Masaru sat on the hardwood floor of the living room, his back against the base of the sofa.
He dropped his head into his hands, his fingers digging into his scalp.
He didn't move for five minutes. He just listened to the silence of the house.
It was a heavy, suffocating kind of quiet. The kind that didn't just mean a lack of noise, but a lack of life.
A house this size should have had the hum of a refrigerator, the creak of settling wood, or the distant sound of a neighbor's car.
Instead, it felt like someone had wrapped the entire building in a thick layer of lead.
He looked at the spot on the rug where Alex and Yuki had been standing. They hadn't just disappeared; they had been erased. No struggle. No sound. No blood.
"Think," Masaru whispered to the empty air. His own voice sounded thin and alien in the vacuum of the room.
He was a scavenger. He didn't have the high-spec education of a 5th Deviation or the innate talent of a prodigy, but he had spent years surviving in the cracks of Tokyo.
He had seen the way demons played with space. He'd seen guys get pulled into walls and spat out as red paste.
What could do this? Masaru's mind went to the most dangerous concept in the hunter's manual: an Enclosed Void. It was a pocket of reality folded over itself, a sub-dimension where the rules of the physical world didn't apply.
"But that's impossible," he muttered, shaking his head.
According to the DHC handbook, an Enclosed Void was a high-tier phenomenon.
You didn't see that kind of spatial manipulation in anything lower than a 7th or 8th Deviation. Those things were national disasters.
If an 8th was in this house, the entire neighborhood would be a rotting pile of black slime by now. The air would taste like copper and the walls would be screaming.
This house just smelled like sour milk and old dust. It was a 2nd Deviation haunting. Or maybe a 3rd.
Masaru stared at the floorboards. If it wasn't a high-tier monster, then it was a specialist. Some low-grade demons developed niche abilities to compensate for their lack of raw power. This thing was using a "Manual Void."
It didn't have the energy to create an automated field—the kind that just shredded you the moment you stepped inside (like Sakura)—so it had to pull people in one by one and deal with them personally.
It was a trap-door spider waiting beneath a designer rug.
The problem was, Masaru couldn't see the trap. He was a 2nd Deviation with no specialized technique.
He had his Berettas and a high tolerance for caffeine, but he couldn't punch a hole into a sub-dimension. He was effectively locked out of his own crime scene.
"There's only one person with enough juice to crack this open," he said, his voice flat with realization.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cracked smartphone. He scrolled through the few contacts he had until he hit the name: Kuzushi.
The phone rang four times, each tone echoing in the silent room like a hammer on an anvil.
"What?" Kuzushi's voice was sharp, accompanied by the muffled sound of a TV variety show in the background. "I told you, scavenger. I don't do chores. If you can't find a ghost, try checking the attic again. Or maybe you just lost them because you were looking at your own reflection."
"Listen to me," Masaru said, ignoring the jab. His voice was low and steady. "Alex and Yuki are gone. They vanished in the middle of the living room. No struggle, no sound. They were right in front of me, and then they weren't."
The line went quiet for a second. The TV sound in the background vanished. "What do you mean 'vanished'?"
"I mean an Enclosed Void," Masaru said.
Kuzushi let out a short, mocking laugh. "A void? In a Setagaya haunting? You're lying. You're just trying to get me down there because you're scared of a 2nd Deviation. A low-grade can't manifest a void, Masaru. That's basic biology. It would be like a cat trying to fly a helicopter."
"I'm not lying," Masaru snapped, his grip tightening on the phone. "I've checked every inch of this house. They aren't here. This thing is using a manual trap. It's hiding its energy signature by folding the space. I can't reach them, and if they're in there with that thing, they're dead meat while you're sitting there watching game shows."
"You're serious," Kuzushi said, her tone shifting from annoyed to suspicious.
"I am. Get down here as fast as you can. You're the only one with the Deviation rank to force a breach. If you don't come, I'm calling Sakura. I'll tell her you sat on your ass while the team got erased."
"You little—"
Click.
Kuzushi hung up.
Masaru sat back against the sofa, his heart hammering against his ribs. He checked his watch. He waited.
The house felt like it was watching him. The shadows in the corners of the ceiling seemed to pulse with a slow, rhythmic heartbeat.
He kept his hand on his holster, waiting for the floor to drop out from under him, but the demon was being patient.
It had its prize. It didn't need the scavenger yet. It was probably waiting for him to lower his guard.
Ten minutes later, the front door didn't open; it exploded inward.
The lock shattered as the door slammed against the interior wall with a violent bang. Kuzushi stepped into the house, her pink hair a messy halo and her face twisted into a mask of pure irritation.
She was still wearing her cargo pants and tank top, but the air around her was vibrating with a heavy, oppressive energy that made the air feel thick.
"If I get here and this turns out to be a misunderstanding," Kuzushi said, pointing a finger at Masaru's face, "I am going to rip you apart. I'm going to peel you like a grape, Masaru. I was in the middle of a meal, and I don't like being interrupted by low-specs with active imaginations."
Masaru stood up, ignoring the threat. He pointed to the center of the room. "Look at the floor. Right there. Between the TV and the sofa."
Kuzushi walked to the middle of the rug. She closed her eyes for a second, her head tilting. Her expression changed.
The arrogance faded, replaced by a sharp, professional focus. She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring.
"There's a seam," she whispered. "It's thin. Like a hair. You were right. It's a manual fold. It's pathetic, really. It's like the demon is trying to hide behind a piece of paper, but it's still a void."
"Can you break it?" Masaru asked, stepping closer.
"I don't break things, scavenger," Kuzushi said, a cold smile touching her lips. "I nullify them."
She simply stood still and let her energy flood the room.
The temperature dropped ten degrees in an instant.
Masaru felt a pressure in his ears, like he was diving deep underwater.
It wasn't the "leash" energy Sakura used—that felt like a physical weight. This felt like a lack of everything. A void in the literal sense.
"Move back," Kuzushi commanded.
Masaru stepped behind the sofa, his hand on his gun.
Kuzushi didn't move a muscle, but the air around her began to distort. The light in the room started to bend, warping into a greyish, static-filled haze.
The floorboards beneath her sneakers began to vibrate, a low-frequency hum that Masaru could feel in his teeth.
"Void," Kuzushi said. Her voice sounded like it was coming from inside Masaru's own head. "Kinetic Nullification."
It wasn't a fancy spell. It was a rejection of reality.
A black sphere of non-existence erupted from Kuzushi's body. It wasn't a slow growth; it was an instantaneous snap.
The blackness hit the floor, the walls, and the ceiling.
Masaru watched as the "nothingness" of Kuzushi's void collided with the hidden seam in the floorboards.
There was no sound of an explosion, but the entire house seemed to groan, the wooden frame shrieking as the physics of the room were torn apart.
The two spaces—the demon's hidden trap and Kuzushi's nullification field—hit each other with the force of two tectonic plates.
Because Kuzushi's energy was a higher deviation. It forced itself inside. It overwhelmed the weaker fold, dragging the reality of the living room with it.
The floor beneath them didn't just disappear; it ceased to be a concept.
The white walls of the Setagaya house flickered like a dying television screen and then vanished. The ceiling, the sofa, and the shattered TV were gone.
Masaru felt his stomach drop as the physical world was stripped away. He felt like he was falling, but there was no wind and no gravity.
A second later, his boots hit something solid. It felt like stone, but it was perfectly smooth and cold.
He looked around.
He was no longer in the house. He was standing in a black plane that stretched out in every direction until it met an infinite, starless horizon.
There was no sun, no moon, and no light source, yet he could see Kuzushi standing five feet away from him. Her pink hair was the only color in a world of absolute shadow.
The air here was freezing and smelled of absolutely nothing. No dust, no milk, no life.
Kuzushi lowered her hands, the black aura around her body slowly receding into her skin. She looked around, her brown eyes narrowing as she scanned the infinite dark.
"We're in," she said.