Justice breaks when it sees what order truly demands.
The purge begins before dawn.
Kaito Nakamura, commander once sworn to uphold order, stands in borrowed shadow as the corporate exorcist teams sweep through crumbling dorms. Their insignias—red-on-black, the universal symbol for consensus at any cost—glow coldly against suits armored for conscience and for war. Students scream, data-orphans vanish, chalk sigils and glitched ID tags flaring before the purifiers' beams.
He's always believed in protocol—but the scene before him shatters idol after idol. No Daemon to be found. Only weeping, emptied faces; only flesh, not code, hunted for erasure. This isn't justice. This is something else.
Kaito ducks into a stairwell, burning his own credentials and pocketing forbidden maps. His earpiece hums with headquarters' order: "Genesis anomalies confirmed. Waste no time on extraction protocols; elimination is authorized."
On the third sublevel, he pauses. Through the haze and the alarms, he sees Nyx—Swan—leading a cluster of Cell survivors across a gap, their movements perfectly coordinated. It's not power, not glory. It's desperation, made heroic only by the fact that anyone is left at all.
—
"Stop!" Kaito's voice slices the air as the exorcists corner a duo of shivering teens; one's arm already marked with the sigil of preemptive nullification. "You don't have clearance for lethal force here. Stand DOWN."
The sergeant turns, trigger already half-pulled. "Orders from above. We're cleaning house."
"Above is wrong." The words drop into a silence that seems endless, until gunfire from further down the hall drags the present moment forward.
Swan's group bursts in—Specter-scarred, battered, alive. Echo darts in and out of cover, voice looping: "We rescue...what system erases. We are—what order forgot."
Kaito steps in front of the orphans, raising his hands, official badge tossed aside—a meaningless relic, burning against the floor. "If you kill them, you kill what makes the protocol worth saving," he says, and the room stills.
"Nakamura, you're out of line." The exorcist's visor flashes. "You're one of us, or you're nothing."
Kaito's answer is simple: "Then I'm nothing."
A tense, knife-edge stand-off—Swan's eyes lock with Kaito's, suspicion and hope both flickering. "You leaving the world of idols, Nakamura? Or just pausing before you break us yourself after?"
Kaito's mask cracks. "Justice was the idol. Seeing you live, seeing the lies—they broke it for me. Tonight I'm with the ghosts."
He holsters his weapon, turns his back on order. The exorcists hesitate—and that's all the Cell needs. In coordinated, silent fury, they sweep the teens away, smoke and mirrors through system-blind corridors before backup arrives.
—
When the smoke clears, Nyx, Echo, Kaito, and Elara huddle in a pool of lamplight and burnt-out superstitions. Motifs linger everywhere: the insignia Kaito abandoned; a still-glowing document smoldering at his feet; the haunted faces of the saved reflected in every shard of a shattered emergency mirror.
"Kaito, what now?" Elara asks, voice shaky but recording as always.
He stares down at his empty hands, all scripts and orders burned to ash. "Now? Now I remember every face they taught us to forget. Now I start thinking for myself—and justice starts here, not in a file."
Above them, a corporate banner unravels in the wind. For a moment it looks like the old crest might reform, might be salvaged; then Swan steps on it, and the ashes scatter for good.
Kaito looks at the Cell—these outlaws, these ghosts, this revolution-in-motion—and realizes that doubt isn't a weakness. It's the first breath of freedom.
The world outside falls still, as if expecting him to change his mind.
But Kaito doesn't move, not this time.
[END OF CHAPTER]