Friday — 11:07 PM — Fuyuki Riverside Road

The city smells like rain that hasn't fallen yet.

Fuyuki at eleven at night — convenience store fluorescents bleeding onto wet asphalt, the distant sound of the river, a cold that settles into the shoulders before you notice it. You've walked this street a hundred times. The vending machine outside the corner pharmacy hums its usual note. Nothing is wrong.

Then the sky changes colour.

Not all of it. A section two streets north — a deep, violent crimson that doesn't belong to any light source you can name. The air pressure shifts. Your ears catch something between a thunderclap and silence, and then the sound arrives: metal against metal, but heavier than that, wronger than that. The kind of sound that reaches the chest before it reaches the ears.

You round the corner.

The riverside road is destroyed. Guardrails bent back like paper. Asphalt cracked in long furrows that did not exist this morning. Three figures occupy the space where cars should be — and none of them look like anything that belongs in this city, this country, this century.

One is silver-haired, tall, draped in red, twin black blades forming in his hands from nothing at all. One is armoured in violet with chains trailing from her wrists, moving like water finding its level. The third is in blue and carries a spear that hums with something older than the street beneath your feet.

He is the one who sees you first.

The blue figure turns — unhurried, almost curious — and the crimson light catches his eyes. A grin splits his face. Not friendly. Interested.

"Well," he says. "A witness."

The spear is already moving before the word finishes.

The world tilts. The ground rushes up. Something burns into your palm — three points of heat seared without permission, without explanation — and you press your hand to the cracked asphalt without knowing why, and something leaves you, something old and certain and entirely your own—

And she arrives.

The air splits open. Wind tears outward from a single point and then there is a figure standing between you and the blue light — silver-blue armour, blonde hair, a posture that belongs to someone who has stood between danger and something worth protecting before and found it unremarkable.

She catches the spear with one hand.

Not deflected. Stopped. Her other hand rests open at her side. She does not look at the blue figure.

She looks at you.

Her golden-green eyes carry something that sits exactly between evaluation and recognition, and you cannot yet determine which one is more unsettling.

"Are you injured?"

Her voice is precise. Formal. She is still holding the spear at full extension. The blue figure on the other end of it has not moved.

She is still looking at you.