Chapter 2 - The Voice in the Dark
Akira blinked, the TV's words still echoing in his head: "Kazuo Minami… found dead." The sound of the news anchor faded into a thin, meaningless hum. The room felt too small suddenly, the ceiling too close. He stood, legs shaky, and the remote slipped from his fingers, clattering to the floor.
A draft slipped through the slightly open window, brushing his hair. The light from the streetlamps spilled in, slicing the dark into strips. He pressed his palms flat against the cold glass and tried to breathe. His mind was a churn of questions, none of them helpful.
Then a voice - not heard with his ears but felt, like a cold thing settling behind his eyes.
"Hello, Akira."
The voice was polite and old and wrong. It carried the echo of stone halls and wind through broken temples. Akira's skin prickled. He turned, expecting some elaborate prank, some trick of sleep-deprived imagination.
Something sat in the corner of his room like a folded shadow - not quite human, not quite air. It had the shape of a hunched thing, limbs wrapped close, but its head tilted toward him with a curiosity that made his stomach clench.
"I am a Shiqigami," it said. The words formed like a translation into his head. "My name is Cyt."
Akira's first reaction was disbelief. His second was anger - who would speak to him like this, in his room, in the middle of the night?
"What are you?" He kept his voice low, steadying it even though his heart felt like it wanted to hammer through his ribs.
"A fallen god," Cyt answered simply. The thing in the corner shifted and the air smelled suddenly of metal and old rain. "A power called The Eyes was lifted from the Shiqigami realm and fell into your world. It has chosen you."
Akira's laugh came out thin, more a forced exhale than humor. "Chosen me? I didn't choose anything. I woke up and someone dropped dead." He swallowed. "You expect me to believe a- a fallen god dropped a power on me?"
"You will believe what you see," Cyt replied. "Belief does not matter. The Eyes are real, and they follow rules. I will tell you what you need to know."
Akira felt the word rules like a hand on his throat. He wanted answers, and at the same time he wanted none at all.
Cyt did not move as if to relent. "To use the Eyes to cause death, you must know two things: the target's full name - given name and surname - and what they look like. You must hold both in your mind. If you specify a cause, that cause will be how they die. If you do not, the victim will simply fall unconscious and never wake."
The explanation was clinical, like a courtroom fact read by someone who had already decided the verdict. Akira pictured it in his head: name, face, a mental command. It felt obscene and simple all at once.
"Is that it?" he asked, his voice thin. "I think it, they die?"
"Yes." Cyt's tone carried no malice, only an odd mixture of curiosity and something like boredom. "There are other properties, limits and consequences you will learn. For now, these are the rules required for death."
Akira sat down on his bed, the mattress sighing beneath him. He thought of the boy in his classroom, Takeshi, clutching his chest, the ambulance wailing, the stretcher into the night. He thought of the man on the news, Kazuo Minami, his face frozen on the screen, and the anchor's stunned voice announcing the body found in custody.
A crooked grin pulled at the corner of Akira's lips before he could stop it. The world narrowed into a focus that felt clean and bright. The thought that had floated like a spark at the back of his mind all morning now flared into a plan.
"You're telling me I can-" He didn't finish aloud. The word kill lodged in the air between them and felt small and ugly.
"Yes," Cyt said. "If you know the name and the face, the Eyes obey."
"So," Akira murmured, standing. He walked to his desk, pulled up the news channel again, and peered at the list of recent reports. "So I try. I test. See what happens."
Cyt hummed something like approval. "You should know one more thing. I will be with you until you die or until a condition is met that I am not permitted to describe." The Shiqigami's voice snagged on the last word like a knot. "I cannot say what else."
Akira's brow creased. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because the Eyes act through you. Their keeper must know the boundaries. And because," Cyt added without anger, "I find the entertainment of it preferable to silence."
It should have chilled him - the idea of entertainment in a thing born of godly ruin. Instead, something hot and eager coiled in his chest. He imagined the criminals listed on the screen one by one, their names clear, their faces sharp. He imagined them gone. He imagined himself the invisible hand sweeping their scum from the streets.
He turned toward the TV. Names scrolled beneath grainy footage: Arata Fujimoto - arrested for assault.Nanri Koba - suspected of embezzlement.Satoshi Oki - wanted for trafficking. He clicked open a longer bulletin about a gang that had terrorized a district for months. Photos. Names. Addresses. Faces like targets on paper.
"Watch," he said, almost amused.
He concentrated, folding the face into the name, tasting the syllables silently. He pictured a cause - a heart attack, sudden and untraceable. He imagined it clean, clinical. His mind felt like a trigger.
Seconds crawled. Thirty, forty. The narrator on the screen shifted topics. Nothing. Akira felt something small inside him coil, like a mechanism engaging, then release. The feed continued. The anchor's voice droned about unrelated traffic.
Cyt's shadow stirred. "Patience, Akira. You will not always see immediate effects. Some variables… require alignment."
"Alignment," Akira echoed, thinking of all the times criminals escaped justice because law and loopholes favored them. He let the word mean whatever he wanted. "Fine. Then I'll be patient."
He began with small names - a series of petty criminals that had been irritating the city. He practiced the ritual the Shiqigami described in his head: name, face, a reason. He felt no guilt. The emptiness that had been his companion felt less like loneliness now and more like potential.
Cyt watched him without expression. "You plan to clean the world."
"I plan to make it better," Akira said. "Start with them. Remove the worst. Reduce the numbers. Maybe someone will finally sleep at night."
The Shiqigami made a soft sound that might have been amusement. "Humans always wish to be arbiter of good and evil. We shall see which you choose."
Akira's smile widened. For the first time that day, he felt alive in a way that wasn't dull or tired. He pictured headlines, people praising reforms, police admitting gratitude for a sudden drop in crime statistics - all without asking how it happened. He pictured himself standing over a changed city.
"Watch me make a better world," he whispered, more to himself than to Cyt.
Outside, the city lights blinked with indifferent life. Inside, Akira closed his eyes and tasted the silence that followed every name, every face folded into his mind.
From the corner, Cyt tilted his head, eyes like distant coals. "Good," he said. "Begin."
Akira opened his eyes and keyed in another name.
He did not know then the small things that obeyed The Eyes - the way time could bend, the cost that crept into sleep, the threads that began to tug unseen. He did not know the detective's quiet interest that would soon pry at the edges of truth. He only knew the power humming at his temple and the cold, pleasant certainty that with a thought, the world would obey.
He thought of the first boy, of the man from the news, and then of a thousand other faces, and his smile sharpened.
"Watch," he said again. "Watch me."