[MA 15+ — Graphic violence, war imagery, psychological trauma, blood and gore]
The nightmare always began the same way: with the smell of plum blossoms.
It was spring in the dream—early spring, when the world was still deciding whether to commit to renewal or retreat back into winter's safety. Young Ushinau stood in the courtyard of the Subete compound, watching petals drift down like pink snow.
His mother was singing. A traditional lullaby, the kind that had been passed down through so many generations that no one remembered who'd written it first. Her voice carried across the courtyard, soft and certain, as she hung laundry in the morning light.
Ushinau was twelve in this memory. Still a child. Still innocent of what war really meant.
"Ushinau-kun!" Kenji's voice. Bright, full of life. "Look what I found!"
His childhood friend came running from the garden, cupped hands held carefully in front of him. When he opened them, a butterfly emerged—iridescent blue wings catching sunlight like stained glass.
"It's beautiful," Ushinau breathed.
"Father says they're called ōmurasaki—great purple emperors. He says they're good luck." Kenji grinned. "Maybe it's a sign that this will be a peaceful year."
The butterfly took flight, circling twice around them before disappearing into the plum trees. In the dream, Ushinau already knew what was coming. Tried to scream a warning. Tried to tell them to run, to hide, to leave this place before—but dreams, like memories, followed their own merciless logic.
The sky darkened. The plum blossoms turned black. And the screaming began.
Present Day — 3:47 AM
Ushinau woke up on the floor of his room, gasping, his school uniform soaked with sweat. The carpet was torn where his hands had clawed at it—unconscious, desperate, trying to dig through decades of synthetic fiber to reach soil that no longer existed.
His heart burned. Not metaphorically. Actually burned, with a pain so visceral it felt like being stabbed all over again. He lifted his shirt with shaking hands.
The scar was there. The old wound—the one that should have killed him three centuries ago. It had reopened. Not bleeding, exactly. The curse wouldn't allow something as simple as blood. Instead, the flesh had split, revealing darkness underneath. Not muscle or bone, but something else. Something wrong.
Black wisps leaked from the wound like smoke from a dying fire. "No," Ushinau whispered. "Not yet. Please, not yet." The curse was reasserting itself. Reminding him what he was. What he'd always be. Curse energy spilling out, that was connected to his curse.
He pressed his palm against the wound. The darkness retreated slowly, reluctantly, sealing itself back inside his skin. The scar remained—three centuries old and still fresh, a permanent reminder written in flesh.
Outside his window, Neo-Tokyo slept. Or pretended to. The city never truly rested; it just changed its rhythm, moving from daytime chaos to nocturnal commerce.
Ushinau sat on the floor until dawn, staring at nothing, feeling everything. School felt surreal in the way dreams sometimes did—technically coherent but fundamentally wrong.
Mrs. Tanaka had made him breakfast again. Had looked at him with that increasingly familiar confusion: Who is this kid? Why is he in my home? The question was in her eyes even as she smiled and asked if he wanted more rice.
Mr. Tanaka had walked past him twice without acknowledgment.
Only Yuki still saw him clearly. She'd squeezed his hand as they left the apartment, a gesture of solidarity he didn't deserve but accepted anyway because he was selfish and lonely and desperate for any scrap of human connection.
"You look tired," she'd said. "I am," he'd replied. "So tired."
Now he sat in homeroom while attendance was taken. The teacher called his name—"Subete... Subete-something?"—with increasing uncertainty, as if the syllables themselves were becoming difficult to pronounce.
"Here," Ushinau said. The teacher frowned, marked something on their tablet, moved on. Mizuki, the student who sat beside him, had moved her desk three centimeters further away. Small adjustment. Unconscious. But Ushinau noticed. He always noticed the ways people began to drift from him, like debris caught in a current they couldn't see.
Third period: Physical Education.
The class was doing combat training—a modern interpretation of traditional martial arts, augmented with technology and contemporary technique. The teacher, a former semi-pro fighter named Instructor Hayashi, paired students for sparring drills.
"Subete-kun," Hayashi called out. "You'll partner with Daisuke." Of course. Daisuke grinned across the gymnasium. Subtle threat displays designed to intimidate.
"Try not to embarrass yourself this time, freak," Daisuke muttered as they bowed to each other. The other students formed a loose circle. Watching. Always watching. Looking for entertainment, for hierarchy confirmation, for blood.
"Begin!" Hayashi commanded. Daisuke lunged immediately—no technique, just raw augmented power. His fist came at Ushinau's face like a piston, fast enough that several students gasped. Ushinau's body moved on instinct.
Tenshin. Body displacement. He rotated his entire frame, letting the punch slide past his shoulder by millimeters. Felt the wind of its passage. Felt the killing intent behind it. Because that's what it was: killing intent. Maybe Daisuke didn't consciously want to kill him, but his body remembered violence the way Ushinau's remembered war.
The punch missed. Daisuke stumbled forward. Ushinau could have ended it there. Could have delivered atemi to three separate vital points before Daisuke recovered his balance. Could have replicated the techniques his father had drilled into him—techniques designed for battlefields where hesitation meant death.
Instead, he simply stepped back. Reset his stance. Waited. "Lucky dodge," Daisuke snarled. He attacked again. And again. Each strike faster, harder, more frustrated. His augmented muscles burned through energy, seeking contact, seeking dominance, seeking to prove something Ushinau didn't care about.
Ushinau moved like water. Like wind. Like all the things his father had taught him to emulate. He didn't block—blocking implied resistance, implied force meeting force. Instead, he flowed around each attack, minimal movement, maximum efficiency.
Mubyōshi—without rhythm. His movements had no pattern for Daisuke to recognize or predict. The other students had gone quiet. Even Instructor Hayashi was watching with professional interest.
"Stop running and FIGHT!" Daisuke roared. Something in Ushinau's heart—something old and wounded and angry—stirred.
Fight? He'd fought. For three hundred years he'd fought. Fought wars and monsters and the crushing weight of his own existence. He'd perfected techniques that could kill with precision, had trained until his muscle memory became more reliable than thought itself.
And what had it earned him? Nothing but this. This endless cycle. This permanent demotion to childhood. This curse wearing his skin. Daisuke threw a wild haymaker. Ushinau moved. Not to dodge this time. To counter.
His hand came up—shuto, the knife-hand strike—and stopped one centimeter from Daisuke's throat. Perfect precision. Perfect control. The edge of his palm pressed against the larger kids throat with just enough pressure to make breathing difficult.
Daisuke froze. "If this were real," Ushinau said quietly, voice empty of emotion, "you would be dead. Your augmented muscles, your size advantage, your anger—none of it would matter. Because you telegraph every movement, leave yourself open after every strike, and fight with ego instead of strategy."
He lowered his hand. Stepped back. Bowed formally. "Thank you for the match." The gymnasium was silent. Then Instructor Hayashi began to clap. Slowly. Deliberately.
"Exceptional control, Subete-kun. That was... where did you learn to move like that?" Ushinau looked at his hands. At the scars that shouldn't exist on a middle-schooler's palms. At the scars—invisible to normal eyes but visible to him—that mapped three centuries of combat.
"I don't remember," he lied.
Edo Period — Winter, 1868
The memory came crashing through his carefully maintained walls. The attack had come at dawn.
Ushinau remembered stumbling from his sleeping quarters, messily dressed, wakizashi in hand, to find the compound already burning. Enemy forces—rival clans allied with the new government—had surrounded them during the night.
Professional soldiers. Not samurai bound by honor codes. Just people with orders to eliminate a potential threat to the new regime.
His father was already in the courtyard, katana drawn, cutting down the first wave of attackers. Each movement was perfect. Textbook. Beautiful in the way only master samurai skills could be beautiful—the fusion of art and death.
"Ushinau!" his father shouted. "Get your mother to the north exit!"
But his mother was already running toward the family shrine, trying to save the ancestral tablets—those physical records of every Subete who'd lived and died with honor.
An enemy soldier saw her. Raised his rifle.
Ushinau was running before thought completed itself. Fifteen years old, barely trained, moving on pure desperate instinct. He tackled his mother as the shot fired, felt the bullet tear through his shoulder, felt them both crash into the mud.
"Run," he gasped. "Mother, please—" "I won't leave you—" The soldier was reloading. Others were coming. The world was fire and screaming and the metallic scent of blood. His mother pushed him behind her. Stood. Faced the soldiers with nothing but pride and the weight of her family name.
"I am Subete Haruka," she said. "Wife of Subete Takeshi, mother of Subete Ushinau. We have served our lord with honor for six generations. If you must kill me, then kill me standing."
They shot her. She fell forward into Ushinau's arms. Blood spreading across her kimono like spilled ink. Her hand reached up, touched his face one final time.
"Live," she whispered. "Whatever it costs... live." Then her eyes went empty.
Ushinau had screamed. Actual scream, raw and animal and breaking. Had pulled her body close, felt her blood soak into his clothes, felt the world ending in real-time.
Red. So much red. And after much wandering and his father already dead through out all the chaos after his father had taken twelve of them before falling and more events throughout, Kenji died instantly with no goodbyes to, he fell. The soldier licked his blade clean. And then turned toward Ushinau during all the screaming and destruction. Who had just arrived at the scene. "Run," Kenji had whispered. "Please, Ushinau... run..."
What happened next was fragmented memory—combat shock turning experience into disconnected images.
His body had acted on training, on instinct, on pure survival desperation. Three cuts. The first severed the soldier's sword arm. The second opened his throat. The third—
The third was unnecessary. Vengeful. Cruel. But Ushinau hadn't cared. Couldn't care. His entire world had just died in front of him and he was young and nothing made sense except the need to make someone pay.
He'd killed three more before his father found him, somehow still alive. Before the overwhelming enemy numbers had forced them back. Before the wound in his side—the deep one, the fatal one—had finally registered through combat adrenaline.
His father had carried him as far as the compound wall before falling. Had died with Ushinau in his arms, whispering the family motto: "Through honor, we endure. Through endurance, we are eternal."
Except they weren't eternal.
Everyone died. Everything burned. And Ushinau was left bleeding into snow, surrounded by corpses, with three days of crawling ahead of him before he'd reach that cursed shrine and traded his humanity for this nightmare immortality. And why, because he wanted to reclaim his clan's honor and swore revenge on the ones who took his life away from him. But in the end he did win. But he felt hollow in the very end.
Present Day
Ushinau came back to himself in the school infirmary.
He was lying on a medical bed, the school nurse hovering over him with a concerned expression. Apparently, he'd collapsed after the sparring match. Had been unresponsive for seven minutes.
"You're severely dehydrated," the nurse said, checking vitals on her holographic display. "And your stress fluctuations are off the charts. When's the last time you slept properly?"
"I don't remember," Ushinau said. True in more ways than she could understand.
"I'm calling your foster parents. You need to go home and rest." But when she tried to access his file, her expression shifted to confusion. "That's odd. Your emergency contact information is... it's corrupted somehow. The system can barely read your name."
"That happens sometimes," Ushinau said quietly, because even devices somehow forgot him from the curse. He sat up despite her protests. The room spun. His wound still burned where the scar had reopened. Through the window, he could see storm clouds gathering over Neo-Tokyo—real clouds this time, not atmospheric processor output.
It was going to rain. It always rained when the memories got too heavy to carry alone. A student appeared in the doorway. It was the quiet one from the other day. The invisible one.
"Subete-kun? Are you okay?" The nurse looked at the student, then back at Ushinau, then at her tablet. "Who are you here for?" "For..." The student trailed off, suddenly uncertain. "I thought... someone was sick?"
"Yes, but..." The nurse looked at Ushinau with dawning confusion. "I'm sorry, what was your name again?" It was happening. Right there, in real-time. The forgetting accelerating, spreading, consuming his existence like fire eating paper. "It doesn't matter," Ushinau said, standing. "I should go." He walked past them both. The nurse tried to stop him but her hand passed through empty air where she thought his shoulder should be. Her mind was already editing him out of reality.
Ushinau made it to the school roof before the tears came.
Not gentle tears. Not quiet grief. This was three hundred years of accumulated anguish breaking through at once—ugly, again, desperate, shaking sobs that tore from his heart like shrapnel.
He sank to his knees on the wet concrete. The rain had started. Of course it had. "Mother," he whispered to the storm. "Father. Kenji. Everyone. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I couldn't save you. I'm sorry I'm still here when you're all gone. I'm sorry I asked for strength instead of accepting death with you."
The rain mixed with his tears until he couldn't tell which was which.
Somewhere below, the school continued its day. Students laughing, learning, living their temporary lives with the blessed ignorance of those who didn't yet understand how fragile everything was. And Ushinau knelt in the rain, crying for a family dead three centuries, in a world that was forgetting he'd ever existed. The curse whispered from somewhere deep inside: Over and over and over...
TO BE CONTINUED... [Next Episode: "Shrine of the Wrong Prayer"]