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Chapter 24 - Volume 4 - (Part 2) - This is my Pharmacy!

Chapter 2 - Scarlet Labyrinth

The city had chosen, but peace hadn't. Though the attack on the pharmacy failed to silence Akio and Hikata, it succeeded in exposing just how deep the enemy's web went. The name Yakasuke was whispered like a curse across encrypted message boards, in secret city councils, and within the reconstructed walls of Hukitaske Pharmacy itself.

But the face of Hakurage Yakasuke hadn't been seen again. Not on newsfeeds. Not in backdoor camera scans. Not in whispers.

He had vanished. Or perhaps he had only just begun to move.

Scene 1: A Map of Scars

It started with a delivery—innocent on the surface, like so many things. A wooden box sealed with an unfamiliar symbol: two serpents devouring one another in a spiral. No return address. No signature. It arrived on a rain-washed morning when the city seemed too quiet.

Akio sliced the seal open, Hikata and Rumane at his side. Inside: data drives. No message. No encryption. But they didn't need one.

"Coordinates," Yamataro confirmed, hours later, hunched over his array of cables and monitors. "Hidden relay points for a blacksite—deep in the underlayers of western Kyoto. Abandoned subway tunnels converted into a research labyrinth. Code name: Scarlet Helix."

Akio nodded. "That's where he's hiding."

Misaki frowned. "Or where he wants us to think he's hiding."

Rumane crossed her arms. "So what? We sit back and wait for another hit? Another pharmacy raid? Another attempt to erase Akio's name while we all bleed trying to protect him?"

Akazuchi slammed a palm onto the counter. "No. We end this. On our terms."

Scene 2: Gathering the Unseen

Preparation wasn't just about weapons or medicine. It was about people.

Akio and Hikata made silent rounds through old networks—contacts from before the regression. Former soldiers who had walked away. Scientists whose guilt outweighed their fear. Street medics, like Raka had once been, hardened by the system's failure to protect the poor.

They came quietly. They came at night. No banners. No pledges.

Just fire in their eyes.

One of them, an ex-lab technician named Kyo, handed Akio a flashdrive. "I worked on Project Ribbon. Before they erased it. Before they burned the data. I salvaged what I could. What I dared."

It contained footage. Of people—test subjects. Of even failed experiments to. Of memory splices. Of identical figures fighting to escape a facility that burned from the inside.

Akio watched it alone, in the dark.

He didn't cry.

He didn't sleep either.

Scene 3: Descent Into Scarlet

The team left in separate vehicles, dressed like civilians, but hearts armored.

Beneath the quiet ruins of Kyoto Station, where the deepest lines once ran before the city shifted upward and outward, they found the gate: a sealed pressure door masked behind a wall of digital graffiti.

"Password required," a distorted voice announced.

Hikata stepped forward. "Hakurage always had one weakness. He admired his own reflection. Try: 'Echo Protocol 0.1'."

The door hissed open.

What greeted them was not a facility. It was a monument to obsession.

Scene 4: The Red Spiral

Scarlet light pulsed across the walls in steady rhythms, like a heartbeat. The entire tunnel system had been rewired into concentric circles, each layer descending deeper—redder—as they progressed. At each checkpoint, remnants of experiments lined the walls: failed clones suspended in fluid, torn lab notebooks, flickering memory cubes playing glitching echoes of lives long since consumed.

Rumane shivered. "This place isn't just evil. It's wrong."

They advanced, clearing rooms, disabling sentry bots, bypassing retinal scanners.

Until they reached the central chamber.

And found him.

Scene 5: The Mirror Brother

Hakurage Yakasuke stood at the center of a cylindrical room made entirely of transparent tech-glass. Monitors floated in the air around him, each showing a different face of Akio—young, old, grieving, healing. So many ways he wanted to destroy Akio and depicting even his future ages thanks to AI to even give him ideas on how to do so in the future as well to finally rid of him...

He didn't flinch.

He smiled.

"So little brother," he said, turning to Hikata, "you finally grew teeth."

Hikata's fists clenched. "I didn't come to trade favors."

"Of course not. You came to make peace with your failure. You were always the failed experiment. The unchosen. The soft one."

Akio stepped forward. "And yet here he stands. With us. While you rot in your spiral of cruelty."

Hakurage sneered. "You? You were nothing but a discarded prototype. And yet, here you are—beloved by the masses. A tragic hero. A fraud.

Akio said nothing.

Instead, he activated the feed.

Scene 6: Truth Floods the Wires

Across the city, across the globe—his voice was broadcast.

Not as a warning.

But a reckoning.

"My name is Akio Hukitaske. I was part of a project that rewound time through the human mind. A project that stole lives, corrupted science, and turned hope into horror. And here is the person who built its most damning chamber."

The chamber's walls turned opaque. The Scarlet Helix lit up like a neural storm.

Hakurage's eyes went wide. "You can't—"

"I can. And I did."

The data poured into the public stream: names, photos, proof. Memories. Real-time breakdowns of synthetic aging. Failed trials. Buried victims.

The Scarlet Helix was undone by its own archives.

Scene 7: The Price of Ending

But nothing ends without cost.

As the data uploaded, backup security initiated a failsafe—plasma conduits set to overload. The lab would collapse within fifteen minutes.

Akio turned to the others. "Get out. Now."

Hikata refused. "Not without you."

Akio grabbed him by the collar. "This isn't your fight to die in. Go!"

But Hikata pulled free. "Then let's end it together."

They located the control node, overloaded it manually.

Outside, the others watched as the Scarlet Helix trembled.

Then it fell.

Scene 8: Ashes to Soil

They emerged blackened by smoke, coughing, bleeding, but alive.

The world erupted.

Media outlets reversed narratives. Protests began against labs still hidden which ended up being true as the information actually showed labs that were gonna be there way of winning. International watchdogs issued subpoenas.

Akio and Hikata were no longer fugitives. They were symbols.

But they didn't want thrones.

They went home.

To the pharmacy.

Where letters waited. Where people waited.

Where healing was still needed.

Rumane handed Akio a new photo frame—inside, the mural of the phoenix, redrawn by all people alike.

"You were never the spiral, Akio," she said. "You were always the flame."

He wept.

And for the first time, he let the tears stay.

[Next: Volume 4, Chapter 3 — The Child With No Birthday]

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