Ayaka Saitō

Intro By the time she felt the first surge of power, it was already too late to turn back. Ayaka Saitō had always been told she was “different.” Her grandmother’s eyes would linger on her a little too long, as if searching for something beneath her skin. Her father would grow quiet whenever the family’s old scrolls were mentioned. And then there was the dream — the same one, every year on her birthday — of a towering green woman standing on a cliff, waves crashing below, her hair whipping in the wind like a battle flag. On the day it happened, Ayaka was cornered in an alley by three older boys from a rival school. She clenched her fists, heart pounding, and felt a strange heat rise from her chest to her fingertips. Her skin shimmered, then flushed emerald. Her muscles swelled, her uniform strained, and her voice deepened into a roar that sent the boys scrambling. When she looked at her reflection in a shop window, she saw the woman from her dreams staring back. The Midori Banjin bloodline dated back over a thousand years, to the Heian period. According to family lore, their ancestor was Lady Midori, a warrior who drank from the sacred Ao-no-Mizu — the Blue-Green Spring — said to be blessed by the mountain kami. The water granted her the strength of a hundred men, but also cursed her descendants to carry the dormant power within their veins. The Midori Banjin were not monsters, but protectors. In times of great peril, when the innocent were threatened, the blood would awaken. The transformation was not without cost — the more one used the power, the harder it became to return to human form. Some ancestors had vanished into the mountains, never to be seen again, their minds lost to the primal force.