The morning over Tokyo was the colour of old bruises thick with light that refused to cut through. Satō woke with the taste of iron in his mouth and the echo of amplifiers behind his eyes. He lay still until the room stopped orbiting; the city outside his window went on with the small, indifferent noises of morning: a truck backing up, a dog yapping, a vending machine coughing to life.
He moved like a man who kept his muscles coiled for reasons that had nothing to do with sleep. The afterimages of last night's club fight flicked behind his lids: neon slicing through smoke, the knife that flashed at a shoulder and folded like an evil plan, the crate sliding into hands that needed it more than they needed mercy. And above it all, the way the three Kurogumi looked at him was not with thanks but recognition. That looks lodged like a splinter.
By the time he'd forced his jaw to work and his feet into boots, he knew someone had seen him the way a hunter considers prey. Recognition hunted differently from rage; it tracked you with a ledger in hand.
He kept to alleys keeping in of his sight lines, cut across narrow markets, and treated every glass storefront like a mirror that might show more than his face. In the convenience store window, he caught a beige coat in the reflection, with broad shoulders, movement too economical to be accidental. In the laundromat glass, the shape was there again, in the same posture. In the mirrored steel of a train carriage, the shoulders were closer.
Minamisenju should have been a place to lose a tail. He chose it for the maze of small streets, the stalls, the laundry carts, a place where a shadow could be lost if you moved like you wanted to be. He miscalculated.
A van rounded the alley like a seal cutting water. It parked with the indifferent hiss of a thing meant to swallow light. A sliding door peeled open. Three figures poured out, not the clumsy gait of amateurs but the practised quiet of men who move for business.
One of them was the courier: the same thin face, the same puffy cheek. He had not thanked Satō. He had no reason to.
The hands on Satō were quick and professional: a clamp at the collar, a strike to the kidney with a push-knuckle technique that left his breath shallow and hot in his throat. Zip-ties bit into his wrists so that the world narrowed to the blackness pulled over his head. He let them take him. A fight now would only change the terms. He'd learned that lessons cost more than pride.
Concrete hit his shoulder, then his cheek; the hood was peeled away to a warehouse smell: diesel, mildew, salt from the Sumida, and the cold that clung to girders. Fluorescents hummed like a nervous insect. Plywood partitions hacked the space into rooms like paper walls, hiding larger things. Men stood inside the shed with the slow patience of predators.
The manager waited with an economy of motion, hair greying at the temples, jacket open, forearms thick as rope. He had the kind of face that had eaten many small cruelties and made them into habits.
"You move like you've been taught to take men apart," the manager said. His voice had the flatness of a ledger entry.
Satō felt the rope burn in his wrists and kept his face neutral. "I was at a club. I drink. I leave."
The manager's smile was small and precise. "No one fights like that for free."
They did not begin with questions, after that response.
They began with touch.
Two palms shot forward and hooked the cloth at the front of Satō's shirt, not in a crushing clamp but in a practised hook that found seams, collarbone, and the tiny give where fabric meets skin. The men's forearms bunched like steel cable pulled taut; knuckles whitened under the skin. The motion was a single fluent action: seize, pivot, check. Satō felt it not as a hand on his body but as a change in his skeletal geometry, the vertebrae clicking into a different rhythm, the whole axis of his torso yawing a fraction of an inch. Tendons along the neck and the base of the skull pulled tight. Soft tissue stretched. The noise it made in his chest was slight and involuntary: the sucking grunt of expelled air, the body accounting for sudden displacement.
The man holding him listened to that sound as if it were a reply. It was data. A metronome. "You hear?" he asked, but his voice was a probe more than a question.
Before Satō could answer, the fingers slid up, repositioning with surgical precision. Palms cupped his jaw; thumbs found the hollows beneath cheekbones and pressed. The pressure was not brute; it was geometrical a force applied to rotate not the skull so much as the way he looked at the world. Bones beneath skin became maps: masseter tightening, the little muscles by the ear contracting against thumb pressure, the microspasms under the temple. Satō felt the minute fibres of his facial muscles pull like tiny springs. His eyes were forced level; the warehouse around them narrowed into the plane of another man's face.
"Eyes here," the interrogator breathed, and the world folded into that point of focus.
The first slap came from the left. It was an evaluative strike: palm slightly cupped, fingers relaxed, wrist cocked to send an instant of kinetic curiosity across bone and nerve. The sound cracked and reverberated down the jaw into the cervical spine, and the slight, reflexive tightening along the neck's lateral muscles betrayed the first measurement. The muscle spindles, the body's quick sensors for stretch and speed, flared and told the brain to force posture to safety. Satō's jaw locked for a heartbeat.
Before his body could reset, the second slap arrived — faster, flatter, designed to ask whether his nervous system repeated the same response. Would the eyes blink in the same split? Would the breath hitch? He did not flinch. The interrogator's pencil-thin mouth lifted in a millimetre of surprise.
The third slap aimed beneath the ear. It did not aim for damage so much as for comment; it sent a line of hot white down tendon and into the shoulder where involuntary digits tightened. Fingers splayed on his collarbone in the aftershock revealed the small, animal sensations: the curling of toes, the widening of pupils, the micro-exhalations. One of the men muttered, not unkindly: "Solid."
This was not anger. It was a careful, clinical appraisal. Each hit mapped a threshold: where the reflex was elastic and recoverable, where it would begin to fray.
Two men seized him by the arms. Their grips contrasted one a blunt bulk that anchored and absorbed, the other a surgeon's hold that placed torque on the rotator cuff and coaxed the shoulder into work. They dragged him toward the plywood, which sagged slightly where it leaned against the concrete. The sight of the board gave him a moment's sick recognition: this was not meant to break bone but to send a message through the soft parts, a percussion that carried through viscera.
A fist hooked the collar and pulled, then released so that the momentum of his body carried him backward into the woods. The slap of shoulder to panel was a noise felt more than heard: a dull, satisfying thud that rattled teeth and ran like a low current through vertebrae. The ply bowed, then snapped back, returning energy into him in a thousand tiny reverberations. Muscles that had been slack tightened reflexively; intercostals contracted in a dry line of pain. There was a taste of iron at the back of his mouth.
They repeated it. Pull-slam-rebound. Each impact reached deeper than the previous, driving tremors along his spine and into the long muscles of his back. The ligaments hummed as if tuned. After the third hit, his legs felt hollow, not from acute trauma but from the way vibration drained strength out of connective tissue. Sweat stung in his eyes even though the room was cold.
Someone behind him observed, "He knows how to absorb." It was not praise, it was a ledger entry.
They dragged a metal locker out. Old steel, edges nicked, the paint gone thin where hands had gripped it. The door scraped open like a creature releasing a hiss. Satō was shoved inside as if his body were a rag to be tucked into a trunk. Upright, knees slightly bowed, shoulders grazing cold sheet metal. The air in the box was thin and taut; the metal sucked heat out of him as if the locker were a vacuum.
When they slammed the door, the sound folded around him with obscene volume. Inside the box, his heartbeat, magnified by proximity to metal, stood up and shouted. His ears rang in the small echo chamber. The creak of the locker expanding had a living quality; each inhale made the steel protest. Minutes crawled. Time became a series of small losses: the slow tingle as toes went numb, the creeping burn in quadriceps as circulation receded, a subtle lock-up in the hamstrings as they refused to lengthen.
He managed breath like a manual metronome, counting inward to anchor the mind. The muscles began to chatter with the panic of immobility, little involuntary jerks where the body tried to reassert space. Those twitches rasped against the metal, feeling obscene in their futility. The soft, thin sound of his own breath became loud in a way that bordered on hallucination.
When the door yanked open, the cold warehouse air stabbed at skin like needles. They dragged him out so abruptly his joints complained, and his legs threatened to buckle.
They forced him into a kneel with a twist: knees tight together on cold concrete, back arched so the lower lumbar muscles burned to hold the angle, arms threaded behind his head so that triceps, shoulders, and pecs sang. It was a posture built on mechanical discomfort, not brutal in the way a bone break was, but ruthless in the insidious, erosive sense: tendons stretched like bowstrings, ligaments jealous of their strain.
The pain arrived slowly and then compounded. The thighs felt as if coals had been set beneath the skin. An ache radiated into the sacroiliac joint and up the paraspinals until even shallow movement felt like negotiating a collapsing scaffolding. Small muscles that never get used in a static hold, adductors, and the tiny stabilisers around the ankle screamed in an unfamiliar language. Sweat beaded at his lower back despite the cold. His breath shortened not from panic but from diaphragm fatigue; the lungs learned a new, inefficient rhythm that required effort to maintain.
Minutes lengthened into a test that used time as a weapon. They watched the micro-tells: the first blink pattern that changed, the cough that meant a diaphragm gave way a little, the eye-roll where the mind briefly considered falling apart to save the body. "Watch his shoulders," someone said. "Soon the quiver will come." But Satō's shoulders did not quiver. They were quiet instruments. He held the angle until the world narrowed to the noise of his blood in his ears a thin, clean sound.
When they released him, it was not with noise or cruelty but with economy ropes cut enough to leave a mark, but slack to remind. He lurched forward, hooking his hands under him to stop a face plant. His muscles hummed with aftershocks like an engine cooling. Every fibre felt relearned; an elastic tension lived along the fascia of his limbs as if the body retained the memory of their hands.
They had not broken him, not then, but they had done what they set out to: they had read him. They had mapped his thresholds, catalogued his reflexes, and learned where his silences lay. The men around him exchanged small phrases, like men reading the margins of a book. The leader's eyes moved over him with the flat confidence of someone who has recorded a new account.
Outside, the cold bit at exposed skin. Satō's wrists, still tender from the zip ties, stung as they pulled him along. His legs vibrated with residual tremor.
Across the yard, like punctuation, a battered sedan waited in a shallow cut between shuttered storefronts. Men in plain coats moved around it with the efficiency of men who had rehearsed a thousand apologies. Under the dash, a compact block was duct-taped in place like a coarse secret.
The driver sat in the front seat. He was young and small, face raw with sleeplessness. His eyes were a slick, red ring. What made Satō's stomach go hollow wasn't fear so much as the way the man's hands were secured not by his sides but taped to the wheel, palms wrapped in coarse adhesive, thumbs pressed white. A digital timer sat against the man's chest, visible through a slit in his shirt, the numbers already marching down in small, clinical ticks.
The courier looked at the scene and went pale. "We can't—" he started. He coughed and swallowed the protest like a sour taste. "He stole from us. He's sorry. He—this…" The words failed him.
The manager didn't look at him. He spoke as if reciting a budget. "We need a spark. A frame. A nuisance that will shove the other gang into a mistake. He volunteered. He'll drive; he's been convinced he will be 'useful' after. You watch it. You will see it unmake a life."
Satō's throat closed. "You'll kill him."
"Not kill," the manager corrected with clinical calm. "Designate. Make them think. We make the fire; we hide the hands." He meant something practical and monstrous, both.
Satō imagined the headlines if he let his mind reach for print: "Hotel blast blamed on rival cells." Or the slow, efficient ripples: funerals, demands, reprisals. It was arithmetic made human.
"You want me to watch?" Satō asked.
"Yes." The manager's eyes took him in like inventory. "You will be a witness. You will carry the memory. That makes you pliable. It gives you context. If you survive, and if you remain as stubborn as you are, you will be useful."
They led Satiō a short distance down the yard and bound him to a concrete bollard. The ropes looped his wrists so tight the skin went numb; a thin blanket was draped over his legs like a small, strange courtesy. They left him with a radio turned off; sound would have been a distraction anyway. The driver sat with his hands taped to the wheel, the timer ticking like a heartbeat someone else owned.
The sedan rolled out when they nodded. Men melted into the shadows like practised smoke. Satō's breath went small and hard. He could see the driver's lips move in a prayer he did not understand. The manager's men spread out, one at the corner, one near the target, building a neat choreography.
Satō could have tried to bite his restraints and wriggle free. He had done worse when the price of inaction was certain death. But brute force had boundaries here. The manager had options. The wrong move and the man whose hands were strapped to the wheel would become a mark worse than death: proof.
The car turned the corner too fast, skidding on wet asphalt, taillights bleeding red across the puddles like open wounds. For one stretched, sickening moment, it didn't look like a vehicle; it looked like a decision being carried out, a verdict rolling on four wheels.
It hit the hotel entrance with a sound that had no business belonging to metal.
More like an animal being broken, spine-first, against something merciless.
The timer on the driver's chest reached its last digits. Satō didn't breathe. The number hit zero with a soft, obscene click.
And then the world did not explode—
It ruptured.
Light tore the air apart in a sheet of white that burned itself into the reader's skull; shadows caved in; every colour inverted into nightmare negative. Heat didn't wash over the scene; it punched hard enough that anyone within a dozen meters would feel their lungs squeeze like a clenched fist.
The sedan did not simply break; it disintegrated, panels peeling back like skin from a wound, the frame folding inward before twisting outward again, a grotesque, blossoming metal flower.
The driver's body still bound to the wheel, hands taped, the timer fused to his sternum—
was there one instant
and the next instant It was a shape.
Not a person. A violent absence. A smear of motion. A shockwave made flesh.
A red mist hung where he had been.
Not drifting, vibrating in the air.
A tyre spun in place, screaming against nothing, before it tore free and bounced down the street, skipping over a curb like a skipping stone until it hit a wall and dropped, still spinning.
The silence immediately after was the most horrifying part, a void so sudden and so total it felt wrong, like some essential part of the world had been punctured and was waiting to decide whether to collapse.
Then the screaming started—
not cinematic screaming
but raw-throated, wet, animal grief.
People staggered from the hotel, their faces grey with dust, their hair standing up as if electrified. Some were bleeding from their ears. One man's tie smouldered. A woman stumbled barefoot into the street, holding her hands out in front of her as if afraid her fingers might fall off. Another collapsed, retching black smoke.
A child's suitcase lay open on the pavement, clothes fluttering in the heat currents like frightened birds.
Satō's knees hit the concrete before he realised he'd dropped. His body wasn't shocked, but the world around him was. He saw details the way only someone detached from his own fear could:
A shard of glass stuck upright in asphalt, trembling. A man limping away, one shoe melted to his skin. A balcony railing is bowing outward like a cracked ribcage. A hotel clerk's name tag fused to the collar of a shirt that was no longer being worn by a shape that resembled a living human.
The courier threw up in prolonged, dry spasms, hands clamped over his mouth. One of the gang's lieutenants backed away, whispering something like a prayer, something like an apology. Another filmed the scene with a cold steadiness that felt more monstrous than the bomb.
Phones on the street lit up like warning flares as pedestrians captured the ruin, lenses shaking, fingers trembling, their voices caught between shock and voyeurism.
Satō felt a pressure behind his eyes, not grief, not panic, just the heavy, undeniable understanding that he had witnessed a political act disguised as a suicide. A precision-cut narrative. A manufactured martyr. Someone's war was given its first spark.
The smoke thinned in the breeze, rising in slow, oily ribbons. Through the wavering heat and debris, a human silhouette stood on the hotel's second-floor balcony, too still, too composed, untouched by the chaos.
A thin man.
Gaunt.
A face carved down to angles and intention.
Eyes bright in the haze like two lit coals.
And he smiled.
Not with teeth.
Not with amusement.
With the calm, clerical certainty of a man making a notation in a record book:
The deed is done. The message is sent.
Takeda's smile was almost tender in its precision.
A man watching the first domino fall exactly where he placed it.
And for a second, just a second, the city felt less like a place and more like a trap that had been spring-loaded long before Satō ever stepped into it.
The van that picked Satō up after the explosion was a sedan cleaner than the previous vehicle, tinted windows muting the city's gaze, the interior smelling faintly of incense masking the stale bite of tobacco. The manager, the tall man with grey-streaked temples who had orchestrated the earlier chaos, sat in the back with him. The lacky drove, one wrist taped where the airbag had burned him, his knuckles white against the wheel.
The city outside felt absurdly normal. Salarymen crossed streets with briefcases swinging. Mothers pushed strollers past vending machines. A street vendor grilled squid skewers, unaware that three blocks away a sedan had become a crucible of fire and human desperation. Satō's ribs still throbbed, ears rang with residual sound, and the memory of screaming and glass remained vivid.
The manager lifted his phone without glancing at the keypad. He dialled as though the number were etched in his muscle memory.
A rasp answered a wet, corrosive rasp, like metal dragging over cement.
"—ahh… You finally call."
The manager's posture straightened, measured, and deliberate. "Takeda-san. We confirmed the thing you asked us to watch."
A wheezing, almost ecstatic chuckle followed.
"Good… good. Bring him."
The lacky's eyes flicked into the rearview mirror. "Him?"
"Yes," the manager said quietly. "Takeda wants the boy."
A cold spike ran down Satō's spine.
The manager hung up, sliding the phone into his pocket, then met Satō's gaze. "Whatever happens," he murmured, "speak only when spoken to. Takeda is temperamental."
Snorted. "He's a chemical swamp with a beating heart."
The manager's jaw tightened. "Enough."
The sedan drove east, away from river warehouses and anything resembling Kurogumi territory. The buildings became older, sagging under decades of neglect, post-war tenements, rusted shutters, narrow alleys with trash piled like grey, grotesque organs. Satō's mind catalogued each visual cue: every street lamp bent, every shutter peeling, every puddle reflecting neon like bruised water.
The lacky stopped at a dead-end lot behind a shuttered pachinko parlour. There was no sign of security. Only a steel maintenance door covered in peeling, hand-written talismans, warning away spirits and perhaps men alike.
Kazuma knocked six times, four rapid, two slow. Bolts slid.
The door cracked, and a young man with needle-pitted arms appeared. His pupils darted like frightened insects. "Hurry," he whispered, vanishing back inside.
The hallway smelled of cat urine, acetone, and rot. The fluorescent lights flickered, casting reality in stuttering frames, as though the building itself could not decide whether they belonged in this world.
A freight elevator groaned into service. They stepped inside. The descent was agonisingly slow, a metallic groan echoing like a throat clearing after years of silence.
When the doors opened, the smell hit Satō: meth fumes thick as tar, mixed with the stench of sweat and unwashed bodies.
He expected a room.
Instead, he saw a warren, an old bomb shelter repurposed into a chaotic kingdom. Curved concrete ceilings arched overhead, punctuated by scattered beams. Piles of junk electronics sat like ruined monuments, burned-out bulbs lay in heaps, blankets crusted with vomit, portable fans buzzed with mechanical desperation, and a small camp stove hissed quietly in the corner.
At the far end rose a throne not a throne of wood or gold, but a glittering, crystalline altar: bags of methamphetamine stacked like frozen mountains, catching the light from bare bulbs overhead, shimmering with a cruel, icy beauty.
And on that altar of chaos sat Takeda. Cross-legged, shirtless under a red suit jacket discarded over a chair back, a black and yellow jautance flora shirt clinging to his gaunt frame. His tattoos were ordinary for the underworld: thick black outlines of koi, tigers, and waves, blotched and softened by years of wear and abuse. His cheekbones were sharp, his eyes vast, red-rimmed, bottomless.
He tilted his head at Satō, a thin smile curling his cracked lips. "Ahhh… so this is the one? The boy who walks into fire and does not burn?"
Satō inclined his head slightly, neither deep nor deferential. "Takeda-san."
Takeda giggled, a high, rattling sound like a thousand insects trapped in a jar. "Polite. Polite boys are liars. Liars have stories."
The manager bowed deeply. "He's the one who asked around for you."
Takeda's reptilian head cocked. "Asked? For me?" He stretched a trembling hand, yellowed fingernail pointing directly at Satō. "Why?"
Satō measured each word. "Someone told me you know things. Things even the oyabun doesn't."
Silence.
The lacky's pupils widened slightly; the manager's jaw tightened.
Then Takeda erupted, his laughter a violent, wet, rasping sound that made his entire body convulse. "Even the oyabun doesn't!" he wheezed. "You say it like a child pointing at the moon!"
He leaned back against the mound of meth, arms resting loosely on the uneven stacks. "The oyabun keeps the city in lines and ledgers," he said, voice low, rasping, eyes never leaving Satō. "Money. Alliances. Orders. That's his world. Mine…" He tapped his temple, the movement jittery and sharp. "Mine's the space between lines. The streets that never sleep. The men who talk when no one listens. The women who carry knives hidden in plain sight. The alleys where bodies vanish and no one notices. I see it all."
Takeda leaned forward, the crooked, unnerving smile fixing Satō in place. "I know these things because I stopped being a man a long time ago. What do you want, little spark?"
Satō inhaled, keeping his composure. "I want to understand why every path I walk keeps circling back to your name."
For a moment, Takeda's pupils sharpened with a clarity that seemed unnatural, almost surgical. "You want to understand me?" he whispered. "Then sit."
He patted a spot on the step of his meth throne.
The manager's gaze turned grave. His lips mouthed: "Don't".
Takeda crooned, "Come. Let me show you the map of sin this city hides. Sit, and see why everyone fears the man with nothing left to lose."
Satō stepped forward, and the room seemed to inhale with him, as if the shelter itself recognised the weight of what was about to unfold.