The mob wasn't divided by income or age or creed. It wasn't professionals against punks, or men against women, or young against old. It was something more primal—people—your average, unremarkable, blink-and-you-miss-them Joes. The ones who work until their backs ache. The ones who raise daughters with pepper spray in their wallets. The ones who live obscurely and die obscurer, unknown and unloved by the systems designed to serve them. They were the ones screaming now, teeth clenched not out of ideology but out of experience.
"They scare the monsters," someone snarled, voice low as a cigarette ember burning in the dark. "That's more than I can say about the police."
"They are monsters," one snapped back harshly, breath tangy with scorn. "You desire justice, not revenge!"
Third voice, grizzled, bitter crack. "Now we're concerned with principles, oh yeah? Where were your sacred principles when that son of a bitch touched up my niece in front of a crowded train car and no one even batted an eye?"
Sneer. "Because we have courts, goddammit. Because there's procedure. You don't just beat people like it's the goddamn Warring States."
"Then where's the justice?" snarled the reply. "Law isn't justice if it doesn't punish the ones who harmed us."
The heat rose like steam off pavement. Arguments congealed like blood. Then there was a voice—a soothing one, a woman's voice, smooth like worn linen—cutting through the yelling. A teacher. Hair drawn back. Tired eyes behind smudged glasses. "You think I enjoy this?" she demanded. You believe I rest well, aware teens out here are breaking bones because the system's a corpse in a suit? I don't. But when I tell my girls they'll be home safe now. It's not due to patrol cars.
It's because the Red-Eyed Ronins claimed this territory like wolves.
A father stepped forward, holding his son tight like the boy might be accused next. "What happens when they get it wrong? When one of them snaps? When it's your kid, they twist the knees off?"
The teacher's gaze didn't waver. Her voice cracked, but not with fear. "If my boy ever does something that deserves Shotaro showing up at my door—then I'll break his knees myself."
The silence that followed wasn't peace. It was pressure. A city letting go of shame.
For everyone knew. The Ronins struck for a purpose, but they didn't advocated for guilty until proven innocent. They checked. Cross-matched. Checked allegations. Checked histories. Checked trauma. Then the justice. Not poetic. Not theoretical. But dealt by oiled bamboo and unvarnished hands
And then it boiled.
Not slowly. Not politely. Like oil on fire. A boy—shaking voice, clenched jaw, still-wet-from-the-rain hoodie—yelled over the din, "My little sister used to flinch boarding the train, y'know? She'd double up with two jackets to conceal her body. Now?" He pointed a finger into the air. "Now?" She struts through Musashi-no-Yamato with her head held high".
"Because if someone even dares to do something, they know someone's watching."
Someone who doesn't like bribes or badges.
A middle-aged man, wrinkled shirt, factory workers—answered back, "So what, now we root for gangs? Let kids make the law because the adults messed up?"
"YES!" a woman screamed. A woman in scrubs, perhaps just off a double shift. Her voice cracked with fatigue. "Because I'd rather have children with justice than apologies from adults!"
The crowd shattered like ice under an unexpected load—clean cracks turning jagged. Voices cut. Bodies shifted. Elbows flew, not out of brutality, but from desperation—desperation that this was not a debate anymore. It was a break.
A plastic water bottle crashed onto the pavement, bursting open with a soggy, helpless pop—the sort of sound that signaled that someone had gone over an imaginary line. People gasped. Then they cursed. They shouted. A scuffling of feet hitting pavement. The mood changed from argument to naked-throated bellow.
Old women, faces etched with wisdom and anger, snapped like firecrackers—cursing at everyone and no one. Young men howled over one another, faces flushed with anger or passion or both, fingers pointing at strangers whose names they'd never learn. Every phrase stung like a slap, no longer for justice, but for sides.
A guy in a blue jacket—possibly twenty, possibly younger—pulled off his headphones as if he'd just awakened to discover he'd spent his entire life asleep. "They're not saints!" he snarled, throat husky. "But at least they scare the right fucking people!"
Someone snorted up behind Fatiba. Sarcastic. Bitter. "Yeah. Let's all just melt down, then? That's the future? Forget laws, forget trials—just go full caveman? Anarchy, baby!
"Anarchy?" One spat, lips curled like a dog's. "You say that like order ever saved anyone."
There was no response. Only the bright, snapping sound of a phone falling from someone's hand and shattering on the concrete—screen shattering like ice under a boot. The pieces reflected light, like a mirror broken on a truth no one wanted to see.
A thin-faced security guard, too young for the uniform he wore, took a hesitant step forward. Then halted. His gut shouted what training had never told him—this was not a riot yet, but not peace either. The atmosphere was combustible. The crowd didn't breathe so much as they hissed.
And over it, like the weight of tidewater pulling dead fish upward, came a voice—low, worn, salted and soured with memory.
"Perhaps that is the point," replied the aged fisherman, arms rolled up, fingers smeared with the indelible ink of nets and tides. "We were never meant to be like him. He does not desire us to be."
Individuals turned—some in disbelief, others in bone-deep silence, as if they were expecting something sacred.
"He's a vigilante. An enemy of the ones up high so we don't have to be." His voice shook, but not with fear—with weariness, with age, with something that had witnessed too many sunrise funerals and ocean burials. "That's the point. Your children, your parents, and you. You didn't have to do it. Because someone else did."
He didn't mention Shotaro's name. He didn't have to.
And then for an instant, the commotion dropped into quiet—not the gentle type, but the one that comes after an earthquake, when dust lingers like ash and hearts beat too strenuously to notice anything else.
All remained motionless—not out of respect, not out of fear, but something denser. A quiet that was metallic and remembrance. Words had fallen like rocks, and now the ring of what hadn't been spoken penetrated farther than what had.
From the benches along the rusting edge of the platform, an old woman stood up—slowly, but with no show of weakness. Her spine was crooked, her fingers bent like dried-out roots, but her presence sliced through the heat like paper through a knife. Even Fatiba turned, drawn by something unseen and timeless.
The woman did not speak. She rolled her sleeve up slowly on purpose, the way a person might draw out a long-forgotten sword. Her paper-thin pale skin carried a number.
5675.
A brand, not a tattoo. A sentence etched into living tissue.
"1943," she croaked, her voice like rent fabric. "I was just a child when the Japanese arrived."
Her words struck with no drama. Just raw force.
"Eleven years old. I danced with my family in a faceless village. We juggled for pennies. Sang for bread." She stopped. Not for air, but because the words she was going to say had teeth.
"They arrived on horseback. Uniforms. Banners. Barks like dogs after rabbits." Her jaw clenched. "They killed the men. Every one. Fathers. Brothers. Sons. No asking questions. Wrong village, wrong blood, wrong breath in our lungs."
Her gaze raked over the crowd—not accusatory, not begging. Simply reporting. As if the words had waited seventy years to be performed.".
They raped the women. My mother. My sisters. Girls hardly old enough to braid their hair. Age wasn't a barrier—it was a preference. Some of them died quick. Most didn't."
Something caught in someone's throat, but nobody would speak.
"One officer gave the order. Just one." She raised a crooked finger. "Born on land he didn't plow. Maybe if he were a farmer's son, he'd have spared us. But maybe not. Maybe it doesn't matter what spoon you're fed from—gold or wood—monsters chew the same."
Her hands trembled, but her voice didn't.
"Some of my sisters bled out from the inside. Like animals ripped open from the belly and left to see the sky. My mother was shot because the officer determined she wasn't 'good enough.' for satifying their lust."
Her words allowed no room for pity. Only quiet.
"And those of us who lived?" Her face twisted—not in grief, but in memory. In survival. "They sent us to Unit 666. A lab, they called it. But it was a slaughterhouse made of doctors and scalpels."
She tapped the number on her arm with a single, dry knuckle.
"This was my new name."
The old woman's voice sliced through the tension like a sword honed on a century of blood. Heads swiveled, arguments suspended in mid-syllable. The city came still—because when a survivor speaks, the moment listens.
The greatest irony," she stated, her voice shaking not with age but recollection, "is that the people who committed it—those who raped and slaughtered my village, those who opened us up like cattle and referred to it as science—never paid." Her arm was still rolled up, the branded number searing like a scarlet banner. "The war was over. But the brass—the higher-ups—they retained their land, their titles. their graves still get clean at their resting places".
Her lips twisted, a venom that had lain in wait for decades to brew. "I thought—perhaps the child in my womb would never experience that hell. That my suffering purchased her peace."
She gazed upwards, as if seeing specters.
"I gave that girl everything. I taught her to dance like my mother taught me. She was more beautiful than I ever was—clever, strong. She graduated. She married. She gave birth to my grandson. And then—"
Her voice did not crack. It curdled.
"Yakuza's son ran her over." Her eyes blazed through the platform like fire through snow. "He got away. The boss made a phone call. Another big shot. They hugged behind closed doors."
She didn't stop to let it sink in.
My grandson came of age without her. Raised by his father—but even that boy couldn't outrun the rot. The same gang ringing their doorbell every week. Ransom. Threats. Fear. Until he cut it out himself."
Her mouth curled into a snarl—not for grief, not for sorrow. A rage long hardened into stone.
When I screamed," she spat, "when I begged for justice—they hired a lawyer who likely had wine in his courtroom briefcase. And just like that, poof—case dismissed. Paper justice."
She took a step forward now, each step taking centuries with it.
"I came here with what I had left. My grandson's wife. My great-granddaughter. To this island. This land of order." She laughed dry and savage. "Lawful? The first thing I smelled here was rot. Every night—sirens, screams, blood. The same old story."
The crowd leaned in. Even the wind did not dare to cut in now.
"But last week," she said softly, "my great-granddaughter didn't come home."
A hush. A breath held back. Something old curled in the air.
"I ran. Bones snapping with each step. Hoping it wasn't—"
She broke off.
Then smiled.
"She was kicking soccer ball. With girls. Safe. Laughing. Do you get it?" Her voice went up, hoarse but booming. "She was laughing, not glancing over her shoulder. She knew she did not have to be brave. She knew—if a monster came, she only had to make one call."
The words fell with the force of thunder.
"They would be found," she snarled. "Kneecaps distorted, ribs broken, hiding or no, it matters not. Even the gangs understand—you can run, you can plead, but if the Ronins know your name, he will come."
Her eyes blazed with a flame no storm could extinguish.
"She lives. She lives. Because a monster decided to tread on earth in our name."
And then softer, like an ash-steel lullaby:
"That's the point, isn't it?"
She gazed at no one and everyone.
"Not everyone must do what he does. Not everyone must. Because if every person on this world was like Shotaro Mugyiwara…"
Silence.
Not the peaceful kind, but the heavy, bloated hush that comes after something too real has been spoken. The kind of quiet that hangs like fog over a graveyard, making every breath feel borrowed.
No one clapped. No one dared.
Because it wasn't a speech. It wasn't a performance.
It was a wound left open on purpose, so everyone could see what rot looks like up close.
There was no triumphant conclusion. No neat answer. Only that raw, bleeding truth lodged in the gut of every listener.
Was he right? Was he wrong?
Nobody knew.
The old woman wavered, bones clicking, breath catching. A man—just a man, someone's uncle, someone's neighbor—stepped forward and took her arm, helping her back toward the bench.
People resumed their day, sort of. Not fully. Not cleanly.
They drifted like pieces of paper in a breeze, slow and unsure, shoulders tense, eyes lowered—still carrying her words like embers in their pockets. Some looked angry. Some looked afraid. Some looked like they might cry.
Fatiba stayed rooted in place, the last to move. Around her, the crowd reassembled itself—boarding trains, buying coffee, checking phones.
But something had changed.
There were no chants. No slogans. No verdict.
Only the sound of a city not knowing what to think anymore.
.....
Fatiba sat motionless along a cafe's corner table, hands clenched around a paper cup she'd left untouched. The window glass beside her reflected a blur—her face pale, eyes sunken, the entire world distorted by the drizzle of the city outside. The old woman's voice lingered in her head like a broken bell. That number—5675—seared in the space between her ears as if it was tattooed on her own flesh.
So that was it, wasn't it? A lifetime condensed into a monologue among a crowd. Horror handed down like a bane of an heirloom. A daughter killed by impunity. A grandson swallowed by extortion. And the ones who did it all? Dead or dying with medals and spotless graves and full bellies. The ones who suffered? They vanished. Like they never existed.
Fatiba's knuckles whitened as she wrapped her fist tight, nails digging into her hand.
"It's all pointless," she muttered to herself, hardly listening. "Her crime was being a victim.
The idea had come unexpectedly, but it was as stubborn as tar. When the old woman passed away, the family grief would pass with her. The world wouldn't notice. Nobody would recall. Nobody would put down their names. No god had prevented it. No judge. No nation. Nothing.
"Fucking unfair…" she hissed bitterly, eyes burning.
A shadow crossed her table.
"Do you have room?" a low and strangely joking voice asked.
Fatiba blinked and gazed up. A girl stood there—same age, same cynical heaviness in her eyes—but dressed like a punk poem. Her hair flowed down her shoulders in languid waves, terminated in dyed purple tips. Thick eyeliner. Black lipstick. Leather belt with tiny baubles of rebellion jingling against her hip.
"Amaya… Wagakure?" Fatiba asked, the name ringing recognition. Shotaro had spoken of her more than once, typically while sighing too hard at nothing.
The girl smiled.
"What if I'm not?" she asked, slipping into the seat before Fatiba could confirm or deny. "Perhaps I'm just another goth. Culture's on to something, haven't you noticed? Goth's the new Gen-Z stress manager."
She played with her hair like it was silk on fire, smiling as she leaned back theatrically. "Perhaps I witnessed how amazing, cool, badass, enigmatic, emotionally broken but in an attractive way Amaya Wagakure is and chose to emulate her flow."
Fatiba looked at her.
"You're making a fool of yourself."
"Lock me up if being fabulooouuusss is a crime, honey," Amaya shot back, cocking her head like a cat challenging someone to blink.
She wasn't acting cool. She was trying to shake something loose. She didn't enjoy stillness in people—it all too horribly reminded her of the sort of pain that burrows deep and doesn't yell.
"Darvish, right?" Amaya asked, offering a hand suddenly, like she just remembered how introductions worked. "Allsalawalkum."
"It's As-salāmu ʿalaykum," Fatiba said, recoiling slightly, too tired to hide her frustration. "And a handshake would've been fine."
Amaya didn't blink. Didn't flinch. The smirk stayed, but her eyes—those dark-ringed, glitter-dull eyes—contained something quieter now, something pointed. "Why aren't you proud of your identity?" she asked once more, not with irony, not as a tease, but with the honesty of a knife creeping in.
Fatiba let out a breath, soft and abbreviated. "It's not that I don't have pride about being Muslim," she grumbled, scooting sideways to accommodate at the table, "but you're getting it wrong."
Amaya settled into the seat as if it belonged to her, crossing legs, fingers already playing with a napkin she had no intention of using. "You don't sound like what everybody says you are," Fatiba ventured, handing her a menu.
Amaya didn't even look at it. "One extra creamy black chocolate purple pumpkin pie latte," she stated to the waiting waiter with formal ritual, as though she were demanding the philosopher's stone.
The waiter blinked. "Lady. this is a pizzeria, not fucking Starbucks."
"Okay then," Amaya said unflustered, "give me a black and purple pizza."
".How the hell are we supposed to make a purp—
"Color it or something," she drawled with a complete bratty inflection, throwing her hair like a princess.
Then she snapped—laughed like a bottle that was finally opened, leaned forward, wiping at her eye. "Sorry, sorry," she grinned, "I was kidding. One cheesy chicken pizza, extra hot, please."
The waiter just stared at her. Something within him snapped—but it wasn't a grin.
"Oh ho," he said, voice flat as roadkill. "You're so funny. I'd really be laughing if I-WASN'T-A-MINIMUM-WAGE-WORKER-WITH-UNIVERSITY-DEBT-STILL-UNPAID-AND-A-CHILD-TO-FEED-BECAUSE-THE-CONDOM-BROKE, WHO-HAS-TO-WORK-FOUR-JOBS-JUST-TO-SURVIVE-IN-A-STINKING-SHOEBOX-IN-THIS-OVERPRICED-CITY-FILLED-WITH-PRETENTIOUS-TEENAGERS-WHO-THINK-LOOKING-LIKE-A-GHOST-IS-AESTHETIC."
He didn't wait for a reply—just turned and stormed off, muttering curses in three different dialects and aggressively typing something on his phone that definitely wasn't the order.
Amaya leaned back, lips pursed, brows arched like twin little villains. "Okay," she said under her breath. "He wins that one."