Nakano Underworld

The rain had not decided whether it wanted to fall or just hang in the air and threaten everyone. It clung to the streets behind Chiyoda Ward in a thin gray veil, turning every neon reflection into a smear of bruised color. Raven and Takumi moved through it like people who had already been written into a report.

They did not run. Running drew attention. They walked fast, shoulders low, eyes forward, as if they were late for somewhere boring and necessary.

Raven’s wrist throbbed under her sleeve. The mark left by the businessman pulsed in slow, patient beats. It felt less like a wound and more like a second heart that did not belong to her.

Her phone vibrated. Miyu. Then Kana. Then Ryo.

She did not open the messages. If she did, the world they belonged to would rush back in. School. Lockers. Train jokes. Group chats filled with stickers and bad memes. That life still existed somewhere, but it felt like it was on the other side of a closing door.

Takumi glanced at her. “They will use social nets next.”

“I know,” Raven said. “Just… not yet.”

The city hummed around them, louder than it should have been. After the blue flare, everything felt tuned too high. Streetlights flickered in uneven pulses. Billboards jittered between frames. Even the vending machines rattled softly, like they were whispering to themselves.

They turned into a narrow alley that smelled like wet concrete and old takeout oil. A door at the far end opened just enough for a slash of red light to cut through the rain.

Mika’s back entrance.

Mika stood there in a leather jacket that had seen better decades, fox eyes sharp and amused in a way that did not quite reach kindness.

“You took too long,” she said. “That means they turned on you.”

Takumi said nothing. His jaw was set, a tight line of contained frustration and something more brittle.

Raven stepped inside. The room smelled of smoke, citrus, and old magic. It was nothing like the Blue Gate upstairs. No jazz. No warmth. Just concrete walls, a crooked table, and a single lamp that buzzed with a tired yellow glow.

Mika shut the door behind them. The lock clicked like a gun being cocked.

“Rei?” Raven asked.

Mika’s grin softened by a hair. “He is fine. Or he will be. He knew how this would go.”

Takumi’s eyes snapped up. “You told him.”

“Of course I told him,” Mika replied. “That Bureau has been sniffing around Raven since the Nakano incident. Rei does not get caught by surprise. He gets caught on purpose.”

Raven felt something cold slide down her spine. “He let them come.”

“He let them miss,” Mika said. “There is a difference.”

Her phone vibrated again. This time she glanced. A wall of unread messages. Miyu’s name at the top, then Kana’s. Ryo’s was last, a single line that made her throat tighten.

Are you safe.

She turned the screen dark.

“I cannot go back,” Raven said quietly. “Not now.”

Mika tilted her head. “No. You cannot. That bridge burned about two security checkpoints ago.”

Takumi folded his arms. “We need low signal. Safehouses.”

“And you need information,” Mika cut in. “You want to know who put a price on her head and why her mother’s ghost keeps rattling chains in every database that matters.”

Raven looked at her. “You know.”

“I know where to ask,” Mika said. “Same place the Oni ask. Same place the Bureau pretends does not exist.”

Takumi stiffened. “Nakano.”

Mika’s smile returned, all teeth and trouble. “Under Nakano.”

The word settled between them like a dropped coin.

Raven thought of the glass sphere she had seen in her mind, her mother’s face flickering inside it. She thought of the burning torii and the Colonel shouting orders into a storm that did not care.

“I am going,” she said.

Takumi shook his head. “That place is not a market. It is a feeding pit.”

“Then maybe it is time I learned what they have been feeding on,” Raven replied.

Mika clapped her hands once. “Good. Decisive girls live longer. Sometimes.”

They left through the back again, slipping into a different alley that led toward the rail lines. The rain had thickened, tapping against metal like impatient fingers.

Raven’s phone buzzed again. This time she did not even look. Her friends were still out there, still worried, still real. That made everything harder, not easier.

As they headed toward the old subway entrance that no longer appeared on any map, Raven felt the city shift beneath her feet. She was stepping into a place that had been hidden on purpose, a place where truth was bought and sold in pieces.

And she was afraid of how badly she wanted to pay.

* * *

They did not go back to Kōenji. Instead, Mika led them through a service corridor beneath a shuttered subway entrance, past a chain-link gate that hummed with warded current and into a tunnel that had not seen a train in decades. Rusted rails cut through the dark like exposed ribs. Neon sigils had been painted along the walls in thick, dripping strokes, pulsing in slow, sickly colors that made the concrete look bruised.

The air changed as they descended. It grew warmer and thicker. It smelled like hot metal and old incense and something faintly sweet that made Raven’s stomach twist. Voices carried from deeper in the tunnel, not echoes but murmurs, layered and hungry.

The market revealed itself all at once.

Stalls had been built between the tracks, glowing with cheap LEDs and paper lanterns. Spirits with borrowed human faces leaned over glass cases, selling things that should not have been solid. Memories flickered inside crystal vials. Pieces of laughter were folded into plastic sleeves. Raven saw a woman hand over a wedding ring in exchange for a small jar of pale blue light that pulsed like a trapped heartbeat.

Oni in tailored suits moved through the crowd, calm and efficient, trading in clipped voices. Their eyes glinted red when they smiled.

Mika walked beside Raven, her fox grin gone. “This is where resonance goes when it becomes money,” she said quietly. “Magic tech. Memory extraction. Emotion harvesting. Everything that should stay sacred.”

Raven felt her pendant heat in protest. She knew, with a certainty that hurt, that this was what her mother had tried to burn out of the world. And it was thriving.

The stall sat at the far end of the tracks, half hidden behind a tangle of old signal cables and hanging talismans. A low red light burned above it, steady and patient, like a heartbeat that did not belong to anyone human. Behind a narrow counter stood an Oni wearing a Hannya mask, its carved grin frozen in an expression of endless, theatrical agony. The lacquered surface reflected the neon around it in warped, shifting colors.

Floating behind him were glass orbs, dozens of them, suspended in a slow, lazy drift. Each one held something inside. A face caught mid-laughter. A child’s first step. A scream folded into light. They were memories, stripped and bottled, sold like liquor.

Raven felt the pull before she saw it. One of the orbs glimmered brighter than the rest, its surface rippling like water. Inside, a woman stood in a wash of red and white fire. Her hair was loose, her eyes fierce with a determination Raven had seen only in old photographs. A blazing torii arched behind her, its shape warped by heat and resonance.

Raven’s breath left her in a sharp, broken sound. “That’s her.”

The words came out raw, stripped of anything that resembled composure. Mika stiffened beside her. Takumi took a step forward, then stopped, as if afraid the truth might break if he moved too fast.

The Hannya mask tilted slightly, as though in amusement. “The soul you seek burns in Kagutsuchi’s fire,” the Oni said, his voice smooth and deep beneath the painted horror. “It is a rare thing, to be so completely consumed.”

Raven’s hands curled into fists. “She didn’t die in an accident.”

The Oni let out a soft, theatrical laugh. “Accident is a word people use when they do not wish to say sacrifice.” The orb with her mother’s image pulsed, bright and hungry. “She was not lost. She was taken. The Gate devours what stands in its way.”

Raven’s pendant flared hot against her skin. The market noise faded, replaced by the roar of that unseen fire. She stared at the image of her mother, alive and burning, and felt something inside her tear loose.

Mika took a half step closer to the counter, her voice calm in the way a knife can be calm.

“Who paid for that memory,” she asked. “Who brought it to you.”

The Hannya mask did not move, but the vendor’s attention sharpened. Raven could feel it. The stall’s air tightened, as if the question had weight.

“Names cost,” the Oni said. “And you are already in debt.”

Takumi’s hand brushed Raven’s sleeve, a warning without words. He was watching the edges of the market, the flows between stalls, the places where people lingered too long without buying anything.

Raven kept staring at the orb. Her mother’s face flickered, the fire behind her warping the image like a living thing. She wanted to reach in and pull her out. She wanted to smash the glass. She wanted the world to rewind.

The vendor’s voice slid through the frozen moment. “Your mother stood before Kagutsuchi’s threshold. She did not beg. She did not run. She burned because she chose to.”

Raven’s teeth clenched. “Stop talking about her like she is a story.”

The mask tilted again, and that carved grin seemed to widen. “All of you are stories here.”

That was when the market’s lighting changed. The neon along the tunnel flickered once, then steadied in a deeper red. The sigils painted over the rails brightened. The crowd shifted in a subtle ripple, like fish sensing a shadow in the water. Music from a nearby stall died mid note. The hum of commerce thinned into something watchful.

Mika’s shoulders tightened. Her hand disappeared beneath her coat.

Takumi’s gaze snapped toward the entrance corridor. “Move,” he said, low and urgent.

A group of men stepped into the market as if they owned the air. Their only distinguishable features were their impeccably pressed business suits, polished shoes, and hair neat enough to be a uniform. Their faces were ordinary at a glance, but their eyes were not. Red glints caught the neon like brake lights in fog. On their hands, ring-seals glowed faintly. On their wrists, tattoos peeked from cuffs like inked wards.

The first of them raised two fingers. Neon seals ignited along the walls in response, forming a lattice of light that boxed the tunnel in.

The Hannya vendor did not look surprised. If anything, he looked satisfied.

“Your syndicate is early,” Mika said, her voice still casual. Too casual.

A man in front smiled. “We go where the signal goes.”

Raven felt the word signal like a hook in her ribcage.

Takumi stepped forward, palm already lifting. “Bureau jurisdiction does not extend here.”

The suited man’s smile remained polite. “We are not Bureau.”

Takumi flicked an ofuda into the air. It snapped open with a clean, sharp sound, and a white ward spread across the ground like chalk lines drawn by an invisible hand.

For a second the market held its breath.

Then everything broke at once. One of the enforcers swung a charm like a blade, sending a crack of red light through the ward. The protective lines buckled. The air snapped. Nearby stalls toppled as people surged away, bodies colliding, voices rising. Spirits scattered like startled birds, their borrowed faces dropping into something hungry and wrong.

Mika moved with practiced speed. She drew a handgun and a charm in the same motion, one for flesh and one for resonance. The charm flared as she threw it, a small coin of light that struck an approaching enforcer in the chest. He staggered as if hit by a physical blow.

Takumi’s wards went up in rapid succession, paper snapping and burning, geometry taking shape in the air. He was fast, precise, angry in a controlled way. Every seal he threw felt like an equation solved under fire.

Raven stood rooted for one heartbeat. Not because she did not want to move, but because her eyes were still on the orb with her mother’s face. Because the market had become a battlefield around the one thing she could not stop staring at. Because part of her believed if she blinked she would lose it.

A shout jerked her back.

“Raven,” Takumi barked, sharp enough to cut. “Now.”

An enforcer lunged past a fallen rack of charms, moving straight for her. His suit jacket flared open and Raven saw the ink beneath his skin. Loaded seals, threaded into muscle. His eyes flashed red as he reached.

The pendant at Raven’s throat burned.

Something inside her surged up from the desert and the shrine and the alley and the memory vendor’s words. Rage, hot and clean and simple. It drowned out fear. It drowned out thought. It drowned out every careful instruction Takumi had given her.

Her voice rose before she made a decision.

“Walk in beauty,” she sang.

The sound hit the tunnel like a detonation. Not loud in volume, but heavy in effect. Resonance slammed into the painted sigils and made them stutter. The neon lattice flickered. Glass orbs behind the vendor trembled as if the air itself had become a drum.

Takumi turned, eyes widening. “Raven, don’t!”

She barely heard him.

“Walk in fire,” she sang, and the second line tore through the market.

The floating orbs exploded. One after another, they shattered in sharp, bright bursts, memories spilling into the air like smoke made of light. Faces, laughter, grief, a thousand stolen moments flashing and vanishing. The stall’s counter splintered. The Hannya mask cracked down the center with a sound like porcelain breaking.

Neon sigils on the rails shattered. Painted wards peeled off the wall in strips, curling as they burned. The tunnel filled with turquoise flame that did not consume wood or cloth, but ate resonance, devouring seals and tech and the invisible threads holding the market together.

Enforcers screamed, not always from pain. Some of it sounded like recognition.

Takumi’s largest ward buckled under the surge. Its clean white geometry fractured, then collapsed like glass under pressure. He threw another seal to compensate, but his hands were shaking now, and that was what terrified Raven most. She had never seen him shake.

Mika grabbed Raven’s shoulder and yanked hard. “Crow Girl, move. Now.”

Takumi seized Raven’s wrist, pulling her through a gap where the lattice had failed. They ran, boots slipping on wet metal and scattered debris, through smoke and turquoise glare. Behind them, the market continued to burn in silent, obscene beauty.

Raven did not look back until they were deep in the abandoned tunnel, lungs heaving, clothes dusted with ash. The sounds of the market faded into distant chaos, then into nothing but the steady rumble of the city above.

She leaned against the wall, shaking so hard her teeth clicked.

Takumi stood a few feet away, staring at her like she was a phenomenon he could not contain. There was soot on his hands and chalk dust on his sleeves. One of his wards still flickered weakly at his feet, struggling to stabilize the air around them.

Mika wiped blood from her lip with the back of her hand, eyes narrowed. Rei was not with them. Not here. Not now. The tunnel felt emptier for it.

Raven drew in a breath, then another. Her pendant cooled, slowly, as if satisfied.

That was when she realized the worst part. For a moment in that burning market, with the orbs shattering and the neon dying and the world finally going quiet under her voice, she had wanted it. She had wanted the destruction because it silenced the ache.

She looked down at her hands, blackened with ash, trembling with leftover power.

Takumi’s eyes held no fear of the Oni. They held fear of her. Raven swallowed, and the truth settled in her stomach like a stone. The answers were no longer distant. Neither was the monster she was becoming.