The plaza fell silent. No breathing. No footsteps. Just the faint crackle of burned stone cooling in the night air.
Jin gripped his staff, his heart still pounding from the last fight. The ground where the Face of Honor had knelt had turned black, cracks spreading outward through the concrete like roots searching for water. Something shifted beneath the surface, slow and deliberate, and then it rose.
The Face of Regret didn't look solid the way the other faces had. It was closer to a man shaped shadow, barely holding itself together at the edges, its limbs flickering in and out of existence like a signal losing its connection. Its face carried no real features at all, only a pair of hollow, gray eyes set into a void where a face should have been. It didn't speak. It didn't move. It just stood there, its head tilted slightly, watching them the way a lost ghost might watch the living pass through a room it could no longer belong to.
