The Knots That Bind Us

The snow outside the money exchange store directly above the Hades Bureau fell in thick, silent clumps, muffling the world in a deceptive blanket of white. The Hades Bureau breathed beneath the ground, a beast unaware that its veins were being opened. Above, on the iron-grey streets of Takayama, the air was sharp enough to cut.

We turn the time a little back: to when Kurogane and the rest of the bandits first arrived to Takayama, which was where we last left them off asserting our focus to the actual infiltration. This is the time period when the infiltration was well underway with the Kodokuna Sonae still alive.

Kurogane stood at the mouth of the alleyway, his dark coat dusted with frost. Behind him, the remnants of his unit—the men who still believed he was one of them—gathered the weeping, huddled forms of the women they had snatched from countless villages. They were being prepped for the transport, tied together at the wrists like livestock meant for the slaughter.

“Take them to the northern gate,” Kurogane ordered, his voice flat and devoid of any tremor. “The buyers won't wait for the weather to clear. Sell the lot of them and return to the store for your cut.”

The bandits grunted in agreement, their breath blooming in the air like pale ghosts. Yahiko, his stump of a hand wrapped in filthy, blood-crusted bandages, spat into the snow. He looked at Kurogane with a mixture of fear and simmering resentment, his eyes darting to the older bandit beside him.

As the two parties prepared to split,

Kurogane... suddenly stopped.

He didn't turn around. He didn't reach for a blade. He simply became still—so still that the snow began to settle on his shoulders as if he were a stone monument. Seconds stretched into a minute. The wind whistled through the eaves of the exchange store, a low, mourning sound that seemed to vibrate in the silence.

Yahiko shifted his weight, his teeth chattering. “O-Oi, Kurogane? What is it? We don’t have all day to stand around playing statue.”

Kurogane didn't answer. He blinked slowly, his long lashes catching the white flakes. He looked up at the moon, which hung in the sky like a cold, unblinking eye. A long, shuddering breath escaped his lips.

“In the dim zendo,” he began, his voice barely a whisper, yet it carried with a weight that made the bandits freeze.

“I sit with breath like fading incense. 

The moon watches, silent. 

To seize the lotus, I crawled through mud, robes forever stained. 

I bow, whisper repentance, yet my heart accuses: ‘How low you stooped for what was already afloat.’

Cherry blossoms fall indifferently on the pure and the defiled alike.

Breath in. Breath out. The mud dries, cracks—perhaps one day this stain will wash away in rain that spares no one.

Until then, I sit with the weight of my own betrayal, offering it to silence like incense burning itself to nothing.”

A long, agonizing pause followed. The wind died down. The world felt suspended in a vacuum of sound. The bandits exchanged confused, nervous glances.

“What the hell are you rambling about?” the older bandit grunted, taking a step toward him.

Kurogane’s hand.. moved.

It was faster than a sword draw, a motion so fluid it defied the eye. From his inner breast pocket, he produced a Smith & Wesson Model 2 Tip-Up revolver. The brass frame gleamed once in the rising sunlight before the world exploded.

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

The three bandits leading the women away didn't even have time to scream. The heavy lead rounds caught them in the center of their foreheads, snapping their heads back with a sickening crunch of bone. They collapsed into the snow, their lifeblood steaming in the cold air.

Yahiko and the older bandit gasped, reaching for their katanas, but Kurogane was already pivoting.

BANG! BANG!

The two shots were precise. Yahiko screamed as a bullet tore through his ankle, the bone shattering like glass.

The older bandit let out a choked roar as his own foot was pinned to the earth by lead. They both collapsed into the slush, clutching their mangled limbs, their eyes wide with the sudden, terrifying realization of their mortality.

Kurogane didn't look at them. He walked toward the woman—the one with the haunting eyes and the iron spirit—and Tenmichi. He held the revolver out by the barrel, offering the heavy metal grip to the lady.“Do as you wish,” he said, his voice cold as the frost.

The lady took the gun. Her hands were shaking, not with fear, but with a long torture worth of bottled lightning. 

She looked down at Yahiko, the man who had tormented her, who had treated her like a piece of refuse.She didn't fire. Instead, she gripped the barrel, using the heavy brass and steel frame of the Model 2 as a cudgel.She lunged at Yahiko. The first blow caught him across the temple, the sound of metal meeting skull echoing like a hammer on an anvil.

“YOU!” she screamed, a raw, jagged sound that tore from her throat. It was the sound of a woman breaking, of someone who had watched her world burn. “YOU PIECE OF FILTH!”

She rained blows down on him. She used the gun to smash his teeth, to break his nose into a bloody pulp. She threw handfuls of freezing snow into his eyes, blinding him while she grunted with effort, her tears hot and stinging on her cheeks. Tenmichi watched, paralyzed, as the lady she had looked up to became a creature of pure, unadulterated vengeance.

The lady’s voice rose to a shriek, much like a wounded animal. “WHY?! WHY ME?! YOU TOOK EVERYTHING! YOU TREATED ME LIKE NOTHING!”

She beat him until her knuckles were bruised, until Yahiko was nothing but a whimpering, unrecognizable mass of meat and broken bone. 

"DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!"

The older bandit lay unconscious nearby, his breathing shallow. Yahiko, however, was still awake—barely.

"DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!"

Already having suffered from his wrist cut from Kurogane and the immense bloodloss, he crawled through the red-stained snow, his remaining hand clawing at the earth.

“Y-Y'know what...” Yahiko wheezed, his voice bubbling through broken teeth and blood. “I wanna.. I wanna beg for my.. my life right now..”

"But.. fuck you."

The lady stopped. 

She wiped the snot and tears from her face with a trembling hand. Her chest heaved. She looked at Kurogane.

“Kurogane,” she said, her voice dropping to a terrifying, quiet register. “I love this kid to death. Keep her away from the me she might see in the next ten seconds.”

Kurogane didn't hesitate. He stepped in front of Tenmichi, pulling the girl into his chest. He wrapped his large, scarred hands over her ears and used his broad frame to block her vision, pulling her into the shadow of his coat.

Inside that darkness, Tenmichi felt the vibrations of the world. The lady took a deep breath. The sound of the revolver’s cylinder clicking into place—crack-crack—was the loudest thing in the world.

She thought of every night she had spent in their captivity. She thought of the faces of the women who hadn't made it. She thought of Naomi, a ghost she had lost to a heartless father. She thought of her own mother, one she'd send the Ryō she would earn so she can survive. She thought of her life up to this point.

“Go to hell, if it even earns a scum like you.” she whispered.

BANG.

Yahiko’s whimpering stopped.

BANG.

The unconscious older bandit didn't even twitch as the second bullet found its mark.

Silence returned. The lady stood over the two corpses, the revolver smoking in her hand. Her shoulders slumped. The rage was gone, replaced by a hollow, aching exhaustion.

She walked toward Kurogane. He released Tenmichi, who stood blinking in the moonlight, her face pale. The lady looked at Kurogane, her eyes hard and unforgiving.

“There is no way I’ll ever forgive you for what you’ve done,” she said, her voice steady. She reached out and took Tenmichi back into her arms, pulling the girl close and giving the revolver back, “But..

Thank you.”

She turned to walk away, “Wait,” Kurogane said. He walked to them, holding the pistol out to Tenmichi.

“Hold onto this one, okay?” he said, his eyes meeting the young girl’s. “I’ll get you another one as well once we’re clear. One lucky day, you might very well need those two,

Consider it a gift from your father."

He looked at the lady. “I’ll get you two some Ryō to buy some new clothes. Wait in one of the rooms of the exchange store after that. Stay there and do not move.”

"What about you?" The lady asks.

“I have to go to the basement,” he muttered, his hand going to his sword. “The end of the age is waiting down there.”

And so, the dawn in Takayama went by not with a bang, but with a soft, ethereal blue that bled into the edges of the frosted wooden eaves. The air was impossibly crisp, tasting of mountain snow and the distant, earthy scent of woodsmoke from breakfast fires. The violence of the minutes before—the thunder of the Model 2, the wet thud of the metal against bone—felt like a fever dream that the rising sun was slowly dissolving.

The lady walked with a newfound lightness, her hand firmly but gently clasped around Tenmichi’s. They moved through the Sanmachi Suji district, the traditional heart of the town, where the dark timber buildings stood like silent sentinels of a peaceful age.

“Look, Tenmichi-chan,” the lady whispered, her voice no longer jagged with rage, but soft as the mist rising off the Miyagawa River. “The world is waking up. And it’s a world that belongs to you again.”

They stopped before a small, elegant boutique. Its noren curtains fluttered in the morning breeze, smelling faintly of cedar and aged silk. The owner, an elderly woman with silver hair tucked into a neat bun, was just sliding back the wooden shutters. She paused, seeing the two of them—one a child with eyes too wide for her years, the other a woman with the regal bearing of a fallen queen.

“We need something for a new beginning,” the lady said, bowing slightly.

The shop interior was a kaleidoscope of color. Bolts of silk were stacked to the ceiling: deep indigo, vibrant vermillion, and the soft, pale greens of early spring. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Tenmichi felt a spark of genuine wonder. She reached out a tiny, hesitant hand, her fingers brushing against a fabric that felt like cool water.

“This one?” the lady asked, crouching down beside her.

It was a soft peach kimono, patterned with delicate white cherry blossoms that seemed to drift across the silk like the snow outside. The lady held it up against Tenmichi’s face. The color brought life back to the girl’s pale cheeks, highlighting the gold in her eyes.

“It suits you,” the lady murmured, her eyes shimmering with a sudden, fierce tenderness. “You look like the spring itself after all.”

They spent the next hour in a cocoon of gentleness. The shopkeeper assisted them with the intricate layers of the undergarments, the nagajuban, and finally the silk itself. The lady chose for herself a deep, midnight blue kimono with silver cranes in flight—a garment that commanded respect and hid the shadows of her heart.

When they stepped back out onto the street, the sun had finally crested the mountains, turning the frost on the cobblestones into a carpet of diamonds. Tenmichi looked down at her new sleeves, the silk whispering against her skin. She felt clean. She felt heavy with the weight of beautiful things rather than the weight of chains.

“Hungry?” the lady asked, a small, genuine smile playing on her lips.

They stopped at a small stall near the bridge where an old man was grilling mitarashi dango. The sweet, salty scent of the caramelized soy glaze made Tenmichi’s stomach growl, a human sound that made them both laugh. They sat on a wooden bench by the rushing river, the water crystal clear as it tumbled over the stones.

The lady watched Tenmichi eat, carefully wiping a bit of sauce from the corner of the girl’s mouth. For a moment, she wasn't a tormented spirit or a vengeful ghost. She was just a woman caring for a child in the morning light.

“You know, Tenmichi-chan” the lady said, looking at the sunlight reflecting off the water. “The mud of the pond is deep and dark, but the lotus doesn't care. It just keeps reaching for this light.”

Tenmichi looked up, her mouth full of rice cake, and nodded solemnly. She reached out and took the lady’s hand, squeezing it. The lady squeezed back, her eyes closing as she soaked in the warmth of the sun.

In this quiet corner of Takayama, the war in the basement felt a thousand miles away. Here, there was only the scent of silk, the taste of sugar, and the fragile, beautiful hope of a morning that had actually come.

“Let’s go back now,” the lady said softly, standing up and smoothing Tenmichi’s hair. “We have to wait for the others. But we wait as ourselves, not as prisoners.”

They walked back toward the exchange store, two figures in bright silk, leaving the first footprints of a new day in the thinning snow.

Watched by him all this time, with a lingering look at the woman he had just helped, Kurogane turned and vanished into the store, assured they're safe.

We turn the time forward again to where we left off previously, to when Ichirō arrives upstairs to meet her eyes.

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Author's Note*: Hi everyone! Hope your year is going well so far. Firstly, if you haven't seen the art I released for Jinko and Aika in celebration of 2026, do check it out as I uploaded it to the fan art section of this novel! Secondly, Act II is nearing it's end! We are almost done with this past arc that has essentially given a means of building the world out with events that plays into the previous arc and the next arc in more ways than you might think! I hope you keep reading Dream Seclusion.