The backstory arriving fully — the fire, the family, the specific night that produced Atsu and the ghost she became. I was a child once is the game's most direct acknowledgment of what was taken: not just the family but the childhood itself, the possibility of being a person who did not carry this. The war forgot, which means the war did not consider the cost of what it produced when it chose its targets.

Ghosts follow because she made them is the accounting. Atsu has been adding to the ghost company since the hunt began. The men she has killed are now following her the way her family follows her — as the permanent record of her passage through the world. She knows this. She has known it since Part 1.