To the Rise

by colbub

Kageyama reincarnated alone, convinced he's slowly going mad. Sugawara lost his country, Daichi fails his duty as knight, Nishinoya wanders with a mission, and the Tanaka siblings abandon their past to yolo as adventurers. Hinata had everything the others didn't, but felt empty until one day he saw a magic mirror with a lonely boy inside. Then he straps on his bag and looks up.

4. The Trust of Sugawara Koushi

"Found you."

The voice was feminine, slightly mocking and amused. Not that Sugawara wasn't prepared though, as he'd already swung an elbow backwards to where the throat of the voice would be, whipping his head sideways in a tight coil. Instead of the slight elastic give of a crushed trachea though, his elbow was caught by an open hand.

"Still always opening with a backwards spin when approached from behind?" A cheerful voice chirped in his ear.

Sugawara had always been good with reading people, and the voice held no blood-lust at all. Not even a smidgen of ill-intent, which was probably why the intruder had come so close to him without him noticing. But… with an experimental tug on his elbow, the hand holding it clenched their fingers into the hollow of his joint as a warning, so Sugawara cast a curious glance over his shoulder, an Inuoka smile plastered on his face.

"Who are you?" Sugawara huffed a disarming laugh and added, "And how did you get in here, of all places?"

"Can't say," the voice replied, finally letting go of his elbow so that he could turn around and see the intruder. A woman dressed in black, average height, moderately tall. The woman didn't pull down her mask as she talked, and the room had gotten too dark to really see by the lone lamp Sugawara had lit. "Just someone in the destiny your Sage mentioned, if you want a little more detail. I'm only here to give you a warning, and collect something."

Sugawara paused for a long moment as his eyes sharpened and the angles cleared as his qi forcefully widened his pupils. Analysing that mask – the round brown eyes with the short lashes crinkled into a warm, wistful smile – before he swallowed and straightened up. His fingers slightly shook as he traced the hems of his bag absently, before replying with another nonchalant huff of a laugh, more genuine this time.

"What do you need?"

"You have a bird resting here right? I need to collect it."

"The crow that brought Nekomata the message a few days back?" Sugawara asked in surprise, pausing his gaze on the flowerpots on his window, with the smileys drawn on them. Her eyes rested like a weight on the side of his head. "It's resting downstairs. What else do you need? Food is in the kitchen. Water?"

"Nothing else, just a warning that you need to get out of the city soon. Preferably in the next ten minutes," she replied, voice smooth and familiar. Sugawara felt her gaze resting along his shoulders, before shifting away. "Don't notify anyone, just leave, or you'll get caught. Those packages that the Sage gave you needs to be delivered as quickly as possible."

The woman turned to leave then, before pausing mid-step.

"…Are those faces drawn on your flower pots?" She asked softly.

He was still staring at them, his small line of small pot-plants with different expressions drawn carefully with markers. He'd shared a little of why he did so to Daichi and Asahi, and they'd both drawn wobbly faces on another two that rested on the ends. Daichi had bowed his head to them in thanks, saying "Without your teacher, you wouldn't have escaped and we wouldn't have met you, right?"

Sugawara swallowed. "Yeah. It's so that I don't forget a dear friend of mine."

There was a thoughtful pause then, before there was a warm chuckle behind him, the sort of careful laughter that Sugawara had grown out of years ago. Quick footsteps, and a fleeting pat on his head.

"Still a stupid nugget, I see," the woman called over her shoulder, before slipping downstairs in a brush of wind. The next second, Sugawara felt no-one again, the presence out the door and towards the Palace. Too late for things like, 'Have you met Nekomata? He can wipe the suicide curses'and 'Don't go, we can free you' or 'I have so many things to show you.'

Can't say, she said. With that, Sugawara had known nothing he said would let him save her. She still had something to do, and Michimiya didn't rise in ranks just because she was prettier or smarter than the rest.

Sugawara let the palace draw his gaze, pensive.

Nekomata leaving. Asahi's haunted look, Daichi's puzzled acceptance, and Michimiya…

What was going on? He looked at the note that Nekomata had left for him, before forcefully uncurling his fingers from the tight clench he had on his bag.

Ten minutes, she said? To get out of the Chou's capital, and head towards his first location?

Ruffling his hair through his fingers, Sugawara mocked himself a little. As the sage's apprentice, he could've stuck his head into any of talks that Asahi had attended these past few weeks, but he didn't. He'd told Nekomata that he didn't want to deal much with politics, and the old man had respected that decision like any of the others Sugawara had chosen. But hating politics isn't enough of an excuse to not support a friend in need.

Not that, of course, Asahi had asked him or Daichi for help.

The thought stung a little.

Nothing to do about that now though, so Sugawara sniffed all the feelings in and swung his packed spatial bag onto his back, gave the room one last check for any potentially helpful travelling supplies before jumping out the window. It was only a few minutes later when Sugawara was swinging himself over the palace walls (he waved to one of the palace guards on watch, who gave him a nod) across a street onto some rich dude's house in the upper city when his heart seemed to squeeze. The world tunnelled, and he heard it, something large, primal, a breath in. It was the sound of the universe shifting, the gears of a particularly difficult ritual starting to grind forward. He felt the qi of the world changing through his skin, funnelling through space to stream into the Palace. Magic, fire-tinted, rushing into the palace so thick it was visible in the air in a whirlpool of power and in the moments where he couldn't breathe—

Click.

A large flock of birds screamed into the air, a cacophony of panic as they spiralled into the sky. Dogs barked urgently in their yards, and when Sugawara found it in himself to take a sharp breath in, sweating as if he'd run a marathon, his mind clamoured that sound he heard somewhere, in the back of his mind. An echo. A creak, as something opened.

"Where are you?" The universe whispered.

("I miss you," the universe screamed.)

Sugawara's heart suddenly jerked, jack-rabbiting in his chest as his head instinctively turned to chase the voice. Downwards, chained. In the corner of his eye, a white light bloomed from the depths of the castle.

Ten minutes.

The whole world burst into blue heat that faded into red and orange, blasting him into a wall, drying his mouth and cracking his skin into red and white flakes. The roof he had been standing in cracked into black, then white ash. The neighbourhood woke with choked screams and gasps before the whole area turned still. The dogs that barked suddenly quieted and Sugawara watched through blurred eyes of birds dropping from the sky to scatter into dust as they hit the ground. Nekomata's cloak crumbled as Sugawara struggled to focus past the heat, spreading his awareness with the start of a despairing hope, thinking of King Naoi, the kitchen maids, the palace guards, their smiles and their teases— silence. All the heartbeats in the palace's immediate radius had suffocated to death except...

Sugawara's mouth turned into a grim line, as he sunk his foot into ash. In a creak of dying timber, the husk of a black house collapsed from the force of his kick as he ran towards the edge of the city. Even as he ran, he sensed tens of dark presences streaking out of the Palace turning in pursuit.

Bells started to toll, deep peals that woke the middle city. Lights started to flicker on in windows of intact houses, as Sugawara pushed himself through the winding back-streets.

"Chase him!" Five shadows dropped down from the roofs with him to land around the corner, with another two reinforcements from that jumped from a nearby guard tower joining him. In the background, a woman screamed. Her house had caught on fire from the embers that flew from the castle, and she was trapped as the flaming roof started to fall down. Sugawara's feet twitched to help, but a snap and a gurgle told him it was too late.

Sugawara gritted his teeth, feeling the strain of his muscles, burning through his qi. Even if his qi underneath Nekomata's direction of constant flow didn't run out, it didn't mean that his muscles didn't stop tearing as he forced them to their limits. Qi can only fill so many of those tears. Flitting through the tight alleyways was hell on the knees. Sugawara footwork was still in its intermediate stages, unlike true masters that could run faster than a dragon at maximum speed for days on end. He could hold it for five hours at most when he wasn't dashing around alleyways.

"Around the corner! Call reinforcements!" A man yelled. Sugawara sensed a sharp killing intent to his far left, before he took a breath to duck, a flash of a thrown dagger inches away from nailing his neck.

"We can't let the sage's apprentice escape!" Another muffled voice shouted, far too close for his liking.

It had taken more time than he expected to escape. Nearly an hour had passed when he passed into the lower city, going well until the third tier of gates when, in his attempt to save a baker, he'd triggered a trap— (but Akio gave all the orphans fresh cream buns on Sunday, boasted about his grand-daughter to Sugawara whenever he sneaked Asahi down into the city, and he'd been screaming, bowed over a small girl underneath rubble how could he ignore him how) Four five-man teams leapt up into the air around him in ambush when he'd rushed to them, attacking him when he was in the middle of pulling out Akio and his grand-daughter as if they'd been waiting for him. He clenched his teeth, throwing a few poisoned daggers at the ones closest to him as he dashed away from the two, and as expected they followed him.

How had they known? His mind flashed to Michimiya, but shook the thought away. She'd never betray him.

"The sage's apprentice is close to King Naoi, the Sage, and the Azumane heir," someone roared at his subordinates, above the crackle of flames. Someone's windows cracked and exploded, sending heat and shards of sharp red glass onto the streets. "He's the only one left! If any of you let him escape before we can tear information out of him, I'll report all of you to get beheaded!"

Sugawara skidded through alleyways, heart hurting when he saw all the familiar stalls all crackling down in flame. Masami, and her apple treats, Iori and his steamed dumplings, Yoshimi's delicate origami, all gone. His ankles ached when he took another sharp turn to the left, ducking low. Nearly there. He had to continue surviving.

A hail of needles rained from the rooftop ahead of him, and Sugawara cursed, going too fast to stop. Swinging his pack up, the needles sunk into his bag instead, arms shaking from the force.

Sugawara's mouth twisted into a bitter smile. He'd thought he would've been important enough that the enemy would have wanted to capture him alive, but apparently, he'd overestimated his importance. There were ways to get information from a corpse, after all.

Slinging his bag back, he let his feet skid him through a low hollowed hole in a wall, his feet landing on a wall for him to jump back up, eyes narrowing when he found what he'd been aiming for. The alleyway lead straight to a grate where rainwater usually slid through to a channel that lead to a river. Long ago, a water mage had spelled this grate as an emergency escape for any official Chou citizen during attack, while any foreigner would be blocked by a strong barrier.

So Sugawara dived straight into the metal bars without a thought and the grate rippled and slid around him, only to flash white light and block the few daggers that had tried to follow him. With a quick hand, Sugawara swiped all the daggers fallen near the grate and retreated back quickly, eyes narrowed as his breaths were finally let out hard, now that he was safe.

"It's a barrier!" Sugawara heard shouts and curses behind him as he quickly found his feet, and minding the low ceiling, scuttled down through rainwater pipe in a low crouch.

"We can't fail! This must either lead to the rainwater or sewage system. Go!"

He wouldn't be safe for long.

The gutter only lead to one exit – to the edge of one of the subsidiaries of the great rivers of the east, the Naka river.

Down, dark, and slippery, Sugawara's boosted eyes leant all the dark shadows shape as he followed the small etched markings on the walls that indicated where the escape was. When his eyes caught a glimmer of light near the exit, he let the qi from his eyes ebb to adjust, slowing down in caution. Barriers can be broken, with enough time. He needed to be careful.

Just when he was about to turn the corner, a sudden hand on his arm made him stiffen and jerk his elbow up to hit his assailant in the face. The shadow ducked, and Sugawara was about to surge into an upper cut when the figure put his hands up in surrender.

"Stop!"

Sugawara paused at the harsh whisper, recognising the voice.

"Inuoka?" Sugawara's eyes found the guard's face, finding the cheerful smile dimmed and one of his strong eyebrows half singed away. A bruise bloomed all the way from his neck up to his left ear, even as fingers ruefully rubbed a new one on his chin. Sugawara winced in apology. "Sorry for the hit," he offered, "but why are you here?" Why was the captain of the guards alone in one of the evacuation routes?

"They're waiting for you out there," Inuoka whispered, not taking the elbow to the chin to heart as he nodded towards the exit. "They knew about this exit. Somehow. They're all waiting outside, trying to break through. No-one can break the barriers yet, but they're getting closer."

"What?" Sugawara repeated, mind whirling as he tried to slot information in place. The enemy was outside the exit, the captain of the guards was alone in a civilian evacuation tunnel... Inuoka's lips somehow quivered into a smile, and Sugawara's heart fell.

"I was in one of the groups escorting civilians in an emergency evacuation." And now that Sugawara had calmed down, he noticed Inuoka's whole body trembling. Slowly, the smell of blood also seeped through the air, from the exit behind him. Sugawara didn't dare to look. "I only escaped because I was bringing up the rear."

Self-loathing tinged the whole of Inuoka's defeated appearance.

"What do we do now?" Sugawara asked, unwilling to leave Inuoka like this.

"There's another exit, one that I know only because Nekomata showed me when I got lost here when I was a kid." He heaved himself onto shaky feet, a horrible smile still on his face. He faced Sugawara. "I was waiting here for any other survivors or evacuation groups, but you were the only one that came. You wouldn't abandon Chou like this if you didn't have something important to do, right?" The small smile wavered, as Inuoka tried to believe.

Sugawara nodded immediately. "Of course, Inuoka. They're chasing me, for some reason. Maybe if I escape, I can draw some of them away from Chou."

Another distant explosion rocked the small channel they crouched in, dust falling onto their hair.

"Then you have to leave." Inuoka closed his eyes, before looking back down the way Sugawara had come. "Let's go."

Inuoka moved slower than Sugawara, being in heavy armour and always having less agility as a power type warrior, but when he stumbled he hauled himself up with a frown of determination, and when he fell, he waved off Sugawara's hand with an angry grimace at himself.

Soon, they arrived at a small wall. A dead end.

"Here," Inuoka whispered, tracing a small character onto the stone. It lit up into a dim yellow before the wall shimmered, and faded. "Go through."

"Come with me," Sugawara said, even as he knew the answer. Inuoka shook his head in refusal. "Your mother?" Sugawara guessed.

"In the group I was escorting," Inuoka responded, voice bleak.

The blood from the exit.

"What?" Sugawara responded, numb. Inuoka's mother had been one of the first people in Chou to truly try to make him feel accepted – the most insistent one on making him smile. He was around their family so much that she'd basically adopted him as her son, always chiding Inuoka to take care of him, joking that if Nekomata ever mistreated him, that he could always officially become her second son. She'd always been proud of the fact that her soup was better than the palace kitchens, enough so that Sugawara had found an excuse at least once per week to crash at her place.

"We were told of some suspicious movements in the guard a week before, so evacuation happened quicker than usual. But she was in one of the later groups because she thought of you," Inuoka replied, brown eyes closed. "She was worried. They attacked the palace first, we all saw where the first explosion was lit. The people chasing you weren't quiet about the fact you escaped and they were trying to capture you."

"Inuoka, I…" Sugawara tried, before his throat strangled him. He didn't know what to say.

"Go," Inuoka replied, determined. A gauntleted hand pushed him forward. "I have to go back, but you have something to do. I'll rest a little more easily when I know you're safe. At least I'm not going to lose you."

Sugawara gripped his arm in a tight squeeze, not knowing how else to convey what he was feeling, words fluttering in his throat.

"Go!"

Sugawara let himself be pushed, and the last thing he saw was Inuoka drawing another character into the air before the wall was back in solid stone. The sound of Inuoka's footsteps on the other side left after a few seconds, and with a heart full of regret, Sugawara did the same.

When Sugawara struggled through an old trapdoor in an abandoned inn outside the city, he immediately hid his presence as well as he could, pulled his hood up and ran towards the west roads. When he found the roads were filled with panicking people, he ran into the forest instead. Behind him, the echoes of the great bells, the general roar of fire and fighting, and the screen of smoke all faded as he pushed his speed to the limit. Faster. Faster.

A few hours later, when he was slogging through a river to lose any scent trails, when Chou City was only a distant red speck in the night, he felt like he heard the mighty roar of the voice. It was a pressure that made the hairs of his arms stand on end, distant but overpowering. Sugawara turned his head back just in time to see a great shadow rising over the smoke, a large arm rising up, larger, hundred times, a thousand times larger than the small dot of a city wreathed in golden flames— then the hand clenched into fist, as the great shadow came down, slowly, in Sugawara's eyes standing so far away, with no way of helping. The fist touched the earth — and the small, golden city of Chou in the distance disappeared.

---

"Need to travel over the desert to the West, my boy?" A cheerful merchant called him over, waving from a relatively large store. "I have all your desert needs right here, along with a few camels!" The man's jowls jiggled as he over-enthusiastically pointed at a few bored looking camels, whose long lashes blinked melancholically over the sand dunes they'd crossed on the whims of humans hundreds of times before. "If you buy over ten gold coins of my wares, perfectly practical for such a long, hard, journey, I usually lend a camel half price! Since you're a little younger, I'll give you the special deal of five gold, how about that?"

Carefully eyeing the camel being offered for hire, Sugawara opted out. At this point, the camel was way too slow for his needs. It would only paint a large convenient target for his pursuers.

"Give me ten of those water skins please," Sugawara asked politely, and the merchant drooped in disappointment when his bid didn't work.

"Alright, five silver coins for ten water skins."

The simple purchase didn't take long, and Sugawara soon tucked ten full skins into his bag, glad all the water didn't make his bag any heavier.

"…By the way, any news about Chou?"

The question just slipped out without much permission, and Sugawara immediately scolded himself in the head. It would've been better if he hadn't mentioned Chou. People had ways to track subjects, especially if he was thinking about that the attack came from Wu. There was no other explanation as to why Michimiya would have been there, otherwise.

The merchant had already turned away at that point, disinterested after the purchase had finished, but he twisted one jiggling chin over his shoulder at Sugawara's question as his whole face melted into one flabby soft expression of sympathy.

"Ah, are you a refugee?"

Was that what they were calling them, nowadays? Sugawara wondered. Refugees?

"Yeah," Sugawara answered shortly.

"You're awfully fast to have crossed from Chou to Wakan's desert outpost in a week," the merchant mused. "Well, tell your parents that after the attack on the Chou City, it seems like Wu's influence is spreading. From what I've heard from the merchant's grapevine… Everywhere from the Palace to the Nishi-fief had joined the information blackout. No-one knows anything." The merchant paused, before giving a huff. "It's quite frustrating really."

Sugawara's brows creased.

The Azumane fief was only two fiefs northwest of Nishi.

Asahi's sombre near panicked plead for Sugawara to come with them echoed in his mind. Even his fief wasn't safe now.

Sugawara turned and smiled at the merchant, before asking whether he had any maps with him. Although it cost another five silvers, it couldn't be helped.

He'd planned to just cross the desert the fastest way to the city Nekomata had indicated on his map. Duke Tsukishima was a Duke of one of the larger frontier Capitals of the West, White River City. Although the West and the East had traditionally held many different values, Nekomata had assured him that the continent mostly spoke the same language.

Alright.

Sugawara carefully scanned his surroundings, before adjusting his hood and striding forward. One water skin could last him a three days, especially if he was running. Ten skins equalled approximately thirty days. The bag had been made by Nekomata to never weigh more than a certain amount, and its spatial pocket was big enough to hold all his camping supplies, the water, enough food, as well as weapons and other equipment. The great desert usually required at least four weeks by camel, especially since the normal traveller tagged along the great merchant routes.

Sugawara estimated that he could probably run straight through the desert in a two and a half weeks, if he only took rests during the day and ran throughout the cold night to help regulate temperature.

He narrowed his eyes as he wandered nonchalantly through the crowd and out the outpost until there was no one left around him. Then he promptly circulated his qi, and flew forward.

Break

"A spy?"

When he spotted the suspiciously non-shimmering patch in his vision of the horizon as he camped the sunlight out (what amateurs, they did know what heat haze should look like right?), Sugawara waited until night-time before he kicked off cautiously, looking at the map and speeding towards his destination. However, he had underestimated the number of pursuers.

In the clear night of the desert, Sugawara didn't notice the line of bombs that they had circled around his camp. Sugawara cursed when the explosion hit, only having the power to shift into a roll and curl up in his cloak to shield himself. It was simple enough to finish the roll and throw one of his more poisonous bombs backwards, and target the three who escaped breathing it in with daggers to the throat. One down.

He started to engage the one who looked slower in combat, a furious spar that didn't touch on the fluid elegance of any of the martial forms that Sugawara had learnt from Daichi. The form was something rawer, utilised for maximum effectiveness instead of beauty and enjoyment, the wildness reminiscent of times before Chou.

When he was finishing off the enemy by crushing his stomach with his foot, the other one stopped attacking from afar and ran away instead. Underneath the night, Sugawara gave chase while whipping out some smaller shuriken.

In the end, he couldn't catch him, only giving the runaway superficial wounds. Sugawara tightened his lips, heightening his vigilance. Although the poison he'd hit the runaway with should slow them down... Sugawara rolled back his trousers and applied medicine to his burnt leg. He wasn't entirely unscathed either.

He had to hurry.

---

He took two minutes to brush himself off, another to breathe down the adrenaline, and half a second to stare at the stars and the moon and his map and swear.

"Don't do this to me," Sugawara muttered, frantically comparing the constellations and his footprints and the map. "I can't be lost, right?"

Well, when the next morning came, even the sun didn't help orientating him to continue towards White River's Desert Outpost. In fact, he didn't even know the way back to Wakan.

Sugawara stifled a sigh that was building up, before imagining what his very upright, optimistic friends would do (i.e. not Asahi). Inuoka would use exercise as an excuse to keep moving, probably. Daichi would give a weirdly inspiring speech, most likely about 'don't give up, Suga!' and 'perseverance and hard work is the key to success!' What were they doing now?

"Come on," Sugawara told his legs. He wiggled his toes. His shoes gave a twitch, leaking some sand into his pants. "Yup, we've got to go now."

He heaved his bag up and continued onwards.

The desert was a silent place – unlike the waves and the roar of the ocean that he'd spent his first few years of his life hearing when he slept. It wasn't the quiet of the forests where he mostly camped out when he got missions, listening to small bugs and birds and the brush of leaves within a canopy. It wasn't even the quiet of a city in the late evenings, where everyone had gone to bed and the only things were the echoes from the inside of houses, the creak of a house accustoming itself to summer and the midnight shuffle of someone getting a cup of water.

No, the desert was a vast shimmering place where, when there was no wind, was a place of baking heat and the muted feel of sweat sliding down his skin. The only sound was the crunch of sand beneath his feet, his breath slow and still as he carefully paced himself quickly, but not stamina draining. However, now it was nighttime, and at night, as he continued to walk, the sky stretched above him in a glittering sweep of distant space, stars prominent in a way he'd never appreciated and the air bitterly cold.

If he got cold, he just moved a little faster to stay warm.

Sometimes, he thinks he may hear the voices people, or a camel, but when he checks he's alone. Maybe if he had travelled with a caravan like most sane (normal) people, he wouldn't have noticed all this silence as much.

Maybe he should've hired a camel, only to talk to. But then, he would have to carry it over the distance since camels were too slow for his needs, and camels didn't really like getting carried, generally speaking.

Sugawara sighed. There was just no winning, was there?

When he crested another dune, he looked back and saw no-one. He looked forward, and saw a near flat horizon, stretching further and further into a gold haze. Dawn had come.

Slowly, a breeze blew, just enough displacement to ruffle a few strands of his hair, and shifting the golden dunes slowly, the edges eroding away only to shift to the edges of another dune and Sugawara continued on.

When he was on his last half-skin of water, delayed by more than three weeks that he'd expected, Sugawara saw the first difference in the rolling dunes – a shadow in the distance that crested into a large shadow. The start of a mountain range.

Sugawara changed his direction slightly and trudged towards it, having used all his qi to just push his body normally now. Some of his muscles were damaged to the point he moved them more with qi than with his own strength, and he knew he direly needed to rest his body. But as much as he'd delayed his pursuers by injuries, it didn't mean by retreating and sending in someone fresh, they couldn't catch up to him. Wu trained the best agents – legendary for their ability to run for a week straight with only water, track even through slogging rain, and kill targets even when they were hidden in the deepest, most protected prisons or castles. He'd know, after all.

So he didn't stop, channelling more qi into muscles long overused and thinned. Slowly, he crested the mountains, tentatively squeezing his some of his remaining qi into his eyes and scanning for any path over the mountain without outright making a path for himself.

…There. A small outpost, nearly invisible in the mountain's shadow.

Sugawara swallowed another sigh, but allowed his heart to be bolstered when the small cluster of tiny huts grew closer.

And, in the middle of the small, dilapidated street, was a small slip of a boy that stood firm in the middle of the only road, staring straight at him.

Waiting.

When Sugawara first met the boy's eyes, forcing a cheerful smile onto his face, he paused.

Somehow, the boy felt familiar. The dark blue of his eyes, large, intent on a pale face. Thin lips that pursed together, hands that tightened their grip on an old shirt. He was hunched, defensive, but open and relieved at seeing him. A strange mixture. Something in him looked at the boy and didn't like how sharp his cheekbones cut his face, the smallness of his hands.

Even when his mind started filing away all the suspicious signs of familiarity (impossible, he'd never crossed the desert, or met anyone like this boy from Western envoys. An agent?), he felt… happy. For the first time since Chou, he felt the stirrings of some peace as he talked to this boy.

Kageyama Tobio.

The name rolled around his mind like a warm burst of amused exasperation, making Sugawara pause on sheer instinct. But he ignored that for now, stealthily drawing a small barrier on the hut that Kageyama Tobio led him to, before collapsing on the mat and resting.

(If, that night, he said he wasn't surprised when small fingers touched his sleeve, he'd be lying. The fact that Kageyama's heart rate calmed at the touch after his nightmare doubly so. In the morning, Sugawara spent a few minutes staring at the boy, wondering.

Who did he remind Kageyama of?)

---

That night in the small desert hut, he dreamed of a festival back in Chou, the year after he met Daichi. He'd always avoided the Children's Festival – there was always work to do when the city was busy with laughter and crowds. However, that year Inuoka's mother was horrified to find out he knew none of the fairy tales that the floats of Chou's Children's Festival were based on, and sent Sugawara out with a firm order to 'find someone to talk to right now!'

When Sugawara expressed more interest in finishing his antidote research for Nekomata, Inuoka's mother sighed, before bribing him with an extra free bowl of mapo tofu from the street stall she was planning to make for the festival.

So Sugawara was tasked to find his friends and ask them to teach these fairy tales to him. However, when he found Inuoka, he was too busy with arranging the security for the festival. All the yelling and the bustling inside the Palace Guardhouse was a little intimidating, so instead of badgering them for stories like a five year old, he wandered inside bearing strong cups of tea instead. He may have been greeted with tears of joy and cheers, and a few cries of 'my saviour!'.

Being their caffeine god was a nice feeling.

Anyway, he left soon trying to find Asahi, who was in his daily etiquette lesson, learning another twenty-three ways of tea etiquette. In the few seconds that Sugawara peered his head through, Asahi was only on his fourteenth type of bow. And since the palace tutor was a scary, scary person when provoked (he intimidated even Nekomata), Sugawara gave up right away and tracked down Daichi instead.

Daichi, who always had a break whenever Asahi was doing his palace training and lessons, was slouched on a bridge, swinging his legs as he sat on one of the endlessly elegant bridges of the palace garden with a small fishing rod in hand.

"Daichi!" Sugawara waved, and his friend visibly perked up when he turned. The bored face quickly wiped into a full blown grin.

"Suga!" Daichi called as he reeled his line in carefully, dropping the pole with a loud clack on the smooth wooden boards of the bridge (Sugawara winced when it seemed to chip some of the dark lacquer). "I couldn't find you earlier at your cottage, so I decided to try this fishing spot everyone was raving about!"

Then he promptly gave the pond a stink-eye.

"You don't look very happy though," Sugawara pointed out as he walked over, hands in his pockets as his smile grew a tinge wry and teasing.

"Yeah," Daichi looked at the water with a small slump. "I don't know why, but all those fish that apparently bite like crazy don't like me."

Sugawara laughed, before picking up Daichi's fishing rod and settled next to a red post. The wood was warm from the sun, and Sugawara flicked the rod out, the lure dropping into the water with a soft plop.

Before Daichi had even properly sat down, Sugawara felt a tug on his line. After reeling in for a few seconds, he flicked a fish up into his hand. Daichi's only reaction was only a startled twitch before a familiar a sharp grin followed. "Awesome as always, Suga!"

And there was that gleam that had made Sugawara admire him in the first place, as Daichi leaned forward, his determined smile never fading as he insisted, just like always…

"Teach me."

Daichi's blazing determination in life was probably what made him both likeably popular and lack close friends, Sugawara reflected as he handed the pole back to Daichi and started giving him pointers. It could be quite intimidating.

Daichi had a fish in five tries, and Sugawara clapped him on the back in congratulations before getting to the point. Inuoka's ma had the best mapo tofu, and he wasn't going to miss out.

"Hey, Daichi, what's your favourite fairy tale of the Children's Festival?"

"Oh man, you're asking me?" Daichi asked back, scratching the back of his neck. "No-one really likes the ones I like…"

"Go on," Sugawara urged, swinging his legs. "I won't judge."

"Alright. I like the one about the boat. Or maybe the one about the girl and the bowl?" Daichi put his hand on his chin, wondering. At Sugawara's puzzled look, Daichi didn't ask (he's shared a little of his childhood to his sympathy) and just told him the stories.

One a beautiful peasant girl whose dying mother told her to put a black bowl on her head to hide her beauty, and to take it off when the time was right. Soon after, the mother died, leaving the girl alone to fend for her fortune, and after a long struggle, she found employment at a rich Lord's house. Working there with the bowl on her head, the Lord's son fancied her, courted and proposed to her to everyone's disapproval, for she had a bowl on her head and came from poverty. Alas, they married, the Lord's son not caring of her appearance or past, and the moment they married the bowl burst into an unfathomable amount of riches to everyone's delight but the son, who did not care for anything but finally seeing his beloved.

The second story featured a man whose son found a horse. A horse, being extremely valuable to any poor villager, made the whole household celebrate. During this celebration, the son was showing off the horse before something startled the horse, and the son fell and broke his leg. The villager then cursed the horse, as his only son now couldn't help him with harvesting. The next morning, a soldier carrying an imperial decree ordered all able bodied men to conscript for a brewing war with the neighbouring country. The villager, realising his son was safe, reversed all his curses and thanked his ancestors again with all his might.

After hearing the two, Sugawara blinked in surprise before deadpanning, "Yeah, I haven't really heard them before." Daichi laughed, a boisterous one that echoed over the elegant lily ponds a little too wildly.

"Right?" He huffed through a chuckle. "The story of Tarou, or the Flight of the Moon Princess, or the Bamboo Child are all very popular. Much more popular than the one about the Girl and the Bowl, and the Fortune Horse."

"But why do you like them?"

"They have different morals of course," Daichi shrugged, "but one talks about the worth within, and the other deals with perspective. I think it's cool."

Sugawara hummed as he watched a stray koi, much fatter than a fish should generally be, before breaking Daichi's concentration with a few well-placed elbow nudges.

"You mentioned the other stories. Teach me," he (maybe not as playfully as he intended) demanded.

"So pushy, Suga," Daichi waggled his eyebrows at his friend before shrugging. "Sure. I'll start with the Flight of the Moon Princess. A lot of girls like that one. Well, a long time ago in the Celestial realm…"

Daichi talked until he ran out of bait, until they arrived at Asahi's rooms in the palace to wait for their friend to finish his dressing preparations for the festival's more formal palace echelon feast, bumping shoulders along the way. When Daichi politely stopped in front of the door, and Sugawara (who didn't need to care, with his status) just flung it open anyway, Asahi's blinding smile at being rescued from the maids and tailors and butlers made him burst out laughing.

That night, when Daichi was busy guarding Asahi during all the palace politics, Inuoka somehow found the time to drag him out of Nekomata's cottage and plonked him next to his mother, sitting on his other side just in time to see the late night fireworks show.

The dream continued with their smiles and laughter, and ended with Inuoka's desperate smile as he refused to escape with him. And Sugawara woke, eyes burning, thinking I need to be quicker.

---

The next morning, Kageyama showed he was more than a strange [suspicious] child – he showed him a witch's tablet. It was impossible. The witches lived on the fringes of the Great Void, vastly east of here, east of even Chou, bordering the wastelands of that had once been Jin before it was wasted by the Demon Lord. How could a tablet so well made come to a nobody town? A town that, Sugawara noted, wasn't even recorded in the map he'd bought?

Barring that, something like a recording was something most rural villagers couldn't even comprehend. With even just a smidgen of suspicion Sugawara should have just decided to leave, for his friend's sake, for Nekomata's sake. The child was slowing him down.

But.

Even when faced with a veneer of friendliness, Kageyama stumbled over his words in, Sugawara sensed, in an sincerely awkward way to both make him at ease and befriend him. The sincerity (a great, looming expression of intense ferocity at the most mundane things) in which he tried his best in whatever he went about to do was more than a little funny. It was obvious from his shape and muscles he'd never had any combat training at all. The utter ignorance about magic and how to use it was genuine; not a surprise when regarding the small, poverty-stricken villages around the area. He was just a small, awkward, well-meaning kid. With all of that, Kageyama was like any other normal child.

But.

Kageyama spoke like no child he'd ever known.

He knew things about the usages of electricity used greatly in the great metropolises of the south, was prone to using formal phrases and language that would have seemed perfectly fine in an educated middle-class family in Chou. When they talked, Kageyama mentioned many things beyond the scope of such a poverty-stricken mountain range, so far away from any civilisation, should know.

But.

Kageyama couldn't read. Kageyama couldn't write the common language. Kageyama didn't even know elementary, day to day things like the lowest, easiest spell fos that all children in Chou learn with gleeful joy when they're twelve, magically inclined or not.

He also liked staring at Sugawara in the most blatant of ways. Kind of awe-struck. Half disbelieving. One hundred percent earnest. If he was a spy wanting to blend in, Sugawara watched silently, drawing the hood of his cloak down as a traveller neared them on the small road Kageyama was leading him, he was very, very bad at it. And something in Sugawara twinged when he ever thought of putting a foot down and leave in a burst of speed. Nekomata had always told him to trust his instincts. What was it about this boy?

"Sugawara," Kageyama started, fidgeting and awkward, "are you, um, tired yet?"

A quick glance showed that Kageyama's feet had blisters where the sandals had rubbed his feet too much, and his legs had the slight trembling of over-used muscles. On the other hand, Sugawara hadn't even drawn on any qi for energy yet. He hadn't even broken sweat.

"Of course I am," Sugawara smiled. "Let's take a break! I have some food that can be heated up for lunch. Fos," Sugawara muttered, and a small stream of sparks flew towards the kindling. As usual, Kageyama gravitated towards him, watching with wide eyes. And as usual, the sparks changed course, drifting right when Kageyama watched from the left. The little crackles of fire were drifting right… even against the slight breeze.

He glanced at Kageyama, who tilted his head enquiringly in reply.

"What?" Kageyama asked, slightly taciturn in a way that Sugawara was quickly realising was just his inherent character.

"Ah, nothing," Sugawara grinned. "Just deciding what to eat."

"What food do you have?" Kageyama's eyes gleamed.

"I have some sausage links, some cheese, and some pickled plums? Also, rice…"

That night, Sugawara built his tent and was about to invite Kageyama in when he saw the boy had already laid out his pallet on the ground and was lying near the campfire, looking as lost as usual he scanned the sky and its stars. So Sugawara zipped up his tent instead and waited for the kid to sleep. To start his true investigation.

Sugawara had always been able to see magic, but Nekomata had taught him how to see colours and blessings within them. Usually elemental blessings had one colour in respect to element, while Divine Blessings shone various colours that represented their deities, richer and more powerful. Nekomata had let him compare once, the blinding verdant green that was Nekomata's divine sage-y powers and something more… normal. That evening, Nekomata pointed at Inuoka at the start of a night market, giving a small grin to Sugawara as he did so. "Look at him, Koushi. I gave him a small earth blessing, back when he was young. Check it out," Nekomata had told him, mouth munching on a freshly fried taiyaki.

Sugawara back then had still been a primarily silent student, and just did what he was told. He lead all the qi in his body to his eyes and glanced at Nekomata next to him. Just like usual, Nekomata was like a burning green sun, and even when Sugawara knew that he would never hurt him, he still took a tiny step back before looking away. After Nekomata's magic, Inuoka's blessing was only a curl of green wisp around the normal pearl-white of a person's soul.

"It's so… dim," Sugawara murmured in surprise, blinking again at Inuoka who was presently haggling over the price of a bag of apples. He glanced back at Nekomata just to make sure his vision was still working and got blinded all over again. Nekomata laughed gleefully at his sour face, half-chewed taiyaki clearly visible as he guffawed at Sugawara's pain.

Nekomata hadn't been a bad teacher. He'd showed him all sort of different blessings – water, metal, fire, wind, earth. Combinations of them, like wood, craft, ice. How blessing's manifested. The differences between blessings that were given (high-ranked priests, certain prophets, oracles, heroes and minor deities), in comparison to blessings that people were born with (sages, royalty, saints, witches, other such positions). How to fight people with blessings. Stuff like that.

So when Kageyama fell asleep and his soul was at its calmest state, Sugawara unzipped his tent flap and pulled all of his qi to his eyes to detect what blessing Kageyama had. If he was lying about the witches and the blessing they gave him, Sugawara could just pack all his things and leave anyway, no big loss. Closing his eyes in preparation, it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, the qi settling in a pool within his eyes and the rest of his head – letting him see the qi emanating from all living things, lighting the veins within his eyelids in a greenish gold web that spiralled up and out of his vision.

Slowly, he brought his attention beyond his eyelids, past the tent into the wispy green of the clearing. Kageyama was... Sugawara flinched backwards.

Once he looked it couldn't be ignored, as Kageyama burned a coiling still whirlpool of blue that shone even through his eyelids, the clearing, and all the vague yellow wind qi around. It was unlike the lush green of Nekomata, who always gave a sense of the wild forest, mysterious and filled with mischief. No, Kageyama shone the purest sapphire he'd ever seen, an azure ripple of surface-calm, belying dark indigo currents that roiled underneath in a never-ending spiral into darkness he couldn't see the depth of. Sugawara had to forcefully blink himself out of it, twisting to the side harshly before realising that he was on his knees, breathing hard just from looking. He let all the qi leave his eyes, wiping the sudden sweat on his forehead.

Nekomata had always laughingly said he was already controlling his power and presence, and Sugawara had always scoffed at him because who leaked all that power willingly? An idiot, that's who. The stuff Nekomata leaked in a second was more magic than a normal non-magical produced their whole life.

…Yeah, he wasn't doubting his words now.

Sugawara flopped outside the tent for some cool air, staring into the stars.

A blessing, definitely Divine. A blessing for a prophet? For a future High Priest?

Or a sage?

Sugawara laughed, slightly unbelievingly. Sages were the rarest of the rare, barely one or two in a generation. Entire countries could trace back hundreds of generations and still not record a having produced a sage. Telling himself that he'd meet two sages in his life was a joke practically not worth thinking of.

...What else could it be though? True prophets were rare and powerful too, but prophets siphoned their power from their surroundings leading to a slightly muddy magical composition of different elemental qi in their body. A priest seemed even more unlikely, since they only got power when they prayed and lived their lives in devotion and Kageyama had blatantly said this afternoon that he didn't know any Gods, and had never worshipped at a temple.

Sugawara's thoughts turned towards the sage's staff Nekomata had left for him.

[The staff I gave to you because I have a hunch you'll meet a person who will need it].

It… it couldn't be?

A sage's staff was powerful enough that even if someone couldn't truly use its power, they would still find it somewhat useful. Sugawara had thought he'd be giving it to some religious figure or something and not an actual, new sage.

If Nekomata knew this, couldn't he, like, warn him or something?

(Thinking of Nekomata though, of course he wouldn't.)

If Kageyama did have access to the gods, then maybe his weird spurts of knowledge and general genius wasn't that unexpected. Water was associated with knowledge, and the blue definitely told Sugawara that Kageyama was affiliated with a water deity… In any case, Sugawara slapped a hand to his forehead in confusion, how come no-one had found him yet? Power attracts power, and if what Kageyama said was true, a witch couldn't give a sage's blessing. Sages were born, not given. Even Sugawara noticed something strange about Kageyama after a mere day of being around him.

Witches did, however, have the power to seal blessings away. And in turn, they had the power to free their sealed blessings. A blessing as powerful as a sage's mark would need the Witch Queen, Kiyo, or her daughter, Princess Kiyoko, or at least someone on the calibre of the Ushijima royalty to control.

How would Kageyama ever earn the favour of any of those figures, when he lived in such a small, forgotten village?

Whoever the witch in Kageyama's tablet was, they had lied that the blessing had come from the witches, probably, to protect him.

(But how? Why? The witches' forest was all the way at the Great Void, near the wastes of Jin, and Shiratori was a country that even Sugawara hadn't been to, existing too far in the North. There couldn't have been any contact. Someone must have liked Kageyama enough to protect him like this, but it was impossible.)

Turning contemplative eyes on the small figure, Sugawara picked himself up and carefully tucked the blanket more securely around him when he noticed the child had kicked it off. He looked down at the boy's face. All the tension and lines that made Kageyama look perpetually tense and focused had smoothed out, and he was actually even snoring slightly.

There. Again. There was a small tinge of fondness, as he tucked him in.

Turns out he couldn't leave Kageyama after all. Even without knowing one hundred percent if he was a sage or not and that Kageyama was probably not a spy himself… if the witches knew about him, who else knew? Who else could start using him? Wu was on his trail, and to search for him they would track Kageyama down even if he left Kageyama behind.

Kageyama would be the best bonus prize they could ask for. No, he couldn't abandon Kageyama, not until he had at least found somewhere safe.

The night fell a little more as he thought, the dark creating a damp chill that made Sugawara rouse from his thoughts and get concerned for Kageyama who only had his blanket. Wet cold only led to sickness…

Then he noticed that Kageyama was completely dry. Just like how Nekomata never got dirty when he did any gardening.

Sugawara was alarmed to feel a twitch of amusement across his lips when Kageyama flailed out of his blanket and frowned angrily at someone in his dream. Muttering about some 'idiot' and a game? Tucking him in again, Sugawara retired to his tent, exhausted.

---

That night, he dreamt of Daichi.

They were raiding the castle kitchens together so that they could haul it all up to Asahi's rooms. They stole a lot of cheeses, a pot of leftover stew, a bag of bread rolls, and a bag of sugar before racing out into the gardens. There, Daichi gripped the bag of cheeses and bread rolls tightly before spinning his qi and leaping up the walls of the palace, bouncing off window sills and toeholds in the mortar before reaching the third floor, rolling softly onto Asahi's balcony before waving down at Sugawara with a laugh and a flash of white teeth.

Sugawara smiled back up before squinting down. He had to be more careful since he'd chosen the pot of stew, so he simply concentrated and bent his knees, jumping up onto the balcony in one go.

Daichi clapped his shoulder when he landed, nearly making him stumble.

"Amazing! When are you going to teach me that, Suga?" Daichi rambled as Sugawara opened the balcony door and walked straight into Asahi's suite of rooms. Sugawara playfully batted his arm back, manoeuvring the stew into a more steady place in the crook of his arm .

"When you can win me in an arm-wrestle, of course."

That quickly earned a grimace.

"Evil, that's what you are," Daichi rolled his eyes, and Asahi poked his head out of his bedroom.

"Evil? Are you talking about yourself?"

Sugawara carefully set the pot down, chuckling as Daichi rolled his sleeves up with a dangerously genial smile on his face.

"Ah? Want me to show you evil, Asahi-sama?"

Asahi visibly shuddered at the usage of formal language, to their utter amusement. "I didn't mean it!" Asahi quickly blurted out in a voice that would have been a squeak if his deep voice would have allowed. "Lets eat all of this already, I mean! I'm super hungry from all the lessons today."

Daichi stopped pretending as his face changed into one of slight concern, eyebrows furrowed.

"They're really pushing you. You okay?"

Asahi flopped onto a couch, staring at Sugawara's pot of stew with hungry eyes.

"Yeah, I don't even know why they want me to memorise the last five-hundred years of our war against demons but the test is in a week and I don't think I have anything I read in my brain."

"Ah, such a muscle-head," Daichi snorted, mouth full of cheese.

"Yeah, a muscle-head," Sugawara nodded, reaching into the bag of rolls and dipping it into stew.

Asahi looked affronted. "M-muscle? I don't even like fighting! You guys are the ones who're training nuts!"

Sad thing was, having a large, hulking, bearded teen tearily whining these things made the situation just funnier to the other two. Daichi sprayed cheese everywhere with his next snort, causing Sugawara to wrinkle his nose while Asahi brushed off chewed cheese off his embroidered pants with disgust.

"Disgusting!" They both exclaimed, Asahi wiping his hands on Daichi's shirt, before all three of them proceeded to let it pass and spoil dinner by gorging on too much stew.

The next moment, Sugawara woke up to a crisp clear morning, Kageyama's breathing soft outside his tent.

His eyes narrowed, thinking back.

Asahi, and his increasing stress. The large shadow of the arm that crashed down on Chou.

It wasn't natural. Something, that day, was unlocked.

Demons?

He carefully put the thought at the back of his mind as he pulled a large grin to his face, opening his tent flap. Kageyama still wasn't up yet, so he leapt up into a tree, and started meditating. Half an hour later, he smiled down.

"Hello, Kageyama! Good morning!"

"Sugawara," Kageyama started and stopped, randomly short like always, as if the thought didn't link to another sentence.

"Yes?" Sugawara asked back, pleasantly.

"Here," Kageyama muttered awkwardly, eyes to the side and ears on fire. In his hands clutched a blue bunch of some borage that Sugawara had nonchalantly muttered he needed when he did inventory last night. He hadn't thought Kageyama was listening.

"Oh, thank you, Kageyama! That's very kind," Sugawara said with genuine happiness, accepting the star-flowers. He'd needed it for a restock of a certain antidote. "Where did you find it? I'm surprised you know about herbs."

"Over there," Kageyama answered, short again. It was as if he never really thought of expanding his thoughts, Sugawara thought with a tinge of amused exasperation. "I hope it helps," Kageyama twitched awkwardly as he did something weird with his arms, an awkward half-wave-half-awkward shoulder jerk, before he stopped midway and instead gave Sugawara a sincere nod instead, ears burning even brighter as he looked sideways.

Sugawara watched, considered. There were many problems that he couldn't solve (Asahi, demons, Chou), but…

They'd moved so slowly that he could probably solve this one. Let him rest his case against Kageyama. No matter enemy or not, the boy didn't deserve continued suspicion.

He just needed more information.

That night, he sneaked out of his tent and made sure that Kageyama was asleep, before he jumped into the trees and made a beeline back the way they came. Their three day trip was reduced to four hours with his maximum speed (Kageyama really did walk quite slowly, and needed quite a few breaks) as Sugawara went back to Kageyama's dilapidated village.

"Kageyama Tobio?" An old man scratched his beard, with eye bags that dipped into his cheeks and stinking heavily of a person who hadn't bathed for at least a month. "Sounds familiar. Probably an orphan, ask the lady down the street. Pink hair, name's Hana," the man added helpfully.

He found the middle-aged woman sitting in front of an old building, picking her nails. "Kageyama Tobio disappeared a few days back," Hana regretfully murmured to him. "A kind boy, he is, even though he is a little strange. Never got along with the other orphans, insisted on living alone."

Hana twirled her pink hair around a finger, staring at Sugawara in curiosity. Behind her, Sugawara sensed only a few small living signatures within the orphanage.

"He never showed signs of magic or power?" Sugawara asked.

"Well, he was always weird, but I've never seen him shoot any fireballs or anything," the woman replied, obviously quite ignorant in the way that magic worked. "If you want more information, there was another woman who gave handouts to orphans weekly. Yoko doesn't mind questions, you'll find her in the town square around this time."

A relatively pretty young lady was folding up a cart in the square when he arrived.

"Kageyama?" She asked, pausing at his question. "Well, he has always been stand-offish, but it's normal among orphans." After his next question, she looked at him strangely. "Weird? Well, he has always been silent. Lives in his head, that boy. I heard him talking to himself when he was alone a few times, but… we all have our own traumas. I guess he misses his mother, poor boy. Why are you asking?"

Even if he'd disguised himself, it was never good to be under scrutiny. Sugawara politely disengaged himself, and located Kageyama's past house.

An empty, drafty square of dirt. A small wooden slab propped up by stones for a desk. A utilitarian storage area, relatively clean. A holey piece of cloth that had once been a shirt lay abandoned in the corner, used for wiping probably. The wooden walls were thin enough that even a non-reinforced punch could probably crumble parts of the wall. Nothing gave him answers to the conundrum that was… Kageyama.

When he visited the small field a villager had told him had been Kageyama's, he found etched characters on a nearby rock, clearly symbols that held a meaning of some kind. A script. Kageyama was educated.

However, there was no school in the village he'd just passed. When he searched his memory of languages and scripts, the etchings on the rock only vaguely reminded him of some ancient, nearly dead script called hiragana, a language that only ancient history scholars used nowadays. How would Kageyama have known it?

Sugawara hummed in vague thought, fingertips tracing over the characters.

But nothing… indicating any contact with an enemy. Hiragana would be too easily cracked as a code. Although Hiragana only added to Kageyama as an enigma, Sugawara did know that the witches often used it for summonings. Perhaps Kageyama was more entrenched in witchery than Sugawara suspected. After an added moment of contemplation, Sugawara raced back to their camp, even faster now that he'd warmed up, to their clearing where Kageyama had once again had kicked off his blankets.

Adjusting the small blanket that Kageyama had, he finally noted the quality - small, and threadbare. If they were sticking together, he would have to buy a new one for Kageyama soon. Also some more supplies, because he'd noticed that Kageyama seemed to like dishes with a little more meat in them, and frankly his cheeks looked better already, even with only a few days of good food. It wasn't as if Sugawara lacked money…

Sugawara raked a hand over his hair, confused out of his mind. It was one thing to stick to a Sage. It was another to care. Why was he getting attached so quickly? Even Daichi and Asahi took a few months to get him to properly talk to them. A little unsettled at his own emotions, Sugawara went back to sleep.

A few days later, he followed Kageyama into town to shop for some supplies for the both of them instead of avoiding civilisation like normal. Even though he'd been going slowly for Kageyama's sake, there had been no pursuers so far. Eyeing a camping supplies store that had a few warm blankets on display, he reached for his purse and—

"This is nice fabric," a low voice muttered, and Sugawara tensed at the hand that clutched a handful of his cloak. A pleasant enough face, generic, but sharp-eyed in a way that Sugawara instinctively knew to dislike. The man continued to drag the cloak down a little, making the hood shadowing his face start to slide back. "Very nice. Not from around here, are you? Hmm, the east?" Sugawara discreetly pinched his cloak so that it stopped sliding backwards, knowing when the intruder had seen too much when he was able to make eye-contact. The smile that the man made was triumphant even before his supposed 'offer'. Not good. "Want to trade for it, son?"

Alarm bells were flaring in Sugawara's mind, even as he tugged the hood back over his head, careful not to look alarmed for Kageyama's sake, who had turned around and was staring at them with an inquisitive tilt to his head. Kageyama was thin, small, and a noncombatant. He didn't know if he could protect him properly if a few agents ambushed them in this town.

"No thank you," He grinned, clapping Kageyama on the back to use it as an excuse to step before him. Kageyama, with a growing furrow on his forehead, seemed to notice that something was amiss and hefted their purchases up in readiness, even as Sugawara started dismissing the guy. "Me and my friend still have a ways to go, you see!"

He laughed, already stepping backwards as he joked. "Believe me, I could use some coin too."

Then he walked Kageyama around the corner, stuffed all the things Kageyama had in his arms into his bag and practically ran out of the backstreets of the village back into the forest.

"You say you got a blessing, right?" Sugawara asked, hands tight on Kageyama's shoulders. Sage or not, a divine blessing meant divine words. Kageyama met his eyes with confusion, "You can see words floating above heads? What did he have?"

He distantly noted that he didn't like how nervousness stretched Kageyama's features.

"Clever-eyed Profiteer. Why?" Kageyama replied.

Of course. An observant busy-body who would do (or say) anything for money.

His pursuers had probably already caught up to him.

Sugawara glanced at the road to the Capital, and made a split-second calculation. If he burned himself out, rushed at maximum speed without sleeping, he'd get to Duke Tsukishima's Frontier City in a week. The month to take the trip was an estimate made by Kageyama's speed anyway, he can find a safe place for Kageyama, settle him down as he did the business Nekomata told him to…

But he glanced down, saw Kageyama's small determined face staring up at him, and faltered.

Kageyama had tilted his head in inquisitive worry, large blue eyes having a sort of confused gleam that was starting to connect dots together. He looked as angry as usual, frowning as his brain turned over and over. Although many would probably argue Kageyama wasn't expressive, Sugawara would argue otherwise. For the past week, Kageyama had only expressed himself like a book to an absolute stranger like Sugawara. Happy when he cooked breakfast, proud when Sugawara smiled and said it was delicious. Stumbled awkwardly over strange questions, followed Sugawara with dogged determination. Kageyama, holding the sleeve of a stranger after a nightmare, with a whole village who didn't care that he disappeared. No stranger awareness at all. What if Kageyama trusted someone else exactly the same way as he did for him? What if someone who didn't know his worth attacked him for his naivety?

What if someone who did know his worth stole him and... His own childhood flashed in his mind. Sugawara flattened his lips as he turned on his heel, marching quickly down the road, listening to Kageyama's quick footsteps as he followed behind. His mind flew through scenario after scenario. What could he do?

That night, he made preparations. Sugawara swept the road and removed any traces that would lead to anyone tracking them to their campsite. Then he put all those traces back, leading to a fake clearing, carving some false ward carvings on trees around an illusionary tent to make it more legitimate.

Then he went back, to where Kageyama was lying wide awake on his small pallet. His blue eyes immediately shifted over to him when he strolled into the clearing, question clear on his face.

"If you want to speak, Kageyama, speak," Sugawara encouraged.

The other boy frowned in thought before finally settling with a slow, "Are you okay?"

Of course, Sugawara thought, of course he asks how I'm feeling first. He cursed his heart for softening a little more. "Maybe," Sugawara shrugged. "I hope I'm alright, at least! Good night, Kageyama."

For the first time, Kageyama's face creased in dissatisfaction when he looked at Sugawara, but he ignored it.

That night, Sugawara packed up his tent the moment Kageyama fell asleep, watching. In the early morning, Kageyama woke up probably expecting to make breakfast. Instead, Sugawara gave him a pack of trail mix, before pretending to do inventory, slipping his weapons back into their slots within his clothing – a small knife in each boot, various pockets in his belt for poisons. Only one pack of needles, since they were highly specialised and annoying to use sometimes, and a small metal blowpipe he put in a front pocket in front of his heart for easy access and extra protection if need be. Then he loaded the rest of the hidden spaces around his arms and legs with shuriken and kunai. He holstered his two tantō – one hanging from his hip, and one on his back. A cloak over it all, sleeves and hands free. Hood up.

During all of this, he felt Kageyama's stare on his back, waiting. Watching.

As always.

How was he going to protect Kageyama? It wasn't a boast to say Sugawara was well-known in Chou. Near-undefeated in combat. A young genius, in poisons, medicine, hand-to-hand combat, projectiles and short weaponry. The Sage's Apprentice.

They wouldn't have sent any less than the best.

Sugawara gritted his teeth, staring at all his supplies. Then a sudden flock of birds flew into the air with loud shrieks.

All the wards he set up around the fake campsite shattered. Even before the first curls of smoke rose into the air, Sugawara knew.

"They've come," he murmured. As always, his instincts were right. They had been much nearer than he expected. He'd been stupid to put down his guard.

Nekomata's staff was the most powerful thing in his arsenal. Most of the things that lived around Nekomata grew like crazy. Qi was the life-force of the world, and everyone had a set capacity of it throughout their life. A Sage however, wasn't a container – they were producers, a natural source of qi made human through divine connection. Everywhere he went, plants grew like mad, soaking up Nekomata's magic to grow. This staff had been soaking Nekomata's magic for a decades.

It should be able to protect Kageyama.

"I still don't know if you're a spy or not, but if you are innocent, I'm sorry for dragging you into this due to my paranoia," Sugawara said quietly stated, before pulling out the staff and it's near sentient power to Kageyama. He knew Kageyama was innocent, but this statement... was an apology in itself, for how he'd treated Kageyama this week. He knew he'd disappointed Kageyama again and again during the first few days with his non-answers. "This is a staff that was given to me by my mentor, who was also a sage, one blessed like you. If you're really who you way you are, the staff will protect you. If not, then you're more capable than you look, and I don't have to worry."

If Sugawara stated that he was still suspicious of Kageyama, maybe if he was too injured to return, or if he died in battle, Kageyama would feel less burdened since he'd think they never really connected. Just another stranger, wandering through his life with an unfortunate end. When Sugawara looked at Kageyama in the eyes, the pre-dawn made his already pale, little gaunt face look even more scared. Somehow, he managed to scrounge out a kind smile, pushing the staff into unresisting hands.

…A powerful qi signature was streaking their way.

Sugawara quickly took out the letters that Nekomata had given him from his pack and slipped it into his pocket just as a black shadow flitted into the clearing.

Judging from the footwork, he was from Wu. The man smelled like smoke and fire, and a hint of the sea.

"I found you, Sugawara. Hand it over."

Sugawara gave a tsk inside even as his face twisted into the biggest, most friendly smile he had as he stepped slightly away from Kageyama to draw him out of this intruder's attention, bouncing a little to loosen his muscles and keep the attention. "Hmm, any chance of you telling me who sent you?"

"No." A smirk from under the cowl. "Your time's out."

The first strike, to Sugawara sudden blinding anger, was at Kageyama. It was with a seeping coldness that Sugawara took a flash of a step back to catch the shuriken between his fingers.

"Wha—" Kageyama let out a startled gasp, three seconds too late. He would have already died.

"Wow, your aim is really bad!" Sugawara replied, even letting a little bit of a chuckle leak into his voice even as he made sure not to let Kageyama draw any more attention. The attacker's face had set into a grim line, and Sugawara felt a cold streak of satisfaction. Underestimated him, did he? "I was waaay to the right, you know?"

The shuriken wasn't of bad quality, some part of Sugawara's mind noted even as snapped his wrist to send it straight back at the intruder's own jugular with a little burst of qi behind it so that the attacker couldn't catch it again and make it a ridiculous round of hot potato. When the assassin dodged it with more speed than most elites, Sugawara made a snap decision. He had to bring the fight away. With a leap, Sugawara raced east, heart leaping upon the gamble that the attacker from Wu would immediately follow him.

It wasn't even a few seconds later when he felt a huge explosion of qi behind him that crashed over him like a wave to realise one, his gamble had failed, two, Kageyama was now undoubtedly a sage after all and not something like a prophet, and three, the attacker would now know that.

He had to kill this man.

Sugawara stopped at a clearing far enough, planted a few poisonous mines and waited.

The assassin burst into the clearing with a few burst poison grenades. A charred leg for a slice to the assassin's shoulder, a nick to the neck for a poisoned stab to the stomach. A bruised rib for a flinch when the assassin threw a flashbang straight into his face. It hadn't been a surprise to Sugawara that a man sent to take him out could keep up with him, but he hadn't expected someone who had been prepared for every single one of his tricks. Not just know his tricks, but know his trick's weaknesses.

(He hadn't let that much slip in Chou right? He hadn't gotten that soft?)

It ended with Sugawara winded in the middle of the clearing, hand over his heart as if trying to catch his breath when in fact his hand had curled around Nekomata's letters. If he couldn't recover fast enough, he'd set them on fire before any attack that could take his life. His grey hair rested in clumps over his forehead as he glared up at the Wu assassin, who uncharacteristically paused before dealing the final blow.

"Sugawara Koushi," the assassin slowly sounded in his mouth. Tendrils of power come from his next words, trying to trickle into his mind and failing underneath Nekomata's protection. Truth spells, Sugawara thought with disgust. "Was the boy you were with one of your missions commanded by the Sage?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Sugawara wheezed with an easy smile. "You don't seem to know any post-mortem interrogation techniques," Sugawara clicked his tongue, tone patronising as he shook his head in disappointment. "Wu's standards are slipping, I see."

Sugawara circulated his qi faster, ready to spring away, even as the assassin's twisted his own qi to light up the runes in his knives, power smoking along the blades until they gleamed, ready for a death blow. Just as the assassin was about to swing his arm, a small figure dived between their stand-off, a familiar staff swinging. A small tense back stood protecting him, sweat wetting the black hair, chest struggling to catch air with harsh panting. The staff was nearly too big for him, drooping in a utterly useless grip.

Sugawara stared at Kageyama in utter disbelief.

Was he an idiot?

Who, who would dive between two trained individuals in the middle of a battle—

"Back off." Kageyama's voice was strong despite the shaking hands that held up Nekomata's staff. "You're not welcome here, Chaser Assassin." The boy stood with a conviction that still completely baffled Sugawara.

"Sage," the chaser had backed off. "You're not involved in this. If you hired this boy to protect you, believe me that after this is done I will gladly escort you wherever you need to go."

Sugawara's eyebrow twitched at such a bald lie, before using all the qi he had previously accumulated to haul himself onto his knees. "Don't believe him," he scoffed, "he'll just kidnap you."

Oh ow. His ribs hurt from just breathing.

"Are you okay?" Kageyama asked immediately, voice immediately anxious as the boy half turned towards him. This strange little boy with no martial training at all, who made a really pathetic defensive pose with his staff all in an effort to protect a stranger he'd met for a week.

All thoughts of running away halted, paused, and changed into ones where Sugawara tried to somehow tuck Kageyama under his good arm and flee a still armed and near full-functional assassin. Just when Sugawara was (half) determined to go on a (half) kamikaze attack, the whole clearing was flooded with unimaginably pure qi – so pure that he could see the waves of qi even without any sort of enhancement. Strong enough he could feel it in the air as he breathed it in, heavy and clean.

It also froze their enemy in his mid-air lunge.

Sugawara's eyes widened at seeing something he'd previously thought impossible. Even Nekomata didn't...

"Leave," the tiny underfed idiot midget solemnly stated in front of him, still carefully placing himself in between Sugawara and the assassin who'd retreated to the trees by then. In the meantime, Kageyama shook the staff experimentally, before asking Sugawara with no beguile at all, "Is this blue thing magic?"

He couldn't be serious.

"...Yes, it is," Sugawara replied anyway. Then he marvelled at all this qi everywhere, examining the surprisingly normal boy that made it happen, with his worn sandals, old button shirt and still trembling hands. Trembling, not from fear this time but strain.

Oh. Of course. "But Kageyama, we both know you can't hold this for long." Sugawara paused. "You can leave me behind if you want." By himself, if he pulled out all the stops, he could probably incapacitate the assassin though by now he'd half guessed Kageyama would probably ignore him…

To his exasperation, Kageyama turned his heel and did, in fact, ignore his perfectly valid suggestion. Then with a scrunch of his brow, and a tightening grip on his staff, all the blue qi was somehow… gripped. Swung, until it was one solid blue line that led to where the assassin was still waiting, outside of their bubble of azure qi. The next second, Kageyama yelled "Fos!"

Sugawara nearly clapped a hand to his forehead.

"What, you're threatening me with that useless campfire spell?" The assassin spluttered, because even assassins have pride, thank you very much. Sugawara understood completely. If someone tried to attack him with fos he would totally get annoyed too. At most, fos could light a cigarette, let alone be any sort of attack spell…

The next second, there was a roar of a large bonfire at night, the crackling of a devouring forest fire as the largest fireball Sugawara had ever seen shot out from the tip of Kageyama's staff to eat all the blue qi, a blue-white monstrosity that shot straight towards the assassin and past him, ploughing through dozens of thick, decades old trees and far into the distance.

The assassin would have lost more than an arm from that if he'd been hit head on, and when Kageyama seemed to summon another wave of his qi, he wisened up and streaked away. Sugawara followed him with his senses, tracking him until he disappeared, far away. It was true. He was really gone, probably to report to his superiors that there was a new sage.

While Sugawara was cursing a little at being unable to kill the guy, Kageyama stared at the destruction in front of him with a sort of slow-burning horror. Whirling around, the boy bent in a ninety degrees bow yelled out an apology. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to! Really!" Kageyama insisted, facing the floor.

Sugawara tilted his head expressionlessly. Didn't mean to... what? Burn down the forest? Sugawara couldn't believe his ears. After all that, he cared about Sugawara's opinion on his destruction of the environment? Sugawara wanted to burst out laughing, only to choke on a broken rib because, ow, that was a thing.

"It's," Sugawara struggled through the pain, "it's okay, Kageyama. We should probably get away from here though, just in case?" He continued in bemusement at the lost fluttering that Kageyama was doing around Sugawara's wounds.

"Are you okay?" The kid asked, all worried and Sugawara couldn't even try to stop the bubble of amusement and affection that popped somewhere in his sternum and made his face twitch into a smile.

Kageyama helped him hobble back to their camp, obviously straining underneath his weight. He was all bones and solemn glares really, just a stick of unwavering determination. And not once did the kid try to grab Nekomata's staff back when Sugawara needed it as a walking stick.

Something in Sugawara's chest eased.

His burn salve was as effective as always, and when he explained the life-debt thing to Kageyama, he was expecting something normal. As the Sage's apprentice (not that, you know, he ever told Kageyama he was Nekomata's apprentice as such, but it was plenty obvious that he came from somewhere well-off and powerful by now) he could basically promise anything in the world.

"Be my friend?" Kageyama asked, the tips of his ears turning red.

And Sugawara stopped. Be his friend, that's all. No loyalties, no threats upon his life. Just 'to be a friend' and do 'friend-things'.

Kageyama obviously didn't know the weight of that statement. Friends were an interesting subject to Sugawara – something he didn't know much of, really, except that Daichi and Asahi did the friend-thing much better than he, had lead him step by step into understanding what friends were supposed to be. He'd lost all of them. Daichi, Asahi, Inuoka, the guardsmen, the cooks in the kitchen... and Michimiya, who had bought his freedom with her own and asked nothing in return. Sugawara didn't have a great track record with friends.

But he did know one thing. Friends stuck up for one another. They were someone to trust.

Kageyama, as much as he was just a set of rough-knees and large serious blue eyes now, was the sage of the future. Countries would be fighting over him until he grew powerful. Get sucked into the petty squabbles of politics, chewed and torn and near digested before being spat out into the most convenient conflict when he became inconvenient, something unbeatable, a quest like 'eradicate the demons!' or something. He would be one of the guides of the world, whether or not he wanted to be.

And here he was, asking Sugawara to have his back throughout it all.

Did he know? Did he know the weight of what he was asking?

No. No he didn't, did he?

Sugawara stifled a chuckle, warm.

"Kageyama, okay. I'll be your friend."

---

Sugawara loves spicy things, but he also really likes eating spicy things with people who can't handle spicy. As in, Asahi. (Their faces are just hilarious, okay?). Only he does it underneath a veneer of niceness, of course. Like, 'ah, here's some cold water!' but secretly he knows cold water only makes it worse…

In a quiet, underground poll, certain members voted for who was the most stubborn within the Karasuno alumni. Kageyama was a strong contender for first, along with Hinata and surprisingly, Yamaguchi. In the end, the dark horse Ennoshita won due to his strong, unwavering, i-gotta-prove-myself mentality. (To his utter sadness, Asahi placed last).