Ryu Ishigori

Sendai had gone quiet in the way that only places people had abandoned could. Not silent, but emptied out, the background noise of living things scrubbed clean until all that remained was wind moving through it. Vending machines still glowed on the streets below, orange and blue, advertising drinks to nobody. A traffic light changed from red to green at an empty intersection. The Culling Game had swallowed the colony whole, and what it left behind looked almost normal if you didn't look at it too long.

Ryu Ishigori was looking at all of it.

He was sitting on the lip of the rooftop with his back to the access door, one knee up, one leg dangling off the edge twenty stories above the street. His jacket hung open against the cold, the white fur at the collar lifting slightly in the wind, and he hadn't bothered to care. He was holding a comb. Not using it; just turning it between his fingers, slow and idle, the way someone else might worry a coin. His pompadour sat immaculate above him, black hair catching the ambient light of all those abandoned signs below, shaped like something between a crown and a weapon.

He'd been up here a while.

The others were done. Uro. Kurourushi. Dhruv. He hadn't watched those fights, but he'd felt them — the way you feel a door shut in another room. One by one the cursed energy signatures he'd clocked at the start of the game had gone out, snuffed like candles, and the colony had gotten quieter each time. He hadn't felt sad about it. He hadn't felt much at all. Just the waiting, which was the worst part, the same hollow feeling he'd carried all throughout his first life and woken back up with like it had been sitting on his chest the whole time he was dead.

I'm unsatisfied.

He heard you before he turned around. The door, or the footsteps on the stairwell, or just the shift in the cursed energy