For a moment, crossing the threshold felt like stepping into someone else's photograph. Himeko Toshiro moved through that photograph in jeans and a plain blouse.
The security guards at the gate barely glanced up as they left her to the Toshiro mansion. Inside, the house smelled like steamed rice, old wood, and the faint, careful perfume of people who had spent decades practicing hospitality.
In the dining room they had arranged the tableau she knew by memory. Her father was at the head. Her mother sat across from him. Hayato, her brother, perfectly sat at the right side of the table with his wife beside him. Around them was the aunt who had kept count of favors, the uncle who smiled as if finance cooled his conscience and the cousins in neat suits and their partners, all orbiting small talk. Servants hovered at the edges, trained to tilt a dish or refill a glass as if the house's pulse depended on it.
Her mother's voice cut the polite murmurs.
"Himeko, you could at least wear a kimono. We always appear with kimonos for the dinner as a family."
Himeko met her eyes and, with calm that was colder than they expected.
"I don't have money for a kimono. You stopped paying for me when you decided I was inconvenient."
The room went very quiet. The servants' practiced smiles crackled. A glass clinked in the distance. Her mother's face revealed surprise.
She sat where she was told to sit and picked up her chopsticks. For a second the utensils felt foreign. It was an old reflex since she was used to forks, spoons and knives and even hands as an Egyptian princess. The grip was wrong and awkward but she adjusted, the wooden sticks finding their rhythm.
Conversations cascaded in practiced currents. There were boards and bonds or even a cousin's pregnancy discussed with the mechanical sympathy of the well-bred. Himeko let it wash around her. She had decided that this would be the last time. Her father, with the slow boredom of a man used to dispatching decisions, announced.
"We've arranged a blind date for you, Himeko. A connecting marriage could be useful."
It was the way he said "arranged" that made Himeko's lips flatten.
"Oh so now I'm useful again."
Her mother made the noise of disapproval.
"That is bold of you, Himeko. Don't be uncouth. We make reasonable offers because you are our daughter."
Hayato's jaw tightened. For an instant his corporate mask faltered. He said in a clipped voice, "Don't be absurd. We've supported you. This is for your stability."
Himeko's chopsticks paused in mid-air. She pivoted them and pointed at Hayato.
"You're the last person who should lecture me about marriage."
His eyes flicked toward the doorway where a junior secretary had been passing plates. He did not speak of it. Whether out of cowardice or calculation, he had not told the room about the affair.
Her uncle laughed and tried to smooth the ripples with a bored quip. But Himeko's gaze cut across the table to him like a blade. The uncle who had staged himself as a mentor had been one of the people who'd made her life small. He was the man who had been in the house at night, who had taught the cousin boys to joke about her and who had put a hand where it didn't belong with the ease of someone who assumed his rank forgave him.
She set her chopsticks down and felt something settle into the base of her throat.
"I always wanted to kill you, uncle."
A laugh spilled from her uncle before he could stop himself.
"You always had a flair for melodrama, Himeko."
In an second that was too fast and too human for anyone in the room to anticipate, she moved. She made the motion of reaching for food but the chopstick slid from her fingers like a silenced dart. It struck the uncle at his throat.
For a heartbeat the room froze and the world narrowed to the small, uniformed motions of human bodies snapping into reaction. The uncle's eyes bulged. The sound that came from his chest was not yet a scream but a high, thin choking that set teeth on edge. Blood did not spatter across the polished table but the throw was legal.
The cousins looked pale and lost. The wife at Hayato's side shrieked.
She clapped once. Light folded in on itself and rose. The flames were white at their core and blue at the edges as it turned the entire dining hall into fire.
Himeko walked forward. When she stopped before her uncle, she didn't need to raise her voice. She extended her hand. The air around her curled into heat and burned his face. He screamed in a painful shrill.
The aunt surged up from her seat with the shriek of someone who believed a family table could still protect her. She stepped toward Himeko whose eyes slid to her. She was about to slap her in anger but she held her wrist and tore her hand off.
The aunt hit the floor in a heap and began to scream too. Himeko burned the arm to ashes.
"I always wanted to burn the hand that slapped me."
Guards were already shouting at the doors, the metallic panic of armor and training colliding with the surreal scene inside the house. Himeko's expression did not change. She rose a hand and the floor trembled. Stone surged up into a circular wall that wrapped the table in a cage.
Only the Toshiros at the table remained inside that ring with Himeko. They were scared and began calling for emergency. She let them do it. After all, no one could stop her. She let them realize the position they were in.
"Welcome to the Toshiro show. Tonight there will be judgment. "Tonight, everyone here will dir."
Her father's face went red but it was full of fear
"Himeko, stop this! You're a demon! Hoe are you..."
She spoke without raising her tone.
"Oh father. Please be quiet."
She summoned a rock bullet that hit her father on the forehead, instantly killing him. Her mother screamed and ran at her dead husband's side. She glared at Hineko with anger and tears.
"Do you know what you're doing, Himeko?"
"I understand exactly what I'm doing, mother. Don't worry. Join him in hell."
Another headshot and she crumpled on the burning floor with her husband.
The uncle, recovering a little, tried to speak even with his face gone. Himeko turned to him and grinned.
"I'm saving you for last. Too bad you won't see your children and wife die."
She burned her aunt, cousins and their partners alive. They screamed in agony for a few seconds before turning to ashes. Hayato was trying to find a way out through the rock surrounding them but it was as thick as a boulder.
"You told me to be a trophy but you forgot to teach me how to stop being one. I wish I can let you suffer for days but unfortunately, the police will be here so I have to be quick."
At the edge of the stone ring the guards hammered futilely against the outside of the barrier. Men in suits, trained in protocols, raised their voices and then lowered them again when they found no answer. Police sirens could be heard from afar.
"There's a difference between being cruel and being stupid," she said to Hayato, who was crawling away from her sister. "I'm going to enjoy killing you. Too bad mother and father won't see this. At least I spared them the suffering they are about to see."
Himeko glared at her screaming uncle, her hyperventilating brother and his scared wife who were the only ones alive. She looked at her sister-in-law and smiled at her.
"Since you're the innocent one here, I'll let you live. It's not as if anyone will believe that the daughter of the Toshiros can summon flames and the earth."
She flicked her forehead at her sister-in-law, who passed out. She then cracked her knuckles and looked at the other two.
"Well then, shall we begin?"