"Words are seeds. In the wrong hands, they bloom into monsters."
Inside the Office – 9:17 AM
The morning was quiet. Too quiet.
Hiragi sat with the jar of red thread in front of him. Ishigami stared at a blueprint of the city, overlapping leyline data and library archives. Airi brewed coffee, bleary-eyed.
"This isn't just about Reina," Ishigami finally said. "It's about the original five books sealed under Tokyo."
"You mean the Living Manuscripts?" Hiragi asked.
"Yes. They weren't written. They were born."
Living Manuscripts – Origins
200 years ago, during the Great Binding War, five anomalous entities emerged from the astral veil. They didn't speak—they wrote.
Wherever they passed, people began speaking in verses, walking in rhyme, and vanishing into paper.
Sorcerers sealed them inside books. But even sealed, the manuscripts remembered.
Now, someone had unsealed Book III. And reality was shifting again.
Library – Scene of the Breach
Hiragi and the gang entered the lower archive.
The walls were bleeding text.
Sentences scrawled themselves on the floor:
"This is not fiction. This is infection."
Suguru gagged.
"Why does it smell like burnt dictionaries in here?!"
"The manuscript is active," Airi said, covering her nose. "It's rewriting the rules of language around us."
At the center of the chamber was Book III—floating midair. Its pages turned on their own. A heartbeat pulsed from within.
Suddenly, it spoke:
"I remember you, Hiragi. The unfinished sentence. The child who escaped erasure."
Manifestation – Sentence Beasts
Ink crawled from the book, forming monstrous beasts made of typography—spines of commas, jaws of quotation marks, limbs of hyphens and vowels.
"Incoming!" Ishigami warned.
Hiragi leapt in first, Void Blade glowing.
His blade sliced through narrative flesh, but every wound birthed a new paragraph of pain.
"They regenerate!" Airi yelled. "They're recursive!"
Suguru tossed a "Grammar Bomb" (a literal C4 shaped like a correction mark). It exploded, forcing the creatures into blank-space limbo.
"I'm useful now!" he yelled, then tripped on a period.
The Core Page – The Broken Verse
At the center of Book III, a torn page floated. On it was a verse.
"Erase him. Erase him. Erase—"
"That verse…" Hiragi narrowed his eyes. "That's the original spell that tried to delete me."
The book lunged at him, trying to swallow him whole.
But Hiragi raised his blade, chanted the forgotten counterspell Nolan once etched in his mind:
"From silence I rose—unwritten, unchained—
By Void's decree, I remain."
The manuscript screamed.
The verse cracked.
Silence
The beasts crumbled. The pages burned.
Book III slammed shut, now sealed again—by Hiragi's blood.
Everyone stood in silence.
"That verse was targeted," Ishigami said. "They tried to erase you, specifically."
"Yeah," Hiragi replied, looking down at his hand. "And now… they're trying again."
To Be Continued…