They say the pen is mightier than the sword.

  Masao never believed that.

  Not really.

  ...

  Not until the day his drawings killed someone.

  He remembers the smell of the ink. It always started there. Sharp. Metallic. Like something alive. He remembers the late nights hunched over his desk in that cramped apartment, window open to the dull hum of New York sirens, drawing panels he could barely see through tired eyes.

  He wasn't trying to make anything dangerous. Just a story. Something raw, something real. A man who stabs his neighbor. A woman who disappears in a subway tunnel. A child who watches it all, silent. It was fiction. He told himself that. Again and again.

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  Then, the stories began to bleed out of the pages.

  He saw it first on the news. The same name. The same alleyway. The same method of death, right down to the knife. His panel mirrored in reality. Down to the shadows.

  It didn’t stop there.

  He started writing softer stories out of fear. Characters who live. No more violence. No more pain. But his hand always drifted back, back to the darkness, to the nightmares. To the truth that the world didn’t want heroes. It wanted honesty. And his honesty was ugly.

  Then the letters started arriving. Pages of his own work, photocopied. Annotated. Highlighted. Circled. Sometimes with fingerprints in the margins. Sometimes with blood.

  And always… always with a message:

  “Keep going. It’s not finished yet.”

  Masao doesn’t know if it’s in his head or in the ink. But every time he draws, someone else pays the price.

  He doesn’t remember when he last felt safe. Or sane.

  But tonight, he picks up the pen again.

  Because the story isn’t over.

  Not yet.