Ryuu blinked, his voice barely audible through the roaring gale. "Theory?"

Liam didn't answer at first—he just reached behind his back, gripping the familiar curve of his bow and pulling it free. The polished wood gleamed faintly and he drew the string back without a single arrow nocked.

Ryuu stared, utterly baffled. "Wait, hold on." He squinted through the flurry, stepping closer to Liam. "What the hell are you thinking? You're not actually planning to snipe that thing from here, are you? We can't even see 10 feet in front of us in this mess—and arrows won't fly straight in this wind! Clemens told me that arrows are useless against it!"

"I know that..." Liam said calmly, his eyes sliding shut as he steadied his breath. "That's why I didn't bring any arrows."

Ryuu froze mid-gesture, his mouth hanging open. "...What?" He stomped closer, wind whipping his coat as disbelief cracked in his tone. "Then why did you bring your bow in the first place!?"

But Liam didn't respond. His expression had changed. His previous strain and uncertainty was still there, yes, but now also focused. His breathing slowed even as the wind screamed around them.

Ryuu started again, softer this time. "What are you…" He trailed off, his eyes widening as realization struck. The faint hum in the air—the pulsing warmth radiating from the drawn bow—made it unmistakable.

Liam's voice came low, calm, and grounded. "I'm feeling it out. The Oni's soulura. I've felt it before…and it's all around us now. If I can just follow the wave, pinpoint its origin—its position." He smirked a bit, though tension lingered in his voice. "Between that and Domitius' training, I'm sort of confident I can pull this off..."

Ryuu studied him for a long moment—Liam's focused face, his drawn bow, and the empty space where an arrow should've been. He exhaled slowly, realization giving way to awe and disbelief. "You're planning to shoot an arrow—made purely of soulura..."

Liam's lips parted into a thin, tense smile. "Correct."

But Ryuu heard it—the faint tremor in his voice. The hesitation.

Both of them knew what that meant.

It would take a miracle for Liam, even with all his progress, to pull off something like this.

However, Liam knew he didn't have time to hesitate. He needed to try, even if it meant burning himself out. The wellness of everyone depended on it. Koul, Domitius, Okun, Miuson—and most of all, Dama.

His brow furrowed, eyes narrowing against the sting of the freezing wind as he steadied his breathing. He called upon the lessons Domitius drilled into him—how to feel the world rather than just see it. "Don't think, just do!"

The sensation of the Oni's soulura was still fresh in his memory, that raw, frigid essence that gnawed at the warmth of his own aura like fangs.

He centered himself, letting his body still even as the storm raged.

At first, his "soul sense" was indistinct—a blur of static and distortion, even worse than his physical vision through the blizzard. His mind's eye was filled with noise: howling echoes, drifting white, and formless shadow.

But the longer he focused, the more shapes began to emerge.

A subtle glow. A faint hum beneath the chaos.

Then—threads.

Delicate, luminous threads of blue light weaving through the air like drifting snowflakes. They flowed, intertwined, and pulsed with a chilling rhythm that made Liam's teeth grit. "That's it," he thought, "that's the Oni's soulura."

Each thread led in a direction deeper into the storm, and though following them strained every sense he had, he pressed on. He traced them back to their source, his breath hitching as he finally perceived the core—a whirling vortex of blue light, thick and turbulent.

Through that wall of blinding energy, Liam saw them. Seven distinct souls around the light blue one flickered in his mind's vision, like candles in a hurricane.

One orange. One brown. Two gray. Two blue. One golden.

Liam's eyes widened. Another presence—one nearly identical to the Oni's, though far weaker, almost faint to the point of vanishing—hovered at the edge of his awareness. "A second Oni?"

He didn't have time to puzzle it out. His chest tightened as he focused on the others.

First he recognized was the brown one, steady but fading, "That's the chief's soulura, Okun! And the gray one next to him, Domitius, no doubt about it!"

The orange and other gray signatures puzzled Liam though. "I can't really tell who those are, but if I had to guess, the orange one is Miuson, and the other gray one is Himon..." He thought to himself before realizing something urgent. "Both of them are dimmer than Okun and Domitius, that can't be good...!"

Then there was the golden one, of which seized his full attention.

Its light wavered—brilliant, but flickering. Each pulse dimmed faster than the last, like the last breaths of a dying flame.

Liam's heart dropped into his stomach.

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That golden soul—he knew it. He could feel it.

"...Dama."

He could sense it fading, its warmth being consumed by the overwhelming cold swirling around it.

Liam's grip on his bow tightened until his knuckles went white. "I can't let anything happen to him." The words echoed in his skull, a desperate plea to himself that sounded almost like a scream.

If Dama was gone—if the boy he'd practically watched grow up died here—then Liam would never forgive himself. Not in this life, not in any other.

His mind flooded with memories, each one sharper than the last—each one containing Dmaa's father, Joel.

His hearty laugh when Liam would tell him a joke. His hand on his shoulder as Liam grieved the loss of his parents. The night Madima gave birth, how Joel had stumbled out of that room beaming and holding a tiny bundle wrapped in blankets.

Joel had placed that bundle in his arms. "His name is Dama. You'll look out for him, won't you, Liam?" Joel's voice echoed in the depths of his memory. "Something tells me he'll really appreciate having someone like you in his life, like I do."

He grit his teeth. "If I let Dama die… It'd be like spitting on Joel's grave."

That thought ignited something deep inside him.

The air around him began to hum—softly at first, then stronger. His soulura burst within, faintly crackling across his skin like lightning through glass. His breathing steadied as instinct took over, his body moving without conscious thought.

Just like before, some wind that was not apart of the Oni's storm answered him.

They coiled around his hands, drawn by his will—like ribbons of invisible energy swirling tighter and tighter. The warmth from his palms spread through his veins, a feeling both foreign and familiar, awakening the same resonance he'd felt in training.

But then—something else stirred.

A different kind of heat.

The flame from Ryuu's torch, once struggling to stay alive in the storm's fury, suddenly flared. It stretched, bending toward Liam like a living thing sensing its master.

Sparks leapt off the torch, carried by the wind, then veered sharply—each ember drawn to the vortex gathering in Liam's palms.

The fire joined the wind.

Embers and air began to swirl together, fusing into a spiral of heat and green light that pulsed in waves. Ryuu was mesmerized by the show.

And still, Liam's eyes remained closed, his focus locked deep within, unaware of the small inferno forming in his hands.

At the same time, Mumu and Nini burst through the fading wall of the blizzard, the storm's scream dimming into a hollow whisper as they entered its heart. What they saw stopped them cold.

There—standing like a monument to tragedy—was Dama, frozen solid.

His body encased in a perfect sculpture of glacial blue, arm stretched outward, fingers inches from the trembling child Oni who stared up at him with wide, tear-filled eyes. The air between them seemed to shimmer faintly, the last vestiges of soulura still fading from the confrontation.

For a heartbeat, Mumu and Nini couldn't move.

It was Nini who broke first. A choked, voiceless sound caught in her throat as she sprinted past the injured forms of Domitius and Okun—both half-buried in snow, shivering, blood staining the white ground. Her paws tore through the ice, leaving trails of snow in her wake.

She didn't think. She couldn't think.

All that filled her mind was the sight of her master—her Dama—frozen mid-reach, like he had been trying to save even his enemy before the cold stole him away. The memory of his laugh, his small but determined voice, the warmth of his very soul his smile—all of it crashed over her like waves of grief.

She reached him, paws uselessly scraping the ice. Each strike of her paws echoed sharply through the air, punctuated by the faint, desperate whine of her struggling.

Mumu, meanwhile, snapped from his paralysis when he heard a faint, broken voice call out from nearby.

"...Dama…"

It was Koul—barely conscious, his voice cracking, half-buried in rubble and snow. His skin was pale, his lips blue. Mumu's head turned sharply, eyes wide as he sprinted over.

He found Koul slumped beside the ruins of a collapsed wall, blood matting his hair. Beside another mound of snow, two legs jutted out stiffly.

After making sure Koul was okay, Mumu dug quickly around the legs, his large, clumsy hands scooping snow away until he uncovered Miuson. The young guard seemed the worst off—unmoving, his skin frostbitten to a worrying shade of blue.

Mumu didn't hesitate. He gathered both Miuson and Koul into his arms and pulled them close, wrapping them in his sturdy embrace. His stitched frame yielded as he tightened his hold, radiating what little warmth his body could both produce and hold.

His eyes flicked toward Nini and Dama, his chest tightening at the sight.

Nini's paws continued to rake uselessly at the ice, each strike slower than the last. Her head bowed, trembling. And then—something impossible happened.

From the black stitched sockets of her eyes, clear droplets began to fall...

Tears.

They hit the ice around Dama's feet and froze instantly, tiny crystals catching the dim light like diamonds scattered across the snow.

If she had a voice, she would have screamed until the sky cracked open.

But instead, only silence filled the storm's wake—broken by the faint whimpers of the child Oni, and the soft hum of the dying wind.

The child Oni stood amid the howling quiet that followed the storm's retreat, small and shaking, its now normal eyes fixed on Dama. What he saw puzzled it to no end—his frozen smile.

The light of that serene and gentle smile reflected in the Oni's pupils, a ghostly warmth in the cold world around it. It didn't understand. It couldn't understand.

Why was he smiling?

Why, even as the storm consumed him, did this human not show fear or anger?

The child Oni's breaths came out in trembling bursts of frost. Its gaze wandered downward—toward Nini, who was pressed against Dama's legs, her stitched frame trembling with grief. When it saw the drops fall from her seemingly bottomless sockets, shimmering like fallen stars, something deep inside the child Oni stirred.

It raised a hand to its own cheek.

"Wet."

It blinked, staring at the tears gathering in its palm.

These tears—this ache in its chest—it was the same pain it felt that night, long ago. The night it watched its mother fall. The night it saw its father turned into a puppet before its eyes. The night humans laughed through black cloaks and shadows as they took everything away.

Realization struck. It had done the same. It had hurt someone else. Someone who hadn't hurt it.

Someone who had smiled at it, even when the cold devoured him.

The child Oni's throat tightened as it looked toward its mother, still lying in the snow behind it, chest barely rising and falling. Maybe…maybe this human wasn't like the others. Maybe that hand wasn't meant to hurt, but to help.

The thought made its heart twist.

One step. The snow crunched beneath its bare feet. Two steps. The air shimmered faintly, calm now, the blizzard's fury gone. Three. The child Oni stopped just before Dama.

It stared at the boy's outstretched hand, encased in glassy ice that sparkled under the dim light. Slowly, tentatively, it raised its own hand. The hesitation in its movement was almost human—the flinch of a creature afraid of making another mistake.

Its fingers trembled as they neared his frozen fingertips.

"Maybe…" the child Oni thought.

At that same moment, away on the rooftop, Liam's entire body tensed. His hands glowed as the swirling energy of wind and fire answered both his will & mission, creating a makeshift arrow in the place of a normal one. It pulsed with intertwining light, flickering like a living flame bound in the wind's grasp.

The moment the Oni's fingertip neared Dama's frozen hand, Liam exhaled.

And let the arrow fly.

-

Next: (Chapter 105) The Ghostly Mediator

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