Golden Melody

Golden Melody (黄金のメロディ) is a short story that is part of an anthology of short stories based on the Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan series. It was written by Ballad Kitaguni (北國 ばらっど) and published by Shueisha. Golden Melody was included with the November 2021 issue of Ultra Jump in commemoration of the second season of the TV drama.

One man's meeting with Rohan leads to the destruction of a village, and a loss of humanity.

Summary
Twenty-year-old Rohan Kishibe meets an audiophile named Kyomei Isaka (伊坂 恭明 Isaka Kyomei), owner of the audio appliance store Sakamochi Record in Sakamochi Town of T Prefecture. When Rohan first met him, Kyomei was a lazy teenager who was not at all business savvy and took pleasure in showing his superiority towards people over his audio equipment. Rohan immediately saw his attitude and reprimanded him for how lazy and arrogant he was and told him that if he is going to "pursue" one medium to devote his life to, he should put his all into it.

Inspired by Rohan's words, Kyomei's life suddenly turns around. He spends the rest of the day helping Rohan out finding the equipment that suits his needs and they parted ways from each other.

Seven years later Kyoka Izumi hands Rohan a postcard addressed to him from Kyomei, inviting him to meet at Sakamochi Record at exactly four PM next week. Having done some research on the town beforehand, Kyoka tells Rohan that its population has been rapidly declining for years, seemingly starting around the time that Rohan had visited Kyomei.

When the two of them arrive, they are surprised to see that there are no signs of life whatsoever in this town. Even though they were well aware by now that the population had decreased over the last seven years, it seems as if all the life here was evacuated rather quickly.

Eventually they come closer to the Sakamochi Record store and hear a strange sound and are then approached by a monster that looks to be made up of audio equipment. It has a speaker for a head and looks like machine parts integrated into a human body.

The monster grabbed Kyoka, who began to scream, but instead of wailing like you might think a human would, she began emitting this wonderful music and began dancing. The creature turns to Rohan and greets him as though he is an old friend, and Rohan immediately knows who it truly is: Kyomei Isaka. Kyomei tells Rohan to make his "luggage" cease the noise, or else he will kill her.

Rohan uses Heaven's Door to silence Kyoka for three hours, which gets her released from Kyomei's clutches.

Rohan joins Kyomei in walking throughout the rest of the town and is surprised to discover that his monster friend's footsteps make absolutely no sound as he treads the ground. Kyomei reveals to Rohan that ever since that fateful day they met seven years ago, he has been trying to pursue the purest audio humanly possible. He devoted his life to discarding all things that generated unecessary sound, which happened to include all the people in the town he resides in.