More than two years ago, a calling card on the school bulletin board of Shujin Academy had hailed the advent of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. Selling their image as a group of righteous thieves who stole the distorted desires of their evil and corrupted targets, any high-profile figure who found themselves facing one of their calling cards and even a few smaller crooks who didn't found themselves inflicted with what could only be called a change of heart. After a string of successful missions against increasingly high-profile targets, they finally culminated their work by taking down the incumbent Prime Minister Masayoshi Shido and causing him to confess his every crime with his own mouth.

The following summer, the Phantom Thieves had made a comeback, not just in Tokyo, but across the entirety of Japan. When various individuals began to affect the masses through the use of the AI known as EMMA, the Phantom Thieves returned, targeting Shibuya, Sendai, Sapporo, and Osaka, tracking down the people using the AI to change the hearts of the masses to force them to support them, and restoring the people's stolen desires in each town they visited. Their work once again completed, they faded back into the shadows of urban legend.

A year later, the world came to an end.

Okay, not really. The world didn't actually come to an end. I mean if it did, you wouldn't be reading this, right?

Anyway, I should probably start over.

My name is Kenzo Okuda. I'm...well, who I am to people really depends on who you ask. But if there's one thing everyone who's properly met me can agree on, it's that I'm weird. Why? Maybe partially due to the way I obsess over things, from games and shows I find cool and interesting to the tiniest details in whatever project I'm currently working on. Maybe it has something to do with the way I like to put my own unique spins on anything I'm told to do, such as when I turned grammar assignments in grade school into miniature stories unbidden. Maybe it even includes the way I speak to people, subtly deflecting conversation to topics I'm more interested in and occasionally making odd leaps in logic that other people can rarely follow.

But I'm getting sidetracked here.

The day started about the same as any other. Well, any other day the week before exams, that is. For most students, it meant moaning about studying, then a few late night hours of cramming, then waking up feeling exhausted and dragging their feet to school the next day. Not me. In comparison to grade school and middle school, the pace of high school was like a breath of fresh air to me, perfectly paced to keep me invested in the material rather than being a boring slog of repeating the same stuff over and over again. In addition, due to my family's tendency to move every seven years for one reason or another, I was going to Shujin Academy now, far from my old grade school where I was picked on for being too booksmart and bad at sports and socializing.

I never liked grade school that much.

Shujin might have had a bad reputation because of that gym teacher who beat up his students and got his heart changed by the Phantom Thieves, but I didn't care about that. As far as I was concerned, now that he was gone, so was the reason for the school's bad reputation. Plus, it was close enough to my family's apartment that I could just walk there. So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone when I was walking to school the same way I usually did when it started.

At the time, I didn't think much of the tremor in the earth that I felt. Earthquakes weren't uncommon in the region after all. I just paused in my step to make sure that nothing more serious was going on and continued walking, ears pricked for any sign that the quake was a precursor to a more serious event. Looking back, a normal person probably wouldn't have reacted the way I did, but hey, I have a rather active imagination.

People were chatting away as normal when I stepped into my homeroom class. Everyone ignored me as usual as I found my seat near the back and unpacked a couple of books and a binder onto my desk. I was hardly a very sociable person, and about the extent of my interaction with the other members of class 2-A was when I participated with them on group projects. That being said, I could more than settle for being ignored. Back in my last year of middle school, people had learned pretty quickly that picking on me wouldn't gain them anything; as soon as the bullies realized I couldn't be intimidated and they couldn't physically force me to do anything due to how good I got at dodging any attempt they made at trapping me, they settled for ignoring me like everyone else.

Probably the person besides me who stood out the most among the class was a girl named Futaba Sakura. While I had become very good at hiding my quirks behind an evasive facade of semi-normality, Sakura-chan made hardly any attempt at hiding her weirdness. She openly made video game and manga references in every other sentence, occasionally rambled on when she didn't realize other people expected her to stop talking, and was almost unbelievably twitchy. According to the rumor mills, one time a guy who thought she was cute tried to approach her from behind so he could ask her out, and she'd jumped and ran so fast, you'd almost think she'd teleported.

Pulling out my phone, I simultaneously pricked my ears, catching snippets of the conversations around the room. Most of what I heard was useless, but you could never tell when something interesting would come up.

"Did you seriously stay up all night studying?"

"Oh, my god, that is so cute-"

"Dude, what about that earthquake this morning?"

"...says here they think it was around a 4.3."

Chouno-sensei had walked in and was ordering everyone in their seats when it happened. A sudden pulse, as though everyone in the room could suddenly feel the heartbeat of the universe, and just for an instant, the sky turned a dark gray and all visible light suddenly redshifted. Then the sensation was gone, as was the order in the classroom. Then another earthquake, stronger this time, shaking the entire city so that the students all scrambled to take shelter under their desks. The earth continued to shudder, and for a minute, I was almost worried that it might not end, but an instant after the thought crossed my mind, the shaking suddenly stopped. Any semblance of order in the classroom was now well and truly gone. Students were scared now, and a clamor erupted in the classroom, but before it could get out of control, the principal's voice rang out from the loudspeaker.

"Everyone, please do not panic. Teachers, please get your students together and head to your designated evacuation areas. Ensure that any injuries from the earthquake are reported as soon as the evacuation is complete. Thank you."

Chouno-sensei immediately began barking orders, directing the students to line up out in the hallway. My eyes drifted over to Sakura-chan as I slipped out from under my desk. She was still curled up in a ball under hers, trembling and muttering to herself. I moved over to her side.

"Sakura-chan? Are you okay?"

"...impossible...can't be back...the shadows...SHADOWS-!"

"Sakura-chan!" I repeated, a little louder. She jumped and looked at me. "Come on, we have to get going. We're evacuating."

Sakura-chan's eyes widened as she realized Chouno-sensei was still hanging out by the door, waiting for us. She shot out from under her desk and was out the door faster than I could blink. I jogged over to the teacher.

"Get going, Okuda."

"Sorry, sensei."

By the time we had all evacuated to the sports fields, everyone could hear the small booms in the distance, and Sakura-chan was looking even twitchier than usual. Then the usual buzz of conversation suddenly swelled, and one of our classmates said, "It's on the news!" Sakura-chan and I both whipped out our phones. The earthquake was indeed the first thing on the news. The authorities were calling it a 6.0 on the richter scale. But a minute later, the earthquake became obsolete.

"We have breaking news: a series of unknown creatures have escaped from the Shibuya underground and begun wreaking havoc on the inner city. Reports state that efforts by the police to contain these monsters have proven ineffective. However, an unidentified individual in a skull-shaped mask appears to be successfully attacking and destroying this new threat. Unconfirmed reports state that this individual is using some form of supernatural powers to fight the rampaging monsters."

By the time I looked up, Sakura-chan was gone.


"Shit!" Skull cursed as he blasted the shadows with lightning and bashed them with his steel pipe. "What the heck are shadows doing in the real world?! This doesn't make any effin' sense!"

A flicker of motion caught his eye. A Pyrojack was wandering a little close to the ramen shop he'd been eating at.

"OH NO YOU DON'T!"

Sprinting at the shadow with an earsplitting battle cry, he bashed it in the head and knocked it to the side, where it promptly dissolved into smoke. A couple of the patrons left inside were looking at him with wide and scared eyes.

"Go! Get out of here!" he shouted at them. There was a scramble as the few remaining people ran for the doors. Skull didn't have time to escort them out properly; there were still too many shadows about.

Skull grit his teeth before moving his free hand to his mask. "Persona!" William's ethereal shape rose up behind him, formed of azure flame and directing its cannon arm at the approaching shadows. "Mazionga!" Skull cried aloud. There was a flash and a bang as tendrils of lightning arced from the persona's outstretched cannon, striking each of the shadows. Some screamed and burst, but others merely tanked the hits and kept coming.

Skull let out a growl. Pixie, Incubus, and Mokoi. All small fries, but resistant to electricity. Skull seized his shotgun and blasted the Pixie and the Incubus, but the Mokoi was almost on top of him, so he settled for bashing it upside the head with his pipe. All three fizzled and died.

Skull let out a breath and looked around. There didn't appear to be any more shadows coming...for now at least. There were definitely a few bystanders still hanging around though, watching wide-eyed as he'd battled. At the sound of sirens, Skull grumbled and marched out into the street, where he was in plain view of the arriving squad cars. Three of them roared to a stop around the Phantom Thief, where he stood with his pipe on his shoulder, tapping his foot impatiently.

"About damn time!" he barked as the officers started to exit their cars. "I'm trying to get some food here, and suddenly the city's being flooded with Shadows? The hell are you lot even doing!?"

The officers only trained their guns on him. "Drop your weapons! Get down on the ground!"

Skull only sighed and scratched the back of his head. "Dude, I just killed a bunch of monsters for you, and this is the thanks I get?"

There was a boom and the thud of footsteps as a tall white humanoid shadow peered around the corner of another nearby building. Immediately, the scared officers turned to face this new threat, firing their pistols. The bullets ricocheted uselessly off its surface.

"Ziodyne!" Skull screamed, blasting the shadow in the chest with a lightning bolt. It staggered a little but didn't fall. "Stop shooting!" he shouted back at the officers as William faded back into his mask. "That thing's immune to physical attacks!" The Shiki-Ouji lunged at him, swiping its hand through the debris, but Skull leapt over the outstretched hand and rolled out of the way. "Persona!" Another Ziodyne smashed into the shadow's chest dead-center, causing it to dissolve into a puddle of black. Skull let out a breath as his mask reappeared.

"Skull!" A young woman in a red catsuit and a matching mask dropped from a nearby building and vaulted over the police cars.

"Panther!" Skull greeted her.

"You okay? Need any healing?"

"Pfft. Against the small fry Shadows that showed up here? Nah, I'm good. How's everyone else?"

"I left Fox near the park. He was facing a couple of Oni, but he should be fine. Queen and Noir have their hands full keeping Shibuya Station under control though. No sign of the others so far."

Skull smashed his pipe against an outcropping of concrete, which promptly cracked in half and toppled over. "Dammit! Where are these things coming from? How are they even here?"

"Questions for later!" Panther cut him off. "We need to get going before all of Shibuya is overrun!"