Modulo Chapter 7

With his twin hurt and senseless, Cross takes on Maru's identity and stays at the side of Tsurugi and Yuka.

Battered and bleeding, Masaki ducks into an alley to escape the sorcerers, only for Usami to corner him and shut him down with Cursed Speech. Elsewhere, Cross presses Tsurugi on how he came to know the word neighbors, and the answer that Maru taught it sends Cross into a rage, certain that humans and Simurians can never reach genuine understanding. As Maru is carried off for care, Usami proposes treating him on Earth to spare him exposing his wounds to the Simurians, but Cross turns it down, lifting Maru's eyepatch to hold onto for his own purposes. Tsurugi later stirs awake in a hospital bed, fresh from a dream of a let-down Mahito, and Cross, still wearing Maru's face, drops by; he is briefly thrown when Tsurugi apologizes for ever imagining an invasion. Once Yuka turns up too, the threesome heads off to an amusement park that Maru had been longing to visit.

Cross trudges through the day at the park alongside Tsurugi, Yuka, and Mino. Pausing to rest, he snatches a boy's runaway balloon, then packs Tsurugi and Mino off to the lost child desk while he and Yuka wait out the wait for the child's mother. The boy's tears earn him a scolding from Cross for crying with his mother still alive, and when that backfires Cross resorts to acrobatics to lift his mood, winning applause from the crowd; the grateful child leaves him a Halloween balloon. A conversation about Halloween's roots and belief follows, during which Yuka lets on that she has seen through his Maru disguise and asks whether he holds any faith, and Cross owns that the Simurians worship a divine being. When Yuka brings up the fumi-e and her trouble understanding why Christians refused, on pain of death, to set foot on a depiction of their deity, Cross flips it, asking if she could crush something alive in its place, which reframes things for her, before he charges that shallow people like her have trampled the Simurian way of life and should brace for payback. Set on changing his mind, Yuka leads him the next morning to a hospital for her own exam, where she is told a malignant brain tumor leaves her half a year. Later, fording a river, Cross compares her stolen future to that of his people, and Yuka leans on that common grief to beg for coexistence and ask to hear his tale. Brushing it off as naive, he insists coexistence would mean nothing but living meekly under human rule and swears he would sooner go on stealing. But when she asks how long he means to keep at it, Cross has no answer, and Yuka offers to break the cycle with him.