Murakumo
The man stood before me, his face a shadowed mask, hiding his identity—or a terrible truth. His presence was a heavy weight. His voice, when he spoke, was a deep, husky, and resonant rumble, intrinsically scary yet undeniably powerful.
"It's been a while, but seeing you now, my long search was worth it," he drawled, his words a chilling, final menace that knotted my stomach.
A heavy silence followed, broken by my shaky breath. "Do I know you?" I asked after a prolonged hesitation. An inexplicable, visceral feeling screamed the undeniable truth: I know this man.
Even though his face was shrouded, I could almost feel the cold, cruel curve of his malicious grin.
"Ahh, you and I go way back," he replied, his voice jarringly excited yet dripping with sarcasm and malicious intent—the sound of a predator.
"What do you want?" I asked, anxiety finally cracking my composure. His overwhelming, ancient presence made fighting unthinkable. His claim of knowing me immediately linked him to the previous incarnation who gave me this cursed power and to her gruesome death. He was a dangerous consequence of that past life, perhaps here to finish me off too.
"I want you to come with me," he offered, his voice smoothing into a seductive pitch. "I can show you how to wield your power—a power these fools could never grasp or control."
I took a deliberate, steadying breath. "I don't know who you are, but I'm not going anywhere with you. You may leave," I commanded, injecting every ounce of cold, threatening seriousness I could muster into my voice.
Slowly, deliberately, he raised his gaze, finally lifting his head to allow me to see his face. The breath hitched in my throat. His eyes were not human; they were a shocking, luminous crimson glowing with malevolent intelligence, and his mouth stretched into a massive scar all the way up to his eye with fangs sticking out like some kind of monster. His skin was marred by intricate, jet-black markings—they looked like ancient, ritualistic writings, or perhaps, the natural texture of a being that defied human classification. He was not a man; he was something else entirely. His smile was a nightmare made real, an inhuman, predatory grimace—the triumphant expression of a killer who hunted for sport.
"Then, I'll have to take you," he stated, his voice devoid of any warmth, "and kill everybody else."
The terrifying clarity of my purpose slammed into me: I needed to fight, but fear locked my body, freezing me in place. I had no idea how to call upon the Something, how to activate its power. It could very well just decide not to come out and lend me its power at all out of sheer spite. This being's raw, cursed energy was on an entirely different plane of existence, and I was incapable of wielding my full power in a real combat situation yet. I fought to maintain my composure, refusing to let him see the fear that was a bitter taste in my mouth—though I was certain he could already smell it.
Before he could make a move, I lashed out. I channeled my nascent energy and unleashed a blinding, focused blast. The impact was cataclysmic, causing the very ground around him to explode and erupting a colossal cloud of dust and debris. I stared at the swirling, brown tempest, my heart hammering, desperately waiting to see if my reckless attack had accomplished anything. When the dust finally began to settle, revealing the cleared space, a fresh wave of shock hit me: he was gone. How could he possibly dodge that?
Then, a cold pressure snapped around my throat. He had appeared instantly, silently, directly behind me. It had all happened in a fraction of a second, too fast for my mind to even register the movement. His hand was clamped on my windpipe, and I felt the sickening sting of his long, curved claws sinking into my flesh. I was utterly paralyzed, too consumed by terror to even attempt to turn my head and look at him.
"Nice try," he said, his voice now calm and dripping with a patronizing sarcasm. He sounded incredibly bored, yet beneath the indifference, I sensed a deep amusement at my pathetic, futile attempt to attack him. "But you are coming with me now."
At that critical, paralyzing moment, a blur of motion announced the arrival of Hisakage. He must have heard the deafening blast. He rushed into the scene,his face a mask of determined fury, ready to launch a powerful blow of his Aspect at my attacker without a moment's hesitation. He launched himself forward, but then…
I couldn't scream at first. The shock was too profound, leaving my body numb and incapable of action. I don't know how long I was suspended in that frozen state—seconds, maybe—but time seemed to stretch, pulling the event into agonizing slow motion. Hisakage's head separated from his body with impossible speed and precision, hitting the ground with a soft, sickening thud right next to his torso.
A raw, guttural scream finally tore itself from my throat. I watched the head roll slightly on the dust-caked earth, my face instantly splattered with a warm, visceral spray of blood. My best friend, gone, erased in less than a blink of an eye. I couldn't even process the event; it was too fast. My attacker hadn't even appeared to move. How did he sever his head off so fast? I had never, in all the texts and training, encountered an Aspect like that.
That was the moment the final, terrifying realization settled in my soul: the legends of the true demons were true.
As more bearers rushed blindly into the courtyard, drawn by the sound of the fight, the only sound I could manage was a ragged, desperate scream for them to stop. But I was too late. Dismembered body parts began to fly through the air; blood sprayed and smeared across the stone courtyard. All of it unfolded with such blinding speed that none of them stood a chance. My body began to shake violently, seized by shock. He hadn't lifted a finger, hadn't uttered a spell, yet they were all dead. It was as if an imaginary force moving at an inconceivable velocity and precision reshaping matter and space making bodies implode and fall apart in every shape of form, moving at an inconceivable velocity and precision.
A deep, resonant, evil laugh echoed from behind me.
"Pathetic," he sneered, clearly pleased with his effortless massacre. "And these people are supposed to be one of the strongest houses in the bearer world." His tone was deeply annoyed by the utter failure of my house members to put up any semblance of a fight against him.
My brain was a block of ice, frozen from the trauma. I couldn't think, couldn't plan. I was supposed to be the one protecting them, not the other way around. I felt truly pathetic, helpless, and utterly useless.
''Why won't you come out already damn it!?'' I managed the desperate scream.
As the last few sorcerers continued to rush in from the compound, a clear sadistic enjoyment began to flicker in his crimson eyes. His focus shifted, and he lowered his guard—just enough. That sliver of opportunity was all I needed. I instantly collected every last reserve of my Aspect and released a desperate, high-powered blast outward around my body, a sphere of concussive force that slammed into him, sending him rocketing backward into the stone wall with a shattering impact.
I launched myself high into the air, finally ready to fight, to unleash whatever power I had left, but a blood-soaked cry ripped through the air. The Chief, his arm a mangled stump, blood squirting rhythmically from the wound, screamed up at me:
"You have to run!"
Staring at him in frozen disbelief, a cold dread overwhelmed me. Logic screamed to fight, but a chilling certainty paralyzed me: we couldn't win against this ancient demon. If the collective's master bearers failed to even scratch him, my hope was delusional. My mind scrambled for a suicidal, defiant last stand.
But I couldn't finish that thought. It was violently, sickeningly severed by the sound of the same manic, sadistic laughter that had echoed just moments before a handful of my house members. ''You bearers are all the same. Mistaking structure with power and stability. With all that misconception you fail to realise that true power is in pure unstructured chaos''
—faces I knew, names I'd spoken—were reduced to countless, unrecognizable pieces of flesh and bone. He was there, a shadow against the dying light, his eyes, pits of absolute malice, fixed solely on me. He was ready. Ready to take me, to finish off every last soul present, not for some grand, dark purpose, but simply for the hell of it. And in that horrifying realization, a clear, desperate path opened: That was my chance. I saw it—he had come for me, not the others.
If I fled now, if I turned and ran into the wilderness, his perverse fixation would shift. He would follow the prize, and their lives, the precious few remaining, would be spared, at least for a while.
My gaze snapped down to Yokojon, the chief, who stood steadfast beside me. He looked back, his usually stern face etched with sorrow and fierce resolve. In his eyes, a flicker of understanding passed between us, a wordless communication that delivered the exact, agonizing message I needed to hear: Go.
In the next instant, he moved. Yokojon launched an attack, a concentrated blast of pure kinetic force, a chief-level spell that would have pulverized a stone fortress. The demon, with an air of utter boredom, casually raised a hand and blocked the surge, the powerful blast simply dissipating against his skin like mist.
But the chief of the Yakojon house was a legend for a reason—a clever, immensely powerful man. He knew this was not a fight to win; it was a distraction to buy. He was ready to fight until his final breath, a sacrifice for his people. His subsequent attacks were stunningly powerful, precise, and relentless. He moved with the agility of a jungle cat, not the elder he was.
His sheer speed and unexpected ferocity surprised even the demon, who, for the first time since his arrival, actually had to move, dodging a razor-sharp strike to his head, then weaving back to avoid a retaliatory energy burst aimed at his chest.
This was the moment. The demon was momentarily, infinitesimally, distracted. I had to use this sliver of opportunity for my escape. I turned, not daring to look back. Guilt was already a physical weight on my shoulders, a poison I knew would never leave me, and looking back would have cemented my failure.
I ran, pushing through the terrified, exhausted crowd of remaining bearers. They were giving everything they had left, forming a desperate shield to defend their chief, who was fighting his magnificent, doomed battle against the relentless offender. The demon, however, seemed merely irritated, his movements fluid, almost lazy. This grand struggle was, to him, mere child's play.
Then came the final, sickening sound—a flash of movement too fast for the eye, and a brutal explosion of flash and bone It was over.
The chief of the Yakojon house collapsed, only half of his body intact, his face upturned, frozen in an expression of raw, primal terror, now lifeless. That horrific image was the last thing my eyes registered before I threw myself over the battle lines, plunging headlong into the dense, dark forest in a desperate, panicked attempt to escape.
I ran for what felt like hours, my lungs burning, the sound of my own frantic panting deafening. Then, a sudden, blessed stillness. I no longer felt the oppressive, chilling presence of the demon behind me. For a split second—a moment of dangerous, delirious hope—I thought I had lost him. I staggered to a stop, leaning against a rough bark, trying to pull air into my ragged lungs.
It was then he appeared. Not a shadow, not a sound, but right there, a step in front of me, leaning against the same tree, as if he had been waiting patiently.
I gasped, halting mid-breath. He slowly, fastidiously, wiped a single drip of blood—Yokojon's, no doubt—from the corner of his lips with a long, pale finger and smiled. It was not a warm smile; it was a predator's baring, a horrifying display. I could see his elongated fangs, sharp as surgical steel, as his smile stretched unnaturally wide across his face, a mask of pure, amused cruelty.
"Let's talk this out, shall we?" he said, his voice soft, patronizing, and laced with an annoying patience that chilled me to the core. "There is no need for either of us to..."
He never got to finish the sentence. My survival instinct, finally breaking through the terror, took over. Before the last syllable left his mouth, I slammed a massive, jagged boulder from the forest floor directly into his chest. The boulder hit him with the force of a battering ram, but instead of crushing him, the rock itself shattered. It broke in half upon contact with his body, sliced cleanly apart as if struck by some gigantic, invisible knife.
By the time he registered the shock of my desperate move—a flicker of genuine, offended surprise in his eyes—I was already sprinting through the woods again, the adrenaline surging, my heart hammering against my ribs. I was nothing more than a terrified, panting prey running from the hungry predator.
His laughter began then, echoing everywhere, bouncing off the trees, seeming to come from the sky, the ground, everywhere and nowhere at once. It was a terrifying, mocking chorus that made me question my sanity. I ran faster, blindly, desperate to escape the sound, the chase, the inevitable capture.
And then I was falling.
In my panic, I slipped on a patch of slick moss covering a hidden rock and failed to take a sharp turn in the path. The momentum carried me forward, not onto the path, but off the sudden, unseen edge of a cliff. I plunged into the void, the last sensation a blinding, excruciating pain as my body struck a sharp, protruding stone at the bottom of the drop.
Then, mercifully, everything went dark.