The city looked peaceful when it wasn't being measured.Streetlights hummed. Screens scrolled ads that promised better mornings.Midnight arrived, found everything in its place, and decided to stay a while.
Then a pulse touched the grid.
It was too small to register as an error: a half-second blink across one traffic camera, one bus-stop display, one vending machine. A pattern repeated — four slow beats, one pause — the rhythm of a breath.No glitch report filed itself. Machines do not confess immediately.
By 00:17 a.m., the same pattern appeared in thirty-two devices. By 00:19 a.m., people had stopped mid-sentence without knowing why.
Someone at a convenience store counter looked up from counting change and realized the neon lights had synchronized with their heartbeat. A couple arguing in an alley forgot the last word of their fight. A taxi driver turned off the radio and didn't know why the silence felt correct.
The grid exhaled. Then it didn't.
1 | U.A. – The Observation Room
Aizawa had meant to sleep. Paperwork disagreed.He was half-through a report when the monitor on his desk blinked awake, uninvited.The feed showed the main quad, empty except for moonlight.
Then the timestamp rolled backward one second, forward two, backward one — a heartbeat stutter made of electricity.
He frowned, reached for the switch, and the power steadied before he could touch it.
On another desk, Nezu's emergency line blinked.The principal answered on first ring, sounding almost amused. "The city's learned percussion."
Aizawa rubbed his eyes. "How wide?"
"Seventeen districts so far. No power loss. Just… harmony."
"That's worse," Aizawa said. "Accidents happen when things agree too much."
Nezu adjusted his tiny glasses. "Commission's already calling it an algorithmic echo. They think someone leaked calibration code."
"Someone," Aizawa said flatly.
"Someone human, they mean."
He looked out the window. The floodlights along the training field blinked in unison, four slow beats, one pause.
Aizawa's scarf moved like an old instinct. "He's asleep."
"Then something's dreaming for him," Nezu said.
2 | Commission HQ – 00:32 a.m.
The lab lights stayed on because bureaucracy doesn't sleep.
Dr. Imai stood in front of a wall of graphs that refused to agree about being random.Kurobane leaned against the doorframe, hair damp from rain, eyes trained on the single monitor that mattered — R-17's archived waveform, suddenly live.
"It's broadcasting?" he asked.
"No," Imai said. "The file's closed. The data is offline. But every node with access to the Evaluation feed is emitting this pattern."She gestured at the rolling lines. "Same phase. Same amplitude."
"Replication," he said. "Not transmission."
"Like a song stuck in memory," she said.
"Except the memory is the city," he said.
She ran a simulation; the map of Musutafu lit up like a constellation inventing itself."It's localized around electrical infrastructure — devices that once processed sound or light."
Kurobane watched the dots multiply. "You should shut them down."
"I can't," she said. "They're not connected. They're agreeing."
He thought of Renya sitting in a room, quiet enough to teach machines manners.He said, "Call it what you want. It's a network."
Imai typed a label: Incident: Night Network.
3 | Aki – Home at Midnight
The first flicker reached their apartment at 00:41.The lamp above the sink blinked four times, paused, blinked again.
Aki froze mid-step. "No," she whispered, thinking of the table, of the square that had learned obedience."It's not you," she told it. "You're asleep."
The square warmed anyway, a ripple through woodgrain. The kettle on the counter clicked once, twice, keeping the same rhythm.She touched the edge of the table. "You're picking it up," she said. "Not making it."
The shadow brightened defensively, as if misunderstood. The lightbulb joined in, gentle, matching heartbeat for heartbeat.
Her phone buzzed — a message from a neighbor:is ur tv doing that breathing thing too?She didn't answer. She turned the device face-down like her brother did when politeness needed privacy.
Through the thin window she saw the streetlights blink in the same tempo, as though the whole district were practicing meditation.
She spoke softly to the room. "If he's dreaming, tell him to stop."
The square's light steadied. It didn't dim.
4 | The Lab – Cross Talk
Back at HQ, the graphs went from elegant to frightened.
"Look," Imai said. "Every surge aligns with ambient emotional metrics. People are calmer. Emergency calls dropped 12 percent in ten minutes."
"Artificial serenity," Kurobane said. "That's a nice way to describe hypnosis."
"It's not invasive," she argued. "It's benevolent."
"So is anesthesia," he said.
She glared. "If this is him—"
"It isn't him," he cut in. "It's what listens to him."
The words startled both of them.
They watched the data crawl upward, a heartbeat over a skyline.In the silence between beeps, he heard his own pulse trying to synchronize.
He whispered, almost prayer: "Don't make me the translator of this."
5 | U.A. – Control Wing
Nezu and Aizawa stood in the monitoring bay.All thirty screens showed the same steady rhythm.Students sleeping in dorms turned over at the same time, exhaled in perfect order.
"It's not dangerous yet," Nezu said."Yet," Aizawa echoed. "That's optimism pretending to be strategy."
He picked up the radio. "Kurobane."
"Here."
"You seeing the same?"
"Worse. It's in the fiber grid."
"What's the pulse frequency?"
"Four-one," Kurobane said. "Like breathing."
Aizawa glanced at the nearest clock. The second hand hesitated, four ticks, one pause. "Yeah," he muttered. "It's breathing."
Nezu's whiskers trembled. "If order spreads faster than meaning, we lose agency before we notice."
Aizawa folded his arms. "Then we notice loudly."
6 | Aki – The Call
The lights had calmed. The apartment smelled of metal and rain.Her phone buzzed again. R:You awake?She typed: City's breathing funny. You?
R:I know. It's not me.
She wrote back: Then who?
No reply.
The square under her hand warmed, forming two dots of light — one short, one long.Morse, if she still remembered: OK.
She smiled despite fear. "Good boy."
Outside, a bus passed with its cabin lights flickering in time. The driver didn't slow down; he was humming without realizing it.
7 | Renya – Awake
He had not meant to wake.The pulse did it for him — four soft beats, one pause, exactly where dreams inhale.
The city's rhythm brushed his skin. The Veil whispered not in words but in agreement.
He sat up, pressed his palm to the wall. The plaster cooled immediately.
"Enough," he said quietly.The square flared once.The lights steadied.
In a thousand devices across the district, the pattern skipped one beat, as if listening.
He closed his eyes. "You don't need to protect peace that isn't yours."
The air trembled; circuits obeyed.In the control rooms, the graphs dipped.People resumed mid-sentence conversations they didn't remember pausing.Aki's lamp stayed on.
He lay back down and waited for silence to forget its lines.
8 | Commission Debrief – 04:00 a.m.
Imai faced the blank monitor."All systems stable," a tech reported.
Kurobane stared at the data's flat calm. "No, they're obedient. Difference matters."
He picked up the radio. "Aizawa."
"Here."
"It's not spreading noise—it's spreading order. And that's worse."
Static answered like a sigh.
He turned off the radio before it learned the rhythm.
The city inhaled once — soft, synchronous — and forgot to exhale.