The television showed her son murdering a monster, and Yuki Watanabe made tea.
She didn't know why. Habit, maybe. The kettle screamed. She poured. Her hands didn't shake. They had stopped shaking three days ago, around the same time she realized the screaming in her head would never stop.
On screen, Jun drove the sword through the creature's neck. Black blood sprayed his face. He didn't flinch.
This was not her son.
Her son flinched when the microwave beeped too loud. Her son apologized to furniture when he bumped it. Her son — her gentle, failing, beautiful boy — had never held anything sharper than a kitchen knife, and even then he cut himself.
The screen cut to a different angle. A boy with a hatchet — Kai, the chat called him, number 069 — lay against the cave wall, shoulder shredded, smiling.
"See?" Kai whispered. "You don't... choke..."
His eyes closed.
Jun dropped the sword. Pressed his hands to the wound. Golden light flickered — weak, dying, not enough.
Kai's chest stopped.
Jun screamed.
Yuki's teacup shattered on the floor. She didn't look down. She was already moving.
Three days ago, the sky broke.
Yuki had been stocking shelves at the convenience store when the light came. Purple. Wrong. She ran the six blocks home, forty-seven years old, asthma burning her lungs, and found Jun's bedroom empty.
Headset spinning on his chair.
Monitor still showing DEFEAT.
She called the police. They put her on hold. She called hospitals. They asked for a body. She called the television stations, the government, the United Nations switchboard, and a man in Geneva told her to "remain calm" while nine thousand other parents called the same line.
Then the screens changed.
Every screen. Phone, TV, billboard, smartwatch. A red eye. Blinking. And below it, a grid of numbers, names, live feeds from somewhere that had two moons.
She found Jun in hour two.
071. Messy hair, hoodie, crouched in a cave with strangers. Healing a monster instead of killing it. The chat laughed at him. Called him weak. Called him Ghost-Talker.
Yuki didn't laugh. She sat on the floor of his empty bedroom, surrounded by his dirty laundry and his failed dreams, and watched her son refuse to become a killer.
She had never been prouder.
Now Kai was dead. And Jun — her Jun — had picked up the sword.
The screen followed him as he walked out of the cave. Into darkness. Into howling. The red eye in the corner pulsed, and text scrolled beneath it:
LIVE BETTING: 071 — WILL HE SURVIVE NIGHT 1? ODDS: 3.7 TO 1
Yuki stared at the numbers. Then she laughed. It sounded like breaking glass.
She opened her phone. Typed in the search bar: #BringThemBack.
Nothing. Good. She would be first.
The first tweet took her four minutes. Her thumbs were thick, clumsy, old. She typed:
"My son is 071. He heals monsters. He just lost his best friend. And you're BETTING on him? #BringThemBack"
She attached a screenshot of Jun's face, golden eyes glowing, walking into the dark.
She hit send.
By morning, ten thousand people had shared it.
By noon, a reporter knocked on her door. By evening, she stood outside the Tokyo Broadcasting Center with two hundred other parents, holding signs with numbers instead of names, chanting until her throat bled.
"Zero-seven-one! Bring him home!"
A mother beside her — Chen, daughter 338 — clutched a phone showing a girl in bloody scrubs healing a wounded man. A father held a tablet with a soldier firing his last bullet. A grandmother waved a printed photo of twins, 442 and 443, huddled in a cave.
They weren't protesters. They were witnesses.
The station manager came out at midnight. Expensive suit, exhausted eyes. "We can't stop the signal," he said. "We're sorry. We're so sorry."
Yuki stepped forward. She was short. Old. Her knees ached from standing. But she had watched her son become a murderer on live television, and she had run out of fear.
"Then we'll find another way," she said.
She turned back to the crowd. Raised her phone. The screen showed Jun — still walking, still killing, still alive. For now.
"My son thinks he's alone," she said. Her voice cracked, but she didn't stop. "He thinks nobody cares if he lives or dies. But he's wrong."
She looked directly into a news camera. Red light blinking. Recording. Broadcasting.
"Jun," she said. "If you can hear this — you don't choke. You never did. And I'm coming."
The crowd roared.
On a billion screens across Earth, the red eye blinked.
And somewhere on an alien island, a boy with a bloody sword paused. Looked up. Like he heard something.
Maybe he did.
[End of Chapter 2]