Katoru Ryuto

  March 3, 1979 - August 1, 2022

  Beatrice Ryuto

  April 26, 1981 - August 1, 2022

  The stones had few words, only names and dates. However, I knew these few words were important to me - important to my past.

  Katoru Ryuto, my father, was born and raised in Japan with no siblings. I remember the stories he always told me. He was a decent student growing up, making mostly A's and B's in school. He attended a local university in his hometown where he studied culinary arts to become a chef.

  When he graduated, he decided to apply for a job in his university's cafeteria. He always told me he didn't remember exactly how it happened, but even though he was hired as an assistant that cleaned tables and washed dishes, he ended up becoming head chef within a month.

  Two years ter, he met my mother, Beatrice Ryuto.

  She was only half Japanese, on her mother's side, and was born in America. She spent most of her life here, discovering a desire to study the English nguage and a passion for teaching. She graduated from a college, and decided to teach English to university students in Japan.

  She moved there and began teaching the semester after she graduated from school in America, and as it turned out, she ended up with a job at the same school as my father. They met on her first day working there, but to her surprise, she went home to her new apartment to find him living right next-door.

  They ended up falling in love, and within the year, they got married and my mother became pregnant with Kino. They eventually decided that while they were happy with their jobs and their new baby girl, they felt like they were missing something. Trying to find that something, they decided to relocate to America.

  They found a nice college town - a little on the smaller side - and decided to buy a small wooded property outside of the city that came with a nice cottage, perfect for a family of four. As if to celebrate their new home, I was conceived and ter born and raised in that little cottage, the very house I'm outside of right now.

  Of course, my parents’ past isn't all that I remember. It was as if everything pyed out in front of me like a movie, simultaneously being a little over 17 years long while only sting a second.

  I saw a younger version of myself living with my family, enjoying a peaceful life without any fighting or trouble of any kind.

  As a baby, my parents seemed to give me all the attention in the world, doting on me whenever they had the chance along with Kino, who seemed to think of me as her new favorite toy.

  As I grew, I began learning about everything the world had in store for me. The giant creatures that took care of me were ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’, and the short, stubby one was ‘Sis’, or ‘Kiki’.

  Mother, whenever she wasn't working at the local university, spent her time at home teaching me and Kiki English. Apparently, I also figured out that the nickname I gave Kino as a baby- Kiki - stuck until I died and lost my memories, but that’s not important right now.

  Around the time Kiki first started attending preschool, we had already mastered basic English, and Mother began teaching us Japanese as well. By the time I finished kindergarten, I found myself lucky enough to call myself a bit of a genius when it came to nguage, and I could do so in two of them.

  Kiki and I were like best friends, and we always did everything we could together. Of course, that included watching TV after school most days, and like any other kid, we stumbled across a lot of shows with knights and sword fighting. And like many others, we entered a phase where we were completely fascinated with swords, to the point where we annoyed our parents enough that they gave in and bought us foam swords to hit each other with. Pretty normal stuff.

  What wasn't normal, was that we never grew out of that phase.

  In middle school, hitting each other with foam swords wasn't enough anymore, and we convinced our parents to set aside a portion of the yard to be a makeshift training area, and once that was done, we got a couple of wooden swords and spent a while fighting each other with them.

  After realizing that swinging at each other's swords like barbarians wasn't going anywhere, we spent a while trying to learn how to fight on the internet. Of course, since we didn't know what we were doing, that ended with us developing a weird amalgamation of tons of different styles of sword fighting from cultures all over the world.

  Somehow, after tons of time dedicated to working on our home-made methods, we managed to turn it into something that actually worked, taking all the good parts of some methods of fighting and mixing them with others to cover their weaknesses. Of course, we weren't as special as we thought we were doing this, as many professionals will use a certain style to cover the weaknesses of another, but that still didn't change the fact that we made something that we could call our own, and we gave it the name ‘Ryuto Sword Arts’.

  By high school, we had truly made the RSA our own, even going to the extent of carving unsharpened spears from trees and incorporating those into it, changing the name to ‘Ryuto Bde Arts’. There was a really bad virus going around in the spring semester that shut down school for more than a quarter of the academic year, so we had plenty of time to focus on practicing with RBA. We even dabbled a little in fencing.

  By my second year, we decided we enjoyed fencing, so we invested in foils and other equipment we would need, starting a club at our school where people can simply gather after school and poke at each other with steel toothpicks.

  The year after, we started going fencing competitively. It was around that time that I learned that while I was better than Kiki normally, she was much better than I was in that setting. I would usually get knocked out of tournaments fairly early, but she almost always pced top three, if not outright winning.

  That was Kiki’s st year of high school, and she was going to go to the university our parents worked at in the fall to major in some kind of game design program, having taken a liking to art. She made pns to start a competitive fencing team there that would compete with other colleges that already had teams, and while I didn't know what I would try to major in, I promised that I would keep practicing so that I could go there too after I graduated and join her team.

  When August came around that year, in 2022, Kiki and I were out training in the yard as usual, when Mother called us in for lunch. I went to put away the equipment we were using while Kiki went ahead to wash up.

  I walked around the side of the house to a storage shed we had built around the time we got into fencing to store everything we needed for that, as well as all of the other swords we were collecting. Once everything was in its proper pce inside, I stepped out of the shed, witnessing an event that would change my life forever.

  I saw Setsuna, running out of the trees covered in cuts and bruises, holding the same katana I've become very familiar with to her chest and gripping it as if it was more important than her own life. Of course, she didn't fail to notice me, and as her fearful eyes met mine, she addressed me, albeit not very politely.

  “You! You have to help me. Please!”

  I had no idea what happened next, as that was the extent of the memories returned to me, but I knew one thing: The stones in front of me only have a few words.

  August 1, 2022

  That was the day I met Setsuna, and the day my parents died. Why did both happen the same day? What did her appearance have to do with the deaths of my parents…?

  Alpy376