My palms glistened red, the warmth clinging like it belonged there. The stench—sharp, metallic—filled my lungs. Not my blood. Theirs. Innocent lives, now stillness at my feet.
How? Why? When?
I lifted my head. Zenk lay broken—windows shattered, mechcarts smashed into walls, their brass shells cracked, arc-reactors hissing with leaking plasma that stung the air. Crimson streaks painted the cobblestones, trailing to bodies scattered in the streets. Women. Men. Children. Their faces locked in terror.
I had done this. But something else had moved my hands.
I dropped to my knees and wept—for the ruin I'd wrought, the lives I'd stolen, the choice I could never undo. My mind dragged me back three nights, to the moment I made the pact. That's where I met it—the entity that smiled like it already owned me.
"You did this," I choked into the blood-soaked air. "You possessed me."
It gave no answer. Only silence—heavy, deliberate—as if my need for truth amused it.
The morning my parents left for Kinmura, my father stood at our gate, adjusting his travel cloak. "Look after the house, Akihiro." His calloused hand—strange on a wealthy man—rested briefly on my shoulder. "Take care of what matters, son."
I nodded from beneath silk covers, believing it a simple task. Our house in Kutogane gleamed with polished cedar floors and paper walls painted with cranes. Maids moved like shadows through rooms that smelled of sandalwood and prosperity.
But they never returned.
The messenger brought news of the carriage accident on a gray morning that tasted of ash. By nightfall, the neighbors swarmed in like carrion birds, finally unleashing years of swallowed resentment.
"Always thought they were better than us," old Watanabe muttered as he pocketed my father's ivory pipe. "Staying in Kutogane when they could afford Kinmura—what was that but showing off?"
They stripped our home bare. The crane-painted walls, my father's ceremonial swords, my mother's silk kimonos—even the koi from our pond, scooped into buckets like common fish. I watched, too stunned by grief to understand I was witnessing my own destruction.
The creditors came next. Then the streets. Then hunger.
I learned quickly that the world had no patience for fallen nobility. Three years ground by—silk to rags, comfort to cold cobblestones. When shame finally drove me from Kutogane, I thought Zenk might offer anonymity. Instead, I found fresh mockery.
"Rich boy," they called me. "Silk fingers." As if poverty hadn't already scraped those soft hands raw.
Three nights ago, it found me on Zenk's outskirts.
I'd been searching through refuse behind the mechanist's shop when Jo's voice cut through the evening air: "You missed a spot, Your Lordship. There's a moldy crust under the gears there."
He stood with his usual crowd—dockworkers still grimy from their shifts, brass buttons on their coats reflecting the gaslight. Jo himself wore a leather jacket patched so many times it looked like piecework, a chain of mechcart keys hanging from his belt like trophies.
I said nothing. My education had taught me philosophy, literature, mathematics—but not how to answer this particular cruelty.
"What's wrong? Gone mute?" Jo's grin was all teeth. "Or maybe you're composing poetry about your tragic fall? 'Oh, woe is me, I used to have servants—'"
"Leave it alone, Jo," someone muttered. "Boy's had enough."
But Jo had tasted blood. "Enough? His family lived like kings while our children went hungry. You remember his mother, parading through the market in those silk robes? Buying the finest cuts while we scraped for scraps?" His voice turned knife-sharp. "And his father—oh, the great philanthropist—donating just enough to make himself feel noble while hoarding the rest."
My hands clenched. Something cold stirred in my chest.
"They got what they deserved," Jo continued. "That carriage accident was justice. Only mistake was not taking their spoiled brat with them."
The words hit like physical blows. I tried to walk away, but Jo's voice followed:
"Maybe you should join them in the ground, silk boy. Do us all a favor."
I stopped. Turned. My voice came out steady, quiet: "Say that again."
Jo's grin widened. "I said maybe you should—"
The rest of his words disappeared into blackness. When my vision cleared, Jo's head rolled across the cobblestones, his body crumpling beside the mechcart he'd been leaning against. Blood sprayed the brass fittings, hissing where it touched hot metal.
My hands—not my hands—were covered in red.
The screaming started then. The running. But the darkness came for me again, and when it lifted, I stood in the ruins of Zenk itself.
Now, kneeling in the blood-soaked streets, I felt the entity's presence coiled in my chest like a parasite. Cold. Patient. Satisfied.
After my parents died, I had dreamed of power—not the brutal kind that destroyed, but the quiet authority that commanded respect. I had wanted to rebuild, to matter again. Instead, I had become an instrument of slaughter.
"Why?" I whispered to the thing inside me. "Why show yourself as light? Why pretend to be salvation?"
For the first time, it answered—not in words, but in images that flooded my mind. I saw myself as it saw me: a perfect vessel of rage and grief, ripe for harvest. I saw the moment it had chosen me, not on Zenk's outskirts, but years earlier—watching my slow descent, waiting for desperation to ripen into something useful.
It had never intended to give me power. Only to borrow my body for its own purposes.
The revelation should have broken me. Instead, something else began to stir in the ruined air around me. Shadows crept along the cobblestones—not cast by any light, but moving with purpose. The blood on my hands turned black as ink, and a low hum filled the air like distant mourning bells.
The entity inside me recoiled for the first time, its confidence wavering.
"What—" I started to say, but my voice sounded hollow, distant. The world blurred at the edges, reality bending inward. I could feel it now—a pull, inexorable and dark, tugging at something deep in my soul.
This wasn't the entity's doing. This was something else. Something that came for those who had spilled innocent blood, regardless of whether they had chosen to or not.
The shadows reached for me with tendrils of absolute darkness. I tried to stand, to run, but my limbs felt like lead. The hum grew louder, and I understood with growing horror that justice—or perhaps something far older than justice—had finally arrived.
The darkness swallowed me whole, and the last thing I saw was Zenk disappearing into a void of black—as if the world itself was rejecting what I had become.
But in that final moment, as the entity's presence writhed in panic within my chest, I felt something I hadn't experienced in years:
Hope.
Perhaps this new darkness would destroy me. But it might also destroy the thing that had made me its puppet.
Either way, the slaughter would end.