◆ Biography ◆
In the waning years of the Ashikaga shogunate, in the spring of 1452, beneath the soft bloom of cherry blossoms and amidst the distant tolling of temple bells, a girl was born under a blood-red moon in the province of Yamashiro. She was the daughter of Daichi Nakamura, a stoic samurai and last surviving heir of the ancient Kageyama clan, and his wife, Hikari, a quiet herbalist whose eyes glowed with secrets older than the empire itself. They named her Sakura, after the blossoms that fell like snow upon her first cries.
But Sakura was no ordinary child. In her veins coursed the blood of a dying legend. She wasn't an ordinary fox like her parents, she was a kitsune, a fox spirit of rare, seemingly celestial lineage. Where others aged, she remained unblemished by time. Where others faltered, she rose with impossible grace. Her soul shimmered with the duality of light and shadow, of discipline and wild instinct. And within her tiny form burned a destiny too large for any one era.
The village elders whispered that the gods had sent her. Some feared her. Others worshipped her. Her parents only loved her as best they could, under the weight of expectation and prophecy.
The Kageyama clan had once been protectors of the land, warriors sworn not to emperors or lords, but to the balance of the world itself. Their legacy was carved into the steel of a singular weapon: Aka no Kokyū, a katana said to be forged from the molten tears of a fallen sun. It was more than steel, it was a soul.
Sakura was trained in silence and solitude. While other children played among the bamboo groves, she bled for hours under her father's gaze. She learned the way of the blade, of spirit-walking, of divine geometry and elemental alignment. Her every breath was a discipline, her every heartbeat a blade sharpening in her chest.
Time became fluid. Seasons passed like moments. By the time she reached her third decade, she was not merely trained, she was perfected. Her father, now frail and silver-haired, stood before her on a misted morning, knelt, and offered her the family blade. She wore the crimson garb of the Kageyama, and with that, her past life vanished. She was reborn, she became a legend.
She moved through the provinces as a shadow, correcting the imbalances of Japan with swift, elegant violence. Bandits found themselves disarmed before their swords could leave the sheath. Warlords spoke her name with complete fear and constant stuttering. She didn't even age a day. Her silence became her myth; her presence, divine. Where she walked, peace followed. Her blade remained sheathed more often than drawn. Even the most hardened criminals faltered at rumors of a woman who could literally summon the sun itself from her sword. She was spoken of in poems, in hushed prayers, and even in the dreams of dying men. Children idolized her, emperors bowed to her all the more.
However though, as the centuries passed, the need for warriors diminished as the world progressed into a more modern era. Sakura, nearly eternal and untouched, began to drift. She wandered beyond Japan, across the continents, through world wars, revolutions, renaissances... She simply became an observer of rise and its follies, studying them like they were insects in a jar. In time, she found herself in the North, what would soon be the United States, tired, and for the first time in her life, yearning for a life unburdened by legends that would be considered myths in this day in age. and thus, she buried her blade in a place no map would find, far from memory or myth, forever.
It was the year 1932. Sakura lived as an regular, normal woman. She had a modest job as a librarian, a quiet circle of friends, and a small, sunlit home on the edge of a growing city. The war drums of the world were distant just echoes at this point. She smiled more, laughed even. Her supernatural nature remained buried beneath the mundanity of a normal, mortal life. She had, against all odds, found contentment.... until the storm, of course.
On one cursed night, black clouds swallowed the moon. Thunder cracked like cannon fire, and it was raining like hell. Something ancient stirred beneath the city though, and needing some place to seek somewhere that wasn't wet during a walk home from work, Sakura walked into the ruins of an old storage facility named Security Recreational, a place abandoned and forgotten by men, but not by the darkness and evil committed there.
The moment she stepped into the place, her fate was already sealed, as if the building itself had been waiting for her, like some ancient force had sensed her presence and reached out to claim her. The storm outside faded into a distant memory as the shadows within the warehouse seemed to close in around her, twisting and writhing like living entities. Whispers echoed from the walls, voices, both familiar and alien, beckoning her deeper into the heart of the forsaken building. The further she went, the more disconnected she felt from the world she once knew, as if reality itself was slipping away, replaced by something far more insidious.
In the deepest recesses of the warehouse, Sakura came across a chamber that seemed untouched by time. The air here was colder, heavier, and in the center of the room stood an ancient stone altar, stained with the blood of long-forgotten rituals. Symbols of dark power were etched into the walls, and candles flickered with an eerie, unnatural glow. It was here, at this cursed altar, that Sakura's transformation began. The malevolent forces that had lurked within the building for centuries seized upon her, wrapping themselves around her soul like tendrils of shadow. She could feel them clawing their way into her mind, filling her with a sense of dread so overwhelming that it threatened to consume her entirely.
But instead of succumbing to the fear, something within Sakura snapped. The dark energies, which had intended to break her, instead found themselves merging with her. The whispers in her mind grew louder, but instead of driving her mad, they began to guide her, twisting her thoughts and corrupting her very essence. Her once gentle demeanor gave way to a seething malevolence, her heart blackened by the forces that now resided within her. The transformation was complete, and in her place stood a creature of pure evil, a vessel for the darkness that had claimed her. She did not kill for hunger, nor or pleasure. She killed to feed the thing inside her. And the thing inside her was never sated, it was screaming in the name for Satan. She became myth yet again, but this time, a myth of terror. Over the next several decades spanning into the 21st century, Sakura was a brutal, brutal serial killer that terrorized the entire United States, claiming the lives of dozens upon dozens in horrible and gruesome displays of violence. Nobody could ever even prove if she truly existed or not, and she was nothing more than a legend akin to something like BigFoot. Alas, a cult rose around her, calling her a goddess of entropy, if she truly even existed in their twisted POVs. Her acolytes painted their bodies in blood and gave offerings of flesh.
Among them was Tsubaki, a refugee from a forgotten realm, who became her most faithful servant, being able to finally meet and prove her existence to herself, somehow managing to befriend the cold and now completely emotionless Sakura. She had a crush on her, she was obsessed, and did everything with her and lived with her in the facility.
Meanwhile, a bounty hunter had made it her life's mission to hunt down Sakura and bring her to justice. She had seen the devastation she had wrought firsthand, and she knew that she was no ordinary killer and that she was very real, having already encountered her years prior in a scuffle.
The showdown finally came outside of Security Recreational, the very place where Sakura's transformation had begun. The bounty hunter, and a handful of others who had joined her stormed the facility, determined to put an end to Sakura's reign once and for all. The battle that followed was like something out of a nightmare. Sakura, now fully consumed by the dark forces that had claimed her, unleashed her true form. She towered over her adversaries, standing at ten feet tall, her body cloaked in an abyssal shroud of darkness. Her once beautiful face was now a twisted, crimson mask of malevolence, her eyes burning with a hellish light.
But just as the battle seemed lost, a new player entered the fray. Mania, a demon of immense power who had been drawn to the scene by the pulsating aura of dark energy that surrounded Sakura, arrived with his own agenda. He had no interest in saving lives or stopping Sakura’s rampage. In her, he saw an opportunity to increase his own strength. With savage fury, Mania attacked, his clawed hand plunging into Sakura’s chest with terrifying precision. He began ripping the souls she had consumed from her body, one by one, draining her of the power that had sustained her for so long.
For the first time in decades, Sakura felt something she hadn’t in what felt like an eternity: freedom. As the souls were torn from her body, the weight of her torment began to lift. For a fleeting moment, she was no longer the dark vessel she had become; she was simply Sakura, the woman she had once been. Tears welled in her eyes as the memories of her former life flooded back and regained proper control once more. But this moment of clarity came at a terrible cost, her mortal body, unable to withstand the brutal onslaught, began to fail her.
As she collapsed to the cold concrete floor, her blood pooling and spilling beneath her, Sakura gazed up towards the ones watching. A fragile smile crossed her lips, and for the first time in so long, she felt at peace. Her torment was over. The dark forces that had claimed her had been vanquished, and she was free, free to embrace the oblivion that awaited her as a sacrifice to all the evil she was forced to commit. As Mania’s foot descended upon her skull, crushing the last remnants of life from her, the warehouse echoed with the final breath of a legend.
