The Man Who Hunts Echoes

Night in Hinode City looked different from the academy’s gentle twilight. Away from the carefully maintained grounds and polished stone, the streets narrowed, lights grew harsher, and the shadows stretched long between cramped buildings.

In one of those forgotten streets, where neon signs flickered weakly over shuttered shopfronts, a man walked alone.

He did not look dangerous.

His stride was unhurried, the collar of his dark coat turned up against the evening wind. His hair was ash brown, cut neatly enough to blend into a crowd. He might have been mistaken for an office worker returning home late, if not for the way people’s eyes slid away from him without realising they had done so.

He had a forgettable face.
He cultivated it carefully.

A drunk man staggered out of a side alley, nearly colliding with him. The stranger reached out and steady hands caught the drunkard by the shoulders.

“Careful,” the man said. His voice was polite and calm, with the faintest hint of amusement. “You almost fell.”

The drunk laughed. “Ah, sorry, sorry. You are kind. No one walks down here this late, you know.”

“I noticed,” the man replied.

His hand lingered just a moment longer than necessary.

The air between them tightened.

The drunk frowned, suddenly uneasy. “You alright, mate?”

The stranger tilted his head slightly. His eyes, which had seemed utterly ordinary a moment before, began to darken, the irises swallowing the light.

“What scares you the most?” he asked softly.

The drunk man blinked, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“You carry a great deal of fear,” the stranger continued. His tone remained calm, but something in it had sharpened. “Loss. Failure. Being forgotten. Being left. It is all tangled together. You should not walk alone at night when your soul is this loud.”

The drunk tried to pull away.

He could not.

His limbs responded too slowly, as if moving through thick water.

“Who… are you?” he whispered.

The stranger’s fingers tightened on his shoulder.

“Akito Senzai,” he said. “But some people call me other things. Ghost Jackal. Fear Cutter. Emotion Hound. It does not matter. I am here because your emotions have been leaking for too long.”

The drunk shook, fear rising in his chest like boiling water.

Akito smiled faintly. “There it is. I can hear it now.”

The air around his hand shimmered. A faint, greyish smoke seeped from the drunk man’s chest, thick with terror and regret. Akito drew it out gently, as if pulling a splinter from skin. The man’s eyes rolled back.

Buildings around them creaked softly as the pressure shifted.

The smoky fear twisted in Akito’s grip like a living thing.

He watched it with mild interest, as one might study a strange insect.

“If I leave this,” he murmured, “it will become a beast. A crude one. Unstable. Loud.”

He closed his hand around the smoke.

It vanished.

The drunk man collapsed to his knees, eyes empty. Not dead. Not conscious. Just hollow.

Akito stepped back, brushing invisible dust from his sleeve.

Above him, on a rooftop where no one else could see, a small device within his coat flickered once, receiving a transmission.

A voice emerged, crackling through the silence.

“Report. Status on target city.”

Akito tapped the edge of the device lightly. “Hinode is noisy,” he answered. “The usual beasts. The usual emotional overflow. But there is something else here. Something layered.”

“Can you confirm Subject’s presence?”

Akito glanced towards the distant glow of the academy on the hill.

“I cannot confirm yet,” he said. “But I can feel the echo of an experiment. A familiar one.”

“Proceed to observation,” the voice replied. “Engage only if necessary. Do not kill the Subject. Not yet.”

Akito smiled without warmth. “Understood.”

The device clicked off.

He slipped his hands into his pockets and began walking towards the faint silhouette of Hinode Garden Academy.

“Not yet,” he murmured. “Such a dangerous phrase.”

A white petal drifted from somewhere above, perhaps from a tree, perhaps from nowhere at all. It landed on the wet pavement near his shoe, then faded before the water could stain it.

Akito watched it go.

Then he continued on.

Shizukesa woke with a strange weight in his chest. It was different from the usual tightness. He could not tell whether it was from the council’s words, Reika’s brittle reassurance, or the memory of white light flickering in his hand.

He dressed in his uniform in silence and stepped into the small kitchen.

Reika was already there.

She stood by the cooker in worn joggers and a faded tank top, stirring a pot with more focus than soup required. Steam rose around her, smelling of miso and spring onions. Her hair was tied up lazily, a few strands falling around her face.

“Sit,” she said, without turning. “You are eating properly today.”

Shizukesa sat.

Reika ladled soup into a bowl and slid it in front of him. “Drink that. Then we talk.”

He obeyed.

The soup was hot and comforting, the taste rich in a way that grounded him. He watched Reika move around the kitchen. There was a subtle tension in her shoulders that had not been there a few days ago.

“The council is not taking you away,” she said suddenly.

He looked up.

“I spoke to someone higher up,” she continued. “They know better than to remove you from someone who actually understands you.”

“How did you convince them?” he asked.

Reika shrugged. “I am very persuasive when I am angry.”

She tried to smirk, but it faltered halfway.

“However,” she said, more quietly, “they are sending more people to observe the academy. Outside Guilds. External evaluators. People who love the word ‘threat’.”

Shizukesa rested his fingers on the warm bowl. “Are they dangerous?”

“To you? Potentially,” Reika said. “To me? I am not concerned.”

There was no fear in her eyes.
Only steel.

He swallowed. “Will you be careful?”

Reika snorted. “I am always careful.”

He thought about her storming through battles in the past, at least as far as he knew from rumours. He thought about her punching a Guardian down a stairwell. The image did not match the word careful.

But he did not say so.

Instead, he finished the soup, and for a brief moment, the world felt manageable.

The Prism class was summoned after lunch to one of the smaller training halls. A cluster of instructors waited inside, along with Kurobane and a representative from each Guild.

Aki leaned towards Rin as they walked in. “Why are there so many important people here? This feels like the start of something terrible.”

“Because it probably is,” Rin replied.

Mira walked beside Shizukesa, her fingers lightly brushing the side of her skirt as if she were feeling currents in the air. “The emotional field over the city has shifted. I noticed it on the way here. Something cut through it.”

“Like a beast?” Aki whispered.

“Not like a beast,” Mira said. “Sharper. Cleaner.”

Kurobane cleared his throat. “Prism students. You are here because a new threat has been detected in Hinode City.”

A murmur rippled through the small group.

“Last night, several incidents occurred in the lower districts,” Guildmaster Saito said. She stood near the far wall, arms folded. “Emotion drain. Sudden loss of emotional capacity. People found sitting motionless with no clear injury.”

Aki’s eyes widened. “Like… empty?”

“Like husks,” Rin said quietly.

Saito nodded once. “We believe a high-level Soul Link user is deliberately extracting emotions from civilians.”

Mira’s hand tightened around her sleeve. “That is forbidden.”

“It is more than forbidden,” Kurobane said. “It is classified as Soul Interference. A type of emotional crime we do not speak of lightly.”

Shizukesa felt a strange chill move through him.
Someone who could extract emotions.
Pull them out like threads.

“What does this have to do with us?” Rin asked, though his tone suggested he already suspected.

Saito’s gaze moved to Shizukesa.

“Because the pattern of the interference resembles the residue of a project we have encountered before,” she said. “It is similar to the experiment that created you.”

The room went utterly silent.

Shizukesa’s breath stilled.

Aki stepped closer to him instinctively. Mira’s eyes fixed on Saito, searching for any sign of dishonesty. Rin’s jaw clenched slightly.

Kurobane continued, “We believe someone associated with that experiment, or at least familiar with its methodology, is in the city.”

Aki shook her head. “So someone like Shizukesa… but wrong.”

Rin glanced at her. “We are not calling him wrong.”

“You know what I meant,” she muttered.

Saito’s voice remained steady. “You will not engage this person. That is for higher-ranked operatives. However, you must be aware of the situation. You will also be placed on a supervised field exercise near the affected districts, to see how your resonance interacts with the interference.”

Aki stared. “We are going near the place where people turned into emotional husks. That is your plan for training.”

“Yes,” Kurobane said. “You will not be alone. You will be under professional protection.”

Mira looked at Shizukesa. “They are testing you.”

Shizukesa nodded slowly. “I know.”

Rin touched his shoulder, his voice low but firm. “Whatever they are trying to measure, you will not face it without us.”

Aki raised her hand. “I am against this on about seven levels, but if Shizukesa is going, I am going.”

Mira smiled faintly. “Then it is decided.”

From the top of one of the academy’s outer towers, Akito Senzai watched the training hall through a pair of sleek, dark lenses. He could not hear the words, but he could see the movements, the posture, the way the boy in the centre of the group seemed to distort the attention in the room around him.

Shizukesa Hana.

The experiment’s child.

Akito lowered the lenses and rested his elbow on the cool stone ledge.

“So it really is you,” he murmured. “I wondered if the data was wrong.”

The wind tugged at his coat, brushing past him as if eager to escape.

He closed his eyes for a moment.

Beneath the city, emotional noise churned. Fear, hope, apathy, longing. He could taste it like static on his tongue. But there, at the centre of the academy, was an absence. A hollow in the noise. A point where the emotional frequencies could not settle.

Hana Shizukesa.

“Your existence annoyed some very important people,” Akito said softly. “I am here to see whether you annoy the world as well.”

A faint sound reached him. The grind of a boot on stone behind him.

Another figure stepped out from the stairwell. Cloaked, masked, careful.

“You are within visual range?” the newcomer asked.

“Yes,” Akito replied.

“And his guardian?”

“Still alive,” Akito said. “Still loud. She has not forgotten how to fight.”

The newcomer paused. “You know your orders regarding her.”

Akito smiled with the corners of his mouth. “Observe. Evaluate. Do not kill her yet.”

“And the boy?”

Akito looked at the distant outline of Shizukesa leaving the training hall with his friends, Aki chattering, Rin watching, Mira listening.

“The boy is more interesting,” he said. “He is not empty. He is layered.”

“Can you handle him?” the other asked.

Akito’s eyes sharpened, all softness gone.

“I can handle anything that feels fear,” he replied. “And if he does not yet, I will teach him.”

The other figure withdrew without another word.

Akito stayed a moment longer, watching the academy below.

“A guardian who punches too hard,” he murmured, thinking of Reika. “A boy with two conflicting petals. This will be complicated.”

He turned away, coat brushing lightly against stone, and descended the tower.

Hinode Garden Academy continued its afternoon as usual.

Students went to class. Teachers scolded late arrivals. The bells rang.

No one noticed the new shadow that had entered their world.

Not yet.