I was walking down a road I knew by heart—and hadn’t seen in decades.
The path from my part-ti café shift to my cheap, lonely apartnt in the downtown area. Narrow, a little cluttered, alive with the kind of small-city noise that you stop noticing until it’s gone. I knew every crack in the pavent.
The reason it felt so nostalgic was simple: three years after the ga bled into reality, this place had been wiped off the map entirely. I still rembered that day with a clarity I wished I didn’t. It had taken most of my allies with it. Most of my acquaintances. Most of the people who had made this street feel like sothing worth coming back to.
"...But this ti, I’ll make sure to change that."
I had more than enough ti. And now—starting from launch day, from the very beginning—things were going to go differently. I’d make sure of it.
"Oi, Kamishiro! How about so pork today? I’ll give you a good price!"
"Young man! Fancy so ran? Noodles are freshly made!"
The butcher uncle and the ran auntie called out from their respective storefronts as I passed, the sa way they always had. Their faces had blurred in my mory over the years—worn smooth by ti and grief—but seeing them now, standing there exactly as they always had, my lips curled without my permission.
They hadn’t survived the first wave. Neither of them. Whatever warmth they’d carried had existed only in my mory for thirty years, preserved there like pressed flowers—fragile, faded, real.
This ti, I wasn’t going to let that happen.
"Thanks, but I’m in a hurry." I gave them an awkward wave without breaking stride. "Maybe later!"
"Oh! Then I’ll save you a seat for tonight—and you’d better show up! Miyabi keeps saying she’s lonely since you stopped coming around!"
"M-Mother!"
The voice that shot out from inside the ran shop was mortified and sharp, and it stopped dead in my tracks.
I turned slowly.
Behind the auntie, half-hidden in the warmth of the shop’s interior, stood a face I could never have forgotten. No matter how many years, no matter how many things I’d survived that should have burned every soft mory out of —her face had remained.
She was red to the ears, her eyes darting anywhere but at .
"Miyabi..." I whispered.
Just her na. Just saying it was enough to disturb sothing deep and still inside —sothing I had genuinely believed I’d buried past the point of feeling.
Apparently not.
"..."
But it wasn’t the ti.
I turned away before the mont could take root, throwing one last line over my shoulder. "I’ll visit tonight, I promise. Make sure you serve your best, Auntie!"
I didn’t look back. I already knew that if I did, I might not be able to keep walking.
Miyabi was not simply a woman from my past. She had been my lifeline—the last tether that kept recognizably human through everything the ga had put through. The one person whose presence had consistently reminded that I was still sothing more than a weapon pointed at the next monster.
And I had lost her too, in the end.
’I was too weak back then. I couldn’t protect myself, let alone anyone else.’
I shook my head and kept moving.
This ti would be different. This ti I’d beco strong enough that the word protect would actually an sothing coming from .
---
Back at my apartnt, nostalgia hit the mont I stepped through the door.
The old dresser. The small table, ringed with old cup stains. The bed that had seen better decades. The ancient computer slouched in the corner like it was embarrassed to still be running, more than ten years past its pri.
My room. Exactly as I’d left it—or rather, exactly as I’d left it thirty years ago, which amounted to the sa thing.
I didn’t let myself linger.
I went straight to the dresser and took stock. My work uniform was out of the question, which narrowed things down considerably. In the end: a plain white shirt, a down jacket, and jogging pants—chosen entirely for ease of movent. The jacket was partly for the cold—the last day of December was not forgiving—and partly because it was the most practical thing to wear when concealing sothing you’d rather not advertise.
"The Red Axe Gang’s boss... Mokuro, was it?"
I murmured to myself, pressing through the fog of decades-old mory.
"Vicious. Wouldn’t think twice about killing soone for the right price."
Which, from my current perspective, made him a fairly convenient target for so early liquidity. His assets ran well into the hundreds of thousands—a few tens of thousands wouldn’t even register as a loss to him. And I needed startup funds.
For weapons, I kept things sensible.
A knife—eight inches, a fillet blade—was too short to be a primary option against multiple opponents, but useful enough as a backup. I tucked it against the back of my waistband, nestled against the garter of my jogging pants. Light enough that it wouldn’t shift when I walked.
Then I opened my construction site toolbox and pulled out sothing more practical.
A crowbar.
Light enough for my current body to manage without embarrassing myself. Decent reach. Versatile, reliable, and virtually indestructible in any scenario I was likely to encounter today. The ideal instrunt for a peaceful conversation with a gang boss.
I wasn’t going there to kill anyone. I still needed six clean months—six months of keeping my head down, playing legally, getting through the ga without drawing the wrong kind of attention. This was just a friendly discussion. The crowbar was simply a conversational aid.
On my way out, sothing else caught my eye.
I paused.
"...I’ll take this too," I said, mostly to myself. "Better safe than sorry."
I packed what I needed, locked up behind , and stepped back into the cold. The wind ca off the street in a sharp gust that cut straight through the jacket, and I shivered slightly before adjusting.
To avoid passing by the ran shop again, I cut through a back alley—winding and convoluted, the kind of route that would’ve gotten most people turned around within two minutes. My sense of direction had been honed across thirty years of navigating places far more disorienting than this. I wasn’t concerned.
The reason for the detour was simpler than it probably looked.
Miyabi had the sharpest intuition of anyone I’d ever t. One glance at —ard, dressed for a fight, wearing the particular expression I apparently couldn’t keep off my face when I was about to do sothing violent—and she’d have known. She wouldn’t have stayed quiet about it, either. That wasn’t who she was.
And I wasn’t entirely certain that her saying sothing wouldn’t cost the resolve to go through with this at all.
A hypothetical. Probably nothing. But I wasn’t in the business of taking unnecessary risks.
I picked up my pace, moving from a walk into a light jog, and redirected my thoughts by force.
It worked, more or less—and sowhere in the middle of it, without quite noticing, I’d made my way back to the alley from before.
The bodies were gone, as expected. Enough ti had passed that they’d either walked it off or been collected by their friends. Including the one I’d left conscious specifically to guide .
I stopped.
Ahead of stood the surviving lackey—and arranged around him, clearly having been briefed on the situation, were ten n. Large, broad-shouldered, radiating the specific energy of people who were paid to stand in front of trouble and look intimidating about it.
I smiled pleasantly.
"You guys his friends?"
Ten to one. All of them bigger than , at least in this body.
I wasn’t remotely concerned.
This was nothing.
Just the appetizer.
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