A new chessboard

The air in the corridor was stale, mingled with cheap cleaning fluid, cooking grease, and a faint trace of mildew. Muffled television noise and a baby's cries drifted from somewhere far away. The sounds of the real world, rough and alive, stood apart from the room behind me, steeped in death and gunsmoke.

I did not look back. My footsteps barely made a sound on the worn carpet as I hurried through the dim corridor and down the creaking stairs. The back door's lock had long since broken. A gentle push opened it, and I stepped into a narrow alley crowded with garbage bins.

The night was heavy, the city's light pollution staining the sky a dirty orange-red. A cold wind swept past, carrying scraps of paper and dust.

I did not stop. I did not survey my surroundings. The pack on my back was not heavy, but what it held carried enough weight to change the world. I pulled up my jacket collar, lowered my head, and blended into the thin stream of people heading home late.

The first safe house was no longer usable. He-or rather, the remnants of the forces behind him-would trace their way there sooner or later. I needed a new base. More concealed, more inconspicuous, more... unpredictable.

My brain worked like the most precise navigation system, automatically plotting a route through the city's arteries. I avoided the main surveillance cameras, crossed the back lots of several wholesale markets that had closed for the night, and detoured through a shantytown slated for demolition. My steps never faltered. My breathing remained steady.

The shadows in the corners seemed deeper than usual. It was no illusion. Ryuk's enormous, inhuman silhouette followed at an unhurried pace, in a way ordinary people could not perceive. He did not show himself, but that faint, cloying sweetness of rotten apples wound around my nose like an invisible thread.

He was enjoying himself. Savoring the aftermath of this scene, savoring the beginning of a new round of hunting.

Half an hour later. The other side of the city. A tenement building with peeling exterior walls, packed with tenants. The corridors were dim, their walls plastered with little advertisements, the air smelling of food mixed with urine.

The top floor, the room farthest inside. Its door number was barely legible. I unlocked the door with the key I had prepared earlier-"borrowed" from the mailbox of a tenant who had been out of town for a long time.

A gust of dusty, stuffy air hit me. The room was tiny, with only a creaking metal bed frame, a crooked wardrobe, and a wooden table covered in grease. The window glass was so dirty it barely let any light through. The bathroom was cramped, its pipes giving off a low hum.

Perfect.

I set down my pack. Locked the door. Left the lights off. By the faint glow seeping through the window, I quickly checked the entire room. No cameras, no listening devices-at least none obvious enough for me to find.

I dragged the table into a corner, out of sight of the window. Took out the computer and connected to a wireless network routed through multiple layers of encryption and relays. The screen lit up, casting a cold blue glow across my face.

Information surged in instantly, like floodwater bursting through a dam.

News of the "SRO-7" command center's self-destruction had been tightly suppressed, but the ripples from the upheaval at the top could not be concealed completely. Speculation both true and false, rumors of internal purges, unusual prices on the international intelligence market... chaos was the best cover.

"Mentor's" death had yet to be discovered. His body could remain hidden in that bombed-out rental for at least a while longer.

But my gaze did not linger on these completed "works" for long.

The cleansing could not stop.

I needed new targets. Before the opposition could recover from total disarray and reorganize an effective pursuit, I had to keep expanding my gains, keep spreading fear, keep... purifying.

But the selection of targets needed to change. They could no longer be people directly connected to "SRO-7." That would point too clearly toward revenge and might provoke the remaining forces into striking back at any cost. I needed something more "random," closer to "Kira's" original image-an elusive "god" who punished the world's sins.

My fingers slid across the touchpad, filtering through news sites, social media, and dark web forums. Corrupt politicians, wealthy men beyond the law, cold-blooded criminals... the list was long, very long.

Suddenly, an inconspicuous local news notification caught my attention.

"Another homeless man found dead beneath a bridge in the city, suspected to have frozen to death. Charity urges greater attention to the plight of the homeless."

The accompanying photograph showed a pixelated figure curled up in ragged bedding. The report was brief, its tone indifferent, and it was quickly buried beneath other, more "important" news.

Frozen to death.

In an age of material abundance.

The cursor hovered over the report for a moment.

Then moved away.

I continued filtering. More "important" targets. Targets that would attract more attention and inspire more fear.

But that pixelated, curled-up figure remained like a tiny thorn lodged in a corner of my mind.

Irrelevant. One individual's misfortune was insignificant beside the grand cleansing plan. Purification required deterrence, scale, impact.

My gaze turned cold and focused again.

I found one.

A name: Liang Zhaohui, chairman of the Liang Group. He had made his fortune in real estate through dirty methods. Recently, one of his shoddily built developments had caused an accident with heavy casualties, yet a powerful legal team and "insufficient evidence" had once again allowed him to escape legal punishment. The victims' families had nowhere to turn with their grief.

Perfect.

Public outrage was immense. The law was powerless. Fit for "judgment."

I opened the Death Note. The pen tip hovered above the yellowish page.

Write down the name. Design the death. It needed to be public enough, humiliating enough, to reignite the public's fervor for "Kira"...

The pen was about to touch down.

Just then-

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught something at the edge of the computer screen.

An extremely discreet, almost imperceptible encrypted pop-up flashed for a tenth of a second.

It contained only a single line of constantly shifting, chaotic characters, like some kind of crashing code.

But in the instant those characters flickered, I caught something familiar, something that should never have appeared again-

The ghost of an identifier.

[SRO-7]

The characters vanished. The pop-up disappeared.

As though it had never appeared.

I froze. The pen tip hovered above the page, ink almost ready to bleed onto it.

My heart skipped a beat.

SRO-7?

Hadn't it self-destructed?

The temporary command center had approved it unanimously. The Omega-Level Protocol had been activated. That muffled boom...

Had it been fake?

Or... had the self-destruction failed to finish the job? Had some remaining node escaped? Had... the self-destruction itself been another level of "calibration" and "cleansing"?

An icy chill crept up my spine.

"Mentor" was dead. But his shadow...

It seemed it had not entirely dissipated.

From the shadows in the corner came an extremely faint smacking of Ryuk's lips, almost gleeful at my misfortune.

"Tsk... rotten apples..." he murmured hoarsely, his words indistinct. "...bite away half... only to discover..."

"...even more worms inside."

I slowly raised my head.

My gaze shifted from the place on the screen where the pop-up had long since vanished to the filthy night sky outside, stained red by the city's neon.

A new chessboard had been laid out.

But the old shadows,

it seemed, were unwilling to leave the stage.

The game,

had become...

more interesting.