The port of Beenari reeked of rain-soaked blood, boiling seaweed, and wet rust. Every building leaned like it was trying to escape itself. Mold clawed out from behind splintered shutters. The streets hiccuped with crooked music and the hush of things pretending to be forgotten.
Kazuya stepped off the ferry without a word. His scarf dragged wet lines in the wind. The first man he saw was dying—folded over on the dock, red blooming from his gut like ink in snow. His opponent stood calm, wiping his blade. Elegance in his final movement. No celebration. Just a nod. The crowd murmured: Painter's Signature.
Kazuya watched the technique, then turned away like the name meant nothing.
Somewhere across the street, half-buried in fog and muttering through cracked teeth, a missing-nin wrapped in layered ponchos tracked his shape from a rooftop chimney. Mizuki. His fingers twitched on the pommel under his cloak, and his smile bent like a blade left out in the rain.
Inside the city's maze, Kazuya moved past food stalls, garish inns, and street girls pretending not to see the blade at his hip. He walked until the path narrowed and the signage curled into symbols only the desperate could read. He found the brothel behind two wilted paper lanterns and a slit-mouthed fox etched into the sliding door lintel. No name. Just a pulse beneath the wood.
He stepped inside.
A painted oiran in violet robes and pearled skin stepped toward him smiling professionally. "We have girls from five provinces," she purred. "And two boys from islands that don't show up on any map. What flavor of hunger are you hiding tonight?"
"I want to speak to Madame Kaji," Kazuya said.
"You make appointments with the living. Not with rumors."
"I'll wait."
He paid in full, refused company, and was taken to a high corner room under a leaking paper lantern. He sat cross-legged facing the wall, blade across his knees, every breath folded between the ache in his ribs and the noise of fractured pleasure bleeding through the thin halls beyond him.
Hours passed.
Eventually she came.
Madame Kaji entered with the stillness of someone who'd had enough lovers and enough grudges to tell both apart just by smell. Her kimono was tight and oil-slick black, the cuffs embroidered in foxes hunting snakes. She leaned in the doorway, took one look at him, and sighed.
"You don't even know what you've brought into my house, do you?"
"I brought coin. You have privacy. That's all either of us need."
"I know who you are. Or who they say you are," she said softly. "I've heard of the specter's edge. But every man who walks in here carrying a legend eventually shows me he's just another ruin trying not to need something."
Kazuya didn't reply.
She turned and gestured for him to follow. Down the corridor, up a narrow servant ladder, through joists carved years ago by peepers and collectors. She lifted a panel to show the crawlspace above the sleeping rooms—the hollow above desire.
Below them: monks weeping in a woman's lap. A war hero asking to be tied. A clan heir sobbing for forgiveness into someone else's hands. Lust had rules here, but none of them were written.
"I don't sell shame," Kaji whispered. "Just release."
Kazuya's reply came like steel dragged across dirt. "I'm not here for softness. I don't need want. I have purpose."
"If all you are is purpose," she said, watching him, "then all you'll ever leave behind is blood."
Back in his room, she tossed him a paper scrap and a broken reed brush. "If you're too proud to name what you want out loud, then write it."
Kazuya didn't hesitate. He took out his blade and pressed the sharpened edge into the parchment. The carving wasn't precise — it was personal.
Abijah Fowler.
The name looked ugly in the flicker of oil light.
Her expression froze.
He saw it. And said nothing.
"You're not the first to come looking for him," she said, voice brittle. "But he's seen by fewer than ever return. I won't help you put steel to the spine of the man who funds half my survival."
"He funds pain," Kazuya murmured, eyes unwavering. "You protect currency. I end legacies."
"I've housed worse than Fowler," she spat. "You want a list? You think I haven't had girls picked apart by men who only finish with a scream in the bedding? If I killed them all, I'd wear my joints to ash."
That's when he gave her the second name.
Heiji Shinjou.
She paused.
"I took his arm," he added softly. "He won't touch your girls again."
She turned. The air was heavier now. She walked toward the screen. When she spoke again, it had the weight of a favor begged and buried.
"You want Fowler? I'll show you where to crawl. But first, you clean something that's been rotting in my doorstep for too long."
She walked him through the alleys to a hill above a massive gambling house at the edge of Beenari's Eastern Quarter. Three-tiered. Fortified courtyard. Run by a subhuman demigod of a yakuza boss named Hamata.
He kept a girl. Deaf. Mute. Barely old enough to carry grief properly. Name was Kinuyo. She'd been Kaji's once. Before being bartered. Now she lived in plasters and bruises and sleepless cold.
Kazuya assumed Kaji wanted revenge.
But she turned slowly and shook her head.
"Hamata isn't stupid. Killing him will put a thousand knives at my throat. But if Kinuyo dies quietly…"
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
Kazuya didn't answer. He just walked away.
Back at the brothel, he was preparing when the door slid open again.
A girl entered. Slender. Sharp-eyed. Painted.
She bowed with perfect precision.
Then smiled with a curve he'd seen before.
Akemi.
She said everything without saying it. Shimmying around the edge of his name. Pretending not to know, but also pretending not to pretend.
She poured him sake. Tried to share it. Pushed her praise into his scars. He let her talk. Let her try.
"It's kind of poetic," she said eventually. "That the ghost killed the swordsman. That Taeko died for something as small as pride."
"He isn't dead," Kazuya replied coldly.
Her gaze faltered.
"You failed before you picked where to strike."
He struck first this time. Flipped her to the floor in half a breath, her hair dragging her beauty into disarray. He bound her wrists with the scarf she mocked earlier. Tossed her to the bed and walked out.
The city was quiet by then. Or quieter.
At Hamata's house, he crawled through smoke ducts and rafters. Passed over the sighs of tortured laughter and the stifled coughs of addicts trying not to move. Found her—Kinuyo—unmoving, except for a few flickers of pain tugging at her mouth.
She was lying beneath moxibustion coils. Her skin bubbled along her ribs. Her eyes didn't blink until he dropped in.
She didn't scream. Too afraid, or too conditioned.
He knelt beside her. Signed "I love you" with his gloved hands.
She flinched.
He waited.
She stared at the door. Then took his hand.
The firelight caught the edges of her eyes as she leaned in with a sigh.
He exhaled once, closed his eyes, and snapped her neck swiftly between his palms.
It took less than a second.
But the weight came after.
He remained cradling her for a long moment. When it passed, he arranged the scene. Took the guard he'd stabbed with her hairpin and rolled him next to her. Twisted the angle of her shoulders just so. Made it look like struggle. Panic. Fatal mistake between two people no one would miss.
On his way out, a small boy selling rice muted under the eaves said quietly, "You smell like wrong."
Kazuya pressed a single coin into the boy's palm. "Go tell them there's been an accident."
He returned to the brothel with blood dried into the seam of his collar, eyes dim with something halfway between exhaustion and everything else.
"It's done," he muttered.
Madame Kaji bowed her head once. Handed him a map with ink lines that flickered like veins.
Use the ash in the vial, she said. There's a wall at Tanabe's northeast tower. Push where the stone flattens. Behind it is the only way Fowler doesn't know exists.
He turned.
Akemi met him in the hallway, unfettered, confused, furious. "You killed a girl," she said.
"No," he answered, emotionless. "I killed the cage that would've outlasted her."
Then he smelled it. Heard it.
Screams outside. Boots hammering into gravel. Voices barking in rhythm.
One of Hamata's Thousand Claws had seen him. The boy had talked. The army had come.
Kaji didn't scream.
She blew out the candle behind her and closed the front gate with both hands.
Kazuya stood, facing the sound of iron.
And drew slowly, deliberately, like a grave opening.
Steel met breath.
And the ghost walked forward into more blood.