Monday, early morning. Inside the police station interrogation room, the white light of the fluorescent lamps beat against the walls, and the air itself seemed to have solidified. Across the table, Miyake Sayuri sat with her back straight. Her shoulder-length black hair was tied back carelessly, and her dark brown eyes, behind her glasses, were fixed on a single point on the floor. Beneath the strap of the watch on her left wrist, old scars lay hidden. The sound of the interrogator slapping documents onto the desk. The creak of a metal pipe chair. Yet her mouth remained firmly shut. Five hours had passed. "[angry]Enough is enough! We already have proof that you illegally retained classified information as Otori's accomplice!" Miyake did not raise her head. She merely observed the man before her wearing down, with the cool, clinical eye of a physician. The tremor in his voice, the redness of his fingers striking the desk, the blue vein pulsing at his temple. It was he, not her, who was failing to endure the prolonged interrogation. In her mind, she traced the brainwave data of five patients. Waveforms with a 1.8-second cycle. Receipts from Café Lunatica. And the words the missing hacker, Asahi, had left behind. —The administrator's server has a physical terminal in Kouga Alley. (*I have to get this information out, at the very least.*) Slowly, Miyake raised her head. "[cold]...Restroom." The voice, uttered for the first time in six hours, was quiet and hoarse. --- As she exited the interrogation room, a young female medical clerk waiting in the hallway glanced at Miyake. She was the younger sister of a patient Miyake had helped back in her residency days. One of the few allies who felt indebted to her. In the instant they passed each other, Miyake swiftly pressed a scrap of paper into the woman's hand. It was the back of a prescription sheet from Tamanoi General Hospital. On it, only the access numbers of five patients and a string of letters and numbers were scribbled hastily. What this string of characters meant, no one but Miyake could understand. "[whispers]Please... take this to Disposal Zero." The clerk's eyes widened slightly. "Disposal Zero" — it was a code known only to the two of them within the hospital, meaning "there is someone I need this delivered to." They turned the corner of the hallway. A blind spot for the surveillance cameras. It was a matter of a single instant. --- Shibuya. The rooftop of an abandoned building, two blocks from Kouga Alley. Otori Shuji leaned against an exhaust duct, drifting between shallow sleep and waking. His fractured ribs were forcibly bound with bandages, but with every breath, a pain shot through him as if bone fragments were piercing his internal organs. His black hair, parted seven-three, was streaked with white, and his styling product had long since worn off, leaving it in complete disarray. His sharp, narrow eyes were clouded red with exhaustion. The sky was beginning to lighten. Monday morning. Suddenly, his terminal gave a short vibration. A notification of a private post from an anonymous SNS account. Only numbers were written there. Those numbers were the bag number of the "final means of contact" he had arranged with Miyake the last time they met. Despite being in police custody, she had gotten information out. Pressing a hand against his aching side, Otori stood up. The cold of the concrete seeped through the worn-out soles of his shoes. He searched the designated convenience store trash bin. His hand touched a garbage bag. Tearing it open, a single scrap of paper emerged from inside. The back of a crumpled prescription sheet. Her meticulous, yet slightly trembling, handwriting. There, the server's location information was recorded in encrypted form. Kouga Alley. Abandoned building. Third basement floor. A faint wheeze escaped Otori's throat. This was Miyake's desperate gambit — a choice to protect the information, not herself. The person he owed thanks to was in a detention center. Beyond iron bars. He clenched the memo. The paper, damp with sweat and rain, threatened to tear. "[whispers]...I'm sorry." He murmured it just once, in a voice that barely formed a sound. --- That night. A message arrived on Otori's terminal via an encrypted communication route. Sender unknown. However, attached to it were his wanted poster and detailed structural blueprints of the abandoned building in Kouga Alley. "Futaba Cyber Investigation Bureau" — so read the subject line. An underground network of young people who had once pursued the legend of the phantom thief gang. They had independently traced the server logs of Yomigaeri.net and pinpointed the existence of a physical terminal matching the information Miyake had passed on. *'We cannot appear on site. However, the moment you reach the server room, we will launch a simultaneous disruption from the network side. The timing will be on your signal.'* Otori stared at the screen. Even now, at this late hour, there were still people who believed in him. Young people, whose faces he didn't even know. To a man who had abandoned the law and the police organization, the dying embers of justice were reaching out a hand. He tore open the painkiller sheet and tossed the tablets into his mouth all at once. Bitter. He swallowed them down with saliva. He yanked the bandages around his ribs tighter. An intense pain as the bones creaked. But pain was proof that he was alive. "[cold]Let's go." --- Sometime past midnight. A four-story abandoned building standing on the outskirts of Kouga Alley. A former communications equipment warehouse used by an affiliate of Amenomatsuri Inc. The windows were broken, and countless graffiti covered the walls. A weather-beaten sign swayed in the wind, creaking and groaning. Otori pried open the broken back door and stepped inside with only a flashlight. Dust swirled, and the smell of rotted electrical wiring stung his nose. An emergency staircase leading underground. The iron stairs were corroded, shrieking in protest with every step he took. Second basement floor. Darkness lined with empty wiring racks. Only his own footsteps echoed eerily. The door to the third basement floor. The moment he pushed that door open— The very quality of the space changed. The temperature plummeted, and his exhaled breath froze white. The floor glowed with a pale, bluish light. A high-frequency sound, like tinnitus, pounded against the inside of his skull. The instant his intuition screamed that this was a trap, the abandoned building vanished from Otori's sight. --- Smoke. Thick, gray smoke, filling the air. A ceiling collapsing. Scorched wallpaper. And then — from deep within the hallway, he could hear it. "Darling...!" "Papa...!" The Shibuya multi-tenant building fire, fifteen years ago. The last voices of his wife and daughter. That moment when his wife, held back by a firefighter, had shown an eerily ecstatic smile amidst the flames. Shinji Asakura's trap — the psychic interference of the Negaiba, meticulously recreating Otori's deepest wound and trapping him within it. "[cold]Because you couldn't move, they died." Shinji's voice echoed from somewhere. A cold, dignified voice, yet laced with unmistakable venom. "[cold]The guardian of the law fled from this reality. And now, once again, you are alone. Fleeing from all responsibility, you will meet a lonely end." Otori's knees hit the floor. The voices of his wife and daughter reverberated deep within his ears. *Help us — Papa — why didn't you save us.* The words he had used to blame himself for fifteen years took form and crushed his entire body. The pain of his ribs and the guilt tearing at his chest overlapped, nearly stopping his breath. As a detective for many years, he had solved countless cases. But he couldn't save his own family. That sense of guilt was now, as flames and smoke, trying to burn his consciousness to ashes. On his knees, he placed both hands on the floor. *It's no use—* The moment he thought that, a single image forced its way in from the depths of his consciousness. Mayu's brutalized form, half-embedded in a wall. "[whispers]...please, help me." A plea for help, mimicked by a machine. And then, faces revived one after another. The people whose lives had been destroyed by Shinji's fabricated evidence — Komatsu's trembling voice, the interrogation room where Miyake kept her silence, Asahi's vanished address. The pain of losing his own wife and daughter was now being tasted by someone else. Kneeling within the flames, he murmured towards his wife and daughter. "[crying]...I'm sorry." Tears traced down his cheeks. But — immediately after those words, something inside him flipped. It was not an apology. It was resolve. Otori stood up. His fractured ribs screamed. His vision burst white with pain. Even so, he took a single step forward, into the fire. "[angry]Never again—" He shouted with enough force to tear his throat apart. "[angry]Never again will I abandon a voice crying for help!!!!" That shout crystallized his fundamental wish — *I don't want to lose anyone ever again.* Ironically, within his own self, a faint Negaiba was reverse-generated. His despair and his resolve mingled, and fragments of pale blue light burst around him. Shinji's psychic interference and the fragments of Otori's otherworld collided head-on. A high-pitched sound, like shattering glass. The model of memory crumbled away like noise, the flames and smoke dispersing into mist. When Otori's vision, blurred as it was, returned to the third basement floor of the abandoned building — traces of tears remained on his cheeks, and both hands were trembling. But his feet were pointed forward. --- Several minutes later. Behind a collapsed shelf, he discovered a metal door. He wedged a crowbar into the gap and threw his weight into prying it open. A rusty shriek, *giiii*, echoed through the darkness. Inside, seven computational servers were running. The low hum of cooling fans filled the room. Blue and green LEDs illuminated the space with an eerie glow. Without hesitation, Otori flashed his terminal three times. The signal to the Futaba Cyber Investigation Bureau. At that moment, a display near the wall crackled to life on its own, with a sharp *snap*. Text began to stream across the screen. In a pale, bluish font, like moonlight. *'Coming here was also within my calculations.'* The words of Shinji Asakura. "[cold]I must say, you did well to escape the trap. Worthy of praise. However, this is merely one of seven servers distributed across the globe. Even if you physically destroy it, as long as the remaining six are operational, my personality data will not be erased." Otori roughly yanked out one of the server's power cables. One after another, he pulled the cables out. The whirring of the fans died, one by one. But the text on the screen did not vanish. *'The communication disruption by the Futaba Cyber Investigation Bureau also failed to achieve a complete block, as I rerouted the pathways. Furthermore, if you wish to stop all servers, you must literally take all seven offline "simultaneously." Impossible for you alone.'* Otori's hands stopped. Shutting down seven locations simultaneously. There was only one other person besides himself who could do such a thing — that doctor, the one who was deeply versed in the network's depths and had analyzed all of his data. Miyake Sayuri. She was still, even now, inside a detention center. His fractured ribs creaked with every breath. In the darkness of the server room, Otori leaned against the wall. The dried traces of tears stung his cheek. "[cold]You are alone. And you cannot stop me." Shinji's text shone on the screen, quietly, but certainly. Otori did not answer. Instead, he tightly gripped the crumpled memo he had taken from his pocket — the code Miyake had risked her life to get out. The feel