Chapter 88 - Kotori Yami
Hollow Night
03:47:46
The CRT monitors hummed like drowsy wasps as I leaned forward, elbows digging into the warped wooden table. Love—the pink bear Noise—perched on the edge beside me, its glowing yellow eyes flickering like faulty bulbs. The others huddled close, their forms casting jagged shadows in the pale screen-light.
“We were… good,” the stick-figure Noise—Kin’s hollow echo—droned. “Or as good as you can be when death’s the price for a wrong step. But we stuck together. Shared information. Rotated duties. Checked on each other during the day, too. Especially when the Noise started getting stronger.”
A flicker pierced my skull—sunlight through leaves, laughter echoing down a school hallway—before dissolving into static. Yoshida’s soul squirmed in my chest, restless.
"We made it to the final night. All of us. Juno told us to gather at Towa Records. Said it’d be over soon.”
Another flicker—cold metal stairs, a rooftop bathed in moonlight, hands gripping mine—sharp enough to make me flinch. Arthur shot me a glance, his blue eyes narrowing, but I waved him off.
I did find it strange, though, that despite my EXS ability having been 'taken', I still retained my power to commune with souls so fluidly - like it was tied to me on some deeper level. A level deeper than EXS? I wondered if such a thing even existed.
“And then?” I pressed after a pause.
“Black,” Love chirped, innocently grim. “Just… black. Woke up like this!” It gestured to its plush body, smile never wavering.
“How many of you were there in total?” I asked, drumming fingers against the table to ground myself.
Courage, the lion, puffed out its chest. “Nine! No, ten! Wait, eight? Hells, it’s all—”
“Twelve,” Sadness whispered, the blue owl’s feathers drooping. “We were twelve. Asahi, Inja, Asuna, Shika, Osamu, Tetsuya, Rindo, Kazuya, Akane, us and… and…” Its glow dimmed. “…Two others. I can’t—”
Mizuko leaned against the wall behind me, arms crossed.
“Daisuke had mentioned two survivors. Their names were somehow redacted.”
The word survivors sent a current through Yoshida’s soul. My fingers twitched—a notebook, hastily scribbled, names circled in red: Minami & Kenjiro.
“Wait,” I breathed, the realization slipping out like smoke. “’Minami’ and Kenjiro. They weren’t there, were they?”
The room dropped ten degrees.
Love’s head snapped sideways with a pop. Sadness screeched, wings thrashing. Courage’s mane erupted in violent sparks as Kin’s stick-figure body elongated, snapping like a whip.
“NONONO—”
The syllables tore through my skull, warping into screams—their screams—as Yoshida’s memories erupted.
—a girl with short cyan hair warping into an endless void
—a boy with crimson-red hair and broken glasses clawing at his own shadow
—hands, so many hands, dragging them under—
“Kotori!” Arthur’s voice frayed at the edges as my chair toppled. Concrete slammed into my shoulder, but the pain was distant, drowned out by the noise—
Mizuko’s boots clicked into my blurring vision. “Yami-san, focus! What’s happening?!”
“They’re… all fighting—” I choked, fingernails scraping the floor. Yoshida’s soul raged against mine, a storm of grief and guilt. “I tried… I tried to save them—”
“Get them out!” Arthur barked, hauling me upright as the Noise writhed, their forms glitching violently.
But it was too late.
The memory hit like a sledgehammer.
—Cold air. Gravel biting my knees. Our voices, raw and desperate.
—A blade through her chest. Not Noise. Human. Familiar.
—Pools of blood. Grief. Hatred. Then fear.
—Then, the black. The endless, hungry black.
[HR][/HR]
Asahi Yoshida
Hollow Night, 3 years ago
The air tasted like burnt sugar.
That’s what I’d always hated about this twisted mirror of Osaka—the way the neon lights bled into the sky, staining everything saccharine and sour. Tonight, though, the bitterness felt earned.
We’d almost won.
Akane collapsed onto the cracked pavement beside me, her laugh sharp and bright against the distant screech of dissolving Noise.
“Told you we’d clear the nest,” she said, elbowing my ribs. Her skin was bone-pale now, the cost of her blood-wrought whirlwind still drying in rusty streaks down her arms.
I tossed her a half-empty water bottle.
“You’re gonna pass out before the finale if you keep showboating, you know.”
“Says the guy who grew a redwood through that bat-thing’s skull.” Her grin faltered as she glanced at my hands—still trembling from the EXS surge, veins faintly green. “...You good?”
“Peachy.”
Lie. Always a lie. But the kind she let slide.
We sat in comfortable silence, watching the others pick through the rubble. Inja and Kazuya bickered over some shattered monitor – Inja insisting she could “Totally fix it up” while I imagined Kazuya just wanted to mess with her. Asuna was heckling them, the small girl trying her best to get them back on topic.
Kin lingered apart, as usual, his dark silhouette hunched over the ground. It looked like something was on his mind, and it didn’t take a genius to guess at what.
Ren and Kenjiro should’ve been back by now.
The thought slithered in, unwelcome. Ren had vanished the night prior after muttering about “unsolved variables,” and Kenjiro, as he always did, followed along.
“You’ll all regret not having solved for ‘x’,” he’d said last night, his usual infuriating smirk exchanged for a grave frown.
Just what on earth had he meant? Why didn’t he just-
Akane nudged me again. “Stop brooding. We’re out after this. Drinks on me.”
“We’re minors.”
“Pretty sure they make an exception for this kinda thing.” She sat up and shot me one of those smiles that made me forget what I was doing.
“Maybe then you’ll finally ask me to karaoke without pretending it’s ‘for team morale.’”
My throat tightened.
Soon, I told myself. Soon.
—
Some time later
The screams started just as the false neon stars flickered out.
We found them in what was left of Dotonbori Alley—or its warped mirror. Paper lanterns lay shredded in the gutters, their glow replaced by the sickly crimson aura radiating from Anger. Kin’s split self stood at the epicenter, a jagged silhouette drenched in dripping scarlet light, his eyes twin coals burning through the smoke.
Osamu—Goro-Goro—was already gone. What remained of his lion form twitched in the rubble, his crimson mane matted with blood and black ooze. Bunraku, as usual, wasn’t far behind. Tetsuya’s body was slumped against a crumbling wall nearby, his chest a pincushion of Shika’s light-arrows. Kin’s real body knelt beside him, trembling, his featureless face streaked with tears.
“Asahi—!”
Akane’s warning came a half-second too late.
Hatred moved like rusted clockwork—jerky, inevitable. His blade—a serrated thing of molten gold—plunged toward my chest.
Akane stepped into its path.
Time didn’t slow. It shattered.
I saw the exact moment the blade pierced her ribs—the hitch in her breath, the way her fingers spasmed against the hilt. Saw her blood bloom across her faded band t-shirt, the one she’d stubbornly worn every night since we found it in a hollowed-out konbini. Saw her stumble back into me, her weight familiar and terrible.
“N-Not… your color… greeny,” she rasped, her smirk smeared red.
I caught her as her knees buckled, the cobblestones biting into my shins. Around us, the Hollow Night unraveled—buildings warping into fleshy sinew, the canal water boiling black.
“Shut up,” I hissed, hands scrambling to staunch the wound. Her blood pulsed between my fingers, too warm, too much. “Shut up, shut up—we’re getting out, you hear me? You’re buying those drinks—”
Her hand found my wrist. Ice-cold.
“Asahi.”
Her voice—steady, final—stopped me.
I knew that tone. The one she used when arguing with Ren over strategy. When convincing me to stop hoarding snacks, even though we didn’t physically need to eat or drink while we were here. When betting her last yen candy she could climb the Osaka Castle replica faster.
It was the tone of: I’m not losing this argument.
Her thumb brushed my cheek, leaving a smudge of blood.
“We… had a good run. Right?”
The tomb erupted before I could lie.
Roses—crimson, thorned—wreathed her body, vines cradling her like a saint. I didn’t remember summoning them. Didn’t remember screaming.
Only the silence after.
Kin crawled toward us through the debris, his stick-figure limbs snapping with every shuddering breath.
“I’m s-sorry—Juno said—said if we didn’t —the whole system would—”
I turned.
Hatred’s blade disintegrated in my grip, the shards dissolving as my EXS surged. The ground split, birthing a forest of writhing roots. They tore through storefronts, through billboards, through the memory of this damned fucking place.
Kin didn’t flinch as the vines circled his throat. “D-Do it. I deserve—”
The Hollow Night screamed.
Black tendrils erupted from the cracks—not shadows, but void. They devoured Akane’s tomb first, petals crumbling to ash. Then the roots. Then the light.
“Damn it! Grab my hand!” I roared, lunging for Kin as the ground liquefied.
He shook his head, tears dissolving into the rising dark. “T-Tell them… I tried…”
The moon blinked.
A massive, orange lidless eye stared down from it, its pupil a vertical slit. The void reached my chest, my throat—
“I DON’T WANT TO DIE!”
Akane’s laugh echoed as the darkness took me—bright, reckless, already fading.
Soon, she’d said. We'll hang out soon. Just you and me.
The Hollow Night swallowed the lie whole.
[HR][/HR]
Kotori Yami
Hollow Night
The monitors’ hum sounded like a funeral dirge.
I clawed air into my lungs, Asahi’s phantom still clinging to my throat. Arthur’s hands steadied me as Mizuko hovered, her usual composure fractured.
“Didn't I tell you not to push—”
“What did you do?!”
The words tore free before I could stop them—hollow, accusatory. The Noise flinched as one. Love’s pink fur had dulled to ash-gray. Courage’s mane deflated. Kin—Neutral—stared at his stick-figure hands, his voice stripped of its robotic flatness.
“We believed him.”
Arthur’s grip tightened on my shoulder. “Who?”
“Juno.” Kin’s hollow eyes flickered. “He came to me in secret. He said… only two could leave. That the rest of us… had to…”
Asahi’s rage boiled up my spine, acidic and sweet. “AND YOU JUST BELIEVED HIM?!”
The table cracked under my fist. Mizuko jerked back.
“We could’ve figured it out—together!” The words weren’t mine, but they burned truer than anything I’d ever said. “Why did she have to—why did you—”
A sob cut me off—his sob, my throat.
Silence pooled like spilled ink.
Love sniffled, clutching Sadness’s wing.
“...W-We didn’t want to! But Anxiety said… said if we didn’t listen, we’d all…”
“Where are the others among you?” I rasped.
Courage stiffened. “Gone. Hatred, Anger, Anxiety… vanished after the collapse.”
The journal’s brittle pages flashed in my mind—looping script, frantic equations, the name "Anxiety" smudged with dried tears. Daisuke had won it from some kind of yellow rabbit Noise. And the other two, the red bull and that black snake...
“They’re dead,” I said after putting two and two together. “Another player and I killed them. Anxiety had left… notes. That’s how we knew about you.”
The Noise froze.
“Notes?” Kin whispered.
“A journal. Full of details. Full of regrets.” I met his gaze, Asahi’s satisfaction curling through me like poison. “Guess he figured out Juno’s lie too late.”
Sadness wailed, a sound like shattering glass. Courage crumpled. Only Kin remained upright, his stick-body trembling—not with grief, but fury.
“He knew,” he hissed. “Anxiety always knew, that cowardly—!”
The radio crackled to life.
“—ko here! Rusuban’s forces are moving southwest, but they’re not claiming zones—can’t track—gkhh—Miharu’s guards maybe—static—might need backup—!”
“Junko?!” Mizuko lunged for the comms, her voice splintering. “Junko, respond! What’s your—”
The line died.
Mizuko slammed her fist into the table, monitors rattling. “Damn it! Just what is he playing at?!”
Arthur’s nostrils flared. Fur rippled across his neck as he shifted, claws scraping concrete.
“Let’s find out.”
He inhaled deeply—then froze.
“Arthur?”
His blue eyes widened, pupils thinning to panicked slits.
“He… He was never at Towa…!”
“What?”
“How…? How did we not see it sooner? How long has he been…?!”
The words slithered down my spine.
Arthur turned, slow and stiff, toward the main road into A-East. The street beyond lay choked in unnatural shadow. It felt like the same void that swallowed Asahi whole.
The only difference was that a faint silhouette now coalesced at the edge of the dark.