Tokyo: Proving one's position from behind the scenes

The ward office's duty room is at the end of the second-floor corridor, with windows facing east. In the morning, sunlight streams in through the windowpanes, drawing several white parallelograms on the floor.

At 9:16 a.m., the phone rang.

The patrol officer on duty was named Tamura, 42 years old. The phone calls he received ranged from cats climbing trees to couples arguing. As he picked up the receiver, his other hand was still flipping through the newspaper on the table. The newspaper had a follow-up report on the Adachi Ward serial murder case three days earlier, with the headline "Police say the case is still under investigation."

A young man's voice, mixed with the excited voice of a middle-aged man, spoke quickly as he recounted seeing a fish while night fishing in the Arakawa River—an outrageously large fish that emerged from the water, its back wider than a person's outstretched arms. He said he had been fishing for over a decade and had never seen anything like it before; the fish was at least three meters long.

Tamura closed the newspaper, took a ballpoint pen from the pen holder, and scribbled a few lines in the duty log. He confirmed the location and time of the discovery, asked again for the person's name and contact information, and then hung up. The young patrolman sitting opposite him looked up and asked him with his eyes what was wrong.

"They said they saw a big fish in the Arakawa River." Tamura tossed his pen back into the pen holder. "A three-meter-long catfish."

The young patrol officer, Sakamoto, had been assigned to Adachi Ward this spring and was still in the stage of taking all emergency calls seriously. He stood up and said he should go check it out. Tamura glanced at him, seemed about to say something, but in the end, he simply closed his duty logbook and took the patrol car keys from his drawer.

The patrol car was a small white vehicle with the Metropolitan Police Department logo on its body and several dark blue stripes on the side. Tamura drove, and Sakamoto sat in the passenger seat. Outside the window, the morning street scene of Adachi Ward flashed by, with laundromats, 100-yen shops, and real estate agencies with faded signs passing by one after another.

The banks of the Arakawa River look completely different during the day than at night. The river surface gleams with a grayish-green light under the sunlight, and the factory chimneys on the opposite bank emit wisps of white smoke. Clumps of weeds grow on the concrete slope of the riverbank, and a few fishing rods are propped up by the railing. Fishermen sit on folding chairs with plastic buckets and insulated boxes beside them.

Tamura parked the car in the parking area below the embankment and turned off the engine. The two walked up the cement steps to the top of the embankment, where the young man on the phone was already waiting. Next to him stood a middle-aged man shouting something at him. The two men had identical expressions, looking like they had a lot to say and couldn't wait to say it.

The middle-aged man pointed to a spot in the middle of the river and said that the fish from there had emerged the previous night. He said he had been fishing in this river for over ten years and had never seen anything so big. When its back arched out, the river water looked like something was pushing it up from below, and the entire surface of the water bulged into an arc. He gestured the size in the air, his arms outstretched.

Tamura stood on the embankment and looked down. The river was calm; apart from a few withered leaves drifting downstream and the occasional small ripples stirred by the wind, there was nothing to see. The water wasn't clear; visibility was very low, and nothing could be seen clearly beneath the grayish-green surface.

Sakamoto walked down from the embankment and squatted by the water for a few minutes. There were several irregularly shaped dents in the mud and sand by the water's edge, as if something quite large had crawled up from the water and then been blurred by the current. He gestured with his finger to indicate the size of the dents and glanced back at Tamura.

Tamura didn't say anything, but took out his phone from his pocket and dialed the headquarters number.

When the transfer from headquarters to the Operations Section occurred, Naoya Taniguchi was reviewing an analysis report on Nobuko Yoshida's whereabouts. The report contained a map of the Arakawa Ward's sewer system, with several possible routes marked in red and densely covered with notes.

The person on the other end of the phone described the situation in the Arakawa River: a giant catfish, about three meters long, spotted by a night angler; there were what appeared to be crawling marks on the riverbank silt. After listening, Taniguchi Naoya remained silent for a few seconds, closed the report, and asked if anyone had been sent into the water to investigate. The person on the other end said not yet, because they weren't sure what the creature was and dared not venture into the water rashly.

Naoya Taniguchi hung up the phone, took a cigarette from the pack on the table, put it in his mouth, but didn't light it. His gaze fell on the map of Tokyo's 23 wards on the wall, where the location of the Arakawa River was circled with a highlighter.

A three-meter-long catfish.

From a biological perspective, catfish can indeed grow very large. One of the world's largest freshwater fish is the giant catfish, with records of fish exceeding three meters in length found in Southeast Asia and Europe. From a purely natural standpoint, the appearance of a three-meter-long catfish in the Arakawa River is not entirely impossible.

But this is Adachi Ward.

Too many things have happened in Adachi Ward lately. Yoshida Sho turned into a monster and killed thirty-seven people, leaving behind a glowing coral after his death. Yoshida Nobuko jumped from the third floor of a hospital, dragging a sword that could ignite flames, and wiped out three yakuza organizations in two hours, then fought her way through twelve American special forces soldiers and jumped into the Arakawa River. And then there's Hoshimiya Akira, the eighteen-year-old shrine maiden in white robes and red hakama, who claimed to be instructed by the gods, her palms emitting a bluish-green light that dispelled evil spirits that even the American bishop couldn't handle.

Before these events occurred, if someone told Naoya Taniguchi that there was a three-meter-long catfish in the Arakawa River, he would have thought that the night fisherman was drunk and seeing things.

He wouldn't think that way now.

He picked up the phone, about to dial Director Yamazaki's number, when the office door was pushed open. A clerk in uniform leaned halfway in, his expression a mix of confusion and tension, and said that the shrine maiden of Hoshimiya Inari Shrine had just called with important information to report.

Naoya Taniguchi took the cigarette out of his mouth.

When Hoshimiya Ei's voice came through the phone, the sound of wind chimes tinkling in the background could be heard, crisp and clear. Her tone was calm, as if she were talking about something she had confirmed many times and no longer needed to doubt.

She said that the aura of two Sukuna fingers appeared in the Arakawa River, which was a divine message from the Inari God.

She paused, then added, "Ryomen Sukuna's fingers are dangerous evil objects. If left unchecked, they could give rise to monsters like Yoshida Sho."

After hanging up the phone, Taniguchi Naoya dialed Director Yamazaki's hotline and relayed Hoshimiya Akira's words verbatim.

Director Yamazaki's reply was very short.

"Grasp."

Within an hour of receiving the order, the operations team completed the initial deployment. A three-kilometer stretch of the Arakawa River where the catfish was discovered was designated as a warning zone, with a temporary interception net set up both upstream and downstream. Observation posts were placed every fifty meters on both sides of the riverbank. The diving team began checking their equipment. Heavy dry suits, oxygen tanks, underwater lights, and capture net guns were taken out of their equipment cases and laid out on the embankment one by one.

Naoya Taniguchi stood on the embankment, gazing at the greyish-green river. Sunlight shone on the water, scattering into tiny, shimmering flakes in the wind, making his eyes sting. He held a cigarette between his fingers, this time lighting it; the smoke was quickly dispersed by the river breeze and disappeared.

A black SUV drove up from the road below the embankment and stopped next to the patrol car. The door opened, and Commissioner Smith got out. He was wearing a dark blue short-sleeved polo shirt with the silver eagle badge pinned to the collar, and his trousers were tucked into his boots, making him look like he was going fishing.

He walked over to Naoya Taniguchi, his gaze sweeping over the busy rubber boats on the river and the diving equipment on the shore, before pulling a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and putting them on.

"Oh, dear Taniguchi, do you remember our agreement on supernatural matters?" he said.

Naoya Taniguchi glanced at him but didn't say anything.

Downstream from the Arakawa River, about two kilometers from the temporary interception net, a drainage outlet with a diameter of 1.2 meters is partially submerged above the water. The concrete edges of the outlet are covered with dark green moss, and murky water slowly flows out from deep within the pipe, merging into the main stream of the Arakawa River.

Inside the pipe, in the dark depths.

Nobuko Yoshida sat on a dry concrete platform, her back against the pipe wall. Her hoodie hood was pulled up, and the sleeves extended beyond half of her hands, leaving only her five fingers gripping the hilt of the Demon Slayer Sword exposed. The greatsword rested across her knees, its dark red sheen flickering in the darkness, illuminating half of her face.

Her eyes were closed, her breathing was steady and slow, and the Vajra Wrathful Form was constantly being activated.

Deep within my consciousness, that gray-white sky unfolded once more. Human bones littered the ground, their gray-white fragments whistling softly in the wind. On the throne made of human bones, the figure with four arms and two faces still sat there, the one on the front of the throne wearing that nonchalant smile.

"Arakawa River." Ryomen Sukuna's voice came from all directions, deep and slow, each word like a pebble thrown into water. "My finger is there. A fish swallowed it and is turning into something else."

Nobuko Yoshida remained silent. She stood before the throne, her right hand gripping the hilt of the demon-slaying sword, the tip of which rested against a grayish-white bone fragment.

"Go and get it back. It's mine."

Nobuko Yoshida opened her eyes.

A tiny ripple appeared on the surface of the water deep inside the pipe.