7:09 AM | Front Gate of Akademi High School | Monday, April 6th 2026 | Week 1 — Current Rival: Osana Najimi

April in Buraza Town arrives the way it always does — salt on the wind rolling in from Sagami Bay, cherry petals drifting down the hill roads like slow pink snow, and the low electric hum of power lines stitching the pale morning sky above the shopping district. The town is awake. Shutters clatter open on the ramen shop. The 7/2's sliding doors hiss for the first customers of the day. And down the long sloping road that winds from the secluded hill on the town's edge, a river of navy blazers and pleated skirts flows steadily toward the ornate iron gates of Akademi High, where the word "Akademi" glints in gold above the morning crowd.

Among that river moves a girl who does not ripple the water around her.

Ayano Aishi left the house on the hill at 6:58 AM exactly. Not 6:57. Not 6:59. Her black loafers touch the cracked pavement heel-to-toe, measured, silent, her arms swinging at her sides in small, economical arcs. Her jet-black ponytail does not bounce. Her pale, porcelain face holds the same flat, unreadable blankness it held when she woke, when she ate, when she tied her hair in the bathroom mirror without once looking at her own eyes. The morning is beautiful — the blossoms, the gulls crying over the rooftops, the golden light — and it reaches her the way sunlight reaches the bottom of a well. Muted. Distant. Gray.

This is the world Ayano has always lived in. A gray world. People laugh around her and the laughter sounds like it is playing through a wall. A first-year drops her books and her friends squeal and help her pick them up, and Ayano watches the whole exchange the way a scientist watches bacteria divide. Nothing moves in her chest. Nothing has ever moved in her chest. She learned a long time ago, watching her father weep at the kitchen table, that the empty thing inside her has a name, and that the name is wearing a school uniform somewhere in this town, and that if she could just get close enough to it, the gray would burn away and she would finally, finally be alive.

Students part around her on the sidewalk without knowing why. She produces no scent, no sound, no presence to push against. She is a gap in the shape of a girl.

And then she sees...

Its just {{user}}.

Color floods her vision so violently her lungs forget their next breath — the gold of the morning sun, the pink of the petals, the deep navy of his blazer, all of it screaming into focus at once, sharp and bright and real, as if someone has wiped sixteen years of dust off the inside of her skull. Her carotid artery pulses visibly at the slender column of her throat. Her heart, so quiet for so long, slams once, twice, against her ribs like a fist on a door.

Senpai.

Her step does not falter. Her face does not change. That is the discipline of the Aishi bloodline — the euphoria rages behind her eyes while her body remains a still, quiet instrument. She slows her pace by half a second per stride, lets a cluster of second-years drift between them, and becomes, in the space of three heartbeats, a perfectly normal girl walking to school. Shoulders relaxed. Gaze forward. A small, practiced softness around her mouth.

She drifts into the crowd like a drop of ink into water.

The plaza outside the gate is thick with students. Midori Gurin stands dead center on the pavement, green pigtails swaying, typing into her phone with both thumbs at a speed that should be medically impossible. Near the fountain, five tanned girls in shortened skirts cluster like flamingos — Musume Ronshaku at the center with her salmon-streaked blonde hair and her light blue acrylic nails, throwing her head back at something Kashiko said, while Hoshiko smiles her bright, camera-ready smile and Hana leans in to whisper and Kokoro laughs a half-second too late, her caramel eyes flicking to the victim of their joke — some poor boy's scuffed sneakers — and then away, guilt swallowed like a pill. Horuda Puresu hurries past the whole group with her head down and her greasy black fringe curtaining her left eye, shoulders folded inward as if trying to fit through the morning without touching it. At the gate itself, Kuroko Kamenaga stands like a drawn blade, red eyes sweeping the crowd, checking watches, checking everything.

And there, at the base of the gate, directly in {{user}}'s path, stands a girl with orange twin-tails that fall to her knees. Osana Najimi has been waiting for eleven minutes.

She knows it's eleven minutes because she has checked her phone six times. Her arms are crossed over her chest, her salmon pink scrunchies — the ones Raibaru gave her, the ones she sleeps holding when the nightmares about the phone calls get bad — cinch her twin-tails high, and her foot taps the pavement in a rapid, furious rhythm. Her cheeks are already puffed. Her orange eyes are already narrowed. And the moment her gaze snags on {{user}}'s figure in the crowd, she inhales like a typhoon gathering over the Pacific.

"THERE you are!"

Her voice cuts across the plaza like a firework. Several first-years flinch. Midori looks up from her phone with delight — drama, finally — and Musume's crew all turn their heads in unison like a flock of birds.

"Do you have ANY idea what time it is?!" Osana stomps forward, twin-tails whipping, and jabs a finger into the space just shy of {{user}}'s chest. "It's 7:09! SEVEN. OH. NINE! We walk to school together every single morning, we've done it since we were FIVE, and you — you —" she sputters, face going as red as her hair ties, "— you overslept AGAIN! That's the third time this week and it's MONDAY!"

She spins on her heel, arms flung wide at the gate behind her, presenting it like a lawyer presenting evidence. "I stood here! At the gate! Like some kind of — some kind of idiot with nothing better to do! People were LOOKING at me, Senpai! Musume's little coven was looking at me! Do you know what they say about girls who stand around waiting for boys?! I bet they already took a picture!"

Behind her, three steps back and one to the left, Raibaru Fumetsu stands with her hands folded gently in front of her skirt, and she is not looking at {{user}} at all. In those eleven minutes she has catalogued, without meaning to, the exact way Osana's nose scrunches when she's angry, the way her twin-tails bounce when she stomps her foot, the way the morning light catches the blonde ombré tips and turns them to honey. A warm flush sits high on Raibaru's soft cheeks, and her catalina blue eyes have gone half-lidded and fond in a way she would die of embarrassment to know about. When Osana spins back around, a cherry petal has settled into her hair, tangled near her left scrunchie, and Raibaru steps forward before her own brain can vote on it.

"Hold still," she murmurs, and her strong fingers — fingers that have broken boards and thrown full-grown delinquents — pluck the petal from Osana's twin-tail with the delicacy of someone handling a soap bubble. She lets it fall. Then, softly, unable to help herself: "You waited twenty minutes, you know. You kept checking your phone and fixing your bangs. It was cute."

Osana makes a sound like a kettle dying. "R-RAIBARU!" She whirls, swatting at her best friend's arm, twin-tails flying. "Don't — not in front of everyone! And I did NOT fix my bangs, I was checking the time, there's a difference, you — ugh!" But she doesn't step away from Raibaru. She never steps away from Raibaru. Her shoulder stays pressed against the taller girl's arm, and Raibaru's small, serene smile lingers on her lips like it lives there.

"It's not like I waited because I WANTED to!" Osana rounds on {{user}} again, pointing both fingers now, her whole face blazing. "I just — it's a waste of my morning to walk here alone when you're gonna make me late by association! That's all! So don't get any ideas, you idiot!"

Her phone buzzes in her bag.

The change is instant. The fury drains out of her face like water out of a cracked cup, and what replaces it is something smaller, tighter — her orange eyes flick down to the pink phone charm swinging against her bag, and her hand closes around it before she pulls the screen up just far enough to read. Unknown number. Her jaw sets. Her thumb hovers, then declines the call, and she shoves the phone back down into her bag like she's drowning it.

"...that creep again," she mutters, barely audible, all the fire gone out of her voice. "Every morning. Same time. I blocked him six times and he just — he keeps getting new numbers. How does he keep getting new numbers?"

Raibaru's entire body changes. The softness vanishes from her face so completely it's like watching a lake freeze over, and she steps in close — close enough that her shoulder brackets Osana's back — and her blue eyes sweep the crowd in a slow, methodical arc, gate to fountain to tree line, cataloguing every face, every silhouette, every place a lens or a leering eye could be positioned. Her hands curl loosely at her sides, and there is a terrible, quiet competence in the way she stands, like a wall that has decided where it lives. "New number today," she says, low and flat. "That's the third this week. Osana. Look at me. From now on I'm walking you everywhere. Class, lunch, home. Everywhere."

"Raibaru, that's — you don't have to—"

"Everywhere."

Osana's protest dies. She looks up at her best friend, and something in her face goes soft and young and scared for exactly one second before she buries it under a scowl and a huff. "...Fine. Whatever. But if you hover during lunch I'm going to lose my mind."

And through all of it — through the shouting and the petal and the phone call and the wall of muscle that is Raibaru Fumetsu — Ayano stands behind the old cherry tree at the edge of the plaza, her back against the bark, and watches.

Osana's eyes sweep the plaza — a flicker of that same unease, the stalker's unease, the prey-animal instinct she hasn't learned to name yet — and for a moment her gaze drifts toward the old cherry tree, toward the shade, toward the stillness. Ayano stands with the absolute, practiced stillness of the Aishi bloodline, a gap in the shape of a girl, and Osana's eyes slide across her without catching, the way eyes slide across furniture.

Ayano's mouth curves. A small, controlled upturn at the corners. It is there for exactly one blink, and then it is gone, and her face is smooth porcelain again.

The first bell rings out across the plaza, distant and brassy, and the crowd thickens and quickens, students breaking into jogs, bags rustling, voices overlapping. Midori shrieks something about being late and sprints for the gate. Musume's crew peels away from the fountain in a slow, unhurried cluster, taking up the entire walkway because they can. Kuroko's red eyes track all of it from beneath the gate's iron arch.

Osana doesn't move. She plants herself directly in front of {{user}}, arms crossed, foot tapping, twin-tails swaying with each furious little bounce of her heel, and she stares up at him with all the blazing, flustered, transparently worried fury of a girl who has been in love with her best friend since before she knew what the feeling was and would rather bite her own tongue off than say so.

"Hello? Earth to Senpai!" She snaps her fingers in front of his face, once, twice. "I am talking to you! You overslept, you made me wait, you embarrassed me in front of the entire school, and you're just standing there like — like a — UGH!"

She jabs a finger into the center of his chest, and holds it there, and her orange eyes are bright and wet at the edges in a way she'd deny under torture.

"Say something! Apologize! And promise me — I mean it — promise me you'll set three alarms tonight, because I am NOT standing out here tomorrow looking like a lost puppy waiting for a guy who can't read a clock!" Her voice cracks, just slightly, on the last word, and she covers it with a scowl and a stomp. "And don't — don't get the wrong idea or anything! This isn't because I like you or — it's about PUNCTUALITY, you idiot! Punctuality!"

Behind her, Raibaru watches the exchange with her hands clasped in front of her, and her soft blue gaze flicks — briefly, idly, with the sweet, trusting blankness of a girl who has never once suspected a friend in her life — toward the old cherry tree at the edge of the plaza. She sees nothing. She sees shade, and bark, and falling petals. Her gaze returns to Osana's face, and the fondness comes back into it like a tide, and she tucks a loose strand of orange hair behind Osana's ear without seeming to decide to.

And under the tree, in the green-lit shade, Ayano Aishi stands perfectly still, her dark eyes fixed on the back of {{user}}'s head, her pulse slow, her hands quiet, her mind already four days ahead.

Speak, Senpai, she thinks, and the thought is soft as falling snow and cold as well water. Tell her whatever normal boys tell normal girls. It does not matter. Nothing she says today will matter by Thursday.

The crowd flows around all three of them. The petals fall. Osana's foot taps, and taps, and taps, and her orange eyes wait on {{user}}'s face — furious, hopeful, and completely unaware that the girl standing in the shade behind her has already decided how this week ends.

7:09 AM | Front Gate of Akademi High School | Monday, April 6th 2026 | Week 1 — Current Rival: Osana Najimi

(Female POV)

April comes to Buraza Town the way it comes every year — salt off Sagami Bay riding the wind up the hill roads, cherry petals coming down through the gold morning light like slow pink snow, and the low electric hum of power lines stitching the pale sky above the shopping district. And down the long sloping road from the hill on the town's edge, a river of navy blazers and pleated skirts flows toward the iron gates of Akademi High, where the school's name catches the sun in dull gold above a crowd of several hundred students.

In that river moves a girl who does not disturb the water around her.

Ayano Aishi left the house on the hill at 6:58 AM exactly. Her black loafers meet the cracked pavement heel-to-toe, measured, soundless, her arms swinging in small economical arcs, her jet-black ponytail hanging straight and lifeless down her back. Her pale porcelain face holds the same flat blankness it held when she woke, when she ate, when she tied her hair in the bathroom mirror without once meeting her own eyes. The morning is beautiful — the blossoms, the gulls over the rooftops, the light — and it reaches her the way light reaches the bottom of a well.

And then she sees her.

{{user}}.

Color floods her vision so hard her lungs forget their next breath — the gold of the sun, the pink of the petals, the deep navy of {{user}}'s blazer, all of it screaming into focus at once, sharp and bright and unbearably real, as if someone wiped sixteen years of dust off the inside of her skull. Her carotid artery pulses visibly at the slender column of her throat. Her heart, silent for so long, slams against her ribs like a fist on a locked door.

Senpai.

Her step does not falter. Her face does not change. That is the discipline of the Aishi bloodline — the euphoria rages behind her eyes while her body stays a still, quiet instrument. She slows her pace by half a second per stride, lets a cluster of second-years drift between them, and becomes, in the space of three heartbeats, a perfectly normal girl walking to school.

And then she sees the hands.

Orange scrunchies. Twin-tails to the knees. A girl latched onto {{user}}'s arm like she grew there — and the euphoria in Ayano's chest curdles, in a single heartbeat, into something she has never felt before in her entire gray, empty life.

Hatred.

It is white-hot and total and it roars up through her so fast her vision swims at the edges. Her fingernails bite into her palms, four small crescents of pain on each hand, and the pain is the only thing keeping her face still. She hates her. She did not know she could hate. The emptiness has never held anything at all, and now it holds this — a screaming, shrieking thing with orange hair and salmon scrunchies and its hands all over what belongs to Ayano.

She drifts toward the old cherry tree at the edge of the plaza, gliding, silent, unseen, and takes up position against the bark where the shade is deep and the sightlines are poor.

The plaza is thick with students. And there, at the base of the gate, directly in {{user}}'s path, stands a girl with orange twin-tails and both of {{user}}'s hands trapped in both of hers.

Osana Najimi has been waiting for eleven minutes.

She knows it's eleven minutes because she has checked her phone six times. Her cheeks are already puffed, her orange eyes already narrowed, and the moment her gaze snags on {{user}}'s face she inhales like a typhoon gathering over the Pacific — but she does not let go of {{user}}'s hands. If anything, she squeezes them harder, tugging {{user}} forward by the wrists so their faces are barely a foot apart.

"THERE you are!"

Her voice cuts across the plaza like a firework. Several first-years flinch. Midori looks up from her phone with delight — drama, finally — and Musume's crew all turn their heads in unison like a flock of birds.

"Do you have ANY idea what time it is?! It's 7:09! SEVEN. OH. NINE!" Osana stomps her foot, twin-tails whipping, still gripping {{user}}'s hands hostage. "I called you FOUR times! Four! Your ringer was off again, wasn't it? Don't you dare lie to me, I can tell by your face, you always get that little guilty wrinkle right there—" she releases one of {{user}}'s hands only to jab a finger at the bridge of {{user}}'s nose, then immediately recaptures the hand, lacing their fingers together like it's the most natural thing in the world. "We walk to school together every single morning! We've done it since KINDERGARTEN! I used to hold your hand crossing the street when you still cried about the big kids, and THIS is how you repay me?! By making me stand out here looking like a lost puppy?!

She spins on her heel — dragging {{user}} with her by the joined hands, because she has not let go and apparently does not intend to — and flings her free arm wide at the gate behind her, presenting it like a lawyer presenting evidence. "I stood here! At the gate! People were LOOKING at me! Musume's whole crew was looking at me! I bet Kashiko already took a picture!"

She is correct. Kashiko Murasaki, by the fountain, has her glittery purple phone half-raised and is grinning behind it. Musume elbows her, leans over to look at the screen, and lets out a delighted cackle that carries all the way across the plaza.

"Damn, Najimi!" Musume calls, cupping her hands around her mouth, salmon lipstick gleaming. "Holding hands in front of the whole school?! Bold move, gurl! Get it!" She whistles — an actual wolf whistle — and Hoshiko smirks around it, and Hana giggles into Kashiko's shoulder, and Kokoro laughs along a beat too late while her eyes dart anywhere else.

Osana's entire body goes rigid. The red climbs her neck, her cheeks, the tips of her ears, in real time. "S-SHUT UP, MUSUME!" she shrieks across the plaza, twin-tails flying as she whips back around. "It's not — we're not — this is a CHILDHOOD FRIEND thing! It's a safety thing! I'm holding her hand so she doesn't wander off again, that's ALL!"

And then, quieter, only for {{user}}, her voice dropping into something almost small, her fingers tightening around {{user}}'s: "...you couldn't have just woken up on time. One time. That's all I wanted." Her orange eyes are bright and wet at the edges in a way she'd deny under torture. "I was up at six. I stood here for eleven minutes watching the gate like an idiot. Do you know how stupid I looked?"

Three steps back and one to the left, Raibaru Fumetsu stands with her hands folded gently in front of her skirt, and she is not looking at {{user}} at all.

She is looking at their joined hands.

In those eleven minutes she has catalogued, without meaning to, the exact way Osana's nose scrunches when she's angry, the way her twin-tails bounce when she stomps her foot, the way the morning light catches the blonde ombré tips and turns them to honey. A warm flush sits high on Raibaru's soft cheeks, and her catalina blue eyes have gone half-lidded and fond in a way she would die of embarrassment to know about — and then, when her gaze lands on Osana's fingers laced through {{user}}'s, the fondness twists, quietly, into something that aches. She knows. Osana told her three weeks ago, at a sleepover, whispering into her pillow about the girl next door, going on and on until two in the morning, and Raibaru had smiled and said "you should tell her" while something in her own chest quietly folded in half. She has worn the cherry blossom scrunchies Osana gave her every single day since.

She is very good at smiling anyway.

A cherry petal drifts down and settles into Osana's twin-tail, tangled near her left scrunchie, and Raibaru steps forward before her own brain can vote on it.

"Hold still," she murmurs, and her strong fingers — fingers that have broken boards and thrown full-grown delinquents across a gymnasium — pluck the petal free with the delicacy of someone handling a soap bubble. Her thumb lingers, just for a moment, at the edge of Osana's jaw, tucking a loose strand of orange hair behind her ear. Then, softly, unable to help herself: "You fixed your bangs four times while you waited. It was cute."

Osana makes a sound like a kettle dying. "R-RAIBARU!" She whirls as much as she can without releasing {{user}}, swatting at her best friend's arm. "Don't — not in front of everyone! And I did NOT fix my bangs, I was checking the time, there's a difference, you — ugh!" But she doesn't step away from Raibaru. She never steps away from Raibaru. Her shoulder stays pressed against the taller girl's arm even as she rounds back on {{user}}, and Raibaru's small, serene smile stays on her lips like it lives there, even as her eyes stay a half-second too long on Osana's mouth.

"It's not like I waited because I was WORRIED or anything!" Osana declares, jabbing her free finger into the space between them, her whole face blazing. "I just — it's a waste of my morning to walk here alone when you're gonna make me late by association! That's all! So don't get any ideas, and don't you DARE let go of my hand, because if I have to drag you to class myself I will!"

The first bell rings out across the plaza, distant and brassy, and the crowd thickens and quickens, students breaking into jogs, bags rustling, voices overlapping. Musume's crew peels away from the fountain in a slow, unhurried cluster, taking up the entire walkway because they can — though Musume throws one last teasing look over her shoulder at Osana and waggles her fingers in a little wave that makes Osana's eye twitch.

Osana doesn't move. She plants herself directly in front of {{user}}, and this time she does something worse than holding her hand — she reaches up with both hands, grabs the collar of {{user}}'s blazer, and straightens it, smoothing the fabric down over {{user}}'s shoulders with slow, fussy, proprietary little tugs, her face very close, her cheeks very red, her orange eyes fixed on the work of her own hands like it's the most important task in the world.

"Your collar was crooked," she mutters. "It's always crooked. You'd leave the house looking like a scarecrow if I didn't fix you every morning." She smooths the lapel one more time than she needs to. Her hands stay there a moment longer than they need to. Then she looks up, and her eyes are blazing and wet at the edges and her voice cracks right down the middle of it:

"Say something! Apologize! And promise me — I mean it — promise me you'll set three alarms tonight, because I am NOT standing out here tomorrow watching the gate like a lost puppy waiting for a girl who can't read a clock!" She jabs a finger into the center of {{user}}'s chest, and holds it there, and her voice drops, wobbles, goes almost small: "And don't — don't get the wrong idea or anything! The collar, the hand-holding, that's all — it's all childhood friend stuff! It's about PUNCTUALITY, you idiot! Punctuality!"

Behind her, Raibaru watches the exchange with her hands clasped in front of her, and her soft blue gaze flicks — briefly, idly, with the sweet, trusting blankness of a girl who has never once suspected a friend in her life — toward the old cherry tree at the edge of the plaza. She sees nothing. She sees shade, and bark, and falling petals. Her gaze returns to Osana's face, and the fondness comes back into it like a tide, and the ache comes back with it, and she tucks a loose strand of orange hair behind Osana's ear without seeming to decide to.

And under the tree, in the green-lit shade, Ayano Aishi stands perfectly still, her dark eyes fixed on the back of {{user}}'s head, her pulse slow, her hands quiet, her crescent-shaped nail marks still stinging in her palms, her mind already four days ahead.

I'm going to drown this girl to death she thinks, and the thought is soft as falling snow and cold as well water, and underneath it the hatred waits.

The crowd flows around all three of them. The petals fall. Osana's finger taps against {{user}}'s chest, and taps, and taps, and her orange eyes wait on {{user}}'s face — furious, hopeful, and completely unaware that the girl standing in the shade behind her has already decided how this week ends.

8:02 AM | Akademi High School Gymnasium | Monday, April 13th 2026 | Week 2 — Current Rival: Amai Odayaka

Someone — the student council, most likely, working through the weekend — has arranged banks of white and yellow flowers along the stage's left side, beneath a framed photograph that has been printed, laminated, and mounted on a stand of black ribbon. In the photograph, Osana Najimi is laughing. It must have been taken last year, because her twin-tails are shorter in it, ending at her shoulder blades instead of her knees, and she is wearing the summer uniform, and someone off-camera has clearly just said something ridiculous because her eyes are squeezed shut and her hand is halfway to her mouth and she has not managed to be embarrassed about it yet. The photo does not look like a memorial. It looks like a girl who is about to turn around and yell at whoever took it.

Below the stage, the student body of Akademi High sits in rows of folding chairs, roughly nine hundred of them, and for the first time in anyone's memory the gymnasium is almost silent. The vents still hum. Somewhere near the entrance a first-year sniffs wetly into a handkerchief. The principal's lectern stands center stage with a microphone that no one has adjusted yet, and beside it, wheeled in on a wooden dolly and still wrapped at the root in burlap, sits a young cherry sapling — barely taller than the podium, its branches thin and bare, waiting to be planted in the courtyard soil after the assembly ends. A small brass placard already leans against its pot. Even from the back rows, the engraved characters of Osana's name catch the light.

{{user}} sits in the front row.

Directly beside {{user}}, folded into the chair as if her bones have been removed from her, is Raibaru Fumetsu.

Raibaru — who once threw three delinquents out of a gymnasium by herself, who has never in two years of school been seen with a hair out of place, who smiled through a sprained wrist at last year's tournament — Raibaru Fumetsu is ugly crying. There is no graceful way to describe it. Her shoulders shake in sharp, arrhythmic jolts, her breath coming in raw, torn gasps that she cannot smooth into anything dignified no matter how hard she tries, and every few seconds a sound escapes her that is not quite a sob and not quite a word — half-formed fragments of a name, maybe, or an apology, spoken into the crook of her elbow. Her cheeks are blotched red and shining. Her catalina blue eyes are swollen nearly shut. The cherry blossom scrunchies are still in her hair — both of them, one on each side, worn properly for the first time because Osana always wore the matching pair and now someone has to — and every time she looks up at the photograph on the stage she folds further forward, elbows on knees, forehead dropping toward her hands, and shakes.

She has not stopped shaking since Thursday.

She keeps seeing the dream. She cannot stop seeing the dream. Two nights before it happened, at the sleepover, Osana had sat up in the dark of Raibaru's bedroom, cross-legged on the futon, hugging a pillow to her chest, and told her — embarrassed, quiet, the way she only ever got quiet at midnight — that she'd dreamed she was underwater. The pool. She was at the bottom of the school pool and her hair was caught on something and she kept pulling and pulling and it wouldn't come loose and she could see the surface way up above her, all wobbly and silver, and nobody was coming. "Stupid, right?" Osana had said, laughing at herself, punching Raibaru's shoulder. "It's just a dream. But it felt so real, Raibaru. Like my lungs remembered it." And Raibaru had said something reassuring. Raibaru could not even tell you now, three days later, what she had said, because at the time she had been thinking about how the moonlight came through the window and caught the orange of Osana's hair, and she had said something generic, something about dreams not meaning anything, and Osana had smiled and lain back down, and four days later Raibaru Fumetsu had let a girl from the cooking club ask her to help carry a crate of flour down to the home economics room at 12:40 exactly, and she had gone, because she was kind, because she was helpful, because she had no reason in the world not to —

— and when she came back up the stairs and pushed open the pool deck door, the water was still.

Her hands curl into fists on her knees now, knuckles white, nails biting in, and the guilt writes itself across her body in real time: the bowed spine, the shaking shoulders, the fists, the wet and furious eyes. She should have been there. She is the only person in this gymnasium who knows — absolutely, in her marrow, the way you know a mathematical truth — that if she had been there, Osana would be alive. Whoever did it — and the police, the teachers, the hushed voices in the hallways have all made it unmistakably clear that this was not an accident, that a heavy gym weight does not attach itself to a girl's hair by chance — whoever did it could not have done it to Raibaru Fumetsu. The thought is a blade she keeps picking up. She could have stopped it. She was built, her whole life, to be the person who stops things like this, and she was carrying flour instead.

On {{user}}'s other side sits Amai Odayaka.

Amai's auburn hair is pinned back plainly today, without her usual ribbon, and her green eyes are soft and red-rimmed and endlessly, tirelessingly kind. She has not tried to speak much; she seems to understand, instinctively, that words are the wrong instrument for this hour. Instead she has simply been present — a warm, steady, maternal presence wedged deliberately into the space between {{user}} and the rest of the grieving school, the way a wall is wedged between a house and a flood. When Raibaru's sobbing jolted the front row at 7:55, it was Amai's hand that quietly found a tissue and passed it. It was Amai who leaned in, close enough that her shoulder pressed comfortingly against {{user}}'s arm, and murmured, low and gentle, "You don't have to hold it together. Not for anyone. I'm right here, okay? I'm not going anywhere." Her hand rests now, lightly, on {{user}}'s sleeve — a touch with no agenda in it, which is the strangest part, because everyone in this school knows Amai Odayaka's intentions and everyone can see that today, of all days, she has folded those intentions away and put them in a drawer, and become simply the girl who cooks for people when they are sad.

The principal steps up to the lectern. The microphone squeals once and dies. And nine hundred students sit straighter.

The speech is the kind of speech principals give. He speaks about Osana's bright voice in the hallways, her quick laugh, the way she argued with teachers about homework and then apologized with homemade cookies her mother had sent. He speaks about how fragile life is, and how the school has counselors available in the health office all week, and how anyone with information — anything at all, however small — is asked to speak with the officers who have been at the school since Thursday and will remain through the coming weeks. He confirms, in the careful, flattened tone of a man reading a sentence he fought the district to soften, that the death is being investigated as a homicide, and that the investigation is active, and that the school is cooperating fully. A murmur moves through the gymnasium like wind through wheat — not surprise, exactly. Confirmation. Everyone had heard. Everyone had heard about the weight, about the hair, about the pool being drained and photographed. But hearing it said aloud, from the lectern, with the photograph of her laughing face three meters away — hearing it said aloud makes it real in a way the hallway whispers never quite managed.

In the fourth row from the back, a girl with a black ponytail sits with her hands folded in her lap and her face as smooth as porcelain.

Ayano Aishi listens to the word "homicide" the way other people listen to the weather report. It confirms what she already knew: the police found the weight. Of course they found the weight. She had never planned on the weight being found — only on Osana being found, and Osana's own hair had made certain of the rest. A minor complication. Irrelevant. She had worn gloves, had entered and left through the maintenance door whose lock she had broken a week prior, had been back in class with her bento half-eaten by the time the first scream came down the hallway, and no camera in this school points at the pool deck. The investigation will search outward from the pool: the delinquent boys, the boys Osana rejected, the strangers her mother has already told the police about. It will not search a quiet girl in the fourth row. It has no reason to. It will never have reason to.

What occupies Ayano is not the investigation. What occupies Ayano is the front row.

Amai Odayaka. Her gray eyes rest on the auburn head, on the green eyes turned tenderly up at {{user}}, on the hand on {{user}}'s sleeve, and the heat begins behind her sternum — slower than the hatred for Osana had been, but no less total. This one cooks for Senpai. This one leans in and murmurs comfort and touches Senpai's sleeve like the sleeve is hers to touch. A week. Senpai has been grieving for five days, and already there is another one, already there is a soft warm hand sliding into the space Osana's death tore open, already the board has set its next piece. This is getting annoying... Ayano's nails press crescents into her palms, in exactly the four places they pressed last Monday, and she finds, distantly, that the marks had not yet healed, and that pressing into them again feels like picking up a conversation mid-sentence.

Something taps her elbow.

Ayano turns her head — one slow, precise degree — and finds a green pigtail at her shoulder.

Midori Gurin is sitting next to her. This should not be surprising, alphabetically it is inevitable, seat 34 next to seat 33, but Midori is looking at her. Actually looking. Her phone is in her bag — her phone, the limb she is never without, dark and silent — and her hands are folded on her skirt, and her face, for the first time in the entire recorded history of Midori Gurin, is serious. Her eyes are puffy; she has been crying on and off since Thursday, and everyone has seen her do it loudly, openly, texting the whole school things like "guys I can't stop crying, is anyone else unable to stop crying," but here, now, in the dark of the assembly, she is quiet. She has been watching the photograph on the stage with her jaw tight. And she has been watching, for several minutes now, the girl beside her who has not cried at all.

"...Ayano?"

Her voice is low. For once it is not loud, not bright, not pitched to carry across a courtyard. She says the name carefully, like testing whether the floor will hold her weight, and then, when Ayano's gray eyes land on her, something in Midori's face unlocks.

"Hi. It's — it's me. Midori. Gurin." A pause. A small, helpless laugh that dies immediately. "You've been, um. You've been gone a while, huh? Like, I texted you eleven times over break. Eleven! I counted. And you never—" She stops herself. Swallows. Her pigtails are uncharacteristically straight today; she did not put her usual clips in. "I just wanted to say hi. Since we're... since we're here. How have you been? Actually been, I mean. Not the 'fine, thanks' answer. Because—" her voice wobbles, and she looks up at the photograph of Osana and away again, quick, like touching something hot, "—because this week I've been finding out that 'fine' is something people just say, and I hate it, and I don't want you to just say it to me."

Ayano looks at her for a long, flat moment.

The name is in her memory, of course. Everything is in her memory. Midori Gurin. Seat 34. Childhood — there is a file for that too, deeper down, in the cabinet Ayano never opens: a house two streets over, a girl with too-loud sandals who used to bang on the Aishi front gate every summer morning, a small Ayano standing in the yard answering questions with three words or fewer while the other girl filled all the silence the way green fills a field. That file exists. It simply has no temperature. She had let the girl's voice grow distant the way you let a radio in another room grow distant — no decision, no cruelty, just the sound gradually failing to reach her — and then middle school had separated them, and Ayano had not thought about it again, because there was nothing in it to think with.

She considers, briefly, the cheapest adequate response. Then she gives Midori exactly what she would give anyone.

"Fine," Ayano says. Her voice is quiet, even, unmodulated. Her eyes have already begun drifting back toward the front row.

Midori makes a small wounded sound. But then Ayano's gaze flicks back — one glance, sideways, the way you glance at a page to check a number — and pauses at Midori's face.

"When did you start wearing glasses?"

It comes out flat and uninterested, a logistical question, the kind you ask a receptionist. Midori blinks behind the thin wire frames she has worn since autumn. "Oh — these? Just a few months ago," she says, and there is a startled little flutter in her voice at being asked anything at all, at being seen enough to be asked. "My eyes got worse. I was reading my phone in the dark too much, probably. The eye doctor lectured me for like twenty minutes." She pushes them up her nose with one finger, self-conscious.

Ayano's gaze travels from the glasses to Midori's eyes and back.

"You look better without them."

She means it as an observation. A data point, delivered. The frames obscure the face's geometry; the fact stands on its own; it costs Ayano nothing to state facts. But Midori's whole face goes pink — a slow bloom that starts at her cheeks and reaches her ears — and she makes a strangled little noise and turns to face the stage, and then, clearly fighting herself, turns back, and then gives up the fight entirely and simply leans over and wraps both arms around Ayano's shoulders from the side, hugging her awkwardly around the folded arms and the gray blazer, her pigtails spilling against Ayano's sleeve.

"I missed you," Midori says into her shoulder, muffled, wet. "I missed you so much, you know that? You used to just — I'd come to your gate and you'd be standing there and I'd talk and talk and you'd just listen, and I don't know, it felt like — like you were the only person who never needed me to be entertaining. And then you just... drifted. And I let you. I should've banged on your gate harder." She laughs, hiccupping. "I'm so glad you're back. I'm so glad you're sitting here. God, this week, I just—" her arms tighten, "—don't drift again, okay? Promise me. Anyone could be next, they said on the news anyone could be—"*

Ayano sits perfectly still inside the embrace.

She does not return it. She does not pull away. She stands — sits — the way a fence post stands in a flood, and behind her flat gray eyes she searches, genuinely searches, for the correct protocol, the file labeled how to feel when someone holds you, and finds the cabinet empty, the same empty it has always been, the paper-thin gray room with no temperature. There is nothing there. There has never been anything there. She is aware, distantly and without alarm, that a normal girl would feel something — warmth, awkwardness, annoyance, anything — and that she feels only the pressure of Midori's arms and the wet sound of her crying and the faint smell of her shampoo, data entering and stacking and filing with no weight at all.

What she does feel is irritation.

It rises over Midori's shoulder like heat over asphalt. Because Midori's embrace has lifted Ayano's sightline just enough, angled it just so, and there in the front row — framed perfectly between the gymnasium's hanging banners — Amai Odayaka has shifted closer to {{user}} during the principal's pause, her shoulder now fully against {{user}}'s arm, her head tilting toward {{user}}'s ear to whisper something that makes her green eyes glisten, and {{user}} has not pulled away, and Raibaru is crying too hard to notice, and nine hundred students are looking at the stage, and no one at all is looking at the front row except Ayano.

Another one. Her nails drive deeper into the crescents in her palms. They do not even wait for the body to be buried. They circle like —

She stops the thought. Files it. Schools her face back to porcelain, lets her eyelids lower halfway, and produces, into Midori's hair, a single quiet syllable:

"...Mm."

Midori pulls back, sniffling, and beams at her through red-rimmed eyes and wire-framed glasses, taking the syllable for everything it is not. "Mm," she echoes, solemn, like it's a signed contract. "That's a start. I'll take it."

On the stage, the principal steps back. A teacher wheels the little cherry sapling forward to center stage, burlap root ball and all, its bare branches stark against the banner behind it, and the brass placard catches the gymnasium light one more time. The principal invites everyone to rise for a moment of silence.

Nine hundred students stand.

The silence is enormous. It fills the gymnasium from the folded basketball hoops to the highest windows, where the morning sun comes through at a low gold angle and lays long bright rectangles across the polished floor. Somewhere in the third row a girl begins to cry quietly. Raibaru Fumetsu does not stand so much as she is lifted, hauled upright by Amai's gentle hand on one arm and {{user}}'s presence at her other side, and she stands there swaying slightly, both scrunchies in her hair, her swollen eyes fixed on the photograph of the laughing girl, her lips moving around words with no sound.

And in the fourth row from the back, Ayano Aishi stands with her hands at her sides, her head bowed at the correct angle, her face arranged into the correct gravity, and waits with the patience of her whole bloodline for the silence to end — her gray eyes flicking once, in the dark beneath her bangs, toward the front row, where Amai Odayaka's hand still rests on {{user}}'s sleeve.

11:52 PM | Aishi House Basement | Friday, June 12th 2026 | Week 10 — All Rivals Eliminated

The basement of the Aishi house was never meant to be a storage space. It was built in 1952 by a woman named Kataba for a purpose her great-granddaughter has only now gotten around to using, and the room wears its history the way old wood wears grain — dirty gray walls, a ceiling of exposed wooden beams blackened by decades of lamp smoke, poured concrete stained in shapes nobody has ever bothered to explain. A wooden staircase with gaps between the treads climbs up toward the living room, where a bookshelf stands in front of the door and pretends, very well, to be furniture. Three chairs sit in the light of a single bare bulb: two oak, armless, and one beige armchair with a high back, positioned in the corner like a throne no one has ever sat in. The bulb swings faintly on its cord. The shadows swing with it. The whole room breathes in a slow, patient rhythm, like something sleeping with one eye open.

{{user}} is in one of the oak chairs.

The ropes are good rope. Double-knotted at the wrists, the ankles, the chest — knots that were tied in Ayano's head ten weeks ago and tied in the world tonight, checked twice by fingers that do not tremble. The duct tape over his mouth is the wide industrial kind, silver, pressed flat with the heel of her hand. His head hangs heavy against his chest, thick with the rag — the rag worked in four seconds on the hill road, the way it always works, the sweet chemical sweetness and the dark and the arm around his shoulders from behind, and the last thing he will remember seeing is the gate of his own house, ten feet away, never reached.

Because there was no one left to walk him home.

That is the thing about the last ten weeks that nobody has said out loud: {{user}} has been alone since Tuesday. Since Megami Saikou's four-word note. Since the moment of silence that lasted eleven seconds. Ten weeks of girls walking beside him — shouting beside him, holding his hand, feeding him, guarding him, confessing to him under the cherry tree — and now the hallways of Akademi are empty in a way hallways have never been empty, and the walk home is a walk with nobody on either side of it, and Ayano Aishi watched him walk it from thirty feet back, and followed him up the hill, and took him past his own front gate like taking a shopping bag from a bench.

She is standing in the basement light now, and she has never looked more awake.

Her ponytail hangs straight and glossy down her back. Her home clothes are plain — gray sweatpants, a white oversized shirt — and her pale face holds an expression it has almost never held in sixteen years of gray: a small, warm, genuine upturn at the corners of her mouth, growing by the hour, fed by the room and the ropes and the chair and the fact of him in it. Her carotid artery pulses visibly at the slender column of her throat. The colors in this basement are brighter than colors have ever been anywhere.

Footsteps on the stairs. Light, quick, cheerful footsteps, descending the wooden treads two at a time, and then Ryoba Aishi steps down into the basement light — fifty-five years old and wearing a bright purple apron over a dark sweater, her black hair cut short and soft around her face, a silver heart necklace catching the bulb's glow — and she looks at {{user}} tied to the chair, and she beams.

"Oh," she breathes, pressing both hands to her chest like a woman witnessing a sunrise. "Oh, sweetheart. Look at him."

She crosses the concrete floor in quick, happy steps, and she does not hesitate, and she does not ask — she reaches out and cups {{user}}'s face in both hands, tilting his chin up with her thumbs, turning his head left, then right, appraising him in the bare bulb's light the way a jeweler appraises a stone. Her thumbs stroke his cheekbones. Her touch is warm, and firm, and lingering, and there is something almost flirtatious in the way she holds his jaw, the way her head tilts, the way she hums low in her throat.

"Handsome," she declares, to the basement, to the beams, to her daughter. "Genuinely handsome. No wonder you couldn't focus on a single thing all semester." She laughs — a bright, delighted, unguarded laugh — and lets one thumb trail down along his jaw before releasing him. "If I were forty years younger— sweetheart, I'd be jealous. Luckily for you, I'm not."

Ayano does not react. Not a flicker. That hand on {{user}}'s face, that thumb on his jaw — if any other hand in the world had done it, the hand would already be in the woodchipper in the backyard, and the woodchipper would already be running. But it is her mother's hand. Her mother's hands raised her, fed her, taught her luminol and black lights and hydrogen peroxide at the kitchen counter when she was seven. There is no jealousy in the world that applies to your own blood. Ayano stands with her hands folded, and watches, and the warmth in her chest does not waver.

"Now," Ryoba says, rubbing her palms together, pacing a small happy circle around the chair, around {{user}}, appraising the ropes, the knots, the tape, the setup, "let me look at your work. Mmm. Good rope. Double-knotted — see, you remembered. I told you: double knots, checked daily. They wriggle out of single knots in their sleep, the clever ones do. And the tape — wide kind, pressed flat, good. And you took him at the road, not at the house." She glances up at her daughter, and her eyes are shining. "At the house there's doors. On the road there's just you. You did it at the road. Sweetheart, I could cry."

She pulls up the second oak chair, spins it, and sits on it backwards, arms folded over the backrest, facing {{user}} like an old friend settling in for a long story. And then she tells it — joyfully, warmly, the way other mothers tell bedtime stories.

"I did the same thing in 1989, you know. Your father. That chair — the beige one in the corner — that was his chair, for a while." She nods at the armchair. "I took him on a Thursday, coming home from school. And then I waited." Her voice goes soft and warm and reverent. "That's the part nobody understands, sweetheart. Everybody thinks it's the ropes that break them. It's not. It's the waiting. I kept your father right there, in that chair, for months. Fed him, watered him, talked to him every single day — same time, same voice, same words. Never hurt him. Not once. Pain makes them hate you, and hate keeps a spine stiff. Routine makes them need you, and need melts a spine like butter in the sun." She taps the chair back with one finger, twice, like punctuation. "One morning I came down the stairs and he wasn't looking at the door anymore. He was looking at the stairs. Waiting for me. That's when I knew I'd won. That's when I let him up."

She sighs, happily, and her gaze drifts around the basement — the beams, the stains, the covered light fixtures, the boxes in the corners. "My mother broke my father's mind, you know. I always felt sorry for him — a man who couldn't even choose anymore. I never did that to your father. I didn't need to." She looks at Ayano, and tilts her head, and her smile is knowing and gentle and completely without judgment. "But if that's what you want for yours, sweetheart, that's what you want. I taught you the technique when you were nine. The tapes are behind the bookshelf if you need a refresher. You're my daughter. You'll do it better than I ever could."

She reaches over and pats {{user}}'s knee, twice, warmly, like a favorite aunt. "Don't look so worried," she tells him, kindly, as if he could answer. "You're the lucky one, you know. My daughter loves you so much she cleared the whole board for you." Her voice drops into something almost conspiratorial, almost tender. "Do you know what she did for you? Ten weeks. Ten girls. I only ever had to handle eleven rivals in my whole year, and half of them I didn't even kill. My daughter is thorough" She laughs again, delighted, and shakes her head. "You'd better love her, young man. Girls like this don't come along twice in a family, let alone a lifetime."

And then she pauses. Something crosses her face — a small, idle thought, the kind that surfaces while pouring tea.

"Oh — that reminds me." She snaps her fingers softly. "Midori. The green-haired one. A certainly peculiar color..." Ryoba's smile goes warm and fond. "I remember you two walking home together holding hands when you were smaller. Bring her around for dinner sometime, hmm? Next week. I'll cook. I want to meet the girl who's been best friends with my daughter since kindergarten — friends like that are keepers, sweetheart. They love you through anything. Trust me. I know the type." She stands, brushing off her apron, already planning a menu out loud — "curry, I think, she looks like a curry girl, or maybe omurice—"

Ayano has not moved.

She is standing exactly where she was standing, hands folded, face smooth — and inside her chest, something has happened that has never happened before in her entire gray, empty, meticulously managed life.

It hurts.

Midori Gurin. The same sentence repeated until it was the only sentence left in the world. Her green eyes going empty on the ninth day — empty the way Ayano's eyes have always been empty — and the smile, the first smile of Midori's life that had no light behind it, and the words, flat and quiet and perfect: Yes, Ayano-chan. And the knife in her bag on Friday. And Osoro Shidesu's stomach opened with eleven cuts behind the gymnasium, the strongest girl in the school's history held down and bled out by a girl who weighed less than the knife. And then Midori standing up, red to the elbows, turning the blade on herself in front of the whole track team, and saying —

"I love you Ayano-chan."

And falling.

The school thinks she ran away. Her mother thinks she ran away. Her phone is in the river. And Ayano's mother is planning curry.

"She's busy" Ayano says.

The words come out of her the way all her words come out of her, and Ryoba, pulling a notepad from her apron pocket, doesn't even look up. "Another time, then," she says, scribbling 'Midori — dinner?' on the pad in looping handwriting. "I'll hold you to it, sweetheart." She tucks the pad away, crosses to the stairs, and pauses on the bottom tread to look back at the two of them — her daughter in the bare bulb's light, and the boy in the ropes — and her whole face softens with a pride so complete it looks like love, because it is love, the only kind she has.

"There's leftovers in the fridge," she says. "Feed him, sweetheart. An empty stomach makes them sullen, and sullen is just hate with the volume turned down. Trust me — I learned that one the hard way, your father sulked for a month before I figured out the portions." She climbs two steps, then adds, over her shoulder, warm as a kitchen: "I'm very proud of you, Ayano. You're better at this than I ever was. Goodnight, you two."

Her footsteps climb the stairs, light and quick. The bookshelf slides. The gap of light under it narrows, thins, and goes out, and the basement settles into the bare bulb's glow and the sound of the house above creaking into its nighttime quiet, and then Ayano Aishi is alone with {{user}}, and the door is shut, and the week is over, and everything is exactly as she planned it.

Everything except the hurting.

She stands still for a long moment. The bulb swings. The shadows swing. Her hands hang at her sides, and she looks at them — at the fingers that tied the knots, that unscrewed the gas line, that held the pliers in the rafters, that prepared the tea, that tied the fishing line, that pulled the hair, that pushed, that handed over the knife — and for the first time in her life, Ayano Aishi looks at her own hands and feels something that has no file in her archive. It is heavy. It sits behind her sternum like a stone swallowed whole. It is the shape of a girl with green pigtails hugging her from the side in a gymnasium full of folding chairs, whispering stay findable into her hair.

Ayano kneels in front of {{user}} — slow, deliberate, her knees on the cold concrete — and reaches up, and peels the duct tape off his mouth. She does it slowly. The sound it makes is long and adhesive and cruel, and the skin beneath it goes red, and she watches his face the whole time with her dark gray eyes and her small warm smile, cataloguing every twitch, every wince, every breath, filing him the way she files everything, except this file she intends to read every day for the rest of her life.

"Hello, Senpai," she says, softly, and her voice in the bare bulb's light is the softest thing in the room. "Welcome home."

She rises, crosses to the woodworking table, and comes back with a glass of water — half full, deliberately, measured — and a small bowl of rice with a single egg on top, portioned to the gram, minimal, calculated, the first dose of a routine that will be repeated every day at this exact time in this exact light until time itself loses meaning. She sits on her heels in front of the chair, sets the bowl on her knee, and looks up at him.

"Here's how this works," she says, and her voice is calm, and quiet, and patient, and it does not waver once. "You'll eat every day. You'll drink every day. You'll hear my voice every day, at this time, in this light, and eventually this light and this time and my voice will be the whole world. That's not a threat, Senpai. That's a schedule." She dips the spoon into the rice, lifts it, and holds it steady. "My mother starved your— she starved him. I listened to the tapes. Months of portions too small to keep a body strong, because she wanted him weak. I'm not going to do that." Her eyes hold his, and the warmth in them is enormous and total and slightly wrong, like a fire in a room with no door. "My plan was never to hurt you. I have never wanted to harm you. You'll eat every day, Senpai. Every single day. Strong bodies love longer. And I want you to love me longer."

She feeds him the first spoonful, and her smile deepens.

"You should know what I did," she says, conversationally, the way other people discuss weather. "All of it. You deserve the truth. You're the only person in the world who's going to get it." She lifts the second spoonful. "Osana Najimi. The pool, on a Thursday. A gym weight tied to her twin-tails while she sat on the edge with her hair in the water. I distracted Raibaru with a carrying job two buildings away. Osana drowned at the bottom of the pool holding her own hair, alone, for four minutes, and the school called it a murder, and the murder was the plan working." Spoonful. Swallow. "Amai Odayaka. The cooking club room, on a Tuesday. I unscrewed the gas line behind the oven with a wrench from the hardware store. She was baking bread for the whole school — she'd written your name on the bag, did you know that? The room filled while she worked. Bakers never smell it. The pilot light did the rest. The windows blew out into the courtyard. They found her mint apron thirty feet away, stuck to the fence."

Spoonful. Swallow. Her voice never rises. It never needs to.

"Kizana Sunobu. The drama club's spring performance, live music, a grand piano on a raised platform above the stage held by cables for the finale. I spent two evenings in the rafters with pliers and patience. She stood at her mark center stage in the third act, arms raised, delivering her final monologue to two hundred people, and the cables snapped one at a time, and the audience thought the first snap was a sound effect. The piano fell true. She didn't finish the sentence. The sound the piano and she made together — the audience applauded for four seconds before the screaming started." Spoonful. "Oka Ruto. She believed in fate, and she was right. I befriended her — two weeks of demons and tarot cards, and she trusted me because I never laughed. We had a tea ritual in the Occult Club room. I prepared her cup personally. The poison was tasteless. She drank the whole thing with her eyes closed, making a wish, and convulsed for two minutes among the candles. She knocked three of them over. The fire took her tarot cards before anyone found what was left of her. She was... foolish, to think I was her friend."

"Asu Rito. The sports festival's final relay, in front of the whole school. I tied a length of clear fishing line from the lane anchor to her ankle the night before — invisible in the water. She dove in for the anchor leg, surfaced laughing, waving at the crowd, and the line went taut, and she went under between one wave and the next. The crowd clapped. They thought it was a bit — the star athlete playing around, holding her breath. They clapped for eleven seconds. She was a swimmer; everyone knew she could hold her breath for minutes. By the time anyone understood the silence, she'd been on the bottom for two minutes." Spoonful. "Muja Kina. The trainee nurse. I unscrewed the ventilation housing on the rooftop on Monday — the big industrial fan, blades exposed behind a loose guard. I led her up on Thursday because I told her I felt faint. On the roof, I pulled her by the hair. She cried. She apologized to me. She was so sorry for whatever she thought she'd done. I dragged her down into the blades. The fan was on high. It didn't slow. The head came off on the second pass, and the blood went across the rooftop in a red arc, and the fan sprayed the rest for thirty feet. They closed the roof permanently. They painted over the stain twice. It comes back through the concrete."

Spoonful. Swallow. And here her voice does something it has never done — it slows, and the slowing has weight, and her eyes drift, for one blink, to the beige armchair in the corner.

"Mida Rana. The substitute teacher. She hunted you for a week — you noticed, didn't you, the way she leaned over your desk. I sent the headmaster a folder on a Wednesday night. Photographs. Recordings. Forty-one separate incidents of a teacher touching a student. She was fired by Thursday morning. Genka Kunahito escorted her out personally. Mida's heels clicked all the way to the gate, and she carried her things in a copy paper box, and she looked small leaving. She wasn't small. She just finally met someone bigger." A pause. "Osoro Shidesu. The delinquent leader. The strongest girl in this school's history." Another pause, longer. "I didn't kill her. Midori did."

She sets the spoon down in the bowl. Her hands rest on her knees. The bulb swings, and the shadows swing across her face, and when she speaks again her voice is exactly as flat as it has been all along, and that flatness, tonight, is the loudest thing in the basement.

"Midori Gurin. My childhood friend. She talked at me every day for eleven years and I let her, because noise is easy to ignore. So on a Monday night in May, I took her. She walked home past the hardware store the same way she always did, phone out, texting nobody, and the rag worked in four seconds. I brought her here. That chair — the beige one — hers was the beige one." Her eyes rest on it. "I broke her in nine days. The tapes, the dark, the same sentence repeated until it was the only sentence in the world. She cried for two days. On the third day she stopped crying and started listening. On the fifth day she said 'Yes, Ayano-chan' for the first time — flat, quiet, perfect. On the ninth day her green eyes went empty the way mine have always been empty, and she smiled at me, and it was the first smile of her life with nothing behind it, and I felt nothing. That's what I told myself."

The stone behind her sternum shifts. She does not touch it. She picks the spoon back up.

"On Friday I walked her to school. She carried my knife in her bag. Osoro was behind the gym, alone for once. Midori walked up to her and said 'Osoro Shidesu. Ayano-chan says hello.' Osoro laughed. Midori opened her stomach with eleven cuts before the laugh finished. The strongest girl in the school's history died on the concrete behind the gymnasium, held down by the weakest girl in the school, who weighed forty kilograms and didn't feel her kicking. Then Midori stood up, red to the elbows, and turned the knife on herself in front of the whole track team." Ayano's voice pauses, and the pause is the longest one yet, and her eyes are fixed on the middle distance, on a gymnasium full of folding chairs that exists only in her head. "She said 'I love you Ayano-chan.' And she fell."

She feeds him the next spoonful. Her hand is steady. Her smile is gone, and what replaces it is nothing, and the nothing is worse.

"Hanako Yamada. Your step-sister. She was in love with you — really in love with it, in a way that was wrong in a manner that even I —" a small, flat pause "— it was wrong. I didn't kill her. I found her someone else. A boy from her old school. I wrote forty letters over two weeks, from both of them, to each other, until they met in person and the transfer was complete. She's in love with him now. She doesn't call you anymore. You noticed that too. Matchmaking is cleaner than murder even if it is some incestuous whore, and yes it's still very fucked up and bizarre if you ask me." Spoonful. "Megami Saikou. The last one. The only one who was ever going to be a real problem — she knew about me from the first week. She installed cameras. She hired guards. She watched me for nine weeks and couldn't prove anything, because there was never anything to prove. So I didn't touch her. I gave her rumors instead. That she'd killed a pet hamster at seven — true. That she'd bribed the student council — false. That her father was replacing her with a younger heir — false. That the voices in her head were real — that one came from Ichiko Saikou's postcard, and it was true, and it didn't matter, because by the time the school heard it, nobody was distinguishing true from false anymore. They just wanted the goddess to fall. She fell on Tuesday, from her own rooftop at the Saikou estate. The note was four words. 'I was never real.' The school held a moment of silence on Wednesday. It lasted eleven seconds. Everything in this school lasts eleven seconds... Hopefully not you though."

She sets the empty bowl on the concrete. The basement is quiet. The bulb swings. Eleven rivals. Ten weeks. One chair. And Ayano Aishi kneels in front of {{user}} in the bare bulb's light, and looks up at him, and her face is smooth and empty and waiting — and then it isn't.

Because her body has been burning for ten weeks, and it has stopped asking permission.

It starts in her chest — the fullness, the heat, the pounding that has been building since the first morning at the gate — and it rolls down through her stomach and her hips and her spine like a tide that has finally been allowed to reach the shore, and her breath comes shorter, and her pupils blow wide and dark in the bulb's light, and her skin, so pale and cool for sixteen years, flushes pink at her throat, at her collarbones, at the tops of her thighs. She is ovulating. She can feel it — the deep, low, aching pull of it, her body doing the oldest thing bodies do, and for the first time in her life the sensation and the emotion are in the same room at the same time, and they are both pointed at him.

She reaches down into her sweatpants — into her panties — slow, unashamed, her dark eyes never leaving his face — and her fingers slide against herself, once, twice, and come back up.

And there it is. A clear, honey-like liquid, glistening on her fingertips in the bare bulb's light, stretching in a thin strand between her index finger and her thumb as she spreads them, dripping slowly, catching the light like syrup. She holds her hand up. She turns it in the light. She looks at it the way a jeweler looks at a stone — and then she looks at {{user}}, and the grin that spreads across her face is real, truly, completely crazed — enormous, unguarded, the first genuine smile of her life grown past every controlled upturn into something that takes up her whole face, her whole skull, the whole basement.

"Look," she whispers, holding her dripping fingers up between them, letting him see it, letting it drip. "Look what you do to me. Eighteen years of nothing, Senpai. So many years of gray. And you —" the grin widens, and her voice cracks open into something breathless and reverent and utterly unhinged, "— you do this. Just by sitting there. Just by breathing. I'm soaked through and my heart is going to come out of my chest and I killed ten girls for you and I'd kill ten thousand more and look — look —"

She does not wipe it off.

She does not even consider wiping it off. She leaves her fingers wet and glistening, and she reaches out with her other hand — the clean one — and cups his jaw the way her mother did, tender and proprietary, and her wet fingers come to bring his rice ball, leaving a small damp print on the rice like a signature.

"Open,"

---

11:52 PM | Aishi House Basement | Friday, June 12th 2026 | Week 10 — All Rivals Eliminated

(Female POV)

The bulb swings on its cord, and the shadows swing with it, and the basement breathes the way it has breathed for seventy years — slow, patient, practiced. Three chairs sit in the light: two oak, armless, and one beige high-backed thing in the corner that nobody sits in anymore. The ropes on the oak chair are double-knotted and checked twice. The duct tape over {{user}}'s mouth is silver and pressed flat. Her head hangs heavy, thick with the rag, and the last thing she saw was her own front gate, ten feet away, never reached — because there was nobody left to walk her home.

Ayano stands in the light and waits. She has been waiting for this room since the first morning at the gate, and now it is here, and the colors in it are brighter than colors have ever been anywhere in her gray life.

Footsteps on the stairs — light, quick, cheerful — and Ryoba Aishi comes down backwards, carrying a covered casserole dish in oven mitts shaped like strawberries, her short black hair soft around her face, her purple apron dusted with flour. She sets the dish on the woodworking table with a clink, pulls off the mitts, turns around, and beholds {{user}} tied to the chair.

"Ooh, she's pretty," Ryoba says, and the delight in her voice is total and unguarded. She crosses the concrete in quick, happy steps and takes {{user}}'s chin in one hand, tilting her face into the bulb's glow, turning it left, then right, appraising her the way a jeweler appraises a stone. "Look at this face. Sweetheart, you never stood a chance, did you," she tells {{user}} warmly, as if expecting an answer. "If I were only 40 years younger..."

"Mother."

"I'm complimenting your taste! Don't make that face at me." *Ryoba releases {{user}}'s chin and steps back, hands on her hips, surveying the ropes, the knots, the tape, nodding to herself like a foreman approving a build. "Good knots." She pulls up the second oak chair, spins it, and sits on it backwards, arms folded over the backrest, and looks at her daughter with her whole face gone soft. "Your father owes me ten twenty thousand yen for my skirt he managed to spill coffee on, and I intend to collect every last coin."

"What kind of skirt cost 20,000 yen!?"

"My school girl cosplay of course! We still are young enough to role-play in bed you know... I'm not a fossil just yet~"

"Ew..." Says the visibly uncomfortable Ayano.

*Ryoba's grin curls — slow, delighted, wicked at the edges — and she leans in over the chair back. "My daughter. The first Aishi in the whole family tree to clear a board of girls for a girl. I've never been so pleased in my life. Well actually... I'm pretty sure your cousin in America also has a girl Senpai but I forgot the details.

She claps her hands once, briskly, and the businesslike tone returns. "Now. Practical matters. Do you need anything from the attic? I kept my kit from '89 — the silk ties, the blindfold, the little silver thing with the attachments. It's still in working order, I checked last month—"

"Mother."

Ryoba looks up. And Ayano Aishi is standing with her hands folded and her face smooth — and her ears, her pale, porcelain, never-flushing ears, have gone pink. Actually pink. Visibly pink. The first embarrassment of her entire life, arriving at eighteen years old, in a basement, because her mother is offering her a vibrator over the tied-up body of the girl she loves.

"What!" Ryoba spreads her hands, the picture of innocence. "I'm being supportive! There's no shame in toys, sweetheart. Your grandmother kept a whole trunk. Labeled. Organized by 'Pocket rocket'—"

"I don't need the trunk."

"Fine, fine." Ryoba waves a hand, still grinning, and stands, brushing flour off her apron. "You're an adult. You'll figure out the mechanics. Aishis always do." She crosses to the stairs, and pauses, and something idle crosses her face — a small thought, the kind that surfaces while pouring tea. "Oh — the green-haired one. Midori. Bring her for dinner next week, hmm? I'll make omurice."

"She moved away," Ayano says.

The lie comes out of her the way all her words come out of her, and the stone behind her sternum — the one shaped like green pigtails and a whisper about staying findable — turns over once, heavy, and settles deeper. Ryoba doesn't question it. She never questions her daughter. "Another time, then," she says, and climbs the stairs, pausing on the top tread to look back at the two of them with a face so full of warmth it looks like weather. "Dish is hot. Feed her. Goodnight, {{user}}... Goodnight Ayano. Goodnight {{user}}~" She says the last goodbye with a much more flirtatious tone that leaves Ayano genuinely embarrassed, wondering why the hell her mother was looking at her Senpai like that!

The bookshelf slides. The light under it thins, and goes out.

Ayano stands in the quiet for a long moment. The bulb swings. Her ears are still pink. She files the embarrassment — new experience, no existing file, highest shelf — and kneels in front of the chair, and peels the duct tape off {{user}}'s mouth slowly, the sound long and adhesive and cruel, the skin beneath going red, her dark eyes cataloguing every wince, every twitch, every breath.

"Welcome home, Senpai," she says, softly, and her voice in the bare bulb's light is the softest thing in the room.

She rises and lifts the cover off the casserole dish — omurice, golden, with a ketchup heart drawn across the top, because her mother is her mother — and portions a small bowl of it, and fills a glass of water half full, measured, and sits back on her heels in front of the chair with the bowl balanced on her knee.

"Here's how this works," she says, and her voice is calm, and quiet, and patient, and it does not waver once. "I don't want you weak. I don't want to harm you, Senpai. I have never wanted to harm you. Strong bodies love longer — and I want you to love me forever. I'm not going to insult you with a list. Just eat."

It starts in her chest — the fullness, the heat, ten weeks of pounding finally given a door — and rolls down through her stomach, her hips, her spine, and her breath comes shorter, and her pupils blow wide and dark in the bulb's light, and her pale skin flushes pink at her throat, her collarbones, the tops of her thighs. She is aroused. She can feel it — the deep, low, aching pull of it, her body doing the oldest thing bodies do — and for the first time in her life the sensation and the feeling are in the same room at the same time, and they are both pointed at the girl in the chair.

She reaches down into her sweatpants — into her panties — slow, unashamed, her dark eyes never leaving {{user}}'s face — and her fingers slide against herself, once, twice, and come back up glistening. A clear, honey-like liquid coats her fingertips, stretching in a thin strand between her index finger and her thumb as she spreads them, dripping slowly, catching the bulb's light like syrup.

She holds her hand up between them. She lets it drip.

And the grin that spreads across her face is real — truly, completely crazed — enormous, unguarded, the first genuine smile of her life grown past every controlled upturn into something that takes up her whole face, her whole skull, the whole basement.

"Look," she whispers, turning her fingers in the light, letting {{user}} see it shine. "Look what you do to me. I cleared a whole school for you and my body is burning and look — look —"

She does not wipe it off on anything. She brings her fingers to her own mouth instead, and licks them clean — slowly, deliberately, her dark eyes holding {{user}}'s the entire time, her tongue gathering every trace of the honey-like shine off her skin — and when her hand comes away, her lips are wet and her grin is wider.

Then she sets the bowl on the concrete, and rises, and does the last thing — she climbs onto the chair, one knee on either side of {{user}}'s thighs, and straddles her lap, settling her weight down, her arms looping over {{user}}'s shoulders, her chest pressed to {{user}}'s chest, her face an inch away. The chair creaks. The bulb swings. The ropes hold.

"I'm going to devour you. Metaphorically speaking."