Chapter Text
"In this world… do we guide our fate, or are we guided—by a will unseen, vast and cruel? Is freedom but a dream, dancing on strings pulled by silence? If so… then perhaps struggle is the only choice left to those who still remember how to feel."
The forest had gone quiet again—eerily so. The kind of silence that comes only after something terrible has been forced back underground, waiting to rise again.
Sakurā walked through the damp leaves, his boots crunching over the soil as mist rolled across the roots. Opal followed closely, the faint glow from her Jewel casting ghostlike patterns on the trees. Diana lagged behind, her breathing sharp and uneasy.
Something glimmered beneath a broken branch. Sakurā stopped, crouched, and pulled it free—just a crumpled, damp piece of paper, its edges stained dark red.
Diana: “What is that?”
Sakurā didn’t answer right away. He unfolded it slowly, the paper crackling. The stench of iron hit his nose. Blood.
The words were scrawled in jagged, uneven handwriting:
“There are monsters among us. And ‘The Children of the Sacred Feast’ on Samhain will arrive—and The Leftovers will be its meal. Soon, not yet in the near future.”
For a moment, none of them spoke. The forest wind howled through the treetops like a whispering voice.
Opal: “The… Children of the Sacred Feast? What is that supposed to mean?”
Sakurā (narrowing his eye): “Samhain… the night when the veil breaks. When demons, spirits, and things worse crawl between worlds.”
He turned the note around, studying the markings beneath the words—circles, strange runes drawn in ash and old blood. The kind of sigils he’d seen before carved into corpses during the Doomsday War.
Diana (nervously): “You think it’s another cult?”
Sakurā folded the note and tucked it into his coat pocket. His tone dropped low, gravelly.
Sakurā: “Not a cult. A warning. Or a countdown.”
He stood, his mechanical hand tightening around the hilt of his sword. The red eye on the Devil’s Blade blinked faintly, as if it too had read the message and understood its meaning.
Opal: “So what do we do now?”
Sakurā: “We find out what this feast is… before we end up on the menu.”
He started walking deeper into the forest, his cape dragging over the dead leaves. Opal and Diana exchanged a worried glance before following him—each step taking them closer to a truth no one was ready to face.
The fog thickened until the path itself seemed to dissolve beneath their boots. Sakurā didn’t say another word. He just kept walking—each stride slow, deliberate, his expression unreadable beneath the shadows of his hood. The forest groaned and shifted as though it wanted to swallow them whole.
Diana shivered. “This place… feels wrong.”
Opal glanced behind her. “We should go back. There’s no trail anymore.”
Sakurā stopped abruptly. His left eye, the blind one, twitched as though sensing something unseen. He turned slightly toward them. “No. The forest isn’t alive—it’s remembering. Something happened here.”
His words made both of them tense. The air reeked faintly of ash and blood, though there was nothing visible—no signs of violence, only trees that seemed to lean in closer with every breath.
He reached into his coat, pulling out the blood-written note again. For a long moment, he simply stared at it. Then, without a sound, he tore it in half and dropped the pieces to the ground.
“They’re not messages,” Sakurā muttered.
“They’re invitations.”
Diana’s eyes widened. “Invitations to what?”
“Doesn’t matter.” His voice was distant.
“Whatever sent that… it already knows I’ve read it.”
The wind rose sharply, scattering the torn fragments through the fog. Opal’s hooves instinctively grabbed Sakurā’s arm, but he didn’t flinch. He simply looked ahead—his breath slow, measured, almost serene.
“Let’s move,” he said finally. “If the forest’s watching, let it watch. It’ll learn nothing.”
They continued deeper, three fading silhouettes in the pale mist, their figures swallowed by the grayness of the world. No one spoke again. Not about the note, not about the words written in blood. The night itself seemed to close around them, as though the trees were sealing a secret best left buried.
And somewhere in the distance, something breathed—a slow, patient exhale—then fell silent again.