The Shadow That Spoke

The rain fell so fine it looked like blue neon dust.

Yokohama, 02:14 AM, 2047. The abandoned docks smelled of rust, salt, and memories no one wanted to recall.

Ren Kaito Ichinose ran without making a sound. Black boots from the Textual Suppression Division (TSD) stepped into puddles that reflected two moons: one from 2047, the other from 1995 leaking through the temporal rift. The tight uniform bore the golden kanji “抑” on the back: suppression. At 17, he was the youngest hunter in the Black Lotus section. And the fastest.

Ahead, a man in his forties stumbled between rusted containers. The scroll he held against his chest glowed with red letters that moved like fish underwater.

“Stop!” Ren shouted, his voice firm but devoid of anger. “Rule 3. Incomplete recitation results in total Supression.”

The man stopped. He turned. His eyes were wide with hope.

“I just wanted to bring her back!” he yelled back, tears mixing with the rain. “My daughter… the Amaterasu Collapse took her in 2027. The Black Sutra promised…”

Ren was already two meters away. His right black glove was raised. The air around his hand trembled like heat rising from asphalt.

“I understand,” Ren said, low. “But understanding doesn't change the rule.”

The man opened the scroll. He began to read aloud. The letters leaped from the paper and started spinning around him like red fireflies. It was beautiful. It was wrong.

“'In the beginning was the word...'” the man tried.

Fatal mistake.

The letters froze in the air. They stalled. Then they began to fall like black pixels. The man’s body followed suit: skin turning into a broken screen, bones into code, clothes into shadow. In ten seconds, nothing was left but a pile of black light rising toward the sky like reverse smoke.

Ren lowered his hand. The heavy silence returned.

He pulled the communicator from his inner pocket. A pale blue hologram projected in front of his face.

“Field report 47-B,” he spoke into the void. “Target neutralized. Location: Yokohama docks, Sector 9. Cause: incomplete recitation of fragment 12 of the Black Sutra.”

The robotic female voice responded instantly:

“Received, Agent Ren Kaito. New maximum priority. Code Omega. Target: Aoi Ayane Tsukishiro. Official status: deceased since 2044. Sighted yesterday, 23:57, Shinjuku, platform 8. Image sent.”

The hologram changed. A photo. A 17-year-old girl, silver hair to her waist, a fluttering white scarf, and clear violet eyes that seemed to know all the world's secrets. She smiled directly at the camera as if she knew Ren was looking.

Ren felt a chill that wasn't cold.

“Deceased?” he asked the hologram. “Then why am I hunting a ghost?”

“Because ghosts are breaking the rules,” the voice replied. “Eliminate with Alpha priority. No witnesses. No questions.”

The hologram went dark.

Ren put the communicator away. He looked at the ground. The black light remaining from the man still danced, forming letters for a second before vanishing:

“You weren't real… were you?”

He blinked. The letters were already gone. Only the puddle reflecting the shattered sky remained.

Ren walked to the black motorcycle parked behind container 17. The tank had a scratch shaped like a temple bell. He ran his finger over it, an old habit. He put on his helmet.

On the internal display, before lowering the visor, a sentence appeared reflected on the wet surface:

The truth is only the lie that no one managed to erase.

Ren frowned. He didn't remember writing that. Or reading it. But the phrase remained there, glowing faintly in neon pink, until he turned on the engine.

The roar of the motorcycle swallowed the silence. The distorted temple bell echoed a single time, as if someone far away had struck it in anger.

Ren accelerated. The rain turned into lines of blue and pink light. Behind him, the docks grew small, then smaller, until they vanished in the rearview mirror.

In the reflection of the mirror, for a microsecond, he saw the man he had just erased. Waving.

Ren blinked hard.

When he looked again, no one was there.

Only the wet road and the phrase that wouldn't leave the helmet:

The truth is only the lie that no one managed to erase.

He sped up. Shinjuku was twenty minutes away. Twenty minutes to hunt a ghost who smiled too much.

The night swallowed the black motorcycle.

And, somewhere between 2047 and 1995, a temple bell rang again.

It sounded exactly like a heart that didn't yet know it was about to stop.