Chapter 16_ The Debt and the Plan

The torn pieces of Stalker’s note fluttered in the silent, tense air of the safe house before settling on the table like dead leaves. The threat wasn’t just spoken; it was now a physical presence among them.
Chisato was the first to move. She reached out, not for the note, but for the antique music box Raze had placed beside it. With a gentleness that seemed at odds with the cold fury in her eyes, she lifted the lid.
A soft, tinkling melody filled the room—a simple, old European lullaby. It was hauntingly beautiful and utterly grotesque in this context. The sound was a violation.
“He’s trying to get inside your head,” Takina stated, her voice cutting through the melody. She reached over and closed the lid with a decisive click, silencing it. “Using sentiment that isn’t yours to create a debt you don’t owe.”
“It’s working,” Mizuki muttered, pacing like a caged animal. “He knows we’re off-balance. He knows we’re angry. Angry people make mistakes.”
“Then we stop being angry,” Mika said, his calm, deep voice a stabilizing force. He gathered the torn note fragments. “We become focused. He has given us two pieces of data: a timeline and a destination. ‘Where your story began.’ He expects fear, or a desperate, sentimental journey. We will give him neither. We will give him a reckoning.”
He looked at Raze. “You said we turn his trap into ours. How?”
All eyes turned to him. The pressure was immense, but the clarity that had come with his rage focused his mind. The chip processed scenarios, but the plan that formed came from the man.
“He wants me to go to the beginning. The South Africa lab is gone, destroyed. But he wouldn’t send me to a crater. He means the concept of the beginning. The place where Project Aegis was conceived, or where the first data core was built.” Raze’s gaze turned inward, sifting through fractured, painful memories. “Dr. Kiri… he sometimes talked about the ‘Source Point.’ Not the main lab, but a private, secure research villa in the Drakensberg foothills. It was his personal workshop. If anything survived… or if Stalker has made it a shrine to capture me, that’s where it would be.”
“A foreign country. A remote location. A prepared enemy position,” Takina listed, her tactical mind already wrestling with the horrific odds. “It is the definition of a tactical suicide mission.”
“Which is why he won’t expect us to actually use it as the battlefield,” Chisato said, her eyes gleaming with a new, fierce light. She leaned forward. “We don’t go to his villa. We make him think we are. We use his own countdown and his own arrogance against him.”
Kurumi was already typing, pulling up maps of South Africa. “If we can create a convincing digital phantom—a fake trail of travel documents, satellite phone pings, even dummy financial transactions—we could make him believe Raze is panicking and making a solo run for the Source Point. It would pull his attention, and hopefully his resources, halfway across the world.”
“And while he’s looking there,” Raze continued, the plan crystallizing, “we find his beginning. Not mine. His operational beginning in Tokyo. The nerve center he’s using to run everything here. Not the Arashiyama Tower; that’s a showpiece, a lab. The real command bunker. We hit it while he’s distracted.”
It was audacious. A double-bluff of global proportions.
“The risk is astronomical,” Mika said, weighing each word. “If the digital phantom fails, he sees through it and we walk into a fortified bunker with no element of surprise. If it succeeds too well, he might actually leave, and we lose our shot.”
“We don’t need it to succeed for long,” Raze argued. “Just long enough to create doubt, to make him split his focus. Forty-eight hours. We spend the first twenty-four selling the lie. The final twenty-four, we strike here.”
A debate erupted, sharp and professional. Mizuki argued about logistics and escape routes from a hypothetical bunker. Takina dissected the intelligence gaps—they still didn’t know where this command center was. Kurumi and K-1 began a frenetic dialogue about the layers of deception needed for the phantom to be believable.
Through it all, Chisato watched Raze. Finally, she spoke over the chatter. “It’s a good plan. It’s our plan. Not a reaction to his move. Our move.” She smiled then, not her sunny smile, but the sharp, fearless grin of a Lycoris going on the offensive. “I like it.”
The decision was made. The final forty-eight hours of Stalker’s countdown would be a race to build two illusions: one digital, one lethal.
The team split into focused units. Kurumi and K-1 became creators of a digital ghost. They hacked into airline databases to create a tentative, fuzzy booking for a passenger with features similar to Raze’s. They generated phantom IP addresses in Cape Town accessing files about the Drakensberg region. They even had K-1 simulate a faint, encrypted burst transmission—the kind a hidden neural chip might inadvertently make—originating from southern Africa.
Mika and Mizuki began the harder task: finding the real target. They pored over every intercepted scrap of Syndicate data, looking not for science, but for logistics. Power usage that could mask a server farm. Unusual water or sewage flows in areas not zoned for heavy industry. Patterns in secure vehicle movements that didn’t terminate at the tower.
Raze, Chisato, and Takina prepared for the eventual assault. Their training shifted again. No more urban camouflage or precision drills. Now, it was fast, violent, breach-and-clear simulations in the DA’s most realistic close-quarters battle facilities. They practiced moving as a single organism through dark, confined spaces, communicating with hand signals and instinct.
During a break, Takina approached Raze as he checked the seals on a canister of non-lethal flash grenades. “This plan relies on you as the anchor,” she said. “The phantom is you. The assault will be for you. The emotional burden is yours to carry. Can you?”
He met her steady gaze. “The burden isn’t the mission, Takina. It’s the thought of him turning his attention to any of you. That’s what I can’t carry. So we end it.”
She gave a single, shallow nod of understanding. It was all that was needed.
Later, Chisato found him on the facility’s rooftop. The city sprawled before them, holding its secrets.
“You’re thinking about the music box again,” she stated, leaning on the railing beside him.
“Was he lying?” Raze asked, the question escaping before he could stop it. “Did Dr. Kiri really have it? Did he… care? Or was it all just part of the experiment?”
Chisato was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t know. People are complicated. Scientists who make kids in labs can still like music. It doesn’t make what he did okay. It just makes him a person who did a monstrous thing.” She bumped his shoulder. “But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Your story didn’t begin in that lab. It began when you decided to run. It began again when you decided to stay and fight with us. We’re your beginning, Ren. Right here. This noisy, messy, wonderful team. That’s the source point you defend.”
Her words dismantled the last of the music box’s psychic hold. Stalker had tried to tether him to a painful, ambiguous past. Chisato anchored him firmly, fiercely, in the present.
With twelve hours left on the countdown, Kurumi and Mika called a final council.
“The phantom is live,” Kurumi reported, dark circles under her eyes but with a triumphant glow. “Syndicate signals intelligence is picking it up. They’re confused, cross-referencing. The seed is planted.”
“And we found a candidate,” Mika said, pointing to a map. “Here. An old, privatized underground waste treatment control center in the Adachi ward. It’s been off the public grid for five years, supposedly ‘mothballed.’ But our pattern analysis shows subtle, shielded data cabling running to it, and the nearby transformer station has a power draw with a unique signature that matches the buffered systems we saw in the tower. It’s a ghost in the machine. Their machine.”
It was the perfect location. Isolated, hardened, hidden in plain sight beneath the city’s infrastructure.
“That’s it,” Raze breathed, looking at the map. “That’s his nest.”
The final preparations were a solemn ritual. Weapons were checked and re-checked. Comm links were tested. Kuruti established a dedicated, hardened network just for this operation. K-1 ran final diagnostics on both his systems and Raze’s neural interface, reinforcing the firewalls against any remote Phoenix Protocol signal.
As they suited up in the pre-dawn darkness of what would be the final day, Mizuki handed Raze a small earpiece, a different model from the team comms. “Private channel. Just you and me. If this goes to hell in there and you need an exit that isn’t on the map, you tell me. I’ll make one.”
It was a promise, raw and real.
They gathered in the safe house’s main room, a unit poised on the edge of violence. Mika looked at them all—his children in all but blood.
“Stalker believes he is offering a choice: the past or the future. He is wrong. You are not choosing between a lab and a café.” His gaze rested on each of them. “You are choosing to defend what a family is. Go. And come home.”
No cheers, no grand speeches. They moved out into the creeping dawn, shadows fading into the city’s awakening grey light. The digital phantom was swirling in the Syndicate’s networks, a tantalizing ghost in South Africa.
And the real threat was moving, silent and determined, toward the buried heart of their enemy in Tokyo. The countdown was over. The answer was coming.
End of Chapter 16