The stockade rose out of the dark like a memory someone had beaten into shape with axes and fear.
Torchlight licked over split-log walls and iron-reinforced gates. Two armored sentries snapped upright the instant I broke the treeline.
"Tomare!"
I stopped dead, palms up.
They came forward slow, spears ready. My torn, blood-crusted jacket and foreign face did me no favors.
"What kind of thing are you?" the scarred one growled.
Thing, not person.
"Ryan," I said. The Japanese rolled off my tongue cleaner than it ever had in any classroom. "Something hit me in the forest."
The younger guard's spear tip hovered an inch from my heart. "What kind of something?"
"The kind that doesn't belong in this world."
Scar-face circled, eyes narrowing. "Your eyes catch the fire wrong. Like a beast's. Or worse."
My stomach clenched hard enough to double me.
A strangled grunt slipped out.
Both men jumped back.
"He's marked!"
"Quiet." A new voice, low and iron-hard.
Captain Oda stepped between the torches. Older, scarred, calm the way a drawn blade is calm.
"Bring him in."
"Captain—"
"Now."
They marched me through the gate. Soldiers stared—some curious, some already reaching for swords. To them I was plague, omen, enemy spy, all at once.
Inside the command hut they shoved me to my knees. Spears never wavered.
Oda dismissed the guards with a look, then studied me the way a butcher studies questionable meat.
Modern jacket. No visible wounds. Eyes that drank the lamplight and threw it back wrong.
"A gaijin walks out of the demon woods after dark," he said softly. "Unscratched. Unafraid."
He leaned in until I smelled iron and smoke on his breath.
"So tell me, Ryan of nowhere… what are you really?"
The hunger stirred, patient and amused, coiling behind my ribs like it already knew the answer.
I met his stare.
"Just a man trying to stay alive."
He didn't blink.
He didn't believe me.
Not for a heartbeat.