The Courier & The Code

Rain whispered against the guesthouse eaves, fine and cold, the kind that soaked into fabric without ever seeming to fall. Ryunosuke stepped out onto the narrow landing just after sunrise, pulling his hood over his head as he slid into his sneakers.

He was still half-asleep, thoughts slow and drifting. No plans for the day. No one waiting. Just the gray Kyoto morning curling around him like fog.

Then he saw her.

A girl—maybe fifteen—leaning against the gate with a half-eaten melon bread in one hand and a convenience store umbrella drooping off her shoulder. Her school uniform was soaked from the knees down, but she didn't seem to care. She was chewing lazily, eyes scanning the street like she wasn't supposed to be there but didn't mind being seen.

When she noticed him, she gave no greeting. Just tilted her head and pulled a small envelope from her jacket.

She walked toward him, stopped two steps away, and extended it.

"For you," she said in perfectly flat Japanese, then added in lightly accented English, "Special delivery. No questions, okay?"

Ryunosuke blinked. "Wait, who sent—?"

But she was already turning.

He stepped forward. "Hey—wait!"

The girl waved one hand without looking back. "Too slow, sketchboy."

She disappeared around the corner a moment later, umbrella swinging loosely at her side.

Ryunosuke looked down at the envelope. It was cream-colored and slightly bent from water, sealed with an old-fashioned wax stamp—black, not red. No address. No sender. Just one thing written across the front in brushed kanji:

墨の口へ.Sumi no Kuchi e — To the Mouth of Ink.

He ran his thumb along the wax. It had a faint imprint—something circular, too smudged to make out clearly.

His heart began to thump faster.

He stuffed the envelope inside his jacket and glanced up the street, but the girl was long gone.

No license plate. No name. No trace.

Ryunosuke turned and went back inside, shutting the gate behind him a little slower than usual.

There was something different about this message. It wasn't just secret.

It felt personal.

Back in his room, Ryunosuke dried the envelope gently with a towel and laid it flat on the low table. The wax seal crumbled as he pried it open—no dramatic emblem, just a blurred ring that looked like it had once held shape before the rain softened its edges.

Inside were two things.

A postcard, aged and slightly bent, showing Tokyo Tower at dusk, lights glittering in warm hues against a pink sky. On the back, no message—just a single sketch, hand-drawn in faded black ink.

An iris.

Simple. Elegant. The petals open wide, but the ink had smudged slightly near the bottom, as if the artist had hesitated or touched it before it dried.

There was no name.

Just that.

He set it aside and unfolded the second item.

The letter was short—no more than ten lines—but it was written in fragmented Japanese with mirrored kanji and strange spacing. Parts of it looked like gibberish. One phrase ran in a perfect vertical column along the margin. Another was centered in tiny script between the lines.

Ryunosuke stared at it for a minute, unsure where to start.

Then he pulled out his phone, opened the camera, and snapped a photo. He loaded it into a basic filter app he'd once used for stylizing drawings, flipped the image horizontally, and ran it through a simple OCR scanner he'd downloaded during high school. The characters popped out slowly—glitchy, inconsistent.

He cross-referenced the scan with the raw image. Some symbols were code; others were written in shorthand his father used to teach him.

He started piecing it together.

Where the ink dries… the serpent listens.

The truth is buried beneath glass and ash.

Find the words he left behind—they're not yours, but they belong to you now.

Near the bottom, a final line stood apart from the rest. Smaller. Tighter.

"墨の口で始まる.It begins at the Mouth of Ink."

Ryunosuke leaned back.

What the hell is the Mouth of Ink?

He picked up the postcard again—and that's when he noticed it.

In the lower-right corner, barely visible even up close, was a shimmer under the paper's gloss. He angled it toward the desk lamp.

A faint watermark.

A circle—broken. Not a full ouroboros. Just the body.

The serpent's head was missing and right next to it, faint as a flicker, he saw an address of sorts: Minato Ward. Block 14. Kuroishi-ku

—

(Somewhere else in Tokyo)

The city was louder from above.

Aiko sat cross-legged on the rooftop of a ten-story apartment building in northern Tokyo, headphones around her neck, tablet balanced on her knee. Her coat flapped in the breeze, a size too big for her frame but covered in pockets. She liked pockets. She didn't trust people who didn't have pockets.

Rain misted over the streets below, cars dragging halos of light across the wet asphalt. But Aiko's focus was on the screen in front of her.

A grainy timestamped image: Ryunosuke Hiyashi Omeo, standing under the gate of a Kyoto guesthouse, holding a cream-colored envelope.

She smirked.

"Got it," she whispered, tapping the edge of the screen.

Her interface blinked. An icon flashed green.

::Courier completed drop – Confirmation logged.::

She slid through security camera footage with the practiced flick of a finger, jumping between commercial feeds, transit hubs, and private cams she probably wasn't supposed to have access to.

Aiko wasn't affiliated with the Hiyashi Family, at least not directly. She worked with someone they used to trust—before the purge, before Navarro's networks had shifted east.

She didn't care about crests or loyalty.

She cared about threads.

Patterns. Movement. Noise where there shouldn't be noise.

And Ryunosuke?

He was noise wrapped in silence.

She zoomed in on the still of his hand holding the envelope. Paused it. Tilted her head.

"They gave him the Mouth of Ink."

The phrase sent a ripple of curiosity through her chest. She tapped open an encrypted window, logged coordinates, then pulled up her project folder: a spiderweb of data nodes with names like KANDA_REACH, V.N_TRAFFIC, RELIC_R4, and now:

::RYUNOSUKE_INIT::

She added a connection to the ouroboros file, then sat back and took a sip from a thermos of milk tea.

"Alright, kid," she murmured to no one. "Let's see if you can read between the lines."

The screen pinged.

Someone was trying to trace her relay point from Kyoto.

She smiled.

Let them try.

—

(Back at the guesthouse)

The room was quiet again.

Ryunosuke sat cross-legged at the table, the postcard and letter laid out before him, along with a notepad where he'd scribbled fragments of the decoded message. His phone was still open to the image of the watermark—the incomplete ouroboros, clearer now under a lighting filter.

The serpent without a head.

He stared at it until his eyes hurt.

"Where the ink dries… the serpent listens."

Who wrote it? His father? Someone working with him? Or someone pretending to?

And more importantly… why send it now?

Ryunosuke glanced at the train schedule he'd pulled up earlier. The first direct line to Tokyo left before dawn. The price wasn't cheap, but he had enough. Barely.

He could tell Kenji.

He could tell Mayu.

But part of him knew what they'd say. "It's bait."

"Let us vet it first."

"Stay in your lane."

And part of him was tired of lanes.

He took the torn sketch of the reimagined crest—the one he'd folded into his wallet—and slipped it into the side pouch of his backpack.

Then he picked up the postcard. Ran a thumb along the corner where the watermark shimmered faintly under the lamplight.

He didn't need permission.

Not for this.

He grabbed his phone and began booking the ticket.

There was no plan. No handler. No fallback.

But there was movement.

And for the first time in almost two weeks, that felt like enough.

He packed light—just the essentials. Sketchbook. Charger. A folded copy of the decoded letter, annotated with notes he didn't quite understand yet. Something was waiting in Tokyo. A message. A place. Maybe a truth his father left behind, too dangerous to carry but too sacred to destroy.

And if it was a trap?

Fine.

He zipped up the bag, glanced once at the Kyoto skyline through the window, then turned off the lamp.

If this is a trap, he thought, slinging the bag over his shoulder, then I'll walk into it awake.