Hito-mane Extermination: Made Within Heaven

"Do you believe in gravity?"

Enrico Pucci, From JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

                                      ...

The air didn't merely grow cold. 

Throughout the different neighborhoods of the town, the sudden shift in the atmosphere brought an immediate, suffocating weight that pulled people from their sleep. Windows rattled within their frames, driven by a low, sub-audible vibration that traveled through the floorboards and into the bones of anyone awake to feel it. Zhenyu’s eyes snapped open well before his conscious mind understood. He didn't waste time putting on shoes and looking for his gear. He lunged across his room, his bare feet slapping against the cold wooden tiles, and threw his weight against the door. He bolted down the narrow, dimly lit corridor that led toward the part of the Inn Asumi was in. Every instinct within himself was screaming at him that something was wrong. There was an unnatural silence that seemed to suck the moisture out of the air.

He reached the door to Asumi’s room and didn't bother knocking. He rammed his shoulder into the wood, bursting inside with his hand instinctively reaching for his blade. "Asumi!" he breathed out, his voice sharp against the quiet. She wasn't in bed. She was standing by the wide, western-facing window, her frame silhouetted against a deeply unsettling crimson glow that washed over the entire room. The glass was cool to the touch, but she had her forehead pressed almost directly against it, her hands gripping the sill so hard her knuckles were white. She had changed into her casual wear only an hour before falling asleep, clearly expecting a full night of rest before the following day. She wore an oversized, baggy white shirt with the characters 食べ物 (Food) printed in simple black ink across her chest, hanging loosely over a pair of plain black athletic shorts. Her pink hair was messy from the pillows, but her posture was rigid with absolute terror. She hadn't even found the time to put her eyepatch on and her eye was closed. Outside, the sky had turned the color of an open wound. The three massive moons hung directly overhead, bleeding a rust-colored light across the rooftops and casting long, distorted shadows that didn't seem to align correctly with the buildings. 

Three blood moons.

A once in a lifetime event.

"Zhenyu," Asumi whispered, her voice trembling as she slowly turned her head toward him. Her bright blue eye was wide, reflecting the trio of moons above. "The calendar. Did we get the calendar wrong? Tell me we messed up the calculations. Please." Zhenyu stepped deeper into the room, his dark hazel eyes fixed on the sky through the glass. The air in the room felt thick, tasting faintly of copper and old dust. He didn't speak immediately. He couldn't. His throat felt dry, his mind racing through the charts, the astronomical projections, and everything else in between. The blood moons weren't supposed to happen for another fourteen days. They hadn't even built their defensive strategy around that two-week window. Fourteen days, gone, all gone. 

Without saying a single word, Zhenyu simply shook his head. His expression was grim, his jaw locked tight. There was no mistake. Something had simply broken the rules. As the reality of the situation settled into the small room, a sudden realization struck both of them at the exact same moment. They turned their heads toward each other, their eyes locking in mutual panic, and the words spilled from their mouths at the same time:

"Tatsuchi is still outside."

Miles away from the Inn, the world was a blur of dark yellow sand and stone rooftops. Ryuzuki was moving at a frantic pace, his boots skidding across the loose gravel of a flat roof before he launched himself off the lip. With his one arm, he caught a thick, dead power line, using the momentum to swing forward in a wide, sweeping arc before releasing his grip and landing cleanly on the far edge of another house. As he ran, his eyes kept darting upward, his chest heaving as he tried to process what he had witnessed just moments prior. He had been on his routine patrol near the upper district of Kokohama when the horizon had simply split. To his eyes, it looked as though the sky were a pane of glass that had fractured under immense pressure. A kaleidoscope patterned into jagged lines before instantly snapping back into place with the newly arrived blood moons sitting dominant in the center. They weren't supposed to be here. Not for two weeks. That time was meant to be a luxury, a period to physically and mentally prepare everyone for the horror that always accompanied the red sky. But that had been stripped away in the span of a single heartbeat.

As he crossed into the lower neighboring houses, a sudden wave of pressure hit him, making his stomach churn violently. It was a dense, nauseating Zyn energy, emanating from somewhere deep within the open sands just outside the town's perimeter. It wasn't the clean, tempered Zyn of a trained soldier. It was chaotic, heavy, and drenched in malice. Tatsuchi was out there. She was out there in the open sands, right in the path of whatever just caused this. The sheer impossibility of the event kept hammering at his brain. Why would somebody do this? How could anyone possess the sheer output to force an event like this ahead of its natural cycle? It defied every law of nature he had ever studied. Whoever held an ability of this scale wasn't just strong. They were beyond what somebody like him would call strength. 

"Damn it!" Ryuzuki cursed out loud, his voice swallowed by the whistling wind as he jumped another gap between buildings. He reached down to his side, his fingers twitching. He was completely dry. In his haste to cover ground, he hadn't thought to gather any clouds or moisture before leaving everybody back at the warehouse. 

His specific form of water manipulation Reijutsu carried a massive, frustrating caveat. Unlike Zyn Techniques, he could not manifest water from nothingness using Reijutsu. He was entirely dependent on what was already present in his immediate environment. Normally, his routine was meticulous. He would expend a significant portion of his already low Zyn reserves early in the week to condense and infuse nearby moisture, creating a permanent, heavy shelf of dark clouds directly over the village. Once those clouds were established, the system ran naturally, keeping the town in a state of perpetual, drizzling rain. That rain acted as his network, his personal highway. It allowed him to travel in and throughout the town at a moment's notice, drawing from the puddles and downspouts without ever having to draw deep from his own internal Zyn reserves. His personal reserves were shockingly small compared to the powerhouses of your average Gate Guard, a biological limitation he had spent his entire life trying to outmaneuver through sheer efficiency. But right now, looking up at the dry, crisp night sky beneath the bleeding moons, there wasn't a drop of water to be found. The air was bone-dry, parched by the sudden shift. He was running on empty, relying purely on his physical stamina to reach the open sands where Tatsuchi was. 

As he cleared the edge of the merchant row, he slowed his pace slightly, his boots sliding against the clay tiles of a low villa. He looked down into the streets below. Something was profoundly wrong. Even with the blood moons active, the silence was unnatural. By all accounts, the appearance of the blood moons should have triggered an immediate, violent transformation among the skinwalkers within the town. Yet, as he scanned the alleyways and courtyards, he didn't see a single skinwalker. More confusingly, he didn't even see them acting as humans. The stalls were left open, street lights flickering against the stone walls, but there was no sign of life. No footsteps, no voices, no breath. Had they fled before he even realized the sky had changed? Leaving the questions behind, he hardened his gaze and focused on the dark outline of the outer palisade. He couldn't afford to stop and investigate the empty houses. He had to reach the edge of the desert.

Back within the residential district, Zhenyu ran out onto the street. The moon light gave the asphalt a slick, oily appearance, making every shadow look far deeper than it actually was. His mind flashed back to the brief, tense conversation he had shared with Asumi in her room just minutes prior, before he had broken into a sprint down the road. "I’ll go outside to find Tatsuchi," he’d told her, his hand firmly on the frame of her door, his breath coming in short, controlled bursts. "You need to move through towns and gather anyone who’s left and evacuate them outside of the town.” Asumi had stepped away from the window, her fingers hooking into the hem of her oversized shirt, her face pale but determined. "And if I find someone? What if the person I’m trying to save turns out to be a skinwalker in disguise, Zhenyu? How do I tell the difference?" Zhenyu had stopped at the door, turning his head back just enough for her to see the hard line of his jaw. "What would Tatsuchi do?" Asumi hadn't answered. The silence that followed between them was heavy, filled with an unspoken, cold understanding. They both knew exactly how Tatsuchi operated. There was no room for hesitation.

Now, standing alone in the open air, Zhenyu ran down the center of the avenue, his shoes hammering against the pavement. He passed long rows of parked cars and delivery trucks, their metal bodies cold, their windshields reflecting the three moons like sets of dead eyes. Just as Ryuzuki had observed from the high roofs, the ground level was completely devoid of movement. There were no civilians huddled in the doorways, and no monsters tearing through the gates. The lack of knowledge weighed heavily on him. He didn't even truly know what a skinwalker looked like. He had never faced one in the open light of day. All he had to go on was a fleeting, terrifying silhouette he had caught a glimpse of in the deep concrete canal while investigating a corpse alongside Tatsuchi. It had been an image of impossible proportions, a shape that didn't belong in a sane world, but it had vanished into the darkness before he could study its features.

"Hey!" Zhenyu stopped dead in his tracks, his hand flying to the hilt of his katana. A few dozen yards ahead, near the intersection of two major storefronts, a figure was standing beneath a flickering street lamp. It was a girl, her back partially turned to him, her head bowed low. "Is someone there?" Zhenyu called out, his voice echoing off the brick facades. He began to close the distance with cautious, deliberate steps, his eyes scanning the surrounding rooftops for any sign of an ambush. "Do you need help? Where is everyone else? Where did everyone go?" The girl didn't turn around, but her voice drifted down the street toward him. It was a thin, high-pitched warble, lacking any natural inflection.

"Help me! I’m over here! I’m scared!"

Zhenyu took three more steps forward, his boots clicking softly against the stone. "Get behind me. The town isn't safe. We need to get you back to safety."

"Help me! I’m over here! I’m scared! 

She repeated the phrase with the exact same cadence, the exact same pauses between words, like a needle stuck on a damaged vinyl record. Zhenyu froze. He was close enough now to see her clearly under the light. As she slowly tilted her face upward, the breath caught in his throat. Her eyes weren't white with dark irises. They were pools of solid, pitch-black that reflected absolutely no light. Her skin had an unnatural, greyish tint, and her limbs hung at angles that suggested her joints weren't seated correctly in their sockets. 

Then the smell hit him. It wasn't the scent of a human who had been running or sweating. It was a thick, cloying stench that filled his nostrils instantly, the smell of old iron, stagnant water, and rotting meat. She reeked of blood. Zhenyu instantly shifted his already shifted weight, taking a sharp, deliberate step backward, his fingers tightening around the leather wrapping of his hilt.

"For the love of-," he started to mutter before getting cut off. That was when the shadows in the alleys on either side of him began to move. From the narrow gaps between the buildings, claws began to emerge. They were massive, greyish talons attached to long, muscular forearms covered in thick, black, unkempt fur that was caked with dark, dried gore. The limbs moved with a jerky, spider-like motion, scraping against the brickwork as the creatures dragged their massive bodies out into the open light of the street. Zhenyu backed up further, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He was completely surrounded. There were several of them, each one easily standing ten feet tall if they were to straighten their misshapen, hunched spines. Their heads were horrific parodies of mammalian life, elongated and lumpy, with long, tattered ears that drooped backward like those of a starving hound. Their eyes were wide, unblinking discs filled with a static-like, milky white film that seemed to twitch independently of one another. The most grotesque feature was their mouths. Some of their jaws were unhinged, hanging open so wide that the skin of their cheeks was torn and weeping a black fluid. Inside, a multitude of rows of jagged, yellowed teeth spiraled down into their throats in an endless, concentric pattern. As they hissed, a pair of long, muscular tongues, each easily five feet long, half the length of their entire bodies, snaked out from between their teeth, tasting the air with wet, slapping sounds. Their arms were so long that their clawed hands dragged along the pavement behind them as they crept forward, leaving long, pale gouges in the asphalt.

Zhenyu had never felt terror like this. The air around him felt ten times heavier than normal, his lungs struggling to pull in a clean breath against the stench of death and the crushing weight of their collective Zyn. His legs felt weak, his vision tunneling as the skinwalkers began to close the circle, their tongues clicking against the cobblestones. “Move,” his mind commanded, but his muscles were locked in place by sheer dread. “You have to move.” He took a ragged, shuddering deep breath, his chest expanding as he forced his eyes to stay open, refusing to look away from the rows of teeth. 

He needed something to anchor him. His mind slipped backward, racing away from the dark street and into the dark, quiet recesses of his childhood. He remembered his mother, Izanami Mori. She had passed away when he was only five years old, during the chaos of what the older generation still referred to as the Sun God Incident. He could still remember the smell of her, not of blood, but of dried lavender and clean rain. He could remember the soft weight of her hand on his shoulder when the sky had burned bright all those years ago. "Trust yourself, Zhenyu," she had told him, her voice low and steady while the city around them screamed. 

"Never forget who you are. You are a Mori."

As a child, he had never understood what that meant. He had never met another living soul from the Mori clan outside of his mother. She had been a striking woman. She possessed fair, almost translucent white skin and long, silk-like white hair, despite barely being in her late twenties when she died. She had bright hazel eyes that seemed to catch every piece of light in a room, and she carried a quiet, unshakeable dignity. It was the kind of look on her face that told anyone and everyone, without a word spoken, that she could be trusted with their lives. But that trust had died with her. His father, Lytle Mori, hadn't stayed to raise the boy. Shortly after his mother’s body was put into the dirt, Lytle had simply vanished into the night, leaving a five-year-old child to fend for himself in the absolute worst territory known to the Avethryn. The slums of Strignora.

The underworld of Strignora was a lawless, black strip of land where neither the Gate Guard nor the prestigious Ten Fate Vanguard ever bothered to bring peace. It was a dead zone, a massive junkyard of human lives where the authorities only came to dump bodies or collect taxes at the end of a spear. It was a place where nobody bothered to help the children who would be crying for bread on a street corner one afternoon, and hanging from the loose, rotting telephone poles by their necks the very next morning after a local gang dispute. Zhenyu had learned to survive by becoming a ghost. But you couldn't remain a ghost forever in Strignora. 

At the age of twelve, while being cornered by three adult scavengers who wanted his boots and his teeth, something inside his spirit had ruptured. In a moment of pure, blind panic, he had accidentally awakened his Zyn Technique. He didn't remember the details of the strike, only the sound of a sudden, deafening crack like iron snapping, and the smell of ozone. When his eyes opened, the three men were dead on the stones, their chests charred black.

He hadn't been arrested. In Strignora, death was an advertisement. A local mob family took him in before the bodies were even cold. They saw the boy as a weapon to be shaped, and they trained him for years in the art of the blade, tactical movement, and Zyn control. The man who ran the family didn't treat him like a tool, though. Zhenyu never thought of him as a father, father was a dirty word in his vocabulary, but he thought of him more like an older brother who was showing him the dangerous, jagged ropes of a life spent in the dirt. 

But even with training, the slums didn't improve. As the years went on and the mob boss fully took control over the surrounding families, the body count only rose. Zhenyu watched as neighboring blocks were burned to ash over minor disputes, territorial pride, and trivial arguments over who controlled the distribution of stale grain. Why? Zhenyu used to ask himself while wiping blood off his boots in the family compound. Why did so many people have to die for something as trivial as somebody's pride? Power shouldn't be a tool to prolong misery. Power should exist to end the conflict entirely, not to pursue it like a game.

The leader of the mob had been a man of immense presence, a figure who treated Zhenyu with a strange, fierce affection. He trained him personally every morning, gave him fine clothes, and ensured he had any need or comfort he desired. Then, on the night of Zhenyu’s birthday, after a long dinner of roasted meat and heavy wine, the boss had called him into his private study. The room smelled of old paper and tobacco.

"There is something you need to know about your blood, kid," the boss had said, leaning back in his leather chair, his fingers scarred from a hundred street fights. "A few years back, before I found you, I found out through a close acquaintance of mine that somebody murdered your clan. The entire Mori line. Wiped out. There is nobody left out there looking for you."

At first, Zhenyu didn't really seem to care. His mother was long dead, and his father had abandoned him to the rats. He had convinced himself that he didn't need a family. Family was a vulnerability in a place where women and children were hung from poles for sport. But as he sat there in his chair, a cold, hollow ache opened up in his gut. Something deep inside his soul told him that his indifference was a lie. He wanted to know who had done it.

"It wasn't some political coup d'état like the papers in Makagiri claimed," the boss continued, his voice dropping to a low rumble. "It wasn't a military strike. It was all done in a single night, by one man. A single blade. He’s currently a high-ranking member within the Revolutionary Army, a monster known for bringing requiem wherever he sets his foot. His name is Kyosuke Mori. The most wanted man on the face of the earth."

Zhenyu had stared at him, his thirteen-year-old hands shaking slightly. "If he’s the most wanted man in the world, why have I never heard his name? Why don't the guards talk about him?" The mob boss, a man named Raikō Yorimitsu, looked at him with a mixture of pity and respect. "Because his name is kept out of the mouths of the public, Zhenyu. The high World Goverment doesn't want the basic public to know that a single man can defy the entire system. But I am no basic person, and neither are you. I can see it in your eyes every time you look at the slums. You still have a human heart, kid. You haven't let this place turn you into an animal yet. If you want to meet him, if you want to look the man who killed your people in the eyes, I have channels. I can get in contact with the Revolutionary Army for you."

The memory blurred. The specific answer Zhenyu had given that night remained unheard outside of the doors.

Shortly after that conversation, Raikō had changed his approach. He didn't offer more training or more luxury. Instead, he presented Zhenyu with his very first authentic katana, a beautifully weighted piece with a plain black tsuba and a dark silver steel blade. "There is only one way out of these slums that doesn't end with your corpse in a ditch, kid," Raikō had told him, his face hard as flint. "The Gate Guard is holding their selection tournament in Phoenixis in eight months. You’re going to enter."

Zhenyu had refused. He didn't want to serve the World Government that had left Strignora to rot. He wanted to stay with the family that had fed him, housed him, and kept him alive over the years. In response, Raikō had pulled a heavy, iron-framed revolver from his belt, cocked the hammer, and pressed the cold muzzle directly against Zhenyu’s forehead. "You will go to the capital, and you will build a better life for yourself," Raikō had growled, his hand steady as a rock. "You have the talent to change things, Zhenyu. If you stay here and waste your life acting as a mafioso for my petty kingdom, you’re already dead. If that is the choice you are making, I will save us both the time and pull this trigger right now. The result is exactly the same."

Zhenyu had looked into Raikō’s eyes and seen no hatred. He saw only an absolute, unyielding determination to save him from the mud. "Get walking," Raikō said, lowering the weapon but pointing toward the massive oak doors of the mansion. "The capital is thousands of miles from here. If you start now, you will reach the gates of Phoenixis in about two hundred days. Don't look back." With tears welling in his eyes, his fourteen-year-old fingers gripping the scabbard of his new sword, Zhenyu had begged him to let him stay. He didn't want the capital. He didn't want the tournament. But Raikō didn't care about his tears. He didn't say another word. He reached forward and shoved something into Zhenyu’s hand, before turning his back on the boy and slamming the great doors shut, locking the bolt from the inside. That long, lonely walk across the country was what had led him to the capital. It was what had brought him to the arena floor of the tournament, where he had ultimately faced off against Tatsuchi in a match that had nearly broken both of them, earning him his place within the Gate Guard.

The memory snapped shut like a book. The present returned with the force of a physical blow. The skinwalkers were mere feet away now, their long, trailing arms scraping against the pavement as they prepared to spring. The stench of blood was overwhelming, and the static in their eyes seemed to hum with anticipation. Zhenyu stood in the center of the crossroad. The absolute terror that had frozen his joints only a moment before suddenly shifted, transforming into something cold, sharp, and focused. A slow, wry smirk spread across his face. He had survived the alleys of Strignora, he wasn't going to die in a nameless street beneath the same sky Raikō was probably staring up at right now.

A single, warm tear escaped his left eye, tracing a clean path through the dust on his cheek before falling toward the stones. He raised his right hand, his fingers wrapping around the hilt of his sword. As his grip tightened, the ambient air around his body began to vibrate. His braided black hair, usually hanging loose across his forehead, began to float upward slightly, lifting away from his brow as if caught in an unseen updraft. Beneath his feet, the loose sand and pebbles on the pavement began to rise as well, hovering a few inches in the air alongside the fabric of his dark trench coat he had managed to put on when he ran out of the Inn. He drew his blade with a single, fluid motion, but he didn't assume a standard fighting stance. Instead, he flipped his wrist, bringing the hilt into a reverse grip and locking his fingers around the hilt in a firm motion, the steel extending backward along the line of his forearm.

The moment the steel settled into position, the world above them changed again. Despite Ryuzuki’s previous inability to find moisture, the sheer density of Zhenyu’s Zyn began to violently pull whatever ambient water remained in the upper atmosphere together. Massive, swollen black cumulonimbus clouds gathered over the entire town in the span of three seconds, blotting out the crimson light of the three moons and plunging the street into near-total darkness. The weight of the world seemed to double. The skinwalkers stopped their advance, their unhinged jaws snapping shut as they looked up at the sky, their hazy eyes twitching with sudden, uncharacteristic confusion. A flurry of jagged, black lightning stormed down from the newly formed cloud layer, striking the surrounding roofs and brick walls with deafening force. Stone exploded into dust, and the iron lampposts twisted under the heat.

Before the monsters could react, a massive bolt of pure black lightning descended directly onto the center of the street, striking the metal blade of Zhenyu’s blade. The impact didn't blast him apart. Instead, the current coiled around his arm like a serpent, hissing and crackling with enough concentrated, kinetic energy to split a mountain in two. Zhenyu himself looked down at his weapon, his hazel eyes wide with genuine surprise at the sheer volume of power he was currently holding. He hadn't known he could draw this much from the sky. The front-most skinwalker launched itself forward, its ten-foot frame crossing the distance in a fraction of a second, its long talons raised to tear his head from his shoulders. Zhenyu didn't think. He simply swung his arm in a short, horizontal arc behind him. The movement was too fast for the eye to follow. A thin, crescent line of black lightning cut through the air. The monster froze mid-leap. A thin, horizontal seam appeared across its furry torso, and a second later, its entire body split clean down the middle. A thick, black viscous liquid erupted from the wound, spraying across the parked cars and Zhenyu's face. The creature hit the ground in two separate pieces, its long tongue thrashing as its flesh attempted to regenerate, but the black lightning left behind in the wound kept cauterizing the cells, preventing the two halves from connecting back together.

The remaining skinwalkers let out a collective, high-pitched hiss that sounded like boiling water poured over winter ice. They moved together, their dragging arms swinging forward as they lunged from three separate angles. Zhenyu took another deep breath, his mind completely clear now despite the immense fear still humming in the back of his brain. He anchored his feet into the cracked asphalt, raised his blade high with both hands still locked in the reverse grip, and yelled into the storm as he drove the blade into the ground.

"BLACK LIGHTNING REVERSAL: RAIKŌ!"

A blinding, vertical pillar of pure black lightning rang down from the heavens like a solid iron spike, smashing into his position and erupting outward in a massive, roaring shockwave that shook the foundations of every building within a three-mile radius. The sound wasn't a standard clap of thunder. It was a deep, resonant rumble that sounded like a colossal dragon roaring its battle cry into the night. 

The black pillar was visible from every corner of the settlement. In the lower section of the town, Asumi stopped in the middle of a wide courtyard. She was currently guiding a group of civilians toward the exit of the town. The sudden, earth shaking roar made everyone freeze. She looked up, her hand shading her eye as she watched the massive column of black lightning pierce through the clouds. "Zhenyu," she whispered to herself. Before she could scan the horizon further, a wet, tearing sound behind her made her spin around. Two of the civilians she had just pulled from a basement, men who had seemed perfectly normal only a minute before, were beginning to expand. Their clothes were ripping away as thick, black fur burst through their skin, their jaws cracking as they began to unhinge. Asumi didn't hesitate. Her fingers wrapped around the hilt of her katana, her stance dropping low as her eyes turned cold. She would cut them down. 

She had to.

On the high ridge of the buildings near a convenience store, Ryuzuki was knocked off his balance by the sheer force of the atmospheric shockwave. He slid across a sloped tile roof, his hands gripping the ridgepole to keep from tumbling into the street below. He stared at the black column in absolute disbelief. The clouds that had suddenly formed weren't his. They were the result of a massive, Zyn eruption that had forced the dry air to condense through raw pressure. "Which one of the others had the power to do something like that?" Ryuzuki muttered, his teeth gritted against the wind. He didn't waste another second marveling at the display. Using the moisture that the black lightning had forced down into the air as a catalyst, he managed to manifest a small, swirling current around his boots, significantly boosting his speed as he leaped off the roof, sprinting with renewed velocity toward the eastern gates. 

Out past the town, where the stone of the town transitioned into the dark, yellowish sands of the open desert, the sound of a dragon's roar arrived as a low, rumbling echo that vibrated through the dunes. Tatsuchi stood motionless in the center of a wide salt flat. Her blade was still sheathed at her hip, but her right hand was resting lightly against the hilt. A few dozen yards away from her, parked haphazardly on the crest of a low dune was a man. He was dressed in a high-collared, pitch-black jacket that billowed slightly with every step he took, its scarlet lining flashing like a warning sign against the dark sky. Beneath it, a sleek white, form-fitting dress shirt was buttoned halfway down to reveal dark ink tattoos stretching across his chest, paired with dark, tailored trousers that tucked into sturdy metal shin guards. A thick belt sat low and relaxed on his hips with a belt buckle had an insignia she's never seen before. Around his neck was a mismatched collection of thick scars that looked like he had been strangled by heavy wire. On his feet, he wore simple slip-on shoes. He didn't look anything special, yet he carried himself with an effortless, mocking grace. His face and hands were entirely obscured by a complex arrangement of paper talismans and tight fabric bindings, leaving only his long black hair, a single visible eye, and his pale white arm exposed to the elements. That single eye caught the pale moonlight, shining a cold silver that was faintly tinted with an ominous red hue at the bottom. From his back, a cluster of thin, exposed wires snaked downward, reaching directly into the sand beneath his feet. He held a long, heavy wooden bo staff, resting it lazily over his shoulders behind his neck, his arms draped loosely over the ends.

He was currently laughing. It was a light, amused, condescending sound that carried clearly across the open sand. He looked upon Tatsuchi not as a threat, but as a fascinating, slightly pathetic toy.

"Well, well, well," the man hummed, his voice smooth and dripping with mock politeness. He tilted his head, watching the distant town skyline where the black light was just beginning to fade. "So, you Gate Guards do have a few wild cards left in the deck, don't you? I always assumed you were all just a bunch of pencil-pushing fuckers who kept yourselves safely hidden within your little barracks while the rest of the world secretly burned. Truly, color me surprised." He pushed himself away from where he was sitting, stepping down into the soft salt flats. His posture remained perfectly relaxed, almost slouched, exuding an aura of someone who considered this entire encounter beneath him.

"Who the hell are you?" Tatsuchi demanded, her voice like grinding stones.

"Ah, where are my manners?" he said, bowing with an exaggerated, theatrical sweep of his hand. "The name is Kaguya Katsugoro. An extremely high-ranking member of the Revolutionary Army, if you care about such trivial titles. I came out here to deal with you personally, Tatsu. Kyosuke Mori seems to lack the motivation to do anything nowadays. He’s either getting old, soft, or maybe just terribly bored. So, someone had to handle the cleanup." Tatsuchi’s expression didn't change, but her hand tightened around her blade until the leather creaked. The long scar over her eye seemed to twitch with her anger. "Shut the hell up! I don't give a damn about your army or your internal politics. I want to know what you know about my bounty. What is your connection to me?" 

Kaguya let out a soft, delighted chuckle, waving his hand dismissively in the air. "Your bounty? Oh, little girl, you are looking at the wrong end of the rope. If you want to know anything about why your head is worth so much Yorin, you can just go ask your precious brother.” He paused mid-sentence. He suddenly pulled his arms off his bo staff, letting it float momentarily in the air beside him, and slammed both of his bound hands over his face in a mocking gesture of panic. His single silver eye widened with sarcastic regret. "Uh-oh," Kaguya said, his voice dropping into a high-pitched, exaggerated singsong tone. "Should I not have said that? Oh dear, oh my. This tongue of mine just gets away from me at times like this. How terribly clumsy of me." A cold, purple light began to emanate from Tatsuchi’s eyes. The sand around her shoes began to swirl in small, violent eddies, driven by the sudden, massive spikes in her own Zyn. 

"What do you know about my brother?" she whispered, her tone dropping into a dangerous, lethal register. Kaguya's sarcastic smile was half hidden beneath his talismans, but his eye narrowed with predatory amusement. He snatched his bo staff out of the air, spinning it around his torso with an effortless, blurred speed before locking it diagonally across his chest. The wires trailing from his back hummed faintly. "I know that you two act exactly the same," Kaguya said, his voice losing the playful lilt, becoming smooth and deadly. "And right now, he is probably off dealing with something far more important than you. The ghost you think is your brother is dead, girl. The real Ichirou doesn't care about you, and when I take your head off your shoulders tonight, neither will I." 

He advanced two steps, his shoes barely making a sound against the salt and sand. "Honestly, Brass should have dealt with you and your little team back in Condorian," Kaguya added, shaking his head slightly as if remembering an annoying chore. "Regardless of whatever nonsense orders Mosa Saint gave him to hold back. Brass was always too soft on people like you. But I will not make that same mistake tonight. I think I’ll just break you apart and see what makes you tick."

Tatsuchi didn't reply. The purple glow in her eyes flared. So Brass was a part of the Revolutionary Army. She thought. With a sharp, metallic ring that cut through the desert wind, she pulled Shinkoku from its scabbard, the dark steel catching the reflection of the three blood moons above as the two red and blue ribbons caught the wind. Kaguya swung his bo staff in one final, heavy circle, clearing the sand before settling into a low, coiled battle stance, his single red-tinted eye locking onto her. Between them, the desert wind died away entirely, leaving only the moon light and the long shadows of the dunes. The fight was about to begin.