The first sound Amato heard wasn't screaming.
That was the strange part. In every film he'd ever watched, apocalypses started with screaming. Crowds running, car horns from collisions, sirens that never stopped. But that morning, the first thing he heard was silence.
Silence that felt wrong in the way a held breath feels wrong.
He'd woken up at 6:47 AM to his phone buzzing with emergency alerts he couldn't read fast enough. NEXUS-V. Quarantine zones. Stay indoors. The kanji blurred together because his eyes weren't working right yet and his brain was still trying to decide if this was a dream worth taking seriously.
He got up anyway. Went to the window.
Shinjuku was not on fire. That was his first thought, and it felt stupid the moment he had it, because the absence of fire didn't mean anything was fine. The street six floors below was empty in the wrong way. Not empty like Sunday morning empty. Empty like someone had pressed pause on a city of two million people and forgotten to press play again.
One car sat in the middle of the intersection with both doors open and the engine still running. He could hear it faintly, that low idle, incongruously normal. There was a shoe on the sidewalk. Just one.
Then he saw the man near the vending machine.
The man was standing very still, facing the machine, and at first Amato thought he was just reading the options. People did that. People stood in front of vending machines and took too long deciding between canned coffee and sports drinks. It was a normal human thing. But then the man's head tilted at an angle that heads don't tilt, too far, like something inside had come loose, and he started moving toward the machine with his arms at his sides and Amato stopped watching.
He stepped back from the window.
His heart was doing something complicated in his chest. Not fast exactly. More like irregular, like it had forgotten the rhythm and was trying to remember it one beat at a time.
The phone buzzed again.
AWAKENING SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE.
He stared at that for a long time.
There was no sender. No app name. The notification sat in his screen like it belonged there, which it didn't, because he had never downloaded anything called the Awakening System and he was very certain of that. He was someone who deleted apps obsessively. His home screen had four apps on it. This wasn't one of them.
He tapped it.
The screen went white.
Then:
BOND SYSTEM ACTIVATED.
You are not the blade. You are the chain that holds all blades together.
"What," Amato said, to no one.
The screen returned to normal. Except there was now a small icon in the corner he'd never seen before, a simple chain link, gray and unassuming. He pressed it. A menu opened that looked like nothing he had a reference point for. No tutorial. No help text. No blinking arrow telling him where to start. Just a blank interface with a search function and a section labeled BONDS: 0 and another labeled LINKED ABILITIES: NONE and a small line of text at the bottom that read:
Strength is not yours. Strength is them.
He sat down on the floor next to his bed.
Outside, somewhere below, something made a sound. Low and sustained, not quite human, not quite not.
He sat there for eleven minutes. He counted.
Then he put on his shoes.
The stairwell smelled like copper and he didn't look too closely at the dark smear on the third floor landing. He moved fast without running because running felt like it would commit him to something he wasn't ready to be committed to yet. The building had twenty units and he passed four doors with sounds behind them, shuffling, or silence that felt occupied, and he did not knock on any of them.
The parking garage was underground, two levels down, accessed through a door near the mailboxes that always stuck. He had to shoulder it open and the noise it made when it scraped the floor seemed enormous.
The garage was dim and smelled like motor oil and old concrete. Most of the cars were still there. He moved between them with his hand trailing along the hoods, not because he needed the support but because the contact felt grounding in a way he couldn't explain.
He was looking for his bike. He had a bicycle. It was a practical thing to have in Tokyo. He'd been meaning to get a better lock for it for four months.
He found it leaned against the far wall, lock still intact.
He also found someone else.
She was crouched behind a silver sedan, arms braced on her knees, watching him over the hood. She had short hair and dark eyes and she was holding a fire extinguisher in both hands like she had decided it was a weapon and committed to that decision fully. She looked like she was maybe a year younger than him. She looked like she had not slept and also like she would not be apologizing for that.
They looked at each other across six meters of oil-stained concrete.
"Don't come closer," she said.
"I'm not."
"Your eyes are normal."
"So are yours."
She didn't move the extinguisher. "You have a system?"
"Yeah."
"What kind."
He hesitated. "I don't know yet. You?"
"Combat class. Karate enhancement." She said it like she was reading off a specification sheet, no inflection. "Yours is different."
It wasn't a question. He didn't know how she could tell.
"I think so," he said.
She studied him for another moment. Then she stood up slowly, still holding the extinguisher but not raised anymore, just carried. "Tsuna," she said.
"Amato."
"There are three of them between us and the exit ramp. I've been waiting for them to move."
He looked toward the ramp. He could see the shapes now that he knew to look, two near the entrance, one further back, all doing that same wrong-stillness he'd seen from his window. Waiting without seeming to wait.
"Have they seen you?" he asked.
"Heard me, maybe. Not reacting."
"So we go now."
"I go now." She looked at him. "Can you run?"
"Yes."
"Fast?"
He thought about his 5K time from the university sports day two years ago. "Relatively."
Something shifted in her expression that might have been doubt. "Stay behind me. Don't fall."
He wanted to say something like I wasn't planning to fall, but she was already moving, low and quick between the cars, and he followed because there was no alternative that made sense.
The three figures near the ramp turned at the sound of their footsteps, and up close they were worse than from a distance, the wrongness more specific and harder to look at directly. Tsuna hit the nearest one with the extinguisher before it could close the distance and the sound it made was very loud in the concrete space and Amato did not look back.
He ran.
He made it up the ramp and into the gray morning light and kept going because his legs had decided they were in charge now and his brain was just a passenger. He ran half a block before he realized Tsuna was beside him, matching his pace easily, not even breathing hard.
He was breathing very hard.
They stopped in the recessed doorway of a closed ramen shop. The street was still empty in that paused way. No sign of anything following them.
Amato bent forward with his hands on his knees.
"You said relatively fast," Tsuna said.
"I was being accurate."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked away. "The konbini two blocks north. I saw lights on when I came down."
"Okay."
"Can you walk."
"In a minute."
She waited. She didn't say anything else, just stood at the edge of the doorway watching the street, and the fact that she waited without making it into something felt like more than it probably was.
His phone showed the BONDS: 0 icon in the corner of every screen now, persistent, like it wasn't going anywhere.
He straightened up. "Okay."
They walked north.