Ren flinches hard. Maybe Akechi thought he cared once, but that was before he got here, before Ren opened his fucking mouth and—

Akechi steps out from behind a nearby vending machine. He gives Ren a single glance, not even contemptuous but just dismissive, before he turns and leaves without a word. The Akechi cognition loves to fucking walk away—and it's obviously a hallucination of a cognition; he wasn't even there a second ago. But Ren still looks desolate as he watches Akechi vanish around a corner.

"Did you know I'm a murderer?" he asks Makoto distantly, staring at the spot where he last saw Akechi's cognition. "I don't even know how many people I've killed. You were probably picking up on some kind of vibe when we met."