Location: Derelict Access Tunnel, Seocho District – 6:51 AM
Aiko stood at the mouth of the stairwell, the signal from Keisuke's beacon still echoing faintly against the underside of her spine. It wasn't just a location tag—it felt like a pulse, like a tap on the shoulder from someone who'd been following them since before they even knew they were being followed.
She looked down into the dark.
No lights. No sound. Just a narrow set of concrete steps that dropped into what used to be an emergency utilities corridor—pre-modern, pre-digital, and untouched by Seoul's hypernet overlay. A ghost-zone.
"This wasn't on the uplink," Miura muttered, already pulling a compact scanner from her coat.
"Of course it wasn't," Ryoji said. "That's the point."
The scanner blinked once—then went dead.
Miura frowned. "He's jamming local feeds. No active networks. Nothing gets in or out past ten meters."
"Guess we're going in blind," Aiko said.
Ryoji offered a small smile. "Wouldn't be the first time."
They descended in silence.
Each step brought them lower, the walls tightening and shifting from concrete to rust-streaked metal—like the remnants of a forgotten shelter system, long since sealed off and overwritten by city planning algorithms. But someone had cleared a path. The corridor bent left, then right, then deeper still—until the walls began to hum.
It wasn't electricity.
It was code.
Aiko felt it first—threads of repurposed signal spun through the walls like veins, old analog wires pulsing with compressed quantum data, disguised as heat or static. The Seal lit faintly with each pulse, like it recognized the pattern.
"He's not just hiding," she whispered. "He's built a whole layer under the city. Invisible. Alive."
Miura said nothing. But her hand moved slightly closer to her concealed sidearm.
**
The door was marked with nothing but a sticker: a badly drawn cartoon ghost holding a sock.
Ryoji stared at it.
"You're telling me this is Ghost Laundry?"
Aiko smiled faintly. "Looks about right."
She reached for the handle.
Before her fingers touched it, the door clicked.
It swung inward on its own.
Revealing—
A maze of lights and screens and soft, ambient jazz.
The room beyond was vast—far larger than it had any right to be. A converted maintenance hub retrofitted into a cathedral of code: holographic feeds hung in slow orbits from the ceiling, trailing data in fluid spirals; modular terminals curved across repurposed laundry machines, each one displaying different parts of the city's surveillance lattice; and everywhere, coils of cabling twisted like vines around pillars and steel beams.
In the center, seated in a rolling chair half-swallowed by wires, was a young man with wild, overgrown black hair, a lopsided grin, and half a dozen mismatched monitors casting light across his face.
He wore a hoodie with a ghost and a sock on the back.
"Miura," he said, spinning lazily in his chair. "You got old."
Miura sighed. "You got dumber."
He gasped, clutching his chest. "You wound me, Nee-chan."
Then he stood, arms wide.
"Welcome to the Laundry. Please leave your shoes, your weapons, and your existential despair at the door. The rest, we can work with."
Aiko blinked. "You're really... him?"
Keisuke Kaito turned to her, and for a moment, his grin softened.
"You must be Aiko."
She hesitated. "You know who I am?"
"Course I do. You're the girl carrying half a dead god in her spine."
Silence.
Even Ryoji tensed.
Keisuke shrugged. "What? You think I haven't been watching? Your whole journey's been lit up like a bad telenovela on every obscure subnet I can find. Division Zero screwed you over. Screwed us all."
He tapped a keypad on his wrist, and the room's holograms shifted.
Images appeared—maps, photos, surveillance feeds, documents.
Each one stamped with the red glyph of Division Zero.
"Everything you've ever wanted to know," he said. "All of it. Right here."
Miura's eyes narrowed. "Then why haven't you shared it?"
"Because knowing the truth isn't the same as surviving it." Keisuke's voice dropped. "What I'm about to show you? It doesn't just rewrite your mission. It rewrites everything. Your past, your purpose—hell, maybe even what you are."
He turned to Aiko again.
"And you, especially. There's something buried in your Seal. Something no one else has touched. Not even Division Prophet."
She stepped forward. "Then show me."
Keisuke nodded slowly.
"Alright. No turning back."
He reached toward the center console.
The room dimmed.
And the truth began to rise from the dark—data-stitched memories, stolen reports, hidden experiments, and one name repeated over and over beneath it all:
PROJECT ASHGLASS.
TO BE CONTINUED…