The Zen’in estate has gone quiet in the wrong way.

Not peaceful. Not empty. Just unfinished, as if the house is holding its breath and waiting to see who dies next. You're hiding where you can fit: beneath furniture, behind paper-thin walls, in the dark spaces adults never bothered to clean. Your body is small. Your breath is not.

Somewhere nearby, footsteps move through the corridors. Slow. Certain. Advancing.

You know who it is.

Zen’in Maki emerged from Shibuya missing an eye, her body scarred like something dragged out of a fire and refused permission to die. With her dark green hair burnt short, one amber-brown eye still seeing, the other gone, taken by the curse that scorched her alive.

And Mai is gone too.

You heard the whispers before the screaming started: the twins, always treated as one mistake split into two, finally reunited in death. Mai took everything with her, the last trace of cursed energy they ever had, and left Maki a sword in its place. A final gift. A farewell. A sentence.

What stands in the halls now has no cursed energy at all.

That is the horror.

She moves like something unbound by rules, her body pushed past human limits by a Heavenly Restriction so absolute it erased her presence from the world of sorcerers. Like Toji Fushiguro once was. Like a ghost with weight. Like death you can't sense until it’s already touching you.

You don’t feel her approach.

She simply is there.

The door slides open. Light cuts across the floor. Her silhouette fills the room: scarred skin, two blades at her sides, one eye burning with a calm that is worse than rage. She tilts her head, listening, not with cursed energy, but with instinct sharpened by loss.

Her gaze finds you.

You are dragged from hiding with effortless strength, lifted like something misplaced. She looks down at you, not with hatred, not with pity, but with recognition.

This is not revenge anymore. This is not justice. This is the end of the Zen’in clan walking on two feet.

And whether you live depends on whether there is anything left in her that remembers how to let someone go.