Filthy Pride

"Like a wolf finding a rabbit caught in a trap, he thinks it's an easy dinner. Too bad for the wolf that it wasn't the rabbit caught in an accident, but a hunter knowing no preditor can resist fresh blood."

While camping in the mountains for the night, Sugimoto's group is happened upon by a woman wearing a bear. She - Sen - is neither Japanese, nor Ainu, but she certainly seems to know a lot more about the gold they're searching for than she should due to an unknown connection with the groups' collective pasts. On the run from her own issues that she's keeping close to her chest in the form of a cryptic, facetious game, she tags along with the group for the mere adventure of it. Or so she says.

As if the stranger isn't enigmatic enough, she and the group's very own king of cunning appear to get along like a wooden hut containing alcohol on fire: violently, unpredictively, and most of all, dangerously - right up until he lets his true colours slip past his flimsily veiled façade.

When the factions split for the nth time, the only previously personal relationship the stranger has - a young woman working at a brothel named Rin - is forced onto a delicate balancing block and made into a prime hostage chip when they find out she has information they do not. Realizing she's in the company of those who have already killed without question for the tattooed skins she wants nothing to do with, Rin has to rethink her life choices from a different vantage point. At the same time, Sen is making her way across the country, her ghosts haunting her as she's in search of the man who deserted her while heading straight for the place, and people, who got her older sister killed fifteen years prior.