The Night Kisaragi Ren Died

Kisaragi Ren emerged from the office to find twilight had beaten him to the streets, painting the city in purples and grays that reminded him of injuries never quite healed.

Hanamizu’s skyscrapers caught the winter evening, while streaks of neon signs bled weakly into the cloud-heavy sky. He exhaled, watching his breath escape in exhausted wisps, and burrowed deeper into his coat.

With numb fingers, he straightened his tie—navy blue fabric covered in ridiculous cartoon cats wearing miniature suits and ties. A midnight purchase that had seemed clever once. No one at the office found it amusing anymore.

He liked it anyway.

Eleven-fifteen glowed on his watch face. The trains hadn’t stopped yet, but taking one meant navigating the fluorescent hell of Hanamizu Station and its late-night crowds.

Ren flexed his toes inside leather shoes gone stiff with dried sweat, his body making the choice before his mind could argue. He turned away from the main boulevard, toward the shadows between buildings.

The corner convenience store’s glow faded behind him as he veered left, abandoning the main street’s electric hum for narrower passages where shadows pooled between buildings.

Muggers and gang members haunted shortcuts like these, but Ren didn’t care. His wallet held nothing but a transport card and a few crumpled bills.

His phone—a blank screen devoid of notifications. Work chats silenced, college friends faded to digital ghosts, family reduced to monthly obligation calls. Even the dating apps had been purged months ago.

His existence had contracted to four points: the ergonomic chair that hurt his back, the monitor’s blue glow, endless columns of data, and a mattress he collapsed onto well past midnight.

He slipped one hand into his pocket, fingers finding the keychain he’d won from a mall arcade game years ago—a plastic space cowboy with a ray gun pointed skyward. The paint had chipped from the tiny figure’s boots, but he’d never replaced it.

“Twenty-four and already washed up,” he muttered. “What a joke.”

A siren’s distant cry faded into the night. Someone staggered past a shuttered storefront, hurling slurred insults at metal that wouldn’t answer back. The wind pushed discarded wrappers and receipts in lazy circles through the gutter. With each footfall, Ren’s shoes clicked against concrete in perfect time with the metronome in his head.

Work. Bed. Work. Bed.

He tried, briefly, to remember the last time someone had truly seen him. All that surfaced were hollow moments: a coworker’s “Could you just handle this one last file?” His manager’s worn-out expressions of gratitude. Girlfriends existed in his mind as theoretical concepts—hypothetical variables in an equation he’d never solved. Dating required resources: evenings not spent hunched over spreadsheets, money not already consumed by rent and bills, and energy beyond what remained after fourteen-hour workdays.

His last attempt had ended when he failed to suppress a yawn during the climactic scene of some blockbuster, watching her expression harden from disappointment to decision in the blue glow of the screen.

“Be nice if something actually happened,” he said to no one, turning into a narrower street. “Even if it killed me. At least then it’d be a story.”

He slipped into the next alley—barely a gap between looming apartment blocks, just wide enough for a single person. The concrete path reeked of stale cigarettes and rainwater that never quite dried. His feet knew this shortcut by heart: the lip where the pavement buckled three steps in, the shallow pothole near the midpoint.

Tonight, winter had glazed everything with a treacherous sheen of frost. Each step required deliberate care as he buried his hands deeper in his pockets and tucked his chin against the chill that seeped through his collar.

He heard the voices first.

“…final warning. Hand it over.”

“Like hell. You think I don’t know what happens if JP-TAC catches me? Might as well put the gun to my own head!”

Ren’s pace faltered, pulse skipping. The alley curved sharply twenty meters ahead, the exchange ricocheting off concrete walls. These weren’t the slurred complaints of drunks or the theatrical accusations of fighting couples.

The smart choice waited behind him: retreat, detour, selective amnesia.

His feet disagreed, carrying him forward without his consent.

Reaching the bend, Ren flattened himself against concrete cold enough to bite through his coat. He inched his head past the corner, just far enough for one eye to capture the scene.

In the alley’s open stretch, under the stutter of a dying streetlamp, two figures squared off. The man trembled despite the weapon gripped in both hands and aimed at the woman before him. Sweat gleamed on his forehead, plastering strands of disheveled hair to skin.

The woman faced the barrel without flinching. She held herself with the unnerving stillness, making the man’s trembling seem almost infantile by comparison.

Streetlight caught the contours of her fitted graphite-black bodysuit beneath an open coat. Blonde hair fell in a loose tail, stray wisps framing a face all sharp angles and cold calculation. Her eyes—unnaturally crimson—tracked his every twitch with the patience of someone who had all night to wait for his mistake.

Ren’s brain short-circuited. His first, idiotic impression was that reality had glitched, dropping an impossible woman into this grimy alley—dangerous grace and cold beauty that belonged on a screen, not in his mundane world.

“You’re not walking out of this with those strips,” she said, voice flat with conviction. “Hand them over, and maybe Internal Oversight goes easy.”

“How about you turn around and act like you never found me?”

“You stole glyph scripts and tried to sell them on the black market. You knew the penalties when you signed up, Reader Sonomura. Don’t act surprised now.”

Ren’s gaze dropped to what they were holding.

Pistols, but not quite—something fundamentally off about them. The basic shape matched what he’d seen in action films and collector’s displays, but these had bulkier muzzles encircled by concentric metal bands that caught the dim light like breathing rings.

“You may be a Rank 3,” Sonomura snapped, voice cracking, “but I’m the one pointing the gun here. By the time you aim at me, I’ll have already fired. You won’t even have time to say a prayer!”

The woman sighed—a tired sound utterly at odds with the tension. “Your hand’s shaking. You’ll miss.”

“I swear I’ll do it!” he shrieked, finger twitching near the trigger.

A voice in the back of Ren’s mind whispered that he should walk away. Call the police. Junior analysts wearing novelty ties did not insert themselves into standoffs involving strange glowing weapons.

But the man’s trembling finger twitched harder. His gaze flicked frantically between the woman and the alley mouth, a cornered animal searching for escape. The gun barrel traced unsteady figure-eights in the air.

Any second now, he’d pull that trigger.

Ren stood there with his heart pounding and thought, absurdly: If I walk away, this is just another night I did nothing. Another day where nobody remembers I was here. If I step out and make some noise… I might die. But maybe she’ll remember me. For five seconds, a girl like that might look at me and think, “He tried to help.”

Self-destruction masquerading as courage.

“Hey!” he shouted, voice cracking. “What the hell is going on here?”

Two heads whipped toward him.

Time suspended: Sonomura’s face drained of color, while something sharp flickered behind the woman’s crimson stare.

Ren raised his hands, palms out. “You—uh—you can’t just point guns at people in an alley. That’s—” He heard himself and winced. “That’s illegal, you know.”

Why did I say that?

“Who the—?” Sonomura snarled. “Get out of here!”

Ren swallowed hard. His mouth tasted like cotton. His legs felt hollow, detached from his body. Terror should have gripped him—should’ve sent him running—but instead a strange lightness settled over him, as if he were watching himself from outside his own skin.

“If you’re gonna shoot someone,” he said hoarsely, “you should at least shoot someone your own size.”

He didn’t know what it meant.

For a heartbeat, he met the woman’s gaze. Calculating. And—was that surprise? As though she hadn’t expected anyone to be this stupid.

Sorry, he thought. I just… wanted to matter.

Sonomura’s fear snapped into decision. He pivoted, weapon arcing toward Ren.

The gun made no sound. The concentric rings pulsed with a nauseating orange glow, then darkened.

A moment of nothing. A single suspended breath.

Then came the heat.

It spread through Ren’s side. His legs betrayed him. He staggered sideways, one hand clutching desperately at his waist, fingers grasping at an absence where flesh should be.

He looked down.

His coat, shirt, and the skin beneath had vanished, leaving a perfect void with charred edges that smoked softly. A blackened border around the hollowed-out space. No ragged tissue, no blood, no glimpse of bone—a clean excavation, as if some cosmic scoop had carved away a portion of his existence.

His mind rejected the sight.

The pain hit.

Not sharp—vast. An ocean of agony flooding his consciousness, crashing, swallowing, then receding into a cold numbness that made his thoughts thick and slow.

His knees buckled. One hit pavement. Then the other. His palms slapped the ground as his lungs wheezed, drawing in breaths that tasted like metal.

Movement flickered above him.

The woman’s hands moved with a practiced efficiency. She reached for a narrow strip from her belt pouch, slapped it against her weapon’s side with a crisp, practiced motion. The paper ignited, burning into the barrel’s metal, the strip curling into sparks before disintegrating.

Her weapon hummed.

“Rank 1 Reader Sonomura Kaito,” she declared, voice cold and steady. “By authority of JP-TAC Internal Oversight, you are under arrest for theft, attempted black-market distribution, and attempted murder.”

Sonomura snapped his weapon back toward her, panic breaking him. “I’ll kill you—!”

She fired first.

There was no bang—just a pressure wave that seemed to skip across the air, distorting the space around it.

Sonomura convulsed. His spine arched, his arms shot outward, fingers spasming. For a single frozen moment, he hovered on his heels, limbs locked at grotesque angles. When gravity took him, he crumpled to the frost-coated concrete, chest rising and falling in shallow, labored breaths, but every limb held rigid in a grotesque mechanical stillness.

Darkness seeped into the corners of Ren’s vision. The pavement beneath him drained warmth from his body. Instinct made him press his palm to the void in his side—but there was nothing to cover. Only steam rising from a wound that wasn’t a wound.

Bootsteps clicked sharply.

The blonde woman knelt beside him, coat fluttering with the motion. The moment her eyes landed on the hollow in his torso, her expression cracked—just a fracture, but enough to reveal the shock beneath her composure.

“Damn it,” she muttered. “Why would you step in like that, you idiot?”

Her hand hovered over him, suspended between the urge to help and the futility of it.

Ren’s vision swam. From this angle, her blonde hair caught what little light remained in the alley. Frost clung to the strands near her jaw.

“If… someone’s got to be an idiot,” he whispered, astonished he could even form words, “I’m… qualified.”

It hurt to talk.

It hurt to exist.

“Save your strength,” she said automatically. “Medical team’s on standby. Don’t close your eyes. Hey—stay with me.”

He wanted to ask her name. It seemed important. People in anime always asked names at moments like this.

But the world was already dissolving around him—cold, pain, everything softening at the edges, drifting.

If I have to die… at least it was for something.

His gaze wandered past her, toward the narrow slice of sky between rooftops.

…What?

That… hadn’t been there before.

He knew the skyline here—every crooked apartment silhouette, the distant red pulse of the antenna tower. He knew it with the familiarity of someone who’d walked these lonely paths too many times.

But now something impossible rose behind it all.

A tower.

Bone-white. Seamless. Featureless.

Utterly alien.

It stood beyond the city’s limits, dwarfing every building, too tall, too straight, too perfect. Clouds swallowed its peak. Its base was hidden behind distant rooftops. City lights bent around it, neon stretching into impossible curves as if reality itself warped near its surface.

Wh… what…?

Color drained from the world, fading into nothing. Sound pulled away. The alley vanished.

Only the Tower remained.

Then—

A voice?

It bypassed his ears, appearing directly within his consciousness, each word snapping into place like lines of code typed across the inside of his skull.

…Initializing…

Soul Signature: Fragmented.

Echo: Detected.

Root-Level Read Permissions…

ACQUIRED.