The silence was a lie. It had been for three years, seven months, and twelve days. To anyone else standing on the platform of the Shinjuku station, the world was a predictable blend of screeching steel, muffled announcements, and the rhythmic shuffling of a thousand feet. For them, the space between people was empty. For me, that space was a graveyard of discarded truths.
I pressed my palms against my temples, the plastic of my heavy-duty noise-canceling headphones digging into my skin. They were a placebo. They could block the vibrations of the air, but they couldn't stop the resonance of a decaying mind.
A salaryman stood three feet away from me. His suit was impeccable, his face a mask of disciplined exhaustion. But his Surface Echo was a jagged, rhythmic pulsing of Crimson.
*I should have pushed her. The stairs were right there. Just one nudge and the debt would be gone. One nudge and I could sleep.*
The thought wasn't a voice. It was a texture—a greasy, metallic taste in the back of my throat. I looked at him, and for a split second, our eyes met. He offered a polite, practiced nod. I looked away, my stomach churning. He didn't know his soul was screaming. He didn't know I was drowning in his filth.
That was the curse of the Cognitive Echo. Most people think telepathy is a gift, a way to bridge the gap between souls. They imagine clear sentences, secrets shared in whispers. They are wrong. Humanity isn't composed of sentences; it's composed of static. We are a collection of half-formed hungers, suppressed violent urges, and the agonizing friction between who we are and who we pretend to be.
The train arrived, a silver serpent swallowing the crowd. I pushed inside, cornering myself against the plexiglass.
The density of the crowd made the echoes unbearable. It was a sensory claustrophobia. A woman to my left was projecting a Fractured Echo—staccato bursts of grey fear.
*Did I leave the stove on? No, he's going to find the letter. If he finds the letter, the locks will change. The locks. The stove. The letter.*
Her thoughts looped like a broken record, the edges fraying into a high-pitched whine that made my teeth ache. I closed my eyes, trying to find my own center, but there was no center left. My identity was a shoreline being slowly eroded by the tide of everyone else's misery.
"Kurogami Ren."
The name didn't come from the air. It didn't come from the echoes. It was a digital vibration in my pocket.
I pulled out my phone. The screen was black, save for a single line of white text that seemed to bleed into the pixels.
[ THE VEIL REQUESTS YOUR ATTENDANCE. ]
My heart skipped a beat, a cold needle of adrenaline piercing my chest. I hadn't opened the app in months. I had tried to delete it, but the icon always returned, a digital parasite that refused to die. VEIL—the only place where the noise was curated, and the only place where the noise could kill you.
Beneath the text, a small icon flickered. It looked like a stylized eye with a cracked pupil.
I hesitated. My thumb hovered over the glass. I knew what happened to those who played. I had seen the "Burned"—people whose cognitive circuits had been fried by the pressure of the game, reduced to catatonic shells staring at walls in psychiatric wards.
But I also knew about the Shards.
The man sitting across from me, a teenager with bleached hair and sunken eyes, was vibrating with a White Shard resonance. I could tell by the way his Echo was unnaturally sharp, almost geometric. He wasn't thinking; he was calculating. He was staring at the girl next to him, not with lust, but with a terrifying, analytical coldness. He was counting the threads in her coat. He was predicting the exact second the train would brake based on the sway of the hand straps.
*3.4 seconds. 3.3. 3.2. Shift weight to the left heel. Minimize kinetic transfer.*
The White Shard gave him the focus of a god and the empathy of a stone. And I knew, with a sickening certainty, that he was an addict. In twenty minutes, the Shard's effect would wear off, and his brain would feel like it had been scraped with sandpaper. He would need another. Or he would need the "Void."
My phone vibrated again.
[ CHALLENGE STARTING IN: 04:59 ]
[ STAKE: NEUROSHARD - VOID (SAMPLE 0.1mg) ]
[ OBJECTIVE: LOCATE THE SILENT ZONE ON THIS TRAIN. ]
The air in the carriage suddenly felt thin. A Silent Zone.
In a world where everyone's mind leaked like a rusted pipe, a Silent Zone was an impossibility. It was a hole in the universe. It was someone whose mind didn't echo. Someone who was truly, terrifyingly empty. Or someone who had mastered the art of the lie so perfectly that even their subconscious was a fortress.
I looked around the carriage. There were forty-two people in this car.
I began to filter.
I pushed past the Surface Echoes—the hunger for lunch, the annoyance at the delay, the dull hum of boredom. I ignored the Fractured Echoes of the broken and the mourning. I searched for the absence of sound.
It was like trying to find a black thread in a dark room.
The teenager with the White Shard was still calculating. A businessman was mourning a dead dog. A student was terrified of a math test.
Then, I felt it.
Near the back door. A pocket of absolute, chilling nothingness.
It wasn't that the person wasn't thinking. It was that the thoughts were being swallowed. It felt like standing on the edge of a cliff at night, looking down into a sea you couldn't see but could feel through the cold dampness of the air.
I stood up, my legs feeling heavy. The train swayed, and I stumbled, brushing against a middle-aged woman. Her Echo flared—a brief spark of irritation—but I ignored it. I walked toward the back, my eyes scanning the faces.
There.
She was sitting by the window, her hands folded neatly in her lap. She wasn't wearing headphones. She wasn't looking at a phone. She was just... looking.
She was Korean, I realized. Her features were delicate, a deceptive harmony that masked a terrifying lack of "noise." Han Seo-Yun. I didn't know her name then, but the name flashed on my phone screen as I drew closer.
[ TARGET IDENTIFIED: HAN SEO-YUN. ]
[ CURRENT STATUS: THE SILENT HARMONY. ]
She didn't look up as I approached. Most people, when someone stares at them in a crowded train, project an Echo of defensive alertness. They wonder why you're looking. They feel judged.
She projected nothing.
I stood in front of her, gripping the overhead strap so hard the leather groaned. Up close, the silence coming from her was deafening. It was a vacuum that pulled at my own Echoes, threatening to drag my messy, chaotic thoughts into her void.
"You're looking for something," she said.
Her voice was calm, melodic, and entirely devoid of the inflection of a stranger. She didn't look at my face; she looked at my eyes, as if she were reading the data written on my retinas.
I didn't answer. I couldn't. My mind was scrambling, trying to find a crack in her armor, a single leak of an Echo that would tell me who she was or what she wanted.
Nothing.
"The VEIL is a cruel mirror, Kurogami-kun," she continued, her lips curving into a ghost of a smile. "It shows you the world as it is, and then it asks you if you're strong enough to hate it."
I felt a bead of sweat roll down the back of my neck. "How do you do it?" I whispered, my voice raspy. "The silence. It's impossible."
She finally stood up. She was shorter than me, but the space she occupied felt immense. The train began to slow, the brakes screeching—a sound that usually sent a wave of mental agony through me. But standing near her, the screeching felt distant.
"It's not silence," she whispered, leaning closer until I could smell the faint, clinical scent of her perfume. "It's a symphony played at a frequency you aren't ready to hear yet."
She reached out and tapped my phone screen with a slender finger.
[ CHALLENGE COMPLETE. ]
[ REWARD GRANTED: NEUROSHARD - VOID (0.1mg) ]
[ WARNING: THE VOID IS NOT A GIFT. IT IS A DEBT. ]
The doors hissed open. The station was Ebisu.
"Don't take it, Ren," she said, her voice dropping to a level that only I could hear. "If you open the Void, you'll never be able to close your eyes again."
She stepped out into the crowd, her silhouette instantly swallowed by the sea of salarymen and students. I tried to follow her, but my legs buckled. A sudden, violent pressure exploded behind my eyes.
The echoes of the entire station—thousands of minds, thousands of lies, thousands of screams—slammed into me at once. The "filter" I had spent years building shattered like glass under a hammer.
*I hate him. I'm hungry. Why won't she call? Kill them all. I'm so tired. I'm so tired. I'm so tired.*
I fell to my knees on the floor of the carriage. People stepped around me, their Echoes a cacophony of disgust and indifference.
*Another junkie. Don't look. Stay away. Is he sick? Don't get it on my shoes.*
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small, translucent vial that hadn't been there a minute ago. Inside was a single, microscopic grain of something that seemed to absorb the light around it. The Void Shard.
My hand trembled. The noise was unbearable. I could feel my own consciousness fraying at the edges, being pulled apart by the gravity of a thousand strangers.
*Liar. Liar. Liar.*
The word echoed in my own head, but I didn't know if it was my thought or someone else's.
I looked at the vial. I looked at the dark grain within.
She had told me not to take it. But she was the one who had activated the reward. She was a player. She was the architect of my current agony.
I unscrewed the cap. My vision was blurring, the world turning into a kaleidoscope of grey static and crimson pulses.
I didn't want to see. I didn't want to hear. I just wanted it to stop.
But in the world of VEIL, there is no stop. There is only the next level.
I tilted the vial back.
The grain hit my tongue, and for a heartbeat, there was a total, absolute, and terrifying silence.
And then, the world screamed.