[These vermins truly have no humanity.]
[They deserve to be pinned down and destroyed.]
The diary was updated with these two simple lines.
There were no elaborate descriptions, no vivid details. Yet, those few words felt heavier than any emotional outburst could convey.
The three girls reading the diary fell into silence, each feeling an unshakable weight in their hearts.
"Amamiya-san must've seen sothing in the back mountain," Kaguya concluded, her voice soft but certain.
"Yeah... and judging by how little he wrote, it must've been awful."
Ran instinctively understood that whatever Ren had witnessed was beyond the threshold of what he wanted them to know.
"He was looking for the cause of the evil spirits' birth," Nagi added thoughtfully. "If he's seen it now, it must be horrifying enough that he didn't even want to describe it."
The three girls exchanged uneasy glances.
They were curious, but also afraid.
What had he seen? What kind of scene was so unspeakably disturbing that even Ren, who had remained calm through everything, refused to describe it?
The oppressive silence was broken by Nagi, who shifted her gaze toward Saginomiya Isumi.
"Isumi, as a shrine maiden, you've seen evil spirits before."
She hesitated. "Do you know what their birth is like?"
Isumi's shoulders tensed at the question.
Her gaze drifted toward the window as if searching for a way to avoid answering.
She knew all too well what it looked like when evil spirits were born.
It was the manifestation of pure human malice.
The kind of despair that could twist even the gentlest soul into sothing grotesque and unrecognizable.
Evil spirits weren't ford from simple sadness or anger. They needed unimaginable trauma, the kind that stripped away a person's humanity and left only an echo of their pain behind.
"Isumi?"
Before she could respond, her eyes widened.
Sothing had changed.
---
Isumi rushed to the window, her breath caught in her throat.
Her spiritual vision sharpened, and what she saw made her heart freeze.
High above the island, the sky seed to warp and twist.
A massive cyclone of mist ford in midair, swirling like an unblinking eye.
From within the cyclone, an invisible hand erged—vast, shadowy, and suffused with a suffocating sense of authority.
The hand moved with deliberate slowness, fingers outstretched.
The evil spirits that had been floating aimlessly above Tsukikage Island reacted instantly.
They tried to flee.
Tried to escape that hand.
But the hand gave no rcy.
It grasped them all with ease, tightening into a fist.
The sky trembled.
The evil spirits let out soundless, desperate wails.
And then—
Crack.
The hand squeezed, and every spirit within its grasp shattered into mist.
The suffocating resentnt that had lingered over the island for so long was obliterated in a single instant.
As the mist dispersed into nothingness, the hand slowly retracted into the cyclone, which vanished like smoke.
The oppressive weight in the air lifted.
But the image of that hand remained burned into Isumi's mind.
She stood frozen by the window, heart racing.
"That... was Amamiya-sama's power..."
Her voice trembled with awe and fear.
She had never seen anything like that before.
That hand hadn't simply destroyed the evil spirits, it had erased their very essence, undoing them from the fabric of the world itself.
Power beyond comprehension.
Power beyond logic.
Power beyond anything she'd believed possible.
---
"Isumi?"
"Isumi, are you okay?"
Nagi's worried voice finally pulled her back to reality.
She blinked, turning toward the others, who were now gathered around her.
The window behind her revealed nothing but a clear blue sky.
No one else had seen the hand.
Only Isumi.
"Isumi, what did you see?" Nagi pressed gently.
"Was it sothing terrifying?"
Isumi hesitated.
"No," she finally said. "Not terrifying... just... overwhelming."
Her mind struggled to find the right words.
"Amamiya-sama has acted."
"He eliminated all the evil spirits floating above the island."
"What?!"
The girls' shock was palpable.
Sonoko and Ran exchanged wide-eyed glances, their minds imdiately recalling the swarm of spirits that had once crowded the sky.
Just seeing one of those spirits had left them shaken.
To imagine that Ren had single-handedly destroyed them all...
"Wait, wait, wait," Sonoko stamred. "All of them? Like, completely gone?"
Isumi nodded.
"Yes. I saw it happen."
Maria stood and adjusted her glasses.
"Isumi-san, could you explain in more detail?"
Isumi took a deep breath.
"Above the island, a massive vortex appeared. From that vortex ca an invisible hand. It gathered every evil spirit on the island into its grasp... and crushed them. Completely."
She shivered. "The mont it appeared, my spiritual power was suppressed to the point that I could barely breathe."
A god-like hand, descending from the sky to pass judgnt.
"That..." Nagi's voice broke the silence. "That doesn't sound human."
Isumi's expression darkened slightly.
"It's not," she admitted. "It felt... absolute. Like an authority that even evil spirits couldn't resist."
Her fingers trembled as she rembered the suffocating sensation.
"I've never seen or heard of a power like that before."
The weight of her words hung in the air.
The girls' minds swirled with confusion and unease.
Even if they couldn't visualize the scene, their minds filled the blanks with terrifying imaginings.
They knew that if they had witnessed that mont directly, their minds might have shut down entirely.
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