Nene sat at her usual desk in the back of the high school's computer room, the hum of the cooling fans providing a steady rhythm to her racing thoughts. She had the APSC reports pulled up on her screen, but she was digging much deeper than the surface-level headlines everyone else was reading.
"There's just no way," she whispered, her fingers flying across the keyboard while the glow of the monitor reflected sharply in her glasses. "There's something they aren't telling us. Something going on behind the scenes that they're scrubbing in real-time."
She clicked through tab after tab, her eyes darting across lines of data, public safety logs, and grainy witness uploads. She opened a cached thread from a local forum, only for it to refresh with a "404 Not Found" error. Her mouse clicked rapidly as she bypassed a secondary firewall, pulling up a series of redacted police reports from the Shinsei district.
"Gas leak? No, that's just the cover story... Structural fatigue? Please, that building was reinforced last year." She scrolled further, her brow furrowing as she skimmed a list of 'unidentified energy discharges' that had been officially deleted from the public record. "No... no, that's not it either. Too vague. Come on, where is the actual raw data?"
She moved to another search engine, then a third, her mouse clicks echoing in the empty computer room. She bypassed a regional filter to access a private server used by urban explorers, hoping to find raw footage or unfiltered eyewitness accounts.
"Seismic activity? No, the sensors didn't even twitch..." She muttered, closing the window in frustration. She pulled up a blueprint of the Shinsei sector, cross-referencing it with the power grid's failure logs. "Electrical surge? No, the flow was cut from the *inside* out, not the other way around."
Nene leaned closer to the screen, her glasses sliding slightly down her nose. She tried a hidden sub-directory on a tech-enthusiast board, but it was just more of the same—wild theories about underground construction and local myths.
"Illegal demolition? No, that's just stupid.
Government training exercise? No... that doesn't explain the distortions." She sighed, her hands hovering over the keys as she stared at a dead-end link. "No, no... that's still not it. It's like someone went through with a digital vacuum and sucked up everything that actually mattered."
After a while, a buried link on a fringe forum caught her eye. It wasn't a news site; it looked more like a leaked, unformatted database. The title at the top made her pause: CLASSIFIED: PHENOMENA CATEGORIZATION.
"Ghouls and Chimeras...?" Nene whispered, her nose wrinkling. "Okay, this has to be a joke. Some bored kid's dark fantasy project." She rolled her eyes, but curiosity won out. She double-clicked the link, and her screen filled with a breakdown of entities that made her blood run cold.
"Whoa... What the heck is this..." She cast a quick, paranoid glance around the room. It was still empty, the only sound being the soft whirring of the cooling fans. She turned back to the monitor, her glasses reflecting the jagged text as she began to read:
Nene's eyes narrowed as she reached the final, most detailed section of the file. The description of the Malforms was accompanied by a rough, high-contrast thermal scan that made her skin crawl.
"Entity Classifications..." She read.
The text was jagged and unformatted, looking more like a leaked military transcript than a webpage. Nene tracked the descriptions, her skepticism fighting a losing battle against the terrifyingly specific details.
First were the Ghouls. The database labeled them as the baseline—common, physical, and driven by a primal, animalistic hunger. They were the predators behind most "unexplained disappearances," relentless but lacking any real strategy. Just beyond them were the Chimeras. These were technically ghost-like, existing almost entirely in a spectral state. The data suggested they were untouchable phantoms that "haunted" the environment, invisible to the human eye but leaving a trail of freezing air and electronic interference.
Then the list moved into the Remnants. These were described as flickering echoes, the dregs of the supernatural world that looked like visual glitches or static in the air. They were weak on their own, but the report noted they acted as a warning sign for the heavier hitters.
Nene's cursor hovered over the next entry: Amalgams. They shared the same ghostly nature as Chimeras but possessed a terrifying "phasing" ability. They could turn solid in a heartbeat—long enough to shred concrete or steel—before vanishing back into a spectral fog before anyone could land a counter-blow.
But at the very top of the file sat the Malforms.
Nene felt a chill prickle her skin as she read. These were the elites. Though they stood on two legs with a humanized silhouette, they were anything but human. Their bodies weren't made of flesh or bone, but seemed to be composed of a swirling, violent black wind—a living energy that churned within their humanoid shape. Unlike the mindless creatures below them, Malforms were frighteningly intelligent. They didn't just lash out; they used "proper" battling moves, displaying tactical combat skills and calculated precision. They weren't just anomalies; they were a trained, rival army.
A final, bolded note at the bottom of the page caught her eye, making her breath hitch. It claimed that to a normal human, these things weren't visible as monsters at all. They were just simple distortions—brief ripples in the wind or a slight blurring of the air, easily dismissed as a trick of the light or a sudden breeze.
"A hierarchy..." Nene whispered, her heart hammering against her ribs.
She looked at the description of the Malforms again—black energy shaped like a man, moving with the grace of a fighter. If these things were real, and people were just walking past them thinking they were feeling a draft, then the "Public Safety Commission" wasn't just a police force. They were a cleanup crew for a nightmare no one could see. She gave a small, nervous laugh, looking around the empty room. "I mean, come on. Ghost-monsters that use martial arts? This is straight-up sci-fi. There's no way the government is hiding literal monsters... right?"
Nene didn't have much time to linger; the bell for her next class was set to ring in just a few minutes. As she stared intensely at the monitor, the heavy door to the computer room creaked open. Yuna stepped inside, her eyes immediately finding Nene hunched over the desk.
"Momose... class is starting soon. You should be heading out," Yuna said, crossing her arms. Nene didn't even flinch, her eyes glued to the screen as she processed the data on the Malforms. Yuna waited, her brow furrowing, before trying again, her voice sharper this time. "Hey, Momose!"
The sudden shout acted like an electric shock. Nene practically jumped out of her skin, her chair screeching against the floor. "Y-Yes! Huh...? Oh, Aoshiki..." Nene stammered, her heart racing. In her frantic scramble to gather her things, she completely forgot to close the browser tab.
"Class. Now," Yuna repeated. Nene felt that familiar prickle of annoyance. Yuna's "perfect student" energy and constant air of maturity always rubbed her the wrong way.
"Yeah... yeah, whatever. I'm going," Nene muttered, throwing her bag over her shoulder. As she brushed past Yuna at the doorframe, she couldn't help but throw a parting jab. "Is everyone on the Student Council this pushy, or is it just a 'you' thing?" She didn't wait for a comeback, disappearing down the hallway toward her classroom.
Yuna sighed, shaking her head as she walked over to the terminal to shut it down. She reached for the mouse, but her hand froze before she could click the 'X'.
The words on the screen—Ghouls, Chimeras, Amalgams—seemed to burn into her retinas. A cold weight settled in her stomach. She was one of the few who had actually seen the "ripples in the wind" turn into something lethal. She had felt the terrifying chill of their presence firsthand just a few nights ago. Now, looking at the descriptions of the black, swirling energy and the tactical movements of the Malforms, the monsters that had nearly ended her life finally had names.
To be continued...