Absence of Signal

The command hub did not descend into chaos.

It crystallized.

Orders snapped into place. Displays reconfigured. Tactical layers replaced civilian overlays. Ginza’s power grid fragmented into unstable sectors, each marked with projected failure curves. Someone muted the ambient alerts. The silence that followed was worse.

Renji’s status marker remained empty.

No static. No decay.

Just absence.

Hina stood near the central display, arms loose at her sides, posture deceptively calm. She had stopped trying to feel for him actively. That only made the wrongness louder. Instead, she let the ground speak on its own.

It hadn’t settled since he vanished.

“He dropped off the grid at 21:47,” an operator reported. “No residual discharge, no feedback cascade.”

A government official folded his hands. “Which means he disengaged.”

Hina turned her head slowly.

“No,” she said. “That means he was removed.”

The official stiffened. “That’s an assumption.”

“It’s pattern recognition.”

She stepped closer to the display and highlighted the energy curve herself.

“Renji doesn’t cut power cleanly. He burns out or bleeds off. This ended too neatly. Someone closed the circuit around him.”

The room shifted. Not disbelief. Calculation.

Haruto watched her profile carefully. “You’re saying Ishikawa planned this.”

“Yes.”

“And succeeded.”

Hina didn’t argue that point.

Another voice entered the conversation, clipped and clinical. “Then we are facing a compound threat. If Ishikawa can suppress or redirect Renji’s output—”

“He’s not suppressing him,” Hina interrupted.

Several heads turned.

“If he were,” she continued, “we’d already see grid harmonization. Instead we’re seeing interference. Overlap. Drag.”

She paused, choosing her words carefully.

“This is restraint. Not control.”

That unsettled them more.

“So what’s your recommendation?” someone asked.

Hina didn’t answer immediately.

Outside, the city struggled back to life in uneven pulses, lights flaring and dimming like an irregular heartbeat.

“My recommendation,” she said finally, “is that you stop talking about Renji like a weapon you lost.”

Silence.

“He’s a variable you don’t understand,” she went on. “And if you push too hard, you’ll force Ishikawa to adapt faster than you can.”

Haruto frowned. “They’re already considering a partial grid shutdown.”

“That would hand him leverage,” Hina replied flatly.

“And if we do nothing?”

She looked at the map again, eyes narrowing.

“Then we buy time.”

Outside the reinforced walls, Tokyo flickered unevenly back to life, unaware that one of its anchors had been pulled out from under it.

Renji came back to himself in fragments.

Sound first. A low, constant hum that wasn’t air, wasn’t wind. Power moving through something vast. Then pressure. Not physical. Directional. Like standing in a current that refused to let him face upstream.

He tried to move his hands.

They moved.

Not exactly the way he intended.

Electricity traced along his arms at a lower frequency than usual, smoother, heavier. The city’s signature was different here. Deeper. Older.

“Easy,” a voice said.

Ishikawa.

Renji forced his eyes open.

They weren’t in Ginza anymore.

The space around them was industrial, cavernous, threaded with massive conduits that disappeared into darkness. Substations, he realized distantly. Or something built beneath them. The grid’s bones.

“You fought beautifully,” Ishikawa continued, tone conversational. “Most people try to overpower me. You tried to understand.”

Renji clenched his jaw. “Let me go.”

Ishikawa smiled faintly. “You don’t want that.”

Renji laughed, sharp and humorless. “You really think—”

“I think,” Ishikawa interrupted gently, “that you felt it. The moment the current stopped resisting you. The moment the city answered.”

Renji said nothing.

Because it was true.

That was the part that terrified him.

“You don’t belong to me,” Ishikawa went on. “But you don’t belong to them either. Not anymore.”

The pressure shifted. Not tighter. More precise.

Renji felt his control stretch, expand, interface with layers of infrastructure he had never accessed before. Feeds within feeds. Redundancies. Fail-safes.

Power without friction.

His breath caught despite himself.

Ishikawa watched closely. “There it is,” he murmured. “Recognition.”

Renji forced his hands into fists. Sparks snapped, angry and uneven. “You’re not in control.”

“No,” Ishikawa agreed. “But neither are you.”

The words sank in, cold and deliberate.

“Rest,” Ishikawa said. “Resist if you must. It won’t change what you are now.”

The hum deepened.

Renji shut his eyes, jaw tight, and thought of Hina. The way the ground always steadied when she focused. The way her presence anchored his storms without ever trying to cage them.

He held onto that.

Hard.

Back in the command hub, the argument had shifted.

Maps were redrawn. Power plants marked as liabilities instead of assets. Evacuation zones expanded.

“This is no longer containment,” someone said. “It’s escalation.”

Haruto stood beside Hina now, voice low. “They’re going to push for a grid shutdown.”

She shook her head immediately. “That feeds him.”

“They don’t care,” Haruto replied. “They care about damage control.”

Hina stared at the screens, her reflection faintly visible in the glass. Renji’s absence felt like a missing note in the floor’s resonance, a constant, irritating wrongness she couldn’t tune out.

“They’ll kill the city,” she said quietly. “And still lose him.”

Haruto hesitated. “Then what’s your plan?”

She looked at him.

“I don’t have one yet,” she said honestly. “But I know one thing.”

He waited.

“I’m not going to fight Renji,” she continued. “And I’m not going to fight the city.”

Her gaze hardened.

“I’m going to break the connection.”

Haruto exhaled slowly. “That’s not something you can test safely.”

“No,” she agreed. “It’s something I’ll have to do right.”

An alarm chimed again. Softer this time. Different frequency.

An analyst looked up. “New readings. Not an attack.”

Hina stepped closer instinctively.

“What is it?”

The analyst frowned. “It’s… rhythmic. Like a pulse. But it’s not Ishikawa.”

Hina felt it then. A faint echo beneath her feet. Not chaos. Not threat.

Familiar.

Her breath caught.

“That’s him,” she said. “That’s Renji.”

Haruto turned sharply. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Her hands curled slowly at her sides, grounding fully, deliberately, feeling the city respond in kind. Somewhere deep in the grid, something answered back. Not clearly. Not freely.

But enough.

She straightened.

“Tell them whatever they need to hear to buy me time,” she said. “Because next time we move—”

She met Haruto’s eyes.

“I’m going where he is.”

And for the first time since Renji vanished, the floor beneath the command hub steadied completely.

The city, wounded and flickering, held its breath.

So did the war.