The sound of her footsteps was swallowed whole by the thick gray carpet.

  Mamiya Kaori walked as if she’d entered a place where even noise was regulated. The hallway lights were too bright and too colorless—white that leaned toward blue, the kind that made skin look slightly unwell. No sunlight. No windows. Just a smooth, quiet corridor that smelled faintly of disinfectant and warm plastic from hidden machinery.

  At the end of the hall, a door slid open without a handle. She was guided into a conference room walled with frosted glass. The glass wasn’t decorative. It was functional. It blurred the outside into pale shapes and erased any sense of direction, like being sealed inside a snow globe.

  There were no windows. No clocks. No visible vents. The air was steady, temperature-controlled, and so still it felt like it had been filtered for sound along with dust. Cold, artificial light poured from panels in the ceiling and cast almost no shadows. It made everything look flatter than it should—faces, papers, even the edges of the table. A hermetically sealed space where “time” didn’t move unless someone made it.

  Documents were arranged with geometric precision in the center of the long meeting table. Not stacked, not piled—aligned. Corners squared. Margins matched. As if the shape of the paper itself could impose order on whatever was inside.

  At the far end sat the Technical Director, posture rigid, hands folded.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Dr.Mamiya.” He gave a slight nod of acknowledgement.

  “No need for thanks,” Kaori replied, “This isn’t the kind of matter we could discuss over a web call,” voice calm.

  It wasn’t just politeness. It was a boundary. There were subjects that shouldn’t live on networks, even internal ones. Or perhaps—there were subjects that simply refused to stay contained when spoken into a microphone.

  Kaori reached into the inner pocket of her suit jacket and took out her glasses. The motion was practiced, almost ritual. She slid them on and felt the world sharpen in a way she preferred for rooms like this.

  In the classroom, she was bare-faced, chalk-dusted, moving on instinct and habit. Here, in the realm where numbers and waveforms ruled, she needed armor.

  Gathered in the room were two Operation Executives, both older men with the kind of tired eyes that came from making decisions nobody thanked them for. The Technical Director, younger, but wound tight enough to look older than his years. And the Chief Observation Log Analyst, quiet, hands hovering near his tablet as if touching the screen too hard might break something.

  Before each of them, a file lay open, silent and heavy. No one offered tea. No one asked how her day had been.

  “Shall we begin?” the Technical Director said. He flipped through the documents in his hands, then tapped a control on the tabletop panel. Several graphs blossomed across the embedded screen, projected in clean lines and muted colors. Mana waveforms. Coordinate maps. Timestamp columns. Error flags.

  “The topic of discussion is the occurrence of Signal 401.” Director said.

  Kaori’s eyes tracked the graphs automatically. The lines were familiar—too familiar. She’d been staring at patterns like these since EWS was still a dream held together by theory and arrogance.

  “According to the logs,” the Director continued, “no broadcast record exists for the relevant time slot. However…” He paused as if giving the room a chance to refuse what came next, “…the mana waveforms recorded clear indications of lens generation.”

  Kaori’s fingers tightened, almost imperceptibly, on the edge of her folder.

  A broadcast lens was not a metaphor inside EWS. It was an engineered phenomenon: a stable, reproducible gate through which perception could pass. A “view” that could be rendered, transmitted, archived. A piece of reality turned into stream data.

  And it didn’t appear by accident. She turned her gaze to the next set of readouts. Coordinate overlays. Observation point identifiers.

  “What about the observation points?” Kaori asked.

  “None,” the Director said. “Zero. It didn’t pass through any observation points. It bypassed the spatial reaction zone entirely.” One of the executives let out a low groan and rubbed his temples, as if he could press the headache back into his skull. “…In other words,” he said, “a viewer connected and outputted video without connecting to the system?”

  “Not only that,” the Director replied, voice tightening. “The Observation-Translation Program—which is normally essential for rendering the data—wasn’t even active.”

  That, more than anything, made the room feel colder.

  EWS wasn’t built on a single spell. It was a structure—a lattice of spells and safety rails and conversion protocols. Observation points fixed coordinates. The translation program stabilized the raw phenomena and turned it into something human eyes could process without burning out.

  Without those, you didn’t get a stream. You got noise. Collapse. Failure. Or… you got something that wasn’t supposed to exist.

  Kaori leaned forward, looking down at the waveform data in her hands. The printout showed a pulse inside the static. Not a random wobble. Not a harmless bump. It had rhythm. Like a heartbeat in the machine. But on the usual observation lines—where there should have been reflections, triangulations, anchor traces—there was nothing. A ghost with footprints. It’s there. And it isn’t there.

  “Is this… frame generation?” Kaori asked quietly.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  “It’s an abnormal waveform that can be interpreted as such,” the Director said. “Additionally, the scale of this fluctuation cannot be explained by normal backend processing.”

  “What about the video data content?” Kaori asked.

  “We have fragments,” the Chief Analyst said, voice low. “It exists. However… analysis will require more time.”

  Fragments. The word sounded harmless until you remembered what it implied. A lens had opened. Something had been captured. Something had been rendered into “visual information.” Even briefly. A heavy silence filled the room.

  Kaori pressed two fingers against the bridge of her nose, not because she was tired—because she needed to keep her thoughts from scattering.

  “…Someone ‘saw’ something that couldn’t be observed,” she said. “Is that the gist of it?”

  “In the existing spell structure,” the Director said, “the generation of a broadcast lens requires reflection—or triangulation—from at least three observation points to fix the coordinates.” He changed the display. A schematic diagram appeared—clean, almost comforting in its logic. Three nodes. A target zone. Lines converging. “Just like a positioning system using Wi-Fi,” he added.

  Kaori’s mouth tightened. The analogy was correct. The problem was that analogies made impossible things sound reasonable.

  “Zero observation points,” the Director said, tapping the screen. “Zero connection logs. Yet, a lens appeared. Structurally, this is a contradiction. It shouldn’t be possible.”

  One of the executives leaned forward, eyes narrowed as if staring harder could force the truth to blink.

  “Does this mean,” he asked slowly, “that someone connected from the outside and established an observation on their own?”

  The Chief Analyst didn’t answer immediately. He glanced at Kaori first, as if measuring whether the next words were allowed.

  “Hypothetically, we cannot rule out interference by an ‘Unknown Observer.’” Then he spoke.

  The phrase landed like a drop of ink in water. It spread through the room without sound, staining everything. Unknown Observer. Not a registered viewer. Not an authorized operation. Not a logged process. A will. A presence. Someone else in the dark.

  “Could it be…” another executive began, voice cautious, “…the Returnee?”

  For a heartbeat, the air in the conference room tensed perceptibly. The temperature didn’t actually drop, but Kaori felt it anyway—the way a room reacts when someone says a name that shouldn’t be said.

  “No,” Kaori shook her head immediately. “That would be too risky for him. He knows that better than anyone.” She said, sharp enough to cut. ”

  Silence followed. No one challenged her. No one pressed the point. The Returnee’s name wasn’t something you spoke of lightly in a place like this. It was like mentioning a crack in a dam while standing under it.

  “Then who?” an executive asked, “And for what purpose?” he said quieter now.

  “…That is why I am here,” Kaori lifted her gaze. Behind her lenses, her eyes felt colder than the room. “To find out.” She said. She tapped the waveform on the screen, right where the pulse rose and fell with unsettling stability. “One thing is clear,” Kaori said. “There is intent behind this interference.”

  The Technical Director’s jaw tightened, and he didn’t interrupt.

  “The stability shown in the spell waveform is at a level that cannot be explained by accidental fluctuation,” Kaori continued. “At the very least, on one side—the connector’s side—there must have been a will to ‘see someone.’”

  To see someone. Not to test a system. Not to steal data. Not to break rules for sport. To look. Kaori felt the skin on her arms prickle. If someone can look across the boundary without observation points… Then the boundary is thinner than we believed. Someone was trying to look to the Other Side of the world. That was the essence of Signal 401.

  “So,” the elderly executive seated near the center of the table said. “This isn’t just a simple error, is it?” His voice grave.

  No one denied it. The anxiety in the room wasn’t loud. It didn’t manifest as panic. It was worse than that—undefined, unlabelled, and therefore impossible to dismiss. The heavy silence of people who had brushed against a truth they didn’t want to acknowledge.

  “The problem,” the Director said, “is the fact that visual information was acquired in a state of zero observation points. This has the potential to shake the structure of EWS to its very foundation.”

  “If it’s real,” one executive muttered.

  “It’s real,” the Analyst said quietly. He didn’t sound pleased about being right.

  “Is it reproducible?” the other executive asked.

  The Technical Director answered while operating his terminal. A new set of logs appeared—thin lines, weak spikes, a scatter of anomalies that looked almost like dust.

  “To date, multiple similar frame waveforms have been detected,” he said, “albeit for short durations. However, they are all extremely faint and have not resulted in visualization.” He enlarged one of the traces. It barely rose above baseline. “We could consider them inconsistencies during the conversion from system magic to data,” he added. “Case 401 is the only one that is distinct.”

  “So we can’t determine if it was intentionally reproduced or accidental,” the executive summarized, “but the traces are there.”

  “Rather than a loophole in the spell itself,” Kaori nodded slowly. “This might indicate the intervention of another will that leaps over the existing structure entirely,” she said.

  “A third-party connection…” someone murmured.

  “Or perhaps,” another voice whispered, “from the Other Side—”

  For a split second, the air froze. Kaori didn’t take the bait. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t react the way fear wanted her to react. Instead, she continued in a flat, clinical tone, the tone you used when naming a disease.

  “We will proceed with the analysis of the spell waveforms,” she said. “If a reproduction pattern exists, we need to isolate it.” She let her gaze sweep the table, meeting each pair of eyes in turn.

  “Whoever the target is, this is not a phenomenon we can overlook,” Kaori said. “In the worst-case scenario…” She paused, not for drama, but because the weight deserved to be placed carefully on the table. “…There is a possibility that they are directly connecting the Otherworld and this side,” she added.

  No one spoke for a moment. The executives looked at each other and nodded slightly. The decision was unanimous without needing to be said aloud.

  “…Please continue the investigation,” the elderly executive said.

  “Of course,” Kaori replied.

  She gathered her documents and stood. The chair didn’t squeak; it barely made a sound as it slid back on the carpet. Even furniture behaved here.

  As she moved toward the door, she stopped. In the corner of the conference room, a monitor displayed fragments of the log analysis screen. Strings of timestamps. Partial coordinate data. A frozen slice of the waveform that had started all of this. Kaori stared at it longer than she meant to.

  Kaori’s reflection hovered faintly in the dark edge of the monitor, glasses catching a pale glint of ceiling light. Her profile looked, even to herself, like someone staring at something far away—something that wasn’t in the room. Something in the past.

  “As one of the people who started EWS, I cannot let this pass,” she said quietly, without looking back at the table. Her voice didn’t shake. But inside, where the room’s cold light couldn’t reach, something tightened.

  Because if this is a door…Then someone is already turning the handle.