It has been twenty years since they put my father in the ground.

I stood numbly watching, overwhelmed by waves of strangers bleeding from a sea of blue. Rachel, they said. His death meant something. He saved a woman.

Even now I don’t see value in that exchange. My mind turns relentlessly, searching for answers in an old murder file. Dad emptied his gun, and the man—the thing—kept coming. Fingernails flashed in the beam of the spotlight. Raven hair whipped a trail of sudden motion, deadly and quick.

Others dismissed the witness account as delusional, but I believe her.

Journalistic instinct screams that the truth lies in forensic record. Numerous lacerations, all perfectly parallel—that couldn’t have been a knife. And what about the blood evidence? Were the samples contaminated, or was there something more that forensics failed to grasp?

The witness clearly doesn’t want to be found, even after all these years, but I track her down. Surprise! She hasn’t aged a day in two decades. Tightlipped, she evades every question, and I’m just staring, wondering how she could look younger than me. I was a child, only eight when my father died.

The cold trail of evidence bears one final lead, and I stumble into the nightmare. A dark warehouse. Air thick with grease and metal masks undertones of decaying flesh. The Asura, a name pulled from myth. The place is filled with them.

Could they really be immortal? Do I care? I just want to find the one that tore open my father’s throat.