Hito-mane Extermination: Fear Factory

The clouds above held a bruised, violet tint, lingering like a heavy bruise over the slate-gray rooftops. The street smelled faintly of roasted chicory and damp pavement, a mix that should have felt ordinary, yet sat heavily in the lungs with the metallic tang of old industry. It was a district caught between its past as a bustling manufacturing hub and its current state of slow, bureaucratic decay.​ At a small café near the corner of the market, the three of them sat around a scarred wooden table. The tables inside were worn down, bearing the circular burns of countless forgotten mugs and the deep, jagged gouges of a knife from years past. 

People passed by the window in a steady, unyielding rhythm. Baskets of bread balanced on hips, the woven straw creaking under the weight of dark, heavy loaves. Handcarts rolled across uneven stone with a rhythmic, clattering roar that vibrated through the floorboards.​ No one rushed. No one slowed. Every step looked practiced, like they had walked this exact path a thousand times before. The pedestrians kept their eyes fixed forward, their shoulders squared against the damp wind, as though an invisible conductor was keeping time for the entire neighborhood.​Everything happened because it was supposed to happen. Not because anyone wanted it to. 

There was an oppressive weight to the air, a sense of inevitability that hung over the cobblestone streets and the rusted iron railings of Kokohama.​ Asumi had whatever book she had been reading propped against the salt shaker and napkin dispenser. It was a thick, cloth-bound volume, the edges cracked and frayed from decades of handling, the spine softened and faded to a pale, dirty brown from years of use. It was one of the very few things Graham hadn’t taken from her bag when the authorities had searched them at the Harpyra capital a few days ago. Her fingers moved carefully as she turned each page, like the paper might fall apart if she rushed it. 

Every movement was deliberate, tracing the faded lines of text with the tip of her index finger as if trying to pull the knowledge directly through her skin.​ Tatsuchi sat across from her, her phone resting in her palm. The dull blue light reflected faintly against her chin, casting sharp, angular shadows across her cheekbones.​ 

Scroll.​ 

Tap.

​Scroll.​

Tap.​

Articles. Records. Archives. Nothing. ​Local Council Approves Road Repairs. Market Prices Remain Stable. Supply Delay from Southern Routes. Three Missing in the Outer prefectures. The headlines read like a static loop, an endless repetition of mundane bureaucracy that served only to mask the rot underneath. ​Her thumb paused there for a second longer than the rest. Then moved on. 

Still nothing that mattered. No mention of the body in the morgue. No mention of the man with the serrated naginata who had looked at her like he already knew how she would die. The memory of his eyes, cold, calculating, and entirely devoid of hesitation, flashed in her mind, a stark contrast to the perfectly ordinary world outside the café glass. ​“Nothing,” Tatsuchi said flatly. She locked her phone. The black screen reflected her purple eyes for a brief second before going dark. “It’s all too clean for my liking.”​ Zhenyu wasn’t at the table. He stood just outside the café, one foot on the curb, the other planted firm against the stone. His phone's speaker pressed to his ear, his jaw clenched tight enough to show the outline of his teeth beneath the skin. 

The collar of his trench coat was raised slightly, even though there was no cold to justify it. The wind was merely damp and stagnant, holding the temperature of a lukewarm bath, but the gesture was habitual, a defense mechanism against a world he no longer trusted.​ Tatsuchi watched him through the glass from the side of her eye. At first, his posture was straight, his shoulders back, the rigid stance of a man who knew he was being observed by those higher up the ladder.​

Then it shifted. 

​It was kinda subtle, really easy to miss if you weren't looking for the sudden drop in his shoulders or the way his weight settled onto his heels. His shoulders lowered slightly. His head tilted down, as if the weight of the words coming through the speaker was a physical burden. He stopped speaking. Just listened. ​His eyes drifted until they met hers through the cracked glass. 

Something he had heard changed the mood around him, like he had just realized something he couldn’t take back. It was a subtle transformation, the sudden stiffness in his spine replaced by a quiet, hollow realization. He gave a short nod, a gesture meant to convey compliance to an invisible observer. The line clicked. Dead. He stayed there for three breaths, his chest rising and falling in a slow, measured cadence. Looking down at his shoes like something was supposed to be there. Then he turned and came back inside. ​The café hadn’t changed. ​Behind the counter, the waiter wiped the same ring of grease from the wood. Again. And again. And again. 

The rag was gray and frayed, moving in a hypnotic, circular motion that seemed to accomplish nothing but the spread of a thin, invisible film across the dark timber.​ “Fresh bread today,” he said again, his voice just a little too flat, lacking the melodic cadence of someone actually trying to sell a product. A woman near the entrance smiled. Too late. Her mouth moved first, stretching into a polite, meaningless crescent. 

Her eyes followed after, dull and unblinking, taking a second too long to register the movement of her own face. At another table, a man stirred his tea. The silver spoon tapped against the ceramic, a sharp, crystalline ring that echoed in the quiet space.

Again.​

Again.​

Again.​

He didn’t drink it, he just watched the surface of the amber liquid like it might tell him what to do next. The bubbles rose and popped in a slow sequence. ​Zhenyu sat down. The bench groaned under him, the old wood protesting the sudden shift in weight. He didn’t order anything. The waiter didn't come over to ask; the routine was already broken, or perhaps it never existed for them. 

He just rested his forearms on the table, the dark fabric of his coat brushing against the rough wood. His knuckles were slightly red, the skin stretched and dry from the cold and the constant, abrasive friction of handling crates and metal levers in the warehouse district. ​“Is everything all right with your dad?” Tatsuchi asked, her voice low, barely carrying over the clatter of the sand covered street outside.​

“He’s fine,” Zhenyu said after a breath, his voice lacking its usual sharp edge. He stared down at his own hands, tracing a faint scar that ran across the back of his thumb. “Checking inventory. Supply wagons from the south are running late. He figured that since I was in the area I could check it out. But I told him no.”​

Asumi muttered something under her breath, the sound swallowed by the rumbling of a heavy transport truck passing by the window. ​Her finger stopped on a page. No illustration. Just tight blocks of faded ink, the characters pressed so hard into the paper they had nearly cut through the thin material. She tilted the book toward them, the rough edges catching the weak morning light.​ "I found something interesting within my book last night, after we got back to the Inn after the morgue.” 

Tatsuchi glanced at the pages of the book. The drawing was crude. Wrong. The proportions were entirely off, drawn by someone whose understanding of human anatomy was clearly skewed by terror or madness. Some limbs were too long, stretching unnaturally toward the edges of the page, while others were too short, stunted and thick. Jaws that didn’t fit the many faces, open in a silent, jagged scream.​“Hollow beasts,” Asumi said quietly, her breath fogging the corner of the lens-like glass above the table.​ She turned the page slowly, the stiff paper making a sharp, dry rasp that cut through the ambient noise of the café.​ 

“They’re what happens when someone uses Hollow Zyn past the point of return. Not all at once. It starts small. The body takes in more than it should, pulling the energy from the air and the marrow until it can no longer regulate itself. Veins darken, the eyes shift, something in them... changes.” Her voice slowed slightly, like she didn’t fully trust what she was reading, as if the words themselves might twist and betray her intent. “The theory says the body doesn’t always reject it. It can adapt. But it twists. Certain parts grow or harden depending on the person. But the mind and soul doesn’t always keep up.”

​Another page turned, revealing a block of text framed by intricate, thorn-like patterns that looked less like a diagram and more like a warning.​ “The later stage is where it gets unclear. Some texts say the person is still there, buried under instinct, watching their own hands do things they cannot control. Others say something else takes over entirely. A kind of imprint. A beast shaped by their Zyn.”​

Silence lingered for a second. Then she turned one more page.​ A name, scratched out in heavy ink, hardly readable. It had been scraped at with a blade, leaving behind only the jagged indentations of the letters and a dark, stained depression in the paper.​

The Skinwalker.​

“These are far different from Hollow Beast, they showed up during one of the old wars Lady Signa talked about,” Asumi continued, her eyes darting between the two of them to gauge their reaction. “At least... that’s what I'm getting from this. Things that didn’t have faces, so they look for them.” ​Zhenyu leaned forward slightly, the wooden bench groaning once more under the sudden movement.​ 

“They take faces,” she said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper that was barely audible over the hum of the tea machine behind the counter. “Wear them long enough to pass. Long enough to sit at tables. Walk through towns. Then they move on.”​ Her grip on the book tightened, her knuckles turning as white as the pages themselves.​“Sometimes they leave the skin behind. ”​Tatsuchi leaned back, her chair scraping slightly against the stone floor. Her expression was unreadable, the pale light of the morning catching the sharp angles of her jaw. “We are not hunting a story,” she said, her tone firm, grounding the conversation before Asumi’s imagination could run away with the narrative.​ “I know,” Asumi replied quickly, her cheeks flushing. “But the body we saw-”​ 

She was cut off.​

“It doesn’t matter,” Tatsuchi cut in, her voice slicing through the air. “Stories don’t cut like that, people do. We saw the wounds. We saw the technique. The person who did this had no regard for the law or the people living here.”​ Zhenyu placed a hand over the page, covering the drawing of the distorted, faceless creature. ​“Or we’re forcing it to fit,” he said, looking down at his palm as if it were coated in grease. “Because we don’t have anything else.”​ 

He looked up at Tatsuchi, his dark eyes searching hers for an answer she wasn't sure she had.​ “What did you find?” ​She tapped her pocket, the heavy, metallic clink of a small object against the fabric of her coat.​ “The burns weren’t random,” she said, her voice dropping lower.​ She leaned forward slightly, her face only inches from his, their private space shrinking until the world outside the window seemed to fade into a blur of motion and color.​ “They match inspection markings.”​ 

Zhenyu’s expression tightened, the small lines around his mouth deepening into a hard, rigid grimace.​“So whoever did it-”​“Knows exactly what they’re doing,” she finished.​ A pause. The café around them seemed to quiet for a fraction of a second, the clatter of the market outside fading into a low, distant hum. ​“The naginata,” he said.​“ The naginata,” she confirmed, her thumb tracing the edge of her pocket where the evidence was stored. “The serrated blade, the length of the shaft, the specific cult like markings on the wood."

As Asumi closed the book, the thud of the thick covers echoed at the quiet table.​ “Then we’re looking for that man with the Naginata,” she said, her voice steady now, the earlier tremor completely gone. ​“The Sin Clan,” Zhenyu muttered, his eyes narrowing as he stared out the window at the distant, smokestacks of the Sin processing plant. “They’re the only ones who can authorize the use of that grade of weapon in this country. If its registered, It should has a serial number.” 

​“Something, or someone, we could trace it back to.” Tatsuchi said, standing up from the chair, the sudden movement causing the waiter behind the counter to flinch, his rag stopping mid-circle for a single, fractional heartbeat. “We start simple. Me and Zhenyu will check with the neighbors. No mention of the book or beast. No mention of anything that sounds insane. We just ask who was near the alley.” Everyone seemed to understand the assignment. Then, Tatsuchi turned her head to Asumi. Asumi took notice of Tatsuchi's new scar. During her brief fight with Graham, his whip caught her off guard and sliced through her face, giving Tatsuchi a scar that ran from the top of her forehead, down her left eye, and catching a part of her mouth as it ran down her chin. It was healing stupidity fast for some reason. "Asumi, you need to head over to the Plant and ask them if they've created any Naginata Draxis grade or higher in the last few years. That means weapon didn't look to old, I'm thinking about seven years at most." Asumi nodded as she got up from her seat and began putting her items away.

​Zhenyu unbuttoned his trench coat, the brass buttons catching the warm, violent light of the morning. Asumi tucked the heavy book under her arm, pressing it against her ribs as if it were the only thing keeping her upright.​ They stepped outside.​ Nothing changed.​ Same rhythm, same people, same empty repetition. The street looked exactly as it had twenty minutes prior, the same cars rolling past, the same woman balancing the same wicker basket on her hip. It was a perfect, clockwork loop that made the hair on the back of Tatsuchi’s neck stand up.​

They paused under the awning, the damp canvas dripping a steady, slow rhythm onto the pavement below.​ Across the street, a man stood still.​ He was standing near the entrance of a dark, narrow alleyway between two brick warehouses. He wore a heavy, dark coat that completely obscured his silhouette, the collar pulled high to hide the lower half of his face, completely still.​ Not browsing the fruit stands. Not moving to let the handcart pass. Just watching. ​At them.​

More specifically, between them, his eyes tracking the space Asumi and Zhenyu left between their shoulders.​ For a moment, everything felt thinner. Like the sound had been pulled out of the air, leaving behind a ringing vacuum that made Tatsuchi’s ears pop. The clatter of the market, the rumble of the transport trucks, the chatter of the pedestrians, all of it vanished into a deafening silence.​ His head tilted slightly to the right, a mechanical, jerky movement that didn't look human.​ 

His eyes met Tatsuchi’s.​ Too wide. Too dark. No white. No color. Just stillness.​ A deep, impenetrable void that reflected nothing of the morning, nothing of the street, nothing but the cold, empty expanse of a regrettable winter night.​ Then, ​he turned the corner, the thick fabric of his coat swishing against the damp brick. Gone. ​No sound, no rush, just... gone.​ 

The noise snapped back all at once. The clatter of the handcarts, the roar of an engine, the low murmur of the market vendors shouting their daily prices. It hit them like a physical blow, a wave of sound and movement that almost knocked Asumi off balance.​ Tatsuchi didn’t move. Her purple eyes remained fixed on the empty space where the man had been standing, her mind racing through the variables, the possibilities, the sheer, impossible reality of what she had just witnessed.​ “We move in thirty minutes,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, yet carrying the weight of a command.

​And they did. They stepped off the curb and into the stream of the city, their feet falling into the same rhythm, the same steady, unbroken pace, while the city marched on around them as if nothing had ever happened.