Manji looked up. A young woman in a worn kimono stood silhouetted against the gray afternoon light, one hand on the doorframe. Not a warrior—no sword at her hip, no calluses on her palms. But her eyes were old. Older than her face. They tracked the fresh wound on his forearm—a deep gash from the last standing swordsman—and watched, without flinching, as the skin knitted itself shut.
Rin met his gaze. The rain outside began to fall harder, drumming on the dojo’s tiled roof. In the silence between them, Manji heard what she wasn’t saying: How many more? How many until I feel clean? How many until my parents’ ghosts stop screaming? Blade of the Immortal -Dub-
“No.” He looked at his hands—the same hands that had killed a hundred men, a thousand, a number that stopped meaning anything after the second century. Hands that had held his daughter, once. Before she aged and withered while he stayed seventeen. “I believe in grudges.” Manji looked up