Location: Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department – Organized Crime Division7:03 AM
Detective Haruka Asano stared at the stack of files spread across her desk like a shuffled deck of nightmares. Her coffee had gone cold hours ago. She hadn't noticed.
Three teenage boys—missing. Last seen on the same street. Same school. Same time.No struggle. No bodies. No witnesses.
But now… it wasn't just them.
She flipped through the reports again.
A thirty-six-year-old convicted serial rapist—vanished from parole tracking without a trace.An underground loan shark, notorious for pushing debtors to suicide—gone.A gang leader known for recruiting kids and feeding them into human trafficking rings—disappeared on camera in the middle of a crowded bar. One frame he was there. Next—nothing.
It wasn't random anymore.
It was a purge.
Haruka leaned back, eyes burning with insomnia. She was no stranger to monsters. She'd tracked them for years, studied their habits, their victims. She knew cruelty better than most psychiatrists did.
But this? This was different.
There was no killer to chase. No trail of blood.
Just… silence.
Each of the files had only one thing in common now:The victim was the predator.
The air was thick with the weight of something unspoken, something ancient. The kind of dread that doesn't just settle on your shoulders—it sinks into your bones.
Her phone buzzed.
"Asano," she answered.
"Detective, we just got a call from Saitama General," her partner's voice said, tired and tense. "You're gonna want to see this."
"More disappearances?"
"Not exactly. The mother of one of the bullied students—Ren Kurosawa—she's in a coma. But apparently…" he paused. "...her vitals spiked last night. Something changed. And get this—the hospital cameras caught someone following the kid. But there's no face. No body. Just… a shadow."
Haruka's spine stiffened. "Send it to my monitor."
Thirty seconds later, the footage played.
A boy—Ren Kurosawa—walking under a streetlamp.Behind him... a flickering, humanoid distortion.Almost like it wasn't walking with him, but through him.
Her blood ran cold.
This wasn't justice.
This was judgment.
And someone—or something—was holding the gavel.
Location: Shibuya District – Rooftop, Sunrise
The old man sat on the edge of the building, legs swinging like a child's. The same crooked smile carved across his weathered face. His eyes glinted not with malice, but with the thrill of watching pieces move exactly where they were meant to.
Below, the city pulsed. Thousands of lives moving, sinning, repenting, sinning again.
"Ah, Haruka," he muttered to himself, smiling. "You've always been good at seeing the pattern."
Behind him, two keys floated in the air—one black, one gold.
He plucked the gold one out of the air and held it to his ear like a phone.
"Let's see how long it takes you to realize that the angels are far more dangerous than the devils."
His voice echoed in the void, not meant for mortal ears, but for the eyes of judgment watching silently from above.
He tossed the gold key into the air. It spun like a coin. Before it could fall, it vanished—blinking into existence hundreds of miles away. Somewhere in the upper floors of a prestigious academy, where another broken soul would find it lying on a windowsill, placed like a gift.
Balance was coming.
And Haruka Asano was about to step into a storm she couldn't analyze with logic or unravel with interrogation.
She would have to listen to her instincts.
And her instincts told her the world had changed—and she had been left behind.
Location: Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department – Evidence Room
Later that evening, Haruka stood alone, flicking through photos taken from the scenes of disappearances. Burned edges. Singed asphalt. A smell of sulfur in the air. No one mentioned it, but the stench lingered for days.
A faint trace of black soot was all that ever remained.
That, and the way people whispered.
Civilians, officers, and even her higher-ups had started to avoid talking about the disappearances like they were superstitions.
"We don't have proof."
"There's no pattern."
"They were criminals. Maybe they went underground."
Bullshit.
She stared at the bulletin board she'd crafted by hand. A spiderweb of faces, strings, case notes, and unsolved red flags. At the center, Ren Kurosawa's photo.
Not as a suspect.
Not yet.
But as a thread that refused to break.
"He's hiding something," she whispered.
As if in response, the lights above flickered.
Haruka didn't flinch. Not anymore. Not after what she'd seen.
She reached for her recorder and clicked it on. Her voice, flat and calm, began to speak:
"Detective's log. Day 12 of the Kurosawa case expansion. Seventeen disappearances. No common M.O. aside from one connection: every victim had a known criminal history. Every last one."
She paused.
"And every last one was known for escaping the law's grasp."
Another click. Silence.
She didn't say it out loud, but it haunted her now:
Someone—or something—was cleaning up the world.
And she wasn't sure she wanted to stop it.