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1.
He won't do it, a part of Jamato thinks, even as the air goes still behind him.
That part is small. Soft-edged. It remembers things it shouldn’t.
The sentimental part. The nostalgic part. The part he never managed to kill when it came to Spoke.
The rest of Jamato knows better.
It remembers how easily Spoke’s kindness had tipped into control—how care came freely, but always on Spoke’s terms. How cruelty rarely looked like cruelty at all. It came wrapped in intention. In certainty. In the quiet confidence that he knew best.
Jamato had hoped—he had hoped—that Spoke would've changed. That disappearing would be warning enough. That absence might do what arguments never had.
But standing here now, he wonders if that had ever been bravery.
Maybe he’d just been running.
From Spoke. From the moment he realized how much power they’d held together, and how easily Spoke had loved it.
Maybe this—standing unarmoured, unmoving, with his back open to the blade—was the first honest thing he’d done in months.
—
Spoke’s fingers twitch.
Not toward the sword at first, just open, then curling, like they’re remembering the shape of it.
Jamato’s back is open. No armour. No totems. No safeguards. Nothing but trust—or surrender.
And for a split second, all Spoke can think is: If I do this, Mapicc can’t leave.
Spoke has already decided to do it.
At least, that’s what he tells himself.
This is the moment that fixes everything. Revenge for being abandoned. Proof that Jamato doesn’t get to appear, disrupt his life, and leave again. Proof that Mapicc won’t be taken from him.
Jamato dies, and the running ends.
Spoke thinks about the beginning.
About Jamato’s laughter—soft, bright—as he’d pulled him aside and shown him what the server really was beneath the rules. The skeleton with no bow. The armour holding enchantments it shouldn’t have been able to carry. That exhilarating, fragile moment where the world felt breakable.
Back when it had felt like trust.
Spoke’s fingers twitch again.
He doesn’t draw the sword.
And for a moment, that scares him more than anything else.
2.
Cold wind slides over Jamato’s bare arms, needling through cloth and skin alike. He feels it properly—sharp, grounding—and lets himself shiver.
It’s been a long time since he’s allowed that.
Since leaving Spoke, the armour had stayed on. Always. Too many mobs. Too many unknown variables. Too many ways the world could turn hostile if he relaxed even for a moment. The armour had been a habit as much as protection. A reminder not to trust. Not again.
Standing like this feels wrong. Exposing.
The months alone had been lonely. Jamato doesn’t pretend otherwise. Silence stretches differently when there’s no one to share it with. No one to marvel with. No one to pull aside and say, Look at this—look what I found.
But they’d been necessary.
He’d always known he wasn’t meant to stay. Not in one place. Not holding power tight in his hands, pretending he could be trusted with it just because he wanted to be. The world was too big for that. Too fragile.
He was meant to move through it. To see it as it was, not as something to be rewritten because he could.
He wonders—briefly, quietly—if Spoke had ever let himself want that.
Jamato’s heard the rumours, after all. About the destruction left behind in Spoke’s wake, about his desperate attempts to erase the past, about the mafia’s collapse.
Fear leaves a mess when it tries to clean up after itself.
He wonders if Spoke would say his life is better now.
Jamato doesn’t turn around to ask.
—
If I don’t do it now, it won’t happen.
The thought drops into place with unsettling clarity.
This is the opening. Jamato unarmoured. Unmoving. Not fighting. If Spoke hesitates—if he lets the moment stretch—Jamato will turn around. He’ll talk. He’ll explain. He’ll leave again.
And Spoke will be left with nothing but the space where certainty almost was.
This is how it always goes. Jamato appears, reshapes the world, and disappears before Spoke can make it mean something. Before he can lock it down. Before he can prove—to Jamato, to Mapicc, to himself—that he wasn’t just temporary.
If Jamato lives, nothing ends.
The questions stay open. The doubt stays lodged under Spoke’s ribs, sharp and unanswerable. Jamato will walk away again—smiling, reasonable—and Spoke will be left wondering whether he imagined the damage at all.
Spoke tightens his grip on the hilt. The leather bites into his palm. He welcomes it. Anchors himself to the sensation.
This isn’t anger. Anger would be simpler than admitting how easily this could all vanish again.
This is clarity. This is fixing a loose end before it unravels everything else.
He can’t let the story slip out of his hands again.
3.
So this is how it ends.
Not loudly. Not in fire or accusation or one last desperate attempt to be understood.
Just quiet.
Jamato exhales, slow and controlled, and lets the moment settle into place. He doesn’t turn. Doesn’t brace. Whatever comes next needs to be clean—untainted by instinct or panic.
He doesn’t think about contingencies. About habits learned the hard way. About the things survival teaches you to keep, even when you swear you won’t use them.
If Spoke kills him like this—unarmed, unmoving—it won’t be necessity. It won’t be protection dressed up as morality.
It will be a choice.
And somehow, that hurts less.
Because if Spoke hesitates—if he can’t do it—then Jamato will know this wasn’t enough. That leaving hadn’t saved anyone. That all he’s done is delay the inevitable.
Worse than dying would be proving that Spoke could still stand here, blade in hand, and call it mercy.
Jamato closes his eyes.
If this is the cost of drawing a line—of refusing to let the server bend around one person’s need for control—then he’ll pay it.
At least this way, Spoke won’t be able to pretend.
—
Jamato isn’t trying to stop him.
That’s wrong.
Spoke had been waiting for it—the tell. The moment Jamato would turn, or speak, or reach for something clever at the last second. A bluff. A trap. Some quiet confirmation that this was still a game of angles and contingencies.
That’s how Jamato always survived.
But Jamato just stands there. No flinch. No reach. No attempt to reclaim the narrative. Like this was always where the road led.
Like Spoke doesn’t matter enough to stop him.
The realization needles into something raw.
That this isn't fear, or defiance, or surrender.
It’s permission.
And Spoke hates that more than anything.
Because if Jamato’s already accepted this—already written himself out—then Spoke isn’t taking control. He’s just fulfilling an expectation.
No.
That’s not how this ends.
This isn’t about Jamato getting to decide anything. If it were, Spoke would already have lost.
This is about consequences. About making something stick for once.
If Jamato dies here, it proves something. That people don’t get to vanish and return clean. That they don’t get to pick morality after leaving devastation behind.
Spoke tells himself he isn’t angry.
He tells himself this is justice.
The lie settles easily.
4.
Spoke is still behind him.
Jamato can feel it in the silence—the way it stretches, tightens, waits. The hesitation isn’t mercy. It’s calculation. It’s Spoke deciding what this death will mean.
That’s when Jamato knows.
The certainty settles, calm and unshakeable, that Spoke will act.
The realization is strangely steadying. Jamato lets his shoulders drop, the last reflexive tension bleeding out of him. If this is the moment Spoke crosses that line, then fighting it now would only make it easier for him to lie to himself later.
Jamato won’t give him that.
He thinks of Mapicc—of the simple truth that Mapicc deserves a choice. A world that isn’t quietly shaped by someone else’s need for control.
If Jamato has to become a warning instead of a guide, so be it.
Stillness is the only refusal he has left.
—
The silence stretches past the point where it should have broken.
This is taking too long.
The thought sparks sharp and irritated, like a snapped wire. He should’ve done it already. Clean. Efficient. Over.
Every second stretches the window thinner. Every second risks someone seeing Jamato alive.
But Jamato hasn’t turned around. Hasn’t begged. Hasn’t tried to bargain or explain or fight.
He’s making Spoke do all the work.
The weight of it presses heavy against his chest. This was supposed to feel decisive. Victorious. Instead it feels like standing on the edge of something irreversible in the worst possible way.
No. That’s exactly why it has to happen.
If Jamato walks away again, there will be witnesses. Stories. Versions of this moment Spoke can’t reach fast enough to correct.
Jamato alive means uncertainty spreads. It means people asking why Spoke hesitated. Why he let him go.
This isn’t about finishing it.
It’s about making sure there’s only one version left.
About ensuring this moment can’t be undone.
Spoke draws the sword.
The sound is controlled. Familiar. The hilt digs into his palm, rough and grounding, and he realizes—distantly—that he’s gripping hard enough to hurt.
Good.
5.
The sound reaches Jamato first.
Metal sliding free. Careful. Deliberate.
There it is.
Jamato’s chest tightens—not with fear, but with something like grief. Not for himself. For Spoke.
For the boy who once laughed with him over broken code and impossible enchantments, who had looked at the server and seen wonder instead of leverage.
Jamato wonders, briefly, if there was ever a version of this that didn’t end here.
Then he lets the thought go.
He won’t twist, won’t beg, won’t argue himself into another escape. If Spoke needs blood—needs proof, needs something irreversible to believe in—Jamato won’t cheapen it by turning this into a struggle.
He steadies his breathing.
Whatever happens next will be on Spoke alone.
—
That's it.
The sound of the blade clears the last of his hesitation. Once the sword is out, it feels stupid to stop. Like backing away from a decision already made.
This is the point of no return.
Spoke locks onto the space between Jamato’s shoulders. Measures distance. Angle. Timing. He doesn’t think about blood. He doesn’t think about pain.
He thinks about after.
About Mapicc’s face when he realizes Jamato isn’t coming back. About how much simpler things will be once the variables are gone. About how this will finally force the world to move instead of stalling in uncertainty.
He tells himself this will simplify things.
That once Jamato is gone, the future will narrow into something manageable—something that won’t keep slipping sideways out of his grasp.
He tells himself he won’t hesitate again.
6.
The air shifts.
That’s all the warning Jamato gets.
He exhales—slow, deliberate—as if loosening the last knot tying him to this place. He doesn’t turn. Doesn’t flinch.
If this is how Spoke defines himself, Jamato won’t be the one to dull the edge.
For a heartbeat, there is only wind and the quiet, terrible certainty of what comes next.
So this is it, he thinks—and almost laughs.
Because even now, even standing here unarmoured, offering himself up as proof, he still has an escape tucked away. A contingency. A way out.
Running again, after all.
The thought is wry, self-deprecating, sharp enough to hurt. Jamato’s fingers close around the totem just as—
—
Spoke commits.
The strike lands exactly where it should.
For a fraction of a second, it works.
Jamato lurches forward—and then the totem shatters with a thunderous crack, green and gold light exploding outward as the damage transfers all at once. The sound is wrong—too loud, too final—echoing off the stone like something breaking that can’t be put back together.
Jamato is torn away mid-impact, something ripping him out of the space before the particles even finish dispersing.
The sword cleaves through empty air.
Spoke stumbles a half-step forward, breath hitching as relief surges—hot, electric—
Then dies just as fast.
Jamato is gone.
No body. No blood.
Just the fading shimmer of a broken totem and the hollow certainty that, for one perfect instant, Spoke did kill him.
Of course.
Of course Jamato hadn’t planned to die. Of course there had been a contingency tucked somewhere Spoke couldn’t see.
That stillness—unarmoured, unmoving—hadn’t been surrender. It had been misdirection. Another vanishing act, clean and precise, leaving Spoke to deal with the aftermath alone.
He’d been expecting a bluff, a last-second turn, some clever escape. He just hadn’t expected Jamato to let the blade land first.
The explanation slots neatly into place. It has edges. It holds.
The relief comes back all at once—too sharp, almost dizzying—
Then it twists, sharp enough to steal his breath.
Something pulls loose in his chest, a clean, empty space where weight should still be pressing down. Spoke tightens his grip on the sword until the feeling collapses inward, crushed flat.
That's fine.
Dead or vanished—it makes no difference. The story still works. It has to.
Spoke straightens, already reshaping the aftermath in his head, forcing the moment into order. A destroyed tower. A missing body. A culprit ready-made.
He sheathes the sword.
If Jamato won’t stay dead, Spoke will make sure everyone else believes he is.
And this time—
no one is getting away.
He won't allow it.