The walk home was a single tunnel of paranoia. Every time a streetlamp flickered, Kami flinched, staring at every nearby shadow, bracing himself to see a hand shoot out from within. But nothing happened. In his pocket, his phone felt hot, the golden script on the display was still glowing.
Once home, he sprinted to his room, threw himself onto his bed, and flipped open his laptop. His fingers trembled as he hammered keywords into the search bar: "objects turning flat," "subway anomaly Tokyo," "man disappeared into shadow," "3D becoming 2D."
The results were worthless. Forums about optical illusions, reports of defective LED displays on trains, conspiracy theories about ghosts. Nothing about the shadow man or anything similar. Nothing about a "Number 3", or anything number related. other than mathematics.
He let his head sink onto the keyboard. His gaze fell on his jacket hanging over the chair. The knife was still stuck there. He touched it cautiously. It was completely flat, devoid of any depth, as if someone had printed a high-resolution photo directly into the fibers of the fabric.
"How do I get you out of there?" he whispered. He concentrated, trying to imagine the knife regaining its volume, filling the space. But nothing happened. "What did it say again? A-Rank ability? I can't do anything, even though A should be the highest??"
Suddenly, a loud scream shattered the silence of the apartment.
It wasn't just a scream of fear, it was a sound of pure agony. It came from his sister Asuka's room.
Kami jumped up. "Asuka?" he yelled, sprinting down the hallway. Even before he reached her door, an unnatural heat hit him. He smelled it before he saw it: the pungent stench of singed hair and burnt flesh.
He threw the door open and immediately recoiled. The room was in flames. Asuka was kneeling on the floor in the center of the room. Her entire body was covered in an eerie blue-red glow. Tears of boiling water ran down her cheeks, evaporating before they even touched the floor.
"Kami, help me, it won't stop!" she screamed. Her voice sounded like the crackling of a forest fire.
Directly in front of her lay a small, charred heap. It was the remains of Benni, her dog. He had turned to ash within a second when she had tried to hug him.
"Asuka, get away from there!" Kami shouted, but he couldn't step closer. The air in the room shimmered so intensely that the walls seemed to be melting. The very atmosphere around Asuka blurred from the searing heat.
He saw Asuka's phone lying on the floor, displaying text in the same script as his own:
[SYSTEM LOG: INITIALIZATION SUCCESSFUL]
[ABILITY UNLOCKED: BURN]
[RANK B ABILITY]
[ABILITY UNSTABLE!]
Asuka screamed again, and the heat became unbearable. A circle of flames formed around her, threatening to reduce the entire house to rubble and ash if she didn't cool down. Kami knew if he didn't act now, she would explode. He looked at the flat knife on his jacket.
"Come on, Kami, you have to save Asuka, do something, damn it" Kami thought as he watched his suffering sister.
"Here, look Asuka, isn't this funny?" He reached his hand toward the blazing flames surrounding her and touched them. He burned his hand in the process, but he managed to use his ability again. The flames lost their three-dimensional properties and turned 2D. Now, they only looked like a Hot Wheels flame pattern on the sweatpants Asuka was wearing.
With a slight grin, though one filled with confusion, she looked up at Kami, and the heat cooled slightly.
"What is going on, Kami? I don't understand any of this. Suddenly there was this message on my phone, I wanted to hug Benni, and suddenly he went up in flames with me."
She was visibly bewildered and heartbroken. When Kami explained that he didn't know what was happening either and that he had been attacked by someone else with powers in the subway earlier, Asuka looked him deep in the eyes. "Then we'll just have to find out what's going on. I can't let this go, I just lost my best friend Benni. I'm going to kill the bastard responsible for this."
Before the two could finish their conversation, the shadow of a grown man spread across the room again, shining in through the window.
Before Kami knew it, the shadow man rose from the floor once more, standing between the two siblings.
With a trembling voice, the stranger spoke again: "Ah, you must be Number 666. You're definitely coming with me."
When the stranger tried to grab Asuka, Kami saw red. In a moment of rage, he grabbed the 2D knife on his top, let it become three-dimensional again, and stabbed the man, who had just turned his back to him, right in the spine.
The stranger simply turned around, however, while the knife stuck in him fell through his body to the floor. "Did you really think you could fight a Coder like that? Your ability is completely wasted on an idiot like you."
He grabbed Asuka, who was still cowering on the floor, completely broken, and dove into his shadow, which then vanished again, taking Asuka with him.