The man hardly had time to scream as Hiroki pushed him hard with a force that sent him crashing against the vending machine, a heavy thud that sent echoes ringing through the room and caused all the cans inside the machine to violently shake, as if bones shaking against each other in a tin coffin. The fluorescent light above them flashed on and off, giving off a weird light. Hiroki's jaw, on the other hand, was clenched tightly in resolve. His grip on the man was equally tight, a manifestation of his adamant resolve and focus.
"Dipshit," he hissed out between his gritted teeth, his breath steaming out in hot gusts driven by raging anger. "You are the best evidence of God's displeasure with his handiwork—I saw you up to some scandalous hanky-panky with your own damn hands in that very spot, you dirty dickhead."
The man squirmed like a rat trapped in mid-scurry—sweating, gasping, trying to get the words out, but what came out was the bubbling mania of a man who thought the crowd would protect him. He had chosen the one place he thought was invisible—half concealed behind bodies, back to the corner wall of the train.
He never knew there existed Red Eye Ronins until this moment.
Zenkichi emerged from the side, sliding with slow, labored speed while cracking his knuckles with effort and melodrama. He did not say anything, deciding he had no words to say. The look in his eye was enough—it was a sermon in itself, a combination of righteous distaste and an almost animal sense of compassion.
The air was pulled taut like a pulled string. No one breathed. People standing around them did not run. They stood. Quiet. Dignified. Some with phones half-raised, others with fists half-tensed—no one applauding, no one stopping it. Just a city's worth of silent verdicts given with narrowed eyes. Because everyone here, all the salarymen and commuters and students in uniform, had known what was never declared out loud by the justice system:
That the only barrier that halted evil in its path wasn't law. It was a shame. Fear. A lesson learned not in courtrooms but with calloused knuckles and teeth knocked off tiled floors.
Hiroki leaned in close, his low and rumbling whisper filled with a searing intensity, as he placed his face inches from the pervert's now very pale skin, which seemed to reflect the fear coming from him. "You ever attempt that crap again," he warned in slow, measured tones but with an unmistakable deadliness in his voice, "I will make it my business to throw you into a vat of liquid oxygen."
There was a pause. Even the trains seemed to hush.
"What?" Bird blinked, genuinely caught off guard. "Why liquid oxygen?"
A subdued murmur coursed through the crowd, like the hiss of static electricity gathering in the air.
Hiroki was completely unmoved and didn't even show any trace of fear or uncertainty. He stopped to readjust his position, arching his neck audibly as he did so, his eyes still shining with that intense, almost-psychotic calm combined with a sense of almost-psychotic justice that hung in the air. "The liquid will not permit him to live," he intoned solemnly, his voice sounding like rough gravel in an old, somber temple. "And the oxygen will not permit him to die."
"Motherf—wait," Bird suddenly cut off his furious, hot-tempered tirade, as an instant of recognition briefly disrupted the momentum of his angry tirade. "She was your daughter's age." He glared intensely downward at the creased man, staring intensely as if he was trying to strip the very flesh of his own soul away using only the strength of his eyes. "Daughterfucker."
The word landed with the impact of a steel bat—absurd in its very nature, furious in its intensity, and strikingly accurate in the most revolting manner possible.
He nodded his head at the entire group of writhing perverts, now six individuals, squirming and twisting like a heap of shattered shame. "The last man who was stupid enough to do that kind of thing," Bird continued, striding back and forth like a preacher preparing to give his congregation a powerful dose of righteous fury, "we subjected him to the ghastly ordeal of eating British food."
A sharp, ice-cold wind cut across the platform as if it, too, had just heard the stunning sentence that hung heavy in the atmosphere. This was not ordinary cold, however, but the kind of cold that comes not from the usual shifts in weather patterns, but rather a cold that comes from a deep, stomach-level fear, the kind that indicates that something that cannot be spoken and something deeply unsettling has just been uttered out loud for everyone to hear.
Bird's voice was like a garrote. "And the one who came before him."
Hiroki moved forward. His boots hit once on concrete, the weight of memory behind it. His tone dropped into something surgical, clinical—like he weren't describing a punishment but a sacrament. "We ensured that he sat down and experienced every single season of Euphoria in its entirety," he stated. "It was a continuous viewing, one episode after another. There were absolutely no breaks allowed. No food was provided during this time."
There was no laughter. There was just silence. Stillness.
A woman lost her phone. A schoolgirl put her hand over her mouth as though she was about to scream. A middle-aged man fell to his knees as though hit by the ghost of Zendaya's dead-eyed monologues. In the distance, a train rumbled in protest.
One mother hugged her child tightly in her arms. It was not a secure hug with a sense of power and safety. Instead, it was a sorry hug. It was as if she was attempting to show silently, "Things in the world have gone too far, and I couldn't stop it."
One of the men—a ghostly figure in a suit, the residue of office strata and an unobtrusive but disconcerting air of debasement—trembled wildly to crawl away. He pulled himself forward on his elbows, like a soldier on a battlefield at war and so battered that it no longer honored the icons of flags or the presence of gods. Tears streamed down his face as he moved, streaking the platform as they mixed with puddles of urine and blood. His voice cracked and trembled with raw emotion as he begged, "Please… just call the police…"
Hiroki didn't so much as look his way. He stood as a pillar of significance, indifferent and unmoved.
The man was cast a shadow by Bird. He did not stoop or threaten. He merely inquired, careless and detached, "What about the rest?"
Hiroki spun in his direction, grinning with a wide smile that resembled the expression on the face of a man whose mind was caught in a lunatic cross between a colorful festival and an insane bar fight. "As for the rest of me? I'm doing just fine, and I thank you for asking. This morning, I ate some leftover takoyaki—though it was a bit on the rubbery side, which unfortunately led to some constipation on my part. But I believe that if I—
SMACK.
Bird's hand came down with a violent and savage slash against Hiroki's head, with an impact that seemed to be imbued with the very force of a cosmic fiat—a cosmic decree of the heavens. It seemed as if, for an instant, a god, tired of the foolishness of men, had taken hold of Bird's arm to give this thunderous blow.
It's not you, you gelatin-brained hemorrhoid—I was talking about them. I meant the others of this strange collection of people!
"Alright, alright! "Damn," Hiroki groaned with a hint of a wince as he massaged the back of his skull in a near juvenile fashion, as if a young one being chastised by the universe itself for some unknown transgression. Nonetheless, in spite of his complaining, which was laced with irritability, the grin on his face made an appearance again—it was crooked, devious, and bore the air of one much too pleased with his own brand of insanity. "We got one of 'em to don a pair of hip Air Jordans, complete with a vibrant Supreme bright red jacket, and to finish the look off, a gaudy Rolex watch."
The audience gazed at one another. One of the boys in the back even raised an eyebrow. "That… doesn't sound like a punishment…"
But before the sentence could finish itself, Hiroki had cut him off abruptly, his tone incisive and unyielding, like the sudden and deadly drop of a guillotine.
"—And made him walk into the O'Block."
The air changed.
Bird's face paled. In the distance, a pigeon took flight as if it knew something was wrong. A child gasped. A man in the crowd crossed himself despite being Buddhist.
The molester, lying on the ground, whined pitifully, and even his creepy friends, being typically oblivious of their own behavior, winced in distaste as if they were sinners confronted with the gruesome image of an open coffin.
"Absolutely not…" a voice whispered softly.
"Oh yes," Hiroki said, eyes flashing like a man who had read Dante personally and thought, "I'll write a new layer for that guy." Rolled up at noon. Daylight. Full fit. Rolex glistening like a solar flare.
"Jesus Christ," Bird moaned. "Did he make it?"
"Ah, he made it through," Hiroki replied, his expression changing to a grin that was so sharp it would cut through steel like a hot knife through butter.
.....
Fatiba Darvish stood on the very edge of the crowded station, her arms folded tightly over the crown of her head, and a deep crease scored between her eyebrows under the soft, flowing curve of her hijab. As she looked around at the scene before her, her voice cut through the warm summer air with a sharpness like the crack of a whip. "What the fuck is going on?" she breathed in anger, her voice half-said in thought and half-said in prayer to God, hoping that some explanation would be found. "They're near as strange as Shotaro," she said, her voice showing her confusion and reciting the strangeness of those around her.
A mother stood beside her, leaning in close to a weathered grandmother, her voice so low and hushed as if she were sharing the secret location of an underground uprising that might alter the course of everything. "I heard," she whispered, "that if one calls them—just one confirmed call from a victim of their doing—those two don't even blink or wait a second."
"Wait for what?" the old woman asked, her eyes wide and blinking with incredulity.
For the man to go out," said the mother, her eyes open wide in shock and wonder. "They do not think twice; they just break in without any hesitation. They just enter the house as if it belonged to them, with bamboos oiled in their hands.".
The grandmother stiffened as if she'd heard the devil himself at the door. "Oiled-up bamboos?
Slippery for maximum impact," the mother said softly, her voice low and filled with an atmosphere of foreboding. "You need to make a faster swing. It does not leave a traceable bruise but it definitely creates a hell of a welt. This is what we refer to as old school justice.".
Amidst the hum of fluorescent lights and cicadas shrieking into the hot summer's night, Fatiba stood at the platform of the station's tile floor as if she had been caught in the middle of a living court trial. No judge. No gavel. Only voices. Low. Passionate. Human.
The grandmother flinched as if the word itself was stinging. "Oiled-up bamboos?"
"Slippery for better effect," replied the mother, not boastful—just truthful. "Doesn't break bones. But it breaks habits."
Both men looked away as another woman sat down, expertly pushing aside a stroller with one hand and a cigarette in the other. "Notice the one on the left, the guy with tattoos and the absurd 'baddass skeleton.jpg' tattooed on his bicep? That's Zenkichi Gojo. He prefers to be called Bird." She blew out smoke, gratified that the action left a bad taste on her tongue. "His dad runs a little electronics store. A very nice man, I assure you. It's funny the way he wears a muffler in this heat, like he has a personal grudge against air conditioners."
"Her laugh is like that of a cow attempting to swallow a mango seed," joked the grandmother. "I know his mother."
Two of the neighbors nodded in agreement, suppressing a snicker. And then stroller-woman continued, no longer wry, "But Bird? Used to be scum. Real scum. Beat up little kids. Stole lunch money. Broke toys. Bragged about it. Until a bigger scumbag.Shotaro found him."
Fatiba's eyes widened, a mirror to her shock and disbelief. "What—are they seriously saying that Shotaro is the bad one in that entire story?
And in an instant, the platform underwent a remarkable transformation. It evolved into a cacophony of hushed conversations and quiet discussions. Small clusters of murmured disagreements ignited spontaneously, spreading rapidly like a wildfire across the hard concrete surface.
And in an instant, the platform was changed. It was a living chorus of whispers, full of the voices of the multitude. Small groups of hushed arguments erupted into existence suddenly, spreading rapidly like wildfire along the length of the concrete floor.
"He has no right to do that at all," someone gasped with passion. "This is no longer the Sengoku era, you know. There are police officers here. There is a proper legal process."
"Right? Slavery used to be a right," another one retorted. "Lynching too. Just doesn't mean legal."
"He's no hero," a weary voice said from behind Fatiba, its tone thick with exhaustion. "What he actually is, is a person who actually just happens to be good at beig scarier the very monsters he hunts."
The station turned into a confessional.
Words spilled out—not with the force of a bellow, nor with the sharpness of a scream—but in a barely audible voice that conveyed an urgency born of a long-suppressed truth beneath the surface of civility. Fatiba was at the center of this tempestuous moment, as fleeting and insubstantial as a breath, observing with piercing understanding a society that cringed in distaste around its festering sore.
A cluster of schoolgirls in checkered dresses and loose sleeves thrust their voices into the struggle. Young, rebellious, shaking but sure.
"Do you even know how Musashi no Yamato used to be before the rōnins' time, when it was their territory?" one of them asked the group's older members. "Those times, we would come home with our keys clutched securely between our fingers for protection."
"Constantly texting back and forth with each other. Telling us where we are in the moment. Constantly looking over our shoulders," another added to the discussion. "It's because you adults didn't do anything."
A snort of disdain from an elderly man. "Is it really your opinion that violence is the same as justice today?
The girl looked him in the eyes. "No. But the creeps don't care about justice. They care about pain. And he gives them something to fear."
"They're not so much afraid of being sued," her friend continued in irate tones. "What they're really afraid of is being dragged into an alleway and not coming out with healthy knee caps."
There was a silence after that line. Sharp. Real.
Next to them on the bench was a father with a tired face and a daughter wearing pigtails, gazing at a neatly dressed businesswoman perusing on her phone with exaggerated disdain.
So, are you okay with the existence and activities of gangs today?" the woman replied in a cold and emotionless tone.
"I'm not," his father answered with a collected tone. "But I am more than happy to have my daughter walk her way home without uttering a prayer first."
"You're teaching her to depend on thugs."
"It's failure of the officials we need a thug, I'm teaching her that monsters only stop when something scarier starts watching over the streets."
Air was thick and heavy in the air—not with smoke, but imbued with an acute sense of tension. Station lights hummed above constantly like a swarm of anxious thoughts churning in one's head. Around Fatiba, whispers and murmurs simmered menacingly like thunderclouds in the distance, low and charged.
"He is no goddamn hero," a chic woman spat disdainfully, brushing her coat with a practiced movement, as though she wore dignity draped proudly over her shoulders. "He is nothing but a vigilante. A thug, if you prefer to call him something. He is just some relic of a lawless past that we should long since have outgrown."
A younger man leaned in, hoodie covering low over weary eyes. "You can say that now. Until it's your daughter being followed home on the 7:15."
"My daughter," the woman snapped back quickly and forcefully, "will grow up knowing full well that the law is around and that it will protect her. That she is entitled and able to report—"
"Report to whom?" a mother shouted behind her, holding a lunchbox at the ready like a club. "Report it to the police who blissfully do the blind thing? Or to the schools that wave such behavior away by calling it 'boys being boys'? My daughter was inappropriately touched on the train last year. I begged the authorities to charge. Do you know what the police officer said to me in response?"
The audience leaned forward.
"Maybe she is the one who had asked for it."
And then silence, as dense as to be choked on.
An old man, sitting on a creaking bench, placed a cigarette between his lips and lit it with shaking fingers less from the years but from the burden of his memories. "These rōnins," he growled reflectively, blowing a slow stream of smoke, "they have no use for rules or laws. That is exactly the reason why their actions succeed. Evil does not fear justice; it fears rather the sort of violence that does not ask questions."
That's not justice!" the woman businesswoman snarled. "That's savagery!
It's a reaction," the hoodie man replied with a touch of fervor. "Legal systems are all about paperwork and red tape. These guys, however, are all about results. Do you really believe that a predator is going to be scared of a lawsuit? Not on your life. What really scares him is the ringing of the doorbell at 2 AM in the middle of the night. He's worried that some guy's going to pull him out by the ankles forcibly, twist his nuts counter-clockwise until he screams like a baby seal in agony.
There were a couple of gasps. Someone suppressed a snicker. But no one dissented.
The air did not just become stale—it developed a curdled feeling. It was thickened by the heaviness of breath and disbelief, heavy with scalding words spoken and an even hotter silence that hung suspended in the air. The station platform, built with the intention of departure and waiting, became something other than its original purpose. It was not a church, nor was it a courtroom. Rather, it became a sort of living marketplace of morals, in which every single soul that came through entered into the exchange of their own private truths and tragedies, bartering their experience in this marketplace of common human complexity.
An old man, whose worn, cracked face resembled a worn piece of leather, raised his eyes slowly from the beat-up cane on which he leaned. "You just don't last very long around this town if you believe that the system does work the way it's meant to," he snarled, his voice thick with experience. "When I was younger, if a man was caught molesting schoolgirls—guess what happened?"
"What?" a young girl asked, her interest getting the better of her sense of personal convenience.
"Nothing. He apologized, got transferred. Returned the next year. Did it again." Gradually, the old man shook his head, as if trying not to see decades of cowardice.
"Seriously, you think Mugyiwara can turn that around?" a young office worker asked, his suit appearing crisply pressed, and his voice displaying an oddly smooth tone. "He is one teenager. This is not an movie."
"He's not just one man," another answered thoughtfully—a hard hat, rolled sleeves and calloused hands from honest toil. "He represents every single man who has grown weary of pretending the system works."
And what about the law?" replied the office worker.
"What law?" was the answer that came from a mother, who had two small children holding the hem of her skirt with their tiny hands. "Have you ever sat to make a police report? Have you ever seen how fast it seems to disappear into thin air if the perpetrator has a good lawyer and black cheques"
Throughout the platform, an older woman paused to adjust her glasses with a slow, precise touch, making sure they settled on the bridge of her nose. "I don't enjoy violence," she said to us in a soft, hushed voice. "But I don't enjoy crying myself to sleep every night either because my grandson was too scared to speak with me about what had occurred to him, and that is no light burden to bear."
And what then?" was the question from someone.
And then she told him, her voice cracking only slightly as though fighting not to shatter, "he goes to cram school with a smile on his face. This is because he knows that there is something even more frightening than the monster lurking in the darkness, watching everything.".
"Not the hero," sneered a university student, nose buried deep within the pages of a sociology textbook. "He is a reaction. A violent one at that. He is the sad product of a breakdown of trust in the very places we once trusted."
"Faith won't save my little sister," a motorcyclist growled. "Shotaro does."
It is not a good solution," the student insisted.
"Neither is acting like we're safe."
A delivery guy, his face miserably sunburned from having spent so many hours driving along the road in the blistering sun, joined in with a sense of urgency. "I don't care about legislation that may inform me of what I can or cannot do. What concerns me most is that my wife is safe and sound on the last train home."
"He's turning us into animals," a high school teacher grumbled. "We're applauding a guy who jumps over due process."
A young woman raised her hand, trembling. "Miss, no offense—but I don't require due process when someone has his hand on my thigh. I need that hand broken."
A deep silence fell over the region. Even the soft electrical thrum of the station seemed to cease.
And from there, it spiraled.
"You're sounding like fascists."
You are like bootlickers.
Wouldn't you prefer if it was your niece?
"Mob justice isn't justice!"
Then why does it feel so goddamn right?
They say he doesn't even yell when he hits you," one of the girls whispered. "Just looks at you. Like he's calculating you.".
"fuck that guy," spat a furious young man, his voice laced with bitterness. "My brother was physically assaulted just because he made a catcall comment."
"Perhaps it would be best if your brother simply shut the fuck up" snapped a furious teenage girl.