Episode 1: When the Sky Burns Away
The screen flickers. Day breaks over the ruins of Shinjuku. Black sun overhead, low and sick, barely winding through the grit and fog. Kirai stands on the 13th floor, wrapped in torn canvas and MF respirator. He stares out. His father, gone. Would you still venture out, knowing what lay beyond?
Natsuko scrapes soot off the garden outside. That lichen hacking the old stones isn’t food, but she picks it anyway. Kirai hacks a spurt of old blood on his sleeve. She looks at him. He forces a ten-yen coin into her palm. ‘Watch over Ma.’ She closes his fist: ‘Don’t go alone again.’
The streets stretch, hiding bodies crumpled by doors. There’s Ji-Hun with his toolkit, already wiring a tower by the mute transit tracks. Everyone avoids the glass-pane screamers — ‘burrowers,’ Ji-Hun calls them. His eyes have bled raw-white. He used to joke in three languages. Since Haru vanished, he just hums army tunes from the DMZ.
What would you do if the sirens never worked?
Tonight, sky glows blue-dark. Pressure crushes the rooms. The garden fungi clicks in Natsuko’s fist, growing wet and hairy as she pushes it in wooden bowls. ‘We’ll share when the old world comes back.’ Kirai gives her a sad-smile. ‘Still got hope.’
Limbs drag along window cracks. Burrowers, thick and creased where skin rots. Lil’ Hide, three floors down, throws bleach off his ledge. It helps for a bit. But one sticks. At day blue, they come again. Panic hits each person different — Kirai stands, knife in boot, hands bleeding, breath slow. ‘I go north soon,’ he says, street by sunken district. Why risk this for info that might not exist?
Natsuko sits astride the tired radio. She chews wires. Breakers whine. At dusk, it picks some voice, maybe. Coughing static. ‘43.93 true, river green.’ Words drilled slow, lost mid-breath. Kirai leans close. His face says: Is it a trap?
Ji-Hun leaves rough maps, codebook tacked under fuel tanks. ‘If you’re late, I burn the lot.’ There’s an edge, like he wants Kirai to come back but doesn’t believe he will. Birds, those left, smack dust off the high-scrapers and vanish when sirens moan mid-wind. Tension wraps the group. Who would lead, if none of them came back?
The arc closes with Kirai halfway on a skybridge. Fog lights distant black towers. Below, burrowers climb the subways in dead packs. One stops, face split wide. Kirai’s radio spits the code again: ‘43.93…’ He stares, fear coiled as he weighs the river route against what hunts.
Fade out. Loud breath. Next move belongs to Ash—or so they call the thing in the core, the thing none of them have ever seen. Tell me: would you run, or would you climb?
