Chapter 80 Episode 80: Hurt

Kael’s POV

The call rings out.

Once. Twice. A third time. Then the soft click of the line falling into silence. No voicemail. No short reply. Nothing.

I try again. The same empty return.

Something in my chest draws tight and cold. Akira always answers. Even when he is exhausted. Even when he is already moving. He answers, or he sends the single word that means later. There is only silence.

The silence sits wrong in a way that makes the air in the office feel thinner than it should. I am on my feet before the second attempt fully ends.

The tracking protocol is not official. It is something I built quietly in the weeks after he told me about the missions, after I understood that the dangers around him did not always travel through ordinary channels.

A low-level location ping tied to the communicator he carries. I told myself it was practical. I told myself it was temporary. Both were lies. I installed it because the thought of not being able to find him if something went wrong had become unbearable.

The signal resolves after twelve seconds.

Eastern storage blocks. The service road behind them. The stretch where the lighting is poor and the cameras have been broken for months.

I am moving before the map finishes rendering.

Corridors blur. People step aside without being asked. I do not remember the stairs or the outer doors or the exact moment the night air hits my face. I only remember the distance closing and the single thought that has replaced every other calculation;

He did not answer.

The service road opens under thin, broken light. Gravel shifts under my boots. The air carries the copper scent of blood. I see him almost immediately.

Akira is slumped against the side of a maintenance shed, half in shadow. One leg stretched out. The other bent awkwardly beneath him. His head rests against the metal as if he simply ran out of the strength to hold it up.

Blood has dried in a dark line from his hairline past his eye. More blood marks his side, his hands, the torn edge of his top. The dagger is still locked in his right hand.

The sound that leaves me is not a word.

I cross the remaining distance in a sprint that feels far too slow. Gravel sprays. I drop to my knees hard enough to jar bone and reach for him with both hands, careful of every place the blood has marked, careful of the way his breathing hitches.

"Akira."

His eyes open a fraction. Recognition flickers, slow and distant. The smallest attempt at a smile forms and fails.

"Kael..."

The voice is thin. Frayed. It undoes something in the centre of my chest that I did not know was still held together.

I cup the side of his face. His skin is too cold. The pulse under my fingers is present but thready. I catalogue what I can see and hate every second of the process. The rib is wrong.

The scalp laceration has bled freely. Contusions darken across his chest and shoulder. Exhaustion sits on him so heavily he could not make it further than this shed.

Someone hurt him.

Someone put him on the ground hard enough that he collapsed alone on a service road no one patrols after dark.

The knowledge lands like a blade.

"I’ve got you," I tell him, and the words come out rough. Tears on the brink of my eyes. "I’ve got you, baby. You’re safe now."

He leans into the touch as if the last of his strength has been waiting for permission to stop. I gather him carefully, supporting the damaged side, lifting him against my chest.

He is lighter than he should be. Or the fear simply makes everything feel breakable. His head settles against my shoulder. One blood-smeared hand curls weakly into the front of my shirt.

The anguish that rises is so complete it borders on physical pain.

I did not reach him in time. I was sitting in an office while someone attacked him and left him bleeding against a maintenance shed.

The image of him fighting alone, overwhelmed, injured, still trying to stay on his feet until he simply could not, writes itself behind my eyes without mercy. I can almost see the moment his strength failed.

The moment he realised he could not make it further. The moment he slid down the metal wall and stayed there because standing was no longer an option.

Hurt sits under the anguish, quieter and more personal. He did not call. Even when the situation turned, he did not reach for the communicator.

Some part of him still defaults to surviving alone, to finishing whatever needs finishing and then collapsing in a place where no one has to witness the cost. I have been trying to rewrite that instinct the same way I rewrote his defence in the yard. Tonight proves how deep the old pattern still runs.

Rage follows last, and it is cold and precise.

Someone did this. Someone decided Akira was an acceptable target and put him on the ground hard enough that he could not walk himself to safety. That someone is still breathing. The fact is unacceptable.

I adjust my hold and stand. Akira makes a small sound of pain as the movement jostles the rib. I murmur another soft reassurance against his hair and start walking.

The questions can wait. The only thing that matters is getting him somewhere the bleeding stops and the mana can begin to recover.

The hospital is too public. Too many eyes. Too many people who would look at the D-rank on his file and then look at the damage and start asking questions neither of us is ready to answer.

I take him to the private recovery suite attached to my quarters, the one I had upgraded months ago for reasons I never fully admitted even to myself. The biometric lock opens at my touch. Lights rise to a low, warm level.

I set him on the clean cot and begin the work of cutting away ruined fabric, cleaning wounds, stabilising the rib with the field kit I keep stocked for exactly this kind of night.

He drifts in and out while I work. Each time his eyes open they find me and the tension in his shoulders eases by a fraction. I keep talking in a low, steady, mostly nonsense, because the sound of a living voice seems to help him stay on this side of the dark. The word baby leaves me more than once but I do not stop it.

When the worst of the bleeding is managed and the pain suppressant has begun to take hold, I sit on the edge of the cot and simply look at him. The protectiveness that has lived in me since the night he told me about the missions has become something sharper and more absolute.

I will not lose him to the next person who decides he is an acceptable target. I will not stand in another empty office while the call rings out into silence.

The plan forms without effort. I will find who did this.

I will follow every trace left on that service road, whatever evidence remains of the attack, whatever path they used, whatever signature they left behind. Someone always leaves something. And when I have a direction, I will pursue it until the threat is removed in the most permanent language I know.

The decision does not feel like vengeance. It feels like the only logical extension of the claim I have already made. His mother gave her blessing.

I have already begun arranging the life that will hold him. The future I intend to build does not include finding him collapsed and bleeding because I was too far away to stop it.

Akira’s hand finds my wrist. His fingers are still tacky with drying blood. The grip is weak but deliberate.

"Don’t," he whispers. The word costs him. "Don’t go looking for answers tonight. Stay with me. Please."

The request undoes me more effectively than any wound.

I lean down and press my lips to his forehead, careful of the laceration. "I’m not going anywhere right now. Sleep. I’ve got you."

He holds my gaze for another second, searching for the lie, and then the exhaustion finally wins. His eyes close. His breathing slows into the deeper rhythm of real rest. I stay where I am, watching the rise and fall of his chest, counting every proof that he is still here.

The rawness does not ease with his sleep. If anything it settles deeper, rooting itself in the places where calculation usually lives. I keep seeing the slumped posture against the shed. The blood on his face.

The way his hand had stayed locked around the dagger even after he could no longer stand. The image loops. Each pass sands another layer off the control I have spent years perfecting.

I wanted to court him properly. I wanted the formal path, the mother’s blessing, the clean ask, the future built in daylight. All of that remains. But underneath it now is a simpler and more brutal truth: I will do whatever is required to keep him breathing. The system can keep its secrets.

The elevation can arrive on any schedule it likes. Whoever put him on that service road can keep believing they succeeded in sending a message.

I will answer it. Carefully, thoroughly and without mercy.

I adjust the light lower and settle into the chair beside the cot. My hand stays wrapped around his. The communicator on the side table remains silent.

Outside, the complex continues its ordinary night. Inside this room the only thing that matters is the slow, stubborn beat of his pulse under my fingers and the cold, clear promise forming behind my ribs.

Whoever did this will pay. I will make certain of it.

And when Akira wakes, he will wake to the knowledge that he is no longer facing these nights alone, whether he is ready to accept the full weight of that fact or not.