After the training session, Araka and Hakasa decided to hit the Hanyo — the herb-infused steam bath — room behind the guest wing of the shrine. 

The Hanyo at Shimana Shrine occupied a small stone chamber behind the guest wing. With Jinhui placing the herb in from the nearby room, herbal steam drifted continuously from vents beneath the floor, filling the room with a warm, woody fragrance.

Wrapped in white towels, the two sat against the heated wall.

Hakasa leaned back with a long sigh: “Nothing beats a Hanyo bath after intense training.”

Araka nodded: “Haven’t tried this for a while since last year’s entrance exam at the Niangkee headquarters. My legs really need this.”

“You know,” Hakasa said, “Hanyo is especially good for Matake users.”

Araka glanced toward her. “Really?”

“The herbal steam helps after you’ve been maintaining a field for too long — you sweat everything out much faster than you would from a normal shower or bath.”

Araka looked at Hakasa for a moment, then a small smirk appeared.“Hakasa-sa, if you do this so often…”

Hakasa opened one eye: “What?”

“…why do you still have that … ‘distinctive sweaty smell’  that lets me know it’s you?”

Hakasa immediately sat upright and tightened the towel around herself, face blushing slightly.

“Hey!” she said, “You know I have to wash off the deodorant before taking the Hanyo.”

Araka laughed.

“I’ve tried really hard to get rid of that, you know?” Hakasa pouted, “And my mom isn’t even like this. I don’t know why I am.”

“Maybe I forgot to recommend the soap I use,” Araka said.

“…You have special soap?”

Araka grinned; “I’ll send you the name later.”

Hakasa narrowed her eyes suspiciously before settling against the wall again. “You’d better.”

—

For a while, only the faint hiss of steam filled the room.

Then Araka noticed something.

“Hakasa-sa.”

“Hm?”

“Your hairpin.”

Hakasa touched the small white hairpin holding part of her short dark-blue hair in place.

“What about it?”

Araka pointed toward her own.

“It’s almost the same as mine.”

Hakasa looked.

“…Oh.” She laughed. “It is.”

Araka smiled, but her mind went far beyond that — as if Hakasa was some kind of double for her. 

The more she thought about it, the stranger it became: 

Both of them had been track-and-field athletes, specializing primarily in middle- and long-distance running; Both carried the natural dark-blue hair associated with the core Peni lineage—even their eyebrows shared the same unusual blue colour; Both had ended up working with SAIR; Both were Matake users.

And, somehow, both had chosen blades as their primary weapons. 

It was as if the encounter was some kind of destiny arranged by a higher power. 

Araka stared at Hakasa.

“…Wait.”

Hakasa looked over. “Hm?”

“If you really were my relative as your mom described, then why didn’t I hear more about you when I was younger?”

Hakasa’s expression changed.

Araka continued. “I mean, our families aren’t exactly unrelated,” she said, “Your mother is someone I’d basically call an aunt, so that makes you…”

“…something close to a cousin,” Hakasa finished.

“Exactly,” Araka tilted her head, “So how did I barely know anything about you?”

The earlier playful expression disappeared from Hakasa’s face.

She looked upward into the steam.

“I was thinking about the same thing about you when I heard your name during last year’s entrance exam,” Hakasa said, “and I’m not sure if it is true, but someone did mention about our eventual encounter.”

Araka waited.

“It’s going to sound difficult to believe,” Hakasa said. “Especially to someone outside our family, but … it really happened.”

Araka leaned forward and listened. 

“I was fourteen.” Hakasa rested her arms over her knees. “I’d just started high school. One night, I had a dream — a strangely vivid one.”

Araka listened silently.

“Someone was speaking to me — I couldn’t see who, but it does sound like a voice coming from an old woman.” Hakasa's  expression hardened. “She told me my uncle, a shrine priest, was in danger. That if no one else knows what happened in his shrine,  there would be chaos in the world.”

Araka’s smile was gone now.

Hakasa continued.

“Then I saw a house burning with flame everywhere, which forced me to wake up,” She paused. “And I suddenly knew something was wrong.”

“You knew?”

“I can’t explain it any better than that.” Hakasa shook her head, “I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t wait until morning, and I got on my bicycle and rode straight to the shrine.”

“You didn’t even tell your mom?”

Hakasa shook her head. 

“When I got there, I saw several men leaving, all dressed in black. They were carrying a case,” Hakasa stared toward the floor and then continued. “I rushed past them and went inside, and found my uncle was lying on the ground, blood seeping through his shrine robe, along with several others lying unconscious.”

Araka straightened slightly.

“When I brought him to the side, he told me those men had stolen something from the shrine — ” Hakasa paused for a moment, “a holy plate dedicated to the local deity. He kept saying that if they took it away, there could be enormous consequences.”

“Wait, what kind of plate is that?” Araka raised her eyebrows. 

Hakasa lifted one hand, tracing its shape in the air. “I’ve seen it several times, and while nothing was unusual at the first glance, at the centre… there was a green crystal.”

Araka froze.

“Wait, isn’t that …”

Hakasa nodded: “Like the one you saw at Yushin Shrine, where Milo had operated — a Shard plate.”

“So someone’s trying to steal that?”

“That’s what I eventually realized.” The steam continued drifting between them. “Long before I met you, when I first visited Hikuyomi Shrine, I saw something similar in secure storage — but that one held five crystals.”

Hakasa slowly counted them on her fingers.

“Different colour, but they share the same structure as the one I saw at my uncle’s shrine.”

Araka stared at her.

“And that’s when you realized the thing stolen from your uncle’s shrine was connected to the Shard?”

“Yes.” Hakasa leaned back again. “After that, a lot of things that had never made sense to me started fitting together.”

Araka’s thoughts immediately returned to the panther Huashin contained on an expressway near Bakju, to the boar she killed in Sonlin village, and eventually, to the underground complex of Yushin Shrine.

Hakasa had encountered one year earlier, but not inside an animal, but on a ceremonial plate that had been deliberately preserved inside a shrine.

Araka frowned. “…Hakasa-sa.”

“Hm?” Hakasa looked at her.

“If shrines were already keeping Shards back then…then people knew about them long before Milo, or … if that’s how Milo got one of the Shard crystals from?”

Hakasa gave a small nod.

“That’s exactly how I thought when I saw them inside the Yushin Shrine.”

Araka’s abdomen hardened.

Hakasa remained quiet for a few seconds.

Then she continued. “Unfortunately, after that night, my uncle, along with others from the shrine, died.”

Araka’s expression changed.

Hakasa looked down at her hands. “He’d lost too much blood by the time I found him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Hakasa gave a small, distant smile. “It was a long time ago, and at least I’m the one who could recall what happened that night.”

The steam drifted slowly between them.

“But what was stranger was after I lost him, I started hearing that voice more often.”

Araka looked toward her. “The same one from your dream?”

Hakasa nodded. “Not constantly. Sometimes months would pass without anything. But whenever it returned, it would tell me something.”

“One day, it told me to wear a hairpin, like this one,” Hakasa touched the plain white hairpin in her dark-blue hair.

“You mean you kept the exact same one since high school?”

“Not literally this exact one. I’ve replaced it a few times.” Hakasa smiled, “But always the same kind — a plain white hairpin. The voice specifically told me that nothing fancier than that.”

Araka blinked.

“The voice told me that wearing one would protect me and bring me luck.”

Araka instinctively touched her own.

“So you listened.”

“I did,” Hakasa’s smile grew slightly. “And strangely enough…things started changing.”

She leaned back against the warm stone wall.

“I asked Mom if she could try contacting your side of the family again. It took a while, but eventually your mom answered.”

Araka listened closely.

“And somehow…” Hakasa chuckled, “I ended up receiving a brand-new Novak track uniform, customized specifically for my school.”

Araka’s eyes widened. “My mom just did that?”

“Really,” Hakasa shook her head. “You have to understand, our school couldn’t even afford to replace everyone’s old track uniforms. It really made me feel like I’m from some well established schools.”

Araka let out a small chuckle.

“And later that year, a cyclone crossed the region. Almost everything around us lost electricity — the whole village was cut off from outside.”

“But our house didn’t, only because the voice told me to install a mobile power unit — something no one in the village would buy just in case — at a secure place in the house.”

Araka stared at her. “So that voice seemed to know a lot about your place.”

Hakasa nodded: “Even though the shrine were forced to shut down due to that incident, it seemed that a deity had found her home inside our house.”

Araka looked at the matching white pin in her own hair.

The coincidence suddenly felt a little less amusing than it had several minutes earlier.

Still, there was something else bothering her.

“But Hakasa-sa, that doesn’t explain something.”

“What?”

Araka shifted on the bench. “How did your mother end up there in the first place? I mean … if your mom is really my aunt, then why was your mother living in such a rural part of Saonshu? There were barely any families from the main Peni Sakashi lineage around there.”

Hakasa exhaled slowly. 

“…That’s the more complicated part,” she stared through the steam for a moment before continuing. “My mother’s family really was from Bakju, but she was born during the final decades of the Southern regime.”

Araka became quiet.

“My grandparents opposed the government — not with weapons, they ran an underground newspaper. They wrote about things the government didn’t want people reading—especially as the regime became increasingly militaristic.” Hakasa paused, “Eventually, they were caught, and both of them were sent to a labour camp in the interior of Saonshu, and because my mother was still a child, she was forced to go with them.”

Araka’s eyes widened.

Hakasa continued quietly.

“The camp supplied logging labour for communities around the southern foothills of the Wuyun Mountains. My mother spent part of her childhood there.”

“Then one of the nearby village mayors saw her, and he realized how badly she was suffering.”

Araka listened without interrupting.

“He started looking after her whenever he could — food. clothes, even somewhere warmer to stay, and eventually…” Hakasa lowered her gaze. “a decision that saved her life.”

Araka blinked her eyes: “What do you mean?”

“A landslide,” Hakasa answered plainly, “both of her parents died.”

Araka’s face fell. “…Oh.”

“After that, there wasn’t really anyone left to take my mother back to Bakju, especially under the rigid household registration system of the South,” Hakasa folded her hands together and said.

“When the North and South were finally reunited, there were programs to locate displaced families and repatriate people, but for political prisoners, especially during the final years, their records from that period were a mess.”

“But she’s still a Peni, right?” Araka said, “that means she could go back to Bakju.”

Hakasa sighed and said. “According to the surviving documents, my mother wasn’t a displaced Peni child from Bakju — she was simply a girl born in a small village at the southern foothills of the Wuyun Mountains.”

Araka slowly understood.

“So officially, that village became her home.”

Hakasa nodded. “The mayor’s family had taken care of her. It took time for the new family to explain to her what happened to her real parents. But — at that point, she had already been deeply tied with the villages.”

“Years later, she eventually met my father. For a while, things actually went pretty well — they ran a small souvenir store together. Nothing compared to what your mom was capable of, but still comfortable enough for me to receive proper care.”

“But when I visited your mom’s place, it was your mom who did all the work.”

Hakasa continued: “A few years later, one of the regional downturns hit — the store started struggling. My father started drinking — at first occasionally, but then…” She didn’t finish the sentence. “That is partially why my mom didn’t contact your mom, especially when she heard all the success stories from your family.”

Araka remained silent beside her. Suddenly, the differences between them felt much larger than the similarities. The same dark-blue hair; the same Peni lineage; the same running tracks; and even the similar white hairpins.

Yet while Araka had grown up knowing where she came from, Hakasa’s branch of the family had effectively disappeared from its own history.

It wasn’t because anyone had deliberately forgotten them, but everything that shouldn't have gone wrong went wrong. 

Araka looked toward Hakasa again. She didn’t say anything.

Hakasa continued: “Still, when my mom eventually contacted your mom, she was such a nice person — a real person with real memories. Yet, there was still one thing that I couldn’t understand exactly.”

Araka opened her eyes widely.

“The voice in my dream told me to visit a proper shrine, find a proper master, and meet with a person that shared the same hair pin with me; and after that, I would understand what everything is about…”

“So… she told you to meet me?”

“I don’t really know what it was about,” Hakasa said, “but eventually, when I heard your name in the entrance exam candidates, I was taking you as someone who I could connect with my real family, the majestic Peni Clan, and my Matake lineage.”

Araka lowered her eyes.

The white hairpin in Hakasa’s hair suddenly seemed different: it wasn’t merely something the two happened to share; for Hakasa, it had been there before SAIR; before she became known as a Matake user; before she became the swordswoman Araka knew. Yet, somewhere in between a stolen Shard, a mysterious voice, and a family nearly erased from the records, Hakasa’s path had begun to turn toward hers.