“You don’t believe in luck.”
“That’s the last of the senior students,” she said, standing. Her voice didn’t shake. He’d taught her that. “Anotsu’s inner circle is down to seven.”
The voice came from the doorway. Low, female, unimpressed.
“Seven.” Manji rolled his shoulder, feeling the sacred bloodworms shift under his skin. “Lucky number.” Blade of the Immortal -Dub-
He didn’t have an answer. He hadn’t had an answer for a hundred and fifty years.
She stepped over a severed hand without looking down. “You took your time.”
Rin knelt beside the last body—a boy, really. Sixteen, maybe. His waki-zashi was still clutched in his death grip. She closed his eyes with two fingers, murmuring something Manji pretended not to hear. A prayer, or a curse. With Rin, it was hard to tell. “You don’t believe in luck
He stood in the wreckage, wiping a clot of gore from his kama chain with his thumb. Around him, the corpses of the sword school’s finest twitched in their death throes. His own haori hung in ribbons, revealing a chest mapped with scar tissue—each mark a story he didn’t owe anyone. He’d stopped counting after the first fifty years.
“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.”
“Rin,” he said. Her name tasted like dust and obligation. “Anotsu’s inner circle is down to seven
Manji bent down, retrieved his bamboo hat, and settled it over his face. The weight of it felt like a promise.
“After you,” he said, and the immortal followed the girl into the rain.
“Let’s go,” she said finally. “The next one’s in the pleasure district. He likes to watch women drown.”
“You move like a man who’s forgotten how to die.”