The room was dim, lit only by the pale flicker of the old CRT monitor on the desk. Akito sat in front of it, motionless, his face bathed in the shifting glow of digital static and muted color. Rain still whispered against the window behind him, a constant rhythm like breath on the verge of sleep. But Akito was wide awake. Always awake.
The screen flickered once, then resolved into a block of green code. Encrypted text rendered in sharp, angular lines as sterile and impersonal as the voice behind it. The sender never used names. There were no greetings, no explanations. Just directives.
"Target: Daisuke Maruyama. Public persona: philanthropist, advocate for displaced youth. Suspected ties to trafficking syndicates operating through his overseas foundations. Surveillance initiated. Confirm readiness."
No emotion in the message. No margin for doubt. The information was a blade handed to him, already drawn.
Akito reached for the keyboard and typed a single word:
"Confirmed."
The message vanished. The screen went dark. Silence reclaimed the room, deeper now, heavier. In the corner of the desk, a small external drive blinked once, then began to hum. It fed video data into the computer with the sluggish consistency of a dying vein. Akito leaned forward.
Footage spilled across the screen, grainy surveillance pulled from security cams, mobile feeds, even low orbit satellite footage. Each frame captured the same man: Daisuke Maruyama. Mid-fifties. Sharp suits. Carefully cultivated expressions of benevolence. He shook hands with government officials, visited orphanages with camera crews in tow, cut ribbons on new hospital wings. He smiled often. Performed compassion like an art.
But Akito wasn't interested in the mask. He studied the spaces between the gestures. The moments when Maruyama's eyes moved before his head did. The times he stood too still, or scanned a room as if counting threats. The way his hand twitched slightly after touching a child's shoulder reflexive disgust or guilt or something colder.
A slow playback of one clip showed Maruyama stepping into a black sedan. Just before the door closed, his expression dropped flattened into something cold and hollow. The kind of face Akito knew all too well. Not anger. Not fear. Just calculation. The absence of conscience.
He memorized it.
Frame by frame, Akito dissected Maruyama's life. His schedules, his allies, the architecture of his movements. Nothing about the man was spontaneous. He existed within curated patterns, layers of security wrapped around him like armor. But patterns, no matter how carefully built, could be exploited. They always could.
The hours passed unnoticed.
When the feed finally stopped, the screen returned to black. Akito stood and walked to the opposite wall, where a thin metal cabinet waited, locked, and inconspicuous. He opened it with a fingerprint scan and slid the drawer out with practiced ease.
Inside was an arrangement of weapons and gear that resembled more of an altar than an arsenal. Each piece rested in a custom-carved space, untouched by dust or age. Akito ran his fingers over the black polymer casing of a silenced pistol. The metal was cold. Familiar. He checked the slide, the suppressor threading, the tension in the recoil spring. Every component was intact. Ready. Like him.
Next, the knives... three in total. Each one honed to surgical sharpness, balanced perfectly for his grip. One for close work. One for throwing. One for insurance.
He packed deliberately, without hurry, folding the gear into a matte-black satchel designed to hold death like a secret.
And then, as he reached to zip it shut, the tremor came.
Not in his hands... those were steady. But behind his eyes, behind the mask of his present mind, something opened. A breach. A memory.
Heat. Suffocating. The air thick with smoke and the sound of something collapsing... timber, glass, ceilings, whole lives.
Flames licked across the walls like wild things tasting their cage. The hallway pulsed red and orange, each flicker casting shadows that twisted like demons. Akito, much younger, his breath ragged and lungs burning, ran.
Screams echoed behind him high and raw. A woman's voice. A child's. It was hard to tell. It didn't matter.
He turned a corner, and the hallway exploded in sparks. A power line had come down, arcing across the corridor in serpentine chaos. His path blocked, he spun, only to see the smoke thickening behind him, sealing off the way he'd come.
And then...
A figure. A shadow through the flames. Someone reaching for him, their face half-lost in smoke and light. A silhouette male, tall, staggering through the heat with outstretched hands. Akito had reached back, fingers brushing the stranger's for a heartbeat...
... and then the ceiling gave way.
Everything became noise. Then nothing.
The memory faded with the precision of a blade leaving flesh. Akito exhaled through his nose, slow and deep, anchoring himself back in the present. The bag was closed. The weapons packed. The plan forming.
The subway was the best entry point.
Not because it was hidden, but because it wasn't. Every day, thousands passed through the city's underground arteries, their faces blurred in motion, their lives anonymous in transit. It was the perfect place to vanish into the crowd. And, more importantly, it was the perfect place to begin a path that required no witnesses.
He left the apartment without a sound, locking the door with a quiet click that sounded louder in the stillness of the hall. The rain had stopped, but the world still shimmered with its memory sidewalks slick with reflected light, streetlamps dripping silver tears. Akito kept to the edges of the buildings, moving through the city like something it had forgotten how to name.
The subway entrance yawned beneath a crumbling overpass, its stairwell slick with algae and disuse. Only a few passengers loitered near the platform early commuters, eyes dulled by routine and sleep deprivation. None of them looked up as Akito passed. They never did.
He stepped onto the platform just as the train arrived. The rush of air pushed his coat back, exposing the satchel slung tight against his frame. He stepped inside, choosing a car half-empty, and leaned against the far wall. The doors closed with a pneumatic hiss.
The lights inside were fluorescent, flickering in that slow, sick rhythm that gave everything a jaundiced hue. He stared at the glass panel opposite him, the kind meant for ads, but empty, reflective in the low light.
In the glass, Akito saw himself and a dozen versions of himself reflected from every polished surface: the windows, the ceiling, the screen of a stranger's phone. Each reflection slightly distorted. Each one carrying a different aspect of him.
There was the assassin... precise, impassive, dressed in the shadow of anonymity.
There was the boy from the burning building, breathless and bleeding.
There was the version of him who had once wanted peace, whose hands had not yet learned to kill.
There was the empty space where a future self might have existed, one not born of trauma.
He watched them flicker in and out of frame as the train curved through the tunnel, each reflection aligning for a breath, then shattering again.
The city roared overhead, unseen but omnipresent, like the pressure in a storm about to break. Akito stood still in the center of it all, unmoved by the movement, untouched by the noise.
And in that stillness, he made a vow not aloud, not to himself, but to the balance of things. To the ledger of blood and consequence that he'd been keeping since the day the fire took everything.
This new assignment was not justice. He didn't believe in that anymore. It wasn't vengeance, either. That had burned out years ago.
It was necessity. The same necessity that pulled a knife across a throat to stop another from screaming. The same necessity that erased names before they turned into statistics.
He did not question why men like Maruyama were allowed to thrive. He had stopped asking why the world was built this way. His job was not to fix it.
His job was to remove the cancer before it spread.
And that, more than anything, was what gave him clarity.
As the train plunged deeper into the tunnels, the reflections multiplied again, his face fractured into endless angles, hunter, haunted, hollow.
The mission had begun.