Location: Saitama Medical Center, North Tokyo – 3:17 AM
The fluorescent lights of the hospital ceiling buzzed with a faint, maddening hum. Ren Kurosawa sat beside the hospital bed, his hands clenched tightly together, fingers wrapped in the sleeves of his hoodie, stained with the scent of antiseptic and sleepless nights.
His mother, barely recognizable beneath the bruises and wires, lay unmoving. Machines whispered her every breath—mechanical, fragile, borrowed.
The woman who once cradled his head during thunderstorms… was now weathering a storm of her own, and he couldn't even hear her voice through it.
He'd already lost count of how many days it had been. The nurses spoke gently when they updated him. Pity in their eyes. Clinical words like coma, trauma, no neural response.
But Ren didn't need their updates.
He had the key.
And ever since that night… he could feel something else too. A presence. A pressure in the air—like the world was holding its breath, watching what he'd do next.
He pulled the black key from his pocket. It was ice-cold, even now. No matter how long he held it.
Its shape was unnatural. Part relic. Part weapon.
He twisted it slowly in the air, watching as no reflection came off its surface.
"I used you to punish monsters," he whispered. "So why does it feel like I became one too?"
He looked at his mother. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. Her face—swollen, but soft—still held that same tired warmth, even in sleep.
"I'm sorry," he said, voice cracking. "I didn't… I didn't want to be this. I just didn't want to be powerless anymore."
Tears welled up, but he blinked them away. That's when it happened.
A sudden shift in the air.
The key trembled in his hand.
Ren jerked up, looking around. No footsteps. No shadows. But something had changed. He felt it.
Like another thread had been pulled in the fabric of fate. Like…
Like someone else had used a key.
He stood up, shaking, clutching the black metal like a lifeline.
He looked down at his mother one more time, then kissed her forehead gently.
"I'll be back, Mom. I promise. And I'll make sure the gates don't take anyone else."
Elsewhere…
A rooftop in Shinjuku
The old man stood under the moonlight, watching two shimmering keys float in his hands—one black, warm with wrath, and one gold, humming with harmony.
A smile crept across his wrinkled face.
"Two sides of the same coin," he said. "Soon, they'll see. Heaven and Hell don't judge the living… the living judge themselves."
The cold air outside the hospital bit through Ren's jacket as he stepped onto the quiet street. The city never truly slept—but in this hour, it only whispered.
He didn't know where he was going. Only that something was pulling him. The key in his pocket still hummed like it had a pulse of its own. Something—or someone—had used a key. He could feel it.
He walked past dimly lit convenience stores, under buzzing lamps and empty bus stops. His reflection in the glass looked like a ghost.
But he wasn't alone.
At first, it was just a feeling. A chill down his spine. The way the back of his neck tingled.
Then the sound—a soft, deliberate step—half a second after his own. Then another. Matching his pace. Matching his rhythm.
He spun around—nothing.
Just wind. Concrete. Trash bins.
He continued on, picking up his pace.
But so did the steps.
Faster. Closer. Behind him but never visible.
Then—he saw it. A flicker.
Not a person exactly. A silhouette without definition, darker than the night around it. Like someone had cut a hole out of reality itself and stitched it into the alleyway behind him.
"Who's there!?" Ren barked, voice cracking with both fear and rage.
The figure didn't answer. But it stopped.
And smiled.
He couldn't see its face. But he knew it was smiling. That same sickening, patronizing smirk the old man wore whenever the gates opened.
Ren reached into his pocket and grabbed the key.
The moment his fingers touched it, the figure twitched—glitch-like, jerky—as if reacting to the key's presence.
"I'm not afraid of you," Ren lied.
The figure took a step forward.
And then—
CLANG!
A stray piece of metal clattered nearby. Ren's heart nearly exploded. When he looked back…
The figure was gone.
Not vanished—dispersed, like mist under the sun. Like it was never real to begin with.
But the dread remained. Worse now.
He stood still for a moment, trying to breathe.
Then he heard a whisper.
Not from outside.
From the key.
"Judgment is not finished…"
Back at the hospital, monitors around Ren's mother blinked unnaturally for a brief moment. Her fingers twitched. Then stilled again.