It's been over a decade since the curse took root.
A festered rot that began in his right hand—now severed—after faces began to bloom in his flesh like grotesque tumors, their wailing mouths stitched with nerves, whispering in unison.
"Justice... give us justice..."
He carved them out.
He burned them.
He even cut the arm clean off, severing the flesh that dared to betray him.
But the voice always came back.
It was never just a voice; it was a feeling, a pervasive chill, the phantom grip of skeletal fingers clutching at his soul.
Tonight, like every cursed night, he sought refuge in the warm, fleeting comfort of a woman in the red-light district—one of the few who still pretended not to see the flickering shadows hanging around him, the lingering scent of ash and fear that clung to his very being.
The room was dim, lit by a single, flickering oil lamp.
Perfumed smoke, thick with the cloying sweetness of opium and cheap perfume, clung to the silk curtains, making the air heavy and cloying.
The scent of sweat, incense, and rot—the omnipresent stench of decay that followed him like a loyal hound—he'd gotten used to it.
Desensitized.
She slept beside him, her breathing soft and even, utterly motionless, unaware of the inferno that burned within him.
He woke with a gasp, drenched in sweat, his skin crawling as if covered in a thousand scurrying ants.
A pressure behind his eyes, a dull, throbbing ache that threatened to split his skull.
A buzzing sensation vibrated in his teeth, vibrating through his very bones.
He stumbled from the bed, his steps cracking softly on the wooden floor.
He made his way to the tarnished copper sink in the corner of the room.
He filled a glass with lukewarm water, drank it down in desperate gulps, then splashed the rest onto his face, trying to wash away the creeping dread.
Then he looked up.
The mirror.
Behind him—
A woman stood.
Silent.
Absolutely motionless.
Her skin was not skin; it was charred, blackened, cracked like cooling coal, thin tendrils of fire flickering eerily in the hollow of her torso.
A black, gaping void where her stomach had once been, a testament to unimaginable heat.
Inside that void: a tiny, skeletal form, curled and fused into her scorched ribs, a silent testament to a life never lived.
Her eyes were not eyes; they were melted, liquefied, running down her cheeks like dark, viscous tears.
Her mouth hung open as if it was still screaming—but no sound came out.
Until—
"You burned us."
He spun, magma already swelling in his fists, the heat intensifying, ready to incinerate the apparition—
But there was no arm.
His prosthetic, the one he had commissioned after cutting off the cursed flesh, was gone.
His left hand? Gone too.
Only a stump remained.
He looked down—his legs vanished before his eyes, his legs melting like hot wax, liquefying into a formless puddle on the floor.
He fell.
More of them emerged.
From behind the silk curtains, their forms blurring with the patterns.
Through the very walls, their skeletal limbs tearing through plaster.
Out from under the bed, crawling from the shadows with a grotesque agility.
Some were nothing but charred skulls on skeletal frames, their empty eye sockets burning with cold fury.
Some dragged half a torso, intestines trailing behind them like wet ropes, leaving slimy trails on the floor.
Some were still children, small and horribly disfigured, with melted dolls fused to their hands, their tiny fingers locked around the deformed plastic.
"Where is your justice now?" a chorus of voices shrieked, their whispers louder than any roar.
"Is this the law? The law of the innocent burning?"
"My baby. My baby was crying when you burned us. You heard her, didn't you?"
"We were civilians… we held no arms…"
"We were loyal… we raised no banners…"
"We begged… on our knees, we begged for mercy…"
He lay on the floor, completely bare—stripped of his coat, his power, his pride. Stripped of everything.
The burning woman, the first one, knelt over him.
Her body was a horrific tableau of blackened and cracked flesh, like a corpse left in a furnace for too long.
Her fingers—mere splinters of charred bone—pressed into his stomach, and with a horrible, wet pop, she plunged her hands inside him.
Gripped his heart.
Then pulled it out.
"Vice Admiral, you'll be fine without it, don't you?," she whispered, her voice a dry rasp of ash and resentment.
He screamed, a raw, primal sound, but it was muffled—another ghost, a hulking figure with a missing jaw, was straddling his chest, her hand shoved deep into his throat, holding his tongue like a leash.
His mouth stretched far too wide, cracking at the corners, blood bubbling between his teeth.
The pain was unbearable.
Around him, the dead began to feast.
They surrounded him, their forms pressing in, their mouths wide, tearing at him—not with claws, not with weapons, but with teeth.
Jagged, broken, smoke-stained teeth.
One ghost, a woman with a child's melted doll clutched in her charred hand, ripped open his abdomen with bare hands, spilling his intestines in steaming coils onto the floor.
A small child ghost—no more than five—bent over, picked up a piece of his colon, and bit into it like candy, chewing slowly, deliberately, while staring into Sakazuki's eyes with chilling malice.
Another spirit, its face a blackened void, scooped out his liver, its fingers dripping black ichor.
It licked the blood off its fingers with a sickening slurp, then shoved the organ back in—wrong way around—just to hear him scream harder.
"You burned us like meat," one rasped, its voice a dry cough.
"Now you're the meat."
They pulled out a length of intestine, stretching it between them like a skipping rope, cackling with dry, skeletal laughter.
Pulling it tight.
His own organs were passed around, shared, tasted, desecrated.
He saw their faces.
Each one was someone he had killed or abandoned.
Civilians.
Marines who had questioned his orders.
Children too young to understand.
Rebels who never lifted a weapon.
They all looked at him with an unquenchable fire of rage and resentment in their eyes.
"You said it was justice."
One of them—the ghost of a young Marine he had once ordered to die, her face still contorted in disbelief from the fatal blow—knelt close.
It reached out, its charred fingers brushing his face.
"I still believed in you," it whispered, its voice mournful, accusatory. Then, with a sickening crunch, it drove its fingers into his eye socket and twisted.
Every bite, every rip, wasn't just physical pain—it was memory.
Every time they tore him open, he relived the moment he gave the command.
The screams, the roaring fire, the crying children clinging to their parents, turning to ash.
His own trauma, his own atrocities, were turned back on him, tenfold, in this personal, burning hell.
But the sound became a siren.
He jerked awake.
The room was on fire.
Not in his nightmare, but in horrifying reality.
The wooden walls were blackened, charring rapidly.
The silk curtains had turned to ash, fluttering away in the rising heat.
The woman beside him—what was left of her—was twisted, her body half-melted to the floorboards, her mouth locked in a silent, eternally screaming rictus.
His magma powers, subconsciously active in his terror, had turned his nightmare into a blazing inferno.
Marines, alerted by the smoke and screams, stormed in, their rifles raised.
A Vice Admiral, pointing their weapon at him, a Vice Admiral.
"Vice Admiral Sakazuki… step away from the corpse!" One of the Marines, his voice strained with disbelief.
Sakazuki turned slowly, the smell of burned flesh thick and nauseating in his nose.
The mirror on the wall was cracked, spiderwebbed with scorch marks.
And behind him—
The burned woman stood again, perfectly intact in the reflection.
Still screaming silently.
He looked at his prosthetic hands—still glowing with residual magma, fresh blood sizzling on his fingers.
The scent of burned flesh clung to him, a constant reminder.
Outside, beyond the smoke-filled windows, the morning sun rose, a sickly, bloody red against the dawn sky.
The public would learn what happened that night—and rumors would spread through the ranks, through the streets.
"He's possessed."
"The Vice Admiral is cursed."
He was no longer just feared—he was pitied, or worse… mocked.
A figure of dread reduced to a tragic, haunted wreck.
The fires of his justice had finally come home.