As Reo suspected, Akiro hadn’t lost the phone. He’d planted it to later find us.
His biggest mistake was that the phone was actually his. The hardware signature matched his custom builds with modified firmware and reinforced encryption layers.
Before planting the phone, Akiro had done his part. He’d wiped everything that could be wiped.
Messages.
Call logs.
Contact trees.
Even the secret caches most people didn’t know existed.
But nothing was ever truly erased. Not from a device that had lived this long in his hands.
My hackers didn’t look for what was there. They probed for what hadbeenthere. Residual heat signatures in the memory banks. Fragmented packet trails buried in system logs. Ghost pings from towers the phone had whispered to before the wipes. Tiny inconsistencies in the clock cycles—fractions of seconds that didn’t line up unless something had been deleted.
They rebuilt his silence.
Piece by piece.
Akiro was smart, careful, and patient enough to think three moves ahead. But my team of hackers lived ten moves beyond that. And through the cracks he thought he’d sealed, his world started bleeding open for me.
They didn’t just unlock his phone.
They dissected it.
Akiro had encrypted the surface—standard biometric locks, layered passcodes, false partitions meant to stall amateurs.
My hackers mirrored the device at a kernel level, bypassed the OS entirely, and built a ghost environment to run the phone without triggering its internal alarms.
Every keystroke Akiro had ever made was reconstructed from residual memory.
Deleted messages weren’t recovered—they werereassembled.
Even the battery logs were useful. Tiny fluctuations mapped against tower pings gave us movement patterns down to the minute.
They pulled the baseband data and forced the modem to confess every handshake it had made in the last six months.
Cell towers.
Private repeaters.
Dead zones that weren’t supposed to exist.
From that, my team built a map where three locations consistently pulsed.
The first was Yoshiwara Depths. He’d spend a lot of time in those tunnels and service corridors, forming his plan to lure us there.
But was my father still hidden there? The Depths were massive. We could have missed him within that dark maze of deception. This place would be the perfect trap for the next battle. If we returned, we would be the hunted.
Unless that’s exactly what Akiro wanted me to believe.
Perhaps, the trap wasn’t the tunnels, but my fear of them due to losing men there.
What would Akiro guess about my mental state?
The second location was my family’s estate on the outskirts of Tokyo. A place my father had not returned to since losing my mother in an enemy bombing.
