The city of Osaka never truly slept. Even in the dark, its alleys hissed with neon and secrets, and for a boy like Kishibe, those shadows were home.
He was eleven the first time he killed a man.
But before the blood, before the body, there was her—his mother.
She had a smile made of bruises and a laugh that trembled like glass. She worked the street corners and fed her son with aching hands and too many apologies.
"You'll be better than me," she told him once, pressing a warm rice ball into his palm. "You'll be someone real. Not some ghost walking in heels."
She died three weeks later. A customer stabbed her seven times for refusing to go without pay.
Kishibe didn't cry.
He pulled the kitchen knife from the drawer, and sharpened it until the steel hummed with purpose. The killer had a name. Kishibe never remembered it. Only his face—and the way it changed when Kishibe slit his throat in a dirty public bathroom.
There were no witnesses. No sirens. Just the quiet sound of life leaving a man and the boy who watched it happen.
That was the night the curse inside him bloomed.
The air twisted around him, thin threads snapping like spider silk. His breath fogged with unnatural cold. A sliver of light carved across his chest—not from the knife, but from within.
"Cursed Technique: Severance."
It had no shape at first. Only sensation. Cutting, slicing, cleaving things that couldn't be cut. Threads. Ideas. The air between words. He didn't understand it—but it came when he killed. And it always, always wanted more.