Chapter 5 - The Night I Was Rewritten
The pharmacy had gone quiet hours ago. Its neon sign buzzed faintly against the dark, washing the street below in pale blue. Snow still clung to the windowpanes, and every gust of wind rattled the old glass, whispering through the cracks. Inside, the only light came from the backroom's single overhead bulb and the eerie, cold gleam of a syringe resting on the metal table.
That glow was wrong. Too alive. It pulsed faintly—as if something inside it was still awake.
Akio stood in the middle of the room, his reflection trembling across the metal surface. He hadn't slept. Not since the night they found it lying like a threat on their floor. The syringe was small, delicate, almost elegant in its design, but the faint blue shimmer at its core made his stomach twist. He knew that color. He remembered the cold that came after it.
Around him, his friends—the family he'd built from the broken edges of his life—stood in varying degrees of unease. Raka leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, her usual sarcasm silenced by something heavier. Misaki sat perched on a stool, hands trembling around a mug of long-cold tea. Hikata stood near the window, back straight, eyes scanning the snow-covered street outside. Yamataro, face drawn tight with suspicion, kept drumming his fingers against the table. Akazuchi sat furthest from the light, his expression hidden, but his silence spoke loudest.
For a long time, no one said a word. The hum of the lights filled the space between them, a mechanical heartbeat waiting for someone to break the tension.
It was Rumane who finally did.
"Akio," she said softly, her tone calm but firm. "You knew what it was the moment you saw it. You didn't flinch. You didn't even pretend to be surprised."
Akazuchi's voice followed, quiet but edged. "And now Block 9's gone. You can't keep pretending this isn't connected. Not to you. Not to… whatever it is you're hiding."
Yamataro leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "We've all been through hell with you, alright. But this—this feels different. You owe us the truth."
Akio didn't look at them. He stared at the syringe, its glow reflected in his eyes. His hand twitched at his side. He took a long, slow breath, like someone trying to swallow something sharp.
Finally, he spoke.
"I wasn't always who you think I am."
The words came low, deliberate. Every syllable felt like it carried years of weight.
"I wasn't always a pharmacist. I wasn't always someone worth trusting. My name was Akio Hukitaske—but the being who used to carry that name was dead long before you met him."
He paused, the bulb flickering overhead.
"I used to work in a game company. Nothing glamorous—just another desk in a gray office full of the same tired faces. I spent my life building digital worlds for other people to escape into while I couldn't even escape my own. I told myself it was meaningful—that one day I'd create something beautiful, something that mattered. But all I ever built were systems designed to keep people addicted. Loot boxes. RNG mechanics. Skin packs. The art was gone, replaced by numbers."
His voice cracked slightly. "I started counting the hours of my life the same way. Patch by patch. Deadline by deadline."
He turned his gaze to the window, snow glittering faintly outside.
"Then came the night I lost her."
No one moved. The name didn't need to be said. Every one of them had heard hints before—Akio's quiet pauses whenever he saw a father with a child, the way his expression softened when kids came into the pharmacy. But none of them had ever heard the full story.
"My daughter," he whispered. "She was twelve. Smart. Gentle. She wanted to build things, too. Said she'd make 'fireworks for medicine' someday." He gave a small, broken laugh. "I never knew what she meant. Maybe she just wanted to make the world brighter."
The silence deepened.
"One night… she was walking home from a friend's birthday. Drunk driver ran a red light." His words came slow now, deliberate. "She didn't even make it to the hospital."
Misaki's cup shook in her hands. Yamataro's jaw tightened. Raka closed her eyes.
"I fell apart after that," Akio said. "My wife left. My job dropped me. I stopped answering calls. Stopped eating. There's only so much emptiness a person can hold before they start to disappear."
He looked down at his hands—the same hands that had saved lives since—but to him, they still looked like the hands that failed.
"Then one night, I passed out in the snow outside a closed bookstore. I remember thinking, 'Maybe this is it. Maybe this is how I go.' And then… I heard footsteps."
He looked up. His eyes were distant, glassy.
"A person in a white lab coat. Young. Too clean for the world he stood in. He crouched down, looked at me like I was an insect, and said, 'You look like someone who'd volunteer without realizing it.' Before I could react, he injected something into my neck. Burning. Ice. It felt like dying—and waking up all at once."
The room stayed still, as if afraid to breathe.
"When I woke up, I was… somewhere else. Somewhere new. In a school infirmary. Fourteen years old again. My body young, my mind still thirty-two. Every memory intact. Every regret screaming inside a kid who hadn't lived yet."
Akio turned back toward them, his face pale in the cold light.
"I thought it was a dream. A cruel joke. But it wasn't. It was an experiment. The Project."
The air in the room shifted. Misaki frowned. Raka leaned forward. Hikata stopped pacing.
"They called it Time Regression. A pharmaceutical-lab hybrid project buried beneath legal fronts and research divisions. Their goal was to manipulate memory and biology—to see if they could rewrite the human timeline. Create subjects who could live again, serve again, belong again. But it wasn't about healing."
His tone darkened.
"It was about control."
He glanced at the syringe again—the blue light reflecting in his pupils.
"I was Subject 9. The one who fought back. The one who wouldn't follow protocol."
Yamataro's voice was barely a whisper. "What… happened to the others?"
"They complied," Akio said flatly. "Until they didn't. And when they didn't, they disappeared. Data wiped. Families paid off. Death certificates forged. I escaped—but I wasn't supposed to. They let me live because they wanted to see what I'd do. Whether a rewritten life could rebuild itself."
He laughed quietly, bitterly. "And I did. I built this pharmacy. I built us. And for a while, I actually thought I was free."
He stepped closer to the table, the blue glow painting his features in cold fire.
"But they never stopped watching. Never stopped collecting data. The bombs. The letters. The fire at Block 9. Every move we've made since… has been part of their experiment."
Raka spoke up softly. "Then that syringe… it's part of it, isn't it?"
Akio nodded. "It's the new version. Their way of reminding me they still own my past."
Misaki's voice trembled. "Why didn't you tell us?"
"Because I didn't want to drag you into it," Akio said. "Because I thought if I ignored it long enough, maybe it would stop being real."
Akazuchi's jaw tightened. "And look how well that worked."
Akio's gaze softened. "I know. I was wrong. But if I'd told you sooner, you'd have done what you always do—thrown yourselves in front of me. And this isn't a fight I wanted you to bleed for."
Raka pushed off the wall, stepping closer. "You idiot," she said quietly. "You really think we'd rather be left behind?"
Misaki wiped her eyes. "You saved us, Akio. All of us. We're here because of you."
Rumane spoke next. "And we're not letting some ghost from your past take that away."
Yamataro nodded, his usual grin returning faintly. "Guess we're all in this project now."
For the first time in hours, Akio smiled—a small, tired, genuine smile.
He looked at the syringe again, then picked it up, holding it between his fingers. The blue glow pulsed, faintly illuminating the cracks in his palms. "This," he said, "was supposed to define me. But maybe it's time to rewrite the rewrite."
He walked to the sink, twisted the tap, and dropped it in. The water hissed as the glow dimmed, then vanished entirely.
For a long time, no one moved.
Then Hikata spoke, his tone steady. "So what now?"
Akio looked at each of them in turn—his family, his miracle, his rebellion.
"Now," he said, "we fight back. Not as experiments. Not as subjects. As people."
Outside, snow began to fall again, soft and quiet against the windows. The world beyond was still cold, still dark, but inside the pharmacy, something shifted. The hum of the lights steadied. The air seemed to thrum with purpose.
The past had come calling. But Akio wasn't that lost, dying person in the snow anymore.
He was something new. Something chosen.
He turned to his team, voice low, resolute.
"We call it Operation Phoenix."
Raka raised an eyebrow. "Rising from ashes, huh?"
Akio smiled faintly. "Exactly."
And as the last faint trace of blue disappeared down the drain, the future—uncertain, dangerous, burning—began to take shape in the shadows of Hukitaske Pharmacy.
[Next: Chapter 6 — Operation Phoenix Begins]