Chapter 1861: Incomprehensible Man
Her gaze dropped. Her free hand was on her belly, palm flat over the mark.
The skin under it was warm. It had been warm since last night, a small hearth burning low in a body that had run cold for four centuries, and it would not bank down.
The violet began to swim.
Madness rose in it, the dangerous kind, with nowhere to point itself and no one to kill.
’I am free of time itself now,’ she informed the mark, in full decree register. ’The one chain every mortal being wears, and mine is cut. Quinlan will tear the barrier down soon, and the restriction dies with it.’
’The whole world, open, for the first time in my life. I can leave whenever I please. Go wherever I please. Kill whatever I please. I ascended alone once, from nothing, and I require no one for a second ascent.’
She stared down at her own belly the way she stared at enemies she was about to kill.
The mark pulsed warm under her palm, unintimidated.
’...I do not want to?’
The breach was answered at once, with logic.
’The gains alone are decisive. Every kill mine, whole and unshared. No experience points distributed, no spoils split across an entire group. When the barrier breaks, I will grow as I grew as a girl. Alone is optimal. Alone is the proven track.’
The logic was flawless. The logic had always been flawless.
Her want ignored it entirely.
She tore the offending hand off her belly and planted it on the roof, where it could do no further harm.
*Krrk.*
The ridge tile under it broke through in five clean lines, one per finger.
Below the eaves, the estate’s birds decided, unanimously, to be elsewhere.
’Why.’ It came out in the voice she used on enemies needing information extraction, the voice no subject had ever held out against. ’Why do I not want it? Why does the optimal path hold no appeal? Why do I wish my kills witnessed? Why do I want to hunt beside him, when I have never once required anyone beside me? Answer!’
Along her forearms, the serpents stirred, coiling in slow unrest.
The subject declined to testify.
The voice that had never needed to ask twice asked twice.
Then a third time.
From the hall below, muffled by tile and distance, came the sound of two idiots collapsing into laughter.
The answer, when it arrived, did not come out of the interrogation. It drifted up from below, wrapped in laughter, and assembled itself out of the evidence unbidden: a gift with no invoice attached, a smile that mocked nothing, a leash placed into her own hands.
Only one hypothesis on record produced that pattern. She had never handled it herself, only read the reports.
’Love...’ she murmured, violet swirling, comprehending nothing.
’Impossible. Infeasible. But what is it then?’
The most feared woman on the continent conducted a lengthy soul search on the Fujimori clan’s rooftop.
And when she was done, she did not leave.
...
Kaede came walking up the estate’s oldest courtyard with her head bowed and a stick of temple incense carried in both hands.
She had been waiting for this ever since the truth came out: a morning where she could come to the dawn dojo, kneel on the floor where she had committed the worst act of her life, and apologize to the ancestors properly, alone, expecting nothing back.
Every notable Fujimori was tested on that floor. Her father had first closed her hands around a practice grip there, six years old, winter light on the boards, his voice above her promising that the floor remembered everyone it had ever judged.
And years later, on the same boards, before the same ancestors, she had dueled her own sister for the succession, taken the verdict, and spent it on a slave contract.
Twenty paces from the doors, the dawn dojo giggled.
Kaede stopped walking.
The sound came again, doubled: a woman’s giggle, bright and breathless and thoroughly undignified, wound around a man’s lower laugh.
Her first theory was that some of the staff had chosen the clan’s most sacred hall for a tryst, and that she would now have to determine whether a penitent in servant’s gray had standing to discipline anyone for anything.
Then the giggle resolved into a voice, and the theory died on the spot. She had known that voice its whole life.
She should have turned around. She was telling herself as much the entire time her feet carried her to the doors.
The great doors of the dawn dojo stood wide open to the winter morning. Slid apart the night before, by hands that had owned every right to open them, and left that way since, because closing the most sacred doors of the clan had evidently made nobody’s list of concerns.
She looked in.
The hall had been destroyed.
’The floor!’ she began. ’The central boards have been... The lacquer is... The stains... the brazier was allowed to...’
The report failed to complete a single clause.
Her eyes kept moving anyway, from the split and cratered center of the sacred floor, across a dried dark tide staining a long stretch of heritage grain, to the weapon rack leaning drunk against its brothers, and nobody in the room had even noticed, let alone moved to do anything about it.
The two occupants lounged in the middle of the most sacred ground her clan owned as if ruins were furniture.
And then there was her sister.
’Hie?!’
Ayame Fujimori had been the measure Kaede spent her whole life failing to reach.
Perfect form in the practice yard at dawn; the heir who never slouched, never raised her voice, never let one hair fall out of place in front of the clan. She was grace, honor, and dedication welded into one small relentless person, the living argument that the Fujimori name meant what it claimed to mean.
Kaede had studied her the way other children studied scripture, right up until the months before her own great sin.
That sister was naked.
Naked, in the holiest hall of their line, sprawled the full length of a naked man, giggling into his neck while his hand rested on her bare backside with the confidence of territory long held.
Kaede got herself behind the doorframe.
’What??? Did I die? Am I dreaming?!’ Kaede screamed inwardly.
She had no memory of ordering the movement; her body had simply removed her from the sightline and pressed her back flat against the outer wall, incense stick clutched to her chest. Her hands came up over her face.
Then her fingers opened a crack, because apparently her hands had come up for form’s sake only.
She understood the situation completely. That was the worst part.
The man was Quinlan Elysiar, shamelessness given flesh and crowned for it, and the keeper of her sister’s heart, as the entire continent knew by now.
And Ayame owed this clan nothing, much less respect. She had every right in existence to tell the Fujimori, their halls, their precepts, and their ancestors’ floorboards to burn. Kaede herself had signed the deed to that right and collected payment for it.
All of this was rational.
Yet none of that helped.
’She... She had s-s-sex?! H-hard at that... In the sacred dojo?!’
Understanding a thing and watching it turned out to be two different organs, and the second one was failing.
’Wait.’
Kaede had a sudden realization.
The evidence of his crimes was clear: a destroyed room, and a sister whose behind was still slightly red. There were no enemies here. Which meant...
’Is he... beating her?!’