Chapter 15 — Part 1
Lena arrived before dawn, the static-bitter taste of recycled air still clinging to her throat. Overnight logs waited like an unwashed stack of dishes — small anomalies, borderline errors, nothing that declared itself guilty. Nothing clean either.
She set her bag down, touched the terminal, and the office lights rose in a muted blue wash.
"Alright," she murmured, the Kansai-edged consonants slipping out of her after too little sleep. "Let's see what y're hidin' now."
The System populated three anomalies.
Two internal.
One… also internal, but from somewhere unexpected.
She frowned.
The request had come not from outside the region — that would've been easy to classify — but from another wing of the Rainescorp Regional Headquarters here in Nugano. Not her floor. Not her chain of command. A node tied to the Research Oversight Department, a team that rarely touched SRO archives without layers of paperwork.
The time-stamp was exact:
00:14, minutes after her closed-door committee session last night.
Someone in her own building knew she was tightening the net.
Someone in Nugano HQ had reached straight into the obsolete subpatch archive — the same archive she'd been dissecting — without notifying her unit.
She routed a secure call to the Research Oversight wing. After three authorization hops and a slow, undercaffeinated greeting, a voice answered.
"Eh—Research Oversight, Nugano HQ. This's Analyst Yori. Who'm I speakin' with?"
"Director Lena, Systems Integrity Division."
A nervous shuffle crackled through the line. "Ah—yes, ma'am. How can we, uh, assist?"
"I'm looking at a midnight request from your floor for SRO subpatch archives."
"Mm? Ah… let me pull that."
A pause. Keys clacking softly.
"Right — that was Ichikami Haru. Senior analyst. Flagged it as a cross-check request."
"Did he specify from which division?" Lena asked.
"No ma'am. Only wrote: 'expedited internal verification.' Looked routine enough."
Routine. At midnight. Minutes after her classified committee session.
Lena's jaw tightened. "Was Ichikami on-site at that hour?"
"Yes. Logged in from Terminal 4-B on our wing."
Terminal 4-B. A blind spot for her team's usual audit sweep. Not a restricted area — but not tied to any ongoing diagnostics either.
She narrowed her eyes.
Someone inside her building, inside Nugano HQ, was mirroring her work in real time.
"Send me his full request chain," she said calmly. "And the logging metadata for Terminal 4-B."
"Already on its way, Director."
The channel closed.
Lena leaned back, letting the implications settle.
This wasn't cross-regional interference.
This wasn't a distant partner.
This was someone down the hall.
Someone who knew exactly when her committee meeting ended.
Someone who knew which archive she would examine next.
Someone who wanted access to the same outdated subpatches — either to follow her trail…
or erase it.
She pulled up the building's internal terminal map.
Nugano Rainescorp Regional Headquarters suddenly felt smaller.
And much more crowded.
Chapter 15 — Part 2 (Special Chapter Conclusion)
Lena crossed the bustling operations floor of Nugano Rainescorp Regional Headquarters with the clipped stride of someone who had run out of tolerance before she had run out of clues.
Ichikami Haru.
Terminal 4-B.
A midnight archive retrieval with no visible motive and no corresponding ticket.
She had known for days that the problem was internal.
Now she knew the floor it was sitting on.
The elevator chimed softly as she reached the Research Oversight wing. Compared to her division, this floor felt quieter — too quiet. Researchers walked in hushed pairs, clutching tablets, murmuring in the soft Kansai-lilted Sojo dialect that permeated every corner of Nugano's institutional culture.
She found Terminal 4-B in a side corridor that smelled faintly of ozone and dust.
Empty.
Powered down.
Recently scrubbed.
Her lips pressed into a thin line.
A freshly wiped terminal was as suspicious as a freshly mopped crime scene.
She opened a diagnostic panel beneath the workstation. A strip of polymer residue clung faintly to the inner hinge — the same batch-class microstructure her forensic team had flagged earlier.
"Found you," she whispered.
She pinged Security. "Get a containment team to 4-B. And locate Analyst Ichikami Haru. Now."
Before the reply arrived, a soft beep on her tablet drew her attention.
A new anomaly.
A small one.
Barely more than a shiver in the logs.
A low-level access ping from an outbound satellite relay — not from another region, but from a Rainescorp substation used for supporting remote territories.
Specifically:
Rainescorp Support Node — Keya Rural Liaison Hub
Okinawa Prefecture, Northern Island — Keya Township
Lena frowned.
That hub almost never generated any activity beyond routine sync pulses. It existed mostly to maintain communication with rural civic projects in places where infrastructure was fragile.
And Keya…
That was the tiny coastal town where the company supported a sponsored elementary robotics program.
She knew the liaison officer there by name.
Ryota's father.
A kind man, mild-mannered, always apologizing for occasional delays in transmitting attendance logs from the village kids. He often mentioned his young son Ryota — the shy boy who tinkered with scrap circuits and occasionally sent hand-drawn thank you notes to tech staff in Nugano.
The hub should not have been touched during an internal breach investigation.
Not unless someone was using it as a test hop.
"Don't tell me," Lena muttered. "Someone thinks a rural signal relay's beneath attention."
She tapped open the packet detail.
It wasn't a breach.
Not a surge.
Not a patch event.
Just a call for resynchronization — forced manually, not automatically.
And the timestamp?
Dead center of her committee session last night.
The breath left her in a slow, cooled stream.
Someone in Nugano HQ had triggered a remote sync on a rural hub during the same window as Ichikami's archive pull. Not to breach anything — but to mask a small internal reroute behind the noise of external maintenance.
A clever trick.
And one that could only have come from someone who knew that Keya's hub reported with a delay and was rarely examined closely.
She rubbed her temples. "Poor Ryota's probably wonderin' why the lights flickered durin' his study hour."
Her expression softened for half a second before hardening again.
Whoever did this had used a harmless rural node — connected to families, children, community outreach — as misdirection.
That was unacceptable.
She closed the panel and stood.
A shadow fell across the corridor.
Ichikami Haru stood at the far end, holding a mug of tea, expression unreadable.
His voice came sharp with polished Kansai cadence.
"Director Lena. Yer lookin' awful busy this mornin'. Somethin' I oughta know?"
Her mind processed his tone, posture, timing.
Too smooth.
Too confident.
Too expecting.
She stepped forward but did not answer. "Come with me to the main floor. Now."
He blinked once, slowly. "That serious, huh?"
She gestured sharply. "Move."
He obeyed — outwardly calm, but the slight tension in his shoulders betrayed a man who already knew the walls had shifted.
They entered the elevator.
The doors closed.
Lena spoke without turning. "Ya accessed SRO subpatch archives at 00:14. Unscheduled. Unauthorized."
A small pause. A breath.
Then, lightly:
"Mm. I did."
No denial.
No surprise.
Just admission — as if the crime were a calendar error.
"Ya rerouted a sync pulse through the Keya hub," she continued. "Y'know that's a rural line used for elementary outreach? Didja consider what happens if ya overload a node out there?"
Haru's eyebrow twitched. "It was low amperage. Wouldn't hurt the system. Wouldn't hurt anyone."
Lena's jaw locked. "That 'anyone' includes kids."
Silence.
No apology.
No guilt.
Just a faint calculation behind his eyes.
Then he spoke in a voice that chilled her in its clarity.
"I don't want to hurt anyone, Director. But someone has to open the way. Someone has to make sure the System sees the flaws before the wrong people exploit 'em."
"Yer not savin' the System," Lena snapped. "Yer usin' it."
The elevator chimed.
The doors opened.
Security waited.
Two officers stepped forward. Haru didn't resist. He simply set down his tea on a nearby shelf with a steady hand.
As they took him by the arms, Lena studied his expression.
He didn't look trapped.
Or defeated.
Or cornered.
He looked… patient.
As though this was one step in a larger pattern.
As though someone else had already moved to the next piece.
Her stomach tightened.
This wasn't the mastermind.
This was a technician — precise, capable, complicit — but not the architect.
And if the architect had used Haru…
If they had used Keya…
If they had used anything beneath notice…
Then Lena knew the investigation had only truly begun.
**Side Scene — Keya, Northern Okinawa Island
(Teaser for Ryota's Story)**
The cicadas were loud again.
Ryota pressed his small hands against his ears, squinting at the bright sky as he stood barefoot on the wooden deck outside his house. The cicadas didn't listen, of course. They never did. They buzzed and sang like they were trying to shake the whole forest awake.
"Mmm… too loud…" he mumbled, scrunching his nose.
Inside the house, Mama clinked dishes in the kitchen. Papa's voice drifted through the window — tired but warm — talking into the comms handset for his Rainescorp shift report. Ryota only heard pieces of it:
"…Keya hub… small flicker… should be fine… kids' robotics program tomorrow…"
He didn't know what a 'hub' was, except maybe a box with lights that Papa sometimes cleaned. Papa always said not to touch it, so Ryota touched the other boxes instead. The ones full of spare wires and tiny little gears.
Those were safe.
Mostly.
Ryota plopped down on the deck and started fiddling with a broken toy drone he had found near the shoreline last week. It had washed up with the tide, its little wings cracked, its battery missing. He liked it anyway.
He liked things that needed fixing.
He held the drone up to the light and squinted. "Mm… maybe if I put a new wire here… it'll fly again…" He nodded to himself, even though he wasn't totally sure.
The wind shifted, warm and salty. The afternoon sun glowed orange over the tops of the trees. Everything about Keya felt soft and slow — the kind of place where nobody rushed unless a storm was coming.
Then—
click
The lights inside the house blinked.
Just once.
Tiny, like a wink.
Ryota's head shot up. "Eh?"
He scrambled to his feet, staring through the open door. Papa stopped mid-sentence. Mama paused with a dish in her hand.
Then the lights steadied again.
Mama sighed. "Ahh, power flicker again? Guess the relay's tired from summer heat."
Papa stepped out onto the deck, rubbing the back of his neck. "Just a sync issue from Nugano, I think. Happens when the mainland sends updates."
Ryota tilted his head. "Papa… did the house blink?"
Papa chuckled and mussed his hair. "Mm. Just for a moment. Nothing scary."
But Ryota wasn't scared.
He was curious.
He felt something when the lights blinked — not scary, not bad — just weird. Like the air had been pushed sideways for half a second. Like the world hiccuped.
He didn't know that word, though.
So he just said:
"It felt funny."
Papa blinked. "Funny?"
Ryota nodded big, eyes wide. "Like—" He puffed out his cheeks and jerked his shoulders. "Like the house went hup!"
Mama laughed softly. "You and your imagination, Ryota."
But Papa didn't laugh.
He looked at the sky for a moment, just a second too long. Ryota didn't understand the expression, but he remembered it.
The breeze picked up and rustled the banana leaves. A pair of shisa guardian statues watched from the garden, chipped but smiling.
Ryota picked up his drone again, but his hands felt different now. Like maybe the broken parts mattered more than he thought. Like he should fix it soon.
The sun dipped lower.
The world felt the same.
But also… not.
He whispered to himself:
"Whatcha doin', sky…?"
The sky, of course, didn't answer.
But somewhere in Nugano, a woman named Lena discovered that someone had used Keya's quiet relay as cover for something larger.
And somewhere far in the future of Ryota's small life, this one flicker would matter more than he could ever imagine.