Yumi Raijin

Overview

Yumi Raijin is Satomi Hikari's Royal Knight, protector, and chosen companion. She is a disciplined dual-blade swordswoman whose katana-and-wakizashi style uses lightning-fast movement associated with the Raijin Family. Her loyalty is personal as well as sworn: when assassins drive Satomi toward the Tower, Yumi offers her own life and service to secure the queen's treatment.

Flight to the Tower

Yumi reaches the summit injured beside Satomi while Arata Hikari's Black Hand closes behind them. Zero's barrier stops the attackers, and he kills them under the standing command to defend the Tower. Shun initially refuses to heal strangers who brought a human war to his gate. Yumi answers that refusal by offering anything. He accepts her service, and Mimi saves both women.

Conflict and training with Shun

At dinner, the sight of Shun's demon form prompts Yumi to attack with a concealed dagger. Shun suspends and restrains her through his voice and power, then rebukes both fugitives for threatening his home. Yumi later challenges him in the courtyard. Her formal Raijin discipline contrasts with his wild, instinctive style, shadow storage, puppets, and lightning. Although his servants outnumber her, she is individually superior to the constructs.

Their contests continue during the six-month refuge. Beneath the Grand Tree, combat gives way to conversation and music. Yumi carves a flute from a broken branch and plays a Hikari war prayer associated with safe return, peace, and tranquillity. The shared routine grows into love neither has yet resolved publicly.

Love and loyalty

Satomi sees that attachment and asks Shun to prevent Yumi from following when the loyalist army is ready. After the queen departs secretly, Shun lies that she is scouting. Yumi discovers the unchanged, empty rooms and confronts him at the gate. He invokes his promise to Satomi; she invokes her sacred vow, her queen, her home, and her right to decide whom she serves. Shun holds her by force, then releases her when her anguish overwhelms his attempt at protection. Yumi leaves the Tower to pursue Satomi.

The pursuit across the provinces

After leaving the Tower, Yumi crosses the country on foot to rejoin her queen, running without pause and arriving in a state of complete physical collapse. She breaks through the tree line of the Eterna Forest far behind the loyalist host and continues her solitary march, refusing to falter despite her exhaustion. Her cyan hair is noted as she emerges from the forest.

Defence of the queen

Yumi reaches the rear command position at the Battle of a Thousand Shadows at the moment an assassin of the Black Hand drives a dagger toward Satomi's heart, killing the man before the strike can land. She refuses to discuss anything until the fighting is done and turns on the remaining killers with electric sparks discharging across her skin and blade.

The engagement demonstrates the speed of Raijin swordsmanship at its most extreme: she disappears from her opponents' sight entirely, cleaves the nearest assassin in two, weaves through a volley of thrown daggers as though time had slowed, and cuts down the rest of the unit one by one. When the last falls, her knees give out and she can only remain upright by propping herself on her sword, though her attention stays fixed on the wider battle.

Wounded

Facing Arata Hikari directly, Yumi forces herself back to her feet and accepts Satomi's formal command to execute him. The duel is pre-empted when General Kenji Osore takes the queen hostage on Arata's signal, leaving Yumi unable to strike without costing Satomi her life. She is lowering her blade in defeat when Satomi stabs the general's thigh; Yumi exploits the opening and cuts Osore's throat.

Arata closes while she is distracted and cuts diagonally across her back, tearing through her armour to the bone. She loses consciousness immediately and collapses. Satomi catches her and shields her body with her own as Arata raises his sword over them both. Yumi is still unconscious when Shun Sato intercepts the killing blow, and her condition is not resolved within the published story.

The gifted dagger

The small blade Satomi uses against Osore is established as a gift from Yumi, given long before the battle and kept hidden against her chest ever since. It is the instrument that breaks the hostage standoff.

Healed on the field

Yumi takes no further part in the Battle of a Thousand Shadows after Arata cuts her down. She is bleeding out in Satomi's arms when Shun Sato arrives, and his first order is to have Mimi Sato heal her. Mimi closes the wound across her back, but Yumi remains unconscious for the rest of the engagement from the blood she has already lost, and is still unconscious when the usurper's army surrenders. She is guarded by Mimi throughout.

Chapter 19 also names her mother for the first time: Takane Raijin, the master of the Raijin style who personally trained Arata Hikari — meaning the speed that nearly killed Yumi came from her own family's discipline.

Waking in Goguma

Yumi regains consciousness a week after the Battle of a Thousand Shadows, in her old chamber in the Hikari Royal Castle. She is woken by the roar of the crowd carrying up from the plaza where Satomi Hikari has just executed the traitor nobles, and by a flashback of her final duel with the usurper that jolts her upright in bed.

Her wound has been closed by magic, but her body has not forgotten the strike: sitting up sends a violent spike of phantom pain across her back, and a later attempt to stand drops her to her knees. A maid attending her confirms she has been unconscious for an entire week and that the household had begun to fear the worst.

The maid's account of the battle is the version the kingdom has been told — the legendary Lord of the Tower arriving like a savior, besting Arata Hikari in brilliant swordplay, and forcing the entire usurper army to surrender through tactical genius. The narration notes plainly that the more gruesome details have been quietly scrubbed from the story. Yumi, who knows what was scrubbed, asks only where he is, and learns that he vanished into thin air the moment the vanguard laid down its weapons.

Told that Satomi has sent a royal emissary to the Tower with an invitation to a victory ball, Yumi feels not delight but cold dread. She knows the interference will not go unpunished — that his transgressions are never without a cost — and turns to the window to look at the distant silhouette of the Tower against the setting sun.

The dance

Yumi attends the ball a week later as Satomi's knight, wearing a powder-blue tulle gown chosen to match her ocean-blue eyes. She is visibly out of her element in court society, stumbling slightly as she is fawned over by local and foreign nobility alongside her queen, and is quickly surrounded by suitors from Kaladria's finest houses competing for a single dance.

She leaves them all to cross the hall to Shun Sato, who is standing alone and about to walk out. With her hand shaking and her face burning, barely able to meet his eyes, she asks him for the dance herself — an act the narration frames as bravely trying to bridge the chasm that had opened between them, in full view of a court that despises him. He accepts without a word.

She surrenders to his lead and is struck by his hand: warm, and etched with calluses, a map of untold hard labour that mirrors her own. During the dance she counters his teasing by spinning back across his arm and burying her red face in his chest, taking refuge in the man teasing her.

“Stay”

As the music slows, Yumi asks him to stay. Shun refuses, telling her he is a fuse who will give Magnus the pretext to reignite the war. Her answer is that they will face Magnus together; he tells her he cannot be the reason she and her people die.

She demands to know why he fought for them, protected her, and took her hand, and he answers that it is because he loves her. Yumi's attempt to say it back — “I… Also…” — is cut off by Shun, who begs her not to give him hope. A single tear escapes as she stops. The exchange is broken off when Shun is called away by Zero, and Yumi's response to the refusal is not shown at this boundary.

“Live, Yumi”

When the music ends, Shun wipes away her tear, spins her one last time, and is swallowed by his shadows mid-twirl, leaving her grasping at empty air. His parting words to her are “Live, Yumi” and “Live long, and prosper.” Her attempt to call his name is cut off halfway.

Through the Great Hall's windows she sees the Tower standing in the distant mountains. She is held in place by duty: the narration states that she could not abandon her oath to chase her own desires, and that she was trapped between loyalty and heart. Satomi Hikari breaks the deadlock. Watching from the sidelines, the queen smiles and gives her a small nod of blessing.

The pursuit

Yumi kicks off her high heels and runs barefoot out of the hall. In her quarters she tears off the blue tulle gown and puts on her armour and blades, then vaults onto her horse in the stables and rides for the outskirts. Her thought as she goes is recorded directly: “I will not give up! I will rescue you!”

The song

Chapter 21 also ties Yumi's flute to Shun's own past. The tune she played for him is revealed, through Shun's dream in the dungeon, to share its melody with a song sung to him long ago; he realises there why it had sounded both different and familiar. The chapter does not say how Yumi came to know it.