In the sterile quiet of Kazegami Clinic, where death often speaks louder than life, Yuna presses her palm against the neural interface of a dying patient. Her hand trembles. The sync is routine—drifting through the last lingering echoes of thought, harvesting emotional residue to preserve memory—but something breaks the rhythm this time.
A whisper. Unfiltered. Ragged.
"Inugami Hollow... the dogs... the man who smiles before killing..."
The thought isn't just memory. It's trauma looped with panic. Yuna jolts back, eyes wide, music box clutched to her chest. She draws a picture later—a man with painted lips, teeth like knives, and behind him, a wall of hounds with eyes like glass.
She shows it to Kaito.
He studies it silently. The phrase "the man who smiles before killing" clings to him like smoke. That phrase wasn't metaphor—it was a signature.
Without a word, he packs the neuro-sync device, recalibrates his mask overlays, and sets coordinates for Inugami Hollow. A new ghost waits.
Fog presses against the train windows as Kaito descends into the Hollow, now aware he's entering a place where myth bleeds into machinery. At a half-burned bus stop near the edge of town, he meets Detective Kyohei Aomine, rifle across his back, eyes shadowed with doubt and fatigue.
The detective is cold at first—suspicious of Kaito's vagueness, especially when the stranger speaks in terms like resonance bleed and neurological imprint instability. But something about Kaito's calm, analytic demeanor feels trustworthy. Kyohei eventually relents.
He shows Kaito the USB footage—the lighthouse scene, Shiro's command, the trained precision of the dogs. But what troubles Kyohei most isn't the violence—it's the performance.
"He doesn't just kill. He stages it. Choreographs it. The dogs attack in rhythm, like it's a damn opera."
"It's not just criminal... It's symbolic. Ritualistic. I think he believes the murders mean something."
Kaito nods, eyes narrowing. "Then it's not madness. It's conditioning."
He begins to suspect something darker than theatrical egoism—something clinical.
Donning the disguise of an eccentric street magician, Kaito gains entry into Shiro's estate during the man's annual "Birthday Carnival"—a grotesque parody of joy, complete with fire-breathers, Victorian jesters, and children paid to laugh on cue. Shiro, clad in a flamboyant taiko warrior outfit, welcomes Kaito as though expecting him.
"A stranger with secrets! Oh, how delightful! What trick will you show me—pull out my sins like a rabbit from a hat?"
Their private conversation takes place in a mirrored greenhouse lit by red lanterns. Shiro plucks petals from a black chrysanthemum as he speaks.
"I was just a boy when I found my first beast. I tried to love it, but the world laughed at me. So... I taught the laugh to bite."
Kaito's neuro-scanner, hidden in the pendant of his disguise, begins to spike—Shiro's brainwave patterns are erratic, inconsistent with typical psychopathy. There's fragmentation, hyper-activated limbic spikes during empathy-associated memories, as if certain emotions were inserted or forcibly overwritten.
Kaito knows this pattern.
He's seen it before—on Yuna's charts.
But before Kaito can slip away, his device emits a high-frequency chirp—enough to trigger the sensitive ears of Shiro's genetically modified hounds. The room explodes into chaos.
Kyohei, having circled the perimeter with a stolen dog whistle system, detonates resonance disruptors—spheres that emit conflicting command frequencies. The dogs snarl, confused, momentarily stalled.
Amid the mayhem, Kaito tosses decoy masks rigged with pulse emitters to throw off scent trails. Shiro, watching from the tower above, smiles down like a puppet master watching his strings tangle.
Kaito and Kyohei flee into the woods as the hounds give partial chase, snarling at every unnatural sound. Behind them, the Enma estate lights flicker like a theater mid-collapse.
Back at a safehouse hidden beneath an old radio station, Kaito assembles the fragments: Shiro's neural pattern, the footage, Yuna's immunity, and the archived trial data he salvaged from blacklisted servers years ago.
He cross-references a suppressed keyword from a corrupted Ministry server:
Project Kuroinu.
It clicks into place.
Shiro Enma: Subject Zero – early-stage testing of limbic re-mapping via induced trauma and neuroplastic rewiring. Emotional desensitization trials.
Yuna: Subject Two – secondary prototype for empathy nullification and mirror-neuron suppression. Failed trial. Escaped containment.
The project's full name reads like a punch to the soul:
KUROI NUKE (Black Dog) Initiative – a failed psychological weaponization program aimed at creating trauma-immune operatives who could manipulate or nullify the emotional landscape of others.
Shiro wasn't born a killer. He was manufactured. And Yuna? She was never supposed to survive.
Now Kaito sees the stakes not just in memory, but in inheritance—a legacy of sins coded into the minds of children shaped by science. He stares at Yuna's latest drawing: a magician, a detective, and a little girl standing at the edge of a forest, facing a laughing man in a crown of teeth.
"Project Kuroinu wasn't shut down," Kaito mutters. "It just put on a mask."