The Rats Becoming More

  A week passed. The days blurred. But the absence didn’t.

  Then she came back.

  Her arms bore faint track-marks where they'd drawn blood.

  He'd counted seventeen needles. Stopped counting after that.

  Her eyes were quiet, but not broken.

  Wiser. Angrier.

  They hadn’t made her a hunter.

  They didn’t know what to do with her yet.

  Two guards shoved her forward between them like they were pushing a caged animal back into its pen.

  One muttered under his breath, almost to himself, “Ticking bomb…”

  The other grunted, “Master Hellick's will decide.” keeping a hand on the butt of his baton longer than necessary.

  Neither looked her in the eye.

  So, they returned her. Allowing her to stay with the workers until Master Hellick's final verdict.

  Pending.

  That was her status.

  Dozai, Nobu, and Rei pulled Rizaru aside the moment they could. Rei held onto her sleeve for a second too long, like trying to make sure she was real. Nobu leaned closer than usual toward her.

  “What did you see?” Dozai asked, voice low, eyes darting to make sure no one was eavesdropping.

  Rizaru stared at the dirt floor for a while, her thumb twitching slightly, still adjusting to being back. Her voice was dry when she spoke.

  “They’re not just using Hunters,” She paused. Then met his gaze. “They’re trying to make them weapons.”

  Dozai's brow furrowed.

  Nobu's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. His gaze dropped to her needle marks and something flickered behind his eyes. Understanding, maybe. Or memory.

  Rei's hands pressed together. "Weapons? What do you mean exactly?"

  Rizaru held their gaze. "Like... Mass production of Maho users. That's the gist of what I got." She paused. "Though I didn't really understand the specifics."

  There was a long aching pause before anyone could say anything.

  Before it could full register, a hand shoved Rei from behind.

  She stumbled into the dirt face-first. A boy’s voice followed, soaked in mockery.

  “No Maho this year either? Guess a rat will always be a rat.”

  The boy wore his pride like armor and his yellow ribbon like a crown. Nobu clenched his fist, eyes flaring, about to say something. But then he froze because he recognized the ribbon.

  “Why’d you stop?” Kota sneered, stepping in close. “Go on. Hit me. I dare you.”

  Dozai stepped in instead.

  Calm. Flat.

  “We get it. Sorry for being in your way.”

  Kota smirked, puffing up like a peacock. “No backbone. That’s why you’re not a hunter like me. Even if you were, you’d be under me. Bet you rats don't even know anything other than dirt.”

  Rizaru helped Rei to her feet, her grip firm, steadying.

  “Yellow Ribbon,” she said, voice low. “Rank 2. Kota, right?”

  Kota’s brow flinched, small, but sharp enough to catch.

  “Hm. Guess some of you rats are smarter than you look.”

  “Yeah? I might be joining you hunters soon.” Her tone cooled, her gaze tightening on him like a dare. “So you’d better hold on to that yellow ribbon. Looks a lot like cheese to me.”

  Kota’s smirk faltered, the confidence in it slipping as his eyes narrowed, recalibrating.

  Something uncertain flickered behind them, quickly smothered.

  He stepped closer, close enough that that their foreheads were inches apart.

  His glare drilled into her, searching for the slightest flinch.

  “Ha,” he muttered. “If you’re gonna challenge me, you need better trash talk than that.”

  “Is my fist caving your face in good enough trash talk for you?” Rizaru asked, not giving him so much as a millimeter.

  His smile vanished outright. What replaced it was heavier—intent, pressure, the weight of someone used to ending arguments with broken bones. His hands opened and closed at his sides, knuckles tightening, loosening, tightening again, like his body was already halfway through a swing his mind was still deciding on.

  His stare locked with hers.

  A long moment where their shoulders squared, their feet shifted, each of them coiled and ready if the other so much as breathed wrong.

  Then Kota exhaled sharply. A scoff, almost disappointed.

  He turned away and walked away.

  “You and your status.” He spat at the ground, voice dropping to a bitter mutter. “Watch yourself. If you do make it to becoming a Hunter, I'll put you in your place.”

  Nobu and Dozai knelt beside Rei, worry creasing his face. “Are you okay?”

  Rei didn’t answer right away. She patted at the dust smeared across her skirt, the motion brisk but shaky at the edges. A thin laugh slipped out.

  Too light, too quick.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  The second fine splintered in her throat.

  She swallowed hard, eyes darting anywhere but at the others. The ground, the corridor walls, the faint scuffs left by Kota’s boots. Her fingers tugged at her clothes again even though the dirt was already gone.

  “Let’s just… let’s get going,” she said. “We’ll get in trouble for standing around too long. I’ll see you guys after shift.”

  She pushed herself to her feet before either of them could say anything.

  Her steps were steady, but her shoulders stayed tight, drawn in.

  An Adult

  Later that evening, the sun had dipped low, and the deeper tunnels of the quarry grew cold. The children were split into work rotations, dragging dead mana-beast corpses, harvesting shattered crystal veins, and into The Void; an abyss that swallowed corpses, memories and anything you hoped would come back.

  Dozai was covered in sweat and grime. His arms ached from lifting chunks of armored hide and beastbone.

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  But he kept pushing.

  He never used to work this hard.

  But Nobu had changed that.

  He remembered the day Nobu, who once did the bare minimum and didn't bother to try, nearly collapsed trying to carry twice his weight. It was like he was deciding to train himself. Every step forward was survival. Every strain necessary.

  He shoved a twisted beast-carcass off the ledge into The Void.

  But just before it hit the darkness, he heard something.

  A sniffle. Quiet. Echoing.

  He paused. Turned his head.

  Another soft sob followed, carried by the hollow wind.

  Dozai followed the sound. Deep down. Past the filth. Past the tunnels where no guards ever ventured.

  He found her.

  Rei.

  Curled into herself in the corner of a dark, rotting chamber.

  Knees to chest. Silent tears. Her face was streaked with grime, salt, and shadows. She looked like she’d folded herself into something smaller, trying to disappear into the walls.

  Dozai stepped closer, cautious.

  She flinched, but when she saw it was him, her eyes softened.

  “Aww, shucks,” she said with a small, broken laugh. “Didn’t think anyone’d come all the way down here. It stinks so bad.”

  Dozai eased down beside her, back against the same moldy wall.

  “Yeah,” he finally muttered. “My eyes are burning from the stench.”

  Rei let out another laugh. It was brief, trembling, but real. She sniffled and wiped her face with the heel of her hand.

  Her breathing slowed, bit by bit.

  After a long stretch of silence, Rei’s head drifted to rest against his shoulder. Dozai didn’t move.

  “You know,” he said quietly, “no one would blame you for crying after… everything. You don’t have to hide down here.”

  “I know…” she whispered. “It’s just—”

  Her voice caught.

  She swallowed hard.

  “It’s… a bad habit. My mom…”

  She didn’t continue. The gap in her sentence stretched like a bruise.

  Dozai didn’t fill it. He just placed a hand on her feet—blistered, cracked from labor, curled in tight as if bracing against an old memory.

  She glanced at him, but he didn’t look at her.

  She smiled, faintly.

  And then looked down.

  After a longer pause, she spoke.

  “My mom… was beautiful. Strong, too…”

  Her voice lowered into something fragile.

  “I keep it together most days, you know? Smiling. Laughing. Acting like none of this scares me. Because if I let even one crack show in front of the hunters, or the guards, or the others… it feels like the whole thing will split open.”

  Her fingers tightened around her shins.

  “And today, when Kota looked at me like that... Like I was a problem he could crush whenever he wanted... My chest just remembered.”

  She pressed a trembling hand over her heart.

  "My mom raised me in the southern forests, near the old outer-villages. Said we weren’t like the Kingdom folks; we were free. We lived off the land, and hid from the monsters, never trusted anyone wearing a crown or a sigil. But the land… it stopped being safe."

  Dozai finally looked at her as she spoke, calm and quiet.

  Rei continued telling Dozai about her past.

  She told him how she’d watched the beasts tear her mother apart. How the Rebels found her and promised salvation… only to abandon her the moment they realized she couldn’t fight well enough to be useful. Their help was never help—it was recruitment. And when she failed their test, they tossed her aside like spoiled rations.

  That feeling of uselessness.

  Of being carried only as far as she was convenient.

  Every word scraped a little deeper, as if the altercation with Kota had cracked open a door she usually kept locked from herself, let alone anyone else.

  “I ran,” she whispered. “And then came the Knights. The real ones. Gleaming masks. Cold hands. No eyes… just light.”

  She blinked hard. A tremor shook her fingers.

  “They took me for questioning. Called me ‘Rebel-spawn.’ Threw me in a box. Left me there for days. And when they were finished?”

  Her voice thinned.

  “They sold me. Like another useless toy…”

  Her eyes squeezed shut, trying—failing—to hold herself together.

  By the time the sentence left her lips, her voice was stripped raw.

  Hollow.

  She turned her head slightly toward Dozai.

  A soft, shaky smile wavered on her face.

  That’s when Dozai understood. The armor. The reflex.

  The only way she knew to keep the world from seeing how breakable she felt.

  Rei’s voice came again, barely above a whisper.

  “I keep thinking… if I could just find the right adult… someone would finally say, ‘You’re safe now.’” She swallowed. “But no one ever did. And now here I am.”

  A thick silence settled over the chamber. It pressed against the walls, sank into the floor, filled the air between them. A silence shaped by everything she’d said and everything she hadn’t.

  Dozai stayed quiet. He knew better than to say things like I’m sorry or that it would be okay.

  Instead, he just leaned his head against hers, no words just presence.

  A quiet anchor for her to lean on.

  Rei looked at him for a long moment, with teary eyes, before her breathing finally slowed.

  And for that one moment, in the deepest hole of the camp, where the dead beasts were discarded and no one cared to look.

  Two broken kids sat quietly in the dark.

  Trying to carry a little of each other’s pain.

  The Spark Before the Fire

  The scent of rot clung to his clothes even after he left the Void, but he could still smell the salt of her tears. He'd heard stories like hers before, everyone here had one. But hearing it from her mouth, watching her armor crack, made it real in a way it hadn't been.

  So what did that make me? Another bystander? Another failure?

  His chest tightened. Like his heart was bracing for a wound it couldn't see yet.

  He rubbed his chests as he kept walking.

  Past the collapsed tunnels.

  Past the spots where children used to sit and no longer did.

  His body ached, but he welcomed it. It made him feel something.

  Pain was proof he was still here.

  But lately... that hadn’t felt like enough.

  There was a time, not long ago, when he didn’t care about escape.

  Didn’t even think about it.

  Because he knew better.

  People always talked about freedom like it was some glowing light waiting on the other side of a wall.

  But Dozai saw what happened when kids came into the camp.

  Some arrived screaming. Others silent.

  Most were hollow. As if they’d already seen the world out there.

  As if the outside had chewed them up, spat them into cages and the camps were just the last stop before nothing.

  I used to believe this was hell. Now I wonder if it might’ve been a mercy.

  That belief had kept him grounded.

  Numb. Unmoving.

  Because what hell must the outside look like if this was the place it dumped you?

  But...

  He thought about Nobu, stubborn, reckless Nobu, once just another hollow kid. Now he pushed himself past every limit, digging, coughing, sweating, refusing to stop.

  Conviction.

  He thought about Rizaru, closed off, unreadable Rizaru, who looked Kota dead in the face, a Rank 2 hunter, and told him she’d take his ribbon like a it was already written.

  Resolve.

  Rei, who cried where no one could see and hum songs into her shirt so her voice wouldn’t echo. Who, even in her brokenness, was still trying to hold all of them together.

  Heart.

  He hadn’t planned to care. He really hadn’t. But here he was.

  And for the first time, the camp wasn’t enough.

  He clenched his jaw. His fingers curled into fists against his palms.

  All he'd ever done was watch.

  That wasn't a survival strategy anymore.

  It was a surrender.

  A thought.

  A quiet, stubborn thought, etched at the front of his mind.

  What if I want to live now too.

  The moment the thought etched his mind, his knuckles throbbed. Sharp and sudden, like he'd punched stone. He flexed his fingers, confused.

  They were fine, but It had been happening more lately.

  Phantom pains. Echoes of impacts that never came.

  For a heartbeat, he could have sworn he felt something else—a warmth that wasn't heat or a pressure that wasn't just weight. Like standing near a fire too big to look at directly.

  Then it was gone.

  He didn't understand it, but he'd learned to ignore it.

  Before he knew, during that evening, he found them again.

  Nobu was still bandaging a burn on his wrist from hauling overheated crystal. Rizaru sat near the barracks wall, fiddling with a rusted tool out of sheer habit. Rei had just returned from the nursery after comforting a younger kid who’d seen his brother collapse.

  They looked up when he approached.

  He looked at them, with a new weight in his chest.

  He didn’t try to sell it. He just knelt beside them, voice even.

  Like the decision had already been made.

  “Let’s escape.”

  Nobu blinked. “...What?”

  Rizaru's finger twitched.

  Rei's eyes widen.

  Dozai didn’t blink, his hands were steady, but his chest was tight.

  A slight tremble in his frame that he pushed down.

  “I’ve been thinking. If we stay here... it doesn’t end. We'll be stuck in this hellish loop." He paused, making sure he looked them all in their eyes. "But if we move, break the rhythm, we have a chance. And if we’re smart about it... that chance can create opportunities.”

  There was a long pause before anyone said anything. They just stared at Dozai's calm, serious face.

  Nobu was first to break the silence with a scoff.

  “That's...” Nobu said with widen eyes before slowly narrowing back to his blank stare. “Fine... But how?”

  Rei met Dozai's gaze, a soft flicker of something unspoken reached her eyes. She took a deep breath in, then whispered. “Okay.”

  Rizaru stretched languidly, already preparing to what's to come. Her gaze stared right into Dozai's eyes. "What's the plan?"

  For a moment, none of them spoke.

  The silence was thick, unshakable, terrifying.

  It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, the ground behind them burning, the drop before them endless.

  There was no going back.

  Only forward.