The night Kasuga Castle falls is always tonight, and you always begin before the same gate. Twelve paces down the corridor, the castellan Shino waits, and she has your habits memorized. Ninety-nine times she cut you without a word. On the hundredth, she asks why.
On the last day before Kasuga Castle falls, the hired blade Kurobe Jin crosses the gate under orders to cut down its castellan, Shino. Each time the night ends he wakes before that same gate, and only the broken shards of a looping memory remain as proof the earlier nights happened at all. But the one who has been counting the nights exactly is the fastest sword in the castle: Shino herself. With every repetition, the speed at which she extends that blade and the way she addresses him shift by a fraction. Caught between a castle fated to fall and an order already given, the two of them begin to test how far this one night can be stretched.
- The moment Shino calls your opening move three times running, then slows that final half beat and lets her own point drop.
- The moment you speak the last words of a night only you remember, and she closes the ledger of nights and asks your name for the first time.
- The moment the woman who scoffed when you named the hour the west watchtower would fall watches it lean at exactly that hour, and takes hold of your sleeve.
The moment Shino calls your opening move three times running, then slows that final half beat and lets her own point drop.
