Ma En was carried through the sky without any say in the matter. Each of the neighbor's leaps spanned multiple buildings — the shorter ones covered dozens of meters, the longer ones well over a hundred — and during the seconds of airborne suspension between each landing, Ma En felt a sustained lightness, a floating sensation that made "gliding" feel more accurate than "jumping." This was not how a person moved. It was how something else moved — something that simply happened to look like a person.

The "lightness" observation became more precise when the neighbor touched down. Even carrying a grown adult and a corpse, even with that silhouette that radiated such overwhelming mass and gravity, the landing barely made a sound — nothing that could be called loud in the still of the night. Someone sleeping on the other side of a wall wouldn't have stirred.

Heavy bearing, light step. A contradiction — yet they fit together seamlessly, as if that was simply what he was.

All this talk of "monsters," the neighbor kept insisting — and yet those monsters, disguised as humans and living in the city without a single person noticing, couldn't hold a candle to the thing actually carrying Ma En through the air. They didn't deserve the word.

The night wind, sometimes gentle and sometimes surging, seemed to rise from below and from behind, as if cupping them both in its palms. Bound by the vines — no room to move, no way to do more than look — Ma En still felt it fully: what it was like to run and leap and glide freely through a vast and blazing city, under a sky so deep and wide it seemed to swallow the horizon whole.

As if every anxiety and suffering and dread that had accumulated from the Room 4 Ghost Story had dissolved into the wind, the starlight, the clean bright moon, the glittering sprawl of lights below, and the rapid, weightless, floating rhythm of each bound—

Just running and jumping. The simplest things in the world. And yet nothing like ordinary running and jumping — as if a single point of common sense had swelled like a hot-air balloon and lifted them both into the sky above common sense—

"Where are we going?" Ma En shouted. He couldn't not shout. He was so electrified — no aircraft, no glider, no machine that had ever carried him through the sky had produced anything like this. One was the ordinary, and one was the bizarre; the bizarre he'd spent his whole life chasing had never presented itself more clearly, more viscerally, than right now.

"Sanchoumoku Park!" The neighbor's voice was low and heavy — but there was something else underneath it, a barely suppressed elation. Ma En couldn't see his face or his eyes, but he felt certain: the man was at his most alive right now. Just as Ma En felt liberated — this neighbor who had sealed himself inside his room under constant fear, this man with all those terrors — in this moment, something in him had broken free too.

"Won't we be spotted?" Ma En kept shouting. "We're not high enough!"

"Not by them! Monsters won't notice us — only humans can see us!" The neighbor answered with complete confidence. "If it were just you, you'd definitely be seen. But I've hidden you — you've vanished from their eyes!"

"But humans can see me?"

"Yes — but that doesn't matter. As long as the monsters can't see you, we're fine."

"How does that work?"

"You've been marked. When they try to observe a marked target, their eyes link together. Not individual threads — it's a formless connection. Wherever you go, the moment any one of them sees you, all of them see you. You thought you were being subtle? Ha! You fool."

The neighbor's laughter in the wind — mocking, but easy, unconstrained.

"I've been watched this whole time?"

"The whole time. By them, and by me." He said it with satisfaction. "I can use their network. Their eyes, their connections."

"But they can't see you back — they don't even know you exist?" Ma En felt no embarrassment about shouting his own ignorance into the sky. He laughed along. "You're incredible — you're like a hacker!"

"Exactly. A hacker. A ghost in their network." The neighbor said it without any modesty — as if this were simply his natural state, something he'd long since stopped finding remarkable. And perhaps that was why he'd been able to survive in the middle of the Room 4 Ghost Story for all these years.

But what he's doing right now can't be an ordinary decision.

Ma En couldn't help the thought. In every exchange he'd had with this man, he'd felt how cautious he was — how the weight of his fear of the Matchmaking God, how the knot of his feeling about Matsuzaemon, pressed on everything he did. Perhaps there had never been another person who'd allowed him to move like this — openly, dramatically, with the appearance of someone who had decided to set life and death aside and go all-in.

Ma En didn't think the neighbor's decision was made for him — there might be a small element of that, but the more significant cause was that the man himself had run out of time to keep hiding, to keep waiting.

Maybe it was mood, like a volcano that had been building pressure past the point of endurance.

Maybe it was the situation — like someone who had already been backed to the cliff's edge.

In the end, the neighbor had chosen the young man called "Ma En." Not by ideal choice, but by the best choice available after a very long wait.

Ma En suspected as much, though the evidence wasn't quite enough to be certain. Still, he felt he was probably right. And not just him — the neighbor too was running out of time. And perhaps even the person at the very center of this event — Matsuzaemon himself. It was like a whirlpool that had been spinning across years, coming to its reckoning for every human and inhuman party in this August.

"What happened between the two of you?" Ma En's voice went out into the wind, reaching the neighbor's ears. "You and Matsuzaemon?"

"Us?"

"You and Matsuzaemon." Ma En added immediately, "And maybe a woman who looked like Hirota-san?"

He'd already gathered some of this from the neighbor's attitude toward Hirota Masami — the warmth that surfaced in an unguarded moment, the human tenderness that hadn't been erased by everything else. Certain threads of the man's buried secrets had been visible in those moments.

"...Hm-mm." The neighbor made a strange sound, but it carried no negative emotion — not anger, not resistance. Still, he said: "You think I'm going to tell you that? So you can sit back and treat my old wounds as dinner conversation? Naive little fool."

Ma En thought about shrugging, which he couldn't do — all of him was caught in the vines. He did want to know. But it wasn't idle curiosity. In the Room 4 Ghost Story, this neighbor's past ran straight through to the present, and whatever secrets it held were almost certainly critical intelligence. But the probe had closed, as he'd expected, and even the attempt at a shrug was beyond him — he was entirely in the neighbor's hands.

"All right then — was there a woman? Someone like Hirota-san?" He eased back a step, following the plan.

Silence.

"Come on, friend. You're looking at a man with limited brain-power here. At least give me something about Hirota-san."

"...All right, all right..." The neighbor murmured, his voice dropping to something quieter, something with just a trace of melancholy — and in that quietness, Ma En felt again that human warmth that sometimes surfaced in him.

Another landing — and this time, the footfall was heavier and more audible than anything before. Yet the leap after it came faster than any previous one, as though he were running from something.

"Her name was Miyano Akemi. She looked very much like Hirota Masami. But I knew — they were different women... different monsters..." The neighbor spoke as if submerging into memory, his footfalls alternating between heavy and light — and Ma En felt this was his inner landscape expressing itself, the fluctuations of emotion given physical form. "She was a good woman... but also a terrifying monster... she was special. Maybe — if you survive August, if you really make it through — you'll think the same thing about Hirota Masami someday."

"She's important?" Ma En asked, because that was equivalent to asking how important Hirota Masami was. He'd already felt it clearly — the neighbor's claim that she was "special" wasn't just a personal perspective, something born from his own feelings. Within the full scope of the Room 4 Ghost Story, this "Miyano Akemi" and the present-day "Hirota Masami" held an extremely important position.

The neighbor's attitude toward both women was so strange, so contradictory. Ma En couldn't quite determine what form their importance took — perhaps the real problem to resolve wasn't Matsuzaemon at all, but Miyano Akemi and Hirota Masami? Perhaps because the neighbor had failed to resolve the "Miyano Akemi" issue in the past, it had become the "Hirota Masami" issue now?

That wasn't a conclusion Ma En wanted to reach. It was one he had to consider — even though he found it deeply uncomfortable to think about Hirota Masami in such unfavorable terms.

From a purely subjective standpoint, he hoped the neighbor's answer would prove both women innocent.

However important they were to the Room 4 Ghost Story, as long as they weren't the key factor pulling everyone into danger, as long as innocent people could live normally when Miyano and Hirota lived normally — that was enough. Ma En had no desire to pursue it beyond that. The counterargument was that proving this required knowing their secret.

He felt the neighbor understood exactly what he was implying.

"Yes. The way I see it — that's right." The neighbor finally answered from his own perspective. "Miyano Akemi... ah, Miyano Akemi. She never hurt anyone. Not even Matsuzaemon. She only hurt me. And I don't blame her. I really don't. Not at all. But why? Why? WHY!?"

The neighbor's emotion surged — his pace accelerated visibly, as if running off the fury and grief building inside him. Ma En listened to the wind screaming past his ears, and felt that it was the neighbor's anguish given sound.

"What happened?" Ma En hesitated, but pushed the question anyway.

"She... she—" The neighbor's voice cracked. "Matsuzaemon killed her. He killed her. He shouldn't have. That's not how it was supposed to go. When he killed me — when he said he would kill me — he promised he'd look after her!" The roar broke open in the wide dark sky. "That was the price! But Miyano Akemi shouldn't have been the one to pay it! The price was mine! It was Matsuzaemon's! Death — only death can free Akemi's soul from pain!"

"So that's why you want to kill Matsuzaemon!"

"Yes! Kill Matsuzaemon!" The neighbor let out a howl that tore through the open air above the city — raw, desolate, grief-soaked. "You promised me! You'll help, right? You fool! You want to end all of this — you want to protect Hirota Masami — then you have to help me kill Matsuzaemon! Ha ha ha ha ha ha — you have no choice! You've never had a choice!"

Ma En still couldn't see the face of the neighbor racing ahead of him. But the bearing had changed — become something ferocious and elemental — and everything in that voice, everything in that rising and falling body, radiated hatred and suffering that seemed to have physical weight. This was a being possessed by vengeance — a genuine and total possessed being, leaping under the moon, gliding above the city, carrying with it the force of someone willing to drag the whole city down into hell just to pull one enemy there with it. And yet so unmistakably, so completely, like a real human being.

The fury, the grief, the pain, the raw edge of the howl — all of it was turning what looked like a monster back into something entirely human.

This time, the silence belonged to Ma En. The neighbor's voice went on and on into the night wind, scattering itself endlessly: you have no choice, you'll never have a choice...

"I understand. What I promised — I'll do." Ma En said. "As long as you haven't lied to me."

"Lie to you? No. I only tell you the truth. Truth is far more painful than lies." The neighbor's voice carried pain, and with it a warped, bitter satisfaction. "The more truth you know, the less you can escape. If you don't kill Matsuzaemon, and you die — then after you die, Hirota Masami will be killed by Matsuzaemon, exactly the way he killed Miyano Akemi. Everyone is nothing to him but a ripe offering. A fat, satisfying sacrifice."

"Then how do you kill him? With a gun? A blade? An assassination? In front of all the monsters? In broad daylight, everyone watching?" Ma En shouted against the wind.

"Hm-mm. A gun? A blade? You think those can kill him? Listen to me — even if you dropped a hundred nuclear bombs on his head — ten thousand nuclear bombs — it wouldn't kill him!" The neighbor said it with real pain. "He isn't something that simple anymore. He's a true monster now."

Ma En found this claim difficult to fully accept — nuclear weapons as the comparison? Was it really that extreme?

"Then what do we do?" He swallowed the doubt and kept going.

"Only one method. I can only think of one... perhaps there are others, but I've run out of road. The intelligence has been suppressed — no, it's not even that the intelligence was suppressed. Some of it simply can't be found no matter how hard you search, no matter how many people you use, no matter how much time you spend. Everything about the Matchmaking God, about those monsters — all of it has been swallowed by time, erased, leaving only fragments. And the fragments that haven't been destroyed yet — they seem to have a will of their own. Only the rarest of people will ever know them..." The neighbor's voice turned simultaneously painful and hazy, as though he were sinking into a hallucination. "Only the chosen ones. Only they will know. I wasn't chosen... why? Why? WHY!?"

Intelligence that couldn't be found no matter how you searched? That existed only for "chosen" people? No matter what methods you used, what resources you applied, what years you devoted — you simply couldn't reach it? Ma En couldn't fully make sense of the description. He couldn't tell whether it was objective truth or the narrow, distorted worldview of a mind under catastrophic pressure.

"Human beings pursue knowledge," the neighbor said, his voice thick with pain. "But not all knowledge can be pursued by human beings. Some knowledge pursues the human — not the other way around. The roles are reversed, the positions inverted. That knowledge wants to be understood by certain people. But there is some mechanism — an incomprehensible mechanism — that ensures it will never be understood universally."

Ma En's mind sharpened. He felt the bizarre pressing against him again — not in any concrete form, not through any specific event, but in some subtle and invisible way, winding into his thoughts as the neighbor spoke, entering him without a door. He felt as if he almost understood something, but couldn't say what he'd understood.

"Then what do we do?" Ma En asked.

"Nothing to be done. There will always be things you can't know, and things you can." The neighbor's emotional pitch seemed to stabilize, settling back down from that frantic height. He dropped from the air — a straight drop into a wide expanse of enclosed land, landing heavily, leaving deep prints in the vegetation-covered earth.

Every visible structure around them had gone dark. The light here was far dimmer than the city streets — only thin moonlight settling over everything, as if it had draped him in gauze.

Ma En and the body were set down.

He already knew where he was: Sanchoumoku Park.

The neighbor said: "With you, I have a one-percent chance of success. Without you, none at all."

"Killing Matsuzaemon?"

"Yes. Killing Matsuzaemon. One percent, now that you're here." The enormous body turned to face him. Those eyes, even now, were bright and sharp. "Are you afraid, young man?"

Ma En straightened his spine, reached up and adjusted his deep-red tie, and let out a short dismissive snort through his nose. The answer it conveyed needed no translation.

"Fear of death isn't my line of work," he said.