The school rooftop was often a safe bet for a place of quiet, even at the bustling lunch hour. The few students that came up here did so because they wanted to be alone, and so even if there were others, they—fortunately for Rin—seldom chose to interact. Some quiet was all he needed, especially after the tiring altercation with Bango. Rin opted not to think about it. He had more important matters than that. The November air sent a crisp chill down his throat, and his breathing left a misty trail that dissipated up to join the light grey stratus blanketing the sky.
Diving into his schoolbag, Rin was soon able to retrieve the hefty package that had been, up until now, not just an extra weight on his shoulder, but a weight on his mind. He hadn’t even been able to properly concentrate on his sketching on account of one tiny detail: he recognised the handwriting on the box. Piercing the film with his nail, Rin severed the tape, wielding his finger like a box cutter, and emptied out the contents onto the bench nearby.
The way Rin sat was strange. He wasn’t actually sitting at all. He was perched on his ankles like some kind of bird, crouching like a gremlin over their hoard of treasure with his knees tucked into his chest. A seagull, perched on a railing nearby in a strikingly similar fashion, gave Rin a very odd look and squawked. The boy jumped.
“Go away, will you?”
When he found it looking at his box of sushi sitting nearby, he picked up a cucumber roll and threw it. The roll hit the bird square on the head, causing it to emit another shrill, cut-off sound, after which it proceeded to tumble backwards off the railing.
“Stupid bird,” Rin cursed under his breath. He popped another roll into his mouth and tore off the dusty packaging around what he was holding. A large knife, nearly the length of his forearm, clattered to the bench. Rin’s eyes shot wide open and he quickly buried the knife from view in case anyone else had seen. They hadn’t. There was no-one near him at all, as it happened. Thank god for that. Rin picked up the knife and viewed it from all angles, marvelling at the intricate design.
This relic looked like it belonged in a museum, rather than something wrapped in brown paper and addressed to a highschooler. What in the world was this? Well, a knife, for starters, he thought, but Rin had never seen anything like it. The scarab emblem on the hilt was a telling detail, and the guard extended on both sides in a curved shape that resembled a pair of wings. Rin considered himself an expert in many things, but bladesmithing was not one of them. Whoever made this, he thought, clearly knew what they were doing. He removed the sheath, and the steel shone brilliantly in the concealed sunlight. The blade was long and winding, and he didn’t even need to touch the edge in order to know how deathly sharp it was. Rin stared at it for a moment longer in sheer awe, clutching this masterwork of design. Looking into the metal, Rin could see a perfect reflection. That was odd. Normal knives weren’t such effective mirrors, were they? Of course, his only point of comparison was the brushed stainless steel that was in kitchen knives. That was completely different.
The oddities didn’t stop there. Examining further from a few different angles, Rin saw the reflective property of the metal was only on one side. About halfway through its width, the knife looked cracked—as though it had been split in two. He’d never seen a blade sustain that kind of damage before. What had caused this, he wondered. The split was so clean, it looked deliberate.
The longer he held it, Rin became consumed with a strange sense of foreboding, as though what he were doing was somehow wrong. The sinking pit in his stomach told him his possession of this just wasn't right, like he had stolen it from its rightful owner. But how could he have? This was all addressed to him in that package he received. He, Rinkaku Harigane, hadn’t done anything wrong, had he? Unless, this wasn’t his doing, but rather…
Sheathing the knife in its fading leather scabbard, Rin wrapped it back up in the paper and took to the second item that had fallen out of the box. He now held a large, leather-bound notebook, and a heavy one at that.
“The Tomb of Horus’ Banished Disciple…” Rin read off the title. “What the hell? Sounds familiar, far too familiar…” He scratched behind his neck as he thought, “Reminds me of something…”
His sentence was finished for him when he opened the cover.
“Knew it.”
The scrawl was faded through many years of wear, but written as clear as day below a statement of ownership was the signature of Katsuro Harigane. Rin could recognise that handwriting from anywhere.
“What the hell have you sent me, old man?”
Rin idly traced the man’s signature with his finger. The ink had dried long ago. Leafing briefly through a few pages near the beginning, Rin found nothing remarkable about it. The pages were yellow and had curled in a few places, the binding was peeling off slightly, but neither of those were noteworthy. The book was just old. He couldn’t be bothered to trail through his father’s research if you put a gun to his head. Besides, the lunch break would be over soon. He only had so much time.
“Wait a minute—” He had just seen something on the inside cover.
It was quite hard to decipher at first, but if there was anyone that could read his father’s writing, it was him. Scrawled in large, faded grey letters, as though written by a blunt pencil, read the following:
Rinkaku
153 to 160
Use the blade
I never wanted to involve you in this
Forgive me
Rin didn’t know what to make of it. His forehead creased as he squinted at the text. What was this? Some kind of instruction? His father had been in a rush at the time of writing this, he could tell. After all, he hadn’t had the time to write out the kanji for his name, instead only using hiragana. “Use the blade”? “Forgive me”? He repeated the phrases in his head for a moment or two. What on earth is he talking about? Forgive him? Forgive him for what? Well, there were many things Rin could forgive him for. That didn't mean he was going to. He unwrapped the strange relic and gave it another look. What did he mean by using it? Using it, how, exactly? As a weapon? There wasn’t anyone nearby that posed a threat. Besides, it looked so fragile that Rin thought it might shatter on contact if he tried to harm anyone with it.
A thousand further questions popped into mind as he tried to make sense of his father’s hastily scribbled cripticisms. There was a chance that this didn’t mean anything, that none of this meant anything. His father could’ve just sent him a meaningless novelty gift from one of his “excavations”, along with a record of discoveries. Like hell he cared about that! Rin had his own things to do. He wanted nothing to do with the dusty burial mounds and relics his father spent his days gawking over like how a magpie lusted after a wedding ring.
All he had to go off were those numbers: 153 and 160. What jumped to Rin’s mind were page references. He flicked ahead a few pages in the notebook, seeing if they were numbered. To his relief, they were.
I wanted to hear from you, old man, Rin said to himself as he flipped through page upon page of his father’s senseless ramblings.
But not like this, not like this.
I wanted you to come home.
The voice inside his head was of a younger Rin, a Rin who wondered why his father never spent any time at home, or with him. There was a reason why, but that Rin wasn’t ready to hear the truth, a truth that an older Rin had since come to terms with.
The truth was that Katsuro didn’t care about Rin.
The truth, at least according to him, was that he never had.
Flashes of the past, static memories came to his mind: an empty seat at the dinner table; a disappointed frown on a woman’s face; a locked office door; and a man who would much rather have his head buried in a book than be with his only son. Rin shook his head.
He didn’t want to think about that, not now.
Soon, the seemingly endless flipping of pages yielded the number he was looking for. For a moment, Rin stared at the page. Then, he turned the book on its side, squinted at it for a few seconds, before turning it upside down.
“What the hell am I reading?”
From pages 153 onwards, Rin was beset with page after page of nonsensical scribbles. They looked like the content of a linguist’s fever dream. Squinting at them again and turning the book upside down, Rin could vaguely make out some similarities to Arabic. That aside, the text bore no resemblance to any script he had seen, least of all Japanese. If this was supposed to be understandable, then he was American. That was how it seemed at the moment. Was his dad pulling his leg here? Was this all some kind of cruel joke, designed just to waste his time and wind him up?
“Screw you, old man.”
Rin cursed the mental image of his father, unceremoniously throwing the book down onto the bench. The leather hit the wooden surface with a dull thud, striking the handle of the knife he had put down previously and causing it to fly off the tabletop.
Rin cursed again, diving after it before it could skid too far out of his grasp. Despite how pissed off he was growing at this whole ordeal, he couldn’t let himself be seen with this thing, or let someone else discover it. Questions would be asked, questions that Rin really did not have the time, energy, or bother to have to answer. Retrieving the damaged implement, Rin couldn’t help but study it some more. He traced its fingers along the intricate grooves that ran the length of the hilt, wondering what the runes etched into the back meant.
That was when he spotted the resemblance. The runes etched into the back of the blade were the same as in the book. Rin looked from one to the other and back again. What the hell? Was his first thought, and comprised a significant part of the ones that followed.
This clearly was no joke. His father never told jokes.
Then what? What did it all mean? An interest in the illegible text suddenly re-ignited, Rin balanced his chin on the palm of one hand propped up by his elbow, taking care to brush his hair out of the way lest it cover his eyes. He refocused on these strange runes. Using the tip of the knife like a stylus, he traced along the lines. The mirrored edge of the blade was facing him as it happened and, as he did this more and more, Rin found himself gazing into the blade’s reflection at some perfectly legible Japanese print.
“What the—”
There was no mistaking it. In the blade’s reflection, he saw Japanese print laid out on the page. Looking back at the notebook, there were the original, illegible runes. What the hell was going on? Rin’s gaze bounced unceasing between the blade’s shiny surface and the yellowed pages of book like a ball at a table tennis rally. His head was starting to hurt—not, this time, on account of his chronic lack of sleep. He was now convinced his eyes were playing tricks on him.
Putting the blade down, Rin rubbed his eyes with balled fists, feeling his hair flop across his face like a curtain as strange patterns danced across his darkened vision from the pressure on his retina. Opening them again, he swore once more. That hadn’t helped, only exacerbating the pain behind his eyes. Was this what the sleep experts meant by sleep deprivation hallucinations? Rin really wished they’d come another time. He had something crucial to take care of right now. Rin had a million things to be figuring out, here, and dealing with hallucinations was not at the top of his priority list.
Despite the pain and fatigue, the question of what all this really meant still bothered him. Picking the knife back up, Rin held it sideways, using the reflecting side of the blade as a mirror in which to read these cryptic runes. His eyes tried to wander, but were kept in place by sheer willpower at this point. He had to make sense of it all, and didn’t have much time yet.
What he read, however, his mind refused to accept.
“No, no, no, nonononononono,” Rin muttered to himself, after all seven pages of cryptic runes had been translated and devoured right before his eyes. Closing the book very gently, he laid the blade on top of it like a sacred treasure, remembering how he had sent it clattering to the ground not ten minutes ago.
“This… can’t be real…”
Long after his string of elided “no”s had concluded, his muttering still continued.
“Dad, for crying out loud. What have you done?”
If this was all a practical joke, he had fallen for it in a major way. He was half expecting for someone to jump out behind him and yell he was this year’s April Fool, before he realised that it was, in fact, still November. The contents of what he had just read spoke of a ritual, one that involved this blade in a horrific process.
The powers it was said to grant sounded like they were lifted from a manga. It seemed so fantastical. However, the fact that this blade, a blade that carried such an aura with it, was sitting right in front of him right this moment, made it all seem far too real.
“I… can’t accept this…”
He really couldn’t. Not yet. Rin felt the nervous sweat on his face grow cold, and he shivered. He looked around. The wind wasn’t particularly strong, and there was no-one nearby. He checked his watch. Afternoon class was about to start—that was why. He had to get going. However, nothing had ever been able to make his blood run cold like what he had read about in that notebook. Like most his age, Rin had desensitised himself to tonnes upon tonnes of senseless horror films for the sake of it, but this was something else. This was terror in its purest form: truly incomprehensible. It wasn’t just his mind that disagreed, but his entire body felt like rejecting what he had just learnt. It was foreign, alien. He shivered. Rin didn’t like it at all.
He wasn’t supposed to know this.
His father wasn’t supposed to know this.
No-one was supposed to know this.
Rin hastily shoved everything back into his bag, legging it back down the stairs before he was able to scare himself anymore with its contents. For once, he was grateful for the monotony of class, hoping it would distract him from his own mind.
Outside the school, the day continued like any other. Senketsu was situated on a fairly busy city street not too far away from Chiba’s central business district. Even during the middle of the day, a time when you’d expect most to be stuck in their offices, attending meetings, powering through busywork, or maybe chowing down on a spot of lunch if their employers were generous enough, the foot traffic nearby the school’s entrance gates was substantial. Men, women and children, all engrossed in that same cultural solidarity that dictated their uniformity, went about their lives in that same blissful ignorance. Yes, they had their problems: problems with work, problems with family, the list went on.
However, none were forced to live with the existential knowledge that the key to power beyond the facets of human comprehension lay in the hands of a seventeen-year-old boy. If they did, and knew the consequences and the dangers such an item attracted, they would all stay far, far away.
If any of them had been looking up at the rooftop—which, of course, they weren’t—they might’ve spotted a tall shadow outlined against the pale winter sky. A man was seated precariously on the rounded edge of a building’s rooftop, legs dangling over the edge with careless abandon as to what awaited below. Clad in that same jet black trench-coat and fedora, Hideyori Hakana couldn’t have looked any more out of place if he had tried. From the way his grin cut through the grey tedium of the day like a cut of a knife, it didn’t look like it bothered him all that much.
What made this strange man even stranger was what was held in his palm. One of his hands supported the rest of him on the metal surface behind, and the other rested on his knee. In that hand was an orb the size of a tennis ball. A few rays of sun fell from the sky like droplets of heaven. They hit the orbs' glassy surface and bounced within its depths, glinting despite the depressive cover of clouds overhead. If one looked carefully enough within its misty depths, one could see a near-perfect replica of the surrounding landscape, progressing in real time. The city-born birds flew over the man’s head, and the pedestrians walked by below, completely unaware.
Everything that happened around Hideyori also happened within his orb. You could compare the orb to a mirror, or a display to a camera situated at a bird’s eye vantage. In reality, it was neither. The orb held a perfect replica of the scene at hand. It captured a Moment in time, a peaceful Moment. One of the last for a long while, he thought.
Raising the orb up to his eye level, Hideyori nodded.
“I’ve seen enough; I’m satisfied.”
His tone was low, calm; the rasp of a smoker, a twang from Kansai. He closed his fist with a flourish, and the orb vanished with a gentle 'pop'. Where it had gone didn’t seem to matter; the move seemed intentional. Getting to his feet, the man crossed his arms and surveyed the street below one last time, the wind picking up the tails of his coat and sending them flapping out to his side.
“Time to test out the new merchandise.”
An actor performing to a rapturous applause, he threw his right arm out to his side, fingers splayed. In between his fingers appeared three more orbs. These were smaller, around the size of golf balls. Where had they come from? The steady thrum of energy that flowed from man’s third eye might just give a clue. His hair flowed with the wind like his coat, lifting off his face to reveal a dark patch over his right eye, leaving only two of his eyes visible: the one where an eye should be, and the other, where an eye definitely should not.
He tossed the orbs a foot up into the air, watching their ascent with fascination. Catching them, he threw them out across the street. The orbs sailed through the air, across the heads of the passers-by. They hit the ground, bounced once or twice, and rolled to a halt. The clinks of glass hitting the pavement attracted the attention of a few nearby, who looked around to try and spot the source of this strange happening. What made it even stranger was that by the time the pedestrian’s searching gazes swept by the rooftops, Hideyori had disappeared. The orbs, however, weren’t just there to be discarded. Each started glowing, before they all burst open in a symphony of shattered glass. Released from containment at last, six large figures suddenly made themselves known.
The most striking thing about them was their size.
To call them large would be underselling it. The smallest of them was two metres tall, and the largest was well over eight feet. Whatever these things were, it was painful to see that they had once been human. Any expression of gender became null and void, as copious muscle bulged from every part of their bodies. Spiderwebs of blood vessels, thick like hosepipes, throbbed loudly against the surface layer of skin stretched so taut it looked as though it were about to split open. Whatever scraps of clothing they once wore lay in torn tatters around their grossly magnified bodies, exposing bare skin around the arms, chest and thighs. To compare the muscle of these things to that the world’s most elite bodybuilders would like comparing the size of an ant to an elephant. The comparison was so nonexistent, it was downright unfair.
The next was their eye.
Like the cyclops, they only had one. It was as though someone had placed a vertical eye right in the middle of their face, only for that eye to take root in the skull like a parasite, growing so vast that it split the face itself clean open, exposing layers of raw, red muscle, and pushing all other parts of the face aside to make room for itself. The eye was the face's sole feature. The rest were barely visible, crumpled up against the ears on either side along with layers of split skin and muscle. Each eye was wide, staring and bulbous, the pupil flexing with the to-and-fro movement of industrial-sized sinews. They bulged out of the skull as though threatened to pop off with a sickening sound and give birth to an entirely new creature altogether.
The screams that followed from those nearby were entirely justified.
The creatures all stumbled about blind like infant demons, letting out visceral roars that shook the ground—a unholy combination of high tones, low tones, and everything else in between. It sounded like the anguished screams of the damned all crying out within one horribly amalgamated prison of flesh. Many of the people watching cried out in surprise, followed by disgust, and then terror, sprinting as fast as they could in the opposite direction. Any and all prior intention was abandoned immediately as primordial fear took root in their hearts. Others weren’t so lucky, and could only stand there, cemented in place, their faces and bodies paralysed in abject horror.
These rejected creations, abominations never supposed to see the light of day, attacked with no rhyme, reason, or mercy for the living. One man only had time to open his mouth before one of the horrifying creatures let loose a blow that ripped right through his stomach. Another wasn’t quick enough to evade, let alone escape. His body was slammed into the tarmac by two enormous fists with enough force to leave a small crater, his skull crushed like a cantaloupe, blood and grey matter painting the pavement.
Many more unfortunate victims followed, some of whom suffered fates far worse than death. But soon, all was still. The traffic ceased. The cars closest to the epicentre had been smashed to smithereens in the initial rampage. Anyone with sense had abandoned their vehicles once the carnage began. In the distance, the sirens of police cars could be heard.
With no more immediate targets to incite their wrath, all six of the Rejected turned in eerie unison towards the school whose gate they now approached. A beacon of power lay ahead of them, a pulsing psychic presence resonated with each of the eyes. That was where they were headed, following a single track towards their target, no matter who might get in their way.
A single voice spoke in their heads, the same voice, compelling them onwards. They had no choice but to listen to her. They would do as she said. The tortured screaming of their mangled souls would not cease, and nor would their march, until they had laid their hands on that blade.
Far enough away for his pleas to fall on the deaf walls of stone, Katsuro's bloodied face fell limp against his broken shoulder. Gus had gotten his way in the end. It was only a matter of time. After that, they had him taken away from that prison cell in Cairo, and back to Japan. His chest heaved up and down without reprieve. A hoarse sound brushed past his vocal cords, irreparably damaged long ago from his tortured yells. He could only make one sound, and he knew it wouldn’t reach. He knew he didn’t have long.
“Rinkaku…” he wheezed. “Be careful. They’re coming. I’m… sorry…”
