Episode 26: CORNERED RAT | DURRUN by Aito Kitazaki

Episode 26

Episode 26: “CORNERED RAT” Picking up the instant Episode 25 ends, the opening Yu-ri promised arrives. What he hooked on his rebar was the frog corpse — the thing his katana collapsed into when Ten’s Transmutation gave out — and he throws it into the path of the rubble. The two meet and burst, and Abura is left standing in a rain of flesh, gagging at the smell. Then the crows come. Yu-ri never worked out what the half-seen haze around him was, but he knew the birds were there, and he baited them. While Abura swings at the flock and screams at it to fight fair, Yu-ri walks straight into his guard and puts the rebar through his throat. Hunter to hunted, he says, and then lower: crow feed. The word that breaks Abura is rat. He denies it, and the denial drags up a boy being pelted with rubble by older kids who called it a rat hunt — the whole hunter-and-hunted world he preached turned inside out. A strike to the jaw ends it without killing him. What follows is the real disclosure. In a flashback to the night at the south gate, Yu-ri decided Janga had to die, and Ten felt that intent through the hilt and shook with fear, because a blade that cannot take a life was being asked to. So Yu-ri makes a promise standing over the man he beat with nothing but iron in his hand: when Sonny Griffin finally bleeds, it will not be Ten who is stained. Then a building explodes outward, and what comes through the dust is Soujun in Fuser form, the case of three hundred million Lenny still with him, asking his partner whether it is over.