The Cherry Blossoms Glitch

The synthetic rain of Neo-Edo’s Sector 4 never truly washed anything clean. It only smeared the grime, dragging the neon reflections of noodle stands and illicit cyber-clinics through the oily puddles of the lower tiers. Above, holographic cherry blossoms—massive, pink, and ethereal—projected across the smog-choked sky, glitching into jagged bands of static every few seconds.

Kenjiro Sato sat in the suffocating darkness of his third-floor hovel, watching the artificial petals fall through the dirty plexiglass of his window. The air in the room was thick with the smell of stale sake, scorched wiring, and the bitter tang of cheap synthetic tobacco.

He took another long pull from a glass bottle, letting the harsh liquor burn a path down his throat. He was trying to achieve a state of numbness, a hollow emptiness that would keep the memories at bay. It was a losing battle. It had been a losing battle for two years.

Two years since the fall of the Olympus station. Two years since his tactical miscalculation had trapped his copilot—his commanding officer, his partner, his everything—in a collapsing fusion reactor. Two years since Aiko burned while he survived, dragged away by the automated retrieval systems of his own mech. The media had called him a hero for saving the fleet. Kenjiro knew he was a coward who had lived while his soul died.

In the corner of the room, beneath a tarp stained with engine grease, lay the dismantled chassis of an outdated MK-IV combat suit. It was a relic, stripped of its heavy munitions, kept only as a masochistic reminder of what he used to be.

The silence of the room was shattered by a sound Kenjiro hadn’t heard in seven hundred and thirty days.

* Beep... beep... beep...*

It was a sharp, high-pitched electronic chirp cutting through the low hum of the city outside. Kenjiro froze, the bottle halfway to his lips. He slowly turned his head. The sound was coming from a dusty, obsolete military comms-console buried under a stack of unpaid cred-slips on his desk.

No one had that frequency. The frequency was dead.

He stood up, his legs heavy, and crossed the room. His hands, scarred and calloused from years gripping the haptic controls of a mech, hovered over the glowing green light of the console. He pressed the decryption key.

The screen flared to life, casting a sickly emerald glow over his hardened, unshaven face. A stream of encrypted military code cascaded down the monitor, automatically unspooling itself.

* SIGNAL SOURCE: UNKNOWN (ORBITAL SECTOR 9)*
* CLASSIFICATION: DISTRESS BEACON - RED*
* BIOMETRIC ID: SATO, AIKO*

Kenjiro’s heart slammed against his ribs. The breath left his lungs in a ragged gasp. "Impossible," he whispered, gripping the edges of the desk so hard the cheap metal bent. "She's dead. I saw the telemetry..."

But the beacon kept flashing. And then, a secondary file attached to the signal decoded itself. It was a text file, simple and cruel.

* A ghost in the dark,*
* Waiting for her broken knight,*
* Come and claim your prize.*

Beneath the haiku was a single, stylized insignia: a red, demonic mask with a long, predatory nose. The Tengu.

Ryu.

Lord Ryu had been their squad commander, a brilliant tactician whose ambition had slowly curdled into madness. Ryu had defected shortly after the Olympus disaster, taking a cadre of loyalists with him to the lawless fringes of the system. He had always despised Kenjiro's 'heroic' morality, viewing empathy as a weakness that needed to be surgically excised.

Ryu was playing a game. A sick, sadistic game tailored specifically to tear open Kenjiro's deepest wounds.

Kenjiro stared at the screen. Logic dictated it was a trap. Aiko was gone. Ryu had simply synthesized her biometric signature to lure him out. It was tactical suicide to respond.

But as Kenjiro looked at the flashing name on the console—*Aiko*—the hollow numbness in his chest was replaced by a roaring, volatile inferno. If there was even a fraction of a percent of a chance she was alive, he would burn the galaxy down to reach her. And if she wasn't, he would finally give Lord Ryu the death he deserved.

Kenjiro walked over to the tarp in the corner and pulled it back, exposing the scarred, matte-black armor of the MK-IV combat suit.

"Time to wake up," he murmured.