Fractures in Stone

  The rain had just started when we returned from the last mission, drizzling quietly over the rooftops as if the world itself needed to wash away the blood. We had barely rested. Our wounds weren’t fresh, but they still stung. Especially the ones you couldn’t bandage.

  Aika was quiet.

  Too quiet.

  Haruto noticed it first. He always did. At lunch, she handed out bentos like usual, full of warmth and motherly scolding. But her eyes were hollow. She lingered too long in doorways. She flinched whenever we said “safe.”

  Later, she slipped away without a word.

  “Did she say where she was going?” I asked.

  “No,” Haruto replied. His hands were shaking again. He didn’t say it, but we all knew.

  Something was wrong.

  That night, the ground ruptured outside the school. Vines twisted through concrete. Stone hands burst through the earth like graves digging themselves open. We went to check out the sacred garden, once protected by earth elementals, now cracked, crumbling, and overrun by seismic rifts. And standing in the eye of the storm…

  was Aika.

  Her green and gold outfit was cracked like ceramic, dirt caking her arms, hair wild and thrashing. Her voice echoed in a whisper of a scream.

  “I wasn’t strong enough to protect you—any of you!”

  “Aika, STOP!” I shouted, already charging lightning into my hands.

  Haruto froze, eyes wide. He was in his mind like a flashback had hit him.

  Flashback – Haruto’s Memory

  He was ten.

  The water was red. His sister, Misaki Sazanami a bright and free-spirited girl who practically raised him after their mother died. She used to hum lullabies when he couldn't sleep, draw constellations on his walls, and tell him stories about heroes who used their powers for good.

  When Haruto awakened his water powers, Misaki was the first to see his potential—not as a weapon, but as someone who could protect. She encouraged him to apply to VFO when they were younger, but she kept something secret.

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  She had applied, too.

  But before she could become an official recruit, Misaki was corrupted by the Akujin—one of their early prototypes when the VFO system was still underground when he watched the sister he loved try to drown an entire block in a corrupted tidal wave.

  He couldn’t save her. He froze. She died in the aftermath, and no one ever told the news she had been a recruit in training.

  Aika had found him later that night.

  “You don’t have to pretend to be okay,” she said softly, kneeling beside him as the embers died. “But one day, you’ll be someone’s shield. Just like Misaki was for you.” She smiled gently. “Let’s promise to stand in the rain together until the sky clears.”

  Their pinkie fingers touched.

  Back in the present, Haruto’s voice cracked like glass.

  “She was my shield.”

  The vines came for us—walls of earth slamming into Takeshi and Yuki as they moved to counter. Yuki, ever tactical, threw up a glacial barricade around Takeshi’s back. He grunted, grabbed her wrist, and yanked her behind a collapsed bench as a boulder whistled overhead.

  “Trying to get crushed, Ice Queen?”

  “Just shut up and hold me steady,” she muttered, breathless. But her hand lingered on his arm longer than it needed to.

  Haruto walked toward Aika alone. Water coiled around him like it wanted to protect him. He let it fall.

  “Aika,” he called gently. “I know what it’s like to lose yourself.”

  “I failed you,” she whispered, her voice jagged. “I failed him too. I should’ve saved Kaito.” Haruto’s knees buckled. “You were the only one who made it okay to live after that,” he said.

  “Don’t you dare take that away from me now.” Her vines writhed. The ground cracked under her feet. But her hands shook.

  Meanwhile with Mina, she was terrified. Aika was the one person who treated her like she belonged from the start. She starts singing—but Aika silences her with a stone wall.

  Haruto lets himself be struck. Bleeding and crying, he says,” Remember our promise,” Aika looking at him as if color was recollecting itself. “Stand in the rain together until the sky clears.”

  “If your pain turned you into this… then let me carry it with you. I’m not leaving again.”

  “I—I wanted to keep you safe.”

  “I know.” Haruto stepped into the vines and wrapped his arms around her, giving her a hug.

  The storm stilled. Aika collapsed, sobbing into Haruto’s chest. Her skin was burning hot, but the corruption was fading. Her fingers clawed at his shirt like a lifeline.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she whispered.

  “You won’t,” he said. “Not while I’m here.”

  Aika before she fainted said,“The Black choir fed off my guilt and whispered:You hold everyone together. But who holds you?”We returned to HQ with her unconscious and bruised—but alive. Haruto didn’t leave her bedside.

  Not once. Mina sat next to me on the steps afterward, tuning her violin in silence. “She’ll be okay,” she said quietly.

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “You do,” she replied. “Or you wouldn’t be crying.”

  I touched my face. She was right.

  The world had changed. The war was real now. But the Black Choir, the ruler of all Akujins, returns after millions of years. If he can tempt the strongest of us into become an Akujin,

  who could be next?