Grendel Jinx In Talentless Nana: A Tale Of Talents And Deceptions (on Wattpad) Https://www.wattpad.com/story/393719322-grendel-jinx-in-talentless-nana-a-tale-of-talents?utm_source=web&utm_medium=tumblr&utm_content=share_myworks&wp_uname=MrTAToad 

Would be even better if Nana is killed by someone she trusted. Would be nicely ironic

Chapter 11: The Time Traveler's End

The brutal, efficient murders of the two bullies, Etsuko and Marika, served as a chilling punctuation mark in the ongoing, silent reign of terror orchestrated by Nana Hiiragi. While those killings might have been, in part, opportunistic or driven by a cold, strategic desire to protect her new “project,” Michiru Inukai, Arthur knew that Nana was also methodically working her way through the list of Talents provided by her shadowy handler, Tsuruoka. She was identifying and neutralizing those individuals whose abilities were deemed a significant future threat to the Committee’s unseen agenda.

One such individual, whose very existence posed a direct and intolerable risk to Nana’s operational secrecy, was Yuusuke Tachibana. Tachibana was a boisterous, somewhat arrogant, and often loudmouthed boy whose Talent was one of the most potentially disruptive on the island: he could, with a visible shimmer and a slight dizzying effect on nearby observers, travel through time. His ability wasn’t precise or grand; he couldn’t leap years into the past or future. Rather, he experienced short, often uncontrolled, and disorienting bursts into the very near past, usually just a few seconds or, at most, a couple of minutes. He’d often use it in a showy, almost juvenile way – replaying a dropped catch in a ball game to make a spectacular save, or “predicting” the next card to be turned over in a casual game by having already seen it a moment before. But Nana, with her assassin’s mindset, would undoubtedly see the immense danger in such an ability. Someone who could potentially witness her committing a murder, or preparing a trap, and then rewind time, however briefly, to expose her or warn her victim, was an unacceptable variable.

Arthur watched with a growing sense of dread as Nana subtly began to engage Tachibana in conversation over several days. Her questions were always light, posed with an air of innocent, almost girlish curiosity, expertly probing the nature, range, and limitations of his unique Talent. Tachibana, clearly flattered by the attention from the pretty and popular class representative, boasted openly and carelessly about his abilities, demonstrating them with small, unnecessary temporal skips, entirely oblivious to the predatory intelligence gathering happening behind Nana’s bright, encouraging smile and wide violet eyes.

Knowing Tachibana’s grim fate from the anime – a lonely, silent death by drowning in the island’s picturesque, deceptively tranquil lake – Arthur felt a particular, gnawing urgency. Tachibana, for all his casual arrogance and showboating, wasn’t malicious. His Talent, while potentially problematic for a clandestine operative like Nana, hadn’t been used to harm anyone. He was simply a boy with an extraordinary, poorly understood gift, who was about to pay the ultimate price for it.

Arthur sought out Tachibana during a relatively quiet free period, finding him by the lake’s edge, cheerfully and rather inexpertly skipping flat stones across its placid, sun-dappled surface. The water was a deep, inviting blue, its stillness belying the cold darkness that lay beneath.

“Tachibana-san,” Arthur began, his phone held ready, the synthesized Japanese voice emerging into the peaceful lakeside air. He gestured vaguely towards the shimmering water. “A word of caution, if I may. From one wielder of a… perception-altering Talent to another.” He paused, trying to imbue his next words with a suitable gravity. “My own Talent… it sometimes shows me ripples, disturbances in the flow of things, especially around those with powerful or unusual abilities. Your ability, Tachibana-san… it creates such significant ripples. Be wary of still waters today. Very wary indeed. Still waters can be… deceptive.” He tried to inject a note of ominous foreboding into the translated warning, hoping to pierce through Tachibana’s characteristic self-assurance.

Tachibana laughed, a loud, confident, dismissive sound that sent a flock of small birds scattering from the nearby trees. “Ripples? Disturbances? Still waters? Don’t you worry your strange little head about me, Tanaka-kun,” he said, with an arrogant grin, not even bothering to look away from his stone-skipping. “If I see any hint of trouble, I’ll just pop back a few minutes and avoid it altogether! That’s the great thing about my Talent, isn’t it? I’m practically untouchable.” He selected another flat stone and, with a flick of his wrist, sent it skittering across the lake’s surface, supremely self-assured and clearly unconcerned by Arthur’s cryptic, unsolicited pronouncement.

Arthur sighed internally, a wave of helpless frustration washing over him. He’d tried. He’d delivered the warning as clearly and as ominously as he could without revealing his true knowledge. But Tachibana’s overconfidence in his own ability was an impenetrable shield against any form of caution.

A day later, Yuusuke Tachibana was officially reported missing by a “concerned” Mr. Saito after he failed to appear for morning classes.

Nana Hiiragi, naturally, was at the forefront of the students feigning distress and organizing impromptu search parties that, Arthur noted with a grim certainty, conspicuously and deliberately avoided any thorough search of the lake area or its immediate surroundings. He knew, with a chilling clarity, what had happened. Nana would have lured Tachibana to the lake, perhaps under the pretext of wanting to see his fascinating Talent in action in a “safe, open space where no one would be accidentally affected by his temporal shifts.” Then, at a moment when he was vulnerable, perhaps mid-skip, disoriented, or simply distracted by her deceptive charm, she would have incapacitated him – a swift blow to the head, perhaps, or a poisoned needle if she wanted to be certain – and then, with cold, brutal efficiency, drowned him in the cold, unforgiving waters of the lake. A silent, lonely end, leaving no immediate trace, no struggling victim to rewind time and raise an alarm.

The true, macabre horror of her plan, however, came a little later that same day. Arthur observed Nana in a quiet, intense conversation with Sorano Aijima, a timid, easily intimidated girl whose Talent was cryokinesis – the ability to freeze water and lower temperatures significantly in her immediate vicinity. He didn’t need to hear their hushed words, or see the fear in Sorano’s eyes as Nana spoke with that terrifyingly sweet smile, to understand the purpose of their interaction. Nana was coercing her, using a mixture of charm, subtle threats, and the authority of her position as class representative.

That evening, a sudden, unseasonable, and highly localized cold snap seemed to settle over the lake. By the next morning, a significant portion of its surface was frozen solid, a glittering, unnaturally smooth sheet of ice under the pale, indifferent winter sun.

Some of the more adventurous and less thoughtful students, thrilled by the unexpected novelty, somehow managed to procure a motley collection of old ice skates – where from, on this isolated island, Arthur couldn’t begin to imagine. Soon, they were gliding, laughing, and performing clumsy pirouettes across the frozen expanse, their cheerful shouts echoing across the water, entirely oblivious to the horrifying fact that they were dancing on Yuusuke Tachibana’s watery, icy grave. Nana Hiiragi watched them from the lake’s edge, a small, almost imperceptible, chillingly satisfied smile playing on her lips. The evidence of her crime was now sealed away, perfectly preserved, at least until the spring thaw, by which time she would likely be long gone, or other events would have overtaken this one.

Arthur felt a particular, visceral coldness towards this murder. Hoshino, at least, had been dying anyway, his life already tragically curtailed. The bullies had been actively cruel, inviting retribution in their own small way. Habu had been a blackmailer, practically signing his own death warrant with his foolish arrogance. But Tachibana… Tachibana had been guilty of nothing more than possessing a powerful, potentially disruptive Talent and a naive, boyish trust in a pretty, pink-haired girl. Nana hadn’t even allowed him the dignity of a swift, forgotten end, instead encasing him in an icy tomb, his final resting place a spectacle for the unknowing, a grotesque parody of winter fun.

He stood by the edge of the frozen lake, the cheerful, carefree shouts of the skaters grating on his nerves like nails on a chalkboard. His phone felt heavy and useless in his pocket. What good were his warnings, his fragmented knowledge, if they were so easily dismissed, so effortlessly circumvented by arrogance or naivety? He was failing, again and again, in his self-appointed, impossible mission. Each death was another heavy stone added to the crushing weight on his conscience, another name on a list he was powerless to shorten. The vibrant, living world of the island, with its sunlit paths and whispering bamboo groves, felt increasingly like a meticulously crafted, beautiful stage for Nana Hiiragi’s deadly, unending performances, and he, one of the few who knew the horrifying script, could only watch in mute, impotent despair as the body count continued to rise.

Thank you @sku-te and everyone who got me to 5 reblogs!

Hej

Heh

Chapter 38: Weighing the Price of Truth

Arthur’s challenging question – “Unless, of course, anyone else has any better ideas?” – hung heavy in the smoky air of the cave, a stark invitation that no one seemed immediately eager to accept. The fire crackled, spitting a few defiant sparks, but otherwise, a profound, contemplative silence enveloped the small group of fugitives. He watched their faces: Nana, her expression a complex mixture of fear and a dawning, almost reluctant consideration; Kyouya, his gaze distant, already dissecting the proposal with his sharp, analytical intellect; Michiru, her brow furrowed with worry, her gentle eyes fixed on Arthur with a mixture of concern and a hesitant, fragile trust; and Jin, his usual enigmatic smile softened into something more thoughtful, more appraising.

It was Michiru who spoke first, her voice barely a whisper, yet carrying a surprising weight in the quiet. “Arthur-san… your idea… it is very brave. Terribly brave. But… surely there must be another way? A way that doesn’t put you in such… such direct, unimaginable danger? If we all stayed together, perhaps, found a truly remote place…”

Arthur offered her a small, sad smile. “I wish that were possible, Michiru-san. Truly, I do. But Tsuruoka’s reach is long. The Committee’s resources are vast. There is no place on this earth, I suspect, where we would be truly, permanently safe from them if they were determined to find us. Hiding is merely delaying the inevitable. We need to confront the source of the poison, not just flee its symptoms.”

Kyouya Onodera finally broke his silence, his voice cutting through the smoky air with its characteristic cool precision. “Setting aside, for the moment, the almost suicidal audacity of your core proposal, Ainsworth,” he began, his pale eyes fixed on Arthur, “let us consider the immediate logistical impossibilities. You propose to return to that island, an island where your previous persona, Kenji Tanaka, is now undoubtedly flagged as a problematic individual, possibly even believed dead or ‘neutralized’ by some. You would require an entirely new identity – one so flawless, so deeply embedded with verifiable, albeit fabricated, history, that it could withstand the Committee’s intense, paranoid scrutiny.” He paused. “Crafting such an identity, complete with supporting documentation, academic credentials for a teaching position no less, and a believable backstory for a foreigner seeking employment in such a… unique educational institution… that is not a simple task.”

He was, Arthur knew, entirely correct. The sheer bureaucratic nightmare of what he was proposing, even before considering the physical dangers, was daunting. Forging a new life from whole cloth to bring down a shadowy, all-powerful government organization… it was a far cry from his old life, from debating complex VAT codes with Henderson from the accounts department back in the Crawley borough council offices. Though Henderson, Arthur mused with a flicker of grim internal humor, in his own quiet, pedantic way, could be just as terrifyingly thorough when he found a discrepancy. Still, this was hardly the stuff of the spy thrillers one might pick up from a dusty second-hand bookshop on a dreary Tuesday afternoon in… well, any quiet, ordinary English town. This was their insane, desperate reality.

Nana, who had been listening intently, her expression unreadable, now spoke, her voice low and strained. “Kyouya-san is right. The island’s security protocols, especially for new staff, will be… extreme. Tsuruoka is no fool. After the events of the last few years, after our escape from the mainland camp, he will have tightened everything. Background checks will be exhaustive. And even if you did somehow get through the initial vetting, as a teacher, you would be under constant surveillance. Every lesson, every interaction, potentially monitored.” Her gaze flickered towards Arthur, a silent warning in their violet depths. “And my… my own file… Tsuruoka knows I was… close… to Michiru-san. He knows you interfered with my assignment concerning Nanao Nakajima. He knows you are an anomaly. If he suspected for a moment that ‘Kenji Tanaka’ had somehow returned under a new guise…” She didn’t need to finish the sentence.

“I understand all of that,” Arthur said, his voice quiet but firm. “The risks are astronomical. But what are the alternatives? Do we have another viable plan? Another way to strike at the heart of the Committee’s operations, to reach those children before they are turned into… into what Tsuruoka intends for them?”

A heavy silence descended again. No one offered an alternative. Their current situation – fugitives, hiding in a cave, with limited resources and the constant threat of discovery – was a testament to their lack of viable long-term options.

It was Jin Tachibana who finally spoke, his voice as smooth and unruffled as ever, though his eyes, when they met Arthur’s, held a new, almost unnerving intensity. “The creation of a sufficiently robust new identity for a foreign national, complete with verifiable, if entirely fictitious, academic and professional credentials,” he began, his tone almost conversational, as if discussing the weather, “while indeed complex and resource-intensive, is not… entirely beyond the realm of possibility.”

All eyes turned to him. Nana looked particularly surprised.

“I maintain… certain connections,” Jin continued, a faint, enigmatic smile playing on his lips. “Individuals with particular… skills… in the art of information fabrication and bureaucratic navigation. It would be costly. It would be time-consuming. And there would be no guarantee of success. The Committee’s counter-intelligence measures are formidable.” He paused, his gaze sweeping over Arthur. “You would also, Ainsworth-san, need to significantly alter your physical appearance. Hair colour, eye colour, perhaps even subtle changes to your facial structure, if possible. You would need to adopt entirely new mannerisms, a new way of speaking, a new way of being. You would have to become someone else entirely, someone so unremarkable, so devoid of threat, that you could pass beneath Tsuruoka’s ever-watchful gaze.”

“And even if all of that were possible,” Kyouya interjected, his skepticism still evident, “how would you gain entry? That specific island academy is not a place one simply applies to for a teaching position through conventional channels. It is a black site, a secret institution. They recruit their staff, especially their foreign language instructors, through very specific, very carefully vetted, and often deeply compromised channels.”

Jin nodded slowly. “That,” he conceded, “would be the most significant hurdle. Finding a legitimate, or legitimately falsifiable, opening. Engineering an opportunity. It would require… patience. And a considerable degree of luck. Or, perhaps, the creation of a vacancy where none currently exists.” The last words were spoken with a chilling, almost casual quietness that sent a shiver down Arthur’s spine.

“So,” Nana said, her voice barely a whisper, her gaze fixed on Arthur with a mixture of fear, disbelief, and a dawning, reluctant respect. “You are truly… truly willing to attempt this? To walk back into that place?”

Arthur met her gaze, his own resolve hardening despite the terrifying litany of obstacles they had just outlined. “If Jin-san believes it is even remotely feasible to create the necessary cover,” he said, his voice steady, “and if a credible opportunity, however slim, can be found or made… then yes, Hiiragi-san. I am. Because, frankly,” he looked around at their tired, hunted faces, “I see no other way to even begin to fight back against what they are doing. We are currently reacting. This… this is an attempt, however desperate, however insane, to act.”

Michiru sniffled quietly, wiping a tear from her eye, but she said nothing more, her earlier protestations silenced by the grim, undeniable logic of their desperate situation.

Kyouya let out a long, slow breath. “The potential for catastrophic failure,” he stated, his voice flat, “is exceptionally high. The probability of your survival, Ainsworth, should you be discovered, is effectively zero.”

“I am aware of that, Onodera-san,” Arthur replied, his own voice equally devoid of emotion. “I have been living on borrowed time since the moment I arrived in this world. Perhaps it’s time I tried to make that borrowed time… count for something more than just my own continued, miserable existence.”

A new kind of silence fell upon the group then, no longer the silence of stunned disbelief, but the heavy, contemplative silence of individuals weighing the terrible, almost unbearable price of a desperate, fragile, and perhaps entirely illusory hope. The fire had burned low, casting long, flickering shadows that danced like accusing spectres on the damp cave walls. The decision had not yet been made, but the first, terrifying steps onto a new, even more perilous path, had been irrevocably taken.

im gifflfing ur blog is so funy

I've no idea what that means, but thanks!

Chapter 1: The Unwanted Journey

The absolute, unequivocal last sensation Arthur Ainsworth, fifty-one years, three months, and a dreary Tuesday into a life he often felt was on loan from a particularly uninspired mail-order catalogue, registered with any degree of certainty was the gritty, slightly abrasive texture of overly toasted wholemeal bread lodging uncomfortably between his teeth. The sharp, familiar, and frankly unwelcome tang of too-bitter, cheap chunky marmalade still coated his tongue. He’d been staring blankly out of his perpetually damp Crawley kitchen window, past the condensation fogging the lower pane, at the aggressively, almost offensively cheerful fuschia in Mrs. Henderson’s meticulously manicured, gnome-infested garden. He was contemplating, with a familiar sense of existential dread, the yawning, featureless abyss of another interminable Tuesday morning meeting about synergistic resource allocation and departmental overheads, when the very fabric of his mundane reality had simply… dissolved.

Not in a gentle, cinematic fade to black, but with a violent, nauseating, wrenching compression, as if he were being forcibly, painfully squeezed through the eye of a cosmic needle that was far too small for his middle-aged, slightly paunchy frame. A silent scream, a pure rictus of terror and disbelief, tore from lungs that, a horrifying microsecond later, felt alarmingly… undersized, tight, and distressingly inefficient.

He blinked. Once. Twice. His vision swam, a nauseating, disorienting blur like looking through a disturbed goldfish bowl that had been filled with murky water. The comforting, slightly musty, entirely familiar aroma of his own small kitchen – old tea towels needing a boil wash, the faint, lingering ghost of last night’s overcooked shepherd’s pie, the metallic tang of the ancient gas hob – was gone, brutally, inexplicably supplanted. Now, his nostrils flared against an aggressive, unwelcome olfactory assault: the sharp, briny sting of sea air, the unmistakable, oily reek of diesel fumes, and beneath it all, a cloying, faintly sweetish, almost chemical perfume he couldn’t quite identify – cheap cherry blossom air freshener, perhaps? It made his stomach roil with a sudden, violent wave of nausea.

He wasn’t standing, a half-eaten piece of toast clutched in his rapidly cooling hand. He was seated, or rather, vibrating, perched precariously on a ridiculously hard, unforgivingly cold plastic bench that thrummed with the powerful, rhythmic, almost hypnotic beat of a massive engine. The vibration resonated through his slight, unfamiliar frame, up his spine, and into his teeth, making them ache. His entire field of vision still swam, a nauseating blur that slowly, reluctantly, resolved into... a boat? No, this was larger, more substantial. A ferry, judging by its considerable size and the churning, slate-grey-green water visible through a salt-streaked, grimy window.

His hands. He stared down at his hands, which were resting, almost formally, on knees that felt strangely knobbly, pointed, and alarmingly close to his face. They were small, slender, the skin unnervingly smooth and pale, entirely unblemished. Gone were the familiar, comforting liver spots, the intricate network of fine wrinkles he’d painstakingly earned over fifty-one years of worry and indifferent skincare. Gone, most shockingly, was the faded, silvery-white scar on his left thumb, a cherished, almost nostalgic memento from a foolish, boyish attempt to whittle a stick with his father’s intimidatingly sharp penknife when he was barely ten. These were the hands of a boy, a complete stranger. A wave of pure, unadulterated vertigo, cold and terrifying, washed over him, making the already unsteady deck beneath his feet seem to tilt and sway even more alarmingly.

Panic, sharp, icy, and visceral as a shard of glass plunged into his chest, clawed its way up his throat, a silent, suffocating, desperate scream. He looked down further, a strangled, wheezing gasp escaping lips that felt thin, unfamiliar, and strangely unresponsive to his mental commands. A pristine, almost unnaturally dark-blue school uniform – a tailored blazer with an unfamiliar, elaborate embroidered crest on the breast pocket, a stark white, slightly stiff shirt, a neatly, tightly knotted tie that felt like a miniature noose around his suddenly slender neck, and sharply creased, unfamiliar trousers – encased a frame so lean, so light, it felt like inhabiting a fragile, empty birdcage. His comfortable, tea-stained cardigan, his worn, beloved corduroys, his trusty, down-at-heel slippers – all relegated to a life, a world, a self, that felt galaxies, lifetimes, away.

This isn't happening, the thought was a frantic, desperate, looping denial against the overwhelming, irrefutable sensory evidence. This is a stroke. A brain aneurysm. A complete psychotic breakdown. A ridiculously vivid, cheese-induced dream brought on by that questionable Stilton I had before bed. But the insistent, bone-jarring thrum of the powerful engine beneath him, the penetrating chill of the damp sea air seeping through the thin, unfamiliar fabric of the school uniform, the too-tight, starched collar chafing uncomfortably against his strangely youthful skin – it was all terrifyingly, undeniably, horribly concrete.

He was on a ferry. A modern, somewhat utilitarian vessel, judging by the functional, uncomfortable plastic seating and the smeary, salt-streaked windows that offered a bleak, uninviting view of the turbulent, grey-green water churning past under a bruised, weeping, overcast sky. In the middle distance, wreathed in a swirling, clinging mist that seemed to swallow the light, an island rose steeply, almost menacingly, from the restless sea, its slopes a dense, unbroken, unwelcoming carpet of dark green. It reminded him, vaguely, unsettlingly, of some of the starker, more dramatic parts of the south coast back home, but… wrong. Utterly, fundamentally wrong. The light was wrong, the air felt wrong, the very angle of the sun, when it briefly, weakly, pierced the oppressive cloud cover, seemed alien. What a dreadful, dreadful May this was turning out to be, he thought with a sudden, bizarrely specific pang of dislocated misery, before shaking his head to dispel the irrelevant, nonsensical thought.

Around him, other teenagers – actual, living, breathing teenagers, their faces a sea of youthful energy and incomprehensible expressions – chattered and laughed and scrolled through their phones, their voices a bewildering, overwhelming cacophony in a language that flowed around him like fast-moving water, every sibilant hiss, every sharp vowel, every lilting intonation entirely, utterly alien and incomprehensible. They all wore the same dark blue uniform, a depressing ocean of conformity. They were all, he noted with a fresh, sinking wave of despair, Japanese.

“Excuse me,” he tried, the English words feeling thick, clumsy, unnaturally foreign, and obscenely loud in this new, higher-pitched, unfamiliar voice. A few heads turned, their expressions ranging from mild curiosity to outright, disdainful indifference. Blank, uncomprehending eyes stared back at him for a moment before dismissively turning away. One girl, her hair an impossible, almost aggressive shade of bubblegum pink tied into ridiculously perky pigtails, giggled openly into her hand, then whispered something clearly amusing to her smirking friend, who also giggled. The isolation was immediate, profound, absolute. He was a foreigner in a land he didn’t recognize, in a body that wasn’t his own, speaking a language no one here apparently understood. He was, he realized with a sudden, sickening lurch of his stomach, utterly, terrifyingly alone.

His heart, this new, unfamiliar heart, hammered a frantic, panicked rhythm against ribs that felt alarmingly close to the surface of his skin. He patted the pockets of the unfamiliar school blazer, a desperate, fumbling, almost spastic search for something, anything, familiar, an anchor in this maelstrom of unreality. His worn leather wallet, with its comforting, familiar collection of well-thumbed loyalty cards, a few emergency pound coins, and that faded, creased photograph of his late, beloved spaniel, Buster? Gone. His house keys, his car keys, the comforting jingle they usually made in his pocket? Vanished. But then, his fingers, these new, slender, unnervingly smooth fingers, brushed against a familiar, solid rectangular outline in the blazer’s inside pocket.

His mobile phone. An older, slightly battered, but entirely reliable smartphone. His lifeline. With trembling, uncoordinated hands, he pulled it out, its familiar weight a small, almost insignificant comfort in this ocean of terrifying unfamiliarity. The screen flickered to life, displaying its usual, incongruously cheerful background of a slightly out-of-focus bluebell wood he’d photographed on a long-forgotten bank holiday walk. 27% battery. A fresh, sharp spike of pure, undiluted panic lanced through him, colder and more terrifying than the sea wind. Twenty-seven percent. How long would that last? Hours? Minutes? It was his only link to potential understanding, his only tool for navigating this waking nightmare.

He fumbled with the touchscreen, his larger, older man’s muscle memory struggling, fighting against the delicate, precise coordination required by these smaller, younger, entirely unfamiliar teenage hands. He found the voice translation app – a half-forgotten relic from a disastrous, sunburnt package holiday to Majorca with his ex-wife nearly a decade ago, an app he’d kept on his phone for reasons he couldn’t now fathom but was, in this moment, profoundly, desperately grateful for. He jabbed clumsily at the English-to-Japanese setting, his finger slipping twice on the smooth glass.

Clutching the phone like a drowning man grasping a flimsy piece of driftwood, he turned to a boy slumped apathetically beside him on the hard plastic bench. The boy was entirely, almost aggressively, engrossed in a sleek, brightly coloured handheld gaming device that emitted a series of tinny, irritatingly cheerful bleeps and bloops. “Excuse me,” Arthur said again, his voice shaking slightly as he spoke clearly and slowly into the phone’s microphone. The device chirped once, a small, tinny, almost hopeful sound, then emitted a short, polite, perfectly synthesized Japanese phrase.

The boy jumped as if he’d been poked with a sharp stick, startled, his game momentarily forgotten. He looked up, his eyes wide with surprise, then narrowed with suspicion as he took in Arthur’s clearly foreign, distressed appearance. He pointed a questioning finger at himself, then at Arthur. “Watashi? Anata?” (Me? You?)

Arthur nodded vigorously, a ridiculous, almost hysterical wave of relief washing over him at this tiny, fragile, almost insignificant flicker of basic human comprehension. He spoke urgently into the phone again, the question feeling utterly absurd, almost laughably inadequate, even as he voiced it. “Where are we going? Please, can you tell me where this ferry is going?”

The phone chirped. The boy listened, his expression still wary, then replied in a rapid, almost unintelligible stream of Japanese, gesturing vaguely with his free hand towards the misty, forbidding island looming ever closer on the grey horizon. The phone dutifully, if somewhat tinnily, translated back: “To the island. We are all going to the island. For the special school.”

“School?” Arthur croaked, the word catching in his throat like a fishbone. He repeated it into the phone, needing confirmation, needing something, anything, to make sense.

“Yes. The academy. For those with Talents.”

Talents? A sliver of icy, unwelcome unease, sharp as a shard of freshly broken glass, pierced through the thick fog of Arthur’s confusion and terror. The word echoed with a dark, half-forgotten, deeply unpleasant familiarity. The island. The special school. For the Talented. His mind, sluggish with shock, began to churn, to sift through old, discarded memories, searching for a connection, a terrifying, almost unthinkable recognition beginning to dawn.

The ferry docked with a gentle, almost anticlimactic bump against a solid, seaweed-stained concrete pier. The previously chattering students began to gather their bags, a river of dark blue uniforms flowing with a surprising, almost disciplined orderliness towards the disembarkation ramp. Arthur, feeling like a man walking to his own execution, followed them woodenly, his legs like leaden stilts, his mind a maelstrom of fear and dawning, horrifying comprehension. The island air, when he finally stepped onto solid, unmoving ground, was humid, heavy, carrying the cloying scent of pine needles, damp earth, and something else, something faintly metallic, like old blood. A few stern-faced adults, presumably teachers, their expressions uniformly unwelcoming, were directing the arriving students with curt, impatient gestures towards a narrow, winding path leading steeply upwards, into the island’s dense, shadowy, and deeply foreboding interior.

He walked as if in a trance, the phone clutched in his hand like a talisman against the encroaching darkness. This new, young body, this ‘Kenji Tanaka’ as his hastily discovered student ID card (found in another pocket of the unfamiliar blazer) proclaimed him to be, was a reluctant, terrified automaton, and he, Arthur Ainsworth, was its bewildered, unwilling, and increasingly horrified pilot.

Evening found him in a small, stark, sparsely furnished dormitory room, shared with another silent, sullen boy – his roommate, Suzuki, who had grunted a minimal, almost resentful greeting earlier before burying himself completely in a brightly coloured manga volume, effectively vanishing from Arthur’s immediate reality. The overwhelming, unrelenting newness of it all – the constant, bewildering barrage of the unfamiliar Japanese language assaulting his ears, the strange, unappetizing food he’d barely been able to touch at dinner (a slimy, unidentifiable fish and a bowl of disturbingly grey rice), the constant, terrifying, almost schizophrenic disconnect between his fifty-one-year-old mind and this unfamiliar, unwieldy teenage body – was crushing, suffocating.

He sat heavily on the edge of the narrow, unyielding bed, the phone’s battery indicator now a glaring, accusatory, terrifying red 15%. He needed to charge it. Urgently. Desperately. It was his only link to comprehension, his only tool for navigating this bewildering, hostile new reality. But the power sockets in the dorm room wall were a different, unfamiliar shape, and he hadn’t seen his own trusty charger since… well, since his own familiar, comforting kitchen in Crawley, a lifetime, an eternity, ago.

He had to think. He forced his panicked, reeling mind to focus. Talented. Island academy for the Talented. Snippets of disjointed conversation, hazy, half-recalled images from a garishly coloured, excessively violent animation his teenage nephew had been briefly, inexplicably obsessed with some years ago, flickered like faulty neon signs at the frayed edges of his memory. A pretty, innocent-looking girl with bright pink hair and an unnervingly sweet, almost predatory smile. A sullen, white-haired boy with an obsession with immortality and a penchant for asking inconvenient questions. Gruesome, inventive deaths, casually, almost gleefully, inflicted. Dark secrets. Government conspiracies.

Talentless Nana.

The name, the title, hit him with the force of a physical blow, knocking the last vestiges of air from his already constricted lungs. No. It couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t. That was fiction, a dark, twisted, nihilistic little piece of entertainment his sister had tutted disapprovingly about. He wasn’t in an anime. Such things didn’t happen. They couldn’t happen.

But the evidence, the terrible, mounting, undeniable evidence, was all around him. The isolated island, miles from any recognizable mainland. The special school, exclusively for "Talented" youth. The subtle, pervasive undercurrent of something… predatory, something dangerous, he’d sensed beneath the thin, fragile veneer of enforced institutional normalcy.

If this was true, if this waking nightmare was indeed his new reality, then he was in unimaginable, immediate, and quite possibly terminal danger. Everyone here was. And he, Arthur Ainsworth, a mild-mannered, unremarkable, fifty-one-year-old former accounts clerk from the peaceful, predictable suburbs of Crawley, was trapped, helpless and horrified, in the unfamiliar, ill-fitting body of a Japanese schoolboy named Kenji Tanaka, days, perhaps mere hours, from the inevitable arrival of a ruthless, highly trained, government-sanctioned teenage assassin.

The phone’s screen flickered ominously, then dimmed. 10%.

The raw, animalistic panic gave way, momentarily, to a desperate, pragmatic, almost cold urgency. He had to find a charger. A compatible one. And a socket that would accept it. Now. Without the phone, without his translator, without his only tenuous link to the world around him, he was deaf, dumb, defenceless, and almost certainly, irrecoverably, dead.

He scrambled to his feet, his earlier exhaustion forgotten, replaced by a surge of pure, undiluted adrenaline. He left his silent, manga-absorbed roommate without a word and ventured cautiously out into the dimly lit, echoing corridor. The dorm was quieting down for the night, most of the other students presumably already in their rooms. He found a common room at the end of the corridor, its lights still on, though it was deserted. It smelled faintly of stale noodles and cheap cleaning fluid. A few students were chatting quietly within, others were hunched over textbooks, already studying. His eyes, wild and desperate, scanned the walls, searching. There. A grimy, overloaded power strip, with a couple of tantalizingly vacant sockets. And discarded carelessly on a low, battered coffee table, amidst a scattering of empty snack wrappers, discarded manga volumes, and students’ textbooks, was a tangled, spaghetti-like mess of assorted charging cables. One of them, a generic-looking black one, looked promising, its micro-USB connector seemingly, blessedly, similar to his own phone’s charging port.

His heart pounding in his throat like a trapped bird, he darted forward and snatched it up. It was a cheap, no-name brand, but the connector looked right. He hurried back to the precious, vacant sockets in the power strip, his hands shaking so badly he could barely insert the plug. He then, with a silent, fervent prayer to any deity, any force, any cosmic entity that might conceivably be listening in this godforsaken corner of reality, connected the other end of the cable to his phone.

The charging icon appeared on the screen. 10%. Then, after an agonizing, heart-stopping pause, 11%.

A tiny, almost hysterical, choked laugh escaped him, a sound perilously close to a sob. One problem, at least, one immediate, life-threatening crisis, was temporarily, blessedly, solved. But as he slumped weakly against the cool, indifferent wall, watching the battery percentage slowly, painstakingly, begin to climb, the larger, more terrifying, more inescapable reality of his utterly impossible situation settled upon him with a crushing, suffocating, and unyielding weight. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, on Murder Island. And the deadly, bloody games, he knew with a certainty that chilled him to the very marrow of his new, young bones, were about to begin.