As if to confirm his words.
In that very moment, a crimson flash of light flared and vanished at the edge of the distant Nishiyama Forest.
It was the signal flare from the mercenaries, sent up after they had reached their attack positions.
The countdown to destruction had begun.
Eru Chitanda's body began to tremble violently.
She looked at that ominous spark in the distance. Then she looked at Seiji Fujiwara before her.
In that moment, every question she had was answered.
Why Senpai Irisu had told her to stay close to this man.
Why he had appeared here in the dead of night.
Her family, her land, even she herself, were already pieces on this man's chessboard, possessions in his pocket.
The so-called "deal," the so-called "price," were nothing more than him savoring the spectacle of his prey struggling.
All her struggles, her resistance, her revulsion, in the face of absolute power and the destruction bearing down on her, looked so childish, so absurd.
After the deafening roar, it all collapsed completely.
Every struggle inside Eru ebbed away like a receding tide, settling into a dead, silent calm.
She looked at Seiji. Those purple eyes that had once sparkled with curiosity now held nothing but a hollow, resigned numbness.
...
...
The main residence of the Chitanda Family blazed with light.
But the relieved joy of having survived a catastrophe had vanished entirely.
In its place was a suffocating anxiety.
Tetsugo Chitanda, the current head of the Chitanda Family, paced the corridor like a wounded lion in a cage. He moved restlessly back and forth across the expensive tatami.
Every turn carried barely contained fury.
"Still haven't found her?! It's been an hour! Where the hell did Eru go?!" He let out a low growl at the old steward standing before him with bowed head, his voice straining to suppress his rage.
"My lord... I am terribly sorry..."
The old steward bent at the waist, trembling. "Just now... the servant on night watch reported that he saw... he saw Miss Eru going alone to the rice paddy in the west..."
"The rice paddy?" Tetsugo froze, then his anger flared hotter. "What is she doing in the rice paddy alone at this hour?!"
"Yes... and... and..." the old steward stammered, cold sweat beading on his forehead. He didn't dare continue.
"And what?! Spit it out! Stammer once more and I'll have your tongue cut out!"
"And... Mr. Seiji Fujiwara's car is parked... parked right beside the ridge of the western rice paddy..."
Tetsugo fell silent.
Seiji Fujiwara...
The dead of night...
His own daughter...
A rice paddy...
What those words added up to, he, a grown man who had lived half his life, knew all too well.
An emotion he couldn't put into words surged through his chest in an instant.
Seiji Fujiwara?
The man who, in just a few days, had reduced a Wall Street titan to ashes.
The man whom all of Japan's upper echelons privately, fearfully, called the "Demon God."
Forget confronting him. He didn't even have the courage to stand in front of the man.
Had his own daughter already gone this far on her own initiative?
Tetsugo, torn between joy and dread, didn't sleep that night.
He dismissed everyone and sat alone in the dark room. Bloodshot eyes wide open, he watched until the eastern sky turned pale. He sat there.
He even considered the worst possibility. If Eru were carrying that man's child, the Chitanda bloodline of several centuries would...
Early the next morning, just as he was about to send people out to find his daughter no matter the cost.
"My lord! My lord!"
The old steward came stumbling in, half-falling.
He had even forgotten to knock. The look on his face wasn't last night's discomfort, but a kind of horror, as though he had seen a ghost.
"Last night... something terrible happened in the mountains last night!"
The old steward gasped out his report. "At first light, several familiar hunters, the boldest of them, came running to report. They said that last night in Nishiyama Forest, they found... they found signs that a large number of unidentified armed men had been moving through it! Bootprints everywhere, branches snapped clean off! The whole edge of the forest looked as if an army had plowed through it!"
"What?!" Tetsugo shot to his feet. The exhaustion of the night before was swept clean away.
"And... and they found this!" The old steward, trembling, drew a black metal cylinder from inside his robe.
The cylinder was caked with mud, wrapped in a piece of cloth.
Tetsugo took the thing. One glance, and his pupils contracted sharply. He was a farmer, but he had seen this object in the news and in books.
It was a spent shell casing. US military issue, an M14 White Phosphorus Incendiary.
"They... they found over a dozen of these casings at several spots along the forest edge. And... and a huge amount of abandoned firearms, ammunition, and military equipment..."
The old steward's voice carried terror.
"Looking at the scene, that group... it was as if they ran into something absolutely terrifying. They didn't even take their weapons. They just... they just bolted, scared out of their wits! And at the scene... there were huge trees, scorched, like they'd been struck by lightning!"
"But the strangest thing of all," the old steward stammered, his face full of lingering fear and bewilderment, "is that with all that commotion they made, not a single rice paddy of ours was burned, not a single fence damaged... it's as though... as though someone protected us..."
Armed men...
Incendiary bombs...
A thunderstorm...
Last night...
His daughter not coming home until late...
Seiji Fujiwara...
Every clue, in that instant, connected together in a way that admitted no doubt.
Tetsugo understood at once.
Last night, an army had been at his gates, intent on destroying his family.
And his daughter, in her own way, had brought Seiji Fujiwara to them.
Last night's "movements" weren't a shameless tryst. They were the price paid to save the family from the brink of annihilation.
The shell casing in Tetsugo's hand fell to the floor with a clatter.
In his heart, only the shock of having narrowly escaped death remained.
That, and fear of Seiji Fujiwara's power.
Then the shock and the fear quickly transformed into a complicated kind of acquiescence.
He was a businessman, a head of a family. Protecting the family's legacy was his highest duty.
Tetsugo, almost instinctively, did the math in his heart.
His daughter, traded for the survival of several hundred souls in the family.
This deal...
This deal was, in several centuries of Chitanda Family history, the most profitable bargain ever struck.
He slowly sat down. The strength seemed to have been drained from his entire body.
He looked out the window at the rice paddy.
In the morning light it was still golden, still untouched. Tetsugo's eyes grew unspeakably complex. But in the end, all of it settled into a deep awe and relief.
He knew that from this night on, the Chitanda Family would no longer belong to the Chitandas alone.
But of this, he had no doubt.
Indeed... his heart was full of gratitude.
...
...
The moonlight was like flowing, ice-cold silver.
It poured itself without reserve onto that vast rice paddy, anointing every plump ear of grain with a sacred halo. It fell the same way on the girl laid out in the dirt between the rows, on the bare pale shape of her, on the gorgeous exquisite kimono cast carelessly aside in the mud where it no longer counted for anything.
The night wind moved through the rice and over her bare skin and stirred the long black hair scattered across her shoulders. The earth under her back was cold and damp and smelled of green things growing, the same paddy her family had worked for four hundred years, and he had laid her down in it the way a thing is laid down after it is cut.
Eru Chitanda had offered everything she was to the Seiji Fujiwara above her, and he was taking it at his leisure, deep and slow, his cock working into her in long unhurried strokes she felt in the base of her spine and in the cold soil grinding against her shoulder blades at the same time. It hurt. It was the second time her body had been opened and it had learned nothing from the first except how to be opened, and she lay there under him on her own land and let it happen, because nothing was left in her that could have made it stop.
Seiji savored the pleasure that mixed conquest with desecration.
What he gained was not merely a beautiful, pure body, still trembling faintly with youth's untouched shyness, slick now where he had forced it slick, opening around him in the mud against her own will and against her own knowledge of herself.
It was the final confirmation, by this "Daughter of the Land," of his ownership over her. He was fucking the heiress of the soil down into the soil, and the soil would be his by morning, and so would she, and she understood both things with the same flat clarity and could refuse neither.
He had taken complete possession of her curiosity, her purity, her soul.
And in the deepest moment of their union...
A piercing, ear-splitting shriek rose suddenly from the distant forest.
It tore through the night sky, filled with the breath of violence and ruin. Like the scythe of death, it howled down toward this peaceful, sacred ground.
A streak of fire trailing a long orange-red tail, like a meteor falling from hell, ripped open the silent night curtain in a terrifying parabola.
It was a white phosphorus incendiary. Some panicked mercenary had fired it off at random before fleeing. Loaded with destruction and malice.
By the simple math of its arc, its point of impact was the dead center of the rice paddy.
The exact spot where Seiji and Eru lay.
Temperatures of over a thousand degrees, enough to reduce everything within a ten-meter radius to charred carbon. It would arrive in seconds.
Destruction was about to descend.
This sudden death threat finally drew from Eru's already-numbed body its first, most basic biological response.
Her pupils snapped tight. Across her empty face, finally, flickered an irrepressible, unalloyed terror.
And yet, Seiji didn't even raise his head.
He didn't break his rhythm either. He stayed inside her, moving at the same slow unhurried pace, while a thousand degrees of death came down out of the sky toward the small of her back. He only gathered the stiffening body more tightly against him, one hand splayed flat at the base of her spine to keep her taking him through it, holding her the way a man holds something he fully intends to still be using when it is over, as if to grind her into his own bones and blood.
He felt her terror the way one tastes the most exquisite dessert. He felt it clench tight around his cock, and that, more than the fear on her face, was the part he savored.
...
The shriek tore through the air again.
That spark, born of the mortal world, bore the purest malice of mankind. It carved a blinding, lethal arc across the deep night sky.
The white phosphorus incendiary's wail was as shrill as the cry of a hellish banshee. It tore brutally through the centuries-old tranquility of the Kamiyama Region.
That sound, like a red-hot iron needle, drove deep into Eru's already-numbed soul.
Death was so close.
Close enough that she could clearly see the warhead, swelling rapidly in her pupils.
Close enough that she could almost smell, in the air, that distinctive scent of what was about to ignite.
A primal terror seized her heart in an instant. It rose from the deepest depths of life itself.
But Eru couldn't move.
Because that man, her master, with a force that brooked no resistance, held her prisoner against him.
Seiji didn't look up at the falling star of death.
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