The smoke didn't so much rise as it crawled, a slow, thick thing that smeared the sky into a permanent bruise. Kagekawa had the look of a place that would never heal: roofs peeled back like torn skin, shrine stones melted into weird, glassy puddles, the smell of charred grain and human fat hanging on the air like a promise. Somewhere close, a child howled until the sound frayed into a hollow echo.
They had been running already — hearts in their mouths, lungs on fire, feet slipping on the greasy cobbles — when the world folded itself around a new, impossible center.
For a breath, the rain thinned.
Not stopped — thinned, like a curtain being eased aside.
From that smaller, slower world walked someone who did not belong in the ruin of war.
They came not with thunder but with the small, precise steps of a messenger; a human figure wrapped in a long coat that absorbed light instead of reflecting it. The coat fell like water, uncaring of the wind. At the hip, a sword slept in a scabbard patterned like a single opening bloom — just enough ornament to look ceremonial, not theatrical. The face beneath the mask was masked — white lacquer, two thin crimson streaks that might have been paint, might have been blood. The mask's expression read like a calm promise.
Genji felt it first. A pause in the world where even the smoke seemed to catch its breath. The captain's shoulders drew up; his hand found the hilt as if a muscle remembered the motion, even without thought.
The masked figure stopped. Twelve paces away. Close enough to be a threat, far enough to make the space between them a deliberate choice.
Petals fell. Not a storm, only a thread of them — four, five, maybe six blossoms, soft and deliberate, sprinkled through the air like punctuation. They were not from any living tree nearby; no trees lived in this ruin. They were small, stubborn things that did not scatter in the smoke the way ash did. One landed on Daiki's mud-smeared shoulder and did not burn.
For a second, the street was quieter than the quiet between heartbeats.
Genji's voice came like a blade trying on a habit. "This is Dominion ground. Step out and we will cut you down."
The masked figure tilted its head, an almost courtly movement. No words. No posture of threat. Just the slow unwrapping of someone who measures human life like a merchant checks coins — carefully, without hurry.
Then, with a speed that made the rain look indecently slow, the samurai moved.
Not with the violent, announced motion of Genji, but with something surgical: a step, a twist, a ripple through the air.
Genji's sword came down in a clean, practiced arc — a man's lifetime of killing boiled into a single, inevitable line. The blade split the air, found its mark… and stopped.
Not stopped by another blade. Not broken by force. Stopped like a hinge held by an invisible hand.
Genji's muscles locked, the effort visible in his jaw. For the first time that morning, his eyes widened.
The samurai did not strike. They only let the pause exist, held it like a statement. The breath of the city, the scream of burning wood, the wet slap of blood hitting stone — all of it muted under that tiny sphere of impossible calm.
For those seconds, the siblings did the only thing survival teaches first: they moved. Not in careful tactics, not in words or plans. Feet carried them. The ruin gave way to a path they had known as children — an alley carved between two collapsed shopfronts, a broken shrine gate still standing crooked, a river of mud that would hide tracks if they could just keep moving. They ran as one scattering thing, a human tide pouring away from the place that had birthed them and now wanted them dead.
Behind them, the masked figure turned at the merest angle as if to confirm the retreat, and in that turn the man in black — Genji — found his freedom to act. His body shook, the muscle memory snapping back into place like a drawn wire.
But the Blooming figure moved again. Not to strike, not to parry, but to file and slow. A step, a ring of air, a tilt of the head. Genji's blade vibrated. His feet moved, but the gap the samurai held refused to collapse.
They exchanged movements like players of some older, crueler game. Genji lunged; the samurai sidestepped with the soft severity of falling water. The blade of Dominon might met only the empty air where the samurai had been. When the captain thrust, the scabbard at the samurai's side tasted the point with a soft, mocking clink that echoed twice before the rain could swallow it.
The samurai's presence was a contest of wills: Genji with the raw, practical force of a career soldier and the samurai with a cold, refined claim that his every motion cut the possibility of violence down to size. They moved like two philosophies carving a street in different languages: one loud, one patient. Genji wanted to crush; the samurai wanted to show a lesson.
The captain's face went through colors — annoyance, puzzlement, rage — as each strike he launched either missed, or struck only that still, strange air that seemed to hum with the samurai's control. When a shard of wood whistled toward the masked one on the wind, the samurai simply breathed, and the shard slowed like a bird realizing its directionless. It fell harmlessly to the ground at the samurai's boot. For the soldiers watching — for anyone watching — it looked like a trick. For those nearest enough to feel it, the air tasted like cold iron.
Genji tried to end it. He gathered his Kigen and threw it at the samurai with the intent of crushing a man into paste. The pressure hit the place where the samurai had been a breath before, and the samurai's coat fluttered as if caressed by the kernel of whatever force had touched it. Then the samurai moved through the crush of power as through a room they already knew. They did not so much dodge as recalibrate the world along a different axis. The pressure brood slid off them like water from a stone.
And then the samurai spoke.
It was a voice without sharpness, low and careful, as if measuring how many lies were left in the world. "Bury your dead before they bury you."
Not a taunt. Not a command. A plain, fatal truth.
Genji's mouth opened. For a second, he looked almost human, which suited the samurai's intent perfectly. A blade struck the flagstone nearby and sank in with a terrible, echoing clank. Those watching understood in the way one understands thunder after it has passed: someone who could kill Genji with a flick of a wrist had chosen instead to give them a chance.
That chance was all the siblings needed.
They did not look back as they fled. They had no words for gratitude, now — only the animal rhythm of breath and footfall and the hot, bitter taste of ash.
But the samurai did not follow. They held the place between smoke and ruin like a gate. For a few minutes they stood solitary, mask angled once toward the children's retreating backs, and then toward Genji. For a while, all the man in black could do was watch the player in white leave them space.
Someone cursed. Genji's hand twitched on the sword. He wanted to lash out, to make a posthumous example. But his blade would not move cleanly; every stroke met the same uncanny resistance. He struck a second time and the sound it made was like glass breaking far away. He struck a third. The sword split along some invisible seam — snapped into two brittle pieces that clattered to the ground.
The samurai's movement that made the break was maddeningly simple: a step, a turn, an inch of wrist. All of the violence of the scene — the burning, the shouting, the weapons — seemed to inhale into that tiny motion and vanish. The soldiers surrounding them wavered like reeds in a sudden tide. Those who had been holding their rifles up found them heavy, technique failing, as if competence had been drained from the world and replaced by a cold, calibrated mercy.
Genji did not scream. He steadied himself and then, with the slow, animal accuracy of a man who has spent his life deciding when to cut, he picked up the two halves of his weapon and let the dirt swallow his fingers.
The samurai walked up until they stood within touching distance of the captain. They did not lower the mask. They let the hush hang between them for a long second that might have been a lifetime. Then the samurai's hand went to the scabbard at their hip and they tapped it with two fingers — not a threat, but a note — like pointing out a map's edge.
"Forget today is mercy," the samurai said, voice like rain on an old roof. "You have no right to that word."
It sounded like a sermon. It sounded like a verdict.
Genji's jaw cracked. He looked briefly — very briefly — at the collapsing rows beyond the square, at the ruined lives. For a flicker, something like shame passed through the captain's eyes, and then he turned and barked an order that had been waiting like a mold: "Regroup. Purge the rest."
The soldiers moved like men who had been waiting for the command, but their hands were slower. The samurai stepped between them and the crowd, and the soldiers had to find another path through ruin because blades did not cross this new line. For a handful of ragged, precious minutes, the procession of death stuttered.
The siblings did not breathe until they were three roads away, until the smell of burning was a memory that hit the throat in rhythms instead of a constant ache. Only then did any of them lower their gaze. The run had not been clean; some had clothes torn, one had a split lip tasting of iron, one had already begun to walk with a limp. They had left behind names and faces and a city that would not forgive them even if it wanted to.
They did not know the samurai's name. Nobody did. The mask's painted streaks might have been war paint, blood, or simply a craftsmaster's flourish. The sword's scabbard hinted at someone who had learned more than one style. The petals had been a detail — a signature more than a spectacle — and the manner in which the samurai had stalled Genji spoke of an old and precise violence.
On the edge of the ruins, taking stock of what remained of their breath and what remained of them, someone finally spoke.
"Who the hell was that?"
No answer came. Only the distant crack of collapsing timber and the ragged, animal sound of a city finally, finally surrendering to silence.
Far behind them, where petals still clung to singed clothing and smoke had not yet learned to forget the shape of a life, the masked samurai stood very still. For those who watched and kept their eyes open, there was the strangest sensation: a presence that was neither ally nor enemy, only a hand placed for a moment on the scale of the world.
They looked toward the south where the siblings had fled — and for the first time that night the samurai allowed something like a small, near-imperceptible nod.
Then they turned and walked back into the ruin, a silhouette that did not seek applause, did not demand thanks. The petals that fell after that were fewer still — a single blossom here, another there — and then none at all. The world resumed its terrible business.
The story of the Fiends would carry the samurai's shadow like a coin in one pocket: a single, inexplicable debt owed to a stranger who had shown up long enough to tilt fate by a hair and then vanished before anyone could pay.
They ran until they could no longer see the smoke-laden skyline of Kagekawa. They ran until the sound of the city was behind them in a way that felt final. And when they stopped, somewhere that smelled of pine and wet earth and the distant music of an unfamiliar river, they could not yet speak of what had happened.
Only one thing was clear, with the salute of muscle memory and the sting of fear still fresh in their veins:
They had been spared.
Not saved. Not rescued.
Spared.
And that was a different, more dangerous thing.