As the first rays of the sun broke apart the night sky, Kenshi rose from the pile of mangled bodies that served as his bed.
His eyes turned once more toward the distant hill.
He moved, his steps slow, deliberate, heavy with the weight of slaughter.
Yet as he passed, his gaze lingered upon the corpses strewn around him.
A hollow stare, still etched with fatigue and the faint burn of bloodlust that clung stubbornly from the earlier battle.
Arms torn, bone jutting from splintered flesh.
Heads locked in their last moments, eyes wide and glassy, staring into nothing.
Mouths frozen in silent screams that would never again reach the air.
Kenshi stopped. Slowly, he turned back, his gaze sweeping across the field of death.
He saw. He heard. He remembered.
Every struggle. Every drop of blood. Every final breath.
This was his truth. His goal.
To rise above it.
To endure.
To survive.
At last, he reached the crest of the hill. His eyes stretched outward, far beyond the battlefield.
Carnage.
Slaughter.
Despair.
Different names. Different faces. The same everywhere, the same always.
And then—beyond the wasteland—he saw it.
A wall, vast and imposing, encircling the edge of the Zaraki district.
For a long moment he stared, and the question that had festered within him, unspoken until now, finally found its answer.
A wall. So we are the commoners of this… Hell. Or as he called it… the Soul Society.
A flicker broke through his vision.
Hands lifting him.
Silver eyes gazing upon him, soft yet sorrowful, heavy with unspoken melancholy.
The vision faded, leaving only the bloodstained path ahead.
Kenshi turns, his feet carrying him toward the narrow road that led to the wall.
The ground was still wet with crimson, the earth itself drinking greedily of the night's slaughter.
His path was clear now.
Beyond survival, beyond despair—
His goal was the wall.
And he would cross it.
The climb down the hill was harder than the battle.
Each step dug into loose stone and dirt, body aching with the weight of blood lost and strength spent.
The battlefield below stretched far, and in the silence, Kenshi felt the emptiness gnaw at him.
His eyes caught a hollow in the hillside—a cave, half hidden by a curtain of roots and shadows.
He pushed the roots aside and stepped in.
The air inside was stale, untouched for decades.
His eyes adjusted to the dim, and there it was—sitting slumped against the wall, a skeleton. Its clothes had long rotted away, leaving brittle bones collapsed inward, hands folded inward as if waiting for whoever was to come.
Kenshi froze.
For a long time, he just stood there, staring at the remains.
Something about the cave seemed heavier, may be because of that lonely corpse, like it had been waiting for him.
He moves towards it, his steps leading to the skeleton on their own.
As if something was calling him, for a talk.
Finally, he sat opposite it, cross-legged, his back against the cold stone. He let out a bitter laugh—dry, cracked.
"…Guess you're not the talking kind."
The skeleton, of course, did not answer.
His gaze lingered on the empty sockets where eyes had once been.
"Do you know what it feels like?" His voice was low, raw. "To be thrown into this hell… and keep walking, when everything inside you wants to lie down and never get up again?"
Silence pressed back.
Kenshi's words came slower, at first unsure, but the more he spoke, the more the weight inside loosened.
"I've killed more than I can count… faces I don't remember, names I never knew. Men, women, but never children. Even in the wars I fought, I never hurt a child. But today... Their blood still clings to me. I can smell it even now."
His hand trembled slightly, but he clenched it tight.
"I didn't want to." His voice broke for a second. "But I did. And I'll keep doing it, because that's the only way to move forward here. Killing in a war, that's ambition. But here it's just SURVIVAL!"
The cave dripped. The bones sat still.
Kenshi leaned forward, his hollow gaze softening just a little.
"…Did you die alone, too?"
For the first time, his words carried something fragile—longing.
He bowed his head, resting his forearms on his knees. "Maybe… we're not so different. You reached the end. I'm still walking. Waiting for my end, or a glorious purpose. That's all."
A silence stretched on.
In it, he felt something stir deep inside—his reiryoku shifting, restless, as if responding to the truth he had finally let slip.
His blade letting a quite hum as he feels the sudden urge to meditate.
As if something was whispering from the back of his mind.
Guiding him to find something.
Finding something only he can.
Himself...
Kenshi sat in silence, his blade resting cold across his lap.
The faint sound of his own breathing echoed against the cave walls, broken only by the dripping of water from unseen cracks above.
His eyes were half-closed, yet something inside gnawed at him—something deeper than fatigue.
A pull.
It wasn't physical. It wasn't even spiritual. It wasn't like the voice he heard.
It was absolute.
His chest grew heavy, as though invisible chains wrapped around his ribs and dragged him downwards.
His vision went black.
Then—he was no longer in the cave.
The ground beneath him shifted to something wet and sticky.
A swamp of shredded flesh, mangled organs, and pale bodies piled atop one another, their faces twisted in eternal screams.
The stench was unbearable, yet he could not gag.
The mire stuck to his feet, sucking him deeper with every breath.
From above, there was no sky. Only darkness, endless and oppressive.
Then it came.
The answer was a whisper that slithers along Kenshi's skin, like cold breath, from a corpse.
The faceless void reshapes itself—no longer merely a heap of flesh, but a silhouette traced in moonlight and blood. The voice that spills from it is low and honeyed, each syllable a caress and a knife.
"You fight so prettily," it purrs, silk and smoke. "But you fight alone, don't you, Kenshi?"
Kenshi's jaw tightens.
The pull in his chest tightens; the swamp's grasp is patient and possessive. He can feel the voice wrapping around his name, testing the weight of it. It's feminine—soft promises sewn into every sentence—but there's a razor beneath the velvet.
"You sound like a sin," he says, voice raw.
A tiny laugh—wet and amused—bubbles up from the darkness. "Sin is only a story the dead tell themselves, in their death, don't they? Kenshi." she murmurs.
"I am what you'll become when you stop pretending to be afraid. Taste me. Let me show you what your blade was made to sing."
Her words coil around his memories: the faces on the battlefield, the people he tried to protect, the warm smear when metal met flesh.
Each image flares and then is smoothed, like a hand erasing doubt from a chalkboard. The succubus-voice nudges, not crude but intimate—an invitation and a test.
"You kept your hunger. Hunger for war, blood and death at bay." she continues, voice lowering to a private tone.
"You call it mercy, restraint. How noble. How fragile." She moves closer in the darkness; Kenshi senses breath across his ear though no mouth is visible.
"But every blade hungers. Every hand meant to hold a sword learns to crave the cut. Will you feed that hunger, or will you deny even if it's the last thing you do ?"
The swamp reacts: bodies shift, tendrils of gore curling like fingers.
The scent of iron brightens.
Kenshi's grip on the hilt trembles. Something in him answers the seduction—not with words but with muscle memory, the old joy of a clean strike.
The spirit hears that small sound and smiles in the dark.
"Good," she breathes. "There's life in you yet." Her tone changes—less coquette, more... devious. "You can be cold, Kenshi. Calculating. Or you can be exquisite. Let me teach you how to enjoy the inevitability. Let me make you inevitable."
He remembers the faces again, and this time the images sharpen into a rationale the voice is already shaping for him: mercy as weakness, slaughter as salvation.
It feels wrong—terribly wrong—and yet the voice fills the wrongness with shimmering possibility.
The world he saw after waking up making him believe it.
Convincing him of it.
"Say my name," she tempts, not demanding but coaxing, like a cat drawing a mouse toward the edge. "Say it and feel the truth in your mouth."
Kenshi feels a churning in his gut, a battle between a memory of vows and the immediate, animal pull beneath them. He is a man who has already crossed lines; the voice knows how to tilt those crossings into absolutes.
"No," he whispers, but his whisper is small and the darkness laughs—soft, delighted.
"Not yet," she croons.
"Good. Let it ferment. Let it bruise. Let it ache until the only thing that will stop the pain is the taste of what you refuse to do."
Her hand—if she has one—presses to a place where his chest hurts most.
The cave around him hums, and beneath that hum is the pounding of an older drum: battle, hunger, dominion. The voice is no longer merely testing; she is guiding, pushing, a devil with a velvet glove.
"Imagine," she says, low as a prayer and sharp as a verdict, "you don't save anyone anymore. You decide. You choose. The weak burn away, and what's left? You. The crown sits clean on your head, heavy and warm." The suggestion is intoxicatingly simple. "Take it. The people you used to protect behind your blade. Weak. pathetic."
Kenshi's hand slides along the hilt; the metal is colder than the air, but his palm finds steadiness in the familiar weight.
He does not speak. The battlefield memories rippling along his memories.
The swamp pulls until his knees dip into the filth; the bodies around him quiet into a chorus that wants him to join.
She leans in, voice velveted iron. "Fear keeps men small. I can make you larger than your fears, Kenshi. You only have to close your eyes and listen to me."
A shudder moves through him—part revulsion, part craving.
The succubus-voice tilts the world so the only clear thing is temptation.
"Decide," she whispers, a final, sweet shove. "Not for them. For you. Just once."
Kenshi tastes the words like bile and honey. The dark pool breathes around him, waiting. The voice waits with a smile that would cut if shown.
Until, another voice is heard.
The same voice that guided him in his first battle.
"Kenshi.."
A quite whisper, all it was.
When he finds himself in the cave, breathing, sweating.
In the light and without the overwhelming darkness surrounding him.