Chapter 42 - Daisuke KuroganeHollow Night I let my mind wander as my body glided, ducked, and weaved through the silent nighttime streets, Juno’s voice ringing loudly through the alleyways and avenues. I didn’t know what they were talking about, and I didn’t care.

  My mind was on other things.

  Soon enough I’d reached the underpass underneath the train tracks right outside the station.

  In the daytime, you’d used to find homeless people congregating around their ragged tents, talking amongst themselves animatedly. Nowadays though, they’d just be shivering around a trashcan fire, hands outstretched like they were performing some kind of ritual.

  Sometimes when I had nothing to do with myself during the holidays or on weekends, I’d wander around forgotten pces like these, filled with equally forgotten people, and wonder how things would turn out for them both a decade or so from now.

  Would they still be here, huddling around a burning barrel with no prospects, no hope? Nothing to ever look forward to but more bumbling around until something irretractable happened?

  Thinking about it never did me any good, so at some point, I stopped. Eventually, I avoided walking by altogether. I didn’t have that luxury in this pce.

  Running away here would only get you killed, after all.

  Once I was sure the pce was clear of any Noise, I hid behind one of the cracked stone pilrs and took the journal I’d gotten from that Rabbit Noise st night.

  I remember giving it to Reaper after they…helped me out st night, but I didn’t get the chance to meet them after-school today to find out what was in it. I’m sure I don’t need to expin why.

  Instead, as soon as we appeared tonight they’d returned the journal and, to my surprise, the lighter we’d been given all the way back on the first night. If I remembered correctly, that Furusawa guy was in possession of it until he died. Why did they have it now?

  I was about to ask them what they’d discovered, and maybe even share some of what I discovered yesterday, but before I knew it, sparks were flying and the idiots had started fighting already.

  Reaper went off to defend the Vice-Prez, who I think was her Pact partner or something, leaving me alone there with the items.

  I remember staring the journal for a long while before I felt someone’s eyes on me too. I didn’t need to look up to know it was him. Aware that he was watching my every move, I raised my head, feigned a chuckle, and locked eyes with my ‘partner’.

  I felt like I was staring into a soulless mirror. Any other bozo might have been shaking in his boots right about now – but this wasn’t one of those situations. After all, this guy and I weren’t so different. Perhaps that’s why we’d been matched.

  I smiled, narrowing my eyes and maintaining eye contact. We remained like that for a while until words that I hadn’t premeditated nor anticipated began to spill out of me, low enough that only he could hear.

  “I’ll be waiting for that rematch,” I heard myself taunt, recalling my failure during that first night. “Until then, try not to get yourself killed, weak-ass.”

  Seeing that the group’s ‘festivities’ in the centre of the space had reached a standstill, I decided to take my leave. Just as I was turning my back to exit, I found myself frozen from head to toe. There was a chill on my neck that was unlike the gust that occasionally blew down the streets.

  I didn’t even hear him walk up to me when he said, “Consider your days numbered.”

  When I finally turned around, he was gone.

  This time, my ughing was real.

  The Hollow Night was fucking amazing.

  Dragging my focus back to the present, I took a sharp inhale before opening the journal to the first page.

  The writing was scrawny and rushed, as if the author had penned the whole damn thing on a rollercoaster. The state of the actual pages didn’t help either, with entire sections containing bnk pages in the middle of hastily written entries.

  I supposed that was where the lighter came in.

  Scanning the area once more, I calmed my pounding chest and began reading from the first page onwards.

  With enough squinting, I could just about make out that the journal had been written by someone, or something, called Anxiety. Who names their kid Anxiety? Is that one of the me-ass codenames they gave us that appeared on the leaderboard or whatever?

  I thought back to visions I saw st night after defeating that ghost-like Noise, courtesy of that gemstone thingy it dropped. As if it could read my thoughts, I felt the object begin to rattle slightly in my pouch.

  I opted to ignore it for now and get back to my investigation.

  Could the author have been Kenjiro, Minami’s partner from the st game? Or maybe someone else from the list of pyers I managed to put together? Either way, I reasoned that reading the contents would help me suss out the identity of the writer.

  So, with lighter in hand, I read from cover to cover of the dusty, aged journal, raising my head every minute and a half to check that the coast was still clear.

  Whenever I came across a bnk page, holding the blue fme of the lighter near the paper caused the words hidden within to manifest in deep, inky bck blots. My surprise was palpable.

  I wasn’t sure how Reaper figured this out, but I had the feeling they knew a lot more about all this than they were letting on.

  Anyway, the first half or so of Anxiety’s journal was useless. Just entries about the stuff it got up to, most of which was feeling scared about the situation and running away from Noise.

  The only useful parts were where it mentioned other people’s names, and thankfully, a lot of the names mentioned here had also featured in the list I’d curated. I was on the right track.

  It appeared Anxiety wasn’t the only one with shitty parentage though, since they mentioned a bunch of other emotions like Anger and Courage and Love like this was some new Super Sentai series.

  But whenever they mentioned an emotion, a specific name would always crop up not long before or after; Kin.

  Takeda Kin.

  Was he their master, or something? I knew he was a student at Kasumi, just like the rest of the pyers, who’d suddenly passed while in a comatose state. Shit, was that what was happening to that Furusawa guy now?

  I kept my questions on standby as I continued through the journal.

  If Anxiety’s information was to be trusted, then the rules of their game were armingly simir to ours. The basic structure was identical – with the Kasumi students also being spirited away each night, given missions, and they had powers too.

  Theirs seemed pretty out there, though.

  Take Kenjiro, for example. Apparently the dude could form his own damn psychic creations; like bsts or weapons. Imagine the damage you could do with that!

  Kenjiro seemed kind of wimpy in the vision I saw of him though, so I guess maybe he used it mainly for defence.

  That was only scratching the surface, too. One girl named Asuna could generate steam, which sounds shit at first, but apparently she got pretty creative with it and turned fights around that they otherwise would’ve lost.

  Another girl named Inja, apparently Asuna’s Pact partner, had some kind of ‘glitch’ ability that allowed her to practically break the game. I’m sure Juno had accounted for that, so there probably weren’t any major vulnerabilities she could’ve leveraged against them, but still…just imagine the havoc they could’ve wreaked.

  It looked like the progression of theirs worked differently, though. Not to mention some of the ter missions got…real interesting. Otherwise, they were pying the exact same game.

  The main difference came in how they handled it.

  While all it took for us to break down was one weakling biting the dust, these guys managed to get through most of the week without losing anyone.

  My guess? That cssic Japanese collectivism.

  From what I read and saw of Kasumi High, the students there were stupidly friendly, like they’d all been children’s TV presenters in a past life.

  Even though most of the students there didn’t really hang around in the same groups, most were on good terms, which was more than I could say for our ragtag entourage.

  Of course, you had your outliers like Minami or this Reihai girl (who apparently gave Anxiety the creeps), but for the most part, these guys were so close-knit in the game I almost threw up.

  That is, until I got about halfway through the journal.

  Turns out these guys weren’t that much better than us, after all. A chain is only as strong as its weakest – or in this case, most calcuting – link.

  By the time they’d gotten to the sixth night, it looked like these guys were pretty optimistic about everything. Until one person decided to speak up. You probably already know who I’m referring to.

  According to one of the ter entries, Minami believed that their troubles were far from over. In fact, he argued that this would be the time that they needed to be on guard the most, now that they were almost at the finish line.

  Not all of Anxiety’s transcriptions were all that legible since Minami was known to speak in terms of mathematical lexicon (which might expin why nobody took him seriously), but it was clear that he was pretty worried about something.

  The st they saw of him, he took Kenjiro and walked off, muttering something about how they’ll all suffer for not having solved for x, whatever that meant.

  That was the st normal entry in the diary.

  Everything else, even with the revealing power of the lighter, was just a bunch of panicked scribbles. I was only able to make out sentences such as:

  Kemono’s dead!

  Is it true that Ren was killing us?

  We can’t find Asuna!

  Inja’s missing!

  Now that I thought about it, this sounded just like the crazy whispers of that Noise I fought yesterday. What was the link between the Noise and the previous pyers? Why were we getting their items from these random –

  ‘Random’? It wasn’t random though, was it? Rabbits are known for being particurly frightful and, well, anxious creatures. Could Anxiety have been…?

  In any case, whatever had gone down on the st two nights was what caused the Kasumi students to all fall apart.

  In the end, Minami seemed to be the only one who made it out, and even then, he seemed extremely nervous that something was coming after him in the real world. Not to mention he knew my name.

  There was also Kenjiro, whose had been completely missing from the reports, even though Minami was apologizing to him in that video. Where was he? Did he make it out too? Did Minami silence him in the real world to stop him talking?

  Kenjiro had also been concerned about something in that vision the gemstone had shown me. Had Minami really been behind the deaths of all those other pyers?

  As I read the journal’s final pages and shut it, all these questions and more began to swirl around my mind. For every new piece of information I discovered, five more questions followed.

  I was going in circles. I needed some time to gather up all of our leads and figure this all out.

  In fact, I was so deep in thought that I hadn’t noticed the steady footsteps encroaching from behind. How could I have been so ignorant? In one swift movement, I rolled away from the pilr, brandished my kusari, and had my eyes ready.

  Just a few meters down the road, I met eyes with the st person I wanted to see right now, and it looks like he’d got himself a new cky.

  “Oh! You startled me, Kurogane!” Rusuban smirked without a hint of jumpiness. ‘Startled’ my ass. He knew I was here. It didn’t take a genius to figure out how, given the ability of the person stood next to him.

  Rusuban’s eyes wandered to the journal and lighter, which I’d dropped onto the floor mid-roll, and I practically saw him pulsing with greed.

  “…What do you have over there, Kurogane? May we take a look?” Rusuban asked without taking his eyes off of the items.

  I got right to point.

  “Fuck off. You and your sidekick – before I make good on that promise from earlier.”

  I hadn’t forgotten what he’d said.

  I know I’d vowed to save him for st, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t rough him up a bit as a little taster of what’s to come. Think of it like an appetiser, if you will…

  His sheepish grin vanished, and for a while he just stared at me emptily. I didn’t know how to interpret that, so I stared back.

  As if he’d understood that I wasn’t interested in pying his mind games any further, he wordlessly nodded to the redhead, Kozuki or whatever, who now brandished a new yet somehow familiar-looking white sword in addition to her own rapier.

  She started walking towards me.

  With a sigh, I put the lighter in my pouch and scooped up the journal in my left arm.

  This was going to be a long night.