Little Red Riding Hood of Shinjuku

One week after joining Public Safety Section 0, Hiiragi Momota was discovering how wide the gap was between potential and proof. During a night operation in the ruins of Shibuya, he watched the veterans work like a single instrument — Captain Kuroba Chris cool and decisive, Shikino Takuto and his shikigami dog Kamase Ken moving in practiced rhythm, the onmyoji sniper Saruta Kinji covering them all from the dark. Momota, for all his training, kept arriving a half-step behind, unable to turn his inherited skill into results.

It gnawed at him. He had left Asakusa and stepped into this world to be useful, to stand beside people who protected others rather than hide what he could do. Instead he felt like a passenger. The doubt followed him out of the operation and into the neon glare of Shinjuku, where a very different case was already pulling another familiar face back into danger.

Kanzaki Rion preferred to work alone with Noir, but she could not refuse Abe Shiori. Her classmate came to her frightened and pleading: their friend Kurahashi Tsukimi had disappeared, and the last trace of her was a photo posted to a street snap account that people had begun to whisper about. Those who were photographed by it, the rumor went, were never quite seen again.

Rion did what she always did — she stopped treating the rumor as magic and started treating it as data. She and Noir traced the account, mapped its posts against the city, and followed the cold logic of timestamps and locations. The pattern that emerged was uglier than superstition. It pointed toward an urban legend taking deliberate shape: the Little Red Riding Hood of Shinjuku, a faceless girl in a red hood who asked her victims a single question — "Am I beautiful?" — before stealing their faces away.

To draw the legend out, Rion used Shiori as bait, calculating the risk the way she calculated everything. But the supernatural refused to stay within her margins. Kirei, the faceless red hood, appeared in the flesh — or in something wearing the shape of flesh — and lunged for Shiori with a hunger that no spreadsheet had predicted. The investigation stopped being an exercise and became a rescue.

It was here that the two threads of the night finally crossed. Momota, pursuing the same case from Public Safety's side with Kinji, intercepted the attack. Working alongside Rion — the brilliant girl who trusted machines, beside the rookie who didn't yet trust himself — he found, for the first time since donning the uniform, that he could actually help. Together they tracked the red hood's trail to an abandoned studio on the edge of the district.

Inside, the building was a maze of dust and silence that opened into something far worse: a room lined wall to wall with mirrors. The glass threw their reflections back at them from every angle, and among those reflections they began to find the victims — girls whose faces had been taken, left blank and waiting, Tsukimi among them. The cursed street snap had not been collecting followers. It had been collecting faces.

Rion's mind, so comfortable with cause and effect, struggled against the wrongness of the place. Momota steadied them both. The mirror room was the legend's true body, and at its heart lay the source of everything — a single artifact that gave the faceless girl her terrible power.

The artifact was Konpakukyo, a cursed mirror capable of stealing faces and reshaping identity itself. Beneath the light of the full moon, Kirei moved to complete her ritual, to finally claim the beauty she believed had always been denied her. Public Safety and Rion's group raced to stop her before the mirror could finish its work.

And yet the closer they came to Kirei, the clearer it grew that she was not simply a monster. Behind the faceless horror was a lonely girl, warped by cruelty and obsession and the whispering influence of the mirror — someone who had wanted, more than anything, to be seen as beautiful, and had been answered by a curse instead. Stopping her was necessary. Pitying her was unavoidable.

When the night ended, Momota had finally proven something to himself, and Rion had been pulled deeper into a world she could no longer keep at arm's length. The VARZ incidents were no longer distant curiosities glimpsed through a camera lens. They were growing more dangerous, more personal, and far closer to home than either of them wanted to admit.