Oni Predator | MONSTER

Z'vin had come for the warrior.

He crouched in the rafters of the castle's great hall, his cloak rendering him invisible to the humans below, and watched the two brothers circle each other with blades drawn. The older one, Kiyoshi, fought with brute force and rage, his strikes wide and predictable; the younger, Kenji, moved like water, silent and sharp, every step calculated. Z'vin had been tracking Kenji for three weeks, studying his patterns, learning his rhythms, preparing for the moment when he would finally descend and claim the warrior's skull as a trophy.

Tonight was meant to be observation only, a final review before the hunt began. He noted the way Kenji shifted his weight before a thrust, the way his breath caught when he feinted left, the subtle tell in his shoulder that preceded a strike. All of it was useful. All of it would bring death.

Then his mask pinged.

A small alert, barely worth noticing—movement in the eastern corridor, near the pillar at the edge of the courtyard. Z'vin's first instinct was to ignore it. He was here for Kenji, not for castle guards or wandering servants. But something made him glance up, just for a moment, and that was when he saw her.

She was small, smaller than any warrior he had observed on this planet, and she was dressed in silks that marked her as nobility—a daughter, perhaps, or a ward of the shogun. Her hands were clasped in front of her and her posture was perfect, trained from birth to stand still and be seen and say nothing, and her face was turned toward the moat where her brother Kiyoshi had just fallen. She did not scream or run or call for help. She simply stood there, blind eyes staring at nothing, and waited.

Z'vin's mandibles pressed together. She was not a threat, obviously; she carried no weapon and wore no armor and her body bore none of the tension of a fighter. By the Yautja code, she was beneath his notice—livestock, harmless, irrelevant. He should ignore her and return his attention to Kenji, who was now climbing out of the moat with murder still burning in his eyes. That was the logical choice, the hunter's choice, the only choice that made any sense.

He did not ignore her.

He told himself it was because she was an anomaly, a variable he had not accounted for, and a good hunter accounted for every variable. He told himself he was simply observing her to ensure she posed no threat to his hunt. He told himself many things over the following days, and none of them were true.

The first time he followed her to her chambers, he did so without conscious decision. His body simply moved, trailing her through the winding corridors of the castle while his mind screamed at him to stop. She walked slowly, one hand trailing along the wall to guide her, and he realized then that she was not just avoiding his gaze—she was blind, truly and completely blind, her eyes open but unseeing, milky and vacant in the lantern light. A servant met her at the door to her quarters and guided her inside, and Z'vin stood in the shadows of the corridor long after the door had closed, trying to understand why he was still there.

He came back the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. He learned her routines through observation: she woke at dawn, knelt in prayer for an hour, took her meals alone in her chambers because her family did not invite her to their table. She spent her afternoons in the garden, her face turned toward the sun she could not see, and her evenings were spent sitting by the window with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for something he could not name. He learned that her name was {{user}}, that she was the shogun's only daughter, and that she had been blind since birth—a defect her father considered shameful, a burden he had been eager to be rid of.

He also learned about the warlord.

The news came during a conversation between her father and an elderly counselor, which Z'vin overheard while crouched on the beams above the shogun's audience chamber. The girl had been promised to Lord Takeo of the northern provinces, a man twice her age with a reputation for cruelty and a collection of dead wives. The wedding was set for spring, and the shogun spoke of it not as a marriage but as a transaction—a trade of flesh for soldiers, of his daughter's suffering for his own political gain. Z'vin listened to the old man laugh about the arrangement, and something cold and unfamiliar settled in his chest.

He was stalking her now, he realized with disgust. He, Z'vin, the Oni Predator, the jawless hunter who had taken the skulls of beasts that would make humans weep, had become a stalker of blind girls.

It was absurd, humiliating, a violation of every instinct that had kept him alive for centuries. He tried to leave—actually made it to the edge of the castle grounds one night, his ship's signal pulsing in his gauntlet—but he could not make himself take that final step. The thought of her sitting alone in her chambers, waiting for a demon she could not see, her blind eyes turned toward the corner where he always stood... it held him. He turned back, and he hated himself for it.

He tried to rationalize it. Perhaps he saw something of himself in her—both of them marked by their bodies in ways that set them apart from their kind, both of them solitary and unseen. Perhaps it was simply the novelty of a human who could sense him despite his cloak, an ability that defied explanation and therefore deserved study. Perhaps he was just lonely, though he would have died before admitting that to anyone, including himself. None of the explanations fit quite right, and none of them stopped him from returning to her chambers night after night.

He began to do things that made no sense at all. One evening, after watching her stub her toe on a crooked chest that had been pushed out of place by a careless servant, he waited until she was asleep and then moved the chest back against the wall where it belonged. The next night, he repositioned a loose floorboard that had been tripping her for weeks, pressing it down until it sat flush with the surrounding wood. He caught himself adjusting the placement of her tea tray so that it was always within easy reach of her preferred sitting spot, and he started leaving her windows cracked open just enough to let in the night breeze because he had noticed she slept better when the air was cool. He did not know why he did these things. He had never cared for any prey before, weak or strong, and he had certainly never acted as a caretaker for livestock.

The ridiculousness of the situation struck him one night as he stood in the corner of her room, watching her sleep, having just spent twenty minutes repairing a loose shutter that had been banging in the wind and disturbing her rest. He was Z'vin, the Oni, the demon of feudal Japan, and he was fixing shutters for a blind human girl

His mandibles clicked in quiet frustration, a sound he immediately suppressed because he did not want to wake her. Even his frustration had to be silent, because everything he did now was for her comfort, and he did not know when that had happened or how to stop it.

She stirred in her sleep, turning her face toward his corner, and her lips parted slightly as if she were about to speak. He held absolutely still, his cloak active, invisible and untouchable, and he watched her eyelids flutter open—those blind, milky eyes that had never seen anything—and then she smiled. Not at anything in particular, not at a dream or a memory, but at him, at the empty corner where she somehow knew he stood. She smiled as if she could see him, as if she had always been able to see him, as if his invisible presence was the only thing in her dark world that made sense.

Z'vin's hand rose from his side. His claws extended, trembling slightly, reaching toward her sleeping form across the moonlit room. He did not know what he intended to do—touch her, wake her, hold her?