"LOOK... THE SHADOWS!" Haroku shouted, his voice cracking the silence of the corridor.
"Start chanting—FAST!" I yelled back, frantically digging into my coat for the borrowed papers.
The physical space around us shifted. It felt as if a massive weight had been dropped onto the building, compressing the very gravity in the hallway.
They poured out from everywhere. From the cracked plaster of the walls, from the uneven floorboards, from the absolute black beneath the overturned desks. Dark, twisting figures pulling themselves into our reality. Watching us.
This was nothing like our first encounter. We were completely surrounded.
Haroku stepped forward, raising his right hand. His usual reckless demeanor vanished, replaced by a cold, hardened mask. When he opened his eyes, the irises burned with a faint, unnatural glow.
"Spirits of the underworld..." he intoned. His voice was unnervingly deep, carrying a commanding resonance that didn't sound entirely like his own. "Obey me."
A dark, violent aura erupted around him. It spiked and flared—unstable and incredibly dangerous.
I felt the wrongness of it immediately. This wasn't standard binding magic. It was forbidden. The kind of power that didn't just control entities, but actively dragged them down into something far worse.
The shadows shrieked. Their forms warped and stretched violently as Haroku's power hooked into them, trying to rip them apart.
But they didn't break. They dug in, resisting the pull with terrifying strength.
I gritted my teeth, my lungs burning as my breathing grew shallow and uneven. "We need to leave... NOW," I gasped, struggling just to keep my footing. "I can't hold my ground anymore. These entities... they're too powerful."
And then, the rules of reality simply gave way.
Directly in front of us, the space in the corridor silently tore apart. A jagged, lightless portal opened in the center of the hall.
A man stepped through.
He was tall and completely still, wrapped in a darkness so dense it felt like a living, breathing thing.
With barely a flick of his wrist, the shadows multiplied. Dozens became hundreds. An endless, suffocating wave of them flooding the corridor.
My eyes went wide. "This... this is impossible..."
Haroku tried to stand his ground, pushing his aura to the limit. But the sheer pressure radiating from the man was catastrophic. It crushed Haroku's defense instantly. His body trembled violently under the weight before his knees gave out.
He collapsed to the floor.
"Haroku!"
I rushed forward, hooking my arms under his shoulders and hauling his unconscious weight up.
The shadows closed in from every direction. The exit was blocked. The windows were covered. There was no path. No escape.
For the first time in years, the cold spike of genuine, paralyzing fear pierced my chest.
Then, Haroku's eyes fluttered open.
He was fading, his strength entirely depleted, but a fierce determination locked his jaw.
"I won't..." he whispered, his voice barely audible over the roaring of the entities, "...let you die..."
In that fraction of a second, Haroku released every last drop of his life force.
A blinding surge of energy exploded outward from his chest. It was violent and completely overwhelming. The blast wave shattered the advancing shadows, pushing them back against the walls as the corridor itself shook on its foundation.
Reality fractured under the strain. And in the center of the blinding light, a door appeared. Pure, radiant, and entirely unnatural.
I didn't stop to think. I moved. Carrying Haroku's dead weight, I threw us both through the threshold.
In a single, disorienting instant, we were outside.
The sharp, biting cold of the night air slammed into my face. It was real. We were alive.
Haroku slipped from my grasp, hitting the damp grass of the schoolyard. His chest barely moved. I dropped to my knees beside him, watching for agonizing seconds until his eyes finally cracked open again. He was weak, completely drained, but conscious.
I didn't waste the window. I pulled out my remaining high-tier papers, biting my thumb and smearing blood across the runes.
I began chanting the strongest sealing spell I knew. Every word was clipped and precise. Every symbol burned with absolute intent.
One by one, I sealed the perimeter of the old building. The heavy iron doors. The shattered windows. Even the unseen, spiritual pathways beneath the soil.
It was a final lock. It wouldn't hold permanently against something like that man. But it was enough for tonight.
We dragged ourselves back to the base house across the street. Neither of us spoke a word. The silence stretched until I had the door deadbolted behind us.
I dropped into a chair at the command desk. Haroku slumped onto the couch.
He was the one who finally broke the quiet.
"Bro..." he rasped, his voice dead serious. "That man..." He looked up, his exhausted eyes locking onto mine. "Who was he?"
I didn't hesitate. "You already know."
His eyes widened slightly in the dim light of the room. "That was... Jason?"
I nodded slowly. "Yes. The real Jason."
"What...?" he whispered, struggling to process the scale of what we had just survived.
I looked down at my hands resting on my knees. They were trembling. Only slightly, but enough to betray the calm facade I was trying to hold.
"My memory block broke," I said, my voice steadying. "I remember everything now."
Silence settled over the room again, but it wasn't the empty, tense quiet from before. It was heavy with the weight of an ugly truth.
"He's the one who killed my grandfather."
Haroku froze, leaning forward slightly. "What are you talking about? Your grandfather... he was that legendary guy, right?"
I nodded.
"My grandfather," I began, letting the memories finally play out in my mind, "was a paranormal expert, too. Stronger than anyone I've ever met in this field. He solved thousands of cases. In the underground circuits, people treated him like a living legend."
I stared at the blank monitors on the desk.
"One day, he took a contract at a place a lot like this. Silent. Abandoned. And when he went in, he found them. The shadows. They were performing rituals."
Haroku didn't interrupt. He barely even breathed.
"He fought back," I continued. "He used every spell in his arsenal. Burned through every ounce of power he had." I swallowed hard. "But he couldn't defeat Jason."
I clenched my trembling hands into fists.
"At the end of the fight... Jason cursed me. He placed a death mark on my bloodline."
The words hung in the air, heavier than anything we had faced tonight.
"My grandfather knew I wouldn't survive it. So, he used the absolute last of his remaining power... and transferred the curse from me to himself."
I looked up at Haroku. "He saved me."
Haroku's voice was barely a whisper. "Then... how did you learn the craft?"
"I was fifteen when it happened," I replied. "He survived the transfer, but the curse was eating him alive. He spent the next two years telling me everything. He trained me. Taught me how to scribe these papers, how to read the energy... how to survive."
My vision blurred slightly, but I forced myself to keep talking.
"And then, on my seventeenth birthday... his body gave out. He died."
Complete silence filled the base house.
I exhaled a long, shaky breath. "His last words to me were... 'You can finish this case.'"
The room grew colder. Not because a spirit had breached the house. But because we finally understood exactly what we were up against.