The air felt wrong.

  Heavy. Suffocating. Unnatural.

  Every man on the battlefield—samurai, foot soldier, even the wounded gasping for their st breath—froze as the presence enveloped them. It wasn’t fear. It was submission.

  A force beyond mortality had arrived.

  And then she stepped forward.

  Her sheer scale rendered everything around her insignificant. The once-mighty shogunate warriors—men who had faced death a thousand times—cowered before her. Not a god. Not a demon. Something worse.

  Reika.

  But the Reika I knew had died in another world.

  She was beyond beautiful, yet something about her beauty felt like a punishment.

  Her bck silk kimono draped over her body like a whisper, thin enough that the moonlight betrayed the curves of the inhumanly sculpted form beneath. The golden embroidery—woven in delicate, twisting sigils—seemed to shimmer and shift like living script, pulsing faintly with energy.

  The neckline plunged deep, offering a tantalizing glimpse of pale, fwless skin, while the sleeves hung loose, revealing her slender, delicate fingers—fingers that could crush a man’s skull with a casual flick.

  The high slits in her kimono ran dangerously up both thighs, revealing smooth legs encased in sheer bck stockings. The thin fabric ended at the top of her thighs, leaving a scandalous expanse of skin exposed, broken only by the golden garters that held the silk in pce.

  On her feet—delicate bck sandals, the straps wrapping around her ankles, each step sending deep tremors through the broken earth.

  She was both elegant and obscene, divine and ruinous.

  And her eyes—amethyst fmes, devoid of warmth or mercy—settled on me.

  I didn’t know if she recognized me, or if I was just another insect beneath her feet.

  She blinked. Slowly.

  And then she moved.

  The first man died without even realizing it.

  A bck tendril of energy shot from Reika’s fingertips—not flesh, not shadow, but pure writhing force. It slithered through the air, weaving like a serpent before piercing through his chest, emerging from his back in an explosion of gore.

  He gasped—more out of confusion than pain—before his body crumpled to the ground, hollowed out.

  The tendril dissipated into mist, vanishing like it had never existed.

  Then the next one came.

  A flick of her wrist, and five more tendrils shed out, each one selecting a target, each one striking with terrifying efficiency.

  A man screamed as his body was bisected in a single fluid motion, his top half colpsing while his legs stood for a second longer before toppling separately. Another warrior was lifted off the ground, his armor crunching inward as the bck energy coiled around him like a constricting snake, squeezing him to pulp before tossing his remains aside like waste.

  Reika exhaled—calm, unhurried.

  She wasn’t fighting. She was exterminating.

  And then she spoke.

  "Jin."

  I flinched.

  It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t an acknowledgment. It was fact. As if she had always known I was here. As if she had been waiting for me.

  She took one step forward, and the earth beneath us cracked.

  Another flick of her hand—this time, the air itself seemed to fracture.

  A wave of bck-gold energy erupted outward, swallowing everything in front of her. Stone walls melted like wax. Men, still trying to flee, were vaporized before they could scream.

  The castle gates—wood, reinforced steel, decades of craftsmanship—simply disintegrated under the force of her casual gesture.

  She didn’t even look at them.

  Her focus remained only on me.

  I wanted to speak, but my throat refused to cooperate.

  She stopped barely ten paces away, her shadow drowning me in darkness.

  She was so impossibly massive, standing over me like a living monolith, the sheer scale of her presence suffocating. I had never felt smaller in my life.

  She tilted her head, studying me.

  Then she smiled.

  It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t cruel. It was simply inevitable.

  And behind her—the city burned.