Shock

"Morning."

"Ichikawa, morning~~"

Students gathered at Suimi High School from all over, greeting one another.

Though it was a third-rate public high school where people coasted through life, not everyone was vicious. Most simply went with the flow; only some scum took pleasure in bullying others.

A very small number studied hard, trying to change their fate.

And those people were instead bullied and tormented by the scum.

Everyone else had given up, so why were they working hard?!

Akihi Yu had once belonged to that bullied group, but things were completely different now.

As he entered the classroom, everyone's gaze gathered on him before casually shifting away.

Except for—

"Yu, are you okay?"

Class Monitor Nao stood and walked over.

Her eyes carefully checked Akihi Yu from head to toe, and only after seeing no injuries did she let out a sigh of relief.

"Thanks for asking~~ What could possibly happen to me?"

Akihi Yu shrugged and walked to his seat.

"That's good."

Patting her impressively endowed chest, Class Monitor Nao's gaze swept over an empty seat.

Yamamoto.

Knowing that person as she did, he had actually not caused trouble for Yu?

"Yu, be careful on your way home after school."

If she could, Ai Nao really wanted to go to and from school with Akihi Yu.

But... her relationship with Yu's younger sister was tense, and Nao did not want to go home early either.

"Mm."

Akihi Yu nodded at the Class Monitor's concern.

As the teacher entered the classroom, another leisurely day of high school began.

Ayase Town, Third District.

"Hehehe, just as I expected."

Inside a restaurant with a cuisine sign hanging outside, Iori Ichika, deputy chief of the Organized Crime Division's Fourth Section, dressed like a biker, crouched on the ground and held out her hand.

With her five fingers spread, she gestured above the mangled corpse.

"Only human fingers could leave scratches like these."

The corpse on the ground was powerfully built, clutching a pistol in one hand. His scarred face seemed frozen in an expression of having witnessed something unimaginable. Four wounds had been gouged across his chest, as though by a fierce tiger—no, something even more terrifying—cutting deep into the bone!

"The wounds run across his entire chest and are roughly six centimeters deep. Muscle and ribs... were torn apart without any resistance."

"Tsk tsk tsk, what a mad beast!"

Click, click, click.

Several forensic officers were photographing the scratches left on the walls and seats. Yet the more they photographed, the more uneasy they became.

"Chief Iori, even a beast wouldn't have claws that long."

Looking at the deep furrows carved into the wall, the officers called in to preserve the scene felt their hearts pounding.

"Do your jobs."

Iori Ichika stood, already having reached a conclusion, and impatiently waved them off.

"Don't think about the rest, don't ask, and don't talk!"

"It's for your own good, understand?"

"Understood!"

Turning away from the restaurant and stepping outside, Iori Ichika found the surrounding area already cordoned off. She pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag.

That surveillance footage was not fake. The supernatural really existed!

How exciting.

"Hmm?"

The radio on her body crackled.

"Ichika, come to the Metropolitan Police Department."

Chiyoda Ward.

Kasumigaseki Town, Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.

If Tokyo was the heart of the Island Nation, then Chiyoda Ward, where politicians gathered, was the heart within that heart.

And Kasumigaseki, located before the Imperial Palace, was like a third nested heart, known as the "Central Government Circle."

Government agencies such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Justice, Metropolitan Police Department, and Public Security Bureau were concentrated here. In the truest sense, if one tossed a brick, whoever it hit would be either rich or powerful. Even a mere driver here was a major figure whom people from other areas had to curry favor with.

Ordinarily, outsiders to the system would never come and go from a place like the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. Today, the atmosphere was especially grim.

In the Metropolitan Police Department parking lot, a row of black sedans silently proclaimed the lofty status of their occupants.

Even the reception desk staff responsible for receiving visitors could feel the heaviness in the air.

Inside the Metropolitan Police Department conference room sat one high-ranking big shot after another.

The chairman of the National Public Safety Commission, Director Takeya, the head of Tokyo Police Headquarters, the director of the Ministry of Justice's Public Security Intelligence Agency... The most influential person was the Chief Cabinet Secretary seated at the head of the table—under special circumstances, the Chief Cabinet Secretary could serve as acting Prime Minister.

"Whew."

Having changed into a women's suit, Iori Ichika tugged at the tie that made her uncomfortable.

As the chief of the Violent Crime Countermeasures Division's Fourth Section, her rank in this conference room was low enough to bring tears to her eyes.

If she had not just returned from the Ayase Town scene, she would not even have been qualified to appear here.

"Ahem."

Under the cough and stern gaze of Director Takeya, her immediate superior, Iori Ichika, who had only just been reinstated, unhappily stepped forward to act as the presenter.

"Please look. These are images extracted from the internal surveillance cameras of Broken Tooth Building."

As she spoke, she inserted a disposable USB drive into a physically isolated device.

The USB drive would self-destruct once removed, then be physically pulverized afterward. Furthermore, none of the devices or phones in this room could connect to the outside world.

On the conference room screen, a projector displayed the footage. Though there was no sound, it did not affect the viewing.

"Last night, a murder took place in the Broken Tooth Gang's headquarters."

The footage had been edited, spliced together, and restored.

In the footage, on the first-floor lobby of the Broken Tooth Gang building, someone suddenly appeared out of thin air. A priest? An Onmyoji?

He—or she—wore an ancient, loose hunting robe, making their gender impossible to discern. A tall black ceremonial cap sat atop their head, a magatama pendant hung at their waist, and wooden clogs were on their feet. Excluding the hat, they appeared only around one meter forty tall. A white cloth hanging from the front of the hat concealed their face, and the black character "San" on it was exceptionally conspicuous.

Cosplay?

Like a mysterious figure who had stepped out of history, the person immediately attracted the attention of several Broken Tooth Gang members.

Those yakuza members surrounded the figure from all directions. Their impatient movements showed that they were preparing to drive this inexplicable person away.

The next second, as the "mysterious person" casually waved a hand, black shadows flew from their sleeves and transformed into... women with long hair covering their faces, ragged clothes, and thin limbs?!

The women drifted out, extending their withered arms. The instant they touched the yakuza members, the men froze in place! In the silent footage, only the terrified faces of the Broken Tooth Gang members remained.

Then, the mysterious person took out a stone.

The frozen yakuza members immediately began convulsing, their eyes wide open as though they had witnessed an indescribably dreadful horror!

Finally—

One phantom after another.

Flew out from the bodies of those yakuza members and entered the stone in the mysterious person's hand.

And those yakuza members, as though—no, as if their souls had truly been pulled away, collapsed soundlessly to the ground as empty shells.

Just like that, the black female shadows released by the mysterious person scattered in all directions. Anyone touched by one of those "women" immediately froze, their trembling eyes filled only with terror. Meanwhile, the mysterious person strode through at an unhurried pace, calmly harvesting lives one after another.

There was resistance along the way, but bullets passed uselessly through the black female shadows. Daggers and bats could tear the shadows apart, but the severed female shadows regrew from their torn points and split into two!

Faced with these shadows that no attack could affect, the Broken Tooth Gang members were possessed one after another. Then, after the phantoms left their bodies, they fell to the ground and stopped moving.

The video was not short. From the mysterious person's appearance to their arrival at the Broken Tooth Gang leader's office on the eighth floor, roughly an hour passed.

Under normal circumstances, what interest would the big shots in the conference room have in watching something like this?

But today, they all stared at the screen, afraid of missing some crucial piece of information.

Only after the mysterious person arrived on the eighth floor, killed the gang leader and three members in the Broken Tooth Gang leader's office, exchanged a few words with a young man kneeling and begging for mercy, and tapped the young man's forehead did the mysterious person and those black female shadows vanish into thin air.

After the footage finished, Chief Iori projected photograph after photograph onto the screen.

Compared to the somewhat blurry surveillance footage, the scene photos taken with expensive cameras were much clearer. The terror on the faces of those yakuza members was visible in every detail.

"A total of fifty-three bodies were found at the scene, all members of the Broken Tooth Gang, a violent organization from Adachi Ward."

After speaking, Iori Ichika discreetly observed everyone's expressions.

Aside from Director Takeya, her immediate superior who had visited the scene, everyone else wore expressions that were difficult to describe, mixed with doubt, absurdity, and confusion. These normally unflappable big shots looked as though question marks were written all over their faces.

"Director Takeya."

The Chief Cabinet Secretary spoke only after thinking for a while.

"Are you certain this really happened, rather than being some... CG animation?"

Only the Chief Cabinet Secretary present could openly ask such a question, since he had come on behalf of the Cabinet Prime Minister.

"It is real, Minister Suzuki."

The Metropolitan Police Department superintendent stood and gave a slight bow.

"The fifty-three bodies have now been gathered at nearby facilities. The scene has been preserved, and there is one survivor from this incident. We are urgently tracking his whereabouts."

"Then, can I take this to mean that this is... this is..."

The Chief Cabinet Secretary thought for a moment. He felt he had many things to say, but in the end, he did not know what to say.

Finally, the spokesman who was effectively the Island Nation government's secretary-general and represented the government's "face" spoke with difficulty.

"A supernatural incident?"

He had risen to this position. What storms had he not seen before?

But today's surveillance footage truly challenged everything he knew.

Ghost God?

Surely this was not an April Fools' joke?

"Yes."

Director Takeya answered with a grave expression.

"Though it sounds unbelievable, after repeated confirmation, this is indeed a supernatural incident!"

His words were resolute, but to the big shots present, they sounded like a fantasy. Quite a few looked around, wondering whether they were hallucinating.

For a time, silence was the only thing left in the conference room.