The lieutenant, whose name was stitched into the scrap of fabric still pinned to his collar—Jiro—woke slowly, chained to a chair, armor stripped, jaw swollen. His golden eyes flicked from face to face, pupils slitted like a snake preparing to strike.
"Traitors," he hissed, voice thick with blood. "Ryo will digest you."
Hajime stepped forward and slapped him without ceremony. The sound cracked through the freezer like thunder. "Spare me the sermon," he growled. "Where's the convoy? The one headed to Kansai?"
Ren leaned against a broken shelf lined with expired ramen, arms crossed, trying not to shiver. Not from the cold. "You're not gone yet," he said calmly. "Your eyes haven't fully changed. Help us, and maybe we help you back."
Jiro spat, the blood painting his chin. "There's no cure. You're lying. You're always lying."
Mika, watching from a corner with her arms crossed over her chest, murmured, "His pulse is jumping. They've wired him. A biobomb—same implant the hybrids use."
Koji leaned in with a stolen Argwan scanner, watching data ripple across the screen. "Confirmed. One wrong word, and boom—his ribs become shrapnel. Cute, huh?"
Jiro's eyes widened. "I—I don't know the full route. I swear. But… Shin-Ōsaka Station. They restock there.11 pm. Please—"
"How many?" Hiroshi snapped, stepping forward, shadows dancing over his jaw.
""Twelve enforcers. And… one commander. Hybrid. Shinobu. She's—" His voice trembled, "—she's not human anymore."
Time fractured.
The air in the freezer thickened like fog, and something inside Ren cracked—quietly, inwardly, as if the world had tugged a thread that shouldn't have been touched.
His shoulders stiffened. Not from fear. Not from anger.
From disbelief.
That name.
Shinobu.
A ghost not even his guilt dared to remember.
She wasn't the first success of Project Eclipse. She was the first failure. A girl too young for war, too eager to impress the scientists who promised her salvation. She'd volunteered before the protocols were even stable—before the serum had been tested on anything that could cry. And when her body rejected it, violently, brutally… she had burned. Not in fire, but from the inside out.
Or so they thought.
He remembered the way she screamed in the isolation tank. How the lights flickered with each seizure. How her heartbeat skittered into chaos. How the monitors flatlined at 2:11 a.m.
And how he'd stood there, frozen on the other side of the glass, while the emergency crew sealed her in and marked the file: deceased.
But if Jiro was right…
Shinobu hadn't died.
She'd evolved.
Ren stared into nothing, his breath shallow. His hands trembled, just barely, the way they did when old sins crawled out of their graves.
Serena caught the shift in his posture, the slight crumbling at the edges of his mask. She stepped forward slowly, like someone approaching a man sleepwalking on the edge of a cliff.
"Ren?" she whispered. "You good?"
He didn't answer at first.
In his mind, Shinobu's face flashed—young, defiant, smiling with a mouthful of braces and eyes too bright for a dying world. She used to call him Sensei, even though he told her not to. Said it made him feel old.
And now…
She was a commander.
A hybrid.
Something between human and Argwan—twisted, evolved, maybe even reborn in agony.
She was supposed to be ashes.
Instead, she was coming for them.
Ren's voice, when it came, was soft and hollow. "No. That can't be her. Shinobu's dead."
Jiro laughed—cracked and bitter. "Then whatever's wearing her skin… sure knows how to scream your name."
No one spoke after that.
And Ren didn't move for a long time.
Not until the cold finally reached his bones, and even the ghosts stopped whispering
Then: "Plant a tracker. Dump him in the red zone."
Jiro's face twisted. "Wait—no—the bomb—!"
Koji pressed a small device against the back of Jiro's neck. "This'll block the signal. You've got six hours, pretty boy. Better run."
They left him trembling in the cold, whispering prayers no one taught anymore.
Back in the tunnels, the team walked slowly through the silence, every footstep echoing down concrete veins. Mika checked the tracker again—Jiro's signal blinked weakly, fleeing north through radiation fog. Haruto quietly disassembled his rifle, wiping it clean like it was a sacred ritual.
"He'll die anyway," Mika said, softly, almost like an apology to the world. "They'll trigger the kill-switch."
Ren exhaled slowly, voice low. "Gave him more time than his commanders would've."
Hajime scoffed, his prosthetic boot scraping the stone. "Sentimental crap. Shinobu'll find him. Rip his mind apart like the others."
Ren stopped walking. The shadows cast by broken lights played across his face, making him look older than he was. His fingers twitched as they grazed the chain around his neck, where Aiko's locket pressed against his skin like a wound that never scabbed.
He didn't speak, but in the stillness of his silence, Yui's voice rose from memory like a song sung by ghosts:
"Papa… why do the bad people look so scared?"
And somewhere, between the breath and the blink, Ren thought: Because they're still human. Because they know what they've become.
And maybe… because they want to be saved too
Maybe…..?
Who knows..?.