"Ichiro, wait up a bit—we need to examine the case more carefully," said the girl, her tone steady but urgent as she stepped onto the rooftop.
Ichiro didn't stop walking. His long coat fluttered behind him as he made his way to the edge of the roof, staring down at the distant crowd below. "What else is there to examine?" he snapped. "The case is already clear. It's a spectre. We need to find the host and obliterate the parasite before more people fell victim to it."
She frowned. "You're being reckless again. We don't even know who the host is or how long they've been infected. If we go in blind, we might end up killing an innocent—someone who's being forced into this."
Ichiro finally turned to face her, his expression grim. "And how many more people do you want to disappear while we sit around theorising? Seventeen are missing. Seventeen. How many more do we need before we act?"
The wind picked up between them, brushing her long hair across her face as she narrowed her eyes. "You think I don't care about the victims? I've seen every report, visited every grieving family. But charging in without a plan isn't justice—it's desperation."
They stood on opposite ends of the rooftop, the sun beginning to set behind them. Shadows stretched long across the concrete, and with them, the weight of unspoken fears.
The two espers—Ichiro, with his straightforward aggressive method, and his colleague, with her methodical calm—had been assigned to the same task: investigate the string of recent disappearances. On the surface, the case looked ordinary—people vanishing without a trace in different districts of the city. But for those trained to sense supernatural interference, there were cracks beneath the surface.
Burn marks that never spread. Rooms are too cold despite fire damage. And the faint trace of spiritual residue—flickering silver embers left behind.
"Don't forget," she said quietly, stepping closer. "Spectres don't kill just for fun. They infect people who have esper powers… people like us. We don't just have a duty to stop them—we have a duty to understand what's happening."
Ichiro clenched his fists. "Understanding doesn't bring back the dead."
"No," she said. "But it might save the living."
Ichiro didn't reply. For a long moment, the only sound was the hum of distant traffic and the sharp cry of a crow flying overhead.
Then, finally, he sighed and turned away from the edge.
"If you want to take your time and play detective, be my guest. But I'm not sitting around while more people die because of that damn spectre."
Without waiting for a reply, Ichiro turned on his heel and leapt off the rooftop—his coat billowing as a sharp gust of wind cushioned his descent. It wasn't the most graceful exit, but it was pure Ichiro: direct, emotional, and dangerously impulsive.
His colleague remained on the roof, watching him vanish into the city below. She didn't call out to him. She knew it would be pointless.
Ichiro's actions weren't born from recklessness alone. There was history behind that fire in his eyes. The spectres had taken something from him—someone. His older sister, the woman who'd raised him after their parents died, had succumbed to one of those parasites. The memory of her—frail, drained, and terrified in her final days—was etched into Ichiro's mind like a scar that never healed.
That loss had twisted something in him. What used to be righteous resolve had sharpened into a single-minded hatred. And now, every time he caught wind of a spectre sighting, he moved like a man possessed.
He wasn't stupid. He knew how spectre hosts operated. They didn't kill right away. They waited. Watched. Hunted their prey from the shadows before striking at the moment no one expected.
Ichiro's own ability wasn't flashy. A wind-type esper, his gift was limited to short bursts of force—concentrated gusts that could disarm or unbalance an enemy if timed well. He couldn't summon tornadoes or glide through the air like some overpowered prodigy.
But what made him dangerous wasn't the wind.
Years of martial arts training had honed him into a living weapon. His body was a toolkit of precision strikes and reflexes, and his esper ability just gave him the edge he needed to close gaps or land critical hits. He wasn't elegant, and he wasn't subtle. Tracking and surveillance weren't his strengths—he was far too direct for that.
But when the fight came, Ichiro never held back.
And tonight, somewhere in the maze of alleys and rooftops below, he intended to find the host. And end this.
Unfortunately for Ichiro, the spectre host he was chasing wasn't someone who sought out confrontation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Aneira was a coward.
Not in the traditional sense, perhaps—but in the way she feared pain and feared conflict. She didn't take pleasure in what she was doing. If anything, she loathed it. But her fear of death—of that slow, draining decay the spectre had promised—kept her moving forward. Kept her killing.
Unlike other hosts who left behind corpses as evidence, Aneira was obsessively clean. She never left a dried husk behind. Every victim was incinerated—completely erased in moments by her own power, aided and amplified by the spectre's influence. The white-hot fire left behind no blood, no remains. Just a faint trace of silver ash that could easily be mistaken for something else.
It wasn't mercy.
It was fear.
Fear of being discovered. Fear of having to fight. Fear of what might happen if someone stronger came after her.
And ironically, that fear had turned her into a meticulous killer. Clean, calculated, and impossible to track. The Esper Association had only recently begun suspecting a spectre's involvement, and even then, the trail was maddeningly thin.
But that fear had kept her alive. And now, it alerted her again.
Someone was watching her. She felt it in the way the wind shifted unnaturally near her, in the subtle weight of a gaze lingering too long from the shadows. It was Ichiro. She didn't know his name, but she knew he was different. Persistent. Dangerous.
And worst of all, getting too close.
She stopped in her tracks and subtly changed her pattern, avoiding the busy downtown area she usually hunted in. No new victims tonight.
The spectre inside her stirred with irritation.
'Tch… spoilsport. Just when I was getting hungry again.'
Aneira didn't respond. She didn't have the energy to argue.
'Fine, fine,' the spectre muttered, its voice curling like smoke around her mind. 'I'll let it slide—for now. You've been feeding me well lately. I suppose I owe you a little leeway.'
Even the parasite recognised her caution. But Aneira had her reasons. This decision—delaying the next hunt—wasn't just for survival.
It was a gamble.
By halting the killings, she hoped the trail would go cold. That the man chasing her—this relentless shadow—would be thrown off, that he'd question his lead and abandon the idea that she was a spectre host.
She wasn't confident it would work.
But right now, hope was all she had.