There was no moment of epiphany. No cinematic resolve. Just a cold, hollow quiet. He moved with slow precision, digging a shallow grave in the shadow of the ruined clocktower. He laid Aiko's body down, wrapped in the jacket she used to hate. No ceremony. No cross. Just her knife, driven into the dirt above her heart, and Yui's ribbon tied around the hilt.
He didn't cry again.
He had no tears left.
The sky above them flickered with the promise of more death. Argwan drums beat their rhythm into the ground, deep and inevitable. The Hollowing pulsed beneath his feet—awake now, hungry.
Ren lifted Yui onto his back. Her arms circled his neck with unconscious trust. Her warmth pressed against the last unbroken part of him.
No more running. No more graves.
He turned from the grave with fire in his blood.
Let them come. Let the world burn.
He would burn it first.
The tunnels swallowed them whole, not like a mouth but like a memory—a slow collapse of light, of breath, of self. Each step deeper erased another fragment of the surface world. There was no sky here, no moon to mourn beneath. Only the damp echo of boots over corroded metal, the twitch of bioluminescent mold pulsing along the walls like a heartbeat. Ren's flashlight carved a fragile tunnel of light through the dark, but it couldn't touch the shadows that walked behind his thoughts.
Yui held his hand in silence. Her fingers burned against his calloused palm, hot like fever, like mutation. She didn't speak at first. Then, in a voice too small to belong to someone who had just watched her mother die, she whispered, "Papa… the walls are breathing."
He almost told her she was imagining things, that the air wasn't alive, that the moist rhythm pulsing behind the concrete was nothing but the blood in their ears. But he couldn't lie—not here. He heard it too. The low, wet pulse, like a second heartbeat inside the city's bones. The Hollowing wasn't above them anymore. It was inside the tunnels, wrapped around Tokyo's roots like a parasite made of memory and rot.
Aiko's voice haunted him like the smell of ash in his clothes. *You built this, didn't you? Your little empire of secrets.*
Yes. He had.
The first safehouse loomed like a coffin at the end of a rusted corridor. A blast door covered in grime and symbols long since worn away waited, sealed like a promise no one believed anymore. Ren reached for the keypad, his fingers moving automatically to punch in the code—1988. The door hissed open like an old wound.
Inside: stillness. A cold, clinical kind of death