Two a.m. on Neon Street. A stream ends. A voice begins.
By day, Mashiro is just another psychology student at Minamo University. By night, he chases urban legends through the back alleys of Minamo City, streaming his verifications for an audience that barely exists. Horror doesn't scare him—it thrills him. And the gaps in his own memory? He's never thought to look too closely.
Then a burst of static hijacks his monitor, and a woman's voice slips through the noise: *"I'm sorry, Mashiro-kun."* A
Mashiro's Memories, Akane's Heart - Resonance at 2 a.m. — a forgotten voice mingles with the noise
2:00 a.m. On Neon Street, in the downtown district of Minamo City.
The glow of the signs bled across the pavement, and drunken laughter drifted out from the depths of the alleys. In a corner of that city, Mashiro was packing up his streaming equipment. A white shirt, a black jacket, a red scarf around his neck. Atop his short black hair, a safety-pin hair ornament caught the streetlight and reflected it dully.
"...Done."
His own voice came out so hoarse it surprised him. Two hours of streaming, and what had closed it out was a ritual-like procedure of sinking a doll in water. Normally, you'd purify the thing here and send the doll off to be ritually burned. But honestly? Too much hassle.
(Well, nothing's gonna happen anyway.)
Mashiro shoved the doll into a plastic bag and stuffed it into a pocket of his equipment bag. During the stream, a few comments from viewers had come through—"Isn't there a lot of noise lately?" That was probably just a loose connection or something. Cheap mic and all.
"See you next time."
He gave a small wave at the phone screen and cut the stream. The viewer count had been low. Well—same as always.
He was a second-year in the psychology department at Minamo University. By day he attended lectures; by night he ran these urban-legend verification streams. This city had an absurd number of rumors like that. The lost wanderers of Kagero Mountain, the night-crying of the Minase River, the vanishing factory in the old industrial zone. Every one of them was material worth verifying, as far as Mashiro was concerned.
Horror didn't scare him. If anything, it thrilled him.
It had always been that way. Back in middle school, no matter what the girls in his class did to him, at night Mashiro would walk the streets hunting for scary stories. The memories from those days remained only in fragments now.
He hitched his equipment bag higher and stood up.
That was when it happened.
A harsh burst of static, and the monitor inside his equipment bag powered on by itself. The screen flickered violently, white and black noise racing across it.
"...Huh?"
Mashiro set the bag down and peered at the monitor. Beyond the sandstorm of static, something was showing. A figure. No—this was him. Himself, mid-stream. But the background was wrong.
A white ceiling. The smell of disinfectant. Being pulled by the hand, running.
"Ghh—!"
A sharp pain burst deep in his skull. A memory he didn't know. No—a memory he should know. The white ceiling, the cold hand, the sound of running footsteps—all of it was carved somewhere into his body.
A voice came from the speaker.
"I'm sorry, Mashiro-kun."
A woman's voice. Soft, trembling, on the verge of tears.
"Who...?"
Mashiro crouched where he stood. Something tightened in his chest, and his breathing went shallow. The noise on the monitor died away within seconds. The screen went black again, and the equipment hummed quietly on as if nothing had happened.
(Just my imagination... right?)
He tried to think so. But his heart wouldn't stop pounding. Sweat was seeping into his palms.
Mashiro rose slowly and started walking down Neon Street. The light of the signs dyed his black jacket red and blue. The late-night city still wasn't asleep. The calls of karaoke touts, the clatter of arcade machines, the distant wail of an ambulance.
If only all of it could drown out that voice.
"What am I forgetting...?"
Here he was, studying memory in the psychology department, and he knew nothing about his own. The contradiction stirred uneasily in his chest. Mashiro stopped and looked up at the sky. The neon light hid the stars.
(I've heard that voice somewhere.)
No—heard it somewhere wasn't the half of it. Somewhere deeper, he felt like he knew that voice. He couldn't recall a name or a face, but the voice alone caught at the bottom of his heart.
After Mashiro left, a man in a suit emerged from the darkness of the alley.
He aimed the smartphone in his hand at Mashiro's retreating back and quietly pressed the shutter. Lifeless eyes. A face impossible to read.
"Target confirmed. Memory response present. Signs of recall confirmed."
The man reported to the person on the line, his tone flat.
"Yes, I'll send the data to Laboratory 7. ...Kuroha-sama, your next orders."
A low voice answered from the other end. The man gave a small nod and ended the call. He melted back into the darkness of the alley and vanished.
Only the reader knows. That Mashiro is under surveillance by a secret organization called the Chronos Agency.
Mashiro's home was an old single-family house in the eastern part of the city.
The walls were cracked and the yard was a wilderness—so run-down you couldn't be blamed for mistaking it for a ruin. The front-door lock barely worked, and honestly, the rest of it could collapse at any moment. But to Mashiro, this was the only place he could come home to.
"I'm back."
When he opened the door, the calico cat Pawako rubbed against his feet. A friendly little thing—she always came to greet him like this when he got home. Behind her, the black cat Nia watched warily, though she did spare him a glance.
"Were you two good while I was out?"
Mashiro crouched and stroked Pawako's head. Nia observed him from a slight distance. That sense of distance was so like her.
In the run-down room, feeding the cats, Mashiro replayed what had happened during today's stream. The noise. The voice. The memory of the white ceiling.
"Guess running all these urban-legend verifications, I picked up something weird."
He tried on a wry smile. But the trembling in his hands wouldn't stop.
He opened the fridge and took out a plastic bottle of water. Room temperature—it had been sitting in there for days. Mashiro stared at it and let out a small sigh.
(I should've bought a cold one.)
He couldn't drink room-temperature drinks. A strange quirk he'd had forever. His throat just wouldn't accept them. Only cold things—only those would his body take.
Mashiro put the bottle back in the fridge and took out chilled mineral water instead. The cold water slid down his throat. Even so, the trembling in his hands didn't stop.
Late at night.
Mashiro lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Beside him, Pawako was curled up asleep. Nia sat in the corner of the room, eyes open, watching him.
"I'm sorry, Mashiro-kun."
He thought he heard that voice again.
(Whose voice is it?)
He couldn't remember. And yet his chest ached. Just hearing it made him want to cry.
Mashiro closed his eyes. As if chasing the fragments of lost memory, his consciousness sank. The white ceiling, the smell of disinfectant, someone's hand. Running footsteps. And that voice.
"Let's run away together."
The words echoed up from the bottom of a deep darkness.
—Meanwhile.
In the old industrial zone of Ash Lane, in the northwest of Minamo City. Deep beneath the rows of abandoned factories, in Laboratory 7 of the Chronos Agency.
A wall of monitors displayed feeds from the surveillance cameras on Neon Street. In the center, Mashiro's retreating figure.
"Signs of recall, is it."
Short silver hair, and a single white streak running through his bangs. Cold gray eyes fixed on the monitor. The tall man in the black suit—Kuroha Juu. An executive of the Chronos Agency, and the man in charge of the experiment that had erased Mashiro's memories.
On the monitor before him, a waveform extracted from Mashiro's stream data was displayed. The faint waveform of memory resonance. Proof that Mashiro's lost memories were stirring, shaken by some kind of stimulus.
"Two years, hm..."
Kuroha smiled quietly. A smile impossible to read.
"Time to come back to us, I think. Mashiro Meme."
On the monitor, Mashiro's figure had already turned the corner of the alley and disappeared.
Kuroha operated the terminal in his hand and pulled up a file. In it were Mashiro's photograph and a detailed personal history. In the "Special Notes" column, written in red text:
"Subject M-07: Memory resonance ability. Details unknown. Requires re-verification."
Kuroha traced the words with a finger and narrowed his eyes.
"Your power—no one understands it yet. ...Not even me."
The voice dissolved into the quiet room, meant for no one's ears.
Mashiro still knew nothing of the fact that an organization was hunting him.
Only, in his sleep, that voice echoed over and over.
"I'm sorry, Mashiro-kun."
And that the owner of that voice would appear before him tomorrow.
Mashiro still knew nothing at all.
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