The rain was a cold, unpleasant drizzle, and it was carving me down to the bone. Each drop that struck my face was another small truth: the world didn't care. It would fall on the victor and the vanquished, on the living and the dead. A perfect, final impartiality.
Asset inventory, a voice in my head, the cold, hard part that had kept me alive this long—began its grim tally. One functional arm. One kunai, held in reserve. Approximately one hundred seconds of effective combat mobility before blood loss induces my death. Conclusion: Unfavorable.
I leaned on the sword I'd driven into the mud, the steel was almost like a familiar third leg. The forest around me was littered with bodies of the men I had killed, lying crumpled on the forest floor like dolls. My work. The general's head was gone, the job was done. But the price had been high. A dozen of his best, and they'd made me pay for every inch of ground.
Three were left.
They circled me, their movements slick and uncertain in the muck. Samurai. Even with their fine lacquered armor smeared with filth, they carried the arrogance, the same as their generals. They saw a lone, wounded shinobi. A cornered rat. They were wrong. A cornered rat is desperate. I was simply… tired.
"He can barely stand," one of them hissed, a boy trying to sound like a man. "Together!"
The first mistake. Announcing intent.
My body was a screaming of destroyed muscle and broken bone, but i had to act part of the Scarecrow, which had one last sequence left play. I didn't push off the sword. I let my weight fall forward, a controlled collapse that a healthy man couldn't replicate. They expected a lunge; they got a landslide.
The boy's eyes widened. His blade came up in a panicked, novices parry, but I ignored it. My own blade, low and fast, was not aimed at his sword. It slid past his guard, the flat of the sword slapping his scabbard hard enough to throw his balance. As he stumbled, my forward momentum carried me past him, and the kunai was in my good hand. A quick, upward thrust under the jaw. No glory in it. Just the wet, percussive sound of steel finding bone and flesh. It was an ugly, efficient motion. The kind they don't write poems about.
One.
I didn't have time to retrieve my sword. I left it in him and spun on my heel, the kunai held in a reverse grip. The other two were on me, their blades scything through the rain. There was no strength left in me for a contest of blades. So I didn't give them one.
I dropped, my knees slamming into the corpse of their friend. Their swords whistled over my head, close enough to feel the air pressure. Using the dead man's body for leverage, I kicked out, my leg sweeping low and hard. The mud from the rain did the rest.
The samurai on the left went down with a surprised grunt. I was on him in an instant, a predator that had forgotten pain. I drove the kunai down into the gap of his neck armor. He thrashed once, like fish on a hook, and then went still.
Two.
A gasp tore from my throat, hot and bloody. The wound in my side, a deep, ragged tear, exploded with pain. I can feel my life fading, the edges of my vision turning grey and fuzzy. I tried to push myself up, but my muscles refused. I was on my knees, defenseless.
The last one. The big one. He hadn't moved. He'd watched it all, his face a grim, unreadable mask under the brim of his helmet. He was a veteran. He was a tool, just like me.
He stepped over the bodies of his comrades, his heavy boots sinking into the mud. He raised his katana, ready to take my life
"You fight well, Scarecrow," he said, his voice a low, gravelly thing. It wasn't a compliment. It was a statement of fact.
I looked up at him, a bloody smile finding my lips for the first time. I had nothing left. No weapons. No strength. Only the ending. And after a life like mine, an ending felt like a reward.
This is a good death. An honest one. But I do not deserve such honor.
I saw the blade begin its descent. I saw the crows in the trees, their black eyes like obsidian rocks, waiting for their feast. I closed my eyes, and for the first time in a long time, I felt something like peace, I think.
The blade struck.
And the world faded to white.
I was in a chair. A hard, uncomfortable wooden chair, bolted to a grey, dusty floor.
The transition was so absolute, so devoid of fanfare, it was the most terrifying thing I had ever experienced. One moment, I was dying in the mud. The next, I was… being processed.
The man behind the desk was a stark contradiction to the timeless, grey hallway. He was sharp, modern. He wore a crisp, pinstripe suit, the kind a wealthy merchant or a high-ranking official might wear. A red tie was knotted neatly at his collar. His hair was a spiky, unruly shock of pure white, and perched on his nose were a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses. A cigarette dangled from his lips, a thin ribbon of smoke curling up towards a ceiling that wasn't there.
He sighed, a long, weary sound that spoke of endless, soul-crushing repetition, and took a slow drag from the cigarette. He exhaled, the smoke mingling with the dust. "Another one," he muttered, his voice flat. He tapped an ash into a small, clean tray on the desk. "Name?"
I tried to speak. My name, Karasu, was like it didn't exist on my tongue, no sound came out.
He didn't look up. "No name. Right. Most of you don't have one by the end." He scribbled something down with a quill, the scratching sound loud in the oppressive silence. "Origin?"
Silence.
"Foreign world, anomalous soul signature. Figures." The man sighed again, rubbing the bridge of his nose and adjusting his glasses. Through the lenses, I saw his eyes for the first time. They were crimson. Not just red, but the deep, unsettling color of fresh blood, and they held an expression of profound, analytical boredom. "Always the complicated ones. Do you have any idea how much paperwork you strays generate?"
He finally met my gaze, and I felt a chill that had nothing to do with death. It was the look of a scientist examining a specimen, an accountant reviewing a ledger. I wasn't a warrior, a hero, or even a man. I was a clerical error.
He picked up a heavy wooden stamp. "Right, then," he droned. "Let's see... not on any approved summons list. No divine patronage. Soul is… a mess. Looks like a collapsed void that tried to eat itself. Definitely not a candidate for Ascension." He squinted at the form. "Not wicked enough for the Pit, not stable enough for the Cycle."
He shrugged, a final, dismissive gesture, and took one last drag from his cigarette before stubbing it out. "Disposition is clear, then."
He raised the stamp. A single word, carved in a language I didn't know but understood in the very marrow of my nonexistent bones, faced me.
REJECTED
THUMP.
The sound was not a sound. It was the universe passing sentence. It struck my soul, and my soul shattered.
The world dissolved. I was falling, tumbling through a cold, silent, starless abyss.
The landing wasn't a fall; it was an impact. A brutal, violent reunion with my own dying body. The pain returned, a supernova of agony as I slammed into something that gave way beneath me with a wet, fleshy squelch. I screamed, a raw, ragged sound, as my lungs filled with air that was fundamentally wrong. It was thick, heavy, clinging to the back of my throat like a shroud. It smelled of damp earth, sweet rot, and a sharp, sterile tang like lightning right after a strike.
I blinked, trying to clear a film of glowing slime from my eyes. I was lying on my side, half-sunken into a carpet of what looked like pulsating, phosphorescent moss. I was in a hollow, a small clearing at the base of something impossibly large. It wasn't a tree. It was a root, gnarled and grey like ancient stone, as wide as a fortress wall, curving up and out of sight into the oppressive darkness above.
There was no sky, or maybe there was. Only a ceiling of darkness, pricked by the distant, eerie glow of other fungal growths. The only light here, in my view, came from the squirming moss beneath me and a cluster of mushrooms nearby. They were the size of boulders, their caps pulsing with a soft, green light.
The air didn't just hum, it was a low, bass vibration like sensation that resonated in my bones, a constant pressure against my skin. It felt… alive. The whole forest felt like the inside of some colossal, breathing creature.
"This isn't the afterlife, where in gods name am I? This is somewhere else."
The wounds were real. I could feel the ragged gash in my side, the grinding of broken bone in my shoulder, I'm sure I'm dying.
A low, demonic growl echoed from the shadows just beyond my little island of light. It was a sound of deep, patient hunger. The sound of a predator that had just found an easy meal.
I gritted my teeth, the pain spread through my body like fire. I was no longer a tool. I was no longer a scarecrow. I was prey. Wounded prey in a forest with something wanting its next meal.
And there was only one thing for wounded prey to do.
I began to crawl, dragging my ruined body off the glowing moss, leaving a trail of blood as I crawled along the forest floor. I wasn't moving toward hope. I wasn't looking for a way home.
I was looking for a shadow deep enough to die in. A place where a thing like myself belonged. A place where souls rot.