In the Land of Death,
Vanessa leaned back into her new ergonomic office chair, a perk she didn't ask for, in her upgraded cubicle. Her badge now read Senior Reaper Coordinator, Level IV—a fancy title that basically meant she handled even more paperwork than before, with only marginally less screaming souls involved.
The CRSS Department had been oddly eager to sweep her trial under the rug after she exposed the FCO's blunders. That tiny rebellion got her a sudden promotion—likely to keep her occupied and out of their hair. Still, she couldn't complain. Her hours were more flexible, her coffee breaks longer, and nobody questioned her if she used the photocopier for suspiciously mortal-looking documents.
Vanessa opened the Department of Soul Records mainframe. Her job for the day: routine cross-checking of soul transit logs with the Reaper Manifest. Halfway through the list, her eyes narrowed. One name glitched on screen before disappearing entirely.
"Kazuki Zenon…?" she muttered aloud, leaning closer. "What the hell was that?"
The name had blinked in and out like a corrupted file. Vanessa typed in the letters manually: K-A-Z-E-N. Nothing. She tried again, adding a wildcard.
K.Z.N.
And suddenly, the screen began to flood with results.
"...This can't be right," she whispered.
The name or rather, the signature—K.Z.N. appeared on over thirty soul manifests, all from the last four cycles. Every entry was stamped as reaped, sealed, and transitioned… but none of them were assigned to any registered reaper. The processing logs were clean. Too clean.
She ran a cross-check against field records. Still nothing. The Reaper IDs were blank. That never happened. Even rogue reapers had some trail.
Vanessa scrolled back. The souls marked by K.Z.N. weren't random. They were all flagged as anomalies: unclaimed, in limbo, or locked in unresolved trauma cases. And in each case, the report claimed resolution with no follow-up.
Something—or someone—was intervening in the soul processing system.
Vanessa's gut twisted. She minimized the files and locked them under a personal encryption bubble. Only higher-ups or people with administrative override could pull those files now. And she had a feeling someone was watching.
"Bran?" she pinged her assigned AI assistant, a snarky orb of sentience named after a bird that once cursed at her.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm here," Bran's voice buzzed from her desk crystal, irritable as always. "What did you break this time, princess of paperwork?"
"I didn't break anything. But I found something," she whispered. "Ever heard of a reaper named K.Z.N.?"
Silence.
Then: "...Turn off your connection. Now."
Vanessa obeyed instinctively. She pulled the warding scroll from her drawer and slammed it onto the desk. The surrounding area pulsed dimly as the wards activated, forming a quiet pocket of magic.
"Okay," she said. "Start talking."
"Kazen," Bran said, voice low. "The name you just mentioned isn't supposed to exist in any file. And yet you found him. Which means something's cracked open. Or someone is poking where they shouldn't."
"Who is he?"
"A ghost story among reapers. A myth. Some say he was the first reaper before the bureaucratic system took over. Others say he's a scavenger, picking up souls that should've never existed in the first place. There's even a rumor he's a fragment of Death itself. No one agrees on what he is. But everyone agrees on one thing: if you find a trail, you cover it back up."
Vanessa swallowed. "That doesn't sound like something I can ignore."
"Exactly. Which is why you should pretend you never saw it."
"But I did see it."
"And that's what's going to get you killed—or worse, reassigned to the Eternal Filing Basement."
She leaned back, tapping her fingers against the desk. Vanessa had learned to listen to warnings. But this time, her instincts screamed louder. Something about those souls… felt wrong. Like she'd seen pieces of them before. In her dreams. In passing faces.
Maybe even in her own reflection.
She pulled up the last file again. One name popped up—Elias Marrion—flagged as a collapsed soul, unreapable. The cause? Spiritual fusion. Vanessa blinked. That was impossible. Unless...
"Unless someone's collecting pieces," she muttered.
"Don't go down this path, Vanessa," Bran warned.
"I'm already on it."
She yanked the Elias Marrion file and transferred it into a separate drive. She needed to find his last known location in the human world.
Moments later, the map glitched and presented her a location in Zone Null, a restricted realm just between the Land of Death and the Human World. No passage allowed. No returns guaranteed.
And yet—her new clearance allowed her one-time access.
"Perfect," she murmured.
"Absolutely not perfect!" Bran snapped. "You're walking into a dead zone! Do you know how many reapers get lost in there?"
"I'll take my chances."
Vanessa grabbed her scythe—not for reaping, but for defense, and stood up to do whatever she thought she needed to.
As she moved through the halls, a shadow passed behind her. She paused, glancing back. Empty.
But somewhere, far beyond the office halls, deep in the echoes between planes, a figure paused at the edge of a soul stream. He wore a tattered reaper's cloak, though it shimmered strangely, like oil on water. A carved mask hid his face.
The figure turned slowly, as if sensing a ripple in fate.
"So... she's begun to see," he murmured.
Then he vanished.