Sku-te - Down With Nana Hiiragi

Chapter 36: An Idea Forged in Unreality II

He looked at them, his gaze steady, his heart pounding in his chest. “It’s a long shot. A horribly dangerous, probably insane long shot. But it’s a start. It’s an idea. And right now, frankly, it’s the only one I have that doesn’t involve us just… waiting in this damp, cold cave for Tsuruoka’s agents to eventually find us and pick us off one by one.”

He let out a slow breath, the weight of his own audacious proposal settling upon him. He, Arthur Ainsworth, former accounts clerk, a man whose most daring act in his previous life had probably been disputing a parking ticket, was now seriously suggesting infiltrating a secret government death camp for super-powered teenagers to foment rebellion based on a half-remembered Japanese comic book. The sheer, unadulterated madness of it was almost enough to make him laugh, or weep. It was hardly a board meeting strategy session back in… well, anywhere remotely normal, he thought with a grim internal shake of his head. The utter bizarreness of asking a group of traumatized children and young adults for ‘better ideas’ on how to dismantle a tyrannical shadow regime, huddled in a makeshift shelter in what felt like a never-ending, surreal, and increasingly dangerous May… if he wasn’t living this waking nightmare, he would never in a million years believe it.

Arthur ran a hand through his already dishevelled hair. “Look,” he said, his voice infused with a weary but unyielding earnestness, “anything we decide to do, anything we can do, it won’t be quick. And it certainly won’t be easy.” He met their wide, stunned eyes one by one. “But something needs to be done. We can’t just hide here forever. We can’t let Tsuruoka and The Committee win, not after everything, not after what they’ve done, what they plan to do.”

He squared his shoulders, a flicker of the old, pragmatic Englishman surfacing through the layers of trauma and disbelief. “That’s my proposal. My… one idea.” He offered a small, almost apologetic shrug. “Unless, of course, anyone else has any better ideas?”

The fire crackled, its small, hungry sounds loud in the sudden, profound silence. The weight of his words, the sheer, almost suicidal audacity of his plan, hung heavy and palpable in the damp, smoky air of the cave. Arthur had laid his desperate, improbable strategy on the table. Now, he could only wait for their reaction, for their judgment, for their decision on whether to embrace this madness, or to seek another, perhaps even more perilous, path.

Nana is an evil little bitch

Nana Hiiragi

Of course the hate for her is well deserved.

First off, blaming "brainwashing" lets her off the hook far too easily. Patty Hearst tried the same trick in the 1970's and it didn't exactly work out well for her. Ironically, Patty spent more time in prisoner for her bank robberies than Nana does for her 10+ murders, which in itself is unfair - Nana gets away with far too much because she's a girl, instead of in spite of it.

Yes, she would be hated just as much if Nana was male (probably more so).

It should be noted that all Nana's murders were premeditated, on her own cognisance and with malice. Just because she was told to do so, doesn't mean she had to.

In addition to that, just because she may not have wanted to do kill anyone, she was certainly happy to do so (smiling when thinking about killing Mirichu as well as the "won't be shy in killing you" part). Nana is a person who would rather murder someone than think of any sort of alternative (as is the case later on).

Futher more, stating that she's a "child soldier" carries no weight - she's killing civilians, which if she was a soldier makes her actions even more odious.

The fact that people try to exonerate Nana because she was "mind controlled" doesn't hold much water considering she was fully aware of what she was doing; didn't need to; didn't bother querying anything and was fully cognisant during her pre-meditated murders; and she quite happily carried another one out, with no doubt more to come.

In addition, there is no reason why she couldn't have asked questions or even did her own reason about Talents and so forth.

I wasn't surprised that the anime didn't get a second season (if it wasn't just for boosting manga sales) because Nana is so unrelatable, unrelatable and pretty much evil personified. Even later on, she's totally dislikable, obnoxious character.

Considering she's supposed to be intelligent, you would have thought, at the very least, queries the morality, if not the legality and ethics of killing schoolchildren (let alone those she killed before she arrived at the island). She's fully aware of what she's doing, so it's all on her own head. She certainly deserves to be punished far longer than three years (that ends up around 3 months for every kid).

I wouldn't be surprised if Nana Hiiragi does enjoy killing people - she is always smiling happily when thinking about killing her victims.

Whilst she may say that she doesn't want to kill any more, later on - it certainly doesn't stop her (no doubt it would be the first thing she thinks of to solve problems, instead of anything else).

Hopefully, she won't have a happy ending (preferably meet a nasty end - with her own poison needs would be nicely ironic). Whilst she may have "changed" for dubious reasons she will have to end up killing people again at some point. Even though she's changed, she's still an insufferable, nasty little bitch. I've got very little sympathy for her, especially as she was sadistic killing everyone.

And yes, killing Nano led to more people suffering - all because of Nana (no idea why Nano should forgive her - obviously he forgot how Nana taunted him before he fell, although I do hear he did beat the crap out of her as well).

Hopefully she will pay some sort of price for her actions.

Whist Nanao killed more people than Nana, it should be noted that Nana was the cause. It was nice of him really to leave Nana alone, considering she had no compulsion about killing Nanao - he certainly would have had a good reason to seek revenge on her.

Chapter 34: Echoes of a Fictional Past

The fire in the damp cave spat a shower of angry orange sparks into the heavy, charged silence that followed Arthur Ainsworth’s almost whispered, yet cataclysmic, question. The only other sound was the distant, ceaseless roar of the hidden waterfall, a monotonous, indifferent rush of water that suddenly felt like the rushing, uncaring torrent of a reality that had just been irrevocably, terrifyingly, and perhaps even liberatingly, undone. Nana Hiiragi stared at him, her violet eyes wide, her face utterly drained of colour, the half-sketched map forgotten in her lap. Kyouya Onodera’s hand had frozen midway through sharpening his makeshift blade, his usually impassive features now a mask of stunned, almost incredulous intensity. Michiru Inukai’s gentle face was etched with profound confusion and a dawning, childlike distress, her hand instinctively going to her mouth. Even Jin Tachibana, for the first time since Arthur had known him, looked momentarily, almost imperceptibly, thrown, his enigmatic smile faltering, his pale eyes fixed on Arthur with a new, sharp, unreadable intensity.

It was Nana who finally broke the spell, her voice a strangled, disbelieving whisper. “A… a story? You’re saying… everything? The island… the killings… me… it was all just… a story you read? In a… a comic book?” The sheer, insane absurdity of it seemed to overwhelm her. The carefully constructed narrative of her life, her suffering, her crimes – all reduced to pulp fiction in another world.

Arthur nodded miserably, the weight of their collective shock almost a physical blow. “Essentially, yes, Hiiragi-san. A manga, as they call them. And then an animated television series. ‘Talentless Nana’. It was… surprisingly popular for a while, in my time. Known for its dark themes, its psychological twists.” He felt a flush of shame, of acute discomfort. How could he possibly explain the ghoulish voyeurism of it all? Their real, lived pain, packaged as entertainment. It felt obscene.

Kyouya Onodera finally moved, placing his sharpened metal shard down with slow, deliberate precision. His voice, when he spoke, was dangerously quiet, each word a carefully chipped piece of ice. “So all your ‘predictions,’ Tanaka-kun… or should I say, Ainsworth-san? Your ‘Chrono-Empathic Glimpse’… your knowledge of our Talents, our weaknesses, our… our fates… it all came from this… this fictional narrative?”

“Most of it,” Arthur admitted, his gaze dropping to the cave floor. He couldn’t meet Kyouya’s piercing stare. “My memories of it are… fragmented. Incomplete. Like trying to recall a dream years later. I remembered key events, character traits, some of the deaths. Enough to make those ‘predictions.’ Enough to try and… interfere, sometimes successfully, often not.” He thought of the sheer, unmitigated unreality of it all, more like some bizarre, avant-garde play one might see in a small, underfunded provincial theatre back in Sussex, something designed to shock and confuse, than any lived experience.

“So you knew,” Nana’s voice was stronger now, laced with a dawning, terrible anger, a profound sense of betrayal. “You knew what I was. What I would do. You knew about… about Michiru?” Her gaze flicked towards the fluffy-haired girl, who was now looking at Arthur with wide, wounded eyes.

“I knew… some of it,” Arthur said wretchedly. “I knew Michiru was… important. I knew she had a powerful healing Talent. I remembered… I remembered her dying to save you, Nana-san, in the story. That’s why I tried so desperately to stop her at the docks.” He looked at Michiru. “And later, why I hoped… her body being warm, it matched some obscure detail I half-recalled about how truly powerful healing Talents might interact with death in your world, according to the lore of that story.”

Michiru’s eyes filled with tears. “So… my life… Nana-chan’s life… it was all… written down somewhere?” she whispered, her voice trembling.

“In my world, yes,” Arthur confirmed, his own voice hoarse with a mixture of guilt and a strange, weary resignation. “A fiction. Here… here it’s your reality. Our reality now, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t you stop more of it?” Kyouya’s question was sharp, cutting as the blade he’d just been honing. “If you possessed such… supposedly comprehensive foreknowledge, why allow so many to die? Why not expose Nana from the outset?”

Arthur finally looked up, a spark of his old, tired frustration igniting in his eyes as he met Kyouya’s accusatory gaze. “Do you truly think I didn’t want to?” he retorted, his voice gaining a raw, defensive edge. “My memory of this… this ‘story’… it was never comprehensive, Kyouya-san. It was like a shattered mirror, reflecting only fragments, often distorted, often out of sequence. I frequently didn’t know the when or even the exact where each murder or critical event would take place until it was almost upon us, or sometimes, tragically, not until it was too late.”

He took a ragged breath, the faces of the dead flickering before his mind’s eye. “Take Nanao Nakajima, for instance. I knew where Nana planned to kill him – that cliff by the sea. It was a very vivid scene in the story. But I had no idea when she would make her move – which day, which hour. I had to shadow him for days, make a nuisance of myself, an utter fool, just waiting, hoping I could intervene at the right, critical moment. With Yuusuke Tachibana, the time traveler,” Arthur continued, his voice tight with the memory of that particularly cold-blooded murder, “again, I knew where – the lake. But not when. My warning to him was vague because my knowledge was vague. I couldn’t tell him ‘Nana will drown you by the old boathouse next Tuesday at 3 PM’ because I simply didn’t know that level of detail.”

He looked down at his hands, clenching and unclenching them. “And Touichirou Hoshino, the poor boy dying of cancer… for him, I didn’t even have an accurate location. Just a hazy recollection from the story that it was possibly in a cave somewhere on the island. Which cave? When? The story never specified. I tried to find him, to warn him, but the island is large, and he was already reclusive due to his illness.” Arthur shook his head, the weight of these specific failures, these agonizing limitations, pressing down on him.

“And what if I had tried to change things too drastically from the outset?” he pressed on, his voice gaining a note of desperation. “What if I’d stood up on that first day and announced, ‘Nana Hiiragi is a government assassin, and here’s a list of everyone she’s going to kill’? Who would have believed me? They’d have locked me up as a lunatic! Or Nana herself would have eliminated me before I drew my next breath. The story I remembered was horrific, yes, but what if my blundering attempts to play God based on a half-recalled comic book from another dimension made things even worse? Created new, unforeseen tragedies? New victims I couldn’t have predicted?” He gestured helplessly. “And frankly, Kyouya-san, I was terrified. Most of the time, I am terrified. I was alone, in a foreign land I didn’t understand, in a body that wasn’t mine, surrounded by people with often terrifying superhuman abilities, one of whom was a highly trained, remorseless assassin systematically killing everyone around me. My primary concern, I’ll admit it freely, was often my own desperate survival, and simply trying to make some kind of rudimentary sense of an utterly impossible, insane situation.”

He turned to Nana, whose face was a maelstrom of conflicting emotions – anger, betrayal, confusion, but also, Arthur thought he saw, a flicker of something else, something akin to a strange, twisted validation. If her life, her actions, had been “scripted” in some other dimension, did that lessen her own culpability? Did it make Tsuruoka’s manipulation even more monstrously profound?

“And what,” Jin Tachibana finally spoke, his voice still calm, still enigmatic, though his eyes held a new, sharp alertness, “does this… ‘story’… say happens next? Now that we have escaped this camp? Now that your ‘Talent,’ your foreknowledge of our specific immediate actions, is supposedly… depleted?”

Arthur shook his head. “That’s the problem. The story I remember… it focused primarily on Nana’s time on the island during that first year. It detailed many of her… assignments. It touched upon Kyouya’s investigation, Michiru’s sacrifice and return, the conflict with Rentaro. After that, my knowledge becomes… patchy. Vague. I remember broader strokes about Tsuruoka, about the Committee, about the ‘Enemies of Humanity,’ about a growing societal fear of Talents leading to… to situations like this internment camp.” He gestured around the damp cave. “But specific events? Timelines? Who lives, who dies from this point on? I have no idea. The narrative, for me, largely ended with the first year’s major events, or became too divergent from what I was experiencing once I started interfering. From the moment Michiru first returned, from Nana’s breakdown at the cliff, things here have already been… different, diverging significantly from what I dimly recalled. My foreknowledge of your specific futures, your day-to-day choices, is gone. As I said, I’m as blind as the rest of you now.”

A new, uneasy silence descended. The implications of Arthur’s confession, the sheer, mind-bending audacity of it, were immense, earth-shattering. Their lives, their struggles, their very identities, mirrored, however imperfectly, in a work of popular fiction from another world, another time. It was a truth so outlandish, so existentially terrifying, it was almost impossible to fully grasp.

It was Michiru, her gentle voice trembling but surprisingly firm, who finally voiced the question that hung heavy and unspoken in the damp, smoky air. “So, Arthur-san… if our lives here are… were… a story in your world… does that mean we are not truly real? That our pain… our choices… that they don’t truly matter in the grand scheme of things?”

Arthur looked at her, his heart aching at her innocent, profound, and utterly heartbreaking question. “No, Michiru-san,” he said, his voice thick with an emotion he couldn’t quite name – a fierce protectiveness, a profound empathy. “No. Absolutely not. What happens here, what you feel, what you choose to do every single day… it is absolutely, terrifyingly, undeniably real. Perhaps, in many ways, it is even more real than anything I ever experienced in my own, mundane world. The story… it was just a flawed, incomplete window, a distorted mirror reflecting a sliver of your reality. It doesn’t define you. It doesn’t negate your suffering, or your courage, or your capacity for love and sacrifice.”

He looked around at their stunned, searching faces, lit by the flickering, unreliable firelight. He had laid himself bare, revealed his most unbelievable, his most vulnerable, his most insane truth. He felt strangely light, as if a tremendous, crushing burden had finally been lifted from his shoulders, but also terrified of their judgment, their potential rejection, their understandable disbelief.

It was Nana, surprisingly, who broke the heavy tension. She let out a long, shuddering breath, then, a small, hysterical, almost broken laugh escaped her lips, a sound utterly devoid of mirth. “A comic book…” she whispered, shaking her head in stunned, almost numb disbelief. “All this… all this horror… all this blood… because of a damned comic book character who just happens to look like me…” She looked directly at Arthur, and for the very first time since he had met her, he saw not anger, not betrayal, not even suspicion, but a flicker of something akin to a weary, horrified, almost surreal camaraderie. “Well, Ainsworth-san,” she said, her voice raw, cracked, almost unrecognizable. “It seems your life is, if anything, even stranger, even more unbelievable, than ours.”

Kyouya Onodera nodded slowly, his gaze distant, contemplative. “Indeed. This revelation… it re-contextualizes everything. Your past actions, your warnings… your apparent foreknowledge.” He paused, his sharp eyes meeting Arthur’s. “It also suggests that if such a narrative existed, then perhaps our struggles, our very existence, have some form of… pre-ordained pattern, even if you, personally, no longer have access to its specific details. Or, perhaps, and this is the more pertinent consideration, it offers us the definitive chance to consciously, deliberately break from it. To write our own ending.”

The future, which had always been a terrifying, oppressive unknown for Arthur despite his supposed “Talent,” now felt even more vast, more unpredictable, but also, strangely, more laden with a desperate, shared, and almost defiant agency. They were no longer just characters in a half-remembered story he carried within him like a curse. They were survivors, together, facing a monstrous, common enemy, armed now with not just their varied Talents and their hard-won courage, but with the most bizarre, the most unbelievable, the most world-shattering truth imaginable. Where they went from here, what they chose to do with this impossible knowledge, was now, truly, terrifyingly, and perhaps even liberatingly, up to them.

“Most of it,” Arthur admitted, his gaze dropping to the cave floor. He couldn’t meet Kyouya’s piercing stare. “My memories of it are… fragmented. Incomplete. Like trying to recall a dream years later. I remembered key events, character traits, some of the deaths. Enough to make those ‘predictions.’ Enough to try and… interfere, sometimes successfully, often not.” He thought of the sheer, unmitigated unreality of it all, more like some bizarre, avant-garde play one might see in a small festival theatre back in Sussex, something designed to shock and confuse, than any lived experience.

“So you knew,” Nana’s voice was stronger now, laced with a dawning, terrible anger, a profound sense of betrayal. “You knew what I was. What I would do. You knew about… about Michiru?” Her gaze flicked towards the fluffy-haired girl, who was now looking at Arthur with wide, wounded eyes.

“I knew… some of it,” Arthur said wretchedly. “I knew Michiru was… important. I knew she had a powerful healing Talent. I remembered… I remembered her dying to save you, Nana-san, in the story. That’s why I tried so desperately to stop her at the docks.” He looked at Michiru. “And later, why I hoped… her body being warm, it matched some obscure detail I half-recalled about how truly powerful healing Talents might interact with death in your world, according to the lore of that story.”

Michiru’s eyes filled with tears. “So… my life… Nana-chan’s life… it was all… written down somewhere?” she whispered, her voice trembling.

“In my world, yes,” Arthur confirmed, his own voice hoarse with a mixture of guilt and a strange, weary resignation. “A fiction. Here… here it’s your reality. Our reality now, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t you stop more of it?” Kyouya’s question was sharp, cutting. “If you possessed such… comprehensive foreknowledge, why allow so many to die? Why not expose Nana from the outset?”

Arthur finally looked up, meeting Kyouya’s accusatory gaze. “Do you think I didn’t want to?” he retorted, a flash of his old, tired frustration surfacing. “My memory was imperfect, like I said. I often only remembered crucial details moments before they were due to happen, if at all. And what if I had tried to change things too drastically? The story I remembered was horrific, yes, but what if my interference, my blundering attempts to play God based on a half-recalled comic book, made things even worse? Created new, unforeseen tragedies? And frankly, Kyouya-san, I was terrified. I was alone, in a foreign land, in a body that wasn’t mine, surrounded by people with superhuman abilities, one of whom was a trained assassin systematically killing everyone around me. My primary concern, I’ll admit it, was often my own survival, and trying to make sense of an impossible situation.”

He turned to Nana, whose face was a maelstrom of conflicting emotions – anger, betrayal, confusion, but also, Arthur thought he saw, a flicker of something else, something akin to a strange, twisted validation. If her life, her actions, had been “scripted” in some other dimension, did that lessen her own culpability? Did it make Tsuruoka’s manipulation even more monstrous?

“And what,” Jin Tachibana finally spoke, his voice still calm, still enigmatic, though his eyes held a new, sharp alertness, “does this… ‘story’… say happens next? Now that we have escaped this camp? Now that your ‘Talent,’ your foreknowledge of our specific immediate actions, is supposedly… depleted?”

Arthur shook his head. “That’s the problem. The story I remember… it focused primarily on Nana’s time on the island during that first year. It detailed many of her… assignments. It touched upon Kyouya’s investigation, Michiru’s sacrifice and return, the conflict with Rentaro. After that, my knowledge becomes… patchy. Vague. I remember broader strokes about Tsuruoka, about the Committee, about the ‘Enemies of Humanity,’ about a growing societal fear of Talents leading to… to situations like this internment camp.” He gestured around the damp cave. “But specific events? Timelines? Who lives, who dies from this point on? I have no idea. The narrative, for me, largely ended with the first year’s major events, or became too divergent from what I was experiencing once I started interfering. From the moment Michiru first returned, from Nana’s breakdown at the cliff, things here have already been… different, diverging significantly from what I dimly recalled.”

He paused, then added a crucial detail, his gaze shifting, almost reluctantly, towards Nana Hiiragi, who was watching him with a disturbing, unreadable intensity. “There’s something else about this… this ‘story’ you should know. It’s… or rather, it was… ongoing. Or at least, it was still being written, still being released, just before I… before I arrived here. I never read or saw the absolute end of it, because it hadn't been created yet in my time.”

He saw a flicker of something – hope? Dread? – in Nana’s eyes. “And Nana-san,” Arthur continued, choosing his words very carefully, the Japanese feeling heavy and inadequate for what he was trying to convey, “in the version of the story I knew, your character… she begins to change. Profoundly. After certain events, after certain realizations about Tsuruoka and the Committee… she starts… she starts trying to save Talents, not eliminate them.”

Nana’s breath hitched, an almost inaudible gasp. Kyouya’s head tilted slightly, his analytical gaze sharpening further.

“In fact,” Arthur pressed on, remembering the dark, vengeful turn the fictional Nana had taken, “the Nana in the manga… she wants nothing more than to, well…” He hesitated, searching for a way to translate a rather brutal English idiom. He pictured, for a fleeting, absurd moment, the old, battered woodchipper his neighbour in Crawley, old Mr. Henderson, used with noisy relish on his garden waste every autumn. “She wants to ram Tsuruoka into a… a proverbial woodchipper.” He made a crude, forceful pushing and grinding motion with his hands, then quickly dropped them, flushing slightly at the inadequacy of the gesture. “She wants to see him utterly, completely destroyed. And she’d undoubtedly go through every last member of The Committee to do so, to make them all pay for what they did to her, to everyone.”

He looked around at their stunned faces. “As for anyone else in the story… Kyouya-san, Michiru-san, Jin-san… what their ultimate fates were according to that unfinished narrative… I genuinely don’t know. My memory focuses mostly on… on Nana’s arc, as she was the titular character.”

A new, even heavier silence descended upon the cave, thick with the implications of this latest, astonishing revelation. The idea that Nana Hiiragi, their island’s most feared and prolific killer, was “destined” in some other-worldly fiction to become a savior, a destroyer of the very system that had created her, was almost too much to comprehend.

It was Michiru, her gentle voice trembling but firm, who finally voiced the question that hung heavy and unspoken in the damp, smoky air. “So, Arthur-san… if our lives here are… were… a story in your world… does that mean we are not truly real? That our pain… our choices… that they don’t truly matter in the grand scheme of things?”

Arthur looked at her, his heart aching at her innocent, profound, and utterly heartbreaking question. “No, Michiru-san,” he said, his voice thick with an emotion he couldn’t quite name – a fierce protectiveness, a profound empathy. “No. Absolutely not. What happens here, what you feel, what you choose to do every single day… it is absolutely, terrifyingly, undeniably real. Perhaps, in many ways, it is even more real than anything I ever experienced in my own, mundane world. The story… it was just a flawed, incomplete window, a distorted mirror reflecting a sliver of your reality. It doesn’t define you. It doesn’t negate your suffering, or your courage, or your capacity for love and sacrifice.”

He looked around at their stunned, searching faces, lit by the flickering, unreliable firelight. He had laid himself bare, revealed his most unbelievable, his most vulnerable, his most insane truth. He felt strangely light, as if a tremendous, crushing burden had finally been lifted from his shoulders, but also terrified of their judgment, their potential rejection, their understandable disbelief.

It was Nana, surprisingly, who broke the heavy tension. She let out a long, shuddering breath, then, a small, hysterical, almost broken laugh escaped her lips, a sound utterly devoid of mirth. “A comic book…” she whispered, shaking her head in stunned, almost numb disbelief. “All this… all this horror… all this blood… because of a damned comic book character who just happens to look like me… and who then, apparently, decides to go after Tsuruoka like a… a human woodchipper?” She looked directly at Arthur, and for the very first time since he had met her, he saw not anger, not betrayal, not even suspicion, but a flicker of something akin to a weary, horrified, almost surreal camaraderie. “Well, Ainsworth-san,” she said, her voice raw, cracked, almost unrecognizable. “It seems your life is, if anything, even stranger, even more unbelievable, than ours.”

Kyouya Onodera nodded slowly, his gaze distant, contemplative. “Indeed. This revelation… it re-contextualizes everything. Your past actions, your warnings… your apparent foreknowledge.” He paused, his sharp eyes meeting Arthur’s. “It also suggests that if such a narrative existed, then perhaps our struggles, our very existence, have some form of… pre-ordained pattern, even if you, personally, no longer have access to its specific details. Or, perhaps, and this is the more pertinent consideration,” his gaze flicked briefly towards Nana, then back to Arthur, “it offers us the definitive chance to consciously, deliberately break from it. Or, for some, to perhaps… embrace a different version of their scripted path.”

The future, which had always been a terrifying, oppressive unknown for Arthur despite his supposed “Talent,” now felt even more vast, more unpredictable, but also, strangely, more laden with a desperate, shared, and almost defiant agency. They were no longer just characters in a half-remembered story he carried within him like a curse. They were survivors, together, facing a monstrous, common enemy, armed now with not just their varied Talents and their hard-won courage, but with the most bizarre, the most unbelievable, the most world-shattering truth imaginable. Where they went from here, what they chose to do with this impossible knowledge, was now, truly, terrifyingly, and perhaps even liberatingly, up to them.

posting nothing but ai and hate in main tags/on others posts isnt gonna get you very far on tumblr

That is a great question. But needless to say, it's nothing to care about.

Nana is a dislikable character - that's what this account is for.

Chapter 20: Holiday Unease

As the turbulent second school year drew to its uneasy, hunger-tinged close, marked by Commandant Ide’s increasingly brutal regime within the internment camp rather than a traditional school break, the announcement of the term break and the departure of most students brought a tense, almost desperate kind of relief to those not deemed high-priority detainees. The ferries arrived, grimly efficient transports now, ready to carry the bulk of the student body back to the mainland, away from the island’s oppressive atmosphere of fear and scarcity, at least for a few precious weeks. The Committee, it seemed, was rotating its "assets."

Arthur Ainsworth, once again, found himself in the strange position of choosing to stay on the nearly deserted island. This time, however, his decision was not born of a lonely vigil over a lifeless body, but out of a complex, unspoken necessity. Michiru Inukai, though much recovered from her miraculous, near-death experience and subsequent regeneration, was still not deemed "fit for mainland reintegration" by the island's skeletal medical staff, who were themselves Committee operatives. She opted to remain, finding a quiet solace in the island’s sudden emptiness and, Arthur suspected with a complicated mix of protectiveness and trepidation, feeling a continued sense of fragile security in his and, surprisingly, Nana Hiiragi’s proximity.

Nana Hiiragi’s situation was, as always, more precarious and externally dictated. Just days before the scheduled departure of the main student body, she received a terse, undeniable summons – not a polite request, but a clear, unambiguous order delivered via a new, untampered Committee phone that had been “provided” to her. Commander Tsuruoka required her presence on the mainland. Immediately. Her face was a mask of grim resignation when she informed a worried Michiru and, by extension, a deeply suspicious Arthur. Despite her profound emotional turmoil, her shattered faith in the Committee, and the fragile, unspoken shift in her relationship with Michiru and even Arthur, she was still tethered by invisible, unbreakable chains to her handler.

Her reluctant departure left Arthur and Michiru in a strange, almost surreal state of quietude on the nearly empty island. The oppressive atmosphere of fear lifted slightly, replaced by a vast, echoing stillness. Arthur found himself falling into an unexpected role: caregiver, companion, and reluctant guardian to the gently recovering Michiru. They took slow, careful walks along the less treacherous coastal paths, Michiru’s laughter, when it occasionally, shyly surfaced, a sound as precious and rare as a blooming desert flower. He would listen, often for hours, as she spoke of her simple hopes for a peaceful future, her quiet joy in the small beauties of the island’s resilient nature – the wildflowers pushing through cracks in the concrete, the intricate patterns of lichen on the ancient stones. He, in turn, shared carefully edited, heavily censored fragments of his old life in England, tales of rainy afternoons, lukewarm tea, and the quiet, predictable rhythm of an existence that now felt like it belonged to another man, in another lifetime. A strange, almost domestic peace settled over them, a fragile bubble of normalcy in the heart of a deeply abnormal world, though the underlying tension, the knowledge of Tsuruoka’s ever-present shadow and Nana’s uncertain fate, was a constant, unspoken hum beneath the surface.

Nana’s meeting with Tsuruoka took place, not in a conventional office, but deep within the cold, sterile, and windowless confines of his isolated military base on the mainland. Standing before him in his severe, impeccably pressed uniform, his face an unreadable mask of polite inquiry, Nana found a sliver of her old defiance, a spark of the new, desperate courage born of her recent traumas. “I can’t keep doing this, Commander,” she stated, her voice surprisingly steady, though her hands were clenched tightly at her sides. “The killing… some of them… many of them… they’re not all enemies. They’re just… children. Scared children.”

Tsuruoka regarded her with an unblinking, reptilian gaze, his lips curved in a faint, almost imperceptible smile that did not reach his cold eyes. He seemed entirely unphased by her hesitant rebellion. “Your newfound sentimentality is a significant weakness, Hiiragi,” he said, his voice dangerously soft, each word a carefully polished stone dropped into a deep, dark well. “The mission parameters are clear, precise, and unchanged. Your personal feelings, your… moral discomforts… are entirely irrelevant to their successful execution. Or have you perhaps forgotten the severe consequences of… significant underperformance?” The veiled threat, unspoken but utterly potent, hung heavy in the sterile, climate-controlled air.

It was then that Tsuruoka, with a casual, almost dismissive gesture, introduced Mai. She was a young girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen, with enormous, sorrowful brown eyes that seemed to absorb all the light in the room, and an almost palpable air of profound, recent grief and bewildered vulnerability. Tsuruoka explained, with a distinct, chilling lack of compassion, that Mai’s beloved grandmother, her sole guardian, had recently passed away, leaving her a modest but, for some, tempting inheritance, and that Mai was now… tragically adrift, alone, and susceptible. He then instructed Nana, his voice regaining its usual crisp, commanding tone, to train the girl. “Make her efficient, Hiiragi. Make her focused. Like you used to be, before your… unfortunate decline in operational standards.”

Over the following emotionally fraught days, Nana found herself in the bizarre, almost surreal position of playing reluctant mentor to the silent, grieving child. It was a horrifying parody of her own indoctrination. She soon discovered, through Mai’s innocent, tearful, almost incoherent confessions during their stilted “training” sessions, that the girl was being systematically, cruelly conned out of her small inheritance by a manipulative, older girl – a former, expelled student from the island academy, Nana learned with a jolt of cold recognition – whom Mai had unfortunately encountered in her grief-stricken vulnerability. A protective instinct, fierce, unexpected, and deeply unwelcome to Nana’s Committee programming, rose within her. This young, heartbroken, traumatized girl was a victim, not a weapon to be callously sharpened and then discarded for the Committee’s bloody, inscrutable purposes.

Nana made a difficult, dangerous decision, one that was a direct act of insubordination, however carefully she planned to conceal it. She meticulously tracked down the con artist, a cynical, remorseless young woman living comfortably and extravagantly off Mai’s stolen money in a flashy city apartment. The confrontation was brief, brutal, the killing clinical, a chilling, unwelcome echo of Nana’s past lethal efficiency. But this time, Nana knew with a strange, defiant clarity, the motive was not blind obedience, not fear, but a twisted, desperate form of protection. She had eliminated a predator to save a lamb, even if it meant dirtying her own hands further.

When she next faced Tsuruoka, her face was a carefully composed mask of dutiful obedience. “Mai’s initial field training is complete, Commander,” she reported, her voice betraying none of her internal turmoil. “She… successfully neutralized the target who was financially exploiting her. Showed surprising initiative and a commendable lack of hesitation.”

Tsuruoka’s thin lips curved into that familiar, chillingly knowing smile. Whether he truly believed her, or simply chose to accept the satisfactory outcome regardless of the details, was impossible for Nana to tell. “Excellent, Hiiragi,” he said smoothly. “It seems your own… recent operational slump… hasn’t entirely dulled your invaluable training abilities. You are to return to the island school for the start of the new term. There are… new students arriving. And new directives.” Mai, he informed her with casual indifference, would be assigned her own separate “mission” shortly. Nana felt a sharp pang of guilt and fear, wondering what terrible fate awaited the young girl she had tried, in her own compromised, desperate way, to shield from the Committee’s insatiable maw.

During one particularly brutal, psychologically invasive debriefing session with Tsuruoka, where he relentlessly dissected her recent performance on the island – her failure to eliminate more designated targets, her inexplicable emotional volatility, her new, unwelcome tendency towards independent thought – Nana found herself deflecting, almost instinctively. Seeking to shift his critical, penetrating focus, or perhaps genuinely perplexed and troubled by Arthur’s continued, disruptive presence in her life, she mentioned him. “There’s a student, Commander,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “Tanaka Kenji. He has a… a very strange and unusually specific Talent for predicting future events. He’s… unpredictable. Disruptive. He seems to know things he shouldn’t, things he couldn’t possibly know.”

Tsuruoka’s usually impassive expression flickered with a spark of genuine, predatory interest. A student who could accurately predict the future? That was a variable of immense potential value, or considerable potential threat, that he hadn’t fully accounted for. He made a silent, mental note: Kenji Tanaka. This boy might indeed require further, more direct investigation. His file would be moved to a higher priority.

Back on the nearly deserted island, Arthur Ainsworth and Michiru Inukai continued their quiet, fragile existence, unaware of the dangerous ripples their actions, and Arthur’s mere existence, were creating in the wider, unseen world. Arthur found a strange, almost domestic rhythm in caring for Michiru, in their shared solitude. He read to her from the few English books he’d found in the school’s dusty, forgotten library annex, his voice a low murmur in the stillness. She, in turn, tried to teach him simple Japanese phrases, her gentle laughter at his clumsy pronunciation a rare, welcome sound. It was a temporary, precarious peace, an eye in the storm. Yet, beneath the surface calm, the knowledge of Tsuruoka, the omnipresent Committee, and Nana’s uncertain, perilous fate lingered, a constant, unspoken promise of storms yet to come. And unknown to Arthur, his name, Kenji Tanaka – or perhaps even Arthur Ainsworth – had just landed with a quiet thud on the desk of a very dangerous, very interested man.

Chapter 13: Rentaro's Rampage

The end of the first tumultuous school year was fast approaching, and with it, the much-touted, almost feverishly anticipated third-term “leaving party.” For most of the surviving students, those who hadn’t mysteriously vanished or succumbed to tragic “accidents,” it was a time of genuine, if somewhat brittle, excitement – a chance to celebrate the end of arduous exams, the temporary cessation of classes, and the upcoming blissful release of the term break. For Arthur Ainsworth, however, the impending festivities, with their forced gaiety and chaotic energy, only served to heighten his ever-present anxiety. In a place as steeped in deception and sudden violence as this island academy, a large, boisterous, and poorly supervised gathering felt less like a celebration and more like a powder keg perilously close to an open flame. He knew from the grim tapestry of his fragmented foreknowledge that the end of this first year was traditionally marked by yet another brutal series of violent events, a bloody full stop to the semester.

The spark, when it finally came, ignited just a few tense days before the scheduled party, delivered in the arrogant, sneering form of Rentaro Tsurumigawa. Rentaro was a smug, perpetually smirking student with a distinct air of self-importance, whose Talent, Arthur recalled with a shiver of unease, involved a particularly potent and dangerous form of astral projection. His projected self, an ethereal, shimmering duplicate, was largely intangible but could, with terrifying focus, manifest sharp, crystalline projectiles – deadly shards of solidified psychic energy – making him an elusive and lethal opponent. His physical body, however, remained inert, vulnerable, and necessarily hidden while he was projecting his consciousness elsewhere.

The first victim of Rentaro’s sudden escalation was Moguo Iijima, a somewhat boorish, athletically built boy known more for his loud voice and short temper than his intellect. Iijima was found dead in one of the communal bathhouses late one evening, slumped against the tiled wall, his chest and throat impaled by multiple glittering, razor-sharp crystalline shards that seemed to have materialized out of thin air, leaving wounds that spoke of a swift, vicious, and utterly merciless attack. The sheer brutality of the assault, and its almost surgical precision, sent a fresh wave of terror through the already traumatized student body.

Suspicion, swift and almost universal, immediately fell upon Iijima’s volatile and fiercely possessive girlfriend, Saeko Mochizuki. Saeko’s Talent, conveniently and damningly, allowed her to generate and propel similar-looking blades of solidified energy from her hands. She was known for her fiery temper and her jealous outbursts.

Nana Hiiragi, in her official capacity as the concerned and diligent class representative, took immediate charge of the initial “investigation,” her lovely face a mask of grave concern and profound sympathy. Arthur watched her closely as she moved among the shocked students, her voice soft and reassuring, yet her questions subtly probing. She interviewed a hysterical and vehemently protesting Saeko, who swore she hadn’t seen Iijima since earlier that afternoon. Nana’s questioning of Saeko was a masterclass in feigned empathy, yet her inquiries relentlessly circled back to Saeko’s relationship with the deceased. It soon emerged, through carefully elicited “gossip” that Nana “just happened to overhear” from supposedly distraught friends of the couple, that Iijima had been seriously considering breaking up with Saeko, complaining that she was too clingy, too demanding. It was the perfect, almost classical setup: a jealous girlfriend, a spurned lover with the known means and now, apparently, a powerful motive. Saeko looked guiltier by the minute, her frantic denials only serving to further entrench the suspicion against her in the eyes of her frightened peers.

Arthur, however, felt a persistent, nagging prickle of doubt. It all seemed a little too neat, too conveniently packaged. While Saeko was certainly capable of dramatic, volatile emotions, the cold, calculated precision of the attack, the deliberate nature of the wounds designed to mimic her Talent so perfectly, felt off. It felt… framed. He found himself observing Rentaro Tsurumigawa, who was among the most vocal in expressing his profound "shock" and "outrage" at Iijima's murder, his performance just a shade too theatrical, his condemnations of Saeko a little too quick, a little too vehement for Arthur's liking.

The one person on the entire island who seemed to genuinely believe in Saeko’s innocence, who refused to be swayed by the mounting circumstantial evidence and the tide of popular opinion, was Michiru Inukai. Driven by her innate, unwavering empathy and a profound, almost childlike refusal to believe anyone could be so cruel without overwhelming, irrefutable proof, Michiru quietly, almost invisibly, began her own gentle inquiries. While Nana was methodically building a seemingly airtight circumstantial case against the increasingly distraught Saeko, Michiru, with her disarming gentleness and shy persistence, spoke to students who had seen Saeko around the supposed time of the murder, students who could, if pieced together, provide a surprisingly solid alibi. She found small, almost insignificant inconsistencies in the presumed timeline, tiny details that didn’t quite add up. She even, with a courage Arthur found astounding in someone so timid, managed to find a nervous underclassman who admitted, under Michiru’s gentle questioning, to having seen Rentaro Tsurumigawa lurking near the bathhouse shortly before Iijima’s body was discovered, looking unusually agitated and furtive.

Michiru, her heart pounding in her chest but her quiet resolve firm as steel, presented her painstakingly gathered findings to Nana and a clearly reluctant Mr. Saito. The evidence wasn’t conclusive, irrefutable proof of Rentaro’s guilt, but it was more than enough to completely dismantle the flimsy, circumstantial case against Saeko, who promptly collapsed in a heap of tearful, gasping relief. Nana, faced with Michiru’s earnest, undeniable facts and the clear, logical holes they punched in her preferred narrative, had no choice but to publicly concede that Saeko was, in all likelihood, innocent. Arthur saw a distinct, dangerous flicker of cold annoyance in Nana’s eyes – Michiru’s unwavering, inconvenient goodness had complicated things considerably. It had also, he realized with a sudden, sickening lurch, unknowingly painted a very large, very dangerous target on Michiru’s own back.

Rentaro Tsurumigawa was incandescent with fury. His meticulous, arrogant plan to eliminate Iijima (for reasons Arthur still couldn’t fathom, though he suspected some deep-seated prior grudge, a bitter rivalry, or perhaps simply a demonstration of his own perceived superiority) and then neatly frame the volatile Saeko for the crime had been utterly, unexpectedly ruined by, of all people, the timid, fluffy-haired, seemingly insignificant Michiru Inukai. His rage, Arthur sensed, was a poisonous, festering thing.

The day of the leaving party arrived, cloaked in an atmosphere of forced jollity and underlying, unspoken fear. The school gymnasium had been hastily and somewhat haphazardly decorated with colourful streamers and balloons that seemed to mock the grim realities of their island existence. Music, tinny and overly cheerful, blared from a set of aging speakers. Students, dressed in their slightly less formal attire, milled about, attempting a semblance of normal teenage festivity, their laughter often a shade too loud, their smiles a little too bright.

Arthur, however, couldn’t shake a profound sense of impending doom. He kept a close, anxious eye on Michiru, who was trying her best to enjoy herself, chatting shyly with a small group of girls, but seemed subdued, her usual gentle radiance dimmed, perhaps by a subconscious sense of the danger she had courted.

Then, Michiru, looking a little pale, excused herself from her group, murmuring something about needing some fresh air. A moment later, Arthur, his senses on high alert, saw Rentaro Tsurumigawa detach himself from the edge of the crowd and slip silently out of the gymnasium through a side door, his eyes glinting with a chilling, predatory light. Arthur’s blood ran cold. Rentaro was going after Michiru.

Before Arthur could even begin to formulate a plan, before he could push through the throng of dancing students, Nana Hiiragi, who had also, Arthur now realized, been observing Michiru with an unusually protective, almost hawk-like gaze, noticed Rentaro’s stealthy departure and Michiru’s sudden absence. A look of genuine, unfeigned alarm – an expression Arthur had rarely, if ever, seen on her carefully controlled features – flashed across Nana’s face. Without a word, without a moment’s hesitation, Nana sprinted out of the gymnasium, her own party dress a blur of pink, clearly in pursuit.

This was escalating far too quickly, spiraling out of his limited control. Arthur knew he couldn’t possibly catch up to them on foot, nor could he hope to fight Rentaro’s deadly, intangible astral projection. His gaze swept frantically across the gymnasium, landing on Kyouya Onodera, who was standing near the overloaded punch bowl, his usual expression of aloof indifference firmly in place, looking utterly bored by the surrounding revelry. Kyouya, with his immortality and his sharp, analytical mind, was the only one on the island who might conceivably be able to help Nana, to stop Rentaro.

Arthur rushed over to him, his phone already active, his fingers flying across the small screen. “Onodera-san!” his translated voice was sharp, urgent, cutting through Kyouya’s apparent reverie. “It’s Rentaro Tsurumigawa! He’s projecting! He’s hunting Michiru Inukai! Nana Hiiragi just went after them, trying to protect her!” Kyouya’s eyes, usually cool and indifferent, sharpened instantly with a focused intensity, and perhaps, Arthur thought, a flicker of something that might have been genuine concern. “His real body… while he’s projecting, it has to be hidden somewhere nearby, probably within the school building! It’ll be vulnerable! If you can find it, attack it, you can disrupt the projection, stop him completely!”

Kyouya Onodera didn’t waste time with questions or expressions of surprise. He simply absorbed the information, his mind clearly processing it at lightning speed. He gave Arthur a single, curt nod, then strode purposefully out of the gymnasium, his gaze already sweeping the corridors with a focused, predatory intensity, as if he were already searching for Rentaro’s hidden, vulnerable physical form.

Arthur was left standing amidst the oblivious, laughing, dancing party-goers, a knot of cold, sickening fear tightening in his stomach. Nana, Michiru, Rentaro, Kyouya – they were all heading for a violent, inevitable collision, and he could only pray, with a fervour he hadn’t felt in years, that Kyouya would be fast enough, and Nana strong enough, to avert the worst of the tragedy he knew, with a terrible, chilling certainty, was coming. The distant, tinny sound of festive music seemed to mock his rising, helpless panic. He knew, with a sudden, desperate clarity, where they would likely end up: the isolated docks. He turned and fled the gymnasium himself, his own desperate chase beginning.

Nana is an evil little bitch