Kakashi took the receiver out of his ear and leaned in again. Ryouma looked down the hall, empty and dark except for a square of moonlight from a skylight near the end. Over the radio he heard the thunk of steel into flesh and the gurgle of breath as Genma killed Tsuto's son, and in the room behind him Tsuto screamed and wept.

"Primary objective here complete," Genma said at last. "Moving on to secondary. I'll start in his accounting room. Check for a hidden compartment under the tatami in the southwest corner of his bedroom when you finish up with him."

"Roger," Kakashi said quietly. "Ram."

Holding that image of the square of moonlight in his mind, Ryouma went back to the bed. His fingers slipped through the familiar seals of the Nikutai Tokasu. Chakra grew and hummed red-black around his gloved hands, lighting the room with a sickly glow.

Tsuto hung from his pinned hands, still weeping, but the sharp edge of Ryouma's killing intent touched him and his head came up, eyes blank with horror.

"This will hurt," Kakashi said in the same flat voice. "You've earned it. But then it will end. Do better in your next life."

Tsuto didn't seem to hear him. His gaze was fixed on Ryouma, on the shifting fire of visible chakra around his hands. The palms of Ryouma's gloves had begun to shred away. Tsuto made a thin wail at the back of his throat and tried to pull his legs up, kicking and scrabbling at the bedcovers, but there was nowhere to go.

Ryouma leaned over the bed and set both hands on Tsuto's belly. He let the chakra seep in, instead of shoving. Tsuto's anemic chakra system was nothing like a shinobi's robust pathways, barely a life-sustaining flicker instead of coils brimming with fire, but there was enough and more than enough for the Human Flesh Melt Technique to seize and eat. The crumpled sleeping yukata rotted away like the gloves, and Ryouma's fingertips sank into a spongy mass of tissue that dissolved beneath his touch, releasing a fetid reek of decay.

Tsuto screamed and did not stop.

Ryouma pulled back, cutting the jutsu. Tsuto writhed, wrenched one hand free from the kunai in a shower of blood, and curled onto his side, trying to hold his belly with his ruined hand. His fingers sank inside. Liquid rot spilled like blood onto the bedding, and Tsuto's scream found a new throat-shredding pitch.

Even drugged, the servants might begin to wake soon.

Kakashi flicked blood from the tip of his kodachi, sheathed it, and slipped into handseals almost too quick for Ryouma to follow. Ox and Rabbit he caught, but the last might have been either Monkey or Snake. Lightning crackled around Kakashi's right hand with a sound like the chirping of a thousand birds, and Kakashi leaned in and plunged his hand through Tsuto's heart. Blood sprayed like a fountain.

The silence rang in Ryouma's ears, in the aftermath of Tsuto's scream. He wiped his hands, slowly, on a sheet, and then offered Kakashi a clean edge. Kakashi eased his hand out through shattered ribs and took it without a word. He wiped the worst of the clotted matter from his hand and then turned to lead the way out of the bedroom, past Tsuto's daughter's corpse and the pool of blood she'd left in the doorway.

Ryouma couldn't remember her name.

They stopped just down the hall, at a bathroom with its sliding door left half-open. The bath was lidded, still full. Kakashi fouled the water with his bloody hands, scrubbing up the insides of his gloved arms and scooping up palmfuls to sluice down his armguards. Ryouma waited against the door until he was done, then took his place. The soap was expensive stuff, sandalwood scented, soft under his fingers. He peeled out of the flapping shreds of his gloves, ripped the backplates off, and burned the rest in a brief chakra flare.

Kakashi was at the door, looking out. Ryouma scrubbed his hands one final time, turned the tap to rinse them in clean water, and then joined him.

His throat scratched when he finally found words. "Do you really think there is a next life?"

"No," Kakashi said. He started down the hall, back to the bedroom to search for Genma's hidden compartment. "But he had a shrine. So he might."

Small comfort to a man they'd tortured and murdered. No comfort at all, to the murderers.