The neon rain fell on Tokyo 2228 like digital tears—each droplet carrying advertisement code, whispering directly into neural implants about products for a future Sekitanki didn't understand and couldn't afford.
He stood in the shadow of a transit hub, three days since joining Digital Kings, wearing clothes that didn't fit and carrying rage that fit too well. His augmented spine—rebuilt after the eight-story fall—sent phantom pains through his nervous system. Medical nanobots worked constantly, repairing damage faster than his body accumulated it, but they couldn't fix what was broken inside.
Kaito died three days ago. Feels like three years. Feels like three seconds.
The memory surfaced unbidden: Kaito's blind eyes tracking toward voices he couldn't see. His grandmother's screams. The flatline that meant another person Sekitanki cared about had stopped existing.
"Focus." Akari's voice cut through his spiral, sharp as the blade she carried. She stood beside him in the shadows, scanning the transit hub with eyes that catalogued threats by reflex. "Target arrives in four minutes. We extract, we disappear. No complications."
"There are always complications," Ren added from their position on a nearby rooftop. His voice came through the comm-bead implanted behind Sekitanki's ear—technology that felt invasive but necessary. "TRA increased patrols after our recruitment stunt. They're hunting us."
"Then we hunt faster." Akari's hand rested on her katana's handle—the hybrid blade that vibrated at molecular frequency, cutting through matter like it was suggestion rather than solid. "Yuki, status?"
"Medical transport standing by." The doctor's voice was calm despite the circumstances. "But if the target's temporal trauma is advanced, extraction might accelerate the condition. Moving them could kill them."
"Leaving them definitely kills them." Akari's tone allowed no argument. "TRA scheduled termination is tomorrow morning. We extract tonight or never."
Sekitanki pulled up the target file on his stolen data pad—information Ren had hacked from TRA databases, crimes committed so casually they felt like breathing:
TARGET: Yamada Hana
Age: 8 years old
Displacement Origin: 2180 (jumped forward 48 years)
Temporal Trauma Status: Stage 4 (terminal)
TRA Classification: Temporally Unstable - Scheduled for Humane Termination
Notes: Subject displays accelerated cellular decay. Estimated survival without intervention: 36-48 hours. With intervention: indefinite. Recommendation: Terminate to prevent resource expenditure on low-probability recovery.
The clinical language made him want to vomit. Or scream. Or put his fist through something that wouldn't heal. She's to young. They're killing an eight-year-old because saving her is inconvenient.
"I see her." Shou's voice crackled through comms. The pilot was somewhere above in a vehicle that defied several laws of physics, monitoring from altitude the TRA couldn't easily reach. "Two guards, both armed. Standard escort formation. She's... Jeez, she looks bad."
Sekitanki's eyes found the target. Even from fifty meters away, the damage was visible.
Hana walked between two armored TRA guards, hands bound with neural-suppressant cuffs that prevented displaced persons from accessing whatever temporal abilities some developed from time travel effects. Something Sekitanki never got. But him being a unique case, somehow made him survive the journey.
But it was her body that screamed wrongness—skin taking on translucent quality, like she was already halfway to not existing. A case TRA still treated as treason. Despite her being here on accident. Sent here from the messups of times values. Her eyes were distant, unfocused, seeing things from timelines that no longer included her. Because her body could not handle the effects of such power.
Stage 4 temporal trauma. The same thing that killed Kaito, just faster. Her body couldn't withstand displacement the way Sekitanki could. Displacing someone was death sentence. Slow. Agonizing. Inevitable.
Unless someone intervened. "On my mark," Akari said, already moving. Her body language shifted from observation to predation. "Three. Two—" Hana collapsed.
No warning. Her legs simply stopped supporting her weight. She fell face-first onto the transit platform, body convulsing, temporal trauma accelerating in real-time.
The guards hesitated—just a second, training warring with human instinct to help a dying person. That second was enough. "NOW!" Akari's voice was a whip-break.
Sekitanki moved before conscious thought, his Carboniferous reflexes overriding hesitation. The fifty meters between him and Hana compressed into nothing as his augmented body pushed past human limits, past pain, past the screaming certainty that this was going to go wrong.
The first guard registered his approach, weapon coming up—standard TRA neural disruptor, designed to incapacitate without killing. Sekitanki didn't give him time to fire.
His hand found the guard's wrist, twisted with Kamakura precision, heard bone snap with sound like dry wood breaking. The weapon clattered away. His follow-up strike—WWII close-quarters combat, learned from desperate soldiers in 1945—caught the guard's throat, crushing his throat.
The guard fell, drowning in air his lungs couldn't process.
The second guard was faster. Had his weapon up, finger on trigger, neural disruptor humming with charge that would drop Sekitanki like a puppet with cut strings—
Akari's blade took his arm off at the elbow.
The cut was so clean the guard didn't register it for a full second. Just stared at the stump where his hand used to be, weapon still gripped in severed fingers on the ground, brain trying to process an impossibility.
Then the pain hit. He screamed, high and terrified, stumbling backward as blood fountained from the wound in arterial spurts that painted the platform in abstract expressionist horror.
"Secure the target!" Akari's voice cut through the chaos. "I'll handle cleanup!"
Sekitanki dropped beside Hana, catching her, feeling how cold she was. How fragile. Like holding paper in a rainstorm, wondering if she'd dissolve before he could carry her to safety.
Her eyes found his—momentarily focused, momentarily present. "Am I dying?" Her voice was a whisper. "It hurts. Everything hurts. I want my mom. I want—"
"I've got you." Sekitanki lifted her carefully, feeling how little she weighed. "You're going home. I promise."
The lie tasted like copper. She wasn't going home. Her timeline was 48 years in the past. Her mother was probably in her fifties now, living a life that didn't include the daughter who'd vanished into temporal anomaly. There was no home to return to.
But he said it anyway because dying people deserved better than truth in his eyes.
Behind him, the guard with one arm had stopped screaming—shock setting in, body shutting down to preserve what remained. The other guard wasn't moving. Might never move again.
Two more deaths. Two more bodies. Add them to the count spanning four eras.
"TRA response incoming!" Ren's voice broke with urgency. "Multiple units converging. You have maybe ninety seconds before this platform becomes kill zone!"
Sekitanki ran, Hana cradled against his heart, feeling her disappear with each step. Temporal trauma was accelerating—stress of extraction pushing her cellular structure past its limits.
She's dying. Right now. In my arms. And I can't stop it.
Akari appeared beside him, blade clean despite the violence, moving with the fluid precision of someone who'd internalized combat until it became breathing.
"Extraction point is three hundred meters northeast. Shou's dropping down to—" The explosion cut her off.
Not nearby. Somewhere in the transit hub's interior. Followed immediately by alarms—mechanical shrieking that announced security breach, terrorist attack, all-points response protocol.
"What the hell was that?" Sekitanki gasped, still running, lungs burning from exertion and panic.
"Ren's distraction." Akari's voice was grim. "He's hacking the hub's power grid. Creating cascading failures. Making TRA think this is larger operation than single extraction."
"And if people get hurt? Civilians?" "Then they get hurt. Revolution isn't clean. You knew that when you joined." The words sat wrong. Felt wrong. But he didn't have time to argue because the TRA response had arrived.
Six combat drones descended from the upper levels—military-grade autonomous weapons, each one equipped with neural disruptors, kinetic weapons, and AI that adapted to fighting styles mid-combat.
They didn't negotiate. Didn't demand surrender. Just opened fire.
The kinetic rounds—small projectiles moving at hypersonic velocity—tore through the platform where Sekitanki had been standing half a second earlier. His Carboniferous reflexes had read the drones' positioning, predicted firing angles, moved before the AI could complete its targeting calculations.
But Hana was dying in his arms and he couldn't fight while carrying her.
Akari moved in front of him, blade singing as she deflected incoming fire. The quantum-edge technology let her katana interact with projectiles at the molecular level, disrupting their cohesion, turning bullets into harmless dust.
It was impossible. It was beautiful. It was buying them seconds they desperately needed.
"Shou! WHERE THE FUCK IS OUR RIDE?" Akari screamed while cutting through a drone that had gotten too close—her blade sheering through its armor plating like it was paper.
"Thirty seconds! The TRA has aerial denial up! I'm breaking through but it's—shit—INCOMING!"
The air screamed. Something massive was descending—TRA heavy response unit, the kind they deployed when standard forces weren't enough.
"Run!" Akari grabbed Sekitanki's shoulder, physically turning him toward the extraction point. "RUN AND DON'T STOP!"
They ran through a transit hub that had become war zone. Civilians were fleeing, screaming, trampling each other in panic. Ren's sabotage had triggered secondary explosions—power conduits overloading, cascading through the structure, creating fires that filled the air with toxic smoke.
And through it all, Sekitanki carried Hana, feeling her body grow lighter, more gone. Like she was evaporating in his arms. "Stay with me." He was begging now, all pretense of professional extraction abandoned. "Please stay with me. Just a little longer. We're almost—"
Her hand found his face. Touched his cheek with fingers that were barely there. "Thank you. For trying. For caring. I'm sorry I—"
Her body convulsed violently. The temporal trauma reached critical cascade—her cells losing connection to time, experiencing every moment of her existence simultaneously, consciousness fragmenting across impossible dimensions.
She screamed. Not with voice—she'd lost connection to her vocal cords. But her mind screamed directly into his, neural echo of agony as eight years of life compressed and expanded and tore apart and—
She stopped existing.
Not died. That implied a body remained. Hana simply ceased to be, her ashes scattering across timelines as causality itself rejected her continued presence in 2228.
Sekitanki was left holding nothing. His arms cradled empty air where a person had been three seconds ago.
The world stopped. Sound became distant. Motion became abstract. He stood frozen in the middle of a firefight, staring at his empty hands, trying to process what had just happened.
She's gone. Not dead. Erased. Like she never existed except she did exist and I was holding her and she was scared and wanted her mom and—
"MOVE!" Akari tackled him as kinetic rounds shredded the space where he'd been standing. They crashed behind a structural column, ducking incoming fire, while TRA forces closed in from every direction.
"She's gone," Sekitanki heard himself say. His voice sounded distant. Like someone else was speaking. "I was holding her and she just... disappeared. Like she was never real."
"She was real. And she died."
Akari stepped in close. "That's exactly why we keep going," she said, voice low and unyielding. "We don't honor her by collapsing. We honor her by surviving. By extracting the next one. By staying alive long enough to save someone else."
His eyes wavered. "You think this was the first failure? You think it'll be the last?" Akari continued. "Our technology can't send everyone back to their original time. You know that. Sometimes all we can do is pull them out before it gets worse. Sometimes that has to be enough."
Her expression sharpened, grief buried under discipline. "And you—your case is different. You've crossed time too many times. There is no 'going home' for you anymore. That door probably closed a long time ago. But were also still trying to help you get home, in return for your help."
She said calmly.
"So don't drown in what we couldn't fix," she said. "Focus on what we still can. Because the next person is out there right now, and they don't get saved if you give up."
"Snap out of it, Sekitanki."
He didn't understand anything. His hands were empty. A person had died—not from bullets or bombs but from the universe itself deciding she didn't belong.
Shou's vehicle appeared through the smoke like a miracle made of metal and desperation—hovering craft that shouldn't fit in the enclosed space but existed there anyway, temporal manipulation letting it occupy spaces normal physics denied.
"IN! NOW! I CAN'T HOLD POSITION MORE THAN TEN SECONDS!"
Akari dragged Sekitanki toward the vehicle, physically moving him because his legs had forgotten how to function. They tumbled into the cramped interior, Shou hitting acceleration before the door fully closed.
The craft shot upward through the transit hub, dodging structural supports and incoming fire with equal precision. Shou flew like physics was suggestion rather than law.
They burst into open sky, into the neon rain, into Tokyo 2228's endless sprawl.
Behind them, the transit hub was burning. Emergency services were responding. Casualties were being counted. And somewhere in the chaos, two TRA guards were dead or dying, and one eight-year-old kid had been erased from existence.
The silence inside the vehicle was absolute. Finally, Ren's voice crackled through comms: "Extraction failed. Target is... the target didn't make it. Confirming mission failure."
"Confirmed." Akari's voice was flat. "Return to base. Debrief in one hour." The comm went silent. Shou flew in silence. The city passed beneath them in silence.
Sekitanki stared at his hands. They were shaking. Had been shaking since Hana disappeared. Might never stop shaking. "First mission failure?" Akari asked quietly.
"First person I've watched die from temporal trauma." His voice broke. "Kaito died about the same way. injury instead though. Just stopped existing because the universe couldn't handle him being displaced."
"It never gets easier. Anyone who tells you it does is lying or broken." "What if we're both? Lying and broken?"
Akari didn't answer. Just stared out at the city that had become their battlefield, her hand resting on the blade that had taken a guard's arm, and said nothing because there was nothing to say.
They landed at Digital Kings' temporary base—an abandoned industrial facility in Tokyo's manufacturing district, the kind of place where questions weren't asked because asking led to answers no one wanted.
The rest of the team was waiting. Yuki with medical equipment she hadn't needed. Kenji with the partially-assembled time machine that represented months of work still ahead. Ren surrounded by holographic displays showing news coverage of the transit hub attack—21 civilian casualties, 47 injured, 2 TRA guards dead, 1 child missing and presumed killed in the explosion.
The official narrative was already set: Terrorist attack by anti-temporal extremists. No mention of Digital Kings. No mention of extraction attempt. No mention that the child had been scheduled for termination anyway.
History written by people who controlled the narrative.
"I'm sorry." Yuki approached Sekitanki, her medic's instinct recognizing shock. "I heard on comms. Temporal cascade during extraction. There's nothing you could have done."
"I could have moved faster. Been stronger. Not let the TRA catch us. Not—"
"Stop." Her voice was firm. "You're not a god. You can't prevent causality violations. All you can do is try. You tried. She knew someone cared enough to risk everything for her. That mattered."
"Did it? She's dead. Erased. Gone like she never existed. What the fuck did my caring matter?" No answer. Because there wasn't one.
Ren pulled up additional files—dozens of displaced persons currently in TRA custody, all scheduled for termination over the next month. People, mostly. Some criminals. All deemed "temporally unstable." All considered acceptable casualties in the name of preventing temporal paradoxes.
"This is what we're fighting," Akari said, her voice addressing everyone. "This is what the TRA does. Lets people die because saving them is politically inconvenient. Tonight we failed. Tomorrow we try again. And again. Until either we win or we're dead."
"What if we're making it worse?" Sekitanki's question came out harder than intended. "Twenty-one civilians died tonight. From Ren's sabotage. From the chaos we created. How is that different from what the TRA does?"
"It's different because we're trying to save people. TRA is trying to maintain order. Intent matters." "Does it? Tell the families of those twenty-one civilians that our intent made their deaths meaningful."
Tension crystallized. Akari's hand moved toward her blade—not threatening, just habitual response to confrontation.
Ren stepped between them: "We're all tired. Traumatized. Operating on rage and hope in equal measure. Maybe we take tonight to process instead of tearing each other apart?"
Sekitanki walked away, finding a corner of the facility where shadows were thick enough to hide in. He sat with his back against cold metal, staring at hands that had held a dying person, and tried to remember why he'd agreed to this.
Kaito. I did this for Kaito. To honor his memory. To help displaced persons.
But Hana was displaced. And he'd failed her. Added her name to the list of people who'd died because he wasn't good enough, fast enough, strong enough to save them.
The list was getting long. Spanning four eras. Filling his mind with faces and final words and the terrible weight of surviving when everyone around him ended.
Footsteps approached. Yuki, carrying medical supplies and something in a small container. "You're bleeding." She tilted her head, eyes narrowing at the dark stain spreading across his side. "Kinetic round grazed you during extraction. Didn't penetrate—but it's enough. You're bleeding."
He hadn't noticed. Pain had become background noise.
She treated the wound in silence, her hands gentle despite the violence they'd all participated in. When she finished, she set the small container beside him.
"What is this?"
"Hana's final scan. Ren pulled it from TRA medical database before they could purge the files." Yuki's voice was soft. "Her overall code. Her temporal signature. Everything that proves she existed. I thought... I thought you might want to remember her. Not as failure. Just as person who deserved better than what the universe gave her."
Sekitanki opened the container. Inside: a data chip containing an persons entire record. Proof of existence. Memorial for someone who'd been erased so completely that even her corpse didn't remain.
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Just promise you'll keep fighting. Keep trying. Because the next extraction might succeed. The next child might make it. And if we give up now, Hana's death means nothing."
She left him alone with the data chip and his guilt and the city beyond the walls—Tokyo 2228, where neon rain fell on the displaced and the broken and the revolutionaries who'd forgotten the difference between salvation and damnation.
Sekitanki held the chip like a prayer. Like a promise. Like a weight that would crush him eventually but he'd carry anyway because carrying was what survivors did.
Outside, the artificial Milky Way activated—billions of false stars painting the sky. Beautiful. Meaningless. The future displaying wonders while people died in shadows.
And somewhere in those shadows, six more Digital Kings members prepared for the next mission. The next extraction. The next chance to save someone the system had deemed acceptable casualty.
The revolution continued. Would continue. Until they won or died or lost themselves so completely in violence that victory became indistinguishable from defeat.
Sekitanki closed his eyes, holding a dead persons being code, and wondered which ending they were heading toward.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT TIME: Episode 2 - "The Price of Information"]
Ren hacks TRA's central database, discovering the cure for temporal trauma has existed for decades. The technology that could have saved Kaito—saved Hana—has been deliberately withheld. The revelation transforms grief into cold fury. And fury becomes the fuel for revolution that will burn everything.
The war escalates. The body count rises. And Sekitanki learns that sometimes the only way to save people is to become the monster the system claims you are.