The drunk office clerk staggered into the alleyway behind the concert building. He made it three steps before collapsing against the wall, retching up beer and regret. His vision swam as he wiped his mouth with a trembling hand.
Then he looked up.
His bloodshot eyes widened at the impossible sight before him.
A silhouette—humanoid but wrong, formed from living darkness—stood watching him. A single eye blazed in the center of what might have been a face, white-hot and utterly inhuman.
The clerk's alcohol-soaked brain tried to rationalize it. Hallucination. Stress. Too much to drink.
But the cold radiating from the creature was real. The sulfur smell burning his nostrils was real.
"W-what..." His voice cracked. "What are you?"
The eye curved upward. A smile without a mouth.
The clerk's legs gave out. He hit the concrete hard, and warmth spread across his crotch as his bladder failed. "P-please... I'll never drink again! I swear! I'm sorry!"
The silhouette vanished.
For one blessed moment, the clerk thought it was over. That he'd imagined it all. That he could go home, shower, sleep this nightmare off—
Pain exploded through his chest.
His body convulsed, spine arching unnaturally. Darkness erupted from beneath his feet, climbing his legs like living tendrils. It wasn't consuming his flesh—it was consuming something deeper. Something essential. His eyes rolled back as the thing inside him began to feed.
The screams died in his throat.
His body went still. Dark wisps rose from his eye sockets like smoke from candles. The silhouette reformed above the corpse, more solid than before, more real.
"Five more..." Its voice was distorted, layered, like dozens of throats speaking at once.
Its pupil snapped toward the concert venue's back wall. A strong spiritual presence had just entered the building—clean, bright, unmistakable.
A seer.
The silhouette melted into the brick and shadow, patient and hungry.
Soon. Just five more souls until evolution. Then nothing—not even seers—could stop it.
...
"This is idiotic!"
Noir glared at the LED light sticks in his hands as if they'd personally offended his entire bloodline. Pink and white. Flashing in sync with the saccharine pop music. Around him, thousands of fans screamed lyrics he didn't know to a song he already hated.
He'd fought rippers. Survived Yuusha's orchestrated mission. Manifested an uncontrollable crimson power that was beyond even veteran seers like Shin Jin.
And somehow, this was worse.
Next to him, Arata Kenji was waving his own light sticks with a sincerity that bordered on concerning. Not with showy enthusiasm, but with a focused, slightly stiff dedication, like he was completing a checklist item: Blend In.
"You know, they actually track our mission enjoyment metrics," Arata said, not looking away from the stage. His voice was almost lost in the roar.
"I'm not kidding. Head Office does quarterly reviews. So, um. Could you maybe try to look... less homicidal? For the paperwork."
"I don't do fun."
"Yeah." Arata's shoulders slumped a little. "I'm getting that impression."
Noir scoffed and half-heartedly waved the light sticks. The crowd around them was a churning mass of bodies—sweating, shouting, pressing forward toward the stage where some idol gyrated under strobing lights. The bass pounded through his ribs. The heat was suffocating.
Phase Two, Yuusha had called it. The Head Priest's dark eyes had been as unreadable as ever, but his words were clear: In order to understand the void inside you, you must adapt to foreign situations.
So here he was, paired with the one person in the Ise Order he'd never noticed—Arata Kenji, Mid-Rank Seer, the boy who'd once tried to arrest him in a silent archive. Polite. Unassuming. A ghost with a security clearance.
Noir had no idea if he could trust the guy in a real fight. And based on the mission briefing, they were about to find out.
A silhouette ripper, hunting in the crowd. Six souls away from evolution.
They had to find it before it finished feeding.
An obese man stumbled into Noir's back, nearly knocking him over. Cold beer sloshed from the guy's cup onto Noir's crimson scarf.
"Hey! Watch it!"
The man froze when he saw Noir's expression. "S-sorry, man. My bad. It was an accident—"
"Was it?" Noir's hand curled into a fist. "Or are you just too drunk to function?"
"Noir." Arata's voice was a hesitant murmur beside him.
"Not gonna apologize?" Noir took a step forward.
The man's face went pale. He mumbled something incoherent and disappeared into the crowd, moving with surprising speed for someone his size.
"Wow." Arata lowered his light sticks, his cheerful facade dissolving into pure, unvarnished bewilderment.
"I was just... How did you work with Soo Ah? I heard she has a really low tolerance for... that." He gestured vaguely at Noir's entire demeanor. "Actually, never mind. Sorry. Not my business."
They stood there in awkward silence for a moment, surrounded by screaming fans and pulsing music. Then Arata's posture shifted—subtle but unmistakable. His smile stayed in place, but his eyes went sharp, tracking something across the crowd.
"Three o'clock," he murmured, barely audible over the music. "Group near the left speaker tower. Something's off."
Noir followed his gaze. A cluster of fans were swaying oddly, movements out of sync with the music. One of them—a young woman in a band t-shirt—had gone completely rigid. Her eyes rolled back, mouth slack.
"Shit." Noir's hand went to the brass knuckles holstered at his hip. New ones, since he'd lost the last pair. They were heavier than the originals, inscribed with spiritual wards that would glow when activated by spiritual energy.
If he had any spiritual energy to activate them with.
"Don't rush." Arata's hand tapped his arm, a brief, hesitant contact. "If we panic, it'll just... go. Into all these people." He looked at the churning crowd with genuine dread. "Let me try something. Just... follow my lead, okay?"
Arata moved, not with slick confidence, but with the careful determination of someone navigating a minefield. "Miss! Hey, someone? She doesn't look good!" he called out, his performance awkward but effective.
Fans turned, phones came out. In the manufactured concern, no one noticed Arata catching the woman as she fell, his fingers pressing to her forehead.
His expression tightened, all pretense falling away. "She's... empty. That was really fast," he whispered to Noir, his voice strained. "It took just enough to make it look like she fainted from excitement."
"Smart bastard." Noir scanned the crowd, looking for shadows where they shouldn't be. "Where'd it go?"
"Could be anywhere. These rippers can—"
Noir stopped listening.
Through the churning crowd, he saw him. Silver hair. Pale skin. Standing perfectly still while everyone around him moved and screamed and celebrated.
The man from his nightmares. The one who'd appeared before him at The Devil's Cradle when Noir was just a kid, offering candy that tasted like smoke and darkness.
Their eyes met across the crowd.
The man's smile widened. He raised one hand in a small wave, almost playful. Then he pressed a finger to his lips: shh..
And pointed toward the backstage entrance.
"Noir!" Arata's voice was sharp with alarm. "It's moving—backstage! We need to go!"
Noir turned back to where the silver haired man had been standing.
Empty space. Just more fans, cheering and dancing like nothing had happened.
"Yeah," Noir said, his voice hoarse. "Yeah, I'm coming."
His hands shook as he followed Arata toward the service entrance. If that man was here—if he was real and not just a manifestation of Noir's fracturing mind—then this mission had just become far more complicated.
They slipped through a service door, leaving the thunderous music and screaming fans behind. The backstage corridors were dimly lit, nearly empty. Most of the staff were either managing the concert or on break. The bass still pounded through the walls, making the concrete floor vibrate beneath their feet.
Noir drew his brass knuckles. The metal was cold against his skin. Dead. No spiritual energy to activate the wards carved into them.
Beside him, Arata pulled out his pistols—twin ornate weapons that looked too delicate for combat. He fumbled slightly with the chamber check. Blue spiritual energy sputtered, then caught, flickering along the barrels like captive lightning.
"Baptismal rounds," he said, almost to himself. "Blessed water. It'll, um, force the ripper solid for a second. Hina—my old time partner—she figured out the pressure ratios."
"Ever fought one of these before?"
"Yeah. With Hina." Arata's gaze dropped to the pistols, his thumb tracing a small, worn spot on the grip. "They're only vulnerable when they're... eating. So we have to wait. It's not great." He winced, a reflexive habit. "And if it's about to evolve, it'll be... pretty desperate. Yeah. Sorry. That's probably obvious."
"Stop apologizing."
The words came out harsher than Noir intended.
"I mean—" Noir forced himself to breathe, to focus. "You're giving me information. That's helpful. You don't need to apologize for telling me the horrible truth."
Arata blinked, looking genuinely chastised. "Right. Okay. It's just... habit. The apologizing, I mean. I'll work on it."
They moved deeper into the corridor, following the faint trace of corrupted spiritual energy. At least, Arata was following it—Noir couldn't sense anything. Just cold concrete and the muffled bass thrumming through the walls. The cheering crowd seemed distant now, almost unreal.
"There," Arata whispered.
At the end of the corridor, near the loading dock, a patch of darkness that was too dark peeled away from the wall. It solidified into that terrible humanoid shape—featureless except for the single burning eye.
The eye rotated toward them. Focused.
Seers, it seemed to say without words.
How inconvenient.