> "The most dangerous voices are the ones we silence inside ourselves."
---
The room was empty.
No, not empty—void.
Shinomiya Reiji stood in the center of a concrete chamber beneath Sector 6, where no cameras were permitted to record and no echoes were ever heard. Only the dim flicker of an old tungsten bulb overhead provided light, buzzing in protest like it, too, wanted to be somewhere else.
He had been called here. Not summoned by voice, but compelled by instinct—by a whisper deep inside his consciousness that told him the truth was buried below the surface of everything he knew.
His black gloves were stained with ash from the mission the night before. His jacket—still smelling of blood and metal—hung heavy on his shoulders. But it wasn't the weight of the coat that pulled him down. It was what he had begun to remember.
The dust on the floor swirled without wind, shaped by something unseen. A sound. A presence.
And then he heard it.
A voice—not from a speaker, not from the corridor, but from somewhere impossibly close. From behind his eyes.
"You've seen it now, haven't you?"
Reiji didn't flinch, though his hands clenched. The voice was layered—like two tones speaking at once, one familiar, one unknown. It wasn't the first time he'd heard it. But this time, it responded to him.
> "Who are you?" Reiji's voice echoed back at him, lost in the dead silence.
"You already know."
He remembered the face of the man in the alley from Chapter 2. The way he had spoken just before dying—about a symbol, a shadow not cast by light. And now, here it was again: not as a riddle, but as a confrontation.
On the far wall, the concrete began to crack. Slowly, deliberately, forming the shape of an emblem—a stylized eye wrapped in thorns. The insignia of Yamigen: the clandestine network that once controlled the underground assassins of the Eastern District before they were supposedly eradicated.
Except they weren't gone. Not all of them.
> "You were one of us," the voice said, now clearer.
"But they made you forget."
Reiji took a step back. His heartbeat didn't race. His breathing didn't falter. But his world—the memory he believed was his—began to fracture.
> "That's impossible... I was trained by the Central Bureau. I was cleared. I—"
"You were erased. And in your place, they built a soldier."
Silence returned.
But the message was left behind, carved into the wall now flickering with static that hadn't been there before. As Reiji reached for it, the cracks sealed shut—as if the wall had never been touched.
Then came the sound of approaching footsteps. Not mechanical. Human. And familiar.
From the darkness of the hallway, a figure emerged: Kirisawa Mei, his Bureau handler. She wore her black overcoat tight, her face unreadable as always. But her eyes, just for a second, flicked to the wall behind him—exactly where the symbol had appeared.
She said nothing about it.
> "You've been silent lately," Mei said calmly. "Something wrong, Reiji?"
He turned toward her, hiding his thoughts behind his usual stillness.
> "I heard something… strange."
Mei's lips curled, not quite into a smile.
> "Strange is part of the job. We adapt, or we disappear."
Chapter Themes:
Psychological instability begins to surface
Introduction to a deeper secret (Yamigen organization)
Mysterious voice inside Reiji – linked to his forgotten past
First indication that his past may have been altered
Relationship tension with handler Kirisawa Mei
Emphasis on "truth buried under memories"