The briefing room was too small for the number of ghosts it held.
Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead like dying insects, casting a jaundiced hue that made even living skin look post-mortem, heightening the room's oppressive atmosphere.
Saitō remained standing. He always stood during briefings. Sitting made him feel trapped. Standing made him think about what the truth was these days, anyway. His reflection wavered faintly in the darkened window opposite him, the faint shimmer of a man who appeared more composed than the coil inside his lungs allowed. Miyamoto leaned against the back wall with his arms crossed, boots planted apart, the posture of someone who had stopped pretending anything in this job could still surprise him.
Noriko tapped the projector, and it cracked like an old bone. A burst of white light swallowed the far wall. Then, slowly, the shape sharpened into a grainy photograph. The scene was a cramped club in Yokohama, the kind that smelled of rotted beer, burnt MSG, and sweat that had nowhere to evaporate. In the picture, a thin man stood in the centre, framed by patrons frozen mid-movement, as if halted by violence that had become the primary language in the room.
His grin was wrong-too wide, too calm, like he knew secrets the living could never grasp, adding a layer of menace to the image.
Takeda.
His pupils gaped like coinholes. Tattoos braided over his forearms like centipedes crawling toward the crook of his elbows, black, segmented, hungry. One hand pinched a cigarette between two fingers. The other strangled a man to his knees. The kneeling man's throat bowed in submission, the way prayer bows the head. A flare of fire was shoved into a mouth. Flesh shrieked voicelessly. Steam curled up around the ember, blurring Takeda's jawline in a halo of heat.
Saitō's chest tightened, a sharp reminder of past horrors, sharpening his awareness of the danger lurking in the image. He didn't let the reaction reach his face. He locked his expression into the calm mask he'd worn since coming back from undercover the first time, the version of himself the department now accepted as "functional enough."
Noriko exhaled like she'd been holding her breath for hours.
"This is who will come for you," she said softly, as if conjuring Takeda's image out loud might summon him into the room, underscoring the danger and heightening the audience's sense of impending threat.
Miyamoto pushed off the wall. "And this," he added, "is the part where you pretend you don't remember what men like him can do."
Saitō did remember. Too well. He could smell the scalded flesh from the photograph, even though he knew it was impossible. Memory didn't obey physics.
Noriko clicked to the next photo: a map of alleyways, intersection points, escape routes.
"This operation requires precision," she said. "And you need to understand the choreography exactly. Two undercover officers will be on scene at the moment of escalation. They're there to provoke the confrontation… and to bail you out if it goes sideways."
She hesitated, then added, "Though if it goes sideways in the way we're planning, they won't have much time." Saitō swallowed a low, dry laugh. "Your confidence in me is overwhelming."
Miyamoto's expression remained steady, His calmness reinforcing the sense of resignation and the inescapable nature of the situation for the audience.
Noriko flipped another page in her binder. The sound was crisp, like a blade sliding free.
"Your role," she said, "is simple on paper. The first undercover provokes. You retaliate. Break a nose. Something clean, unavoidable, believable."
"Bonus for a cut?" Saitō murmured.
She didn't smile.
"This part has to look real. The Kurogumi have an eye for sincerity. They read hesitation like scripture." She pointed to a figure circled in red on the map. "You won't be dragged out in cuffs. That's sloppy. Instead, we manufacture debt. You will appear in the alley because you owe someone something. Our undercover will escalate hard. You intervene. You get dragged in by the men who think you're reckless enough to be useful."
Miyamoto stepped closer to the projected map, his shadow slicing the city in half.
"Then someone higher up will test you," he said. "If you're lucky, it's one of their lieutenants. If you're unlucky, the oyabun sends Takeda."
Noriko's voice softened, but the softness only made it colder.
"Takeda doesn't check loyalty. He checks the character. He looks for fractures. Weaknesses. He's the kind of man who can smell grief the way sharks smell blood. He'll push wherever he thinks you're weakest."
Saitō's jaw clenched. He tasted metal, though he wasn't bleeding.
"And if he likes me?" he asked. Miyamoto's gaze was heavy, almost pitying. "Then he'll want to keep you."
A silence thickened between them. Not dread something heavier, like resignation before the wheels of a machine he'd already stepped inside.
Noriko continued, "You don't win. You survive. You earn a look, maybe a word. Enough for them to put a name to your face."
She pointed to the corner of the map, a sewer grate marked with an X.
"You leave nothing connecting back to us except the paper trail you'll dump in the drain when the dead drop is made tonight. After that, you're in their hands until we pull you out."
Saitō stared at the map, at the grainy photograph ghosting faintly behind it. Two layers of danger overlap like an omen. Something inside him, something he'd spent years teaching to stay quiet, shifted.
It wasn't fear.
It wasn't dread.
It was the recognition of a familiar road, a path he had walked before, which brought a quiet sense of resignation and understanding to the audience. He'd walked versions of this one before.
Noriko must have seen the flicker in his eyes because she closed her binder and stepped into his line of sight. "You're carrying too much into this," she said quietly. He didn't deny it. What was the point? She continued, "Whatever happened with your last cover… this isn't the same."
"It's always the same," Saitō replied, voice level. "New names. New alleys. Same rot." "That rot keeps this city afloat," Miyamoto said. "We're not surgeons cutting out a tumour. We're maintenance workers making sure the infection doesn't drown the innocent."
Saitō gave him a sidelong look. "You rehearsed that?"
"No," Miyamoto answered. "But maybe I should've."
Noriko's fingers hovered over the projector. "There's more you need to see."
The following slide clicked into existence.
Takeda again, this time mid-motion. A surveillance frame from some hidden camera in a gambling den. Motion blur streaks his knuckles. Blood suspended in the air like a constellation. A man collapses out of frame.
Takeda looked almost serene.
Saitō felt something cold creep down his spine, not from the image, but from the way part of him understood it too easily. Violence wasn't foreign to him. It had never been foreign. What frightened him now was how natural the understanding felt.
Noriko's voice trembled at the edges. "He's the oyabun's favourite. They say he was born wrong. That he had a smile before he had a name."
Miyamoto nodded. "And if he takes an interest in you, you'll need to play it perfectly. Men like him don't like puzzles that take too long to solve."
Saitō rubbed the scar along his ribs, a thin, pale line from an old job. "Then we don't give him a puzzle."
Noriko blinked. "What do you mean?"
"We give him a reason," Saitō said. "A reckless outsider with just enough violence in his bones to be useful, and nothing tying him anywhere else."
Miyamoto narrowed his eyes. "But that isn't you."
Saitō didn't answer.
Because maybe it was him. That could be the problem.
Noriko turned off the projector. Darkness rushed into the room like a tide, soft and absolute. Only the faint streetlight from outside painted golden lines across the floor.
"You're not alone out there," she said. "Two undercover officers will stay close. One stays in the crowd, ready to escalate the scene. The other begins the chase after the provocation, so you can stage the assist, letting some of the Kurogumi escape while you 'interfere' with police pursuit."
She met Saitō's eyes. "It will look like loyalty to them. Betrayal to us. That's the point." "And if either officer gets them cornered?" Saitō asked.
Miyamoto stepped forward. "Then you save them. You see the cops. You help the Kurogumi men slip away. And they'll remember that. They always remember the ones who help them outrun the badge."
Saitō exhaled slowly, deliberately, like a man testing how much weight his ribs could still bear. A sharp pain spiked beneath his sternum. He ignored it. Noriko gathered the photos into a neat stack, though her hands shook slightly.
"You don't have to prove anything," she said. He let the silence stretch before replying. "I'm not proving anything. I'm finishing something. "What?" Miyamoto asked.
Saitō's gaze drifted back to the darkened projector screen, where Takeda's silhouette still stained his vision. "The part of me I keep pretending doesn't exist."
Noriko opened her mouth to argue, but stopped when she saw the expression on his face — a calm far too controlled to be healthy. A calm that had nothing to do with confidence and everything to do with resignation. She closed her binder gently, as if afraid loud noises might fracture him. "The operation is at midnight," she said. "Dress like someone who's one debt away from breaking. Move like someone with nowhere else to be. And Saitō—"
He paused in the doorway.
Her voice lowered to a thread.
"Don't let them see you care about anything. Not even yourself." He didn't turn back. He just nodded once, then stepped out into the corridor, where the dim lights buzzed above him like distant insects gnawing through the quiet.
For a brief moment, brief enough, he could pretend it didn't matter. Saitō wondered whether, after tonight, the man who walked back into this station would still be him at all.