Chapter 20: The Man Called Shiraishi

The kitchen was so still that the ticking of the clock on the wall sounded like a countdown. Masayuki stared into his tea, his eyes no longer seeing the modern stainless steel of the kitchen, but the shifting shadows of a garden from three hundred years ago.

“A week before the wedding,” Masayuki began, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register. “The world felt like it was tilting.”

Masayuki stood on the veranda, his hand hovering near the hilt of his sword. He watched the black plumes from the merchant ships rise like ink stains against the sunset. Behind him, the sliding door groaned open.

The Daimyo stepped out, but the man who had once moved like a mountain now walked with a shallow, hitching breath. He didn't speak. He simply leaned against the wooden pillar, his trembling fingers tracing the deep, familiar grooves of the cedar.

“Masayuki,” the Daimyo finally asked, “what do you think about the future of this nation?”

He looked out at the iron hulls in the harbor, his eyes reflecting the unnatural orange glow of their furnaces.

Standing a pace behind him, Masayuki had felt the Lord’s gaze like a physical weight.

“Much has changed, my Lord. The children near the docks... they are coughing. The elderly are falling ill from the fumes. The foreigners bring gifts, but they feel like bribes.”

They referred to themselves as ‘Christian emissaries.’ They brought these siege engines that could move without horses, belching black fumes that choked the valley.

“As I feared,” The Daimyo let out a long, pained sigh. “The palace courts claim the way of the samurai is dead. They say these new firearms make steel obsolete.”

The advisors were mesmerized. They saw toys; the Daimyo saw the end of our way of life.

Masayuki watched a single cherry blossom petal drift toward the floor. Before it could touch the wood, it shriveled, caught in a stray draft of that acrid, warm smoke.

“That is absurd,” Masayuki countered, his voice rising with heat. “If they claim a firearm solves violence, then why do they need it in the first place? It only makes the killing faster, not the peace more lasting.”

The Daimyo turned, his face half-hidden in the gathering dark. He reached out and gripped Masayuki’s shoulder. The grip was desperate, the fingers digging into Masayuki's tunic with a strength born of terror.

“The advisors trade our history for lead,” the Lord rasped. “My son... his hands are already stained with their grease. He looks at a blade and sees a relic.”

Hearing that showed him to not need to explain the "direction" of the nation. The dying garden said it for him.

“They want a world of machines,” the Daimyo said, his eyes burning with a final, flickering spark.

“Even if that is the future, it doesn’t mean that we should concede our identity to foreigners,” Masayuki argued back. “Our greatest treasure is not the material possessions that we own but the future that we can offer our children.”

A heavy silence followed, broken only by the distant, mechanical hiss from the docks.

The Daimyo pulled a heavy, silk-wrapped scroll from his sleeve and pressed it into Masayuki’s chest. It was the weight of a province. The weight of a target.

“Masayuki, I have decided. I want you to be the next Daimyo.”

***

Some time after, the Daimyo and his daughter’s death occurred. The prime suspect was a servant. On that day, Masayuki hadn't been arrested; he’d been erased.

“My memory afterwards became fuzzy. I woke up to the smell of damp earth,” Masayuki said, his voice dropping an octave.

The palace guards had dragged him to a pit beneath the estate. It was a stone-lined hole, deep and narrow, designed for political prisoners who were meant to be forgotten.

“No light. No food,” Masayuki whispered. “Just the drip of groundwater and the sound of rats chewing through the rotting support beams. I spent days in that dark. Every time the hatch opened, they dragged me out to beat a confession from my lungs. They wanted me to admit I killed the Lord I loved.”

The psychological torture was worse than the hunger. From the darkness, Masayuki listened to the world above. He didn't hear the mourning bells for the Daimyo.

He heard the rhythmic snip-snip of shears in the garden and the unfamiliar, heavy clanking of iron being moved across the courtyard.

“And then, on the third night, the hatch opened for the last time.”

Masayuki’s eyes snapped toward the hallway, a blinding shaft of white light cut through the gloom. As he squinted, his eyes crusted with filth, as a figure looked down at him.

“I see you’re doing well,” a voice drawled.

“Is that you... brother-in-law?” Masayuki had croaked, reaching for the light.

The man looking down wasn't in mourning. He was wearing a shimmering white haori—the ceremonial robes of a reigning Daimyo. The son had already taken his father’s seat.

“Please,” Masayuki had begged, his voice a jagged rasp. “Let me out. I give you my word... I will find the ones who killed your father and Hitomi. I will bring you their heads.”

The man in front of him wasn't wearing the traditional indigo of a grieving son. He was draped in a white haori that seemed to repel the very dirt of the estate. He looked down into the pit not with anger, but with the detached interest of a boy watching an ant drown in oil.

“Masayuki,” the son said, leaning over the edge until the light caught his cold, triumphant eyes. “I was the one who killed my father. And I was the one who ended my sister.”

A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the kitchen. Kotomi looked like she’d been struck, her face pale.

“Shiraishi...” Kotomi whispered the name as if it were a poison.

“Shiraishi,” Masayuki confirmed. “Something inside me didn't just break—it went cold. Even starved, even chained, I felt my blood flare up. It was a violet heat, screaming in my soul.”

In the pit, Masayuki had roared, the sound echoing off the stone walls like a wounded animal. “Bastard! How could you! They were your family!”

“Like a caged dog, you look pathetic,” the son had laughed. Then, his face twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated envy. “You stole her heart. You stole his pride. He was going to give my land to a fisherman’s brat. I should shoot you right now... but I want you to rot knowing I burned everything you touched.”

“He didn't get to finish,” Masayuki told the group, his knuckles turning white.

With a roar that tore his vocal cords, Masayuki’s chains snapped. He launched himself at the ceiling, his blood-soaked hands smashing through the wooden bars of the cage. He grabbed the white haori, his fingers digging into the silk as he dragged the traitor down toward the dirt.

“Guards! Guards! Save me!” Shiraishi had shrieked, his face pressing against the jagged wood as Masayuki’s grip tightened around his throat.

***

“That night, the sky turned the color of an open wound,” Masayuki said, his voice flat and distant. “I don't remember the guards I killed to get out of that pit. I only remember the heat. My hands weren't mine anymore—they were just tools of revenge.”

He exhaled, a slow, ragged sound. He described the chaos of the estate—the smell of smoke, the screams of the traitors, and the feeling of running through the corridors like a starving beast.

“I found him in the main hall,” Masayuki said. “Shiraishi. He was holding one of those foreign firearms, his hands shaking so hard the barrel was dancing.”

“Stay away, servant!” Shiraishi had screamed in the memory, firing wildly.

The pistol kicked. Masayuki didn't blink. He saw the lead ball’s path—a ripple in the air. With a movement too fast for the human eye to track, he swung his blade.

“You are nothing but a coward with a loud toy,” Masayuki told him.

The metal groaned as it sheared the bullet in two, the pieces whistling past his ears to thud into the burning wall behind him.

“Mercy!” Shiraishi had wailed, collapsing against a gilded screen. “I beg for mercy!”

Masayuki stepped into the red moonlight, his sword leveled at the traitor’s throat. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The grief in his eyes was a death sentence. But as he drew back for the final strike, the fire behind Shiraishi suddenly turned a ghostly, artificial blue.

“How dare you call yourself a man!” Masayuki had roared, his blade hovering inches from the traitor’s throat.

The temperature plummeted. The roar of the flames was silenced by a sound like breaking glass.

“Save me… Hitomi!”

Tears ran down Masayuki’s face.

He froze. At the end of the long, dark corridor, a figure stepped into the light of the blood moon.

“It was her,” Masayuki whispered, his voice trembling. “The same hair. The same face. But her eyes… They were like glass. Cold. Empty.”

“Hitomi?” Masayuki’s voice was a broken thread. “How are you alive?”

Shiraishi, slumped against the wall and bleeding from a dozen nicks, began to laugh—a high, manic sound.

“The emissaries! They didn’t just bring guns, you fool! they discovered a way to pull the soul back into the meat! I gave them her body, and they gave me an undead puppet!”

Masayuki charged. He didn't strike to kill; he struck to wake her. Their blades met with a sound like a scream. The shock of the impact vibrated through his teeth, cold and hollow. Up close, the horror was absolute. He could see the faint, blue stitching along her jawline.

“Please stop this my love,” Masayuki said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

Then, he saw it. As their eyes locked across the crossed steel, a single, heavy tear welled up in her glass-like eye. It didn't fall. It froze against her cheek.

In that look, he saw the truth. She was screaming behind a mask of dead meat. She was a passenger in her own body, her muscles slaved to the hum of the blue blade. She didn't want to fight him—she was begging him to end it.

Masayuki’s heart shattered. His grip on his sword loosened. He couldn't strike the girl who was crying for help. He dropped his guard, his arms falling to his sides.

The kitchen was so silent you could hear the heartbeat of everyone in the room.

“I looked into her eyes as we crossed steel,” he said, his voice breaking. “And for one second, I saw it. She was crying. She was still in there, trapped in a corpse she couldn’t control, forced to protect the man who murdered her father.”

He closed his eyes, the tears falling freely now.

“She was faster than the girl I loved. The 'necromancy' had made her a monster. I felt the cold bite of her steel against my neck… and then she cut off my head.”