"So sleepy…"
Karasawa yawned at his reflection in the mirror.
His whole body felt heavy, but he still had to make his way back to Café Boro, sneak around cutting up newspapers to make a calling card, figure out how to deliver it, and all without Amuro catching wind—if the news got out and he got exposed, his phantom thief career would be over before it began.
So when the café finally closed and he saw Amuro off for the night, he watched him leave with a look of deep satisfaction.
Knowing someone out there was even more overworked than him made everything feel lighter.
In the mirror, the boy wore a short double-breasted tailcoat on top, paired with knee-length shorts. The scarf around his neck floated behind him as if gravity didn't apply—seasonally confusing, but aesthetically striking.
The most ridiculous part was still the mask.
"Mask, huh…" Karasawa leaned in and tugged at it. "More like a blindfold!"
A flat band of material wrapped around his upper face, no holes for eyes, just a smooth, seamless arc of black covering.
Great, a budget 9S cosplay.
No clue how it worked, but somehow it didn't impair his vision at all. From the outside, though, it looked like he'd been blindfolded with leather.
He played with the mask for a bit, then idly flipped the tail of his gravity-defying scarf, before finally switching off phantom thief mode.
So now he had a new skin, a one-click costume change, complete with concealed identity.
The mask even covered his very distinctive eyes.
Basically a new alias. All upside.
Karasawa crossed his arms over his chest and fell asleep in the most blissfully serene pose imaginable.
Just one thing left: time to go beat the crap out of Leon in his dreams.
While Karasawa was happily messing around in dreamland, a lot of people were very much awake.
On the street outside the Maru estate, murmurs drifted among the passing residents.
No one dared to gather near, given the awful temper of the household head, but the estate walls were covered with strange fliers and the streets littered with calling cards. Impossible not to notice.
Small voices recited in unison.
"'To the petty man consumed by greed, Mr. Maru Denjirou,'" a woman passing the alley leaned closer to the paper on the wall.
"'You exploit those in hardship with your wealth, trampling their dignity and grinding their hopes into dust. Your shameless deeds—we know them all.'" A salaryman picked up a card and read its contents aloud.
"'Tomorrow, you will pay for every one of your sins,'" a house servant, trembling, read from the card clutched in his hands. "'We have taken your twisted desires. From the Phantom Thieves of Hearts.'"
"Bang!" Maru slammed a hand down on the table, splashing tea everywhere.
"Who did this?!" Though over fifty, his voice still thundered with rage. "Rip all this trash off the walls! I want it gone!"
"We don't know, sir," the manservant said, head lowered, unable to meet Maru's flushed, furious face. "They're plastered all over the wall, and the cards are scattered everywhere—across the whole district…"
"What about the security cameras? The guards?!"
"The footage shows a few kids pasting them up… They said they just found them on the street…"
Maru's face turned an ugly shade of grey as he snatched the remaining cards out of the servant's hands, crumpling them and throwing them back in his face.
"Useless garbage. Clean it up, all of it! Now!"
"Yes, sir!" The servant fled like a man on fire.
Maru sat heavily at the table, heaving breath through clenched teeth, glaring at the fallen paper scraps.
Across the room, his wife, Inako Maru, covered her mouth with her teacup, hiding a smirk as she watched his furious outburst.
She had long suspected the shady dealings her husband kept buried under the floorboards.
Nothing written on those cards was false.
The Maru Group was thriving, and it wasn't like they needed the spare hundreds of thousands of yen. But Denjirou always had to resort to underhanded tactics, almost like the illicit profits were what really satisfied him.
"There, there, dear. Maybe someone's just jealous of our success, trying to sully your good name with slander?" she said, voice dripping with false concern. "It's just childish nonsense. Don't let it upset you."
Maru shot her a glare. "You don't get it. Rumors like this damage our reputation! Why am I even explaining it to you?"
That woman had been acting increasingly shady lately, always distracted. Maru suspected she had a lover and had already hired a PI to dig into it. Her smiling face made his stomach churn.
Useless, all of them. Maru stormed away from the table, heading toward the storage room where he kept his collection.
Forget this "pay for your sins" crap. More likely someone was using this "Phantom Thieves" nonsense to threaten his treasured artifacts.
Sure, his acquisitions hadn't all been legal—but he never hid the fact. Aside from being a successful businessman, he was a well-known collector.
Probably just some worthless debtor trying to steal from him.
In the hidden world he didn't know existed, the shadow of Denjirou Maru, draped in ceremonial robes, scowled beneath his crown. He picked up a katana from the wall and drew it, the blade flashing silver.
"Thieving little rats. Covet my treasures, do you? You'll die for it. None of you will leave this place alive!"
"The subject has no formal training background."
"You're sure?"
"We've compiled over a decade of the subject's life history. No prolonged absences from school during junior high or high school. Matches the profile of a normal student."
From the top floor of an apartment building across from Café Boro, Shuichi Akai frowned, listening to the report over the phone.
"No way. No untrained kid slips surveillance like that."
Photos were laid out before him, showing Karasawa during that incident at the shopping district: surprised mid-turn, fists raised in a boxing guard, then catching the man as he stumbled.
"If you've seen the stills," Akai said, voice low, "his reflexes are instinctual. That coordination, the precision of his stance—he has solid training in boxing or martial arts."
If Amuro saw these photos, he'd feel a disturbing sense of déjà vu.
That was exactly how Amuro fought in the field.
"No blank spots in his record after junior high. What about before that?"
"Shuichi… he would've been, what, eleven or twelve?"
"Don't forget who his parents are," Akai said, switching the phone to his other ear and lighting a cigarette. He took one of the photos, dropped it into the ashtray, and let the flame catch. "At eleven, he was still under their care."
Silence stretched over the line. Then, hesitantly: "You think the Karasawas experimented on their own son?"
"It wasn't an experiment," Akai said, exhaling smoke, his gaze locked on the darkened street below.
"They started that research for him. If there's anything in this world that embodies the fruits of their work—it's Karasawa Akira."