Chapter 31: The Great Escape

Chapter 15: The Long Watch

The aftermath of the horrific confrontation at the docks was, with chilling Committee efficiency, unsettlingly, almost surreally, muted across the wider school. News of Rentaro Tsurumigawa’s sudden, immediate, and permanent “expulsion” for “egregious and violent misbehaviour that endangered fellow students” spread like a carefully managed wildfire, a conveniently sanitized and deliberately vague narrative disseminated by a pale-faced, visibly shaken Mr. Saito and the other grim-lipped, tight-faced teachers. It was designed, Arthur knew with a cold certainty, to mask the true, terrifying violence of that awful evening and prevent any semblance of mass panic just as the students were on the cusp of departing for the long-awaited, much-needed term break.

Nana Hiiragi, it was quietly, almost confidentially, announced, had suffered a “severe emotional shock” from her “brave and selfless intervention” in the Rentaro incident and was under strict, isolated medical care in the school infirmary, strictly forbidden any visitors for her own well-being. Of Michiru Inukai, there was initially no official word, a heavy, pregnant silence that was, in itself, deeply, profoundly ominous. Then, just hours before the first ferry was due to depart, a sombre, almost funereal Mr. Saito informed the assembled students during a hastily called morning assembly that Michiru-san had, with tragic, heartbreaking suddenness, succumbed to a rare, aggressive, and previously entirely undiagnosed latent medical condition. Her passing, he’d said, his voice thick with carefully feigned sorrow and his eyes not quite meeting those of his students, had been peaceful. A suitable memorial service, he’d assured them, would be held at the start of the next term to honour her gentle spirit.

Arthur listened to the carefully constructed, insidious lies with a cold, contemptuous, almost murderous anger churning in his gut. He knew the truth. He knew, with a sickening certainty, that the Committee, through the school’s puppet authorities, would desperately want Michiru’s body. A Talent user who had performed such an unprecedented, almost unbelievable act of resurrection, sacrificing her own life to restore another’s, was an invaluable, unique research specimen. They would want to study her, to dissect her, to understand the profound, terrifying nature of her ultimate sacrifice, perhaps even to weaponize it. He would not allow it.

While the other students – a volatile mixture of genuinely relieved, superficially excited, and still deeply, palpably unnerved – bustled about the dormitories packing their bags, their chatter a jarring counterpoint to Arthur’s grim resolve, he moved with a singular, almost predatory purpose. He had already, under the cover of the pre-dawn darkness, retrieved Michiru’s impossibly light, still form from the cold slab in the school’s small, under-equipped morgue where she had been temporarily, disrespectfully placed. He’d carefully, reverently wrapped her in a clean, new sheet he’d "requisitioned" from the infirmary linen closet when no one was looking. Carrying her small, precious burden, he walked with a steady, determined gait through the increasingly deserted school corridors, a sombre, solitary spectre of grief and defiance amidst the fading echoes of youthful excitement and hurried departures. No one questioned him; no one tried to stop him. Perhaps it was the stark, unapproachable, almost dangerous grief etched on his face, a silent, potent warning against any form of intrusion. Or perhaps, more likely, in the frantic, institutional rush to vacate the cursed island, the lone, grim-faced boy carrying what looked like a peacefully sleeping, sheet-shrouded classmate was simply an oddity too inconvenient, too unsettling, too difficult to address or explain away.

He took Michiru to her own small, now entirely empty dormitory room. It was neat, almost clinically tidy, and already stripped of most personal belongings, her former roommate having clearly departed on the earliest available transport, eager to escape the island’s oppressive atmosphere. The silence in the room was profound, heavy as a shroud, broken only by Arthur’s own ragged, hitching breathing and the distant, mournful cry of the first ferry horn sounding its departure from the docks, a sound that seemed to echo his own internal desolation. This strange, suspended May, he thought with a fleeting, dislocated sense of temporal confusion – so different from any May he’d ever known back in England, a time usually of burgeoning hope, of lengthening, sunlit days, not this… this cold, grey, empty waiting.

Gently, with an almost reverent tenderness that felt alien yet entirely natural to his grieving heart, he laid Michiru on her narrow, bare mattress. Her white, fluffy hair, usually so vibrant and full of innocent life, seemed dull and lifeless against the stark, utilitarian pillow. Arthur found a washcloth and a basin of clean water from the thankfully still-functional communal bathroom and, with a gentleness that surprised even himself, began to clean the lingering traces of grime and sea spray from her pale face and small, delicate hands. It felt like a vital, final act of profound respect, a small, silent, defiant rebellion against the island’s casual, brutal disregard for its young, vulnerable charges. He straightened her simple school uniform, which he’d managed to keep relatively clean, and smoothed her soft hair back from her forehead. He wanted her to look at peace, to be accorded a dignity in death that this island, and the monsters who controlled it, so readily, so callously, stole from the living.

Then, the long, solitary, and uncertain watch began.

The final ferry horn blared in the distance, a mournful, fading cry signalling the departure of the last contingent of students and the few remaining skeletal staff. From Michiru’s small, heavily curtained window, Arthur could see the vessel pulling away from the pier, growing smaller and smaller until it was just an indistinct, insignificant speck on the vast, indifferent grey horizon. He was alone now. Utterly, terrifyingly, and in a strange way, almost peacefully alone, on an island saturated with unspoken secrets, spilt blood, and the sorrowful ghosts of lost innocence, with only the silent, still form of a girl who had so bravely, so selflessly, sacrificed her own precious life for her damaged, deeply undeserving friend.

He pulled the room’s single, uncomfortable wooden chair beside Michiru’s bed and sat, the silence in the room, in the entire deserted dormitory wing, in the whole silent, echoing school, pressing in on him, vast, profound, and suffocating. He knew the Committee would eventually realize Michiru’s body was missing from their cold storage. They would search. But he also knew something else, a strange, chilling piece of information gleaned from his fragmented anime memories, a detail about the Committee's own twisted beliefs regarding extraordinary Talents. They believed, or at least theorized, that a Talent as potent as Michiru’s, one capable of true resurrection, might possess a residual capacity for self-regeneration, even after apparent death. It was probably, Arthur thought with a cynical twist of his lips, the only vaguely true or insightful thing the Committee had ever inadvertently revealed about the true nature of Talents amidst their mountain of lies and manipulative propaganda.

The critical, terrifying unknown, however, was the timescale. If such a regeneration were even possible – and Arthur clung to this thought with a desperate, almost ferocious tenacity, fueled by the unnatural coolness that still eman మనed from Michiru’s body, a bizarre stasis that defied normal decomposition – how long would it take? Days? Weeks? Months? Or, God forbid, years? He didn’t know. Nobody did. But he made a silent, solemn vow to the still, silent girl before him, a vow that resonated in the deepest chambers of his weary, grief-stricken soul. He would tend to Michiru. He would watch over her. For as long as it took. He would not abandon her. He would not let her become just another experiment for Tsuruoka’s butchers. And more than that, a new, chilling fear took root: he would not see Michiru, if she did somehow return and was left alone, terrified, and uncontrolled, eventually transform into one of those monstrous “Enemies of Humanity” he knew were a horrifying potential endpoint for unchecked or traumatized Talents. That, he vowed, he would prevent at any cost.

In that profound, echoing emptiness, he found himself talking to her, his voice low, hesitant at first, then spilling out in a quiet, rambling stream of his native English, a stark, intimate contrast to the stilted, carefully translated Japanese he was forced to use with the living.

“It’s Arthur, you know,” he murmured, his gaze fixed on her pale, still face, so achingly young. “My real name. Arthur Ainsworth. From Crawley, down in Sussex. You wouldn’t know it, of course. Terribly dull place, Crawley. Grey skies, mostly. Nothing like this… this Technicolor, blood-soaked madhouse.” He spoke of his mundane, unfulfilling job as an accounts clerk, his quiet, amicable but ultimately failed marriage to a woman who had deserved better than his own hesitant apathy, the soul-crushing, quiet desperation of his previous, unlamented life, a life that now seemed like a distant, almost unimaginable, sepia-toned, irrelevant dream. “Funny, isn’t it, Michiru?” he continued, a dry, humourless, almost painful chuckle escaping his lips. “I used to think my life back there was utterly pointless, completely devoid of any real meaning or purpose. Now… now I’m here, trapped in this waking nightmare, and I’m failing on a truly epic, spectacular, almost biblical scale.”

He told her about his impossible, inexplicable predicament, his fragmented, cursed foreknowledge gleaned from a garish, violent television show his teenage nephew had been briefly, inexplicably obsessed with some years ago. “I knew… I knew so much of this horror was going to happen. Nanao, Habu, Hoshino… even you, in a way, though not like this. Never, ever like this.” A wave of profound, helpless, suffocating guilt washed over him, so potent it almost choked the words in his throat. “I tried to stop you, Michiru. With Nana. I really did. I shouted until my voice was raw. But you were so… so damned determined. So brave. Far braver than I could ever be.” His voice cracked, and for a long time, he simply sat in the silence, the only sound his own ragged, unsteady breathing.

Hours bled into days, an eternity of dim light and profound, echoing silence, marked only by the slow crawl of the sun across the dusty, curtained window. He ate sparingly from the dwindling tins of forgotten, non-perishable emergency supplies he managed to pilfer from the deserted school kitchens, his phone, its battery now carefully, obsessively conserved, his only companion for checking the slow, agonizing passage of time. He slept in fitful, nightmare-plagued starts in the uncomfortable wooden chair beside her bed, or sometimes, when the exhaustion became too much to bear, curled up on the cold, unforgiving floor at her feet, waking with a jolt, the oppressive, unnatural silence always the first thing to greet him, a constant, unwelcome, terrifying reminder of his utter, profound isolation.

As the first long, silent, grief-haunted week of the term break drew to its close, Arthur Ainsworth sat his solitary, unwavering vigil, a self-appointed, grief-stricken, and increasingly desperate guardian in a silent, empty, and deeply cursed school. He watched over a brave, gentle, and selfless girl who embodied a purity and unconditional love that this island, and the dark, malevolent forces that controlled its destiny, seemed hell-bent on eradicating from existence. He was adrift, his own future an utter, terrifying, featureless unknown, his only certainty the profound, crushing weight of the recent, tragic past and the silent, solemn promise he’d made to protect Michiru’s final, precious rest, and her even more precious, if improbable, potential return.

Chapter 26: Reunion in the Rain

The chaotic, premature end of the third school year on the island had seen Arthur, along with the other bewildered and traumatized student survivors, unceremoniously dumped back onto the mainland like so much unwanted refuse. For him, it meant a grim, dispiriting return to the life he had briefly, miserably known before his forced return to the academy: the anonymity of the teeming city, the gnawing ache of poverty, and the soul-crushing, repetitive labour of a sprawling construction site on the urban fringe. The bitter irony wasn’t lost on him; he was now walking the same path of grueling menial toil, enduring the same casual cruelties from foremen and co-workers, that Kyouya Onodera had apparently walked before his own arrival on that cursed island. He endured the harsh, unforgiving conditions, the meagre, often insufficient pay that barely covered the rent for a shared, squalid room in a decaying lodging house, and the constant, wearying taunts from his fellow labourers who mocked his still-halting Japanese and his foreigner’s awkwardness. Each day was a fresh testament to his unwanted, unwelcome survival. His phone, his former lifeline to communication and understanding, had been confiscated during the island evacuation, leaving him to navigate this complex, indifferent world with only his painfully limited vocabulary and a profound, isolating sense of linguistic inadequacy.

Months bled into one another, a dreary, monotonous procession of exhausting physical labour and long, lonely nights spent staring at the cracked ceiling of his cramped room. He heard nothing of Nana, nothing of Michiru, nothing of Kyouya. The island, and the unspeakable horrors it held, began to feel like a distant, terrible fever dream, its sharp edges softened by time and the sheer, grinding drudgery of his current existence.

One particularly bleak, miserable evening in late autumn, as a cold, persistent, sleety rain lashed the city, relentlessly turning the streets into slick, reflecting rivers of neon and grime, Arthur trudged wearily away from the cacophonous, muddy construction site. His body ached with a bone-deep exhaustion, his spirit felt numb, hollowed out. He took a shortcut through a narrow, dimly lit, garbage-strewn alleyway, more to escape the biting, rain-laden wind than to save any appreciable time. And there, huddled in a recessed, darkened doorway, trying desperately to find some meagre shelter from the relentless downpour, was a figure he recognized instantly, despite her ragged, filthy clothes and the haunted, almost feral terror in her eyes. Nana Hiiragi.

She looked up with a start as he approached, her eyes – those once bright, violet, calculating eyes – widening in shocked, terrified recognition. She was thinner, almost skeletal, her once vibrant pink hair now lank, faded, and plastered to her skull by the rain, her face smudged with dirt and etched with a weariness that went far beyond mere physical exhaustion. She looked like a cornered, wounded animal, a desperate fugitive who had finally run out of places to hide. On top of a nearby overflowing, reeking rubbish bin, a scrawny, spectral white cat sat preternaturally still, its intelligent, luminous eyes fixed on them both, seemingly entirely unfazed by the driving rain or the charged atmosphere in the narrow alley.

“Tanaka-kun?” Nana whispered, her voice hoarse, cracked, barely audible above the drumming of the rain, disbelief warring with a flicker of raw, desperate fear, and perhaps, Arthur thought with a jolt, a tiny, almost imperceptible spark of desperate, unwelcome hope. She looked utterly broken. She began to stammer, incoherent words of regret, of apology for… for everything, her body trembling violently.

Arthur, his own weariness a heavy, sodden cloak upon his shoulders, cut her off, his voice flat, the English words falling like chips of ice in the damp, cold air. “Save it, Hiiragi. Just… save it.” He saw the last vestiges of fight, of defiance, go out of her. She sagged against the grimy, graffiti-covered wall, the rain plastering her thin clothes to her shivering frame.

“Tsuruoka,” he began, speaking slowly, deliberately, still in English, knowing she had some comprehension, and needing the precision of his own tongue for what he had to say. “Commander Tsuruoka… he killed your parents, Nana. Not you. He did.” He saw her flinch as if he had physically struck her, her eyes widening in stunned, uncomprehending horror. “He hired two Talented criminals to do the job, individuals with existing convictions, easily manipulated, easily controlled. They were likely… disposed of… after they’d served their purpose. Silenced. Standard Committee operating procedure.” Nana stared at him, her mouth agape, rain dripping from her chin, her breath catching in her throat. “Your parents,” Arthur continued, his voice relentless, a grim, emotionless recital of terrible truths. “They supported Talents. They were actively opposed to Tsuruoka’s ideology, his methods, his growing power within the Committee. He decided not only to eliminate them as a threat but, as the ultimate, monstrous act of revenge against their memory, to take their only daughter and twist her, mold her, into the very thing they fought against. It was so much easier to shape you, to control you, if you could be blamed for their horrific murders, wasn’t it? If you truly believed yourself a monster from the very start.” He saw the dawning, unutterable horror in her eyes as pieces of her shattered, manipulated past began to align with his brutal words. “You running to that police station, a terrified child clutching your own father’s severed head… the accusations, the recriminations you faced there… that was all part of Tsuruoka’s meticulous, diabolical plan. The reason you were shunted from one uncaring, abusive foster family to another. It was all designed to break you, to isolate you, to make you utterly pliable, to make you his perfect, unquestioning weapon.”

He paused, letting the crushing weight of his words sink into her already fractured psyche. “You could have asked more questions, Hiiragi,” he said, his voice softening almost imperceptibly, a hint of weary sorrow creeping in. “You could have done more research. Yes, many Talents are bad, dangerous, destructive. But it was never your place to be their judge, their jury, and their executioner.” He looked her directly in the eye, his gaze unwavering, trying to convey the full import of his next statement. “And Talents, Hiiragi,” he added, his voice dropping to a low, pointed near-whisper, “they don’t have a monopoly on doing bad things.” The implication that he knew she, Nana Hiiragi, the Committee’s most feared assassin of Talents, was herself entirely Talentless, hung heavy, unspoken but deafening, between them in the cold, rain-swept alley. “Now, perhaps, after everything, you finally understand the full, terrible extent of my ‘Talent.’ My ‘predictions.’ And believe me, Hiiragi, things are going to get much, much worse. For all of us.”

Nana, looking utterly numb, her face a mask of dawning, unbearable truth and profound, world-shattering despair, finally spoke, her voice a mere breath, almost lost in the relentless drumming of the rain. “I’ve seen them… Tanaka-kun. I’ve seen… the Enemies of Humanity.”

Arthur, who had almost turned to leave, to walk away from her and the vortex of pain and violence she represented, froze in his tracks. Her words, so quiet, so full of a new, specific terror, stopped him cold. He knew, with a sudden, sickening lurch, where this was heading, to the most bizarre, the most terrifying, the most inexplicable aspect of this twisted, nightmarish world. He turned back slowly to face her, the rain dripping from his hair, from the collar of his thin jacket. He struggled for a moment with his limited Japanese, then resorted to blunt English again. “Tsuruoka. He’s shown you, hasn’t he?” he asked, his voice grim. “Two of them, I’d wager. Two of those… monsters. And he told you that Talents don’t truly die when you kill them? That they just… change? That they turn into those things?” Nana, her eyes wide and haunted, brimming with a fresh, unspeakable horror, nodded slowly, a single tear tracing a path through the grime on her cheek.

“He was telling you the truth, Nana,” Arthur said, his voice heavy with a weariness that seemed to age him decades in that moment. “Up to a point, at least. My own… additional information… it may not be entirely precise, you understand. It’s… fragmented. But from what I’ve managed to piece together, from what I remember… when a person with a Talent reaches a certain point in their life – late teens, their twenties, sometimes as late as their forties, it varies – their Talent can undergo a kind of… profound, often terrifying metamorphosis. Think of it as… as puberty, but with new, often unstable, uncontrollable superpowers. A secondary, more monstrous blossoming.” He saw the flicker of horrified understanding in her eyes. “Unfortunately, from what I know, it’s not long after that stage, that secondary manifestation, that they can… they can transform. Become those creatures Tsuruoka so proudly, so callously, displayed for you. The process, I believe, can also happen, perhaps even accelerate, if a Talent appears to be dead to our eyes, like Etsuko, the girl he showed you in that body bag. Their essence, their Talent, it just… festers, corrupts, transforms.”

He saw the recognition of Etsuko’s name, the confirmation of her own terrible experience in Tsuruoka’s charnel house, reflected in Nana’s horrified gaze. “I don’t know what the Committee’s ultimate, endgame plan is, Nana,” Arthur admitted, running a hand through his wet hair. “I truly don’t. But I strongly suspect Tsuruoka will use – or perhaps already is using – these so-called ‘Enemies of Humanity’ as a potent, terrifying tool. Maybe, just maybe, it’s to keep the current Japanese government in power, by presenting these monsters as a constant, existential threat that only he, and the Committee, can manage, can protect them from. Or, and this seems far more likely given his megalomania, once he’s successfully eliminated all other Talents he deems problematic or uncontrollable, he’ll use these monsters, these transformed Talents, to try and take over the world himself.”

He looked at Nana, her face a canvas of shock, dawning comprehension, and utter, soul-crushing despair. “He played you, Nana,” he said, his voice softer now, almost gentle. “From the very beginning. He played us all.” With that, Arthur Ainsworth turned and began to walk away, his shoulders slumped, leaving Nana Hiiragi alone in the cold, dark, rain-lashed alley to absorb the full, crushing weight of his devastating revelations. As he reached the grimy, graffiti-scarred end of the alley, he glanced back, a brief, almost involuntary movement. Nana was slowly, unsteadily, pushing herself to her feet, a small, broken figure in the vast, uncaring city. The scrawny white cat, which had been watching their entire exchange with an unnerving, almost sentient stillness from its perch on the overflowing rubbish bin, hopped down with a silent, graceful leap and, with an almost imperceptible flick of its tail, began to follow Nana as she stumbled out of the alley and disappeared into the rainy, indifferent labyrinth of the darkened city streets. He knew, somehow, with a certainty that settled like a stone in his own weary heart, that their paths, his and Nana’s, were still destined to cross again. The island’s dark, insidious tendrils reached far, even into the deepest, most anonymous shadows of the sprawling mainland.

Another pointless poster

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

Chapter 24: The Detective and the Drowning

The tense, unspoken, and deeply exhausting cat-and-mouse game between Arthur Ainsworth and Nana Hiiragi simmered beneath the deceptively placid surface of the Third School Year for several uneasy weeks. Arthur remained relentlessly vigilant, his limited Japanese forcing him into a mode of heightened observation and carefully chosen, minimal interactions. Nana, visibly haunted and profoundly conflicted, continued her hesitant, almost reluctant pursuit, Tsuruoka’s orders a poisonous whisper in the back of her mind, her own fractured conscience a screaming counterpoint. The new intake of students, meanwhile, remained largely, blissfully oblivious to this silent, deadly undercurrent. Then, a new, entirely unexpected variable arrived on the island, an element that would irrevocably shatter the uneasy status quo and drag the island’s darkest secrets into the harsh, unforgiving light: Akari Hozumi.

Akari was a petite, unassuming girl with short, neat black hair and sharp, intelligent, almost unnervingly observant eyes that seemed to miss absolutely nothing. Her arrival was unceremonious, just another late addition to the ever-shifting student roster, assigned to fill an empty bunk in one of the dormitories. But it became rapidly, abundantly clear that she was no ordinary student. During her formal introduction to the class by a vaguely apprehensive Mr. Saito, Akari Hozumi declared her Talent with a quiet, unshakeable confidence that brooked no argument and sent a ripple of unease through her new classmates. Her ability, she stated calmly, was "Forensic Insight" – a complex combination of acute environmental analysis, the ability to reconstruct past events with uncanny, almost supernatural accuracy by observing a location or individuals involved, and a near-perfect, almost infallible capacity to detect falsehood through micro-expressions, vocal inflections, and physiological tells. She was, in her own carefully chosen words, a truth-seeker, a dedicated, amateur detective.

The island, with its hushed-up disappearances, its string of unexplained “accidents,” and the palpable undercurrent of fear and suspicion that clung to its very stones, was a veritable, irresistible playground for someone with Akari Hozumi’s unique abilities and singular, almost obsessive inclinations. She began her disquieting investigations almost immediately, her polite but relentless, deeply probing questioning unsettling students and the beleaguered teaching staff alike. Rumours of past events, half-forgotten whispers of students who had vanished without a trace or died under deeply mysterious circumstances, drew her like a bloodhound to a fresh scent. She was a small, quiet whirlwind of disconcerting inquiry.

Her razor-sharp attention, inevitably, turned towards the large, picturesque, yet strangely ominous lake on the island’s northern edge. Perhaps it was the lingering, hushed stories of Yuusuke Tachibana’s sudden disappearance nearly two years prior, or the still-discussed, unexplained phenomenon of the unseasonable, localized freezing that had sealed its surface for a time. Or maybe her unique Talent simply picked up on the dark, cold secrets hidden beneath its deceptively tranquil, sun-dappled waters.

One grey, overcast afternoon, Akari, accompanied by a small retinue of curious and now somewhat fearful fellow students, and under the clearly uncomfortable and wary eye of Mr. Saito (who had been “persuaded” to attend by Akari’s polite but unyielding insistence), focused her formidable abilities on the lake. The thick ice that Sorano Aijima had been coerced into creating had long since thawed with the changing seasons, leaving the lake’s surface murky and undisturbed. After a long period of intense, silent concentration, her gaze fixed with unnerving precision on a particular spot near a dense, overgrown patch of reed beds, Akari calmly directed two of the stronger, older male students to begin probing the area with long, sturdy poles they had brought from the school’s neglected groundskeeping shed.

There was a sickening, dull thud from beneath the water’s surface, a sound that made several students gasp. With considerable, straining effort, the two boys, their faces pale and sweating despite the cool air, dragged a sodden, heavy, and horrifyingly human-shaped form from the murky, weed-choked depths.

It was, unmistakably, the badly decomposed but still identifiable body of Yuusuke Tachibana.

A wave of collective, visceral horror rippled through the assembled students. Some cried out, others retched, their faces turning green. Tachibana’s disappearance had eventually been officially written off by the school administration as him simply running away from the pressures of the academy, or perhaps a tragic, unexplainable drowning accident while swimming alone. The sight of his preserved, mud-caked corpse, brought forth so dramatically from its watery tomb after nearly two years, was a visceral, traumatizing shock that shattered any lingering illusions about the island’s safety.

Akari Hozumi, however, her expression grim but resolute, was just beginning. Her gaze, sharp as a shard of ice and utterly accusatory, swept over the pale, horrified faces of the upperclassmen who had been present during Tachibana’s time, eventually settling with unwavering, damning intensity on Nana Hiiragi. Nana, who had been observing the grim proceedings from the edge of the crowd with a carefully constructed mask of shocked concern, felt a jolt of pure, cold terror lance through her, a premonition of impending, inescapable doom.

“Hiiragi Nana-san,” Akari Hozumi said, her voice clear, cutting, and utterly devoid of emotion, carrying easily over the terrified whispers of the other students. “My Talent reconstructs events with absolute clarity. It tells me of deception. It shows me the hidden patterns of murder.” She then proceeded, with chilling, methodical precision, to lay out the sequence of events leading to Yuusuke Tachibana’s death nearly two years prior: Nana identifying Tachibana’s dangerous Talent, her careful grooming of him, her luring him to the secluded lake, incapacitating him, and then brutally drowning him in its cold, silent depths. Akari even detailed Nana’s subsequent coercion of the terrified Sorano Aijima into freezing the lake’s surface to conceal her heinous crime. Akari might have used her Talent on Sorano earlier, who would have broken easily under such intense scrutiny, or perhaps she was directly reading Nana now, whose involuntary micro-expressions, her sudden pallor, her barely perceptible trembling, would have been an open, screaming confession to someone with Akari’s acute lie-detecting abilities.

As Akari spoke, her calm, incisive voice detailing not just Tachibana’s murder but hinting at a clear, undeniable pattern of calculated eliminations, of other convenient “accidents” and “disappearances,” Nana Hiiragi’s carefully constructed composure finally, catastrophically, shattered. Cornered, exposed, with the irrefutable, horrifying evidence of Tachibana’s decaying body lying before them on the muddy bank and Akari Hozumi’s unshakeable, terrifying certainty pinning her down like an insect under a microscope, Nana broke. In a choked, hysterical, tearful confession, her words tumbling out in a torrent of incoherent guilt, fear, and self-loathing, she admitted to killing Tachibana. More admissions, fragmented and horrified, about other “enemies,” other “threats she had neutralized for the good of the Talentless,” began to spill from her lips, though she instinctively, desperately, refrained from implicating Commander Tsuruoka or the Committee directly, that deeply ingrained, conditioned terror still holding sway even in her utter disintegration.

The reaction from the assembled student body was instantaneous, predictable, and utterly savage. The simmering fear that had lurked beneath the surface of island life for so long, the paranoia born of so many unexplained disappearances and the constant, vague threat of “Enemies of Humanity,” erupted into a violent, cathartic rage. Cries of “Monster!” “Murderer!” “She killed them all!” filled the air. The students, transformed in an instant into a terrified, enraged mob, surged forward, easily overwhelming the few panicked, ineffective teachers present, and fell upon the sobbing, collapsing Nana Hiiragi, their fists, their feet, their hoarded, improvised weapons instruments of a brutal, summary, and entirely merciless justice.

Nana curled into a tight ball on the muddy ground, trying desperately to protect her head and vital organs, but the blows rained down upon her, a furious, unending hail of pain and retribution. Arthur Ainsworth watched, his expression grim, his heart a cold, hard, unfeeling knot in his chest. A primitive, vengeful part of him, the part that had carried the unbearable weight of Nana’s countless crimes for what felt like an eternity, felt a sliver of grim, ugly satisfaction – this was justice, in its rawest, most primal, and perhaps most fitting form. Another part of him, however, the weary, fifty-one-year-old man who had witnessed too much death, too much violence, recoiled from the sheer, unbridled brutality of the scene, recognizing with a sickening clarity the dangerous, self-perpetuating cycle of violence. He thought, fleetingly, of Michiru, of Nana’s tearful, human confession at the cliff edge. But he did not move. He couldn’t. His limited Japanese would be useless against this tide of fury, and a deeper, colder part of him believed, with a chilling detachment, that Nana Hiiragi had sown this terrible whirlwind, and now, she was simply, inevitably, reaping it.

It was Kyouya Onodera, his face an impassive, unreadable mask but his movements swift, economical, and incredibly powerful, who finally, decisively intervened. Pushing his way through the frenzied, screaming mob with an almost contemptuous ease, he physically dragged students away from Nana’s battered, bleeding form. “Enough!” his voice, cold and sharp as a razor, cut through the din with an authority that momentarily stunned the attackers into a surprised, hesitant silence. “This solves nothing. This is not justice; it is barbarism. We need answers. We need understanding. Not a lynching.” He stood over Nana’s crumpled, unmoving form, a silent, formidable bulwark against the still-seething, murderous crowd, his stance clearly indicating that any further attacks on the girl would have to go through him first.

Nana Hiiragi lay on the muddy ground, bruised, bleeding, her bright pink hair, now caked with mud and her own blood, a grotesque mockery of its former vibrancy. She was broken, not just physically, but spiritually, her carefully constructed world, her entire identity, utterly demolished. Her reign of terror, her intricate, carefully woven web of lies, manipulation, and murder, had been brutally, irrevocably torn apart. Akari Hozumi stood a little apart, watching the chaotic scene with a strange, almost detached expression, her face betraying no emotion, only a stern, unwavering adherence to the terrible truth she had so ruthlessly, effectively, and devastatingly uncovered, regardless of its catastrophic consequences. The island’s dark, festering secrets were finally, violently, bleeding out into the open, and its fragile, deceptive order was irrevocably, terrifyingly shattered.

Chapter 32: A New Beginning, An Old Fight

The night chosen for their desperate gamble, their improbable escape, arrived cloaked in a maelstrom of furious, driving wind and torrential, sheeting rain. It was a late autumn storm, one of the worst in recent memory, that lashed the internment camp with a savage, almost sentient fury – perfect, chaotic cover for the desperate endeavour that was about to unfold. For weeks, Kenichi Tanaka, their quiet, nervous “Architect,” had been painstakingly, almost obsessively, working in the damp, freezing, and carefully concealed confines of a long-disused, partially collapsed storage shed at the far, neglected perimeter of the camp. Shielded by the sound-dampening Talent of a timid girl named Hana and by the watchful, rotating guard duty of Kyouya and a few other trusted inmates, Kenichi had been slowly, agonizingly coaxing their improbable, monstrous escape vehicle into existence from scavenged scrap metal, compacted earth, shattered concrete, and sheer, unyielding force of will.

It was a hideous, utilitarian creation, a testament to desperate ingenuity rather than engineering aesthetics – less a train or a conventional vehicle and more a heavily armored, multi-terrain articulated transport, its hull a patchwork of rusted plating and reinforced rubble. Arthur had privately, grimly, dubbed it the “Land Leviathan.” Its motive power was a complex, jury-rigged, and highly unstable system cobbled together by Kyouya and a handful of other resourceful Talents, relying on a dangerous combination of kinetic energy conversion, makeshift steam power, and Kenichi’s own ability to subtly manipulate its structural integrity for movement.

On Nana Hiiragi’s quiet, tense signal, relayed through a chain of trusted whispers just as the storm reached its terrifying zenith, the meticulously planned operation snapped into motion. Hana, her face pale with concentration and fear, extended her sound-dampening field to its absolute limit, creating a precious cone of relative silence around Kenichi’s makeshift workshop as the final, noisy, and dangerously volatile connections were made to the Leviathan’s power core. Another student, an older boy named Ren whose Talent allowed him to cause localized, temporary electronic interference, focused his abilities on the camp’s main perimeter fence sensors and the central guardhouse communication lines, hoping to buy them precious, crucial minutes of confusion and disarray at precisely the right moment.

Kyouya Onodera, leading a small, handpicked, and utterly determined team of their strongest and most disciplined allies, moved like avenging shadows through the howling wind and driving rain, their movements swift, silent, and deadly. They neutralized the few terrified, rain-lashed guards patrolling the designated breach point near Kenichi’s workshop with swift, brutal, non-lethal efficiency, adhering strictly to Nana’s unwavering directive for minimal violence against their captors, if at all possible. They used chokeholds, pressure points, and improvised restraints, leaving the guards bound and unconscious, but alive.

The rumbling, groaning emergence of the Land Leviathan from the collapsing remnants of the workshop was a moment of terrifying, breathtaking, almost suicidal audacity. Its massive, misshapen form, slick with rain and mud, seemed to absorb the dim, flickering emergency lights of the camp, a creature born of desperation and shadow. Nana, a small, rain-soaked figure of calm amidst the controlled, adrenaline-fueled chaos, her voice sharp and clear above the howl of the storm, directed the first wave of chosen prisoners – the old, the sick, the youngest children, along with those whose specific Talents would be most useful in the immediate aftermath – towards the vehicle’s hastily constructed, reinforced loading ramp. Arthur found himself, alongside a surprisingly resolute Michiru Inukai, helping to guide a small, terrified group of wide-eyed children, their faces pale with fear, towards the relative, if claustrophobic, safety of the Leviathan’s dark, cavernous, metallic hull.

Then came the breach. With a deafening, tortured groan of protesting, tortured metal and crumbling ferroconcrete, the Land Leviathan, with a stoic, grim-faced Kyouya wrestling with its crude, unresponsive controls, ploughed with terrifying, unstoppable force through the first electrified perimeter fence, then the second, and finally, with a cataclysmic roar, through the main camp wall itself. Alarms, shrill and panicked, finally began blaring belatedly across the entire compound, their desperate cries almost lost in the fury of the storm. Guards, confused and disoriented, emerged from their shelters, firing wildly, their bullets pinging harmlessly off the Leviathan’s thick, improvised armor or whining away into the storm-tossed darkness. The monstrous vehicle, shuddering and groaning under the strain, surged forward, a juggernaut of desperate hope, into the dark, unforgiving, and unknown wilderness beyond the camp’s rapidly receding, oppressive lights.

Not everyone made it. In the ensuing chaos of the breach, amidst the shouting of guards and the panicked scramble of prisoners, some were caught by Ide’s enraged security forces, their desperate bid for freedom ending in brutal recapture. Others, overcome by fear or confusion, hesitated too long and were left behind. But a significant number – well over a hundred desperate souls – rumbled away into the stormy, concealing night, leaving Commandant Ide to survey the smoking, gaping hole in his perimeter wall and the utter wreckage of his authority in a transport of impotent, murderous fury.

They travelled for what felt like an eternity, the Land Leviathan crashing and lurching through the dense, trackless forest, pushing its makeshift, Talent-powered engine to its absolute limits. Kyouya, his face a mask of grim concentration, wrestled with the controls, navigating by instinct and the occasional, shouted direction from Jin Tachibana, who seemed to possess an uncanny, almost preternatural knowledge of the surrounding, uncharted terrain. Finally, just as the first, watery, grey light of a stormy dawn began to filter through the dense canopy, the monstrous vehicle, with a final, shuddering, metallic sigh, ground to a halt deep within a remote, mist-shrouded mountain valley, its power core finally, irrevocably, depleted.

Exhausted, mud-caked, soaked to the bone, but undeniably, miraculously free, the escapees stumbled out into the cold, damp air, their faces a mixture of stunned disbelief, dawning elation, and a profound, soul-deep weariness. They had done it. Against all odds, against all reason, they were out.

In the difficult, uncertain days that followed, a fledgling, fragile resistance began to take shape in their secluded, temporary mountain hideout – a series of interconnected, damp caves hidden behind a waterfall that Jin had, with his usual uncanny foresight, led them to. Nana Hiiragi, Kyouya Onodera, Arthur Ainsworth, Michiru Inukai, and Jin Tachibana (who, as always, appeared and disappeared with unsettling, mysterious ease, often returning with vital supplies of scavenged food, medicine, or crucial intelligence about Committee movements in the region) formed the de facto core of its hesitant, informal leadership. There were disagreements, naturally; tensions born of fear, exhaustion, and conflicting personalities. The constant, gnawing fear of discovery, of Tsuruoka’s inevitable, relentless pursuit, was a shadow that hung over them all. But there was also, for the first time in what felt like an eternity, a shared, defiant purpose.

For Nana, that purpose had now crystallized into an unwavering, all-consuming obsession: find the absolute, unvarnished truth about her parents’ murders, expose Commander Tsuruoka for the monster he was, and then, with every fibre of her being, dedicate herself to dismantling the Committee’s entire rotten, bloodsoaked infrastructure. For Kyouya, it was simpler, yet no less profound: protect his rediscovered sister, Rin (Jin), and ensure that no one else ever had to endure the horrors he had witnessed, the pain he had suffered. For Michiru, it was a quiet, unwavering commitment to healing, to offering comfort, to nurturing the fragile sparks of hope in the hearts of her fellow survivors.

It was during one of their first, tentative strategy sessions, huddled around a smoky, sputtering fire in the largest of the damp caves, the sound of the nearby waterfall a constant, rushing counterpoint to their hushed voices, that Arthur Ainsworth decided it was time to unburden himself of his longest-held, most significant secret. He looked at the tired, determined faces around him – Nana, her expression now one of fierce, almost righteous resolve rather than haunted guilt; Kyouya, his stoic presence a silent, unshakeable bedrock for them all; Michiru, her gentle strength an unexpected, vital anchor in their storm-tossed existence; Jin, his enigmatic smile hinting at depths of knowledge and purpose still unknown.

“There’s something… something important you all need to understand about me,” Arthur began, his voice quiet but firm, his Japanese, learned through years of painful necessity and now constant, unavoidable immersion, surprisingly steady, though still carrying the unmistakable, softened consonants of his native English. He no longer had his phone, his crutch, his electronic voice; these words, this truth, had to be his own. “My Talent… the ‘Chrono-Empathic Glimpse,’ as I once called it… it was always a finite thing. A limited resource. Like a well that, through overuse, eventually, inevitably, runs dry.” He paused, meeting their expectant, curious eyes, one by one. “That well… it is dry now. Completely. I’ve seen too far, too often, peered too deeply into futures that were not mine to see. I can no longer glimpse what is to come. I am, for all intents and purposes, truly Talentless now.”

A profound silence fell over the small, firelit group, broken only by the crackle of the flames and the distant roar of the waterfall. Nana looked at him, a flicker of complex, unreadable understanding in her violet eyes – perhaps a memory of his earlier, pointed comment in that rainy alleyway about Talents not having a monopoly on wrongdoing. “From here on,” Arthur continued, a new, unfamiliar, almost liberating resolve hardening his own expression, “I have no special foresight, no prophetic warnings, to offer any of you. What I have left is simply what you all possess: whatever intuition remains, the sum of the experiences we’ve endured, the lessons we’ve learned, and whatever stubborn, foolish determination we can collectively muster. We’re all… flying blind in that respect now, I suppose.”

He looked down at his hands, these unfamiliar teenage hands of Kenji Tanaka, hands that had, in the course of his bizarre, unwilling journey, performed acts, witnessed horrors, that Arthur Ainsworth, the mundane accounts clerk from Crawley, could never have begun to imagine. He wondered, as he often did in these quiet, reflective moments, about his old life, his old world, the one he had been so violently, so inexplicably, torn from. Could he ever truly return? And even if it were somehow, miraculously possible, after everything he had seen, everything he had done, everything he had become… would he even want to? The question, vast and unanswerable, hung heavy and unspoken in the damp, cave air.

Nana was the first to break the silence, her voice surprisingly gentle. “Your ‘glimpses’ may be gone, Arthur-san,” she said, using his first name with a newfound, hesitant, almost shy respect, the Japanese honorific a quiet acknowledgment. “But your insight, your unique understanding of Tsuruoka, your… your perspective… that is still valuable. More valuable now, perhaps, than ever before. We all still have a role to play in what’s to come.”

Kyouya Onodera, his gaze fixed on the dancing flames, nodded once in silent, stoic agreement. “We fight with what we have,” he murmured, his voice a low rumble. “And with who we are.”

They began to strategize then, their voices gaining a new strength, a new conviction, in the flickering, uncertain firelight. They were a small, battered, and profoundly unlikely band of survivors, pitted against a powerful, ruthless, and deeply entrenched enemy. The fight ahead was uncertain, perilous, the odds overwhelmingly stacked against them. But as they spoke, as they planned, as they began to forge a new, shared path forward into that terrifying, unknown future, Arthur Ainsworth felt a strange, unfamiliar, almost forgotten sensation begin to stir within him. It wasn’t foresight. It wasn’t prescience. It was something far simpler, far more fundamental, and perhaps, in the end, far more powerful. It was hope.

Would serve her right

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

Hej