The Gods Are Fighting Over Me - Chapter 3

The night was as dark as ink.

At the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Public Security Bureau, the crowded office was a hive of activity, with the sound of keyboards clicking everywhere. When Rei Furuya arrived, the entire department was already swamped.

“Mr. Furuya, you’re finally here!” Kazami stood up in a hurry, his chair scraping against the corner of the desk with a sharp sound. Everyone else looked relieved to see him, their eyes all fixed on Rei.

“What’s the situation?”

Yuya Kazami led Rei to a technician’s computer, and the technician gave them some space to see.

On the desk were three monitors. From left to right, they showed complex code, someone’s Twitter account, and an IP tracing result.

Kazami pointed to the middle screen. “Thirty-seven minutes ago, our intelligence division picked this up.”

The browser was on the main page of a Twitter account with a handle called “@Tsuki_eats_Hagi” and 30,000 followers.

Rei took the mouse, and the cursor glided across the homepage. Twenty-six illustrations appeared one by one. The account’s owner was an illustrator, and their page was filled with meticulously drawn pictures of Kenji Hagiwara in all sorts of situations: at work, in his daily life, and even in more intimate moments, like just out of the bath with only a towel wrapped around him.

With just one look, Rei knew who the owner was. There was no one else but Lin Jianyue.

Rei’s index finger suddenly stopped on an image of a rainy night in a back alley.

Moss seeped from the bricks of the narrow alley. He wore white gloves and had a dangerous smile. In the shadows on the right, Scotch, carrying his bass case, held a finger to his lips, as if shushing someone just outside the frame. On the back wall to the left, Rye Whiskey stood with his arms crossed, a lit cigarette in his mouth.

The artist used a delicate touch to create an incredible atmosphere, perfectly capturing the dark, dangerous, and alluring side of all three of them.

Rei’s face grew serious, and his eyebrows furrowed.

Too dangerous.

If anyone from the Organization saw this, it would cause an uproar. Knowing Gin’s suspicious nature, he would most likely catch all three of them, hold a gun to Rei’s head, and force him to reveal the artist’s name and his relationship with them.

But thankfully, this picture wasn’t enough to expose his and Hiroshi Morofushi’s undercover identities. At most, Gin would get suspicious, thinking they were either dating an outsider or had an unreported contact.

Either way, it would be enough to enrage Gin.

Rei pushed the thought aside and continued to scroll.

The screen glided past a series of single-person illustrations of Kenji Hagiwara. The love flowing from the canvas was so strong it almost spilled from the screen. This river of deep affection was reflected in Rei’s violet-gray eyes, and he suddenly understood why Kenji had fallen so hard.

As he flipped to the third page, his finger on the mouse felt a sharp prick, and he flinched back. A tremor shot from his tailbone to the back of his neck, and his mind went blank.

A suffocating coldness rushed at him from all directions, like a rope tightening around his neck, blocking his breath from going up or down.

“This…” The hoarse sound of his voice was lost in the clicking of keyboards.

In the picture, he and Hiroshi Morofushi were surrounded by a variety of blooming flowers. Light poured down, giving them both a soft, golden outline. Hiroshi’s police hat was tilted slightly to the left, and Rei was holding his, in the middle of putting it on.

They were in their ceremonial police uniforms, their faces filled with smiles under the shadow of their hat brims, their eyes crinkling with anticipation for the future.

Rei stared at the picture, his breathing unsteady for a few seconds. He anxiously tightened the muscles in his hand and cursed under his breath.

The cold sting of a security breach shot through him. This was a major incident, one that could erase years of work by the Japanese Public Security Bureau in a single night.

Rei forced his voice to be steady, even with a slight tremble. “Since you guys found this account, how many views has this picture gotten?”

The technician quickly typed a line of code. “The user is a well-known illustrator. In the half-hour we’ve been monitoring, it’s already gotten 361 views, with 63% from domestic IPs.”

Rei was silent, his gaze fixed on the smiling corners of Hiroshi’s lips in the picture, but his vision was also capturing the numbers flashing in the lower right corner of the technician’s screen. The real-time view count refreshed every three seconds, like a death tally.

A bead of cold sweat rolled down Rei’s temple. “Can you lock down this account?”

Yuya Kazami pushed his glasses up his nose. “We’re in the process, but an international request takes 72 hours. You know how slow Twitter’s response time is, and we don’t have a direct collaboration with the U.S., so we can’t fast-track it.”

Rei gritted his back teeth, his jawline tensing into a hard line.

But he quickly realized something was off. “Kazami, you’re calmer than I’d expect. Why?”

Kazami’s face still held the fatigue of working nonstop. He looked at Rei with a look of helplessness, self-reproach, and an unsettling calm that shouldn’t have been there.

That strange calm gave Rei a sense of foreboding. Goosebumps crawled from his fingers to his forearms.

Kazami’s expression shifted slightly as he briefly looked away, pushing his glasses up a second time even though they hadn’t slipped. “Mr. Furuya, I don’t think you need to be too worried.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed. “The account owner has already prepared a solution for you.”

Rei frowned in confusion.

“Mr. Furuya, you can go directly to the fourth page. Your answer is there.”

“Fourth page?”

The mouse wheel clicked as Lin Jianyue’s Twitter account was scrolled to the fourth page. When he reached the seventh picture from the top, Rei’s pupils constricted violently. The capillaries at the edge of his iris looked like they were about to burst.

Rei couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The hum of the air conditioner, the rustle of a subordinate flipping through a file, the sound of keyboards… All the sounds around him faded away like a receding tide, until everything was silent.

Rei stared at the enlarged solo illustration in the center of the screen, the veins at his temple throbbing. He let out a laugh he didn’t know he had in him, a laugh tinged with a sense of powerlessness.

In the image, Gin was in a police ceremonial uniform, standing in the middle of a bustling crowd with a fierce look on his face. The other graduates in the background had blurred faces, their smiles only faintly visible.

If you looked closely, you could see a red sash diagonally across Gin’s chest with the faint words “Class Representative” on it.

A small line of bold text was written above the picture. It was what Lin Jianyue had typed when she posted the image. Translated to Japanese, it roughly read: “Heard the red vs. black switcheroo is a trend. Giving it a try.”

Yuya Kazami spoke up at the right moment. “Mr. Furuya, you can click on the bottom half of the third page, the one you skipped earlier.”

Rei did as he was told and was treated to a view of the Public Security Bureau’s resident police beauty, Vermouth, the Criminal Investigation Department’s dynamic duo of Chianti and Korn drawn to look like a pair of simple-minded Patrick Stars, along with their boss, the honorable Gin, and their loyal driver, Vodka.

“…Heh.” Rei let out a hollow, bitter laugh, followed by a long silence.

Kazami was quiet for a few seconds before speaking again. “Judging by the timeline, the picture of you and Mr. Morofushi appeared after the ‘Officer Gin’ series, so…”

Kazami didn’t finish, but Rei understood what he meant.

Gin’s loyalty to the Organization was absolute. Anyone could be a mole, but Gin? Never.

The moment Lin Jianyue drew Gin as a police officer, her artwork lost all credibility.

You’d be more likely to believe Gin was the reincarnation of a god sent to punish Japan than to believe he was a police officer.

“Mr. Furuya!” Kazami suddenly called out. The technician sitting nearby jumped up from his swivel chair, making a loud noise.

Rei looked up.

Lin Jianyue’s social media account, which had been perfectly fine on the screen just moments ago, now showed a message: “Account does not exist.”

Lin Jianyue’s account had been suspended.

Rei’s brows furrowed slightly. “Akai Shuichi finally found it, too.”

Three years ago, Rei and Hiroshi Morofushi had taken a huge risk, using the information Kenji had gotten from Lin Jianyue to save themselves at the last possible moment.

Hiroshi was cleared of suspicion and continued his undercover work. They also exchanged identities with Shuichi Akai through a series of tests, but it was only enough to confirm their affiliations. They didn’t exchange any intel with him, and the FBI and Japanese Public Security remained separate entities.

They hadn’t even exchanged real names. They had only heard the name “Shuichi Akai” from Kenji and confirmed its authenticity after repeated tests.

“That’s great, Mr. Furuya,” the technician said with a sigh of relief, his tone a bit fawning. “The FBI must have been the ones to erase the account. It saved us a lot of trouble.”

Rei lowered his eyes, saying nothing.

The account issue was resolved, and he no longer had to worry about Lin Jianyue’s drawings exposing his real identity.

But he was worried about two other things.

First, Lin Jianyue’s safety. If Gin found this account, he would definitely scour the earth to find her.

Second… it seemed the world was undergoing a subtle merger.

As he browsed Lin Jianyue’s account, he noticed that the page navigation at the bottom went up to 37 pages. He didn’t know when she’d started using Twitter, but it was definitely more than six months ago.

And yet, they had only just now detected her account.

Almost all of Lin Jianyue’s posts were of Kenji Hagiwara, with a few of the Organization’s members and his five police academy classmates.

Her homepage was filled with current police officers and high-profile criminals who were still at large. This was basically dancing on the face of the Japanese Public Security. No matter how incompetent their network monitoring was, they couldn’t possibly miss a catch this big.

Rei asked, “Did this account just appear an hour ago?”

Kazami nodded. “Yes.”

Rei’s eyes narrowed dangerously. That explained why Lin Jianyue had suddenly disappeared from Kenji’s dreams.

Because she had truly crossed over from the dream’s parallel world and was now here with him.

“Kazami, did you find the account’s IP address?”

“We found it, it’s in Tokyo. But there seems to be some kind of interference, so we can’t pinpoint the exact location.”

Rei crossed his arms and rubbed his chin in thought. She must have just merged into this world and wasn’t stable yet, which was why her exact location couldn’t be pinpointed.

But he didn’t plan on telling Kazami this theory.

The idea of a world merging was too absurd to tell a materialistic police officer. Besides, it had taken them years to even accept the fact that Kenji was dating a woman from a dream.

Rei lowered his eyes, his mind already made up. He took out his phone and sent a message to his friend who was several miles away:

I’ll arrange for a composite sketch artist to come see you as soon as possible. Describe Lin Jianyue’s appearance to them. Remember, this is confidential.

A few seconds later, the reply came:

You know where Lin Jianyue is?

Rei had originally planned to keep everything a secret, but after editing it a few times, he settled on a single, short sentence: I don’t know, but I have to find her.

At the top of the chat, where Kenji Hagiwara’s name was displayed, it changed to “Typing…” for a long time, only to finally send two words: Got it.

Rei was silent for a moment before adding: Lin Jianyue isn’t in danger right now. Don’t worry, wait for me to contact you.

Police Dorms.

Kenji Hagiwara was propped up on his pillow, leaning on one arm. The collar of his shirt was loose and had slid to the side, revealing a spot on his shoulder that Lin Jianyue had once bitten in a dream.

The night breeze lifted a corner of the curtain. The cold light of his phone screen fell on his face. His eyelashes trembled, and his violet-blue eyes reflected the characters he kept deleting and retyping. He kept mouthing Lin Jianyue’s name, but all he tasted was bitterness.

The message he had sent half a minute ago, Okay, count me in for the mixer XD, felt hot in the chat box. His thumb hovered over the “unsend” button for three seconds before he finally pressed it.

In the endless night, his troubled thoughts clung to him like seaweed, dragging him down.

A new message was sent.

The moment the “delivered” notification appeared, Kenji suddenly threw his phone onto the bedside table, closed his eyes in defeat, and gave up.

The new message was short, but it carried the heavy weight of his feelings, shattering into a thousand pieces of moonlight he couldn’t pick up.

Sorry, Miyamoto. I’m not giving up just yet, so I’m not going to the mixer.