The smell of ozone was gone. In its place was the heavy, cloying scent of scorched plastic, cold rain, and old blood.
Jin lay on the wet linoleum. His vision was a flickering kaleidoscope of red and black. The emergency light above the register hummed—a dying, mechanical rattle that felt like a needle scratching against the inside of his skull. Every pulse of that dim red light sent a wave of nausea through his gut.
He couldn't feel his left leg. It was a block of dead, frozen wood attached to his hip. He tried to twitch his toes, but the signal died somewhere in his spine.
Footsteps.
They were heavy. Each stride carried the crushing weight of the black iron sword she dragged behind her. The metal tip shrieked against the floor, carving a shallow, jagged trench in the linoleum tiles. The sound was high-pitched, a metallic scream that made Jin's teeth ache.
Jin tried to prop himself up. His right arm, slick with spilled milk and sweat, buckled immediately. He collapsed back into the puddle. The liquid was warm now, mixing with the heat of his own breath.
The girl stopped.
The black leather boots were inches from his face. They were covered in soot and thick streaks of blue ichor from the ice monster. Jin stared at a drop of that blue blood as it slid down the toe of her boot and fell into the white pool surrounding his head. It didn't mix. It swirled like oil.
"I watched you eat that apple."
Her voice was flat. Like stone hitting stone in a deep well.
"The parasite wanted the girl. It was screaming for her. But you gave it fruit. That was... inefficient."
Jin coughed. A ragged, wet sound that sent a fresh spike of agony through his cracked ribs. He turned his head slowly, squinting up at her through the haze of his own fractured vision.
She wasn't looking at him with pity. There was no warmth in her expression, no heroic concern. She was looking at him the way a surgeon looks at a tumor. Her eyes were dark, almost black, and they held no reflection of the red emergency light. They were twin voids.
"Who..." Jin's voice broke. He swallowed, forcing down the copper and bile. "Who are you."
The girl didn't answer. She shifted her weight, and the massive sword groaned under its own impossible mass.
"You have no aura," she said, her voice dropping an octave. She leaned down, her face inches from his. Her skin was unnaturally pale, like polished marble under the crimson light. "No demonic signature. No holy light. No mana. Just a hole where a soul should be. An empty vessel filled with a rotting, alien energy."
She reached out. Her hand was small, but her grip was like a frozen vice. She grabbed the front of his blue store vest and hauled him upward.
Jin's head spun. The room tilted violently. He hung in her grip, his toes barely scraping the floor. The pain in his chest flared into a white-hot sun, stealing his breath.
Critical System Failure.Neural integrity: 86%.Immediate bio-matter required.Option: The Predator in front of you.Chance of success: 0.04%.
The parasite was desperate now. It wasn't suggesting a transaction anymore; it was clawing at the walls of his consciousness. It wanted him to bite. To tear into the pale throat in front of him and drink the blue fire he could feel vibrating inside her. The hunger was a physical weight, a hollow vacuum in his stomach that demanded to be filled.
Jin's left eye burned. He could feel the blood rushing to the optic nerve, the heat of the Sharingan begging to be released.
He clenched his teeth until he heard them grind. He forced his hands to stay limp, hanging like dead meat at his sides.
"Eat." The girl whispered. She saw the flicker in his pupil. She saw the red heat trying to surface. "Go on. Show me the monster."
She slammed him back against the metal lockers. The boom echoed through the ruined store like a funeral drum.
Jin's breath left him in a long, painful wheeze. He looked at her. He didn't use the Sharingan. He didn't use the System. He used his own eyes—bloodshot, tired, and stubbornly human.
"I'm... a clerk." Jin gasped.
The girl stared at him. The silence in the breakroom was absolute, broken only by the rhythmic dripping of water from the hole in the wall. She searched his face for a lie, for a spark of the power she expected.
She found nothing but exhaustion.
She let go.
Jin slid down the lockers, his back scraping against the cold metal until he hit the floor with a dull thud. He clutched his stomach, his breath coming in jagged, shallow pulls that whistled in the quiet room.
"The Gremory girl is curious about you," the girl said. She straightened up, slinging the massive black sword onto her shoulder as if it were a feather. "The Sitri girl is cautious. They play their games of chess and politics. But I don't care about their houses. I only care about the anomaly."
She walked toward the hole in the wall. The rain was pouring through the gap, drenching the small room, turning the dust into mud.
"My name is Xenovia," she said. She didn't look back. "Don't die yet, Jin Kurosawa. The cost of your power is high, but the cost of your secrets is higher. The Church doesn't like holes in the world."
She stepped into the dark. A flash of blue light illuminated the rain for a fraction of a second, and then she was gone.
Jin sat in the wreckage.
The silence returned, heavier than before. He looked down at his left hand. The bandage had been torn away during the struggle. The four crescent cuts were wide open, weeping fresh, dark blood into the puddle of milk.
What was my apartment number.
He reached for the memory. He saw the hallway. He saw the door. But the number was a blur. A smudge of gray ink on a wet page.
What was the name of the woman who lived next door.
Nothing.
What was the name of the street I grew up on.
Nothing.
The static was winning. The parasite had taken its payment for the survival it had provided in the alleyway. It didn't care that he had refused to eat. It didn't care about his morality. It was a machine, and the machine required fuel.
He crawled toward the half-eaten apple.
It lay near the lockers, covered in dust, shards of glass, and the white residue of the milk. It looked pathetic. Small.
He picked it up with a trembling hand. His fingers were blue from the cold. He looked at the white flesh of the apple, now browning, oxidising in the stagnant air of the breakroom.
He took another bite.
He chewed slowly, deliberately. The juice was cold and bitter. It tasted of the floor and the rain.
He forced himself to swallow.
A single, silent tear traced a path through the grime on his cheek. He didn't feel sad. He didn't feel scared. He didn't even feel like himself.
He felt light.
As if the more he forgot, the less he weighed. As if his entire existence was being erased, one memory at a time, leaving behind only the cold, hard shell of a survival instinct.
In the distance, the first sirens began to wail. Blue and red lights began to dance off the wet pavement outside the shattered storefront, miles away.
Jin leaned his head back against the locker. The cold metal was a comfort. It was real. It was there.
He looked at the hole in the wall. The rain kept falling, rhythmic and indifferent.
He closed his eyes.
He tried to remember the face of the girl with the red hair. Rias.
For a second, he saw a flash of crimson. A lock of hair falling over a blank page. Then, the white static rushed in—a screaming, chaotic roar—and the image dissolved into ash.
He drifted into the dark.
His last thought was not about the devils, the angels, or the iron sword.
It was about the milk.
Tanaka would be angry about the spilled milk. He would deduct it from his paycheck.
Jin wondered if he would remember who Tanaka was tomorrow.
The sirens grew louder. The red light of the emergency bulb finally flickered and died.
The store was dark.
The apple core fell from his hand, rolling into the shadows.
It stayed there.
Empty.