"...Alive?"
Tendou Kisara repeated the word with a slightly dazed expression.
"That's right. Alive."
Haimer tilted his head back slightly, watching the swarm of sparks drift down through the blazing night sky.
"Not merely alive."
"But—"
"More brilliantly than anyone else."
Haimer turned. His dark hair stirred gently in the waves of heat rolling off the fire.
"Revenge was never your destination, Miss Kisara."
"It was only the blade you had to swing — the one necessary cut to sever the rotting roots of your past."
"And once that blade has fallen, what begins is your rebirth."
"The version of you I am waiting for is not a killing machine that only knows how to draw a sword. Nor is it a pitiable creature drowning in the wounds of the past."
"I want you to stand in the sunlight. To stand in the new world that is coming. And with the sword in your hand — to carve out a path of glory that belongs to you and you alone."
"Even—"
Haimer paused. The faintest smile curved the corner of his lips.
"Achieve something so extraordinary that even the gods sitting high in the Heavens are left speechless."
"That is the scale of ambition befitting someone who now bears my Grace."
"And then — bring your parents back to life."
Bring your parents back to life. Leave the gods speechless. Live brilliantly.
Those words detonated inside Tendou Kisara's mind like shells going off one after another.
The girl's eyes — which had held a certain dull, extinguished quality until just a moment ago — began to brighten, little by little.
Like an ember catching flame in the ashes.
Weak, perhaps. But carrying within it the potential to set a whole prairie ablaze.
No longer the unhinged, desperate blaze that might gutter out at any second — but something purer, harder, more enduring.
Parents. Resurrection.
Those had once been wishes too extravagant to even dare dream of. Images that only surfaced in the very deepest, most buried layers of sleep.
But now.
She believed.
If it was this person — this Kami-sama —
He could do it. He absolutely could.
"Yes..."
With that thought settled firmly in her chest, Tendou Kisara gave a single, deep nod.
She drew a slow, steadying breath, and slid the blood-dripping cursed blade — Yukikage — back into the scabbard at her hip.
Click.
The clean, crisp sound of the tsuba meeting the sheath rang out with startling clarity against the backdrop of the roaring, crackling fire.
Then.
She lowered her head.
Her hair — silky black, now stained with the dark residue of blood — slid forward with the motion, curtaining the elegant lines of her profile. It hid her face. But it could not hide what lived in her bones: the absolute, unbreakable resolve radiating from somewhere deeper than flesh.
She closed her right hand into a fist.
And pressed it firmly against the left side of her chest.
Where her heart beat.
— A gesture of complete and total fealty.
Like a lone wolf that had wandered the wastelands for far too long. Weathered by frost and hollowed by hunger. Finally standing before the alpha who could lead it to hunt lions — and bowing its head at last.
"Whether it leads to glory or to hell."
"Wherever Kami-sama's will points — that is where my blade will go."
Tendou Kisara's voice was unshaking. Absolute.
A promising student.
Haimer gave a single satisfied nod.
Compared to the version of her from the original story of this world — the one who had spent the whole time twisting and struggling, only to end up shackled at the last moment by what passed for a 'sense of justice' — he found this version far more to his liking.
She knew what she wanted.
And she was willing to pay for it.
That was the fundamental logic that separated the strong from everyone else.
Strength had never been about how fast the blade in your hand could move. Or how much force you could put behind it.
It was about whether you possessed the resolve — the sheer, unblinking audacity — to stake everything on reaching your goal.
That was the essence of what made a strong person strong.
The Tendou Kisara standing before him now.
Had it.
With that thought, Haimer's gaze shifted downward — settling on the section of Tendou Kisara's waist and abdomen that was, by any standard, far too slender.
That area.
Was missing something vital to human life — a kidney.
The kidney function Tendou Kisara had lost in the assassination attempt during her childhood had forced her to depend on artificial dialysis to sustain her life, day after day. Every battle she fought was a withdrawal from the finite account of her own vitality.
Right now.
It was the thread of Divine Power Haimer had previously infused into her that was forcibly keeping her internal organs functioning — the reason she could still be standing here after a massacre of this intensity and the emotional hurricane she had ridden through, instead of collapsing with foam at the lips as toxins overran her system the way they normally would.
"Now then."
"Give me your hand."
Haimer's voice had gentled considerably.
"Your body has already reached its limit."
"While I deeply respect your ferocity — the kind of savageness that would burn through everything, even yourself, for the sake of revenge — as a member of my Familia, I have no desire to see my blade snap from rust before it has ever truly been drawn from its sheath."
"Let me restore you."
The words settled into the air.
A faint golden luminescence bloomed in the palm of Haimer's outstretched hand.
The unmistakable prelude to Divine Power stirring to life.
Ten years. Three thousand six hundred and fifty nights.
Every single waking moment enduring the nauseating, grinding agony of toxins accumulating in her blood. Day after day, grinding through a sword-drawing discipline that placed devastating strain on the body.
And then the regular pilgrimages to the hospital — watching her own red blood flow out of her body, pass through the cold filtration of a machine, and flow back in.
The visceral, unrelenting terror of feeling one's own life drain away in real time was the sort of thing that could drive most people to madness — or push them, long before now, to simply end it themselves and be done with the endless torment.
Tendou Kisara had endured all of it. Held together by nothing but the sheer, ferocious will to avenge.
And yet.
Contrary to what Haimer had expected.
Upon hearing those words, Tendou Kisara went still.
Her hand moved on instinct, reaching up to touch her own flank.
That place.
Was hollow. Empty.
Every night, in the small hours when only the low hum of the dialysis machine broke the silence, that emptiness would remind her — she was incomplete in this world. Deficient.
This was a pain she had deliberately kept. A wound she had refused transplant surgery to preserve. A constant, burning reminder she had chosen to carry so that she would never forget her hatred.
Now, the revenge was over.
By all logic, this scar — the one she had kept to keep herself sharp — should now be allowed to go.
But.
"Kami-sama..."
Tendou Kisara's voice came out uncertain.
"That... could it..."
"Could it wait? Could you not heal it yet?"
After a beat of silence, she bit her lip and raised her head, a conflicted expression on her face.
In the dancing firelight, those striking violet eyes shimmered with a kind of stubborn, layered complexity.
"...?"
The request brought Haimer's eyebrow up.
A flicker of genuine surprise.
"Your reason?"
Haimer studied Tendou Kisara without a trace of anger. Only simple, unhurried curiosity.
"These ten years... I've gotten used to it."
Tendou Kisara shook her head quickly, the pallor of her cheeks flushing faint red with the urgency of her words.
She seemed to realize herself how ungrateful the request must sound — how it might even border on desecrating divine benevolence. What kind of follower refused their god's gift, after all?
Even so.
In the end.
Tendou Kisara drew a long breath, and lowered her head.
Gazing at her own blood-stained hand.
"It's just..."
"These ten years — this pain has become a part of my body."
"All these years, whenever the confusion crept in. Whenever I wanted to give up. Whenever I wanted to be a normal girl — to go shopping, to fall in love, to live out the youth that should have been mine..."
Tendou Kisara's gaze grew distant.
Surrounded by a hell of fire and ruin, her thoughts drifted far away — back to those cold, lonely nights.
To that hospital room, where the only sound was the low, mechanical drone of the dialysis machine.
How many times had she stared out the window at the lights of a thousand ordinary households, and thought about throwing herself from the ledge to end the endless suffering?
"This pain has been my companion for years. It never stopped reminding me."
"Reminding me how cruel this world is."
"How weak I once was."
"And who I am."
"Where my hatred lives."
"How my parents died."
"Everything. All of it — this pain was the thing that kept warning me. Keeping me honest."
"To me, this pain was both a curse and a driving force."
"If it's healed now... I feel like... I would be betraying the person I used to be."
"And besides..."
"Kami-sama — didn't you say that if I built something worthy of glory, I could even have my parents resurrected?"
Tendou Kisara raised her head, looking up toward the sky painted red by the fire.
Up there, the vast Divine Eye had receded from sight — but its pressure still lingered in the air, still saturated every breath.
— The Sword of Damocles, suspended above the crown of the world.
"If..."
Her voice began to tremble at the edges.
"If my parents can truly be brought back. If that day truly can arrive..."
"Then let it wait until that day."
"Until the day I have truly built glory worthy of you, Kami-sama. Until the day I can stand before my father and mother once more."
"On that day — I will kneel before you and beg you to grant me a whole and healthy body."
"But not now."
"Please — let me go to war for you carrying every wound I have. Let me fight for you and seize glory for you with this broken body."
"Because only this way can I remind myself, at every moment."
"I am someone who crawled back out of hell."
"I have no retreat. I need no retreat."
"Pain is the finest fuel."
"I need this pain to goad me at every waking moment. To tell me I cannot stop. Cannot slack. Cannot afford a single instant of comfort."
"If I were healed now — if I were made comfortable..."
"I'm afraid... I would forget what it felt like to claw my way through hell."
She even feared that the sudden absence of that suffering — that unexpected lightness — would make her soft.
"May I?"
"Kami-sama?"
So this was the logic of young Lady Tendou.
In order to preserve that upward-driving momentum — she was willing to take something as negative as pain and forcibly transmute it into a pillar of the spirit.
Like an ascetic monk who refines the soul by tormenting the flesh.
Unhealthy, yes.
But impossible to deny — inside that unhealthiness lived a force that commanded a certain awe.
Having said her piece, Tendou Kisara looked back at Haimer, her eyes carrying a stubborn, earnest plea.
Haimer regarded her.
This girl — drenched head to toe in blood, somehow rendered more striking by the flames surrounding her — this girl of pure, absolute black.
This willingness to torment oneself for the sake of an obsession.
He found it rather suited to his tastes, if he was being honest.
Those gods in the Heavens who cried out for centuries over the slightest scratch really ought to find a crack in the floor and crawl into it.
Of course.
Relying on self-inflicted suffering to sustain one's fighting spirit was, without question, an extreme approach. Undeniably unhealthy.
But.
It also, without question, testified to the caliber of Tendou Kisara's character — and to the depth of a conviction that would willingly shoulder pain rather than lay it down and move on. That conviction far exceeded the measure of ordinary people.
As a God, Haimer respected the free will of every life.
Because gods had no need for an army of identical puppets.
A soul with its own singular conviction — even if that conviction looked like madness to the rest of the world — was precisely the kind of soul most capable of blazing with the most blinding light.
If this was her choice, then there was no reason to force otherwise.
And besides.
That obsession.
Might well give birth to something truly extraordinary.
"As you wish."
Haimer withdrew his hand. The golden light in his palm faded slowly until it was gone.
"If you see pain as fuel, then let it burn."
"Keep it."
"Until the day you decide you are ready to let it go."
"As for my Divine Power — it will remain within you, so that you do not fail at a critical moment."
Hearing those words.
The tension drained from Tendou Kisara's shoulders all at once. A smile crossed her face — the unburdened, genuine kind that only comes with relief.
"Thank you for your understanding, Kami-sama."
"..."
"K— Kisara-nee?!"
At that moment, a voice cracked through the air from the direction of the main gate — a shout soaked through with sheer disbelief.
Tendou Kisara turned her head slightly, sending her gaze toward the sound.
She knew that voice too well.
— Satomi Rentarou.
Standing at the gate.
Fifteen years old. His short black hair, slightly disheveled, was plastered to his forehead by sweat. The face everyone agreed was born for hardship wore an expression of pure, open-mouthed stupefaction.
Satomi Rentarou's uniform was soaked through from sprinting the whole way here — several buttons had even burst open from the urgency of his run, exposing the faint outline of artificial skin beneath:
— The telltale marks of a left eye, right hand, and right leg replaced with super-metal prosthetics.
— The adopted son of Tendou Kikunojou.
And Tendou Kisara's childhood friend from a time before memory.
More than that — the only other person who had survived that accident ten years ago alongside Tendou Kisara.
Right now.
Satomi Rentarou stood at the main gate of the Tendou Family Estate, chest heaving with ragged breaths, pupils contracted to pinpoints — as though he could not bring himself to accept what his own eyes were showing him.
Fire.
Fire everywhere.
The Tendou Family Estate.
The place where he had once lived — a place filled with nothing but unpleasant memories, and yet one that had still been the backdrop of his childhood.
Now.
It was burning.
And.
In the center of the courtyard.
Among the bodies covering every inch of ground.
Now reduced to mangled, incomplete masses of flesh.
No survivors.
The Tendou family — the most powerful clan in the entire Tokyo Area — had been wiped out in its entirety, in this impossibly short span of time.
And beyond that.
Standing at the center of that mountain of corpses, in that sea of blood.
Was the person he cared about most in this world.
Tendou Kisara.
Holding that killing blade. Standing beside a man he had never seen in his life.
Coated in blood.
Face cold as stone.
A version of her so utterly unfamiliar it felt like a stranger.
"This..."
"Just what..."
"Kisara-nee — did you do all of this?!"
Satomi Rentarou's voice cracked and shook with the force of his shock. He lurched forward a step.
Only to catch his foot on a body on the ground and nearly pitch forward onto his face.
He looked down —
His adoptive older brother.
— Tendou Hinata's corpse.
The eldest legitimate son of the Tendou family — the one who had always looked down on him with an air of absolute superiority — lay with a single clean stab wound punched through the center of his chest.
He looked to the side —
Tendou Gentaku.
Tendou Kitoshi.
The other two. Both dead. Both in equally wretched states.
"You killed them?"
"Yes."
"I did. Every last one of them."
"And Grandfather?"
Satomi Rentarou asked through gritted teeth.
"Burned to death."
Tendou Kisara answered without inflection.
"I kept him alive for a while, first."
"I cut his throat just enough — so he couldn't speak."
"I made him watch the Tendou family fall with his own eyes. Unable to beg. Unable to say a single word."
Satomi Rentarou felt a shudder run through him from scalp to sole.
He knew her better than anyone.
They had been together since ten years ago. Training side by side, living side by side.
He knew she hated the Tendou family.
He knew she had always been planning her revenge.
But he had never imagined —
This.
A slaughter this absolute. This total.
____
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