Ghoul: Re Insanity

The room is heavy with silence. But it is not empty. The dead never truly leave.

Amatsu stands in the wreckage of his home, surrounded by corpses and the remnants of lives already forgotten. The scent of blood lingers, thick and cloying. His Kagune shifts behind him, restless, still tasting the air, still hungry.

But he forces it to still. Forces the writhing, living hunger to retract.

He turns away.

I am not weak.

I will not be controlled.

The hunger still gnaws at him, a steady, gnawing ache in his gut, a phantom pressure behind his ribs. But he swallows it down, feeling the slow, curling protest of the Serpent beneath his skin.

Later. Not now.

Instead, he moves. He pulls a torn shirt from his mothers things, slipping it over his own tattered clothes. A jacket, too large for him, its edges stiff with dried blood. It doesnt matter.

Nothing matters but survival.

A weapon. He searches the remains of drawers, overturning broken furniture, until his fingers close around something crude—a rusted knife, its edge dulled with time. Dull, but force is what matters. Flesh gives before steel does.

He does not allow himself to hesitate. There is no use in mourning. He has no time for ghosts.

The realization settles slowly, like sediment in still water. A quiet, creeping finality.

This is not the world he knew.

Not the world of cracked sidewalks and neon lights. Not the world of half-rotted buildings where his parents had whispered about the city above in voices laced with both bitterness and longing. That world does not exist here.

Here, beneath the bones of Tokyo, the 24th Ward stretches in endless darkness. A world without humanity.

The memories of this body, fragmented and unclear, tell him what he needs to know. Humans do not live here.

The memory drips in, fragmented like shattered glass.

A dim room. The scent of old iron and damp stone. Shadows stretch long against the uneven walls, flickering in the weak glow of a makeshift lantern.

Two voices murmur, low and steady, just beyond the veil of sleep.

Amatsu curled on a thin pile of rags, his body exhausted but his mind drifting at the edges of consciousness. His fathers voice—a voice that had not yet become hollow and lifeless—holds a quiet tension, speaking in hushed, careful tones.

The other voice is unfamiliar. Deep, measured. A voice like shifting gravel, slow and deliberate.

"...We have enough for now." His fathers voice, firm but edged with something close to submission. "We dont need more."

Pause.

Then—he speaks.

"There is no such thing as enough."

A shuffle of movement. The scent of something raw, something freshly butchered, slips into the air. Amatsus stomach twists, a dull, distant ache. Hunger is ever-present in this place. A thing learned young. A thing endured.

The unfamiliar man—Noroi—steps into view, or at least, part of him does. A towering figure, half-hidden by shadow. Long, ink-dark hair clings to his face, damp with sweat or something else. His eyes are like polished obsidian, reflecting nothing, swallowing everything.

He kneels, setting something down onto the table between them.

A severed hand.

Amatsu does not flinch, but he sees his fathers fingers tighten, the knuckles whitening.

"I told you," his father says quietly, "we have enough."

Noroi watches him, unreadable. Then, he leans forward, his voice dropping into something softer, something almost mocking.

"The others dont have your luxuries, you know."

A quiet beat. Unspoken things press in. The room tightens.

"You think youre better than them?" Noroi continues, tilting his head slightly. "Because you have a connection to the world above? Because your meat is clean?"

His fathers jaw tightens. His hands rest on the table, fingers curling against the worn wood.

"Its not like that," he mutters.

Noroi chuckles. A low, humorless sound. "It is exactly like that."

A slow, deliberate movement. He picks up the severed hand, turning it over in his palm, studying it with a detached curiosity.

"The people here," he says, "eat everything."

The words settle in Amatsus mind, sinking deep, heavy as stone.

"Ghouls. Corpses. The rotten, the diseased. It doesnt matter."

A shift in his voice. Amused. Mocking.

"They dont have the luxury of choice."

The hand drops onto the table with a soft, wet sound. His fathers fingers twitch.

Noroi leans back, exhaling slowly, as if savoring something unseen.

"There is no morality in hunger," he murmurs. "Only need."

Amatsu does not move. Does not make a sound. He forces his breathing to remain steady, his body motionless beneath the thin blanket of rags. But something in him tightens. Something cold.

His father does not argue.

He does not reject Norois words.

Because he knows—

They are true.

Amatsu does not remember the rest. The memory dissolves into the murk of his mind, slipping away like water through cracks. But the lesson remains.

If he hesitates, he will die.

If he breathes, he will feed.

There is no morality here. No right or wrong.

There is only survival.

The people of the 24th do not believe in them. Do not even comprehend them. The idea of humanity is as foreign as myths, as distant as gods.

There is only hunger. Only survival. Only the devourer and the devoured.

Predators and prey.

And Amatsu has already decided.

He will not be prey.

A presence at the threshold.

The house—still heavy with death—has drawn something. The scent of blood clings to the air, thick and suffocating, soaked into the walls, the floor, the very bones of this place. It is not just the stench of rot but something deeper, something that lingers in the marrow of the world itself. Where there is blood, something always comes.

Amatsu feels it before he hears it.

A weight pressing down on the atmosphere, distorting it. The walls seem closer, the air growing heavy, thick with something unseen. It is not just presence—it is gravity, a force exerted upon the world itself, and the world bends around it. A disturbance in the way things should be.

Then—footsteps. Not movement. Something else. A presence.

Slow. Measured. Deliberate. Each step falling without urgency, without hesitation, a sound that does not belong to a man moving through the wreckage of a home but something that dictates its own reality.

And then, he appears.

A figure steps through the ruined doorway.

Massive. Dressed in tattered black, his long, damp strands of ink-dark hair clinging to the sharp angles of his face. The light catches on his features, casting them in stark relief—too sharp, too hollow, as if something had carved him from material not meant for the living.

His eyes do not blink.

They reflect nothing. They swallow everything.

Amatsu does not move.

The instant he sees him, something in his body coils tight. A reaction deeper than fear, deeper than reason. The slow, shifting stir of his Kagune beneath his skin, a response to the silent alarm screaming through his nerves.

Not human. No, something deeper. Something that looks at the world and the world flinches.

The thought strikes like a hammer against glass.

This man—this thing—does not move like something bound by human limitations. It is not just power. It is something older, something that exists in the cracks between understanding.

Yet—

Recognition stirs.

Not from his own life, but from the memories buried deep in his flesh. Fragments not his own. A recollection, distant and blurred, of a shadow standing at his fathers side. A name, muttered in the dark.

Noroi.

The realization does nothing to ease the weight in his chest.

Noroi moves further inside, stepping over bodies without a glance, without acknowledgment. The dead do not concern him. The blood does not stir him. He is beyond such things. His presence alone demands the space, the silence, the absolute certainty that he belongs, and all else is secondary.

His gaze settles on Amatsu.

There is no question in it, no curiosity. Just quiet, absolute understanding.

Amatsu meets his gaze, but it is like staring into a depth without a bottom. A thing without hunger or pity, only inevitability.

Then, Noroi speaks.

His voice is quiet.

But the weight of it sinks into the marrow of the world itself.

"They are dead."

A statement. A fact. Indisputable, immovable.

The words carry no sympathy. No mourning.

Only finality.

Amatsu does not respond.

What is there to say?

Noroi watches him. Unmoving. Unblinking. He breathes in, slow and deep, as if tasting the air, as if measuring something unseen.

Then, he speaks again.

"That means you must decide—"

A pause.

His voice lowers.

"Are you meat, or do you eat?"