Chapter 14: Returning Back To The Crime Scene

They moved through the side streets like shadows cutting through oil, careful to never linger under the direct glare of the neighbors.

Tokyo had already resumed its indifferent rhythm. The neighborhood was too quiet—the kind of silence that precedes a landslide. Houses stood in neat, suburban rows under the sickly orange hum of the lights, their windows dark and their lawns trimmed to a terrifying precision. It looked like a memory someone had tried to preserve in amber, frozen and lifeless.

Kotomi walked with her head down, the brim of the borrowed baseball cap pulled low to hide the tear-stains on her cheeks. The oversized Family-Mart uniform hung off her like borrowed skin, a blue-and-white reminder of the "Kaito" persona Kyle had just discarded. She clutched the fabric closed with one hand, the other curled around something hidden in her pocket.

The scent of lemon and bleach still clung to her sleeves—a fragile, fading echo of the store’s sanctuary. But here, the air was different. Thicker. It tasted of burnt ozone and metallic static.

Kyle slowed, his hand brushing her shoulder with a light, grounding pressure.

“Wait.”

Kotomi stopped instantly. She didn’t look up.

Kyle scanned the street—not for snipers, but for rhythm. He looked for the "wrongness" that the mundane eye ignores. A man walked his dog with a mechanical, perfectly measured stride. A woman two doors down closed her blinds at the exact same second the dog-walker reached the fire hydrant. It was too synchronized. Too clean.

He remembered the voices he had overheard a block away.

“Yeah, I heard there was a gas leak,” one man had said.

“A gas leak,” another had echoed, the cadence identical.

“Structural instability,” a third had added. Same pause. Same inflection.

It wasn't a cover story. It was a script being played back by actors who didn't know they were on stage.

He stepped into a blind spot between the streetlamps, his boots making no sound on the slick pavement. Kotomi followed him into the shadows, her breath shallow and jagged.

The front door of the Doka house was sealed with yellow police tape. It didn’t look like a warning; it looked like a gag.

Inside, the house was too quiet. It wasn't just abandoned—it had been scrubbed. The air was raw, smelling of industrial ammonia and silence. Glass shards glittered on the floor like fallen stars, the only remains of whatever struggle had taken place. The kitchen linoleum had been bleached bone-white, erasing every footprint, every drop of blood, every trace of struggle.

Kotomi paused by the fridge. A calendar still hung there, a lone survivor of the purge.

She reached out, her fingers trembling as they brushed the page for the previous month. Her father’s handwriting was still there: Check rice cooker. Buy salmon. In the corner, a small, messy doodle of a cat.

She didn’t speak. She just stood there, her shoulders drawn tight, looking at the evidence of a life that had been deleted by men in white suits.

Kyle didn’t interrupt. He let the silence stretch, standing guard in the doorway, his eyes darting between the empty rooms. He felt a cold, familiar rage simmering in his chest—the same rage he felt when the Demon Lord’s armies razed the villages of the Borderlands.

Then Kotomi turned. She wasn't drawn toward her bedroom or the evidence of her father’s disappearance. She moved toward the small family shrine in the corner of the living room.

As she approached the dark wood of the altar, the silver clip in her hair began to pulse—not the frantic, jagged flare of the alleyway, but a steady, rhythmic throb. Like a heartbeat remembering its own name.

Kyle watched her hands shake as she reached for a small, overturned photo frame.

“She looks like you,” he said softly, looking at the woman in the photograph.

Kyle moved toward the window, but his ears tilted toward a faint, high-frequency hum—just on the edge of human hearing. It wasn't mechanical, not exactly. It was like the sound of pressure building behind a thick sheet of glass. The air in the room felt heavy, as if it were being compressed by an invisible hand.

“What’s this?” Kotomi murmured.

Her fingers, still stained with soot the industrial bleach hadn’t reached, found a small, hidden latch on the back of the photo frame.

Click.

The frame popped open with a hollow snap.

Inside, tucked behind the smiling, sun-drenched portrait of her mother, was a second photo—older, the edges yellowed by time and kept in the dark. Seven girls stood in the smoking ruins of a city that was definitely not Tokyo. They weren’t wearing school uniforms or trendy clothes. They wore outfits similar to Kotomi’s magical girl transformation that seemed to pulse even in the still image, each marked with a distinct celestial symbol: a star, a crescent, a jagged bolt, a flame. One of them—laughing, radiant, and holding a jade-handled blade—was unmistakably her mother.

They weren’t pretending to be Magical Girls for a camera.

Kotomi didn’t lift her cap. She didn't want the empty, scrubbed house to see her eyes. She just stared at the photo, her thumb brushing over her mother’s armored face as if she could pull the woman out of the paper and into the room.

Kyle stepped closer, his gaze sweeping the seven figures. He recognized that look—the weary, defiant stare of soldiers who had seen the end of the world and decided to fight anyway. “Seven of them,” he whispered.

“She never told me,” Kotomi breathed. “She was just... Mom.”

“She probably didn’t want you to carry the weight of a war she thought she’d finished,” Kyle said. He turned his head, his focus shifting toward the window.

A beat passed. The air in the room didn't just feel heavy; it felt electric.

“Is something wrong?” Kotomi asked, her voice sharpening with a survivor’s instinct.

Kyle didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Outside, the high-frequency hum grew into a roar that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly into the skull. A drone—larger and sleeker than the scouts—hovered directly above the roof, its presence like a dark thought someone was thinking for you.

“Get down!” Kyle commanded.

Kotomi dropped by the shrine, clutching the photo to her chest as if it were a shield. She didn't hesitate. Her silver hair clip spasmed, throwing off jagged violet sparks that hissed like angry snakes as they struck the floor.

“Transformation: Resonance!”

Jade and gold light exploded from her core, weaving into a translucent, honeycomb barrier just as the world outside went mad. The lightbulbs overhead didn’t just flicker—they burst in a chain reaction, raining glass like diamond dust across the room.

Phfft-phfft-phfft!

The Men in White weren't using batons anymore. High-velocity rounds slammed into Kotomi’s barrier, the impact points blooming like ripples in a pond.

“I don’t think... it can hold!” Kotomi gritted her teeth, her small frame trembling under the kinetic pressure. The whine of the drone was tearing through the air like a chalkboard shriek layered over gunfire. The walls of her childhood home groaned; the shrine rattled as if the spirits within were screaming.

“Just hold it,” Kyle’s jaw tightened, his eyes tracking the flicker of the muzzle flashes through the broken windows. “Give me one minute.”

The barrier groaned. A hairline fracture appeared in the jade light, spider-webbing outward as the intensity of the shots increased. Kotomi’s breath came in ragged gasps, but she didn't let the shield drop. If he needed a minute, she would give him her life.

Fifty seconds. Fifty-five.

The barrier finally shattered into a thousand glittering shards.

In that exact microsecond, Kyle slammed his heel into the floor. He didn't reach for a weapon. He didn't need one. He became the weapon.

[Chi Second Stance: Iron Mountain – Tetsutetsu!]

The floorboards didn't just break; they vaporized. A shockwave rippled outward from his heel, low and resonant, vibrating through the very bones of the house. It wasn’t just brute force—it was a localized frequency of absolute rejection.

The air shimmered. The incoming bullets didn't just stop; they disintegrated mid-flight, their trajectories disrupted by the counter-pulse of Kyle's Chi. The walls of the house hummed with a deep, metallic thrum that drowned out the drone’s whine, turning the living room into a fortress of invisible iron.

“Did we do it?” Kyle rasped, his lungs burning from the exertion of holding his own barrier.

For a heartbeat, the house held its breath. The air was thick with the smell of pulverized wood and the metallic tang of deflected bullets. But the silence was a lie.

The roof didn't just leak—it ruptured.

Four Men in White plummeted through the ceiling in a storm of jagged plaster and yellow insulation. They didn't fall; they landed with the heavy, hydraulic thud of soldiers wearing powered exoskeletons beneath their pristine suits.

“Target secured,” the lead agent said, his voice a flat, synthesized monotone. He didn't even look at Kyle. His visor was locked on Kotomi, who was still huddled by the shrine, her knuckles white as she clutched the secret photo of the Seven.

“Not today,” Kyle growled.

He moved.

He didn't lead with a punch—he delivered a palm strike. Direct. Absolute. His hand connected with the agent’s chest plate with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting an anvil. The kinetic energy didn't just push the man; it launched him. The agent flew backward, his body a white blur as he crashed through the front door and skipped across the asphalt of the street outside.

The second and third agents didn’t hesitate. They raised their forearms, where sleek, integrated gauntlets hummed with building pressure. The air around them warped in visible, shimmering waves.

Phfft. Phfft.

These weren't bullets. They were Condensed Air Slugs—high-pressure bolts of atmospheric force designed to punch through light armor.

Kyle grabbed the heavy oak dining table—the piece of furniture where Kotomi’s father had eaten breakfast every morning—and flipped it. The slugs hit with the force of cannonballs. The oak didn't just break; it was reduced to a cloud of splinters and toothpicks in mid-air.

“Kotomi! The back window—go!”

She scrambled, her oversized sleeves flapping like broken wings as she vaulted over the kitchen counter. Her fingers reached for the latch, desperate for the cool night air—

The window exploded inward.

A white-gloved hand punched through the smoke and glass, seizing the brim of her baseball cap and yanking her upward with terrifying strength.

“I have the Asset,” the fourth agent hissed into his comms.

Kyle was ten feet away. He wouldn’t make it in time. His muscles screamed as he realized the gap was too wide.

He reached inward—past the physical pain, past the noise of the collapsing house—to the still, dark place where his Chi lived. He stopped trying to be a shield and became a hook.

[Chi Fourth Stance: Curtain Pull – Kokushi!]

He raised his hand and grasped at the empty air, his fingers curling as if catching an invisible thread.

A filament of crimson light snapped into being—thin, translucent, and humming with an impossible, wire-tight tension. It looped around the agent’s wrist like a noose made of sheer will.

Kyle yanked.

The agent didn’t just fall; he was accelerated backward like a snapped tether. He was hauled through the kitchen, his body colliding with the industrial-grade refrigerator in a metallic crunch that left the appliance caved in and sparking with blue electricity.

Kotomi stumbled, her feet tangling in her oversized pants as she nearly hit the floor.

Kyle caught her mid-fall, one arm braced around her shoulders, his body acting as a shock absorber. He didn't look at the carnage; he looked at her.

“Do you have the photo?” he asked, his voice rough and smelling of ozone.

“I… I have it,” she gasped, her small hands trembling as she clutched the hidden picture of the Seven against her chest. It was the only piece of her mother she had left.

“Then we leave. Now.”

Kyle didn’t bother with the door. He didn't have the time to negotiate with locks or handles.

He turned toward the kitchen wall, Chi coiling through his spine like a pressurized spring. With a single, explosive shoulder strike, the bricks didn't just break—they detonated outward in a cloud of red mortar and white dust. They burst into the cool night air, landing in the gravel of the side-yard.

Outside, the neighborhood’s "amber" silence had shattered. The blockade was in place.

Two matte-white vans idled at the curb, their high-intensity LED headlights slicing through the darkness like surgical searchlights. Figures moved behind the beams—white suits, glowing visors, and weapons held at low-ready.

“We can’t outrun them!” Kotomi cried, her voice hitching. Her borrowed cap tumbled off in the wind, revealing eyes that were wide, tear-bright, and reflecting the clinical glare of the enemy.

“We’re not running,” Kyle said. A grim, knowing smile flickered on his lips as he spotted a familiar silhouette.

A sleek black sedan slid around the corner, ghosting through the street with predatory grace. Its headlights were off, but it moved with a silent, heavy authority that the white vans lacked. It skidded to a precise halt inches from the curb, right in the center of the kill zone.

The heavy back door swung open with a muffled thump.

“Master Kyle,” came a voice from within—smooth, dry, and faintly amused. “The neighborhood’s aesthetic has been quite ruined this evening, hasn’t it? Do hop in. I’ve prepared a light blend of Earl Grey, though I fear the road ahead may be… somewhat bumpy.”

“Sebastian?” Kyle gasped, relief flickering behind his eyes as he recognized the impeccably groomed butler. “How did you find us?”

Sebastian tilted his head, the light from the enemy vans glinting off his silver cufflinks. “Sir, do you truly believe we have the leisure for a retrospective analysis of my tracking capabilities?”

Kyle didn't argue. He scooped Kotomi up and slid her into the plush, leather-scented darkness of the back seat. She didn’t resist; she curled into a ball, still clutching the secret photo of the Seven against her chest, her breath coming in shallow, frantic bursts.

Kyle dove in after her, pulling the heavy door shut just as the first suppressed rounds began to ping against the sedan’s reinforced glass.

“Drive, Sebastian!”

“Of course, sir. Though I must ask—do try not to get plaster dust on the Connolly leather. It is, as you know, a nightmare to vacuum.”

The sedan’s engine roared to life—a deep, low-frequency growl that spoke of hidden horsepower and expensive engineering. Tires shrieked as Sebastian tore away from the curb, the G-force pinning Kyle and Kotomi into their seats.