Chapter 27: — "Beneath the Surface"

The ride back felt like an eternity. No explosions. No drones. No gunfire. Just the sad, uneven wheeze of the car’s engine threatening to die at any second. When we finally pulled up to Kaito’s place, the hood was literally smoking.

Kaito didn’t even bother turning off the radio. He just slumped forward against the wheel, breathing like someone who’d run a marathon while on fire. Rin kicked the passenger door open with a groan.

“Welp,” she said, throwing her arms out dramatically. “At least the car survived! …mostly. Kinda. If you squint.”

No one laughed. Not even a snort.

Rin’s face twitched like she wanted to strangle the silence. “Tough crowd,” she muttered, slamming the door behind her.

I dragged myself out next. My legs felt like jelly. My hands were still stiff from gripping the blaster for so long. And the stupid box? Yeah, I was the one carrying it, because... well because of course I was.

Kaito finally got out too, glaring at the wrecked front bumper like it personally offended him. “I’m never stealing a car again,” he muttered under his breath.

Rin snorted. “Yeah, says the guy who just 'did it for the first time' and turned it into a war movie.”

He didn’t reply. None of us did. The weight of the box in my hands felt heavier with each step toward the front door, like it knew we were about to open it.

Kaito's house felt way too quiet when we stepped inside. The kind of quiet that made the chaos earlier feel like some fever dream.

We headed straight for Kaito’s room, then down the narrow staircase to the basement, the same basement where I used to practice aiming and not dying during training. The cold air hit me the moment the door opened, and the hum of his overkill computer setup filled the room like always.

“Put it here,” Kaito said, tapping the metal table right next to his main monitor.

I carefully set the box down. It looked so small compared to everything we’d gone through for it… and yet every nerve in my body screamed that something about it wasn’t right.

Rin was already pacing around like a caged animal, her boots thudding against the floor. “Can we just open the damn thing already?”

Kaito didn’t look up. “If this thing was worth dying for,” he muttered, pulling on gloves and inspecting the lock like some kind of paranoid bomb tech, “it’s worth opening carefully.”

I swallowed. He wasn’t wrong. The air around the box felt heavy.

Rin rolled her eyes but didn’t argue. That alone told me she was nervous too.

The box hissed softly when Kaito cracked the last layer of its lock. It didn’t burst open or explode with light, it just clicked and split in half, like it had been waiting for this moment.

Rin leaned forward immediately, eyes gleaming with impatience. I stayed a little back. Something about this box had made my skin crawl from the beginning, and now that it was open, that feeling only grew stronger.

Inside were folders. Neatly stacked, sealed with plastic straps, stamped with red letters: CLASSIFIED – UMBRA INTERNAL.

Nestled between them were a few sleek black drives and, most striking of all, a matte black envelope with no label. Everything about it screamed serious. No wasted design. No cute branding. Just pure, cold corporate secrets.

“Damn…” Rin breathed out. “This is… way more boring-looking than I expected.”

Kaito ignored her, already tearing one of the folders open. His eyes scanned fast, too fast. I could tell by how his jaw clenched that whatever he was reading wasn’t good.

Rin snatched another folder. “Let’s see what’s got you looking like you just swallowed a bomb.”

I forced myself to pick one up too. The pages inside were printed clean, minimal. Logistics charts. Organizational structures. Facility blueprints. And at the top of every page… Syntrix Umbra.

But then I saw it... on one of the pages, a logo I’d known my whole life. I froze.

“No way…” I whispered.

Rin frowned. “What?”

My finger trembled as I pointed at the second logo printed faintly beneath Umbra’s name.
Ecliptix Corp.

Kaito leaned in, eyes narrowing. “...You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Rin’s face twisted. “Ecliptix Corp? The shiny ‘world-saving’ company that builds drones and smiles at cameras? That Ecliptix?”

I nodded stiffly. “My dad… he works there.”

That killed the air in the room. None of us said anything. Not for several seconds. Even Rin, the one who always had a comeback, went dead quiet.

Kaito finally exhaled through his teeth. “Of course it had to be one of the ‘good guys.’ They always are.”

I clutched the folder tighter, my chest tightening. If Ecliptix Corp and Syntrix Umbra were the same company… then my father wasn’t just near the problem. He was in it.

“Hey,” Kaito said, catching the panic in my face. His voice softened a little, just a little. “Don’t spiral yet. We’ll figure out what the hell this means. First, we need the full picture.”

I nodded weakly.

Rin, on the other hand, had already moved on to the sleek black envelope. She pulled out what looked like a slim, disk-like chip, the moment she touched it, the box reacted. A faint blue light shot upward from inside, forming a flickering holographic projection.

All three of us jumped back.

The hologram was just a rotating sigil at first, but then a distorted male voice began to play.

“...Phase One... nearly complete.”

The voice crackled and glitched, like someone had taken a blade to an audio file.

“The integration of human neural data... with the adaptive Umbra AI... is on schedule. Once the key nodes are secured, corruption begins. We will overwrite every—”

The message glitched out with a burst of static.

“The Ecliptix facade remains stable. No one suspects a thing. Soon, they won’t have to.”

Rin’s face went pale. “...‘Corruption’? What the hell are they talking about?”

“Sounds like some movie villain shit,” Kaito muttered, but I could see in his eyes, he wasn’t joking. He recognized something.

I turned to him slowly. “Kaito. You… look like you know that voice.”

His jaw tensed. “...It’s familiar. I just can’t—”

The recording continued:

“Kouji’s team is already positioned. Once the Umbra Core is finalized, resistance will be irrelevant. They will bend... or break.”

The name hit him like a bullet.

His whole body stiffened. Rin blinked. “...Wait. Who the hell is Kouji?”

Kaito didn’t answer. He just stood there, completely still.

Rin crouched back down, frantically rummaging through the rest of the box. She pulled out a manila file and tossed it onto the table. A list of names stared back at us, neatly typed, sorted, categorized. Next to each name: a photograph.

And there it was.

Shirayama Kouji.

The same sharp jawline. The same dark hair. But older. Colder. Wearing an Umbra uniform.

Rin’s breath caught. “...Kaito…?”

I just stared at him, stunned. I didn’t even know he had a brother.

“You never told us,” Rin said, her voice sharp now, a flicker of hurt bleeding through. “We’ve known you for years. I was your girlfriend for two. And you never said a damn thing.”

He didn’t answer. His hand was gripping the edge of the table so tightly his knuckles turned white.

Rin slammed the table with her palm. “Kaito—”

The next second, his blaster went flying across the basement, slamming into the wall. He spun around, roaring, actually roaring, and kicked one of the metal chairs across the room.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!”

His voice boomed in the basement, raw and furious.

“I SPENT YEARS, YEARS, not hearing a goddamn thing from him! No calls, no visits, no messages. And now, now, I find out my own BROTHER is behind the biggest shitstorm we’ve ever stepped into?!”

Rin instinctively took a step back.

“Kaito, calm down—” she started, but he cut her off.

“Calm down?” he snarled, eyes burning into her. “Calm down? ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS, RIN? MY BROTHER IS BEHIND THIS. MY BROTHER. And you tell me to CALM DOWN?”

Rin clenched her jaw. “What the hell else am I supposed to say?!”

“NOTHING!” he barked.

I couldn’t take it anymore. “STOP!” I yelled, stepping between them. My voice cracked but it worked. They both froze, still glaring at each other over my head.

I lowered my voice. “...This isn’t helping. Not now.”

Rin exhaled shakily, turning away. Kaito pressed his forehead against the wall, muttering curses under his breath. His rage didn’t vanish, it just simmered, heavy and violent.

The box sat in the middle of the room like a loaded gun.

Ecliptix Corp was Umbra.
My dad worked there.
Kaito’s brother was leading their operation.

Too much. Too fast.

No one spoke for a long time. We just stood there, me staring at the files, Rin clenching her fists, Kaito burning holes into the wall with his glare.

The room was still a mess. Files were scattered across the table, and the projection chip still glowed faintly, casting cold blue light over their tired faces. No one had yelled in a while. The only thing filling the air was the sound of breathing, slow, uneven breathing.

Kaito finally pushed himself off the wall, dragging both hands down his face. He looked older, exhausted. Not just bruised and bloodied from the escape, but broken in a quiet, unseen way.

Rin kicked at one of the empty ammo boxes on the floor. “So,” she muttered bitterly, “world domination, corrupted humans, evil big brother, fake shiny company. Real light bedtime story.”

Kaito let out something that might’ve been a laugh, but it was hollow. “Yeah. Real fucking hilarious.”

I hugged my arms around myself, staring at the Ecliptix logo on one of the folders. I couldn’t stop picturing my dad’s face. The thought of him somehow being involved, or worse, in danger, twisted my stomach into knots.

Kaito noticed, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe because he was fighting his own storm.

He straightened up, his voice rough. “...You two should head home.”

Rin blinked. “What?”

“I need time to think,” he said flatly. “To process this shit. Kouji. Umbra. Everything.” He gestured at the mess on the table. “Especially you, Yuzuki.”

My throat tightened at the sound of my name. He was right. I did need time. My brain was a hurricane.

Rin looked like she wanted to argue, her jaw twitched, but she didn’t. She just nodded once. “Fine.”

Kaito walked over to the box, closed it slowly, then leaned both hands on it, his head hanging low. For a moment, he looked less like the reckless, stubborn idiot we’d followed all day and more like a lost kid.

Rin turned to me. “C’mon.”

I hesitated, glancing back at Kaito one last time. He didn’t look at me...

“Why did it have to be you?” he muttered under his breath, too quiet but was able to catch anyways.

We all had something to face now.

As Rin and I climbed the basement stairs, the last thing I heard was the soft, tired click of Kaito turning off the lights.

Darkness swallowed the room. And the box waited.

Everything had changed in a single night.