Hito-mane Extermination Part 2

"I've learned the hard way that the world is built entirely on perception. If you play the villain well enough, the truth ceases to matter. People only believe what their eyes tell them to believe."

-Zamarion Jackson

                                   ...

The air in Kokohama tasted like wet copper and rotting wood. 

Asumi leaned her weight heavily against the worn hilt of her blade, using the sheathed steel as a makeshift crutch to keep her knees from bouncing off the filthy pavement. Her breath came in ragged, uneven gasps, each exhalation sending a thin, dark stream of blood trickling past her split lip and down her chin. She was on the absolute brink of death, and she knew it. The pristine black kimono she had worn into this town, the one embroidered with delicate, hand-stitched pink spider lilies, was completely ruined. The left sleeve had been torn away entirely, repurposed into a crude, violently tightened tourniquet wrapped high around her right arm to stop the arterial spraying. Her white hakama was no longer white; it was riddled with thick clods of dark mud, street filth, and the lingering, black blood of things that should have been human. 

Most striking of all was her face. The black leather eye patch she traditionally wore to cover her missing eye had been violently ripped away during the ambush. In the stark light of the three blood moons hanging over Harpyra, the raw, intense scar tissue surrounding the empty void was laid bare, a jagged, sunken reminder of the day her eye had been systematically gouged out by Brass Hymlinn all those months ago.

She let out a low, bitter laugh, the sound catching in her throat. “We thought we were just passing the area,” she thought, her lone, glacial blue eye scanning the silent alleyway. The ambush had been flawless. The last time she had stood her ground, she had been successfully escorting a small, terrified group of local civilians out of the immediate area of the town, defending them with clinical precision against two Skinwalkers that had broken through her limited vision. She had cut the beasts down. She had genuinely believed, even for a single fleeting moment, that she was in the clear. Then, the horror had unraveled. 

One by one, the very civilians she had been bleeding to protect stopped crying. Their faces had gone entirely slack. Their skin had ripped, the bones beneath their clothes shifting with sickening, wet pops as the rest of the group slowly revealed themselves to be Skinwalkers as well. The entire crowd had been a nest. Just how many people in this godforsaken town were real, and how many were nothing more than hollow, flesh-wearing mimics?

With a sharp intake of breath, Asumi unknotted the remaining silk of her ruined hakama, letting the blood drenched outer layer slide down her legs into the mud. Beneath the traditional garments, her attire was revealed. She wore a large black bra covered by a dense layer of chainmail mesh. The metallic rings covered her entire torso, extending tightly up her neck and running down both arms, engineered specifically to deflect blade strikes while leaving just enough space between the links for her skin to breathe during high intensity exertion. But even the mesh had its limits. Near her lower abdomen, the chainmail was violently torn, the rings sheared apart by a jagged claw strike. 

Beneath the broken metal, a large, gaping laceration leaked blood down her waist. “If I don’t get to Tatsuchi soon,” Asumi realized, her vision swimming slightly, “I’m going to bleed out right here in the sand.” Her mind immediately locked onto an idea: the Asclepius Gem. Right before they had formally departed from the Tomidoru estate up north in the snowy mountains on their trek into the sandy wastes of Harpyra, Itaka had pulled Tatsuchi aside, pressing a rare, glowing artifact into her hands. It was a relic known to possess astronomical, near instantaneous healing properties, something Itaka had warned would likely come in handy sooner rather than later given the scaling threat of the Revolutionary Army. 

Tatsuchi, ever the pragmatist, had not left it whole. She had crushed the gem into a fine, highly concentrated powder, storing it safely on her person so it could be easily distributed or applied as an emergency poultice in the event anyone in the squad suffered a fatal injury. Tatsuchi was still in possession of the powder. The problem was, Asumi had no way of getting to where her captain had gone in this state. 

She forced her head upward, her lone eye straining against the crimson glare of the three blood moons. Suddenly, the sky directly above the town center fractured. A pitch black vortex, a swirling tear in the fabric of the atmosphere, snapped open without a sound. It lasted for less than two seconds, violently dropping a distinct silhouette out of its spatial void before instantly collapsing back into nothingness. The drop point was roughly four kilometers away, deep within the residential alleyways of Kokohama. Asumi stared at the empty space where the vortex had just been, her jaw tightening. “Only I saw that,” she realized. Whatever just fell, it didn’t belong to the sky.

She closed her eyes, expanding her sensory perimeter to track her remaining allies. She could distinctly feel the faint, fluctuating Zyn signatures of Ryuzuki and Zhenyu moving somewhere within the town limits, but neither of them was close enough to see her position, nor had they noticed the brief spatial anomaly. Asumi took a slow, deliberate breath, calming her frayed nerves. She raised her left hand, hovering it directly over the gaping wound in her abdomen. “I don’t have time to wait for a miracle.” she thought. She focused her core, drawing upon her internal reservoir of Zyn energy. Instantly, a soft, shimmering energy began to coat her palm. 

In this world, Zyn energy was a deeply personal manifestation, its color inherently tied to either the specific nature of a user’s technique or the foundational traits of their personality. Brass Hymlinn, a cold-hearted, detached slaughterer, utilized a ice type spirit anchored to a Zyn Scroll, giving his Zyn a brilliant, glacial blue hue. Tatsuchi’s unyielding, aggressive spirit manifested as a fierce ruby red. Zhenyu’s grounded, gravity warping presence radiated a heavy, dark amber. Asumi’s natural Zyn signature was a beautiful, clear rose quartz pink.

But as she held her breath, the soft pink light radiating from her hand began to curdle. The edges darkened, the vibrant rose quartz hue systematically bleeding away until her palm was entirely enveloped in an unnatural, light devouring, inky blackness. 

This, was Hollow Zyn. 

It was an ability so profoundly rare, so fundamentally dangerous to the established order of the world, that both the World Government and the Church of the 10 Fates had spent centuries systematically suppressing and censoring its very existence from historical records. The mechanics were a terrifying violation of standard energy theory. Normal Zyn energy, or Nero, as the high scholars formally designated it, occurred when a practitioner maintained a near-flawless equilibrium between the pure energy of the Soul and the volatile energy of Chaos, allowing them to safely execute standard Zyn Techniques. But, Hollow Zyn answered a much darker question, which was what happens when the Chaos nearly overrides the Soul?

Asumi lowered her inky black hand onto the large open wound. The moment the Hollow Zyn made contact with her flesh, a sharp, white-hot agony pulsated through her nervous system. Her teeth ground together so hard she feared they would shatter, her knuckles turning white as she forced the chaotic energy to bind her torn flesh. The cells did not just heal, they aggressively rewrote themselves, the torn muscle fibers snapping back into alignment with unnatural velocity. Exactly three minutes and fourteen seconds passed. When she finally pulled her hand away, the gaping wound had completely vanished, replaced by a smooth, faint line of minimal scar tissue. It was a masterclass in high-tier manipulation. How had a upranking Gate Guard officer like Asumi ever found the opportunity to not only discover the existence of Hollow Zyn, but learn to wield it with such terrifying efficiency?

She stood up, her balance fully restored, but she did not leave her appearance unaltered. With a calculated flick of her fingers, she deliberately suppressed the final cycle of the technique, leaving a few of the superficial outer skin layers near the edge of the wound partially open and oozing just enough blood to look damaged. “If I find Tatsuchi completely uninjured,” Asumi reasoned, her face hardening, “I need a legitimate reason to ask for that Asclepius powder after I tell her what had happened here.” Asumi, like the rest of her team, was masking her true intentions and knowledge. She picked up her blade, stepping out of the mud, and began making her way toward where Tatsuchi had been dropped from the sky four kilometers away. But she hadn't even cleared the mouth of the alley before a faint, rapid footstep echoed behind her.

Her instincts flared. She spun on her heel, drawing her blade, Tsuchigumo, an inch from its scabbard, fully expecting another wave of Skinwalkers. Instead, she was greeted by the familiar faces of Zhenyu and Ryuzuki. Zhenyu moved with a tense, low posture, the steel of his blade visibly crackling with erratic, violent arcs of black lightning. Beside him, Ryuzuki looked rough for wear, his outfit was torn, and his breathing was heavy, but he was still in a functional condition.

"Asumi," Zhenyu called out, his eyes widening slightly as he took in her torn sleeve and the blood on her face. "You're alive. We’re on our way heading to the salt flats just outside of Kokohama. We need to reinforce Tatsuchi immediately."

Asumi didn’t move. She kept her eye fixed on them, her voice dropping into a low, serious register. "Don’t bother with the flats. I can still sense the residual Zyn signatures. Tatsuchi was just fighting someone incredibly strong out there, an energy signature that's giving me the exact same violent, sickening knot in my stomach from when we were all taken out by Brass."

The revelation hit Zhenyu like a physical blow. His stance faltered for a microsecond, a look of profound, lingering trauma flashing through his dark amber eyes. During their last encounter with Brass Hymlinn, long before Zhenyu and Itaka could've been pushed past their absolute limits. The cost had been severe. Zhenyu had lost the vast majority of his own access to his Zyn Technique, leaving his once near absolute control over gravity and anti-gravity severely crippled, reduced to unstable arcs of lightning among whatever else he was keeping up his sleeve. Hearing that an opponent of that exact caliber, if not higher, was currently on their doorstep sent a visible shiver through his core.

Ryuzuki glanced between the two of them, his brow furrowed as he adjusted his grip on his weapon. "Was this Brass you speak of truly as monstrously powerful as you claim?" he asked, his voice tight. Asumi looked back at him, her lone blue eye devoid of warmth. "He didn't just dismantle us, Ryuzuki. He single handedly defeated two active Gate Captains, a Vice Captain, and the Second Seat simultaneously. He quite literally told Tatsuchi and the Captain of the ninth Gate Guard that he was ‘holding back so much that it was straining his soul.’” Asumi thought for a moment, she had to recall what Tatsuchi and Itaka had told her about the rest of the encounter. 

Ryuzuki went completely quiet, his mind racing. "Hmm," he muttered, his fingers tightening on his dagger. "The only living people I can think of who meet the prerequisite for that level of strength, would be the First Gate Captain, Rayleigh Tachibana. Or perhaps the Supreme Commander of the 10 Fate Vanguard himself, Yuta Kuroainaru. Either them, or the absolute highest ranking field commanders hidden within the Revolutionary Army."

Asumi’s gaze sharpened, her focus locking onto Ryuzuki's. "You say that with an incredibly specific amount of certainty, Ryuzuki. How exactly do you know how powerful the high-tier Revolutionary Army commanders are?" She said, both hands on either side of her waist. Ryuzuki hesitated, looking down at the damp ground before magnifying his breathing as he exhaled slowly. "Because I had a direct run-in with someone from their upper echelon about two months ago," his voice dropped to a whisper. "It wasn't a formal engagement, it was more like a crossing of paths in the border districts. He carried a set of incredibly unique weapons that I honestly cannot quite describe with standard terminology. He had this wild, messy white hair that fell around his face, and a remarkably kind, gentle expression." He paused, a cold sweat breaking out along his neck. "But it was a kindness that felt like it was actively masking a deeply volatile, violent intent."

"A kind face?" Zhenyu thought, his black lightning crackling passively. “I can't think of anybody from the revolutionaries that would have a kind face.” Ryuzuki stared back at Zhenyu "No," he countered, now looking straight into Asumi's lone eye. "It was not his face that stayed with me. It was his eyes. In this world, practically every major clan possesses at least one distinct, undeniable tell, a unique facial feature or a specific biological trait where you can instantly identify their heritage the second you look at them. This man had the unmistakable tell of the absolute strongest bloodline.” Zhenyu and Asumi's eyes widened. Ryuzuki continued. “His eyes were a brilliant, dark purple."

Asumi and Zhenyu locked eyes instantly. Neither of them uttered a single word, but the silence between them was deafening. The exact same terrifying realization flashed through both of their minds simultaneously, which pointed directly to only one person:

Ichirou Kuroainaru. Tatsuchi’s long lost twin brother. The forgotten son of the strongest.

Did this mean all of the proof was actually right? Was her twin brother genuinely real, let alone, alive? Actively serving as a high-ranking member within the ranks of the Revolutionary Army? Or was it possible that the man Ryuzuki encountered wasn’t even the real Ichirou? The clandestine proof that Tatsuchi and Itaka had uncovered months prior had only firmly established one concrete fact, which was that a boy named Ichirou Kuroainaru had legally and physically existed before being scrubbed from the all records. But if he had survived the horrors of his disappearance, why on earth would he actively choose to align himself with the revolutionaries? Why would the son of the strongest man alive fight to tear down the system his father built?

Zhenyu shook his head, forcefully snapping himself out of the cognitive loop. He tightened his guard. "It doesn't matter right now anyways," he said firmly, looking at Asumi. "Ryuzuki and I are still going to make our way directly to the outer salt flats. We felt a massive, malevolent Zyn signature erupting out there minutes ago. We have to pray Tatsuchi is still alive and holding her own against whatever monster is driving it."

Without waiting for a counter argument, Zhenyu turned and exploded forward, leaping onto the low eaves of a nearby residential structure, his black lightning trailing behind him as he sped toward the towns border. But as Ryuzuki turned to follow him, Asumi’s left hand shot out like a viper. She firmly gripped the fabric of his coat sleeve, her physical strength anchoring him to the spot. Ryuzuki blinked, turning back to face her.

The warm, sisterly expression Asumi typically maintained for the other members of the Guard was entirely gone. Her face was a mask of cold, calculating severity. With her missing eye socket exposed and surrounded by its raw scar tissue, her solitary, glacial blue eye stared with an intense, unblinking focus straight into his pupils.

"Let me ask you something very clearly, Ryuzuki," she said, her voice dangerously quiet. "If this boy you say you saw truly is Ichirou Kuroainaru, if he is actually alive out there, do you believe he is a legitimate, high ranking revolutionary by choice? Or is he just one of the many broken individuals they systematically lusted over to their side with false promises of wealth, liberation, and power?"

Ryuzuki stared at her, sensing the immense weight behind the question. He swallowed hard before answering honestly. "I don't know the intricacies of their command structure, Asumi," he admitted softly. "But logically speaking? It would be almost mathematically impossible for him to be a willing commander, let alone a member, who sought them out for power. Think about the timeline. Ichirou would have to be exactly twenty years old right now, the literal identical twin of Tatsuchi. If the horrific events of the Sun God Incident occurred roughly fourteen years ago, that means he would’ve been a mere six-year-old child when he was violently taken from the flames."

He paused, letting the numbers settle between them. "A six-year-old does not make an ideological choice to join a global rebellion, Asumi. There is a very high probability that he was systematically brainwashed the moment he was kidnapped, raised inside their organization until the violence became his only reality. He is not a traitor. He is a casualty."

Asumi searched his eyes for any trace of deception. Finding none, her expression softened by a fraction of a degree, and she slowly let go of his sleeve. “Theoretically, right?” Ryuzuki searched Asumi in the same manner. “Theoretically.” They both looked to calm down a bit. "Thank you, Ryuzuki," she murmured, looking content with the assessment. "Go. Don’t let Zhenyu get ahead of his own abilities." Ryuzuki gave her a solitary, serious nod, turned on his heel, and executed a powerful vertical leap, vaulting onto the clay tiles of the rooftops to catch up with Zhenyu’s trailing amber colored energy. 

Left entirely alone in the damp alleyway, Asumi looked up at the three blood moons one final time. What would my parents have done if they were standing in this filth? she wondered silently.

She shifted her weight, ignoring the residual sting in her abdomen, and began running at full sprint toward the precise coordinates where she had seen the pitch-black vortex drop Tatsuchi. As her shoes beat a steady rhythm against the pavement, a memory, a distant, buried echo of her family, flashed through her mind. She could distinctly hear her mother’s voice from the morning she had formally left home to enlist in the Gate Guards: “Remember Asu, don't use our name as a symbol. You are our daughter first. Our age is long over now, but you are still a-”. 

"Asumi!"

The memory shattered instantly. Asumi skidded to a halt at the intersection of a narrow residential corridor. Standing in the center of the path was Tatsuchi.

The sight was jarring. The captain’s signature yellow kimono, typically kept immaculate, was completely draped over her shoulders in a state of absolute ruin, caked in fine white desert salt and thick streaks of fresh crimson. Asumi’s trained eye immediately scanned her form, counting at least fifteen distinct, clean tears in the fabric that corresponded perfectly to deep knife or sickle wounds across her body. “What the hell happened out there?” Asumi said, a cold dread pooling in her stomach. How is she even standing right now? She thought. 

Asumi’s face shifted instantly from her calculated, serious demeanor into a look of profound, exhausted worry. She rushed across the pavement, dropping her blade to her side as she reached her captain. "For the love of the 10 Fates, Tatsuchi, what happened to you?!" she demanded, her voice cracking with authentic panic.

Without asking for permission, Asumi used her free left hand to unbutton the rest of Tatsuchi’s blood soaked white shirt, pulling the fabric back to immediately inspect her body for lethal internal trauma. She froze. There were no open wounds. The skin across Tatsuchi’s whole body was completely intact. While there was an immense, heavy spread of fresh scar tissue scoring her flesh exactly where the fifteen blade strikes had landed, the flesh itself was completely sealed shut. The bleeding had stopped entirely.

Tatsuchi looked down at Asumi, her purple eyes carrying a dull, hollow exhaustion. "Besides the severe volume of blood loss I failed to prevent with my Shinkoku Ketsugan," she said, her voice remarkably steady, "I feel relatively fine, Asumi. You don't need to patch me."

Asumi pulled her hand back, her mind working furiously as she noticed the superficial blood still oozing from her own abdomen. "Tatsuchi, look at you. Tell me exactly what happened over at the salt flats. Who did you run into?"

Tatsuchi adjusted her grip on Shinkoku, her eyes narrowing as she stared past Asumi’s shoulder toward the towns border. "There is an elite Revolutionary Commander operating the field by the name of Kaguya Katsugoro," Tatsuchi revealed, her tone completely devoid of inflection. "Based on the density of his output, he's probably operating on a higher caliber than Brass. Regardless, he’s still holding back a bit. And that is not the only variable. During the exchange, he formally confirmed that Kyosuke Mori is actively aligned with the Revolutionary Army's high command as well."

Asumi’s lone blue eye widened. "Kyosuke too? Then, who exactly are our enemies?" Tatsuchi met her gaze, her purple eyes flashing with a cold, terrifying clarity. 

"The whole Revolutionary Army." 

Asumi opened her mouth, a single syllable forming on her tongue. She thought about mentioning the portal she had just witnessed with her own eye, the spatial tear that had dropped Tatsuchi out of the sky away from the flats and back into town. As if it was getting her to safety. She thought about demanding to know how anybody could survive an encounter with a Brass level entity and walk away with fully closed scar tissue in a matter of minutes. 

But as she looked at her captain’s unyielding face, Asumi kept her mouth firmly shut. We’re all keeping secrets, she reminded herself, her fingers twitching against her side. Every single one of us.

"What is our immediate move?" Asumi asked instead, adjusting her posture. Tatsuchi didn’t hesitate. She turned her body back toward the outer border of Kokohama, the ribbons on her hilt catching the stale town wind. "We turn around, we re-enter the battlefield, and we execute Kaguya Katsugoro." Asumi held back a laugh. "You want to go back out there?" Asumi pressed, her voice tight. "Against a Brass tier opponent?"

"We don’t have a choice," Tatsuchi stated flatly. "His specific Zyn Technique revolves around an incredibly high form of puppet manipulation. He has a massive, synchronized battalion, at least a hundred plus of them, actively hidden within the sand, waiting to breach the town and kill us. If we don’t intercept him before he decides to stop playing around, we will be entirely erased."

Asumi took a slow step forward, her lone eye locking onto the back of Tatsuchi’s head. She knew her captain better than almost anyone alive. She knew the pride that defined the Kuroainaru lineage. She knew the unyielding ego that drove the daughter of the strongest to rather die in the dirt than give an inch of ground to an inferior opponent.

"Tatsuchi," Asumi said softly, her voice carrying a dangerous, hidden undertone. "How exactly did you manage to get out of that situation in the first place? If you were surrounded by a hundred puppets and a fighter of that caliber, how are you standing here next to me?" Tatsuchi didn’t turn around. Her posture remained entirely rigid under the crimson light of the three blood moons. With zero hesitation, her voice came out clear, cold, and absolute.

"I ran."

Asumi stared at her back, a bitter, silent understanding settling between them. It was a blatant, undeniable lie, and the both of them knew it with absolute certainty. The Tatsuchi that Asumi had trained alongside, the captain she had served under for four grueling years, was a person who would stubbornly stand her ground until she was either physically moved by force or left a corpse in the dirt. She would never run. But Tatsuchi was not just lying to protect a secret from her subordinate. 

The terrifying truth that lay buried beneath her cold demeanor was much simpler, which was that Tatsuchi was lying because even she didn’t truly understand the black void that had just swallowed her whole. The two women stood side by side for a final heartbeat, isolated entirely by the weight of their own unspoken secrets. Then, with a synchronized, metallic ring that cut through the silence of Kokohama, they drew their blades. With their weapons catching the blood-red moonlight, they turned their backs on the safety of the town and began making their way back toward the lethal white flats.

The heavy silence of the desert crept back into the edges of the town as they advanced, the cobblestones giving way to loose gravel, then to the fine, powdery white residue of the outer flats. The static charge left behind from the earlier dynamic shifts still hummed against the ground, making the fine hairs on Asumi’s forearms stand upright beneath her chainmail mesh. She could feel the lingering pressure of Kaguya’s energy, a massive, suffocating blanket that seemed to warp the very horizon line where the salt met the sky. 

Tatsuchi kept her pace measured, her breathing deep and rhythmic, yet the excessive blood loss was subtly taking its toll. The ruby red sheen of her Zyn coating began to pulse along Shinkoku’s edge, faint but determined, flickering like a dying candle that refused to let its wick burn out. Asumi tracked the micro-movements of her captain’s shoulders, noting the rigid stiffness that lingered from the unhealed internal exhaustion. They were running headfirst into a meat grinder, two broken instruments attempting to play a flawless symphony of execution.

As the first structural ruins of the town boundary dropped behind them, the landscape expanded into a terrifying, stark void of absolute white, illuminated by the oppressive, heavy glare of the three blood moons. The salt flats stretched infinitely ahead, broken only by the sudden, jagged silhouettes of Kaguya’s emerging battalion. Even from a distance, the sight was staggering. The smooth, featureless wooden faces of the puppets caught the blooded moonlight, turning the white desert into a grotesque theater of silent, inanimate soldiers. The metallic rattle of their kusarigama chains echoed across the empty waste, a chilling, rhythmic sound that mimicked the approach of an incoming storm. 

Kaguya stood directly in the center of the mass, his high-collared black coat swaying slightly in the freezing wind, his silver eyes waiting for them to cross the threshold back into his domain. Neither Asumi nor Tatsuchi slowed their stride. They simply gripped their hilts tighter, their individual colors flaring against the red sky. This wouldn't end like it did with Brass.