Scavenger

The first thing Kazuto noticed was the cold.

Not the cold of the light. That was gone. This was the ordinary, heavy cold of stone, pressing up through his school uniform from a floor that was much too smooth and much too hard to belong to class 2-B.

The second thing he noticed was the smell. Wax. Smoke. Something sweet and heavy underneath it all, like incense, or flowers left too long in a vase.

The third thing he noticed was the sound of somebody crying.

He sat up so fast his head swam. For one wild second he thought he was still in the classroom, that the light had been some kind of gas leak, that he’d passed out and any moment now Mr. Nakamura would come running back in with his coffee. He pressed a hand to his pocket and felt the hard shape of his phone through the fabric, and he held onto that, the one ordinary thing he had left, while he made himself look up.

He was sitting on the floor of the largest room he had ever seen.

Everything was white. White marble floor. White pillars as thick as old trees, climbing up and up toward a dome so high it seemed to have its own weather. Light poured down through enormous windows of colored glass, gold and blue and deep red, laying patterns across the floor like spilled paint. And on the inside of the dome, far above, someone had painted a figure.

It was a man, or the shape of one, made entirely of light. He had no face. Where his face should have been, the painter had laid down gold leaf instead, so bright that it was hard to look at even from all the way down here. His arms were spread wide, his palms open, reaching down toward the floor as if he were about to gather up everyone in the room.

Kazuto had seen a lot of art in his life. Most of it was on manga covers, admittedly. But he knew what a picture was trying to make you feel, and this one was trying very hard to make him feel safe.

It wasn’t working.

All around him, the rest of class 2-B was waking up. Someone was still crying. Someone else was saying “What the hell, what the hell, what the hell” in a steady, rising loop. Kobayashi was on his hands and knees, patting the marble like he expected it to be fake. Mio was sitting up slowly, eyes wide, one hand pressed flat over her heart. Kaito was already on his feet, because of course he was, turning in a slow circle with his fists clenched.

And around the edges of the room, in a perfect ring, people were kneeling.

There had to be fifty of them, men and women in long white robes trimmed with gold, heads bowed, hands folded. Some of them were trembling. A few had slumped forward onto the floor and weren’t moving at all, and the robed figures beside them didn’t seem to have noticed, or didn’t seem to care.

Kazuto looked at the slumped ones for a long time.

Then one of the robed figures stood up, and the whole room went quiet.

He was old. That was what Kazuto noticed first. Not old like a grandfather. Old like a building, like something that had stood in the same place for so long that the world had grown up around it. He was small and thin, with a neat white beard and a face so gentle and so lined that it looked folded rather than wrinkled. His robes were whiter than the others, his gold trim heavier, and he carried a tall staff topped with a golden sunburst.

He walked slowly into the center of the circle. And then he did something that Kazuto would think about for a long time afterward.

He knelt.

Right there on the marble, in front of thirty frightened teenagers in school uniforms, the old man lowered himself onto both knees and bowed his head.

“Welcome,” he said. “Welcome, children of another world. Welcome, Heroes.”

His voice was soft. It should not have carried across a room that size. It did anyway, reaching every corner, warm and clear, as if he were speaking right beside each one of them at once.

“I am Severin,” the old man said, “servant of the Radiant Father, and Pope of His holy church. You have been called to the world of Eredia by the Father’s own mercy. I know you must be frightened. I know you must have a thousand questions. Please. Allow me to try to answer them.”

It took Kazuto a moment to figure out what was wrong.

The Pope’s mouth didn’t match his words.

It was subtle. His lips moved in shapes that didn’t quite line up with what Kazuto was hearing, always half a beat off, like a badly dubbed anime. Whatever language this man was speaking, it wasn’t Japanese, and it wasn’t anything Kazuto had ever heard before. And yet he understood every word of it perfectly, as if the meaning were being poured straight into his head.

He looked around. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. They were all too busy staring at the kneeling old man.

The Pope’s story took a while, and he told it beautifully.

Eredia, he said, was a world of humans and many other peoples, and for a thousand years it had lived under the protection of the Radiant Father, Aurion, the god of light, who had shaped the land and kept it safe. But in the far north, beyond the mountains, lived the demons, a cruel and ancient race who hated the light. And now a Demon Lord had risen among them, stronger than any in living memory. His armies were gathering. Villages along the northern border were burning. The people of Eredia prayed every night for deliverance.

“And the Father has answered,” Severin said, opening his hands. “In every age when darkness has risen, the Radiant Father has reached across the void between worlds and called forth Heroes. Those who cross the void are blessed by His own hand. You will find that you are stronger than you were. Far stronger. Each of you now carries a power many times greater than any soldier of this world. With your help, we can drive back the darkness and save millions of innocent lives.”

It was a good speech. Kazuto could tell it was a good speech, because he could feel the room changing as it went on. The crying had stopped. People were sitting up straighter. Over by one of the pillars, Mori had actually whispered “No way” in a voice that sounded a lot more like excitement than fear. Kaito’s fists had come unclenched. He was listening with his whole face, the way he listened to teachers.

“We’re stronger?” somebody asked. “Like, for real?”

“You will see,” the Pope said kindly. “Very soon.”

Kazuto raised his hand.

He did it automatically, the way he would have in class, and he felt stupid the second he did it. But the Pope’s eyes found him at once, and the old man nodded, so Kazuto lowered his hand and said, “How do we get home?”

His voice came out smaller than he wanted. It still sounded very loud in that room.

The Pope’s expression didn’t change. It stayed kind and patient and a little sad. “The great summoning is the Father’s miracle,” he said gently. “It is not ours. We are only His hands. I am afraid there is no one in this world with the power to open the way back. Only the Radiant Father Himself.”

“Then will He?”

“When the Demon Lord has fallen,” Severin said, “I have no doubt that He will hear your prayers.”

A murmur of relief went through the room. A few people actually smiled.

Kazuto didn’t.

He had worked a register for three years. He had stood behind a counter and told customers “I’m sure we can get that in for you” about books that had been out of print since before he was born. He knew exactly what a polite answer sounded like when it was built to keep you calm and promise you nothing.

“I have no doubt” wasn’t yes.

It wasn’t even close to yes.

He looked around for anyone else who’d heard it. Mio’s face was pale, but she was nodding. Kaede was staring at the floor. Goto was grinning at Mori about something. Nobody was looking at the Pope the way Kazuto was looking at him.

Then Kaito stepped forward.

“Your Holiness,” he said. His voice shook a little at first. Then it steadied, and Kazuto watched him find his footing the way he did before a kendo match, rolling his shoulders back, lifting his chin. “If people are really dying, and if we really have the power to help them, then I think we have to help.”

“Kaito,” Mio said quietly.

“We’ll defeat this Demon Lord.” Kaito turned to face the class. “All of us. Together. And then we’ll go home together, too. I promise you that. Nobody gets left behind.”

And it worked. It actually worked. Kazuto watched it happen. A few people clapped. Somebody cheered. Goto shouted “Let’s go!” and punched the air. The fear that had filled the room a few minutes ago folded itself up and vanished behind thirty brave, relieved faces, and the Pope smiled at Kaito with such warmth, such gentle pride, that for a moment Kazuto almost believed in it too.

Almost.

Because when the Pope turned to rise, leaning on his golden staff, Kazuto caught his face from the side for just a second, and the smile on it hadn’t changed at all. Not a crease. It hadn’t grown, or softened, or warmed. It just sat there, exactly where he’d put it, like a picture hung on a wall.

---

They were led out of the great hall in a long, nervous line, through a pair of golden doors, and into a smaller chamber.

Smaller was relative. It was still the size of a school gym. But it felt tighter, because every inch of its walls was covered in writing.

Names.

Kazuto knew they were names before anyone told him. They were carved into the white stone in neat, careful rows, from just above the floor all the way up to the ceiling, in what had to be a hundred different alphabets. Some were curling scripts he’d never seen before. Some were blocky symbols that didn’t look like letters at all. But here and there, as he walked, his eyes caught on writing he could read.

A Japanese name, carved in kanji, worn soft with age. Then an English one. Then something in Russian. Then another Japanese name, much older, the strokes so faded he could barely make them out.

“The Hall of the Called,” said the priest leading them, a young man with a round, earnest face. He said it with real reverence. “The names of every Hero who has come before you. Each of them gave their life in the service of Eredia. They will be remembered until the end of days.”

Kazuto slowed down.

Each of them, he thought.

He looked up at the walls. He tried to count the rows, gave up, and started estimating instead, the way he’d estimate a stack of returns. Fifty names to a row, maybe. Hundreds of rows. Thousands of names. Thousands of kids, maybe, pulled out of their classrooms and their bedrooms and their ordinary lives, exactly like them.

The bottom of the far wall was blank. The stone there was smooth and clean and freshly polished, a long strip of empty white space.

Waiting.

“Excuse me,” Kazuto said. The priest turned. “Did any of them go home?”

The young priest looked genuinely puzzled by the question. Then his face cleared, and he smiled the bright, simple smile of someone who had never once doubted what he’d been taught.

“They went to the Father’s side,” he said. “What home could be greater than that?”

Kazuto didn’t have an answer. At least, not one he could say out loud.

Someone bumped his shoulder. It was Kaede, walking just behind him, staring up at the walls with her lips pressed tight. Their eyes met for a second. Kaede looked away first.

---

In the center of the room stood a pedestal of white stone, and on top of it sat a sphere of crystal the size of a basketball.

It was clear as water. When the light hit it, thin rainbows rippled across its surface, slow and liquid, like oil on a puddle. Beside it stood a tall, sharp-faced woman in red-trimmed robes, holding a thin silver plate in one hand and a stylus in the other. The other priests called her Cardinal, and they stepped out of her way.

“The Eye of the Father,” the Cardinal announced. “Each of you will place your hand upon it, and the Father will reveal the gifts He has granted you. Your class. Your strengths. Your skills. They will be recorded on a plate of truth, which you will carry with you always.” Her sharp eyes moved down the line of them. “Who will be first?”

Of course it was Kaito.

He walked up to the pedestal the way he walked out for a match, took one deep breath, and pressed his palm flat against the crystal.

Light exploded out of it.

Not a glow. An explosion. A blast of pure gold that lit the whole chamber and made everyone in the room throw their arms over their eyes. When it faded, words were hanging inside the crystal, burning like neon signs, and the Cardinal was staring at them with her mouth slightly open.

“Kaito Sanada,” she read, and her voice wasn’t quite steady anymore. “Level one. Class… Hero.”

The priests along the walls actually gasped. One of them traced a sunburst over his chest with two fingers.

“Strength, one hundred. Endurance, one hundred. Magic, one hundred. Agility, one hundred.” The Cardinal swallowed. “Skills. Holy Sword. Light Magic. All Elements. Battle Instinct. Blessing of the Radiant Father.” She looked up at Kaito with something close to awe. “A knight of this kingdom, at the very peak of his training, might reach thirty in his strongest attribute. Hero Kaito. You are the Father’s champion.”

Kaito stared down at his own hand like he’d never seen it before. Then he grinned, wide and boyish and stunned, and the class cheered so loud it echoed off the names on the walls.

After that, it went fast.

Mio laid her hand on the crystal and it bloomed a soft, clean white, and the Cardinal read out the class of Saint, the rarest healing calling in the world, and two of the older priests began quietly weeping. Goto slapped his palm down hard enough to rattle the pedestal and came away a Berserker with a strength of one hundred and twenty, and he roared with laughter and flexed at Mori, who’d gotten Lancer, and at Kobayashi, who’d gotten Flame Mage and was already trying to make fire come out of his fingers. One by one, the rest of class 2-B stepped up. Swordsman. Archer. Guardian. Wind Mage. Alchemist. Every one of them glowed. Every one of them walked away holding a silver plate, wearing the dazed, delighted face of someone who had just found out they were special.

Kaede went near the end. Kazuto didn’t catch her result. He only saw her walk away from the pedestal holding her plate flat against her chest, very tightly, with no expression on her face at all.

Then it was Kazuto’s turn. He was last. He’d made sure of that.

He walked up to the pedestal. He could feel everyone watching. He could feel his own heartbeat in his throat, and he hated, really hated, that some small, stupid part of him was hoping.

He put his hand on the crystal.

It was cold. Not cool, like glass. Cold like the light in the classroom had been, a deep and aching cold that went straight up through his palm and into his arm and into his chest. And for one long, horrible second, Kazuto had the feeling that something was looking at him.

Not the Cardinal. Not the priests. Something else. Something on the other side of the crystal, or behind it, or beneath it. Something enormous and patient and completely without warmth, turning him over the way he’d turn over a used book that someone had brought in to sell. Checking the spine. Flipping through the pages. Deciding whether he was worth the price.

Then, just as quickly, it was gone. Like the book had been put back on the shelf.

The crystal flickered. A thin gray light came up inside it, barely more than a candle in a dirty window. Words formed, small and faint.

The Cardinal leaned in and squinted.

“Kazuto Kirigaya,” she read slowly. “Level one. Class…”

She paused.

“Scavenger.”

Nobody said anything. Somebody near the back whispered, “A what?”

“Strength, ten,” the Cardinal went on, in a much flatter voice. “Endurance, ten. Magic, ten. Agility, ten.” Her mouth tightened. “Ten is the measure of an ordinary man of Eredia. Skills. Language Comprehension. And…” She squinted harder. “Scavenge.”

“What does a scavenger do here?” Mio asked. Her voice was careful.

The Cardinal hesitated, as if it embarrassed her to say it.

“When an army wins a battle,” she said, “the soldiers take what they want from the field and march on. Whatever they leave behind belongs to whoever comes after. Broken blades. Dented helmets. The boots off the dead.” She cleared her throat. “The ones who come after are called scavengers. It is not a calling anyone chooses. It is what people do when they have nothing else.”

For a second, there was perfect silence.

Then Goto laughed.

It was a huge, delighted bark of a laugh, and it bounced off every wall in the chamber. “A garbage picker!” he shouted. “He’s a garbage picker! We get magic and swords, and he gets to dig through the trash after everybody else is done!” He bent over, slapping his knee. “Kirigaya, man, we’re in a whole new world and you’re still a loser!”

Mori laughed. Kobayashi laughed. And then it spread, the way laughter spreads in a classroom, nervous and relieved and a little bit cruel, passing from one person to the next until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. Not everyone joined in. Mio didn’t. Kaede didn’t. But enough of them did.

“Hey, come on. That’s enough,” Kaito said, holding up a hand, and the laughter died down a little. He turned to Kazuto with that same warm, patient expression from homeroom. “Don’t worry about it, Kirigaya. Not everybody has to fight. We’ll protect you. That’s what a team does.”

Kazuto didn’t say anything. He took his hand off the crystal. The gray light went out, and he accepted the silver plate the Cardinal held out to him without looking at it. It weighed almost nothing.

He turned around, and that was when he saw the Pope.

Severin was standing at the far end of the hall, beside the golden doors, where he must have been watching the entire time. He wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t smiling either. He was simply looking at Kazuto, very still, with the calm and patient attention of a man studying a chessboard.

Then he noticed Kazuto looking back, and the warm smile settled over his face again, exactly as before.

“Every soul the Father calls has a purpose, child,” he said gently, across the whole length of the hall. “Even the humblest.”

---

They gave each of them a room.

Kazuto’s was bigger than his family’s whole apartment. It had a bed with a canopy and curtains, a fireplace somebody had already lit, a carpet so thick his feet sank into it, and a silver tray on the table piled with bread and roasted meat and fruit he didn’t recognize. Through the walls he could hear the others. Doors opening and closing. Footsteps running in the halls. Goto’s voice somewhere far off, laughing at something. It sounded like a school trip. It sounded like everyone was having the best night of their lives.

He didn’t touch the food.

He sat down on the edge of the enormous bed and took out his phone.

No signal, of course. No bars, no Wi-Fi, no little loading circle. Thirty-one percent battery. But the clock still worked, faithfully counting the time in a world that wasn’t there anymore.

7:14.

There was one message on the lock screen. It had come in at three forty-one, while he was watching the clock in class and telling himself he’d answer it later.

Don’t forget. Seven o’clock. Your father bought ingredients, so pray for all of us.

Kazuto read it four times.

Then he typed back On my way with thumbs that weren’t quite steady, and pressed send. A little circle spun beside the words for a long time. Then it stopped, and two small red words appeared underneath.

Not delivered.

His mother would be at the table by now. She’d be pretending not to be worried, because she always pretended not to be worried. His father would be checking his phone for the fourth time, saying the kid probably stopped by the arcade, saying don’t call him yet, he’s sixteen, give him a few minutes. There would be something burned in a pan on the stove, and the pizza would be sitting in its box in the middle of the table, going cold.

And sometime tonight, his mother would call him. He knew she would.

And the phone in his hand would not ring.

He turned it off to save the battery. He didn’t know what he was saving it for. He just knew he couldn’t stand to watch the minutes go by on it. Then he sat there with the dark phone pressed against his forehead and his eyes shut tight.

He didn’t cry. He came very, very close.

After a while he picked up the silver plate. The words had been etched into it in the same thin, faint lines that had appeared in the crystal. His name. His class. His row of tens. And at the very bottom, under Language Comprehension, one more line.

Scavenge. Take what the fallen leave behind.

That was it. That was the whole description.

“Scavenge,” he said out loud, feeling stupid.

Nothing happened. No light, no sound, no little floating window like in the games. The fire popped. The noise of his classmates kept drifting through the walls. The plate sat in his hand, exactly as useless as before.

He laughed. It came out cracked and ugly, and he stopped quickly, because he didn’t like the sound of it.

He knew this story. That was the worst part. He’d read it a thousand times. In every version there was a kid exactly like him. The one with the useless class. The one the others laughed at in chapter two. And he knew what usually happened to that kid, because he had always been the kind of reader who noticed.

Sometimes that kid got stronger. Sometimes that kid got revenge.

But first, every single time, that kid got thrown away.

Kazuto put the plate down. He held the phone against his chest with both hands, the way you’d hold onto something in deep water, and he lay back on that huge soft bed in that beautiful room and stared up at the canopy in the dark.

“I’m coming home,” he told it. His voice was hoarse. “Mom. I’m going to be late. I’m so sorry I’m going to be late. But I’m coming home.”

Wait and hope, she would have said.

He’d always thought it was the most annoying phrase in the world.

Tonight, it was the only thing he had.

---

Far from the white cathedral and its hall of names, and very far down.

Below the mountains, and the roots of the mountains, and the old stone the mountains stand on. Below anywhere that light had reached in a very, very long time.

There was a girl in the dark.

She sat against a wall that was not quite a wall, with her knees drawn up and her head bowed, and she did not move. Dust lay on her shoulders. Dust lay in her hair. She had been still for so long that the dust had forgotten she was a person, and had simply settled on her the way it settled on stone.

She did not know how long she had been there. She had stopped counting a long time ago. She remembered very little. A hall full of light, once. Faces she had trusted. The sound of something heavy closing behind her. The rest was gone, worn away like writing on old stone. On her worst days, which were most days, she was not sure she remembered her own name.

Then, far above her, the world trembled.

It was faint. Just the barest shiver in the rock, a hum she felt in her bones more than she heard it. Somewhere high above, something bright had torn open, and then closed again.

Slowly, for the first time in longer than she could remember, the girl in the dark lifted her head. Dust slid from her hair.

She knew that feeling. She had felt it before. Many times.

“Again,” she whispered. Her voice cracked like old paper. It had not been used in years.

She listened for a long time. For footsteps. For voices. For anyone at all.

Every time before, no one had come.

She lowered her head to her knees again, and closed her eyes, and waited.