24. Dojin
TWENTY-FOUR
DOJIN
The coffee had gone cold twice.
Dojin sat in his office on the thirty-eighth floor of Keiser Tower with two monitors open, a legal pad full of notes, and a splinter in his brain that had been there since Thursday night. Nari’s question. Casual, innocent, asked over a mixing board at eleven p.m. with his jacket on her shoulders:
Where did the concept come from?
Professional curiosity, she’d said. The words had been right.
The eyes hadn’t. He’d been replaying the conversation in his head for two days—her face when he said Meridian Creative, the micro-pause before she’d repeated the name, how she’d tucked her grandfather’s notebook under the production bible like she was hiding evidence rather than organizing a desk.
Something had been restless in him ever since. Not the warm, gravitational pull toward Nari that had become background noise in his life—a different current. Alert. Suspicious. Every instinct raised against a threat it couldn’t yet see.
He pulled the Meridian file and spent an hour with it that confirmed only what his instincts had already decided. Then he picked up the phone. “Reo. My office. Bring your laptop.”
Reo appeared in four minutes. He always appeared in four minutes when Dojin used that voice—the clipped, no-padding tone that meant the boss had found a problem and the problem was about to have a very bad day.
He dropped into the chair across from Dojin’s desk, opened his laptop, and waited. Dark henley, cargo pants, a fresh scar across his left knuckles from a training session Dojin had told him to ease off on and he’d ignored because Reo eased off on nothing.
“Meridian Creative Partners.” Dojin turned his monitor toward Reo. “The company that pitched us Voidborn. I need their corporate structure traced to the source.”
Reo didn’t ask why. He started typing.
“Meridian traces back to…” He turned the laptop. The screen showed a Nevada business filing. Halloran Consulting Group. Registered agent: Kenneth Pruitt. And beside the name, Reo had opened a second tab—a LinkedIn profile. Senior Vice President of Business Development.
Mercer Global Media.
Silence.
Dojin’s vision sharpened. The gold flecks in his irises flared—not a choice, not a performance. The surface of his desk was mahogany. His fingers dug into the edge. The wood creaked.
Brent Mercer. The name hit with a clarity that bypassed thought and went straight to instinct.
Mercer, who built his media empire on acquisition and extraction.
Mercer, whose reputation in the industry was polished steel over a predator’s appetite.
Mercer, who had pitched Dojin a flagship property through a chain of shell companies designed to make the concept look independent.
He sold me stolen work. Wrapped it in paperwork, dressed it in a pitch deck, and sold it to me like a gift. And I bought it. I put my studio’s name on it. My team’s work. My company’s reputation.
Nari’s voice. In my booth. Performing a character built on materials that were taken from her family.
The desk creaked louder.
Reo looked at the desk. Looked at Dojin’s hands. Looked at Dojin’s eyes.
“You’re about to snap your own desk in half. That’s an eleven with good posture.” Reo closed the laptop. Placed his hands flat on the surface. “We can’t build a legal case from a jail cell.”
“Who said jail?”
“Your face.” Reo leaned back. Crossed his arms. His expression was calm—the professional calm of a man who’d pulled Dojin back from ledges before and knew the terrain. “Your face is currently planning three felonies.”
Dojin released the desk. Stood. Walked to the window. Midtown spread below him—glass and steel and the Saturday afternoon hum of a city that didn’t care about corporate theft or stolen legacies or the quiet rage building behind his ribs.
He thought about Nari’s question. The careful tone. The way she’d tucked the notebook under the production bible. She’d already known. She’d been testing him—looking for the lie, the flinch, the giveaway that he was complicit.
She kissed me in that hallway, carrying a suspicion I might have stolen from her grandfather. She kissed me anyway.
The thought hit differently from the anger.
Softer. Worse. Because it meant she’d weighed the evidence against the man and decided the man was worth the risk, and that kind of trust—given in the middle of an active investigation, given despite every reason to withhold it—was not a gift he could afford to waste.
“What do we know about the concept’s creative origins?” He turned from the window. Controlled. His eyes had settled back to brown. “The pitch said original IP. We did standard verification. But if Mercer’s behind Meridian, the concept wasn’t original. It was sourced. From where?”
Reo opened his laptop again. “The Voidborn mythology. Thirteen-gate structure, zodiac guardians, celestial ronin archetype—”
He stopped himself. Too quickly. A visible clamp of the jaw, a hard stop that suggested more knowledge than the sentence accounted for. Dojin had seen it before—small moments over the past weeks where Reo’s professional neutrality cracked against personal territory lurking underneath.
“Finish that thought.”
Reo’s jaw worked. “The mythology. It’s not original. It’s—” Another pause. His fingers drummed once on the laptop’s edge. “It’s derived from an existing property.”
“Which property?”
Reo stared at his screen. The silence stretched. Then his posture shifted—a resignation, like a man stepping off a ledge he’d been balancing on for weeks.
“Celestial Ronin.”
Dojin blinked. “The Wixx property.”
“Created by Hideo Saitō. The thirteen-gate structure was introduced in Volume 23, Chapter 141. The zodiac guardians, the celestial ronin archetype, the exile mythology—all Wixx original. It was said that unpublished materials from the final arc were in the estate archives when Wixx died in 2019.”
The room was very quiet.