Sleep became a stranger.
Seigi lay awake night after night, the grainy image of the hooded man replaying behind his eyelids like a cursed reel. He slowed it frame by frame, searching for details: the faint glint of boots, the way the cloak shifted with each step, the casual weight in the stance—as if caving in a chest were no more effort than brushing aside a curtain.
His walls soon filled with printouts, scribbled notes, maps of the city marked with pins and dates. What had once been a tidy apartment became a shrine to obsession. A single red thread ran from a still of the CCTV—hood, arm, impact—to a city map and then to a blank index card where he'd written nothing but a question mark.
He had questions—more than he could count. Answers felt agonizingly close and always out of reach.
Around two in the morning, when the fluorescent buzz of his kitchen light sounded like judgment, he stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tried again. He planted his feet. He breathed like athletes did on TV—counting four in, four hold, four out. He lifted his palm toward the empty air over the sink.
"Move," he whispered. Then, immediately embarrassed by himself, he tried, "Please."
Nothing. The apartment hummed, the fridge clicked, a neighbour coughed through the wall. The only thing that moved was his reflection: a tired detective with a fading bruise on his cheekbone and too much hope crammed behind his eyes.
He tried again. He tightened every muscle as if effort alone could shove the world into a new shape. He imagined the old manga panels he'd memorized: force lines, impact bursts, the elegant arc of a punch that changed everything. He even whispered the names of ridiculous moves under his breath—childish, mortifying, necessary.
A gust would have been enough. A flicker. A quiver in the glass.
Nothing.
He sagged forward until his forehead touched cool tile. "Just once," he said to the empty room. "Prove I'm not crazy."
The apartment did not oblige.
By day, the precinct buzzed with routine chatter and the thrum of printers. Seigi's desk drowned beneath papers, reports, and half-empty coffee cups. Strings of red thread and printouts peeked from the edges of his folders, threatening to spill the secret obsession he tried so hard to mask.
Renji Takeda sat opposite, tapping a pen against a half-completed report. He glanced at Seigi's clutter with the faintest crease between his brows. "You're going to get cited for a paper avalanche. I'll have to pull you out by your tie."
"Better buried than blind," Seigi muttered, not looking up.
Renji studied him a second longer, as if weighing whether to press. Then he set two steaming cups on the desk—coffee and instant ramen—and nudged one across with a knuckle. "Eat. Your eyeballs are starting to make that glassy sound."
"Eyeballs don't make a sound," Seigi said.
"They do when they're dehydrated." Renji's smile was easy, a little forced. "Anyway, eat. Please."
Seigi took the ramen. The steam smelled like cheap salt and mercy. He ate because Renji needed him to, not because hunger had remembered him.
Detective Sato noticed, of course. He always did. He appeared like weather—no fanfare, just a shift in the room's pressure and then his shadow along the desk.
"You've been burning the candle at both ends again," Sato said, sliding a black coffee onto Seigi's case files.
Seigi forced a smile. "Just trying to stay ahead."
Sato didn't buy it. "Ahead of what? Reports are filed, cases closed, and you look like you've been fist-fighting your REM cycles. Even Hana down in forensics mentioned you're haunting the lab more than the suspects. And she counts hauntings for a living."
Seigi almost laughed. If only Sato knew.
"She said that?" he asked, trying for light.
"She did," Sato said. "Also said if you keep dropping by unannounced, she'll start billing you for rent." He took a sip of his own coffee, eyes never leaving Seigi's face. "Take a day. Two. Go see your parents. Pretend you're a person who sleeps."
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked." Sato's voice softened. "You don't get extra points for breaking in half, kid."
Seigi stared at the knot in his tie. The world felt like it had shifted half a centimeter to the left, just enough to make everything sit wrong. "If I stop now… I'll lose the thread."
Sato's brows lifted, faint amusement and concern braided together. "Lose the what?"
"The… trail," Seigi corrected quickly, heat pricking the back of his neck. "The pattern."
Sato let the moment pass. "Patterns aren't shy. They wait for you. Madness doesn't." He tipped his head. "Think about the time off."
Renji reappeared with a stack of printouts and a grimace. "Captain wants us on the nightclub assault from last week—finally got the forensics back." He looked between Sato and Seigi, sensed the gravity, and backpedalled with a small, apologetic smile. "Uh… I'll be at my desk."
The day wore on. Phones rang. A suspect yelled in an interview room and then cried in the same chair. The city did what it always did—forgot the heroes it demanded and chewed on them anyway.
Near dusk, a call cut through the noise. Patrol had found a body behind a nightclub in Minato. Mid-level trafficker, known face, known temper. Seigi's stomach tightened before the address finished printing.
They rolled up under a neon sign that blinked between two broken letters. The bass from inside thudded through the brick—music meant to be felt in ribs, not heard in ears. Rain had come and gone, leaving the alley slick with city sheen. Puddles held upside-down neon; when the wind shivered, the colours wavered like a heartbeat.
The victim lay half in shadow, half in the pink wash from a karaoke lounge across the way. No blood spray on the walls. No boot prints in the mess you'd expect after a brawl. Just a wrecked body and a very careful absence.
"Shotgun?" a uniform muttered, crouching and then recoiling. "No… there's no spread."
"Hydraulic press," another offered, because gallows humour needed somewhere to live. "Maybe the trash compactor came to life."
A young tech tried to charm away the horror. "Or a superhero. Ka-pow." The laugh died quickly when no one joined it.
Seigi crouched, gloved fingers hovering over the ruin of a sternum. The ribs had crushed inward as if something had punched through bone and muscle without splintering outward. Clean collapse. The kind of impossible neatness he'd seen on a flickering screen at 2:17 a.m.
He swallowed. The alley smelled like rot and bleach and spilled beer. Somewhere, a bottle toppled, rolled, and found a wall. He traced the air above the wound, not touching—just measuring distance, angle, the way the force might have travelled. No pellets. No blade. No tire tread or boot heel.
Just pressure, focused and absolute.
Seigi's hand drifted to a plastic evidence tent someone had set near a scuff mark. He didn't touch it. He didn't move. He only stared and willed it to shift a millimeter. Move. Give me something.
The evidence tent did not move. The wind refused to be a co-conspirator.
He set his jaw and looked away, embarrassed at himself. If the others had seen the intensity of that look, they would have thought he was praying. Maybe he was.
Hana arrived with her kit, hair tied back, gloves snapping into place. She didn't look at him at first—she never did, not in front of others. She flowed through the scene, quiet and exact: photos from three heights, a laser measure down the alley, swabs, a gentle lift of the victim's hand to check under the nails.
She paused over the chest cavity and frowned, the kind of frown that meant something didn't belong.
"Not a shotgun," she said to no one, to everyone. "Not a blade. If it's a tool, it isn't one we catalog." Her eyes flicked to Seigi just once, quick as a match strike, then away. "Trajectory's… strange."
Sato stood a pace behind Seigi, hands in his pockets, the collar of his coat catching the rain. "You look like you want to flip the alley over and shake answers out of it," he murmured.
"Would if I could," Seigi said.
Sato's exhale fogged and vanished. "Be careful what truths you decide are worth your bones."
Renji drifted close, holding out a printout of the victim's sheet. "Name's Hayama. Angry habit of stabbing people who disagree with him. Someone disagreed back." He glanced at the cavity, swallowed hard, and tried for a joke that didn't land. "Remind me not to pick fights in alleys."
"Don't pick them anywhere," Seigi said, too sharply. He softened it with a nod. "Thanks."
They worked the scene until their fingers ached from the cold. The club's music changed three times. A couple stumbled out a side door, saw the tape, and went very quiet. An ambulance took a woman inside—overdose, not tonight's blood. Life continued to be messy around the island of something surgical and wrong.
Back at his apartment, Seigi pinned a new photo to the wall: the wound, printed in stark black and white, next to a still from the CCTV. He connected them with red thread. He stood there longer than the act required, thumb pressed to the tack until his nail paled.
The obsession was no longer curiosity. It was fire in his veins.
If the cloaked man existed—if he was human, yet more than human—then Seigi would find him.
He turned to the mirror one more time before bed. He raised his hand at the empty air and didn't ask it to move. He just held his palm steady, as if steadiness could make belief become real.
The bathroom hummed. The night pressed at the window. Somewhere in the city, music bled into rain.
And Seigi waited, stubborn enough to think the world might eventually blink first.