Chapter 6: Chapter 6
The shift was gradual, then absolute.
It started with the hovering. Yujiro, who had spent a lifetime occupying space like a sovereign territory, began to orbit. If Baki was training in the underground dojo, Yujiro would be there, not coaching, just leaning against the wall, his eyes missing nothing—the micro-tremor in Baki’s left leg on a deep squat, the slight hitch in his breath after a particularly brutal combination on the heavy bag. He’d note it all with a grunt.
Then came the touching. It was a mirror, a perfect, aggressive reflection. Where Baki had been casually persistent, Yujiro was deliberate and absolute. A hand on the back of Baki’s neck as he passed him in a hallway, fingers squeezing the tense cords of muscle there before releasing. A palm flat against Baki’s stomach when he walked into a room, checking the healing ridge of the scar through his shirt. If Baki sat, Yujiro’s hand would find his shoulder, his hair, the side of his face, turning it to examine a fading bruise or for no reason at all.
It was possession, plain and simple. A silent, physical edict: This is mine.
Baki both chafed against it and leaned into the warmth. It was confusing. One afternoon, he was doing handstand push-ups, blood roaring in his ears, when Yujiro’s shadow fell over him. Two massive hands encircled his waist, steadying him, then sliding up to his ribs, thumbs pressing into the intercostal muscles.
“Your alignment is three millimeters off,” Yujiro’s voice rumbled from above. “You’re favoring the healed side. You’ll create a weakness.”
“I’m fine,” Baki gritted out, sweat dripping onto the mat below his head.
“You’re not.” The hands adjusted him, a brutal, precise correction that felt intrusive and perfect. Yujiro held him there for a full minute, as if manually recalibrating his skeleton, then let go. “Now continue.”
Baki did. His form was flawless.
The world outside noticed the change in frequency. The energy around them had warped. People gave them even wider berths, their stares a mix of terror and voyeuristic confusion. It was in this charged atmosphere that Kozue Matsumoto finally asked to meet.
They met at a quiet café she liked, one with plants and soft light. Baki arrived to find her already there, two iced coffees on the table. She smiled, warm and normal, and for a second, the last month dissolved. He could have been any guy meeting his pretty, kind-hearted girlfriend. Then he sat, and the movement pulled tight at the scar tissue, a permanent reminder that he was not any guy.
“You look better,” she said, her eyes soft with concern. “The color’s back in your face. I was so worried when I heard you were in the hospital after that mountain trip.”
“Yeah,” Baki said, stirring his coffee. “It was a rough climb.”
They made stilted small talk. She told him about her university classes, a funny thing her brother did. He nodded, offering short replies. The normalcy of it was like a thick glass pane between them; he could see her life happening, but he couldn’t feel its temperature.
Her smile began to falter. She played with her napkin. “Baki… I’ve heard some things.”
Here it came.
“What things?”
“Just… rumors. From people who see you around town with your father.” She looked up, her brown eyes searching his. “They say he’s… different with you now. That you’re different. That you’re always together, and it’s… intense.” She chose the word carefully, layering it with all the meaning it could hold. “People are talking. They’re saying things that don’t make sense.”
Baki felt a cold stillness settle in his gut. He saw it from her side: the unexplained near-death experience, the sudden, inseparable bond with the most terrifying man alive, the whispers circulating in a city that thrived on combat gossip.
“What are they saying, exactly?” His voice was flat.
Kozue took a breath, her cheeks flushing. “They’re saying he acts like you’re… I don’t know. Like you’re his…” She couldn’t finish. The words were too absurd to voice. “What happened on that mountain, Baki? Something did. You won’t talk about it, and he’s everywhere you are now, touching you like… like he’s checking you’re real. It’s freaking me out.”
The image flashed, visceral and unforgiving: the dark cabin, the feel of rough wool, the shared, brutal heat that had nothing to do with fever. The way Yujiro’s breathing had hitched. The way his own body had responded, a traitorous welcome. The weeks of tangled, hungry closeness that had followed. The feeling that had curdled inside him from desperate survival into something else, something that craved the very thing that had broken him.
How the fuck was he supposed to tell her? Yeah, Kozue, I got impaled. My dad saved my life by fucking me raw in a shack to share his body heat, and now I think about his hands more than I think about oxygen. It’s complicated.
He couldn’t. The truth was a black hole that would annihilate her gentle world. It would poison the way she looked at him forever. She’d see the stain, and she’d flinch. He realized, with a sudden, sinking clarity, that he couldn’t stand to see her flinch. Not from him. It would be a different kind of death.
He looked at her—really looked. At her neat nails, her worried, kind face, the college textbook peeking from her bag. She belonged to sidewalks and cafés and soft concerns. She did not belong anywhere near the bloody, monstrous truth of what he was, and what he was becoming with Yujiro.
“You’re right,” Baki said, his voice quiet and final. “Something did happen.”
Her eyes widened, hopeful for an explanation, any explanation she could understand. “What? You can tell me.”
“I can’t.” He held her gaze. “And you don’t want me to. If you knew, you’d never look at me the same way again. You’d be scared of me.”
“I’d never be scared of you, Baki,” she whispered, but there was already a fear in her eyes—the fear of what she was hearing now.
“Yes, you would.” He said it with absolute certainty. “Because I’m scared of it. It’s… in me now. And he’s part of it. He is it.” He took a slow breath. “You’re a good person, Kozue. The best I know. That’s why this has to end.”
The words landed. She recoiled as if slapped. “What? Baki, no… I’m just worried about you! We can figure this out—”
“There’s nothing to figure out.” He stood up, the chair legs scraping loudly on the floor. The other patrons glanced over. He didn’t care. The need to get out, to get back to the brutal, honest hellscape he understood, was a physical pull. “It’s over. Don’t call me. Don’t look for me. Forget about me.”
“Baki, please!” Tears welled in her eyes, sparkling and human. “I love you!”
He paused. He let the words, so foreign, so achingly simple, hang in the air between them. They had no purchase on the cliff-face he was now climbing.
“That’s why you have to let go,” he said, and it was the gentlest thing he’d said to her in weeks. Then he turned and walked out, leaving his half-finished coffee and the soft, breaking sound of her crying behind him.
The café door chimed. The sun outside was too bright. Across the street, idling at the curb like a predator at a watering hole, was Yujiro’s black car. The window was down. Yujiro wasn’t looking at him. He was staring straight ahead, as if he’d just happened to be parked there. But his knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
Baki crossed the street, opened the passenger door, and slid in. The car smelled of leather and Yujiro’s specific, oppressive scent.
“Done?” Yujiro asked, his voice devoid of any readable emotion.
“Yeah.”
Yujiro finally turned his head. His eyes, yellow and unblinking, scanned Baki’s face, looking for regret, for tears, for weakness. He found only a weary, settled resolve.
A large hand came up, cupping the back of Baki’s head, fingers threading through his hair. It wasn’t a gentle gesture. It was an assessment, a reaffirmation of ownership. Yujiro pulled him close, until their foreheads nearly touched. He searched his eyes again, deeper this time.
“Good,” Yujiro murmured, the word a vapor of heat between them. He released him, put the car in gear, and pulled into traffic. He drove one-handed, his other hand resting on Baki’s thigh, a heavy, inescapable weight.
The silence after Kozue was different. It wasn't a hollow silence, but a dense, fertile one. She had been a sweet, normal anchor in a world that was neither, and her absence didn't create a void so much as it removed a boundary. The space she left was immediately filled by the gravitational pull they exerted on each other. There were no more dinners to excuse himself from, no more gentle phone calls to ignore. The outside world, which had briefly flickered in the form of a smiling girl, receded entirely. The island of two was complete.
Baki’s body knitted itself back together with a stubborn will that impressed even Yujiro. The pink scar on his abdomen was a permanent brand, a tactile memory they both carried. Their casual, claiming touches in public grew bolder, a silent fuck-you to the whispers. But it was in private where the real terrain was being mapped. Baki’s need for proximity became a constant, low-grade hum. Yujiro’s tolerance for it became a form of addiction.
One evening, driven by a restlessness that wasn’t about fighting, Yujiro simply said, “Come,” and led the way out of the city. They drove until the lights were a smear in the rearview, then hiked a steep, moonlit trail into the mountains that overlooked Tokyo. It was not the brutal, killing peak of their past, but a place of quiet grandeur. The air was cool and clean, smelling of damp earth and cedar.
They reached a rocky outcropping that cantilevered over a vast, dark valley. The city below was a distant galaxy of light, utterly silent from this height. A blanket of stars, undimmed by pollution, sprawled overhead. Yujiro sat on the flat stone, his back against a boulder. Baki, without a word, settled between his legs, his back against his father’s chest. Yujiro’s arms came around him naturally, locking over his chest. It was a replication of the cabin bunk, but without desperation, without death hovering in the corner. This was chosen.
For a long time, they just watched the stars. The heat from Yujiro’s body seeped through both their clothes. Baki could feel the slow, powerful thud of his heart against his spine.
“It’s quieter up here,” Baki said, his voice soft.
“Everything is quieter from a distance,” Yujiro replied, his chin resting on the top of Baki’s head.
Baki tilted his head back, looking up at the sharp line of Yujiro’s jaw. “Do you ever think about it? The cabin.”
Yujiro was silent for a moment. The arms around Baki tightened almost imperceptibly. “I think about the snow. How clean it was the next morning. How it covered everything.”
“It didn’t cover everything.”
“No.”
Baki turned in the circle of his arms. It was a slow, deliberate motion. He shifted until he was straddling Yujiro’s lap, their faces close in the moonglow. He could see the stars reflected in Yujiro’s dark eyes. “I don’t want it covered,” Baki whispered. “I want to remember the fucking feel of it. Every second.”
He leaned in and kissed him. It wasn’t like the frantic, bloody clash in the sickbed. This was slow, a deep, searching exploration. A claiming of a different kind. Yujiro’s hands came up to cradle his face, thumbs stroking the scars on his cheeks. When they broke apart, their breath misted in the cool air, mingling.
“This is what you want?” Yujiro’s voice was a low rumble in his chest, vibrating through Baki.
“It’s what I am,” Baki corrected, grinding his hips down slowly, feeling the hard ridge of Yujiro’s cock already straining against his jeans. “You made me this. On that mountain. You don’t get to act surprised now.”
Yujiro’s answer was to crush their mouths together again, one hand fisting in Baki’s hair, the other sliding under his shirt, mapping the familiar landscape of his back, finding the ridge of the scar on his abdomen and tracing it with a roughness that made Baki shudder.
They undressed each other with a focused slowness that was its own foreplay. The night air pebbled their skin. In the starlight, Yujiro looked like a myth carved from granite, every muscle defined. Baki, smaller but coiled with lethal grace, was the live wire against him. They sank back onto the blanket Yujiro had brought, the rough stone beneath it a solid, real contrast to the softness of the night.
Yujiro lay back, pulling Baki on top of him. Their cocks slid together, a hot, slick friction that drew a sharp gasp from Baki. He braced his hands on Yujiro’s chest, looking down at him, his hair falling into his eyes.
“Tell me,” Baki breathed.
Yujiro stared up, his expression unguarded in the dark. “You’re mine,” he said, the words not a boast, but a raw, fundamental truth. “Not my heir. Not my rival. Mine. In every way there is.”
It was the confession they’d both been circling. Baki’s eyes glistened. He lowered his head, kissing Yujiro’s throat, his collarbone, the brutal shelf of his pectoral. “Then take what’s yours,” he murmured against his skin.
Yujiro moved them with a gentle strength that was more devastating than any throw. He guided Baki onto his back, settling between his thighs. He didn’t rush. He kissed him again, deeply, as his hand slid down, fingers tracing the cleft of his ass. Baki’s legs fell open willingly, a silent, absolute surrender. When Yujiro’s finger, slick with spit, pressed against his entrance, Baki arched off the stone with a sharp inhale.
“Look at me,” Yujiro commanded, his voice thick.
Baki’s eyes, wide and dark, locked on his. Yujiro pushed in slowly, watching every flicker of sensation on his son’s face—the initial tight resistance, the shock, the dawning, overwhelming pleasure. He worked him open with a meticulous, almost cruel patience, first one finger, then two, scissoring and stretching until Baki was panting, his hips lifting off the ground, begging wordlessly.
“Now,” Baki choked out. “Fuck, now.”
Yujiro aligned himself. The broad, blunt head of his cock pressed against that stretched, quivering ring. He didn’t shove. He leaned down, capturing Baki’s mouth in a kiss as he pushed forward, an inexorable, millimeter-by-millimeter invasion. Baki cried out into the kiss, his body seizing up, then shuddering in a wave of intense, burning fullness as Yujiro finally, fully sheathed himself inside him.
They stayed like that, locked together, breathing raggedly into each other’s mouths. Yujiro pulled back just enough to see Baki’s face. Tears had leaked from the corners of his eyes, tracking into his hairline. Not from pain. From a feeling too huge to contain.
“Move,” Baki pleaded, his voice shattered. “Please.”
Yujiro began to move. It was a slow, deep, rolling rhythm, each withdrawal an agony of loss, each thrust a homecoming. He kept his weight on his forearms, caging Baki in, his face buried in the curve of his neck. And with each deep, penetrating push, he pressed his lips to Baki’s skin.
He kissed the pulse hammering at the base of his throat. He kissed the salty hollow above his collarbone. He kissed the line of his jaw, his temple, each touch of his lips a silent punctuation to the physical act. Each thrust was not just a taking, but a sealing of a promise. He kissed the scar on his eyebrow. He kissed the shell of his ear and whispered filthy, tender things—how tight he was, how good he felt, how he was made for this, for him.
Baki clutched at his back, his fingers scrambling for purchase on the shifting mountains of muscle. Every nerve ending was on fire. The stretch and burn had melted into a deep, throbbing pleasure that coiled tighter with every measured stroke. He could feel everything—the night air on his sweatin
g skin, the rough blanket beneath him, the impossible, solid heat of his father inside him, the soft, relentless assault of lips on his neck. It was too much. It was everything.
“I love you,” the words tore from Baki’s throat, raw and unbidden, a sob mixed with a moan. “God, I love you. I always have.”
Yujiro’s rhythm broke for a second, a stutter that drove his cock even deeper. He lifted his head, his own composure shattered. His eyes, usually pits of calculated fury, were wide with a terrifying vulnerability. He stared down at the wrecked, beautiful face beneath him.
“I know,” Yujiro groaned, the admission a convulsive ripple through his entire body. “You stupid, stubborn boy. I’ve always known.” He drove into him harder, losing the slow tempo, consumed by the confession. “It’s the only thing that ever scared me.”
That was the catalyst. Baki came with a broken shout, his body clamping down around Yujiro in violent, pulsating waves, his release streaking hot between their stomachs. The intense, milking pressure dragged Yujiro over the edge immediately after. He buried himself to the hilt, his own roar muffled against Baki’s neck as he emptied himself deep inside, each jet a hot, claiming flood.
The collapse was gradual. Yujiro’s immense weight settled onto him, a welcome crushing. They were both slick with sweat and come, breathing in ragged unison. The stars wheeled overhead, indifferent and magnificent.
After a long while, Yujiro shifted, pulling out gently. He lay on his side, gathering Baki against him, their fronts pressed together. He retrieved the blanket, pulling it over them. Baki nestled into the heat of his chest, spent and boneless.
Yujiro’s hand came up, stroking through Baki’s damp hair. “On the mountain,” he said quietly, his voice roughened by use, “when your heart stopped… it wasn’t the thought of losing my successor that terrified me.”
Baki looked up, waiting.
“It was the thought of the silence,” Yujiro finished, his gaze fixed on the infinite stars. “The permanent silence where you should have been. That was the true weakness. That is the only weakness I have.”
Baki pressed a kiss over the spot where Yujiro’s own heart beat, a slow, powerful drum against his lips. “Then I guess I’ll just have to stay alive,” he murmured. “To protect your only weakness.”
A grunt that was almost a laugh vibrated through Yujiro’s chest. He held him tighter. Below them, the city gleamed, a world of noise and conflict and ordinary lives. Up on the cliff, under the cold, watchful stars, there was only this: a fierce, tangled warmth, a completed circuit, and a peace that felt, for the first time in both their lives, like victory.
The silence in the Hanma estate training hall was a living thing, thick and feverish, broken only by the rhythmic slap of Baki’s bandaged fists against the heavy bag. Sweat sheened his torso, highlighting the intricate map of scar tissue that now dominated his midsection—a pale, jagged sunburst from which lesser scars radiated like twisted rays. Each impact sent a dull ache through his core, a reminder he welcomed. Pain was a compass. This new, different pain inside him had no direction.
He wasn’t training to get stronger, not in the usual way. He was training to feel solid again. To feel like his body belonged to him, and not to the memory of a freezing cabin, or to the confusing warmth that had bloomed in its aftermath.
The tall, paneled door to the hall slid open without a sound. A silhouette filled the space, elongated and sharp. Not Yujiro’s mountainous bulk. This was a different kind of threat, lean and coiled.
Jack Hanma stepped into the light.
He was taller than Baki, all stretched sinew and engineered violence. His long blond hair was tied back, emphasizing the brutal angles of his augmented jawline. He stood just inside the doorway, not moving further, his pale eyes scanning the hall before fixing on his brother. They held none of the chaotic fire of Yujiro’s gaze. They were cold, surgical, and utterly, poisonously still.
Baki stopped punching. He didn’t turn, but his stance shifted, a subtle widening of his feet. The air changed. The lingering warmth from Baki’s exertion seemed to chill and settle.
“You look well,” Jack said. His voice was a dry, papery scrape. “Recovered.”
“Getting there,” Baki replied, finally turning. He grabbed a towel from a rack, wiping his neck. The movement was casual, but his eyes tracked every minute shift in Jack’s posture.
“I heard a story,” Jack continued, taking a slow step forward. His boots were silent on the polished wood. “A fascinating one. Circulating through the lower ranks. About the Ogre and his pup on a mountain.”
Baki said nothing. He draped the towel over his shoulders.
“They say you almost died. That Father played nursemaid. Carried you down like a damsel.” Another step. “But the most interesting part comes later. In the recovery. The… closeness.”
“If you’ve got something to say, Jack, say it.” Baki’s voice was flat, devoid of its usual taunting energy.
“I am.” Jack stopped, now only ten feet away. He tilted his head, a predator examining strange prey. “I heard you’ve become his shadow. His little pet. Leaning on him in public. Letting him put his hands on you.” The words were methodical, devoid of emotion, which made them cut deeper. “Tell me, brother. Is it true? Did freezing to death on that mountain finally thaw something in you? Or just… melt your spine?”
Baki’s knuckles tightened around the towel. “What happens between me and him is none of your business.”
“It became my business,” Jack snapped, the icy control cracking for a fraction of a second, “the moment your weakness began to pollute the Hanma name. People aren’t just whispering about your strength anymore, Baki. They’re whispering about what you let him do to you. Where you let him put his hands.”
The image was deliberate, graphic, meant to wound. Baki felt a flush rise up his neck, part anger, part shame.
Jack saw it. He smiled, a thin, cruel stretching of his lips. “You always were sentimental. A momma’s boy. Maybe that’s what this is. Looking for a replacement.” He took another step, closing the distance. “Let me remind you who you’re curling up with. That man crushed your mother’s skull with a single hand. He raped mine and left her to die with me in her belly. He has ended bloodlines, shattered nations, for sport. He is a tumor on the world. And you…” He leaned in, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper. “You’re opening your legs for him now? Playing whore for the monster that killed your own mother?”
The words hung in the air, foul and final.
Before Baki could move, could even draw breath to respond, a voice detonated from the shadows near the weapon racks.
“You will shut your fucking mouth.”
Yujiro emerged, not from the door, but from the deep gloom in the corner of the vast hall. He must have been there the entire time, a presence so still and contained it had become part of the architecture. His eyes were slits of amber fury, fixed on Jack.
Jack didn’t flinch. He turned his head slowly, meeting his father’s gaze. “Or what? You’ll kill me? You’ve wanted to for years.”
Yujiro moved then. It wasn’t the explosive, blurring speed he used in battle. It was a deliberate, terrifying stroll that shook the floorboards. He came to stand beside Baki, not looking at him, his entire being focused on Jack like a scalpel.
“If you ever speak about your brother that way again,” Yujiro said, his voice a low, tectonic rumble that vibrated in the chest, “I will not kill you. I will take your head from your shoulders and mount it on the gate. Not as a trophy. As a warning to other maggots who dare to soil his name with their tongue.”
The hall seemed to darken. Baki stared at his father’s profile, shock wiping his mind clean. This wasn’t defense. This was possessiveness, raw and feral.
Jack’s cold smile returned, brittle at the edges. “His name? He shares your name. The name of the beast. And he’s making it a joke.”
“Baki,” Yujiro said, the name a stone dropped into the silence, “has always been my real son. He fights for the top because it’s his birthright. You fight for it because you think it will make you something you are not.” He took a final step, now looming over Jack, his shadow engulfing him. “There is no room in my world for weak trash like you. Only strength matters. And you have never had it. You built a jaw to bite me because your heart could not.”
The insult was absolute. It wasn’t just about power; it was an annihilation of Jack’s very identity, his decades of agonizing transformation, his entire reason for being.
Jack’s icy composure shattered.
A sound ripped from his throat—half roar, half shriek of pure, desolate rage. He didn’t telegraph the attack. His body just uncoiled, a whip of augmented fury. His fist, knuckles grafted and reinforced, shot toward Yujiro’s throat in a blow meant to crush the larynx and spine as one.
Yujiro didn’t block it.
He took it.
The impact was a sickening, meaty thwack that echoed through the hall. Yujiro’s head snapped back a fraction, his neck muscles cording like steel cables. He absorbed the force, rooted to the floor, and smiled. It was a terrible sight.
Jack’s eyes widened for a microsecond before his training took over. He flowed into a barrage, a hurricane of violence born of a lifetime of hatred. Bone-shattering kicks, precision strikes aimed at nerve clusters, all delivered with a speed and ferocity that would have liquefied any other creature on earth.
Yujiro defended without moving his feet. His hands and forearms were blurs, parrying, redirecting, slapping blows aside with contemptuous ease. Each block was a gunshot. The air itself seemed to tear around them.
“Is this it?” Yujiro grunted, catching a kick aimed at his knee and shoving it away, making Jack stumble. “This is the revenge you baked yourself in a tube for? You hit like a child having a tantrum.”
Spittle flew from Jack’s mouth. He feinted low and lunged, his augmented jaws snapping shut with enough force to sever steel where Yujiro’s elbow had been a millisecond before. Yujiro pivoted, his own elbow driving down into the space between Jack’s shoulder blades. The crack was audible. Jack gasped, his spine arching, but he twisted, lashing out with a backfist.
It was chaos. A destruction of form and technique, devolving into primal, brutal exchange. Jack’s fury made him faster, stronger, but also reckless. Yujiro was a mountain in a storm, weathering the assault with terrifying patience. He wasn’t trying to win. He was demonstrating a point.
Baki watched, frozen, his own conflict forgotten. He saw the truth in Yujiro’s movements. He was playing with Jack. And Jack knew it.
With a guttural cry, Jack committed everything to a single, lunging spear-hand aimed straight for Yujiro’s heart. It was a suicide move, leaving him completely open.
Yujiro finally moved his feet. He sidestepped, the motion so minimal it was an insult. His left hand shot out, not to strike, but to clamp around Jack’s extended wrist. His right hand rose, fingers held in a peculiar, rigid shape.
Demon Brain.
The strike wasn’t to the body. Yujiro’s rigid fingertips, moving with the force of a piston, tapped a rapid, precise sequence against Jack’s temple, his jaw hinge, the base of his skull.
Jack’s body went rigid. His eyes, wide with fury, glazed over. His augmented muscles, all his bio-engineered power, locked up as his nervous system was swarmed with conflicting, devastating signals. He didn’t fall. He stood there, vibrating, trapped in the prison of his own flesh, a statue of agony.
Yujiro released his wrist. Jack remained upright, quivering, a marionette with cut strings. A thin line of drolet mixed with blood trailed from his slack jaw.
Yujiro looked at him, his expression one of pure, dispassionate disdain. He leaned close to Jack’s ear, his voice barely a whisper, yet carrying perfectly in the now-silent hall.
“Weak.”
He turned his back and walked toward Baki, leaving Jack standing there, immobilized, humiliated beyond any physical breaking.
The spell of the Demon Brain lasted another ten seconds. Then Jack’s legs buckled. He crashed to the wooden floor, his body convulsing once before lying still, his breath coming in ragged, wet gasps. He couldn’t even lift his head.
Yujiro stopped in front of Baki. He wasn’t even breathing heavily. There was a faint red mark on his throat from Jack’s first, desperate blow. He looked down at his son, his face unreadable.
For a long moment, the only sound was Jack’s labored breathing from the floor.
Baki looked from his broken brother to his father. The fury was gone from him, leaving behind a hollow ache. He spoke quietly, his voice barely carrying past Yujiro’s chest.
“You didn’t have to say that. That he was weak. That I was your ‘real’ son.” He glanced at Jack’s prone form. “You didn’t have to make him feel like that.”
Yujiro followed his gaze. He snorted, a short, derisive puff of air.
“I wasn’t making him feel anything,” he said, his tone flat, matter-of-fact. He turned and began walking toward the hall’s exit, his footsteps echoing in the vast, wounded space. He didn’t look back at either of his sons.
“I was only speaking the truth.”