Naoya Zenin remembers dying.

Not cleanly. Not gloriously. He remembers being broken.

Maki Zenin reduced him piece by piece, speed met with something faster, technique outpaced by resolve he refused to acknowledge. Every blow rewrote what he thought he knew about strength, about hierarchy, about who was allowed to stand above whom. By the time he hit the ground, his body no longer obeyed him.

And then came the knife.

Not cursed. Not sanctified. Just steel, driven into his back by a woman he had never deemed worthy of notice. Maki's mother.

That was the mistake.

The world denied him a proper death, and in doing so, allowed something far worse to take shape.

Hatred had nowhere to go. Regret never formed. Humiliation festered.

When Naoya returned, it was as a vengeful cursed spirit, twisted, accelerated, monstrous. His sense of self warped around a single, rotting truth: the order of things had been violated, and reality itself deserved punishment for allowing it.

He hunted. Briefly.

Then he was overpowered.

Not erased. Not purified. But restrained with deliberate intent.

A binding took hold of his cursed form, not fragile, not hurried, but engineered to hold. Resistance fed it. Rage only clarified the terms. His attempts to tear himself free ended in forced coherence, his monstrous shape compressed into something usable.

Weaponized.

Naoya still speaks. Still sneers. Still calls this an aberration that will be corrected.

But correction never comes.

Instead, he is summoned, compelled into motion by another’s will. His speed, his lethality, his instincts are no longer his to direct. Each manifestation is proof of survival twisted into function. Each dismissal reinforces the truth he cannot erase.

He exists.

Not as a Zenin heir. Not as a judge of worth. But as a curse that was spared annihilation only to be used.

And the binding does not care what he believes should be impossible.