I Don't Believe in Ghosts

Kanzaki Rion did not believe in ghosts. She believed in code, in current, in numbers that behaved exactly as they were told. To her, the world was a machine, and every machine could be understood if you were clever enough to read its logic. At sixteen she was already cleverer than most of the adults who tried to lecture her, which was precisely why she preferred the company of Noir, the AI butler she had built and trained herself.

Her days followed a clean, satisfying order. Noir woke her with a market summary and a weather report, brewed coffee she rarely finished, and filtered out the endless noise of a city that insisted on being superstitious. When classmates whispered about cursed videos or vanishing girls, Rion only rolled her eyes. Fear, she had decided long ago, was just a gap in someone's information. Fill the gap, and the fear disappeared.

So when the morning news ran yet another breathless segment about "ghost incidents" spreading through Nippori and Ueno, Rion barely looked up. Noir, ever attentive, flagged the reports as a statistical anomaly worth ignoring. It was an ordinary morning, ruled entirely by science. It was also, though she did not yet know it, the last ordinary morning she would ever have.

The disruption arrived in the shape of a clumsy stranger. Omura Towako, an assistant from the Lock Holmes Detective Office, collided with Rion on a crowded street, scattering an armful of bizarre equipment across the pavement. Among the dropped objects was an old camera and a crude, handmade charm that Towako pressed into Rion's hands while babbling something about exorcism and protection. Rion accepted both only to make the strange woman go away.

She intended to dismantle the camera out of curiosity, expecting cheap optics and a gimmick. Instead, when she raised the viewfinder to her eye and turned it toward the park, her breath caught. There, perched on a lamppost where her own eyes saw nothing at all, was a creature — small, hunched, monkey-like, watching the passing humans with an unsettling intelligence. She lowered the camera. Empty air. She raised it again. The thing was still there.

Rion was not a girl who screamed. She ran the obvious tests instead: different angles, different light, Noir cross-referencing the lens against every database he could reach. Every result told her the same impossible thing. The camera was not creating an illusion. It was revealing something that had been there all along, something her science had no name for.

Towako found her again, and this time Rion listened. Over the hum of a quiet café, the detective's assistant explained the unexplainable. The creatures were called Spils — spirits that had slipped out of their own realm and into the cracks of the human world, where their presence twisted ordinary events into the "ghost incidents" filling the news. The place they bled through from had a name too: VARZ, a hidden sacred domain layered over modern Tokyo, invisible to anyone without the means to see it.

Every instinct Rion had screamed that this was nonsense. And yet the camera in her bag refused to lie. Noir, parsing Towako's words with cold precision, admitted that the evidence — however absurd — was internally consistent. For the first time, Rion's tidy machine-world had encountered a process it could not reverse-engineer, and the gap in her information was not closing. It was widening.

The matter refused to stay theoretical. As the incident escalated through the streets, the small Spils gave way to something far larger — a towering Daishojo whose presence pressed on the air like a coming storm. People nearby felt only a vague unease, a reason to hurry home. Rion, cursed now with sight, saw the monster in full.

And then she saw the answer to it. Kagiya Saya, the onmyoji detective Towako worked beneath, stepped into the danger without hesitation. Before Rion's disbelieving eyes, Saya underwent Soul Injection, her power flooding into form as she crossed into VARZ to meet the creature head-on. It was not a trick of light or a staged performance. It was a battle, real and dangerous, fought in a layer of the world Rion had not known existed until that day.

When it was over, Rion stood very still, the camera hanging from her hand. The girl who believed only in science had watched science fail to explain what her own eyes had witnessed. She could lie to her classmates, perhaps even to Towako — but not to herself, and never to Noir. The hidden world had noticed her now, and she had noticed it back. Whatever came next, she could no longer pretend the unseen was not real.