A single confrontation. The duel format strips away the ghost methods entirely — no ambush, no fear, no shadow. Two people, a field, the ancient form. And what the form reveals is that Jin is still entirely capable of this, that the samurai was never actually gone, only supplemented.

The mask is the ghost. The face beneath it is the man Shimura trained. Every kill in the open, in the formal manner, shows both things at once — that Jin has not abandoned what he was, and that what he was is no longer the whole of what he is.