[These vermins truly have no humanity.]

  [They deserve to be pinned down aroyed.]

  The diary dated with these two simple lines.

  There were no eborate descriptions, no vivid details. Yet, those few words felt heavier than aional outburst could vey.

  The three girls reading the diary fell into silence, each feeling an unshakable weight in their hearts.

  "Amamiya-san must've seen something in the back mountain," Kaguya cluded, her voice soft but certain.

  "Yeah... and judging by how little he wrote, it must've been awful."

  Ran instinctively uood that whatever Ren had witnessed was beyond the threshold of what he wahem to know.

  "He was looking for the cause of the evil spirits' birth," Nagi added thoughtfully. "If he's seen it now, it must be horrifying enough that he didn't even want to describe it."

  The three girls exged uneasy gnces.

  They were curious, but also afraid.

  What had he seen? What kind of se was so unspeakably disturbing that even Ren, who had remained calm through everything, refused to describe it?

  The oppressive silence was broken by Nagi, who shifted her gaze toward Saginomiya Isumi.

  "Isumi, as a shrine maiden, you've seen evil spirits before."

  She hesitated. "Do you know what their birth is like?"

  Isumi's shoulders te the question.

  Her gaze drifted toward the window as if searg for a way to avoid answering.

  She knew all too well what it looked like when evil spirits were born.

  It was the maion of pure human malice.

  The kind of despair that could twist even the ge soul into something grotesque and unreizable.

  Evil spirits weren't formed from simple sadness er. They needed unimagirauma, the kind that stripped aerson's humanity a only an echo of their pain behind.

  "Isumi?"

  Before she could respond, her eyes widened.

  Something had ged.

  ---

  Isumi rushed to the window, her breath caught ihroat.

  Her spiritual vision sharpened, and what she saw made her heart freeze.

  High above the isnd, the sky seemed to and twist.

  A massive cye of mist formed in midair, swirling like an unblinking eye.

  From within the cye, an invisible hand emerged—vast, shadowy, and suffused with a suffog sense of authority.

  The hand moved with deliberate slowness, fingers outstretched.

  The evil spirits that had been floating aimlessly above Tsukikage Ised instantly.

  They tried to flee.

  Tried to escape that hand.

  But the hand gave no mercy.

  It grasped them all with ease, tightening into a fist.

  The sky trembled.

  The evil spirits let out soundless, desperate wails.

  And then—

  Crack.

  The hand squeezed, and every spirit within its grasp shattered into mist.

  The suffog resehat had lingered over the isnd for so long was obliterated in a single instant.

  As the mist dispersed into nothingness, the hand slowly retracted into the cye, which vanished like smoke.

  The oppressive weight in the air lifted.

  But the image of that hand remained burned into Isumi's mind.

  She stood frozen by the window, heart rag.

  "That... was Amamiya-sama's power..."

  Her voice trembled with awe and fear.

  She had never seen anything like that before.

  That hand hadn't simply destroyed the evil spirits, it had erased their very essence, undoing them from the fabric of the world itself.

  Power beyond prehension.

  Power beyond logic.

  Power beyond anything she'd believed possible.

  ---

  "Isumi?"

  "Isumi, are you okay?"

  Nagi's worried voice finally pulled her back to reality.

  She bliurning toward the others, who were now gathered around her.

  The window behind her revealed nothing but a clear blue sky.

  No one else had seen the hand.

  Only Isumi.

  "Isumi, what did you see?" Nagi pressed gently.

  "Was it something terrifying?"

  Isumi hesitated.

  "No," she finally said. "Not terrifying… just… overwhelming."

  Her mind struggled to find the right words.

  "Amamiya-sama has acted."

  "He eliminated all the evil spirits floating above the isnd."

  "What?!"

  The girls' shock alpable.

  Sonoko and Ran exged wide-eyed gheir minds immediately recalling the swarm of spirits that had once crowded the sky.

  Just seeing one of those spirits had left them shaken.

  To imagihat Ren had single-handedly destroyed them all…

  "Wait, wait, wait," Sonoko stammered. "All of them? Like, pletely gone?"

  Isumi nodded.

  "Yes. I saw it happen."

  Maria stood and adjusted her gsses.

  "Isumi-san, could you expin in more detail?"

  Isumi took a deep breath.

  "Above the isnd, a massive vortex appeared. From that vortex came an invisible hand. It gathered every evil spirit on the isnd into its grasp… and crushed them. pletely."

  She shivered. "The moment it appeared, my spiritual power was suppressed to the point that I could barely breathe."

  A god-like hand, desding from the sky to pass judgment.

  "That…" Nagi's voice broke the silehat doesn't sound human."

  Isumi's expression darkened slightly.

  "It's not," she admitted. "It felt… absolute. Like an authority that even evil spirits couldn't resist."

  Her firembled as she remembered the suffog sensation.

  "I've never seen or heard of a power like that before."

  The weight of her words hung in the air.

  The girls' minds swirled with fusion and unease.

  Even if they couldn't visualize the se, their minds filled the bnks with terrifying imaginings.

  They khat if they had withat moment directly, their minds might have shut dowirely.