The Vanishing Point(Part 2) - Dead Logic

The taxi finally began to speed up after leaving the crowded roads behind. There was no talk between Shuhi and Akari during the ride. The buildings had become fewer, the traffic thinner and the familiar noise of the city had slowly faded into the background. Eventually, even the shops and houses disappeared, leaving behind a long stretch of asphalt surrounded by patches of empty land and wild grass. It was 3:43 pm. The sun hung almost directly above them, its heat reflecting from the road and making the distant scenery shimmer slightly.

The driver checked the navigation system before pulling the taxi over to the side of the road.

"We're here."

Shuhi leaned forward and looked through the windshield. There was something strangely unsettling about the place. It wasn't abandoned exactly, but there was so little around them that it almost felt like they had accidentally driven beyond the boundaries of civilization.

Shuhi opened the door and stepped outside. Akari followed, carrying the laptop under one arm while carefully looking around the area. There was no obvious building nearby, no warehouse, no parking lot and no large structure that could explain why Haruto's tracker had stopped here.

The taxi driver remained in his seat, waiting for them to finish paying. Shuhi looked at the meter and took out her wallet.

"How much?"

The driver told her the amount, and she handed him the money. He gave her the change, nodded politely and pulled the taxi back onto the road. Shuhi watched as the vehicle disappeared into the distance, leaving the two teenagers standing alone beside the empty road.

She turned toward Akari.

"So this is where he disappeared."

Akari didn't immediately respond. He had already opened the recording of the tracking interface and was staring at it with an unusually serious expression.

"Look at this again."

Shuhi moved closer.

The recording showed the map from earlier. Haruto's location appeared as a small red pointer, moving steadily across the digital map. The movement was completely normal. There was no strange fluctuation, no sudden jump and no indication that the device was malfunctioning.

Then, without any warning, the pointer vanished.

Akari paused the recording.

"Right there."

He rewound it and played it again. The same thing happened. The pointer continued moving normally and then simply disappeared.

Shuhi stared at the screen for a few seconds before speaking.

"So what could it mean?"

"I am not sure. Wait, lemme see if I can find something else." Akari said and kept digging in his laptop.

"If the tracker had simply lost a stable connection, the signal should have deteriorated first. The pointer could have stopped updating, jumped around or shown an inaccurate position. But it didn't. It was moving normally until the connection ended completely."

He closed the recording and looked at the surrounding area.

"But even that doesn't explain everything. Haruto wasn't carrying some cheap tracker. This was connected to the organization's satellite network. It doesn't have the ordinary range limitation. Distance shouldn't have been enough to make the pointer disappear."

Akari looked down at the laptop again.

"Something interrupted it. A jammer most likely."

Akari looked down the road.

"And if that's what happened, then this wasn't some random technical failure."

Akari continued thinking aloud.

"Now imagine the situation. A criminal gang is being chased by multiple police units. They somehow manage to escape to this area. Then the police trackers and communication systems suddenly stop working, and the entire operation disappears."

He shook his head.

"An ordinary criminal gang couldn't do that."

"Akari kun." Shuhi called him.

"Hm?" Akari turned back only to realize Shuhi wasn't listening to a single word of his till now and had gone a little far. She was running her own investigation by observing the road carefully.

"Do you think it was the organization?" It was a complete intuition from her.

Akari completely turned toward her. Shuhi immediately noticed his expression. He wasn't surprised by the possibility.

"You were thinking about it too."

"Right."

She looked toward the empty surroundings again. Her voice became quieter as she tried to explain the intuition that had appeared before she could properly construct the reasoning behind it.

"An entire police operation doesn't just disappear. Even if the criminals were extremely organized, there should be something left behind. Broken glass. Tire marks. Blood. Weapons. Anything. But there's nothing."

She looked at the road beneath her feet.

"Like this absence of evidence is itself becoming an evidence. It's almost as if someone cleaned the entire place."

Akari remained silent for a moment. Then he nodded.

"I've been thinking the same thing."

Shuhi looked at him.

"If the organization really is involved, then..."

Akari finished her thought.

"We'll probably hear about it soon."

"What do you mean?"

He closed the laptop halfway.

"Think about what happens if several police units disappear simultaneously."

Akari's voice remained calm, but the words carried an uncomfortable weight.

"In a few hours, there could be a headline saying something like, 'Mysterious Disappearance of Multiple Police Units, Authorities Unsure.'" Shuhi grimaced.

"Don't say it like that."

"I'm only pointing out what would logically happen."

"I know. That's why I don't like it."

They began searching the area.

At first, they examined the roadside carefully, checking the patches of grass and dirt for anything that looked out of place. Shuhi crouched down several times, inspecting small objects that turned out to be nothing more than pieces of broken stone or dried branches. Akari repeatedly checked the coordinates on his laptop and compared them with the physical surroundings, trying to determine exactly where Haruto's vehicle had been when the signal disappeared.

They found nothing.

Shuhi walked farther down the road and examined the asphalt. There were faint tire marks here and there, but nothing that looked recent enough to indicate a large police convoy. She followed one of them for several meters before realizing that it was probably just from an ordinary vehicle that had passed through the area earlier.

"Nothing."

Akari was examining the grass nearby.

"Same here."

They continued.

Every possible clue was checked and discarded. There was no abandoned equipment, no bullet casing, no broken vehicle parts and no indication that a confrontation had taken place. Even the surrounding soil seemed undisturbed.

Eventually, Shuhi crouched beside the road and placed her palm against the asphalt.

"There's nothing."

Akari looked at her.

"That's the problem."

She turned her head, "What?"

"Isn't it obvious? We can't trace Haruto back. No digital footprint nor physical evidence." Akari answered with a straight face.

The two remained silent. The possibility of the organization being involved became increasingly difficult to ignore.

"I think we have our answer."

Shuhi looked at him.

"The organization was involved."

She didn't respond immediately.

Akari continued.

"They somehow intercepted the police operation. They probably used a jammer to cut communications and tracking. Then they removed the entire group from this area."

"Removed?"

Akari looked at her.

"Terminated."

The word made Shuhi's body tense. Memories of childhood began appearing a little in her mind. She could still recall that scene clearly. The time when she accessed the organization's computer system and saw many people's name with the status "terminated". She knew exactly what it could mean.

"You're saying they killed them?"

"I said it's possible."

Akari didn't try to soften the statement.

"If the organization wanted to keep its existence secret, eliminating witnesses would be the safest option. Just like it had been doing for…who knows for how many decades."

Shuhi looked away.

For a moment, her mind filled with an image of police vehicles surrounding the criminal gang, only for everything to suddenly turn against them. The radios would have gone silent. The vehicles would have been trapped. Nobody outside would have known what was happening.

She shook the image away.

"Then Haruto..."

Akari looked at her.

"He was there too."

Shuhi's voice became quieter.

"Hey…could they have killed him?"

Akari was silent for several seconds.

"No."

Shuhi looked at him.

"How can you say that for sure?"

"I can't."

Akari glanced back toward the empty road.

"But I don't think they would."

"Why?"

"Because Haruto isn't one of the police officers to them."

He turned toward her.

"He's Gamma."

Shuhi understood immediately.

"He was sent to retrieve Delta. If the organization discovered who he was, he would have an explanation ready. He could simply tell them that he was carrying out the mission he had been assigned."

"But would they believe him?"

"They wouldn't need to believe every word."

Akari's expression remained calm.

"They already know Gamma exists. They know he was sent after Delta. His presence would make sense."

He paused before adding another point.

"And even if they suspected him of something else, killing him would be wasteful. Because he's valuable to the organization. Trust me, I have been with him longer than you. He is a very good student."

"Haruto spent fourteen years inside that organization. He knows their methods, their people and their internal structure. So…"

Shuhi stared at the ground.

"So you think he's alive?" Sushi asked, stopping Akari's sentence.

"I think he has a much better chance of being alive than the other officers."

Shuhi sighed.

"That's not exactly reassuring."

"I know but it's the most reassuring answer I can give you without lying."

That managed to silence her.

They stayed at the location for a little longer, but there was nothing more they could uncover. Whatever had happened here had been carefully concealed, and neither of them had the resources to reconstruct an entire police operation from an empty stretch of road.

Eventually, they began walking back toward the city.

It took almost an hour before they finally reached an area with enough traffic to find another taxi. By the time they got into it, Shuhi was exhausted from walking beneath the afternoon heat. Akari remained quiet for most of the journey.

When they reached Shuhi's neighborhood, Akari didn't immediately get out.

"Wait."

Shuhi looked at him.

"What?"

"We need to make sure your living room is empty."

She glanced toward the house through the taxi window. Her parents were still inside. Right. There was still an unconscious police officer in her bedroom.

Shuhi paid the driver and stepped out. Akari followed her after checking the surroundings. They waited outside for several minutes until Shuhi was certain that her parents were no longer sitting near the entrance.

She approached the front door and unlocked it. The moment it opened, Akari slipped inside. Shuhi followed and quietly closed the door behind them.

They climbed the stairs carefully, trying not to make unnecessary noise. When Shuhi finally opened her bedroom door, Rina immediately looked up from where she had been sitting.

"You two are back."

Shuhi nodded.

"We found the last location."

Rina's expression became serious.

"And?"

Shuhi entered the room and placed her bag down.

"Nothing."

Rina frowned.

"Nothing?"

"Not a single useful trace."

Akari explained the tracker problem, the sudden disappearance of the signal and their conclusion that the organization was probably responsible. Rina listened carefully. When they finished explaining everything, she leaned back against the wall and stared at the floor.

"So they're probably holding Haruto."

"That's what we think," Shuhi said.

Rina looked toward her.

"Then we can't wait anymore."

Shuhi knew what she meant before she said it.

"We need to return."

Akari nodded.

"I agree."

Rina glanced toward the unconscious police officer.

"If Haruto is being held by them, every minute we spend sitting here is another minute they have to figure out what happened."

Shuhi remained quiet. Returning to the organization wasn't something she wanted to think about.

For years, she had imagined freedom as something permanent. She had escaped that place, built another life and slowly allowed herself to experience things she had never been allowed to experience as a child.

Now she was being pulled back toward it. But there was something else. Something she had almost forgotten. Shuhi slowly raised her head.

"Before we go..."

Akari looked toward her.

"What?"

"There is something I need to fix."

Rina's eyes narrowed slightly.

"What?"

Shuhi thought about Hiroshi.

She remembered how easily she had destroyed his reputation. One carefully constructed lie had turned into another, then another, until an entire school had begun seeing him as someone he wasn't. She had manipulated the circumstances, played the victim and allowed everyone around her to believe a false story.

Hiroshi had lost his position as student council president because of it. His reputation had been dragged through the mud.

And although she had created the entire situation for a larger purpose, that didn't change the fact that an innocent person had suffered because of her actions.

"I ruined Hiroshi senpai's life."

Akari and Rina got quiet, waiting for Shuhi to continue.

Shuhi continued before either could interrupt.

"So I'm going to fix it."

Rina watched her carefully.

And if there was one thing Shuhi had learned after everything that had happened, it was that destroying someone's life could be frighteningly easy. Repairing it would probably be much harder. But she had caused the damage. So she would be the one to clean it up. Only after that would she return to the place she had spent years trying to escape. Because she knew she might never come back.

Chapter 58 - The Vanishing Point(Part 2)