Empathy is a friction.
Before the Crimson Shard, every person I passed was a drag on my soul. Their grief was a weight; their anxiety was a sandpaper rub against my nerves. I moved through the world like a man wading through chest-high mud, slowed by the sticky, suffocating mess of human emotion.
But as the red pill dissolved into my bloodstream, the mud turned to air.
I stepped out of the "Glass House" and onto the Roppongi sidewalk. The night was cold, but I felt like I was standing in the core of a furnace. The Crimson Shard didn't just mute the noise; it weaponized it. I could still hear the Echoes, but they no longer hurt. They were just data. Transparent, pathetic, and easily manipulated data.
I watched a couple arguing near a taxi stand. Normally, the woman's spiraling fear of abandonment would have made my head throb. Now, I looked at her and saw a series of tactical errors. Her voice was too high; her body language was too desperate. She was losing the argument because she was feeling too much.
*I'm so tired of this. Just leave. Just go.* Her Echo was a dull, muddy brown.
I walked past them, my stride long and predatory. The "lag" was still there—the half-second delay between the world and my perception of it—but the Crimson Shard allowed me to use it. I was living in the future. I saw where people were going to step before they did. I saw the muscle in a man's jaw twitch before he decided to be angry.
I wasn't just listening to the symphony anymore. I was the one holding the baton.
[ STATUS: CRIMSON PEAK ]
[ PULSE: 142 BPM ]
[ EMPATHY LEVELS: 4% ]
The notification flickered on my phone, but I didn't need the screen to tell me. I could feel the ice in my chest. I felt... clean.
"Ren."
The voice was a rasp, like stones grinding together. It didn't come from the crowd. It came from the shadows of a closed boutique entrance.
I stopped. I didn't feel a jolt of fear. Fear requires a projection of future pain, and the Shard had severed my connection to such trivialities. I turned my head, the movement crisp, waiting for the "lag" to catch up.
A man stepped into the light of a streetlamp. He was tall, gaunt, and looked like he had been assembled from spare parts found in a scrapyard. His clothes were high-end but filthy, and his eyes were wide, the pupils dilated until the irises were mere slivers of grey.
Elias Moore.
I recognized the resonance before I saw the face. It was an Echo I had heard rumors of in the dark corners of the VEIL forums—a Fractured Echo that sounded like a choir of ghosts.
*He's late. They're all late. The clock is melting. Don't let the voices touch the floor.*
The static around him was immense. It was a localized storm of trauma. But unlike the people in the gala, Elias wasn't hiding it. His mind was a wound that refused to scab over.
"You smell like the Shard," Elias said, his head tilting at an unnatural angle. "The red one. The 'Kill-Your-Soul' one. You're burning bright, kid. Too bright. You'll be a cinder by sunrise."
"I've never felt better," I said. My voice sounded foreign to me—deep, steady, and devoid of the tremor that usually defined it. "Who are you?"
"A ghost who forgot to die," he muttered. He walked toward me, his Intent Pulse flickering like a dying lightbulb. He wasn't aggressive, but he was unstable. "You found the girl. You identified the truth. That makes you a target, Kurogami. The VEIL doesn't like truth. It's bad for business."
"I'm not interested in the business," I said, stepping closer to him. I was checking his geometry. If he swung at me, I knew exactly how I would break his arm. The thought was as casual as deciding what to have for dinner. "I'm interested in the Silent Zone. I'm interested in Han Seo-Yun."
At the mention of her name, Elias's Echo flared into a violent, jagged purple.
*The Harmony. The Lie. The Silence that eats everything.*
"Stay away from her," Elias hissed, his hand shooting out to grab my lapel.
I was faster. The Crimson Shard gave me a reaction time that felt like cheating. I caught his wrist mid-air. I squeezed. I could hear the faint creak of his radius and ulna. I didn't feel bad. I didn't feel anything.
"Don't touch me," I said quietly.
Elias didn't flinch. He leaned in, his breath smelling of stale coffee and something chemical—Void residue.
"She isn't a person, Ren. She's a mirror. If you look at her long enough, you'll forget what your own face looks like. She's a Void Shard in human skin."
I released his wrist. He stumbled back, but his eyes never left mine.
"Then why did she help me?" I asked.
"She didn't help you," Elias laughed, a dry, hacking sound. "She fed you. She's fattening you up for the slaughter. You're a candidate now. Rank: Unrated. Do you know what the first Rank-Up challenge is?"
I looked at the barcode on my wrist. It was pulsing with a hungry, dark light.
[ NEW CHALLENGE INCOMING ]
[ TYPE: ELIMINATION ]
[ OBJECTIVE: SILENCE THE NOISE ]
"It's not about listening anymore, is it?" I asked, the red heat in my blood surging.
"No," Elias said, his Echo softening into a mournful wail. "The first step to joining the VEIL hierarchy is to prove you can take someone's voice away. Permanently."
My phone chimed. A map of Roppongi appeared on the screen. A single, glowing red dot was moving three blocks away.
[ TARGET: PLAYER 77-B (STALKER) ]
[ STATUS: HUNTING YOU ]
"He's already here," Elias whispered. "A Black Shard user. He doesn't hear thoughts. He eats them. He'll drain your Echo until you're nothing but an empty skull staring at the stars."
I didn't wait for Elias to finish. I turned and began to run.
But I wasn't running away. I was running toward the dot.
The Crimson Shard was screaming in my veins. My muscles felt like coiled springs. I took a corner, my shoes skidding on the asphalt. The "lag" was now a tool—I could see the shadows of cars before they emerged from the side streets. I was weaving through the city like a ghost.
I reached an alleyway behind a row of luxury boutiques. The air here was heavy with the scent of damp trash and expensive perfume.
The red dot was stationary now.
I stopped at the entrance of the alley. I didn't hide. I didn't crouch. I stood in the center of the path, my silhouette framed by the neon glow of the street behind me.
"Come out," I said.
From the darkness, a figure emerged. He was wearing a hooded jacket, his face obscured by a digital mask that flickered with static. But it wasn't the mask that caught my attention.
It was his Echo.
It was a Black Shard resonance. It didn't pulse, and it didn't shimmer. It pulled. It was a gravity well of pure, unadulterated hunger. I could feel my own thoughts being dragged toward him—memories of my mother, the sound of the train, the face of the girl at the piano—all of it being sucked into his void.
*Hungry. Need more. Feed the gap. Empty. Empty. Empty.*
The Stalker didn't speak. He raised a hand, and I felt a sudden, sickening vacuum in my mind. It was as if he were trying to pull my brain out through my ears.
Usually, this would have destroyed me. I would have collapsed, screaming as my identity was erased.
But I was "Red."
I didn't try to protect my thoughts. I did the opposite. I pushed.
I took all the noise, all the filth from the gala, all the screaming contradictions of the two hundred liars I had just met, and I funneled them into a single, concentrated burst of mental static. I didn't hold it back. I threw it at him like a grenade.
*THE MERGER. THE DEBT. THE LIES. THE HATE. THE STOVE. THE LETTER. THE RED. THE RED. THE RED.*
The Stalker froze. His digital mask flickered violently, then shattered.
His Echo, which had been a void, was suddenly flooded with more data than a human brain could process. It was a system overload. He fell to his knees, his hands clutching his head, his own "hunger" turning against him as he choked on the filth I had provided.
I walked toward him, my footsteps slow and deliberate.
"You want to eat?" I asked, my voice cold and flat. "Then feast on this."
I stood over him. I could see his eyes behind the broken mask. They were bleeding. The Black Shard had cracked under the pressure of the Crimson output.
I reached down and grabbed the front of his jacket. I didn't feel a flicker of pity. I didn't feel the weight of his pain. I only felt the objective.
Silence the noise.
I raised my fist. My Intent Pulse was a straight, unwavering line of Crimson. I wasn't just going to hit him. I was going to erase him.
"Ren! Stop!"
The voice was distant, but it carried a resonance that bypassed the Crimson Shard's armor.
I froze. My fist was inches from the Stalker's temple.
I turned my head. Han Seo-Yun was standing at the end of the alley. She wasn't running. She wasn't shouting. She was just standing there, her presence a pool of absolute silence in the middle of the carnage.
"He's defeated," she said. "The challenge is met. You don't need to kill him."
"He was going to eat my mind," I said, my voice sounding like it belonged to a machine. "He is a threat. Threats must be eliminated."
"That is the Crimson talking," Seo-Yun said, stepping into the alley. Her silence began to wash over me, and for the first time since I took the pill, I felt a flicker of something else.
Doubt.
"The Shard makes you efficient, Ren. But it also makes you predictable. If you kill him now, you become exactly what the VEIL wants—a tool. A weapon with no hand to hold it."
She walked up to me and placed her hand on my arm. The contact was like ice on a burn. The red vision in my eyes flickered. The "lag" stuttered.
I looked down at the Stalker. He was unconscious, his breath shallow and ragged.
I released his jacket. He slumped to the ground like a discarded doll.
[ CHALLENGE COMPLETE ]
[ RANK UP: COPPER (Lvl 1) ]
[ REWARD: NEUROSHARD - WHITE (3.0mg) ]
[ WARNING: CRIMSON DOWNTIME IMMINENT ]
The notification flashed, and then the world tilted.
The heat in my blood vanished, replaced by a cold, soul-crushing exhaustion. The Crimson Shard was wearing off, and the interest on the loan was coming due.
I fell back against the brick wall, my breath coming in ragged gasps. My empathy returned like a flood, and with it, the weight of what I had almost done. I looked at my hands. They were shaking again.
"I... I almost killed him," I whispered, the horror finally breaking through the numbness.
Seo-Yun stood over the fallen Stalker. She didn't look at him with pity. She didn't look at him at all.
"You did," she said. "And tomorrow, someone else will try to kill you. This is the world you chose, Ren. There are no heroes here. Only survivors and ghosts."
She turned to leave, but I reached out and caught the hem of her sleeve.
"Why did you stop me?" I asked, my voice breaking. "If there are no heroes, why save a monster like him?"
She paused. For a split second, I thought I felt a ripple in her silence. Not an Echo, but a tremor—a ghost of a feeling that was too deep for the Shards to reach.
"Because I'm tired of being the only one who remembers what it's like to be human," she whispered.
She pulled her arm away and vanished into the night.
I stayed in the alley, alone with an unconscious man and the screaming ghosts of my own mind. The Crimson was gone, leaving me hollow and broken.
I looked at the sky. The stars were invisible, drowned out by the neon lies of the city.
I was a Copper Rank now. I had survived the first hunt. But as I sat there in the dirt, I realized that the silence I had been searching for wasn't a reward.
It was a grave. And I was digging it one Shard at a time.