The intersection of Hibiya-dori and the main arterial road leading to Shiba Park was a graveyard of steel.
It was 4:48 AM. The sky to the east was beginning to bleed a bruised purple, but the streetlights were still humming, casting long, sickly yellow shadows over the gridlock. Every traffic light in the Minato district hundreds of thembhad turned red simultaneously.
And they had stayed red.
"Move!" Manjiro slammed his hand on the horn, the sound joining a chorus of thousands of other frustrated drivers. "Get out of the way!"
Kenji Sano didn't bother honking. He stared through the windshield of the unmarked sedan at the sea of brake lights stretching endlessly toward the Tokyo Tower. The tower itself stood like a jagged orange needle against the dawn, mocking them.
"It's not an accident." Kenji said, his voice terrifyingly calm. He was checking the traffic grid on his tablet. The entire district was a solid block of red lines. "He hacked the grid. He locked the signals to 'stop' in a three-mile radius around the park."
"He's blocking the response teams." Manjiro realized, looking at the GPS. "Ambulances, patrol cars, SWAT... nothing can get through this knot. We're stuck."
"He doesn't want the police there." Kenji unbuckled his seatbelt. "He wants the audience."
Kenji kicked the door open. The humid morning air hit him, thick with exhaust fumes and the nervous energy of a city waking up to a nightmare.
"We run." Kenji ordered. "Leave the car. Leave the heavy gear. Just run."
They sprinted between the stalled cars, weaving through the labyrinth of bumpers and side mirrors. Drivers were stepping out of their vehicles, confused and angry. But they weren't looking at the traffic lights anymore. They were looking at their phones.
The blue glow of screens illuminated their faces like ghost lights.
Kenji caught snippets of audio as he ran past a group of teenagers huddled by a taxi.
"...livestream is live..."
"...is that the Judge?..."
"...The Shogun is posting..."
The city wasn't asleep. It was watching. The killer had turned the morning commute into a front-row seat for an execution.
Zojoji Temple, Shiba Park.
05:05 AM.
Shiba Park was usually a sanctuary of silence at this hour. It was a place where history whispered, where the ancient Zojoji Temple - the family temple of the Tokugawa Shogunate, stood in stark contrast to the modern steel of the Tokyo Tower rising directly behind it.
But today, the silence had been murdered.
Kenji and Manjiro burst through the northern gate, their lungs burning, sweat soaking through their shirts. They stopped dead, their hands hovering over their holsters.
They expected to see a lone madman digging a hole. They expected a crime scene.
What they found was a congregation.
Hundreds of people were already there. They stood in a wide, loose semi-circle on the gravel path leading to the main temple hall. They were silent, a collective mass of curiosity and morbid fascination. There were joggers, salarymen with briefcases who had detoured from the subway, and night-shift workers still awake from the night before.
And in the center of the circle, bathed in the harsh white light of a portable LED floodlight that the killer had set up, was the verdict.
Judge Masao Tanaka was buried in the earth.
He had been planted like a tree in the center of the gravel path. Only his head remained above ground. The soil was packed tightly around his neck, immobilizing him completely. He looked like a grotesque bust statue abandoned in the park.
His face was grey with terror, covered in a sheen of sweat and dirt. His hair was matted with mud. His eyes darted frantically from face to face in the crowd, pleading, begging.
But he couldn't speak. His mouth was gagged with a thick strip of white cloth, tied brutally tight behind his head.
Mmmph! Mmmmpphhh!
The sound was pathetic. A high-pitched whimper that barely carried over the wind.
Next to his head, driven deep into the soil, was a wooden stake. Leaning against it was the instrument.
It wasn't a metal saw. It was a piece of bamboo, roughly two feet long. It had been split down the middle, and one edge had been whittled and carved into jagged, serrated teeth. It looked primitive. Cruel. A tool designed not to cut cleanly, but to tear.
And next to the saw was a placard, written in thick, black brushstrokes on a white board:
THE LAW IS BLIND.
THE JUDGE IS A LIAR.
TAKE A CUT, AND RESTORE JUSTICE.
Kenji pushed forward, shoving people aside. "Police! Back away! Move!"
The crowd rippled, but they didn't scatter. They looked at Kenji with a strange, detached defiance. They were filming. Hundreds of camera lenses pointed not at the suffering man, but at the spectacle.
"Manjiro, secure the perimeter!" Kenji shouted, though he knew it was impossible. Two men against three hundred?
Kenji reached the Judge. He fell to his knees in the gravel, clawing at the packed dirt around Tanaka's neck.
"It's okay." Kenji breathed, his hands digging into the soil. "We're here. We're going to get you out."
Tanaka's eyes rolled back in his head. He was hyperventilating. The pressure of the earth on his chest was likely making it hard to breathe, restricting his diaphragm. Every breath was a struggle against the weight of the ground.
"The dirt is packed too tight," Kenji grunted, his fingernails tearing against the stones mixed in the soil. "I need a shovel! Does anyone have a shovel?"
He looked up at the crowd.
Silence.
Not a single person moved to help. They just watched. A young man in the front row, wearing a university hoodie, zoomed in with his phone, the flash going off in the Judge's eyes.
"Help me!" Kenji roared, his voice cracking with desperation. "He is a human being! Put down the phones and help me dig!"
"He didn't help us." a voice called out from the back of the crowd.
Kenji froze. "Who said that?"
"He didn't help my father." the voice came again, emboldened. A woman stepped forward slightly. She looked tired, her face worn. "He dismissed the cancer lawsuit against Kurosawa. My father died coughing up blood because this man ruled that the factory smoke was 'within legal limits'."
A murmur of agreement rippled through the mob. It started low, like the buzzing of wasps.
"He took the money!" another man shouted.
"We saw the ledger! The Shogun posted it online!"
"Let him rot!"
"Use the saw!"
The atmosphere shifted instantly. It went from curiosity to anger. The mob realized they weren't just spectators, they were the jury. The killer had given them permission to hate. He had stripped the Judge of his authority and served him up on a platter.
Kenji stood up, drawing his weapon. He pointed it at the sky, his hand shaking with rage.
"Get back!" Kenji screamed. "This is a crime scene! Anyone who steps forward will be arrested for obstruction of justice!"
"You can't arrest all of us." the university student muttered, lowering his phone but not backing down. "There are too many lies, Detective. And only one saw."
Manjiro appeared at Kenji's side, his massive frame acting as a shield between the Judge and the mob. But even Manjiro looked rattled.
"Kenji, we have a problem." Manjiro whispered, tapping his earpiece. "The livestream... it's broadcasting audio. But not from here."
"What?"
High above, lost in the glare of the rising sun behind the Tokyo Tower, the hum of rotors became audible.
Kenji looked up. A heavy-lift drone was hovering about fifty feet above the temple grounds. It was black, sleek, and carried a high-output speaker system slung under its belly.
The Shogun wasn't here. He was watching from the sky.
A voice boomed from the drone's speaker, echoing off the wooden walls of the ancient temple. It was the same distorted, god-like voice Kenji had heard on the phone.
"The sun has risen."
The crowd looked up, mesmerized. The sky to the east was now blindingly bright. The first rays of the sun hit the golden ornaments of the Zojoji Temple, and illuminated the terrified face of Masao Tanaka.
"The weed is exposed." the voice continued.
"The gardener has prepared the soil. But the gardener cannot do the work alone. The community must tend to its own garden."
Judge Tanaka began to sob behind the gag. Tears mixed with the dirt on his face. He shook his head violently, pleading with his eyes. He looked at Kenji, silently begging him to shoot the drone, to shoot the crowd, to do something.
"Look at him.." the voice commanded. "He sits in judgment of you every day. He decides who goes to prison and who goes to the gala. He decides whose pain matters. Today, you decide."
The drone descended slightly, the camera lens pivoting to look at the crowd.
"The law failed you. The courts failed you. But the wood is honest. The Saw is waiting. Who has the courage to take the first cut?"
Kenji aimed his gun at the drone. "Shut it down!" he yelled at the sky. He fired two shots.
Bang! Bang!
The shots missed. The drone simply ascended higher, out of range, its voice still booming.
"Don't listen to him!" Kenji shouted at the crowd, turning his back on the Judge to face the mob. "He is manipulating you! He wants you to become murderers! If you touch that saw, you destroy yourselves!"
"We are justice!" a man shouted.
The crowd parted.
A figure stepped out.
He was a middle-aged man, wearing a worn blue construction uniform. His boots were dusty. His face was lined with a grief so deep it looked like erosion on a cliff face. He walked slowly toward the circle, his eyes locked on the bamboo saw.
"Sir, stop!" Kenji leveled his weapon at the man. "Stay back! I will shoot!"
The man didn't stop. He didn't even blink.
"My daughter was raped." the man said, his voice trembling but loud in the silence. "The attacker was the son of a politician. This judge... this man... he gave him probation. He said it was a 'mistake of youth'. My daughter hung herself three months later."
The crowd gasped. The sympathy was palpable. It swirled around the construction worker like armor. The police were the villains now. The man in the blue uniform was the hero.
"Sir," Kenji lowered his gun slightly, knowing he couldn't shoot a grieving father in front of a live audience. "I am sorry about your daughter. Truly. But this is not the way. If you hurt him, you let the darkness win."
"I am already in the dark." the man said.
He stepped into the circle.
"Manjiro!" Kenji signaled.
Manjiro lunged forward to tackle the man, but the crowd surged. It was a physical wave of bodies. Three men grabbed Manjiro from behind, pulling him back.
"Let go of him!" Manjiro roared, throwing an elbow into a ribcage, but he was swarmed.
"Kenji! Watch out!"
Kenji was cut off. A wall of people separated him from the Judge and the construction worker.
"No!" Kenji holstered his weapon, he couldn't shoot civilians and threw himself into the mass. He was punching, shoving, screaming. "Get out of the way!"
Through the gaps in the bodies, Kenji saw the construction worker kneel in the dirt.
The man reached out. His calloused hand wrapped around the bamboo saw.
Judge Tanaka screamed behind the gag, a sound of pure, primal terror that vibrated in the ground. He twisted his neck, trying to pull it into the earth like a turtle, but the dirt held him fast.
The construction worker looked at the Judge. There was no hesitation in his eyes. Only a cold, dead resolve.
"For Yumi," the man whispered.
He raised the saw.
Chapter 11 Ends - Justice!