Yoyogi Park, late at night, on a wooden bridge over a dark lake.
In the middle of the bridge, there was a strong stench, and the entrances on both sides had been blocked off.
Inside, several police officers were gathering evidence, and the forensic team was working to collect more.
The body on the ground appeared to have been torn apart by some wild beast, with pieces of flesh scattered everywhere.
A relatively young policeman who had just graduated from the academy looked at the corpse on the ground and smelled the stench he had never experienced before. He quickly covered his mouth and nearly vomited.
"Detective Isshiki, you again?"
"Damn it, don't contaminate the crime scene. Let the forensic team work, and stay back for now."
Isshiki Totomaru smiled awkwardly and said with embarrassment, "Sorry, it won't happen again."
The head of the detective department, Soichiro, who was in his forties, frowned at the brutally dismembered body on the ground.
He pinched his nose and crouched down next to the corpse, observing the scene in front of him, silently waiting for the evidence to shed some light.
Shortly after, two more forensic doctors with toolkits arrived at the scene and carefully inspected the body.
The two forensic doctors were highly experienced and got to work quickly.
After a while, the crime recorder murmured, "The body parts are mostly intact, with no apparent anomalies."
"The face is intact."
"Clean wounds; no sharp weapons were used to kill the victim."
"Mostly tearing injuries."
"A blunt force suddenly acted on the surface of the victim's body, causing the skin and subcutaneous tissue to tear due to sudden pulls or twists. It's as if the body had been slammed repeatedly from a height of more than three meters, judging by the blood splatter, which is common in suicide cases from significant heights."
After some time, the two more experienced forensic doctors examined the scene, and then Captain Soichiro stepped forward and asked, "How could something like this happen in an open place?"
The senior forensic doctor obviously knew Captain Soichiro, who had one of the best careers in the police force.
"These tearing injuries are not common here. There's no logical explanation other than this body being placed here, but the evidence indicates that he died here not too long ago."
"There were no cutting wounds near the injury, but there were obvious nail marks and huge fingers like those of a bear, as if someone had torn the body apart, like jerky, with their bare hands after killing him."
"Is that even possible?" Soichiro was pleasantly surprised, as this kind of case had never happened in this area.
"Soichiro, I'll be honest with you. After this, I'll have to create a coherent medical report despite what we've found here... To kill the victim, at least 300 kilograms of tearing force would be needed to rip open a human body like this with bare hands," the forensic doctor finished solemnly, coughing as he said, "It's hard for people to do something like this, and we don't have bears in this park."
"Of course, we'll have to send more detailed information to the station and conduct further inspections before we can draw any proper conclusions, but if this case is connected to the others across the country, I'm afraid it will be another unsolved violent crime."
After saying this, the two forensic doctors put on gloves and skillfully used body bags to collect the parts of the body.
"So…"
"I recommend not getting obsessed with this case. You won't get anywhere if you try to investigate it like other top detectives."
Soichiro nodded slightly, lit a cigarette, took a deep breath as if pondering something, and then told the young officer next to him, "Check the nearby surveillance cameras to see if there's any clue."
Soon, the young detective who had gone to check the surveillance returned, pulled out his phone, and after copying footage from the surrounding cameras, showed it to him. "Captain, two figures of identical proportions seemed to follow what is now the victim to this area where there are no more cameras."
As he spoke, the young detective Isshiki handed the phone to Soichiro.
In the video, a man and a woman were being followed by two figures of equal proportions. After less than five minutes, those two figures appeared again, carrying something.
"We're missing the woman..." Soichiro realized that at this point, the murder case had also evolved into a kidnapping.
Two not-so-tall figures killed the man and took the woman, all in less than five minutes. What's the point of that?
...
At noon the next day, Hisagi sat in an armchair, watching Aoki, who had worked all night setting up dozens of screens connected to a strange machine.
"So, what have you been doing all night without sleeping?" Hisagi was genuinely intrigued by who Aoki really was and why he had decided to follow him.
"I don't remember if I mentioned it, but when my family was killed by a cursed spirit, a Jujutsu sorcerer suddenly appeared and saved my life at the last moment." Aoki began telling Hisagi his entire story, and in short, it was heartbreaking.
He couldn't protect his family when he was younger; he never managed to join a Jujutsu school, and all the information he had gathered was collected over many years of study.
But now that Aoki had found someone who could kill cursed spirits and wasn't a Jujutsu sorcerer, he wanted to join him to explain more about the dark world surrounding them.
"So, how do we start killing cursed spirits?" Hisagi, who didn't want to go around killing cursed spirits without a plan, wanted to know the best way to begin.
Aoki clapped his hands and, shaking off his sadness, said, "Something recently came up. By hacking into the police servers, I found a report about a man who was brutally and unrealistically killed last night around midnight in the park that's a few kilometers from our location."
"Yoyogi Park?" Hisagi frowned, as it was relatively close.
"Yes, since it's not a human murder, it could be related to cursed spirits." Aoki handed the report to Hisagi to read for himself.
After glancing at it, Hisagi nodded slightly and said, "Fine, I'll investigate. You can take over the cooking from now on."
"I'm fine with instant soups."
"We'll die soon if we only eat instant soups." Hisagi muttered as he left the apartment without saying anything else.