The silence after the flash-bang was absolute, broken only by the frantic hammering of Kenji's own heart and the scuff of their boots on grimy concrete. Akari dragged him through a maze of service tunnels, her grip on his wrist like a vice.
"Move! They'll reboot faster than you can blink!" she hissed, her voice strained.
Kenji's head was a warzone. The residual pressure from the Hound's null-field was gone, but the act of pushing his own energy into its mind had left a searing, psychic brand. He could still feel the cold, alien architecture of its consciousness, the terrifying void where a human mind should have been. It was like touching death.
But he was moving. The adrenaline and the lingering effects of the nutrient paste fueled his flight.
Akari led him to a rusted grate. She didn't bother with stealth, kicking it open with a deafening clang. They spilled out into a narrow alley, the relentless acid rain a shocking return to reality after the claustrophobic tunnels. The neon glow of the upper city was a distant smear through the industrial smog.
"This way," she gasped, pulling him toward the towering, skeletal remains of a decommissioned mag-lev line. They scrambled up a collapsed access ramp, the rusted metal groaning under their weight.
High above the street, hidden within the steel girders of the dead track, Akari finally stopped, leaning against a massive beam to catch her breath. Below, the city sprawled out like a wounded animal, pulsing with light and life and decay.
Kenji slumped against a cold support column, sliding down to sit on the wet metal. He stared at his hands. They were shaking again.
"What did you do to it?" Akari asked, her breathing still ragged. Her cybernetic eye was fixed on him, scanning intently.
"I… I don't know," Kenji whispered, the words tasting like ash. "It was trying to shut me down. To silence everything inside me. I just… pushed back. I pushed everything I had into it."
"You overloaded its processor," Akari said, a hint of morbid fascination in her tone. "Psi-Hounds are receivers, tuned to a specific frequency to sense and suppress psychic energy. You didn't just scream back; you shoved a live power line into its antenna. You fried it from the inside out." She let out a short, incredulous laugh. "They won't have expected that. Their null-field protocols are designed for containment, not for a feedback loop of that magnitude."
The thought that he might have killed someone—or something—sent a fresh wave of nausea through him. "Is it… dead?"
"Does it matter?" Akari's voice was cold again, practical. "It was a tool. A very expensive, very dangerous tool. And now Kusanagi knows their tool can break. They'll adapt. They'll come back with a different model. Stronger. We need to be gone before they do."
She turned her back to him, accessing a data-port hidden behind a loose panel on a girder. A small, holographic interface sprang to life from her wrist projector. "The Nest is gone. My primary hub. Years of work, wiped out. Because of you." The accusation was flat, devoid of anger, which somehow made it worse.
"I didn't ask for this," Kenji said, the frustration finally boiling over. "I was just trying to survive!"
"And now I am too," Akari shot back, not looking at him. "Which means we need to change the game. They're tracking your psychic residue. Every time you use that… thing… you're painting a brighter target. We need to make you invisible."
"How?"
"By understanding what you are." Her fingers flew across the holographic keys. "My initial scans were rushed. Incomplete. I need a full diagnostic. A deep-level neural map."
Kenji instinctively recoiled. "No."
"Do you have a better idea?" she snapped, finally turning to face him. "You're a glitch in the system, Kenji. An unknown variable. To hide you, I need to understand the variable. I need to see your code. All of it."
The rain fell between them, a curtain of cold indifference. He had no better idea. He was utterly dependent on this girl he barely knew, a ghost who saw him as a tool and a problem.
"Will it hurt?" he asked, the question making him feel like a child.
"Probably," she said, no sugar-coating. "But less than a Psy-Hound's null-field."
After a long moment, he gave a single, stiff nod.
"Good." She produced a thin, filament-like cable from a compartment on her belt. On one end was a standard data-plug. On the other, a vicious-looking neural interface needle. "This goes into the port at the base of your skull. Don't have one? Doesn't matter. This makes its own."
Before he could protest, she was behind him. He felt a sharp, piercing pain at the back of his neck, followed by a cold, invasive sensation as the needle slid deep. He cried out, his vision swimming.
"Relax. Fighting it will just give you a migraine," Akari's voice was calm, clinical, as she plugged the other end into her wrist port. "Boot-up sequence initiating. Try not to think about anything. It screws with the baseline."
The world dissolved into data.
Holographic readouts exploded into life around them, cascading screens of information flowing faster than Kenji could comprehend. His entire being was being translated into light and code.
`[SUBJECT: KENJI] - NEURAL MAPPING INITIATED...`
`[BIOSCAN: NOMINAL] - [CYBERNETIC IMPLANTS: ZERO]`
`[ANOMALY DETECTED: NEURO-PSYCHIC ACTIVITY]`
`[MAPPING THETA-WAVE EMISSIONS...]`
Agony lanced through his skull. It was like every thought, every memory, every fear was being pulled out and examined under a blinding light. He saw flashes of his life—the flophouse, the noodle bar, the alley, the explosion, the Hound's blank face.
`[PSIONIC SIGNATURE ANALYSIS: IN PROGRESS]`
`[ENERGY MANIFESTATION: TYPE-UNKNOWN] - [POTENTIAL: UNQUANTIFIABLE]`
`[WARNING: NEURAL STRESS LEVELS CRITICAL]`
"Fascinating…" he heard Akari whisper, her voice distant, echoing in the datastream. "It's not an implant. It's… innate. A latent gene expression, activated by extreme stress. Your brain is… rewiring itself in real-time. Creating new neural pathways to channel the energy."
The pain intensified. Kenji felt like his mind was being torn apart.
`[TRACING PSIONIC EMISSION ORIGIN...]`
`[LOCATION: PINEAL GLAND/PRECUNEUX CORTEX/UNKNOWN]`
`[ERROR: SIGNATURE DOES NOT CORRELATE TO KNOWN BIOLOGICAL STRUCTURES]`
"There's something else…" Akari's voice was sharp with new urgency. "There's a resonance. A faint echo… but it's not coming from you."
The holographic screens flickered. A new signal, weak and almost buried under the noise of Kenji' own screaming psyche, appeared on a spectral analyzer. It was a unique frequency, a silent harmonic that subtly mirrored his own psychic signature.
`[EXTERNAL RESONANCE DETECTED]`
`[SOURCE: UNKNOWN] - [LOCATION: TRIANGULATING...]`
"It's not them. It's not the Hounds," Akari muttered, her fingers flying. "This is different. Older. It's… responding to you."
The triangulation completed. A set of coordinates superimposed themselves over a map of the Rust Belt. The signal was coming from a specific, deep-sector location—the old Yokohama Metro Archives, a subterranean complex buried under centuries of urban decay and forgotten by all city maps.
The piercing pain in Kenji's head suddenly vanished. The neural link disconnected. He slumped forward, gasping, sweat and rain mixing on his face. The holographic displays winked out.
Akari was staring into the middle distance, the coordinates reflected in her human eye.
"What… what was that?" Kenji rasped, rubbing the tender spot on his neck.
Akari didn't answer for a long time. Finally, she spoke, her voice barely a whisper against the drumming rain.
"I don't know," she admitted. "But it's the first thing related to you that hasn't tried to kill us. It's just been sitting there, silent, for who knows how long. Until you woke up." She turned to look at him, and for the first time, her expression wasn't one of calculation or annoyance, but of genuine, awe-struck curiosity.
"Your power has a echo, Kenji. And it's calling from the ruins under our feet." She stood up, her decision made. "Forget hiding. We're going to go answer it."