My Scourge Wife can't be this Cute

Chapter 2: At her back...

Hikaru's focus sharpened at once.

"He" in that sentence was obviously the late husband.

Hashira lowered her lashes slightly, both hands resting on her thighs, her pale fingertips pressing into the fabric of her kimono. "At first, I thought it was just my imagination. After Nakamoto passed, everything involving the company fell on my shoulders. There were weeks when I slept only a few hours at a stretch, so I told myself it was exhaustion, nothing more. But then it started happening more frequently. At night, I would see him standing beside my bed. He never spoke. He only stood there and looked at me."

She raised her eyes, and in their depths lay something thin and cold. Fear, carefully contained. "The way he looked was terrifying. Some nights I was certain I would faint right where I lay."

As she said it, she placed one hand lightly against her chest, as if even the memory was enough to send pain through her heart. The gesture was entirely natural. And entirely dangerous. Hikaru glanced over without thinking, then moved his eyes away at once.

Hashira seemed to notice. The corner of her mouth curved a fraction more, but her voice remained even. "After that, I began having a servant sleep in the same room. It did help. When someone was nearby, I stopped seeing him."

"But then every time I closed my eyes to sleep, I dreamed of him instead. In the dreams he always appeared the same way, that terrible form, and he would come after me. At first he stood at a great distance. Then he began moving closer, a little more each time. In the dreams that followed, he passed through the gate. Into the courtyard. Down the corridor. Up to the door of my room. And these past few days... he has walked through the door itself."

Her voice grew quieter as she spoke, as though the telling of it was wearing her down. "He wants to kill me. Many times I have felt his hand about to reach me. But every time, just before it makes contact, I wake up."

Hikaru narrowed his eyes slightly. "Have you brought in anyone to address this?"

"Many people. Onmyoji, monks, clergy, and those who claimed they could see spirits. But none of them accomplished anything." Hashira looked at him, the exhaustion behind her gaze kept under careful rein. "You are the eighth."

The eighth.

Those two words alone were enough to make Hikaru uneasy.

He rubbed his jaw slowly. "Tell me the rest, from the beginning. I want to hear all of it."

Hashira gave a small nod. "My husband's name was Nakamoto. He was the head of a major conglomerate, but he had suffered from a rare illness since childhood. His family hired every kind of physician and tried every kind of treatment, but they could only slow the condition, never cure it. We married five years ago. Around four months after the wedding, his illness deteriorated suddenly. He fell into a coma for nearly two months before he died."

She paused, then continued in a level tone, the kind that came from reciting something that had already been told too many times. "After he passed, the funeral was conducted with full ceremony. His body was cremated, and I personally carried his ashes to the sea and scattered them. Everything should have ended there. But four months ago, on the first anniversary of his death, I went to the memorial site. And I saw a figure standing beside the grave marker. Even as a dim silhouette, I knew without any doubt it was Nakamoto. I could not have been mistaken."

"And after that?" Hikaru asked.

"I went home immediately. But from that night forward, the dreams began. At first it was only the image of him standing before the grave. Then he started leaving the cemetery. Then he came after me. I have moved many times since then, but it made no difference. No matter which house I went to, the sequence in the dreams stayed exactly the same. As though he is not attached to any place at all. He is attached to me."

Hikaru was quiet for a moment before asking: "Before he died, was there anything he left unfinished? Any regret, anger, resentment, or anything unusual about his state of mind?"

Hashira shook her head. "Nothing. He died while still unconscious. His expression at the time was completely calm. The funeral arrangements were thorough. There was nothing lacking."

The answer was too complete.

Complete to the point of being unbelievable.

Hikaru watched her, his fingers tapping slowly against his knee. At last he asked the question that most people would not have dared to raise. "Did you love your husband, Hashira-san?"

Hashira stilled for just a moment. Then she lifted one hand to cover her lips and laughed, softly, a sound as lovely and delicate as a thin silver bell. "Of course I did. He was my husband, after all."

The words were perfectly round.

Regrettably, what flickered in the depths of her eyes was not love.

It was contempt.

Cold. Very cold.

Hikaru's pupils contracted slightly.

And in that exact moment, he saw something else.

His gaze drifted past Hashira's shoulder, toward the sun-drenched courtyard behind her.

Out there, the bodyguards in black stood their posts like statues, earpieces in place, faces blank, nothing out of the ordinary. But directly behind Hashira, in the space barely half a step from her back, something was standing there.

It was very tall. Its entire form was black, not the black of clothing, not ordinary shadow, but a thick, viscous darkness, as though shadow itself had been compressed into a human shape and propped upright in the middle of daylight.

Yin Energy coiled thickly around its body, rising in thin tendrils of black smoke that curled and crept across the floor like serpents.

Sunlight still poured into that part of the hall.

But it could not touch the thing.

Where the shadow stood, the light arriving at its edges seemed to dim, to distort, and then to simply vanish, as though even the sun could find no purchase on whatever this was.

Every part of Hikaru went still.

But inside, he was already cursing.

'Trouble. Far more trouble than I expected.'

The shadow behind Hashira had no discernible face.

Where eyes, nose, and mouth should have been, there was only a featureless mass of black, rippling slowly like the surface of stagnant water disturbed by a cold wind. No features.

No expression. No trace of anything that had once been human. And yet Hikaru knew with perfect certainty: it was looking at him. More precisely, it had recognized that he could see it.

The knowledge arrived with absolute clarity, like two ice-cold hands pressing down on the back of his neck.

The temperature inside the main hall dropped.

Not the chill that came when wind moved through the corridor, but the kind that grew upward from beneath the floorboards, that crept along the ankle and climbed the calf and slid into the spine and gripped the skin like invisible fingers pressing from every direction at once.

Hashira continued to sit where she was, composed and unhurried, entirely unaware that something terrible was standing close enough to breathe against the back of her hair. The bodyguards in the courtyard showed no reaction either. Clearly, only Hikaru could see it.

Then the first sound came.

Ketch...

Very faint.

Dry.

Grating.

Like teeth being ground together somewhere in the dark.

Hikaru did not move. Even his breathing did not change. Outwardly he held the same composed posture. But every nerve inside him had pulled taut.

Ketch... ketch...

The sound came again.

Hashira did not react.

The bodyguards outside remained motionless as statues.

That only confirmed what he already suspected: the sound existed for him alone.

The black shadow slowly tilted its head forward. What passed for a face began to twist more violently, as though something inside the darkness was clawing at the surface, trying to break through. Its shoulders trembled in faint, irregular pulses.

The Yin Energy around its body churned. The tendrils of black smoke on the floor moved faster now, cutting paths across the wood like a nest of vipers that had caught the scent of fresh blood.

From years of dealing with malevolent entities, Hikaru understood immediately: this was no ordinary wandering spirit.

Nor simply a soul that had not yet passed on.

The Yin Energy was too dense.

The Resentful Energy ran too deep.

The killing intent radiating from its form was so thick it had nearly taken on physical weight. The fact that it could sustain itself under midday sunlight without weakening even slightly was evidence enough of how dangerous it truly was.

Against an ordinary spirit, Hikaru might have given himself seven chances in ten.

Against this...

He was not willing to say.

Across the table, Hashira continued to sit with that same composed expression, waiting, as though she had no idea there was anything beside her at all. She watched him with eyes that were tired but careful, waiting for him to speak after hearing everything she had told him.

Hikaru did not respond immediately. He needed a moment to think.

If he revealed now that he could see the Wraith, there was a strong chance it would be provoked into acting at once. This was the shrine's main hall, and Hashira's bodyguards were stationed just outside. A confrontation here would create enormous complications.

More importantly, he still did not know what the woman seated across from him was actually hiding.

This was not a simple matter of a widow being followed by the ghost of her dead husband.

It could not be that simple.

At that moment, the black shadow raised its head.

Where its mouth should have been, the darkness slowly split open along a long, crooked seam, jagged and deep, as though someone had reached in with their bare hands and torn the shadow apart.

Then the sound came.

"L... lied..."

The voice was hoarse, forced through what sounded like a throat that had been burned to ash long ago. It was not loud. But reaching Hikaru's ears it was like filthy water seeping through gaps between bones, and his scalp prickled with cold.

"Lied... deceit..."

Hashira did not stir.

She clearly heard nothing.

The shadow shook harder. The Yin Energy surrounding it swelled, rolling outward in dark coils like smoke from a fire no one could see. Then it forced out more words, broken and misshapen:

"Hashira..."

Her name left the shadow like a curse.

"Kill..."

"Must... kill..."

This time Hikaru could almost feel the hatred packed inside each syllable. It was not merely following her. It despised her. A loathing so deep it reached the marrow, the kind of hatred that had rotted in darkness until it stopped being grief or sorrow and became something that only knew how to destroy.

The conclusion Hikaru had begun forming shifted completely.

Before, he had assumed Hashira was withholding a portion of the truth.

But now it seemed the situation was far more complicated than that.

Nakamoto's death was certainly not natural.

Either he had carried an intensity of resentment before dying that far exceeded anything ordinary.

Or...

The reason lay with the woman seated right in front of him.

Hikaru slowly withdrew his gaze, keeping his expression perfectly unchanged, as if he had seen nothing at all. He looked at Hashira's face: beautiful, gentle, refined, like someone who had just stepped out of an old painting.

It was genuinely difficult to imagine that directly behind her, something utterly horrifying was standing so close it nearly pressed against her hair.

'Thirty million...' he exhaled inwardly. 'Of course it was never going to be easy money.'