Rin always came home.
Even if she was late, even if she had that look like she'd just pulled something behind someone's back — she came home. Ate her leftovers cold. Kicked off her boots by the door. Threw her bag onto the couch like it hadn't been carrying the weight of the world.
That night, the leftovers stayed cold.
And the bag never made it home.
…
Tanaka didn't panic, not at first. He told himself she was being stubborn. Maybe ditched her phone. Maybe got roped into another job, another dumb plan to one-up the system.
She was smart. Too smart. Dangerous, sometimes, with how easily she read people. How she acted like she could shoulder things alone.
But she wasn't bulletproof.
Tanaka worked his shift the next morning, throwing crates into the back of a delivery truck. No questions. No excuses. Just sweat and breath and cracked knuckles. That's how the work stayed manageable — keep the body tired so the mind stays quiet.
By noon, he couldn't keep quiet anymore.
…
The apartment was still empty. The couch untouched. Her boots exactly where they'd been the day before.
He stood in the middle of the living room, cracked open the fridge, and stared at her leftovers again. Fried rice, packed sloppy in a plastic container. She never sealed it right.
"Come on, kid," he muttered.
He checked her usual haunts. The rooftop of the old community center. The bookstore near the station where she argued with the clerk over philosophy. The alley behind the corner ramen shop where she once pulled a switchblade on a mugger and told Tanaka she was just "solving a problem."
No sign. No trail.
Nobody had seen her.
By evening, something twisted in his chest — a pressure, slow and ugly. He didn't get scared easily. He was built too solid, too dumb, by Rin's own teasing standards.
But he knew when something was wrong.
…
Two days in, he started asking harder questions. Kept it quiet. No cops. No news reports. Rin wouldn't have wanted that.
She hated being seen as weak. Hated pity even more.
A shopkeeper he knew said there'd been "rumblings." That was the word he used. Rumblings. Said someone new was cleaning up gang zones. Quiet-like. No flashy fights. No quirks in the sky.
Tanaka didn't know what that meant.
Another woman, one of the nurses from the clinic he'd helped carry supplies for last winter, said something similar. Whispers about a group. Young. Well-dressed. Didn't use names. Helped with local cleanup, beat back street thugs, made people disappear — the bad kind of people. The kind that never got taken off the board.
"They wear suits," she said. "And pins. Little snake design. You don't see them until they're already walking away."
Tanaka didn't understand half of it.
…
He didn't sleep much that night. Sat in the dark kitchen, elbows on the table, staring at her empty seat. His hands were too rough for this kind of thing. He could break a door, lift a bike with one arm, carry someone out of a fire — but he couldn't track a girl who didn't want to be found.
Still, he tried.
He started walking neighborhoods. Talking to food stall owners. Janitors. Other odd-jobbers like him — people who saw things and didn't care about hero badges.
The snake showed up again.
Not a gang. Not a company.
A name, spoken low: The Eighth Coil.
…
He didn't get much more than that.
A man in a cap sweeping a parking lot said they'd "cleaned out a whole warehouse of junkies last week." Said they didn't steal anything. Just walked in, walked out, and left silence behind.
"Didn't even see how they moved. They were just... there."
Tanaka didn't know what scared him more — the idea that his sister might've been taken by people like that, or that she'd gone to them on her own.
…
By the end of the week, he stood on the roof of the same community center she used to climb. Hands in his jacket pockets, wind biting at his ears. The city stretched out in lights and metal and noise.
He didn't cry. He didn't even clench his fists.
He just stood there.
Let the wind take the words he wasn't sure how to say.
"If you're out there," he said under his breath, "you better be okay."
The wind didn't answer.
But somewhere far below, a light flickered off in an alley. Brief. Controlled.
He narrowed his eyes.
And started walking.