Lucrezia jammed her hand into her coat pocket, reaching for her black feather. Himushi extended her hand, signaling her to stop. "I wouldn't do that if I were you. If we fight here, those girls inside will die in the crossfire. What would be the point in that, after working so hard to get them together?"

Lucrezia knew she was right. She drew her empty hand from her pocket, biting her lip in frustration. "Damn it..."

"Come with me. Quietly. Do that, and I won't hurt them. This is strictly between us, after all."

Realizing she didn't have a choice, Lucrezia hung her head and raised her hands. "...Okay. I surrender."

Osamu, Shinju, and Cyanide bolted out of the shrine and sprinted through the woods, cutting through the middle of the cemetery and heading back to the neighborhood. Cyanide held the scroll as they ran, keeping his eye and the shifting ink indicating Magatori's location.

"Looks like he's holed up at an abandoned hospital not far from here. We need to head south!" Cyanide shouted.

"Good. We'll make a barrier around this end of the neighborhood and take the fight to the hospital!" Shinju said.

"What should I be doing?" Osamu asked.

"What should you be doing?" Cyanide repeated. "Don't you think you should be going home and fleeing? You're not exactly needed anymore."

"What? Are you saying I should run?" Osamu recoiled.

"You've got two divine descendants here. Just leave the battle to us!" Cyanide urged.

"Osamu, I normally take you with me in our adventures, but this is leagues above snatching a common crook or curing a cursed goddess. Himushi and Magatori are extremely dangerous. A mere human should never approach them. If I were you, I would go home, make sure your wives are okay!"

"It's because I want to protect my family that I'm dead set on going!"

Shinju stopped in her tracks, prompting the rest of them to stop as well. "Is that the truth?"

"O-of course it is!" Osamu said.

"Cyanide, go on ahead." Shinji commanded, breathing heavily. "Set up the barrier for me. I'll catch up."

"All right. Osamu, if we don't see each other again, it was great meeting you." Cyanide saluted.

Cyanide ran ahead, leaving Shinju with Osamu in the middle of the snow-covered cemetery.

"Osamu, have you ever noticed?"

"Noticed what?"

"Despite being the descendant of Ebisu, the god of wealth and prosperity, Cyanide never wishes to be wealthy. He never wishes to have more than he knows he can handle. Cyanide recognizes the futility in having and in being more than what he actually is. That's why he's still alive, and it's why he got away with his life after fighting Himushi and Magatori. That same principle, however, is lost on you."

Osamu's heart felt like it was tightening as he listened to Shinju's words, each syllable a knife through his emotions.

"You have two people who can solve this for you. There's no need to get involved any further." Shinju explained. "There is such a thing as being far too heroic, Osamu. A hero is classically thought to be one who is brave and upholds the law, but there are also people who are so absorbed by the act of heroism, that they break all of the rules and become unlawful. I, of all people, can tell you that when a law is broken, justice finds a way to take what it's owed. At that point, the person who thinks they're being heroic is truly no different from the common sociopath. Low impulse control, eagerness to break rules, and always on a harmful mission to seek out novelty and risks."

Shinju's eyes only told Osamu that she was serious. Though he wanted to protest, he realized that Shinju, whether he agreed or not, had a point. He was foolishly willing to throw himself into a situation that was clearly out of his depth, and for what? What could he have possibly achieved? Why would he ever want to go toe to toe against a former exorcist and a demigod?

He swore he had an answer, a perfectly understandable justification for his altruism, but his tongue turned into stone as he tried to find the words to express it. All he could think of where his two biggest failures in life; Aika losing her memories, and Isabella passing away.

Did throwing himself into the jaws of danger make him feel as though he had control over fate itself, that perhaps, if he played the hero, a tragedy like Isabella would never happen to him again? Or perhaps a darker impulse within him found a way to pass itself off as heroism, as a meaningful way to end his own life.

Osamu himself didn't want to confront the answer right then and there. How then, could he possibly express any of his swirling, agonizing thoughts to Shinju?

"Yeah...you're probably right." Osamu said.

"I am right. Can't name a time I was ever wrong." Shinji tittered. "Besides, if you died under my watch, that wouldn't be very righteous, would it?"

"Right. You'd blame yourself a thousand times over for that." Osamu said.

Shinju smiled. "You know me well."

The wind blew Shinju's orange hair to the side as she turned her back towards Osamu. Her hair danced like a flickering flame of a dying candle, mesmerizing the agonized Osamu. Some part of him was so jealous of her he wanted to scream.

She was like a superhero from a Saturday morning cartoon that always had a massive task to undertake and important decisions to agonize over. Even if she failed or stumbled along the way, it would never look like her suffering was in vain, or her life lacked meaning.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

For Osamu, he could make that exact same sacrifice, agonize over the exact same choices, and it would be for nothing. He wasn't part of some power struggle between exorcists and demigods. He wasn't repaying a debt to a family he had wronged, like Lucrezia was. He was simply an ordinary man trying to find his way out of suffering ordinary tragedies.

"Get the girls and leave the area. Call the Shoku Twins and have them take you back to Hokkaido, if you have to. Just remember that Izanami cannot teleport you anymore, not while she's pregnant." Shinju said.

"You'll make it, right?" Osamu asked.

"It will be tough, I won't lie. But with Cyanide, I think we'll be okay. Don't worry."

"All right. I'll trust you, then."

"Then be on your way. Thank you for your help until now."

"Right...Good luck, Shinju..."

Shinju walked ahead, and Osamu turned the other way. He shoved his hands in his pockets and strolled past the field of tombstones before him, stopping at one particular grave. It had been a while since he returned there, but Osamu was standing before the grave of his friend and classmate, Kenjo. The wind tugged at his wavy lion's mane of raven hair as he stared at Kenjo's grave with glassy, tear-soaked eyes.

"How did you do it, man? How did you leap in like that, time and time again?" Osamu asked. "How did you find meaning...at the meager age of seventeen?"

Kenjo's grave answered him with coldhearted silence. It only highlighted the difference between the tragedies he suffered, versus the ones Shinju suffered. There was no grand story or fierce battle he could use to romanticize what happened to Kenjo. There was no greater struggle or lesson to be had.

The people he loved didn't go out in blazes of glory. Kenjo went out in an instant, his bloodied, mangled body pulled from the wreckage of his mother's car. Isabella died painfully and slowly, and Osamu had to watch as his best friend and former lover was ravaged by cancer, both physically and emotionally. He watched her say goodbye to her parents as she made the painful choice to remain in Japan rather than go home to America.

Death didn't give those two any fanfare, nor some heroic tale to sweeten the bitterness of their loss from the world. It just took them, mercilessly so, while Osamu could do nothing but watch, grieve, and regret. He marched home with a cold void in his chest. As soon as he entered through the front door and kicked his shoes off, he was suddenly swarmed by the girls. All of their eyes were wide with panic.

"Osamu! Have you seen Lucrezia?" Amatsuki asked.

"Huh? I thought she was with you guys." Osamu said.

"She went missing while we were putting up the tree!" Izanami cried. "We thought maybe she needed to go out and handle something, but..."

Kagutsuchi held up Lucrezia's black, leather boots. "We don't think Lucrezia would walk around in the snow with no shoes on."

Osamu's face was soaked in sweat and horror. He immediately remembered that Magatori was in the neighborhood even before he left the shrine. It couldn't have been a coincidence that Lucrezia disappeared around the same time, not even taking her shoes with her.

"Oh my god..." Osamu gasped. "I think...I think Lucrezia was abducted."

A freezing splash of water stung Lucrezia's body as Himushi poured a bucket over her head. Her vision blurred and her nerves screamed from the frostbite while her heart ran a marathon inside of her chest.

"Look at me. Look at me!" Himushi barked.

Lucrezia's vision refocused as the pain subsided. She was bound by her wrists and feet, strapped into a wooden chair. Himushi had taken her to the abandoned hospital's third floor, a wide, empty space devoid of furniture, desks, seats, or signs. Trash, rubble, and broken ceiling tile littered the dirty floors and paint was peeling off the walls. Two surgical lights hung above Lucrezia's head, indicating the room might've been used for operations.

Lucrezia sat completely nude in that chair, save for her bandages. Himushi forced her to take her clothes off, and now that she was soaked in freezing water, Lucrezia understood why.

"No more lies. No more bullshit. Somehow, you survived the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995." Himushi said, pacing back and forth. "The exorcists spent months looking for you, and you were registered as missing. It was Magatori and I that finally found where your house used to be before the quake. We were expecting to find two skeletons, one for you and one for your mother. The one we found fit your height, but for some reason, we didn't find your mother's skeleton. But that can't be, because you're right here in front of me. So, what happened? How did you survive the quake? Whose skeleton did we recover?"

"You're...making a terrible mistake, Himushi..." Lucrezia panted. "Amaterasu saw you using blood magic. They know you're related to Inari."

Himushi cocked her head in confusion. "How do you..."

"I know a lot about you. That power you have? Only Inari Okami has that. It's a dead giveaway that you're her descendant. In a way, you were right to abandon the Exorcist Program. They would've treated you exactly like they're treating Inari, like a criminal. Himushi, I'm trying to find Inari. I have to get to her before the exorcists do. I know you know something. You have to."

"Answer my question first."

"Himushi!"

"You don't exactly have time to argue. Without your clothes, you're going to get hypothermia. The quicker you answer my question, the quicker I can give you your clothes back and answer yours. What happened in 1995? How did you survive the quake and stage two emphysema? Whose bones did we find?"

Lucrezia's silence indicated she was more than willing to die to protect her secret. She hung her head, cold water dripping from her...black hair?

"...What....what is going on?" Himushi recoiled.

Lucrezia had always had chestnut colored hair, or so everyone thought. Himushi's shower of cold water washed what appeared to be coloring out of Lucrezia's hair, dying the drippings from her head the same chestnut brown that should've been her natural hair color. Soaked all the way through, Lucrezia's bandages slipped off from her arms and leg, as well as the left half of her face. Himushi stepped closer, pulling the bandages free from her limbs and face.

She nearly fell to her bottom in horror from what she saw. "What is this? Shikome's curse? No, it's different. If it was a shikome's curse, you would've been dead by now."

"Damn it...No!" Lucrezia cried.

Himushi spread apart Lucrezia's legs, checking the color of her pubic hair as well. She figured there was no way she would've went as far as dyeing her pubic hair chestnut brown. Whatever the hair color was down there, it must've been her god-given, natural hair color.

"Black as night..." Himushi gasped. "You're not Lucrezia! You can't be! Her hair was a bright, warm brown! Who are you?!"

"Himushi...please listen to me!"

"Fuck off! Who the fuck are you?! Why did you take my best friend's identity?!"

"You don't understand what you're doing, Himushi! This isn't going to give you any peace! It's just going to make things worse!"

Himushi focused her hateful gaze upon Lucrezia, pointing her index finger right into her forehead. "Tell me whose skeleton we found!"

Once again, Himushi awakened the power of blood magic, the ability to make flesh and sinew enthralled to one's own command. Lucrezia fought it with all of her might, but it was ultimately too much for her. She was forced to shout out the name of the so-called 'friend' whose bones she protected and hid from the world. The secret was finally revealed.

"They're Yui Tobimaru's!" Lucrezia shouted. "...Her moniker was...Lucrezia."

Himushi's stomach twisted into knots. All of that time, she was holding her best friend's skeleton, not knowing who it was. She had dismissed the idea because she thought Lucrezia was alive. She thought she was fighting against her for all of these years, only to learn that the woman she believed was her long lost friend was an imposter who had stolen her identity. Knowing now that the bones belonged to her beloved Lucrezia made her want to vomit right then and there.

"But...if that was Lucrezia...then...who the hell are you?”