From the deck above, the main ship loomed still, sails half-furled and mast creaking in the breeze, tethered just beyond the swell. The Golden Gate Bridge arched in the distance like a skeleton turned to prayer—its cables sagging, its rusted joints caught in the embrace of green vines. Time had not killed it, only hollowed it.
The air smelled of salt and earth and something older—like ash that had long since cooled.
Kohaku was the first to rise. Her movements were slow, deliberate, as though sudden motion might offend the silence. She stepped off the boat and onto the land, heels of her stone-crafted footwear sinking a fraction into the softened loam. The shore gave under her weight but did not falter. She looked ahead, past the bramble and moss, to where the land disappeared into ancient green.
A single bird cried out above them, wheeling once through the pale sky before vanishing into the canopy.
Senku followed. He carried no weapons, only a bag slung over his shoulder and that unreadable expression he wore when his mind was moving faster than his body. His boots touched the soil like they meant to test it, as if science alone could wake the bones beneath their feet.
Behind him came Gen—slow, theatrical, sunglasses perched low on the bridge of his nose, a canteen pressed to his temple like it might draw the fever out. The remains of their celebration clung to him like a poorly worn coat: slurred laughter, glowing bottles, the taste of sour citrus and poorly aged something. Even now, his breath held the ghost of it.
Chrome emerged next, squinting against the light. He’d rallied, but only just. His walk was uneven, burdened by a satchel of tools and the weight of waking up to a world that didn’t want to remember itself.
Ryusui brought up the rear, his stride jaunty in defiance of the quiet. He looked as though he meant to call out something grand, something triumphant, but the words caught before they could form. The stillness pressed down on him too.
They were not explorers here. Not conquerors. Just survivors, walking into a graveyard.
Homura dropped soundlessly from a nearby ridge, landing in a crouch beside them. No one had seen her go, or return.
“There are more inland ,” she said, nodding once toward the cliffs.
It took a moment before anyone asked what she meant.
“ Statues ,” she clarified. “ Dozens. Maybe more .”
They turned slowly, eyes scanning the ridgeline above. And there they were: frozen in place, embedded in the cliffside like fossils. Human forms half-swallowed by vines and rock. One woman, her face upturned as if toward some final sun. A man with a hand outstretched mid-stride. A child perched on what must once have been a ledge—now only a stump of stone. Their presence felt unnatural and deeply familiar all at once.
Chrome’s breath hitched. Senku didn’t look up. He had crouched already, fingers sifting the soil. A sample. A beginning.
They began to walk. Slowly.
Kohaku took the lead. Her steps made no sound but carried authority, the kind that doesn’t ask for permission. Her heels crushed moss, sank into the soft ruin of what might once have been a road. Beneath the greenery, patterns still whispered—old stones arranged in forgotten grids, hints of civilization overtaken by time’s slow mercy.
There were no buildings here. No signs. No broken cars or shattered glass. The city had not fallen.
It had been devoured.
Trees rose where towers once stood—thick, ancient things with roots that cracked through the last concrete bones of the past. Wildflowers bloomed through the ribs of fallen rebar. Ferns unfurled from the mouths of rusted hydrants. The air was rich with green and growth and ghosts.
They passed another statue. A woman, caught mid-turn, arms shielding her face.
Gen stopped in front of it, his lips twisting into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“ Do you think she saw it coming? ”
Senku stood a few paces behind him.
“ No, ” he said quietly. “ No one did .”
Chrome stepped around the base of a tree that had grown through the remnants of what might have once been a bench.
“ So this… this is San Francisco? ”
“ It was ,” Gen said.
Kohaku didn’t turn. She kept walking, her gaze ahead.
Ryusui adjusted the pack on his back, looking up at the sky.
“ No towers. No survivors. Just the old bones. ”
Senku ran a hand through his hair. “ We didn’t come here to be greeted. ”
“Still would’ve been nice ,” Chrome muttered.
Kohaku paused. The trail had narrowed, the forest thickening around them. Up ahead, a fallen sign lay half-swallowed in the dirt, only the top curve of a letter visible—once part of a name, now just shape and rust.
She spoke without looking back.
“ We’re not the first to walk here. But we might be the last .”
The others stopped behind her. Senku stepped forward again. Always forward.
“ No ,” he said. “ Not the last .”
He dropped to one knee and placed a flat black disc against the ground—his latest invention. It whirred faintly. Measured. Recorded. A thin line of light blinked along its rim.
“ We’re the first chapter of what comes next .”
Kohaku glanced back at him. Their eyes met—brief, silent.
Then the wind stirred the trees again, and they moved on.
The water shimmered in fractured gold beneath the morning sun, a trail of wake splitting it clean as the two boats cut downstream—one sleek and powerful, the other squat and humming with quiet intent. The mobile lab floated like a slow, thinking animal, its bow lined with makeshift glass instruments and harnessed panels catching the light. Ahead of it, darting with the ease of predatory grace, the speedboat tore through the current—slicing past long-submerged ruins now devoured by roots and moss, the skeletons of a fallen age.
No one spoke for a while.
The forest was loud in the way untouched things are loud. The canopy groaned and whispered above cliffs that had once been freeways, now a cradle of green teeth. Insects sang. Somewhere, a bird cawed once—sharp, echoing, like a warning shot.
Kohaku knelt near the prow of the speedboat, wind pushing against her cheekbones, one hand braced against the metal hull. Her golden eyes were narrowed, but not from the light. She wasn’t looking at the river. Not exactly.
She watched the way Tsukasa stood at the helm, motionless except for the tilt of his head as he read the current like scripture. The sun caught in the ends of his wild hair, but it was the fur cloak—weathered, thick, soft with wear—that caught her attention. It moved oddly with the wind, not in the rhythm of cloth, but like something remembering what it had once been. She stared at it for too long, as though searching for something unspoken. Not weakness. Never that. But something old. Something quietly human.
The others were scattered behind her—Hyoga still as a coiled reed, Matsukaze sharpening the point of his spear with deliberate friction, Ginro arguing in low tones with Kinro, who ignored him in the practiced way of older brothers. Homura lounged near the edge, her hair flicking in the wind like flame, eyes sharp and distant. Moz watched the treeline, not because he was ordered to—but because something had unsettled him.
It was Kirasame who said it first. Quiet. Almost lost to the engine’s growl.
“ ...Something moved .”
No one laughed. No one dismissed her.
Kohaku stood slowly, her hand falling to the hilt of the stone blade at her back. Her eyes scanned the surface. The river was thick with silt and shadow, but for a moment, she thought she saw it too—a bloom beneath the water, dark and rising, as if something vast had shifted.
Behind them, the second boat trailed through the river’s curve, its pace steady, unhurried, deliberate. Ryusui manned the controls with one hand and the practiced ease of a man born to helm the sea, calling something over his shoulder to Gen. Above the cabin, the hatch creaked open. Senku emerged in a fluid motion, bracing himself against the edge with arms folded, eyes narrowed against the wind as he scanned the shifting river. Ukyo crouched beside him, body still, head tilted—not watching, but listening, every muscle attuned to sound, to movement, to things the rest of them could not yet hear.
They weren’t looking at the water. Not yet.
Kohaku took a breath. The air smelled old, like iron and green and something else. Something wrong.
Her fingers curled.
Three thousand seven hundred years of silence did not mean the world had slept.
And something beneath the surface had begun to wake.
The stillness broke.
Not with a ripple. Not with warning.
The water exploded.
From the deep, ancient crocodiles launched upward like submerged nightmares. Their massive jaws broke the surface first—gnarled, algae-slick, teeth like sunken stone. One slammed into the underside of Senku’s lab boat, sending it lurching with a metallic groan. Another surged alongside the floating structure, its tail cracking against the side as it tried to clamber over.
There was no deck. No helm. Only the tight corridors and outer ledges of Senku’s mobile lab—barely wide enough for two to pass, and now drenched with river spray and the raw stink of predator.
Gen cursed and stumbled inside, already pulling Chrome by the sleeve.
“ Out of the way, out of the way—!”
Senku had climbed through the top hatch a moment earlier, crouched against the roof’s curve, eyes narrowed against the sunlight. The impact made the whole lab shudder beneath him, but he didn’t flinch—he was already calculating the pressure distribution, the likelihood of hull breach, the fastest way to reroute power to the stabilizers.
Ukyo had emerged alongside him, crouched low, bow already notched. He listened—then loosed an arrow straight up.
The sky cracked.
Kohaku saw it.
By the time Tsukasa veered the speedboat around, her boots were already striking the edge. Her body arced midair, sunlight flashing off the pale fur behind Tsukasa’s back—the same fur she'd been staring at moments earlier, thoughts unreadable.
She landed on the lab’s narrow upper platform with a thud that rattled the entire frame. Her heels skidded slightly on the wet surface, but she didn’t fall. Her blade drove down—clean, surgical—into the eye of the first crocodile trying to scale the side.
Another shape shot overhead.
Homura.
Her ponytail curled skyward like a blood-petaled flame, her body whirling low in a spin before she planted herself against the rear edge of the lab. She didn’t wait for room. She made it. Her daggers flashed out, biting into scaled flesh as another crocodile rose from the river mouth.
Hyoga dropped beside her, his long blade a punctuation mark. Together, they danced—an arc of steel and silence. Homura struck to mislead. Hyoga struck to end.
Then Moz came.
He didn’t leap; he landed —a vertical descent from the power boat that broke the water’s rhythm with sheer presence. He drove his blade into the second beast’s flank as if splitting wood. Kirasame was at his side before the ripple had finished traveling, her blades twirling once, twice—then cutting deep into tendon and joint.
The mobile lab rocked hard as another crocodile slammed into its far side.
Ginro screamed.
Kinro shoved him backward, shield up, golden spear out.
“ Don’t let them touch the hull! ” Senku snapped above them. “ One breach and this thing sinks like a rock! ”
Matsukaze moved without sound. He dropped from above—narrow footfalls landing square on the back of one creature, blade slicing in an unbroken line down its spine. The creature twisted, gurgled, and stilled.
Then—
BANG!
A shot rang out from the speedboat.
Yo was standing at the bow, legs shaking with adrenaline, gun clutched in both hands. His face was pale and wild-eyed, but he fired again, aiming for the beast’s open maw.
“ Take that, swamp nightmare!! ”
He missed. The bullet skipped off the water with a splash, ricocheted off a half-submerged tree trunk, and very nearly struck Moz—who didn’t flinch, but did shoot him a glare sharp enough to shear metal.
“ I’m helping! ” Yo yelled defensively. “ You’re welcome !”
Kohaku didn’t look back. Her focus remained on the next predator breaching the surface, her spear spinning with cold, brutal grace.
Blood sprayed into the river. The air stank of algae, iron, and heat.
On the speedboat, Tsukasa stood motionless beside Yo, the fur at his shoulders catching the wind.
He didn’t move to join.
He didn’t need to.
“They’ll hold, ” he said, voice quiet. “ The science team will live. ”
The riverbed, still damp with the residue of the recent skirmish, shimmered faintly beneath the hard light of the afternoon sun. Crocodiles—hulking, ancient beasts—lay motionless now, their gnarled bodies dragged ashore, glistening like wet leather under the sky. The air was thick with salt, blood, and the coppery sting of exertion, but it was quiet, finally. The kind of quiet that follows only after a storm.
Their numbers had held. No one had been lost. But the price of survival lingered in the slump of their shoulders, the sweat that soaked through fabric and bark and leather, and the gnawing in their bellies—a hunger not just for food, but for reprieve.
Senku stood at the water’s edge, his eyes weren’t on the crocodiles, but on the crew. Chrome with his hands on his knees, chest rising and falling. Ukyo, a faint wince as he rotated his arm. Even Kohaku, unbowed and proud, stood a hair more still than usual, her strength banked like a flame.
Senku exhaled, slow and quiet.
“We’ll use the meat ,” he said.
There was no declaration in his tone. Just a decision—measured, precise, inevitable.
The words rolled across the group like a tide, unspoken relief unraveling in its wake. They were scientists, warriors, survivors—but they were still human. And hunger, in the end, was a language they all spoke.
Senku didn’t linger. He stepped back, giving way to the ones who knew how to carve and clean, to make something useable out of bone and sinew. Matsukaze was already at work, Hyoga beside him with characteristic quiet. Even Ginro—usually the first to shirk hard labor—had found a knife.
And then there was Ryusui.
His gaze, ever skyward, now turned groundward—decisive, efficient. He reached for the makeshift communicator: a crude, genius construction of salvaged coils and amplification plates, lashed together with wire and stone, more warhorn than telephone. It crackled to life with a static buzz, oscillating like the throat of some ancient beast.
He brought it to his lips and grinned like a man calling down the gods.
“ François ,” he said, voice bold, commanding, as though addressing the heavens. “ Your chef’s hands are required. We’ve got crocodile on the menu. Come to the riverbank. I expect perfection .”
The static sputtered. A beat passed.
Then came the reply—refined, warm, as crisp as a pressed napkin.
“ Understood. I’ll be there shortly. And rest assured, monsieur Ryusui... even crocodile shall taste like triumph .”
Ryusui lowered the communicator with a smile of perfect satisfaction. He looked over his shoulder at the camp beginning to stir—tools drawn, fires kindled, blades glinting as they worked—and gave a small, approving nod.
The sun had begun its slow descent behind the canopy, casting long shadows across the bank. A fire was lit—not for light, but for warmth, for cooking, for spirit. Around it, the crew took shape, bone-weary but alive. There were no grand speeches, no victory cries. Just motion. Quiet, precise, necessary motion.
Senku sat with his elbows on his knees, watching the sparks rise.
The crocodiles would not be remembered. But the moment might. Not for the kill. Not even for the meal. But for what it gave them:
Another day.
Another chance.
And, perhaps, the first real taste of home since they’d left the sea behind.
The crocodile's body lay across the riverbed like some ancient beast dragged out from myth—its belly upturned to the sky, limbs splayed, the bulk of it still refusing to yield entirely to death. Its thick tail had already been claimed—hacked off cleanly by Hyoga’s spear and hauled aside for smoking, the muscle expertly scored in tidy, diagonal slashes. The ribcage, half-flayed, yawned open like the hull of a sunken canoe, abandoned generations ago and only now unearthed by purpose. Each blow of the axe was met with methodical knife-work—sharp, rhythmic, quiet. There was no ceremony to it. Only the strange reverence that comes from survival.
Kohaku was crouched low, knees firm in the silted riverbank, her hands already stained dark with effort. Her blade—flint, long as her forearm—slid between sinew and joint with the confidence of someone who knew how bodies worked in motion and in stillness. There was no hesitation in her cuts, no waste. Her golden hair clung to her jaw in damp, escaping strands, half-freed from its confined ponytail. Her stone platform heels, mud-caked but resolute, never once slipped.
She moved like a force of nature. Not urgent. Just inevitable.
Beside her, Tsukasa carved through bone with his stone axe, each strike deliberate and unhurried. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, forearms streaked with the red and ochre marks of labor, though his expression remained unchanged—calm, focused, like the meat was simply another puzzle the world had asked him to solve.
“ You’re surprisingly delicate with your cuts ,” Kohaku said at length, not lifting her gaze. Her tone was easy, but not idle—it carried the familiar ring of a hunter acknowledging another.
Tsukasa didn’t look up. “It’s an animal. Not an enemy. ”
Kohaku's lips tugged sideways. “ A distinction you make often? ”
“ When it matters .”
She exhaled, amused. Not a laugh, exactly—but the closest thing to one that didn’t interrupt her work. “ Well, I’m just relieved Senku wasn’t the first to reach it. He’d be halfway through a lecture on reptilian kidney function by now, while the rest of us starve to death on principle .”
“ Accurate ,” said a voice—crisp, sun-dry, and smugly timed. “ Though I maintain you’d die enlightened .”
Kohaku turned, already knowing. Senku stood just behind them, half-leaning against a downed log like a figure someone had accidentally whittled out of thought. One foot crossed lazily over the other, arms folded. His white coat was rolled up past his elbows, smudged with travel and soot. Somehow, his hair still flared skyward, defying not only gravity but the general weariness of the day. It caught the fading light like a crown—silver with a defiant streak.
He wasn’t watching her, not directly. But his gaze skimmed the edges of the camp—the fire ring, the stacked tools, the shadows that moved behind trees. Ever calculating. Always elsewhere.
Kohaku tilted her head. “I thought you’d be fussing over the lab boat. Not loitering like a tragic character from a forgotten epic .”
“I don’t loiter ,” Senku replied evenly. “ I oversee .”
“ You look like you’re brooding .”
“I calculate in silence. It just happens to look cinematic. ”
Tsukasa let out something that wasn’t quite a laugh—more like a breath carrying the shape of one. His axe came down again with a satisfying crunch.
“ You came to check the meat? ” he asked without looking back.
Senku shrugged one shoulder. “I came to ensure no one ruptured a bile duct and turned our dinner into a chemical weapon. And maybe to stretch my legs. You people hoard all the fun.”
Kohaku gave a soft, sardonic noise. “ Trade you. You carve, and I get to fiddle with sulfur and hope it doesn’t explode .”
Senku arched a brow. “ I already handle cold-blooded monsters daily. It’s called leadership. ”
That coaxed a rare huff from Tsukasa—a quiet exhale, brief and dry, as if even he couldn’t help it.
Senku’s gaze drifted to the horizon, where the last blush of sun slipped behind the trees and the evening began to claim its hour. The air cooled around the edges. He shifted, but didn’t move from the log. Still poised. Still apart.
“ François should be here soon ,” he said, more to the trees than to the people. “ Ryusui was yelling into that megaphone like a deity. If it didn’t echo back to the Perseus, I’ll give up my leadership to Magma .”
Kohaku smiled faintly. “ I hope Suika comes too. Camp’s always brighter with her around .”
Senku’s expression didn’t change. But something behind it did. His voice, when it came, was quieter.
“ She makes it easier to remember what we’re trying to save. ”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It settled over the camp like a shared breath—light, heavy, warm.
And in that moment, Senku remembered.
The night of the festival. The firelight licking gold along the river’s edge. Kohaku dancing—not for anyone, not even for herself, but for the memory of a world she had never seen. He had watched her then, from the fringe of celebration, trying not to be seen watching. Her movements had been wild, radiant. Not rehearsed. Not pretty. Real.
And it had struck him—not with romance, not with awe, but with the sheer, impossible weight of it all.
She was alive. And this was the world they were trying to rebuild.
He had never said a word about it.
He never would.
But the image lived in him like science did—in full, merciless clarity.
Now, she sheathed her blade and made her way to him, not as a soldier returning, but simply as herself. She dropped onto the log beside him without preamble, close but not touching, her knees muddied and her arms streaked. She didn’t lean. She never did. But the nearness of her felt intentional.
Senku didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to.
Tsukasa’s voice broke the quiet. “ The meat’s clean. Enough for everyone. Twice over, if we’re careful .”
Senku nodded once. Still watching the dark between the trees. “ Then we wait .”
But it wasn’t idle waiting—not here.
It was filled with the flick of flint and the clatter of stone. The quiet coordination of people who knew one another in the way only survival could teach. Chrome let out a mild curse as something collapsed in his makeshift grill. Hyoga muttered an adjustment. The scent of river and smoke curled upward like incense for a god no longer watching.
And somewhere beyond the trees, there was the faintest tremor. Wheels over root. A distant voice rising.
François was coming.
Civilization approached—not with fanfare, but with flavor.
And dinner, at long last, would be worthy of the fight it took to earn it.
Night fell slow and amber, like honey poured too long—thick and glowing, the kind of dusk that felt earned after a day of sweat and sun. It melted into the skin, into the dirt, into the lungs of those who had carved their survival from tooth and fire. The riverbank exhaled with them—quieting now, softened to the rustle of drying leaves, the sleepy snap of bark splitting in fire, the whisper of flames tracing the underbellies of logs.
Above the low crackle, sparks rose and wandered—drawn skyward in fits, forming momentary constellations no one had names for yet. And maybe they never would. Laughter waned to murmurs, the kind that didn’t need meaning. Just presence. Just people still alive. Bellies full. Knives sheathed. The taste of charred meat and smoke still rich on every tongue, holding in it something ancestral—something that said, we lived again today.
But Senku had not rested.
Not even with the others softening into sleep or firelight ease. He stood apart from the circle, half-shadowed near a thicket of reeds, crouched low with one arm braced to his knee. The other hand gripped a crude but clever thing: a bulb of handblown glass, threaded with copper filament and laced to a thermal pack that pulsed faintly at his hip. It flickered like a captured star—its light strange and golden, neither fire nor moon.
Gen had sworn it wouldn’t explode.
Gen had also taken two steps back, arms crossed and eyes narrowed with theatrical concern.
Senku, for his part, was unconcerned.
He tilted the light upward, and the reeds hissed with motion. Moths—dozens of them, pale as breath—lifted in startled spirals. They caught the light like torn silk, each winged body feathered with minute orange dust. In the hush, their fluttering was loud as pages turning.
Senku’s mouth curved. “ Lepidoptera melanocornis, ” he whispered, half to himself, half to the air. His voice carried just enough to rouse curiosity, but not enough to invite interruption. “Migration pattern confirmed. And those wing stains—no question.”
Behind him, Chrome shuffled into view, rubbing a palm across his face as he chewed on the last strip of crocodile tail. “You naming bugs again, or doing that thing where you talk to yourself and pretend it’s not weird?”
Senku didn’t look away. “They fed on corn,” he said, and his tone changed—sharpened, charged, electrified. It was that tone he only used when he was standing inches from a world-altering truth. “See that pigment? The way it clings to the wing veins? That's not wild pollen. That’s anthocyanin. Engineered. Zea mays. ”
Chrome blinked, sluggish, chewing slower. “Which means…?”
“It means they came from a field,” Senku said, rising now, the flashlight trembling faintly in his grip—not from instability, but from the sheer rush of it. “A field , Chrome. Of cultivated corn.”
Even the firelight seemed to lean in.
“That’s agriculture. That’s not some leftover grove or accident. That’s intent. That’s a brain and a hand and a plan. That’s humans. Alive. Organized. Farming. Now. ” He turned, eyes wide, grin feral, voice lowering to something hoarse with restrained awe. “We’re not just close. We’re breathing their air. ”
Back by the fire, Kohaku stirred from where she’d been seated, quiet, observant. Her gaze, feline in its alertness, slid toward him. The flames etched her in bronze and shadow—muscle, tension, the steel beneath her beauty. “So someone’s been farming here,” she said softly.
Senku met her eyes and nodded, a heartbeat of silence between them.
“And they’re smart enough to grow corn on American soil,” he said. “That’s no small feat. That’s knowledge. That’s data. That’s civilization waiting to be rediscovered.”
He turned, the next thought already halfway to his lips, meant for Tsukasa—
But Tsukasa was no longer at the fire.
He stood apart now, at the edge of the tree line, cast in half-silhouette—statuesque and still, as if carved by what he heard.
Head tilted. Listening.
The fire popped.
The reeds shifted.
And then it came.
A sound too thin for the Stone World. Too precise. Not bird. Not breeze. Not wood. Not fire.
A crack .
Not loud.
But true .
Tsukasa’s spine straightened, muscles winding taut as drawn cord. His eyes sharpened like wet obsidian. The camp froze, though most didn’t yet understand why.
Then it came again.
Crack.
And now even the ones who had never heard it knew.
A voice older than memory. Mechanical. Merciless.
Not a branch breaking. Not a predator’s footfall.
A sound that had once belonged only to gods of war.
A sound that should have died with the last rusted barrel of the old world.
A report.
Gunfire.
Tsukasa turned, his voice slicing across the camp like a drawn blade. “ Retreat. ”
No panic. Just iron.
Several heads jerked up—confused, slow.
But not Kohaku.
The chaos erupted like a split atom—an explosion of screams, gunfire, and splintered ground. But all of it dimmed, muffled like he was underwater. The world narrowed to a pinhole, collapsing in on itself until there was only her .
Kohaku.
She was moving with the others, retreating—but he saw it before she did. That open stretch of land. That too-slow turn of her head. That subtle shift in her shoulders.
She realized it a heartbeat too late.
Senku’s legs had already launched him forward, mouth open, the air already torn from his lungs before his scream could break free.
"KOHAKU!"
But it came too late.
He should have known.
The terrain. The layout. The likelihood of hostiles following predictable ambush paths. He had the schematics of the terrain memorized, the friction coefficients of loose soil underfoot.
He should have known.
But there had been no time.
Now, the scream left his throat like shrapnel.
“KOHAKU!”
The gunfire cracked the horizon open, and in that fractal second before the first bullet hit, Senku calculated the chamber cycle: 750 rounds per minute, muzzle velocity 820 m/s, with a 6.5 kg receiver and estimated recoil dampened by elevation.
Reload time: 4.6 seconds. Enough. Barely.
Then the shot connected.
Her body jerked—shoulder first—blood blooming like a solar flare caught in motion, and for a fraction of time, everything froze.
The math vanished.
There was only her.
The second bullet slammed into her sword arm, her body wrenching violently, muscles misfiring in real time. Her weapon clattered to the dirt, fingers twitching against the grass. She staggered—never fully down—until the third impact twisted her frame with a final, merciless violence.
And then—
She collapsed.
It felt like gravity snapped in half.
Senku's knees hit the ground, the momentum pitching him forward as if reality itself couldn’t hold him upright. He crawled, crawled, the raw bark of stone chewing his palms as he dragged himself across twenty meters of sheer unforgivable time.
By the time he reached her, she was no longer standing.
She was a smear of blood and breathless defiance on the grass, her golden hair tangled across her face like a final veil. Her arm, her shoulder—they gushed arterial red with an urgency that outpaced thought.
He gathered her—crushed her—to him. Her head lolled, hair catching on the stubble of his jaw. Her blood seeped into the lines of his skin like ink.
“Don’t you dare,” he choked. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
Her lashes fluttered—barely.
And when her eyes opened, wide and shivering and shot with red, there was no panic. No desperation.
Just that stillness.
That fatal stillness.
“Don’t… let go,” she whispered, voice tissue-thin.
Not a plea. A farewell.
“I won’t,” he breathed, but even as he said it, she was already slipping.
Behind him, the world convulsed. The rat-a-tat of gunfire resumed—but slower. He counted:
Eleven shots. Three-second pause. The gunman was on his last clip.
He had to be.
Time left: 4.6 seconds.
Senku surged up, calculations be damned, lifting her against his chest. She was heavy with blood-loss, heavy with finality. But she was still.
Still breathing. Barely.
He ran.
Each footfall was a seismic rupture. His heartbeat synchronized with the chambered burst of automatic fire: one-two, one-two-three. And then—he heard it.
The rhythm paused.
Reload.
Now.
“RYUSUI!”
A silhouette cut through the smoke—hand extended.
Senku hurled himself toward the lab boat, Kohaku locked in his grip. Hands pulled them in. The hatch slammed. Water swallowed the boat whole.
Silence dropped.
But it was not peace.
It was the silence of grief not yet earned.
Senku sank to the floor, cradling her. Blood pooled beneath them like a second river.
And for a long, frozen moment, he did not speak.
Kohaku drifted.
It was like floating through warm black silk, her body weightless, her mind feather-thin. The pain had begun to dull—no, not dull, just distant. Her arm, her shoulder, her chest—they throbbed like things that no longer belonged to her. Detached, far away.
The voices around her were muffled. Blurry . Shapes of sound, swelling and breaking like waves crashing against a distant shore. Two voices. Familiar. Urgent.
Yelling.
Senku. Ryusui.
They were shouting. Screaming, almost. The water trembled with it, the current disturbed. It rolled over her like thunder underwater, crashing, pulling her in and out of consciousness.
"Hold her down!"
"She’s going into shock!"
"Don’t you think I KNOW THAT?!"
Senku’s voice cracked through the static in her skull. Frantic. Ripping. She had never heard him like that. Not even in battle. Not even in loss. There was something broken in him now, and he didn’t care who saw it. Didn't care that Ryusui was yelling back just as loud.
“We need to stop the bleeding—Senku—SENKU!”
“Get me pressure packs—right NOW—no, fuck it, hand me the silver nitrate! And morphine, just—keep her awake!”
Their shadows swirled above her like gods at war, frantic and devastating. She felt a searing pressure at her arm. Screamed, or maybe just thought she did. The pain snapped her back for a moment—just long enough to see him.
Senku.
His hands were red, soaked in her blood, slipping across her skin as he tried to find a way—any way—to plug the wound. His gloves had long since been ripped off, his fingers raw, trembling. His face—Gods, his face —was something she'd never forget. Eyes blown wide, jaw clenched, jaw shaking .
A tear slid off his cheek, vanishing into the wound.
“You're not dying here.” His voice shook as he ripped open a packet with his teeth. “You’re not. I didn’t come this far just to lose you—not like this. Not when I never—”
He cut himself off. She could barely hear him over the roar of her own pulse. Her eyes rolled back again.
And then—hands. Cold at first. One on her jaw. One on her heart.
A pressure against her mouth.
A kiss.
But not gentle.
Not a farewell.
It was wild.
Unforgiving.
A scream funneled through his lips, a prayer disguised as passion, a scientist's trembling attempt at resurrection with nothing but his mouth and madness to anchor her back to life.
His lips crushed against hers—hard, wet, open—desperation bleeding into desperation, blood into breath, breath into want. Their mouths collided, parted, collided again, teeth grazing, lips slipping. It was messy. Too much. Not enough.
And somewhere between the chaos,
saliva spilled—slick and silver as it clung to their mouths, stringing between them when he pulled back only a fraction, then surged forward again.
Kohaku’s cracked consciousness snapped. Her pulse, faint and flailing, ignited.
Her body couldn’t move—but her lips responded. A flicker. A twitch. Parting just enough to taste him—salt, metal, heat—his agony, his guilt, his trembling fear. He wasn’t breathing for himself anymore. He was trying to breathe her back into existence.
She saw him through a haze of red and light.
Not the mind that bent nature.
Not the tactician who could speak to the stars.
Just a man with wet lashes, a split lip, and the taste of blood and saliva and grief on his tongue.
His forehead dropped to hers, sticky with sweat and breath and the heat of something dangerously close to madness. His voice came low, guttural, stripped to nothing.
“You were always stronger than me…”
A pause. A shuddering inhale against her cheek.
“Even now. And I—I sent you in like it didn’t matter. Like you didn’t matter. Like I could just—”
He broke.
Head bowed. Shoulders trembling.
“Like I could keep pretending this wasn’t the only thing I ever wanted.”
His hand—shaking—came to her face again. Thumb sliding across her cheekbone, smearing blood and tears and the mess of it all like paint. His other arm pulled her in tighter, fingers splayed across her back, her skin hot beneath his even though she was still barely conscious. Still barely holding on.
The world narrowed to just breath and mouth and trembling mouths—hot, open, tasting, begging. He kissed her again, wetter this time, deeper. Like he didn’t care who was watching. Like he needed her lips, her warmth, her heartbeat thudding faintly against his chest, to convince himself she wasn’t already gone.
Their mouths moved like fire consuming wood—gasping, cracking, unstoppable.
Saliva coated their lips, their chins, stringing when their lips parted, breathless and slick.
Kohaku’s lips twitched against his.
Then parted.
Alive.
Just a sliver of movement—but it was enough to send his heart into a frenzy, into orbit. Her breath touched his cheek, shallow and raw.
And he exhaled like a man being un-drowned.
Behind them, no one moved. Ryusui turned away—not out of shame, but reverence.
Senku’s hand curled at the base of her neck now, his thumb stroking the hinge of her jaw, his forehead still pressed to hers as if physical distance might snap her back into darkness.
“You absolute idiot,” he whispered, voice breaking over her lips like waves over stone. “You beautiful idiot. You think I wouldn’t burn down the world to keep you breathing?”
Then he kissed her one last time—so slow, so deep, their mouths locked, trembling—before he pulled back an inch. A trail of saliva clung to his bottom lip, connecting him to her.
Her mouth was still open.
And her pulse was still beating.
“You idiot, ” he choked, voice cracking again. “You always run ahead. Always throw yourself in the fire first—because you knew I wouldn’t. Because you knew I was too much of a coward.”
He leaned over her again, pressing gauze to her wound so hard his own knuckles turned white. His voice dropped lower, not to her now, but to Ryusui behind him.
“Her pulse is dropping—I'm not gonna let her bleed out, not like this—grab the hemostat—NOW!”
Ryusui’s voice returned, panicked but clearer.
“We can cauterize with the laser filament—Senku, we need to move fast.”
“Then DO it. Cut what you need. She’s losing blood faster than we can replace it, and we’re running out of goddamn TIME—”
Another wave of pain shattered through her, and she gasped, arching, choking on the scream that didn’t come.
Senku pressed his face against hers again.
“Stay with me. Stay with me. You don’t get to leave before I tell you. Not until I say it. Not until I—I”
Her fingers twitched.
Her eyes opened again.
For one moment—one heartbeat—she saw him.
Lit by the cold glow of science and desperation.
Beautiful. Wild. Hers.
Her mouth was still open.
And her pulse was still beating.
Senku froze. For one shattered second, he just watched her.
Blood still bloomed across her shoulder, dark and arterial, spreading down his shirt like a signature he couldn’t wash off. But her lashes had fluttered. Her lips had moved. And her chest—Gods, her chest—was rising, shallow and uneven.
“Okay,” he whispered, voice still shaking, still wet with her breath. “Okay. You’re here. You’re still here.”
Then—like the world had slammed back into him—he moved.
All heat vanished from his face. It calcified into purpose.
His hands left her reluctantly, lingering a heartbeat too long on her skin before he pulled back and became science again. The man vanished. What was left was a machine of thought, calculation, survival.
He tore open a side drawer on the mobile lab’s counter—splash of glass, cotton, dried reagents. His brain ran equations faster than his mouth could breathe:
Exit wound ratio: shallow. Not through and through. Internal bleed possible.
Bullet speed: 400 m/s.
Distance: 13 meters. Time of impact: 0.0325 seconds.
Reload cycle: every 6.2 seconds.
“Chrome!” he barked, voice hoarse but unyielding now. “I need the plasma torch. Ryusui—hold her arm at a thirty-degree elevation. We can’t let the brachial artery dump everything.”
“But—” Ryusui started.
“Now.”
There was no hesitation in his voice. Only thunder. Only war.
Chrome appeared with the plasma tool, face white. “We’re cauterizing?”
“We’re not losing her.”
Senku dropped to his knees beside her again, now soaked in blood, in sweat, in the fading heat of a kiss that had not saved her—but bought her seconds.
His hands didn’t tremble now. They couldn’t.
He found the entry wound—clean, if anything could be called that—and poured alcohol over it. Kohaku jolted beneath his fingers, barely conscious, but reacting. Good. Pain was good. Pain meant nerves. Nerves meant the spinal cord wasn’t—
Focus.
He applied the torch.
And she screamed.
A sound so ragged, so raw, it cracked through the lab like lightning. Not a gasp, not a whimper—but a warrior’s scream, ripped from the furnace of her gut. It wasn’t just pain—it was fury. Survival. Refusal.
Senku clenched his jaw. He didn’t stop. He couldn’t.
The hiss of cauterized flesh roared in his ears—but her scream cut deeper.
Her body arched, one leg spasming, teeth gritted against the next wail that broke loose—and Senku, still holding the torch, dropped his forehead to hers, his voice breaking in real time.
“I know. I know it hurts—I’m sorry—I’m so fucking sorry—”
He would have taken it from her if he could. Every inch of it. Every burn. Every bullet. Every scream.
But she was the one bleeding. She was the one he hadn’t protected.
Her hands had always been weapons. But now—twitching, trembling—they were just hands. And she used them both to grab his shirt, white-knuckled and blind, clutching him like an anchor in the firestorm.
Her scream quieted—but only because she was choking on it.
His voice cracked. “You’re not dying. Not for me. Not now. I won’t let it—”
He pressed the torch to the second wound.
And again—she screamed.
It wasn’t as loud this time. Her throat was already shredded. But it still forced Chrome to flinch, Ukyo to turn away, Ryusui to hold back a curse.
Senku stayed.
Even when her nails dragged down his chest. Even when the smell of seared flesh punched through his every thought. Even when his own eyes blurred, water brimming just enough to catch the glow of the plasma in reflection.
The wound hissed. Sealed. Stabilized.
“Blood pressure’s tanking,” Chrome murmured.
Senku was already ahead. His hands moved to the IV flask they’d built three weeks ago—a contingency for infection, not hemorrhage, but they’d make it work. A mix of saline and glucose. A makeshift tube, tightened with a sterilized glass needle, pierced the crook of her elbow.
“You’re going to hate the taste of this,” he muttered, voice low, distracted—but still her. “But I need you conscious. I need you to breathe, Kohaku. Not just for me—for science. For humanity. For that dumb promise we made, remember?”
Her lips twitched.
Her throat moved.
A breath pulled through her chest, shallow—but hers.
Senku swallowed hard. His mouth still tasted like her. Blood, salt, tears. His lip was cut where their teeth had met, and a single string of saliva still clung to the corner of his mouth.
But all of that—his panic, his guilt, his desire—had no place here now.
He was a scientist again.
And he would not lose her.
Not to a bullet.
Not to blood.
Not when the last kiss still lingered between them like a promise not yet broken.
And so he stayed beside her—hands steady, heart undone—fighting not against death, but for the right to love her in a world that still dared to live.