The chance came sooner than expected.
The old industrial district was a dead city inside the living one—rows of brick warehouses with broken teeth for windows, chain-link fences humming in the wind, puddles skinned with oil. The sting looked clean on paper: buy, surround, arrest. In reality, operations like this were held together with tape, trust, and the hope no one sneezed at the wrong time.
Seigi and Detective Renji Takeda moved along a line of rusted sedans toward the meet. Their breath smoked in the cold. A stuttering sodium lamp blinked overhead as if trying to stay awake long enough to witness a mistake.
"Alpha-three in position," Renji murmured into his mic, voice smooth as a man reading the weather. He didn't look at Seigi when he added, low and only for him, "We let SWAT take first bite. We just watch and clean up."
Seigi nodded, eyes roving the warehouse's yawning door, the skylights like blind eyes, the shadowed catwalks. His ribs still ached from the docks. The ache felt like a promise he hadn't decided whether to keep.
Inside, the "buyers" and "sellers" circled each other in the grey glow. Old forklifts squatted like sleeping beasts. Somewhere, water dripped at an impatient tempo. A laugh rang out too loud, too long, the sound of a man hoping no one heard his fear.
Dispatch repeated calmly in everyone's ear: "Units maintain positions."
Then everything misfired at once.
A shout. The metallic cough of a gun leaving leather. Light popped like a camera flash. Somebody swore. Somebody fired. The sting tore apart into noise and motion.
Seigi moved without thinking—dragging Renji down behind a sun-faded sedan as rounds chewed sparkling bites out of its fender. "Left bay door," Seigi called, peeking under the bumper to track boots. "If they run, they break west."
"Copy," Renji started, but the word burned out halfway through. He glanced at Seigi, and for a heartbeat there was too much in his eyes—knowledge and warning and the thin edge of regret. "This isn't a deal," he hissed, voice tight. "It's bait."
Before Seigi could ask for who, the air changed.
Not colder—heavier. Denser. Like a storm front you can't see arriving all at once.
One of the smugglers lifted off his feet as if by a hook that wasn't there and met a concrete pillar with a sound that stopped a few guns by accident. Another swung a pipe; halfway through the arc, the pipe decided to behave like a ribbon and wrapped the wrong way around his forearm. His scream had teeth.
"They're here," someone whispered, and the whisper worked better than a shout.
Three figures stepped out of the dark.
They wore cloaks that turned light into indecision. The first moved broad and slow on purpose, like a landslide that had learned manners. The second was slim, posture elegant, wrists loose—already holding invisible knives. The third stood a fraction apart, as if he could leave and take the night with him.
Renji's hand clamped Seigi's shoulder. "Down," he said, too loud for fear, too controlled for panic. Under his breath, softer, not meant for Seigi at all: "Not here… not in front of him."
"What?" Seigi demanded.
"Stay down," Renji snapped, eyes wide for show, the pressure of his hand too precise to be accidental. "I said stay down."
Seigi should have. Sato's warning beat steady in his head: be careful what truth you decide is worth your life. His grandmother's voice answered it, a ghost under the gunfire: some things you see will see you back.
But Seigi's chest burned with something that had lived there since the schoolyard. The line between myth and reality was cracking open in front of him like ice around a spring, and he had spent his whole life walking toward this sound.
The broad figure reached a gunman first. Two fingers kissed the man's sternum. The body folded politely, as if remembering it had always been paper. The elegant one tilted a wrist; a steel shelving unit skated sideways without touching the floor and pinned two men with a shriek.
No guns. No wasted motion. Only decisions.
Then the third figure turned and found Seigi across the wreckage.
The hood tilted with a faint, unhurried curiosity.
Seigi's breath hitched. The geometry of the room sharpened, every angle offering a suggestion. He had seen that hooded silhouette collapse steel like cardboard. He had felt that voice last night, calm as weather.
"The detective," the man said, voice carrying without effort. "Still walking toward the dark."
The elegant one's mouth moved under the hood, amusement a brief curve. "Kill him?"
The hooded man—the one who moved slightly off their axis, like a storm visiting its rain—made a small motion that wasn't quite a nod and wasn't quite a shake. "Not yet. He may still be… informative."
Beside Seigi, Renji flinched. Not like a man surprised, but like a man hearing the inevitable said out loud.
Gunfire stuttered and then cut as officers realized bullets were only encouraging the wrong things. SWAT's voice boomed from the east entrance. Radios squawked and died like someone had put a hand over their mouths.
The broad one came for Seigi, cloak brushing concrete dust.
Seigi stood. He didn't remember deciding to. The world tilted a few degrees toward him, generous for a heartbeat. He stepped inside the broad man's reach and let his shoulder slide along a seam in the air the way you move with a wave instead of against it. His fist trailed a faint heat-haze and kissed ribs that should have been granite.
The big man rocked back a fraction. Not hurt—surprised. His eyes, hidden, still managed to narrow.
"Interesting," the elegant one murmured.
The hooded man—Wraith, the name like cold iron in Seigi's mind—watched with the still attention of someone cataloguing weather. He didn't take a step. He didn't need to.
The broad man replied without words. He seized the prongs of a pallet jack and flipped the loaded pallet toward Seigi like a table. Wood exploded into slats and nails. Seigi grabbed Renji's jacket and changed—not the object, not the throw, just the meaning of forward. The pallet's rush curved, found a wall, slammed into it with a tantrum of splinters.
Renji stared at Seigi as if he were a stranger wearing his partner's face.
The elegant one flicked fingers, and a revolver skated along the floor to his boot as if homesick. He didn't pick it up. He didn't have to. He turned a palm and a smuggler's leg decided the floor was slightly to the left of where it had been, dropping the man screaming.
Sirens found their courage outside. Blue light strobed through broken windows. The bay door unlocked itself and began to rise with a reluctant grind, like a mouth forced into a smile.
The broad one drifted for the opening, the elegant one two steps behind, both glancing back only to mark distances. Wraith lingered in the rectangle of night, docks breathing behind him.
He regarded Seigi the way a mathematician regards a problem that has decided to be interesting. "Stand before you tremble," he said, tone neither cruel nor kind. "Then find me."
He stepped backward and did not fall; he asked gravity to wait and walked down into the dark. The others slipped sideways and were gone. The room exhaled. Noise returned all at once—radios clearing their throats, boots arguing with gravel, somebody retching, somebody laughing too hard because laughter is sometimes the only weapon you can fire at terror without paperwork.
Seigi realized his hands were shaking when he tried to holster his weapon. He looked at his knuckles. The skin was unbroken. The ache beneath it was the kind that starts in bone and stays there, telling stories for days.
"Forget this," Renji said hoarsely, dust on his coat like ash on a priest. He brushed at it with hands that wanted something to do. "Write it up as a bust gone wrong. Don't… don't chase them." It came out like advice and landed like a plea.
Seigi stared at the empty door. The thread hummed faintly in his veins—subtle, insistent, like a chorus warming up just out of sight. It wasn't triumph. It wasn't even hope. It was permission. You felt it. You touched it. Stand before you tremble.
"I can't unknow what I know," he said, voice low.
Renji's jaw worked. He glanced toward the far end of the warehouse where the stuttering lamp could not quite decide whether to die. He turned his body away as he checked his phone with all the casualness of a man stepping on a landmine because someone asked him nicely. Screen on. Off. Pocketed. "Then at least don't be the first to say it out loud," he said, almost begging. "Let the report be boring."
SWAT swept through, too late and knowing it, faces set in that particular resignation police wear when the story has already happened without them. Forensics drifted in like gulls smelling salt. One tech paused at the pallet crater in the wall and whistled low. Another crouched by the revolver at the elegant one's boot scuff and muttered, "Gravity took a smoke break."
"Save the poetry for court," a sergeant snapped without heat. He looked at Seigi. "You two good?"
"Yeah," Seigi lied.
Outside, the cold slapped him awake. The river made a slow, black seam through the city. Gulls complained like old men who had seen this all before and weren't impressed. Seigi pulled air into his chest until it hurt. The pain proved there was room for breath.
He thought of Sato's cigarette ember guttering in the gutter. He thought of his grandmother tapping his chest and saying, one day you'll have to decide—hero or villain. He thought of the dock's gravel kissing his back and Wraith's voice in the dark like a map someone slipped into his pocket without asking.
Would being a hero mean drawing a gun on something bullets couldn't name? Would it mean crossing lines he had sworn to keep whole? Was he chasing justice or just his own reflection with a brighter light behind it?
A shout from inside jerked him back. "Takeda! Seigi! Initial statements!"
Renji stood at his shoulder, coat collar up, wind making a small mess of his hair. "You heard him," he said, and for a second his voice was ordinary, the voice of a partner who has learned how to share silence. Then softer: "Please don't say anything that gets you noticed by the wrong people." He tried to smile and failed. "Or me."
Seigi didn't answer. He didn't need to. He had already been noticed.
He turned toward the ruin of the doorway. The thread was still there, a faint warmth under the cold, like a wire humming behind a wall. It didn't promise safety. It promised choice.
This wasn't about shadows anymore.
It was about learning where to push and what would move when he did.
And whether the man in the hood would still be there when he finally stopped trembling.