Kamon Kai has stopped waiting for death—he simply hasn't gotten there yet. Six months behind on rent, out of pills, and buried beneath the garbage of a life he no longer wants, he exists in a rotting six-mat room in the forgotten corner of Tokyo known as Haigami Ward. Every morning is the same: the stain on the ceiling, the ache of hunger he refuses to answer, the quiet hope that today might finally be the day his heart stops on its own.
Then the ceiling tears open.
A girl falls from nowhere—g
Impurity - The creaking of boundaries, and a distorting everyday
"Don't go saying whatever you want..."
Melissa murmured the words as if chewing on them, then crossed to where he lay with a light, soundless step.
Her bare feet didn't even whisper against the tatami. As she cast her shadow over him, the evening gloom in the room seemed to deepen by a shade. Those gold-and-silver eyes looked down at him—the right one gold, fierce as a flickering flame; the left one silver, cold as a frozen blade.
"Watch your tongue, servant. I do not own you. I am merely using that wretched vessel of yours as a 'floor' to anchor my existence."
She bent her knees and brought her face close to his.
A strand of golden hair spilled from the hood of her worn black parka and brushed against his cheek. It was like a thread of light without heat—and the skin it touched tingled with an eerie numbness.
"To absorb another human's Impurity... especially malice as vile and cheap as that, and come back reeking of it—that is a blasphemy against me. If you return cloaked in that stench again, I will order your head struck from your neck."
"...Order who? There's nobody here but you and me."
Kai pulled the arm away from his eyes and threw the words back at her in a low, listless voice.
"Myself, of course. Even with my magic exhausted, a spell to kill a single servant—I would grind my own bones to dredge it up if I had to."
There was not a trace of jest in her words. It was the pure, refined cruelty of royalty.
Kai stared back into her eyes. Pale, muddied gray. A man who had barely survived death, and a former princess driven from her country. Their gazes collided in the dim half-light of the room, scattering silent sparks.
It was Kai who looked away first.
"...Do what you want. I'm hungry."
He sat up, pulled a prepared bento from the convenience store bag, and roughly peeled off the plastic lid. Melissa gave a little snort and turned her face aside, plucking up her own juice and sandwich with slender fingers.
A quiet meal began.
With every bite, the 'Impurity' he had absorbed at the scene that afternoon—Kabuse Mamoru's malice, that syrupy, clinging sensation—seemed to rise up from the pit of his stomach.
(...What the hell did that bastard see in me?)
*You can see it, can't you.*
Kabuse's words, and the cold touch of that white leather glove.
Kai stared at the back of his left hand. The burn scar floated up in the room's faint light, an angry red-black. The heat that had been seared into him that night of the accident, along with his mother's warmth.
Clean, and the Impurity vanishes. But the Impurity that vanishes piles up inside Kai.
And now, with that Impurity as the medium, men like Kabuse were coming crawling toward him.
"...Sickening."
He muttered under his breath and shoved cold rice into his mouth.
The next morning.
The sky over Haimori Ward was blanketed in low clouds that looked ready to burst into rain at any moment.
As Kai started down the stairs of the Haimori Court apartments, he heard a rustling sound near the garbage area on the first floor.
"Oh—Kai."
The one who stood up was Hiyama Sumire.
She wore a white hoodie over her caregiving apron, a large garbage bag in her arms. Her dull ash-brown hair was slightly mussed, and her ever-drooping eyes carried a heavy weight of fatigue.
"Morning. Off to 'Misogi Service' again today?"
"...Yeah."
"Right. ...Hey, here."
Sumire lifted a small thermos bottle she'd set at her feet and held it out to him.
"Warm tea. It's gotten cold so suddenly lately. You always wear those flimsy clothes, don't you? If you catch a cold, you'll lose everything."
"...I told you I don't need it."
Kai frowned at being waylaid and spoke coldly.
For an instant, Sumire's gaze wavered as if wounded—but she quickly recovered her usual stubborn expression, flashed her snaggletooth, and pressed the bottle against his chest.
"Just take it already! I want you to drink it! ...Besides, your face has changed so much lately... it feels like you're about to go somewhere far away, and I hate it."
"...Huh?"
That last part was barely a whisper, the tail of it fading into nothing.
Sumire clenched both hands in front of her chest and looked down, avoiding his eyes.
She was abnormally sensitive to people's ailments and emotional tremors. Since Kai had begun 'special cleaning,' the air he carried had been rapidly transforming into something inhuman—perhaps she sensed it by pure instinct.
A neighbor who was meddlesome, pushy, and far too warm-blooded.
"...I'm not paying for it."
When Kai muttered that and took the bottle, Sumire's head snapped up and a bright smile spread across her face.
"I told you, I don't want money! See you—do your best at work!"
She went clattering off with loud footsteps, climbed into her caregiving minicar, and drove away.
The warmth of the bottle left in his hand seeped into his chilled fingertips.
(...Annoying.)
Even as he thought it, Kai shoved the bottle into his work jacket pocket and set off down the dark back alley.
When he entered the Misogi Service office, Kiryuu Kouichi was already in his work clothes, mixing a special compound into a bucket.
"Morning, Kiryuu."
"Mm. You're here, Kamon Kai."
Kiryuu pushed back his short, graying hair and let the deep furrows between his brows relax just a little.
"Don't let yesterday's business with Kabuse get to you. Preying on people's weaknesses is his trade. The moment he spots someone 'useful' like you, he'll shake you every way he knows how."
"...I'm not bothered. It's just unpleasant."
"I see. ...Then it's fine. Today's site is a detached house. An elderly man who died alone—but the request comes from the bereaved family. We'll be clearing out belongings and doing a special floor wash."
"Understood."
The two climbed into the light van and headed for the old residential district of Haimori Ward.
Today's site was an aging Japanese-style house whose garden trees had grown wild and unchecked.
The moment he stood before the front door, Kai's vision went black.
A viscous 'Impurity' clung to the entire house, as if wrapping it whole. The loneliness of an old man who had died alone, the despair of never being found by anyone, and the accumulated filth of a long life.
"Don't forget your mask and gloves."
"Yes."
Kiryuu unlocked the door, and they stepped inside.
The air was thick with the stench of death and mold. But to Kai, that was already part of the 'everyday.'
He rolled up his sleeves and walked without hesitation into the tatami room slick with mud and bodily fluids.
"Let me clean it..."
Muttering under his breath, Kai dropped to his knees.
He put his strength into the hand gripping the brush. The scrape of bristles gouging the floorboards. The sharp sting of chemicals.
At the edge of his vision, the black shadow of Impurity writhed, screamed, and vanished. Each time, the cold regret the dead had left behind flowed into Kai's chest.
(More... erase more...)
The light drained from Kai's eyes, and pure emptiness and absorption took hold of him.
Kiryuu watched his back quietly and murmured, half to himself.
"...You look like you're polishing the room by shaving yourself down."
"...What?"
"Nothing. Talking to myself. Move your hands. We're finishing this room today."
By evening, the work was nearly done.
As Kai washed the dirty tools at the hand-pump well in the garden, a black luxury sedan pulled quietly to a stop across the road.
The rear window slid down slowly.
Inside sat a man in a long black coat—Kabuse Mamoru.
Holding a cigarette in a white leather-gloved hand, letting the smoke curl upward, Kabuse watched Kai with those narrow eyes.
"...You again."
Kai didn't stop scrubbing the brush, only turned a cold gaze on him.
Without getting out of the car, Kabuse narrowed his eyes further and smiled.
"I told you, didn't I—that we'd meet again. ...So? How does it feel, squaring off against maggots under old Kiryuu? Frittering away that 'special power' of yours for pocket change of a few tens of thousands a job—it's truly foolish."
"I told you I'm refusing. Get lost."
"How cold."
Kabuse flicked the ash from his cigarette out the window.
"That 'Haimori Court' you live in... that's an old apartment too, isn't it? Overdue rent, residents dying alone, rumors of suspicious fires. ...A place where anything could happen at any time."
"...What are you getting at?"
Kai's hand stopped.
Kabuse's black eyes caught him with a serpent's tenacity.
"The helper girl next door... Hiyama Sumire, was it? Quite the dedicated caregiver. But people who stick their noses in too far tend not to die decent deaths. This city's 'darkness' swallows naive do-gooders like her first of all."
"...!"
Deep in Kai's chest, a violent disgust and rage exploded.
The burn scar on his left hand throbbed hot, like gunpowder about to ignite.
Kai gripped the wet brush and started to take a step toward the car. But then the air around Kabuse warped strangely.
—The pressure dropped.
For a single instant, the shadow of a girl with flowing golden hair flickered above the roof of Kabuse's car.
Gold on the right, silver on the left.
Melissa's cold eyes looked down from above at Kabuse inside the car. An existence no ordinary human should be able to see. Yet Kabuse suddenly hunched his neck as if struck by a chill and furrowed his brow.
"...Tch, what is it? It's gotten cold all of a sudden."
Kabuse stubbed his cigarette into the car's ashtray and began to raise the window.
"Fine. Think it over carefully, Kamon Kai. If you don't use that power properly... the people around you will be 'Impure' one by one, starting with those closest."
The black sedan roared off and disappeared.
Kai stood rooted to the spot, glaring at the afterimage of the departing car.
When he looked up at the sky, Melissa's shadow had vanished without his noticing. But her cold voice seemed to echo low and deep in the back of his mind.
"...Shut up."
Kai spat the words under his breath and hurled the brush he'd been washing into the bucket with all his strength.
The Impurity in his own room.
The Impurity of the dead he exorcised at his jobs.
And the Impurity called malice, seeping out of the living.
On the gray asphalt with no place to run, Kamon Kai's 'cleaning' was about to step into deeper, more dangerous territory.
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