Hito-mane Extermination: Memento Mori ll

"Sometimes you must hurt in order to know, fall in order to grow, lose in order to gain, because life's greatest lessons are learned through..."

-Pain, from Naruto.

                                       ...

The desert was colder at night. People who had never lived in Kokohama never understood that. During the day, the sand could burn through cheap sandals and make the horizon shimmer like liquid glass. At night, the wind cut through clothing like a knife.

The settlement of Kokohama was not a grand city. It was an afterthought pinned to the edge of an unyielding wasteland. It existed because a few stubborn veins of water ran deep beneath the bedrock, enough to keep a couple of communal wells from going dry, but never enough to make anything grow. The structures were a chaotic jumble of sun-bleached timber, mud brick, and corrugated tin that rattled whenever the northern gales swept down from the jagged peaks far beyond the dunes. To the outsiders who occasionally drifted through on camelback or in armored transport wagons, it looked like a place where hope came to dry up and blow away. To the people who lived there, it was simply the world, a harsh, unforgiving world where every scrap of food had to be bartered for, and every drop of water had to be earned with sweat.

Eight-year-old Ryuzuki sat outside his house with his knees pulled against his chest. The town was quiet. It was the kind of quiet that settled into the walls and never left. Kokohama had always been poor. Most people worked whatever jobs they could find. Those who couldn't usually left. Those who couldn't leave usually died. The graveyard on the eastern ridge was larger than the residential districts. Its wooden markers were smoothed down by decades of abrasive, wind-blown sand until they looked like rows of teeth rising from the earth.

Ryuzuki looked down at the small handful of coins in his palm. Not enough. Again. He sighed.

The coins were thin copper pieces, worn so smooth that the insignias of the old rulers were completely gone. They felt cold against his skin, a stark contrast to the lingering heat of the daytime sand. He had spent the last twelve hours carrying heavy canvas sacks of unrefined salt from the drying pans to the storage sheds at the edge of the market. His shoulders ached with a dull, throbbing pain that reached deep into his collarbones. His fingers were raw where the rough hemp ropes had chafed through his skin. For all that labor, the overseer had tossed him three meager pieces of copper, claiming the market was slow and that boys his age should be grateful for any coin at all. It wasn't even enough to buy a full loaf of coarse rye bread, let alone the powdered milk his brother needed.

Behind him, the wooden door creaked open.

"Still counting them?"

His mother's voice broke the silence. Ryuzuki immediately closed his fist. He didn't want her to see the disappointment in his eyes, nor did he want her to count the coins herself and realize how little their efforts had yielded. He shoved his hand into the pocket of his oversized trousers, burying the meager fortune deep beneath the frayed lining.

Nanako stepped outside carrying a folded blanket. She couldn't have been older than thirty, yet she looked exhausted all the time. She had dark circles beneath her eyes, calloused hands, and a permanent tiredness hidden behind every smile. The desert had a way of stealing youth from the people who lived within its embrace. Nanako had once been known for her laughter, a sound that the older neighbors said could lift the heavy spirits of the entire street. Now, that laughter was a rare commodity, replaced by the quiet, rhythmic thud of the loom she worked until her fingers bled, or the low hum of the lullabies she sang to keep the hunger pangs from waking the baby. Her hair, once a rich, deep black, had begun to show streaks of dull gray near the temples, not from age, but from the sheer weight of survival.

Ryuzuki hated it. He hated seeing her like that. He hated seeing her pretend everything was fine. It was the deception that stung the most. The way she would set down a plate with nothing but a single boiled turnip and tell him that she had already eaten at the market, her stomach growling even as she spoke the words. The way she would pull her own shawl tighter around her thin shoulders so she could give him her jacket, claiming the desert air felt warm to her. He wasn't a baby anymore. He understood what sacrifice looked like, and it tasted like ash in his mouth.

Nanako sat beside him. The wooden bench groaned slightly beneath their combined weight, its joints loosened by the dry heat that shrank the timber during the day. Without a word, she draped the blanket across his shoulders. The wind immediately felt less sharp. The wool was old and smelled of woodsmoke and the dried lavender she kept in the linen chest to ward off the moths, but it was thick enough to create a barrier against the freezing air. Ryuzuki pulled it tight around his chin, letting the familiar scent ground him against the vast, empty darkness that stretched out beyond the perimeter of the town.

"You should be sleeping."

Ryuzuki looked away. He watched a lone tumbleweed drift lazily across the empty street, its dry branches catching on the corner of a neighbor’s fence before breaking apart into smaller, scattered fragments.

"You should be too."

His mother laughed softly. It was a dry, tired sound, but it held a warmth that the desert wind could never touch. "Fair."

Silence settled between them. The small house behind them wasn't much. It had one bedroom, one living area, and a kitchen that barely deserved the name. It was constructed from mismatched wooden planks that had been salvaged from abandoned mining structures up north, reinforced with mud plaster to keep the scorpions from crawling through the gaps. The roof leaked whenever the rare winter storms rolled through, requiring them to set out every pot, pan, and broken jar they owned to catch the muddy water. The floorboards were uneven, warping upward in the corners like old shoes.

But it was home, which was more than some people had. Only a few streets over, families lived huddled beneath sheets of canvas stretched between ancient stone walls, their children sleeping directly on the cold earth with nothing but discarded burlap sacks to protect them from the frost. Ryuzuki knew they were lucky to have a door that locked, even if the lock was rusty and the key required a specific, careful twist to work.

From inside came the sound of crying. A baby's cry, tiny, weak, and hungry. The sound pierced through the quiet night like a needle. It wasn't the robust, demanding wail of a healthy infant. It was a thin, reedy whimper that spoke of a stomach that hadn't been properly filled in days. Sato was six months old, but he was small for his age, his ribs showing like delicate wicker work whenever Nanako bathed him in the shallow wooden tub.

Ryuzuki immediately stood. The blanket slipped from his shoulders, but he didn't care. The cold air hit his chest, but the urgency in his brother's voice was a sharper sting than any northern wind. "I got him."

Nanako smiled. It was a genuine smile this time, softened by the gratitude of a mother who knew she didn't have to carry the world entirely on her own. "I know you do."

He hurried inside. The interior of the house was dark, lit only by the faint, amber glow of the dying embers in the small clay hearth. The shadows stretched long and distorted across the low ceiling, shifting like silent phantoms as Ryuzuki navigated the familiar clutter of the living space. He avoided the creaking floorboard near the table by habit, his feet finding the sturdy joists without need for light.

The crying stopped almost instantly when he picked the baby up. Sato stared up at him with wide eyes. Even in the dim light, those eyes seemed too large for his pale, thin face, reflecting the faint orange embers from the hearth like two drops of dark water. Ryuzuki adjusted the blanket around his little brother, bundling the coarse cloth around the infant’s tiny limbs to ensure the draft from the window wouldn't reach him.

"You're supposed to be asleep."

Sato responded by trying to grab his nose. His tiny, uncoordinated fingers flailed in the air, catching the tip of Ryuzuki’s nose with a surprisingly firm grip before slipping off. Ryuzuki frowned, putting on his best impression of an angry schoolmaster, though his heart wasn't in it.

Sato laughed. It was a bubbling, gurgling sound that completely erased the tension in the room, a pure note of joy that didn't belong in a house that smelled of poverty and fear. Ryuzuki lost the battle immediately. The stern expression melted from his face, replaced by a soft, helpless smile that he rarely let anyone else see. "You're annoying."

The baby laughed harder, kicking his tiny feet against Ryuzuki’s chest as if he understood the insult and found it hilarious. Nanako appeared in the doorway, watching and smiling. For a moment everything felt normal. For a moment the poverty didn't matter. For a moment Ryuzuki could pretend their father hadn't disappeared two years ago, that he hadn't walked out one morning and never come back, and that every knock at the door wasn't secretly hope.

His father had been a tall man with broad shoulders and a laugh that could shake the dust from the rafters. He had been a miner, working the deep, dangerous shafts of the copper hills three miles west of the town. One Tuesday, the whistle had blown early, signaling a collapse in the lower levels. The townspeople had rushed to the staging area, waiting through the night as the rescue teams brought up the survivors, then the bodies, and then nothing. His father wasn't among the living, nor was he among the recovered dead. He had simply been swallowed by the earth, leaving behind a pair of worn leather boots by the door and a void that no amount of copper coins could ever fill.

Then reality returned. Nanako's smile weakened. The brief spark of warmth vanished from her eyes, replaced once more by the heavy, leaden gaze of a woman who was constantly calculating the cost of the next breath. She looked toward the nearly empty pantry. The door to the cupboard was slightly ajar, revealing a single jar of pickled radishes, a half-empty sack of coarse cornmeal, and an old tin container that used to hold tea but now held nothing but salt. That was everything they had to last until the end of the week.

The mood changed immediately. Ryuzuki saw it. He always saw it. The calculations. The worries. The fear. Would there be enough food tomorrow? Enough medicine? Enough money? Enough anything? The answer was usually no. It was a math that never added up. No matter how many hours his mother spent at the loom, no matter how many heavy sacks Ryuzuki carried through the salt flats, the expenses always outpaced the income. The water merchant raised his prices whenever the wells ran low. The grain dealer adjusted his rates based on the rumors of bandit raids along the southern trade routes. The poor stayed poor because the world adjusted its cruelty to match their endurance.

Nanako looked away before he could say anything. She smoothed down her apron with trembling fingers, her gaze fixing on the floorboards as if she could find the answers written in the grain of the wood. "Go to sleep."

Ryuzuki didn't argue. It was not because he wanted to listen, but because he knew she was worried, and because there wasn't anything he could do. Not yet.

He laid Sato back down in the small wicker cradle, tucking the blanket tightly around the child’s shoulders until the baby gave a small, contented sigh and closed his eyes. Ryuzuki walked over to his own corner of the room, curling up on the thin straw pallet that served as his bed. He kept his clothes on, knowing the temperature would drop even lower before the sun rose. As he lay there listening to the rhythmic breathing of his family and the distant, lonely howl of the desert wind, his hand slipped back into his pocket. His fingers curled around the three smooth copper coins. He squeezed them until the metal bit into his skin, a silent promise to himself that someday, somehow, he would find a way to change the math.

Three days later, someone knocked on the door. The sound was heavy and deliberate, three distinct thuds that seemed to shake the flimsy wooden frame of the house. It wasn't the frantic rap of a neighbor borrowing salt, nor was it the casual tap of the water boy delivering the weekly ration. It was an authoritative sound, a demand for entry that made the air in the small room feel suddenly dense.

Ryuzuki answered it. At first, he thought nobody was there. The narrow dirt street was empty, the bright afternoon sun casting harsh, black shadows against the walls of the opposing buildings. The heat was oppressive, rising from the ground in visible waves that distorted the horizon.

Then he looked up. An umbrella, pitch black and large enough to completely hide the person beneath it, dominated his vision. The fabric was thick and looked heavy, absorbing the fierce desert sunlight rather than reflecting it. It was completely out of place in Kokohama. No one used umbrellas here. People wore wide-brimmed straw hats or wrapped thick linen cloths around their heads to shield themselves from the sun. An umbrella was a luxury of the river kingdoms, an artifact from a place where water fell from the sky instead of rising as dust.

The figure stood motionless. The afternoon sun reflected off the wet fabric. Ryuzuki’s breath caught in his throat. It hadn't rained in Kokohama for seven months. The ground was dry, cracked into hexagonal patterns that resembled the scales of a giant lizard. Yet, the black fabric of the umbrella was glistening with fresh, heavy beads of moisture, as if the person carrying it had just walked out of a torrential downpour. A single drop of water detached itself from the rim, falling to the dry earth below where it hissed faintly and vanished into the sand.

Ryuzuki frowned. A strange sensation, like the prickling of static electricity before a lightning strike, began to crawl up the back of his neck. "...Hello?"

No answer. Then the umbrella shifted slightly, just enough for him to see part of a face. Cracks and thin fractures ran across pale skin, held together by stitches, like someone had taken broken porcelain and sewn it back together. The skin was an unnatural, milky white, completely untouched by the harsh desert sun that turned everyone else’s skin to the color of old leather. The cracks were dark, like the veins in a sheet of marble, and they converged around a series of thick, black threads that held the pieces of the jaw and cheek together. It looked like a mask that had been shattered and roughly repaired by an amateur craftsman, yet the skin moved when the figure shifted, the flesh flexing beneath the coarse thread.

Ryuzuki froze. His hand remained on the edge of the door, his fingers locking around the splintered wood so hard his knuckles turned white.

The man smiled, or at least Ryuzuki thought it was a smile. It was difficult to tell. The face looked wrong. It was not ugly, but wrong, like something pretending to be human. The corners of the mouth pulled upward, but the movement didn't reach the rest of the face. The muscles moved in a way that felt mechanical, a calculated imitation of human emotion rather than an expression of actual feeling. It was the way a puppeteer might pull the strings of a wooden doll to force an expression.

Behind him stood two children, a boy and a girl. Neither spoke. Neither moved. Both stared at him. They looked to be about Ryuzuki’s age, but their clothes were pristine, made of a dark, heavy wool that should have caused them to collapse from heat stroke in the afternoon sun. Their faces were smooth, devoid of any expression whatsoever. Their eyes were wide, unblinking, and fixed entirely on him with a blank, hollow intensity that made Ryuzuki feel like he was looking into the windows of an abandoned house.

The air suddenly felt colder. The oppressive afternoon heat seemed to recede, replaced by a sudden, localized chill that caused Ryuzuki’s breath to form a faint mist in front of his face. He could feel the temperature dropping with every second that passed, the skin on his arms rising in goosebumps. Ryuzuki swallowed. The moisture had vanished from his mouth, his throat feeling as dry as the salt flats he worked during the day. "...Can I help you?"

The man tilted his head slightly. The movement was accompanied by a faint, wet click from within his neck, like the sound of a stone shifting beneath water. Then he laughed, a quiet, amused laugh. "You need work."

Ryuzuki stiffened. How did he know that? The stranger couldn't have known about the three copper coins, or the empty pantry, or the way his mother’s hands shook when she looked at the ledger. They were nobody, just another family of ghosts in a town built on sand. Yet, the man spoke with absolute certainty, his voice a low, resonant baritone that seemed to vibrate directly inside Ryuzuki’s skull rather than traveling through the air.

The man continued, his words calm, simple, and matter of fact, like discussing the weather. "I can provide it."

Ryuzuki hesitated. His mother wasn't home. She had gone to the market to see if she could trade a length of woven cloth for a handful of dried beans. He was alone with Sato, who was sleeping in his cradle inside. Every rule his mother had ever taught him about strangers screamed at him to slam the door and bolt the latch. He knew he should close the door. He knew he should tell the stranger to leave. Instead, he glanced toward the two children. "Who are they?"

The question slipped out before he could stop it. His curiosity had always been a dangerous trait, a stubborn need to understand things that were better left alone.

The man's expression changed instantly. The smile vanished, the temperature dropped, and Ryuzuki's blood turned to ice. The subtle pretense of humanity dropped away from the stranger’s face, leaving behind a cold, terrifying void. The air became so cold that the moisture from the umbrella began to freeze, turning into a fine crust of white rime along the edges of the black fabric.

For the first time he saw the man's eye. His right eye looked normal. It was a dull, standard hazel, tracking Ryuzuki’s movements with a conventional, human rhythm. His left eye did not. It was pitch black, not dark brown or shadowed, but solid black, like a hole drilled into reality itself. There was no iris, no pupil, no sclera. It was a solid orb of absolute darkness that seemed to actively absorb the sunlight around it, drawing the light into its depths and returning nothing. Looking into it was like staring down the shaft of an infinitely deep well, a place where gravity worked differently and where the mind could easily lose its footing and fall forever.

Every instinct screamed at Ryuzuki to run. His legs tensed, his body preparing to dive backward into the house and throw his weight against the door.

The man slowly raised his hand. The movement was deliberate, breaking the paralysis that had seized Ryuzuki’s limbs. The hand was long, the fingers thin and skeletal, covered in the same pale, cracked skin as his face. Thick black stitches ringed the wrist, looking like a macabre bracelet. For a second Ryuzuki thought he was about to be struck. He flinched, raising his arms to shield his face from the blow.

Instead, the hand stopped between them, waiting for a handshake. Nothing else. A simple handshake. The palm was open, the fingers slightly curved, inviting a response. It was an ordinary gesture performed by an extraordinary nightmare. Ryuzuki stared at it. His mind told him to refuse, to step back, to scream for the neighbors. But the neighbors were far away, and the air around the porch had become so thick and cold that it felt like trying to move through deep water.

Then something happened. His arm moved on its own. His body ignored him. It wasn't a choice. It was as if invisible threads had attached themselves to his joints, pulling his shoulder forward, lifting his elbow, and extending his forearm. His mind was a screaming spectator in a vessel that no longer belonged to him. His fingers stretched forward. His hand met the stranger’s.

The moment their skin touched, white flames erupted between them. The fire didn't rise from the ground. It burst directly from the point of contact, a brilliant, blinding flash of pure white light that illuminated the entire porch and cast sharp, dancing shadows against the walls of the street. Ryuzuki shouted and stumbled backward. The force of the movement broke the unseen connection. His feet tripped over the threshold, and he fell hard onto the dirt floor of the living room.

The fire vanished instantly. There was no heat, no smoke, and no burns. It was gone, like it had never existed. He looked down at his right hand. It was perfectly fine. There was no soot, no blisters, and no smell of singed flesh. The skin looked exactly as it had a moment ago, save for a faint, tingling sensation that felt like needles pressing against his palm.

The stranger lowered his hand, satisfied. The mechanical smile returned to his stitched face, the black eye giving one final, lingering look at the boy on the floor. The children behind him remained silent. They hadn't blinked once during the entire encounter, their expressions as vacant as statues.

The black eye stared straight through Ryuzuki. Then the man spoke. "The deal is done."

Ryuzuki's heart pounded against his ribs like a trapped bird. He scrambled backward until his spine hit the leg of the heavy kitchen table. "W-What deal?"

The stranger simply turned away. He didn't offer an explanation, nor did he look back to see if the boy was unhurt. The umbrella tilted, and the children followed. They moved in perfect unison, their steps silent against the dry dirt of the road. One step. Two steps. Three steps. Four. Five.

Ryuzuki blinked. They were gone. There were no footprints, no shadows, and no sound. Only an empty street remained. The dirt road where they had been standing was completely undisturbed. There were no marks from their shoes, no signs of the water that had dripped from the umbrella, and no disruption in the dust. The intense afternoon heat slammed back into the porch like a physical blow, the temperature rising twenty degrees in an instant as the localized winter vanished.

He stood frozen in the doorway, unable to move, unable to think, and unable to understand what had just happened.

The first note arrived the next morning, folded neatly outside the door. It was a small rectangle of thick, high-quality vellum, a type of paper that wasn't sold anywhere within three hundred miles of Kokohama. It was weighted down by a small, perfectly smooth river stone, a deep gray pebble that looked like it had been pulled from a running stream thousands of leagues away. There was no signature and no explanation, only instructions written in precise, elegant calligraphy using an ink so black it seemed to catch the morning light.

PLACE THESE AROUND THE EASTERN DISTRICT.

Attached was a bundle of notices held together by a thin piece of black hemp twine. Ryuzuki picked them up with trembling fingers, half expecting the white flames to return, but the paper remained cold and inert in his hand. They contained missing persons flyers, employment advertisements, and community announcements. They were entirely normal things. One flyer offered a reward for a lost dairy goat. Another advertised a need for miners in the western hills. A third listed the name and description of a young woman who had disappeared from a neighboring village three weeks prior. They looked exactly like the flyers that were routinely tacked to the town’s central notice board.

Ryuzuki stared at them, confused, suspicious, and curious, but mostly confused. There was nothing magical about the papers. There were no hidden symbols, no strange odors, and no coded messages that he could discern. It was an errand, a simple, mundane chore that any child in the village could have performed for a handful of copper.

When Nanako returned home that evening, she found a small pouch sitting beside the doorway. It hadn't been there when Ryuzuki went out to post the notices, nor had it been there when he came back. It had appeared during the twenty minutes he had spent inside preparing a bottle for Sato. Inside was money, more money than Ryuzuki had ever seen. The pouch was made of soft leather, and when he pulled the drawstring, the glint of silver caught the light of the setting sun. There were ten heavy silver coins, each stamped with the profile of an eagle, currency from the central provinces that was accepted anywhere in the world and worth more than a year of salt hauling. At least 100,000 Yorin worth of silver.

Nanako stared at it, then at him, then back at the pouch. "Where did this come from?"

Ryuzuki didn't know how to answer because the truth sounded insane. If he told her about the man with the stitched face, the black umbrella that leaked water in the desert, and the white fire that didn't burn, she would think he had succumbed to the heat madness. She would take the money to the village elder or the temple, fearing it was cursed, and they would be back to eating turnips and salt.

The strange thing was that it kept happening. Every few days another note appeared, bringing another job, another bundle of papers, and another pouch of money. It was always enough, never more and never less, exactly enough. It was enough for food, enough for medicine, enough for rent, and enough to survive. The tasks were always simple, though occasionally strange. Once, he was told to leave a small jar of honey beneath a specific withered cactus outside the town limits. Another time, he was instructed to sit on the well curb at noon and count the number of black horses that entered the market, then write the number on a slip of paper and leave it under the kitchen mat. He never saw who delivered the notes, and he never saw who collected the results.

And slowly, Ryuzuki stopped questioning it. Survival has a way of silencing questions. When your belly is full, when your mother no longer cries herself to sleep, and when your little brother is growing strong and healthy, you don't look too closely at the hand that feeds you, even if that hand has stitches around the wrist.

                              ...

Years passed.

Then more.

The notes kept coming. Sometimes they arrived nailed to the door. Sometimes they appeared beneath his pillow. Once, he found one folded neatly inside a loaf of bread his mother had bought from the market. The instructions never changed.

Hang bounties.

Deliver notices.

Post them in the churches, the local community walls, the taverns. Post them where everyone could see. And every single time he obeyed, money appeared. Always enough. Never more, never less.

By the time Ryuzuki was ten years old, there was food on the table every night. By twelve, his mother no longer worried about bills. By fourteen, Sato had clothes that actually fit him. Nobody ever asked where the money came from. Not because they didn't care. Because at this point, questions were unnecessary. Ryuzuki stopped asking questions too. Life was easier that way. The mysterious man had saved them. At least, that was what he told himself. When he turned sixteen, he began helping around the local church whenever he wasn't working.

Like most people in Kokohama, he followed the teachings of the Ten Fates. The church wasn't much to look at. Its sandstone walls were cracked, and half the roof had been repaired so many times it looked half puy together. But people still came.

Every week.

Every prayer.

Every sermon.

Ryuzuki sat beside his mother while Sato fidgeted through the service. Candles flickered beneath carved stone that held the teachings of the Ten Fates. Voices rose together in prayer and song.

Men and women prayed for protection, for guidance, for a better tomorrow. Ryuzuki prayed too. He prayed for his father's return. Then for his mother's health. Then for Sato. Eventually, he started praying for the mysterious man as well.

Whoever he was.

Whatever he was.

Without him, they would have starved years ago. When Ryuzuki turned eighteen, the notes stopped. Just like that, without warning, the notes stopped coming.

No final instruction.

No knock on the door.

No mysterious man.

Days passed. Then weeks. Then months. For the first time in ten years, nobody knocked.

No messages appeared.

No bounties needed hanging.

The money stopped coming too.

But by then it didn't matter. Ryuzuki had saved enough. More than enough. His family was stable and, more importantly, safe. For the first time since he was born, he felt free. And life only got better from there. He left Kokohama and attended school in western Avethryn, somewhere near the coast of Strignora. He graduated from architecture with honors. He planned on helping rebuild the town and even had his blueprints laid out at his desk every night, upgrading them as he went.

He found steady work. 

Made connections.

Built a future.

Somewhere along the way, he met a girl. She wasn't anything extraordinary. At least not to anyone else. But to Ryuzuki, she was everything. She laughed too loudly, talked too much, and always stole food from his plate. And somehow made every terrible day feel smaller. Three years passed in what felt like a single breath.

Then they got married.

At twenty two years old, Ryuzuki finally had the life he thought he was supposed to have.

A respectable job.

A loving wife.

A future.

Sometimes he still thought about the notes. Sometimes he wondered who the man beneath the umbrella really was. But those thoughts came less and less. Eventually, they became nothing more than strange memories from another life.The past was finally behind him.

                              ...

The knock came just after the final sunset.

Three soft taps. Just someone at the door. Ryuzuki barely looked up from the papers spread across his desk upstairs. "Can you get that?" he called. From downstairs, his wife answered immediately. "You're closer."

"No I'm not."

"Yes you are."

"I'm working."

A laugh drifted up the stairs. "No, you're hiding from work." Ryuzuki smiled despite himself. "Same thing."

"Not even close."

He heard her walking toward the front door. The familiar sound of her footsteps echoed through his house. Everything was normal. For years now, life had been normal.

Just work.

Just home.

Just… her.

The front door opened. Then, nothing. The silence lingered longer than it should have. Ryuzuki frowned. Usually she would've already said something. Asked who it was. Complained about a salesman. Anything really. Instead, there was nothing.

"Honey?"

No answer. The smile left his face. He waited another few seconds.

"Honey?"

Still nothing. A strange feeling settled into his stomach. Not fear. At least, not yet. Just enough discomfort to make him stand up. His chair scraped softly against the floor. The house suddenly felt quieter than before. Too quiet. He stepped into the hallway and yelled once more.

"Akari?"

No response. His pace quickened. The stairs creaked beneath his feet as he descended. One step.Then another. Then another. The knot in his stomach tightened. By the time he reached the bottom floor, he was moving fast. Then he saw her. He stopped. His wife stood in the entrance hall, right in front of the door, perfectly still. The front door remained open behind her. The last orange light of the evening spilled into the house, wrapping around her silhouette.

For a second, his brain failed to understand what he was looking at. Something felt wrong, terribly wrong. But he couldn't place it.

"Akari?"

She didn't answer. Didn't move. Didn't even blink. Then he noticed her hands. They were pressed against her stomach. Shaking. A dark stain spread beneath her fingers.

Slowly.

Steadily.

Red.

Red?

His heart dropped. The world seemed to tilt beneath his feet.

"No..."

The word escaped before he realized he'd spoken. His wife finally looked up. Tears streamed down her face as blood slipped between her fingers and dripped onto the floor.

One drop.

Then another.

Then another.

The sound felt deafening in the silence. Ryuzuki took a step forward. His legs suddenly felt weak. 

"No..."

His voice cracked. The stain continued spreading across her white shirt. His mind refused to catch up. This wasn't real. It couldn't be. Not after everything. Not after finally escaping it all. His wife opened her mouth. Only a broken sob was heard. Her hands shook violently. She looked terrified. Ryuzuki stumbled forward. "Wha-what happened?"

No answer.

Just tears.

His eyes finally dropped lower. Something was tucked against her stomach. A folded piece of white paper. Except it wasn't white anymore. Blood had soaked through most of it. The moment he saw it, every bit of color drained from his face. A note.

"No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No."

Anything but that. His chest tightened. His breathing became uneven. The room suddenly felt too small. His wife looked directly at him. Her lips trembled.She tried to speak.

Failed.

Tried again. Another sob escaped her throat. Then finally-

"I..."

Her voice broke. Blood continued dripping onto the floor. Ryuzuki stood frozen. Unable to move. Unable to think. Unable to look away. His wife shook her head as tears poured down her cheeks. As if she had done something wrong. As if she was the one who needed forgiveness. Then, through trembling lips and a broken voice, she whispered,

"I-I'm sorry..."

Her knees gave out. The words hit him harder than any blade ever could. She collapsed onto the tatami mats. The note slipped free from her blood-covered hands.

And Ryuzuki just stood there.