One second, Reina was standing in the dark, red glow of the hydraulic lift tunnel. The next second, the lift suddenly made a heavy mechanical thud and slammed into the upper latches and launched her into a blinding explosion of white light.
The transition from the darkness of the under-stage to the brightly lit stage was violent. There is no other word for it. The stadium lights hit her all at once, turning her world into a bright, white blur.
She really wished to cover her eyes. But she didn't.
And the moment she arrived, The Tokyo Dome erupted.
Fifty thousand fans screamed her name almost at the same time, a wall of violent sound mixed with redemption, anticipation and hidden desire hit her so hard she could feel her own teeth vibrating.
Above them, the KIZUNA drones through the KIZUNA Network were broadcasting everything and an invisible weight of fifty million extra fans plus fifty thousand fans bore down on her.
The huge 5000-Kelvin stage lights flooded the whole stadium especially upon her and turned the entire stadium in an ocean of white light.
Then the bass from the opening track dropped. It was a heavy, electronic pulse that shook her bones.
Her body moved on its own and she gave a breathtakingly beautiful smile automatically. It was a reflex carved into her body by LUMINA! over seven years.
Smile.
The corners of Reina's mouth curled into a perfect, flawless smile that LUMINA! had copyrighted.
She threw her arm up, striking the opening pose of her first hit, Neon Butterfly.
"Tokyo!" she screamed into her headset mic, her voice hitting that catchy, breathless melody the fans loved.
"Are you ready to fly with me tonight?!"
The crowd responded back with a loud, overwhelming cheer full of devotion.
She began dancing. The dance required absolute perfection. And Reina moved seamlessly, dropping into a sharp pivot as her heavy crystal-covered dress rotated around her in a glittering arc.
Under the silk and crystals, the athletic tape bit into her skin and bound her ribs like a cage. It restricted her breathing and to cope with this she had to maintain a controlled breathing.
To the fifty thousand people screaming her name, and the millions logged into KIZUNA, she was an ethereal, untouchable goddess made of light and sound. But inside she was doing multiple split-second calculations and speculation at the same time. To her the entire venue was a battlefield and the stage was the origin of all chaos. She was desperately trying to distinguish chaos from her perception
Perception versus Chaos.
As the fans cheered and called her name, she was trying to focus through a storm of lasers that cut through the thick fog from the smoke machines and explosive dry waves of heat emitted from pyrotechnic mortars at the edge of the stage. Around her six backup dancers moved around her in a complex formation, moving in and out of her sight which was designed to overwhelm the audience and blind the idol in the center.
At the center of the Dome, the lights were so bright that the audience itself disappeared into a dark, formless void. It's like staring directly into the blinding glare of high beams of an oncoming vehicle. Where you are the target but you can't see the driver nor can you see who is coming for you. But you can only see the glares of people.
But a veteran idol knows how to look beyond the glare. They are trained to hunt for the tiniest, blinking red recording lights of professional cameras buried in the dark and from time to time to make subtle "intimate" eye contact and gestures for the VIP fans who are sitting in the front rows and also for the eyes beyond live stream for generating maximum audience engagement in all over the KIZUNA network.
Reina ignored the cheap seats. The threat also wouldn't come from the rafters of upper decks.
If the Goshuin Council and LUMINA! had intentionally blinded the biometric security gates tonight, they wouldn't leave their carefully designed tragedy to fail. They wouldn't put their assassin to act on their own. They would hand deliver him to the stage.
It had to be close.
She hit the chorus.
Spin.
Drop.
Point.
Kiss.
With every move, every twitch of facial expression, every drop of sweat she could feel the invisible weight of KIZUNA's telemetry arrays tracking her. She wasn't just performing. She was actively being used to train the AI, waiting in the servers to steal her life and replace her with a deepfake so perfect that no one can distinguish between real and fake idol.
As she blew the kiss, the choreography required her to perform a slow, sweeping pan dangerously closer to the front row which was only separated from the front row by a mere six feet of space and a waist-high steel barricade.
The VIP section where the platinum ticket holders were seated.
This was where all the corporate sponsors, agency executives, and the highest spending, most obsessed fans were sitting.
Using a backup dancer's hat to shield her vision from the spotlight, for a moment she slightly narrowed her eyes to block the direct glare of the spotlight.
Her vision adjusted. And she could see individual faces sitting in the VIP row beyond the darkness.
She saw bored middle-aged men wearing suits had their arms crossed.
She saw lecherous gazes of several wealthy young men.
She saw wealthy influencers snapping photos and live streaming her performance on their glowing phones into the Network.
And then, she saw him.
Seat 4, Row A. Dead center. Directly in the path of her solo runway walk.
Kenji.
The shock hit her lungs and she felt short of breath. Her body almost stiffened. But her body continued the dance flawlessly. And executed a synchronized knee-slide with the music.
He was an obsessive fan and a severely unstable stalker, a Class-A sasaeng. One time he followed her to her old apartment building and waited outside for several days. During that time he even tried to break into her room by cracking her door codes but because of several passwords being wrong, an alert was sent to the nearest police station and he had to escape. Then he shifted his attention to her garbage and he sifted through her garbage and followed her whenever she went outside for a walk or buying something from a convenience store. And while doing so one day he was caught by the neighbor and was handed to the authorities. And after a period of time when he was released early because of his clean record, he started to send letters written in bodily fluids, smelling both salty bleach and metallic blood. Just thinking of those letters and imagining the copper and chlorine stench made her shivered with disgust.
One day when she went out for a walk he tried to grab her attention by forcefully touching her without her consent. She didn't hesitate. Before she could even think her father's training had taken over.
She didn't flinch. She simply moved along with him. As his fingers brushed her sleeve, she stepped into his reach and used his own momentum to spin him around. With a quick, practiced trip of her heel, she guided him to the road. Before he could even understand what was happening, she had his face pinned down, her knee resting firmly against his shoulder blade while she held his arm in a controlled lock.
Then he was again arrested.
He was arrested again but the damage was done. Her private address leaked in the aftermath, forcing her to move back to LUMINA! dormitories.
For all of these reasons his KIZUNA social-credit score was a sub-zero hazard. His biometrics were hardcoded into every security gate in the agency's network to trigger an immediate police response.
Yet, here he was.
Sitting in an expensive VIP seat on the night the biometric scanners were miraculously blind-spotted.
Her instincts told her to keep dancing, ignore the crowd, lose herself in the music. But her brain told her to do the opposite thing.
Among the chaos of the stadium, lock your eyes onto him.
Don't miss your sight even for a moment.
Keep dancing and focus your attention towards him.
As the song hit the bridge, Reina danced down the runway, bringing herself within ten feet of him. She kept her iconic smile pinned to her face but her eyes scanned him with the cold, calculating precision of a sniper.
Kenji wasn't just sitting there. He was trembling.
His clothes were a mess. He was sweating profusely, despite the heavy air conditioning blowing from the floor vents. He had his hands shoved deep into the oversized pockets of a heavy, military-style jacket. She could see his jacket twitching as his hands gripped something heavy, and a hard object that was hidden in his pockets.
From the stage he looked like an excited fan. But it was his face that told her another story.
Reina looked directly at him, offering the "personal connection" fans lived for. She wanted to see beyond the man's eyes. She wanted to figure out what his intention was and what he wanted to do.
But when she met his gaze, she saw the horror.
His eyes were two massive, terrifying black dots that had swallowed the color of his eyes whole. All that was left was a tiny, thin ring of brown against the bloodshot whites.
His jaw was locked so tight that the veins of his neck were about to bust open and his teeth were grinding together in a fast, mindless rhythm.
Drugs.
He was on drugs and was dangerously high.
He might have taken a massive dose of banned stimulant Amphetamines.
All of a sudden everything clicked in her mind with a sharp and unsettling clarity. She saw the truth-
Kenji wasn't a ghost nor mastermind who had slipped through the cracks. He was a weapon that had been carefully loaded.
LUMINA! hadn't just ignored security. They had meticulously designed this. They knew exactly who Kenji was. After seven years in the industry, she knew exactly how the agency manipulated the KIZUNA feeds to create and fuel obsession and fan engagement. She knew how easily they could shadow-ban a user or a specific group of people into total isolation, trapped them in a digital cage, limit their feeds in a specific range and flood their screen with targeted rage-baited contents until they snapped.
And in Kenji's case, they had amplified his sick, twisted obsession until it boiled over. Then Kaneshiro simply whitelisted his biometrics, provided him with banned stimulants through KIZUNA recommendation to strip away his fear and then opened the door. They knew if they gave a mad dog access to the VIP section and a front-row seat, he would do something violent, unpredictable, and highly visible.
He was now a dormant explosive, sitting in the front row, just waiting for the spark.
And I am the spark, Reina thought. I am the trigger.
The heavy, thumping bass of Neon Butterfly began to build toward its final.
This was the part she was supposed to run to the very edge of the stage, lean over the barricade, do some explosive poses and sing the final high note right into the faces of the fans sitting and cheering from the front row.
It was the moment she was most wide open and unprotected. Even if she wanted she couldn't even defend herself nor the nearby fans could help her.
And this exact moment they wanted him to strike.
Kenji's breathing was becoming fast and shallow. From the twitching of his jacket she immediately understood what was hiding in his pockets. He shifted his weight, pulling his legs back under him.
He was getting ready to jump the barricade.
Cold, sharp panic clawed at Reina's throat. Her instincts told her to step back, to break the choreography, to point at him and scream for help. But she knew security wouldn't come. The nearby guards were just staring blankly at the crowd. She understood maybe their KIZUNA earpieces ordered them to look the other way for several seconds.
If she ran, he would chase her. If she panicked, LUMINA! still won.
Breathe, the ghost inside her whispered.
Let the tape hold you together.
Do not flinch.
Do not break character.
She had to track the physical threat while hitting every beat of the dance perfectly. She needed to map his trajectory.
Kenji was five-foot-nine, maybe 70 to 75 kgs of weights. But because of taking a massive dose of stimulants he can fight and do whatever he wants to do without being tired or facing consequences. He would leap from his chair, jump over the three-foot barricade and land on the edge of the stage.
Everything would happen in the next few moments. But she would get enough time, maybe a fraction of a second of extra time, to counter attack or dodge him because of the slippery fog residue on the stage and he would most likely slip slightly on the landing.
The song finally hit its peak. The pyrotechnic mortars at the back of the stage detonated in a massive wall of sparks.
Reina ran down the runway, exactly on cue. And at the same time fifty thousand people screamed.
She didn't look at Kenji. She looked beyond the VIP area and looked towards the sea of glowing light sticks. And gave a beautiful radiant smile.
But inside, she was getting ready. She tightened her muscles, ready for what was coming. She shifted her center of gravity, dropping her weight into her hips, sitting just an inch lower than the dance required.
She shifted her angle to the left, positioning herself slightly to the side of him instead of directly in his path.
She planted her foot at the edge of the stage, throwing her head back and raising the microphone for the final, soaring note.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the shadow in Seat 4 exploded upward.
Target acquired, Reina thought, as the stadium lights flared and the song reached its deafening end. This was the moment LUMINA! and KIZUNA network had written for her. The moment the idol was supposed to die and the immortal deepfake was supposed to be born.
But just like a chunk of code couldn't predict the fierce, burning gravity of a dying star.
She didn't screen nor did she brace herself for impact.
She moved towards the blind spot of the nearby cameras, turned the spotlight into a weapon and prepared to intercept.
> [SYSTEM LOG: KIZUNA_CORE // LUMINA_INTEGRATION]
> Asset: Reina Shiratori
> Status: Live Performance (Track 01)
> Alert: Micro-expression anomaly detected.
> Note: Asset eye-tracking deviating from baseline audience engagement patterns. Sustained focal lock on VIP Sector, Row A, Seat 4 (Target: Kenji_094).
> Vitals: Heart rate holding at 145 BPM. Respiration controlled. Cortisol spiking.
> Warning: Asset cognitive load indicates anticipatory physical response.
> Network Command: Override warning. Maintain camera angles.
> Tactical Assessment: Asset physical response violates predicted behavioral model.
> GAN_Deepfake_Sync: 99.8% ... Sync Fluctuating.
> Status: Awaiting Asset Termination to initiate digital handover.
> Error Code 404: Asset Not Found in Expected Parameters.