Rochai Raid on the Pyuika Corral

The Rochai Raid on the Pyuika Corral is the attack that turns Van’s encounter with the black beasts into a struggle over the pyuika, Yuna, and Van’s own connection to the animals. As the beasts approach the enclosure, Van experiences the animals’ panic as if it were passing through his own body. That bond gives him an uncanny understanding of the hunt and the strength to drive the pack back, but it also makes the beasts’ movement a force that can draw Yuna away from him. The raid ends not with Van pursuing the animals, but with him holding Yuna fast as the scent of ashimi restores his familiar senses.

The approach to the enclosure

The attack first registers through Van’s body: a pounding he mistakes for a drumbeat proves to be his own heart. Fear and excitement surge through him, and he feels the child in his arms experiencing the same waves. The black beasts are coming, but their course is not yet aimed at the tent. They are bound for the pyuika enclosure, where the frightened animals stamp and shake the earth; nearby, hunting dogs tied to stakes yelp without stopping.

Van runs toward the enclosure as if propelled. The snowy plain seems to fly beneath him. Outside the fence, the black beasts circle rather than approach directly, and Van immediately understands that the Mohoki is confusing their minds. What follows is not a simple charge: some beasts growl around the enclosure, driving the pyuika toward the far side, while another shadow silently approaches from behind, crouched to spring. Van recognizes the arrangement as a hunt, with the snarling animals acting as beaters and the solitary beast waiting to attack.

Van confronts the hunter

Before the hunter moves, Van sees the path of its jump. The pyuika’s desperate heartbeats overlap with his own, and the scene makes his connection concrete: he acts as though he were a buck facing wolves with his herd behind him. He lowers his head and charges the beast from the side. When it turns to face him, something happens that the narration describes as Van splitting in two, marking a strange rupture in his experience of himself even as the fight becomes immediate.

A later perception of something gathering and gripping the threads severs Van’s connection with the beasts, and everything grows quiet. The pack facing him has a fiendish light in its eyes. One male leaps with its fangs bared; Van brings the back of his hatchet down on its muzzle, and the animal shrieks and falls, bouncing against the ground. When it scrambles upright, the rest of the pack attacks from every side. Van throws away the hatchet, clenches his fists, and punches the lunging shapes. Each blow seems to tug at his arm, yet the animals fly away from him and land hard.

The attack reaches Tohma and Kiya

The encounter is also seen from the threatened human side of the enclosure. Tohma braces himself with his eyes shut, expecting the attack to reach him. Instead, he hears a dull thud and looks up to find Van. To Tohma, Van seems to glow: his eyes flash, flames appear to rise from him, and his movements outrun the beasts’ attacks. Van flips through the air, tears away an animal climbing on Kiya, and sends it tumbling. He then kicks, punches, and flings the attackers with the same image of a stag protecting its herd that shaped his first charge.

Tohma cannot follow Van’s movements; he sees only beasts sailing through the air. The difference between the two men’s perceptions underscores the strangeness of the fight: Van experiences it through instinctive action and bodily force, while the child who witnesses it can barely make sense of its speed. The pack eventually turns toward the forest, hesitates, flattens its ears, and runs as if drawn away by a string.

Yuna follows the fleeing beasts

The beasts’ retreat does not end the danger. Tohma hears his mother’s voice, looks back, and sees Yuna wriggle free of her grasp and run after the pack. Her speed seems impossible for a child. Torchlight catches her figure on the snowy field before she disappears into the darkness, and Van immediately follows. Tohma is left stunned and unable even to cry out.

Van sees Yuna as a small, faintly glowing figure ahead of him, linked to the beasts by the same light that links him to them. He forgets to breathe and runs single-mindedly. When pain shoots between his eyes, he senses someone pulling the reins of light again. The beasts shake themselves and set off at a run, and Yuna starts after them. At the last moment Van reaches her, sweeps her into his arms, and holds on as she wriggles, growls like a pup, and flails her arms and legs.

Restraint and aftermath

Watching the beasts run away leaves Van with a loneliness like that of a child left behind by its mother. He wants to go with them, to the ends of the world, and he recognizes the same powerful urge in Yuna as she cries against his chest. The impulse that made Van protect the pyuika now threatens to pull both him and the child beyond his control; keeping Yuna safe requires him to resist the call that still draws at him.

As the scent of ashimi gradually stills the tiny creatures within him, Van’s familiar senses return. The words that surface in his mind are a command not to go and not to let Yuna go either. He buries his face in her hair and hugs her close. The raid’s decisive outcome is thus not simply that Van scatters the attacking beasts: he must also break the momentum of their departure, choosing to hold Yuna rather than follow the animals that his own body still longs to pursue.