Tag: mystery

“I’m smarter than I look.”

The Daily Grind

Case File #7

January 4^th, 2044

07:20 PM

Sin Ward

Temptation District

Nanbu Naoya

“Have you seen this guy?” it was a question Naoya had asked for the last few hours, and, often enough, he would get the same answer. In his hand, he held out his Augur, which projected the clean-cut image of Nishijima.

“Yeah, I’ve seen him,” answered the surly bartender who looked down at the image.

Naoya was standing in a bar on the first floor of a casino called the “Ivory Tower.” True to its name, the building was a white marble spear that pointed up towards the sky. While it would have stood apart in another ward, in Sin Ward, it blended into the numerous gregarious buildings that vied for the attention of passersby. Since spotting Nishijima down in the south, Naoya had broken away from the chase, and headed north, up into the busier parts of Sin Ward. Though he was no longer looking for Nishijima, he hadn’t truly given up the chase.

The way Nishijima suddenly disappeared finally convinced Naoya that there was more to this man and the people chasing him than Ichinose had told him. It was obvious that running down the man in the grey coat was going to be far more difficult than cornering an ordinary mark with an overdue bar tab, and so Naoya changed his tactics. He headed up north, looking to pick up the earliest steps in Nishijima’s path; he needed to anticipate what the other man really wanted if he hoped to catch him, after all. All his work over the past few hours had led him here.

“I’ve got to tell you, though,” the woman behind the bar fixed Naoya with a keen eye. “You’re not the first guy to come in here asking about him. You’re not even the tenth.”

The inside of the building had a very foreign and very expensive vibe, like it was the palace of a European prince. The floors were pristine white marble with gold patterns, and the walls were decorated with white and gold floral patterns, which contrasted with the hard black furniture and countertops. Golden chandeliers hung from the ceilings, although they were only there to provide the illusion of luxury, as the true light sources were sconces on the walls. The rest of the staff were dressed in the same monotone formal attire with black suits with white button up shirts, waistcoats and gloves.

Far from Ichinose’s soapland in the middle of Sin Ward, or the dark town whose debauchery was on full display, the Ivory Tower was a far more formal and refined den of vices, but it was no less a market of sin than anywhere else in the city. The Ivory Tower was a comprehensive business with various services offered up and down its seventy-odd floors. The first floor had check-in services for the hotel rooms above, along with a ground floor restaurant and bar that Naoya was told paled in comparison to the eateries above, but the Ivory Tower was more than a hotel; it was also a multi-story casino, and brothel.

While soaplands like the Virgin Sacrifice still abided by old laws of Japan and tried to pretend that they were anything but brothel, the Ivory Tower remembered that it was in Yōgai-shima, and Japan’s legislature held no sway over it. Still, the high-class establishment advertised the services of its employees with more grace than Ichinose could ever hope to have.

Like Ichinose’s bathhouse, pictures of numerous women were hung at various points around the lobby in positions that commanded the viewers’ attention. Sitting at the bar, Naoya could see the framed portrait of a woman behind the bartender. The portrait had a frame of gold and the picture itself was styled to look like an oil painting, though Naoya imagined that was the result of some filter applied to a digital photo. The woman in the painting was blonde with wavy hair and a pair of blue eyes and pink lips. She was dressed in a white form-fitting dress with fur dangling over her right shoulder and a small fan in her left hand. She was looking to her right, her sharp eyes and dangerously beautiful features looking away from Naoya, as if to tell the viewer that she was simply too far above them for her to even consider making eye contact.

While the portrait had no name assigned to it, Naoya didn’t doubt that the woman worked in the Ivory Tower at one point or another. The other portraits he’d seen since he’d walked in were much the same; all of them showing women in expensive clothes with the most immaculate of makeup, and every photo framed in a way that made them seem untouchable. The women who worked at the Tower were singers, private dancers, and companions of the rich and famous: courtesans of the modern day. They were beyond the reach of ordinary men unless a commensurate price was paid for their attention. All of that made the bartender seem a bit out of place.

The woman behind the bar was roughly Naoya’s age, maybe a few years older, and dressed in the white shirt and vest that the rest of the staff had. She had thin dark eyes and a headful of black hair that was tied into a loose and messy ponytail. Contributing to her rough appearance, the woman had a washcloth dangling over one shoulder and her sleeves were rolled up, exposing a tattoo on her left forearm. Naoya couldn’t say why the woman was allowed to present herself so out of line with the building’s aesthetic, but he didn’t mind, as it made her seem far more real than the women in the portraits ever were.

“I imagine you’ve had a train of guys coming through this door, flashing this picture around,” Naoya tucked the Augur into his pocket.

“That’s quite the understatement,” the lady bartender cracked a small smile. “I’m afraid you’re out of luck, though.”

“How’s that?” Naoya asked, casually leaning against the bar.

“You’re gonna get the same answer I gave to every goon that walked through those doors,” she flashed him a knowing look.

“And what’s that?” Naoya spread his hands and offered a smile.

“He came in, asked a few questions, and then he left,” the woman gave Naoya a soft shrug and a smile of her own. “He spent less time in here than you did, big guy. He didn’t say who he was, where he was going, or how he planned to get there. He walked out those doors behind you hours ago and never came back through.”

“Really?” Naoya looked over his shoulder back towards the entrance.

“Sorry I can’t be more help,” the woman made it sound as though she were dismissing him, but Naoya didn’t leave.

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask about, though,” Naoya corrected the bartender, and she gave him an appraising look.

“Alright, then,” the woman flashed an amused grin. “Shoot.”

“The man that came in here today,” Naoya leaned closer and lowered his voice, not wanting the few customers in the otherwise vacant bar to overhear their conversation. “He was looking for someone; a woman.”

Naoya gestured at the photo of the woman in white for emphasis.

“Sounds to me like you know more about this guy than I do,” the bartender observed, her dark eyes searching Naoya’s face. “I don’t know what you expect me to tell you.”

“The woman he was looking for,” Naoya fixed the bartender with a pleading eye, trying to impress on her the importance of his question. “What do you remember about her? Did he tell you her name?”

“No,” the bartender shook her head. “He said he was looking for a new girl. I mean, really new, like he expected her to be here yesterday.”

“Did he say anything else about her?” Naoya asked, though he tried not to seem too forceful with his questions. “Did he describe her?”

“No, but he had a picture of her,” the bartender answered, and Naoya felt a soft jolt of surprise. None of the other men and women he’d spoken to had mentioned a photo.

“Do you remember what she looked like?” Naoya asked, feeling a jolt of excitement, thinking that he might be onto something.

“She was young. She had red hair,” the bartender answered, her eyes drifting away from Naoya as she tried to recall the details of the photo. “You don’t see that a lot in this city. She was pretty, too. Not drop dead gorgeous, like, you know,” the bartender nodded her head at the picture of the blonde behind her. “But she was cute.”

“Do you remember anything else?” Naoya asked, grasping for anything else to go on.

“She had brown eyes, and a slim nose,” the bartender gave Naoya a weak smile as she grasped for something to appease him. Naoya felt his face falling into a frown, an expression that was often unsettling for other people, and he remembered to keep his features stoic, despite his disappointment. Even though she may have seen a picture of the woman Nishijima was looking for, the bartender’s description wasn’t far off from what Naoya had heard secondhand from the other dives he’d hit up before this one.

“Oh!” the bartender spoke up after another moment of thought and reached up to touch a finger to the top of her left cheek. “She had a tattoo right here under her eye. It was a heart, with a small kanji inside it.”

“A small heart, huh?” Naoya reached up and touched the same spot on his own face. “I didn’t hear that before.”

“Well,” the bartender spread her hands. “That’s really all I can remember.”

“You’ve been a big help,” Naoya assured her and he flashed another smile.

“I’d say good luck finding the guy, but. . .,” the bartender trailed off, sizing up Naoya as the man stood upright.

“Don’t worry,” he tried to reassure her. “At this point, I’m more interested in just talking to this guy.”

“For his sake, I hope you’re not lying,” the bartender cracked a smile and turned away, signaling the end of the conversation. Naoya was about to turn and leave when he saw the small kiosk mounted on the end of the bar that customers could use to order drinks. He pulled out his Augur and swiped it over the kiosk, triggering the device to pay out a small tip to the bartender. It was probably insultingly small considering the building’s usual clientele, but Naoya figured leaving without a gesture of thanks would be inappropriate considering the Ivory Tower’s hospitality.

The man at the door gave Naoya a dirty look as he left, though he said nothing. Ordinarily, Naoya imagined a man dressed the way he was, in a leather jacket and boots, wouldn’t be allowed into a place like the Tower, but his reputation as a deliveryman in Sin Ward preceded him. Some doors that remained closed to others were open to Naoya, if only because complacent doormen thought he was there on business.

Returning to the world outside, Naoya was greeted by Izumi with a roaring peal of thunder chasing a lightning bolt that had long since vanished. Night had fallen in the hours since he’d had his first “encounter” with Nishijima, but the rain and the wind had continued without ceasing. Naoya strode down the steps in front of the Ivory Tower towards his bike, looking down at his Augur.

He picked his helmet up off the back of his bike and slid it on before his Augur transformed back into a pair of goggles. Pressing the lenses to his face, Naoya mounted his bike and started it up. The engine whined to life, and the Bridge-Runner pulled away into traffic.

When the sun went down, Sin Ward truly came to life. Heading west from the Ivory Tower, Naoya was afforded the familiar view of some of the district’s most scenic structures. The Elysium Fields, a soft tan multistory building that was some sixty floors tall and nearly as wide, which featured a towering relief of two women embracing in the center of the building, and then the Perdition, one of the tallest buildings in the ward with a nanite superstructure which had reshaped itself into a spiral around the building. The tip of a building shaped like a wine bottle peered over the skyline, struggling to be seen by the busy traffic, and another building flashed bright red, imitating a volcano, but none of them could compare to the mysterious tower of Tsukuyomi looming in the background, its false pale moon hanging forever in the sky.

Traffic moved too slowly for Naoya’s liking; with the sunset, the human tide flowed into Sin Ward, filling the streets with flashing lights, roaring engines, tires sloshing through the wet street, and people crowding the sidewalks. There were thousands of people around Naoya in all directions, be they in a car, or a bus, or in one of the rail cars that ran along the tracks suspended over the city streets. Ordinarily, Naoya enjoyed the sights and sounds of Yōgai-shima when the island came alive, but being stuck in the traffic jam, barely able to move forward while a hundred other vehicles flanked him made him feel trapped.

“Just breathe, Naoya,” he tried to imagine those words being spoken in Suzume’s voice. “Breathe.”

When he was finally able to fight through the traffic clogging the east-to-west streets, Naoya turned south, heading back towards Decadence District. The traffic thinned, but it didn’t disappear, though Naoya was able to gain enough space and speed that he could shove his anxiety somewhere into the back of his mind for the moment. When the opportunity came, Naoya turned down a side street and pulled into a dark alley between two apartment buildings.

He pried his Augur away from his face, and the device shifted back into the silhouette of a phone. Holding it in his gloved hands, Naoya paused for a moment, considering what he was going to say to the man he was about to call. He needed to be discreet, he knew, but he felt the press of time. He’d chosen to try and approach the problem of Nishijima from a lateral angle, trusting that the man would prove too elusive for his other hunters to find, but Naoya knew he was daring a little too far at this point. Nishijima might have been caught already, and if he wasn’t, Suzume was soon to be off work, meaning that Naoya would have to suspend the chase. With those thoughts in his mind, Naoya swiftly placed the call, choosing to improvise.

The call rang four times, and an automated voice tried to prompt Naoya into leaving a message, he hung up. He stared at the phone, wondering if he’d made some kind of mistake and waited too long, but his thoughts were interrupted as he was called back, and Naoya promptly answered.

“Tell me it’s good news,” came Ichinose’s voice from the other end of the phone. The man sounded tired and irritated.

“Not exactly,” Naoya folded his arms, frowning as he considered the other man’s mood. “That guy, uh, Nishino; has anyone caught him yet?”

“What do you think?” Ichinose growled, his frustration palpable. “I don’t suppose you’ve gotten shit done, have you?”

“I’ve got a lead or two,” Naoya answered, though he only said it to try and keep the soapland manager agreeable. “But, about this guy; would you know if he got picked up by a debt collector working for another pimp?”

“I’d know, Accident-kun. I’d know,” Ichinose assured him, and Naoya could hear the other man shuffling around, leaning over the phone. “Now, what leads have you got for me?”

“They’re my leads,” Naoya told him, shutting the other man out. The more he heard, the more it sounded like Ichinose was just a middleman for someone else. He didn’t seem to have any personal investment in the chase; he didn’t even remember Nishijima’s name. “I don’t need anyone else cutting in and taking this out from under me.”

“Taking it out from under you?” Ichinose scoffed; his voice filled with mockery. “Have you forgotten who’s paying you to do this?”

“Somehow, I get the feeling that you’re not the one in charge of all this,” instead of saying that out loud, though, Naoya chose a different tact.

“I’m being paid by a man who is very well connected, to hear him talk,” Naoya agreed, adding a little mockery to his own voice. “Which is a good thing, seeing as I need to find someone.”

“You and me both,” Ichinose scoffed, his patience wearing audibly thin.

“I’m looking for a woman,” Naoya could hear Ichinose laugh over the phone line at that.

“Hitting up all the flesh bars in town helped you work up an appetite, eh, Nanbu-kun?” the other man chuckled. “Swing on by if you have an itch that needs scratching.”

“I’m not looking for one of your girls,” Naoya ignored Ichinose’s provocations.

“Who, then?” the manager asked with interest and Naoya paused, knowing he needed to choose his next few words carefully. Every bartender, janitor, or working girl that Nishijima had spoken to all told Naoya the same thing: he was looking for a specific woman. Young, red hair, brown eyes, a tattoo under her left eye, and very new to the industry. Though it was clear that Nishijima was looking for a specific person, he hadn’t mentioned any names. The secondhand description was all Naoya had to go on.

“Someone young; late teens, to early twenties,” Naoya felt a little unclean saying the words aloud. He knew how he meant them, but he also knew how the other man would perceive them. “Red hair.”

“Red hair?” Ichinose repeated the words, thinking aloud. “That’s not so common. Black hair, brown hair, bleach blonde. Blues and pinks, but red? You don’t see that a lot.”

“The woman; she’s new in this line of business.”

“You’re a real freak, Nanbu-kun,” Ichinose sounded truly amused. “I always knew it. You’ve got an appetite for the nasty stuff, but you’re just too ashamed to admit it, aren’t you? Or maybe it’s that girlfriend of yours keeping you hungry?”

“Do you know of a girl like that or not?” Naoya demanded, sincerely regretting that he ever called Ichinose, or that he’d ever met the man to begin with.

“Chill, Nanbu-kun,” Ichinose tried to sound soothing, but there was a toxic mirth in his tone. “I know it’s hard to stay calm when you’re about to have your cherry popped but relax. Take it easy for a moment. You don’t want to be too excited when you find this girl you’re looking for.”

Naoya’s fingers hovered over the screen of the Augur, and he fought not to just hang up and write the day off. At this point, it was curiosity that kept Naoya’s attention, not the money: who was Nishijima and why was everyone looking for him? He wanted to know.

“So, Nanbu-kun wants a redhead who is still young, and not too loose,” Ichinose listed off the details of the girl’s description, thinking aloud. He went silent for a moment, and Naoya waited with baited breath. “Can’t say that rings a bell.”

“You’re sure?” Naoya demanded, desperate for a lead.

“I know what’s on offer in this town,” Ichinose insisted, sounding defensive. “Managers like myself; we’re like coaches and owners for baseball teams. We watch each other, we talk, we study different team compositions, and the women? Well, they float around and trade hands from time to time. Sometimes the girl wants a chain of scenery, other times the manager owes someone else a debt, and he trades an employee to square things. It’s real political, you understand?”

“Political, right,” Naoya scoffed and rolled his eyes.

“What I’m trying to say is that in this industry, it behooves a man like me to know the roster of the other teams in the league,” Ichinose went on. “And to know who the freelancers are, and the new draft picks. But let me tell you, when a new girl shows up in the circuit, that gets attention. More so if she’s young. Lots of repeat customers will pay extra for, uh, freshness, let’s say. Red hair; that makes a splash, too. If a girl like that was in circulation, I’d have heard about it.”

The soap-land manager paused for a moment, choosing to be dramatic.

“If she were on this side of the river, that is,” he finished and Naoya knew instantly what he meant.

The White-Mountain Sanzu; a “river” that ran through the east side of Sin Ward. In reality, it was a crack in the city’s foundations from the quake of 2042, and the rupture had filled in with seawater. The homes and businesses near the Sanzu were badly damaged, and many of the buildings on the east side of the Sanzu had been left to fester, and they’d since become occupied by many of the transients from Foundation, which in turn transformed the White Mountain Sanzu into the de facto borderline between Sin Ward and its eastern neighbor.

“You don’t keep up with the business in Foundation?” Naoya tried to pump the other man for more information, but part of him knew that he may very well have hit a wall he couldn’t climb.

“It’s not that I don’t,” Ichinose corrected him. “It’s that I can’t. The Kabuki Towers run all the sex trade in that part of town, and they don’t talk to people outside their circles.”

“Shit,” Naoya clicked his teeth in frustration.

“If the lady you’re looking for is working in this town, my bets are she’s on the other side of the Sanzu,” Ichinose affected an amused nonchalance. “Of course, if you’re still looking to hit it while she’s fresh, I’d cross the river sooner rather than later.”

Naoya hung up and sat staring at the phone for several long seconds, torn by indecision. Several times today, Naoya had been close to hanging up the chase and washing his hands of everything, but he was never closer to giving in than he was at that moment. Crossing the Sanzu wasn’t something he’d ever done before, and it wasn’t something he wanted to do.

He’d been close to the river before on a delivery or two, and he’d seen the damage that still lingered from the quake. Even on Sin Ward’s side, he’d felt hostile eyes on him as he crept through the town in his bike. He’d had enough thugs in Sin Ward that targeted him because he was tall and intimidating to ordinary people, but Naoya had no desire to go looking for trouble, and crossing the Sanzu was always a recipe for just that.

It was getting late, the sun had fallen, and the storm howled overhead; all of them convincing reasons not to go. On the off chance that he did find Nishijima, there was no guarantee that he could actually catch him this time. He still didn’t know how the stranger had even performed his little disappearing act, and he couldn’t stop him from doing it again. Maybe it was the challenge that Nishijima represented that spurred Naoya into motion.

“I’ll just take a look,” Naoya told himself as he pressed the Augur towards his face, shifting them back into the shape of goggles. “I’ll make a quick pass through and then go home.”

He spurred the Bridge-Runner into motion, exiting out through the other side of the alley. He headed east, traveling down along the southern coast while the storm rolled on overhead. He felt a sense of foreboding, but he pushed it to the back of his mind, reasoning that it was nothing more than a feeling of lingering anxiety.

The first thing that Naoya noticed as he headed towards the island’s eastern edge was the gradual diminishing of traffic. Cars quickly made themselves scarce where the roads connecting Sin and Foundation were concerned. Regulars visited the Temptation District in the north, and some tourists went down to the Ambition or Decadence Districts, but no one was keen to visit Foundation Ward. Pedestrians vanished even faster; driven indoors by the rain. Only a single commuter rail actually ran across the Sanzu, furthering Foundation’s sense of isolation.

The businesses with their flashy neon signs and provocative imagery thinned out, becoming sparser with each block that Naoya passed. Naoya felt the slight shift in his tires that told him he was riding over fissures in the wet street beneath him, though he couldn’t see them in the dark. The headlight from his bike was reflected in the broken, dark windows of the buildings on either side of the road, many of them having the grey, standard shape of the island’s early mass-printed buildings. They weren’t unoccupied, but they were abandoned in nearly every other sense. The concrete buildings were bare, lacking a laminate to protect them from the rain, or to hide the graffiti painted onto their sides, or the spider-webbing cracks that traveled up their walla. Ahead of Naoya, a light shined, and he slowed as he reached the edge of the Sanzu.

The Sanzu stretched from north to south, forming a fracture in the foundation of Yōgai-shima as it passed from the banks of Getto-san out to the sea. The rift in the city’s concrete and steel foundation stretched some one hundred feet across, and every year, the tear grew wider and deeper from the erosion of the saltwater. The river had overflowed from the constant downpour released by Izumi, and the Sanzu had flowed up its concrete banks, however, it wasn’t enough to overcome the protections the city had put in place.

A pair of identical bridges had been erected to span the Sanzu, which were a bright and polished silver in color, serving to contrast the worn roadway. The floor of the bridges was a dark, coarse material made to provide friction for car tires in inclement weather, and two smaller pedestrian walkways were sequestered at either side of the bridge. Matching silver barriers had been placed on the banks of the river to hold back the overflow, and Naoya heard the hum of machinery and sloshing of water, suggesting some mechanism was redirecting the current to prevent it from breaching the barricades. A pair of signs were fixed over the bridges, flashing the same message: “FLOOD WARNING! CROSS WITH CAUTION!”

Naoya gently nudged his bike forward, guiding the vehicle onto the bridge across the Sanzu. He drove slowly and carefully, crossing the bridge while keeping his eyes peeled for any obstructions ahead of him, however, a glinting light to his right slowly drew Naoya’s attention. Turning his head, he could see shapes within the water of the Sanzu. Piles of concrete could be seen stacked below the water’s surface, along with broken pipes, and the silhouettes of more of those grey concrete buildings that had collapsed into the river. Flickering lights flashed in the dark currents, illuminating the sunken buildings, but Naoya couldn’t tell whether they had somehow survived the water for the past few years, or if the lights had been placed in water for some reason he couldn’t fathom. The ghostly sight stayed with Naoya even after he looked away.

Leaving the bridge behind, Naoya crossed into Foundation. The city wasn’t what he’d expected; half the stories he’d heard about Foundation had prepared him for some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland with burning buildings, broken roads, and the clap of gunfire echoing from some indiscernible location. Instead, the wear and tear from the fringes of Sin Ward continued unabated.

Naoya rolled by block after block of grey buildings, not seeing anyone. The rain seemed to start pouring harder the moment his bike crossed the bridge, and the wind hit Naoya in the chest with more force, as if whatever ephemeral protections the rest of Yōgai-shima had simply didn’t exist here. The streets were empty save for the pooling water and cars parked against the side of the road. Not a person was in sight, which made Foundation feel all the more vacant. The only evidence of habitation were lights in the windows of the apartment Naoya passed, and old lit-up signs over bars and stores still open amid the hurricane.

In his goggles, the map Ichinose gave him appeared in the corner of his vision. The flesh-peddler had the foresight to mark businesses on the far side of the Sanzu, but there were only three. Of the businesses that were in Sin Ward, Naoya reasoned that whatever men were looking Nishijima, they’d certainly canvassed the entire north side of the city and were likely pressing towards the southern shore. He could only hope that Nishijima had remained a step ahead of the hunters chasing him, even as Naoya hoped he was another step ahead, still.

Taking a turn, Naoya laid eyes on the first building marked by Ichinose, which appeared to be a squat grey building with only three floors, a veritable dwarf among the towers of Yōgai-shima. The sign out front showed a fisherman with a large net, who leered lustily at a mermaid caught inside it. Although he couldn’t see the name of the building, there was a lit red sign that flashed in one of the windows, declaring that the establishment was open.

Pulling over at the side of the street, Naoya tried to decide whether or not he should go inside. If the girl was there, then he could find her and confirm his suspicions, but there was also the chance that Nishijima could spot him coming in or out of the establishment. Naoya looked at the map again, which still flashed in the corner of his eye.

The soapland in front of Naoya was the nearest to the bridge into Foundation, so if Nishijima had already beaten him here, then he was wasting his time. Looking at the map, the two other establishments were further into Foundation, and it wasn’t lost on him that Ichinose’s admitted ignorance about this part of the city meant that there could be more brothels or dives operated by the Kabuki Towers that the manager didn’t know about, and spending his time searching them one by one risked missing Nishijima somewhere else.

“What if I don’t have to chase Nishijima?” Naoya felt a different tactic forming in his mind. “What if I can draw him to me?”

Twisting his wrist, Naoya spurred the bike into motion again. Using the map for guidance, Naoya circled the block, heading a little further into Foundation. He eventually guided the bike through several tight alleyways, parking it behind a building beneath an awning roughly the same distance away from the three spots marked by Ichinose. When the bike came to a stop, Naoya climbed off and pried off his Augur.

He stood to the left of an alleyway exit door, using the small canopy perched above it to shelter himself from the rain. A small, flickering fluorescent light illuminated the tight corridors in brief bursts of yellow luminescence, revealing that the alleyway formed a T-junction. Naoya stood in the gap between two smaller buildings, with the passage to the street continuing out to his right. To his left was a much larger apartment building with another longer alley that ran parallel to Naoya, from north to south, though the corridor was tight and hardly large enough for Naoya himself to walk down.

He shifted the Augur back into the form of a phone, and the device displayed Ichinose’s map. Looking at the different red pips that flashed on the map around him, Naoya raised a finger and dragged it across the screen, marking a path that ran between all three. A moment later, and the Bridge-Runner charged off at his direction, racing back into the streets of Foundation.

With sheets of rain pouring into the streets, visibility was limited, and Foundation’s sidewalks were marked with few streetlights, and maybe half of them were still working. The Bridge-Runner, even as large as it was, blended in with the heavy shadows on the streets, making it nearly impossible to discern save for the piercing beam of its single headlight and the characteristic whine of its engine. After the first lap around the streets, Naoya switched off the Bridge-Runner’s light and began guiding it around the illuminating gleam of the occasional streetlight, trying to hide the passage of the machine in the darkness of the night.

Guided by Naoya, the Bridge-Runner accelerated through the storm, moving faster than he’d ridden it all day. Buzzing through the streets, Naoya was able to see the occasional person through his Augur which he hadn’t seen before. Vagrants, who had no homes to shelter in, moved about in the alleys, wrapping themselves tightly in raincoats, tarps, and blankets to shield themselves from the endless downpour. Guiding the bike, Naoya gave the misfortunate a wide berth, having no desire to add to their troubles.

The Bridge-Runner circled the streets of Foundation, following the path that Naoya had marked. Whenever he neared one of the businesses that Ichinose put on the map, Naoya would slow the bike, allowing it to hover at a distance from the entrance so he could peer at the doorway through his Augur, watching and waiting to see who was entering and exiting before moving on. The bike spurred into motion again, moving away from the northmost brothel and towards the one furthest east. The machine was halfway between the two when lightning flashed and Naoya noticed a pair walking down the sidewalk on his right.

He was so myopic about getting to and from each bar and soapland Ichinose had marked that he’d momentarily lost sight of the pedestrians he was passing on the road. His eyes locked onto the two figures, but the Bridge-Runner was already moving parallel to them and stopping the black bike in the middle of the road risked attracting attention, so he let the bike race forward down the dark, rainy street and immediately took a sharp right turn. He wheeled the bike around, spinning the block as quickly as he could to get behind the pair again.

At the top of the street, Naoya slowed the bike, moving at half the speed he had before, careful to keep his distance to avoid alerting the pair of pedestrians that he was following them. The bike crept down the road and Naoya kept his eyes fixed on the sidewalk to his right, straining his sight for any motion. He caught up with them not much farther down the street than they were before and Naoya slowed the bike even more, keeping a good twenty feet behind them.

It was a man and a woman walking down the street, with the woman standing on the right, sheltered in the shadows of the buildings while the man stood on her left, with his arm draped around the woman’s shoulders, protectively. The woman Naoya could barely see, hidden by the darkness, the shape of the man’s body, and a dark grey trenchcoat that was draped over her frame. The man, however, was different.

As they passed beneath a streetlight, Naoya saw the man more clearly, and beheld a familiar figure. The man was dressed in a dark suit, unheard of in this part of town, and his black and grey hair was pomaded back with care. The man cut a slim figure, and it was one that Naoya was certain he’d seen before.

The pair were heading east, back towards Sin Ward and away from the last of the three buildings Ichinose had marked. Naoya realized the bike must have already passed them once or twice while driving around the city, and it was only happenstance that a lightning strike revealed them to him. Now that he had them, though, his instincts told him he needed to act quickly.

The bike crept forward, angling the front of the vehicle towards the pair and Naoya flicked the headlight of the bike back on, bathing the pair in the white-blue radiance of the beam. The man, Nishijima, turned to look back, raising his left hand to try and shield his eyes from the light. Then, at Nishijima’s urging, the two of them began to run.

Nishijima didn’t move with the speed Naoya had seen before, instead busying himself with ushering the young woman wearing his trenchcoat. While the Bridge-Runner was built for endurance and not speed, the bike could easily have overtaken the pair, but he kept the bike moving slowly, having it dart forward and honk at the two of them like a dog herding sheep. Halfway down the street as they were, Nishijima chose to step off the street and push the young woman into the alley to escape to the other side of the block, heading east.

The pair scrambled to keep ahead of the bike as it pursued them down the alley, its horn blaring. When they escaped into the street beyond, Naoya had the bike circle north to their right, herding them further south. The pair scrambled down the street, the young woman panicking and clinging to Nishijima, who himself was silent and stoic, alternating between watching the oncoming bike and turning his head about, looking for some safe shelter the pair could find to escape.

The bike continued to chase them south and east, where the pair rounded a corner where a tall, wide grey apartment building stood. They fled down the street, moving eastward, and Naoya pushed the bike to move faster to convince the pair that they wouldn’t reach the end of the next street before they were overtaken. Naoya could see the moment that Nishijima spotted the tight alleyway on his right that ran between a wide apartment building and two smaller structures on its east side. Once again, Nishijima ushered the young woman into the passageway and then forced himself in behind while the bike pulled itself up to a stop, shining its headlight into the alley that was too small for it to follow them into.

Light flashed into the corridor on Naoya’s left, and the sound of panting voices and footsteps echoed up the alley. A moment later, a young woman wrapped in a wet grey trenchcoat burst into the small intersection in the alleyway, followed by a man with dark black and grey hair. The pair were too busy looking over their shoulders at the light being shined at their backs to notice Naoya standing in the alley with them.

“Evening,” Naoya stepped away from the wall he’d been leaning against, raising his voice to be heard. The woman yelped and Nishijima’s head whipped around, his dark eyes flashing with surprise for only a split second before he placed himself in front of the woman, urging her to stay behind him by holding out his left hand while keeping himself between her and Naoya.

“How did you—?” Nishijima began, his eyes flicking towards the bike at the edge of the alley, then towards Naoya. Nishijima looked almost exactly like the picture Ichinose had been provided, but his drawn features spoke of exhaustion, and his once slicked back hair was now messy from the rain and his hurried flight. His clothes were black on black, with only a small white tie pin bringing any color to the jet-black suit.

“I’m smarter than I look,” Naoya raised his Augur, lightly waving it in his hand. On its screen was the bike’s camera, through which he controlled the vehicle from a distance. “You’re Nishijima, yeah?”

The man said nothing but continued to back himself and the young woman up against the wall as Naoya stepped forward. The young woman peaked out over Nishijima’s shoulder, allowing Naoya to get a look at her face. Her features were as had been described to him before, having red hair matted down against her face by the rain. She peered at Naoya with only one good eye; the left half of her face was bruised and swollen, forcing her left eye shut. She was dressed in a slender, semi-transparent dress that was partially torn, which would leave her unprotected against the rain if not for Nishijima’s coat.

“Did you do that to her?” Naoya asked, but he never got an answer. The moment Naoya’s eyes shifted to the battered woman, Nishijima reached into his coat with his right hand and withdrew something. Naoya scarcely had time to react before the man in black whipped something out of his jacket and swung it towards Naoya’s face.

There was a loud crack as something collided with the right side of his helmet and Naoya was sent reeling backwards, stumbling to his hands and knees. His helmet was thrown from his head, sending it clattering across the alley before it hit the wall of a building and came to a stop. Whispers of smoke rose up from the side of the helmet where it appeared to have partially melted from whatever struck it. The impact, although blunted by his helmet, still sent a painful wave through Naoya’s head, and it took him a moment to regain his bearing.

“Do you think you’re the first of the Towers’ goons to catch up with me today?” Nishijima asked, his voice was soft, but it had a rasp that suggested a hard-lived existence. He held a slender black collapsible rod in his right hand, which had a rounded handle and a rectangular shaft which was split in half down the center, and the gap shined with an ethereal blue light. The rod crackled with energy, and every raindrop disappeared into a stream of vapor the moment they collided with the baton.

“Walk away,” Nishijima ordered Naoya in his soft, rasping voice, his eyes shining in the blue light. “This is the only chance I’m giving you.”

Naoya’s head swam with pain and confusion. He didn’t know who this man really was, or the girl who was with him for that matter. And the Towers? How did they play into all of this? The rational part of Naoya told him he should accept the invitation Nishijima had given him and just leave, but something in Naoya, something he couldn’t explain, denied that possibility.

Naoya grit his teeth and slowly stood, raising his fists and bending his knees to drop into a boxing stance. Nishijima continued to hold the baton out in front of him, his gaunt features becoming more severe as he realized that Naoya wasn’t backing down. Without taking his eyes away from Naoya, Nishijima stepped to his left, leaving the young woman behind to cower against the wall. He circled to Naoya’s right in the cramped intersection between the two alleys, and Naoya allowed Nishijima to create space between himself and the woman, not wanting her to get caught up in the fight. The two men stared each other down, neither making a move forward. Though they both waited, neither man was looking for an alternative: that opportunity had already passed.

Nishijima moved first, taking a step forward and swinging his baton low towards Naoya’s left knee. Naoya took a half-step backward before Nishijima revealed his attack was a feint, bringing the baton upward towards the side of Naoya’s unprotected head. Immediately, Naoya reversed his course, trying to start forward again while reaching out with his left hand to try and catch Nishijima’s arm by the wrist. Before he could wrap his fingers around the other man’s arm, Nishijima rolled his wrist, bringing the baton down on his hand. Pain exploded through Naoya’s fingers, along with a surge of electricity, and Naoya struggled to hold his arm up. Nishijima immediately leapt on Naoya’s weakness, swinging his weapon.

Naoya was forced into full retreat, circling around in the small space as Nishijima pressed his advantage, making precise swings of his baton to force Naoya to give ground or risk another hit from the stun rod. In the span of a few seconds, feeling returned to Naoya’s arm, but he was hard pressed to find an opening to engage Nishijima and turn the tide back in his favor. The other man seemed to be very experienced in the use of his weapon, never overextending himself or leaving an opening. Whenever Naoya managed to move a single step closer, Nishijima jabbed with his baton like it was a fencing foil, forcing Naoya to retreat again.

Having been in a few scrapes himself, Naoya was hardly inexperienced when it came to fighting. Against an opponent with a weapon, the best solution was to grapple, denying them the leverage they needed to bring it to bear with full force. Of course, that strategy relied on Nishijima giving him the opportunity to close ranks, which the veteran fighter wasn’t going to allow. Without that, the next best solution was to run away, but again, Naoya denied that possibility.

Perhaps it was the effect of the stun baton, but Naoya began to feel an electric charge in the air around him. Every hair seemed to stand on end, and he could feel an invisible current dance across his skin. While the rippling electricity coursed outside his body, another energy surged inside him.

A perverse exhilaration crept over Naoya as his heart beat faster and the sense of danger multiplied, bringing a smile to Naoya’s face. Even as Nishijima tried to press Naoya into a corner with the crackling rod, the feeling only grew. The world seemed more vivid, and somehow, surreal, as he danced around Nishijima’s blows.

Naoya sidestepped another rapier-like thrust of the baton, moving back to his left and denying Nishijima the option of pinning him against the wall of the alley. Nishijima matched Naoya’s motion, preventing the younger man from circling him. The two men strafed slowly across the alley, keeping pace with one another, an Naoya noticed that Nishijima wasn’t pushing as aggressively as he had at the first.

“Feeling tired?” Naoya asked, his grin growing broader as Nishijima glared back. He didn’t wait for an answer as he continued to strafe along the wall, his left foot colliding with his discarded helmet. At that moment, Nishijima looked down at the fallen object and seemed to realize what Naoya was planning, but it was too late.

Naoya stuck the toe of his left boot beneath the helmet and flicked it into the air with one swift motion. Emulating the shot of football players he’d seen on TV, Naoya kicked the helmet like he was kicking a goal, sending it hurtling towards Nishijima’s face. The other man instinctively stepped backwards, sweeping the baton through the air to knock the helmet back to the ground, and Naoya was on him a moment later.

Naoya’s fists flew in a furious flurry as he pressed into Nishijima’s space. The black-suited man sidestepped the initial rush, but Naoya was quick to chase him, never letting the other man get out of his arm’s reach. Despite being the bigger of the two, Naoya danced around Nishijima on his toes, darting from one side to the other, pressuring him with feinting jabs designed to force him to open his guard. Nishijima held the baton horizontally, being hard pressed to defend himself, shifting side to side as he tried to find an opportunity to counterattack. Naoya slipped a left jab through Nishijima’s guard and the knuckle of Naoya’s left index finger brushed his jaw. The speed of the jab and the unexpected feeling of being touched caused a microsecond of confusion to play itself out in Nishijima’s mind and his eyes darted to his right, seeking the fist that had already pulled back, and in that moment, Naoya launched his real attack.

A right hook caught Nishijima across the jaw the moment his eyes looked straight again. Naoya’s heavy fist crossed Nishijima’s chin with such force that he imagined that the alley was filled with the sound of thunder. Nishijima’s head whipped to his right and blood spurted from his mouth, painting the alley way. To his credit, Nishijima didn’t collapse from the blow, and he remained on his feet.

Nishijima looked back at Naoya with a fury in his eyes, blood dribbling down his bottom lip and across his chin. Sweeping his baton back and forth like he was conducting an orchestra of mad musicians, Nishijima retreated further back, trying to hold off Naoya. Despite the fury of his defense, Naoya recognized that Nishijima’s wild swings were the product of desperation, as the other man was still partially stunned from Naoya’s attack. Pressing forward, Naoya continued to throw jabs, forcing Nishijima to back up against the wall, looking for the moment he could make his final rush and tackle Nishijima to the floor. That was when something truly unexpected happened.

Realizing his poor position, Nishijima raised his baton overhead and swept it downward, and the entire rod broke apart. The weapon shifted into a chain of black rectangular pieces connected by a hot electric blue wire. Nishijima swept the electric-whip through the space between Naoya and himself, causing the weapon to violently crackle as hairs of electricity surged outward to evaporate nearby puddles of water. Instinctively, Naoya retreated, confronted by the strange weapon and the blinding flash of blue light released from it.

Nishijima raised the whip handle and lashed it towards Naoya’s head, and the thong of black metal and electrified wire extended through the air. Immediately, Naoya ducked, and the whip surged through the air above him, striking the concrete wall of the alley with the sound of metal digging into cement. Naoya looked up just in time to see the whip in Nishijima’s hand pull itself taut, and the man in the black suit was pulled into the air, disappearing over Naoya’s head.

Before Naoya had time to turn around, he felt the heel of Nishijima’s foot collide with the back of his head. Lights flashed in Naoya’s vision, and he stumbled forward, off-balance, and he struck the wall of the alley in front of him, stopping himself from cracking his skull against the surface by bracing himself with his hands. Clutching the back of his head, Naoya turned around to see Nishijima standing behind him, his whip once more collapsed into a baton.

Nishijima pressed the baton into the center of Naoya’s chest and electricity immediately flowed through Naoya’s body. He screamed as the pain coursed through him and he dropped to his knees, but Nishijima continued to press the rod into his breast, never breaking contact. Naoya violently seized and he felt his heart begin to palpitate, all while Nishijima callously watched on, only pausing to brush the blood from his bottom lip with the back of his gloved left hand.

“Am I going to die?” Naoya asked himself. The question was hesitant in his mind, and fearful in its tone, but it provoked a response in him. Anger flowed through Naoya: anger at being afraid, anger at Nishijima, anger at feeling pain.

Naoya pressed his teeth together, turning his cries of pain into a growl of rage. He reached up with his right hand and wrapped it around the baton pressed against his chest, trying to pull the weapon away. Nishijima took the baton handle in both hands, trying to resist, but Naoya placed his left hand on the baton and struggled back to his feet. He could see the alarm in Nishijima’s eyes as he struggled to keep the stun baton jabbed into Naoya’s chest, clearly surprised that any man could withstand its current. In truth, Naoya could barely even feel the pain anymore. Gritting his teeth, Nishijima pressed the weapon deeper into Naoya’s chest, trying to elicit some response, and then, there was a flash of golden lines that spread from Naoya’s hands through the stun baton.

The weapon crackled with blue light two or three more times in a stuttering display before the light vanished altogether. Nishijima stared down at his weapon in confusion, trying to understand what happened, when a piece of the baton broke free and clattered to the floor of the alley. Then, the entire baton broke apart like shards of broken glass and spilled onto the pavement. Nishijima looked down at the black fragments that gathered around his feet, opening his hands in disbelief to let the last few pieces fall from between his fingers onto the ground. He looked back up at Naoya and seemed to realize something as he peered at the figure that now towered over him.

Naoya loomed over the smaller man, incapable of words or reason. Like an animal, he panted and grunted, his hoarse and beastly vocalizations growing louder with each second. Violence was imminent, but Nishijima seemed to think that running for his life was beneath him.

“I see,” was all he said, his rasping voice filled with finality.

A moment later, the alley was filled with the sound of crunching bone. Nishijima was held up by Naoya’s left hand on his lapel, while the big man pummeled Nishijima with his right fist, smashing it into the other man’s face over and over again. Nishijima had long since ceased to put up a fight, but Naoya didn’t stop hitting him, filling the alley with the sound of each brutal punch and Naoya’s own animalistic growls. A small voice at the back of Naoya’s mind wondered how long he’d been hitting Nishijima, and when he was going to stop, but he ultimately decided he didn’t care.

“Hey, shithead!” a voice called out from somewhere behind Naoya, but he didn’t listen, deafened by the sound of his constant, demonic panting. Nishijima’s face was swollen and nearly unrecognizable, but Naoya didn’t stop. Blood sprayed from Nishijima’s face, painting Naoya’s knuckles red.

“Hey, asswipe!” the voice called out, louder this time, and full of rage. “I’m talking to you!”

Naoya paused his assault, continuing to hold up Nishijima with his left hand. Nishijima wheezed and gurgled, coughing up blood through his broken mouth, drooling out a handful of teeth. With almost robotic detachment, Naoya let the man fall to the ground, turning his attention to the voice behind him.

“You see?” a familiar voice asked, mocking and smug, as Naoya turned around to face three men that stood tightly packed in the alley. “I fucking told you guys that it was his bike!”

Juzo stood in his raincoat, the small man’s face twisted into an awful smile as he addressed the two taller men standing behind him. Juzo puffed on a cigarette, its tip glowing bright red before he plucked it from his mouth and gestured at Naoya with it. Naoya stared at them in response, the small man’s words pounding in his ears like noise heard underwater.

“You get yourself a little fucked up, dickshit?” Juzo asked, gesturing at his face with one hand, a sneer written on his features.

“I don’t think that’s his blood,” Kubo, the widest of the three men, observed, his voice full of trepidation and his eyes fearful.

“Like I give a shit,” Juzo dropped his cigarette to the floor of the alley and stomped it out in the rain before ambling forward with disinterest. He stepped around Naoya and paused, then exploded into motion.

“Shit! Shit!” Juzo exclaimed in surprise as he beheld the fallen Nishijima. He laughed and danced back and forth, giving the fallen man a middle finger while he cackled. “Holeee shit! It’s him!”

At the sound of Juzo’s crazed exclamations, the other two men moved forward to see what was happening. Kubo hugged the side of the alleyway, being careful to put as much distance between himself and Naoya, but the third man, Hibiki, the tallest of the three, paused to look over Naoya’s shoulder rather than pass him.

“Who is he?” Kubo asked, as the young woman in Nishijima’s jacket made for the dark-clad man’s side, crouching near him.

“It’s the guy from Tsukuyomi!” Juzo cackled, dancing on the spot. “This big son of a bitch actually caught him! Can you believe it!”

“No way!” Kubo took a few steps forward, peering closer at the fallen man.

“Really?” asked Hibiki, and he stepped closer, brushing into Naoya’s shoulder. Naoya reacted immediately, taking hold of the other man by his left bicep. The skinny gangbanger tried to pull away from him, but Naoya’s fingers dug into the man’s arm like a vice-grip, and the other man hissed in pain.

“Hey, relax bro,” the other man’s voice trembled with clear anxiety, the scarce lighting in the alley revealed frightful eyes and a quivering lip. “We just mess with you sometimes. That’s all. It’s just messing around.”

Naoya didn’t respond. He couldn’t.

The man’s voice sounded distant and far away, and his words were incomprehensible. Out of the corner of his eye, Naoya could see Juzo laughing and cackling like a maniac, grabbing hold of the kneeling young woman’s arm to try and drag her to her feet while Kubo watched, impotently. The lanky man tried to pull away again, and he said something that Naoya couldn’t understand.

The lanky man’s face soured, his frightened expression giving way to irritation and anger to mask his fear. He said something again, louder, more forcefully, his expression twisting in a bare-tooth snarl. He tugged his arm back again, shouting in his warped voice Naoya couldn’t understand. When posturing and anger didn’t persuade Naoya to release him, the lanky man raised his right hand and slammed the heel of his palm into Naoya’s chest, trying to push Naoya away.

The push was barely enough to budge Naoya; the lanky ganger wasn’t a brave man, or a strong man, but rather, he was a coward that hid behind his friends and only threw jabs and slaps when someone’s back was turned. Still, the harmless gesture was enough to antagonize Naoya. The world cracked, and fissures of golden light spread through everything in Naoya’s field of vision.

At the end of Naoya’s arm, he gripped a shapeless pile of human glass, its shards a kaleidoscope of different colors and textures without rhyme or reason. Though the mound of glass bore the rough silhouette of a human being, shards with the texture of a wet pink rain parka mixed with pieces of a fractured human face. One slim shard at the top of the pile bore a single human eye, while a larger chunk in the middle held its twin. The disconnected eyes stared angrily at Naoya, and a human mouth, broken into three separate pieces, mouthed words at him, but only distorted noises came out.

Naoya wasted no time in laying into the bizarre mound, slamming his left fist into the mass. The pile of human glass rippled as Naoya struck it, and it cried out, warbling in a strange tongue. The sounds echoed out into the broken alley as Naoya continued to pummel the esoteric assortment of broken pieces, and the conglomerate of shards collapsed to the broken ground.

“Stop!” “Please!” “Don’t!”

The tangled pile of shards made noises that almost sounded like words, but Naoya paid them no heed. The heap of broken glass pulled itself together, tightening itself into a ball to endure Naoya’s fists as they fell onto it, pummeling the accumulation of shapes without consideration. He continued his assault, thinking nothing, his mind filled only with a pure animal desire to destroy the distorted world that threatened him on all sides. With each strike, he grew stronger, feeling bones break and fracture beneath his knuckles, but he still didn’t stop. The collection of broken shapes on the ground tried to crawl away, and Naoya’s hand went wide, missing its target and burying his fist up to the wrist in the concrete.

Naoya felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned around to see another misshapen collage of broken glass latching onto him. It was a bulbous mass, but it screamed at Naoya in a high-pitched voice, demanding something that Naoya couldn’t understand. Instinctively, Naoya grappled his new attacker with his left hand, expecting that his fingers would be lacerated by the sharp edges of the broken silhouette, but his digits brushed against wet smooth material, and Naoya balled it in his fist. He lifted the shifting pile of shards into the air and cocked back his right fist.

Power surged through Naoya, filling him with greater strength than he ever had before. He poured every bit of strength into his right arm, preparing to shatter the collection of shards into a thousand smaller pieces. However, as soon as Naoya did so, a buzzing sounded in his ears. The noise was deafening, followed by an intense heat and the feeling of needles punching into his skin.

He felt as though he was being electrocuted again, but the energy wasn’t flowing through him so much as it was flowing against him. The energy hit Naoya like a river, pushing against him, pulling him down, draining his strength. Immersed in the crackling energy, Naoya struggled to hold up the second pile of human glass, and he was reluctantly forced to throw his captive to the ground.

No sooner than the second pile of broken shards hit the ground than it fled backward, racing across a sea of broken concrete to escape from Naoya’s grasp. Naoya struggled to give chase, barely able to raise a foot as the mysterious pressure sought to hold him in place. He tried to push forward, to fight through the invisible bonds holding him down, but he stopped and turned when something moved in the corner of his eye.

A third human effigy moved in the chaos of the alley, standing out from the chaotic tumult of the endlessly fracturing concrete buildings by virtue of its pink color. Among the tumble of its broken form, Naoya could perceive a human face, though the features were broken into five pieces and spread up and down the roughly humanoid body. Though it was hard to discern anything within the shifting fragments of what was supposed to appear human, Naoya thought that the features were madly grinning at him, and, more importantly, it seemed like it was holding something.

The small, pink glass figure charged at Naoya, its distorted voice making some kind of whooping laughter as it lunged. Naoya raised his right hand as the living kaleidoscope closed the distance, trying to fend off the oncoming attacker, and he was rewarded with a sharp sensation in his palm. A blade had stabbed through his hand, sliding between the bones of his middle two fingers.

Intense pain shot through Naoya’s hand, and the living kaleidoscope cackled again as it twisted the knife and pressed it deeper, causing blood to run down the back of Naoya’s hand. Surprise followed the pain, which gave way to anger. Against logic, Naoya closed the fingers of his bleeding hand around the blade impaling it, tightening his hand into a fist. Something surged through Naoya, and luminous cracks appeared on his arm, spreading from his shoulder down to his forearm, and then into his hand. The light faded from Naoya’s body in less than a second, but the effect it had on the knife was immediate.

The knife fell apart, and the metal shards of the blade fell out of Naoya’s hand to clatter against the shifting concrete pavement at his feet. There was a strange sound from the little glass heap, and although it was a wordless burble of sharp, clashing noises, Naoya faintly comprehended a sense of surprise.

He pulled his hand back, closing the fingers of his right hand around the broken weapon’s handle, crushing it to powder between his fingertips. The little assortment of human glass backed away, its crackling voice raising higher and higher as Naoya began to advance again. The pressure on Naoya’s shoulders began to increase, but the power inside his body swelled, enabling him to keep moving forward.

The little glass heap moved away from Naoya, a series of rising, terrified exclamations as the big man moved closer and closer. The power surging through Naoya increased with every step, and the energy built in his chest, pressing against his ribs. The power surged up through his body and Naoya was forced to release it, throwing back his head to scream. The power tore through his mouth, releasing a terrible wave of pressure that seemed poised to blast apart the broken world around him.

With his cry, the three shifting shapes of glass fled, each one escaping down a different alley. Still held down by the lightning wrapped around his body, Naoya could not give chase, and he was forced to watch the human silhouettes run away into the night between buildings of concrete that seemed poised to fall on them. When they disappeared into the night, Naoya was left alone, feeling as though all the power of the storm above him was holding him down.

He stood staring at nothing, listening only to the sound of his own breathing thundering in his ears. As the moments passed, Naoya’s heartbeat began to slow, and the cracks in the world began to slowly fill themselves in, and a sense of normalcy returned. Naoya stared down the northern alley where the smallest of the three figures had fled, slowly returning to himself.

He wasn’t sure where he was right away. All he knew was that he was standing in the middle of an alleyway, listening to the constant whisper of the rain falling down on his shoulders, while thunder boomed somewhere in the night. He blinked, trying to remember what he was doing, when he faintly heard the sound of someone sobbing.

Naoya turned his head, casting his eyes on the form of a young woman crouching on the ground, leaning over a fallen man in a dark suit. Nishijima coughed through his broken jaw, sending trails of blood down his chin, and Naoya looked down at his hands, observing the wet blood that lingered there, while being slowly diluted by the falling rain.

“Did I do this?” Naoya asked himself, feeling somehow revolted.

“Don’t make me go back,” a voice intruded on Naoya’s thoughts, and he made eye contact with the woman leaning over Nishijima. She stared up at Naoya, her own face bruised and her left eye swollen shut, traces of makeup running down her face.

“What?” Naoya asked, not entirely certain what she was asking.

“I just want to go home,” the woman implored, her one eye full of terror.

Naoya looked down at her, and then at his hands again, not for the first time feeling as though he’d stepped into something deeper and darker than he knew. He didn’t know what Ichinose really wanted with Nishijima, and he had no idea how the girl fit into everything. He didn’t even know what he’d done in the last ten minutes, but he did know what he was going to do next.

Naoya pulled out his Augur and the woman trembled. He stared down at her as he tapped the screen and raised the Augur to his ear. It rang twice, and then Ichinose picked up, sounded annoyed.

“Are you still—?” Ichinose demanded, but Naoya cut him off.

“Nishijima’s gone,” Naoya told him, sharply.

“What?” Ichinose sputtered, clearly caught off guard. “What do you mean he’s gone?”

“Someone grabbed him,” Naoya hadn’t even thought out his lie before he started talking. “I don’t know who, but someone has him.”

“Fuck!” Ichinose snapped, punctuating his curse by slapping something, and Naoya heard something shatter in the manager’s office. “How? Who grabbed him?”

“I already said that I don’t know!” Naoya protested. “Some guys just up and grabbed him! It was dark and I didn’t see their faces.”

“And what the hell were you doing while that happened?” the manager screamed through the phone. “What the hell are you good for, you big son of a bitch? You’re telling me you just sat there with your thumb up your ass and let someone else take our payday?”

“I’m done with your bullshit!” Naoya was tempted to squeeze the Augur in his hand and break it to pieces. “You lost Nishijima! You lost the girl! It’s over! Go crawl into a hole and cry about it, you fucking parasite! Maybe learn to solve your own damn problems!”

“What gi—?” Ichinose tried to ask but Naoya ended the call with a forceful press of his finger. He looked down at the young woman, knowing nothing about her or even her name. The two stared at one another in awkward silence for several seconds before Naoya spoke.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, speaking softly. “This is all I can do.”

“I don’t know where to go,” the young woman shook her head, but Nishijima shifted. The man turned his head to the side and spat out a mouthful of blood from his broken face. Slowly and painfully, Nishijima began trying to climb to his feet, and the young woman hooked his right arm around her shoulder and began to lift him up. Watching her struggle, Naoya stepped forward and took hold of Nishijima’s other arm, helping pull the man to his feet. Nishijima stood, swaying on the spot, but the red-headed young woman supported him, helping him to remain on his feet.

“I’m not certain how many people are still after you,” Naoya looked into Nishijima’s dark eyes as he spoke, and he could see beyond the obvious pain a sharp clarity. “I don’t even know if Ichinose believed me. I’m not so good at lying.”

A thought occurred to Naoya, and he held out his Augur, bringing up the map Ichinose had given him.

“The guys looking for you wanted me to scope out the local brothels and soaplands,” Naoya explained, looking from Nishijima to the young woman. “I guess Ichinose must have known you were looking for someone. Or whoever the hell it was that gave the map to him. Either way, it seems like whoever’s looking for you is combing their way down from the north of Sin Ward. They’ll be here in Foundation before too long, so I guess you might find a place to lay low for a while. I have no idea who you are or where the hell you’re going, and I figure that’s probably for the best.”

Nishijima looked down at the woman holding him up, and then back to Naoya. Like her, Ichinose’s left eye was swollen shut, and his gaunt face was swollen and red, while broken bones pushed beneath his skin. The dark eyed man stared at Naoya for a long moment and then managed to say something through his broken mandible.

“I’ll remember this.”

With that, Nishijima nodded towards the eastern alley exit and he began to stagger forward, assisted by the girl he’d been looking for. Naoya watched the pair struggle together, uncertain whether Nishijima’s last words were expressing gratitude or a threat.

“Are you the good guy in all of this?” Naoya asked as he watched Nishijima stumble out of the alley and back into the city. “Or are you the villain? Where do I stand?”

Naoya didn’t know.

He scooped up his helmet, and looked down at it, turning it over in his hands. There were two dings in the helmet on the left and right sides, and both breaks were half-melted, destroying the helmet’s surface. Reluctantly, Naoya tugged the helmet on over his sopping wet hair and struggled for a few seconds to get it to sit right before sighing and reluctantly heading south, heading back towards his bike.

He mounted the Bridge-Runner and turned it about, preparing to head east and go home. As he reached out to take the handle, Naoya noticed a small glint from the back of his right hand and he paused. Holding his gloved hand up to his face, he saw a small metal fragment jutting out of it. With his left hand, he plucked the piece of metal free and inspected it.

“The knife,” Naoya realized what it was and tossed it down to the street, where it was washed away in the rain streaming across the black pavement. He tugged the glove off and turned his hand over, searching for any sign of injury, but found nothing.

“I was stabbed, wasn’t I?” he asked himself as he cradled his right hand with his left, rubbing the spot where he felt the pain with his thumb. He tried to recall the events in the alley, but it had already faded into a tumult of adrenaline and hallucinations. He sat for a moment on his bike, trying to rationalize the reality of his uninjured hand with the sharp pain that still lingered in his recollection. When he couldn’t, he forced his glove back on and revved his bike, seeking to put as much distance between himself and the alley as he could.

“What do you have to show for all this?” a voice in Naoya’s head reprimanded him as he drove, and he fed the Bridge-Runner more speed, as if hoping he could outrun his own self-doubt and regret. “You wasted an entire day, turning down a dozen smaller jobs to try and be a debt collector; a job you’ve avoided doing for years, and then, you let the guy go. You busted your helmet, you got into another fight, and you’re down another day’s income.”

He drove east, heading back towards the bridge that forded the White-River Sanzu, moving with speed. With each moment, he felt a longing to be home; he’d had enough of the city for one day. He fed the Bridge-Runner with more and more gas, feeling the wind and the rain whipping against him as he went. The sensation kept him in the moment, holding his own misgivings and doubts at bay.

He drove through the streets of Sin Ward, passing by the plain southern shore, taking in the smell of the salt. Cars and pedestrians were out on the streets in force, defying the natural disaster that loomed over the island in their corporate quest for escapism. Naoya weaved around slow-moving cars and drove his bike through alleys large enough to fit the Bridge-Runner, eschewing his usual caution at this time of night in his haste to keep moving and to get away from the part of the city he felt was increasingly vile. He thought of what route he was going to take to get back to Central, and he immediately thought of the Golden Mile, the largest crossing between the two wards, but he eschewed that idea.

The Golden Mile was going to be congested at this time of night, and Naoya had no patience for the blaring horns, flashing lights, and the endless chatter of pedestrians. Naoya continued driving along the southern shore of Sin Ward, heading for a smaller bridge that crossed over into Horizon, hoping to break away from the current of commuters. The small two-lane crossing was vacant at this time of night, save for the distant lights of an oncoming truck looking to cross into Sin Ward. Naoya stepped on the gas as he crossed the bridge, and, immediately, the weather took a turn for the worse.

The wind picked up, pushing against the bike as it neared the other side of the crossing. Naoya reflexively slowed, struggling to regain control of the bike. The front tire slid across the asphalt, losing traction with the road, and the entire bike threatened to slide out from under Naoya. In desperation, Naoya fully hit the brakes, and he leaned to his right, placing his right boot on the street to further brace it and prevent it from flying out of control. He brought the bike to a complete stop and paused a moment to regain his bearings. There was a sudden flash to Naoya’s right, so intense it was blinding, and sparks filled the air.

He blinked, trying to understand what just happened, and he looked up to see the green box truck heading in his direction, smoke pouring from its front grill which had been melted by a lightning strike. The five-ton vehicle went out of control, its headlights flickering as its engine failed, and the machine crossed the lane markings and careened in Naoya’s direction. The flashing headlights blinded him, and the truck’s horn blasted in his ears as the driver desperately warned Naoya of the wild automobile, but it was far too late for Naoya to get out of the way.

“What are the odds?” he asked himself.

January 4th, 2044

04:20 PM

Central Ward

Sunset District

There was a storm outside. A hurricane swept up by the Sea of Japan that, even now, was pelting seawater down on Yōgai-shima, hurling thunderbolts at buildings, attempting to rip apart the city’s infrastructure with gale force winds. It all sounded suitably dramatic and terrifying, but to Fubuki Kamui, it was a world away.

All morning, she’d been inside, sheltered away behind the finest protections modern science could provide. She’d slept peacefully this morning when the storm hit, and not even the loudest thunderclaps served to rouse her. All the pouring rain and howling wind could do nothing to harm her in the twenty-first century fortress she now lived in. She was nothing less than a single citizen of a private city that sat nestled inside a solitary building, as good as being a world away from the ugliness of Yōgai-shima.

It was only now, well into the afternoon with evening fast approaching, that Kamui actually laid her eyes on the storm that vainly tried to engulf the city outside her precious walls. On her way out from her residential block, she’d been so absorbed in preparation and catching up on the news of the day that she hadn’t bothered to so much as look out a window. She hadn’t even intended to see it, lost in her own world as she was, but the scenic view of the Heights’ skybridges made looking at the typhoon unavoidable. All around her, the silver towers of the Heights rose up, breathtaking in their enormity and their design. Their smooth, mirror-like exteriors had the sense almost of an organic creature, folding and undulating in ways that conventional skyscrapers would not and could not.

Each singular building had a footprint large enough to engulf an entire city block, crowding out any hopes for smaller buildings to find purchase in the district. The Heights was made up of two dozen such spires, each one a condensed metropolis unto itself. Like a metal net suspended in the air, skybridges formed an above ground highway, allowing residents of one tower to quickly visit another.

It was in one such skybridge that Kamui found herself when she witnessed the storm outside. The skybridge itself was a shatter-proof plexiglass tunnel that ran between two towers with a metal rail inside it. Kamui sat in the car of a twenty seated capsule that ran through the tunnel, its translucent roof allowing her to view Yōgai-shima in all its glory from her lofty perch. The capsule was empty, save for Kamui and the bag of groceries placed on the seat beside her. Tower 5, her place of residence, had stores aplenty up and down its hundred odd floors, but Tower 3 had the quaintest little bakery on Floor 18, not to mention its superior produce up on 78. Normally, she wouldn’t go out of her way to buy more food when she already had a pantry full of provided rations but today was special. It needed to be perfect.

In the reflection of the glass, Fubuki Kamui beheld a slender woman of average with neck length dark hair and brown eyes. She’d chosen to wear a thick scarlet turtleneck sweater and a long, white skirt in order to combat the foul weather she was only dimly aware of. Of course, the temperature-controlled interior of the Heights meant that Kamui’s precautions were meaningless. Even so, Kamui decided that she cut an attractive figure nonetheless, and that was still worth something.

There was a flash somewhere in the sky and Kamui looked up just in time to see lightning strike Tower 12. The blinding flash of heaven’s arrow vanished as quickly as it arrived, leaving only a lasting mirage in Kamui’s vision. Kamui’s eyes scoured the surface of Tower 12, confirming to herself that the bolt of lightning had utterly failed to leave the smallest stain on Yōgai-shima’s architecture. Her gaze fell on one of the exterior gardens built on said tower, where even now, residents could enjoy the scenery while being sheltered from the storm by a bubble-like dome. Every tower had one or two exterior spaces that were raised high over the city streets below to give its occupants the chance to breathe fresh air and feel the natural sun when the artificial lighting of the tower wasn’t enough.

Kamui reached down to her left wrist, taking hold of her Augur which disguised itself as a bracelet of pearl-white rectangular pieces of nanometal. At her touch, the shape-shifting material changed itself into a compact device in imitation of a smartphone. With the latest of Yōgai-shima’s communication technology in her hands, Kamui tried to get herself lost in the digital world again as the ride continued, once more tuning out the impotent hurricane outside.

Despite the presence of a valuable distraction, countless little worries nibbled at the back of her mind. She didn’t have much time before her husband came home, but she wanted his dinner to be hot and fresh when they ate together. If he got home early, then they could always spend a few moments talking before the meal was served. But should she give him the news before or after they ate?

The anticipation was becoming nearly overwhelming, and the adrenaline was making Kamui anxious. As soon as the car docked itself at Tower 5’s thirtieth floor, Kamui wasted no time in gathering up her groceries and climbing out. She strode across the landing platform connected to the tower and followed the passages inside. Soft, classical music played from unseen speakers, contrasted by the holographic projections of the walls and ceiling that mimicked an arboreal forest, as though Kamui was outside and currently enjoying better weather.

Floor 30 wasn’t a residential level, instead it was used as both a travel hub and shopping center. It had all the amenities a visitor could ask for: restaurants, bars, salons, tailors. But by now, Kamui was numb to the luxuries of the Heights, having been a resident for years. The glitz and the glamor had lost their charm, not simply because of acclimatization, but because she’d closed her mind off to the outside world. All that was on her mind was the impending dinner date with her husband. It had to be perfect. It just had to.

Reaching the bank of elevators made to ferry the enormous populace up and down the tower’s length, Kamui hit the up button and waited for the lift to arrive. She stood indignantly, tapping her right foot expectantly as she glared at the sealed metal doors, daring the elevator car to be late even a second longer. The slow-moving machine won the contest of wills, and Kamui turned back to her Augur to distract herself from the wait.

She’d scarcely began thumbing through the luminescent display when it happened: the lights in the atrium flashed. For a brief moment, Kamui stood in the dark. The tinkling of piano keys playing over the Tower’s speakers cut off abruptly, leaving Kamui alone in blackness. A lightning bolt had struck the tower, the booming of thunder echoing through the building informing Kamui of what had happened.

Within three seconds, the lights came back on. The digital band struck up its tune as though they hadn’t missed a beat, while the artificial scenery sprung back to life. The vents exhaled a cool wind in time with the rustling leaves of the holographic forest. Yet, despite that, the brief lapse in Kamui’s environs was enough to prompt a response in her. A feeling that had been foreign to her for the past few years of her sheltered existence made its unwanted return in the dark: fear.

She stood paralyzed in front of the elevator doors as they finally opened, ominously sliding apart to reveal a windowed car that offered her a front seat viewing of the storm swirling overhead as she rode up the tower. A profound sense of vulnerability made her unable to step forward, and she simply waited, as if expecting something else to happen. It was only when the elevator chimed and began to close that Kamui was spurred into action, and she hastily slapped the elevator button again, coercing the doors into opening back up so she could hustle inside with her groceries.

She stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for Floor 35. The doors slid shut smoothly, acting as though nothing in the world could be wrong, though Kamui clutched her groceries in silence. She stood facing the doors, not wanting to even glance out the window behind her. Even so, the storm chased her into the car. Every drop of rain striking the glass, every wail of the wind, every peal of thunder; Kamui heard it all. Whatever barrier kept the sound of the storm out minutes ago had failed. Had some part of the Tower been damaged by the lightning strike? Or was it her own illusory bubble of ignorance that the lightning bolt had pierced?

Every time light flashed through the window behind her, Kamui flinched, holding the bag of groceries tighter to her body. She wasn’t entirely certain whether she was protecting the food, or she somehow believed the produce would protect her, but either way, it felt good to have something to hold onto. Seconds ticked by, achingly slow, as the car made the short ascent up a mere five floors. With every moment that passed by, Kamui was overcome by the fear of another lightning bolt cutting the power, this time leaving her stranded in the elevator, trapped between floors on the edge of the building and fully exposed to the typhoon outside.

As soon as the elevator came to a stop, Kamui wasted no time in getting out, squeezing herself out through the doors before they even fully opened. She scurried down the luxurious halls with their hardwood floors and rich cream wallpaper. The familiarity of her surroundings did nothing to dampen the growing fear she felt at the sound of the looming thunder.

The front door of her apartment clicked open, the electronic lock activating at the proximity of her ID. Almost as soon as the door closed behind her, Kamui allowed herself a deep sigh of relief, as though the storm was trapped outside in the hall and couldn’t reach her in her domicile. After a few moments of steadying herself, Kamui tucked her Augur into an invisible pocket inside her nano-laminate blouse and made her way to the kitchen.

She unpacked and organized the assortment of food items, laying them out on the countertop. Next, she searched the cabinets for each and every pot, pan, and cooking utensil she might need, trying to get everything put just right before she so much as turned the stove on. She gave the entire assortment of tools and ingredients one last look over, checking each one off a mental list, and then, she took hold of the rice cooker’s power cord and plugged it into the wall.

The lights in the apartment flashed. Kamui felt every hair on her body stand on end as static ran up her arm. Electricity buzzed in her ears, drowning out everything. Pain surged through her hand, and Kamui fell backward, dropping the plug before it got into the socket halfway. The lights came back on as she found herself laying on the kitchen floor, cradling her right hand.

She crawled to her feet and stared at the smoking electric outlet and the scorched plug lying near it. It must be a fault in the electrical wiring, she decided. Or maybe it was something to do with the storm. She’d have to use another electrical socket for the rice cooker. Looking down at her hand, she saw that the right sleeve of her sweater was blackened and scorched. Doing her best to stomach her fright, she left the kitchen and went into the spacious bedroom.

She quickly undressed, tossing her clothes into a hamper. Opening her wardrobe, she shifted through the numerous outfits her husband had bought for her. She wanted to wear something serious and direct, but romantic. But maybe something sexy would work, too? She wasn’t entirely certain what kind of image she needed to project for a day like this. How was she supposed to tell Kamiya what she needed to say? Her Augur rang somewhere in the bedroom, and Kamui turned about, still in her underwear. Following the sound to her hamper where she left her phone in the pocket of her blouse, she fetched it out and answered it automatically.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Kamui?” the voice on the other end was one she was intimately familiar with.

“Kamiya,” Kamui felt herself smile. “How’s your day been?”

“It’s been good,” he told her, though he sounded nervous.

“I’ve missed you,” she felt a little needy saying that aloud, but it was true.

“I’ve missed you, too,” Kamiya agreed.

“I’m making dinner tonight,” she told him, shifting her feet as she talked. “It’s your favorite.”

“That sounds great,” something in Kamiya’s voice was strained.

“What is it?” Kamui prompted him, the sweetness fading from her voice.

“My boss wants me to go out drinking tonight,” Kamiya explained, clearly feeling awkward.

“Tonight!?” Kamui lowered the phone, clutching it in both hands as she tried to suppress her frustration. She crossed over to the bedroom window, peering out through the blinds at the rain pelting the entire city.

“Why does it have to be tonight? The city’s halfway underwater.”

“It’s a work thing, sweetie,” Kamiya tried to explain but his young wife would have none of it. Work could wait, at least for today. Today was too important. Today had to be perfect.

“I need you here,” Kamui pleaded. “I’ve been planning this for a week!”

“Is there something special about tonight?” Kamiya asked and Kamui paused, having nearly let the surprise out before her husband had even gotten home.

“I just really need you home, tonight,” Kamui evaded the question. When she felt that wasn’t enough, she decided to lay it on thicker.

“Please,” she said. “The lights are flickering, and the sockets are smoking. I don’t know what to do.”

“If I refuse to go along, I may not get invited out next time,” Kamiya protested. “It’s not just about going out and getting hammered, sweetie, it’s about social networking. If I dip out on this, it’s going to look bad on my part.”

Clearly, Kamiya was caught between a rock and a hard place, but whichever she was in her husband’s dilemma, Kamui was determined to win.

“If you don’t come home tonight, what I’m going to do to you will make you look even worse,” Kamui warned.

“I’ll be the first one out the door,” Kamiya assured her. “I’ll be out just long enough to be seen with the rest of the guys and then I’ll go, I promise. I’ll be home by eight.”

“Seven,” Kamui insisted.

“Sweetheart,” Kamiya tried to argue, but he was quickly shut down.

“Seven!” she accentuated her demand with a stomp of her foot, and her reward was a weary sigh on the other end.

“Seven,” Kamiya agreed.

“Don’t drink while you’re out,” she added. “And don’t eat anything, either.”

“Kamui!” her husband tried to object but she hung up.

That could have gone better, she chided herself. It needed to go better. Throwing her Augur down on the bed, she felt a tremor of pain flash through her right hand. Cradling it with her left hand, she refused to give up. Tonight could still be perfect. She went to the bathroom, digging through the cabinets as she looked for something to put on her hand. Welts were all over her fingers and her skin throbbed. She must have burned herself when she tried to plug in the rice cooker.

Life was happening fast for twenty-two-year-old Fubuki Kamui. She never dreamed she’d be married already. She never dreamed she would find a husband that could afford all this luxury and still be young and romantic enough to treat her the way she wanted to be treated. Life was moving at a mile a minute in her eyes. It was all she could do to hang on, but hang on, she would.

She found some burn ointment in one of the drawers and smeared it over her fingers before quickly setting about styling her hair. After that, she put on some makeup to hide the stress she was under. She couldn’t show Kamiya an unhappy face. Just before she stepped out, Kamui caught sight of a pregnancy test kit sitting on the edge of the counter and she quickly grabbed it and dropped it into the bathroom’s trash bin. Kamiya couldn’t see that. After that, she went back to her wardrobe and quickly threw on a white shirt and a long blue skirt. It was hardly what she wanted to wear at dinner, but she could always get changed before her husband got home.

Soon, she told herself. Tonight. Everything was going to change. What was once a married couple would blossom into a family and what was simply a house would become a home. The future was so bright, Kamui could hardly bear to look at it. She wiped tears from the corners of her eyes, setting about laying the foundation for tonight’s dinner.

Without wasting a moment, she strode back to the kitchen, looking over the ingredients as she checked her pots and pans. She pulled out knives from the block and laid the carrots on the cutting board. She put the beef in a skillet, ready to get cooking. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the rice cooker sitting on the counter, not plugged in, and automaticity took over. Without thinking, she picked up the power cord and pressed it toward the socket.

Lightning danced up Kamui’s arm as the plug entered the smoking socket. She screamed, her voice sounding out as an inarticulate staccato shriek, and the electricity made her dance on the spot. The lights flashed and strobed, eventually bursting and casting the room into darkness. The power socket exploded, raining sparks and melted plastic onto Kamui’s face as she fell backward.

 She collapsed to the floor, pain flooding through every nerve, heat filling her body. Stars danced before her eyes in the pitch black. Her ears buzzed and popped. Her body writhed and seized on the kitchen’s linoleum floor, refusing to heed her brain’s commands. She was in the darkness again, helpless, as the rain pounded against the walls and the wind howled. Thunder rumbled somewhere outside, and Kamui whimpered helplessly where she lay.

Fear consumed her every thought; fear and pain such as she had never felt. As agony tore through the terrified woman, the seizures became more intense. She rolled onto her stomach, her spine twisting and contorting with bone breaking pressure. A fire was kindled inside her brain, as though it was pressing against her skull. Her teeth clenched involuntarily, and a long, slow groan escaped her throat, the cry warping and twisting.

How did this happen? Today was supposed to be perfect.

January 4^th, 2044

04:30 PM

Central Ward

Sunset District

Senior Inspector Asahi Takeyoshi

The Survivalist was parked in the shadow of a massive silver tower that gently undulated from side to side like a piece of seaweed. The garish structure ran upward over a thousand feet, with metal rails and tubes sticking out of its sides, connecting the argent building to the forest of its siblings that stood in the pouring rain. Red and white lights flashed against the mirror-like surface of the building, and the sound of powerful engines and sloshing water heralded the appearance of white and red fire trucks as they swarmed around the base of the Tower. Among the vehicles was a lone man in a black suit, who waved his arms in the air as he tried to get their attention.

“I need this street closed off!” Takeyoshi faintly listened to his Deputy trying to make himself heard over the wind and the rain. Shin was standing out on the street, speaking with the white clad members of the Civil Service, trying to control the emergency response to the situation inside the building. The young man in his black suit was flashing his silver badge to anyone that would listen, trying to project authority and confidence, though Takeyoshi found it hard to imagine he was accomplishing anything other than irritating the city’s emergency personnel.

The Inspectors and the Civil Services were always at odds with one another; the Bureau and the Cabinet fought a constant, invisible war for power, and their appendages did likewise. The Bureau used to have its own police officers, firefighters, and medics, who would ride along with Inspectors in a parade of black vehicles that had become known as “funeral processions” among the populace. The Bureau’s own emergency services created confusion when they responded to a situation alongside the Civil Services, and clashes over authority were commonplace. Eventually, the Bureau agreed to pull back the Peace Officers, and other emergency personnel, restricting them to policing just the Bureau’s own territory.

It was a rare win that the Cabinet could claim in the game of power taking place between it and the Bureau, but with that victory came concessions; in particular, that the Civil Services bow to the authority of the Inspectors where Human Calamities were concerned. That was how things were supposed to work on paper, but Takeyoshi imagined that Shin was getting a firsthand taste of how much respect the Cabinet’s lackeys afforded them.

While Shin wasted his energy trying to herd the cats outside, Takeyoshi remained comfortably inside the Survivalist. He didn’t have time for cockfighting with the firefighters about the emergency, and he wasn’t keen to throw himself headlong into danger until the situation had properly crystalized. Instead, he waited where he was safe and comfortable, and turned his mind to more important things.

After leaving the Lunar District this morning, Takeyoshi had fallen asleep for an hour or two. He’d been woken up by Shin when they made a routine stop somewhere in Horizon as directed by Kodera. Hazard Energy flowed up and down the entire world, provoking the miraculous and the tragic, and where Negative Energy gathered, disasters often broke out.

Nowhere in the world was more awash in Hazard Energy than Yōgai-shima; the island fed on the abundant energy of natural disasters, but that esoteric diet made the city a magnet for outbreaks of misfortune. Fires, electrical shortages, and car accidents weren’t uncommon, despite all of the protections that Yōgai-shima offered. It was among those disasters that human beings could become something more, something worse, when bathed in the energy of raw misfortune. When a human being was reborn as a Human Calamity, it was the Bureau’s responsibility to deal with them, either by eliminating them, or recruiting them.

In the wake of Hurricane Izumi, the city had become showered with more than just water, and hotspots of Negative Energy appeared up and down the city, threatening to break out into disasters. Less than one out of every ten potential emergencies predicted by the Forecasters actually broke out, and of those that did, they rarely produced a Human Calamity, but the Bureau needed to be present, just in case. Takeyoshi and Shin had spent the day travelling up and down the city on “Emergency Patrol,” going wherever the Forecasters directed them.

It was boring work that required only time and little energy. Every so often, Takeyoshi and Shin would receive a call from Kodera, and he’d direct them to a hotspot where the amount of Negative Energy had exceeded a vague threshold. A dozen times at a dozen different places, the pair had been directed to a potential drowning, or a small housefire, or an assault, and they’d sit and wait nearby to see if something actually happened, but nothing ever did. The potential emergencies had not only failed to manifest, but neither Inspector was even called upon to take any preventative measures to prevent the incident from occurring.

It was thoroughly monotonous, but it was the kind of boring Takeyoshi preferred; at least he was able to stay warm and dry inside the car, and Ink gave him access to everything he needed to do some private work that the Bureau wasn’t paying him for. His Deputy, however, couldn’t sit still. It didn’t matter whether it was a lightning strike or a robbery: wherever the Forecasters sent them, Shin was the first person to climb out of the vehicle and take charge of the situation, even though nothing was really happening. Takeyoshi imagined that the young man’s zeal would fade with the passing of hours and mindless repetition, but Shin was still standing out in the pouring rain, trying to do his job to the best of his ability even when almost everything was out of his hands. Takeyoshi hadn’t decided whether the young man’s enthusiasm was endearing or irritating, yet.

Whenever the pair weren’t being forced to stake out a random building at Kodera’s direction, they were free to do as they pleased. Not being assigned to a case, the Bureau expected them to drive around the city as a show of force and a deterrent for potential calamities, but otherwise, they had no obligations until the Forecasters called them again. After the first stop on their Emergency Patrol came to an end, Takeyoshi had taken the wheel.

He’d been to the Yōgai-shima Municipal Bank, to the Civil Police Headquarters, and up to the Office of Civil Records. With each stop, Shin had innocently asked where they were going and why, but Takeyoshi had refused to answer, and he left his Deputy in the vehicle while he attended to personal business. When he came back to the Survivalist, Shin asked once or twice what Takeyoshi had done, but eventually stopped, either because he realized he wouldn’t get an answer, or because he saw the mounting frustration on his mentor’s face.

“Tanaka Jinta hasn’t been seen since last year,” Takeyoshi fixated on the words as he sat in the passenger seat of the Survivalist, writing luminescent letters in the darkness of his mind. “None of his close associates have received any contact with him. None of his male colleagues or friends show any sign of subversion. The police search has completely halted, and the Office of Public Records hasn’t recorded a single blip from his ID on the city network. He’s vanished.”

The two words hung in Takeyoshi’s mind, taunting him.

“A man can’t just disappear,” it was a pedestrian rule of thumb that Takeyoshi tried to argue with, but it was fact that wasn’t entirely true for a Human Calamity. “He wouldn’t just hide himself away and never stick his head out again. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. So where did he go?

“Maybe he left Yōgai-shima?” Takeyoshi tried to reason his way forward from the dead-end fate had seemed to put in his path. “If he felt he could no longer hide on the island, it makes sense that he would flee, but where? The mainland is in chaos and Honshu’s little better. Where then? Hokkaido? Kyushu? Would he be happy in a place like that? Would he be allowed to leave Yōgai-shima?”

“No,” Takeyoshi decided, perhaps because he refused to accept the idea that his quarry was beyond his reach. “He’s still in Yōgai-shima. He has to be.”

But Takeyoshi’s resolute determination didn’t manifest a new path forward for him simply out of desire. The simple fact was that he’d run out of leads, and the trail he’d been chasing had gone cold. He sat in the Survivalist, listening to the sound of the pouring rain while he stared through the front windshield at nothing. In his mind, he grasped at straws, clutching for some kind of path forward.

“Inspector Asahi, please respond,” a voice suddenly spoke from Takeyoshi’s Omen and he jumped in alarm, having slipped into another bout of microsleep in the silence. He pulled his Omen from his chest pocket and looked at the green display. “Forecaster Ibuka” was written over the symbol of a ringing phone while the time was displayed beneath it: “04:43.”

“Go ahead, Kodera,” Takeyoshi asked, expecting the Forecaster to announce an all-clear.

“Inspector, we have the confirmation of a Casualty in Tower 5,” Ibuka’s pronouncement dashed Takeyoshi’s hopes for an uneventful day. “You are hereby cleared to assume control of the scene and enter the building to perform elimination procedures.”

Outside the car, Takeyoshi heard the sound of feet splashing through puddled rainwater, and then the sound of a hand pressing against the driver’s side door. The door pulled open, and Shin stuck his head into the cabin, his eyes alight with determination.

“Takeyoshi, we’ve got—!” the young man began to explain but Takeyoshi raised a hand to stop him.

“I’m aware,” Takeyoshi insisted and he pushed open the car door to step into the rain. Reflexively, Takeyoshi reached for his Karma, and swiftly found the two pages floating in his mind. He tore half of the righthand page off and imagined taking that shift of black paper and wrapping himself in it, blunting the power of the storm. Climbing out of the car, Takeyoshi stood in the shadow of the tower, looking up at it without the barrier of the Survivalist’s windows, and he marveled at the true enormity of the structure. That wasn’t to say that the building was in any way aesthetically pleasing, but more that Takeyoshi found it impressive that even with the near collapse of human civilization, the rich and powerful still found ways to flaunt their excess over the rest of the populace.

DANGER.

The premonition bloomed in Takeyoshi’s mind as he looked up at the tower, and lightning surged across the heavens, momentarily transforming the spire into a shadowy silhouette, accentuating the foreboding feeling. The ephemeral lightning passed within a second, but the sense of danger lingered in Takeyoshi’s senses as he stared up at the super tower. Through the rain, Shin stepped up beside him and Takeyoshi glanced at the younger man, trying to silently communicate that he needed to be ready for whatever happened next.

The Deputy gave Takeyoshi a firm nod, his eyes clear and brow furrowed with intensity, but his body language told the Inspector that the young man was brimming with uncontrolled energy. In the midst of Exigency, Takeyoshi’s brain was flooded with adrenaline and Hazard Energy, but he was practiced in harnessing it, remaining outwardly tranquil. Shin, on the other hand, was cracking his knuckles and shifting back and forth on his feet as he tried to contain the anxious power flowing through him. The younger man’s nervousness was to be expected, but at the same time, Takeyoshi found it hard to ignore.

The power of Exigency went hand in hand with the fight-or-flight instinct that all humans shared, and Takeyoshi wondered if Shin even realized that he’d already fallen into that mindset. An ordinary human in that headspace was easily startled and prone to sudden, reflexive actions that could make them dangerous: a Human Calamity in the throes of Exigency was exponentially more dangerous. If Shin couldn’t harness that power properly, he could be just as dangerous as any Casualty, and that thought nearly made Takeyoshi order the young man to stay behind.

“As long as I keep an eye on him, it should be fine,” he ultimately reasoned. “The kid can’t learn anything if I keep him on the sidelines.”

“Alright, Ibuka,” Takeyoshi raised Ink to his mouth as he spoke into the Omen and looked back up at the massive silver obstacle in front of him. “Give us the facts.”

“Our catch of the day is one Fubuki Kamui; a twenty-two-year-old woman living on floor thirty-five,” Ibuka spoke through Takeyoshi’s Omen, and the device produced the image of an attractive young woman with dark neck length hair and brown eyes. “Her Civil ID reported heightened stress and brain activity shortly after 04:30 PM before it went dark. Hazard Energy activity spiked shortly after a lightning bolt struck Tower 35, and when Fubuki’s ID began signaling a medical emergency, the Negative Energy readings sharply spiked, and have remained elevated since then.”

“Do we know for a fact that Fubuki-san is the Casualty?” Shin questioned, looking at the image of the woman still floating in the air. “I mean, what’s to say she even became a Casualty? She could be a Survivor, like us.”

“Not a chance,” Ibuka dismissed Shin’s question out of hand. “All the signs say Casualty, and that’s what I’m sticking with.”

“What signs are those?” Shin seemed compelled to ask the question.

“Worry about your own job before asking about how I do mine, pretty boy,” the young woman sniffed.

“But there’s still a chance she could be—!” Shin tried to argue with the Forecaster, but Takeyoshi raised a hand to cut him off.

“Whether she’s a Survivor, or a Casualty, it doesn’t change what we have to do,” Takeyoshi interrupted. “We’re going inside, one way or another.”

“Right,” Shin took a step back and looked away, clearly upset with himself.

“Do have any confirmation on the nature of its Crisis?” Takeyoshi asked, raising the Omen to his mouth.

“Nothing solid,” Ibuka reported with a click of her teeth. “The entire tower suffered an electrical outage after the initial lightning strike, and it’s been suffering cascading outages for the last few minutes. Based on the readings, it’s almost certainly an ‘Electrical’ type, but there’s no way to tell if it’s a manufactured or natural Crisis at work.”

“Do we know if the target’s on the move or not?” Takeyoshi looked up at the silver monolith, imagining that chasing a Human Calamity through its innards could last years.

“The disruptions to the building’s electrical systems are making it impossible for me to pull up any cameras, but the surplus of Hazard Energy still seems to be concentrated on the thirty-fifth floor,” Ibuka switched out the image of Kamui, replacing it with a digital reconstruction of the tower, which zoomed in on the floor in question. “Casualty or not, it doesn’t seem like she’s gone far.”

“What about civilians?” Shin asked, once more butting in.

“All of the swanky apartments in the tower can convert to Type-2 Disaster Shelters when the situation calls for it,” Ibuka informed the young man with a tinge of jealousy in her voice. “There are several Type-3 shelters spread out through the building in case of serious emergency, so I wouldn’t really worry about any of the one-percenters, myself.”

“What about the people inside who couldn’t get back to their apartments before the emergency was sounded?” Shin asked, looking up at the building with a frown.

“If we find anyone in trouble along the way, we’ll nudge them in the right direction,” Takeyoshi assured him, if only to appease the young man’s hero complex. “But we’re not going to do that just standing around out here.”

“Before you go inside, I should advise you that the relay in Tower 5 is having all kinds of trouble thanks to the electrical surges,” Ibuka warned. “All the interference is going to make contact with you once you’re inside the building very difficult.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” Takeyoshi pressed Ink to the left lapel of his coat, and the smart-metal device hooked itself to the article of clothing. Once he felt the device was secure, he started walking, with Shin following at his heels. Firetrucks and ambulances formed a ramshackle barricade around the entrance of the tower, but the Civil Firefighters and EMT’s stood listlessly in their white and red uniforms, being forced to wait until the scene was cleared. They stared silently at the pair of Inspectors as they passed through their midst and headed for the foyer, and Takeyoshi felt a distinct animosity from the men and women surrounding them, but he ignored it. Shin, however, didn’t seem to read the situation the same way.

“Be ready to go at a moment’s notice,” he advised the emergency personnel standing on either side of them, making eye contact where he could as he addressed them with a firm voice. “Once we’ve resolved the situation, we’ll radio down to let you know that the scene is clear. If we encounter any wounded, we’ll direct them down to you if possible.”

Takeyoshi tried to imagine the annoyance and frustration the Civil employees must have felt at Shin trying to assume control of the situation, but that only brought a smile to his face. He considered making a mental note to discourage Shin from interacting with Civil more than necessary, but he decided better of it; unlike some other Inspectors, Shin’s actions didn’t seem to come from a desire to throw his weight around, or to irritate, but from something a little more earnest and genuine.

With Takeyoshi in the lead, the two Inspectors stepped through the pair of automatic sliding doors into the atrium of Tower 35. The interior was a spacious circular room with white tile floors and a light brown wood textured laminate across the walls. The ceiling was a kind of holographic display that cycled through footage of the silver tower and its siblings, advertising the scenic views and luxuries found high above to those visitors on the ground. At the far end of the lobby were six elevators in glass tubes, which allowed Takeyoshi to see the cars sitting patiently in the shafts on the ground floor.

As the two stepped into the interior, some automatic system appeared to trigger, and the center of the open floor began to shift. Beneath his feet, Takeyoshi felt the vibrations of moving machinery, and the sound of tiles clicking together soon followed, along with the groan of metal sliding against metal. Out from the center of the room rose a large desk, coated in the same faux-wood laminate that the walls were. On the front of the desk was the logo of the private wealthy retreat; a forest of silver trees in front of a white mountain.

For a brief moment, a luminescent figure appeared behind the desk, flanked by two ten foot tall digital skeletons of the tower. Before the digital construct could even fully be seen, it shimmered, distorted, and fragmented, becoming a blur of white light smeared across the lobby. The distortion buzzed and shifted like static as whatever program operating the lobby’s front desk tried to fix itself.

“Welcome to the Heights!” a synthetic voice greeted the pair from some hidden speaker. “The world’s last-an-on-lee-refu—.”

The digital assistant barely got a few words out before whatever disruption affected the hologram slurred its speech, and the rest of its greeting fell into a string of staccato syllables. The lights in lobby began to flicker, and the illusory ceiling dissipated to reveal numerous mechanical arms and projectors which made the mirage possible. Takeyoshi stepped around the malfunctioning display, but Shin lingered to stare at it for a moment.

“You ever see something and think to yourself, ‘that’s the weirdest thing I’m going to see today?’” Shin asked, gesturing at the display, where the hologram was trying to remake itself, leading to a face, a torso, and arms and legs sporadically forming from the blur before disappearing,

“That’s nothing,” Takeyoshi brushed off the young man’s naive statement. “Besides, the day isn’t over yet.”

“I don’t suppose we can take the elevators up?” Shin asked, joining Takeyoshi at the far end of the room.

“In an emergency situation, most buildings recall their elevator cars down to the first level and keep them on lockdown,” Takeyoshi gestured at the sextuplet of identical cars waiting behind their glass sheathes.

“Yeah, but we can override that, right?” Shin reached into his pocket and withdrew his Omen, which took the form of a black glossy cellphone. Before Takeyoshi could say anything, the Omen projected a fiery orange eye which fixated itself on Shin.

“Who looks at all the flickering lights and malfunctioning electronics in this building and thinks it’s a good idea to climb into an elevator?” the device demanded in an irate tone.

“These things are built with redundancies these days,” Shin countered, giving the Omen a stern look.

“I’d rather avoid climbing into one, present circumstances considered,” Takeyoshi cast the deciding vote, looking up at the glass shaft where it disappeared above the ceiling and continued to ascend higher and higher. “We’re taking the stairs.”

The stairs up the side of the building were inconspicuous next to the ostentatious bottom floor lobby; they were hardly meant to be seen, or even thought of, but beneath Ink’s careful eye, all was revealed. Takeyoshi walked closed to the wall, following the curve of the room to the right of the banked elevators, while Ink shined a light against the laminated surface. After a moment, Ink’s glowing eye fixated on a spot on the wall, and the emerald rays traced a rectangular doorway that was invisible to the naked eye.

“Stop,” Ink gave Takeyoshi an audible command, but it was pointless, as he’d already come to a halt. There was a brief chirping sound from Ink, and the door shifted, releasing a rush of air as it slid into the wall. Beyond was a small passage into a tight, vertical concrete tunnel that led up into the building above. The stairwell lacked any of the accoutrements of the lobby, being only a perfectly smooth cement cylinder that had likely been molded by nanite. Dominating the space was a steel stairwell made of little more than scaffolding and steps that spiraled up into the confines of the building.

“Why do I get the feeling we’re the first people to ever use this thing?” Shin murmured from over Takeyoshi’s shoulder.

“I doubt anyone’s ever needed it since the building was finished,” Takeyoshi ventured, placing his foot on the bottom step. The sound of his shoe scraping against the metal stair echoed through the small space, but the metal structure seemed stable enough. Takeyoshi reached out and took hold of the metal railing on the staircase, and gave it an experimental shake, being careful to drop out of Exigency before doing so. Satisfied that it didn’t come apart on him, Takeyoshi continued to climb.

“We aren’t seriously taking the stairs up thirty-five floors, are we?” Shin asked, looking cautiously at the scaffolding.

“What?” Takeyoshi asked, turning to look over his shoulder at the younger man. “You aren’t afraid of a little exercise, are you?”

Without waiting for an answer, Takeyoshi turned back around and slipped into Exigency. He raced up the steps, moving with speed that would make an Olympian track runner stop and stare with envy, pounding up the staircase. He circled the steps in moments, his every footstep echoing off the cramped grey walls of the stairwell as he ascended five floors between two heartbeats. However, the staircase began to shake more violently beneath his feet with increasing ferocity, and he worried that he may have trusted the scaffolding too much, and he turned to look over his shoulder to warn Shin not to follow him up. Instead, he saw a black blur racing towards him.

It was only when Shin vaulted over him that Takeyoshi realized that it was the younger man who was shaking the metal structure. Without even turning to look at Takeyoshi, Shin raced ahead of him, and Takeyoshi was scarcely able to follow the Deputy with his eyes. As fast as Takeyoshi was moving, Shin was moving twice as fast, perhaps even three times, and Takeyoshi quickly found himself struggling to keep up. Once Shin had gone a five or so floors ahead of Takeyoshi, the young man would pause on the landing of the stairwell and wait for Takeyoshi to catch up, then race off again as soon as Takeyoshi closed the distance. He continued to follow his elusive deputy until a warning loomed in his mind.

DANGER.

“Shin!” Takeyoshi reflexively called out to his subordinate.

“Yeah!” Shin called out from somewhere above him. “I see it!”

“See what?” Takeyoshi called back, but there was no answer. Whatever it was, Shin had stopped moving, and Takeyoshi hastened to follow. The lights in the shaft above flickered, and Ink automatically shined her own light from the Omen attached to Takeyoshi’s jacket. Takeyoshi slowed his pace as he ventured further up into the passage, the earlier warning still weighing on his mind.

He found Shin standing on the next landing, his back to the metal doorway that exited into floor thirty-four, his own Omen held out in his hand to shine a light upward. The orange beam of light revealed something akin to a spiderweb that dominated the stairwell above them: countless wires ran back and forth across the passage, so tightly woven that neither man could hope to find their way through without touching them. Takeyoshi stepped closer to Shin, plucking Ink from his chest to shine the light on the cord nearest him.

The wires, or cables, Takeyoshi decided, were red and raw, having the appearance of flesh. Each cable was in fact made up of multiple smaller cords that were pressed together and coated in a thin layer of skin. Takeyoshi leaned as closed to the nearest one as he dared, which had fastened itself to the concrete wall, and the warning in his mind grew louder with every inch closer he came. With the strange tendril six inches from his face, Takeyoshi softly exhaled onto it, and the reaction was immediate.

The rope convulsed in response to the gentle provocation, and sparks of electricity glowed from within. The current of electricity ran up the tendril and into the nest above them, creating a chain reaction as the maze of fleshy strings flashed with equal intensity. The stairwell was brightly illuminated by the powerful current and Takeyoshi raised a hand up over his face as the crackling wires grew too intense to look at. After several seconds of activity, the web of feelers began to slowly calm down again, and the light faded, leaving the pair of onlookers alone in the returning darkness, accompanied by the faint smell of burning meat.

“What are they?” Shin asked, naked revulsion in his voice.

“Nerves,” Takeyoshi answered. “I’m guessing Fubuki-san has already transformed.”

“What do we do now?” Shin asked, disappointment written on his face.

“We do what we were always here to do,” Takeyoshi insisted. “We eliminate her.”

He pushed past Shin and stepped to the door behind him. Ink released a series of mechanical clicks as she communicated with the tower’s network again and the doorway released another whisper of flowing air as the door’s seals were broken. The entrance back into the building tried to move once, and then the lights flashed in the stairwell, burning so bright they became blinding. The unseen mechanisms of the sliding door ground together, creating an awful squeal of metal grinding against metal. Then, the lights in the stairwell burst, filling the passage with the sound of intermittent pops from shattered bulbs followed by the sound of glass shards cascading to the floor. The network of nerves above their heads flashed again like lightning, but when their light died, the two Inspectors were left alone on the scaffold with only the lights of their Omens.

“Looks like the Casualty’s the one responsible for the electrical failures in the building,” Takeyoshi surmised, casting his light over the web above them.

“Well, there’s no getting up to thirty-five from here,” Shin leaned against the metal rails to look over the side. “Do we go back down?”

“No. Our highest priority is getting into the building as quickly as possible. The longer that Fubuki Kamui is transformed, the more dangerous she’ll become and the faster the electrical outages will spread,” Takeyoshi turned away from Shin, pulling Ink from his chest. “Ink, where if Fubuki Kamui’s apartment in relation to us?”

“It’s just one floor up, but it’s on the other side of the building from you, which isn’t as nearly as close as it sounds,” the Omen reported, bringing up a map of the building. “There’s another stairwell on the other side of the Tower. You might try going back down a few floors and see if you can cross over—”

DANGER.

Before Ink could finish suggesting her alternative route, the premonition flashed in Takeyoshi’s mind. A second later, there was a thunderous crash and light spilled into the dark passage from behind Takeyoshi. The door into the building had been kicked inward, and it lay shattered upon the carpeted floors outside the stairwell while the culprit, Shin, stepped over it through the opening.

“I got the door,” Shin commented, seeming as proud of himself as he was ignorant of the danger.

Before Takeyoshi could say anything, the nerves above them flashed. A sound echoed through the building, a high-pitched warbling that rose into a shrill scream. The nerves glowed in response to the anguished cry, and they began to unhook themselves from the wall, writhing like a nest of angry serpents.

“Son of a—,” Takeyoshi shoved Shin the rest of the way through the open doorway, and the young man stumbled to safety onto floor thirty-four as the nest of nerves came alive. Like a swarm of electric eels, the nerves electrified the steel walkway, sending an intense current through it. An ordinary man would have been crippled by the pain, alone, and likely would have died in less than a second of exposure to such powerful voltage, but Takeyoshi was already in Exigency. The engorged nerves began tearing the walkway apart, lifting the stairs into the air, while more pressed around Takeyoshi.

He reached into his coat pocket to withdraw a pen, but the small writing utensil exploded and melted between his fingers before he could channel his Crisis into it. Casting the burning tool away, Takeyoshi clawed at Ink, pulling the Omen free from his chest. Without any assistance from him, the Omen shape-shifted into the form of a long, dark grey metal spear half a foot taller than Takeyoshi was. At the same time, Takeyoshi saw Shin standing on the threshold of the door, looking like he was a hair’s breadth from rushing back through, heedless of the tendrils already creeping towards him.

Takeyoshi fixed the young man with his most disapproving look. Flourishing his weapon, Takeyoshi twisted the smart-metal weapon around, carving through the grasping nerves with ease. Even so, the stair broke apart beneath his feet, and Takeyoshi had to brace himself to avoid being thrown over the side to the bottom of the passage. As the stairwell twisted to the left, Takeyoshi used his left hand to brace himself against the rail.

Seeing Shin still standing in the doorway, Takeyoshi flicked his wrist, using the impossibly sharp edge of Ink’s spear tip to cut through the steel walkway beneath his feet, carving out a length of metal nearly as long as the door Shin had broken down. With a flick of his wrist, Takeyoshi struck the chunk of metal with his spear and sent it flying towards open entry where Shin was standing. The crude length of metal slammed across the wall, blocking the doorway and preventing the nerves from following Takeyoshi’s Deputy into the building. Then, the stairwell truly fell apart and Takeyoshi felt himself begin to tumble downward.

He reached into his pocket, withdrawing two pencils, and he threw them upward when they transformed into blades between his fingers. The twin knives sank effortlessly into either side of the metal slab, crudely bolting it to the wall. After that, with no handhold in arm’s reach, Takeyoshi fell back down towards the ground floor as the network of metal stairs fell to pieces all around him..

“Don’t do anything stupid, kid.”

January 4^th, 2044

09:15 AM

Central Ward

Lunar District

Senior Inspector Asahi Takeyoshi

The splash of hot water striking his back was all that kept Takeyoshi awake. The last twenty-four hours were a blur in his mind; nothing more than a collage of images and sounds that bled into one another without rhyme or reason. He felt more like he was living in a lucid dream, vaguely cognizant of reality while slowly pulling away from it. He fell into and out of sleep in a vicious unpredictable cycle that neither coffee nor adrenaline could break. The only things he could recall were facts that he’d driven into his own head with a mental nail, forcing his brain to memorize them amid the tumult of his sleep deprived senses.

“Central Ward. Yōgai-shima Municipal Bank. Aizawa Etsu.”

“Horizon. Yōgai-shima Office of Civil Records. Ask for Hidari.”

“Solar District. Yōgai-shima Civil Police Headquarters. Speak with Captain Iida. Don’t leave without answers!”

“HQ. 8 AM. Morning briefing.”

The thought made Takeyoshi pause as he leaned against the wall of the shower. He let the faucet spray hot water over his head, into his hair, and down across his scalp, hoping the sensation would momentarily spur his beleaguered mind. He wracked his brain, trying to understand what the significance of that last mental note was.

“The morning briefing?” he asked himself, trying to work through his confusion. “Why did I make a note of that? I never bother with that shit anyway. Who was the last person to mention the morning briefing to me? It had to be Kodera; but why was it important. . .?”

A surge of alarm shot through Takeyoshi’s mind as his weary neurons finally fired. He twisted the knob and shut off the flow of water and pushed the tinted glass door of his shower open. He stepped out into the small bathroom and stumbled as he slid on the tile when he overstepped the bumpy non-slip step at the foot of the shower door.

“Ink!” Takeyoshi’s voice echoed off the walls of the tiny bathroom as he took hold of the nearby sink to steady himself. “Where are you?”

In response to his questioning, there came the sound of a buzzing noise, and Takeyoshi looked around for its source. From the hamper sitting in the corner near the bathroom door, the buzzing rang out, and a trail of green motes swirled up from among the dirty laundry. The Inspector hastened to the wicker hamper, and he dug both arms into its contents, dragging out his old shirt and underpants before throwing them aside.

Among the week-old undergarments, Takeyoshi found his Omen; a dark grey cellphone that was releasing soft sparkles of emerald light. As he lifted the device to his face, the Omen shined, and from the beams of green light formed a tiny figure. Suspended on four buzzing wings was a fairy with short dark hair, who was holding an ink brush in her left hand that was as tall as she was.

“You left me in there with your underwear!” the miniscule figure, no bigger than Takeyoshi’s hand, waved her brush at him in outrage.

“Sorry, Ink,” the Inspector sighed and gave the green projection a remorseful look. “I don’t know what I’m thinking anymore.”

“Is that supposed to be an apology?” the fairy demanded, puffing her cheeks out in anger.

“I’ll grovel all you want later,” Takeyoshi gave a placating gesture with his left hand. “But right now, I’ve got somewhere to be. What time is it?”

“It’s after nine,” Ink answered, though there was a slow caution in her words.

“Shit,” Takeyoshi shook his head, trying to gather his thoughts. “Then I’ve missed the briefing; Kodera said that I’d been saddled with a Deputy and I needed to be there.”

“You skipped the meeting, but you met up with him in Horizon when he was fighting that Casualty,” the AI answered him, looking up at his face with concern.

“I—,” Takeyoshi tried to find the words to answer her, but they weren’t forthcoming.

“We’re back at HQ, now,” the AI spoke softly. “Don’t you remember?”

“Right,” Takeyoshi agreed, remembering where he was. He was standing in the bathroom of his Bureau provided apartment; he’d decided to come back to get a shower and a change of clothes. He tried to remember what had happened before that, and he vaguely recalled the sound of the storm howling in his ears and the twisted face of some monstrosity with a repulsive shark-like maw. The dispatching of the Casualty was so ordinary to him that he’d nearly forgotten it.

“Right,” he said again, trying to sound a little more confident. “I remember.”

“Maybe you should see if you can take the day off?” Ink offered and Takeyoshi scoffed.

“Did you forget what kind of job this is?” Takeyoshi asked with a mocking grin. “It’s not like I can call out; not with this newbie hung around my neck,” he sighed and hung his head, trying to marshal his mental resources.

He reached for the door handle, his thoughts racing ahead of him.

“Right now, I need to—,”

“Put some clothes on?” the AI offered, and Takeyoshi had pulled the door halfway open before he realized that he was still stark-naked and dripping wet. He pushed useless feelings of embarrassment away, set Ink down on the rim of the sink, and turned back to the open shower closet. He climbed back into the small compartment behind him and shut the door to close himself inside. He pressed a button on the wall to his right, and the nozzle overhead retracted into the walls. A moment later, vents opened up, piping in warm air. After a few seconds of uncomfortable heat, the small space was as dry as a desert, and Takeyoshi climbed back out into the bathroom.

In the reflection of the bathroom mirror, Takeyoshi spied a short man with ruddy skin and a head of wild black hair. His dark eyes were red with exhaustion, and his flat nose was positioned over a thin mouth and a square jawline that hadn’t been shaved in a week. Takeyoshi looked on himself without remark, while any inclination to groom himself was thoroughly ignored. He had no time to look presentable; the world outside was constantly turning and moving, and it waited for no one.

Takeyoshi stepped out into the halls of his apartment, feeling like a guest in someone else’s home. From the beginning, he hadn’t liked it. It was decorated to suit the Bureau’s tastes with its scarlet rugs, though he was thankful that the walls were a cream color as opposed to the harsh black of the Eclipse Tower. Along with the living space, he’d been given a full set of furniture, which was all in a very hard-edged and angular style Takeyoshi had never found appealing. Beyond that, the apartment was too large: he had his own living room, a shower room, a toilet, a full-sized kitchen, and two extra rooms that had been left bare. For any ordinary person, being given a full-sized apartment with furnishings would be miraculous, more so in Yōgai-shima, where space went at a premium, but that wasn’t true for Takeyoshi.

He’d been given all this not long after the Downfall, when Tokyo was still burning. While countless men and women struggled to survive, whether it be here on Yōgai-shima or back on Honshu, the Inspectors of the Bureau had been given food and shelter in surplus. Takeyoshi hated it; he wasn’t the kind of person to be given a gift like this and not ask where the money and manpower that built the complex around him came from. He felt ghoulish, taking the Bureau’s handouts in the middle of such calamity, but he couldn’t reject it all. To do his duty as an Inspector, he had to rely on the resources given him by the Bureau, but he didn’t have to like it.

For the past few months, he’d barely spent any time here, and whatever minute attachment he’d developed for this space had dissipated. Not once in the last decade had he considered this place to be “home.” In fact, he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d slept here. Still, he found it occasionally useful as a storage space, if nothing else.

From his closet, he retrieved another uniform that had been left dangling there for who knows how long. He dressed in silence, tugging on his pants and buttoning up his shirt. In moments, he was dressed in the accoutrements of the Bureau’s enforcers, that being a black suit and tie. The only addition Takeyoshi made was a dark brown waistcoat that he’d picked up from somewhere he couldn’t remember.

He left his bedroom behind and went to the living room, still decorated with furniture he didn’t like. A sofa was pushed into the corner of the room, while a wall-mounted monitor that he never used hung over a coffee table and a worn chair. Outside of the occasional nights he crashed in his provided bed, Takeyoshi spent most of his time in this apartment sitting in that chair, going through the countless notes and files he left scattered across the living room table. The notes were still there, even now, but Takeyoshi didn’t feel any temptation to revisit them. He’d learned to stop writing his thoughts down with ink and paper and instead kept them in his own head. When his own mind failed him, Ink was always there to remember; an AI didn’t have the virtue of forgetting anything.

Takeyoshi glanced over the papers from a distance, noting that the chaos of the piled notes seemed exactly as he remembered it. Nothing about the apartment suggested that a single person had entered it since the last time he’d been here. He knew better than to trust things based purely on appearance, especially where the Bureau was concerned.

The only thing that stood out of place was a neon green jacket that was slung over the back of Takeyoshi’s chair. The jacket was made of smart-fabric, and it could change its appearance to suit Takeyoshi’s desire at any given moment. For some reason, the jacket had taken on a texture similar to lizard scales, and it had buckled straps on the cuffs and across the collar, which Takeyoshi didn’t remember ever changing it to.

Outside of his mental notes, Takeyoshi knew that his short-term memory was completely shot, and assumed he must have had good reason to change its appearance. He swept the jacket over his shoulders and slipped it on; the feel of the coat was instantly familiar in a way he could scarcely describe. More than the Bureau uniform he wore every day, the coat felt like a part of him, and he’d feel naked without it.

He turned towards the door, tucking Ink into one of the pockets of his jacket before leaving the apartment behind, not bothering to consider the living space a moment after he left it. He stepped out into the halls of the dormitory, and he was instantly confronted by the harsh colors of the Bureau’s interior design. Red carpets like bloody rivers ran up and down every hallway, but the walls were made of black marble with faint white veins. Small circular fluorescent lights illuminated the halls, but the passages were deathly quiet, and empty, save for Takeyoshi.

Up and down the corridor were a number of doors, with either end of the hall terminating into a T-junction. Behind each of the dark doors was another apartment where another of Takeyoshi’s colleagues was quartered, be they fellow Inspectors or members of the Bureau’s support staff. However, every room was entirely soundproof, meaning that not a single decibel could be heard through the walls of the other apartments. Anything could be going on behind the doors that Takeyoshi passed on either side of him, whether it was a band recital, a vicious argument, or a bloody murder, and he wouldn’t know it. The only sound Takeyoshi could hear was the rustling of his clothes and the sound of his footsteps on the carpet. The eerie silence, combined with the hostile colors, made Takeyoshi eager to leave.

The Bureau Dormitories were held in a large building near the northern border of the Lunar District. The Dormitory tower was fifty stories tall, and it had the appearance of four rectangular buildings that corkscrewed together into one, with walls of dark tinted glass. Here, the bulk of the Bureau’s manpower was housed, or at least, those that worked in Central Ward. Each ward of the city had their own headquarters for their local branch of the Bureau, and they were connected through a series of tunnels that ran to and from every corner of the island, through which employees could ride a private rail system. The Dormitories, too, were connected to the Eclipse Tower through a tunnel that ran beneath both buildings.

Takeyoshi crossed into the elevator that sat on the west side of the building, facing the Eclipse Tower across from it. The elevator car and shaft were both made of tinted shatter-proof glass, enabling passengers to look out into the city. Staring at the Eclipse Tower, Takeyoshi reflexively raised his hand, swiping Ink over a small display on the inside of the car to prove that he had the authority to enter the tunnel beneath the building, and there was a small mechanical chime to let him know that he’d been approved. The doors closed behind him, and the car surged into motion, spiraling down to match the shape of the building.

The tinted glass walls allowed Takeyoshi a glimpse of the Lunar District from his vantage. Technically the smallest district in Central Ward, the Lunar District was still a city unto itself. Of course, the Human Calamity Response Bureau was never intended to carve out a fraction of Yōgai-shima for its own purposes, but the unabated accrual of power over its decade long tenure had allowed the organization to alter the city as it pleased.

First came the Eclipse Tower, a seventy-story skyscraper that served as the nerve-center of the Bureau. After that came the Dorms, to provide homes for the Bureau’s staff. Little by little, the Bureau had more buildings put up to suit its needs, beginning with more barracks for its support staff, garages for its fleet of vehicles, private hospitals, and more. With each new addition, the Bureau pushed out any rival influence on the southern shore of Yōgai-shima, and it extended its reach only as far as it wanted.

Someone at the top, whether it was the Director himself or one of his cronies, had decided that the Bureau had cast a large enough shadow over the city, and they chose to end their expansion and mark the limits of their territory with a single move. Black walls had been erected from the east to west side of the Lunar District, cutting the southern curve of the crescent-shaped island off from the rest of the city. The gates were only fifteen to twenty feet tall, but they were lined with cameras, and there were only three entrances via checkpoints set into the east, north, and west.

The checkpoints were always busy between automated shipping vehicles bringing food and supplies into the Lunar District, and the Bureau’s own black-clad Peace Officers patrolled the gates, checking each vehicle and pedestrian against an exhaustive itinerary. No one was allowed in or out of the Bureau’s shadow without documentation. Everything and everyone had to be processed to ensure the Bureau’s protocols were satisfied.

As Takeyoshi descended further and further toward the ground, the Eclipse Tower, the heart and soul of the Bureau, seemed to become taller and exaggerated in its stature. Standing at seventy stories tall, the Bureau headquarters was an impressive piece of architecture, though it paled in comparison to the super towers that dotted each ward of the city. The Eclipse Tower was a teardrop shaped building with its pointed side facing the white mountain in the north, while its smooth rounded side faced the sea to the south. The entire structure was covered with a dark, light-absorbing glass that made the building appear as a jet-black monolith in the daytime, save for the pair of relay towers that extended over the roof whose tips blinked a vibrant red. The only other color the building had was near its top, where the emblem of the Bureau was displayed on its sloping east and west sides; a cheshire moon rendered in silver, whose horns enclosed around a black void.

Though already impressive by twentieth century standards, the Eclipse Tower was raised higher still by a wide concrete base with multiple landings and flights of stairs that forced pedestrians to climb up from the street just to reach the lobby. Within that concrete foundation was the employee parking garage with direct exits onto the intersection, though the garage itself was nothing more than the first of the Bureau’s many below ground rooms and floors that extended unseen beneath the streets.

The Eclipse Tower and, to a lesser extent, the Dorms, had become symbols of the Bureau’s power in Central Ward, and the rest of the Lunar District had taken their aesthetics to heart. In place of grey concrete and whitewashed walls, the Lunar District became a forest of black, sleek, and reflective monuments, evoking the same penumbra of the Bureau itself. Red was the most dominant accent color, another borrowed design element, with silver ornamentation not far behind. The moon, and its phases, had also become popular imagery, but perhaps the strangest of all to Takeyoshi was the change in language.

Signs within the district had changed, whether they were for public awareness or advertisements for private businesses. Hiragana and kanji were depicted with sharp, slender strokes, while sentences were written in a clipped but almost formal style. The occasional word or sentence in foreign languages, particularly English and Korean, also had that short, direct, and detailed stern voice. It was a kind of stagey bureaucratic language born of ordinary men and women imagining the way the Bureau and its agents communicated. If only they knew just how chaotic the Bureau truly was underneath.

Danger.

The warning flashed in Takeyoshi’s mind as he impatiently waited for the elevator to finish its descent to the underground tunnel connecting the Dorms and the Eclipse Tower. The prediction heralded the bright flash of lightning that traveled through the sky, and the rumble of thunder that followed moments later. His prescience didn’t care that Takeyoshi was standing in an insulated shaft, and even if he was walking in the rain, a single lightning bolt couldn’t kill him, but that didn’t stop his brain when it, subtly mutated by exposure to Hazard Energy, sensed the agitated current of electricity through the atmosphere and responded. If he was asked to, he wasn’t certain he could explain what triggered his Forecasting and what didn’t, and he was tempted to believe that there was no logic to it, sometimes. Though his inelegant premonitions had saved his life countless times, it was moments like these that made Takeyoshi wish he never had them at all.

Looking out through the translucent walls, Takeyoshi saw a wave of shimmering black and white particles that swirled in the sky between the hostile clouds and the city below. The protection afforded by Hazard Energy was less substantial than a physical barrier, yet far more effective. More than just stopping the water, the barrier of fortune redirected the wind and rain entirely. Every so often, a brilliant bolt of lightning would dare to descend towards the rooftops, only to be deflected by a flash of light that sent it arcing sideways, safely away from Yōgai-shima and out over the sea.

Danger.

Of course, Takeyoshi’s Forecasting didn’t care, and the warning bloomed in Takeyoshi’s mind, heedless of how well protected he was against the danger that a bolt of lightning represented. Each alarm was accompanied by an involuntary flinch, like a hiccup. The disruptive and unavoidable jolt would only grow more powerful in comparison to the apparent threat, but even a mild inconvenience could set it off. On a day like this, with constant wind, rain, and thunder, Takeyoshi imagined he’d be jumping at every little thing.

“It’s gonna be a long day.”

He rubbed his sore temples as he waited, fishing Ink out of one of his pockets to hold her in his hand. He tapped the slim nanometal device, and it produced a dark green screen, and his fingers hovered over it, waiting for a mental command to give him direction. Takeyoshi likewise paused, his face twisting into a scowl as he tried to remember what he was going to do. Then, it came to him.

“Ink,” Takeyoshi decided to give a command to the AI, rather than struggle to do the simple job himself. “Dial the kid.”

Immediately, the glowing green screen changed, and the name “Atarashi Shin,” was displayed over the word “CALLING” with a small vibrating phone icon. The phone rang twice before it was picked up; that was good. If the Deputy waited even a moment longer to answer the phone from his superior, Takeyoshi was going to have words for him.

“This is Deputy Inspector Atarashi speaking,” came the young man’s voice as Takeyoshi raised the Omen to his ear.

“Kid,” Takeyoshi didn’t affect the same formal tone of his inferior. “Where are you?”

“I’m in the lobby, sir,” the young man replied, hastily, and Takeyoshi questioned himself about his Deputy’s deferent way of speaking.

“Meet me down in the garage,” Takeyoshi ordered. “We’re going back out on the streets.”

“Yes, sir!” Shin was quick to answer, but Takeyoshi barely heard it, having already lowered the phone, allowing Ink to hang up for him. The elevator finally reached the nadir of its downward journey, and Takeyoshi was allowed one last fleeting glimpse of the world above before the elevator plunged below ground, and all he could see was darkness. He could faintly hear the sound of the storm crashing against the elevator shaft again, though the sound was muffled by the glass, but eventually, the sound of the world above faded into nothing, leaving Takeyoshi alone with the soft hum of the elevator as it delved deeper below ground.

Takeyoshi stared into the darkness beyond the glass as he wracked his brain, trying to remember the events of the past few hours. He hardly remembered the drive back to the HQ, or any of the words he might have exchanged with the young man already. In fact, he barely remembered what the young man looked like. A stranger could come up to him and claim to be his new deputy, and he’d have half a mind to believe them. His mind had already evaluated all those details as being “not important,” and had pushed them somewhere to the corner of his brain to be forgotten.

“Welcome, Inspector Asahi,” a male voice greeted Takeyoshi as the elevator reached the bottom of the shaft, though it belonged to one of the AI’s that governed the Eclipse Tower and its secure areas. The elevator doors slid open with a rush of air, revealing a jet-black tunnel that stretched out ahead of him. He paused in the car for a moment, watching as a series of lights clicked on overhead, revealing the passage before him.

The connecting tunnel between the two buildings was a utilitarian rectangular space with the black marble walls of the Bureau’s style and rich red carpeting that quickly gave way to a set of automated walkways to ferry employees back and forth. Takeyoshi strode onto the moving walkway without stopping, not content to let the machine carry him across the long room.

He strode in silence with his hands shoved into his pockets as he went. On either side of him, illuminated billboards were placed on the walls, and they shined into the hallway. The billboards, however, didn’t flash to reveal advertisements, but instead, images of times and places long gone. More than one picture featured a ward from Tokyo, its landmarks and towers rising scenically while white text recounted the ultimate cost of its destruction in both lives and yen. Each still image was accompanied by various slogans which cycled between “Never Forget” and “Never Again.” Takeyoshi was blind to the images and the phrases that had been cynically designed to provoke a sense of guilt in the viewer and manipulate them into working harder for the Bureau’s benefit.

When he reached the other end of the corridor, a pair of sliding doors hissed open, revealing another momentarily dark space beyond. The air whispered through the open space past the threshold, though Takeyoshi could faintly perceive the distant sound of cars echoing through another entrance in the garage beyond. Though he was confident in his own ability to navigate the darkened interior, he customarily paused for a second or two for the automated system to register his presence.

Lights clicked on overhead, revealing a concrete parking garage waited beyond the doorway. It was a thoroughly conventional structure that you could have seen in a million different cities, once upon a time. The only thing that stood out as odd to the casual observer was the fact that the entire garage was stocked with countless copies of the exact same vehicle. Each and every row was occupied by a powerful, two-seater car with a wide front end, a sleek hood and a sloping rear.

The Bureau’s very own custom vehicle tailormade for the needs of its Inspectors; the Survivalist. It was a hardy machine that could outrun a fighter jet with its wheels on the ground, and its polished finish belied armor that could shrug off a tank round. Hand in hand with its ability to perform in the most disastrous of conditions was an interior designed with all the amenities and comforts the Bureau could provide: leather, heated seats with a built-in back massager, and a relay to the city’s network, along with a transmitter that could allow an Inspector’s Omen to control the vehicle. Part of Takeyoshi wanted to complain about the way the Bureau wasted the taxpayer money it squeezed from the population on excess lavishness, but having a Survivalist was one of the few privileges of being an Inspector he allowed himself to enjoy, so he quashed the urge to speak up.

As Takeyoshi stepped into the garage, more lights clicked on overhead, illuminating more of the space the deeper he moved. Evidently, the lights weren’t coming on fast enough for Ink’s sake. A soft green light emanated from Takeyoshi’s pocket, and Ink’s diminutive avatar reappeared. The pixie circled Takeyoshi, floating over his head while leaving a glimmering trail of sparkling dust in the air.

“This way!” Ink called and zoomed through the garage, leaving behind a luminescent trail of holographic paint. Darting around a concrete pylon, the digital construct vanished even as Takeyoshi followed the trail she left behind. In the distance, headlights flashed, and an engine roared to life as the Omen found and took control of the Inspector’s assigned vehicle.

“I went through the trouble of getting the car washed while it was in the garage,” the AI reported from the Omen in the Inspector’s pocket as Takeyoshi approached.

“It’s appreciated,” Takeyoshi thanked the machine as he took in the restored glistening finish of the Survivalist.

“The inside, though. . .” the AI made a noise, clicking an imaginary tongue in disapproval.

“It’s gonna have to wait,” Takeyoshi growled. “We’ve wasted enough time today.”

The sound of a moving elevator rumbled through the walls and reverberated through the dark parking garage. Somewhere off to Takeyoshi’s right, the elevator doors slid open, and lights automatically clicked on. The sound of distant voices reached Takeyoshi’s ears as the automated greeter spoke to the new arrival and, moments later, a pathway of lights appeared on the floor, highlighting the path to Takeyoshi’s car.

The sound of approaching footsteps brought the Inspector out of a seconds-long dose of microsleep. Rubbing his eyes, he spied his approaching trainee. Shin was a good-looking kid somewhere in his twenties, if Takeyoshi had to guess, and dressed in the standard Bureau uniform. He had small black studs in his ears, and he styled his straw-blonde hair chaotically, keeping the left half of his head neatly combed while the right half was messy, with his bangs styled up into a quartet of spikes. At first blush, Takeyoshi would have assumed Shin had a more delicate disposition, but he knew better than to judge a book by its cover. Whoever he was, the younger man hadn’t flinched from chasing a Casualty across town on his first day, when countless other Deputies would have hesitated.

“Well,” the young man brushed the back of his head, nervously. “Should I introduce myself?”

“We didn’t exactly go through proper orientation, did we?” Takeyoshi answered with a tight, brief smile. “But for the sake of courtesy, go ahead.”

“Right!” the young man stood up straight, placed his hands at his sides, and bowed. “My name is Atarashi Shin, Deputy Inspector for the Human Calamity Response Bureau. I look forward to working with you, sir!”

“I’m Asahi Takeyoshi,” the older man gave a slighter bow than his new subordinate. “My expectations are simple: work hard and pay attention. The most important lessons I have to give aren’t going to come from speeches or handholding. I lead by example. Understood?”

“Yes, Asahi-san,” Shin nodded.

“Takeyoshi,” the Senior Inspector insisted. “I’m not big on etiquette.”

“Right,” the young man agreed, but he shifted awkwardly on his feet, telling Takeyoshi that he was uncomfortable with the idea. Even so, Takeyoshi wasn’t keen to change his mind.

“Good,” Takeyoshi nodded. “Now then, you’ve gotten as much down time as you can expect for your first day. For the next ten hours, we’re working nonstop. Do you understand?”

“I do,” Shin nodded, his jaw set, and brow furrowed, as though he expected it was going to be a battle just to get out of the garage.

“Then let’s get going,” Takeyoshi gestured toward the patrol car, stifling a yawn with one hand. “You’re driving.”

The Inspector stepped around to the passenger side and opened the door, staring down at the numerous receipts and fast-food wrappers stuffed into the seats, the door, and lining the footwell. Shin opened the driver’s side door and looked in, his eyes venturing over the mess on his side of the car.

“I basically live out of my car,” Takeyoshi told him, though the excuse felt familiar on his lips. Had he already told Shin that on their drive back to HQ? He couldn’t remember. Either way, Takeyoshi didn’t dwell on it and focused on snatching up the receipts, tucking them into his pocket to throw away later.

“Did you want these?” Shin held his hand out, holding up a handful of bills found on the driver’s side of the car.

“Just drive,” Takeyoshi snatched the receipts from the younger man’s hand and climbed in, Shin following suit.

Whatever mess Takeyoshi made of the cabin, the Survivalist’s engine remained in top condition, and it roared to life when Shin touched the ignition as an orange light shined from the dashboard console, indicating that Shin’s Omen had taken up residence inside the car. Shin carefully backed the car out of the parking space, ignoring the Survivalist’s desire to run free, and Takeyoshi settled back in his seat, folding his arms over his chest and closing his eyes. When he opened them, the car was on the streets of Yōgai-shima already, driving in the shadows of the city’s towers. Shin calmly guided the vehicle with only one hand on the wheel, though Takeyoshi could tell there was a nervous energy in the newly minted Inspector.

“So,” Takeyoshi spoke the word and let it sit, partly because he wanted to get Shin’s attention and partly because he wasn’t certain he knew how he wanted to phrase his thoughts. Ultimately, he decided to be blunt. “Disobeying orders on your first day; that’s not a good look in any line of work.”

“It’s not like I planned it ahead of time,” Shin answered, somewhat bashful, but also somewhat defiant. “I did what I felt I needed to do.”

“In the Bureau, guys like that are usually one of two things: would-be heroes, or total psychopaths,” Takeyoshi shared his thoughts and, if the Deputy was wise enough to see it, he’d also been given a warning about some of his colleagues. “Which are you?”

“What?” Shin glanced at him, seeming surprised by the question.

“Are you a hero or insane?” Takeyoshi asked him squarely. “Let me tell you kid, neither of those kinds of people last all that long in the Bureau. The system we have in place with the Forecasting team, and the divided seniority between Inspectors is there to protect you. We don’t do our job until we have all the information we need to do it right. We don’t just jump in feet first.”

“Even if people could die?” Shin protested, giving Takeyoshi a scrutinizing look. “What good are we if we just standby while innocent people are in danger?”

“A dead Inspector does no one any good except fill an empty grave,” the older man assured him. “And that’s where you were heading, make no mistake.”

“I would have found my way out of that situation,” Shin disagreed, though his objection was quiet, and perhaps petulant.

“Oh, I’m sure,” Takeyoshi’s comment was laden with sarcasm. “And how many people would have been killed in the process?”

Shin didn’t answer, but he stared out through the windshield, his eyes hard and jaw set.

“A hero, then,” Takeyoshi evaluated the young man sitting silently next to him. He was emotional, and defiant, and he seemed to think that the onus of his duty rested squarely on his own shoulders, and no one else. So self-absorbed in his thinking was Shin that he never thought to share the blame for this morning with anyone else, not even at Takeyoshi himself. Ruefully, Takeyoshi acknowledged that if the Deputy thought to point the finger at him, the Senior Inspector would have no excuse for his late arrival, but he doubted that the thought even passed through Shin’s head.

“So, which are you, then?” Shin looked back at his mentor, trying to judge the older man.

“What?” Takeyoshi asked, momentarily confused as the question was turned around on him.

“Are you a hero or a psycho?” Shin had a slight smirk on his face at seeing Takeyoshi’s reaction, mistaking his puzzlement for a small victory.

Seeing that Shin had misunderstood the nuance of his statement, Takeyoshi rolled his eyes.

“I didn’t say all Inspectors were heroes or psychopaths,” Takeyoshi corrected his Deputy. “As for me, I’m neither. I’m a journalist.”

“What?”

“A journalist,” Takeyoshi repeated with incredulity. “I write stories for the local paper. Didn’t you ever read the Yōgai-shima Shinbun?”

“No,” Shin answered with a light shrug. “Who reads newspapers anymore?”

Takeyoshi resisted the affront that rose up in his chest at the young man’s utterly careless words. No, he told himself. Don’t get angry. Someone had to guide the ignorant back onto the proper path.

“Well, I still freelance for the Sanrin Daily,” Takeyoshi told him, pointedly. “Pick up a copy next time you get a chance. Reading’s good for your brain.”

“Okay, so if you’re a newspaper reporter then what are you doing here?” Shin gestured out the window. “Why do all this?”

“The truth is, once you become a Human Calamity, you don’t really get a choice,” Takeyoshi sighed and settled back into his seat as he launched into his destination. “Sure, you might think that you made the decision to join the Bureau, but the truth is that the powers that be would use every dirty tactic they could to draft you into service. Can’t have a living, breathing, catastrophe mingling with the rest of the population unsupervised.”

“So, you were forced to join the Bureau, then?” the younger man’s voice was low, and uncertain.

“In a sense,” Takeyoshi agreed, though half-heartedly. “We all are on some level. In the eyes of Japan, or Yōgai-shima, or the Cabinet, we’re killers. They need us to fight the battles they can’t. That’s the reason they need us here, but at the same time, each Inspector has to decide for themselves why they wear the uniform.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at me,” Takeyoshi told him, and the young man shifted in his seat.

Danger.

“No, not literally. Watch the road.”

“Oh.”

“I joined the Bureau around a decade ago, give or take a few years,” Takeyoshi thought back to the past. “To be honest, I wasn’t too keen on becoming an Inspector, myself. I had a thousand questions about what the Bureau really was, what they were really doing, and who was backing them. So, at first? I dug my heels in. I said, ‘no.’ That was when Natsume came to me. She was already all in on the Bureau. I guess you could say she was a mentor to me. She tried to convince me that the Bureau was something necessary for Japan’s survival and when I shared all my doubts and grievances with her, she listened. Then, she said something to me. Something I haven’t forgotten.”

“Yeah?” Shin prompted him when Takeyoshi fell silent. “What’d she say?”

“‘It’s easier to find the answers you’re looking for from within than from without,’” Takeyoshi recited the words from memory.

“So, she told you to join the Bureau in order to get the answers you wanted?” Shin summarized the intent behind the words well enough, though Takeyoshi mentally docked him some points for his overly blunt way of doing so.

“Joining the Bureau meant being the killer they wanted me to be,” Takeyoshi held up a finger, giving his student a meaningful look. “But it also means that I’m closer to the truth here than anywhere else. The Bureau wants you here for their own reasons, Shin, your own motivations are just as important. Why are you here, Shin? What does being an Inspector get you?”

“I’m here because I want to help people,” Shin made it sound as if it were the most obvious answer in the world.

“That sounds nice,” Takeyoshi clicked his teeth, unsatisfied with the answer. “I’ve heard a lot of Inspectors say the same thing. Some of them even meant it. You seem like a nice kid, Shin, so maybe you mean it, too, but virtue isn’t enough to get you through the hard times. You need something real powerful to hold onto when the work gets dark. Do you have something like that, Shin? Something that makes being an Inspector worth killing for? Something worth dying for?”

The young man stared straight out the window, his gaze strong and steady. He put both hands on the wheel, tightening them into fists. There was something he was thinking about, Takeyoshi could tell. Something that was important to him. The young man glanced at Takeyoshi and then back out the window, emotions running through him. He opened his mouth, trying to find the words he wanted to say, but Takeyoshi already had his answer.

“You don’t need to tell me why,” Takeyoshi assured him, holding up a hand as if to physically stop Shin from speaking. “I just needed to be sure you have an anchor. Whatever that reason is, hold onto it, Shin. That’s your first lesson.”

“I thought my first lesson was that I shouldn’t look at Human Calamities as people,” Shin’s mouth twisted into a wry smile, covering his momentary weakness.

“I said you shouldn’t look at Casualties as people,” Takeyoshi corrected him. “Don’t forget that we’re also Human Calamities.”

“Right.”

“Also, don’t correct me,” Takeyoshi scolded the young man, though he was playful. “That’s your third first lesson.”

“So, what’s my fourth first lesson?” Shin asked, going along with his mentor’s game.

“Today, they have us on training wheels,” Takeyoshi leaned back in his seat again and tilted his head back. “We’ll patrol up and down Central for the next ten hours or so. Check the GPS on the console; the Forecasters at HQ will mark areas that feature sudden spikes in Hazard Energy, and we’ll ride around and make sure the area is all clear before moving on. With the storm rolling overhead, they’ll probably be a dozen or more hotspots at any given time.”

“Okay,” Shin shrugged his shoulders, a nervous energy clearly surging through him.

“Don’t rush it,” the older man advised. “Even an Emergency Level Casualty can still kill a lot of people. If we’re lucky, the rest of the day will go by slowly and quietly. If push comes to shove and we run into another active Human Calamity, I’ll take point. You just focus on polishing your Karma and controlling your Crisis. Stick to the basics, for now.”

“The basics,” Shin repeated the words as he drove. “What are those, again?”

“What do you mean ‘what are those’?” Takeyoshi cracked open an irate eye he wasn’t aware he’d closed. “Didn’t you go through basic training already?”

“Yeah,” Shin protested, defensively. “I had a year-long course in the academy.”

“And what did they teach you?”

“How to handle firearms, CQC, defensive driving, CPR, city evacuation routes, hostage negotiation, crime scene investigation,” Shin listed half a dozen random examples and shrugged his shoulders.

“So, nothing important,” Takeyoshi sighed.

“Don’t say that,” Shin groaned with audible frustration. “I busted my ass for a whole year learning that stuff!”

“Did the Casualty that tore through the city this morning know CPR, do you think?” Takeyoshi asked, pointedly. “Do you think I needed to know how to handle a hostage negotiation to stop him?”

He reached down and pulled a pen from the cup holder, transforming it into a blade within a second, holding it up to illustrate his point.

“No,” Shin answered through gritted teeth, his voice rueful.

“That’s right,” Takeyoshi let the pen shift back into its regular form before tucking it into his pocket. “We’re here because we’re Human Calamities, and the enemies the world needs us to fight are our own kind. That means it’s more important to understand the powers that set us apart rather than being some kind of one-man SWAT team.”

“Don’t blame me,” Shin shook his head in frustration. “I didn’t choose the Bureau’s curriculum, alright?”

“I guess starting from scratch’s better than having to correct some other idiot’s shoddy work,” Takeyoshi tried to find an upside to the situation, but he found his glass of optimism thoroughly empty. “Did they at least teach you basic Exigency?”

“Yeah,” Shin answered, though he sounded uncertain. “I know that. I just have to, sort of, remind myself of how I got my powers and I enter a kind of ‘zone,’ I guess.”

“Well, that’s something,” Takeyoshi tried to take that as some kind of good news. “Though, you’ll want to learn to do it at a moment’s notice. I mean that literally; within less than a second. You need to get a real handle on that switch inside your head. Once you’ve done that, then you’ve really mastered Exigency.”

“Alright,” Shin nodded. “How do I do that?”

“Practice,” Takeyoshi gave the obvious answer. “Some Inspectors use a little ritual or a trigger to get the adrenaline flowing. Other’s use a Transaction to stop and start their Exigency; it’s clever, but I just don’t see it as reliable compared to having full control yourself.”

“A Transaction?” Shin asked, the meaning of the word going over his head.

“It’s a thing that Human Calamities can do,” Takeyoshi rattled off the simplest explanation he could. “Basically, Hazard Energy can influence cause and effect by making things more or less likely to happen. A Transaction is when a Human Calamity creates a kind of unique causal chain of action and reaction, where the user agrees to do one thing, and they get something in return.”

“Can you give me an example?” Shin asked, innocently, but it was clear to Takeyoshi that the entire explanation went over his head.

“Like if you don’t sleep for a week, you become twice as strong,” Takeyoshi hastily tried to think up an example off the top of his head, but his tired brain wasn’t sending its best thoughts.

“Really?” Shin seemed taken with the idea. “Is that possible?”

“Yes, but don’t actually do it,” Takeyoshi warned him, hastily. “That’s a terrible Transaction. You can get a lot better than that.” Takeyoshi felt exhaustion turning every possible explanation for the phenomenon into a wordless buzz. “It’s advanced stuff. We’re sticking to the basics, remember?”

“Right.”

“So,” Takeyoshi tried to start from the top. “You can use Exigency. Has anything ever happened while you’re in Exigency? Like the way that Casualty could manipulate water?”

“Or the way you can make things into knives?” Shin asked, glancing at his mentor.

“You noticed,” Takeyoshi lauded him. “You have a good eye. That’s called a Crisis Ability. Whatever traumatic event made you into a Human Calamity, well, it’s become a part of you.”

“The old man this morning was drowning, so he got the ability to control water,” Shin reasoned to himself. “And you can make things into blades, so—”

Before Shin could finish, Takeyoshi cut him off with a raised hand.

“Don’t ask people how they got their powers,” Takeyoshi warned him, gently. “Don’t even speculate; it’s something of a taboo. I don’t particularly mind, myself, but for some people, their Crisis is wound up in something awful. You can ask what another Inspector’s Crisis is, but never how they got it. We’re all on the same team, after all, but asking for anything past general information is poor etiquette.”

“I understand,” Shin nodded, looking forward through the windshield.

“Your Crisis: do you know what it is?”

“Yeah,” the young man glanced at his mentor. “I know how to use it.”

“Show me,” Takeyoshi gestured at him. “Real quick.”

“Right now?” Shin gave Takeyoshi a worried side glance.

“Just be quick,” Takeyoshi insisted, retrieving the pen from his pocket, twirling it across his fingers as it became a blade, before putting it away again all in one smooth motion.

“Well, it takes some concentration,” Shin held up his left hand, holding onto the wheel of the car with his right as he divided his focus. “But if I do it right. . .”

Danger.

Takeyoshi ignored the premonition; it always went off in the presence of other Crises.

“I can make a kind of explosive powder—”

“Okay, never mind,” Takeyoshi gently placed his hand over Shin’s and prompted him to lower his fist.

“Are you sure?” Shin asked, crestfallen.

“Let’s not fly too far too fast,” Takeyoshi assured him with a hasty smile, inwardly breathing a sigh of relief.

“Okay,” the young man sounded disappointed.

“Well, after that it’s Karma,” Takeyoshi settled back into his seat and folded his arms. “At least that gives us an idea of what to work on.”

“Karma refers to the internal flow of Hazard Energy that resides in every person and object,” Shin described the phenomenon ably enough, but the slow and thoughtful cadence of his words made Takeyoshi wonder if he wasn’t quoting it from some memorized passage out of a textbook.

“Correct,” Takeyoshi agreed. “Learning how to use that power inside you is fundamental to being an Inspector.”

“This may sound like a dumb question. . .,” Shin admitted, his voice bashful.

“It takes practice,” Takeyoshi answered before Shin had even finished asking. “You’ve got to learn to draw out the energy inside you, and how to apply it to the world around you.”

Shin didn’t say anything, immediately, and Takeyoshi could sense another “How do I do that?” before the young man tried to ask it. Takeyoshi reached into the pockets of his coat, looking for something to help him illustrate his point. His fingers closed around something hard and smooth, and Takeyoshi withdrew it from his pocket.

“This’ll do,” Takeyoshi surmised as he looked at the small Yōgai-shima Yen pinched between his fingers. The gold coin had the number “10” printed on one side, with the words “Perseverance” above it and “Yōgai-shima” below it. The opposite side had the symbol of the Cabinet: a sunburst rendered in gold with the printing date hugging the curve of the coin’s edge.

Takeyoshi reached into himself, and a pair of pages appeared in his mind. Both pages were black with unreadable luminescent script, save for the top third of the lefthand page, which was white with indecipherable black letters. The two pages represented the Karma inside Takeyoshi, which was always slanted towards the negative, with only a fraction of it ever manifesting as good fortune at any time.

He tore a piece of script from the lower right corner of the black page, and he imagined tying it around the coin held in his hand. The Negative Energy settled into the coin, but the empty space inside Takeyoshi’s Karma was immediately filled with more misfortune, and the page was made whole instantaneously. Still, as the Karma reacted to his invocation, the Interest on it turned a little more of the lefthand page white.

“This coin won’t land on its head until Atarashi Shin can Invest 10% Karma into it,” Takeyoshi roughly sketched the outline of the Transaction in his mind as he held the coin. Though he only put maybe –10% into drafting the Transaction, by stipulating the terms with a specific outcome, actor, and the means to break the Transaction, that minute amount of Hazard Energy was enough to get Takeyoshi the outcome he wanted.

“Here,” Takeyoshi held up the coin and Shin glanced at him, then held his hand out for the tiny object. “Hold onto this.”

“What’s it for?” Shin asked, glancing between the coin and the streets outside the window.

“That coin will never come up heads, no matter how many times you flip it,” Takeyoshi informed him.

“No way,” without wasting a second, Shin flipped the coin several times in succession, his eyes wandering back and forth between the small coin and the road. “That’s impossible.”

“Save it for when you’re not behind the wheel,” Takeyoshi scolded the young man, catching his left hand by the wrist to prevent another distracting coin toss.

“Right,” Shin agreed sheepishly, and Takeyoshi released his arm so that the Deputy could tuck the coin away.

“Whenever you’ve got free time, I want you flipping that coin,” Takeyoshi instructed, pointing at Shin’s chest pocket where he’d put it. “Think of it as weight-lifting for your Karma.”

“How exactly?” Shin couldn’t help but ask.

“That coin will only land on its head when you force it to,” Takeyoshi assured him. “That’s how Karma works; you have to look at ordinary causality and tell it what to do, even if your instincts try and tell you otherwise.”

“So, if I believe that I can make the coin land on its head, it will?” Shin tried to wrap his head around the idea, but Takeyoshi shook his head.

“It’s not about belief, Shin,” the Inspector corrected him on the spot. “It doesn’t matter how much you believe in something, because belief alone can’t make anything happen. You can only believe in what you don’t know, and if you don’t know that the coin will land the way you want it to, then it won’t. Get out of the habit of wanting and believing in things and get into the practice of knowing and forcing. That’s how Karma works.”

“So, I have to know that the coin will land on its head,” Shin repeated the idea, slowly, and he raised his hand to his left breast where the coin was. “And then it will work.”

“It will take practice,” Takeyoshi reminded him. “It takes a while to get into the right mindset, just like Exigency, but it will get easier as you go. That coin is the smallest step in becoming a proper Inspector. If you can do that, you can learn the rest.”

“But what if I can’t?” Shin fixated on the negative as he asked that question and he looked at Takeyoshi.

“But you can,” Takeyoshi reminded him, and he tapped the side of his head. “And you already know you can.”

“Right,” Shin reminded himself, looking back towards the road. “Mindset is everything.”

The conversation petered into silence and Takeyoshi found his eyelids drooping as the rhythmic rumbling of the Survivalist lulled him like a child in a cradle.

“So, who trained you?”

The question jolted Takeyoshi awake, and his internal clock made him realize that he’d fallen asleep for a few seconds. Even so, the hum of the vehicle and the heated seat made it too comfortable for him to open his eyes.

“Well, my training was a lot more informal than yours,” Takeyoshi told him. “There was a lot of chaos when I took up the badge, and the Inspectors were all spread thin between the mainland and Yōgai-shima. There was a lot of learning by doing. A trial by fire, if you will.”

“Did Natsume teach you anything?”

“Some,” Takeyoshi folded his arms over his chest, his chin dipping down. His breathing became long and deep. “I still remember the first time we ran into a Disaster Level Casualty. That was one hell of a day.”

“Tell me about it,” but Shin’s words never reached Takeyoshi’s ears, nor did he see his new trainee glance over at him as he finally fell truly and deeply asleep.

“Takeyoshi?”

Personnel Dossier (PARTIAL)

Senior Inspector Asahi Takeyoshi (朝日 偉良)

Birthdate: December 11^th, 2009 (34)

Description

Takeyoshi stands about 5’6, with brown skin and a head of wild uncombed hair. He has a squarish, flat face with a nose and heavy bags under his slender brown eyes. He has an unathletic build, with thin arms and legs, and a small gut. He wears the stand Bureau uniform without frills, though he wears a second neon green nano-material jacket over his blazer. He keeps his pockets stuffed with pens, notepads, and old receipts.

Background

Takeyoshi lived a relatively normal life, pursuing a career in journalism after college. Following the events of 2020, Takeyoshi would make a name for himself covering the War for Taiwan. After the war’s end, Takeyoshi would return to Japan, where he would begin investigating the Institute of Human Evolution and their connections to the Japanese Government. He would become a thorn in the side of the powers that be, his digging into state secrets culminating in an attack on his life made to look like a mugging. The stabbing inflicted on him by his would-be assassins transformed Takeyoshi into a Human Calamity.

After the Downfall of Honshu, Takeyoshi would be scouted by the Bureau, desperate for new members after a number of Inspectors died in the burning of Tokyo. Though Takeyoshi would initially buck against this idea, his friendship with one of the Bureau’s Inspectors would see him changing his mind. Opting to join the Bureau to expose its secrets, Takeyoshi would travel to Yōgai-shima and join the Bureau.

Omen: Ink

Takeyoshi keeps his Omen in its basic form as a slab of nanometal, colored a dark grey with neon green lights. In battle, Takeyoshi occasionally unfurls him Omen into a spear, though he prefers to use his more disposable weapons created through his Crisis. The AI avatar of the Omen appears as a small green fairy holding a paint brush. Ink serves as a friendlier voice compared to Takeyoshi’s more bitter disposition, and she spends much of her time trying to coax Takeyoshi into taking better care of himself.

Crisis Abilities

Stabbing Emergency, Cutting Wit

Takeyoshi’s Crisis allows him to channel his Hazard Energy into any object he touches, transforming it into a bladed weapon. This ability can apply to any solid object Takeyoshi touches, regardless of what it’s made of, and the kind of weapon Takeyoshi can create is practically limitless.

Karma Visualization

Takeyoshi visualizes his Karma as a series of pages in his mind, with a single page representing one hundred percent. His Negative Karma taints the pages black with white text, while his Positive Karma is the opposite.

Karmic Abilities

Asking the Right Questions

Transaction

Effect: When faced with an opponent, Takeyoshi asks a series of rhetorical leading questions about their abilities, their motivations, their strategies and so on. For each question Takeyoshi asks, he gains additional insight into his enemy via his Forecasting, allowing him to better understand and predict them. Takeyoshi can ask up to ten total questions, although after the fifth question, he has diminishing returns on his Transaction’s effect.

Cost: Verbally asking questions, requiring +5% Karma on each individual question, with an upper limit of ten questions.

Parameters

Exigency: 6/6.5/6.5

Takeyoshi has above average strength for a Human Calamity, but he’s far from exceptional.

Runaway: 4

Takeyoshi’s power grows slowly over time.

Forecasting: 9

Takeyoshi has a profound ability to sense danger and shifts in Hazard Energy, but his power is so sensitive that it reacts to nearly everything, creating a white noise effect that makes it hard for Takeyoshi to recognize true sources of danger to himself. Takeyoshi suppresses his Forecasting with occasional drinks of alcohol, and his sleep deprivation further impairs it.

Account: 5 (200%/300%/400%)

Takeyoshi has the standard amount of total Hazard Energy control expected of a Senior Inspector.

Precision: 7

Takeyoshi’s powers are built on precision, rendering him mostly incapable of widespread damage outside of his Catastrophe.

Karma: 2.5

Takeyoshi has misfortunate Karma.

January 4^th, 2044

11:00 AM

Central Ward

Horizon District

Nanbu Naoya

“Are you alright?”

Naoya’s Augur lit up with messages not long after he left FAIR Insurance’s office. He’d scarcely climbed onto his bike when the first one came in. He held up his Augur, and the screen displayed a blue message, though Naoya didn’t need to even look at the sender’s name to know who they were. It was from Suzume, his long-time girlfriend, who never missed an opportunity to check in on him.

“How does she know?” Naoya asked himself that question, but there was no answer, even though he’d asked it over and over these last ten years. Whenever something went wrong, Suzume knew it, no matter how small or meaningless the incident in question was.

“I’m fine,” Naoya assured her. He knew that putting up a tough front wouldn’t get him anywhere, but it was his nature to defend himself.

“Where are you?” came the next question, though Naoya suspected she already knew that, too.

“Iron District,” Naoya answered, though he couldn’t see much of it from his vantage inside the parking garage.

“You should go home and rest. It’s not healthy to be out on a motorcycle in the middle of a storm,” Suzume suggested the same course of action that Sakura had, though even in text form, Naoya read that with a more commanding tone.

“I’m alright,” Naoya assured his better half. “This is the ideal time to be working, anyway.”

“Oh really?” the simple question could be seen as conversational, but Naoya read it as a challenge. “How much money have you made?”

“I’ve got a healthy head start on this month’s rent,” he tried to come across as confident, though he knew he’d barely gotten anything done this early in the morning.

“I see,” rather than congratulate Naoya, or even challenge him, Suzume appeared to accept Naoya’s statement with a stoic reply, which was somehow worse, in his mind. He felt as though Suzume didn’t believe him, but she was so desensitized to the idea that she didn’t bother to question it, which made Naoya feel pathetic in turn. All too often, Naoya felt like a little boy lying to his mother, rather than Suzume’s equal. He hated that feeling.

“I’ve got a lead on a job that will pay off this month’s rent straight away,” before he knew it, Naoya was already promising to make up for his shortcomings before he’d thought it through.

“Really?” Suzume seemed surprised, so far as Naoya could tell. “Doing what?”

Her question was entirely natural, but it invited commitment on Naoya’s part to a job he wasn’t actually interested in pursuing. He sighed, knowing that it was too late to “unpull” the proverbial trigger at this point.

“Just a little debt collection, that’s all,” Naoya tried to downplay the dubious nature of the job in question.

“That’s not your typical gig, is it?” Suzume immediately noticed that Naoya was stepping out of his comfort zone. “Where did you get this job, anyway?”

“It’s just a one-time request from a regular customer,” Naoya continued to try and make things seem reasonable and casual.

“Who?” Suzume asked, though she swiftly discerned the answer to her own question. “Someone from Sin Ward?”

Suzume knew that Naoya ventured into Yōgai-shima’s red light district in search of work, and she rarely said anything about it. As protective and controlling as she could be, Suzume never seemed the jealous type. Perhaps that was the one area of their relationship where Suzume extended Naoya full trust, believing that he was beyond the reach of infidelity’s temptation. Or maybe, Naoya wondered cynically, Suzume would somehow know the moment he crossed such a line, just as she seemed to know everything else. He told himself that it didn’t really matter either way, as he had no desire to ever cheat on Suzume.

That said, there was still a sense of “disapproval” in Suzume’s voice whenever the topic of working in Sin Ward came up. She clearly didn’t like Naoya working there, but he couldn’t say whether she looked down on that sector of the city for its dirty reputation, or because she feared that Naoya would run into trouble in its more violent confines. She wasn’t wrong to be worried; he’d run into a dozen street thugs like Juzo who all saw Naoya as some kind of challenge because of how tall he was, regardless of how much Naoya tried to avoid confrontation. However, that was one of few secrets Naoya kept from Suzume. She’d put up enough barriers in his life, and he knew that if she found out he was getting grief from street thugs, she’d forbid him from crossing into Sin Ward entirely, and he couldn’t afford that.

“It’s just from a guy I know,” Naoya didn’t confirm or deny Suzume’s suspicions, but he doubted that the caginess of his reply was lost on her.

“This sounds like a lot of money for a single job,” Suzume observed, ignoring Naoya’s non-committal answer. “This guy isn’t dangerous, is he?”

“No,” Naoya was quick to answer. “He’s a prolific cheapskate who’s quick on his feet. Once I get a chance to talk to him, he’ll fold.”

“Assuming he can repay everything he owes out of pocket,” Suzume was quick to point out something that Naoya had overlooked. What if this guy really couldn’t pay? He could kiss that fifty thousand yen goodbye, that’s for sure.

“I’ll figure things out,” he assured her, and, for once, she didn’t argue.

“Take care of yourself,” she let that sit as the terminus of the conversation, and Naoya looked down at that final message, unfulfilled.

Conversations between the two of them had been tense for a while. Half the time, any discussion they had ended up turning into an argument. It made a part of Naoya afraid to even engage with Suzume, sometimes, but there was another part of him that wanted to call her. He wanted to hear her voice, not just exchange texts. He wanted to really talk to her and reconnect and maybe rewind back to happier days. If Suzume was a normal woman, that might’ve been possible.

But Suzume wasn’t a normal person by any stretch of the imagination. She was an Inspector; someone entrusted with responsibilities that Naoya couldn’t begin to comprehend. Lives depended on her and, for twelve hours a day, she was cut off from him, doing whatever it was the Bureau demanded of her. Even the brief conversation by text was more than he heard from her some days. Asking for more would be selfish.

He slid his helmet back on and raised his Augur, transforming the device back into a set of goggles which he stuck to his face. The engine hummed to life between Naoya’s legs, and he wheeled his bike around, bidding a silent goodbye to the FAIR Insurance Agency as he drove down the ramps that led back to the street.

He pulled out into traffic, cautiously leaving the parking garage with more reserve than many of the city’s other drivers. He looked around towards the office building he’d just exited, and noted that a car had appeared to have jumped the curb and struck the side of the building, which had no doubt caused the violent rumble that startled Naoya a few minutes prior. He shook his head, thinking of a few colorful words for the driver, but he pushed the thought to the back of his mind and focused on the day ahead. He was eager to be out of the Iron District, and away from the crushing grey walls all around him.

He spent the next few minutes simply driving on impulse, not consciously thinking where he was going. In short order, he found himself headed east again towards Sin Ward, as instinct propelled him towards his next goal before his mind had caught up. He made the return trip to Sin Ward without any eagerness, not happy to be about Ichinose’s business of shaking down negligent clients, especially when he couldn’t be guaranteed of any payment at the other end of it. He second guessed himself as he crossed the bridge over the Sunrise River back into the neon-lit pleasure center of the island.

Was he really helping anyone by doing this? The only person guaranteed to benefit was Ichinose; if Naoya was successful in finding the debt-dodging pervert in question, he may not have any money, and he could recompense the soapgirls he’d exploited. At best, he’d be scared away from the Virgin Sacrifice for good, but if the establishment was really hurting for money that badly, then it was doomed if the man couldn’t pay. But would that really be a bad thing?

Ichinose’s establishment was hardly a cultural landmark or the center of the community; it was a brothel in all but name, and a brothel that was barely treading water in a city of vices. It was a business that exploited women, in an industry that was all about the exploitation of women, and from what Naoya had seen, Ichinose was hardly a velvet-gloved tyrant in the way he ran his business. He was a sleazeball who treated his employees like garbage, and now, if Ichinose was being halfway honest, his business rested in Naoya’s hands, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

If the Virgin Sacrifice went out of business, the girls could get jobs somewhere else, and maybe they’d end up avoiding the dead-end life Ichinose had foretold they would all share. At the very least, they could find work at other soaplands out from under Ichinose’s thumb. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that Ichinose was the only person who really stood to win or lose in this situation.

“And me, if he really has the money,” Naoya added, though the thought was far from comforting.

He didn’t like it from the off. He hated being thought of as muscle, and if he ended up using his strength, he’d prefer it was for a good cause, rather than do it for the sake of a low-level flesh peddler. Even so, he needed the money, and he’d already all but told Suzume he’d do it. More than that, if Ichinose could be trusted, this guy he was after already had other people sending debt collectors after him, which meant he’d get caught eventually. If he was going to do it, he told himself, he needed to do it now.

“Dial Ichinose,” Naoya spoke the words as his bike tore down the roads of Sin Ward, his actions once again already moving ahead of his conscious decisions. The Augur goggles immediately responded to his orders, and a small window appeared in the lens over his right eye, which featured the other man’s name and the word “DIALING” beneath it. The Augur rang twice before it was picked up.

“Hey-hey there, big guy!” Ichinose answered the call with an enthusiasm Naoya hadn’t heard from him before. “How’s it going?”

“Not Accident-kun, this time?” Naoya observed the man’s paper-thin good cheer. “He must really need this guy found.”

“That guy you mentioned,” Naoya brought up the topic of their prior conversation, which he imagined Ichinose was no less eager to talk about. “Is he still prowling around?”

“I keep an ear to the ground, and I haven’t heard a thing about him getting snatched up,” Ichinose reported, before coyly asking: “Why? You interested in my proposition?”

“I figure I’ll try and get this guy,” the words left a bitter taste in Naoya’s mouth as soon as they crossed his lips.

“Brilliant!” Naoya could hear Ichinose clapping in self-congratulation over the line. “Money talks, huh?”

Ichinose poked at Naoya’s motives, and Naoya had a powerful desire to hang up the call and just forget the whole situation, but he resisted the impulse.

“If you want me to catch him, you’ll need to send me everything you have on this guy,” Naoya tried to put himself in the mind of a hunter, as strange as a thought that was. “I need his name, a picture, where he goes. Everything.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ichinose didn’t seem remotely flustered by the request. “I’ve got what you need. Just cool your jets for a second.”

Naoya slowed his bike and pulled over to the side of the street, taking shelter from the rain beneath an awning that extended from the side of a building. He pried the goggles from his face, and the device shifted back into its phone form as he held it. He sat on the back of his bike for several long, impatient seconds as thunder rumbled overhead and cars sped by, their wheels sloshing on the soaked roads. Eventually, his Augur chimed, and the device projected a yellow screen as Ichinose sent him the information he requested.

A number of different windows opened on Naoya’s omni-tool, and he was momentarily taken aback by the amount of information he’d been sent. One window popped up after another, and Naoya fingered through the different screens, trying to organize the files he was sent. His eyes skimmed over a map of the city, and then he pushed a text file to the side, focusing instead on an open window that showed several pictures of the man in question.

The man in the picture wasn’t what Naoya had imagined when Ichinose described the infamous sex-pest. The man had a long face with bright skin, high cheekbones, and a square chin, with a pair of focused, dark eyes and a head of neatly groomed hair black hair that was going slightly grey. Even in the photo, Naoya sensed a man of reserve and authority, when he’d been picturing some overweight, balding horndog. Appearances weren’t everything, he reminded himself, and a man had desires, no matter how well-groomed he might seem.

Flicking through the pictures, Naoya observed several shots of the debtor, almost all of them from an overhead position from an indoor camera. The man was dressed often in a dark grey trench coat over a black suit, a retro article of clothing but not completely out of place considering the current weather. Though Naoya couldn’t see too much of the man in the grey coat’s surroundings, the floors and lights of each establishment seemed to be bars, restaurants, casinos, and other scenes from Sin Ward’s nightlife. However, Naoya noted that none of the pictures seemed to match the inside of the Virgin Sacrifice.

“Who is this guy?” Naoya asked, feeling as though he’d taken a step forward, only to find himself teetering on the brink of an unexpected pit.

“He’s the guy I told you about,” Ichinose was hasty to assure him, perhaps, too hasty.

“What’s his name?” Naoya asked and Ichinose scoffed.

“It’s in the files.”

“Shouldn’t you know?” the gap in Ichinose’s knowledge told Naoya something.

“In the suds business, we aren’t big on names,” the manager seemed almost affronted by the question. “What we care about is money. As long as you have that, we don’t ask for names.”

“Bullshit,” Naoya couldn’t fight the doubt crossing his mind. He shuffled the open windows showing the man’s pictures to the back and brought up the text file. He skimmed the page, some of which was detailed, while other passages were written in shorthand with questionable grammar and slang. The various entries on the page appeared to have been written by multiple authors, each one documenting alleged sightings of the man himself along with pictures taken from a distance.

“Nishijima Tatsuki,” Naoya read the name from the list and swept the picture back up, trying to commit the man’s features to memory.

“Yeah, that’s him,” Ichinose suddenly agreed. “Didn’t I say that?”

“What’s the map for?” Naoya asked as he brought the final screen up, which showed Sin Ward spread out from east to west with the fringes of Central Ward and Harbor Ward at either edge. Across the boroughs, various bulletins had been placed. The small beacons ran across Sin Ward from end to end, highlighting different businesses. The bulletins in the northern edge of the city were a dark grey color and marked with a red X, while the markers never strayed further east than the White-Mountain Sanzu that separated Sin from Harbor Ward, which left flashing red beacons across the west and south part.

“See all those little lights?” Ichinose referenced the digital display that Naoya was scrutinizing. “Each of those is a dive that this guy likes to frequent. All the high-class places up in Desire have been picked over. That just leaves all the nightclubs down on this side of town. All you need to do is pick a spot and wait and see if he shows up.”

“What about all the other spots?” Naoya demanded, trying to count up all the businesses that were still left. “How many other people do you have looking for this guy?”

“Just one, Nanbu-kun!” Ichinose balked, affecting a tone of betrayal. “You know you’re my main guy! But I keep telling you, this is an all hands-on deck kind of thing, man. You’ve got half of Sin Ward looking for this guy. He’s got a tab in every flesh bar in the city and a thousand people looking to collect.”

“If this guy’s blowing this much cash all over the city, then there’s no guarantee he’s got the money to pay you back,” Naoya observed, voicing his doubts in the tall tale he’d been told.

“Listen, Nanbu-kun,” the manager’s voice dropped to a soothing, pacifying tone that only made Naoya feel dirtied, somehow. “I’m giving you my guarantee. Cross my heart, and all that. You bring this guy to me, and I’ll give you every single yen I promised you.”

Naoya didn’t exactly put much stock in Ichinose’s promises, but he chose not to voice his distrust, if only to avoid listening to Ichinose try and cajole him into doing his dirty work some more. There were more important things to do right now; if Naoya had any hopes of catching this “Nishijima,” then he needed to act fast. There were already who knows how many men looking for the same man, and they had a head start.

“I’ll hold you to that,” Naoya promised the other man, and he immediately ended the call. He spurred the motorcycle into motion again and merged back into traffic, leaving the protection of the awning above as he drove back out into the rain. Having only glimpsed the map for a few moments, Naoya had already decided on his new direction.

Whoever else was looking for Nishijima, they’d already covered the north end of town. There was probably an important fact about this whole situation hidden in that piece of information, but Naoya didn’t have the time to consider it, nor did he believe that he could have put the larger picture together based on the little information he was given. However, logic dictated that if Nishijima’s other pursuers had already swept the north, that meant they would surgically cover the middle and western parts of Sin Ward and gradually move down to the southern coast. That being the case, Naoya opted to stay ahead of them.

He headed south, away from the Temptation District that served as the beating heart of Sin Ward, where the tallest towers cast eternal night around them while promising endless revelry. He left behind Decadence, as well, where Ichinose and a thousand other men operated their own dens of vices. On the southern end of Sin Ward was the Ambition District, which ran from west to east across the coast, stopped only by the waters of the Sanzu.

Contrary to its name, Ambition wasn’t the home of the captains of industry or the politicians that endlessly dumped their money into Sin Ward. Instead, Ambition was the proletariat sector of the city, where the countless men and women that staffed and serviced Sin’s hives of scum and villainy lived when they weren’t working at the behest of their masters. Free of the need to constantly market and tempt visitors, Ambition was allowed to be a more conventional sector of the metropolis.

The towering, rectangular monoliths that had been erected in mass in the founding of Yōgai-shima had been uniformly cut down in the years since Sin Ward established itself. Here, in Ambition, those buildings had been replaced by new ones. Often still hard, angular, and fashioned from concrete and iron, the forest of buildings that made up Ambition nonetheless still had more individuality than the mass-produced buildings that had been laid down before them.

Red brick and grey stone seemed to be common smart-fabric skins to cover the two-dozen story apartments that competed to blot out the sky. Bars and clubs could still be seen on every other street corner, but they were no competition for their gaudy cousins uptown, and instead they maintained a quieter presence, lacking the twenty-four-hour escapism the rest of Sin Ward promised.

The streets still had pedestrians walking through the rain, but unlike the corporate drones that walked in herds through the storm without regard, the people of Ambition were sparser and lacking direction. Many clustered around bus terminals in the road, others walked solitarily through the rain. Buses were just as frequent on the roads as private vehicles, and rail cars sped above ground and in-between buildings, the squealing of their wheels adding to the constant noise of the traffic and the storm.

Reaching the south coast, Naoya drove east, following the map to find the nearest point highlighted on the map. To his right, the dark sea stretched out beneath a grey sky all the way to the southern horizon. Somewhere, Naoya knew that Japan was out there, though the distance between the archipelago and Yōgai-shima was so vast that nothing of it could be seen. In fact, nothing of the outside world was visible from Yōgai-shima’s shores, save for one exception.

Connected to the southern coast of Yōgai-shima by a bridge was another artificial island, perhaps half the size of Sin Ward itself. Looking at it from the coast, it appeared to be nothing more than a massive silver dome that rose above the waters of the Yōgai-shima bay. The rounded shell was covered in grime whipped up from the furious wind and waves, the product of years of abandonment. A terrible hole had been blasted in the top of the dome, through which rain poured into the interior. It was called “Rakuen,” or something like that.

Apparently, the inside of the dome was fitted with the latest holographic and augmented reality technology, through which the interior of the island could appear and feel like anywhere else on Earth. Those that were lucky enough to see it in its heyday remembered Rakuen as a fantasy land where dreams became reality, but that dream wasn’t to last. The self-contained amusement park had been victim to some kind of catastrophe which had blown the hole in its ceiling and ultimately resulted in the abandonment of the entire facility.

No one rightly knew exactly what it was that caused the scuttling of Rakuen, though there were countless stories told about it on the streets. Many people inevitably pointed their fingers at the Bureau, claiming that they were involved in whatever happened on that fateful day, and the reasons they put forward ran the gamut from well-intentioned but destructive, to outright malicious. Whatever the truth was, Rakuen had been left to rot in the sea, ignored by the city at large, becoming a silver gravestone sitting in the water.

Naoya used the broken shell of Rakuen as a landmark in tandem with the map Ichinose had sent him. Up and down Ambition Ward were a variety of different bars, strip clubs, and cabarets, though they were closed during the daylight hours. He passed those establishments by; if Nishijima was really so devoted to getting his rocks off, he wasn’t going to be hanging around outside a closed bar in the early morning. Instead, he’d go somewhere he could get what he wanted regardless of the time of day, and that’s where Naoya was heading.

Sin Ward was filled with “dark spots.” Tsukuyomi had been the first one: the tower that stretched into the heavens had a sort of field around it that filtered out the daylight, leaving it and the cluster of smaller buildings in its shadow wrapped in perpetual night. Within unending darkness, Tsukuyomi became known as a place of infinite revelry, where men and women partied to celebrate the end of the world. Eventually, other spaces in Sin Ward would attempt to mimic the allure of Tsukuyomi, covering city blocks beneath roofs and domes that concealed them from the sun.

Ambition had one such night spot on its eastern edge, near the running waters of the White-Mountain Sanzu. There were five likely spots marked on the map within the boundary of that singular stretch of night-covered city, which meant it would be easy for a man like Nishijima to get lost in a place like that, and still get his perverse needs met. It was a fine place to look for a needle in a city-sized haystack, but a question lingered in the back of Naoya’s mind.

“What do I do if I actually find him?”

Nishijima didn’t look like much of a fighter, at least, from the photos Ichinose had provided. Judging by what the soapland manager said, he wasn’t expecting Nishijima to actually put up a fight. If anything, the man seemed like a coward well-practiced in the art of running away. However, none of that eased Naoya’s discomfort with the situation, nor did it make it clear what it was he was supposed to do. If he could lay hands on Nishijima, he’d no doubt he could subdue him. The question was, did Naoya really want to do that?

Naoya worked out in his spare time as a form of stress relief, when living trapped in a tight, concrete cube became too difficult for him to deal with. While Suzume would never let Naoya join a gym or visit a dojo, he’d been drawn to martial arts and cage fighting as another kind of hobby. He’d practiced basic drills he found on the net, and imitated what he’d seen professionals do, and those rudimentary fighting skills had been polished by the occasional street fight in Sin Ward when Juzo or another punk thought Naoya looked like a mark.

Naoya was confident in his physicality to see him through most situations, but he never once felt the desire to hurt someone. Confrontation was something to be avoided in his mind, and his size and meager fighting skills were something to be used as a deterrence, rather than to push other people around. Now, he was being asked to be the bully on someone else’s behalf, and he couldn’t shake his distaste for the situation he’d put himself in, no matter how he rationalized it.

“If I find this guy, it’s not like I can just tie him up and sling him over the back of my bike,” Naoya talked himself through the situation as he continued to drive. “I’m not a bounty hunter: I lay a single hand on this guy, and I’m the one who gets the police called on them. I can’t afford that, no matter what.

“Maybe I corner him and called Ichinose? If he sends someone over, maybe they can drag him back. I don’t know if I’d get paid what I was promised if I involved someone else, though. What if whoever Ichinose sends over tries to teach Nishijima a lesson, or make an example out of him? I don’t know if I can just stand there and watch that.”

“I’ll just talk to him,” Naoya shook his head, as though his better judgement was already trying to tell him that his solution wasn’t going to work. “I’ll impress on him the nature of the situation. He’s got a million cronies looking for him and he’s over a hundred grand in debt. He has to know how bad this looks. I just need to convince him to pay Ichinose back, and then I’m gone. No one needs to get hurt.”

“We’ll just talk,” Naoya said to himself again, trying to assure himself that the situation would be so easy to handle.

Through the cascading rain, Naoya saw a domed shape rise up on his left, looking almost like an arena. Despite its appearance, it wasn’t any stadium, but a private refuge for those that couldn’t leave the night behind. The complex was large enough to cover ten city blocks, obscuring all trace of what happened inside from the rest of Sin Ward. Taking a left-hand turn, Naoya wove through the city streets and headed toward the sheltered structure.

Leading into the dome was a four-lane road, two coming and two going. Both lanes were empty, save for the approaching Naoya, which seemed to say to him that everyone that wanted to hide inside had long since done so, and no one else was interested in joining the party. Naoya slowed as he approached the open gates, which stood quiet and abandoned, suggesting that no one cared to police visitors anymore.

Driving through the opening, Naoya left the grey sky behind as he headed into darkness. For the first few seconds, Naoya felt like he was driving into a tunnel. The sound of the wailing wind and crashing thunder faded with each second that Naoya moved forward, replaced only with the hum of his bike’s engine echoing off the walls and the whisper of air moving through the passage. The light from outside faded away, leaving Naoya in a momentary darkness.

In that instant, Naoya felt that same trepidation flowing through him that he felt inside the brighter halls of the FAIR Insurance Agency. Unable to see the floors, the walls, or the ceiling, Naoya’s mind told him that the space around him was collapsing, pressing down on him invisibly. He fought that primal fear nestled into his consciousness, trying to hold it back with reason and logic. It was a losing battle, but he needed to fight it only long enough to reach his destination.

Out from the darkness ahead, Naoya heard something. A deep, bass, rhythmic beat. As he drew closer, other sounds joined the music, ushering Naoya into the apocalyptic festival beyond. Emerging out from under some unlit precipice, Naoya entered into the night township proper. High above him, a silver moon hung in the sky, surrounded by a sea of stars that stretched in all directions without the smallest cloud in sight. Phantom buildings were projected against the night, whose every window shined with light.

Naoya’s brain struggled with a bizarre, instinctual vertigo as his senses tried to reconcile the conflicting information it had been thrust into. No trace of the storm wracked city of Yōgai-shima outside remained, replaced instead by the virtual display of the evening sky and the illusion of a metropolis that didn’t exist surrounding the night parade. Even though his conscious mind knew what had happened, the rest of his brain needed a moment to catch up and reorient itself.

The buildings beneath the barrier stretched up to the roof, trying to appear as tall and towering as they could beneath the artificial sky. Each structure was lined with a metal-exoskeleton, creating jagged, sharp, and harsh spikes that all pointed towards the heavens like spears. Gothic figures leered down at the streets from the rooftops, emulating figures of European and Japanese mythology. Angels and demons watched from around corners, while gargoyles and lion-dogs stood as silent sentries over doorways.

Neon colors flashed in a pandemonium of light, filling the streets with a barrage of clashing incandescence. Naoya had spent enough time on the streets of Sin Ward to learn that the constant lights were meant as a kind of directional guide. Businesses flashing pink lights advertised fleshly delights, while the blue and green lights signaled bars and alcohol. Yellow lights drew musical performances and parties, and red, the rarest color, signified violence.

Though bloodsport and prostitution were illegal in Yōgai-shima, there was no one in this dark sector of the city to enforce those laws. Over the past decade, the police force of Sin Ward slowly disintegrated, and the remaining few officers were spread thin and easily convinced to turn blind eyes to any situation. While Naoya had been lucky enough to have a squad car appear to prevent a fight from breaking out earlier this morning, he wouldn’t be so lucky underneath the false sky. Police didn’t come to places like this.

Instead, the dark sector had its own peace-keepers. Men in neon masks walked down the streets and guarded entrances of private businesses. Some of them openly carried clubs or knives, which they brandished without reserve, but the jaded residents of the black city seemed indifferent to the street toughs on all sides.

Naoya slowed as he rode down the streets, painfully aware of how out of place he was. He kept his eyes down and avoided eye contact with other drivers or pedestrians, not wanting to invite confrontation. However, he couldn’t avoid staring as he watched what appeared to be a salaryman walking down the street in his jet-black suit, stumbling on a pair of six-inch neon green heels. Naoya watched as the man in heels staggered past a woman standing on the street corner who was entirely nude, save for glowing bars wrapped around her breasts and groin. The woman was playing a guitar and caterwauling into a microphone, but her voice was lost in the constant sound of music blaring from open windows and doorways.

“Make peace with the time you have left!” a voice to Naoya’s left was somehow able to cut through the din and he turned to see a group of men standing on the street corner opposite the semi-nude performer. There were three men, each of them dressed in the robes of a yamabushi, though they were deliberately torn and blood spattered. Each of the three men wore a different color; black, red, and blue, and each of them wore different masks made to appear as various disfigured monsters. Each one carried a sign in their hand, and though Naoya struggled to see them in the light, he could see the sign carried by the blue-clad ascetic.

The sign featured an open coffin, out of which climbed a grisly moth or butterfly. The insect’s body was fashioned from human bones, with two sets of ribs making up its thorax and abdomen, while multiple pairs of human arms and legs extended from its skeletal torso and braced themselves against the open wooden box. A human skull leered from the sign, red lights painted in its hollow sockets while a black, curling tongue extended from between its teeth. “DEATH” was written in large brushstrokes beneath the coffin, while “REBIRTH” juxtaposed it above the bony wings of the monstruous insect.

“This world has already ended!” one of the three men evangelized his esoteric message, even as neon-masked bouncers surrounded the trio. “Give your lives to the next!”

Naoya watched the apocalyptic cultists for a few seconds, motivated only by a sense of curiosity at the bizarre display before he sped on, leaving the three men who worshipped death to be lost in the visual and audible noise of the city. He fixed his eyes on the map of the dark streets, using it to navigate. Without his Augur, he wondered if he could ever find what he was looking for or even find his way back out again.

The first of Ichinose’s hot spots came into Naoya’s view. It was a short cuboid building with neon flames dancing up the side, and a large metal cage was wrapped around it to make it appear as some kind of medieval torture device. Outside the open doors, oubliettes were suspended on poles while digital projections of scantily clad men and women danced in the confines. A pair of bouncers waited at either side of the door, a man and a woman, both dressed as devils in the costumes of prison wardens.

Naoya brought the bike to a stop on the far end of the street and stared at the building, but he had zero intention of ever going inside. He felt no temptation from the vices on offer, and the sight of the cage outside it made Naoya feel trapped. It reminded him that, no matter how real it might seem, the sky above him was fake and could fall down on him at any moment.

Part of him wanted to go inside, thinking maybe he could find Nishijima, but his claustrophobia wouldn’t allow him to get any closer. The anxiety began to spread as soon as he came to a stop, and his instincts told him to keep moving; moving helped him forget about the walls inching closer to him, but what if Nishijima came by after he left? He didn’t want to risk missing his target, but Naoya was self-aware enough to know that just sitting outside wasn’t a good idea.

He was out of place here, just as he was in the rest of the city, but for different reasons. He was an outsider here not because he was too tall, or because he didn’t dress in business attire, but because he was too normal. He wasn’t dressed in the bright, eye-gouging colors of the people on the streets, and he wasn’t looking to get laid, or find a stiff drink, or be entertained. Here, he was practically ordinary, and ordinary wasn’t welcome.

Naoya kept moving, spurring the Bridge-Runner back into motion. He told himself that it was because he would be less conspicuous if he was in motion, blending in with the traffic, and not because his fears were prodding him with unseen needles about the darkness and pressure of the walls and ceiling. Scanning the map displayed in the corner of his mind, Naoya traced a line through the cross streets between various points, creating a mental route that would allow him to circle between the hotspots Ichinose had put down.

He circled up and down the dark spot, feeling more aimless with each repetition of the cycle. In the span of a few moments, he’d seen more about other people’s kinks that he’d ever wanted to, but he couldn’t look away, for fear of missing the man he was looking for. He paused to let a group of women dressed as schoolgirls cross the street, their uniforms decorated with torn stockings, leather wrist straps and brightly dyed hair. All of them wore glowing masks, and they sauntered casually across the street while carrying pipes and bats. A couple of them waved in his direction and mimed blowing kisses towards him, but Naoya was careful not to acknowledge the gestures, or to even look back at them for more than a moment. Flirtatious as they might have seemed, Naoya felt the quartet was more interested in trouble than fun.

“I feel like I took a wrong turn and ended up driving through someone else’s wet dream,” Naoya thought to himself after the girls had passed. “Maybe Suzume is right about this part of the city.”

Between the constant weather, the noise, and the surplus of drinks, drugs and sex on offer, Naoya wondered what the real allure of this place was. Even an addict could only enjoy so much, right? The vulgarity of the closed off world made Naoya wonder what kept the people here. Didn’t they have lives outside of this cesspit? Didn’t they know the real world still existed outside? But even asking those questions reminded Naoya that he wasn’t really meant to be here.

The constant night sky made it hard for Naoya to keep track of time, but the feeling that he was wasting the day on this wild goose chase intensified with each passing second. He needed to pay rent this month, and there had to be a hundred jobs all over the city that he could get done in a fraction of the time and get paid. He wouldn’t get fifty grand up front, but at least it was guaranteed money. He was close to just calling it quits when he saw something out of place.

A pair of shabbily dressed men in torn pink and yellow flashing coats walked down the street together, carrying bottles in their hands. Naoya had strayed so far from the nearest neon-coated building that there was only a dim flash of red light projected against the nearest block, and the two men were hardly visible save for their glowing attire. He imagined that they were homeless men that had wandered into the dark sector to evade deportation. They were nothing more than a curiosity in Naoya’s mind, just another strange sight in a sequence of things he hadn’t expected to see today, when the two men were suddenly thrust apart.

They were fifty feet away when they were suddenly pushed aside. The two men had been walking abreast when they were momentarily separated by something Naoya couldn’t see. Shouts rang up and down the street, and the two men turned to gesture behind them, waving their fists at. . . what? Naoya focused his gaze on the two homeless men, and the Augur lenses adjusted themselves, brightening his surroundings to see what had happened. The dim light became brighter, and Naoya saw a third man.

Walking down the street, away from the two vagrants was a dark dressed man. Lacking the bright accoutrement of the glow in the dark city around him, he was nearly invisible in the long shadows of artificial night. Evidently, he was walking in the opposite direction of the two men, and he’d pushed them aside with derision rather than let them pass. Even as the two hobos hurled insults at his back, the dark man continued to walk, as though the pair was entirely beneath his notice.

As the Augur brought the pedestrian into sharper relief, Naoya recognized a kindred spirit. This man, too, didn’t belong in Sin Ward. He wasn’t wearing the bright colors, or leather straps and metal spikes, or an outrageous codpiece. He was dressed in a tightly belted dark grey trenchcoat over a dark suit, and he walked with his hands in his pockets, blind and deaf to the world around him.

“Is that. . . ?” Naoya leaned forward on his bike, peering at the stranger as a sense of disbelief clashed with recognition. At the same time, the man in the grey trenchcoat stopped walking and stood on the sidewalk, tensing for motion. He turned to look over his shoulder and Naoya froze.

“Nishijima?” Naoya stared in disbelief as the man he was looking for looked back in his direction. “There’s no way he could know that I’m here.”

There was a tense silence as the two stared each other down. Naoya knew that he was as darkly dressed as Nishijima, sitting on a bike with a quiet engine and halfway down the street. And yet, almost as soon as Naoya looked at him, the man in grey knew it. Was it coincidence? Feeling as though a spotlight was on him, Naoya wasn’t certain what to do, but Nishijima made the first move.

The man in grey sprinted away, bursting into motion, and Naoya instinctively gave chase. The engine of the Bridge-Runner sang, escalating from a gentle hum to a high-pitched whistle as it accelerated. He raced up the street, passing by the two homeless drunks that had slipped back into disregard for the world around them, and bore down on Nishijima within the span of two seconds.

Knowing, perhaps, that Naoya would run him down before he could get to safety, Nishijima took a sharp right turn and darted down an alley, breaking line of sight with the rider chasing him. Nishijima had been out of Naoya’s view for less than a second when he rounded the corner on his bike and could see down into the alleyway. Looking into the dark crevasse between the buildings, Naoya flipped a switch and the bike’s bright headlight turned on, flashing into the gap to reveal nothing.

Anxiety told Naoya not to enter the narrow space, and caution warned him that he could be ambushed from around the tight corners if Nishijima decided to fight back, or if a two-bit thug decided to try and take his ride. Urgency, however, reminded Naoya that Nishijima was putting more distance between them with each and every second, and he reluctantly guided the bike forward. The alley opened into a small, square space between four buildings, with three more narrow passages leading out.

Shining the light of his bike around, Naoya looked for the missing Nishijima, but the man appeared to have vanished without a trace. He left no footprints behind him, no vision of dark figure ducking around a distant corner, no fleeing footsteps echoing down the alley, or the sound of a door slamming. Nothing. Nishijima had disappeared.

“Amazing,” Naoya bemoaned his ever-present bad luck as he looked around at the dark, bare alley, trying to understand what just happened. “This guy isn’t just psychic; he can teleport, too.”

Frustration mounted, clashing with his ever-present anxiety. The distant rumble of constant music created a rhythmic pounding in Naoya’s forehead, and he decided he’d had enough. He backed the bike out of the alley and turned around, choosing to exit the strange perdition he’d willingly ridden into.

He exited onto the north side of the dark sector, and felt a great burden fall away from his shoulders as the grey sky reappeared overhead. Naoya brought the bike to a stop on the side of the road, and whipped off his helmet and goggles, letting the wind and rain play havoc with his hair. All the thunder, and the flashing lightning, and the howling storm felt a thousand times better than being beneath that false sky. The hurricane was real; it was true, and the lie of that ceiling pretending to be a quiet night sickened Naoya more than words could say.

When he finally found himself calm enough to drive again, Naoya rode the bike a few blocks away, having his Augur guide him to a nearby convenience store. He pulled into the rain-slicked parking lot of “The Last Stop,” which featured a colorful sign depicting a smaller version of the very same store beside a paved road that abruptly terminated in a steep cliff. Naoya left his bike sitting under an awning to shelter it from the rain and headed into the store. As he pulled the glass door open, a soft chime sounded overhead to signal the arrival of a new customer.

“Welcome!” the employee was nearly as tall as Naoya with white skin, freckles, and curly red hair. He was clearly a foreigner by birth, which made him a rare sight for Yōgai-shima, which was almost exclusively made up of Japanese natives. Naoya supposed the humble convenience store clerk had a story to tell about how he ended up in this part of the world, but Naoya knew better than to ask about it. He was certain the foreign-born man got more attention than he liked some days, and Naoya didn’t want to ignorantly add to his troubles. Instead, he simply flashed a smile and a nod at the clerk to acknowledge the greeting.

The inside of the convenience store was a pristine white color, with immaculate floors and walls, while the countertops and the sides of the aisle displays were dark green. The counter stood in the right corner opposite the entrance, while a small stand of newspapers and books stood on the right side of the doors. Against the storefront’s long rectangular window was another display, this one also carrying books, along with manga and magazines. In the center of the floorspace were three rows of different items available for purchase, ranging from dry snacks to over the counter medicines. On the far-left wall was the refrigerated section, where sandwiches, drinks, and desserts were stored.

The store was empty, save for Naoya, and he spent several minutes perusing the aisles, and his appetite eventually drew him to the back of the store. He looked over the neatly packaged sandwiches, meat buns, rice balls, and premade meals, trying to decide which one he felt the most in the mood for. Each item appeared to be carefully made with the freshest ingredients and then wrapped neatly in a container to maximize its freshness for the best possible flavor. On the front of each paper wrapper or plastic container was a white and green rendition of the store’s logo with its catchphrase printed beneath it in white letters: “Don’t wait until it’s too late!”

None of it was real, no matter how good it looked. The rows of frozen treats, noodles, and meals were all simply digital projections that looked entirely life-like, or perhaps it was that they looked too good that served to undermine the illusion. It didn’t help that the supposed refrigerated section was hardly cold at all. Looking at the computerized effigy of a sandwich that tickled his appetite, Naoya raised his Augur and swiped it over a sensor next to the holographic display, and the digital image flickered and disappeared. A small slot opened behind the display, releasing a blast of cold air, and an equally small mechanical arm extended itself holding a real sandwich. At almost the same time, Naoya heard the sound of the door opening over his shoulder, and a small chime rang out.

“Welcome!” the clerk greeted the next customer.

“Right on cue,” Naoya thought to himself. Fifty-percent of the time, whenever Naoya entered a convenience store, he was followed by someone. The later in the day it was, the more likely the encounter was to take place, but Naoya never found the interaction to have an entirely predictable set of circumstances, aside from the fact that they only happened in a convenience store or gas station, and the other person never appeared if Naoya was with someone. He didn’t look around to see if his suspicions were correct and chose to focus on the display in front of him. After a few seconds of eyeing the drinks on offer, Naoya was joined by the new customer.

She was on the shorter side, maybe around only five feet tall, and the top of her head barely reached Naoya’s right bicep. The young woman was dressed in a red raincoat that reached down to her thighs, and below that, Naoya could see she wore red leggings with a white strip down the middle of each leg, and a pair of matching red and white sneakers. She made a show of pulling down her hood, revealing a round, cute face with a pointed chin and nose, along with a head of reddish-pink hair that was tied into a braid that dangled over her right ear and over the back of her right shoulder.

Despite the raincoat and hood, Naoya couldn’t help but notice that the young woman that was so casually standing beside him was completely dry. Her shoes left no watery footprints, and her coat didn’t shed a single drop of rainwater. He knew there had to be a thousand ordinary explanations for that, but he couldn’t help but think back to the Inspector he saw on the bike earlier that morning and how the rain fell away from her without explanation.

The young woman made a show of leaning forward slightly, tapping her chin with one pink-pained fingernail, as if trying to decide what she wanted. Naoya knew from experience that the stranger bought things maybe a third of the time whenever the meeting occurred, and he couldn’t say why that was. He didn’t ask why, or even say anything when she walked up, and she didn’t say anything either.

Despite meeting this way over three dozen times, neither of them greeted the other immediately. Rather, they both kept silent until one of them found something to say. That said, the silence between them wasn’t awkward; if anything, Naoya imagined that actors on a stage felt the same way he did, waiting for a cue in the script to begin their interaction. Determined not to break the unspoken rules of the meeting, Naoya chose to focus on buying himself a drink.

His eyes wandered over the drink section, half of which was made up of unique Yōgai-shima flavors. A black can of Ghoul with a skeletal face etched into it leered at him, a tagline beneath it promising that it was “made from bones, to build stronger bones!” The words “Zero percent appetite! One hundred percent energy!” were written on a red can of Overclock, which featured a speedometer racing past a hundred miles per hour. “Liquid Meals packed with genuine flavor and real ingredients!*” filled several different spaces in the display, each can having a different color with a rendition of various meals printed on the sides, ranging from bowls of miso soup to pork cutlets. Naoya was almost curious enough to try one, but the large asterisk made him think twice: he didn’t want to know where the proteins and vitamins in those drinks came from, and he certainly didn’t want them in his body.

“You know,” the young woman observed Naoya as he slid his Augur over another display, and a mechanical arm deposited a can of green tea for him to take. “Back in Japan, stores weren’t like this at all.”

“Oh yeah?” Naoya prompted the young woman, still not looking directly at her, while he turned the can of tea over to look at the back.

“In Japan, the stores used to have everything up front for people to look at,” the young woman eyed the entire refrigerated section. “You didn’t need to swipe your credit card or your ID just to get a sandwich.”

“I can’t imagine how much food got stolen on a daily basis,” Naoya mused, but the young woman smiled and shook her head.

“In Japan? No,” she corrected him gently. “Crime was always very low. Shoplifting almost never happened.”

“That sounds like somewhere far away,” Naoya commented, dourly, and the young woman sighed, almost wistfully, no doubt thinking of another place and time.

“Yōgai-shima isn’t Japan,” Naoya reminded himself of the truism that was spoken every so often. Though the manufactured island was the product of Japanese engineering and determination in the face of human extinction, the island wasn’t really Japan. Too much was different, and too much had been lost in the Downfall for things to ever go back to the way they had before. It had only been ten years, but the aftershocks of that momentous event seemed to have fractured everything that Japan once stood for, down to the soul of each individual.

The culture of the survivors had shifted, and the times, too, had changed, along with what it meant to be “Japanese.” During the first half of the nineteenth century, Japan had been a nationalistic empire, and, during the latter half, it became a nation of proud pacifists. Both of those cultural identities had vanished, replaced with a mentality that was often much more violent, much more short-sighted, and thoroughly hedonistic. Naoya had seen more of that world today than he could consciously recall of Honshu, or Japan as a whole.

With that depressing thought, Naoya turned away from the cold food aisle and moved back towards the storefront with the display of magazines and bargain bin films. He looked down at the assortment of products on offer, but he didn’t put any conscious effort into actually considering them. Instead, his eyes floated over to the window, where he stared into the storm.

Over the tops of the nearby buildings, he could still see the shape of the dark sector looming in the distance, and his thoughts returned to the tumult of noise and shapes he saw within. Much as he wanted to forget them, he couldn’t ignore that he’d seen Nishijima there. He almost wanted to put the memory down to delusion, but he couldn’t shake the reality of it. He’d almost caught the man, but he’d somehow slipped away. Part of him wanted to wash his hands of the whole affair, and Naoya realized that was probably the wiser fraction of his persona, but something else, something prideful and hostile, felt slighted by the fact he’d been eluded so easily.

“I spotted him first,” he tried to console himself on his failure. “I had the upper hand, but I wasted it. I lost focus, and when I actually saw him, I let myself be surprised. That’s how he got away.”

Despite the narrative Naoya was crafting in his head, he couldn’t explain how Nishijima had instantly known he was being watched, or how the man had made such an easy escape. Naoya didn’t let that bother him, though.

“Next time, I’ll know better,” he told himself. “Next time, I won’t give him a chance to run.”

Naoya surprised himself with that chain of thought. Next time? Would there be a next time?

“Looking for something to watch?” the girl had reappeared again, standing now at Naoya’s left. She would follow him until he left the store, but she would always give him a few second lead before taking a circuitous route and just so happen to end up wherever he was standing. She tapped her finger to her chin as she looked over the selection of movies on offer, perhaps thinking that Naoya was genuinely perusing.

“Conbeni-chan.”

That was the nickname Naoya had given her. At first, he assumed she was some kind of company mascot or hired actress who approached lonely men and persuaded them to buy things; it was a weird idea, but weirder things happened in Yōgai-shima. However, Naoya had been to a number of different gas stations, convenience stores, and small pharmacies, and Conbeni-chan could show up at each of them. After that, he began to wonder whether or not she was some kind of AI construct that projected through an emitter of some kind. It explained her ability to show up at random times, but not her ability to open doors or handle objects, nor did it explain why she appeared when she did. That left two options in Naoya’s mind.

Either Conbeni-chan was an illusion, or she was stalking him. Neither option sat right. If the young woman was a figment of Naoya’s imagination, then she was a delusion the entire world suffered under, seeing that she interacted with the store clerk and other customers sometimes. Putting aside the notion that everything was just an idea in his own head, Naoya looked hard at the girl standing at his left.

She wasn’t someone you pictured when you thought about stalkers, even the rare female sort. She wasn’t inquisitive or prying about Naoya’s life, nor was she flirty or controlling. She was entirely casual about their encounters, as though Naoya was just a neighbor, and the two happened to meet by coincidence while out in the city. She never said or did anything untoward, and if their meetings happened just a little less often than they did, Naoya could almost rationalize the occurrences as a coincidence.

“It’s kind of funny,” the young woman in red mused. “Looking for something to entertain yourself in Sin Ward, of all places. Isn’t there enough to do out there?”

“Sin Ward isn’t really my scene,” Naoya assured her and Conbeni-chan gave him a scrutinizing look.

“Really?” she turned and looked out the window, looking up and down the street. “I think a lot of men say that when they get caught in this neck of the woods.”

“I’m only here for work,” Naoya explained, although he didn’t know why. “I’m not here to indulge.”

“Mmmmhmmm,” the girl rolled her eyes in a coy way that told him he was being teased.

“Do you work around here?” Naoya asked, nodding out past the window.

“Me? No,” the young woman shook her head. “I work in Central.”

That was a trap. In any ordinary conversation, you’d be expected to ask for more details, but not here. Naoya wasn’t allowed to ask about Conbeni-chan‘s personal life beyond what she offered, and that included her name. If he did so, she would end the conversation there.

“So does my girlfriend,” Naoya invoked the “G word”.

In most circumstances, if a woman was flirting with Naoya, the invocation of his better half would prompt a retreat. Most tried to gracefully back out of the conversation, while some women got offended, and assured him that not only had they NOT been flirting with him, but they also had boyfriends. An even smaller minority continued to flirt after he mentioned Suzume, which Naoya took as a sign to avoid those women in the future. Conbeni-chan, of course, didn’t really fall into any of those categories.

She was coy, teasing, and friendly, but never really crossed into flirting. She never complimented his looks, never tried to get his phone number, and never tried to set up a date. Any mention of Suzume was simply acknowledged as a fact of Naoya’s life that Conbeni-chan never challenged or seemed intimidated by.

“Does she know you work in a place like this?” the young woman affected a judgmental tone, though it wasn’t genuine. “If I were her, I wouldn’t let you step foot in this part of this city.”

Naoya noted the fact that the young woman allowed herself to enter Sin Ward but ignored the playful hypocrisy.

“It’s not like she can stop me,” Naoya scoffed. “I’m a grown man that can make his own choices.”

“That sounds exactly like something a little boy would say,” Conbeni-chan affected a teasing tone, and rolled her eyes.

“And that sounds exactly like something my girlfriend would say,” Naoya shook his head. “Women just can’t miss an opportunity to tell men how we should act and what maturity looks like to try and make us feel small. And if we capitulate? We still lose, and we get told we don’t take charge enough.”

“Being in a relationship isn’t a power struggle,” Conbeni-chan turned to face him, folding her arms. “It’s a mutual partnership. It’s not about winning and losing; it’s about both sides sacrificing for each other to the betterment of the relationship.

“Showing maturity as a man means being able to understand and predict what your partner needs ahead of time. Just because your girlfriend doesn’t say she doesn’t like something that you do doesn’t mean that it doesn’t bother her; she’s just chosen not to say anything to compromise with your pride. Over time, though, those countless compromises will add up like overdue bills, and if your girlfriend takes a hard look at all those sacrifices she’s made and sees that you haven’t made any of your own? It’s not going to look good for you.”

“Overdue bills?” Naoya repeated the words, rubbing his chin in thought. “I know a guy with a lot of those.”

“It’s just a turn of phrase,” Conbeni-chan waved a hand, trying to dismiss the notion so that Naoya could focus on her fundamental point, but he was too far down another rabbit trail. “Think of a romantic relationship like a journey; you and your lover are working together towards a single destination. In order to get there together, you both need to know where the other wants to go, and you need to plan ahead of time to get there.”

“If I knew where Nishijima was going ahead of time, he would be a thousand times easier to catch,” Naoya ruminated on Conbeni-chan‘s words, though they were processed through the lens of his current fixation. “But what does he want? More sex?”

But intuition told Naoya that was the wrong conclusion. From the beginning, nothing seemed right to Naoya about what he was told regarding Nishijima. More than just not looking the part, the man in the grey trenchcoat didn’t act the way Ichinose said he did. If someone like that really owed as many people as Ichinose claimed, then the safest course of action would be to hide out until the heat died down, or to move to another part of the city. Instead, Nishijima was walking the streets, knowing that he had a bullseye on his back: what made a man act that way? It was more than just trying to get a perverse itch scratched, he knew that much.

“Are you still listening?” Conbeni-chan asked, noting that Naoya was lost in pensive thought.

“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” Naoya admitted, though he didn’t elaborate on what exactly she’d helped him with.

“Good!” the young woman clasped her hands together, apparently pleased. She looked over the selection of films arranged before them and then reached out to pluck one from the shelf. “Let me give you some homework.”

“Excuse me?” Naoya did a double-take, glancing at the woman in red now holding a film case against the chest of her coat.

“This movie isn’t just a movie,” the woman warned him, her eyes large and expressive.

“Is it going to curse me if I watch it?” Naoya asked wryly, but his joke went unappreciated.

“No!” the young woman huffed, clearly offended. “It’s an experience! It’s a litmus test for any relationship!”

“One movie does all that?” Naoya reached a hand out to be given the film case, but the girl turned away, holding the movie case tighter, perhaps not liking the skepticism in his voice.

“This movie,” the girl looked down towards her feet, a fragile expression on her features. “I watched it a long time ago with someone very special to me. It taught us lessons about love that we never knew before.”

“It sounds like quite the adventure,” Naoya humored the young woman, who reluctantly turned back towards him.

“This movie can really put you through your paces,” she continued to sing its praises, holding it up as though watching the movie were some Herculean task. “If you aren’t ready for it, you may not understand it.”

“I think my girlfriend and I can handle it,” Naoya assured her, holding his hand out again for the movie case. Conbeni-chan scrutinized Naoya with a careful eye for several seconds, but slowly and gently held the item out for him to take. He delicately pulled the case from between her fingers and he turned it over. A cynical part of him expected that he was on the receiving end of a long-winded joke, and the movie would turn out to be a comedy or a raunchy film. Instead, the movie’s cover simply featured a man and woman standing back to back in front of a black background.

“Collision,” Naoya read the title aloud.

“It’s a Shimono Kojiro film,” the young woman stepped around to Naoya’s left to look at the cover with him.

“Wasn’t he busted for being a sex pest or something?” Naoya wondered aloud.

“Is that a deal-breaker?” Conbeni-chan asked, her eyes large and seeking approval.

“No,” Naoya shrugged. “If this movie is as great as you say, then I suppose I can separate art from the artist.”

“You won’t regret it!” the woman in red promised. “I think you’ll really enjoy it.”

“I hope so,” Naoya agreed, still feeling uncertain about what he’d agreed to.

“You can tell your girlfriend I said, ‘you’re welcome,’” Conbeni-chan giggled and Naoya gave her a questioning look.

“You’re welcome from who?” he asked, pointedly. “I don’t even know your name.”

The woman smiled and cocked her head to one side, playfully.

“That’s a silly question,” she wagged a finger at him and stepped away, signaling the end of the encounter. Naoya watched as she moved away to one of the other aisles, where she would peruse the store until after Naoya left, but she wouldn’t re-engage with him from that point on. There was nothing stopping him from trying to talk to her, of course, but he sensed that he would be breaking the rules in doing so and decided against it.

He paid for his food and drink, along with the movie foisted on him, and then left, not looking back to see if the girl in red was still there. Getting back on his bike, Naoya drove to a spot where he could observe the sheltered dark area of Sin Ward from a distance. He had no intention of going back in, but he couldn’t help but wonder what Nishijima had been doing there.

“It’s all about knowing what the other person wants ahead of time, right?” Naoya twisted the young woman’s words of wisdom to suit a very different situation.

If he knew what Nishijima wanted, he could catch him.

January 4th, 2044

09:45 AM

Sin Ward

Desire District

Nanbu Naoya

Sin Ward closed its hands around Naoya like a dark embrace, blocking out the view of the world outside as buildings pressed in around him. Above him was a roof that filtered out the meager sunlight and the sound of the rain, replacing the weather with the image of twinkling stars in a dark sky. The illusion was so real, it was easy to forget what time it was outside of Sin Ward’s many “dark spots.” Racing through the manmade night, Naoya wondered what kind of people chose to live beneath the tenebrous dome, but then, he quickly remembered the obvious answer to his foolish question.

From the buildings on either side of him, flashed signs of all sizes and types, promising every sort of carnal pleasure a man could ask for. Gambling, alcohol, female companionship; a thousand shops seemed to be advertising on each block he passed. Each establishment of sin promised that they had the most premium liquor, the hottest tables, and the youngest girls in town, all to compete for what Naoya thought had to be a vanishingly small market share. Afterall, Sin Ward had to be filled with innumerable businesses just the same as these. But all the blaring signs and digital displays of beautiful women pouring drinks held no allure for Naoya, no matter how many times they reminded him of their “quality service at low prices.”

Naoya sped by on his bike, ignoring the constant advertisements and the stifling darkness, bracing himself to leave the shelter of the tenebrous roof above him before he emerged back out under the dreary grey sky and the ever-present rain. Naoya’s bike was a Black Mountain brand “Bridge-Runner,” a heavy motorcycle that had been developed nearly a decade prior when Yōgai-shima was founded. It didn’t have the nanite structure of more recent and costly automobiles, but the Bridge-Runner was still a machine built for endurance, as everything on Yōgai-shima was.

The wheels of the Bridge-Runner were thick and round, so much so that Naoya didn’t need a kickstand to keep the vehicle balanced when he wasn’t on it. The wheels themselves were made of a complex fusion of materials to make them difficult to puncture, and their insides were filled with a special aerosol rather than air. If the wheels were compromised, the gas inside would leak out and rapidly harden into a light grey scab to maintain the wheel’s pressure. Naoya’s own wheels, worn as they were, were battle-scarred and covered in countless grey wounds from the long time he’d spent riding it.

The rims of the wheels, the suspension, and the frame of the bike were solid black with an angular, multi-faceted design. The fuel tank had been replaced with a self-contained fuel cell that had a decade long guarantee of service and a compact engine housed behind a sharp shell. The bike had a single cyclopean eye to serve as a headlight, though the device was currently hidden behind a mechanical eyelid. Behind Naoya’s seat was a large container, fixed to the frame of the bike, the only addition to its original layout. The square silver box stood out against the jet black bike, unlike the heavy rider on it.

Naoya was a tall man; he was reminded of that daily here in Yōgai-shima. Standing over six-foot-three, Naoya towered over most of the people he met, and his height was only matched by his broad shoulders and frame. He hadn’t chosen the Bridge-Runner just because he liked the look of it, but because smaller bikes were just too uncomfortable for him. But he emulated the bike in more than just size.

Naoya wore a jet black nanite coat, the most expensive bit of clothing he owned, which appeared as a leather biker jacket. The jacket had bronze zippers on its wrists, and an off-center zipper ran up the left side of his chest. Across the sleeves of the synthetic leather ran burnished bronze lines that were reminiscent of the sharp and jagged lines of circuitry, along with bronze pentahedrons among the linework. Beneath the jacket, Naoya wore a slate grey pair of cargo pants for utility, and brown boots. Shielding his head was a battered brown helmet that had seen its fair share of accidents, and he protected his eyes with a pair of goggles.

Looking through the smart-lenses of his goggles, the device displayed a digital path through the flooded streets of Sin Ward, cutting through the constant visual noise of the city beyond, and directed him to climb onto the ramp that led to the city’s southernmost highway which ran from east to west. Naoya obeyed the directions he was given, though he didn’t need them, as he’d run this route a dozen times. Up onto the ramp, he climbed, gaining a momentary vantage through allowed him to see more of Sin Ward.

To the north, the larger-than-life towers of Temptation District stood tall, inviting and gregarious even in the daylight. Skyscrapers shaped like embracing goddesses, or champagne bottles, or volcanoes, shined and glowed in the dismal morning, inviting travelers to partake in an escape from the dreary world. Above all the other towers was Tsukuyomi, a private city condensed into one of the tallest towers on the island, which was surrounded by another private city of much small buildings clustered around its base. A black sky stretched out over the peak of the massive spire, casting it into permanent night. The false darkness was lit only by a lying moon; a pale orb that shined over the parapets of Tsukuyomi, allowing the building to be seen from any point in Yōgai-shima.

Tens of thousands of men and women frequented Temptation District every day, and perhaps hundreds of thousands came at night. Naoya never did, though; at least not to drink or gamble. Somewhere in the city, someone needed something, and Naoya’s job was to provide.

As convenient as Yōgai-shima was made to be, the people on it still needed help in a million small ways. Sometimes, that meant doing some on the spot maintenance. Other times, it was a little extra physical labor. Today, it was a delivery. Deliveries were what Naoya had been doing since the start of the year, once Hurricane Izumi rolled in. As stalwart as the people of the city appeared in the face of natural disasters, no one liked facing the wrath of the typhoon head on if they could help it. However, that did leave plenty of work for Naoya, so he couldn’t complain, despite the depressing weather.

Soon, the time came for Naoya to break from the highway as his journey east neared its end. He took the exit ramp that forced him down, back into the city’s gullet, where tightly packed buildings crowded out the sky, denying him any view of the city’s distant corners. He slowed the bike as he rolled through the busy streets, where men and woman crossed the streets without care for traffic or the howling wind. More digital displays beamed advertisements into the streets, creating a visual and audible noise that was blunted only by Naoya’s helmet. He tuned out all the distractions out with learned practice, keeping his attention fixed on the road ahead.

He saw his destination out of the corner of his eye; a five-story oval-shaped building sitting among an assortment of taller neighbors on all sides. A red holographic banner made the stunted building stand out against its compatriots, tempting passersby with the silhouette of a nude woman being entangled by a serpentine crimson dragon that licked its hostage’s cheek with a forked tongue. The coils of the wyrm wrapped around the captive’s breasts and hips, carefully censoring any nudity, while still leaving plenty of flesh bare for the world to see. Beneath the provocative display, the establishment displayed its name: “The Virgin Sacrifice.”

Naoya brought the Bridge-Runner to a halt alongside the street and parked it, and the machine played a deep tone to signal that its whisper-quiet engine had shut off. Taking hold of his goggles, Naoya tugged at them once, and they broke apart. He held the lenses out in his hand as they dissolved and reshaped themselves, transforming into a black Augur with a yellow screen that displayed a map of the city. A soft blue blinking beacon represented Naoya’s current location, juxtaposed with red marker that signaled his destination. Naoya tapped the screen to signal he’d arrived and climbed off the bike.

“Amazing,” commented a wry voice from the sidewalk as Naoya stepped around the bike to open the box on the back. Naoya looked up to see a man standing on the sidewalk, dressed in a translucent red rain parka, who was shaking his head in disbelief and holding a lit cigarette in his right hand. “I can’t believe you’re still doing this gig shit in the middle of a rainstorm.”

“Well, it beats being trapped inside all day, Ichinose-san,” Naoya countered, and pulled a brown parcel out of the box before he slammed it shut.

“You’re absolutely insane,” the bystander disagreed, as he had done every time Naoya came by. Standing a head shorter than Naoya, Ichinose had a head of cropped brown hair atop a lean face with a thin smattering of hair on his chin that was supposed to pass for a goatee. Beneath his wet parka, Ichinose wore a light grey sweater and light blue sweatpants, with a pair of sandals that couldn’t have possibly kept his feet dry. His puffy clothing made the man seem wider than he actually was, as Naoya knew Ichinose to be bone-thin.

“One delivery for Ichinose Morio, proprietor of the Virgin Sacrifice,” Naoya held up the cardboard box for Ichinose to inspect, and the manager snatched it from his gloved hands with his bony fingers.

“One delivery, huh?” the man asked, eyeing Naoya skeptically as he raised the box to his left ear and shook it. “But how many pieces is it in?”

“Come on,” Naoya folded his arms over his chest, fixing the other man with a stern look. “Give me a little more credit than that.”

“The first package you ever brought me was smashed to bits, you recall,” Ichinose countered, lowering the package to look at the label.

“That was over a year ago, and I haven’t broken anything since.”

“Not for me, anyway,” Ichinose reluctantly agreed, tucking the parcel under his arm. “Alright, Accident-kun, I suppose a ‘good job’ is in order.”

“You keep calling me that, and I’m going to start charging you extra,” Naoya warned, but Ichinose simply grew a wide smile.

“Yeah, yeah, tough guy,” Ichinose turned a half-step away and motioned towards the building behind him. “Come on in; I’ll pay you inside.”

“Come on, man,” Naoya glanced up at the glowing crimson banner above them, then fixed Ichinose with a disapproving look. “Would it kill you to have my money waiting for me outside?”

“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” Ichinose waved him off. “Besides, carrying hard cash on you in this city is asking for trouble.”

“Every time I set foot in there, my girlfriend gives me grief,” Naoya objected, pointing up at the sign.

“Then don’t tell her you came by!”  Ichinose sneered, as though his answer to Naoya’s problem was the simplest thing in the world.

“Oh, I don’t need to tell her,” Naoya shook his head and sighed. “She always knows.”

Nonetheless, Naoya stepped away from his bike and followed the skinny soapland owner through the doors of his establishment. Through the open doors, they came into a small square lobby with a counter nestled into the far righthand corner. A surly looking man dressed in a button up shirt and vest far too professional for the establishment’s clientele slouched in a seat behind the desk. He clutched an Augur in his hands, and every tap of his finger elicited a note or sound effect as he wiled the day away. Ichinose shot the slacking worker a scathing look, but it did little to rouse the man from his stupor.

The floors were a brownish-orange tile, and the walls were painted red in keeping with the red dragon logo of the business. Across the walls were digital portraits placed a foot and a half apart, each one rotating through a gallery of girls who worked at the Sacrifice. They were all in various states of undress, and all shot from alluring or voyeuristic camera angles so that potential customers could get an idea of the service the girls could provide. On the right-hand corner of each photo was the woman’s working name and a list of their “specialties.”

Naoya tried to avoid looking at any of the photos, though he did pause long enough to catch his own reflection when one of the digital frames darkened for a moment to switch pictures. Tugging off his helmet, Naoya found a young man with black-brown messy hair staring back at him. He had a strong chin and a pair of thick eyebrows over a pair of amber eyes that glowed back at him. He found himself glowering back at his reflection, and he had to remember to soften his expression: people often found him more intimidating than he wanted them to. He paused a second longer to try and smooth his unkempt hair and then tucked his helmet under his arm before following Ichinose.

The building seemed empty this early in the morning, which was what Naoya expected. He followed at Ichinose’s heels as they passed by rows of doors, each one leading into a private room. Occasionally, a woman would step out into the hallway, sometimes wearing clothes, sometimes not, and they often distracted Ichinose with a number of complaints, be it about the business or their customers, and every time it would end with Ichinose saying something very ungentlemanly and brushing them off.

Though he disapproved, Naoya bit his tongue; he knew that Sin Ward wasn’t the place for white knights, and both Ichinose and his staff would likely be more offended by his interjection, regardless of which side he took. People came to Sin Ward precisely because they didn’t want others telling them how to live, and, for all Naoya’s reservations, Ichinose was at least a consistent client.

“I don’t know why you’re still doing this,” Ichinose repeated the same sentiment he’d had outside. “This is Yōgai-shima: there isn’t anyone on this island who really knows if there’ll even be a tomorrow. You can’t work like it’s the year two-thousand. The long-suffering employee gimmick just doesn’t make sense anymore. Whether its private or personal, business or pleasure, you need instant gratification in this town.”

“What’s your point?” Naoya prompted the other man, although he already knew where the conversation was headed.

“I mean all this stuff you do,” Ichinose waved a hand in Naoya’s general direction. “Schlepping all over town to do a little of this, and a sprinkle of that. It must be exhausting, and you can’t tell me that it pays well.”

“I get my returns in other ways,” Naoya deflected from the subject of money. “Personal freedom being chief among them. I’m my own man, not some company or government stooge.”

“Yeah!” the soap manager scoffed, openly ashing his cigarette on his own floor. “Instead of being owned by just one company, you sell yourself to anyone with two coins to rub together. You’ve probably had as many customers as any of the girls here.”

Naoya didn’t find the comparison particularly flattering, but he held his tongue again.

“Look,” Ichinose continued, softening to a more diplomatic tone. “All I’m saying is, there are a thousand easier ways to make cash at a time like this. Trust me.”

“Easier or illegal?” Naoya wondered aloud and Ichinose rolled his eyes.

“Illegal!” he repeated the word as though it was the punchline of a joke. “Tell me, when did I say anything about doing anything illegal?”

“It was implied,” Naoya brushed off the question, but the retort seemed to strike a nerve with the flesh peddler.

“Look here, Accident-kun,” Ichinose turned to face Naoya, and he jabbed an accusing finger up under his chin. “Never tell me what I meant, or what I implied. I get enough of that passive-aggressive crap from the girls. I’m a straight-shooter; I say what I mean, and I mean what I say.”

“Sir, yessir,” Naoya held up his hands to signal his retreat, and Ichinose seemed mollified, for the moment.

“Illegal’s got nothing to do with it,” Ichinose insisted, his mouth twisted into a sour frown. “It’s about doing what’s best for you in the here and now. No one’s asking you to break the law. I’m just encouraging you to put all that energy to better use.”

“And where’s that?” Naoya looked around, gesturing towards the empty halls around them. “Here? This place is dead. Honestly, I bet I’m busier than you are.”

“And you’d have bet wrong,” Ichinose wagged a finger at him with his cigarette hand. “It may seem quiet now, but when the sun goes down again? This place will be busy, monsoon be damned.”

“I have a hard time believing that,” Naoya couldn’t bite his tongue on this subject.

“That girlfriend of yours must keep you happy,” Ichinose mused, taking another drag of his cigarette while he considered Naoya.

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t get it,” Ichinose exhaled as he spoke. “You don’t understand the desperation that other men feel. That storm out there? That won’t stop a single one of my regulars. The touch of a woman produces a thirst in most men that no drink can quench. Once you start feeling it, you can’t get rid of it, and once you’ve had your first taste, you’re hooked.”

“You make it sound like you cater to zombies, not people,” Naoya chuckled, and though Ichinose smiled, the good humor didn’t reach his eyes.

“Oh, that’s exactly what they are,” Ichinose assured him. “Slavering, drooling piles of human crap hungering after what they can’t really have. They’re losers, Naoya, all of them. Men who are too damn ugly, way too creepy, or just too poor to afford women in the long-term, so they save up what little cash they have to buy for a moment what they can’t have for real. Let me tell you, long before opiates, sex was mankind’s first addiction, and these suckers prove it every day. But don’t get me wrong; the women are no different.

“Bunch of girls with daddy issues striving to stick it their parents,” the manager waved a hand dismissively towards one of the rotating images of the soap girls displayed on the wall. “Some of them have higher ambitions, though; they think they’ll just do dirty work for a little while, save up some scratch and go to college or something. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it doesn’t work out. If alcohol doesn’t get them, and they don’t end up on the business end of a dirty needle, then they end up falling for some piece of shit guy who ruins their fragile plans. The ones that stay never get out of the business until they get too fat or too old. After that, it’s the streets. There’s no retirement scheme in the world’s oldest profession.”

“If I can be honest, it sounds to me like you hate this place,” Naoya couldn’t resist pointing out the obvious.

“It’s a trial, sometimes,” Ichinose admitted, trying to avoid overt agreement. The pair stopped outside Ichinose’s office door, which was coated in a light brown wood laminate and a sign that said, “No interruptions.”

“Aren’t you the one who just gave me a speech about not slaving away for a better tomorrow?” Naoya pressed on the other man’s momentary weakness. “If this place doesn’t make you happy, if you hate your own customers, why do it? Why not close the doors and try and make something of yourself before time runs out? Give yourself and the girls a chance to live a life a little more meaningful.”

“Meaningful,” the manager swept his hand through the air with disdain, as though he were swatting it down with his bare hand. “I had a chance at a meaningful life, once upon a time. Look at me and tell me what you see, Nanbu-san,” Ichinose, still wearing his see-through red parka and baggy clothes, held out his hands, inviting the other man’s scrutiny. “A nobody, that’s who you see. But I could have had something more. I could have been a lawyer.”

“Really?” Naoya couldn’t hide his skepticism. “What happened?”

“Tokyo happened,” the man snapped with a matter-of-fact tone. “What do you think?”

“Right,” Naoya agreed, feeling foolish for not immediately thinking of it. The Downfall of Tokyo was still foremost in many people’s minds, but to Naoya it was more of an idea than a concrete memory.

“I was studying at the University of Tokyo,” Ichinose stared into the past, taking a deep drag of his cigarette as he relieved memories of another time. “I had a scholarship, and a friend of a friend promised me an internship at a bigtime practice. I was set, Nanbu-san. I had it all figured out. My future was laid out in front of me. Then, one day, Tokyo goes up in smoke. My friend gets turned to ash, his friend burns up, too. Whole damn law firm burns down. Not to mention the university. Everything’s just gone overnight. Honestly, I don’t know how I made it out, much less how I got here,” Ichinose rubbed his temple as he looked down at the floor, trying to fish up a detail from a recollection he’d deemed unimportant. “It was my grades, I think; that stupid scholarship, if you can believe it. All my studying, and whoever’s in charge of migration pulls my name out of a hat and decides that I look like a benefit to society. What a jackass.”

“Why didn’t you finish studying law?”

“Everything was chaos, right from the start,” Ichinose shook his head. “Once the Cabinet swept into power, they and all their cronies couldn’t wait to start tearing up the old legislature so they could stick it back together the way they wanted. I couldn’t rely on anything I thought I knew about the justice system before, and every other day, there was some knew order from our rulers on high that changed everything we were trying to build. I couldn’t take it. No sense in practicing law when the law doesn’t mean anything. I quit.”

“And somehow you end up running a soapland?” Naoya chose to skim over the no doubt strange circumstances that brought the other man to this place.

“Life’s a bitch,” Ichinose chuckled, finding his own life to be little more than a dark joke in the moment. He turned away from Naoya to push his office door open, and Naoya waited patiently outside. The wait dragged on for a few minutes, and Naoya fished out his Augur to begin looking at other jobs.

The device connected to the Yōgai-shima Maverick, an online job board for freelance problem-solvers. The digital display was split in half, the left side showing a list of available jobs posted by citizens across the island, while the right side of the screen revealed a map of the city. Across the eastern side of Sin Ward and the western parts of Horizon, numerous little beacons had been placed, each representing the location of a listed job or a client. Naoya scrolled through the list, highlighting a handful of jobs that he thought looked easy or promising. Somewhere, he heard the sound of a door opening, but he didn’t pay it any mind.

“Hey, is the boss in?” a young woman’s voice intruded on Naoya’s thoughts and he looked up. Standing in front of him was a young woman with dyed blonde hair dressed in a long dark blue puffy jacket with white fur lining. She wore a pair of boots that were still wet with rainwater, but her legs were bare, suggesting that she was wearing a revealing dress or a pair of shorts beneath her coat, despite the weather. The young lady had the hood of her coat pulled down, and she was running a comb through her hair absent-mindedly.

“Yeah,” Naoya gestured at the door. “He’s getting something from his office.”

“Oh!” the young woman’s eyes brightened, and she smiled at Naoya. “You’re that delivery guy! You come here all the time! What was your name, again?”

“It’s Nanbu. I’m just here on business,” Naoya assured her, but he knew she already understood that.

“Oh, that’s right,” the young woman twisted and turned on the spot. “That’s the weirdest thing, when you think about it,” she mused, looking at Naoya sideways. “What kind of guy comes here every day but never actually. . ., you know?” she didn’t finish her statement, choosing to let implication speak for her.

“Gets his back washed?” Naoya offered, sidestepping the actual nature of the business, and the young woman tittered at that, placing a hand politely over her mouth.

“Something like that,” the soapgirl agreed, playfully.

“Well, I have a girlfriend, so I have someone to rely on if I forget to wash behind my ears,” Naoya explained, hoping that it would end the line of inquiry.

“Oh, really?” the young woman pretended that was the first time she’d been told that. “Does she work here?”

“No,” Naoya tried not to deny the fact too quickly, and risk sounding disdainful or superior.

“Well, then how would she know if you got someone to help you wash your back?” the young woman questioned, asking her question in a low, inviting voice.

“Oh, she always knows,” the door to Ichinose’s office swung open and the manager stood in the doorway. “Or so I hear.”

“You got my money?” Naoya asked and the manager scowled at him.

“‘My money,’ he asks me,” the manager rolled his eyes. “Of course I have it.”

Ichinose held up a small card in his hand and Naoya raised his Augur to scan it. There was a brief blip and the Augur’s screen changed, displaying a reading that said: “Transaction Complete.”

“Thank you for your business,” Naoya expressed his gratitude, hoping that it signaled the end of their interaction. Ichinose, however, wasn’t finished.

“Speaking of business,” Ichinose leapt on the word. “I have a proposition for you.”

“Uh, boss?” the young woman tried to step in.

“What are you doing here?” Ichinose waved her off, barely remembering she was still there. “Go find a customer.”

“There’s only one guy here, and you’re keeping him all to yourself,” she protested.

“Please don’t drag me into this,” Naoya quietly prayed, but Yōgai-shima’s mercurial gods already had him in their sights.

“You think if my boy Naoya needs his undercarriage soaped up, I’d have you do it?” the manager balked. “I’d cut this guy a deal with one of my premium ladies, not you.”

The woman’s jaw dropped in shock, and Ichinose reached up around Naoya’s shoulders to guide him out. Naoya shifted uncomfortably, but if Ichinose noticed that he tried to pull away, the soapland manager pretended not to notice. Ichinose led Naoya for a few steps, lowering his voice so that no one could overhear them.

“Look, Nanbu-kun, I got this thing I need help with,” Ichinose began.

“And what’s that?” Naoya demanded, lacking a gentle way to exit from the situation.

“I’ve got this customer,” the manager launched into his proposition. “He’s a real perv, this guy. Man, if I told you even half the things the girls said about him, you’d need three showers. You know what it means when a guy asks for a ‘shelter in place?’”

“No, and I don’t want to,” Naoya raised his hands, rushing to stop Ichinose from going further.

“I’m telling you, this guy’s a real piece of work,” Ichinose went on, mercifully avoiding any details. “He’s always coming around here with IOU’s, claiming his ship is coming in, and whenever we try and throw him out, he claims he knows powerful people and we have to back down.”

“What kind of people?” Naoya couldn’t resist asking.

“Let’s just say, they’re men who are fond of tattoos and classical Japanese architecture,” Ichinose gave Naoya a knowing look.

“If this has anything to do with the Towers­—,”

“Relax, buddy, relax!” Ichinose placed a hand on Naoya’s chest, but the gesture was far from reassuring. “Who said anything about the Towers? Not me. Besides, turns out everything he said was bullshit, and his friends, if he ever had any, have cut him loose. He’s got a debt, and it’s got to be paid.”

“I’m not sure I want to get involved in this kind of thing,” Naoya disentangled himself from the smaller man. It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to hire Naoya to work as muscle, but he’d done everything he could to avoid that line of work. People were often intimidated by him, and Naoya never relished that.

“I’ve been cheated, Nanbu-kun!” Ichinose protested, affecting a betrayed town. “My girls have had their pussies robbed! And a hundred thousand yen, besides!” despite his mock affront, it was clear what Ichinose valued more.

“And they say pimps don’t trade in promises,” Naoya observed, unable to stop himself from smiling.

“Laugh it up,” Ichinose snapped, lightly shoving Naoya with one hand, but the larger man was hardly moved. “But if I don’t get the money back from this guy, I gotta find some way to write it off. That means pay cuts, man. I might even have to fire some of the girls.”

“I don’t know,” Naoya kept trying to signal his disinterest, but Ichinose was implacable. “Can’t you hire a professional for this kind of thing?”

“Believe me, I’ve tried!” Ichinose continued to bemoan his fate. “But this guy’s been dining and dashing all up and down, hitting every establishment he can. Every business owner in Sin Ward has a bullseye on this guy’s back, and he sees all the regular collectors coming before they get close to him. It’s like he’s got ESP, or something, Nanbu-san; if anyone within three miles of him wants money, he knows it, and he runs.”

“If this guy is that slippery, I don’t think I can help you,” Naoya shrugged.

“That’s the thing though, Nanbu-san!” Ichinose insisted, a broad, mischievous smile spreading across his face. “He doesn’t know you! You’re an outsider. You can get close to him and he won’t suspect a thing!”

“I still don’t like this.”

“C’mon, Nanbu-kun!” Ichinose was nearly begging. “You’re my last chance at getting this money back! I’ll tell you what: you get this guy, you get half the money.”

Fifty grand? That was nothing to sneeze at.

“It’s not just the money,” Naoya felt his patience wearing very thin, but he was still determined to try and drag himself free in the most polite way possible.

“If you won’t do it for the money, or me, do it for the girls, Nanbu-san!” the manager finally resorted to cupping his hands in a display of complete contrition. “Do it for the women who don’t have anywhere else to go!”

“These wouldn’t be the women you were slagging off a few minutes ago, would they?” Naoya asked innocently, brushing a hand through his matted hair.

“Oh, you remembered that,” Ichinose was clearly taken aback, and he looked away, caught off guard. He wasn’t the first person to think that Naoya was slow on the uptake, or to be made to look foolish when they underestimated him. “Still, I-uh, I. . .—,”

“I’ll think about it, okay?” Naoya cut him off, his patience exhausted. “That’s all I can promise.”

Naoya turned to leave, and, thankfully, Ichinose didn’t follow.

“You think about it, Nanbu-san!” the manager called after him. “You think about the money! And the girls!”

But Naoya did his best to tune the other man out, crossing the lobby with quickness as he headed for the door. He pushed out the door and stepped back into the howling rain, momentarily happy to be outside again, no matter how onerous the storm seemed, but then, as he laid his eyes on his bike parked on the curb, he realized things were about to get worse.

The rain dropped an endless shifting curtain down on Yōgai-shima; a rippling translucent screen that was painted in a thousand colors by the lights of passing cars and neon signs. Through the screen of falling water, Naoya could clearly see the shape of his bike still standing along the street, but it wasn’t alone. Three figures had joined the motorcycle, one of them going so far as to sit on it.

“Get off my bike,” Naoya barked as he stalked towards the figures through the rain, however, his words only elicited laughter from the three men.

“I told you!” the man on the bike sat on it sideways, facing the doors of the Virgin Sacrifice, and he pointed at Naoya as the big man walked towards them. “The delivery boy is here!”

The three men were all wearing raincoats to shelter them from the weather, which covered them from head to toe, but Naoya recognized them, regardless. The man on the bike continued to laugh, and the other two men flanking him seemed obliged to join in, although nothing about the situation could be described as humorous. Naoya kept his eyes fixed on the interloper seated on his ride, ignoring the two flunkies that stood on either side.

“He looks pissed, Juzo,” spoke the man standing on Naoya’s right. He was the tallest of the three, even eclipsing Naoya by a half-inch, but he was so skinny that he made Ichinose seem like a specimen. He wore a yellow parka with the hood pulled over his face, though Naoya remembered a wide face with high cheek bones, a pierced nose, and a headful of numerous microbraids.

“You don’t remember the last lesson we taught you?” the question was directed at Naoya from the man on his left, though Naoya didn’t answer. Dressed in a dark green raincoat, he was only as tall as Naoya’s chin, but he had a stout build that promised some level of strength. He wore a bucket hat to protect his shaved head from the downpour, and a balaclava covered the lower half of his face.

“Guy’s dumber than a rock,” the man sitting on the bike sneered, reclining on his stolen seat. Juzo, the ringleader of the trio, was the shortest of the three, his head barely clearing Naoya’s collarbone. Dressed in an ostentatious pink raincoat, Juzo had long, stringy hair and pointy ears with numerous studs in them. Unlike the other two, Juzo kept his hood down, allowing the rain to soak into his hair and mat it to the sides of his face.

“Man, you’re a real loser,” the tall one commented, looking over Naoya’s shoulder to look at the building he just came out of. “It’s not even noon and you’re already getting a scrub down. You just can’t wait to get your dick wet, can you?”

“I don’t need to pay for sex,” Naoya answered, still not looking away from Juzo, who glared back at him with a toothy smile. “Unlike some people.”

“Who the fuck are you talking about? Better not be talking shit about me,” Juzo burst onto his feet, standing and crossing the distance between himself and Naoya in the blink of an eye. He entered Naoya’s space with hesitation, standing chest to chest with the taller man as he continued to hold eye contact. “You think you’re a badass, delivery boy? You’re not.”

Naoya remained cool as Juzo bounced back and forth on his feet, clearly feeling the anxious thrill of adrenaline. The small man was like a badger, an animal that had to make up for its lack of power with pure viciousness. Whenever Naoya had the misfortune of encountering the would-be street tough, Juzo often threatened to escalate to violence on a moment’s notice, trying to come across as crazed and unpredictable to keep Naoya off-guard. The put-on insanity, however, had long since lost its charm along with any hope of intimidating him.

“Maybe he needs another lesson, Juzo?” the wide-one stepped forward and cracked his knuckles, trying to emulate his “leader’s” tough-guy persona, for all the good it did.

“Keep back, Kubo,” Juzo raised his right hand, motioning for his lackey not to interfere, before lifting his right leg. “This sack of shit is—,” but Juzo didn’t get a chance to finish. He tried to kick Naoya in the stomach to add emphasis to his declaration, but the attack barely budged Naoya, while Juzo tumbled backward across the slick ground. The small man hit the back of his head on the bike, and he openly winced and clutched his skull.

“You think this is funny?” Juzo demanded in a strained voice, looking up at Naoya, who was smiling down at him.

“A little,” Naoya admitted, absently brushing his coat where Juzo’s dirty shoe had touched it. “But if you did any damage to my bike, you’re paying for it.”

“Paying for this piece of shit?” the tall one asked, chortling in derision as he considered Naoya’s ride, before aiming a swift kick at the front tire. “Forget fixing it; you’d have to pay to get rid of it.”

“Don’t do that,” Naoya growled at the tall thug, who smiled back mockingly, thinking himself untouchable.

“Do what?” he asked, innocently, before aiming another kick at the bike. “This?”

The smile fell from his face as Naoya took a step forward, and the grin was replaced by wide-eyed panic. Evidently, he believed that Naoya couldn’t be cowed into fighting back, and the moment he was proven wrong, he tried to retreat. He managed to take one step back into the street before Naoya caught him by the lapel of his parka and dragged him around, making the lanky man stumble as he tried to keep to his feet.

“Woah, woah!” the man cried out as Naoya pulled him around. “Kubo, get this guy off me!”

The heaviest of the three was already stepping over their fallen leader to protect his friend, but Naoya wasn’t having it. Dropping his helmet, Naoya’s left hand shot out without even a glance in Kubo’s direction, and he took hold of the man’s throat. With one arm, he lifted the group’s enforcer off the ground and then threw him back, depositing him roughly on the concrete some five feet away.

“Fucking piece of shit!” Juzo came up from the ground, and he reached into his parka, and Naoya sensed that he was going for a weapon. The moment Naoya turned his head to observe whatever it was the badger was going to whip out, Naoya felt something collide with his cheek and stars momentarily flashed in his eyes. His right cheek stinging, but otherwise unharmed, Naoya looked towards the tall man again, who’d only been brave enough to hit him when he wasn’t looking.

Naoya felt his left-hand balling into a fist as an almost reflexive reaction, and the man struggling in his grasp went white, terrified of his imminent comeuppance. Juzo stepped closer, so angry he was blind, every bit the wolverine Naoya imagined him to be. Beyond him, Kubo closed ranks, circling around Naoya to trap him between the three men. The tall-man’s inarticulate sputtering melded with Kubo’s barking orders for Naoya to put his friend down, which then blended with the sound of Juzo growling. All the noise, combined with the howling wind and the blood pounding in Naoya’s ears made for a chaotic clamor that made it impossible to hear anything. However, all four men could still see, and the sudden flash of red and white lights was impossible to mistake.

All four men froze in an instant and then turned their heads as one to Naoya’s left. Sitting at the end of the street was a white patrol car marked with a red stripe. Atop the vehicle was a set of lights, which flashed alternating colors. The vehicle’s engine purred quietly in the rain, sending up soft trails of steam into the already damp air, but it made no move to come closer. There was a brief pause as the four men stared into the opaque windshield, trying to gauge the intentions of the officers hidden behind it.

Naoya relaxed his fingers and the tall thug stepped away, hastily retreating. Kubo awkwardly patted Naoya on the back, as though congratulating him before ambling away. Juzo affixed a false smile to his face and reached up to Naoya’s left shoulder to mime brushing dirt from his jacket. His eyes never left Naoya’s though, even as he tucked whatever tool he had stashed in his coat back into its hiding place.

“Next time, asshole,” the small man promised, his voice sharp and eager despite the sweet smile on his face. A moment later, it was over. The three men crossed the street, leaving Naoya to stand alone in the rain under the flashing red and white lights. He looked away from the retreating trio and stared back at the squad car. The lights flicked off a moment later, and the patrol car spurred itself into motion, leaving the scene behind.

Naoya watched until the white vehicle disappeared behind a building down the street, pondering the motives of the Civil Police Officers inside. Were they just too lazy to do their jobs, or were they simply too busy to handle something as small scale as an assault? Whatever their reasons, Naoya tried to convince himself that it was for the best. Afterall, he’d allowed himself to be goaded into starting the fight, and if the Civil Police actually enforced the laws, Naoya knew he’d receive the worst punishment.

He climbed back onto his bike and tugged on his helmet. The bike came to life with a whisper-quiet hiss as the engine turned on. He drove the bike away from the scene of the confrontation and the leering eyes of the Virgin Sacrifice’s lewd banner, heading back into the confines of the concrete jungle.

For a long time, he just drove. He wasn’t heading anywhere in particular; the lingering adrenaline in his system took time to dissipate, and Naoya focused on calming himself down. He pushed the near brawl to the back of his mind, and tried to forget it there, focusing on the feel of the wind and the rain as it collided with him at top speed.

Eventually, he found himself sitting at a red light as the rain poured down around him. Vehicles waited patiently at each corner, their headlights casting broad beams through the deluge. As the wait grew longer and longer, Naoya felt his adrenaline turn impatience to frustration, and in a moment of self-awareness, he tried to prevent his upset emotions from seething any further.

He tugged off his helmet and let the rain fall on him. He whipped his head back and forth, spraying water as he tried to cool off, figuratively and literally. He placed his helmet onto the top of the bike as he took several deep breaths to steady himself. When he felt his heart rate slowly begin to fall back to its calmer range, Naoya lifted his helmet again, prepared to slip it on, but paused on catching sight of another vehicle pulling up on his left.

Another motorcycle joined him at the light, both the vehicle and the rider were so dark they made Naoya’s bike seem drab in comparison. The new motorcycle was a sport bike; sleek, small, and lean with a black polished frame and small white lights across the suspension and tire rims. Though it was dwarfed by Naoya’s ride, he was certain that the smaller machine was much more advanced, though he couldn’t place the model of the vehicle. His eyes left the bike as it came to a stop, and the driver put her feet down to balance herself as she waited at the light.

The rider was dressed in a black riding suit that looked like leather, though something about the texture made Naoya believe it was the product of nanite-infused smart fabric rather than animal hide. The fabric bristled into triangular spikes across the woman’s legs where there would ordinarily be a zipper to separate the rest of the suit from her boots, and again across her midriff, and vertically down her chest. She wore high-heeled boots that blended with the rest of her outfit, though instead of stiletto spikes, the shoes balanced on round, wheel-like heels. Over her riding suit, the woman wore a jet-black suit jacket cropped to reach her ribs, with its sleeves rolled up to the elbow so that she could wear a long pair of motorcycle gloves. The jacket was an odd touch, and it seemed to Naoya that the article of clothing was at odds with the rest of her apparel, but then, Naoya realized who the woman was.

“An Inspector,” the epiphany suddenly made everything about the other rider crystal clear. The entirely custom vehicle, the endlessly expensive nanite bodysuit, and the black jacket all made perfect sense if she was a member of the Human Calamity Response Bureau. She was a short woman, likely reaching only the top of Naoya’s chest if that, but the idea that she could be an Inspector instantly gave her a sense of mystery.

He’d heard strange things about Inspectors; that they were more than human. Inspectors were dangerous and cutthroat and didn’t obey the laws the rest of the island was saddled with. They hunted monsters, it was said; monsters in human form. The reality of Human Calamities was something everyone in Yōgai-shima had to become acquainted with, though Naoya had never seen one in person, and he’d never gotten a satisfactory answer about what they really were. Suzume always had a way of avoiding questions she didn’t want to address.

The thought of Suzume reminded Naoya that Inspectors weren’t the rogue agents they were so often portrayed as. Afterall, Suzume counted among their number, and she wasn’t some crazy super-powered enforcer. If anything, Suzume was the most detailed and rule-oriented person he’d ever met. That thought, in turn, dispelled some of the aura that the rider next to him had acquired in his mind, and Naoya revved his engine to salute his fellow motorcyclist.

The rider turned her head to consider him. She had a head of wild black hair that was tied up into a ponytail, but Naoya couldn’t see her face. She wore a hot pink mask that had the appearance of an oni, complete with curving fangs and horns. He couldn’t see her eyes, either, hidden as they were behind the mask’s lenses, but he could see the skin of the woman’s neck and her ears, which had a ruddy brown color. There was a second of silence as the two looked at each other, and Naoya realized that something was wrong.

The other rider was completely dry.

He noticed it first when he saw her hair, which wasn’t wet at all despite being exposed to the weather, and then, he noticed that the female Inspector’s glossy driving suit and polished motorcycle didn’t have a single raindrop on them. Looking down at the street, Naoya watched as the rain fell around the other motorcycle, never daring to cross an oval-shaped perimeter that shielded the rider. Ignoring the curious instinct to reach across the street and stick his hands into the rainless gap, it occurred to Naoya that maybe, just maybe, the Inspectors were more mysterious than he gave them credit for.

The rider revved her own engine, and Naoya detected a hint of playfulness in the response. The light changed less than a second later, and the Inspector looked back towards the road. She was gone almost immediately, her ride carrying her away with a thunderous roar. Somehow, her machine seemed to go from standing still to moving at top speed in the span of a second, and it took off faster than any machine Naoya had ever seen before. The Inspector appeared to vanish, becoming a dark blur with white lights trailing from its wheels before Naoya lost sight of her.

He stared into the empty space where the woman had been for a few seconds before a honking car horn behind him reminded him of where he was. He quickly tugged his helmet back on and kicked his bike into gear, racing to match the speed of traffic already in motion. He returned to driving with a clearer mind, the momentary distraction helping to put distance between Naoya and his prior confrontation. His headspace free of anger and frustration, Naoya turned his focus back to the goal of the day: making money.

Reaching into his pocket, Naoya withdrew his Augur and raised it towards his face. The device shifted back into a set of strapless goggles before they were halfway to his head, and when he pressed the smart-device to his skin, they compressed themselves against the shape of his brows and cheek bones to find purchase. The lenses immediately began feeding Naoya a stream of information as he drove down the street. On reflex he guided his bike while his concentration was fixated on the digital map that was displayed in the corner of his eye. Once more, the city was recreated by strands of light and small beacons were placed across it.

“Emergency drainage needed,” Naoya read aloud as he raced down the street, while beacons on the map nearest to him unfurled into small flags that detailed the jobs that had been posted. “Freelance plumbing isn’t my thing.”

Naoya road on, passing by a dozen different beacons as he headed west, leaving behind the glitz of Sin Ward as he returned to Central. Once he was well beyond the Golden Mile, the austere grey confines of Central closed in on him. He hadn’t intended to return to Horizon, but in the blur after leaving Ichinose’s “bathhouse,” he supposed instinct brought him back. He wheeled down familiar streets, mentally sorting through the various jobs on offer, brushing aside potential jobs that were either too time-consuming, too technical, or didn’t pay enough for the effort. However, a job posting from a familiar company caught Naoya’s eye.

“FAIR Insurance Agency: Lunch pickup for the office.”

“Lunch at this time in the morning?” Naoya spoke to himself as he read the banner. It wasn’t out of his way, but the job paid little more than a tip. Still, he decided the easy money was worth the fifteen minutes in exchange. “Might as well take it.”

The small beacon turned red, signaling that Naoya had taken the job. A digital route appeared on Naoya’s map of the city, and he dutifully followed it, heading north. At the end of his road was “Apocalypse Curry,” a fairly tame eatery despite the fatalistic naming convention that had become common in Yōgai-shima. Naoya parked outside the ground story restaurant, recognizing it instantly from its logo, which portrayed a large bowl filled with fiery curry and a burning cityscape. Upon his arrival, Naoya’s Augur sent an alert to the employees inside, and Naoya sat on his bike as he waited for them to bring the food, and he once more began scrolling through the list of available jobs.

He idly marked a few prospects, mostly those that needed a courier across the windswept island, or a little manual labor, along with some light maintenance on a car or two. The storm brought an uptick in business, which Naoya was thankful for, but the extra income wasn’t nearly enough. He needed more money; he was already at a deficit for last month’s rent, and he needed to make up the difference this month, and there was no telling when the city would finish absorbing the storm overhead and things would go back to normal. It was a selfish thought, but Naoya could only pray that the storm lasted long enough for him to earn what he needed, and, until then, he could only work as hard and as long as he could.

An employee dressed in a black rain parka brought out the food in bags, and Naoya helped them to fit it snuggly into the box on the back of his bike. He took off again, driving back into the city’s busy streets under the rain as he headed for his destination. He continued west, heading for the heart of Central.

Central, like every ward in the city, was broken up into several smaller boroughs. It’s eastern and western segments were called Horizon and Sunset, respectively, while its northern district at the base of Yōgai-shima was the Sun District, the seat of governmental power on the island, and its counterpart, the Lunar District, was on the southernmost reach of the island that dominated the coastline. The middle of Central was called the Iron District, the downtown and industrial center of the island.

Iron District was dominated by the Conglomerate, the three most powerful corporations in Yōgai-shima and their numerous subsidiaries. With their nearly endless wealth, the Conglomerate had created their own private city, filled with hundreds of thousands of employees living inside company owned towers with all the luxuries and amenities that modern life could afford. At the center of the Iron District, three massive city-towers stretched into the sky, each of them a stronghold and a corporate headquarters. The grey, black, and white towers stood in an endless deadlock, signifying their ambition to conquer not just the rest of the island, but each other. The titanic corporate fortresses were constantly being remodeled in an attempt to make them taller than their competition, with no clear victor in sight. Fortunately, Naoya wasn’t heading that far into the Conglomerate’s territory.

The smaller businesses that had somehow managed to escape the Conglomerate’s hold, or that had been deemed inconsequential, weren’t allowed to share the heart of the island with its most powerful businesses. Instead, they were forced to the outside and made to occupy a perimeter of grey office buildings that wrapped around the exterior of the Iron District like the world’s largest and blandest fence. It was there, among a thousand identical buildings, that Naoya was headed.

Though he’d been to the FAIR Insurance Agency a dozen times or more, it was one of few locations that Naoya couldn’t reach when guided by memory alone. The border wall of featureless, indistinct offices that surrounded the Iron District were dizzyingly uniform in appearance, and once you were among them, they formed an unintentional labyrinth whose twists and turns baffled the eye. Thankfully, Naoya had his Augur to mark the path for him.

The streets that webbed between the border buildings were no less packed than the rest of Central, but they seemed somehow more chaotic. The traffic lights were sparsely placed, and row after row of identical buildings passed by without markers or personalization. Adding to the situation were the various alleys and side streets that joined with the flow of traffic at random, and commuters that had become lost in the shuffle of mirroring buildings would often take sudden turns to try and get back onto a route through the maze they’d nearly missed. At intermittent intervals, pools of standing water filled the roads when the decade-old drainage system failed to match the excessive volume of rain that persisted day and night. Naoya had the good sense to slow down around the occasional water hazard, mostly out of fear for incurring damage to his bike that he couldn’t afford, but the other drivers on the streets didn’t seem so cautious. More than once, he saw a reckless driver nearly cause an accident.

At the end of his designated route, Naoya turned into a parking garage; a rare structure that stood out from the forest of concrete walls around it. He followed the spiraling ramps of the garage upward to the fifth floor, where a sky bridge connected the structure to the nearest office building. Parking his bike, Naoya tried to convince himself that the fifteen-story office building marked on his map was familiar, but it was in vain. Even so, he unloaded the bags of hot food and carried them in either hand.

He carried them across the skybridge and through the sliding doors of the office building’s above ground entrance. Stepping out of the howling wind, Naoya was confronted by a display inside the doors that showed the layout of the building and listed the various companies that leased floor space inside. It was only then that Naoya felt a genuine sense of familiarity. The white walls and spackled linoleum floors weren’t particularly inviting, but they were a trade up from the constant dour grey of the cloud-covered sky.

“FAIR Insurance Agency: Suite 510.”

Naoya’s eyes found the company’s address, and he swiftly headed down the white, quiet halls to his destination. When he reached the FAIR office, he awkwardly turned the nob while still carrying one of the bags in his hands, and he used his shoulder to push the door open. He stepped into the lobby of the insurance agency, which was patterned to imitate a bright sunny sky. The walls were a blue color with clouds spaced at regular intervals in a way that almost seemed childish to Naoya. At the back of the office was door that led deeper into the building, and in front of it was a light, yellow-brown polished desk and behind it sat a young woman.

“Oh, Nanbu-san!” the receptionist looked up and greeted him with a familiar smile. “I can’t believe you’re still working in this weather!” 

She had a cute round face with a head of long dark hair that hung to her back with her bangs neatly trimmed across her forehead. She had a pair of large, violet-colored eyes behind a pair of large round glasses. She was dressed in a bright set of clothes to match the sunny theme of the office, with a bright orange sweater that featured small yellow suns sowed down the sleeves, and a soft yellow skirt that reached her ankles.

“Oh, you know me, Sakura-chan: the work never stops,” Naoya came to a stop in front of the desk, holding up the pair of bags.

“I appreciate you bringing this to us in the middle of this awful weather,” Sakura stood up from her desk, and folded her hands.

“It was an easy thing to deliver,” Naoya shrugged. “Besides, this is the one thing I can bring that you never have to worry about arriving broken.”

“I suppose so,” Sakura agreed hesitantly, ignoring the levity in Naoya’s voice. Perhaps she was too preoccupied with memories of all the times he’d brought their deliveries in less than pristine condition. “Even you can’t break a bowl of curry, can you? Unless you break the bowl, itself. . .”

“Where do you want these?” Naoya hefted the two bags, interrupting Sakura’s reminiscing about his numerous mistakes.

“Oh, right!” she smiled again as she was summoned back to the present. “Can you help me by bringing those into the break room?”

Sakura turned and stepped away from the desk, opening the door that led into the offices beyond, and Naoya made haste to follow. Past the lobby, FAIR’s limited rented space consisted of a large, square interior room that was subdivided by cubicle walls to create separate workspaces. Around the edges of the room were small private offices with windows that looked into the central room.

Sakura led the way around the exterior of the cubicle maze, humming a tune to herself while Naoya followed obediently behind her. He glanced into the open offices and cubicles as he passed, unable to hide his curiosity. Every other seat he passed seemed unoccupied and unused, suggesting that FAIR was far from operating at optimum capacity. The rest of the work stations were occupied by men of various ages, but Naoya recognized a quiet desperation on their features as they worked their lives away in a sunless, cloistered prison. Or at least, he imagined he did.

He wondered if this was the kind of job Suzume would prefer he had; safe, contained, predictable, away from the rest of the world. Naoya couldn’t entertain the idea even for a moment. Being cooped up like an animal all day, only working for the benefit of someone else didn’t agree with him. But what really bothered him were the walls; the cubicle walls extended up to the ceiling, but their actual width was very short, leaving little space beyond a seat and a small desk.

The mental image of being in one of those chairs gave Naoya goosebumps, and the offices weren’t much better. Anxiety began to take root as Naoya couldn’t help but notice how cramped and tight the walls of FAIR’s offices were. They felt close. Suffocating.

“Breathe in your problems,” Naoya began repeating words he used to try and calm himself. “Breathe them out. Just like that, they’re gone.”

He chided himself for letting something so small and easy to ignore to set off his claustrophobia, but it was too late to cut off the chain of events set into motion. Sakura continued to walk ahead, ignorant to Naoya’s discomfort, while his steps gradually became slower and more tentative. At any moment, he expected to feel the walls on either side of him to start pressing in, and to feel the pressure of the ceiling pressing down on the back of his head. It was at times like this that he hated he was as tall as he was, a fact that only served to remind him how cramped and uncomfortable his surroundings were.

The short walk was made to feel like an eternity by Naoya’s anxiety, but mercifully, Sakura finally took a turn to her right, stepping into a side office that had been converted into a communal break room. Naoya followed at her heels, eager to complete the delivery and get back outside. When he stepped through the doorway behind her, Naoya found the bright young woman speaking to a man dressed in black.

The small break room had two small tables at either side of the doorway, with the wall opposite the entrance having been fitted with a sink and a set of cupboards. Sitting at one of the tables to the right of the door with his back to it was a man Naoya didn’t recognize. He was dressed in a black suit that reminded Naoya of the Japanese salary men of decades past, though the salesman sitting at the table wore clothes of smart fabric as opposed to twentieth century textiles. He had a head of black hair combed into a left-hand part, with a series of unruly hairs sticking up along the divide. The man’s pale lower face was obscured by a black mask, and he wore a pair of glasses on the tip of his nose. Though Naoya couldn’t gauge his height immediately, the sitting man had very long legs and arms, which made him appear almost comically bundled up in the small low to the ground chair.

“Excuse me, Yamato-san,” Sakura apologized to the man. “I didn’t realize you were already taking your break.”

“It’s fine,” the man in black answered in a soft, nasal voice, and barely bothered to look up at the young woman. “I just wanted to find a quiet spot to go over some files.”

“Wouldn’t your office be a better place for that?” the receptionist offered in an attempt to be helpful.

“Adachi-san is having a phone call with the main office,” Yamato’s answer meant nothing to Naoya, but Sakura seemed to immediately understand what he meant.

“Oh, I see,” the young woman seemed momentarily crestfallen. “Well, once we have lunch served, he’ll get off the phone right away, and you can go back to work in your office.”

“Isn’t it a little early for that?” Yamato commented with a glance towards Sakura. He acknowledged the company’s secretary, but the man in black hadn’t bothered to even look in Naoya’s direction, though his presence could hardly be missed.

“I’ll just put this here, if that’s alright,” Naoya interjected himself into the conversation, then turned away to lay the bags of made to order food on the break table to his right.

“Oh, yes, Nanbu-kun,” Sakura seemed to finally remember that he was standing there, and she turned to face him. “That’s fine. Have you met Yamato-san? He’s the best salesman we have here at the company.”

Naoya turned around and found Yamato looking in his direction for the first time. From behind the pair of glasses, Yamato peered at the delivery boy with a set of ruby red eyes. Naoya felt unnerved and naked as the stranger’s eyes appraised him without even a hint of surreptitiousness.

“Yamato Kenji,” the man abruptly introduced himself, not bothering to rise from his cramped seat, though he did acknowledge him with a small nod. “A pleasure.”

“Nanbu Naoya,” the delivery boy introduced himself, giving a more respectful bow of his head than he’d received. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Nanbu?” Yamato ruminated on the name for a moment. “Where have I heard that name before?”

“Well, I do deliveries here from—,” Naoya began to answer, but Yamato didn’t let him finish.

“Accident-kun,” Yamato arrived at his conclusion, cutting Naoya off. “That’s what Adachi-san calls you.”

“He’s the one who gave me the nickname,” Naoya thought bitterly. “I have no idea how it got spread across half the city.”

“Well, when I was getting started with the gig job angle, I may have dropped a package or two,” Naoya tried to play the embarrassing nom de guerre off. “But that was forever ago.”

“Didn’t you break that new printer last week?” Sakura wondered aloud, tapping her chin thoughtfully.

“No,” Naoya immediately deflected, shooting a glare in the young woman’s direction, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“I see,” Yamato turned back to the black Augur in his hands and idly began flipping through holographic screens with a swipe of a gloved finger, his momentary curiosity in Naoya thoroughly satisfied.

“Aren’t salesmen supposed to be good with people?” Naoya asked Sakura in a low voice, but the young woman shook her head.

“Yamato-san is the very best we have on offer,” Sakura assured him again, her voice as stern as her gentle demeanor could make it. “His sales record speaks for itself.”

“Really?” Naoya glanced at the surly man in black, who seemed to be pointedly ignoring them. “I can’t think of someone I’d want to buy something from less.”

The strange man seemed to only enhance Naoya’s prior anxiety, and he quickly decided that it was best to make his exit.

“Are you alright, Nanbu-san?” Sakura asked and Naoya looked at her for a moment, then he reached up to brush sweat from his forehead. “You don’t look so good.”

“Oh, no,” Naoya shook his head and tried at a reassuring smile. “It’s just working in the weather can be kind of draining.”

He wanted to just shrug off his anxious nervousness, not wanting to confide his phobia in Sakura, but the moment he admitted weakness, he realized he’d stepped wrong.

“You aren’t coming down with something, are you?” Sakura’s lips curled down into a concerned frown, and her eyes became large with worry. “All that rain isn’t good for the body.”

“It’s nothing!” Naoya hastily tried to hold the young woman off from mothering him. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m going to get you some tea,” Sakura decided, ignoring Naoya’s protestations. “You need something to keep you warm when you’re out in this weather.”

“I don’t really—!” Sakura was opening the cabinets along the wall before Naoya could stop her, and she had pulled out an enamel cup, along with a box of tea leaves. Knowing that continuing to fight was fruitless, Naoya surrendered and seated himself at the table across from Yamato while Sakura fixed him a drink. Naoya fidgeted at the table, tapping his foot on the floor with impatience, his mind torn between thoughts of other work he could be doing at that moment, and a primal need to reach an open space. He fought to keep his desire in check, determined to quaff the tea Sakura gave him as quickly as possible and then leave with equal speed.

“Here you are,” Sakura eventually returned with her tea, which she poured into a cup she placed in front of Naoya. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a stove here to boil the water, so I had to use the microwave to heat it. It’s a shame, as I think a teapot adds something to the flavor.”

“That’s alright,” Naoya assured her, raising the teacup to his lips.

“But don’t worry,” the young woman went on. “I made sure it was extra hot this time to keep your chest warm when you’re on the road.”

Naoya took a sip and had to fight to swallow it. Sakura wasn’t lying; the tea was near to scalding. Nonetheless, Naoya forced himself to smile in the face of her efforts.

“Thank you,” he managed and the girl smiled, blind to his obvious pain.

“You’re very welcome!”

The next few minutes followed with Naoya blowing on the hot tea, trying to cool the hot liquid between sips while he drank as quickly as he dared. At the same time, Sakura stood over him like a warden, passively ensuring that he finished his carefully prepared drink before he even thought of leaving. The secretary tried to make idle conversation with Yamato, but the man in black hardly answered her with more than two words, though his disinterest in conversation seemed lost on Sakura.

Wind howled outside and thunder rumbled, and Naoya thought he saw the walls of the office begin to shake. He forced himself to drink more and more, risking burning his throat in his haste to escape the well-intentioned captivity he’d fallen into. It was just after he’d finished half the drink when there came the sound of tires squealing and horns honking from somewhere outside the building. Then, there came a tremendous crash, and the building really did shake, though only for just a moment.

The world broke in Naoya’s eyes: golden fractures snaked through the room and everything in it. The tables, the chairs, the cabinets, everything appeared to be cracked and broken, held together only by shining golden seams that chaotically coursed through reality. Even Sakura and Yamato broke apart, becoming vaguely recognizable piles of human glass.

“Nanbu-kun!” one of two human beings made of broken shards spoke to Naoya in a woman’s voice. “Are you okay?”

The golden fractures in the world vanished as quickly as they had appeared, and Naoya found himself looking into Sakura’s eyes. He was hot, covered in a veneer of sweat, and he found himself shaking, slightly. A few seconds later, and the dwindling adrenaline allowed Naoya to feel a sense of painful heat in his right hand. He looked down and realized that the teacup in his hands had broken completely between his fingers and countless shards had fallen to the floor, along with the remaining tea.

“I’m so sorry!” the receptionist apologized profusely. “I must have made it too hot! I didn’t think the cup would break like that! That must have been quite a fright.”

Sakura immediately retrieved some paper towels to begin wiping the hot tea from Naoya’s fingers, ignoring his protests. When she was momentarily satisfied, she stepped out of the room to go and get something to mop up the broken cup. Still reeling, Naoya leaned against the table as he tried to steady himself.

“How did you do that?” a voice asked, and Naoya looked up to see that Yamato was staring at him with those red eyes again. The man in black’s interest was apparently rekindled, and the salesman had placed his Augur aside and shifted in his seat to face Naoya this time, his shoulders pointed in his direction. Yamato cocked his head to one side, looking at Naoya like a puzzle he couldn’t figure out.

“Do what?” Naoya asked, innocently.

“The cup,” Yamato pointed at the broken mess on the floor between them. “How did you break it like that?”

“I didn’t,” Naoya protested, awkwardly brushing a hand through his hair. “It was too hot; you heard Sakura.”

“No,” Yamato shook his head, his red eyes lingering on Naoya’s face. “That’s not what happened. I know what I saw.”

The Daily Grind

Case File #1

January 4^th, 2044

09:10 AM

Horizon Ward

Central District

Deputy Inspector Atarashi Shin

The towers of Horizon’s “Golden Mile” rose up into the sky, their gaudy and clashing designs representing Sin Ward setting a foothold into Central’s pristine heart. The spires of the Golden Mile rose up in competition, some reaching twenty stories or more. Side by side, the rectangular and bland towers of Yōgai-shima’s founding stood with newer buildings of glass that bent and curved in ways only made possible by their smart-metal skeletons. In contrast to the rest of the District, the Golden Mile had taken on a little of Sin Ward’s dirt, offering a cheaper, tamer nightlife to the city of vice that sat just across the bridge to the east.

While the new buildings had eye-catching and smooth designs of glass and luminescent veins of nanite, the old-world buildings made do with garish neon lights and partial coatings of smart-fabric to cover up the grey concrete truth. The apartments made to house the refugee population of Japan had been converted into fronts for a thousand little businesses that operated out of a single building, which led to a single structure covered in a collage of clashing skins and signs. Even in the middle of the day, when the darkness of night could no longer cover their ugliness, the businesses continued to advertise and their fluorescent lights flashed in the downpour like lightning, bathing the streets below in a colorful swathe of lights that reflected back up from the puddles.

The foot traffic on the Golden Mile was disinterested in the endless barrage of holographic banners that tried to get their attention. The commuters cutting through the swathe of eateries, bars, cabarets, and gambling parlors had no appetite for entertainment this early in the morning, and they were instead focused on simply getting somewhere else. The only thing that did arouse any interest was the flashing orange alarm that appeared on their Augurs, warning them of an emergency of which there was no sign. The streets were busy with cars and pedestrians, but there were no monsters or mayhem in sight. Instead, the danger lurked high above.

On a geyser of water, what had once been a homeless man rose into the sky, cresting over the top of the Golden Mile’s buildings. Dressed in a torn flannel shirt and a ragged raincoat, the figure might appear human from a distance. However, the transformation from homo sapiens to Human Calamity had not been a kind process: the old man’s face had torn in two, creating a second, eyeless sharklike visage that hungrily bit at the air. The man’s arms had likewise been transformed into grotesque claws, but he’d been deprived of one of them moments after the initial change. Heedless of the bodily trauma, the creature sought escape where one man pursued.

Where the twisted old man used his Crisis in order to quickly climb the face of Horizon’s buildings, Deputy Inspector Atarashi Shin had to use brute force. Drawing on all the energy he could muster from Exigency, the state of mind that made him more than human, Shin leapt upward. He soared over the side of a ten-story apartment; its rain slick surface nothing more than a blur to his eyes, and crested over the top, rising another dozen or so feet. He felt his stomach lurch as gravity took hold of him and dragged him back down. He landed with a splash on the roof beneath him, but the water simply ran off his black suit and blond hair. Before he even touched the ground, his eyes were searching the building tops around him, looking for the Human Calamity he was pursuing.

There, on a building north of him, Shin saw what he was looking for. The old man was gathering small pools of water and causing them to burst beneath him, sending him up into the air. The force that the small pockets of rain could lend him was minimal compared to the geyser of water he used to leap up into the sky, but it was sufficient for the Casualty to skip across the divide between roof tops as it sought to escape. It bounded off one pool after another, making it seem to Shin more like a frog than anything else.

Shin wasted no time in pursuing, bounding across the wet cement ceiling beneath him towards the fleeing monster. Sword in hand, he charged over the side of the building, lunging over it like a track runner, and over onto the next building. Though the old Casualty was aided by a more overt supernatural force as it pounced over the endless array of structures beneath it, its flight was imprecise at best. The creature had a powerful surge of energy at the start of his leap, but he quickly slowed as he moved through the air, and the Casualty often overshot his mark, or landed poorly, colliding with the rooftop and losing precious seconds, enabling Shin to consistently gain ground.

“Where the hell does he think he’s going?” Shin asked as he watched the one-armed monster drag himself back to his feet from a clumsy landing.

“He’s probably not thinking very much at all,” the voice of Shin’s Omen spoke from the black sword in his hand. “When a human being turns into a Casualty, their amygdala swells up and transforms. It puts a lot of pressure on the rest of the brain, so they act more by instinct than anything else. Honestly, he’s nearly as stupid as you are.”

“I’ve heard all of your jibes before,” Shin rolled his eyes as he performed another running leap over the railing of the next building. “You’d think an artificial intelligence connected to the internet could search up some better material.”

“Ehhh,” the machine let out a digital sigh. “The internet isn’t what it used to be.”

There was a single building between Shin and the Casualty, and the Inspector poured on every bit of speed that he could to close that gap. The Casualty turned to look at Shin as the wind whipped its parka around its shoulders like a flag. For a brief moment, Shin made eye-contact with the old man’s face, his eyes wide and bleeding while his features were stretched and pulled by the new mouth growing from his skull. The old man’s mouth moved, and Shin thought that he was mumbling something, but the tempest between them swallowed all sound. Thunder flashed, and the Casualty turned away, rushing across the skyline on another burst of water, and Shin continued to pursue.

“Hey, idiot,” the Omen sword interjected itself again. “You’ve got another call coming.”

“Now isn’t a great-!” but Shin didn’t get a chance to finish.

“Inspector Atarashi, please respond!” came a harsh voice from the Omen sword. Shin nearly tripped over his own feet, momentarily distracted by the chase. He regained his footing and kept running, laying the flat of the sword across his left palm to instinctively speak into it, awkward though it was.

“Oh, Forecaster Kodera!” Shin chuckled nervously. “I, um, uhhh. . ., how are you?”

“Inspector, what are you doing?” the other man cut straight to the point. “You were ordered to monitor the situation from a distance.”

“Oh, I am!” Shin agreed hurriedly, still watching as the Casualty hurtled over the rooftops. “I’m watching it right now!”

“You were ordered not to engage, Inspector,” Kodera reminded him. “You should have waited for Senior Inspector Asahi as you were told.”

“I know! But if I hadn’t done anything, then people might have been hurt!” Shin objected, remembering the two police officers that had been foolish enough to try and shoot at the Casualty. “I couldn’t just sit by and do nothing.”

“I understand your frustrations, Inspector,” Kodera answered, though his voice never rose above his stoic inflection. “But getting yourself killed isn’t going to make the situation any better.”

“I didn’t join the Bureau to be protected,” the Deputy allowed himself a small, wry grin. “Besides, I think you’re giving this guy too much credit.”

“Just keep your distance until Inspector Asahi, arrives,” Kodera continued to warn. “Don’t push things too far; this one is a bad match up for you.”

“A bad match up?” Shin questioned aloud, scoffing at the notion.

A sensation bloomed in Shin’s chest, both hot and piercing at the same time. The Casualty whipped about in midair, turning to face Shin even as he sailed through the sky. Perhaps the creature reacted to Shin getting too close, or maybe it felt insulted by Shin’s cavaliere dismissal, but whether it was acting on base instinct or the lingering traces of human emotion, the creature responded. The sheets of rain falling down around it seemed to hang in the air, frozen, as the creature punched holes through them with its flight. Then, the rain began to fall sideways through the air, flying towards Shin.

The horizontal downpour picked up speed, moving far faster than any natural phenomena, and a thousand tiny missiles of water shot forward like a hail of bullets. The water bullets had little effect, splashing against his skin and clothes without harm, but the same wasn’t true for the building beneath him. The cascade shredded through the rooftop where Shin was standing, and the barrage made the concrete flesh and the steel skeleton beneath melt like clay in the rain. The roof lurched beneath the Inspector’s feet and he staggered, his forward momentum entirely halted, but before the platform beneath him could give way, Shin leapt into the air.

The force of Shin’s leap broke the dissolving cement apart, kicking up a cloud of grey dust that was soon smothered by the rain. Shin soared through the air, crossing the last remaining span of distance between himself and the twisted old man as the raindrops continued to pelt him without success. Both of them, the malformed Casualty and the black-clad Inspector, collided in the air a hundred feet above ground.

The black sword swung through the air, the impossibly sharp smart-metal blade singing as it completed its deadly arc. Shin swung the sword with the intention of splitting the creature in half from the left shoulder to its right hip, but the beast’s control over water allowed it to gather a pool of water between it and Shin. The floating rain puddle resisted the travel of Shin’s sword no better than the Casualty’s own flesh, but as the sword bit into the Human Calamity’s shoulder, the floating pool of water burst violently outwards in all directions.

The rushing water splashed across Shin’s face and flooded into his eyes, blinding him. He was hurled backward through the air, spinning head over heels. His stomach rolled in his belly, flopping around and colliding with the rest of his innards. Literally blind and full-on panicking, Shin somehow managed to clear the water from his eyes and take control of his fall.

The first thing Shin saw as he fell was himself, or rather, his own reflection staring back at him from the dark glass of the Golden Mile’s more exotic structures. Twisting about, Shin kicked the glass paneled walls of the building and surged back into the air amidst a shower of dark shards. Shin traveled across the alley between the glass-walled edifice and its brick-laminated neighbor, and he rebounded off it as well. Using the strength and agility of Exigency, Shin was able to keep moving through the air as he bounced between buildings. He cast his eyes around him as the countless neon lights flashed in the pouring rain, turning the buildings around Shin into a swirl of hard lines and indiscernible color. He couldn’t see where the Casualty had disappeared to during the tumult, so he decided to focus on finding a safer place to touch down.

He descended over a large, grey roof, passing over a boundary of wire fencing that circled it. He landed on the gravel with a crunch, surrounded by generators and ventilators that were being assaulted by the constant rainfall. The fenced off rooftop was part of a dip in the city’s skyline, being a few floors short of meeting its taller peers around it. Standing up, Shin wheeled about, his eyes running across the sharp edges of the buildings above him, looking for the fleeing figure of the Casualty.

He heard it before he saw it. A rasping, wheezing growl sounded out somewhere from the rooftops above, and Shin whipped around to face the Casualty, which loomed over the edge of a taller tower and peered down at him with its eyeless piscine face. The old man’s head was nearly absorbed into the new growth by this point, leaving only a faint pair of eye sockets visible in the side of the blind shark’s neck. Even without eyes, the monstruous new mouth seemed as though it knew to orient itself in Shin’s direction, and it snapped at the air with its mismatched teeth.

It growled through its vicious smile, a horrible sound that grew more intense with each passing second. Then, the creature seemed to seize, its body violently constricting as though an invisible hand were crushing it. It screamed, the noise echoing off the walls of the nearby building and blood sprayed from its left arm. A new limb grew out from the remains of the old, though this limb was larger than its counterpart and even more distant from its human source. The talons were longer, and flaps of skin dangled from its smooth epidermis to awkwardly mimic the fins of an ocean creature. It brandished the new appendage, twisting and turning its new hand out in front of its face in a way that Shin found uncomfortably human. Then, it shuffled forward across the roof, leering down at the Inspector with naked intent.

“Tired of running away?” Shin asked the creature as he brandished the Omen sword, sweeping it through the air. “Good. I’m tired of chasing you.”

The Casualty leapt into the air, and it pulled the rain from the sky around it, forming a bubble that engulfed it entirely. The bubble burst a split second later, all its force directed in firing the Casualty like a bullet down at the roof Shin was standing on. As the Casualty launched itself towards the roof like a projectile, but before it touched the gravel covered rooftop, another bubble formed in the monster’s path, which burst and sent the Casualty up into the air over Shin’s head.

The Casualty grinned down at the Inspector with its shark-mouth, water spilling out from between its teeth. It fell towards the rooftop and opened its maw, spitting a globule of rainwater larger than Shin’s head. The burning in Shin’s chest flared preemptively and he chose caution this time. Shin darted away across the gravel, narrowly escaping the cannonball of water. It burst through the top of the building and Shin felt the entire structure shake beneath him.

“This isn’t a safe place to fight,” Shin realized, glancing down at the massive hole blasted into the top of the building, which descended through several floors of reinforced concrete. “There’s no telling how many people are in this building, right now. I can’t risk letting them get hurt.”

The Casualty didn’t seem to care about the damage it caused; instead, it was galvanized by it. It struck the ground with a wet splash but didn’t pause to get its bearing before it went on the attack again. The Casualty spread its claws, and it raced across the rooftop, the water beneath its feet forming a current that carried it forward. It sharply changed direction just before it entered Shin’s striking range, instead circling to his right for a few feet before changing direction again.

The Casualty circled Shin for several seconds, moving faster with each moment. It moved through the rain like a blur, and the wake of its passage sent cascades of rain droplets in all directions, each one refracting the lights of the towers on all sides of them. Shin remained stationary, his eyes tracking the Casualty whenever it crossed in front of him, but he didn’t so much as turn his head when it tried to strafe him.

“What’s this thing’s deal?” Shin asked himself as he waited for the next attack. “It’s completely different than it was a few minutes ago.”

Fire bloomed in Shin’s chest, warning him, but he didn’t need it. Shin swept his sword over his back, deflecting a strike from the Casualty’s new claw without looking at it. He turned, bringing his sword around to slash at the Casualty, aiming for a decapitating blow. He sensed that that, if the creature could show expression, it would be surprised, but it wasn’t so shocked as to be defenseless. The black blade carved through the rain as Shin swung his counterstrike, but the droplets stuck to the blade, pulling it, guiding it like it was caught in the flow of a river.

The pulling of the rain wasn’t enough to stop Shin’s sword, but it was enough to throw off his swing. The Casualty stepped backward, and the diverted blade carved a gouge in its chest, spraying blood. The creature shrieked, once more wounded but alive, and it raced backward on its current of pooling rain. The pain didn’t frighten the Casualty into fleeing this time, and it renewed its attack with twice as much vigor.

Shin and the Casualty engaged in a back and forth dance: the twisted figure danced and darted around Shin, riding on water currents that pooled on the roof, while the Inspector remained stationary. Once, twice, thrice, the creature darted in, trying to attack from Shin’s blind spots, only for the Inspector to deflect each blow. Every failed strike had a cost: the Casualty lost more fingers from a brutal parry, it had half of its teeth shattered by a strike that nearly took its head off, and its stomach was opened up by another blow from Shin’s sword, causing its entrails to partially spill out. None of it mattered; the creature only seemed encouraged by the pain.

In spite of its numerous wounds, the Casualty did not slow. Instead, it grew faster and stronger, renewing every attack with increasing ferocity and vigor. Riding on currents of rain, the Casualty developed more novel uses of its power, spewing blasts of water to distract Shin while circling him from out of range of his sword before charging in to try and viciously maul him. Shin was always a step ahead, neatly evading and parrying every stroke, but chances to counter became fewer and fewer as his enemy became more dexterous and evasive. The Casualty never managed to wound Shin, but the previously one-sided confrontation was now tipping towards a stalemate, and the Inspector’s frustration mounted.

“This is getting me nowhere,” Shin growled as he parried another claw trying to tear out his throat.

“You know, I think someone warned you about this happening,” the AI in Shin’s sword mused.

“Shut up!” Shin snapped as he whirled and dispersed a blade of water shot at him from behind. “I can do this!”

Evading a counterstroke, the Casualty raced through the middle of the roof, sending gravel up in all directions. It whipped around to face Shin, pausing some fifteen feet away. Hissing through its broken teeth, the twisted Casualty threw its head back, filling its mouth with rain, and Shin knew what was coming next. The Casualty spit forth a stream of supersonic liquid and Shin threw himself to the side to evade it.

Whipping its head around, the Casualty tried to follow Shin’s movements, and the hydro-cutter snaked through the air. It sheared through the iron fence behind Shin without stopping and raked the sides of the buildings behind him. The pressurized geyser of rainwater ripped through glass, concrete, and steel without stopping, even with only a momentary touch. A newer, nanite hardened building to Shin’s right was deeply gouged by the spray, but the smart-metal skeleton began to patch itself immediately, filling in the damage to support the structure. Its neighbor of naked concrete wasn’t so lucky, as the stream clipped one of its rectangular corners and sliced through it, sending a slab of concrete and iron into the streets below with a thunderous crash.

“Shit!” Shin looked back over his shoulder as the ground rumbled and silently prayed that no one was hurt. He came up on one knee but wasn’t able to rise any further before the Casualty struck again. With a gesture from one clawed hand, the Casualty beckoned the endless deluge of rain that had poured onto the building and summoned it back to the roof. The water pooled beneath Shin’s crouching form in an instant, and it blasted upward another moment later, sending the Inspector skyward. He tumbled into the air once more, leaving the relative safety of the rooftop behind him.

Heat blossomed in Shin’s chest as he fell, and he instinctively raised his left hand to intercept an attack he couldn’t see. A jet of water blasted him across the forearm and for the first time that day, Shin felt a lance of pain pass through him, though the sensation was muted by adrenaline. The force of the blast sent Shin hurtling through the air, away from the rooftop and his enemy. He twisted again in the air, trying to find a purchase to arrest his flight, but the buildings that flew by on either side of him were outside of his reach.

Left with no other option, Shin thrust the black Omen blade into the concrete building on his left, and the smart-metal sword obliged to his need, lengthening itself to impale the side of the structure, while simultaneously making itself blunt enough so as not to simply slash through the concrete without stopping. Clinging to the sword with both hands, Shin swung his legs up to brace them against the wall and kick off, soaring away to his right. He landed atop the sloping roof of a building encased in panels of glass, and his feet clattered as he sought to balance himself on the sharp incline.

Instinctively, Shin raised his left arm to look at the damage done. The high-speed water stream had shredded through the smart-fabric of his shirt and jacket, and sheared off a few layers of Shin’s skin, though not enough to make him bleed. The pain had already vanished, and his body mended the superficial harm in moments through the power of Exigency, while the metamorphic fabric of his uniform repaired itself nearly as quickly. Though he’d incurred little harm, the fact that he’d been injured at all forced Shin to question what he was supposed to do.

“I might not be so lucky next time,” Shin told himself, quietly. “He’s just getting stronger the longer this goes on. If only I could use my Crisis,” he held up his hand, letting the small black flecks float from his fingers. However, the dark substance was quickly soaked by the constant rain and dissolved into a dark slurry that ran between his fingers and disappeared.

“I might have a solution to that,” a voice spoke from the Omen in Shin’s hand, though it wasn’t the sneering voice of the AI.

“Uh, Kodera?” Shin jumped at the sound of the Forecaster’s voice. “You were still on the line?”

“Of course,” he agreed, with consummate professionalism. “We never hang up on an Inspector during an emergency situation.”

“Oh, right,” Shin agreed lamely, feeling entirely foolish.

“The Heavy-Rain Casualty you’re fighting is at an advantage in this environment,” Kodera returned to the matter at hand. “Not only can he weaponize the weather against you, but your own Crisis can’t function in such a damp environment. We’ll need to get you someplace dry to put you on an even playing field.”

“Good luck with—,” Shin began to scoff at the idea, but he was interrupted by the sight of a massive plume of water rising over the rooftops. The Casualty descended onto the sloping point of Shin’s perch, landing higher up on the incline. The ungainly creature slid across the glass panels beneath its hands and feet, trying for a few moments to balance its odd proportions as it began moving downward towards the Inspector. With the currents of water running beneath it, the Casualty bounded forward, propelling itself with its two overlarge arms like a primate. Raising his weapon, Shin met the enemy’s charge.

Man and beast darted back and forth over the rooftop, their feet bounding against the shatterproof glass that lined the building’s walls. The Casualty was constantly moving now, gliding on waves of rippling rainwater, never pausing even to attack. Shin had to perform a dance of his own, unable to remain stationary, instead moving with the Human Calamity. Whenever the Casualty backed out of Shin’s range, it beckoned pools of water beneath his feet, attempting to blast him off the roof again, forcing Shin to scramble away. When that strategy didn’t work, the Casualty switched to a more subtle stratagem, and it began causing small waves of water to run back and forth beneath Shin’s feet, attempting to undermine his already precarious balance on the slippery glass.

“Inspector, are you still listening?” Kodera’s tone made the question seem as though he was scolding an inattentive child.

“Yeah, I’m still here,” Shin grunted as he fended off another claw swipe. “Go ahead.”

“As I was saying, you’ll need a dryer environment, and I happened to find one,” Kodera went on as Shin and the Casualty continued to battle.

“And where would that be?” Shin asked, surprised that the Forecaster had even found such a place, much less so quickly.

“Yōgai-shima Regal Hotel; it should be off to your left. Do you see it?” Shin turned, though the name of the establishment had already struck a chord with him. He risked taking his eyes off his enemy for a single moment, twisting his head to look in the direction Kodera prompted, and then he saw it.

Standing in the rain was a seventy-story building that towered over its closest neighbors, being one of the highest structures in the district. It was a thin, wide, squarish building that seemed as though it was more of an immense wall than a hotel. Covered in dark glass, it didn’t appear so out of the ordinary except for its size. However, there was an external layer of nanite across the outside of the building, which currently took the form of dark grey figures that spanned the edifice from the bottom floor to its flat top. The Regal was one of the first buildings in Yōgai-shima to experiment with nanite for aesthetic purposes, rather than simply for construction. While it didn’t hold a candle to the more garish buildings made since then, the Regal could make for quite a sight when the figures dotting its surface began to move and shift as though alive, their appearance and textures changing to suit different events. Marring the surface of the building was a gap in its eastern side where the dark glass and nanite fell away, revealing a hole that covered at least five different floors. The opening was covered by a translucent tarp pinned to its exterior, revealing the building’s bare frame beneath.

“The Regal has been closed since last year,” Kodera explained with clinical detachment. “They had plans for renovations, but they were halted when Hurricane Izumi rolled in. The damaged floors are still being repaired, but there’s a Type-2 Disaster Shelter on the thirtieth floor that’s still functional and connected to the city’s network. If you can lure the Casualty into the shelter with you, I can close the doors behind you and trap it out of the rain.”

“Yeah, that’s a great plan,” Shin was unenthusiastic in his agreement, and a nervous sweat beaded out on his forehead. “But, uh, isn’t there somewhere else we could lure it?”

“Inspector,” the scolding tone was in Kodera’ voice again. “The Regal is currently abandoned; it’s the nearest shelter to you that will have absolutely zero chance of civilians being present. There’s no better option!”

“I just. . .” Shin trailed off, unable to find the words he needed to say.

“Inspector?” Kodera finally seemed to sense Shin’s trepidation. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” pushing away his doubt, Shin answered. “I’ll go to the Regal.”

“I copy you, Inspector,” the Forecaster affirmed. “I’ll be watching you every step of the way.”

Knocking aside another swing from the Casualty’s claws, Shin countered with a wide, sweeping slash designed to force his enemy to retreat from his personal space, and the Casualty did as expected, moving away to look for another opportunity to press its assault. Rather than pursue, Shin turned away, heading north towards the tall silhouette of the Regal, and the Casualty seemed momentarily confused by his choice of actions. A moment later, Shin heard the pounding of the Casualty as it began to pursue him, and its heavy gait made the glass panes rumble beneath his feet. Shin could only imagine the Human Calamity’s desperate desire to overtake him, but the Inspector leapt from the rooftop before his pursuer could reach him.

He soared through the air, plunging through curtains of rain while lightning flashed in the grey heavens with thunder following after. He sprinted across the next rooftop and jumped from it as well, darting from building to building while the Casualty pursued. It hissed and growled as it sought to catch him, and Shin could hear the eruption of geysers as the creature blasted itself into the sky to gain ground. Pools of water formed in Shin’s path, trying to blast him off the building while currents of rain slithered underfoot to try and trip him, but the Inspector was able to sidestep all the obstacles his pursuer placed in front of him.

Shin made the last leap into the Regal’s shadow, launching himself from across the street and down to its eastern side. He landed in a crouch, pausing just long enough to look behind him for the Casualty, which was nothing more than a dark, twisted shadow falling towards him, its shape backlit by lightning flashing in the clouds above. Without wasting anymore time, Shin leapt up the side of the building and began sprinting up its surface when the momentum from his initial jump wasn’t quite enough to get him up to the thirtieth floor. He kicked off the side of the building one final time and slashed through the tarp shielding the Regal’s innards from the wind and the rain.

As he climbed into the dark interior, the lights clicked on, which he could only put down to the Forecaster’s intervention. He was standing in a crumbling hotel room at the edge of the hole torn in the building’s side, looking up at the gap in its interior. It appeared as though a chunk of the Regal had been scooped out, destroying walls and ceilings in the process, allowing Shin to stare up at a cross section of the damaged rooms above him. All of the rooms had been long since emptied of furniture, and in their place, Shin could see buckets of paint and tools to begin the laborious process of putting the Regal back together.

“This must be where the first bomb went off,” Shin mused in a faraway voice. “It’s hard to believe it’s been left this way for a whole year.”

“The building’s been passed around since then,” Kodera interjected an unwanted answer, reminding Shin he was still listening. “The bombings were a bit of a PR nightmare, as you can imagine. The previous owners were castigated for not having the Regal’s emergency preparedness infrastructure up to code, and the property’s changed hands a number of times before reconstruction could begin in earnest.”

“A lot of things could be different right now if the Regal had its act together,” Shin opined as he looked up at the crater in the building’s side.

“How do you mean?” the Forecaster inquired, but Shin didn’t answer.

“Read the room, Ko-chan,” the Omen ran defense on Shin’s behalf. “Sensitive subject.”

“Ko-chan?” the Forecaster balked.

The fire in Shin’s chest returned, and he spun on his heel as a jet of water surged skyward, carrying the Casualty up the side of the building. Shin lunged across the broken floor, moving further inside as the creature pursued him, burbling and hissing with each step. Leaving the exterior rooms behind, Shin escaped into the main hallway, which was likewise barren and stripped, save for dangling tarps and left behind construction equipment. In the middle of the hallway was a large median that ran from floor to ceiling. At either end, if Shin remembered right, were the two banks of elevators. However, the pair of stainless-steel sliding doors set into the center of the wall were new. The shining doorway was marked with posted warnings, and a marker written in large bold letters identified the space beyond: “TYPE-2 DISASTER SHELTER.” As Shin slid to a halt, the doors opened with a chime.

“Alert, this shelter’s doors have been unlocked via a remote command from emergency services,” an automated voice began to play through a set of loudspeakers set into the wall on either side of the doorway. “An emergency alert has not been declared at this time. However, please remain aware of your surroundings, and enter the shelter if necessary.”

Ignoring the message, Shin slid through the opening doors, the sound of the pursuing Casualty echoing through the passage behind him. The inside of the shelter was a bare white room, twenty feet long and eight feet wide with a low ceiling. The walls were lined with empty shelves meant to hold a thousand different supplies in case of whatever random natural or manmade disaster visited Yōgai-shima, ranging from first aid kits to food rations and bedding for long term inhabitation. When it was completed, a Type-2 shelter would be equipped to keep its inhabitants alive for at least a month without access to the outside, with sealed walls that could keep out fires, explosions, gas, and most importantly, water.

“If you can lure the Casualty into the room, then you can slip out through the secondary exit,” Kodera offered as Shin reached the middle of the confined shelter. “I can seal the doors behind you; that should contain it until Inspector Asahi arrives.”

“No,” Shin raised his blade, not hesitating for a moment. “I’ll handle this.”

The dark shape of the Casualty soon filled the doorway behind Shin. It ambled through the open doors with its overlong arms dangling at its sides. It moved slowly, almost cautiously, into the shelter, as though its sense of survival was slowly rekindling, but that latent desire for self-preservation was too weak to stop it from willingly walking into Shin’s trap. It’s every step drew it closer to Shin, its heavy footsteps splattering with rainwater. It stood off against Shin, raising its claws up to its sides while it hissed through a mouthful of foam that dribbled through its shark teeth. So focused on Shin was the Casualty, that it didn’t notice the doors closing behind it.

“Alert, this shelter’s Karmic Barrier system has been activated,” the same female voice spoke over the shelter’s internal speakers, and the doors hissed as they sealed themselves shut. “This facility is now closed to the outside due to an override by the Human Calamity Response Bureau. The doors cannot be opened without authorization from emergency services or the facility administrator.”

The Casualty, deaf to the sound of the alert, spat a mouthful of water out, transforming it into a stream of pressurized liquid to cut Shin in half. The Inspector ducked aside, letting the water cutter strike the white wall behind him. The discharge of water shredded through the white plaster coating the interior of the shelter, and a burst of black particles poured out into the open air. When the stream lost its force, there remained only a dripping hole in the plaster which revealed the metal wall of the environmentally sealed box that made up the shelter. The metal infrastructure beneath the paint and plaster was unharmed, despite the Casualty’s power to cut through concrete and steal.

“Wasted your last shot, huh?” Shin observed as he brandished his sword, raising it up to point at the Casualty. “You’re going to regret that.”

Placing his left hand against the flat of the blade, Shin ran his fingers down the Omen’s length. Thinking thoughts of fire and thunder, black particles flowed from Shin’s fingertips, coating the dark sword. The cloud of Black Powder flowed around the weapon, pulsing with fiery orange light as they anticipated a violent detonation.

“Time to show you what I can do.”

Shin lunged forward, the smoking sword leaving a dark trail as he swept it through the air. The Casualty didn’t back down, meeting Shin’s charge with its own, hissing through its nest of mismatched teeth. The Casualty was stronger and faster than it had been during their very first exchange and it was better adjusted to its twisted frame. However, without the ample rainwater to utilize its Crisis, the tables had firmly turned back into Shin’s favor. The Human Calamity was stronger and faster than any ordinary human or animal on the planet, but the black sword cared nothing for the supernaturally durable muscle and bones of the monster.

The Omen sword sang through the air as Shin guided it, and flesh was carved and blood did flow. Beneath Shin’s blistering offense, the Casualty was forced to retreat, its prior eagerness for bloodshed completely smothered by desperate fear. In moments, it had lost both hands, then its arms up to its elbows. Its chest was carved open soon after, revealing more of its once vital organs struggling to function. Wherever the dark sword passed, the Black Powder caked its wounds, clinging to the old man’s flesh while a thin trail of particulates dangled through the air, connecting the Casualty to the sword in Shin’s hand. The old man’s parka and shirt were reduced to shreds by the passage of the sword, and its entire upper half was a slab of gore that spilled endless crimson blood to paint the floor beneath it. Only through purest fortune, or misfortune, had the creature avoided having its head taken off by the merciless weapon in the Inspector’s hands, but Shin only redoubled his efforts.

Swinging the particulate coated blade towards the mutilated trunk of the Casualty’s head, Shin was sent stumbling backward when the Human Calamity kicked him in the chest at the last second. The unexpected counter forced both combatants to part, enabling the Casualty to avoid certain death one last time before it slammed into the wall opposite Shin. Blood spurted as the creature struck the wall, creating a dark red outline, and it seemed to lack the strength to move any further. It simply stood in one place, trembling under the weight of its wounds. Hefting his sword, Shin prepared to advance, but he was caught off guard by a sound echoing from the walls.

“What’s that noise?” Shin asked as the shelter was filled with the sound of metal groaning and shifting.

“Pipes?” the Omen offered, equally confused.

“Forecaster, this room isn’t connected to the building’s water supply, is it?” Shin asked, a surge of alarm flashing through his brain while a wildfire burned in his chest.

“No,” Kodera answered, though he didn’t seem as certain as he usually was. “It should be completely isolated.”

“But the shelter has internal tanks for drinking water, doesn’t it?” the Omen asked, arriving at the conclusion before either man.

“The construction isn’t scheduled to be finished for at least another two months,” Kodera answered, a frantic tone creeping into his voice. “They shouldn’t have been installed yet!”

With a loud screech, the pipes ruptured in the ceiling, and jets of water began to spray down. The Casualty burbled and it struggled to step forward, its fighting spirit renewed as water began to fill the room. Feeling the water beginning to pool around his feet, Shin raised his sword to point at the Casualty as the dark trail between the weapon and his enemy wavered in the air.

“It’s time,” Shin tried to steel himself for what came next, but the Omen felt the need to interject.

“You sure you want to do this now?” the machine asked. “And here, of all places?”

“I have to do it,” Shin insisted, watching as the Casualty took another step forward, its flesh knitting back together in moments. “There’s no time.”

“Whatever, man,” the Omen relented with less than stellar enthusiasm. “It’s your trauma.”

Pressing his right thumb against the hilt of the sword, Shin activated a hidden mechanism in the weapon he’d designed himself. Out from the crossguard sprang two small hammers, and they struck the base of the black sword, producing a cloud of sparks. The Black Powder swirling around the weapon ignited into a flash of fiery orange embers which traveled up the length of the weapon, then ignited the dark trail swirling through the air. Like a fuse, the stream of Black Powder burnt up as it crossed the room and reached the Casualty. Immediately, the layers of flammable powder coating its bloody body exploded.

There was a bright orange flash like lightning and thunder followed, consuming the Casualty. The wave of intense heat instantly vaporized the water streaming into the room and the shockwave peeled away the whitewash walls and shelves, leaving only the dark grey metal structure beneath plain for all to see. Smoke rose to the ceiling and washed across the room like a dark cloud, and alarms began to ring.

“Alert!” the automated voice rang out again. “A Fire Emergency has been detected in Shelter-033B! All citizens inside Shelter-033B must evacuate!”

There was a rush of air as the doors unsealed themselves, and the pressure in the room changed again. Air rushed out into the halls along with a current of smoke and embers, threatening to release the fire into the rest of the building. Sprinklers emerged from the shelter’s ceiling, attempting to spray the Casualty’s burning body, but they could only manage a light trickle, their pipes having been damaged by the Casualty’s Crisis.

“You defied orders multiple times and ended up starting a fire in an abandoned building,” the Omen admired Shin’s handiwork as the Inspector shielded his eyes from the fiery blaze he started. “I’m really looking forward to how you rationalize all of this on your report.”

Shin didn’t pay attention to anything the Omen was saying, having long since learned to tune it out. He shielded his eyes with his left arm as he stared into the orange blaze, fixated on the screaming figure of the old man dancing in the fires. The Casualty screamed and writhed as the flames consumed it, collapsing face down onto the floor after several long seconds. Only then did Shin turn his back on the fallen creature to make for the opened exit.

He retraced his steps as the empty building’s fire alarms began to blare, and smoke filled the hallways. The empty passages blurred past as Shin raced out of the building, returning to the floors collapsed from the year-old explosion. He hurled himself through the torn tarp that shielded the side of the building and fell into the rain slicked streets below. He landed on the sidewalk below on all fours, shattering the concrete and sending up a wave of water.

Gasps rose up from the street as men and women gathered to watch trails of smoke begin pouring from the abandoned hotel above. Cars slowed on the cross streets as sirens began to wail in the distance. The streetlights in the perimeter around the building flashed red, producing holographic banners that flashed warnings to commuters.

“Forecaster!” Shin raised his Omen, and the black sword collapsed back into its portable form. “We’re going to need a fire response team from Civil Services down-!”

“Inspector!” the Forecaster interrupted him, alarm in his voice. “I’m still getting a reading from the Casualty!”

“What?” caught off guard, Shin struggled to comprehend what he was told. Fire blossomed behind Shin’s ribs and he turned, watching as something landed in the street. A wall of water blasted in all directions, flipping the cars in the street and toppling pedestrians, creating a chaotic din of honking horns and panicked screams.

Adrenaline surged and Shin felt himself fall back into Exigency and he rushed forward towards a sedan that was being swept towards a group of pedestrians who’d been slammed against the wall of a building by the current. They struggled to stand and pull themselves out of the way, but it was clear that they would be crushed by the oncoming vehicle before they could get away. Shin interposed himself, reaching out with both hands to catch the oncoming car. His fingers dug into the chassis as he grappled the automobile and struggled to find his footing on the slick ground. Digging in, he lifted the car into the air and, filled with adrenaline as he was, his first instinct was to throw the car away as hard as he could. However, a glance through the fogged-up windshield reminded Shin that there was a terrified driver inside, and he gently set down the car as best he could. With the immediate problem solved, Shin looked up and down the street at the toppled cars and civilians, trying to discern who needed his help next. However, a figure rose up in the middle of the shattered road, demanding all of Shin’s attention.

Shedding the remains of its incinerated clothing and burnt skin beneath the rain, the Casualty stood up on its feet, and its body shuddered in expectation of an imminent transformation. The creature stood taller and wider than it had before, having transformed from a mutated old man into a seven-foot-tall monstrosity that was over half as wide at the shoulder. In place of his original leathery brown skin, the Casualty produced a smooth, hairless white epidermis that was stretched tightly over its expanded frame. Two new arms had grown out to produced finned fingers and lengthy claws. The sharklike mouth had grown further and further out of the old man’s head, extending outward on a longer neck. To replace the teeth it had lost, clusters of new fangs had grown out in excess, to the point that they poked violently through the Casualty’s flesh. What remained of the old man was nothing more than a vaguely human silhouette of dark brown skin that marred the pale hide of the beast’s neck and torso.

“Dammit!” Shin brandished his Omen, transforming it back into the form of a sword. He stepped into the street, ready to continue the fight, but the Casualty had other ideas. It raised its arms up, its voice rising from a burbling hiss to an ear-piercing shriek. The rainfall stopped and the air became dry, and then, the drains in the street began to overflow, flooding the roadway. Innocent civilians screamed and cried, scrambling for safety as water rushed in all directions while cars lost traction with the road and began to drift helplessly. Geysers of water began to burst up at random, threatening to hurl people into the air or flip cars. Shin froze for a moment, unsure what action to take.

“Do I try and keep fighting?” Shin asked himself, glancing between the shrieking Casualty and the people around him. “Or do I focus on evacuating the street first?”

As if in answer, a new noise echoed up and down the street: a rumbling noise that grew into a roar as it grew closer. It grew louder and louder, and even the Casualty stopped to listen as something came nearer. Following the sound, Shin turned his head to look back up the street behind him just in time to see a car round the corner.

It was a sleek black car with two doors and a wide front end. The vehicle roared forward in the direction of Shin and the Casualty, creating a deafening din that echoed off the walls of the buildings around them. The vehicle passed Shin by, cutting through the flooding street like a blade while also impossibly weaving between pedestrians and toppled vehicles. It charged towards the Casualty and the beast leapt into the air at the last second, carried upward by a plume of water. As the black car passed beneath it, the Casualty gestured downward, and another blast of water shot the vehicle into the sky. The car flipped end over end multiple times and then landed heavily thirty feet down the street. No ordinary vehicle would have survived the rigors of that landing, but the black car seemed perfectly fine and the Casualty whipped around to face it as it returned to the ground.

“Attention! Attention!” the Omen in Shin’s hand began to blare its automated alert. “Senior Inspector Asahi Takeyoshi has arrived at the scene of the Heavy Rain Emergency in Horizon District! I repeat, Senior Inspector Asahi has arrived! All civilians are to comply with orders given by the Human Calamity Response Bureau and the Civil Services!”

It was then that Shin realized there was another man standing in the street between the black car and the Casualty. He was shorter than Shin by a few inches and a decade or so older, with ruddy skin, a head of jet-black messy hair and unshaven cheeks. The man was dressed in a black suit like Shin, but he wore a brown waist coat beneath his jacket, and he wore a neon green laminate jacket over his uniform. In his left hand he held a cup of coffee at stomach level, and he used his right hand to stifle a yawn. Shin gaped at the stranger, trying to discern where he’d come from. The Deputy was certain that the man hadn’t been standing there a moment before.

“Did he jump out of the car in midair?” Shin asked, looking back to the black car which now sat idle on the street.

“A Heavy Rain Emergency, huh?” the Senior Inspector took a sip of his coffee as he surveyed the Casualty, which seemed to be gauging him in turn. “I think that’s a new one. I’ve seen ‘Drowning’ and ‘Flood’ Casualties before, but you’re a first. So, tell me, in your own words, what makes you special?”

 The Casualty gave the Inspector an answer; it raised its hands over its head and then thrust them downward towards the Inspector. The frozen rain drops overhead surged into motion, once more shooting downward in a blistering hail of projectiles. Shin stretched out hand and opened his mouth to try and project some kind of warning, but the words caught in his throat when the Senior Inspector casually strolled through the barrage without issue. For a moment, Shin thought that the older man was simply too hardy to be harmed by the downpour that shredded the concrete street to dust and mud, but when he focused, Shin could see that the other man wasn’t being touched by the rain at all.

“How is he doing that?” Shin could only wonder.

“A water manipulating Crisis?” the man mused as he lackadaisically closed the gap between himself and the Casualty. The man paused for a moment, a pensive look on his face as though he was listening to something, then he started walking again. “You can control the directionality and force of rainwater? That’s a bit specific, but alright. That shouldn’t be too hard to handle.”

The Casualty seemed to share Shin’s mysticism regarding the Inspector’s casual and uninterrupted approach. It stared at the Inspector with its eyeless face, hissing and burbling in momentary indecision, then, it lunged. It charged headfirst towards the Senior Inspector, opening its massive mouth to try and bite him in half from head to hips. A second later, the Casualty was stumbling backward, broken teeth and blood streaming in all direction. The shark mouth had been split open vertically, leaving the upper half of its new head to pull apart in two different directions.

The Inspector held an object in his right hand, though Shin had a hard time describing it. It wasn’t an Omen; instead, it was a slender knife with a faceted yellow wooden handle with a pink pommel and a slender dark grey blade. The Senior Inspector twirled the strange blade expertly with the fingers of his right hand while he held his coffee cup away from the spraying blood with his left.

The Casualty, caught off guard by the Inspector’s counterattack, raised its massive claws to rake the small man in front of it. A few deft passes of the dagger in the man’s hand caused lacerations to appear up and down the Casualty’s forearms, spilling blood and rendering the beast unable to lift them. Staggering backward in retreat once more, the Casualty tensed its legs, ready to leap away from the dexterous butcher that was carving it apart. However, the man in green flicked his fingers and the strange knife flew from his hand, striking the Casualty in the chest and the creature froze where it stood. Shin stared at the immobile monstrosity as the rain began to fall again, and the man standing before Human Calamity took another swig of his coffee. The Senior Inspector glanced around, and his eyes immediately found Shin.

“Hey, kid!” the Senior Inspector gestured towards him. “Come over here.”

“Me?” Shin asked, caught flat-footed.

“Yes, you!” the older man barked. “Who else do you think I’m talking to?”

“Smooth,” Shin’s Omen mocked him as the young man stepped across the street, his sword collapsing back into a phone again.

“Senior Inspector Asahi?” Shin ran an awkward hand through his hair and then bowed, uncertain what he was introduce himself, apologize, or explain himself. “I’m Deputy Inspector Atarashi Shin. I’ve been assigned as your student, starting today.”

“So, I’ve heard,” the Senior Inspector didn’t answer Shin with an introduction in kind, and he sounded less than enthused about their meeting. Shin straightened awkwardly, trying not to take it personally. He looked up at the Casualty still standing entirely immobile over them, and his instincts told him to be tense, despite how entirely frozen it appeared to be.

“Uhh, is it dead?” Shin asked.

“No,” Inspector Asahi took another sip of his drink, and then reached out to flick the end of the knife sticking out of the monster’s chest. “I just made it impossible for it to move.”

Shin followed the other man’s motion with his eyes to the beast’s torso, where the yellow wooden handle and pink pommel still protruded from between the beast’s ribs.

“Wait a minute,” Shin asked, realizing what he was looking at. “Is that a pencil?”

“It used to be,” Asahi grunted a confirmation, and he fished an old-fashioned black pen from a pocket in his green jacket. He raised it up to wrap the Casualty on its mutilated oversized shark nose, as if to scold it. “Pay attention to this, kid; it’s your first lesson. Once a human being becomes a Casualty, there’s no going back. Oftentimes, the transformation into a Human Calamity will leave some traces of their original selves, but you need to look past it.

“The only way to kill a Human Calamity is to destroy its brain. Nothing else will work. Ugly bastards like this guy, the type that grow extra heads? They can make that difficult to determine where the brain is, exactly. The best way to handle that is to locate the original head, if possible, and destroy that rather than worry about the other ones.”

He spun the writing utensil between his fingers, and it changed; the black polished length of the pencil thickened and hardened while the bronze pen clip extended into a finger guard. The bronze pointed tip lengthened, transforming into a six-inch blade. Holding the knife in a reverse grip, Asahi raised the knife and held it over the patch of skin that marked where the old man’s head used to be. He glanced at Shin, making sure the younger man was watching, then thrust the pen-knife through the beast’s flesh.

The immobile Casualty burbled and hissed through its teeth one last time, and then, it suddenly collapsed. Shin stared down at the fallen Human Calamity, the tension in him screaming that it would spring back to its feet at any second, but that didn’t happen. The Casualty simply lay on the sidewalk as the rain poured down, mixing with the blood seeping from the hole in the side of its head. Asahi stopped paying attention to the Casualty the moment he pulled his blade from its head, instead focused on his weapon which had returned to the form of a pen. He shook the pen back and forth with disgust, letting it drip blood onto the sidewalk, and he sighed.

“This was my favorite pen, you know?”

Incident Report

1/4/2044

Central Ward

Horizon District

At roughly 08:30, Deputy Inspector Atarashi Shin encountered a Human Calamity during the course of his duties. He attempted to subdue the Casualty, incurring minor property damage across Horizon as a result. I eliminated the Casualty when I arrived on the scene, and I remained on site until Civil Services arrived.

Senior Inspector Asahi Takeyoshi, Human Disaster Response Bureau

Dossier and Autopsy Report

01/04/2044

Subject Name: Unknown (Jaws)

A run of the mill Casualty created by the constant downpour of Hurricane Izumi. Seemed to serve as a nice opponent for Central Ward’s virgin Inspector, though perhaps the old guy was too much for him to handle. By the time the corpse reached us, the accumulation of repeated physical trauma and advanced mutation had left most forms of identification thoroughly off the table. DNA samples have been submitted to the Civil Database, but I’m not keeping my fingers crossed or anything.

Judging from the data we were given from Inspector Atarashi’s Omen, it seems as though the subject was a transient that ended up getting swept into one of the city’s storm drains. However, the subject underwent extreme physiological metamorphosis as a result of continual exposure to stress. The subject developed a secondary mandible growing from the side of his head, as well as a pair of longer arms tipped with claws, in addition to a steadily increasing muscle mass.

Although Inspector Asahi was kind enough to bring the Casualty in relatively intact, the biological changes to the subject’s form have been evaluated and found to be of little use in further research. The cadaver has been carbonized, and his remains are being stored pending the results of his DNA tests.

Crisis: Heavy Rain Emergency, “Deadly Downpour”

Kitagaki won the rock-paper-scissors match, so he got to name the Crisis this time. A water-manipulating ability, Deadly Downpour manifests in controlling the flow of existing water. As far as Crises go, Deadly Downpour showcased great versatility, being capable of offense, defense, and mobility. However, the Crisis did not possess the ability to generate water through the use of Hazard Energy, nor did Deadly Downpour exhibit any esoteric or exotic effects to set it apart from previously researched Crises of its family. As a result, “Deadly Downpour” has been passed over for further research.

Parameters

Exigency: 4.0

A substandard Human Calamity in terms of physicality, but it must be remembered that even a “below-average” Casualty possesses strength and durability eclipsing even the largest organisms in the animal kingdom. Jaws possessed a powerful overgrown mandible and additional talons as force multipliers for its superhuman strength and hardened skin that could repel small-arms fire. However, against the monomolecular blade of an Omen, it stood no chance.

Runaway: 6.0

Jaws possessed an above average ability to draw in environmental Hazard Energy to fuel its growth. Perhaps the subject’s saving grace, Jaws was endowed with exceptional regenerative abilities in response to continuous physical trauma, even to the point of growing entire limbs in the matter of seconds. Even substantially stronger Saigaijin aren’t guaranteed to heal so rapidly. In addition, the influx of Hazard Energy seemed to enable Jaws to harness his Crisis more ably and more forcefully in a very limited period of time.

Forecasting: ? (Unknown)

The subject’s lifespan post-metamorphosis was very limited, as was the data we were able to gather on it. During the engagement with Inspectors Atarashi and Asahi, the Casualty displayed no signs of precognition, which may suggest that his ability to Forecast was extremely limited, or that complete regression to an animal mind state prevented the subject from exercising what foresight it may have possessed.

Account: 30%

The Casualty possessed a token amount of Karma inside its body when tested during autopsy, and that paltry number was likely boosted by the battle before its death. Nonetheless, the subject showed no aptitude for manipulating causality during its brief time as a Human Calamity.

Precision: 6.0

When utilizing Deadly Downpour, the subject showed a strong aptitude for manipulating water for a wide range of uses. By using rainwater to form projectiles, Jaws could harness his Crisis to target enemies precisely with minimal drop in power.

Karma: 3.0

Posthumous testing of the cadaver revealed a Karmic flow inside the body tilted towards misfortune.

Dr. Aburaya, Human Disaster Response Bureau, Corpse Disposal Unit

The Daily Grind

Case File #0

January 4^th, 2044

08:28 AM

Central Ward

Horizon District

Saburo had always thought himself fortunate.

Life didn’t bless those that allowed themselves to fall into depression and anxiety. No amount of self-pity could change a man’s circumstances, but wallowing in regret could stop you from seeing a way out from your current situation. No, dark thoughts could only make a light downpour into a storm, and the storm above Saburo’s head didn’t need any help.

A storm was perched over the island of Yōgai-shima. A curtain of black clouds swallowed the sky, stretching from one horizon to another so as to trick the city below that the sun was never going to rise. The only light that the hurricane allowed was its own, and that came in the form of terrifying flashes of lightning that roiled through the black clouds, each scintilla followed by a deafening peal of thunder. When the typhoon held its roaring tongue, the silence was filled by the endless whispers of falling rain. A hundred million tiny drops of rain struck the city up and down, colliding with walls and roofs to splash and leave behind a little syllable, another fragment, in a series of indecipherable hushed secrets. Despite the attempts from the wind and the rain to drown out all other noise, the city beneath remained defiant.

Yōgai-shima: the city at the end of the world. When Tokyo burned and the world beyond Japan’s borders fell to pieces, Yōgai-shima became the home to millions of survivors. An artificial island that floated somewhere in the Sea of Japan, clinging to the side of a manmade mountain, Yōgai-shima was perhaps the largest metropolis remaining anywhere in the world and it was made to weather disasters like the ocean storm that perched above it.

The city of Yōgai-shima was made from a thousand-thousand buildings that clustered together, creating a cityscape that stretched from one end of the floating fortress to the other, its expanse held back only by the foam of the sea’s turbulent waves. The first generation of buildings that dotted the island’s surface were almost entirely identical, being put together by automated machines and algorithms rather than by men and architects. Though many of those structures had been knocked down and pulled apart in the decade since, all of Yōgai-shima’s buildings were made to endure. More than that; they were built to devour.

Even as the raging storm tried to pluck the blasphemous isle from nature’s waters, the island of Yōgai-shima fought back. Spears of iron and steel unfurled from the rooftops, thrusting into the sky to draw in surging lightning while streetlights transformed into spiraling windmills to take in the wind. Pipes built along the sides of buildings gulped down the rain and drains opened in the streets to hold back flooding. With each passing moment, more and more of the hurricane’s fury was eaten up by Yōgai-shima.

Thunder, wind, and rain: Yōgai-shima ate it all, and perhaps more. Looking up at the heights of the buildings that crowded around him, Saburo felt that Yōgai-shima wasn’t simply drawing in a little extra power from the storm as it passed by, but that the island was feeding on something more elemental. The metal rods that probed the clouds seemed to be pulling them down, as if they sought to drag the storm from the sky. Nothing built by man could do that, right? But if the city was made to withstand the harshest of calamities, its people were no less determined.

Up and down the streets of humanity’s last refuge, men and women stood in formation, heedless of the downpour. Dressed in water-proof parkas, they walked beneath awnings that unfurled from the sides of buildings to blunt the impact of the rain. Small, heated shelters stood at the corner of every intersection to allow pedestrians to warm themselves while they waited for the lights to change. When the endless stream of cars was finally signaled to halt by a series of floating lights, a transparent cylinder unfurled from the ground so that the men and women travelling on foot could cross without being buffeted by the wind. Even in the face of a natural disaster, the working class of Yōgai-shima never stopped. They couldn’t.

Whether they were walking to work through a rainstorm or driving one of the hundred vehicles filling the streets, or commuting on one of the city’s large green buses, no one in Yōgai-shima had the luxury of sitting still. Yōgai-shima demanded that every man, woman and child run the race of survival without exception. No one had a free pass in Yōgai-shima; you were either studying and proving to the powers that be that you were a useful economic resource to be invested in, or you were earning your keep however you could. If you couldn’t do either, Yōgai-shima had no interest in allowing you a single inch of living space. Pay your dues or get off the island; that was the only way to survive, and that was what separated Saburo from the army around him.

Somewhere along the way, Saburo had stumbled. He’d fallen, and no one was there to help him. He’d truly believed himself fortunate when he was among the first few people to come to Yōgai-shima, especially when so many others didn’t get the chance. Before the Downfall, before Tokyo burned, Saburo had been a construction worker. He’d helped raise up a thousand different buildings all across Honshu, and when Yōgai-shima needed its foundations laid, his company had been contracted to do it.

He still remembered those early days before the destruction of Tokyo when Yōgai-shima was still a secret to the world at large. He and a thousand other workers were living in a camp on the east side of the flat concrete island, sitting in the shadow of the white mountain that erupted from the sea for some esoteric purpose. Their homes back then were tarp tents and shipping containers, and days were filled with hard work, while the nights were filled with booze. It was strange to Saburo that when he thought of “home,” that encampment was the first thing that came to mind, rather than anyplace in Japan proper. But memories of his homeland had faded in the past ten years, and nothing remained to go back to.

He remembered the Downfall when it happened, though he’d been fortunate enough to be miles away. It was the tail end of an otherwise normal working day, and the sun was setting when there was a terrible shaking in the earth beneath Saburo’s feet. He glimpsed a bright burning light in the south, so blinding that it seemed like a second sun was rising while the first began to set. The clouds were swept away, and the seas raged, and Saburo feared the entire concrete island would collapse into the water and disappear.

When the bright light vanished, Saburo and the other workers stood at the southern coast, staring across the sea toward home, unable to describe what had happened. Communication with the mainland had been cut off, and those left on the island were forced to try and understand their circumstances by themselves. Pondering the possibility of a nuclear war breaking out, they huddled in their steel shelters as storms swept over the sea. But those storm clouds were darker than today’s, and they spit red bolts of lightning as they wept black raindrops, staining Yōgai-shima and its white mountain. The chaos carried on only for a week; that was what Saburo’s rational mind remembered, but time had blurred the sharp recall of his heart, turning those frightful days when the sun stopped shining into an eternity. Even so, the madness ended eventually.

When the storms passed, a fleet of ships followed, ferrying passengers from Japan to Yōgai-shima. Japan’s need for a refuge from the endless insanity of the twenty-first century had reached a tipping point and the boats travelling between Honshu and Yōgai-shima brought with them more workers and machines than ever before. New technologies were put in practice to raise Yōgai-shima from a concrete plain up into a working metropolis overnight, and Saburo, and his comrades, were left to watch, useless.

Pushed to one side, the men who’d worked the foundations of the artificial isle were abandoned as an army of machines took over. Saburo remembered how he marveled as he watched buildings being designed, printed, and put together like puzzle pieces in a matter of days. He saw things he’d never seen before, and things he couldn’t explain, in the building of Yōgai-shima, but when the work was done, Saburo was certain that he was unwanted.

When the army of machines went away, a human wave of refugees hit the city and Saburo knew that the world had changed forever. Millions of men and women struggled to carve out their new lives among the grey, lifeless towers of the city, pretending that it was still the same world they left behind. Fortunes changed in an instant; rich men became poor, and the powerful became weak. Those that depended on the logic of the old world and its resources found themselves overwhelmed, but those that could adapt to the changing times reaped prestigious rewards; Saburo supposed he was of the former, not the latter.

In the wake of the island’s founding, new businesses became in demand, and the yesteryear construction company Saburo had worked for had gone out of business. What was its name? Saburo couldn’t remember, but he did recall that he didn’t much grieve its loss when it disappeared. He’d always thought he had a leg up.

Saburo had never found love and never had the time for a family. That gave him an advantage over his coworkers, he’d imagined, all of whom had a brood of mewling mouths to feed. The contract to work on Yōgai-shima had been generous, though that was too small a word for the money they’d been paid. Even though Saburo was among the men pushed to the side in the rush to finish the city, he’d still received an ample sum. There was no one to share it with, so Saburo kept it all to himself, but it didn’t last forever. Nothing did.

When the money dried up, Saburo was forced to realize that his work had, too. The construction workers of days past were no longer needed. What the city of tomorrow needed weren’t strong backs and steady hands, but men trained to guide and control fleets of drones so that entire neighborhoods could be stitched together at the same time. What was Saburo to do? A fifty-something man with the wear and tear of decades of manual labor, with no skills, and no family. The other construction workers were similarly out of work, but they’d hit the ground running, all the same.

Some had thrown themselves into the new industries to stay, learning new skills to adapt to Yōgai-shima. Those that didn’t learn new skills put their knowledge of Yōgai-shima’s innards to good use; machines may have raised the skyscrapers, but men had hollowed out the ground beneath it, and there was a tidy profit to be made in smuggling contraband through the tunnels. And those that weren’t able to change or brave enough to navigate the maze-like confines of the island still had one last refuge: family.

Yōgai-shima had no social welfare. There was no unemployment, nor did the government recognize the rights of anyone that couldn’t work. If you couldn’t provide something useful to the island, you weren’t welcome on it. Family was the only exception to this rule of everyday life. Whether it was dictated by bloodlines or love, whether you were born into it or found it, family was one of the few things you could rely on when life hit you hard in Yōgai-shima. By the time Saburo found that out, it was far too late, and his failure to find a family of his own was one of the few regrets he let himself feel.

Over the last few years, he’d lost everything. When the money ran out, he had to give away what few valuables he had. Eventually, those ran out, too, and when he had nothing more to sell, he had nothing to pay the rent with. He was thrown out onto the streets shortly thereafter, left with little more than the clothes on his back. Life was difficult for Saburo, but he never allowed it to drive him to despair. When life demanded something from Saburo, he gave it with an understanding smile.

Life could always be worse. Well, that wasn’t the way Saburo liked to see things. Rather, from his perspective, there was always something to be thankful for. He may not have a home, he may not have a job, but he was still on Yōgai-shima, and that was something to be thankful for. He couldn’t imagine being homeless anywhere else in the world.

Even so, Saburo couldn’t help but feel the divide between himself and the other citizens walking the streets. He’d found a water-proof parka in a trash bin that someone had thrown out, and he’d used it to protect himself from the endless downpour from the storm above. Life had its little ways of giving Saburo just enough to get through hard times, but the parka had another gift as well. It let him blend in.

Walking down the street in the morning in this part of the city would have seen Saburo stick out like a toothache. He was dressed in a ratty, stained flannel shirt and a pair of fishing waders with torn leather boots; while the men and women marching to work would be dressed in suits and designer clothing. The parkas made Saburo uniform with the rest of the city, and that allowed him to travel further afield than he’d normally allow himself to.

He wasn’t a complete fool, of course. No one lived on the streets of Yōgai-shima for a decade and didn’t know how to keep their head down and avoid attention, and Saburo did just that. He kept his face turned to the ground, preventing him from making eye contact with anyone around them. When a pack of pedestrians walked up the sidewalk, Saburo gave them space to avoid attracting attention. He didn’t speak to anyone, but he just kept walking.

Where he was going, he wasn’t quite certain. For most of his time in Yōgai-shima, he’d lived in the Foundation Ward, the easternmost part of the city. It was where he’d lived in the work camp, and where he’d lived in his apartment, and where he’d lived after he’d been kicked out, too. Foundation was like Saburo, in that it had fallen on hard times; for whatever reason, the eastern ward had never been able to find its footing in the midst of the city’s chaotic early years, and it had fallen into disrepute among its counterparts. Saburo was thankful for that, seeing that the Civil Police and deportation squads didn’t make their rounds in Foundation very much.

He couldn’t stay in Foundation anymore though; not in this weather at least. He’d been living in a small storm drain on the far side of the White-Mountain Sanzu between Foundation Ward and Sin Ward, but that little hideaway had been flushed out by the raging storm. Without a place to go, Saburo had ventured west, crossing into Sin Ward. He tried to find himself a place among some of the homeless camps there, but things were somehow even worse in Sin Ward.

The communes in Foundation weren’t luxury by any means, but the Towers seemed to possess a kind of community spirit that made them ward off tourists that might want to harass the local transient population. That wasn’t true for Sin Ward. The homeless camps on the west side of the Sanzu river were constant targets for harassment. Saburo had only stayed there for a day or two before a gang of bikers had torn through the camp, circling runaway vagrant men and women like a pride of lions circling prey. Saburo had run wildly, heading away from the chaos and further into Sin Ward.

After the panic faded away, Saburo had kept walking, having nothing better to do. He moved further and further west, even though his instincts told him that moving away from Foundation meant it was far more likely that he would be picked up by the Civil Services. He walked south and west, skirting the most opulent sectors of Sin Ward, but he didn’t move so far away that he couldn’t look on the city’s splendor from a safe distance. But he didn’t stop there.

Perhaps it was the mask of the falling rain that emboldened him, but Saburo wanted to keep walking. He left behind the decadence of Sin Ward and continued further west, heading into the heart of the island. It was a foolish thing to do, but a perverse curiosity compelled Saburo to continue. Stepping foot into Central Ward was something he’d never imagined he’d do, but being able to see the heart of Yōgai-shima was a desire he couldn’t quench. He’d help to build the island, but he’d never been able to really see it.

Central was everything he’d imagined and more. Foundation had been nothing but squalor; a gangrenous wound that the rest of the island ignored. Sin was a world of splendor, being both glitz and grime in equal measure. Central Ward, though, was different.

Watching the men and women stalwartly soldiering through the pouring rain while automated vehicles dominated the streets, moving in a constant rhythm as traffic ebbed and flowed all made Saburo believe that this was what Yōgai-shima was meant to be. It was orderly, stoic, and articulated to the smallest detail. This was the city of the future; the way mankind was supposed to live in the twenty-first century. Marveling at the metropolis around him, Saburo momentarily forgot that he had no place in it.

Saburo’s wanderings became less and less focused as curiosity compelled him to marvel at the sights and sounds of the city. Over the constant downpour, a brief waft of warm air caught Saburo’s attention. Along that draft of heat, there was a smell: something light and buttery. Drawn by the scent, Saburo soon found himself standing before a storefront which took up just one small segment of a multistoried building. He stared in through the wide window of the establishment, looking at a small bakery. The inside of the eatery was decorated with pseudo-wooden tables and chairs with matching floors and cream-colored walls. As Saburo watched, rooted to the spot by his appetite, a young woman dressed in an apron stepped up. She had a headband to hold back her brown hair and held a tray of steaming biscuits and croissants which she placed on a rack in front of the window to tempt other passersby. She looked up at Saburo, noticing him standing in the window and smiled, automatically, but then, flinched when he smiled back.

It was at that moment that Saburo remembered where he was and who he was. The girl stepped away from the glass, turning her back on Saburo and he was left to look at his own reflection. An old man with a souring smile stared back, an uneven smile with missing teeth and what remained of them were rotten and brown. His hair, such as he had left, was in matted grey locks that fell down around his unshaven face. Saburo turned his back on the store, bowing his head again and pulling the cowl of the parka lower down around his face, but the anxious fist in his gut reminded him that it was already too late.

She’d seen him and she knew that he was a homeless man as sure as if he’d had it written on his forehead. He wasn’t supposed to be here; this city didn’t tolerate people like him. The fact that he’d been able to stay on the island for as long as he had was a mercy, but now that threatened to change. He’d tread on the good graces of the city, and stepped outside the social bounds that he’d been allowed to live in.

That girl; would she call the police? If she did, there was no hope. There was no due process in Yōgai-shima if you didn’t have a Civil ID. If you weren’t in the city’s records, the idea of rights or protections under the law were a ridiculous notion. Saburo had heard the tales; the Civil Police could do anything they wanted to you if they found you without an ID. At best, he’d be shipped off to a prison colony and be forced to work the rest of his short life. If he wasn’t so lucky, he’d be thrown into the sea. The fear of those old stories told to him by men he couldn’t remember melded together into blind panic and Saburo hastened to find an escape.

East; he needed to head east. Back to Sin Ward, back to Foundation. But which way was east? In his wanderlust, he’d gotten turned around. His eyes scanned the rooftops, and in the distance he saw a false moon hanging in the sky, the telltale sign of Tsukuyomi Tower, the crown jewel of Sin Ward. Using it as a guiding star, Saburo hurriedly shuffled in its direction, hugging his parka around him as he went.

In his haste to get away from Foundation, he drew looks from the men and women on the street with him. It was as though some magic spell had been broken, and whatever esoteric charm that had sheltered Saburo from the looks of the crowd had abandoned him. That, or perhaps he was never as invisible to them as he’d thought. Saburo kept his head down, trying to avoid the accusatory looks of those on the street, glancing up only on occasion to make sure he was still heading towards the luminous ring of distant Sin Ward. With each step, the world itself seemed to accuse him.

The wind picked up, howling accusations as it tried to bowl him over, and lightning flashed in the skies, branching apart to form a thousand glowing fingers pointing down at him. Thunder followed after, as if the storm was declaring “See! He’s right there!” But over the sound of constant whispering rain and the raging storm, there came another sound; a manufactured sound.

A whistling echoed up and down the streets, distant, but growing closer. The whistle warbled steadily up in pitch and then went back down again in a cycle. Saburo knew what it was as soon as it reached his ears: a siren.

Had the girl already called the Civil Police on him? Or could it have been any one of the faceless pedestrians on the street? No, that didn’t matter at all. What mattered was that the police were close and he’d likely be apprehended the moment they saw him. He had minutes to get away, or maybe only seconds!

Saburo threw away any desire to remain inconspicuous and ran across the eastern side of Horizon, desperately sprinting through the Golden Mile that connected the east side of the ward to its neighbor, Sin. The rain seemed to pelt down on Saburo like hurled stones, threatening to drag him to the ground while the wind yanked at his parka to pull him off his feet. The old man stumbled as the entire world attempted to hold him in place, but he kept pressing forward, his eyes on the illusion of safety ahead of him.

He staggered through traffic; his transgression met with the flash of blinding headlights and the honking of deafening horns. Shouts chased Saburo out of the street; their words reduced to gibberish in the constant clamor of the howling wind, but above the din Saburo could still hear the sound of the wailing sirens drawing closer. He continued to flee, ignoring the calls of passersby.

The false moon of Tsukuyomi filled his eyes as he stepped onto the bridge between Central and Sin Ward. Beneath Saburo’s feet was a concrete gulch into which storm drains emptied, producing a raging manmade river that flowed out into the sea. Rain drops and false hope blinding him, Saburo passed through the bright holographic banner that warned pedestrians from attempting to cross the boundary. He stumbled onto the concrete bridge, the sound of the raging waters beneath him blocking out the sharp whistle of the sirens, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

Bracing himself against the barricade on his right, Saburo used it to guide him as he crossed the span. The wind continued to howl and the rain kept falling, but the Civil Police and their haunting sirens seemed a world away, now. He crept across the walkway, clinging tight to the rail as he went, not ignorant to the danger of the waters beneath his feet.

Closer and closer he crept towards the far side, its own bright red banner flashing, which seemed to Saburo like a rope that marked the end of a marathon.

The wind howled.

Closer.

The sky above flashed blindingly bright.

Almost there!

Thunder roared and a wave of water crested the left side of the bridge and washed over the walkway, rushing towards Saburo. The peal of thunder drowned out the sound of the crashing wave and the mischievous fingers of the wind grasped at his parka, pulling it down over his face, making him blind to his oncoming doom until it was already rising over him. He looked to his left at the last moment, seeing only a wall of shifting blue-grey water, and the instant seemed to drag out as adrenaline flooded Saburo’s brain. Before he fully understood what was happening, the wave of water hit Saburo like a truck.

He was lifted off his feet and slammed into the concrete side of the bridge that he’d been leaning on, and all the breath in his lungs escaped in a wheezing exhale. Before he could recover, the water swept him off his feet, and he was carried over the side of the bridge. He tried to scream, but the rain and wind swallowed what little noise he could make. He clutched at the side of the concrete railing and his fingernails ripped, leaving bloody trails across the slick cement as he was pulled down into the manmade river.

He landed with a splash, his parka wrapping around him like a net in the current, tangling his arms and legs as he tried to struggle against the tide. He was tossed around by the river, barely able to stay above the water for a second before he was rudely pulled back underwater. The hood of the parka clung to his face, blinding him, leaving him with no sensation except for the pull of water against his body and the sound of water rushing past his ears. He struggled, desperately, but the cold and turbulent river numbed his arms and legs, stymieing any attempts to stay above its raging surface.

“Help!” Saburo gasped when he felt his head briefly rise above the water’s surface. “Anyone!”

The old man’s desperate croak was scarcely audible, even to his own ears, so loud was the roaring of the storm overhead. In short order he was dragged underneath the water again and it occurred to him that he was going to die. He would be swept out to sea in short order and never be seen again. No, that wasn’t true. He’d likely hit a filter long before then, and then be sucked up into a dark, lightless pipe where he’d be trapped to suffocate to death, to inevitably be found as a rotting corpse some days later.

The thought terrified Saburo, and it compelled him to keep swimming, even as he lost feeling in his arms and legs. The current pulled the parka away from Saburo’s face, allowing him to peer through the dark waters around him. Above him, the world flashed as a bolt of lightning crossed the heavens again, and Saburo saw it as a signal flare. He fought to swim up to that transient light, desperate to escape, but no matter how hard he fought, the light seemed to fall further away and, eventually, everything dimmed.

Saburo had always considered himself fortunate.

January 4^th, 2044

08:45 AM

Central Ward

Horizon District

Deputy Inspector Atarashi Shin

“The emergence of a Human Calamity always coincides with a life-threatening situation. All care and consideration must be taken when an Inspector is directed to the site of an emergency to secure the area and locate victims that threaten to enter Exigency. Exigency can occur in any conscious human being, regardless of age, physical ability, or mental health. Once a human being has entered Exigency, they are classified as a Human Calamity and must be treated with caution. If physical mutations occur, the Human Calamity is to be considered a Casualty, and the Inspector(s) at the scene are entrusted with the responsibility of eliminating it upon identification.” -Human Calamity Response Bureau Standard Operating Procedures, Section 05a: “Disposal of Human Calamities: Identifying Human Calamities.”

The words of the Bureau’s internal legislature rang in Shin’s mind as he stood on a rainy street in the corner of Horizon District, the easternmost chunk of Central Ward. Buildings rose up around him on all sides, stretching towards the sky when the manmade island ran out of space to spread outward. The product of the same automated designers and builders, the buildings on all sides of Shin had nearly uniform appearances, being mass-produced for function rather than style or elegance. Buildings like these originated from the very inception of Yōgai-shima, being among the first structures ever laid down on the island. Though many of them had since been knocked down to raise more aesthetically pleasing structures in their place, pockets of first-gen buildings could still be found standing in stoic uniformity across the island.

In an attempt to breathe life into the block of identical edifices, their current owners had draped them in a nanite laminate; a smart-skin that could alter its appearance and texture to hide the bones of concrete beneath. The result was a party of buildings that were identical in layout down to the placement of their smallest windows, but each one had been given a different skin, with some of them disguised with a layer that imitated brick or marble or metal. Ultimately, it made the entire block more uncanny to the eye in a way that unsettled the passerby and made them stop and stare to discern what was wrong. But Shin didn’t have eyes for the strange buildings all around him; instead, he was staring at the device in his hand.

The young man was dressed in a black suit and tie with a white button up shirt, all of it made of a smart fabric not unlike the synthetic skins that clung to the sides of buildings around him. A product of twenty-first century technology, the suit could also alter its appearance and protect itself from wear and tear, a fact that it demonstrated as it repelled the downpour of water falling on Shin’s shoulders, not that he noticed.

Tuning out the city, the rain, and the storm overhead, Shin’s green eyes were looking downward at the slab of nanite in his right hand. The slim black brick of shape-shifting smart metal had produced a mechanical eye on the upper half of its face, through which it projected a beam of light that expanded into a blue screen surrounded by flickering digital sparks. The screen displayed a digital replica of the city around Shin, and the newly minted Inspector was absorbed by it.

He paused looking at the screen only to wipe the water from his eyes, being careful not to touch his blond hair; he’d spent a good twenty minutes styling it this morning, combing down the hair over his left temple into a neat part while he combed up his right bangs into a quartet of spikes, two smaller locks of upward hair placed in front of the larger set of spikes. It was a style he’d spent more time than he’d like to admit to get right, and though the rain was keen to wash out all traces of styling gel from Shin’s hair, he was eager to keep it neat for as long as he could. He delicately brushed at his bangs with his fingertips using the lightest touch possible before he returned to the digital display from the device in his hands.

Shin’s eyes looked to the map of the city rendered in deep blue, his eyes fixated on the red perimeter ring that marked the area around him. The red perimeter was slowly tightening as he watched, its exterior marked with the words “POSSIBILITY OF HUMAN CALAMITY EMERGENCE: 88%. EXACT LOCATION UNCLEAR.” Taking his eyes away from the screen, Shin briefly looked at the sea of buildings around him, scanning the pedestrians and the vehicles that packed the streets, all of which carried on their day without paying the man in black any extra attention.

“Where is it?” he asked, looking back down to the map as it flickered in the rain. He looked back and forth at the map as if expecting that whatever he was waiting for was going to leap out at him any second.

“Inspector Atarashi,” a voice spoke from the air, and the digital map wavered as the beam of light that produced it contracted. The luminescent map reshaped itself, transforming from a cityscape of light into the head and shoulders of a man dressed in a black suit like Shin’s. Kodera was a man with angular features and an intense pair of brown eyes, though he appeared the mild sort with his buttoned-up appearance and neatly pomaded hair.

“Go ahead, Forecaster Kodera,” Shin addressed the other man, holding his nanite communicator upward to look at the Forecaster’s digital replica.

“Where are you right now?” the Forecaster looked at Shin through a pair of glasses, his expression stern and his tone entirely stoic. It was a needless question, Shin knew: the Forecaster already watched his every move.

“I’m in eastern Horizon, south of the Golden Mile,” Shin answered dutifully. “I’m trying to locate the source of the Forecast, but I’m having a little trouble.”

“We’re getting some interference from the storm,” the Forecaster glanced down at something to his left that Shin couldn’t see before looking back. “The enormous amount of Hazard Energy contained in such a large meteorological event will do that. Still, what are you doing out in Horizon?”

“Well, that’s where I need to be, right?” Shin tried to play it off, but his instincts told him it wasn’t going to work.

“Yes, but I believe I directed you to wait at HQ until your mentor arrived, and then to proceed to the scene of the incident, did I not?”

“He was late!” Shin protested, earnestly. “You can’t expect me to cool my heels when peoples’ lives are in danger.”

“That’s exactly what you’re to do,” the Forecaster rebutted him. “As long as you’re a Deputy, you’re to act only at the discretion of your mentor. You are not to engage a Casualty if it emerges, unless in defense of your own life.”

“Even if other people are in danger?” Shin challenged the other man, but Kodera didn’t take the bait.

“You’ve been given your orders, Inspector,” the Forecaster insisted, coolly. “How did you even get out there, anyway?”

“I, uh,” Shin looked down the street, trying to remember which direction he’d come. “I ran.”

“You ran?” Kodera gave Shin a momentary skeptical look, but his features softened as he remembered that he wasn’t talking to an ordinary human being. “I see. Well, you still need to wait for Senior Inspector Asahi to arrive. I’ll let him know your current position.”

“Is this guy planning on arriving sometime today?” Shin allowed a little sarcasm to creep into his voice, despite knowing that talking rudely of his superior didn’t look good.

“He’s on the move,” the Forecaster confirmed, once more looking at something Shin couldn’t see. “ETA is ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes?” Shin asked aloud, almost scoffing in disbelief. “I ran here faster than that.”

“Remain on standby until you can join up with him,” Kodera continued to repeat orders that Shin wasn’t fully paying attention to. “If a Casualty does emerge, you are to keep a visual on it until Inspector Asahi arrives to support you. Do not engage. Inspector, are you listening?”

Kodera had noticed that Shin had lifted his head and looked away from his digital avatar, but Shin didn’t answer. The young man strained his ears over the falling rain, listening to a distant sound. Something warbled over the sound of the storm above, raising its voice high and low. A siren, Shin realized.

“Well, Forecaster, it sounds like they’re playing my song,” Shin glanced down at the hologram of Kodera and flashed a wry grin, even as his feet began to carry him in the direction of the sound. “I have to go.”

“Inspector!” Kodera called out sternly, but his next few words were cut off as Shin terminated the call. Shin stared at the empty space where Kodera’s image had been, knowing that he was already in trouble. Even so, it wasn’t in his nature to sit still.

“It’s your first day and you’re screwing it up already, huh?” a mocking mechanical voice came from the black device in Shin’s hand and the Inspector glared at the glowing orange eye that was peering at him. “Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shin muttered at the machine and the artificial intelligence housed within. “Just keep your thoughts to yourself.”

Shin raised his left arm and slapped the nanite device down across his left wrist, causing the black omni-tool to shift itself into a watch with the glowing eye as its face. He took a moment to orient himself in the direction of the sound, listening quietly to the faraway noise as it bounced off the walls of the buildings around him. As the sound grew louder and closer, Shin began to move.

He dipped into a delicate mental space, willing himself into action. Adrenaline flowed through Shin’s mind as he hovered between fight and flight, feeling fear and bravery in equal measure. Of all the things he’d learned in the past year training at the Bureau Academy, this was the most important. They called it “Exigency,” and being able to tap into it at will was the single determining factor that separated graduates from failures.

Ordinary humans experienced surges of adrenaline in moments of high tension, giving them the ability to become momentarily stronger or faster in response. For a Human Calamity, Exigency was much the same, but their bodies were flooded by not just chemicals, but by energy. Hazard Energy, the unseen particles that invited tragedies and miracles, flowed through Shin’s body, elevating him beyond the limitations of ordinary human beings.

He burst into motion, racing down the street. The rain parted as Shin raced across the streets, each drop falling in slow motion. The rain that clung to Shin’s waterproof clothes streamed off him as he charged, and the rainwater that pooled on the sidewalk burst as his feet touched the ground.

He raced through the crowded streets of Yōgai-shima as the city around him seemed to fall into a malaise. The world blurred, and the human figures on the sidewalk slowed to the point that they seemed to barely be moving. The cars moving in the street struggled to keep pace with Shin as he accelerated. The constant ambient noise of the storm melded with the sounds of human voices, rumbling engines, and honking horns, becoming nothing more than audible chaos. Shin tuned it all out, listening only for the wailing siren in the distance.

Orienting himself only by the sound, Shin dashed, darted, and weaved through the busy streets towards his unknown destination. The men and women who ambled across the sidewalk didn’t seem to even perceive Shin as he went by, save for the rush of wind he created when he passed too close to them. He was careful to control his speed as he circumvented the pedestrians in his way; he hated to think what would happen if he struck them at full speed.

Vaulting over an intersection, Shin found his progress halted by a new kind of barrier. The street ended in a metal railing that ran from north to south, the barricade marking the borders of a gulch that split Central Ward from the eastern reaches of the city. A variety of bridges spanned the gap, some of them built for pedestrians, others made for automobiles. Metal signs erected a decade prior advised travelers that one sector of the city was ending at the divide, and another began beyond it, while flashing red signs floated in the air, warning those who wished to cross on foot.

Shin slid to a halt on the slick asphalt, noting that a crowd of pedestrians had gathered at the railing. Rather than cross, the men and women dressed in colorful rain parkas were talking among themselves and peering down into the pit on the other side. The sirens continued to cry out, sounding louder and nearer than before, auguring the imminent arrival of the Civil Services.

“Somehow, I get the feeling that this is the place,” the device on Shin’s wrist mused with a sarcastic tone.

“Shut up,” Shin slapped the face of the wristwatch with his right hand, reminding the AI that it wasn’t supposed to speak without his say so. He stepped forward, striding towards the group that was looking down into the pit.

“I didn’t see it,” a woman asked, bracing her hands against the rail as she looked down. “What happened?”

“-went over the side,” someone else said, perhaps having another conversation. “He just ignored the warning signs.”

“Where does the water go?” a third voice asked, high with curiosity and alarm. “Aren’t there any safety measures to help people that fall in?”

Rushing to the side of the barricade, Shin placed his hands against the concrete and leaned over, staring down into a manufactured river. It was a smooth concrete passage that descended some two dozen feet below street level, and it ran as far to the north and south as the city’s clustered confines would let Shin see. Massive storm drains pumped gallons upon gallons of water into the breach, half of it the product of the constant deluge of Hurricane Izumi, while the rest was saltwater from the sea that had been sucked up into the city’s labyrinthine bowels and was regurgitated back out again. Shin’s eyes scanned the raging current, trying to find any semblance of a human figure bobbing up and down amid the churning water. He couldn’t see anyone, but that fact didn’t deter him from what he felt he needed to do next.

The sirens whooped and red and white lights flashed as a pair of vehicles drove down the street in Shin’s direction, but the Inspector paid them little mind. Shin placed one foot on the railing that divided the steep drop into the waters below from the street, and he clutched at the lapels of his uniform coat, ready to throw it off. It was only the timely interjection of his digital assistant that held the young man back.

“You aren’t really thinking of going in there, are you!?” the device on Shin’s wrist demanded. “What is diving into the river even going to accomplish?”

Shin opened his mouth, trying to find the words to explain what he was going to do, when the sound of the siren whooped its last. He turned his head, his eyes landing on a white police car trailed by a matching ambulance. The doors of the squad car opened, and a pair of officers dressed in white uniforms with red brassards climbed out, shrugging on translucent raincoats as they did so.

“Hey, you!” one of the officers noticed Shin preparing to climb over the rail and he made a sharp gesture with one hand. “Get away from there!”

Shin hesitated for a moment and stepped away from the barrier, heeding the words of an authority figure. A split second later, Shin hardened his features and shrugged his coat back over his shoulders, remembering that he was the authority in this situation. With a practiced motion, Shin reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a leather wallet, which he held up to reveal his ID and the silver badge that marked him as an Inspector. The badge was a polished silver Chesire moon with a black orb between its horn displayed over an eight-pedaled flower. The eyes of the officer’s strayed to the symbol and then to one another.

“My name is Inspector Atarashi from the Human Calamity Response Bureau,” Shin introduced himself as the police officers eyed him with doubt. “This area has been marked as the site of a potential Human Calamity-related emergency. I need you to cordon off the area and escort these people out of here.” 

“Yeah, we don’t take orders from you,” the first of the two officers rebuffed him after sharing a glance with his partner.

“This is an emergency situation!” Shin repeated himself, momentarily caught off guard by the officer’s argumentative mindset. “Everyone here is in danger and needs to be evacuated!”

“You let us make that decision,” the second officer insisted, cutting off any hope of a friendly conversation. “Is that badge even real? Let me see it.”

The second Officer stepped forward, but Shin tucked his badge away; he wasn’t about to let himself be admonished like a child.

“We don’t have time for this!” the Deputy’s insistence became prophetic, as a split second later, a painful sensation surged through his chest. He raised a hand to his breast, feeling a sharp and fiery sensation where he’d been hit by a piece of shrapnel a year prior. The wound had healed a long time ago, but the scar left behind had a habit of experiencing that initial pain all over again whenever danger presented itself. Realizing that time had run out, Shin turned back to the river and the voices in the crowd began to cry out.

“What is that?” one of the onlookers pointed into the river where a pool of bubbles began to form on the water’s surface. A moment later, a column of water erupted from the river, cresting twenty feet high. Shin watched as the men and women of the crowd pulled their Augurs out, using the shape-shifting omni-tools to take pictures of the bizarre geyser, but none of them seemed to notice the human figure that fell out of it save for Shin.

Shin turned his back on the officers, watching as the human silhouette fell from the sky like an absurd raindrop. Dressed in a ragged grey raincoat, the figure struck the ground, somehow landing on its feet with a wet splash. The crowd of onlookers finally noticed the new figure now standing a dozen feet away and the officers did, too, but no one moved. The fire in Shin’s chest, however, did not abate.

“Sir?” Shin was the first one to move, cautiously stepping toward what he realized was an elderly man with a leathery skinned face. His hair was a long, stringy mess, and his cheeks were covered in an unkempt beard. His clothes were soaked and his torn flannel shirt clung to his sunken chest beneath the parka. The man stared gormlessly forward for a few seconds, then, he turned to look at Shin. He said nothing as he made eye contact with the Inspector and the two men held their gazes for several seconds. Then, the old man’s chest and stomach heaved.

“Bleh!” the old man began to vomit, and water spilled from his mouth. An endless stream of liquid poured from his lips, more than the old man’s lungs or stomach could hold. He didn’t choke or gag on the outpouring, but continued to stare forward, mindlessly and Shin simply stared, not certain what to do. The man had clearly undergone Exigency and moved beyond the likes of ordinary human beings, but what was Shin supposed to do now that he realized that?

“Human beings suspected of having entered Exigency cannot be allowed to remain among the normal population unmonitored. If you should encounter a Human Calamity during the course of your duties, and they remain unstated by the rigors of Exigency, they must be apprehended and escorted back to District Headquarters for evaluation and processing.” – Human Calamity Response Bureau Standard Operating Procedures, Section 05a: “Disposal of Human Calamities: Identifying Human Calamities.”

Reminding himself of the SOP, Shin raised his left wrist to place a call back to HQ, but he was interrupted when the fire in his bosom flared again. The old man’s eyes turned red as the veins in his eyes began to burst, and he wept red tears down his face. He gurgled on the endless stream of water that escaped his throat as he started to writhe on the spot. Shocked gasps sounded out behind Shin and the sound of boots splashing across the rain-soaked street told him that the pair of officers were racing forward.

“Keep your distance!” Shin stretched an arm out to signal to the two men that they needed to stop, looking over his shoulder at them to ensure they didn’t approach the Human Calamity the old man had become.

“You, uh, might want to do something,” the AI in Shin’s watch urged him as the young man turned to look back at the homeless man. Shin meant to shush the machine, but his words caught in his throat when the old man began to transform.

A small point appeared in the center of the old man’s forehead, causing his skin to bulge. Smaller deformations began to push out from the right side of his face and cheek until they split apart. In moments, a second face had emerged from the old man’s head: an eyeless face with a pointed nose and a wide lipless mouth filled with needle-like mismatched teeth. The nightmarish shark mouth emerging from the old man’s head bit at the air blindly while his original face was stretched and distorted, fusing into the trunk of the new growth as it continued to expand.

The transformation didn’t end there: the homeless man’s shoulders cracked and expanded as his arms began to change. The sleeves of the parka tore as an explosive growth occurred, and the old man’s arms twisted apart at the elbow with a shower of blood. While his original arms dangled lifelessly, two new appendages grew out to replace them. Coated in a layer of newborn blood, the new arms were primate like in their length, reaching to their owner’s feet. Both new hands had five fingers, but they had thick membranes between each digit, and all were tipped by three-inch claws.

Faced with the violent transformation, Shin found that the entire year he’d spent training for situations like this suddenly became useless. He’d attended lectures on Casualties, he’d seen photos of them, even run a few simulations against them in training programs. Seeing one, a real one, in person was entirely different. All Shin could do was gape, still holding his right hand up to hold back the officers.

“Warning! Warning!” the voice from Shin’s wristwatch suddenly blared out a report, its voice repeating itself as the AI projected its voice from every nearby electronic device, causing a sea of glowing orange lights to appear up and down the street. “This is an announcement from the Human Calamity Response Bureau! A Heavy-Rain Emergency has been detected in the Horizon District of Central Ward! All citizens within the radius of this broadcast should evacuate the area immediately following the routes provided to your personal devices! Please report to the nearest Type-1 Emergency Shelter or continue evacuating safely out of the marked perimeter! Avoid open areas and large bodies of water and stay alert until an all-clear has been sounded!”

Screams filled the street as people finally noticed the living calamity that was now amongst them. The Casualty growled through its new mouth, making a throaty gurgling noise as a trail of vapor whistled through its teeth. The creature hefted its new limbs, the claws twitching as if eager for violence. There was a small clap of thunder from behind Shin, a modest noise in comparison to the storm above, and something raced over his right shoulder. The Casualty, caught by surprise, stepped backward as the projectile struck it in the head before it bounced away. A shattered bullet fell into the street at the Casualty’s feet where it hissed as it cooled in the rain. Shin glanced over his right shoulder at the officer in white who held his service pistol in his hands, his face as pale as his uniform. Shin took the moment to glare daggers at the man before he looked back at the Casualty.

The Casualty screamed with both mouths, producing a horrid duet that echoed across the city. It lunged, bursting into motion towards Shin’s right, seemingly intent on pursuing the police officer that had incited its wrath. The spell that held Shin fast was broken, however, and the Inspector darted forward to intercept.

The two Human Calamities collided in the street as Shin reactively entered Exigency. Sound and sight blurred as Shin moved beyond the bounds of ordinary human ability. The Casualty extended its clawed arms forward, viciously grasping for the man in white, and Shin snatched both hands by the wrists when he positioned himself between the monster and the officer. The Casualty struggled to overpower Shin, first trying to bowl him over, then trying to pull its hands free from Shin’s grip. When neither worked, the Casualty leaned its head forward, opening its massive new mouth to try and maul Shin’s face. Shin pushed the creature backward even as he held onto it by the wrists, twisting his head around to avoid letting the beast take a bite out of him. The two struggled in a deadlock and the city erupted into chaos around them.

Cars on the street began pulling away, fleeing the scene without any regard for safety or traffic laws. The crowd of onlookers broke away, running in all directions, screaming bloody murder. Gunfire popped in the street as both police officers opened fire on the struggling Human Calamities. The bullets bounced off the Casualty’s skin without success and Shin felt himself being jabbed across the back with what felt like hot pokers which made him realize he was being shot, too. He felt another bullet strike him in the back of the head and bounce away, and Shin gritted his teeth as a growl of anger escaped his mouth. He kicked the Casualty in the chest, breaking the grapple and sending the creature to roll across the pavement for twenty feet.

“Would you two get the hell out of here already!?” Shin turned back to the two officers and reached up to rub the hot spot on the back of his head. He held out his hand in front of his face, checking his fingers for blood. The sensation of heat blossoming in his chest brought Shin’s attention back to the monster, which had risen back to its feet.

The Casualty tilted its head back and filled its mouth with rainwater, gargling on it. Snapping its jaw shut, the Casualty lowered its head, letting the water run between its teeth and then thrust its shoulders forward, opening its maw. The water in its mouth spurted forward in a stream accelerated beyond the speed of sound. The Casualty’s poor aim caused the hydraulic cutter to split the street apart before it was able to steady its aim and direct the deadly current how it wanted. Shin ducked to the side as the stream flew past him and ripped the white squad car in two before destroying the engine block of the ambulance parked behind it.

“Somehow, I get the feeling this guy doesn’t like the police,” Shin’s AI observed.

“You don’t have feelings,” Shin reminded the machine as he pulled at his watch.

The nanite construction came apart at Shin’s touch, being designed to alter itself to suit his needs. The device was more than an omni-tool or a digital assistant: it was an Omen, the weapon of an Inspector. Holographic orange sparks flew from between Shin’s fingers as his Omen assumed another form and the black nanite flowed into the shape of a sword. It became a five foot long claymore with glowing orange stripes across the flat of the blade and the cross guard. Impossibly thin and equally light, Shin twirled the blade between his hands as he stepped towards the Casualty.

The weapon in Shin’s hand seemed to make the Calamity turn its attention to him and away from the police. Whether it could sense the danger he represented or the image of a sword struck a chord in the creature’s now animalistic mind, Shin couldn’t say, but he preferred that he was the monster’s sole target. After a moment of consideration, the Casualty opened its mouth again and filled its maw with water, prompting Shin to sprint forward.

The Casualty released blasts of water in Shin’s direction as he charged forward. The Inspector slipped between the supersonic water bullets with ease, but he still raised his sword to strike the liquid projectiles as he passed them by, scattering each one to prevent them from striking an innocent bystander or vehicle. He felt the force of each missile as it struck his weapon and the smart metal sword rippled with every impact but remained undamaged. While he focused on defensively destroying the water bolts, Shin couldn’t move at his full speed, but he still crossed the distance in a moment, and the Casualty was forced to change its approach.

The Casualty leaned to its right and then whipped to its left as it spit forth the last of the water in its mouth, creating a horizontal water blade that flew towards Shin. Unable to simply sidestep the monster’s attack, Shin came to a halt and swung his sword through the entire water blade, reducing it to a harmless spray. The moment Shin halted his approach, the Casualty sprang from the street, pouncing on him with its clawed hands outstretched.

Shin watched the Calamity descend towards him with its clawed right hand reaching for his throat. Instinct took over and Shin swept his sword down to his side and raised it up to intercept the attack. The tip of Shin’s claymore sheared through the concrete at his feet as easily as it cut through the air, and the bulletproof skin of the Casualty fared no better. The sable blade carved off the Calamity’s arm at the elbow, releasing a crimson waterfall. The Casualty’s arm splashed into the street and the creature stumbled backward a step. Despite how devastating the wound appeared, Shin immediately knew that he’d made a mistake.

“Shit! I should have gone for its head!” even as Shin reprimanded himself, he raised the sword up over his head and swept it around in an arc to decapitate the Casualty. However, the rainwater beneath the Casualty’s feet flowed with incredible force, producing a current that carried it backwards across the cement. The tip of Shin’s blade carved only a thin line across the monster’s throat, which wasn’t nearly enough to kill it.

The creature left behind a red trail on the sidewalk as it retreated some thirty feet away, slithering back and forth across the cement as it put distance between itself and the Inspector. The bloody path was quickly washed away even as more blood spurted from the stump of its severed arm. However, Shin knew that no amount of blood loss would kill something like the monster he faced. In the throes of Exigency, a Human Calamity couldn’t be killed without destroying its brain. On reflex, Shin had only maimed when he should have killed. Flicking the blood off his sword into the street, Shin raised his weapon and aimed to redouble his efforts. The Casualty, however, seemed to have other ideas.

Rainwater that had pooled on the ground began to flow towards the Casualty’s feet, as it had moments before. The water formed into a puddle that swirled around the monster’s ankles, then flowed up to his knees. Shin watched, his sword held up into a defensive stance, unsure what the Casualty was planning to do. A moment later, the water burst upward into a geyser, just as it had when the old man escaped the river. The Casualty flew into the air, flying away from Shin and into the city to the west. Shin watched as the twisted shape vaulted over a cluster of ten story rooftops and disappeared from view.

“Well?” Shin’s Omen asked, producing a glowing orange eye from the cross guard to glare at him. “What now, genius?”

“Isn’t it obvious? We’re going after it.”