Smoke clung to the mountainside like a choking shroud, thick enough to taste—ash and blood, burnt timber, scorched hair. The wind tried to push it aside, but the air itself felt exhausted, beaten into submission by the screaming beneath it. Half of Kagekawa was already gone, carved open and left steaming against the cold earth. The other half just hadn't died yet.
A grandmother crawled through the dirt with raw hands, fingernails broken down to the quick. Her kimono had burned off in patches, exposing blistered skin that split every time she moved. She wasn't crying; she'd already gone hoarse miles back. She only knew she had to keep crawling, because stopping meant letting her face collapse into the mud where her daughter and grandchildren were already lying.
The youngest boy still twitched sometimes, a weak, involuntary jerk of the leg.
More a ghost than a child.
Above her, the Dominion soldiers advanced in a quiet, coordinated line. No yelling. No commands. They didn't need them anymore. The rhythm had settled in—the efficient tempo of extermination. Step. Search. Burn. Step. Search. Burn.
A clean sweep.
A trail of wet footprints followed one soldier, but they weren't his. A body had dragged along his boot until it tore free. The prints gradually disappeared as the blood dried, turning the earth a dark, sticky brown.
Near the old shrine path, a teenager staggered up from behind a toppled stone lantern. His face was charcoal-black except for the streaks running down from his eyes where tears had cut pathways through the soot. He limped forward, clutching his side, ribs jutting out unnaturally. His breath rattled like broken pottery.
"Why… why are you doing this…?" he wheezed.
A soldier paused. Just paused. Looked at him.
Not confused, not guilty, not angry.
Just… bored.
Then he raised his rifle and fired one clean round through the boy's forehead.
The teenager's body didn't even fall right away—it folded slowly, almost politely, as if bowing. The blood that came out wasn't dramatic, it was strangely minimal. He had nothing left in him to bleed.
Farther down the village slope, a mother shielded her newborn with both arms, curling around the child as she pressed her body into a collapsed doorway. She whispered prayers as fast as she could breathe them, each repetition more frantic, more desperate, syllables breaking apart in her mouth. But the baby couldn't understand terror—only discomfort—so it cried louder and louder.
The soldiers didn't even have to look for her. They followed the sound.
She felt the shadow fall over her before she saw the boot. She looked up, eyes swollen from smoke, shaking as she clutched her child closer. She begged. She didn't use words—just sounds, raw, animal-like, a mother pleading to something that forgot how to be human.
The soldier raised his weapon.
She tried to shield the baby's ears.
The gunshot was quick, but the baby didn't stop crying for several seconds after the mother slumped lifeless on top of him.
It took another shot to silence him too.
A dog ran down the street, limping on three legs, fur burned off one side of its body. It didn't bark. It just nuzzled corpses, one by one, searching for anyone who would move. When it finally found its owner—buried under rubble, crushed chest, eyes open—it lay down beside him, pressed its muzzle to the man's cheek, and whimpered softly.
A passing soldier didn't even break stride.
He shot the dog in the back of the head.
The whimper didn't even finish.
On the upper ridge, someone had tried to make a stand. Dozens of villagers were piled there—some with makeshift weapons, some with kitchen knives, some with nothing but their fists. They hadn't gone down quietly. The dirt was churned up, marked with footprints and drag lines. Something had exploded here; a crater still smoked.
But the defenders were all dead now.
Bodies stacked on bodies.
Steam rising from cooling blood.
A child—maybe six—wandered between the bodies, stumbling in shock, barefoot. His pajamas were burned on one side and drenched red on the other. He stepped carefully, as if scared to wake the people around him. He whispered, tiny voice trembling:
"Big brother…? Big brother, where are you…?"
Someone answered him.
But not the person he wanted.
A soldier grabbed him by the arm and lifted him, dangling. The boy didn't scream—he was too tired. His legs just swung back and forth, weakly.
The soldier tilted his head, studying the child like a broken tool.
"You people really don't understand," he muttered, voice flat under his helmet.
"There's no 'where.' Not anymore."
He threw the boy.
Not far.
Just enough.
The fall was short.
The cracking sound wasn't.
Somewhere on the west side of the village, a woman set herself on fire rather than let the soldiers touch her. She knelt by the lake with an oil jug, whispered a final prayer, and lit the flame. She didn't scream as she burned—she stared straight ahead, refusing to give the soldiers anything. The flames reflected off the lake surface like she was already a ghost.
The soldiers watched.
One of them shrugged.
"Less cleanup."
They were just dying.
One by one.
Street by street.
Home by home.
The Dominion wasn't fighting an enemy.
They weren't battling warriors.
They were emptying a place.
Erasing it.
Methodically.
Completely.
Kagekawa wasn't burning by accident.
It was being removed.
And the flames kept walking forward.
Hours later, when the last scream had bled out into silence and the smoke settled into the mountain's bones, the soldiers planted a single Dominion flag in what used to be Kagekawa's main square. They chose the highest mound of rubble—a collapsed communal hall—still warm from the fires beneath it. The pole punched through bodies hidden under the ash, sliding into the earth with a wet sound, and the fabric unfurled in the evening wind. Red cloth, black emblem. It snapped once, sharply, like a whip across the empty streets. The flames reflected off its surface, making the sigil seem alive—watching, judging. The breeze carried the cloth outward, letting the symbol stretch proudly above the ruins, its edges flickering against the dying light as if hungry for more.
Every direction around it was ruin. Stone cracked open like bones. Homes flattened. Family shrines smeared into the dirt. A whole history ground down to a smear of soot. But the flag stood untouched, perfect, elevated above the corpses as if to mock them. It waved with slow, unbothered rhythm, announcing to the mountain—and to anyone who might dare listen—that this was the shape of order. This was the lesson. This was what happened to places that forgot their place.
The wind rose, carrying ash in spirals around the pole, and the flag billowed wider, brighter, heavier. It didn't tremble with regret. It didn't flutter with mourning. It simply claimed.
Claimed the land.
Claimed the dead.
Claimed the future.
And as the night finally swallowed the valley, the Dominion emblem kept waving steadily in the darkness—like a single, unblinking eye that promised more.