The message left in the mirror didn't fade.
Even hours later, it remained etched across the glass like frost that wouldn't melt:
"She broke the loop. You must seal the cracks."
Renji and Kuro stood in silence, both knowing the weight behind the words.
The Spiral's power had shattered when Renji made peace with the girl trapped inside it… but shattered power doesn't vanish.
It leaks.
And something was crawling through the fractures.
---
The Incident at South Station
The first incident came two days later.
A boy from Renji's class—Toma Yamazaki—never made it home after cram school. He wasn't the type to run away. But when his phone was found at the South Station underpass, things got stranger.
The last photo on his phone?
A reflection.
Not of himself…
But of someone wearing his face, staring back through the station's glass display, smiling with too many teeth.
Toma's body was never found.
---
Crackwalker
Renji couldn't sleep that night. The mirror on the rooftop pulsed faintly, like it knew.
He dreamed of footsteps behind glass. Of shadows moving independently from the people who cast them. Of something pale and jointless, slithering behind the reflections.
And a voice.
A familiar one. Almost like Emiko's—warped and wrong.
> "You sealed the loop… but forgot the space between."
"Where do broken reflections go to die?"
When Renji woke up, he found a word scribbled in chalk on his window.
"Crackwalker."
---
Tracing the Pattern
Kuro and Renji started mapping the pattern.
They pulled in favors, cross-checked missing persons reports, reviewed security camera glitches—all small, odd events that had occurred in the last three weeks.
What they found chilled them.
All the disappearances happened near damaged reflective surfaces—cracked windows, scratched elevator doors, broken mirrors. And always at night.
Renji circled the last four locations.
They formed a line.
No—a spiral.
---
A New Kind of Spiral
But this spiral wasn't like before.
It wasn't tied to looping time or haunted memories. It was feeding. Expanding. Pulling in the broken, the lost, the forgotten.
Where the Spiral had once tried to trap people in time, the Crackwalker was trapping them in reflections.
> "It's hunting," Kuro said grimly, "using the leftover cracks like portals."
> "Then we need to close them," Renji answered.
---
The First Seal
They returned to the South Station at midnight.
Armed with tools: reflective black cloth, silver paint, a handful of talismans Aoi had left behind "just in case," and Kuro's newest obsession—old mirror folklore from local temples.
The underpass was cold, silent.
Renji approached the cracked timetable display. His reflection shimmered—but didn't mimic him. It blinked first.
He froze. Kuro hissed, "Now!"
Together, they painted a spiral of silver over the crack, whispered the words Emiko had left behind in the Truth Engine's memory—
> "Let time flow, let truth rest, let the mirror close."
The reflection screamed silently.
Then fractured—cleanly.
The mirror cleared.
No more echo.
No more anomaly.
First crack sealed.
---
But It Wasn't Alone
As they packed up, Renji's phone buzzed.
A message. No number.
Just five words:
> "You're too late. She's here."
Attached… was a photo.
Aoi.
Standing in a subway station.
And in the mirror beside her—another Aoi, grinning with black void eyes.
---
End of Chapter 68
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To Be Continue