John pulled the IBM back, keeping it just out of reach, then without warning snapped the leash forward.
The IBM ghost lunged with again with a flap of its wings, diving at the ninja.
The ninja was fast, inhumanly fast.
The moment his instincts screamed, his blade was already out. Steel hissed through the night, cutting a perfect arc across the rooftop air. The strike was precise, practiced, deadly, yet it found nothing but emptiness.
Behind him, unseen, wings rippled the air. The IBM closed in, a shadow coiling around his blind spot.
The ninja stiffened, sensing the sudden shift of presence. He tried to spin around but was too late.
For the briefest instant, the IBM slipped into his blindspot. Its form was blurred, half-born into reality, and from its unseen throat came a sound.
A sound that can't be heard or picked up by humans but can be felt by them.
The ninja froze mid-turn. His body betrayed him, muscles locking, fingers numb against the hilt of his sword. His chest heaved in panic, but no breath came. His mouth strained to cry out, but not even a whisper escaped.
Disorientation crashed over him like a wave. The world spun sideways, rooftops bent at impossible angles. A high, shrill ringing bored into his ears, and his vision bled into a blur of smudged colors.
His last coherent thought was a flash of confusion "What the fuck?"
Then, silence.
The sword slipped from his hand with a dull clang against the rooftop. His body crumpled next, unconscious before it struck the ground.
Back in the café, John's eyes snapped open. The world returned in an instant, the muted chatter of late-night patrons, the clink of cups and saucers. He rose without a word, paid for his coffee, and stepped out into the cool night air.
On the surface, nothing had changed. Just another man leaving a shop. But in the unseen spaces above, his IBM lingered.
He didn't recall it. Not yet.
Instead, he sent it drifting at a safe distance, its faceless gaze fixed on the unconscious body sprawled across the rooftop. This wasn't finished. John needed to know exactly how long the paralysis would last.
He began to walk, heading in the direction of his apartment, every step measured.
Seconds ticked by. Twenty. Twenty-five. At thirty, the ninja twitched. His body convulsed weakly as though fighting against invisible chains. Muscles strained, jerking in stiff, unnatural angles. He was awake, but far from recovered.
John's eyes narrowed as he watched through the shared vision. Effective. But not permanent.
The ninja suddenly froze mid-crawl. His hand darted to the scope lying at his side. With clumsy desperation, he pressed it to his eye, angling it toward the café window.
John smirked faintly. The chair he had occupied was empty. The hunter had lost his mark.
Panic rippled through the man's face, he understood the weight of his failure.
Satisfied, John called the IBM back, letting it dissolve into the night. The connection faded, leaving only the quiet rhythm of his own footsteps.
His objective was complete. He had measured his tool, tested its reach, and learned how to deal with his watchers when the time came.
What John had unleashed through his IBM was an innate ability of an Ajin.
Paralyzing Scream.
A resonance that bypassed armor, training, even instinct, and struck directly at the nervous system. It was not heard but felt, vibrating through bone and blood. The closer the victim stood to the scream, the more devastating the effect. Disorientation was common, paralysis inevitable and unconsciousness, almost guaranteed.
The ninja had learned this first hand.
Now, recovered but still trembling, he leapt from rooftop to rooftop under the veil of night. His movements, usually fluid, felt sluggish, as if a phantom weight clung to his limbs. His breath came uneven, his ears still buzzed with the memory of that alien noise.
And yet, he could not stop.
John was not an easy target. That truth had been hammered into him over the past weeks of surveillance. John was a person of pattern, but his patterns were deceptive, lose sight of him once, and finding him again could take days.
Thankfully there was a place he would always return to after he was done for the night.
So the ninja pressed forward. His first thought was to return to the apartment building. From tonight's stunt with the police chief, John had likely finished his business. And if he was returning to his usual routine, he would inevitably head home.
Sure enough, as the ninja landed on the edge of a neighbouring rooftop, his eyes caught the sight he had been waiting for John, calmly walking through the entrance of the building.
The ninja let out a slow breath, relief bleeding into the cold night air. He had not lost his target, he no longer had any reason to call back to the league and report his failure.
But his mind refused to let go of what had just happened.
That scream. That paralyzing grip that had seized his body, robbed him of will, and stolen his voice.
His mind clawed for explanations.
Was he sick? The question crawled under the ninja's skin and refused to leave. It was ridiculous, absurd even for a trained operative to doubt his own senses. Still, the explanations spun themselves out, a hidden illness, a transient seizure, fatigue finally catching up after too many long nights.
He hugged the thought to himself and let it grow. If he told the League everything exactly as it happened, they would either ignore or write him off as cracked: "stress," "paranoia," "overwork." Either reaction could ruin him, ruin his credibility and put him out of the game. The truth was too strange, an invisible thing that made him go still, an alien pressure that hummed across his nerves. Saying that aloud would invite questions he wasn't ready to answer.
So he made a cleaner decision. He would not report the weirdness right away. He would book an appointment, get checked, gather objective evidence he could point to if needed. A clean medical record would give him something to hold up against suspicion. It was a small, prudent plan born out of fear to validate jimself, then decide whether to tell the League.
John, meanwhile, had no idea that his night's work had unsettled the watcher so thoroughly. By the time the ninja's unease rippled into thoughts of doctors and appointments, John had already moved on. The immediate problem, the League's eyes, was solved. His mind was already pushing forward, focused on the next move in a war he had declared.
John's new problem was not the gang itself. It was the performance.
Once he fully engaged them, his talent would no longer be something he could conceal. His speed, his reactions, his precision, all of it would spill out into the open in one violent showcase. To the untrained eye, it would look like raw brilliance. But to anyone who understood him and watched him grow, it would look… wrong.
With his Ajin status, it would come of too clean, too sharp. Too impossible to come from someone who had no long history of combat.
He needed a factor, he could latch his performance on.
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