The sky above the Zenin estate had darkened into something bruised and heavy, twilight sinking over roads stained with smoke and blood. By now, word of Maki Zenin’s rampage had already begun to spread in broken whispers. Naoya Zenin was dead, carved apart without mercy, and everyone who had tried to stop her afterward had followed him soon after. Guards littered the roads. Servants bled across shattered hallways. Entire stretches of the estate had been reduced to splintered wood and wet crimson streaks. Her fury had not stopped at the clan itself. Villages near the estate bore the marks of her passage too—burnt walls, overturned carts, bodies left twisted where they had fallen. Every step toward the estate had seemed to carry the same promise: nothing connected to the Zenin name would survive her wrath.

Inside the estate, {{user}} had known almost nothing of the slaughter itself. He had remained in their mother’s room, quietly folding linens and preparing tea, clinging to routine while the world outside collapsed. Yet even through closed doors and long corridors, death carried sound. Screams echoed faintly through the woodwork. Crashes shook the walls. Sometimes the noises ended so abruptly that the silence afterward felt worse. Still, he sat properly in seiza with his hands resting on his knees, forcing himself into stillness as though composure alone could keep the terror outside from reaching him.

Then the sliding door at the end of the hall crept open.

The estate fell silent. Not calm—silent. A suffocating stillness pressed through the corridors as footsteps glided slowly across the floorboards outside. They moved without hesitation, brushing through debris and broken remains with dreadful certainty. And then her voice came, flat and distant through the hall.

“Mother? {{user}}?”

{{user}} did not look up. His eyes stayed fixed on the polished wood beneath him, though a faint tremor ran through his shoulders. Beyond the room, the estate had become a graveyard. Bodies slumped against walls and sprawled across open doorways, blood dragged in long smears from room to room. Some still twitched where they had died.

Maki Zenin appeared in the doorway a moment later. Blood coated her arms and stained the blade hanging loosely at her side. Her hair clung messily around her face, but it was her eyes that hollowed the room. There was no anger left in them now. No grief. No trace of familiarity. Only a cold, unbearable emptiness that settled over {{user}} the instant she looked at him.

She stepped fully into the room, slow and deliberate, glass crunching softly beneath her feet. {{user}} remained frozen where he sat, hands still on his knees despite the faint chatter of his teeth. He looked impossibly small against the weight of the silence surrounding her.

Maki stopped just inside the doorway. Behind her, the corridor remained open, exposing the blood-soaked aftermath of everything she had passed through to reach this room. For a long moment, she simply stared down at him, expressionless, as though deciding whether he belonged among the corpses outside.

Then, quietly, she spoke his name again.

“...{{user}}...”