Beginning
A tangle of extension cords powered a single flickering lamp in the corner, casting the whole space in a moody, noir yellow that Rin kept complaining made everything feel like a police interrogation scene.
But Kenji loved it.
Of course he did.
“New member, new member, new member!” he chanted in a loop, pacing in manic circles around the room while pretending to hold a clapperboard. “This is, like, season-shift material. Fresh blood! Narrative revitalization! Stakes inflation! Ensemble synergy!!”
Kentaro sat on a broken swivel chair nearby, rolling his freshly healed shoulders like he was cracking walnuts inside the joints. There wasn’t a mark left on him. No burns, no bruises, no holes in his fingers.
His eyes tracked Kenji in a slow, reptilian way.
“Can someone make him stop?” Kentaro muttered. “He’s making me wanna hit something again.”
“You’ve hit enough things this week,” Rin said sharply from where she sat perched on an upturned crate. Her posture was rigid, her hair tied back and her expression strained into neutrality. “Also, don’t indulge him. He’ll only get louder.”
Kenji got louder.
“NEW MEMBER ARRRRRRC—!!”
Itsurō lifted a hand.
The noise stopped instantly, like someone had yanked Kenji’s power cable out of the wall.
Kentaro folded his arms. Rin exhaled. Silence pooled into the the room.
“We have momentum,” he said, pacing along the cracked tiles with one hand in his pocket. “Kentaro is back to full strength. Ai Suishi is on the hook. And the next phase of our plan requires all four of us aligned.”
Rin’s jaw tightened.
She knew where this was going before he even turned toward her.
“You’re not convinced,” he continued. “About Ai.”
Rin’s eyes flicked away. “I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it with that look,” Itsurō said gently.
Kenji nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, Rin-chan. You were super doom and gloom when we talked about recruiting her. Like—extra doom. Doom².”
“Please never say that again,” Rin muttered.
Kentaro snorted, amused.
Itsurō stepped closer, not invading her space, but positioning himself just enough in her periphery that she couldn’t ignore him.
“Rin,” he said quietly. “Why does Ai bother you?”
Rin sat very still, pushed her bangs behind one ear, then the other, buying herself time.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “She’s just… intense. And creepy. And she tried to dismember Tachibana.”
Kentaro grunted. “Would’ve succeeded too,” he muttered darkly.
“That’s not it,” Itsurō prodded almost professor-like. “You’re skirting the real reason.”
Rin’s fingers curled against her knees.
A muscle near her jaw twitched.
“I don’t—”
“Rin.”
She flinched. Then she exhaled, long and shakily.
“…fine,” she said, staring at the floor. “I just… don’t want to deal with her?”
Kentaro lifted a brow. Kenji blinked in confusion. Itsurō remained silent, letting the space open for her to continue.
Rin hugged her elbows, looking anywhere except at their faces.
“We got paired once,” she said. “For a class project. Some stupid joint assignment the teachers thought would build ‘collaboration’ skills. That's it, she's a weird crazy psycho and I'm pretty sure if she joined I'd be the one tasked with keeping her in check.”
Kenji made a sympathetic noise. Kentaro looked apathetic.
“And?” Itsurō said.
Rin frowned. “…and what?”
“You’re lying by omission,” he said. “There’s something else. Something personal.”
She snapped her head up, irritation flaring across her face.
“It’s not personal.”
“Of course it is,” Itsurō replied mildly. “If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be so defensive.”
Kenji leaned in to whisper loudly to Kentaro,
“He does this sometimes. It’s, like, his superpower.”
Kentaro muttered, “Creepy bastard.”
Rin glared at both of them, then glared harder at Itsurō.
Fine.
Fine.
If he wanted the truth, he’d get the petty version.
“…we’re both gloomy, okay?” she burst out. “That’s it. That’s the reason.”
The room paused.
Kenji blinked. “That’s… the reason?”
Rin threw her hands up.
“Yes! We’re both gloomy! So of course the teacher paired us off like, ‘Oh look, two socially maladjusted weirdos, they’ll get along.’ But it doesn’t work like that!”
Her voice pitched up in a rare spike of emotion.
“We’re not interchangeable. Being quiet doesn’t mean I want to be around someone even worse at existing than me. We didn’t have synergy. I'm allowed to hate others too!”
She deflated instantly afterward.
Then Kentaro leaned back in his chair and said plainly:
“…yeah, she’s creepy as hell. Makes sense.”
Kenji nodded sagely. “Social fatigue debuff. Happens all the time.”
Rin buried her face in her hands. “Please let me die.”
Itsurō, however, only smiled faintly.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “For being honest.”
His gaze sharpened, thoughtful, calculating behind the warmth.
“Still, we need her.”
Rin looked up.
“What?”
Kentaro nodded slowly. “Yeah, she nearly put me in the ground.”
Kenji added, “And she fights like a horror movie villain! That’s, like, premium niche talent!”
Rin looked between them, aghast.
“You can’t be serious—she’s a danger to literally everyone.”
“Yes,” he said. “And if she listens to us… she’ll be a danger to the right people.”
“So,” she muttered, “how do you even plan to recruit Ai Suishi? She’s—she’s not someone you can negotiate with. It wouldn’t take much. If Shu just called her name she’d drop everything and run to him.”
Itsurō didn’t dismiss her concern.
He smiled.
The kind of smile that suggested he’d already considered that angle months ago.
“Rin,” he said, “I want you to think about that very carefully.”
Her brows knitted.
“She’s obsessed with him,” Rin tried. “Unhealthily. If Shu told her to stop, she’d—”
“Would she?” Itsurō interrupted softly.
Rin blinked.
Kentaro raised an eyebrow.
Even Kenji, who had been adjusting the angle of a portable fan for dramatic effect, stilled.
Itsurō paced in a careful line, the lamplight tracing a halo behind him.
“You’re assuming,” he said, “that Ai Suishi’s love is obedience. That fixation equates to compliance. But based on what we’ve seen… Ai’s devotion to Shu Jinkō is not healthy admiration. It is not loyalty. It is possession.”
Rin swallowed hard. “Possession of what? Him?”
“No,” Itsurō said. “Possession of her purpose.”
He held up two fingers.
“Two possibilities.
One: Ai obeys Shu’s spoken will absolutely.
Two: Ai interprets Shu’s needs instead of his will through the warped lens of her obsession—and follows that instead.”
Itsurō tilted his head.
“If Shu asked her not to hurt someone,” he asked quietly, “do you think Ai would truly refuse… if hurting that person was what she believed necessary to keep him safe?”
Kenji whispered, “Character analysis arc…”
"Fucking stop with the arcs!" Kentaro barked
Itsurō kept going, voice smooth as lacquer. “Ai Suishi would kill for him. Certainly. We’ve seen that.”
He paused.
“She would lock him away,” Itsurō said calmly, “if she believed the outside world threatened him. If she thought he was in danger? She’d drag him to an isolated building. Hide him. Keep him out of reach of anyone who might harm him. Including his friends. Including us. Including the school. Including reality.”
He tapped his temple.
“And in her fractured mind, she would see it as love. As protection. As obedience.”
Silence settled over them like dust.
“So yes" Itsurō replied without hesitation. “Ai’s fixation is stronger than Shu Jinkō’s intentions. If she decided the best way to help him was to imprison him for life, she would do it. And she would not break.”
A beat.
“Which,” he added, “makes her predictable as far as our purposes are concerned."
Rin shook her head in disbelief. “Predictable? She’s a walking catastrophe.”
“Predictable,” Itsurō repeated, “in her priorities. In her triggers. In her worldview. Ai Suishi’s mind is a labyrinth, yes—but a labyrinth with a single exit. And that exits points to one name.”
He drew a circle in the air with his finger.
“Shu Jinkō.”
Nobody corrected him.
There was nothing to correct.
“And that,” Itsurō continued, “makes her recruitable.”
Rin felt her stomach twist. “Explain how any of that makes her safe to approach.”
Itsurō’s eyes glinted.
“It doesn’t,” he said. “Which is why we are not approaching her here.”
He stepped away from the lamplight, letting the shadows obscure his expression.
“We’re meeting her in the Idea World."
Kentaro straightened. “So we can fight if it goes bad?”
“So we can win if it goes bad,” Itsurō corrected. “In the city, she is dangerous but restrained by circumstance. In a Bleeding Zone, we have the advantage. Our Idolons are empowered. Terrain obeys us, not her. There is no Student Council watching. No Yae Zennami to sniff out our methods.”
“So” Itsurō murmured. “If she refuses to cooperate, we kill her there.”
Rin looked at him like he’d spoken a foreign language.
“You’re talking about killing a classmate,” she whispered.
“A classmate who nearly killed Kentaro,” Itsurō said. “A classmate who would have, without hesitation. A classmate who is capable of dismembering people in bathtubs if given the chance.”
“And a classmate who could become one of our greatest assets.”
Kenji grinned nervously. “High-stakes recruitment arc…”
"You... I told you to top with the arcs." Kentaro cracked his knuckles, newly healed fingers flexing perfectly. “So either she joins us or she dies?”
“Well,” she said, arms crossed, voice just shy of insufferably snide, “try not to get beaten up by her again. If that happens twice, what good is your role supposed to be? You’ll have to retire from ‘fighter’ to ‘professional punching bag.’”
A beat.
Kentaro froze mid-stretch.
He turned his head toward her slowly.
Too slowly.
Rin felt her spine curl inward.
His expression didn’t shift. No flare of temper. No grit of teeth. Just that eerie, unreadable neutrality Kentaro sometimes fell into like a junkyard dog deciding whether the hand reaching out is feeding it or striking it.
For one terrifying heartbeat, Rin thought he was genuinely about to walk over and knock her jaw loose.
Even Kenji stiffened, hands instinctively reaching for his camera like it was a talisman. Or to be ready to film it, just in case.
Then—
Kentaro snorted.
A low, humorless sound that held no cheer and yet somehow wasn’t fully hostile either. He threw his head back and laughed, a rough, barking laugh that sounded half-mad, half-amused.
“Please,” he said, wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. “That wasn’t a fight.”
Rin blinked. “She shattered your ribs, Kentaro.”
“And I’ve shattered plenty of things myself,” he shot back. “Doesn’t mean they suddenly got stronger overnight.”
Rin opened her mouth. Closed it.
Kentaro stepped forward, the air shifting around him not with intimidation, not exactly, but with that unnerving lack of self-awareness he carried like a weapon.
“You think me losing once means I’m weak?” he said, voice steady in a way Rin found more frightening than yelling would've been. “Or that she’s suddenly some top-tier monster? Get real.”
He cracked his knuckles, freshly healed fingers snapping crisp in the dim room.
“I was burned. Choked. Hit with a fucking concrete block. Still could’ve killed her if we’d gone one more round.”
“That’s all it was,” he concluded. “A bad day. Not a habit.”
Kenji leaned toward Rin, whispering behind his hand, “He scares the shit out of me sometimes.”
Rin whispered back, “He scares me all the time.”
Predicting what Kentaro would do, whether he’d snap, laugh, kill, or shrug, was impossible. His moods were landmines buried in fog.
The meeting place lay ahead, somewhere half-forgotten, half-erased from the daily rhythm of Kageoka, and Ai was walking toward it with the kind of resolve that didn’t need encouragement. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. She hadn’t left a note. She hadn’t even checked the time.
Time was irrelevant.
The only thing that mattered was the possibility—small, thin, almost laughable—that the man at the door had spoken the truth.
That Shu Jinkō was in danger.
She clung to that idea like a hook buried under her ribs, dragging her forward step by step.
The side of her abdomen throbbed with every movement. The gunshot wound wasn’t catastrophic—Kentaro’s aim hadn’t been perfect, and her body, pushed far past what it should have endured, had carried her through sheer refusal—but it was far from healed. She’d washed it quickly with tap water that ran brown before it ran clear, pressed trembling hands against the bleeding until the dizziness faded, then sealed it with layers of duct tape pulled tight enough to make her vision spark.
No stitches.
No painkillers.
No rest.
The skin around it was hot now, inflamed. Each breath tugged at it. Each step reminded her that something inside her had been torn open and never properly closed.
She welcomed the pain.
The streets were quieter the farther she went. Traffic thinned. The buildings grew less intentional—older, half-renovated, caught between development plans that never quite materialized. Streetlights flickered unevenly, casting long, broken shadows that stretched and snapped as she passed through them.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything that wasn’t sacred—anything that wasn’t connected to Shu in some way. The hunger had burned past discomfort into something distant and dull, a background ache she’d learned to ignore. Sleep, too, had become optional.
Every thought led back to him.
The memory of Itsurō’s voice pressed against the inside of her skull.
We’re trying to save Shu Jinkō.
She hadn’t believed him. Not really.
But she hadn’t dismissed him either.
Ai wasn’t stupid. She understood manipulation. She understood lies told with the confidence of someone who’d practiced them. She understood that people used Shu as a symbol, a fulcrum, a convenient axis around which to spin their own agendas.
The sky above in the Zone wasn’t quite a sky, more a stretched membrane of colorless fog and fractured geometry, as though reality had been peeled back and stitched together wrong. The ground was uneven, spongy in places, cracked in others, seeping with the faint, oily shimmer that marked a place where the Idea World bled too close to the surface. Sounds carried strangely here. Impacts rang too loudly, echoes arriving late or not at all.
Kentaro filled the space with violence.
Already fully manifested as Daikongō, his Idolon form dwarfed the nightmare eaters swarming him, massive, corded muscle layered over itself, skin like dark stone veined with faintly glowing fissures.
A nightmare lunged, all too many limbs and screaming faces fused into one crawling mass.
Kentaro caught it mid-air.
He didn’t throw it. Didn’t tear it apart slowly. He simply slammed it into the ground with enough force that the impact rippled outward, cracking the terrain beneath them. The thing collapsed in on itself, shrieking once before its form imploded into a smear of viscous black residue.
Another came at his back.
He didn’t even turn.
A backhand swing, casual, dismissive, caught it squarely and sent it cartwheeling through the air, where it struck a jagged outcropping and burst apart like wet paper.
Kentaro rolled his shoulders, bored.
“This is taking forever,” he muttered, his voice deeper in this form, distorted like it was echoing through stone. “You’d think these things would learn.”
A little distance away, Rin crouched near the remains of the creatures he dispatched. She wore gloves thick enough to protect against more than just grime, carefully harvesting what fragments were still usable, matter that still hummed with unstable energy, materials that they could use to empower their Idolons.
“Don’t rush it,” she said without looking up. “The messier it gets, the harder it is to separate anything useful.”
Further back, well out of reach of flying debris, Itsurō stood with Kenji, the two of them watching the scene unfold like spectators at a rehearsal.
Kenji’s Idolon, Tokiwa-chan, hovered nearby. Occasionally, one of her screens would flash an image from a different angle of the battlefield, or display unreadable diagnostics in scrolling text.
Kenji himself looked almost giddy, hands stuffed into his pockets, eyes tracking Kentaro’s movements with the enthusiasm of someone watching a favorite action scene play out live.
“This is great,” he said. “Really great. You can feel the tension starting to build up here. Strong opening, sustained action, looming arrival of the new character—classic escalation. Honestly, if she sticks around, this arc’s gonna be incredible.”
Kentaro looked at him at the mention of arcs again, though he have up on complaining out loud.
Itsurō didn’t respond immediately. His attention wasn’t on Kentaro, or Rin, or even the nightmare eaters. His gaze kept drifting toward the far edge of the zone, where the distorted landscape thinned into something closer to normal space.
“She’ll be here soon,” he said calmly.
Tokiwa-chan’s screens flickered, several lenses swiveling toward Itsurō at once. Her voice came out layered, slightly delayed, as though multiple recordings were playing in near-unison.
“You seem unusually invested,” she observed. “This is the first time you’ve brought up a female with this level of frequency.”
Kenji grinned immediately. “Oho? Is that so? Damn, Itsurō, you finally got a type?”
Itsurō let out a short laugh, smooth and unbothered. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Oh?” Tokiwa-chan pressed, tilting her head. One of the monitors flashed a slow zoom on Itsurō’s face. Another displayed scrolling timestamps. “Then why has Ai Suishi dominated strategic conversation for the last several days? You’ve mentioned her more than Kentaro.”
Kentaro, in the middle of crushing another nightmare eater beneath his heel, glanced back. “Hey. I resent that.”
“You’re loud,” Kenji said. “She’s interesting.”
Rin straightened from where she’d been working, brushing residue from her gloves. “She’s a dangerous freak,” she corrected flatly. “There’s a difference.”
Itsurō nodded, accepting the comment without argument. “Exactly.”
Tokiwa-chan’s screens flashed again, this time displaying a stylized heart icon that immediately cracked and pixelated. “So you’re not interested in her?”
“No,” Itsurō said.
"Are you suuuuure?" Tokiwa-chan drifted closer to Itsurō and Kenji, her monitors flickering with bright, playful overlays of hearts, clapperboards, tiny animated stars that sparkled whenever something “interesting” happened. She hovered upside down for a moment, as if peeking into Itsurō’s face from an angle she thought might be more revealing.
"Of course I am. If anything the only noteworthy connection is that we went to the same middle school. Nothing more, nothing less."
“Oooh,” she chimed, voice warm and teasing rather than mechanical, “so it’s that kind of interest. You went to middle school together? You should’ve said that sooner. That’s like, instant backstory points.”
Kenji’s eyes lit up. “Wait, seriously? Same middle school? Man, that’s gold. Childhood connections are the best kind of narrative glue.”
Itsurō sighed, but there was a trace of something else beneath it, not irritation, exactly. More like resignation.
“Yes,” he said. “I said same middle school.”
Rin glanced up sharply from where she’d been organizing materials. “You never mentioned that.”
“It wasn’t relevant,” Itsurō replied.
Middle school had been… unremarkable.
That was the word Itsurō would have used back then, too.
He remembered the classrooms—too bright, too loud, filled with children who mistook noise for presence and cruelty for personality. He had learned early how to move through those spaces untouched: when to smile, when to stay quiet, when to offer just enough warmth to be remembered fondly and not enough to be entangled.
Ai Suishi had existed on the periphery of his awareness.
Quiet. Tall even then. Withdrawn, but not in a way that drew immediate attention. The kind of girl teachers worried about vaguely and classmates ignored until it was convenient not to.
Her best friend, on the other hand—
Itsurō’s mouth twitched faintly at the memory.
Loud. Invasive. The sort of person who mistook proximity for entitlement. She had laughed too easily, spoken too much, and developed an irritating habit of trying to pull Itsurō into conversations he had no interest in having. She wasn’t stupid, just selfish in that careless, adolescent way that never quite recognized other people as fully real. Such an annoying girl having a crush on him made young Itsurō see her as a pest. He didn't want drama, so openly rejecting her would have been a hassle.
What Itsurō had noticed, even then, was the tension between her and Ai.
Small things at first. The way Ai would hesitate before answering her friend. How she’d flinch when certain jokes were made. The way laughter would arrive a second too late, practiced rather than genuine.
Hairline fractures.
Itsurō had seen them immediately.
And he had acted.
Not dramatically. Not cruelly in the obvious sense.
He had simply decided to be… nice to Ai.
Not overtly. Not in a way that would draw attention or invite rumors. Just small, consistent gestures. A greeting in the morning. Casual conversation during group work. A smile when passing in the hallway. Nothing inappropriate. Nothing that could be challenged.
Crucially, he had ignored her friend.
Not rudely. Never rudely. Just enough that she felt it.
Itsurō remembered the shift with clinical clarity. How the friend’s attention sharpened. How her jokes turned barbed, then pointed. How curiosity curdled into resentment, and resentment into something uglier.
Jealousy was a predictable thing.
So was displacement.
The friend had begun focusing on Ai, subtly at first. Comments framed as jokes. Criticism masked as concern. Then exclusion. Whispered remarks. Shared looks.
Itsurō hadn’t intervened.
He hadn’t needed to.
Within weeks, the social pressure had redirected entirely. The friend stopped bothering him. She barely spoke to him at all. Her fixation had found a new, far more convenient target.
Problem solved.
At the time, Itsurō had felt nothing about it.
It had been a small maneuver. Efficient. Bloodless. The sort of social adjustment everyone made, consciously or not.
He hadn’t stayed to watch the long-term results.
Back in the bleeding zone, Tokiwa-chan hummed thoughtfully, one of her screens replaying a looping animation of two stick figures drifting apart.
“So,” she said lightly, “you poked the first domino and walked away.”
Kenji frowned, the grin slipping from his face just a little. “That’s… kinda messed up, man.”
Itsurō hadn’t looked away from the distortion at the edge of the zone when he spoke.
“She would have been bullied anyway,” he said, voice even, uninflected. “I didn’t invent the conditions. I provided a convenient trigger. If anything, it could have been worse.”
Rin turned on him slowly.
“Oh, sure,” she said, the sarcasm sharp enough to cut. “Worse than ending up trying to kill herself. That’s a pretty generous margin you’re working with.”
Itsurō didn’t bristle. He didn’t raise his voice. He simply acknowledged the statement with a faint tilt of his head, like a chess player noting an aggressive move.
Kenji shifted uncomfortably, scratching the back of his neck. “Hold on—wait. That’s what happened? Suicide attempt?” He blinked, genuinely startled. “I mean, middle school bullying sucks, but it’s usually… you know. Ostracism. Rumors. Shitty notes in lockers. That doesn’t just—”
“It wasn’t just that,” Rin said flatly.
Kenji looked between them, searching for something to grab onto. “Then what was it?”
Before Itsurō could answer, Kentaro spoke.
Unexpectedly. Casually. As if he were commenting on the weather.
“Doesn’t have to be dramatic,” he said. “Constant pressure does the job just fine.”
Everyone looked at him.
Kentaro shrugged, the massive frame of his Idolon settling into a looser stance. “People think trauma needs fireworks. Big moments. One catastrophic event you can point at and say that was it.” He snorted softly. “That’s bullshit.”
He crouched, picked up a fragment of nightmare residue between two fingers, and let it crumble.
“Small things,” he went on. “Daily things. Looks. Comments. Being corrected when you didn’t ask to be. Being ignored when you did. Being laughed at—not loudly, just enough that you know it happened.” He glanced up, eyes half-lidded. “That kind of stuff doesn’t heal clean.”
Rin frowned despite herself. “You sound like you’ve thought about this.”
Kentaro shrugged again. “You live long enough, you watch people break in patterns.” He paused, then added, almost idly, “Hell, even biology gets it. You can feed a newborn perfectly. Keep it warm. Clean. Safe.” He tapped his chest once. “If you don’t show it care—actual care—it dies.”
The words landed heavier than his earlier jokes ever had.
“The heart’s fragile,” Kentaro finished. “Doesn’t matter how tough the rest of you is.”
Silence followed.
Even the bleeding zone seemed to quiet, its distortions smoothing, listening.
"So it doesn’t really matter who lit the match.” Kentaro looked at them. “I’m saying the room was already full of gas.”
Itsurō finally turned back toward them.
“I’m not denying outcome,” he said. “Only intent. I didn’t set out to destroy her.”
Tokiwa-chan's scouting abilities detected something.
Kentaro straightened, grin returning, feral and eager. “Well. Philosophy hour’s over.”
“Yeah,” Rin said. “Regardless of what your intentions were—”
The distortion rippled again, closer now.
“—I hope she didn't set out to destroy you.”
Ai arrives
Rin was first—not with flourish, not with spectacle. One moment she was there, a tense, dark-eyed girl gripping her satchel; the next, her outline blurred and collapsed inward. Her face smoothed, features draining away as if erased by an unseen hand. Skin became a pale, unbroken plane. No eyes. No mouth. No nose.
A Noppera-bō. Hollow Dusk stood where Rin had been.
Kenji vanished beside her—not gone, not teleported, simply excluded from perception. The sound of his breath faded. His presence slid sideways out of the world, hidden under Rin’s veil.
Itsurō followed.
His Idolon did not overwrite him so much as reveal something that had always been there.
Black cloth unfurled from his shoulders and spine, dozens of loose, serpentine bindings coiling and drifting as if underwater. They wrapped his arms, his torso, his legs... Across the cloth, crimson glyphs ignited in slow, shifting patterns: geometric scripture that refused to repeat itself, symbols rewriting their own meaning with every blink. Some resembled prayer. Others looked like warnings.
His face remained his own. That, more than anything, was unsettling.
Ahrimane stood beside Kentaro, calm, upright, hands folded loosely as though this were a meeting room rather than a warped pocket of hostile unreality.
Then they felt her presence moving closer.
Not with a tear, not with a portal, just a pressure drop, a sudden wrongness that made the zone recoil. The distortion tightened into a narrow corridor, and from it, a figure stepped forward.
Ai Suishi.
She stood there swaying slightly, shoulders hunched.
She looked past Daikongō.
Past Ahrimane.
Straight through the space Rin had concealed.
Kentaro barked a laugh. “You’re lucky we’re here to talk,” he said, voice rough, eager. “Otherwise this’d be payback time, bitch.”
Ai didn’t even blink.
Didn’t look at him.
Didn’t acknowledge he existed.
Her gaze slid instead to Itsurō.
He felt it like a hand around his throat.
Interesting, he thought distantly.
He stepped forward one pace.
“Ai Suishi,” he said evenly. He did not raise his voice. He did not use her nickname. He did not soften her name with false familiarity. “You came.”
She tilted her head a fraction, as if listening to something only she could hear.
“Just talk,” she replied.
Her voice was hoarse. Dry. Strained from disuse or screaming or both.
Her fingers twitched at her side. “You said he was in danger.”
“He is,” Itsurō said, without hesitation.
That much, at least, was true.
Ai’s breath hitched, a sharp, involuntary intake that betrayed the fracture beneath her composure.
While Itsurō was still speaking—still choosing his words with surgical care—her hands had risen to her face. At first it looked like nervous habit, the same compulsive scratching Kaoru had seen a hundred times. Fingertips dragging across cheek and jaw. Nails digging in too hard.
Then she kept going.
Skin split under her nails with a wet, tearing sound. Not shallow scratches but deep gouges that carved channels down her cheeks. Blood welled instantly, far too much, spilling faster than any normal wound should allow. It ran over her lips, her chin, down her neck in thick, glossy streams.
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t cry out.
The bleeding intensified, as if her face itself had been opened like a faucet. Crimson poured down her torso, soaked into her clothes, and then her clothes began to give way, dissolving into something else beneath the flood.
Fabric blackened, rotted, tore itself apart.
What emerged was a dress: black, ragged, clinging where it shouldn’t and hanging loose where it should have offered modesty. The hem fluttered in invisible currents, shredded like something that had been dragged through thorns. The neckline plunged irregularly, the fabric sticking to her skin with the weight of blood.
Her hair spilled free.
It lengthened in a violent rush, strands pouring down her back and shoulders like ink dumped into water. Black at the roots, darker than night, heavy and matted where blood soaked through it. It dragged against the ground, stuck to her calves, coiled around her ankles like something alive.
The bleeding didn’t stop.
At her feet, the blood gathered unnaturally fast, spreading outward in a shallow mirror that reflected the warped sky of the bleeding zone.
Ai knelt.
Both knees sank into the blood with a soft splash.
She reached down, fingers plunging into the pool as if it were a gate to somewhere else.
Her hand closed.
And she pulled.
The blood rose with her arm, clinging, stretching, resisting—until it broke, and something enormous emerged from the red.
Scissors.
Huge.
As large as she was tall, pristine steel now smeared with fresh gore. As she lifted them, blood streamed off the edges in slow rivulets, dripping back into the pool with dull, rhythmic splats.
She stood.
The blood retreated, sinking back into nothingness, leaving her soaked, shining, breath coming a little faster now.
Kentaro felt it immediately, the shift from negotiation to violence, the click inside his chest that told him this was about to get ugly. He rolled his shoulders, muscles swelling, stone-hard skin crawling up his arms as Daikongō’s presence surged closer to the surface.
“Oh,” he muttered, baring his teeth. “So that’s how it is.”
Itsurō exhaled through his nose.
Irritation flickered across his face—not fear, not surprise. Annoyance, clean and sharp, like someone watching a carefully staged performance get derailed by an unpredictable actor.
“So much for dialogue,” he said quietly.
Ai didn’t look at him.
Her eyes were locked on Kentaro now.
Wide.
Shining.
Hungry.
She raised the scissors.
The blades opened with a heavy clack.
“You were the first to attack him,” she said, voice thick, distorted by blood and ecstasy, “so you're the first to die.”
Kentaro’s grin widened, feral and delighted. “Yeah?” he growled, cracking his knuckles. “Then come try.”
But Itsurō moved the instant Kentaro did.
What he wanted was control. What he got was chaos.
Kentaro lunged towards Ai with the full mass of Daikongō behind him, arms like collapsing pillars meant to pin her down, lock her spine, end the exchange by brute inevitability. At the same time, Itsurō’s Idolon answered his intent without hesitation with black cloth bindings uncoiling from his frame like serpents loosed from a basket.
Ai moved to retaliate to Kentaro, but mid-lunge, the bindings caught her coiling around her torso, her arms, her throat. For a heartbeat, it almost looked clean. Efficient. Like it might actually work. That she had been subdued.
Her body broke.
Bones cracked audibly as she wrenched herself against the bindings, shoulders dislocating, ribs bowing inward with a sickening crunch. Flesh tore. Blood sprayed from the openings between bindings.
And she kept going.
The bindings snapped, not cut, not cleanly severed, but torn apart by raw, suicidal force. She tore herself free at the cost of her own structure, momentum carrying her backward just long enough for Kentaro’s arms to close around her from behind.
He grunted, stone skin grinding as he locked his grip. “Got you—”
Ai didn’t struggle. She leaned back.
Her scissors plunged forward—straight through her own abdomen.
Steel punched out the other side of her body, slick with blood and viscera—
—and kept going.
Kentaro roared as the blade bit into him, punching through stone-flesh and muscle alike, tearing into something vital enough that even Daikongō felt it. Blood—his blood—splashed across the ground in heavy drops.
They froze like that for a fraction of a second.
Two monsters skewered together.
Then they both laughed.
Kentaro’s was rough, incredulous. Ai’s was thin, breathless, ecstatic.
They tore apart simultaneously.
Kentaro staggered back, clutching his side as stone cracked and reknit, wounds sealing as his foot came down on a nightmare eater scuttling too close—its body crushed, lifeforce rushing back into him in a familiar, addictive surge.
Ai collapsed to one knee, coughing blood onto the ground—
—and dragged her scissors through the body of another creature that dared approach, the act of violence knitting her flesh back together in jerking, uneven waves. Bone slid back into place. Muscle pulled tight. Skin closed sloppily, leaving angry red seams that still leaked pleasure.
They were even.
Itsurō didn’t like that.
His bindings surged again, faster this time. They wrapped around Ai’s limbs, her neck, her waist, yanked her bodily off the ground and threw her. She smashed into the earth, rolled, rebounded, only to be snatched again and slammed against a warped stone outcropping hard enough to crater it.
For a moment, Ai was nothing but a cocoon of black and red, suspended and thrashing.
Then she bit it.
She twisted her head, jaws snapping down onto one of the bindings, teeth sinking in. Not gnawing. Tearing. She ripped fabric free with her mouth, chewed, swallowed—black cloth and glowing script disappearing past the blood-smeared teeth of her lipless mouth.
The bindings recoiled.
She laughed, mouth full, strands of living fabric hanging from her teeth like meat.
Another coil reached for her—
snip.
The binding fell in two twitching halves.
She was free again.
Itsurō clicked his tongue.
“This is a waste of time,” he said flatly.
Not shouted. Not angry. Just done.
He lifted one hand slightly—not a gesture meant for Ai or Kentaro.
A signal.
Kenji and Tokiwa-chan moved like they were stepping onto a set they had rehearsed a thousand times.
Rectangular apertures snapped into existence around the battlefield, thin as film frames held upright in the air. Each one shimmered with static and grain, edges flickering like damaged celluloid.
Through one portal, the fight appeared from above—Kentaro and Ai locked in a spiral of blood and motion.
Through another, the ground itself was visible from below, roots and broken stone rendered in harsh monochrome.
A third caught Ai’s face in extreme close-up, her expression blown out, overexposed, pupils shaking as she laughed and screamed in the same breath.
Kenji didn’t shout commands. He didn’t need to.
“Tokiwa, cut to wide,” he muttered, half-grinning.
The terrain around Ai distorted, depth flattening unnaturally as if perspective itself had been edited out. Her next step went wrong—foot hitting where ground should have been but wasn’t anymore. She stumbled, snarling, scissors scraping sparks from stone as she caught herself.
Rin struck then.
From the portals bloomed threads.
Not shadows exactly but something denser. Lines of negative space that drank in light, threading themselves through the battlefield like a spider’s web being woven in fast-forward. They slipped through Tokiwa-chan’s frames effortlessly, emerging at impossible angles, wrapping around Ai’s limbs, her throat, her waist.
Rin’s faceless Idolon stood rigid, arms raised, fingers trembling as she pulled.
Ai shrieked as the threads tightened, body snapping upright mid-motion. Her spine bowed the wrong way. Muscles tore audibly. Blood ran down her legs in sheets.
She dug her heels into the ground, carving trenches as she strained against the threads. One arm twisted past its socket just to get leverage. She bit down on a strand near her shoulder, teeth sinking in—and screamed as it burned her mouth like ice and ash.
“Jesus—” Rin hissed under her breath, straining. “She’s—she’s fucking insane—”
Kentaro didn’t wait. He came in like a landslide.
Daikongō’s fist crashed into Ai’s ribs, pulverizing bone, sending her skidding across the flattened terrain Tokiwa-chan had created. She rolled, hit a portal edge, and vanished—
—only to be spat back out a second later from a different frame, body tumbling through the air before slamming down hard enough to crater the earth.
Itsurō’s own bindings followed immediately, coiling around her again, this time not trying to restrain but redirect. They snapped tight, yanking her into Kentaro’s follow-up blow, then flung her sideways just as her scissors came down where his head had been.
Each of them was doing their part.
It was working.
Ai was bleeding more than she could immediately recover. Her breathing had gone ragged, manic grin twitching at the edges. One of her eyes had swollen shut. Her dress hung in tatters, soaked through, sticking to her skin.
Rin tightened her grip, threads digging deeper. “Wasn't the plan to recruit her? If she continues resisting like this—”
“Let her,” Itsurō said calmly. “She’ll run out of body before we run out of pressure.”
Ai screamed again, voice shredding, and lunged anyway—only to be yanked sideways mid-step, slammed face-first into stone by Kentaro’s forearm.
She didn’t get up immediately this time.
The four of them stood arrayed around her—open, concealed, above and below—an execution circle stitched together by portals.
They were winning.
Until then.
Tokiwa-chan reacted a fraction of a second before catastrophe.
Something in Ai’s presence had shifted, not explosively, not dramatically, but quietly. A subtle redistribution of mass and intent, like a waveform slipping out of phase. The scraps of binding Ai had bitten through. The shreds of shadow-thread she had swallowed. The residue of nightmare flesh still dissolving in her throat.
Tokiwa-chan felt it integrate.
Her monitors flickered, frames skipping, data streams stuttering as warning glyphs bloomed across her field of perception.
“—Kenji,” she said sharply, voice losing its playful lilt for the first time, “She’s—”
Too late.
Ai moved.
She twisted her torso violently, spine cracking, ribs snapping outward as she broke her own scissors in half, metal screaming as it tore unevenly. One blade in each hand, blood pouring freely from her palms where jagged edges bit deep.
Her head snapped toward one of Tokiwa-chan’s portals.
And she cut it.
She reached through the frame and severed it like a tendon.
The portal screamed. That was the only word for it.
The rectangular aperture convulsed, image distorting wildly as Ai’s blade passed through something that should not have been tangible. The film-grain surface shredded outward in concentric ripples, the frame collapsing in on itself as if reality had just been edited out of existence.
Snuffed out mid-function, leaving behind a vacuum-like distortion that snapped shut with a sound like a reel being torn from a projector at full speed.
Kenji staggered back, clutching his head.
Tokiwa-chan reeled, monitors flashing static and error codes, several screens going dark entirely.
Rin swore aloud. “Holy—holy shit—”
Kentaro let out a low whistle, impressed despite himself. “Did she just—”
“Yes,” Itsurō said flatly, annoyance finally cracking through his composure. His bindings recoiled instinctively, scripts along the cloth flaring bright red like startled rattlesnakes. “She attacked a non-physical construct.”
Ai straightened slowly, blades dripping.
Her breathing was different now. Deeper. Slower. Less manic.
The blood around her feet boiled faintly, drawn back into her wounds in sluggish streams. The damage she’d taken—broken ribs, torn muscles—was already healing.
She rolled her shoulders once. Twice.
Then she smiled, or as close as smiling as she could with her face flayed.
Kenji, even as he shook it off, couldn’t help himself. He laughed—a short, incredulous bark.
“…Wow,” he said, awe bleeding into the word. “She’s got a Phase Two. Talk about an unexpected scene shift.”
Rin felt a chill crawl up her spine as she tightened her shadow threads again—only for Ai to glance at them and step through, blades flicking out to slice clean through three strands without resistance. The severed ends evaporated like smoke.
“This crazy…” Rin muttered. “That’s not fair.”
Itsurō was reaching the end of his patience.
The battlefield had stopped being a problem to solve and started being a liability to contain.
Enough.
The serpentine cloth around his Idolon tightened, glyphs along its surface shifting faster, aligning. He drew in a slow breath not for strength, but for authority.
The world was noisy. Chaotic. Full of variables.
He was about to simplify it.
His inner law rose within him, vast and precise, a lattice of inevitability. The familiar sensation of elevation crept up his spine, the moment where he ceased to be merely in the battlefield and instead became its axis.
He opened his mouth.
Before the words could leave him—
Ai screamed.
Kentaro had her pinned, one arm locked around her torso, the other crushing down toward her throat. Bone cracked. Blood sprayed. Any normal structure would have collapsed under that pressure.
Ai didn’t.
Her head snapped back, eyes wide, unfocused—then suddenly, terrifyingly clear.
Her mouth moved.
“Jump Into This Era.”
The words landed like a dropped mirror.
The bleeding zone shuddered.
Itsurō’s breath caught mid-inhale.
“What—” he started.
Reality tore sideways.
A distortion yawned open nearby—not one of Kenji’s potals. Not Rin’s concealment. Not anything sanctioned by their system of engagement. It was crude, jagged, as if clawed open by someone who knew the shape of a door but not how to build one.
From a portal came Tokiwa-chan’s voice, sharp with alarm, monitors crackling violently.
“Itsurō—listen to me—she’s not activating hers, she doesn't have one—she’s—she’s hijacking—”
Static screamed.
“—Yae Zennami’s JITE.”
The ground lurched.
Kentaro staggered as Ai slipped from his grip—not by force, but because the focus of his strength ahd been changed without his input. He stumbled back, boots gouging into nightmare matter that had abruptly turned smooth, reflective, wrong.
Light flattened.
The zone was crudely overwritten.
The domain pressed outward, half-formed and straining, like a reflection seen through cracked glass. It lacked cohesion. It lacked polish. But what it possessed was unmistakable.
Truth.
Not the comforting kind.
Not clarity.
The cruel, invasive kind that peeled intention away from action and left only naked motive behind.
Lines appeared in the air—thin, translucent seams like stress fractures in reality. Within them, shadows didn’t match bodies. Reflections lagged behind movement. Sound arrived a heartbeat too late, as if the world itself was hesitating before agreeing to exist.
Ai stood at the center of it.
And so was everyone else’s.
Kentaro felt it first.
A pressure behind his eyes, sudden and intimate, like fingers digging into his skull. He saw himself—not as he imagined, not as he justified—but as he was. Every act of violence stripped of bravado. Every excuse reduced to hunger. His healing stuttered as the domain rejected the lie that pain inflicted “didn’t matter.”
He snarled, staggering. “The hell is this—”
Rin gasped.
Her threads unraveled—not cut, not broken, but disproven. Shadow peeled away from shadow as the domain refused to accept concealment. Her faceless Idolon flickered, features trying and failing to erase themselves.
Kenji dropped to one knee, hands over his ears. “This isn’t cinematic,” he muttered wildly. “This isn’t framed—this isn’t—”
Itsurō stood rigid.
He understood instantly.
This wasn’t a proper Jump Into This Era. Not truly. Ai didn’t possess the infrastructure. She didn’t understand the philosophy behind it. She couldn’t sustain it's full law.
What she had done instead was manifest a distilled shard of Yae Zennami’s authority.
Itsurō felt it probe him.
His plans, his contingencies, his carefully curated intentions—laid bare, one by one, like organs under surgical light. The domain didn’t condemn him.
It simply refused to let him lie.
Itsurō snapped.
Not the quiet recalibration his allies were used to. Not the thin, surgical irritation that usually preceded a plan tightening into place.
This was raw.
“Kenji,” he barked, voice tearing through the fractured domain, “tell me how she’s doing that.”
Kenji flinched, half-scrambling back as Tokiwa-chan’s monitors flickered wildly, static crawling across her screens and lenses like ants.
“It’s—it’s not her,” Tokiwa-chan shouted, words tumbling out fast and bright with panic. “Not just her. As long as they trust him—Shu Jinkō, I mean—as long as they support and trust him, his comrades can share part of their power. Partial bleed-through. That’s how—”
A shrill tone cut through her feed.
“That’s how she’s channeling Yae Zennami’s JITE!”
Itsurō went very still.
The incomplete truth-domain trembled as if it had just been acknowledged by something larger than itself. The fractures in the air shuddered. Shadows snapped back into place. Reflections froze mid-distortion.
Trust.
Support.
Sharing.
Not contracts. Not bargains. Not coercion.
Belief.
Something Itsurō had never relied on—never needed—had just intruded into his battlefield and rewritten the rules.
He exhaled.
And it was all because of Shu Jinkō. Of course it was.
“Enough,” he said.
And the world obeyed.
Itsurō invoked his authority.
“Jump Into This Era.”
There was no dramatic tear. No roar. No spectacle.
The bleeding zone didn’t fracture—it aligned.
A pressure dropped across reality, vast and invisible, like an immense hand settling gently but irresistibly over everything that existed. The fractured truths of Ai’s borrowed domain didn’t vanish; they were contained, boxed in, forced to obey a higher-order structure.
Itsurō’s realm unfolded not as scenery, but as inevitability.
Every movement gained direction. Every action acquired consequence.
The battlefield ceased being a place where things happened and became a system where outcomes were decided.
Kentaro felt it immediately.
His muscles tensed and then relaxed against his will. His stance adjusted a fraction of an inch, optimal positioning forced upon him. When he tried to shift his weight back, pain flared through his leg like a nail driven into bone.
He growled, instinctively resisting.
Blood trickled from his nose.
Rin’s breath hitched as invisible vectors nudged her posture, her balance corrected without consent. Her threads stilled, then reoriented, forced into patterns she hadn’t chosen.
She froze.
Kenji swallowed hard.
Tokiwa-chan’s monitors screamed with warning glyphs, the same ones that covered Itsurō's bindings.
Only Ai moved freely.
For exactly one second.
Then the backlash hit her.
Ai had no intention of yielding.
Her entire existence was rejection as much as it was love. Rejection of the world, of herself, of anything that dared try to guide her away from her obsession.
That intent alone was enough.
The moment Itsurō’s law fully settled, Ai’s body convulsed as if struck by an unseen hammer. Bones cracked not from external force, but from misalignment, joints pulled half a degree off where they should be. Blood erupted from her nose, her ears, the corners of her eyes, raining down in thin red threads.
She screamed.
Not in pain. In fury.
She lunged—
—and the world punished her.
Her leg bent wrong. Her shoulder dislocated with a wet snap. The backlash didn’t throw her back; it simply withdrew permission for her to move as she intended.
She collapsed to one knee, gasping, fingers clawing at the ground.
Itsurō stepped forward.
“Ai Suishi,” he said calmly, almost gently, “you don’t need to fight me.”
She snarled up at him, blood dripping from her chin, eyes wild, incomplete truth still pouring into her mind in uncontrollable torrents. Faces, motives, intentions—too much, too fast, too raw.
“I don’t care,” she rasped. “If you’re lying—”
“I’m not,” Itsurō said.
He raised one hand.
The realm tightened.
“Use it,” he commanded. Not shouted. Not demanded.
Ordered.
“Use your borrowed domain. Look.”
Ai’s breath stuttered.
Her stolen authority bucked, screamed, resisted being aimed—but under the weight of Itsurō’s law, it complied. The truth-domain recoiled inward, focusing, narrowing like a lens finally forced into alignment. Until now, her crude manifestation of Yae's domain had only been used to force alterations in the Truth around her as she fought. A very lowly imitation of Yae Zennami's true capabilities.
But now she was forced to focus it on information, on not editing the Truth around her as she had done but instead seek it and acknowledge it, delve deeper into the pool of information accessible through this power.
And Ai saw.
Truth.
Shu Jinkō—standing at the center of converging worlds, smiling even as the pressure crushed him. Shu reaching out, holding the seams together with hands that were never meant to bear that weight. Shu laughing, reassuring, bleeding light as his existence burned itself away to close the gap forever.
A hero not meant to survive his own purpose.
A linchpin designed to break.
Ai’s mind shattered around the image.
“No,” she whispered.
The word was small. Broken. Childlike.
The incomplete domain surged violently and then collapsed.
Her borrowed authority evaporated in a rush of static and blood, the truth she’d stolen ripping itself free now that it had delivered its payload. The fractures in reality sealed. The air returned to weight. Sound normalized.
Ai slumped forward.
Not unconscious.
Not dead.
Just… emptied.
Her scissors slipped from her fingers, clattering uselessly against the ground. Her breathing hitched, shallow and uneven, eyes wide and glassy as if she were still staring at something no one else could see.
Itsurō released his JITE.
The pressure lifted like a receding tide.
Kentaro staggered, coughing, wiping blood from his mouth. Rin dropped to her knees, shaking. Kenji sucked in a long, ragged breath like he’d been underwater too long.
Silence fell.
Ai didn’t move.
She just sat there, broken posture folded inward, staring at nothing as the truth finished tearing her apart from the inside.
Itsurō watched her for a long moment.
Back at the hideout
They didn’t bind Ai.
They didn’t need to.
She lay slack across the warped interior of the hideout like a discarded doll, limbs limp, head lolling with each uneven step as Kentaro hauled her through the threshold. Blood had dried in dark, cracked rivulets along her cheeks and collarbone. Her scissors were gone. Her dress had reverted to mundane fabric. Whatever monstrous intensity had animated her moments ago had burned itself out completely, leaving only a hollowed shell behind.
They laid Ai down on a padded table meant for triage. Rin hovered uncertainly at a distance, arms wrapped around herself. Kenji fussed with equipment he didn’t actually need to touch, pretending busywork to avoid looking too closely at the girl who had nearly torn them all apart.
Itsurō didn’t look at any of them.
He stood apart, hands folded behind his back, gaze unfocused—not distant, but inward.
His mind was already moving.
Yae Zennami’s JITE.
Truth.
Not metaphorical truth. Not belief or narrative. Information. The raw substrate from which reality derived its structure.
At its base level, it granted perception, perfect, merciless perception. The ability to ask the world a question and receive an answer without distortion. At higher strata, with enough authority and power layered atop it, that perception inverted. If the world was information, then altering information altered the world.
Editing reality by rewriting its source code.
Itsurō had always classified it as one of the most dangerous awakened abilities he knew about.
And Ai Suishi had used it.
Crude. Incomplete. Sloppy.
But she had.
She had attempted to edit the battlefield—minor adjustments, forced reinterpretations, the faintest distortions of cause and effect, like when she used it to get out of Kentaro's grasp. Laughable compared to Zennami, yes. But the intent mattered more than the scale.
She hadn’t known what she was doing.
Not at first, when she had focused on alterations and not on information.
Only at the end—when the knowledge component finally flooded in—had she seen.
And that was what broke her.
Itsurō’s eyes narrowed.
Which raised questions he did not like.
Had Yae Zennami ever used her JITE on Shu Jinkō?
If she had, she would have known. There would be no ambiguity. No delay. No ignorance.
Was Yae the type to sit on knowledge like that? Sure, she was passive, but this was beyond relevant.
She was unorthodox. She was smug. She was brilliant.
But she was not uncaring.
So that left one last option, that she hadn’t used it on him.
Then there was the second, more troubling question.
When Ai channeled Zennami’s JITE…
How much did she see?
The fractured truth-domain had been incomplete, yes. Distorted by obsession, by overload, by Itsurō’s suppression. But even a glimpse was dangerous.
Did she see only Shu’s information?
Or did she see more? About Itsurō's plans, about his secrets.
The thought barely finished forming—
—and the world lurched.
Itsurō’s back slammed into concrete.
Hard.
The breath punched out of him as his shoulders struck the wall, cracks spiderwebbing outward from the impact point. Before he could react, a massive hand fisted into the front of his coat, hauling him bodily off the ground.
Kentaro.
Veins standing out stark against his neck.
“Don’t,” Kentaro snarled, lifting him another inch, forearm like iron, “you ever—ever—use that damn domain on me again.”
Spittle hit Itsurō’s face.
Kenji yelped. Rin stiffened, half-reaching, half-frozen.
Itsurō didn’t struggle.
He didn’t even tense.
He looked down at Kentaro’s grip with mild curiosity, then back up into his face.
“You resisted,” Itsurō said evenly. “That was your choice.”
Kentaro slammed him harder against the wall.
“My choice?” he barked. “You tried to turn me into a fucking chess piece! Telling me how to even fucking stand!”
For a heartbeat, it looked like he might actually kill him.
Then Kenji stepped in, voice too loud, too fast. “Hey—hey—okay, okay, let’s all just—”
“Shut up,” Kentaro snapped without looking away.
Itsurō met his glare without blinking.
“I didn’t deploy my JITE against you because I wanted control over you,” he said quietly. “I did it because Ai Suishi was about to kill all of us.”
Kentaro’s jaw tightened.
“And you liked it,” he growled. “Don’t lie. You enjoyed having us on strings.”
Silence stretched.
Kentaro’s breathing was heavy, uneven. His grip didn’t loosen but it stopped tightening.
“You pull that shit again,” Kentaro said finally, voice low and dangerous, “and I don’t care how clever and useful you think you are. I’ll kill you.”
Itsurō inclined his head a fraction. Not submissive. Not mocking.
Acknowledging a condition.
“Noted,” he said.
Then Kentaro never saw it coming.
One moment he still had Itsurō by the collar, rage vibrating through his arm like a live wire—
the next, the air cracked.
Just a single open palm snapping sideways into the left side of Kentaro’s head.
Kentaro’s body jerked as if yanked by a hook, his grip tearing free as he staggered two steps sideways and crashed into a stack of crates. He didn’t go down—but he reeled, hand flying instinctively to his ear, teeth clenched as pain detonated through his skull. A thin, high-pitched ringing flooded his hearing, drowning out the world on one side.
If his eardrum wasn’t shattered, it was damn close.
Rin froze mid-step, eyes wide. Kenji half-rose from where he’d been crouched, hands lifted uselessly like he might catch something already falling. Even Kentaro looked momentarily stunned, less by the pain than by who had struck him.
Ai stood between them.
She was upright now, steady on her feet despite everything. Blood still crusted her face in dark streaks, her hair hung loose and uneven where it had been torn and regrown and torn again—but her eyes were clear.
She didn’t look at Kentaro again.
She turned—
—and drove her foot straight into Itsurō’s ribs.
The impact knocked the breath out of him in a harsh, ugly grunt. He folded sideways against the wall and slid down, one hand catching himself on the concrete as pain flared hot and immediate through his side.
Another kick followed, this one lower, less precise but no less forceful.
Kentaro stared.
Rin’s mouth opened, then closed.
Kenji took a step forward. “Hey—!”
Itsurō lifted one hand without looking at him.
A single, sharp gesture.
Don’t.
Kenji hesitated, torn between instinct and trust—then stopped, swallowing hard.
Itsurō was halfway up from the floor when she dropped him again.
She slammed him into the wall by the collar much like Kentaro had done, bounced him off it, then hit him again just because he was still upright. Her movements were sharp and frantic, fueled by something far past anger.
“How,” she shrieked.
The word scraped out of her throat wrong, like it had to fight its way past teeth and blood and breath all at once.
“Tell me how do I save him.”
Itsurō’s head snapped sideways as her fist connected. He tasted iron immediately.
“How,” Ai screamed again, louder, voice cracking and re-forming mid-syllable, “do I save Shu Jinkō from this—from this rotting, crawling, shit-stained world—”
She hit him again. And again.
Her blows weren’t clean anymore. They were desperate. Messy. Some landed hard, some glanced off his shoulder or ribs, but every one carried the same intent: answer me.
Ai grabbed Itsurō by the front of his shirt and shook him violently, her hair sticking to her face with sweat and blood.
“You said it,” she babbled, words tumbling over each other now, collapsing and reforming without order. “You said he dies. You said it like it was already written. Like it was funny. Like it was neat and tidy and acceptable—”
She slammed him into the wall again, forehead almost touching his.
“I always knew it, how he doesn’t belong here,” she demanded, voice rising into a shrill edge that made Rin’s stomach turn. “Someone that clean. Someone that good. He’s not supposed to exist here—we don't deserve him—”
Her breath hitched violently. She laughed, suddenly, a sharp broken sound that didn’t carry any humor at all.
“Of course he can't be real. He saved me.”
Her hands tightened around Itsurō’s collar, knuckles white, shaking.
“This world is wrong,” she ranted. “It’s wrong from the ground up. It lies. It is disgusting. Revolting. It takes everything beautiful and grinds it down until it’s filthy and small and ashamed. And he just—he still wants to save it—”
She struck him again, weaker this time, unfocused, her arm trembling.
“So tell me,” she sobbed, voice splintering completely now, “explain everything.”
Itsurō coughed, blood wetting his lips. He didn’t raise his hands. Didn’t retaliate.
He let it happen.
Because stopping her would only make it worse.
“He's not just a hero,” he said hoarsely "he is the hero, and he exists to do what heroes do. Save the world. That means closing the barrier. You saw it, when you used Zennami's domain."
Ai froze mid-motion.
Her hands shook harder. Her breathing went erratic, fast and shallow, like she couldn’t get enough air no matter how much she pulled in.
“No,” she whispered.
She shook her head violently, hair whipping across her face.
“No no no no no,” she said faster and faster, backing away half a step and then lunging forward again to hit him in the chest. “That’s not it. That’s not allowed. You don’t get to say that like it’s okay. You'r fucking attack dog attacked him! He hurt him! You knew and you still let it happen. So this is your last chance before I kill you.”
She struck him again, then sagged forward, her forehead pressing into his collarbone.
“Tell me how,” she whispered, almost pleading now. “Tell me how to fix it. Tell me how to save him.”
Kenji swallowed hard. “Jesus Itsurō,” he said quietly, shaken. “What the hell did you drag into our group.”
Ai pulled back slowly, releasing Itsurō at last. Her hands dropped to her sides, slick with blood. Her shoulders trembled, not with tears yet, but with the effort of holding herself together through sheer force of will.
She looked at him again, eyes burning.
“Tell me how to save Shu,” she said.
Ai had folded in on herself in the far corner of the hideout.
Not curled neatly. Not crying loudly. Just… collapsed. Knees drawn in, leaning against to the wall, the side of her head pressed against concrete as if she were trying to disappear into it. Her hands moved mechanically, over and over, rubbing at her arms. Every so often a broken sound slipped out of her throat, half sob, half sigh. Her eyes were open, unfocused, staring at nothing.
Dissociating.
Itsurō sat several meters away on an overturned crate, a first-aid kit open at his feet. He worked methodically, as if order could be reasserted through routine alone. Alcohol wipe. Pressure. Bandage. Tape. His hands shook only once, when he wrapped his ribs; he tightened his jaw and forced them steady again.
Kenji hovered nearby, restless, pacing in small arcs. Kentaro leaned against a support pillar, arms crossed, jaw tight, one ear still ringing faintly. Rin sat on the floor with her back to the opposite wall, knees hugged to her chest, eyes fixed on Ai like she was afraid to blink.
After a while—long enough that the silence stopped being heavy and started being unbearable—Itsurō spoke.
“I first had my suspicions when I saw his file at Higan. So I went to his hometown,” he said quietly.
No preamble. No drama.
That alone made Kenji stop pacing.
“Shu Jinkō’s,” Itsurō clarified, tearing open another sterile packet with his teeth. “Or rather… the place he’s supposed to be from.”
Rin shifted slightly. “You didn’t mention that.”
“I didn’t know it mattered yet.”
Kentaro snorted softly. “Everything matters you fucking retard. You trying to decide what does, now that’s kind of the problem.”
Itsurō ignored the jab.
“It was a small town. Nothing special. Middle school records were intact—enrollment, transfer paperwork, grades. He transferred in for the final year only though.” He pressed gauze against a cut on his forearm, eyes unfocused now, memory running ahead of him. “Teachers, students and people around town remembered him. Left a strong impression.”
Kenji frowned. “So? Lots of people move around, and there's lots of memorable freaks that it's starting to become the new normal.”
“Yes,” Itsurō agreed. “But here’s the thing. When I asked about his life before that year—friends, childhood acquaintances, schools—there was nothing.”
Rin’s grip tightened around her knees.
“No one knew him,” Itsurō continued. “No one remembered him from elementary school. No family connections in the area. No childhood friends. No rumors. No records beyond that one year. It’s as if he… began there.”
He taped the bandage closed with care.
Kentaro exhaled through his nose. “And then he shows up in Kageoka.”
“And immediately transfers into Higan,” Itsurō said. “Immediately gains traction. Immediately becomes central. Student Council president within an absurdly short span. Already awakened. Already possessing an Idolon.”
He finally looked up.
“It’s too clean,” he said. “Too efficient.”
Rin’s voice was soft. “Like he was placed.”
“Yes.”
The word settled heavily in the room.
“At first,” Itsurō went on, “I thought it was just an amusing hypothesis. A narrative coincidence. Something that felt meaningful because I wanted it to be.” He hesitated, then continued. “But I asked our benefactors.”
“Let's call them upper management,” Itsurō said calmly. “I didn’t ask directly at first. I didn’t have the knowledge on proper, lets say, etiquette. That’s why I spent so long pestering you about occult theory, Rin.”
Rin’s lips parted slightly. Understanding flickered across her face—followed by something colder. “You weren’t just curious.”
“No no, I was” Itsurō admitted. “ but I was preparing as well.”
He leaned back against the crate, exhaustion finally seeping into his posture.
“When I finally got the rituals right and asked,” he said, “they didn’t give me a straight answer. They never do. But they didn’t deny it either.”
Kenji let out a weak laugh. “You’re saying they know Shu’s an idea?”
“They might have known all along. I told you they didn't give me a straight answer. I’m saying,” Itsurō replied carefully, “that I had to go on my own guesses. Shu Jinkō fits the notion of something generated to fulfill a role.”
Rin closed her eyes.
“And then,” Itsurō added, “Ai Suishi accessed a derivative of Yae Zennami’s domain. Incomplete sure. But enough.”
He glanced toward the corner where Ai sat unmoving.
“She saw it,” he said quietly. “Not the whole thing. Not the structure. But the truth of my hypothesis.”
Kenji scratched the back of his head, frowning hard. “Okay, wait. If we've confirmed Shu’s an idea—some kind of… living concept—then why is he trying to close the barrier?”
No one answered immediately.
Kenji pressed on, voice nervous now. “I mean, if the barrier goes down, wouldn’t that—wouldn’t he go down with it?”
Itsurō considered this for a long moment.
“Well, Yōkai might not work that way,” Rin said slowly. “They’re closer to spirits. True mystical existences.”
Itsurō shook his head.
“But ideas,” he continued, “are different. An idea doesn’t need to understand itself to function. It doesn’t even need to want what it does. It just… is. It is in the way it's been conceptualized.”
Rin opened her eyes. “You’re saying Shu might not know.”
“I’m saying he almost certainly doesn’t,” Itsurō replied. “And I’m saying his purpose may very well be the barrier itself. Closing it. Ending the overlap. Making the worlds… consistent.”
Kentaro clicked his tongue softly. “And then what.”
Itsurō’s mouth tightened.
“Then the idea completes its function,” he said, “and becomes obsolete.”
Kenji’s voice was barely audible. “So it dies.”
No one contradicted him.
In the corner, Ai let out a thin, broken sound—half laugh, half sob—and pressed her face harder into her knees.
Itsurō watched her for a second longer than the others.
“For all we know,” he said at last, voice quieter now, “Shu Jinkō exists to make the world safe for everyone else.”
He looked down at his bloodied hands.
“And” he added, “he won't survive his own success.”
The conclusion formed in the room not as a declaration, but as an inevitability.
Itsurō let the silence stretch just long enough for the weight of the implications to settle. He wiped his hands on a rag, folded it once, twice, precise as always.
“If Shu can’t abandon his purpose because that's what his whole existence is about,” he said at last, voice even, “and if him succeeding would destroy him anyway—then there’s only one outcome that might not end in his death.”
Rin looked up sharply.
“We succeed,” Itsurō continued. “On our terms.”
Ai’s head lifted.
It was subtle. Just a fraction. But the shift was immediate, like a corpse twitching after electricity touched it. Her eyes—rimmed red, unfocused a moment ago—found him. Locked on.
“We keep the barrier from closing,” he said calmly. “the same plan as before. Making the world fail to reach the condition that requires his sacrifice.”
Ai pushed herself up from the corner, slow and unsteady. Her voice came out hoarse, scraped raw from hours of screaming and crying and choking back reality.
“…that saves him?”
“Yes,” Itsurō said.
He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t hedge. He wasn't confident in this hypothesis at all, but he acted like it was a fact. He lied as easily as he breathed.
Ai stared at him, searching—desperate, animal, frantic—for any fracture in his certainty. Her hands trembled, then stilled. The dissociation cracked, just enough for fixation to pour through.
Kenji opened his mouth. “But don’t you hate—”
Rin’s elbow drove into his ribs.
He hissed and shut up.
Itsurō didn’t even glance their way.
Instead, he turned fully toward Ai, lowering himself slightly—not kneeling, but reducing the distance. A calculated gesture. Not dominance. Not submission. Invitation.
“We need your help,” he said. “As you can see, even tangentially our goals align.”
Ai’s lips parted.
“You won’t have to fight unless it’s necessary,” Itsurō went on. “You won’t be asked to make decisions you don’t understand. When we need you, someone will reach out.”
Her eyes flicked, briefly, to Kentaro. Then to Rin. Then back.
“…who,” she asked, barely audible.
Rin already knew the answer.
She could see it in Itsurō’s posture, in the angle of his head. She straightened unconsciously, bracing herself.
But Itsurō didn’t look at her.
“Kenji,” he said.
There was a beat of silence.
Kenji blinked. “Me?”
“Yes.”
Rin’s mouth opened—then closed again. Surprise flashed across her face, followed by something closer to understanding.
Ai turned her head slowly toward Kenji.
He froze.
Up close, without the chaos of battle or the distortion of Idolons, her gaze was unbearable. Not hostile. Not threatening. Just total. Like being examined by something that would never forget the shape of you.
Kenji swallowed. “Uh. Hi.”
Itsurō spoke again, tone softer now. Not genuinely kind—he wasn’t capable of that—but… almost sincere.
“Kenji understands what it means to cling to something that might slip away the moment that barrier is restored,” he said. “Something that shouldn’t exist, but does only because of the Idea World. Something even precious precisely because it could vanish again.”
Kenji glanced instinctively toward the camera in his hand.
Itsurō didn’t miss it.
“He doesn’t want the barrier closed,” Itsurō continued. “Not for power. Not for control. But because closing it would erase someone he loves.”
Ai’s fingers curled into the fabric at her sides.
“Kenji doesn’t pretend that makes him noble,” Itsurō said. “He accepts that it makes him selfish.”
Kenji laughed weakly. “When you put it like that, man…”
“But he keeps going anyway,” Itsurō finished. “Because of love.”
The room went quiet again.
Ai stared at Kenji. Long. Searching.
Then—slowly—she nodded.
Once.
Rin exhaled, tension she hadn’t realized she was holding finally loosening from her shoulders. Kentaro snorted softly, shaking his head like he couldn’t decide whether this was brilliant or insane.
Kenji scratched the back of his neck, offering Ai an awkward, lopsided grin.
It was almost unsettling how quickly his mind snapped into a new rhythm, as if the situation had simply become another scene shift rather than a fundamental escalation of danger. Five minutes after Ai had been assigned to him—assigned, like a role in a production—he was already leaning against a crate, hands animated, eyes bright with manic enthusiasm.
“So,” he said casually, glancing at Ai like she was a new cast member he hadn’t auditioned yet, “have you ever seen The Ring?”
Ai stared at him.
Not with hostility. Not even confusion, exactly. Just… blank, feverish attention, like she was waiting for him to say something important and couldn’t tell whether he already had.
Kenji mistook the silence for intrigue. Of course he did.
“The atmosphere—man, the atmosphere is everything. You’d probably appreciate it. Honestly, it’s kind of your vibe.”
Rin, across the room, closed her eyes and rubbed her temple.
Ai’s lips parted. “…is it… important?”
Kenji grinned. “Oh yeah. Super important. A milestone of horror.”
She nodded slowly, as if filing that away under research.
While Kenji launched into an impassioned explanation of why horror worked best when it was patient and cruel, Kentaro had already turned his attention elsewhere.
“Itsurō,” he said, voice low. “A word.”
Itsurō didn’t react immediately. He finished tightening the bandage on his forearm, tested the wrap with a flex of his fingers, then stood.
They moved away from the others, into the deeper shadow of the hideout, where the air smelled faintly of oil and damp concrete. Kentaro leaned against the wall, arms crossed. This wasn’t posturing. This wasn’t a threat.
This was business.
“So,” Kentaro said, “be straight with me. Is the plan really the same as before?”
Itsurō tilted his head. “Meaning?”
“Meaning,” Kentaro continued evenly, “we keep doing what we’ve been doing. Build influence. Avoid open confrontation. Let things rot naturally. Except now Suishi’s on our side. That's it? That's your master scheme?”
Itsurō smiled faintly.
“What,” he asked lightly, “are you jealous we picked up another fighter?”
Kentaro didn’t react.
“And that she beat you?” Itsurō added, just to see.
Kentaro pushed off the wall in one smooth motion and stepped closer, until they were almost chest to chest.
“Answer the question,” he said.
The smile faded.
Itsurō regarded him for a long moment, then exhaled slowly—more a release of tension than a sigh.
“Well,” he said. “The goal hasn’t changed. We still have the same win condition.”
Kentaro waited.
“But the execution has,” Itsurō went on.
He stepped past Kentaro, pacing a short arc, hands clasped behind his back. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its conversational edge. This was the voice he used when he meant something.
“We’ve been reactive,” he said. “Letting things come to us. Letting circumstances dictate tempo. That was fine when we were probing, testing the field.”
He turned back.
“It’s not fine anymore.”
Kentaro’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Meaning?”
“Meaning,” Itsurō said, “we stop waiting for fractures to appear.”
He tapped the side of his head once, slow and deliberate.
“We create them.”
Kentaro studied him, expression unreadable.
“You’re talking escalation.”
“I’m talking initiative,” Itsurō replied. “Pressure. Timing. Forcing responses instead of predicting them.”
“And Suishi?” Kentaro asked "You think she'll play along nicely? She hasn't even made a deal with, how did you call them? Our benefactors? Upper management?"
Itsurō’s gaze flicked, briefly, to where Ai sat now—knees drawn in, eyes fixed on Kenji as he mimed camera angles in the air.
“Not like she needs it,” Itsurō said carefully. “You probably didn't see the sky when we fought.”
Kentaro snorted softly. “What? Sorry I was busy being stabbed so I couldn't gaze at the stars.”
Itsurō didn’t answer.
“Anyway, we move first now,” he said. “We choose where conflict happens. Who it happens to. And when. Gather as many losers with Tamagotchis as you can.”
Kentaro was quiet for a long time.
“Good,” he said. “I was getting bored.”
Across the room, Kenji’s voice rose again, animated and oblivious.
“And the best part is,” he was saying, “nobody ever believes the cursed thing is real until it’s way too late. That’s what makes it art.”
Ai tilted her head, listening with absolute seriousness.