“Wait!”

Miyuki Kiseki shouted from behind, her voice an arrow loosed, her feet beating a steady drum.

She swung around the corner. An ordinary street lay ahead, flat as a still pond, yet not a single shadow moved. She grit her teeth and pressed on like a swimmer cutting gray water.

Damn it—where are you in this maze of alleys?

Mizuki’s breath hitched like wind through reeds, but she didn’t slow; dewdrop beads gathered on her brow and stung like salt.

A streak of black shot from the left at a sharp angle, swift as a swallow breaking from the eaves. Miyuki Kiseki sprang after it, as if a lone star had just flared to guide her.

“Don’t run!”

Mizuki chased and shouted, her lungs pumping like bellows.

“Tch. Just a little brat,” clicked the tongue of the black-clad figure, a pebble tossed at night’s surface.

It has to be that one—the nail behind the school’s uproar hammered into the dark.

Her sense of justice flared like a match struck in wind, and it drove her to chase with no thought for herself.

Today was supposed to be simple for Miyuki Kiseki, clear as a blue noon—Student Council chores and friendly teasing drifting like kites.

In the morning she’d called Maya Hanazaka, who said a new victim had been found and told her to be careful, a chill like rain at dawn. She rang others; Mizuki and Sham answered alike, telling her to stay clear, their concern a thin umbrella. Only Yun Shi said to leave it alone, a door closed with finality. But how could Mizuki not care? She was grateful for their warmth, like hands around tea, yet she refused to stand aside.

No more victims—she would drag this faceless phantom into the light like a fish from murky depths.

At dusk she’d caught a flicker of black vanish around the old school building, like ink drawn into paper’s edge. She decided on the spot that this was the culprit stirring the school like a hornet’s nest, and she would haul this lawbreaker in.

It was a just instinct and painfully naive, a moth hurling itself at a lantern, yet Mizuki went. She left her Student Council friends and ran alone, foolish perhaps, meddlesome perhaps, a child’s straight line. But to Mizuki, that didn’t matter; she only wanted to walk her own road, to return fairness to her friends like a borrowed book, to change one small thing—not to play the hero, only to act.

She didn’t know this spur of hot blood would bend the riverbed of her fate.

Closer—closer—right ahead. Move, Miyuki Kiseki. Drag out the one poisoning everyone.

Mizuki’s stride quickened; the tired glaze in her eyes hardened to flint.

Go. Move. It ends soon. Just catch this one and everything—

“Stop right there!”

Mizuki tore forward, breath a ragged saw, refusing to let her legs turn to sand.

But the figure ahead blurred like a mirage in heat—and then dissolved, gone into the stone.

Everything said the same thing: she’d lost them, like a kite cut loose.

Miyuki Kiseki had to halt, drinking air greedily like a drowning swimmer breaking surface.

The figure was gone. She walked by feel, following a tug in her chest like a thread in mist, hoping it would hook on something real.

Deeper into a narrow alley, a harsh scent struck her, sharp as a blade pressed under the tongue. As Vice President of the Student Council, Mizuki had seen a little of everything; even the stench of sewers had once wrapped her, when she climbed down to find a junior’s lost wallet, a memory like damp stone.

But this wasn’t sewer rot. This bite to her nerves was cleaner and crueler, a metallic tide that made her stomach heave like a stormed boat.

“What… is this…”

Miyuki Kiseki pinched her small nose, a hand like a pale leaf, and edged deeper step by step.

“The smell is so strange…”

Mizuki frowned, one hand to the wall like a blind pilgrim, and slid along the narrow way.

“Where is it…”

She meant to keep going—but she stopped, completely still, as if a clock had dropped its spring.

Silence answered.

Miyuki Kiseki’s pupils widened like ink spreading in water; the steady light in her eyes drained away, leaving pale wood and disbelief.

Before her, the ground was a canvas of blood—old brown smears and wet red glisten, brushstrokes clashing into awful color. At the center, bodies were piled like broken dolls; no, not people anymore, just husks fallen out of life’s script. Severed hands and legs lay mismatched, each a jagged moon; no part was whole, no inch free of red. Faces stared with a dozen final masks—terror, fury, empty glass, and shapes that weren’t faces anymore—yet together they sang one truth: their ends were long and cruel.

“Ah… aaah…”

She wanted to scream, but her voice snagged like thread; her throat was dry sand. Miyuki Kiseki doubled over and clamped a hand to her mouth, a leaf folding against hail.

Now she understood the smell—blood, thick as rusted rain.

The iron reek rushed in and filled her senses, crawling into every nerve like cold ants. Her stomach surged, waves battering a fragile pier, and she fought it, helpless.

“Urgh—”

Mizuki couldn’t bear it. One hand on the wall, she emptied her stomach in heaves, bile burning up like acid fire.

She raised her head. Scattered limbs lay like torn branches, the tears still wet and bright. The blood-smell swelled and the urge rose again, a tide unspent.

“U-urgh—”

Miyuki Kiseki wasn’t anyone great; she was ordinary, shaped by ordinary days. She carried justice in her chest, yes, but she had never seen beyond garden walls. Not like this. Not this nightmare scrawled onto her life. Those were corpses, right there in front of her, cold as fallen stones.

The reek battered her nose; what she’d forced down boiled up again. Her body rejected it all like a gate slamming.

Why, why, why, why!

Those are human bodies!

“Ah!!!”

Instinct took over, and Mizuki tore the scream from her throat like ripping cloth.

She couldn’t take it. She’d trailed someone, yet stumbled into a heap of the dead. No, no—help—this is terrifying—

“Who’s there!”

A harsh voice cracked across the alley like a whip.

Mizuki’s mind wavered on the edge of breaking; whatever spoke wore the face of a nightmare.

“Ah!!!”

With one more ragged shriek, she fled the alley like a deer bolting through thorns, panic shredding the path behind her.

“Damn it. She saw it. Cleanup just got—”

“My apologies. I didn’t expect she’d actually come—”

“Tell the King of Hell.”

A spray of blood blossomed, a dark flower spattering the ground and feeding the earth again.

The young man kicked the cooling body into the heap like tossing trash onto trash, and sighed, the sound a breeze over ash. “Someone from the Outer World saw us. Another thorn in the paw.”

“Just a little girl untouched by the world,” the woman said, her smile-not-smile cold as wet porcelain. “Even if she calls the cops, it only makes her easier to find.”

“That girl carries a faint reaction of Mystic Power,” another voice murmured, like a fingertip hovering over a tremor. “It was slight, but I felt it when she screamed.”

“You mean she’s tied to someone from the Underworld?”

“Hard to say. But no one stops me. Not even—”

“I see. So, a target.”

“What is it?”

“That girl might be our target. If so, then we clear all of them. Since someone in the Outer World saw our move, she has no reason left to keep breathing.”

That brat…

Seems like…

Where blood runs, every corner becomes a dead end, a place with no way back.