An Older Brother's Duty

Tsurugi seeks out Maru and requests that his people abandon Earth, hoping Yuka can avoid a fatal clash with Dabura. Feeling answerable for his tribe's safety, Maru turns the request down. Neither side yields, so the two older brothers begin trading blows.

January 14, 2087 is the date set for the bout pitting Earth's champion against Simuria's. Mino questions whether Miyaguni truly intends to throw the ailing Yuka against Dabura Karaba. Yuka is the nation's only real option, Miyaguni answers, because Dabura would shrug off the JSDF and American forces fighting as one, the toll would be catastrophic, and the Security Treaty between the two countries covers nothing of this sort. Raising nuclear arms, Mino learns no government will accept the blame for a second nuclear strike on Japanese ground. Counted as a latent nuclear power for its tech and materials, Japan has even been quietly prodded by the UN to build and use such weapons unaided, a slight Miyaguni resents.

Maru, meanwhile, dwells on the day speaking with Cross turned hard. Their village destroyed, his younger brother offered him the stone their father gripped while dying, sure it held mul. Seeing only common rock, Maru shattered it, stamped the shards, and coldly ordered a weeping Cross to forget the man. He now sees how his fixation on the warrior's road wounded his brother and wishes an apology were possible. Drifting through a derelict building, Tsurugi senses cracks in the Simurian tale: the aliens look eerily human, yet their crude society somehow churned out the fifty-thousand-passenger Naunax overnight. He tracks down Maru and floats his idea that the craft arose from mul reacting to cursed energy, fueled by Maru's technique.

Maru corrects him: the ship leaned on the high-purity mul Dura left behind and combined his own technique with Cross's, which is also how the brothers found one another and converse in Japanese. The Rumelians refuse to leave, he adds, now that the Kalyans, the cursed spirits, have been found in Japan, and a binding vow staking everything will still not save Yuka in his estimation. As her older brother, Tsurugi draws Honoyagi and begs the aliens to depart so she may keep her final three months. Maru says no. Crossing the void from Simuria swallowed nearly two years of travel, he recalls, a stretch his people spent terrified of drifting forever with nothing to come home to, and so he strips the plaster from his third eye and bares his blade. A bonus 4-koma has him chasing speedruns and fumbling a Manju Kowai prank on the siblings. The Marulu versus Tsurugi fight opens, the cursed tool Honoyagi appears, and the chapter lands in Modulo Volume 2.