---
The walk to Yongen-Jaya was quiet.
Not the comfortable kind.
Ann hadn't said much since outside the school. She walked with her arms folded across her chest, looking at the pavement, and nobody tried to fill the silence. Ryuji, for once, seemed to understand that loudness wouldn't help. Shiho stayed close to Ann's shoulder. Morgana had retreated fully into Ren's bag.
Ren walked slightly ahead, thinking.
'The photos are leverage. Which means he hasn't used them yet because they're more valuable as a threat. The moment he uses them, he loses control of the situation. So he won't — not unless he thinks he has nothing left to lose.
Which means we have a window.'
He didn't say any of this out loud.
---
The narrow streets of Yongen-Jaya were quieter than Shibuya, which helped. The late afternoon light was doing something warm to the laundry hanging between buildings, and the smell of someone's dinner drifted from an open window.
Ann looked up for the first time in several blocks.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"Leblanc," Ren said. "My guardian's café. It's quiet and out of the way."
He paused at the corner.
A woman stood outside the clinic next to Leblanc, smoking with the tired efficiency of someone who had been doing it for years. Short dark hair. A lab coat worn open over a dress that looked like it belonged somewhere else entirely. She glanced at the group as they approached with the disinterest of someone who had seen stranger things.
Her eyes lingered on Ren for a moment.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Thank you," Ren replied.
"That wasn't a compliment." She took a drag. "You're the kid staying with Sakura?"
"Yes."
"Hm." She looked at the others briefly — at Ann's carefully neutral expression, at Shiho's bandaged arms — then looked away. "Don't let him overcharge you for the coffee. Though he is a master of his craft."
She stubbed out the cigarette and went back inside.
"Who was that?" Ryuji asked.
"No idea," Ren said, filing it away, and pushed open the door to Leblanc.
---
The bell chimed.
Sojiro looked up from the counter.
He took in Ren first — slightly drawn, moving carefully — then the four teenagers crowding his doorway, then Ann's face, which was doing a convincing impression of fine and not convincing him at all.
"Upstairs," he said.
"Boss—"
"I'll send up coffee. Go."
He was already turning toward the machine.
Ren led them up the stairs.
---
The attic felt smaller with five people in it. They arranged themselves as best they could — Ryuji on the couch, Shiho beside him, Ann standing near the window with her arms still folded. Ren sat on the edge of the bed. Morgana hopped out of the bag and settled on the table, ears forward.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Then Sojiro's footsteps creaked on the stairs and he appeared with a tray — four mugs and a small plate of something. He set it down without comment and went back downstairs.
Ann picked up a mug, holding it with both hands.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Someone start."
Shiho set down her coffee.
She looked at her hands for a moment. Then she looked up.
"How much do you want to know?" she asked.
Ann's jaw tightened.
"Everything."
---
Shiho talked for a long time.
She talked about when it started — not recently, not since Ren arrived, but months ago, before the school year had even found its rhythm. How it had begun with Kamoshida pulling her aside after practice to tell her she had potential. How that had felt good, briefly, before it stopped being about volleyball. How he would "correct her posture" at any time. The way punishment was calibrated — not enough to send anyone to a hospital, but enough to ensure silence.
She talked about Mishima, whose name she said carefully, whose situation was worse than his knee brace suggested.
She talked about how she had convinced herself endurance was the same as strength.
She talked about Ann.
"He told me," Shiho said, "he always said that Ann was taking care of me." She looked at the table. "I didn't know what that meant at first. Ann is my best friend... of course she does. And then I figured it out. And I didn't say anything. Because I thought if I just kept going, eventually it would stop, and Ann wouldn't have to—"
"Shiho," Ann said.
"I should have told you."
"Shiho."
Ann set down her mug, crossed the room, and sat beside her. She didn't say anything else. Just sat there.
Ryuji was staring at the floor. His expression had gone very still in the way that meant he was working extremely hard at not being loud about it.
Ren looked at Morgana.
Morgana looked back at him.
Neither of them said anything.
---
Downstairs, the café was quiet.
The last customer had gone. Sojiro stood behind the counter with a damp cloth in his hand, not cleaning anything.
He was listening to the murmur of voices from upstairs — not the words, just the cadence. The way the pauses fell.
He'd heard that kind of conversation before.
He set down the cloth.
---
In a dark, low-lit room.
"Camera four, attic. Audio partially obscured."
The girl hunched over her keyboard leaned forward, adjusting the gain on the audio feed, her large headphones pushed down around her neck.
—told me if I was difficult—
—didn't know what that meant—
She wrote something in her notepad. Underlined it twice.
Her expression was unreadable. She pulled her knees up to her chest in the chair and kept listening.
---
Back upstairs, the conversation had found its way to the castle.
Ren walked Ann through it carefully — the Navigation app, the Metaverse, Kamoshida's Palace, what they'd seen. He kept his voice level. He'd had practice explaining things that shouldn't be real.
Ann listened without interrupting.
When he finished, she was quiet for a long moment.
"I think I get it," she said slowly. "After being in Mementos and hearing the explanation again."
"That version of him is a king?" she asked, disgust clear on her face.
"Yes."
"And his version of me is—"
"Yes."
Another silence.
"And you're saying," Ann continued, "that if we change something inside his Palace, it changes him. Forces him to confess."
"That's the theory," Morgana said.
"But what is it?"
Morgana looked at the window.
"The core of the distortion. The treasure. The object he has glorified to the point he feels no guilt for his actions. The treasure is both the cause of the distortion and the reason it persists."
"Then we're going back," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"We need to prepare first," Ren said. "Medicine. Something that passes for weapons inside the Metaverse."
"I know a place for the weapons," Ryuji said immediately. "Untouchables in Shibuya. Some scary Yakuza-looking guy runs it. Sells models and replicas, but you'd never know just looking at the display."
"And the medicine," Ren said, "I think I just figured out."
He thought about the woman outside the clinic. The lab coat. The way she'd looked at him — and Shiho's injuries.
"Tomorrow," he said. "We'll sort it out tomorrow."
---
The group filed out as the sun finished setting. Ann and Shiho left together. Ryuji headed for the station with his hands in his pockets and something working behind his eyes.
Ren stood at the door and watched them go.
Then he came back inside.
Sojiro was still at the counter. He looked at Ren, then at the stairs.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yes," Ren said automatically.
Sojiro looked at him for a moment longer than necessary. Then he nodded toward the counter.
"I could use a hand closing up, if you're not busy."
---
Ren worked quietly.
He moved through the café with an efficiency that had nothing to do with being asked. Wiping down tables before Sojiro had turned around. Carrying cups to the kitchen two at a time. Straightening the menus with more precision than they required. When he noticed the sugar dispenser on the far table was low, he refilled it without mentioning it.
Sojiro watched him from behind the counter.
He'd expected, when the kid arrived, a sullen teenager. Maybe the performative politeness he'd seen the first day — the automatic "yes sir" that sat wrong on a boy that age. He'd been prepared to manage around it.
This was something different.
This was a kid making himself invisible by being maximally useful. The posture of someone who had learned that taking up space came with consequences.
"Hey," Sojiro said.
Ren looked up immediately. Alert. Waiting.
"Sit down."
A pause.
"I'm almost done with the—"
"Sit down," Sojiro repeated. "I'll finish it."
Ren sat down at the counter. He folded his hands on the surface in front of him and appeared to have absolutely no idea what to do with them.
Sojiro poured two cups of coffee and set one in front of him.
"You don't have to earn your place here," Sojiro said. "You're not a guest. You're not an employee. You live here. You don't need to be useful every second."
Ren looked at the coffee cup.
"I don't mind helping," he said.
"I know you don't," Sojiro said.
He didn't push it further. He just stood there drinking his coffee until Ren picked up his own cup and did the same.
The café was quiet.
After a while Sojiro said, "Whatever's going on with your friends, you don't have to fix all of it yourself."
Ren didn't answer.
But he didn't argue either.
---
Upstairs later.
Ren sat cross-legged on the bed, the deck of red tarot cards in his lap. Morgana was curled at the foot of the bed watching him.
"Shiho," Ren said quietly.
"Hm?"
"When she confronted her Shadow. The card that stopped it. We would have lost." He turned the deck over in his hands. "It came from this deck. But it was different. Part of a different deck, shuffled into this one like it was waiting."
"You think there's a connection?"
"I think Yu-nii's tarot deck may be special too. I've only seen her a few times, but I think Kotone-neesan has a deck as well. Hers is blue. I think there's a reason this one ended up with me."
He set the deck on the windowsill.
"I drew the Magician last night. Tonight I want to try something."
He reached for the deck.
He drew the top card.
He already knew what it would be.
The Tower.
The card was red like the others, but the illustration was strange — a tall structure with its upper floors on fire, two figures falling from it, their expressions not fearful but almost relieved. As if the fall had been chosen. However, it was overall bland in composition in comparison to The Magician card nearby.
Around its edges faint blue flame flickered and died.
Ren thought about Shiho in the Metaverse. Standing in front of her Shadow. Perhaps they weren't close enough, but he felt this card should be related to her. The castle implying she would endure what she was enduring until she simply couldn't. The deliberate dismantling of every false thing she'd been telling herself.
The Tower. Sudden upheaval. The destruction of what cannot hold.
"Ren, these cards seem important," Morgana said.
"And familiar," Zorro quietly added in Morgana's head.
"Yeah," Ren agreed.
He set the card beside the Magician. The two rested on the windowsill in the low light.
"Hey, Morgana."
"Mm?"
"Tomorrow morning, before school. That clinic next door."
"The doctor?"
"She already knows Sojiro. She looked at me like she already knew who I was." He lay back. "I think she might help with supplies. We need actual medical gear if we're going back into the Palace seriously."
Morgana considered this.
"It's a place to start."
"And after school, Untouchables. Ryuji knows the owner."
"Weapons and medicine," Morgana said. "You're actually planning this."
"Someone has to," Ren said.
He stared at the ceiling for a moment.
"Ann's going to awaken in the castle," he said quietly. "I don't know when. But she will."
"Do you think?"
Ren didn't answer right away.
"She's angrier than she looks," he said finally. "And she's been holding the rebel back a long time."
Morgana was quiet.
Outside, a few alley cats began to yowl and fight.
"Get some sleep, Ren," Morgana said.
Ren closed his eyes.
On the windowsill, the Tower card caught the streetlight and held it briefly before the room went dark.
---
Elsewhere.
The monitor glowed in the dark room.
The feed from the attic was quiet now. Just an empty room, a cat on a bed, a boy pretending to be asleep.
The girl rewound the audio. Listened again to the part where the boy had said someone has to.
She wrote in her notepad.
"This teacher is a scumbag. I want to expose him, but those guys seem to want to do something..."
Then she closed the file browser and sat in the dark and thought about everything she had heard for a long time.
---