Saikon: To Stand As One’s Self Once More

Ryo Kenzaki was just a high schooler. Ordinary. Forgotten. Content to fade into a crowd and wait for the end of the day.Then a star fell from the sky, and everything changed.In a moment of instinct, he pulled a bleeding woman from a crater—and learned that the world he knew was a lie. The Human Realm exists on borrowed time, separated from the Hunting Realm by a crumbling threshold. On the other side, monsters wait. Creatures born when Hunters break—warriors twisted into something that only remembers hunger, their humanity consumed by an endless need to kill and feed.When a Spider creature hunts Ryo across burning ruins, he's dragged into the last sanctuary: a dojo at the edge of both worlds, run by a woman who expected his arrival. Tsukihime offers him a choice—one that isn't really a choice at all.A blade. A Kizugami—a weapon forged from wounds themselves, blessed with a terrible awareness. It doesn't serve the wielder. It judges them.And in the moment Ryo touches the hilt, he feels it: the blade seeing into him, searching for something, finding him wanting.But there's no walking back. A Kaimon hunts him. A cosmic Eye watches from the sky. And somewhere in the gathering darkness, something vast and inevitable is moving toward the world's end.Ryo never wanted to be a Hunter. Never wanted to inherit a curse he didn't deserve. But fate, it seems, has already made its choice for him.The only question left is: when everything is stripped away—when he's forced to become something other than human—can he still stand as himself once more?Or will the blade consume him like it has consumed all the others?