Nanako, the elder sister, gathered the tattered edges of her courage. Her voice was a tiny, hopeful thread in the dark. "Uncle… you healed our hurts. Can you… can you bring our mommy and daddy back?"
Kamo Itsuki felt the question like a knife twist in his chest. He shook his head slowly, his voice gentle with a regret that was its own kind of wound. "I'm sorry. That… is something even I cannot do."
It was Mimiko, the younger, who spoke next, pressing her face into her sister's side. "Then… please, just take us away. Mommy and Daddy aren't here anymore. We don't want to be here either." Her words were a whisper of pure loss, mourning a past she could never reclaim and fearing a future she could not see.
Geto Suguru's brow furrowed. He leaned closer, his voice deceptively soft. "Are you certain? You don't wish for revenge? For the people who hurt your parents?"
Nanako shook her head, her child's eyes holding a startling, weary wisdom. "Even if they all disappear, Mommy and Daddy won't come home. We just… want them." Mimiko nodded, clinging tighter. "Mommy said people who kill are bad. Bad people get punished. Mimiko… doesn't want to be bad."
Then, Nanako's small hand rose, pointing at Geto's face with innocent wonder. "Uncle with the long hair… why are you crying? Did bad people hurt your mommy and daddy too?"
Geto Suguru was crying. Silent, clear tears traced paths down his cheeks, catching the faint moonlight. Kamo Itsuki watched, transfixed. He had seen Geto in rage, in focus, in weary resolve—but never like this. And strangely, in his spiritual perception, Geto did not radiate sorrow. Instead, there was a profound, startling clarity, a release, as if a core of tangled, poisoned thought had finally been dissolved.
Those tears were not of despair, but of a long-awaited baptism.
In that moment, the fog that had clouded Geto's soul—the relentless, grinding question of why he protected those who so often seemed undeserving—simply lifted. He remembered. He remembered the kind elderly neighbors from his childhood, their smiles like sunlight. He remembered the stormy night a monstrous curse shattered their peace, and the raw, pure surge that had erupted within him: I must protect. That was the seed. That was the origin of his power and his path.
He had become a sorcerer to protect the good. Somewhere along the way, drowning in the endless tide of human pettiness and malice, the mission had twisted into a grim, philosophical burden: protect non-sorcerers. The "good" had been lost in the abstraction.
The village chief's cruelty had been the final weight, threatening to snap his strained principles. So he had handed the moral calculus to these two broken children, expecting… he wasn't sure what. Justification, perhaps.
Instead, they gave him back his first truth.
They did not seek the cycle of blood. They sought safety. They sought the memory of love. In their simple, devastating choice, they drew a line he had nearly forgotten: a sorcerer's duty wasn't to the abstract mass of humanity, but to life, to innocence, to those who could still be saved from the darkness—both cursed and human.
The confusion, the nihilistic doubt that had whispered why protect these monkeys?, evaporated. The answer was here, trembling in two small hands clutching his. Protection was not a transaction based on worth. It was a choice, and it started with choosing what was right in front of you.
He wiped the tears away with the back of his hand, a new steadiness in his movement. The gloom was gone from his eyes, replaced by a resolute calm.
"Alright," Geto said, his voice firm yet infinitely gentle. He stood, looking from the girls to Kamo Itsuki. "Then we take them away. We protect them. That is our mission."
He had his answer. The path forward was clear again, not as a burden, but as a vow renewed. He would protect these two. He would protect what was good. And he would start by cleansing this village of its true rot—not with a massacre born of rage, but with the precise, merciless justice of a sorcerer who had remembered his purpose.
"Figured it out?"
Kamo Itsuki's voice was quiet, watching the new clarity settle in Geto's gaze like still water.
"Yes," Geto said, the word simple and final. "Garbage belongs in the incinerator. But not everyone is garbage. To let those wretched souls taint my own purpose… it seems absurd now."
He offered the girls a smile—a real one, warm and anchored, that reached his eyes. It was the smile of the boy who had first awakened his power to protect a neighbor, not the strained facade of the philosopher drowning in doubt.
Yet, Kamo Itsuki's own brow furrowed slightly. "You've found your clarity," he said, a complex, unresolved shadow in his own eyes. "My thoughts… haven't settled so easily."
"You intend to act." It wasn't a question. Geto's gaze was probing, heavy with understanding. "I won't stop you. But have you considered the full consequence of that path?"
A mischievous, almost cold light flickered in Kamo Itsuki's smile. "I'm not so foolish as to martyr my purpose for trash. To stain my hands directly for them would be an insult to my craft. To deal with ordinary evil… one uses a language it understands."
With that, he turned and melted into the night.
What followed was not sorcery, but theater—a performance of divine justice. Moving through the sleeping village like a ghost, Kamo Itsuki wove a subtle, dream-inducing technique into the very air. In the minds of the villagers, visions took hold: a stern deity recounting the chief's greed, his lust, the murdered family, the stolen land. The message was unambiguous: Clean your own house.
The long-suppressed resentment of the villagers, now sanctified by celestial mandate, ignited. They emerged from their huts not as a mob, but as a grim, unified jury. Hoes, scythes, and clubs became instruments of verdict.
They found the chief and his wife in their bed, dragged them naked and shrieking into the cold open.
"I am your chief!" the man bellowed, a last, pathetic grasp at authority.
"You are our sin!" a voice roared back. "This is the will of the gods!"
There was no battle. The tyranny that had ruled through fear crumbled when faced with collective, righteous fury. The couple, reduced to whimpering animals, were hauled to the village's ancient locust tree. Rough ropes were looped around their necks.
In a brutal, silent ceremony, they were hoisted up, their sinful lives ending in futile kicks against the empty air beneath the gnarled branches.
A grim irony hung in the dawn mist. Mimiko's innate technique, yet unawakened within her small, sleeping form, was one of binding and hanging—a twist of fate, or perhaps the world's dark sense of poetic justice, ensuring the method of their end resonated with the very bloodline they had sought to extinguish.
Kamo Itsuki watched from the shadows, his expression unreadable. This was not a sorcerer's justice. It was a village exorcising its own poison, guided by a nudge. It was messy, human, and utterly final.
He returned to where Geto stood, sheltering the two girls from the sight. "The village has administered its own punishment," Itsuki stated, his voice devoid of triumph. "The 'curse' is resolved, by their own hands. The official report will reflect a successful exorcism and a… tragic, subsequent village dispute."
Geto looked at him, then at the sleeping forms of Nanako and Mimiko, nestled against his side. He nodded once, slowly. It was not approval, but understanding. Their paths to justice differed, but their destination for these two children was now the same.
"Let's go home," Geto said softly, and together, they led the girls away from the cursed village, not looking back at the old tree or its grim fruit. A new day was breaking, pale light washing over the mountains, carrying them toward a different future.