In an instant, Ryu’s eyes parted ever so slightly, just enough to stir the very core of the man standing vigil beside the hospital bed.
That man was no ordinary soul. He was Kaito Harunobu, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Yet long before he wore the mantle of power, Harunobu had carved his legend in the world of the sword, a figure both revered and feared in equal measure.
In the days of his youth, he was not merely a swordsman, but he was a spectre woven into the fabric of rumour and dread.
Throughout the shadowed provinces of Chūgoku and Kyushu, there echoed in hushed tones a name seldom spoken aloud, Shizukesa no Yūrei, the Phantom of Silence.
It was not the fact that he slew which earned him that name, but the manner in which he did so.
No sound. No footprint. No reprieve.
So swift was his hand, so ghostly his presence, that not even the flicker of his blade could be glimpsed before it struck.
Those marked by his will felt only a cold breath upon their skin and then oblivion.
There are those who claim that Harunobu was touched by the Kensei no Noroi, the Curse of the Sword-Saint, a fabled affliction said to visit but one soul every few generations, gifting them skill beyond mortal comprehension.
In one tale oft repeated among village elders, he felled seven marauding brigands with but a single, flowing arc of his blade.
Their bodies, they say, remained upright for several heartbeats before cleaving apart without so much as a whisper.
The old ones called it The Cleave of the Spirit, a strike not born of muscle or rage, but of silence incarnate.
And yet Harunobu had always rejected the legends.
To his mind, they were but the fanciful murmurs of peasants tales embroidered by awe and fear.
But there remained one truth, immutable and unnerving.
Whenever his hand touched the hilt and his blade left its scabbard, death itself seemed to stir in the wind. Silent, patient, and inevitable.
And now, in this fragile sliver of time, as Harunobu beheld his son, no longer just a name, no longer a memory, but a soul stirring beneath sterile sheets.
He, the once-untouchable legend, trembled. From the tips of his fingers to the pit of his chest, the man known as a phantom on the battlefield stood undone by a glance.
“Ryu… Ryu…” he breathed, the words barely more than a wisp of sorrow.
Tears, long held at bay by duty and pride, spilled freely down his face.
And Ryu, after years entombed in silence and shadow, opened his eyes.
It was not dramatic, nor sudden. It was the tentative flutter of a soul re-learning the weight of the world.
A thin veil of light blurred his vision, forcing him to squint. But through that haze, one figure crystallised with undeniable clarity.
“F-Father…” he rasped, the syllables dry as parchment, yet more sacred than any prayer.
A shudder passed through Harunobu’s frame.
He sank to his knees beside the bed, arms encircling the son he feared he had lost to the tides of time.
“I… I’m not a child anymore, Father,” Ryu murmured, a flicker of boyish mischief playing beneath the frailty of his voice.
A smile broke across Harunobu’s tear-streaked face, one carved from equal parts relief and awe.
“No, my son,” he whispered. “But to me, you always shall be.”
“Where… are we, Father?” came the next question, faint, tentative, as Ryu’s eyes dull but awakening, tried to trace the room’s outline.
His limbs, however, remained heavy. Lifeless. A cruel betrayal of will.
“I… why can’t I feel anything? Why does my body… not obey me… Father…” he whispered, a note of fear threading through the weariness, like a candle flickering in a storm.
Harunobu bowed his head, fingers entwining tightly with his son’s, as though by sheer will he could channel life back into the fragile form before him.
“Hold fast, my son… just a little longer,” he murmured, his voice tremulous beneath a brittle smile, concealing the dread that gnawed at the edges of his soul, the unbearable truth of scorched flesh and a future severed by paralysis.
And then it struck, an unwelcome torrent of memory surged through Ryu’s fractured mind, the searing chaos of Vuska Laboratory, the heat, the shouts, the smoke.
Yet amid the torment, it was not the pain that carved deepest into his heart, but the fading image of a friend, Vuradisuta.
Desperation surged. He willed his limbs to rise, his muscles to obey but his body remained cruelly still, unmoved by desire or despair.
“F-Father… where is Vuradisuta?! Did he survive?! No… Vuradisuta… Vuradisuta!!” The cry burst from his throat like a broken incantation, shattering the solemn silence of the room.
“Aaarrgghhh!!” he screamed, clenching his teeth as a vicious bolt of pain lanced through his skull, wild and blinding.
Shattered recollections clawed at the edges of his sanity, but instead of clarity, there was only agony, raw, unrelenting.
“M-My head… it’s splitting… F-Father, please… help me!” he sobbed, tears spilling from the corners of his eyes, his broken body quivering beneath a storm of torment too cruel for words.
Harunobu, once the embodiment of composure even in the face of war, unravelled in an instant.
His breath hitched. His hands, once steady as a blade in the storm of battle, trembled.
With a sudden burst of desperation, he flung open the door to his son’s chamber.
“Dr Takeda! Dr Fujimori! At once! This way!” he roared, his voice echoing down the sterile corridor like a rolling thunderclap, unignorable and absolute.
Within seconds, Dr Hiroshi Takeda, Japan’s most revered neurologist and Dr Aiko Fujimori, the nation’s leading authority in physical rehabilitation, came rushing forth, their footsteps brisk, faces drained of colour.
“Save him! Now!," Harunobu’s voice was no longer that of a grieving father, but that of a war-hardened commander.
Low, steely, and charged with a silent, unquestionable menace.
The two doctors stiffened as though struck. Neither dared question, neither dared falter.
The weight of Harunobu’s presence of his sorrow concealed behind a soldier’s restraint, pressed down on them like the cold edge of a drawn katana.
Wordlessly, they swept into the room. The machines hummed. Monitors flickered.
And somewhere between the beeps and the panic, the room was filled with the sacred urgency of saving the life of a boy who had once been a nation’s promise and still was a father’s world.
Dr Takeda leaned in, the penlight in his hand casting a thin blade of illumination across Ryu’s eyes.
He watched, breath held, as the pupils responded sluggishly to the glow.
“Pupils dilated…” he murmured, then louder, with growing urgency, “We may be seeing a spike in intracranial pressure.”
Dr Fujimori was already at work, swift and assured.
His hands moved like wind over water, placing electrodes across Ryu’s chest and temples, his brow furrowed as he scanned the readings surging across the EKG and EEG monitors.
“His heart rate is climbing. Brainwave activity is erratic. He’s in a state of severe neurological stress,” he announced, his voice tight.
Without missing a beat, Dr Takeda uncapped a syringe and introduced a measured dose of midazolam into the intravenous line that ran down Ryu’s arm like a lifeline.
“A mild sedative,” he said under his breath, more to himself than anyone else. “We need to quiet the neurons. Keep him from tipping into seizure.”
Dr Fujimori was beside him, slipping an oxygen mask gently over Ryu’s face, “Support his breathing,” he whispered, “buy his brain some time.”
Takeda reached into his medical case and withdrew a sleek tablet, its surface polished like a blade.
With delicate precision, he pressed it to Ryu’s temple.
The device came to life, projecting a soft, pulsing hologram of the boy’s brain, speckled in angry crimson across the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.
“These are memory centres… and emotional processing regions,” he muttered, his gaze darkening. “He’s reliving something. Violently. The trauma’s not just lingering! It’s breaking through.”
Dr Fujimori placed cooling compresses against Ryu’s fevered brow and neck, his touch steady, maternal.
“The body’s fighting as fiercely as the mind,” he said. “If we don’t bring the temperature down, the nervous system may unravel.”
Together, the two physicians worked in an orchestrated silence, the kind only years of battle against the human body’s chaos could shape.
Every movement was urgent yet reverent as if they were not merely saving a patient, but preserving the fragile line between memory and madness.
“How fares my son?” Harunobu asked, his voice low and unsteady, the weight of dread pressing upon each syllable.
His eyes, once unflinching in the face of war, now betrayed a storm of paternal anguish.
Dr Takeda glanced towards the monitors, their steady hum a cruel contrast to the chaos within Ryu’s fragile form.
He turned, his expression sombre, as though the truth itself had been forged in iron.
“His condition is grave, sir,” the doctor began, his tone measured but burdened. “An emotional rupture has occurred sharp and sudden as if the very pressure of his past detonated within him. Neural pathways long dormant have reawakened in violent haste.”
He paused, choosing his next words with the delicacy of a surgeon’s blade, “We’ve contained the immediate crisis his heart rate, his intracranial pressure both are stable, for the moment."
"But I must warn you, should this psychological upheaval return with such force again, the likelihood of permanent damage to his memory centres becomes near inevitable.”
Dr Fujimori stepped forward, his voice soft but unflinching, “His sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive. He’s trapped in the body’s primal response, fight or flight yet has no means to act. This is not a simple recollection, my lord… it is a wound of the soul. Deep-seated, still raw, and burning from within.”
Harunobu stood unmoving, his gaze tethered to his son’s trembling frame.
The man known across nations as a blade of legend now seemed carved from stone. His fists clenched and his breath uneven.
And then, barely above a whisper, a thought escaped his lips, a prayer not to gods, but to a single name.
“Vuradisuta… wherever you are… come to him. He needs you now more than ever.”