The silence of the Sato household never felt like peace; it felt like a held breath. In the cramped apartment in the heart of Nerima, Tokyo, seven-year-old Arata lived by the rhythm of the city's distant hum and the terrifying, heavy silence of his father's moods. But the night the silence finally broke, it didn't shatter—it roared.
Arata remembered the smell first: metallic and thick, like rusted iron in the summer humidity. He had crept from his futon, lured by a sound like a wet branch snapping. In the narrow hallway, the neon glow of a nearby billboard bled through the window, staining the walls a bruised purple. It illuminated a scene that would forever sever his life into "Before" and "After."
His father stood in the kitchen, a silhouette of jagged, trembling edges. At his feet lay his mother. The sight was a visceral glitch in reality—she was in two pieces, her life extinguished in a single, impossible act of violence. His older brother, Hiroki, lay slumped against the sink, his chest a map of jagged lacerations, his breath coming in shallow, wet rattles.
Arata hadn't moved. He couldn't. He simply watched as his father walked out the door and disappeared into the labyrinthine alleys of Tokyo, leaving the boy alone with the wreckage.
The years that followed were a blur of sterile wards at Tokyo University Hospital and the hushed whispers of child services. Hiroki survived, but he remained a ghost, his mind fractured by the trauma, confined to a care facility in the outskirts of the city. Arata, however, was adopted by the Millers—an expatriate family living in the quiet suburbs of Minato. They were kind, offering him a life of privilege and stability, but Arata remained an island. He grew tall and lean, his eyes carrying a cold, predatory stillness that didn't belong in a classroom. He wasn't mourning; he was sharpening.
On his nineteenth birthday, the invitation arrived. It wasn't a letter, but a woman standing under a black umbrella in the pouring rain of Shibuya Crossing.
Eleanor Vane was a silhouette of wealth and iron. She didn't offer him comfort; she offered a target.
"The man who destroyed your family wasn't just a man, Arata," Eleanor said, her voice cutting through the roar of the Tokyo traffic. "He was a vessel. There are things in this city that feed on the rot of the human soul. They wear our skin, but they possess a strength that defies the laws of physics. My organization—the Vane Foundation—is the only thing keeping this city from being swallowed by them."
Now, months later, Arata stood on a rain-slicked rooftop overlooking the Shinjuku skyline. Beside him stood Kael and Sera, two other survivors Eleanor had plucked from the shadows.
Below them, in a narrow alleyway, a businessman stood trembling. To a passerby, he looked like a victim of a mugging. To Arata, who could now see the oily, black aura clinging to the man's skin, he was a "Possessed." The air around the man distorted, shimmering with an unnatural heat. The thing inside him growled—a sound that vibrated in Arata's very marrow.
Arata reached for the hilt of the black-glass blade strapped to his back. He didn't feel fear. As he stepped off the ledge into the neon-lit abyss, he felt only the familiar metallic tang of that night in Nerima. But this time, he wasn't the boy hiding in the hallway. He was the storm.