Ma En kept returning to one thought: the specifics of how the train had been rerouted didn't matter. What mattered was that the enemy had responded to his "departure for Kanagawa" probe with an emphatically forceful countermeasure.

He'd never actually intended to flee Bunkyo District or the Room 4 Ghost Story — not even after losing his memory, when his interest in the bizarre had dulled to near-nothing.

His work was here. The people he'd grown close to were here. And while the ghost story's pattern of ending with a handful of deaths might seem like a small tragedy, its backstory implicated too many people for him to simply tuck tail and run.

Whether for his own sake, or for the friends he'd made this month, or for the local residents he hadn't yet had time to meet — Ma En felt that even if he escaped successfully, he'd spend the rest of his life haunted by the cowardice of it. A man who'd abandoned the field. The knowledge would never sit right inside him.

How many of those people were the "monsters" the Room 3 neighbor described? Ma En didn't consider the question important. As long as they lived like people, as long as they weren't violent criminals, that was enough. He didn't like the practice of sticking a label on someone and then viewing everything about them through that label, treating it as their essence. He didn't like approaching unfamiliar things from the presumption of guilt.

He wasn't denying the possibility that many of them weren't human. He simply believed that even if this touched on their fundamental nature, it shouldn't be the deciding factor in how the two sides related.

What truly mattered was how the other party actually behaved.

He sat on the edge of the hotel bed, smoking, staring at the papers spread before him, and the people he'd met over the past month drifted through his mind — their faces, their quirks. However strange any of them might be, could any of them be called incompatible with human society? Not one. Every single one lived the way most ordinary people did.

Some might agonize over whether the people around them were really people. Ma En felt nothing of the kind.

He needed only to confirm that most of these possible non-humans would not spontaneously and voluntarily destroy the peace and normalcy of daily life. If some reason existed that would force them to shed the disguise and attack human society — then eliminating that reason was his job.

He'd circled Matsuzaemon several times on his notes. The circumstantial case grew stronger with every inference, but he still had no direct evidence. The Room 3 neighbor's attitude toward Matsuzaemon was direct, hostile, and unwavering — clearly informed by deep knowledge of the backstory. Even so, Ma En had never extracted from the man anything beyond that attitude. Without Katsura Masakazu, he wouldn't even have known Matsuzaemon's official identity.

He was acutely aware that his case against Matsuzaemon rested entirely on instinct and emotion. For dealing with the bizarre, instinct might not be useless. But the moment the issue touched human social order, the lack of evidence became critically obstructive.

The most frustrating aspect remained Matsuzaemon's social position. If the man were an outcast, a known dangerous element, or a literal monster in the wilderness, none of these tactical agonies would exist.

The enemy's strength didn't come only from the bizarre. It came from having woven itself into the fabric of human society. Ma En felt this acutely, and it brought his mind back to the Room 3 neighbor's wretched state — the man had been ground down not only by the supernatural, but by the social pressure the enemy controlled.

Yet the more formidable the enemy, the more committed Ma En became. He'd picked up this stubbornness at the postal service. Whether standing on the side of humanity, of the working people, or of the Red Party — when facing criminals who believed that holding human shields made them untouchable, he'd sooner die than let them keep thinking it. He'd find their weakness and drive something sharp into it.

Several times through the night he went to the window and checked the thirteenth floor. He'd given up on sleeping. He could imagine that while he watched the apartment, the enemy watched him. When he'd checked in, the front desk, the service staff, even management — any of them could be eyes for the other side. But being watched and doing his own watching weren't mutually exclusive.

Since he couldn't disrupt their surveillance, and couldn't flee from it, he'd focus on what he could do.

He locked every door in the room, closed every window, drew every curtain — turning the space into a makeshift sealed box. If the enemy relied only on "the people's eyes" to monitor him, then his actions inside this sealed room retained some degree of privacy. He couldn't do much in here, admittedly, but the illusion of safety helped his nerves.

At one in the morning, he turned off every light and used only the ambient glow of the city streets to observe the apartment building. By now, even Hirota-san's room — the last light he'd seen — had gone dark. The building's visible face was mostly swallowed by night shadow. Perhaps because the day had been too full of bizarre and dangerous events, he found himself seeing the building itself as a creature's nest — or worse, as a single creature entire: a thing that, if he dared enter tonight, would devour him whole.

He licked his suddenly dry lips and told himself his psychological problems were getting worse.

But then he wondered: was this sensation another warning from the enemy? Perhaps the formless adversary wanted to prevent him from returning tonight — and was therefore intensifying the psychological pressure, worsening his mental state.

If forced to describe it, the feeling was like a wild animal marking its territory with scent. The animal's chemical markers weren't only for its own kind — they spoke to every other beast in the forest. A contest of presence and genetics, fought without contact.

This was speculation without evidence. The thought itself might be delusional.

Conversely: if the enemy truly was applying deliberate pressure, and if the enemy knew him well, the apartment tonight might be a reverse trap — set precisely because they expected him to resist the fear and walk in.

When intelligence was insufficient, any analysis produced contradictory possibilities.

Self-help books and success manuals always placed "intelligence" and "intelligence analysis" at the top of their prescriptions. But in practice, having adequate intelligence support was the ideal, not the norm. In a real life — whether you succeeded or failed — there were times when you had to gamble on instinct and improvisation.

Ma En changed his plan. He'd originally intended to wait until tomorrow, after Hirota-san left for work, before sneaking back. Now he decided he absolutely had to go tonight. The feeling that the apartment was a monster or a nest — once stripped of the question is it dangerous? — made him lean toward the conclusion that this wasn't just psychosis; something was actually happening at the apartment tonight.

Yes, the gamble was dangerous. But when was it not? Ma En had never believed that danger was the most important factor in deciding whether to act.

He understood perfectly: the moment he left this sealed room, the odds of re-entering the enemy's surveillance went to ninety-nine percent. They'd know he'd gone to the apartment. They might respond. But as far as he was concerned, if the enemy did nothing, that would be more confusing — an unreadable silence that revealed no intent. Enemies who reacted with organized, forceful measures were easier to predict.

The worst scenario wasn't a visible response. It was fog — scattered moves, feints, the appearance of exposed schemes — and then, out of nowhere, the fatal blade.

From this angle, trusting the theory that he wouldn't actually die before August and deliberately provoking the enemy into escalation was a viable strategy. Better than being the frog boiled slowly.

Ma En grabbed the briefcase from the foot of the bed and opened the hotel room door without hesitation. He half-jogged toward the apartment.

The night was deep, but the city's liveliness hadn't fully subsided. He passed drunks and streetwalkers, convenience-store couples, travelers dragging suitcases, and office workers who were either exhausted or inexplicably wired. Traffic had thinned but not stopped.

Ma En, briefcase in hand, jogging through this population, was entirely unremarkable. Not a single person showed the slightest interest in his behavior, or in the deep-red tie at his collar.

Nothing stopped him from reaching the apartment. At the gate, the guard was in his booth watching a video — and barely glanced up as Ma En slipped past, too fast to register. Past the manager's ground-floor room — anyone entering through the main door had to pass it — the lights were off. She appeared to be asleep.

He entered the elevator. Arrived at the thirteenth floor. Before the doors opened, he was still guessing: in this sequence of perfectly ordinary non-events, what sudden abnormality was waiting for him? But the doors slid apart and the thirteenth floor looked no different from any other night — as far as his eyes could tell, there was no distinguishable variation. All rooms were dark. The corridor lights burned their usual pale white.

No trace of danger here. Yet something felt wrong — an indefinable not-rightness threaded through the air, the silence, the atmosphere. And tangled with the wrongness was a peculiar sense of familiarity, as though this slight deviation from normal had always been part of the building's character. The two feelings existed simultaneously: this is wrong, and this has always been this way.

A faint, ghostly déjà vu — the first he'd ever felt in this corridor during the past month.

He glanced at Room 3 and Room 6. No sound from either. No sense of anyone inside observing him.

Then he took out his key and opened Room 4.

The moment the door swung inward, the source of the wrongness crystallized. The feeling that had been ambient and diffuse became specific and locatable.

His room had been entered.

He paused on the threshold for one beat, then stepped inside, shut the door behind him, and hit the master switch by the entryway. Light flooded every room.

In the brightness, the signs of intrusion were unmistakable — and unsubtle. Whoever had done this hadn't bothered to conceal it. Ma En could tell at a glance: multiple people, probably three or four, likely a group. They'd gone through everything. Drawers emptied, contents scattered. The kitchen, the living room, the bedroom — disorder everywhere.

The heaviest damage was concentrated at the desk and the bookshelves. That was where his research had been — where he'd kept his notes. This was clearly the target. The intruders had pulled things out, examined them, and discarded what didn't interest them. The mess around the desk was far worse than anywhere else, which only reinforced Ma En's certainty: this was the enemy's work.

What he didn't want to conclude yet was whether the people who'd entered were the actual enemy or pawns being used. If the former, he could track them, find them, extract intelligence. If the latter, finding them would likely be a waste of time.

He bent down to pick up a book that had fallen to the floor.

As he did — as his gaze shifted sideways, not by intention but by the accident of movement — he saw a pair of eyes.

Murky. Clouded. Fixed on him.

A human-shaped figure, lying face-up, directly under the bed.

The room's light made those eyes vivid against the shadow beneath the bed frame, but that wasn't what made the hair on Ma En's scalp stand on end.

What he saw in those eyes was a dead person.

Those were the eyes of a corpse.