Her father's brutal death, Matou Zouken's mad, demonlike visage— for the five-year-old Sakura Tohsaka, it was a waking nightmare.
She buried her face in her sister's arms, sobs and whimpers escaping like a frightened animal. Her small body shook like a leaf in the wind, on the verge of fainting.
"Heh… hahahaha… the nuisance… is gone!"
Matou Zouken yanked his blood-stained cane free. Staring at Tokiomi Tohsaka's body on the ground, he let out a deranged, skin-crawling laugh.
Then his crazed gaze snapped to Rei Ao—and to the sisters behind him—like a venomous curse.
"And you!"
"You've learned secrets you shouldn't know. Die—become food for the swarm!"
"Your flesh and souls will be the stepping stones to my eternity!"
He flung his arms wide. His old, voluminous kimono billowed and snapped though there was no wind.
The next instant, a hair-raising scene unfolded.
Rustle… buzz buzz buzz…
From his wide sleeves, from the hem of his robe, even from the creases of his withered skin, countless black specks poured out like a burst dam of midnight tide—an unending flood of crest worms.
They were myriad in size and hideous in form: writhing, beating their wings, chittering in a dense, teeth-setting hum, merging into a suffocating tide reeking of blood and rotten magecraft.
Like a black storm of death, the swarm swept toward Rei Ao—and toward Rin and Sakura behind him. Where it passed, even the paving stones pitted and corroded. The very fog in the air seemed stained an ominous dark.
This was the essence of the evil power Matou Zouken had hoarded for centuries, a horror that could corrode flesh and gnaw at souls.
"Big sis—!"
Sakura cried out in terror, squeezing her eyes shut, too scared to look.
Rin was just as terrified, her face chalk white. But she still forced her eyes open, glaring at the surging swarm while clutching her sister even tighter. She knew their only hope stood before them—Rei Ao.
Facing that monstrous tide, Rei Ao's expression did not change. He didn't so much as take a guard stance or step aside. He simply stood there, the calm eye of the storm.
His gaze, steady and unreadable, took in the onrushing horde—and the twisted thing behind it, no longer human, a living hive at its core. A faint pity flickered in his eyes, but more than that, a cool disgust—as if at filth to be cleaned away.
At the very instant the reeking tide of death was about to swallow the three of them, Rei Ao finally moved.
He merely lifted his right hand.
Snap.
A clear finger-snap rang from his fingertips—so light, yet it tugged on some primal, blazing law of the world.
BOOM—!!!
Centered on Rei Ao, a fire of indescribable color and heat bloomed out of nothing.
It was no ordinary flame. It shone a deep, immaculate, true-crimson. It did not roar or lash about like common fire; it spread in a silent, sacred, imperious calm.
Where the fire passed, even the "impurities" of space seemed to be scoured clean. The countless horrors that could corrode steel and devour souls—at the barest touch of that true-crimson fire—they didn't even have time to writhe or scream. Every last worm vaporized like snow under a summer sun, vanishing without a trace.
Not burning. Not charring.
Erased—at the level of existence itself.
The true-crimson fire kept spreading. It looked slow, but in truth it outran time and space, overtaking Matou Zouken—who had tried to recoil, abject terror finally breaking through his eyes.
"No! What is this power?! Impossible!!"
His final howl was despair. He mustered all the magecraft and all the insect defenses he had—but before that fire, every resistance was laughable and futile.
The flame moved like a living thing, wrapping his twisted shell with a gentle inevitability. There was no agony of burning—only an absolute, undeniable force of purification.
Within the fire, the body that had scraped by for five centuries began to crumble like a sand sculpture, then drift away. Not just the body—the soul stuffed with obsession and warped beyond recognition.
Whatever remnant of "Makiri Zolgen" persisted, whatever madness and filth "Matou Zouken" had amassed—everything was cleansed in the true-crimson blaze, reduced to fundamental particles and returned to nothing.
Five hundred years of obsession, sin, struggle, and decay ended with a single crisp snap and a field of silent, crimson fire. No trace remained—as if no one named "Makiri Zolgen" or "Matou Zouken" had ever existed.
The flames guttered out as abruptly as they had appeared. The space before the Matou manor fell quiet again. Even the heavy fog seemed thinned by that purifying force. The suffocating swarm and the crazed old man were gone.
All that remained was Tokiomi Tohsaka's body on the ground, the Tohsaka sisters locked together and shaking, and Rei Ao standing there, robes still.
It had all happened too fast. From Zouken's sudden murder, to the surging swarm, to Rei Ao erasing everything with a snap—barely a dozen seconds. But for the two little girls it felt like a century—and it changed their lives forever.
It also ended a tragedy five hundred years in the making.
Rin and Sakura stared blankly at the empty street, then at Rei Ao's calm back. Their minds went white, suspended between the extremity of terror and the whiplash of sudden safety.
~~~
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