The rain was warm.
It poured over the ragged hole where his throat used to be, and slid down the inside of his chest like someone rinsing a fresh carcass.
Karasu was still upright only because the spears refused to let him fall.
Seven yari had found their marks with the calm, practiced patience of men who had done this to crows before.
He looked like death already: short, messy gray hair plastered to his head, pale skin, and his lean frame wrapped in soaked black shinobi robes that clung to every rib and tendon.
Eyes black, utterly black, hollow, like the last dying embers in a fire that had gone out hours ago.
A long jagged scar cut across the bridge of his nose like a careless signature.
One spear had punched through the soft flesh under his left collarbone and out the back, nailing him to the tree trunk like a black rag.
Another had slid between two ribs on the right, grated across his lung, and kept going until the tip scraped bark.
A third had opened his belly from sternum to his thigh in one long, deliberate draw; the cut gaped like two wet red tomato slices on top of each other, and the intestines spilled out in hot, slippery, red, mushy ropes steaming on the mud.
He had gathered them once, twice, stuffed them back in with his blood-soaked fingers the way a man stuffs wet laundry into a basket.
They kept sliding out again, lazy, curious, as if they had somewhere better to be.
More steel followed: thigh, kidney, liver, spine.
The last one came from the captain himself, katana angled up beneath the ribs, a soft wet crunch as it found the heart and twisted once, just to be thorough.
The heart fluttered, tried again out of habit, then gave up.
Karasu tasted blood, sweat, and the faint sweet rot of the forest trees soaked in rain.
He did not scream.
He only watched the blood run down the spear shafts in perfect, even streams and thought, very calmly:
Mission complete.
Two weeks ago, on a moonless bridge over a black water stream in his mainland's capital, a woman in a plain indigo kimono and hair tied up neatly in a bun with a hairpin had stepped out of the shadows.
No crest, no words.
She had bowed once, pressed a folded square of paper into his palm, and vanished in seconds.
Black wax, no seal.
Three lines inside.
The investigation of Lord Tadayoshi has concluded. Tadayoshi had been informing about routes, numbers, names, and evidence. Exterminate the lord, the wife, the aides, the records. Anything that breathes or can be read must burn to ash.
That was all.
A regular order from his clan.
He had walked into the estate at dusk wearing the face of a young, deaf servant people barely ever see, and poisoned that nights dinner, making everyone fall asleep.
He had started in the record room, pouring oil across every scroll, every ledger, every map until all the papers, shelves, and floor soaked it up and set it a blaze.
as Karasu was going to leave and head upstairs, he heard what sounded like panicked breathing in the room. He turned and looked at the door. A man was hiding behind it. It was the record keeper. The record-keeper ran and tried to crawl under his desk for a weapon. Karasu dragged him out by the topknot, and ripped out his tongue, nailing the wet pink slab to the man's own ledger with his weapon under the desk, and kicked him into the spreading fire.
Then he had gone upstairs.
The Mistress woke to the blade already halfway through her throat.
Her mouth opened wide; only a wet, bubbling gurgled scream came out.
Blood dripping down the silk, soaking the futon red.
He held her eyes until the light went out.
The chief aide fought well.
Karasu took his time: tendons behind the knees first, then the sword hand, finger by finger, feeding each one to the flames while the man screamed through clenched teeth.
When the roof beams began to fall, he left the aide crawling in a slow death.
Lord Akutsu had pissed himself and begged on the burning tatami, snot and tears mixing with the smoke.
Karasu forced his head back by the hair and made him watch twenty years of secrets burn to the ground alongside his entire life.
Then he drew the tanto across the belly in one slow, deliberate line, reached in, and pulled until the screaming stopped.
He had walked out through the front gate while the entire estate folded into a mountain of flames behind him.
No witnesses.
No records.
No loose ends.
Clean.
So when the capital pursuit team finally ran him to ground in the forest and turned him into a lattice of iron and meat, he felt only the quiet, professional satisfaction of a tool that had performed exactly as intended.
Then the world ended.
Not with darkness.
Not with light.
Just… stopped.
One second, he was a bleeding scarecrow nailed to a tree.
The next thing he knew, he was sitting in a hard wooden chair bolted to a grey floor that stretched into nothing.
No walls.
No ceiling.
Only dust drifting in the air that had never known warmth and an oddly well-kept grey door a few meters behind him.
Twenty paces ahead, a metal desk beneath a single buzzing lightbulb.
Behind it sat the man.
a dark blue Pinstripe suit, knife-sharp.
White hair spiked and unkept.
Thick black glasses.
Cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke curling upward forever, searching for a ceiling that would never come.
He sighed, a long, exhausted sound that had been tired since the first soul ever arrived late, and took a slow drag.
Exhaled through his nose.
"Another one," he muttered, voice flat, irritated, the tone of a man who has filled out the same form since before stars learned how to die.
Tapped ash into a spotless glass tray.
The ash hung, refusing to fall.
Didn't look up.
"Name?"
Karasu opened his mouth.
Nothing.
The man still didn't raise his eyes.
"No name. Fine. Tools rarely keep them."
Quill scratched across paper, loud as a nail dragging against stone.
"Origin?"
Silence.
A deeper sigh, almost a growl.
He finally looked up.
Crimson eyes, the exact color of a red silk cloth held up to lantern light, bored straight into the dying embers of Karasu's eyes.
"Foreign world. Anomalous signature. Naturally."
He rubbed the bridge of his nose like the motion hurt.
"its Always you strays, do you have any idea how much of a hassle you souls are?." he sighed taking a drag from his cigarette
"Hmmmm..well then," the man scoffed
He slapped a single sheet down.
REJECTED.
No explanation.
No appeal.
He lifted the heavy wooden stamp, turning it once with his pale fingers like the motion itself bored him.
The stamp fell.
CRACK.
The grey Door opened, and then Karasu was sucked through.
Karasu fell through darkness that tasted of rust and old grief.
And came crashing down from the sky like a meteor.
White bone-dust exploded around his tabi shoes and settled instantly, as though the ground refused to remember he had ever stood there.
He stood in a desert that was as white as bone beneath a starless dark blue sky.
Petrified trees clawed upward, weaving a canopy that looked like it was almost pulsing like a heart.
The air tasted of rust, grief, and the sweet rot that never quite leaves a place.
A wind with no temperature stirred the black shinobi cloth that had re-formed across his body.
Something vast and hollow opened behind his ribs (patient, quiet, already measuring).
A voice, ancient, genderless, infinitely bored, spoke inside his skull.
[Irregular soul rejected.
Name: Karasu.
Location: The Mire — Ashen Wastes.
Directive: none.
Expected outcome: dissolution.
Begin.]
Karasu exhaled once.
The bone-sand dust erased his footprints before they were finished.
Far away, black iron ribs jutted from the white sea and what appeared to look like some type of ship wreck in the far distance.
He started walking.
No courier.
No next letter.
No master.
For the first time in his life, there was no mission, but a place where souls rot.