"For so long, no one has ever doubted Sibyl's verdict and both enforcers and inspectors have pulled the trigger of dominators effectively, blindly and without question. Those who started out suspicious of its functioning… have eventually become latent criminals. Under normal circumstances, you would not be informed, as you have only been in the Collective for three years, but due to your growing progress and devotion to our common good, I will make an exception," a male voice echoed. "If the matter of the inspector goes any further, there will be a committee I would like you to be on as a listener."

"I would be honored," Kasei Joushuu replied calmly, her half-closed eyes still fixed on the door at the end of her empty office. "What is the nature of such a committee?"

"To contemplate the possibility of integrating a new member into the Sibyl System... or destroy it."

Kasei frowned as the universe opened up behind her slender but imposing figure where there was a wall, slowly darkening the office and her feminine features, giving the atmosphere a sense of infinity. Instead of dwarfing Kasei's figure, it seemed to elevate it.

"Isn't it a bit bold and unprofessional of you to assume that she meets the criteria or may pose a danger to us, without having gone through a process of doubt, thoroughly studying her mindset and behavioral patterns beforehand?" she raised an eyebrow.

"You seem agitated, my friend. I wonder if your thoughts are clear at this point. Perhaps your feelings clouded your judgment," continued the other. "Did you know that cancer is comparable to a bacterial level of complexity, but still autonomous, that is, it doesn't depend on other cells for survival; it doesn't follow orders like other cells in the body, and it can grow where, when and how it wants to?"

Kasei twirled her black pen around her fingers, until she stopped and smirked, tilting her head, "I thought doctors did everything they could to preserve all life, yet you wouldn't hesitate to kill a living organism."

"We are the chosen ones and the ones who choose. We don't hesitate to extinguish any life form that endangers our existence. That's why standard incorporation procedures are long and exhaustive, meticulously studied by several synchronized minds. While we can isolate one from the others or destroy it, structural damage, whether caused by dementia, schizophrenia or major depressive disorder, among other diseases and disorders, is a risk we are not willing to take. We need to test her out on the field before we reach a conclusion or make a decision. One of the qualifications needed to become a member of the Sibyl System is that you must be able to oversee human actions from an objective viewpoint, without empathy or sympathy clouding your judgment. Inspector Takahashi is unique in that she has exceptionally high levels of both cognitive and emotional empathy, easily being able to sense and interpret the feelings and motives of other people. However, this has a downside—whilst it makes her a brilliant profiler and invaluable asset to the Public Safety Bureau, it also feeds her darkness, making her a danger for the centralized structure of our system."

"And yet it never clouded her judgment," Kasei swiveled her chair around, sitting parallel to the desk and looking up at the stars. "She can assume our point of view and still act according to her own standards."

"For now. She was hospitalized once after the death of her parents, although the recovery process was slow, with mandatory therapy sessions, and did not require human intervention. Her psycho pass stabilized and she did not become a latent criminal."

"Yashiro doesn't need therapy," Kasei replied with ease.

"No. She just needs a way out of darkness and someone reading her crime coefficient when she dives too deep."

"Is that why you ordered her to always be accompanied by an enforcer?" Kasei looked at her pen, spinning it slowly. "You wanted to study her psycho pass from the beginning."

"How do you think she felt undergoing a long and cumbersome therapy process?"

Kasei frowned and looked straight ahead with a solemn expression. There was a smaller, younger version of Yashiro sitting in a chair with a man in front of her, asking questions she would never answer, with a serious, blank, even cold expression on her face. Kasei raised her eyebrows for a second, then her chin. Bright vertical and horizontal neon signs filled the skyscrapers of Tokyo. A light blue logo resembling a brain flickered on one of the larger billboards, fading into futuristic animation to reveal a name: SIBYL SYSTEM.

Yashiro was standing on the edge of a building, her head turned to one side and her hands on either side of her body. She was taller, with longer brown hair than before, dressed in black with an open blazer, dress shirt and pants, and derby shoes. There was no sadness, envy or resentment on her face, but a deep, contagious calm. Her gaze was up high, observing the colorful world with curiosity and admiration.

"Misunderstood. Alone. Therapy is useless if it doesn't help you better know yourself. No one ever wanted to acknowledge her hatred. Out of fear. Yashiro saw therapy as self-denial, self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-destruction. Rather than helping her to understand her emotions and feelings, it gave her an acute sense of alienation at being treated as a psychiatric patient or as an individual who had broken the rules, and who had to conform to what society defined as a citizen, abiding by the supreme ideal of the common good. In the end she ended up believing that she might be mentally insane."

Kasei looked down with narrowed, piercing eyes, detached from her body and the office, but only for a couple of seconds until her features relaxed, and her eyes widened normally again. Slowly, her lips curved further up into a greedy smile as she continued, "Community morality can be as powerful and ruthless as the tyranny of the state. We might rarely glimpse the police or the government authority, but people themselves will be authoritarian figures, sometimes even far more frightening than Big Brother."

There was a long, deep laugh, and Kasei's face turned bitter at its sound.

"Insane people would never admit that they are. Paranoid schizophrenics do not think they are crazy at all. They tend to think everyone else is. Because of the symptom of anosognosia—the lack of insight and unawareness of the presence of a disorder—they may not recognize that their behavior, hallucinations, or delusions are unusual or unfounded. Inspector Takahashi has something more dangerous than that—a clear conscience living by her own standards. She must have been called selfish for the courage of acting on her own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for her own life, arrogant for her independent mind, cruel for her integrity…"

"Yashiro is a rare example of a balanced human being in an unbalanced world. Of having a sense of humor in a humorless world. She has been given the job of overseeing the ethics of society. Her ethics are very high, but she does not share the ethics of this society, and certainly not ours, with which she deeply disagrees. She is supposed to be dedicated to the morality of the community, yet is proven to be capable of moral failing and is driven to break the rules of society."

"Did you honestly believe we want laws to be enforced?" the one they knew was among the top fifty minds cut them off. "We want them violated. Innocent men cannot be ruled. The power a government has is to crack down on criminals. But when there are not enough criminals, you create them. You declare so many things a crime that it's impossible for men to live without breaking the law. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? You gain nothing by that. But you pass the kind of laws that cannot be obeyed, implemented or objectively interpreted, and you create a nation of lawbreakers to exploit the guilt. One way to rule men is through guilt, through what they themselves have accepted as guilt.

"If a man finds money on the street, you can impose on him the punishment prescribed for a bank robber, and he will accept it. He will feel he deserves no better and won't even think of a second option. If there is not enough guilt, you create it. If a man believes Hobbes' unwarranted hypothesis that no one would honor a commitment in the absence of coercive power and imminent penalties, thus favoring state authority and absolute monarchy, because all men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests are to steal and murder one another, and that therefore men must be governed by coercion, which must be the exclusive privilege of government, for the purpose of compelling men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice, or that there is no such thing as intellect, for man's brain is a social product, a sum of influences, since no one invents anything and ideas belong to society, we can do as we please with him. He will not defend himself. He will not feel that he is worth it. He will not fight.

"It's a matter of understanding and ruling the soul of a single man in order to understand and rule the rest. A soul cannot be ruled. It must be broken. Use man against himself. Destroy his ideals and his integrity. Once you learn to pull the lever, the mechanism will work for you and the man will be yours. It has been done for centuries, but no one has ever succeeded in sustaining it in the long run. Even the worst of men yearn for an ideal of their own. Use it against himself. For example, preach selflessness. Tell man he must live for others. That altruism is the ultimate ideal. No one will ever attain it. His instincts fight against it. Can you see what you accomplish by this? Man realizes he is incapable of following his ideal, which gives him a sense of guilt and sin. He eventually gives up all ideals, aspirations, notions of personal value and moral code. Since he cannot practice what he preaches, preserving his corrupted integrity, his soul gives up his self-respect. Then he will gladly obey because he can no longer trust himself.

"Another way is killing men's capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it of their own free will. Great men cannot be ruled. But don't deny greatness or denigrate great men. We need people willing to reach for it and to seek it. As our economists would say—money does not fall from trees, wealth must be produced and what is important is the mind, the creative capacity of men. If these ideas had been implemented in the economy, this country would have gone back to the times of steam locomotives and boilers, and we cannot afford that. After all, the Sibyl System is expensive and difficult to maintain.

"Here is another one. Probably the most important one. Don't let men be truly happy. Not on their own volition. Happiness makes them free and free people cannot be ruled. We don't want any free men. Therefore, take from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Altruism helps in this. Unhappy men will always come to you for support and escape.

"Go back in history, look at the systems of ethics. Didn't they preach sacrifice, self-denial? Now look at today's moral society. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes and alcohol to sex and ambition, is considered a shameful admission that will eventually cloud your crime coefficient, making you a depraved, sinful, pathetic man. That's how far we've come. We have tied happiness to guilt. Systems that preached sacrifice grew into world powers and ruled millions of men in the past. As will ours. We are kings and prophets all at once. Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people that they will achieve a superior happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. Fear is what moves men, what drives them to action. Learn to use it against themselves. Tell them that they must give up their freedom, their sense of morality, for safety.

"Beware of a weapon men have—reason. Take it away. Don't say it's evil, but limited. That there is something above it, like instinct, feeling, revelation, Sibyl's oracle. There is no way to rule a thinking man and we want none of them. However, the brain of an independent man will feel the social pressure and will eventually explode, like deep-sea fish brought to the surface. So much for future Takahashis and Tsunemoris.

"Anyone might say that I am a vicious man, but I am the most selfless yet self-aware person you have probably ever met. I am even less independent than you both. While you always used people for what you could get out of them for yourself, I never wanted something for myself. I always used people for what I can do to them. I never really had a private purpose. I just wanted power. A world of unlimited submission where no one owns their own thoughts and everyone thinks the same as everyone else. A stagnant generation where each one will be exactly like the previous one, not in terms of production and economic development, but culturally, socially and morally.

"Well, that was the system, the game played in the past. We have automated it, but the principle is the same. You two were amateurs while we were going for power and we meant it, and once the inspector understands it, she will be much easier to deal with. Both crime and the Sibyl System are necessary to keep society functioning, in the same way that censorship requires people willing to sell banned books, and peace needs the constant fear of war. Our system is perfect in its imperfection and its adaptation to unforeseen situations. The inspector can help us evolve by recognizing those flaws."


Yashiro stepped out of the living room, her shoes echoing down the main corridor, which caught the man's attention and made him turn around. Suddenly, Yashiro slid towards him grabbing a small vase of plants from a table and throwing it at his head. The man managed to dodge it, but when he looked up again, Yashiro gave him a kick that slammed him into the wall. He let out a sigh of pain, and ran to her hugging her waist and pushing her against the small table where the vase had been.

However, Yashiro kneed him in the face and made him get up. In one swift movement, she pulled out a semi-automatic knife, and as the blade unfolded, she lunged at him, plunging it into his stomach, causing him to lose his balance and fall into the corridor, with her straddling him. Blood began to gush out of his mouth and his body twisted as Yashiro continued to stab him, in the middle of his chest, filling the floor with blood. As she stood up, slowly, agitatedly, with the blood-covered knife in her hand, she looked up at the rooms at the top of the stairs and saw that one door was open while the others, such as the bathroom door, were closed.

"Takahashi-san? Takahashi-san," a male voice made her shudder.

Yashiro blinked and turned to the young man beside her. Then, she looked at the huge pool of blood with masses of scorched flesh on the ground.

"Step away from the child!" Aoyanagi's voice echoed throughout the apartment.

There was a woman with her right hand raised to the side of her face, holding a revolver, while the other protected a shorter woman, probably a teenager, not letting her see the body in front of them. The woman seemed to whisper something, without taking her eyes off the inspector, and after a few seconds, when she lowered her hand again, pointing it at them, the younger woman ran off into the adjoining corridor. Shots rang out in the room, passing very close to Yashiro's arm and the enforcers, who ducked instantly. Aoyanagi took cover with the living room wall, but as soon as the other used all six bullets and backed away to flee, the senior inspector leaned out, raising the dominator to take aim at her.

Yashiro's body shuddered when she felt a small thump on her back. It was Kozuki, who patted her and headed in the direction the younger girl had fled, but now she was sitting against the wall, unconscious.

Leaning a hand on the wall to get up, Yashiro ran towards the young woman, past the male body and the kitchen of the apartment, arriving at a wide-open door, which led to an outside hallway from which other apartments could be seen. Turning to the right, several meters away from them both, was Kozuki Ryogo without his dominator.

"It's okay! We are from the Public Safety Bureau. You're safe now."

He glanced at Yashiro, who waited long enough for her psycho pass to drop.

Crime coefficient is 298. Enforcement mode is Non-Lethal Paralyzer. Please aim carefully and subdue the target.

"He was killed this morning," Katashi commented, with one knee on the ground and his eyes fixed on the man's blood.

"Got an ID on the woman?" Yashiro looked at the pool of blood with traces of human parts.

"Nakaya Yua. Ex-wife," Aoyanagi replied, studying a profile in the hologram on her wrist.

Yashiro frowned and shook her head.

"Hey!" Daiki shouted from the living room. "Get out of here! Fucking reporters."

They all turned and walked towards him. Outside the apartment, despite the fact that there were security drones blocking the way to civilians, they saw a small black drone that flew away as soon as they approached to the window. Yashiro, for her part, walked out of the apartment and stood in the middle of the hallway, near a long railing, with her head raised towards the drone. She did not know why she had the impression that she was being watched, a few seconds before it passed over the railing and quickly descended out of sight. Yashiro turned around again and stood in front of the window where the drone had been. From there, anyone could see perfectly well what was written in blood on the living room wall, just above a brown sofa.

"What the hell does it mean? Kozuki scratched his head.

"Moreover, how is that related to this?" Daiki stepped forward.

"He's not done."

They all turned to Yashiro, who had just entered the apartment again and was standing at the entrance to the living room, hands in the pockets of her black coat.

"He?" Katashi narrowed his eyes, looking at the other inspector. "I thought we all agreed on the woman being the prime suspect."

"We don't know for sure if she killed him," Yashiro frowned and studied the body. "He has more than ten stab wounds. Because of the closeness of killing a man like that, she should've had blood on her hands and clothes. But she was clean."

Aoyanagi pursed her lips, moving them to one side in reflection.

"She may have tried to hide evidence, but forgot about the body," Daiki held out one hand, his other arm crossed against his chest. "Sorry, inspector, but this time I see typical spousal abuse where the wife tries to defend herself but goes overboard in the process. He tried to play husband—guess didn't work out."

"Why would she bother writing that if she only acted in self-defense?" Yashiro's question left them silent.

"What makes you think there will be more deaths?" Aoyanagi wanted to know.

"He has some kind of message. And he knows he hasn't given us enough yet to figure it out. Aoyanagi-san, I ask for permission to search his house."

Aoyanagi raised her eyebrows for a moment, lifting her chin and putting a hand on her hip.

"Why?"

"His psycho pass clouded before he got here, that's why a street scanner flagged him. He was targeted for a reason. I want to know what that reason is."

"Take Akiyama-san and Kozuki-san with you and keep me posted," Aoyanagi nodded after several seconds. Yashiro headed for the exit. "Takahashi-san… any thoughts on the message?"

Yashiro looked over her shoulder and read those words for the umpteenth time: SIBYL LIES.

"No," she raised her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders in a casual remark.

Aoyanagi watched her leave with a barely frown. She had the impression that Yashiro had responded an instant too late, just after seeing the wall, but she did not understand why she still felt that strange sensation, even when the young inspector left the apartment, accompanied by the two enforcers.


"Bringing a kill into your own home was… impulsive. Your identity has been compromised, meaning now the entire Public Safety Bureau is after you. This is the end. Your cover life is blown."

Sitting with one leg over the other, Makishima Shougo took a sip from his cup of tea. His words did not match his serene and genuinely indifferent voice.

"And let me guess—you are the only one who can bring it back," a man older than him replied just as calmly.

Makishima narrowed his eyes and smiled, "Is my proposition really so unappealing?"

"I will not be controlled by anyone."

"I don't want to control you. I wouldn't want to if I could. I just want to help you," Makishima shook his head slightly, making Choe Gu-sung frown. "The question is, can you control him?"

"He's a narcissist. I know quite a bit about that. Tell me about your new friend. Still obsessed with avatars, I suppose?"

"I take it you've met Mido Masatake," Makishima slowly frowned.

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," he quoted. "Poor thing. How is Mido-kun?"

"He's losing it," Choe Gu-sung shook his head.

"He never had it," the man narrowed his eyes for a second, smirking and shaking his head.

"How crazy you think he is?" Choe asked, half-opening his bi-colored eyes.

"Oh, bipolar, with strong signs of dissociative identity disorder… but what do I now? I'm not a doctor."

"No, but it's intriguing," Makishima tilted his head.

Agawa Hajime narrowed his pale blue eyes, pausing for a long moment.

"Did you know that one of the many traits of a psychopath is to mirror another's behavior?He may be passionate, but has no life of his own, like an empty shell, which is why he possesses the ability to copy someone else's. I find it despicable. Not the act of cruelty, but cruelty without motive. Blood without cause. He's a man who sold his soul. He who feels at home with anyone has either a narrow mind or hates humankind."


The house they arrived at had white walls and a small staircase at the entrance. Katashi stood to the side of the front door and drew his gun, checking that it was half open. Kozuki also drew his dominator but held it with his right hand, while with his left he opened the door and they slowly walked in. As Katashi went upstairs, Yashiro inspected the living room and kitchen with Kozuki. There was no one in the house.

"What exactly are we looking for?" Kozuki picked up a small frame that held a picture of the man and his daughter.

"Anything… off."

After a few moments, Katashi came downstairs and joined them in the living room.

"All clear," he informed.

"The house is clean and perfect," Kozuki commented.

"Many killers have perfect lives in the eyes of others, but they always leave a trace of who they really are," the inspector remarked, more to herself.

The enforcers exchanged a glance. Yashiro paced around the room with a strange calmness, until she stopped in the kitchen, where there was a glass door leading to the backyard of the house. Yashiro tilted her head to one side, while with her black derby shoe she moved some brown boots that were on the floor, next to a kitchen counter and half hidden behind a broom. They had dirt stuck to the soles. By the time the enforcers approached, Yashiro was sliding the door open and walking out of the house into the garden with long, hurried steps.

In some parts the grass was dark green, although it had not yet grown everywhere. They saw nothing in the garden except a hose in the center and several flower pots. Two-meter walls surrounded the yard. Yashiro walked around the garden for several minutes, until she stopped on a patch of grass and stomped twice with one foot. They heard a metallic sound. As the enforcers approached, Yashiro was crouching down quickly pushing the dirt and grass aside with her hands, until she stopped and stood up. It was a hatch. The moment Katashi bent down to open it, all three held an arm to their noses.

"Ladies first," Kozuki looked at Yashiro, shrugging his shoulders.

Yashiro did not move instantly, but it was Katashi who wrinkled his nose, as he pulled his arm away to activate the flashlight on his wristcom, pointing his dominator forward as he descended the wooden stairs that creaked with every step. Yashiro was the last to go down, and soon they found themselves in a medium sized room, the floor of which was wooden, dirty and stained, with the unpainted cement walls covered in a cold dampness.

It looked like an old tool room from the materials it contained, such as screwdrivers and saws in a library-style cabinet. However, when Kozuki pulled a piece of cloth away from the top of a jar, he took a step back. The other two turned and approached. They counted five eyes inside that dark liquid. Shinning the light around them, they saw other jars covered by pieces of cloth that would simply be mistaken for boxes filled with tools or screws. On a table they found dirty knives of different sizes, and a gray object the size of a fingernail to one side.

"Is that a tooth?" Kozuki leaned towards the wooden table.

"Let's not touch anything," Yashiro's voice echoed. "The whole room is a crime scene."

"We need to call it in," Katashi suggested, turning on a hologram over his wrist.

Yashiro nodded without looking directly at them, and turned around to return to the garden. However, their wristcoms began to jingle and she opened the incoming call, which displayed a hologram on her wrist with Aoyanagi's face in an icon.

"We have a lead on the suspect. Fingerprints have been collected in the room and match those of a man who was flagged by a street scanner while doing a hue check. His name is Miyake Ren. A search of the records of all cameras in town is underway. I've already requested a priority search order with facial recognition. We've sent you his profile and the location where he was last seen. We're heading there."

Both Yashiro and the two enforcers had already gone up the stairs and were crossing the garden.

"We're on our way," Yashiro responded.

The three of them went through the living room and out of the house in long strides, almost running, until they reached the black police car and got into it, synchronizing the location Aoyanagi had sent them with the map of the car, which was not far from their location.

"I'm pulling up maps of the area," Kozuki manipulated the car's hologram, studying the streets and a red dot that disappeared and reappeared in different places. "That's him. Maybe he's making a run for it."

"This is Balto 1," Aoyanagi's voice echoed in the car. "Stand by. That's the target on foot. Now running! He's running. Repeat, he's running loose. Unsighted. Black hooded sweatshirt, black tracksuit bottoms. Target is wearing a grey backpack."

Yashiro deactivated the vehicle's automatic steering, driving past a car that had stopped and avoiding traffic, but risking crossing a street on the opposite side, even though there were no vehicles. People were so used to obeying traffic lights that many drivers looked at her car with surprise.

"He's moving fast," Katashi exchanged a glance with Kozuki from the back seat. "He knows."

"Enforcement strategy not yet in place," Aoyanagi informed. "Follow. Do not lose."

They saw a man running across the street, jumping over a steel railing on the sidewalk. There was a lot of traffic and cars were stopped.

"Target now crossing main avenue," Katashi looked through the window.

"One-way street, unable to pursue," reported Aoyanagi.

As cars began to move down the avenue, Yashiro sped ahead of the others and passed between them, causing some to stop in the middle of the street. The suspect ran into a crowded alley, but they lost him again when he crossed one last street and dashed down a long, wide sidewalk with more people walking.

"Have eyes on target entering Kiyosumi Garden," Yashiro glanced at the man. "Main entrances closed to vehicles—running loose."

"We lost him," Daiki spoke from Aoyanagi's car. "Is the surveillance blown?"

The red dot on the map no longer appeared.

"Not possible to say," the senior inspector responded. "I need cars blocking all exits. Have one man on foot per exit to cover the garden."

Yashiro stopped the car for a moment at one entrance for Katashi to get out and run into the park, dominator in hand. Aoyanagi stopped her car at another entrance further away, at the other corner of the park, allowing Daiki to get out and enter the area. Yashiro and Aoyanagi drove down parallel streets watching people stroll through the garden, circling the park on both sides.

"Entering park on foot," Katashi reported with bathed breath, he was running. "No visual on the target."

"No sign of target either," Daiki added after a pause.

"You were supposed to leave me there," Kozuki craned his neck looking back.

Yashiro turned sharply onto a street and accelerated, which caused him to move sideways in his seat. She was driving down a narrow street that separated the park into two areas. There were not many people, but a cyclist fell to the ground trying to avoid the speeding police car.

"If he crosses this street to the other side of the park we'll lose him," Yashiro waved her hand over the steering wheel. "We can't let..."

A man ran out from the side of the park so fast, that Yashiro felt the steering wheel vibrate and jerk as he ran over the hood of her car, shattering the glass on impact and causing her to brake with a sharp sound of tires. When the car stopped, Kozuki rested his head on the back of the seat for a moment. Some people sitting on the grass in the park slowly stood up, looking at them.

"Oh, shit," the enforcer sighed under his breath, running a hand through his dark hair. "If we hit a civilian we're finished. No excuse will save us from Risa this time."

Yashiro opened the door and tried to get out, but seeing that she was wearing her seat belt, she unbuckled it with a jerk and got out of the car. There was a man in his thirties in the middle of the street, who had staggered to his feet and shot them a glance, half crouched, lips pressed together. His hair was short, black and curly, slightly shaved on the sides, and he was dressed in an open white hooded coat and a black tracksuit. A pair of dark red round glasses lay on the ground, broken. A young woman passing by helped him up, and a man, apparently her boyfriend, asked him if he was hurt.

Yashiro looked around with her forearm resting on the door, realizing that people were starting to approach. They did not know what the suspect looked like, as they had not had time to check the profile Aoyanagi had sent them. As Yashiro turned around, she searched through the group of people surrounding the car. Her eyes narrowed as she noticed that the man in white had disappeared. Peering over the roof of the car, she managed to see him walking calmly in the middle of the street. Yashiro walked hurriedly in his direction, making her way between two people. Kozuki followed her and frowned when the man barely turned his head to one side, as if reacting to their presence.

"It's him," Yashiro stopped in the middle of the street.

As Kozuki drew his dominator, raising it towards the man, the weapon changed its shape, causing his eyes to glow light blue. But suddenly the man began to run diagonally, jumping over a steel railing and continued down the sidewalk. The few people around screamed and ran off in the opposite direction. Kozuki clicked his tongue and ran after the inspector. However, they all stopped as they caught a glimpse of lights half a block away from them. A car turned onto the narrow street they were on and began to drive in their direction. The man turned around and took a few steps towards the park, stopping short when he saw two figures approaching some distance away. Surrounded, he backed up a few steps towards the wall.

Crime coefficient is 308. Enforcement mode is Lethal Eliminator. Please aim carefully and eliminate the target.

"Don't shoot!" Yashiro waved her hand at Kozuki, approaching the man. "We need him."

"Yeah right, tell that to her," Kozuki looked at the car parked in the distance, which Aoyanagi got out of with a dominator. "Unless we find a way to paralyze him before she gets here, there's no way she's letting him live."

The man pulled out a semi-automatic knife and lunged towards Kozuki, who gritted his teeth and stepped back, dominator in hand, but Yashiro stepped between them and slid to the side, grabbing the man's forearm and jabbing it with her elbow to make him drop the knife. She then kicked him in the waist, still not letting go of his wrist, to turn and pull him so that he fell backwards in front of her with a twist in the air. The thud of his back against the ground echoed, followed by a grunt of pain. When he tried to reach for his knife with one hand, which was stretched out like a worm on the ground, Yashiro kicked it away from him. The man pulled his hand away as if he feared she would step on it, but Yashiro remained with her head tilted to the side, looking at him with a serious and composed expression.

"Why haven't you completed the enforcement yet?" Aoyanagi asked aloud as Kozuki rushed towards her.

"We need to question him," he replied quickly, standing in front of her as if to keep her from passing. "We think he may be connected to the other murders. He targeted a serial killer."

Aoyanagi widened her eyes slowly. Katashi had gone to Yashiro's police car, from which he obtained handcuffs, and was returning with long, firm strides towards the suspect, who was surrounded by the rest of the team. Yashiro stepped aside, allowing the enforcer to lift the man off the ground with a jerk, and place the handcuffs on his back, guiding him towards the nearest police car, which was Yashiro's. Daiki approached them, giving Kozuki a fist bump.

"Good timing," Kozuki commented, looking back at Aoyanagi. "You were saying he was dressed in black and carrying a backpack?"

"That's right."

"He must have dumped it somewhere in the park," Daiki crossed his arms. "There are so many lakes and sites of interest to him, finding it is going to be next to impossible. It may have been an attempt to hide evidence."

"He switched clothes so he wouldn't be recognized. He had it all figured out."

"Even security," Yashiro narrowed her eyes, glancing at a scanner on a street corner, then studying the suspect's calm, nonchalant gait. "Can you read his psycho pass?"

"Again?" Kozuki raised an eyebrow. "Why?"

"Just curious."

Kozuki sighed and raised his dominator.

Crime coefficient is 299. Enforcement mode is Non-Lethal Paralyzer. Please aim carefully and subdue the target.

"Where's your dominator?" Aoyanagi studied her empty hands.

Yashiro lifted an eyebrow for a moment, then shook her head, "I lost it in the car during the crash. I didn't have time to look for it."

Kozuki shot her a glance. He knew Yashiro had left her gun in the car, next to the handbrake, and when Aoyanagi walked away he frowned. Yashiro looked at him, testing him, and then followed their senior.

"All right, listen up," Aoyanagi raised her voice, turning around and putting a hand on her waist. "We have a suspect and a new crime scene. Akiyama-san, do you think you can show us the house you searched?"

"Yes, ma'am," nodded Katashi.

"What about us?" Kozuki stretched out his arms, pointing at Yashiro as well.

"Get back to base and put him in a detention room. Stay on the line and wait for my instructions," Aoyanagi ordered, walking down the street to her car.

"Got it."

Aoyanagi paused for a moment, letting Katashi and Daiki make their way to the car at the end of the narrow street, only to turn back to Yashiro, who was walking towards her car in the opposite direction.

"Takahashi-san," she raised her voice with a dangerous expression, making the other turn around, and let out a barely visible yet genuine smile. "This time, no detours."

"There won't be."


"Why would you use a gun?" Makishima Shougo unfolded the razor blade from its handle. "It takes away the rush. Squeezing a trigger is easy, even a child can kill with a semi-automatic rifle. Unless… you wanted to hoodwink the PSB by changing your behavior patterns from planned crime to opportunistic, making them believe it is the work of a thief. What I really don't understand… is why you killed a girl you used to live with. You knew she would be linked to you. That was not a mistake. You let them see you… after all this time."

"Sometimes the simplest answer is the right one. You'd make yourself a good career as an inspector, Makishima-kun," Agawa Hajime scrutinized him between tousled black locks of short hair, and a cup of hot coffee near his lips. "But I didn't kill Janet. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Makishima raised his right hand, holding the straight razor in front of him to see the reflection in its blade. He narrowed his eyes and looked away.


"From the evidence found, Fueki Isamu is the guy behind the Saitama Disappearances," Karanomori Shion swiveled in her chair, a cigarette between her fingers and a frown on her face. "The case has never been solved...until now. His victims were underage boys he abducted without a trace. Nothing was ever heard of them again. 36 years old, born in Saitama. Apparently moved to Tokyo six months ago. He's been inactive for the last year, we thought he stopped."

"They would never just stop," Yashiro was sitting with one leg over the other on the black sofa, drinking a liter of coffee in a disposable cup. "You can't shut down their need to kill unless you kill them. It's like an itch—they can't help it. They have a psychopathic need to kill. They may stop for a while, but that desire will always come back. I wonder how and when it started. My guess is that he was sexually abused from an early age by a male figure… probably his father, leading to a deviation in his sexual development and the subsequent onset of numerous perversions… considering the trophies he took from his victims. Well, who knows. And we won't be able to ask him anymore."

Everyone looked at her with wide eyes, while hers were narrowed, lost in her cup of coffee as if life depended on that drink.

"It doesn't matter, because he's dead. You shouldn't obsess over that case," Kozuki frowned from the other end of the couch.

"We're still not sure how Miyake knew he would try to kill his family," Daiki spread his hands, meeting Yashiro's gaze. "Nor what his motive was. His profile doesn't add up."

"All we know is that he's perfectly healthy and totally insane," Katashi shook his head. "He wrote that Sibyl lies on a wall."

Karanomori widened her eyes slightly and glanced at the inspector, who smelled the coffee with a peaceful expression.

"A serial killer, moreover, a pederast, dead. Does it ring a bell?" Kozuki asked.

"The murder is ordinary and improvised for someone like Agawa Hajime," Katashi pointed to the screen behind him and tilted his head. "He wouldn't leave any prints at the crime scene, wouldn't be easy to find. He's more interested in piquerism, slicing flesh for arousal rather than opportunistic murders."

"That's not accurate," Yashiro blurted out.

Katashi blinked and looked at her, "Would you like to say something, inspector?"

Yashiro raised her head towards him, lifting her eyebrows for a second and shaking her head.

"If I've got it wrong, please correct me," he insisted, shrugging his shoulders.

Yashiro looked at the others and sighed, getting up from the couch with her cup of coffee to walk towards the screens, slowly.

"Agawa is obsessed with the Romantic Period. His lectures consist of Thoreau, Byron, Spooner. He's one of the last men who believe in art. That it has to be felt. He didn't just gouge out their eyes or dismember their bodies. He's making his own art. To classify him as a piquerist would be too simplistic."

Daiki pursed his lips and smiled with a slight nod, then looked back at the screens.

"You wanted to capture this man because you knew he was related to Agawa from the beginning," Kozuki raised an eyebrow.

Yashiro looked down for a moment, but suddenly the door of the Comprehensive Analysis Laboratory slid open, and Aoyanagi Risa burst into the office.

"Takahashi-san, you ready?"

"For what?" Yashiro widened her eyes for a second.

"To see Miyake Ren."

Yashiro finished her coffee and turned to the inspector, who was standing behind the couch with her chin up and a professional, serious expression.

"I thought you were leading on the interview with him," Yashiro frowned.

"He'll only talk to you."

Yashiro raised an eyebrow and felt everyone's eyes on her. After a few seconds, she finally headed for the exit.


When the door slid open, Yashiro walked in and stood motionless for a few seconds, staring at the camera in the corner of the small room and then at the man sitting there, his hands and feet cuffed. He was just as calm as she was, as if it were the continuation of a business meeting.

"They had to die," Miyake Ren sentenced in a deep, strangely soft voice. "It must have been hard for her after the divorce, but she and her daughter had done quite remarkably, which is not always the case."

Yashiro sat in the only available chair.

"So what's this all about, what's the big finish? That's what everyone outside wants to know. I understand why you killed Fueki Isamu, but his ex-wife? How does she figure into this if she was innocent?"

"I didn't kill her. You did," he narrowed his dark eyes for a moment. "Innocent people always die. It's tragic. You can't change that, and you know it."

"What about the girl?" Yashiro answered after a pause. "She almost died."

"Yeah, but she didn't. I was hoping you'd save her."

"What if we hadn't arrived in time?"

"Well, that's what makes a story so unpredictable."

"And you write the stories?"

"Oh no," Miyake shook his head. "Stories write themselves. I'm just a single chapter past the prologue."

"Prologue?" Yashiro slightly raised an eyebrow.

"That was the entire point of Nakamura's death. She was merely the beginning."

Yashiro scowled at him, motionless for several seconds, until she stood quickly from her seat, shoving the chair back with a loud scrape and walking to one side of the room. In the Comprehensive Analysis Laboratory, everyone looked at each other, except for Karanomori, who was still watching the screen in front of them, cigarette near her mouth.

"He's talking about Nakamura Ichika," Aoyanagi frowned and folded her arms. "The woman found in a park."

"Inside a tree," Daiki pointed out. "I remember that the stage was disturbing, and she was pregnant previous to her death."

"But she was a call to action and also a test," Miyake continued, pausing for a moment as she turned to him again. "Same with the letter and signature. It was for you."

Yashiro's eyes darted to the camera in a corner of the room, which could see them clearly.

"What's he talking about?" Aoyanagi's voice echoed down the office. "What signature?"

"Did you get the message?" Miyake asked in a gentler voice, relaxing his eyes. "It should sound familiar by now. How close do you think did I really get with their deaths?"

"We got to get her out of there," Daiki blurted out.

After several seconds, Aoyanagi turned to the enforcer and nodded her head. He left the office with hurried steps.

"Unfortunately for you, it won't reach a much wider audience," Yashiro shook her head, with the same impassive tone of voice.

"You might just change your mind about that," Miyake turned his head to the side, smirking and squinting one of his eyes for a second.

Karanomori started typing on the keyboard, and showed a news channel where a reporter was talking about a video showing a living room with a wall written in blood. Kozuki sighed and put his hands behind his head. Her cigarette moved down, almost falling out of her mouth.

"Agawa Hajime," Yashiro blurted out in a calm, distant voice. "You know where he is."

"You are going to have to do some of the work yourself," Miyake raised an eyebrow and shrugged.

"Why continue to aid and abet a man who won't lift a finger to help you? You have no leverage here and you're wrong if you think he's going to help you. So, why ruin your life? Why let him take all the credit?"

Miyake Ren laughed and shook his head.

"I'll tell you what's going to happen. In a few hours, I will be sent to a rehabilitation facility where I will spend the rest of my days in a room. I won't be free, but I'll live, which is more than I can say for some."

Yashiro stared at him with an unreadable expression, and then she raised her eyebrows.

"I saw that you like drawing surrealism. Do you plan to continue your work in a cell?"

"As I said, I like my chances."

Yashiro frowned and reached for her scanner, checking his crime coefficient. It was 185.

"It's often said that when a man lies, his psycho pass increases," he observed the hologram on her wrist. "Today, through a simple response, scanners are also able to determine truthfulness, like measuring blood pressure, breathing rate and body temperature at the same time. But I should warn you that these machines don't tend to work very well on people with my… psychological profile."

Yashiro walked towards him, standing next to the table and leaning forward, getting much closer. He lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes, looking at her with a thin smile.

"You mean sociopaths? People of your ilk may respond differently, but they do respond. Even to pain," Yashiro whispered with a frown, tilting her head to the side. "They can still feel pain. And pain can break anyone."

They stared at each other for a few seconds, until in a movement that seemed like a blur, Yashiro leaned over him with tight lips but an impassive face, and a prolonged low, loud cry escaped from the man's mouth, as he closed his eyes and stretched his body back in an attempt to free himself. In the Comprehensive Analysis Laboratory, Karanomori did not move for a few seconds, her wide eyes fixed on the screen in front of her, on which a new stress level warning window suddenly popped up, with a tinkling sound, indicating that a psycho pass had been raised in the building at a rate that would be considered an anomaly rather than a fact. Aoyanagi Risa and the enforcers had already rushed out of the office by then.

Away from her location, the light blue eyes of a serene and serious face glowed, as windows loading information began to scroll on a desktop monitor, until finally a security camera image was accessed. Kasei Joushuu leaned forward in her seat, opening her eyes wider, as the image showed a young woman, and another window opened displaying different crime coefficients.

Miyake Ren was still screaming when the door slid open and Daiki lunged at her, grabbing the inspector by the arms to pull her away from the man, who was trapped by the fingers of his right hand between his thighs. Yashiro finally backed away with pursed lips and narrowed eyes, but a strangely cold and composed expression on her face, letting herself be pulled by the enforcer into the hallway, as she saw eyes riveted on her and a motionless body, leaning towards the table like a stunned beast.

"I'll kill you! I'll fucking kill you!" Miyake kept shouting.

They both stepped back until they reached the middle of the hallway, and the door closed automatically, silencing the yelling from inside. Daiki was still holding the inspector by one arm, and when he realized it, he let go. Yashiro was breathing more calmly than before, but her eyes were still fixed on the door and her body was motionless, except for the movement of her chest when breathing. Daiki turned around when they heard footsteps. Aoyanagi and the other two enforcers had turned into a hallway and were standing close to them.

"What have you done?" Aoyanagi's voice echoed.