Chapter 2: Prison and the Katsudon Bowl

Kyle blinked.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead—sickly, relentless, emitting a high, incessant clinical whine. Too white. Too clean. The light felt like a high-frequency razor that scraped against the void where his Chi once flowed, actively seeking to erase shadows and, with them, all meaning.

The precinct doors had slammed shut behind him like a verdict. Not loud. Final.

“Please take a seat over there.”

The officer’s voice was polite, yet monotone. Like he was guiding a tourist, not processing a threat. The room hummed with vending machines and the scent of stale coffee. It felt like a cage for something they didn’t know how to name.

Kyle sat in a cold, cheap, unyielding plastic chair, his armor stripped. His bracers, which had turned dragon fire into mist, were tagged and bagged on a shelf labeled: “Bizarre Film Props.” The clean, crisp white tag felt heavier than any curse; it was a final, official erasure of his heroic narrative.

His hands felt useless and floaty, like he was wearing weights made of air.

He reached inward, searching for the torrent of Chi. His chest tightened—not from injury, but from the sudden, crushing weight of his own lightness. The clinical whine of the lights felt like the only sound; the roaring torrent was gone, replaced by a vacuum that threatened to suck his consciousness clean out of his head.

Across the table, the detective, Detective Doka, flipped through a manila folder with the bored precision of someone who’d seen too many viral stunts. Kyle watched his fingers—perfectly clean, efficient, indifferent. The same rhythm as a bureaucrat processing a lost pet.

“Name?”

Kyle hesitated. The word felt alien in his throat, stripped of its title. Its weight.

“Kyle,” he said.

“Full name?”

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He felt the physical constriction of his throat—his body preventing him from remembering, or perhaps, preventing him from lying. The word Hero felt like a physical lie caught in his mouth.

The detective sighed, tapping his pencil with a sound that seemed louder than the fall of the Demon Lord. The soft, rhythmic flip of the paper wasn't just marking time; it was tallying the cost of Kyle's humiliation, piece by meaningless piece.

“You don’t know your own name?”

The silence stretched. Far too long.

“Detective Doka,” he finally muttered, tasting the lie like ash. “I’m telling you… we’re just… cosplayers.”

The detective scribbled something down, his expression indifferent. Then, without looking up:

“Right. And I’m a magical girl.”

***

In another room, Renji and Luna sat across from a steaming bowl of katsudon.

The detective leaned forward, polite but weary.

“Madam, can you understand Japanese?”

Renji stiffened. He’d begged Luna—multiple times—to play coy. Simple things like tilt her head. Let silence imply ignorance. Anything to avoid her usual theatrics.

She didn’t respond.

Just sat there—elegant, composed, vaguely threatening. Her Western European features and regal posture made the officers hesitate. No one wanted to spark an international incident.

It was decided they contact a few foreign embassies before processing the next steps.

After a long silence, the detective sighed and changed tactics. He had heard her stomach rumble—soft, almost adorable. He nodded to himself, then ordered the katsudon.

The bowl arrived, with practiced ease slid across the table like a peace offering.

Steam curled upward. It carried the scent of home: the specific, cheap-yet-perfect mix of the sweet, heavy steam of caramelized soy and the distinct, deep-fried crunch of the pork cutlet.

Renji’s breath caught. He stared at the food for a beat.

It smelled like his old life—late nights, cheap convenience, the quiet comfort of being nobody. The taste and scent were an immediate, powerful memory trigger, validating the mundane past he thought he'd lost.

He didn’t hesitate.

He shoved his face into the bowl, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“So that was why I was brought back to Japan,” he sobbed, voice muffled by rice. “This is what I died for!”

His horrified partner, Luna, shrieked, struggling to fight back for control.

“Stop! You tell me to play coy and then you break—(muffled gasp)—But oh, my. The texture of this... this is truly exquisite.”

Their body twitched violently—blissful consumption battling aristocratic outrage. One eye was wide with Luna’s aristocratic disgust, the other glazed over with Renji's culinary ecstasy. Their shared hand clutched the bowl; the other tried to pry it out of its grasp.

Then—

Choking.

A cough. A wheeze. Panic.

An officer rushed over, performed the Heimlich. Upward thrusts. A wet, undignified regurgitation.

Luna screamed.

“Eek.... Your boorish manners have caused a staining to the Saint’s Gown!”

Their body spasmed—half sloppily, half elegantly—like a raccoon fighting itself over a trash can. The smell of sweet sauce mixed with bile hung in the sterile air—the disgusting residue of their emotional honesty.

Every officer in the precinct stared. No one spoke. No one ate. The detective leaned back, expression unreadable. Then quietly marked the file:

MENTALLY UNSTABLE.

***

“Hey guys, I know that it might seem scary...”

The female officer knelt to eye level, voice soft, practiced. She smiled like she’d done this before—with runaways, lost children, and exploitation cases that never made the news.

“We just have a few questions.”

Masayuki, Kotaro, and Kokoro refused to speak since the arrest.

They’d been escorted to the precinct’s quietest corner—the children’s area.

The walls were lined with faded posters of cartoon mascots offering safety tips. One showed a bear holding a stop sign. Its smile was cracked, the poster curling at the edges, hinting at the exhaustion and broken promises inherent in the systems meant to protect.

A vending machine blinked in the corner, its hum steady and indifferent—the steady, indifferent heartbeat of the modern world.

Masayuki sat cross-legged, hands folded, eyes closed.

Katana-less.

But not powerless.

“I refuse to speak,” he said calmly, his composure unnaturally absolute, “until I am granted an audience with the Daimyo of this era.”

The officer blinked. She didn’t know what a Daimyo was.

Instead she offered him a juice box.

Masayuki bowed, holding the unflinching, unnerving bow for an extended beat—a formal rejection of the trivial offering.

She moved to the twins.

Something about them tugged at her memory. Familiar. Faint.

“Would you happen to know your parents’ phone numbers?”

Kotaro flinched while Kokoro didn’t look up. The strain of their silence was a physical resistance against the gentle questioning.

The officer hesitated.

“Hey, isn’t that the Kamado twins?” another whispered.

The name hung in the air, then landed with a sudden, painful electrical shock. The officer looked between the twins and the whispered note, a realization slowly clicking into place. She remembered the commercials. Toothpaste jingles. The magazine spread—Japan’s Cutest Siblings.

Then nothing.

Just silence.

The instant the twins heard that, Kotaro and Kokoro curled together in the corner. Kokoro's arm tightened around Kotaro with desperate, involuntary force, and Kotaro’s face buried itself into her shoulder. The name triggered something brittle. Something buried. Their bodies folded inward—a physical retreat from the painful public identity they had lost.

The officer saw it before in previous cases where their silence became armor. She backed off and gave them space.

By the end, Kokoro’s eyes were red, fixed on the floor. Kotaro stared at the vending machine, watching the blinking red and green lights flashing with the relentless, indifferent rhythm of a clock that cares nothing for human time.

Neither moved.

As if still waiting for a director’s cue.