Chapter 61: The 6% Probability — The Greatest Loser in History

Chapter 61: The 6% Probability — The Greatest Loser in History

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“The heavens never chained you as cruelly as you chained yourself. Even now, you would rather tear your own soul apart than let someone mourn you properly. Above all... you're the top, and that makes me the second-biggest loser.”

The air inside the inner sanctum of the shrine felt ancient, heavy with the scent of incense that had long since gone cold. Outside, the world was screaming for sunlight, but in here, the shadows reigned supreme. I, Oozora Kuniaki, kept my head bowed low as I walked across the polished cedar floors. Every step I took felt like I was treading on the surface of a frozen lake, terrified that the slightest sound would shatter the silence.

At the end of the long corridor, framed by a massive circular window that looked out into the indigo void of the Kobe night, sat a figure.

He didn't turn around. I could only see the silhouette—a sharp, jagged outline against the moonlight. He sat on an elevated platform, his back toward me, draped in robes that seemed to drink the light around them. This was the Host, the Lord of the Night, the one who had turned the sky into a tomb for the sun.

“The JAA has intensified its efforts, My Lord,” I whispered, my voice trembling as I knelt on the tatami. “They are no longer just observing the local anomaly. They are tracking the orbital shifts of the entire solar system. They suspect… they suspect the gravity isn't coming from the Moon alone.”

The silhouette remained motionless. A long, agonizing silence followed, broken only by the distant chime of a bell.

“Let them play with their telescopes,” the voice finally spoke. It was a cold, resonant sound, like the cracking of winter ice. “They are ants trying to measure the footsteps of a giant. Their ‘science’ is nothing more than a desperate attempt to find logic in a world that has already lost its mind.”

I swallowed hard, clutching the report in my hands. “But… the Daishimei is active. He has been spotted near the port. He is interfering with the threads in the city.”

At the mention of the Daishimei, the air in the room suddenly felt electric. I could feel the silhouette’s focus sharpen, a murderous intent radiating from him that made my skin crawl.

“Kagechi,” the Lord of the Night murmured, the name tasting like venom in his mouth. “The cosmic identity thief. The one who hides in the skin of the dead because he is too afraid to exist as himself.”

He let out a low, mocking laugh that sent shivers down my spine.

“You think he is a threat because he has survived nine cycles, Kuniaki? You think he is wise because he has seen the end of eras? You are mistaken. He is not a master of fate. He is a parasite of time.”

The Lord of the Night shifted slightly, though he still didn't show his face. I could see the outline of his hand, long and pale, resting on the hilt of a blade that wasn't there.

“He has not lived through nine cycles. He has endured hundreds... to thousands. He has watched this world burn and reset over and over, leaping from one tragedy to the next like a scavenger. But do not let his longevity fool you. In the entire history of the heavens and the earth, Kagechi is the greatest loser ever known.”

I looked up, stunned. “A… loser? But his power… they say he can see the future.”

“He can,” Tsukuyomi replied, his voice dripping with disdain. “That is the tragedy of his existence. He is blessed with the eyes of the Stars—the power of the Da Siming to see millions upon millions of scenarios simultaneously. Every path, every choice, every possible ending is laid out before him in a grand, chaotic map. And yet…”

The silhouette leaned forward slightly, the shadows deepening.

“His winning ratio is a pathetic 6%. Do you understand what that means, Kuniaki? In a million scenarios, he fails in nine hundred and forty thousand of them. He watches his friends die, he watches his plans crumble, and he watches himself lose everything he holds dear in almost every reality he perceives. He sees the victory, but it is always a needle in a haystack of despair.”

I felt a sudden, hollow ache in my chest. To see every way you could fail, and still have to walk the path… it sounded like a nightmare.

“He is the Thousand-faced Survivor,” Tsukuyomi continued, his voice rising in cold triumph. “He survives not because he is strong, but because he is stubborn. He wears the faces of the fallen to hide the shame of his own incompetence. He is a star that refuses to go out, even though it has no light of its own. He is a celestial gambler who keeps betting his soul on a 6% chance, over and over, across a thousand years.”

The Lord of the Night stood up, his towering silhouette casting a shadow that swallowed me whole. He looked out at the moon—his moon—dominating the sky.

“He thinks he can change the outcome this time. He thinks he can use Japan as the board for his final play. But he forgets… I am the Moon. I am the host of this night. And in my domain, there is no room for the flickering, failed light of a Star that doesn't know when to stay dead.”

I lowered my head until it touched the floor. The rivalry between them was more than just a conflict of powers; it was a grudge that spanned the very fabric of time. The Moon and the Stars—the Host and the Survivor.

“Kagechi is a loser who has mastered the art of dying multiple of times,” Tsukuyomi whispered, the words echoing through the dark hall. “But survival is not victory. And this time, I will make sure he has no faces left to steal.”

As I backed out of the room, the image of that 6% stayed with me. I thought of the man I had seen in the city, the one they called Enji or Mei. I thought of the melancholy in his eyes. If Tsukuyomi was right, then the "Arbiter" wasn't a hero at all.

He was just a man who had seen himself lose a million times, and for some reason, was still trying to find a way to win.

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The transition from the incense-heavy shadows of the shrine to the sterile, blue-lit reality of the modern world was always jarring. As I stepped out into the biting Kobe night, I adjusted the collar of my charcoal-grey SANA uniform. My heart was still hammering against my ribs from the audience with the Lord of the Night, his words about the “6% probability” looping through my mind like a corrupted data stream.

But the JAA didn't care about cosmic losers or the pride of the Moon. They cared about telemetry, spectral shifts, and the mounting pressure from JAXA to explain why the Japanese archipelago was drifting into a thermal vacuum.

By the time I reached our apartment, my fingers were numb. I let myself in as quietly as possible, the click of the lock sounding like a gunshot in the oppressive silence of the hallway.

The living room was dim, the only light coming from the flickering glow of a laptop screen on the kitchen table. Chinatsu was there. She was sitting perfectly still, a cup of tea long gone cold at her elbow. She didn't look up when I entered. She didn't even acknowledge the shift in the air that usually accompanied my return.

“I’m home,” I murmured, the words feeling heavy and unwelcome.

Chinatsu didn't respond. She just continued to stare at the wall, her expression unreadable. Our relationship had always been a series of frayed wires—too much history, too many unspoken grievances to ever truly connect. But lately, her silence had taken on a different quality. It wasn't the silence of anger; it was the silence of someone who was listening to a frequency I couldn't hear.

I stood there for a moment, the urge to ask her what was wrong tugging at my throat. I wanted to tell her about the silhouette in the shrine, about the terrifying intent I felt from Tsukuyomi, and about the man named Enji who was playing a game with our lives. But the distance between us was a canyon I didn't know how to cross.

Instead, I walked past her and went straight to my room.

I sat at my desk and flipped open my terminal, the SANA logo blinking to life. I had three hours of data entry and signal processing to complete for the JAXA joint-task force. My role in the Moon Tracker Team’s presentation had been minor, but as a member of Team SANA, I was responsible for the "Ground-Truth" verification—ensuring that the digital models matched the physical observations coming from the Kobe observatory.

I pulled up the latest orbital charts. The numbers were staggering.

According to the JAA’s deep-space arrays, the Moon’s gravitational footprint had expanded by 0.04% in the last seventy-two hours. It shouldn't have been possible. Mass didn't just appear out of nowhere. And yet, the sensors were screaming that the Moon was getting "heavier."

“He is a parasite of time,” Tsukuyomi’s voice echoed in my head.

I looked at the data points, my mind automatically trying to find the 6%—the narrow, impossible window where the math made sense. If Kagechi was indeed the "Thousand-faced Survivor," then he was somewhere in these equations. He was the anomaly that the computers were trying to filter out as "noise."

I glanced toward the door. I could see the shadow of Chinatsu through the frosted glass, still motionless in the kitchen. She was the best of us—the one with the strongest intuition—and yet she looked like a shell. Was she feeling it too? The pressure of the cycles? The sense that we were all just pieces on a board that had been reset a hundred times before?

I forced my focus back to the screen. I had to stay professional. I had to be the technician, the scientist, the reliable sister who didn't believe in ghosts.

But as I typed in the coordinates for the next satellite sweep, my hand shook. The science was telling me that Japan was entering a period of darkness that no solar cycle could explain. And the myth was telling me that we were being led by a man who had already lost this war nine hundred and forty thousand times.

I closed my eyes for a second, the blue light of the monitor burning into my retinas.

“6%,” I whispered to the empty room. “Please, let this be the one time you’re right... stupid Enji.”

Outside, the Moon hung in the sky, silent and predatory. And in the kitchen, my sister remained a ghost, waiting for a dawn that felt further away with every passing second.