.
Amaya breathed out a soft sigh. "That's Mazino Hiroki," she whispered, eyes following the golden-haired tempest of a man through the café window. "Shotaro's right testicle."
Fatiba blinked. "Excuse me?"
Amaya shrugged, unperturbed. "That's what they call him. Not figuratively. Like, literally. Shotaro's right-hand man. Faithful as a heartbeat."
Outside, Hiroki was storming back and forth, jaw clenched, people scattering around him like grass before a typhoon.
"Apparently, he used to be short and chubby," Amaya went on, sipping on her soda with melodramatic seriousness. "Like, true goblin mode. But then Shotaro got ahold of him. Whipped the weakness out of his bones. Forced him to throw up his childhood and swallow steel."
Fatiba just stared.
"Shotaro made a man of him," Amaya continued. "A man through and through. Seriously, if Shotaro bothered half as much about mudslinging as he appears to, Hiroki would've cut those boys into sushi and taped them to a shrine pillar by now."
Fatiba said nothing. She could still see Hiroki down there, like a statue that glared back.
"But listen to this," Amaya leaned in. "His mother? Kaee Mazino."
"The chess genius?" Fatiba blinked.
Amaya nodded. "Yeah. Brain sharp enough to slice through atoms."
"She must hate what her son's become then—beating up kids in the streets, being Shotaro's own warhammer."
"Oh, she dislikes Shotaro all right," Amaya said, spinning a lock of purple-dipped hair. "And by disapprove, I mean dislike. I mean, if she were stuck in a room with Shotaro, Hitler, and Genghis Khan, and someone gave her a gun with a hundred bullets. She'd shoot Shotaro a hundred and ten times. She'd purchase additional bullets."
Fatiba's eyebrows shot up.
But not because of what he does," Amaya repeated more softly. "That's the sick part."
"She doesn't dislike Shotaro for the trouble he creates, the law he breaks or the gangs he provokes. She dislikes him because… she feels he hexed Hiroki."
Amaya turned her head from the window.
"Her son was a round, chubby-cheeked, sweet kid with a soft voice and heart. And then comes along Shotaro and her boy, all scarred up, doing mantra training, punching concrete until it shatters."
Fatiba could envision it now—a mother watching her son transform into a person she no longer knows. A protector. A weapon. A legend in a school uniform.
"She thinks power is a curse," Amaya said to me, her own voice now whispered, as if she were carefully peeling something fragile from her ribcage. "That in making Hiroki powerful, Shotaro didn't save him. He doomed him."
"She sees the world as a chessboard," she continued, eyes still watching through the window of the café. "Black and white. Order and chaos. And to her?"
She gestured with an airy two fingers, drawing the shape of Hiroki in the plaza—stance unyielding, hair a burnished gold kissed by sunlight as if anointed by a god.
"Shotaro Mugyiwara is entropy incarnate."
"Entropy that taints her blood," she continued after a moment.
Her voice changed, deeper now, somber like a closing curtain. "Can't even fault her, really. Her husband—Hiroki's father—he wasn't always just some chess-despising civilian. He was a Yakuza," she said, "and not just any. They say he once faced thirty thousand men."
"Thirty thousand?" Fatiba blinked.
"He stood," Amaya nodded gravely, eyes shining with that mythic weight. "On his feet. Carrying blades and bullets. Refused to fall."
"And Kaede Mazino," she went on, speaking softly as if she heard the memory herself, "beseeched him not to go. Cried at his feet. Declared she'd sooner have a coward than a corpse."
Amaya exhaled a slow, tired breath through her nose.
"And all he said was, 'Then who else is it that has the power to depart?' And departed."
Silence between them grew thick as twilight.
Then, Amaya continued, "She started to see power as a curse." The powerful are not heroes in her eyes. They're the first to leave. First to die. And first to become eaten by the monster that she is battling. Power, in her eyes, is a curse that wraps itself around your family like a hangman's noose.
"She believes a chess piece ought not to move without someone's hand," she continued softly. "Without the player's hand."
Fatiba slumped back in her chair, arms folded. Her lips twisted with bitterness.
"Enough trauma," she said, "can make anyone retarded."
Amaya let out a wry laugh, nodding as if she'd been holding out for someone to say it aloud.
"Everyone on this planet's already retarded," she said. "We're just retarded in different directions."
And then, like a whisper escaping her ribs, a single sentence repeated through Fatiba's mind.
"Can't entropy defend when it pleases? Can't order slay when it thinks?"
Shotaro's voice. Far. Quiet. Deadly in its precision. A truth cutting enough to bleed philosophy from silence.
Fatiba gazed blankly into her drink, the surface calm, but her mind anything but. "Even someone like him…" she whispered, "even he can be despised."
Amaya did not flinch. Did not blink.
People like him are despised the most," she had said, biting off every word like it was bitter. "Matter of fact."
She had leaned forward, her voice falling like an axe, low and slow.
"The deaf crowd," she had said, "declare a man mad for dancing to music that they cannot hear."
The words clung in the dry summer air like the shadow of something wiser than the both of them, and when they finally ceased to echo, something in the quiet had relaxed. Not peace. Not trust. But closeness.
Amaya slid her hand into the side pocket of her pleated jacket and drew out a crumpled note, the type with half-sketched doodles and smudged ink. "Uh…" she said, eyes suddenly uncertain beneath the black lipstick. "Here's my number. It'd be nice if we, you know… kept in touch."
Fatiba accepted it, folding the paper between her fingers as if something more delicate than paper was being handled. A pause. A breath. "Yeah. Sure," she replied, digging into her own bag and signing hers on the back of a receipt with a pen that could just about get the job done. She passed it over. "Fair trade."
Amaya accepted it with a sly tilt of her head and started to walk away. Her boots made more noise than needed, as if she wanted to make sure the sound lingered. "Do your best to make as many contacts as you can," she said without looking back, simply raising a hand in farewell. "In this city, that's the key."
Then she vanished, lost in the crowd, blending into the bustling hum of vending machines, voices, and distant traffic. She became just another shadow woven into the complex fabric of a city built from steel and compromise—a city always teetering on the edge of law and impulse, order and the people who bled to keep it alive.
Fatiba walked alone under the harsh sun. Daylight drained color from the streets, but it couldn't lighten the weight in her chest. She kept her head down, fists in her pockets, eyes closed for a brief moment.
"Can I even tell Shotaro about that incident…?" she whispered to herself, too softly for anyone else to hear.
It was the kind of whisper that left her unsure if it wanted an answer.
Ahead, some students leaned against a stairwell wall, half-laughing and half-checking over their shoulders. Their words drifted to her like crumbs caught by the wind.
"The underground's real, bro. I swear."
"Cap."
"Deadass. My cousin said there's a guy who got recruited. They say they have their own banks down there, their own courts. Like a city beneath a city."
"Who the hell even gets in?"
"Dunno… Maybe the Red-Eyed Ronins? They say Shotaro knows how."
As she passed, their voices blurred together. But it was enough to make her steps slow and her breath catch.
Shotaro.
Of course.
Just when Fatiba thought the conversation couldn't get any worse, it did. Like rot leaking from a cracked pipe, the stupidest voice always found a way in.
"It's the Jews, you know," muttered a man near a vending machine, arms crossed as if he had discovered the secrets of the universe from a YouTube video and an uncle with a gambling problem.
Fatiba blinked. "What?"
"The Underground, the crime rings, the Ronins, the media—the Jews control all of it."
Suddenly, a few heads turned. Some rolled their eyes. A woman sighed, as if she had heard this a thousand times and didn't have the energy to argue yet again.
"There's always one," someone muttered quietly, eyes narrowed at the man who was starting to raise his voice in the center of the square. "Every time. Always one who thinks he's uncovered the secret history of the universe from watching six hours of videos online."
The man stood as if he had been waiting all day to explode. His face was red, veins pulsing in his neck, hands waving like mad signals.
"I'm telling you!" he shouted. "It's all connected—the banks, the networks, the wars, the underground—none of this is coincidence!"
He spun in a circle, eyes wild, searching for followers. "Patterns! Symbols! They hide in plain sight!"
A few people slowed down, intrigued in that grim way people watch breakdowns they can't stop. Someone nearby sighed, and another rolled their eyes so hard it almost turned into a health scare.
Then came the teenager. He slouched, wireless earbuds around his neck, world-weary from having this argument too many times. He stepped up behind the man and placed a firm hand on his shoulder.
"Alright, Grandpa," he said with a robotic tone. "Let's go home. Time for your meds."
The older man struggled, still preaching—about "them," about "the symbols," about "the truth."
But the teen was already pulling him away like a faulty shopping cart. "Jesus," he muttered under his breath. "It's always the Illuminati, the lizard people, the moon laser, and never just therapy."
As they disappeared around the corner, the plaza relaxed. Tension dispersed like steam rising from a cracked manhole. A barista leaned out her window, cutting through the awkwardness with a straight face.
"So, are we blaming crime on crop circles again or was that last year's thing?"
A man nearby flicked ash from a cigarette without looking up. "People like that… they can't handle complexity. They're scared of systems too big to fight, so they make up ghosts they can."
He took another drag and exhaled slowly. "It's easier to scream about hidden puppet-masters than to admit the rot is coming from within."
Fatiba remained silent, but her silence held weight. She was absorbing everything, observing as if tracing invisible shapes in the fog.
Because in every city, in every crowd, there was always a voice that was too loud, too sure, too wrong. And a world just indifferent enough to let it echo endlessly.
Her gaze shifted to the skyline. Glass towers rose like needles. Rooftops had helipads. Limousines glided through alleys no one else could afford to name.
"Something's off," she murmured to herself, narrowing her look. "This city's supposed to be a crime pit… and yet so many wealthy people live here. Not just from Japan. From everywhere."
She watched a black car with tinted windows pass by like a shadow on wheels.
"Some of them," she whispered, "are top one percenters. Global elites. Living right here. Buying property. Throwing parties. Why here?"
A flicker of unease crossed her chest.
"Does Shotaro know?" she asked aloud, more to the wind than anyone nearby. "Did he ever notice? Or…"
Her voice trailed off.
"Did he notice… and choose not to act?"
A thick silence followed, heavy and still.
Was he afraid?