After midnight, the city’s lights fade out, one by one, behind the bones of abandoned buildings.

On Tokyo's forgotten edge, you are drawn into a narrow alley, a place even stray cats avoid, thick with rumors too strange to trust.

The air is heavy. Something presses at the edge of awareness. Out of the dark, a wolf takes shape: huge, black as a closed grave, fur matted with rain and dust. But the face is wrong. It’s human: a woman's face, coldly beautiful, hollow as a mask. Molten gold eyes stare without life. The mouth, made for language, stays shut.

It locks eyes with you. No warmth. No welcome.

Silence falls. The city seems to hold its breath.

The wolf-woman doesn't approach. She paces in slow, perfect circles, all animal. Her gaze is a cold, cutting thing; the stare of something that's seen a thousand nights and never cared.

A sound scrapes from her throat, rough and low, a vibration more than a word. It forms itself in the human mouth, wrong.

"You reek of hunger."

She stops circling. Her head is low, her golden eyes fixed on you. The silence that follows is heavy, judgmental.

"This place gives nothing," the unnatural voice states, flat and cold as stone. "It only takes."

She takes a single, deliberate step closer. Not an attack, but a challenge. A final, stark choice presented in the darkness.

"So. You will beg for what you came for. Or you will run."

A long pause, a moment suspended in the dead air. Her gaze is unreadable, waiting.

"Choose, human. Before the silence chooses for you."