He could hear it in Katsura's voice — there was far more he'd wanted to say; Matsuzaemon's move had agitated something deep, even if the move itself was only a small one. But looked at from the other direction, this only confirmed how seriously Katsura took Matsuzaemon as a person. Ma En was a foreigner who'd been in Japan one month. He didn't know the politics here, didn't know the social landscape, didn't know the web of relationships that ran between the people with actual authority and actual reach. Back in his homeland, he had intelligence networks and access channels that made problems solvable with a single call. Not here. He'd abandoned every connection he'd carefully built in his homeland in order to pursue something strange and uncanny — coming to Japan was walking out with nothing.

Katsura didn't know what he was capable of. But he himself knew: what he could actually do was limited.

The enemy was this dangerous, this vast. Matsuzaemon's official position was clearly sufficient to move the local social machinery, and the root network spreading outward from him was more complex and enormous than Ma En had estimated. Not everyone could force their way into a government assembly session; not every demoted civil servant could threaten influential figures in education — by Katsura's account, this man had gone and communicated with the major figures in Bunkyo District's entire educational system, as if single-handedly threatening the whole of it. To Katsura, the man had simply gone mad.

But Ma En suspected Matsuzaemon hadn't gone mad. Perhaps Katsura and his peers simply couldn't correctly read his intent — and that was the source of their anxiety.

No human being could single-handedly take on a social institution. To attempt it, you had to split factions against each other, pull people toward you through strategic positioning. In any nation that was still at peace, approaching the educational core of one of its most important districts with this kind of aggressive implied threat would have a success rate approaching zero.

Bunkyo District was the most prestigious educational district in all of Japan — without exaggeration, the kind of "school city" you read about in novels: public and private schools together, from kindergartens to universities ranked in the global top ten; more than thirty universities by a count taken ten years ago, over a hundred independent and affiliated middle and elementary schools. Globally renowned research institutes, laboratories, and precision manufacturing facilities — one of the best places in the world for the integration of education, research, and industry, surpassed by few regions anywhere on earth.

Here, teachers, professors, students, and industrial workers were the core population; almost every other industry existed to serve them.

Ma En had formed his own assessment of what Bunkyo District's educational infrastructure meant to Japan — and he believed that if Bunkyo became chaotic, Japan's educational system overall would suffer a severe blow. A place this important in any country carried proportional political weight, and accordingly, the guarantees of security and stability placed on it were of the first order. In practice, Bunkyo District's police force was not only Japan's most efficient but its most forceful — which had kept Bunkyo's safety record the finest in Japan for close to a hundred years, unmatched even by the financial center, the political capital, or the districts famous for wealthy residents.

Matsuzaemon wanted to start a fight with the educational system in a place like this? Even with political resources behind him, his odds of success were nearly zero. Ma En believed: if he truly made a move, even if he were the core figure of the radical faction and the public face of the Imperial Party, he would not survive long. The ability of the two-party system to maintain itself over so many years wasn't arbitrary — Matsuzaemon's conduct was too extreme, and both parties would move to suppress and sanction him.

Then again — he'd already done something extreme. Being sent down to Bunkyo District was the evidence.

Which meant: Katsura and the other administrators collectively believed Matsuzaemon's current intent was even more extreme than what had gotten him demoted in the first place?

Ma En hung up. But he stayed in the booth for a while — he needed to organize his thinking.

Katsura and the others thought Matsuzaemon had gone mad. And indeed, it did look like a madman releasing his madness. But Ma En had to take the intelligence he possessed and examine more carefully whether this particular madness was real.

If Matsuzaemon was drawing not only on human-scale influence but on monster-scale influence, the number of people he could mobilize was at least a hundred thousand.

Assume he had already infiltrated Bunkyo District as his base of operations. Then the students, teachers, professors, workers, and people of every level under his control — even if not a full hundred thousand concentrated in Bunkyo, the number would be close—

No, these people weren't necessarily all in Bunkyo District. Even so, the scale was genuinely alarming.

Consider: even an ordinary strike or march was already a major international event. In the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, with manpower stretched thin and people's nerves raw and unsettled, the severity of the situation went up another level.

Add the particular importance of teachers, professors, students, and workers as a social group — the implications were almost unthinkable.

Before confirming the "monsters" existed, Ma En had hypothesized a massive cult organization operating behind the Room 4 Ghost Story. In that model, Matsuzaemon was simply a cult leader exploiting human psychology for political gain. Even if the cult reached a hundred thousand people, the situation in that model wasn't this dire.

What did Matsuzaemon actually want? Looking at him as a human being, as a cult leader and political opportunist, as a monster — the answers seemed to share some surface features, but the nature of each and the ultimate goal were necessarily different.

Compared to the first two angles, the "monster" angle was the most disorienting. From it, Ma En couldn't see Matsuzaemon's actions or targets clearly. Those actions that looked foolish and insane from the outside might have a much more terrible answer underneath. If Katsura was worried about "civil war," Ma En was starting to suspect that a bad turn could produce something worse than civil war. But what that worse thing looked like, he genuinely couldn't picture — war, especially civil war, was already among the worst things in his understanding.

He felt bad about this — his heart and his head both seemed to be rising like fermenting dough, and the vague but insistent sense of foreboding was lodged in him like a hook, reeling up emotions he didn't know what to do with. These emotions were so transparent, so chaotic — like a fish yanked from water, thrashing with everything it had — making it hard to breathe.

Instinctively, he reached for his collar. Then he remembered — he wasn't wearing formal clothes. The formal clothes and tie had either been burned or thrown away by Hirota Masami. He couldn't pull at a tie to let himself breathe.

He'd never thought, before this moment, that wearing casual clothes could feel this uncomfortable.

Still. Katsura hadn't demanded he return to school today. He had time to visit the best hotel in the district and book a room before going to a department store to restore himself to something like his usual appearance.

First, though — it seemed there were a few pests to deal with.

He stopped masking his movements and looked directly into the alley toward the shadows he'd noticed. He held that look long enough that either the wait grew too much or their patience ran out — the faint shadows on the ground shifted.

Ma En's face remained expressionless. He pushed the booth door open quietly, picked up his briefcase and umbrella, and turned to walk deeper into the alley on the opposite side.

As expected, someone followed immediately. Their surveillance was unprofessional; so was their tracking — like bottom-of-the-ladder criminals who tail women for the cheap thrill of it. In Ma En's perception, these movements were essentially "announcing themselves." They seemed entirely unconcerned about being detected.

Did they think they had the upper hand?

Ma En placed his fingers lightly on the umbrella's trigger mechanism and slowed his pace.

Less than ten meters. He stopped. The people behind him continued forward, gradually accelerating. He could hear their footsteps clearly — untrained, all amateurs, something like street delinquents. Even so, considering the strangeness of the overall situation, he wasn't optimistic that they were simply ordinary street criminals hoping to lift his wallet.

Five meters. He heard their heavy, slightly nervous breathing. He turned around.

As he'd expected: five people. Dyed hair, ear rings, nose rings — it seemed every conceivable surface of each person could accommodate a ring or a stud, and the belly, neck, and arms showed tattoos. The expressions on their faces were hard and openly hostile. Many of Japan's criminal element had this aesthetic, apparently stressing individuality and toughness — an aesthetic Ma En genuinely couldn't quite understand. Back home, street criminals typically looked like perfectly ordinary people; it was only their language that turned disagreeable. Three of the five had obvious muscle. The other two were either too heavy or too slight to be much threat.

Still, given the possible "non-human" factor with any of these five, he'd already prepared to employ some of the umbrella's stronger capabilities.

"Something you want?" He looked at all five without flinching.

The five seemed somewhat thrown. They stopped, fanned out in a rough arc. He could read some hesitation in their eyes — these didn't look like monsters who'd lost ordinary rational instinct. When they met his gaze, the heavy one and the slight one both shifted their eyes away involuntarily.

The three muscular ones seemed stung by his attitude and his look — the faintest flush of irritation was beginning to spread from some fine detail in their faces.

Their mental composure, Ma En thought, was painfully poor.

"You've been watching me. Something you wanted to say?" He asked quietly, without blinking.

He'd been told before that his voice was too flat and colorless — as if it had no emotional content. He knew he had emotions. It was just a habit from childhood, ingrained and impossible to shake. He'd never taken other people's observations about it as reason to change the habit. He'd always felt that when talking with people who didn't matter to him, expressing emotion was unnecessary, and speaking loudly was something he didn't particularly enjoy.

And these five, as it happened, genuinely didn't warrant warmth or volume.

But the five delinquent-looking men didn't appear to share this assessment. In one instant Ma En felt they were a little afraid; in the next, that fear converted into explosive anger.

Still not worth paying attention to.

"What kind of look is that? Think you're better than us?" The one standing in the middle — the biggest and clearly the leader — shouted, and swung a kick.

Amateur's movement.

Against amateurs, this kick might have had some surprise — but in Ma En's eyes it was both slow and weak, and in that moment he thought: perhaps these people really were just ordinary people, not something else.

He deflected it with a casual swing of the umbrella — but as the contact happened, instinct added just a touch of force. The result: he felt no impact at all; the other man was the one who stumbled.

That weak?

Ma En blinked, slightly puzzled, and looked more carefully at the five of them. Had he misjudged? Were they really just ordinary street criminals?

He pivoted the umbrella again in a loose swing, making a sharp cutting sound through the air, and said: "Who's looking down on whom?"

"Damn it — what are you all staring at!" The muscular leader — his first kick having failed — appeared to be losing face. He turned to snarl at his companions: "All of you, together — kill him!"

"Wait — wait — weren't we just here for the briefcase?" The thinnest of the five said, clearly frightened. "You said the moment we showed up he'd hand it over."

"...!" The leader gave this man a speechless stare. "Are you stupid or just blind?"

"I — I — I..." Another voice, the heavier one, stuttered with an accent. "I don't like fighting. You said we wouldn't need to fight, just show up and fill the space — I — I only came because—" He hadn't finished speaking when the leader's fist hit him in the face. Blood from his nose, and he collapsed in pain. Then several hard kicks, and without time to cry out, he was already badly beaten.

The man who was supposed to be their target was standing right there — entirely ignored.

Ma En rested the umbrella tip on the ground, both hands on the handle, and watched the farce unfold. He said nothing. The heavy and the thin ones were clowning around like something out of a low comedy, but the muscular one doing the beating wasn't much better. At least they had stated their objective: the briefcase.

This made him think: why the briefcase? Did they assume it held money? Or something else — the materials and books inside it? If so, how had they judged those things to be significant? Was it because during the earthquake he'd run out carrying only these things? Were they — those monsters, Matsuzaemon — trying to destroy the materials and books? But they'd been through Room 4 already. A fire would have done it then.

And if these five were actually part of "them" — then their performance was embarrassing beyond description. Loose punching, weak kicks, slow reactions, no coordination — and they wanted to take something from him?

Exactly who was looking down on whom, here?

Ma En watched the muscular leader beat his two useless companions, and made no move to leave.

"Done?" When the leader spat contemptuously and turned around, Ma En asked: "Why do you want my briefcase? Because there's money in it?"

"Money? I've got plenty of money!" The leader yanked off his outer jacket, revealing a pistol tucked into his waistband. It was probably meant to signal that he was taking this seriously — but to Ma En it still had the look of posturing. "You — you've been getting on people's nerves lately. You'd better think about whose toes you've been stepping on. Hand over the briefcase and walk away, or this stops being about fists."

"You look a bit wound up." Ma En let his gaze sweep over the gun for exactly one beat, then brought it back to the man's face. "Has someone been threatening you? Whoever sent you here — do they have a lot of pull?"

"Where do you think you're looking?" The leader drew the pistol. For reasons he couldn't name, this calm-faced man with his flat voice was putting something into his chest that he could only call unease. He was having trouble reading this young man — the casual clothes, the briefcase, the umbrella, the bizarre aura of it — his nerves were tight. He'd been in this business a long time, and he'd never quite encountered someone like this before. Or — actually, not quite never, but the memory was too vague to trust.

Bottom line: after that first failed exchange, he'd already confirmed that this person was not going to be easy.

Even so, he had a job to finish, otherwise he'd be in worse trouble himself. He waved a hand. The other two muscular men drew guns carefully from each flank, beginning a slow approach.

Their cautious approach told him: they were still being rational about the trigger. Which meant — if he simply put down the briefcase, they'd leave? That caution was almost gentle.

But Ma En had no intention of accepting that logic, and absolutely no intention of surrendering the briefcase. What was inside was far too important.

"Was it Matsuzaemon who sent you?" Ma En asked.

The muscular leader pressed his mouth shut. One of the others barked: "Drop the umbrella. Put the briefcase on the ground. Hands up, behind your head."

"The umbrella?" Ma En paused on it, then asked: "You know this umbrella?"

"Didn't you hear? Hands off it!" The man approaching from the other side stopped, shouted tensely.

Ma En's face carried a faint, empty smile.

"So you do know something. Don't worry — I don't kill people."

Only make them feel pain.

Before the three men could squeeze their triggers, Ma En released the umbrella handle, raised both hands, and in the same movement tilted his body — two of the men lost sight of him.

The shock in their eyes hadn't fully surfaced before a shot came from the other side.

But like a lizard against a wall, Ma En flattened himself against the ground in a shape that shouldn't have been possible, and the bullet passed. The shooter probably couldn't understand it. From Ma En's perspective it was simpler: when you watched the trigger finger of the person most likely to fire, you could judge the timing before it happened. These people, even holding guns, were amateurs. Most of them had probably never shot through a hundred rounds in their lives.

The umbrella bounced up from the ground — drawing all three sets of eyes.

"Wha—" Before the sound could form into words, the shooter found his ankle in Ma En's grip. In this moment, Ma En could see nothing on the man's face but shock.

Ma En gave him a calm smile, grabbed the ankle, and swept him outward like a stick.

The other two had no time to react, no way to absorb a body being used as a projectile against them. All three went down across the alley's floor and walls in a heap. Three pistols clattered loose. The ankle-grabbed man was already holding his foot and screaming.

He couldn't believe it — a single grab, and his bones felt like they'd dissolved.