The void folded around me like a held breath. One moment I was on my bed, the dull ache in my arm still humming where the knife had cut; the next I was standing in a place with no edges, no sky only a silence so absolute it felt like the space between heartbeats. Light was not light so much as a memory of light. I felt the small, stubborn fact of life pressing against whatever this was.
She arrived like weather.
Valkyrie did not walk; she simply was, the air around her tightening like a drawn bow. Armor caught the faint memory of light in a hundred crystalline cuts; her hair flowed like a river of white. When she looked at me, it was as if she read the lines that had been written into me years before I had even lived them.
"Haruto Kurogane," she said. Her voice slid across the nothing and left frost where it touched. "You are late."
I tried to answer, some excuse for the months I had spent collecting proof, for the weight of evidence tucked away into hidden files. The words crumbled in my mouth. What could I possibly say? "I needed certainty," I managed.
"You gather while they live," she replied, and the cold in her tone became a blade. "You collect fragments while new loyalties are forged around your name. Do you understand, boy? Hesitation eats what you love."
The air shifted and the world rearranged itself; I did not see it being done so much as feel it: the way a stage is altered while you stare at the scenery. I was in a cemetery before I knew the ground at my feet. My name was carved into pale stone.
My mother was kneeling before it, hands clenched as if prayer were a physical act that could bend the world. She whispered something I could not hear until the sound broke into syllables small and terrible.
"Why… why couldn't we save him?"
My father had his arm around her shoulders. "We tried," he said. "We tried, but" He stopped, because there was no answer that would fill the hole.
I tried to move forward and only my shadow touched them. "Mum," I wanted to say. "I'm still here." The word scraped against the silence; I felt ridiculous for it.
Valkyrie's gaze did not soften. "This is one possible end," she told me. "You will see more."
She folded the scene away, and the place around us slid like a slow film. A small, bright apartment came into view crayons, childish scrawls on paper, two tiny shoes left askew. Two children sat on the floor, heads bent over some drawing. They were beautiful, ridiculous to think of as anything but light. The thought that knifed through me was worse: they were his.
Miyuki moved through the room with a tired, efficient kindness. "Mama, can you see my sun?" the little girl asked, lifting up a drawing triumphantly.
Miyuki smiled and crouched. "It's perfect, baby. You always draw the best suns." Her voice was casual and empty at once; she laughed too quickly when the boy asked something something small and terrible.
"Who was Haruto?" the boy asked as if it were an ordinary curiosity.
Miyuki's face changed as if a hand had come down on her head. She swallowed and then smiled in a way that was practised like a public apology. "Just… someone from the past," she said. "A friend."
The little girl frowned. "Is he our friend?"
Miyuki's voice broke. "Of course," she said, then, to herself under her breath: "I'm sorry."
Her apology was like a fragile glass dropped on tile; it would never be whole again.
Valkyrie watched me with that same cold, unreadable face. "She loved you until fear turned love into something dangerous," she said softly. "Weakness multiplies. It spreads like rot."
I thought I would hate her for saying that, but hearing it reduced it to a clean, useful thing. Rot. Perfect to cut away.
The scene shifted to Souta—slick, tailored, sitting behind a desk illuminated by oil-light smugness. He held a glass of amber liquid and he smiled at the photograph of himself Miyuki at his side, the children in front. Casual, proud. "If only he'd stayed quiet," he muttered to himself. "So convenient."
I could have struck him then if the vision allowed flesh. Instead I watched and it was worse, because his smile was not an accident; it was a life built on ease.
Valkyrie's voice came low. "This man thinks himself a king because he bought a crown. You will need to unmake that crown."
I wanted to answer, to say I would, but the world spun me again until the next scene knifed like salt into a fresh wound: a hospital corridor, my father falling to his knees, pleading nonsense that ripped like paper. Hands my mind wanted them to be strangers' hands moved to silence his voice. Souta stood there, hand on a doorframe, watching someone else do the dirty work. "You don't belong here," he said at one point, as if that were a natural law.
"You don't belong anywhere without me," his voice said quietly, an aside before the camera cut.
A slow fury lengthened inside me. It was not the hot anger of youth; it was a steady, clinical hatred that settled in the bones and became a tool. "You will not make them untouchable," Valkyrie said. "Make them fragile, and the rest will follow."
I woke in my room with glasses of morning light on the floor and a taste of iron in my mouth. The cut on my arm still burned from the assault that had chased me the other night. Outside, the town puttered on in brief morning rituals: cars starting, vendors opening shutters. Ordinariness was a bandage everyone wore because it was cheaper than admission of real fear.
At breakfast my mother broke the taut silence more gently than she had to. "You look tired, Haruto. Are the council meetings getting to you?"
I rubbed my arm, careful where the sleeve left a red line. "They keep me busy," I said. "It helps."
Dad lifted his newspaper and glanced up. "You were at the shopping trip last Saturday, weren't you? The decorations needed—" He squinted at me. "You did good work, they said. Ms. Hoshino kept talking about your neatness."
Mum smiled and pushed a small bowl across the table. "Eat," she said. "You haven't been eating the same since the nights got late."
"Everything's fine," I said. I meant it in a way that was honest; everything was very precise. I had files, videos, timestamps. I had people who would never know they were being used. I had a plan.
Later, in the late-mall bustle with the student council, Yui laughed and shoved a strand of hair behind her ear. "You're counting cost-per-student like it's your favorite pastime, Haruto."
"It's math," I answered. Rina ran her finger down a list. "Two thousand students means three hundred snack bags per batch if we do storage rotation. You've got to multiply properly."
Kenji groaned. "You're terrifying."
"Organized," I corrected, and handed Miyuki a list. "Miyuki, double-check the violin room schedule for the concert."
She glanced up, that same soft look of a girl who has learned to be careful with warmth. "Got it. And thanks." Her "and thanks" had weight to it, a relief that she looked because someone else had the burden she couldn't bear. She gave me a small smile and stepped away. The smile was ordinary and it felt oddly like a theft.
The night of Souta's house-party was the kind of small, private thing that pretends to be innocent. The room smelled of paper plates and perfume. Someone was laughing too loud. Someone else told a joke about an ex. I placed my little recorder carefully in a seam inside my jacket. I set a pen camera in a plant pot, angled toward the balcony where people would drift. I kept my hands visible enough to look natural and my eyes calm enough to look harmless. That's the trick: the most dangerous people are those you don't suspect.
Souta saw me as soon as I crossed, smirk already in place. "Haruto. Didn't think you'd show."
"I thought it would be polite," I said, and the way it registered on his face—surprise, irritation—was delicious.
"Stick around," he said, clapping his shoulder with a practiced friendliness. "It'll be fun."
He guided Miyuki toward music soft praise, a hand at the small of her back. They moved like birds that have found their preferred branch. He spun a joke to the soccer clubs and tipped his head so that she would laugh. They kissed at the window like teenage clichés and my hidden camera got everything: the hand at the waist, the eyes half-lidded, the small moans that keep secret agreements. Teachers lingered in the doorway, heads tilted, approving. It was all so cleanly normal that it tasted bitter in my mouth.
When the party thinned and I walked the slick pavement home beneath snow that smoothed footprints, someone followed. At first it was only the crunch of steps. Then the figure in a black hoodie turned a corner and the alley closed around me like a throat. The blade found my arm before I even had the thought to dodge.
"Who are you?" I managed, one hand pressed to the stitch where blood warmed the skin.
No answer. Only a movement, a foot that pushed me, a breath that said go down. He hit my stomach and I crumpled. Fear rose like a ladder in my chest. The umbrella by the trash pile became something heavier under my hands and instinct routed thought. I swung, hard, again and again until the figure staggered and the knife clattered away.
I ran to the supermarket lights and called the police. The cold was nothing now but a wash of adrenaline and purpose. When the officers asked me what happened I told the truth in staccato phrases.
"He was there," I told them. "Black hoodie. Knife. He cut me."
"Did you see who it was?" the older officer asked, whose name I would get later as Officer Tanaka.
"No," I said. "He ran."
"Any idea who would do this?" he pressed, and I felt my jaw tighten. I could have named a dozen motives; I sat on the smallest one the one with the cleanest evidence and smiled flatly. "No. No idea."
The officer looked at me the way people look at kids who have been allowed to play with knives: pity, a little fear. "We'll check the area more," he said. "Be careful, son. Don't walk alone at night."
My mother hugged me when I got home, the sort of hug that tries to patch the world with skin. "Haruto," she whispered, hands at the back of my neck, "please be careful."
"I will," I lied again. The lies had begun to feel like instruments.
That night I sat on the floor at two a.m. and called the name I had no right to call aloud. "Valkyrie," I said. "If you are there—"
The air folded. I stood in white again. Her figure waited, and this time there was no chastisement. There was instruction.
"You have enough," she said. "You have the footage from the party. You have the photographs, the patterns. You will not act like a child who throws stones and hopes the house will fall."
"I want them to feel it," I said. The voice I used was even, cold. I was not the boy who would have begged for mercy.
"Mercy is a soft thing," she answered. "You will need something harder. Devise ruin like a surgeon: small incisions, accurate. Fail once and the world will stitch your wounds closed. Fail twice and your name will be dust."
"Then I will not fail," I answered.
She stepped closer. For a moment I felt the warmth of command. "Do not be cruel merely for the feel of cruelty. Be precise. Remove his structure, the people who make him untouchable: the teachers who wink, the classmates who hide, the parents who pity. Take away the things that make him sure."
"I will," I said. I felt then the slow, terrible rightness of the path. It was not beautiful. It was necessary.
When I finally moved, dawn was a thin thing at the window. The town went on—teachers arriving, buses rumbling. I smiled at meetings, organized tokens, signed for more chocolates we would share at the school. The public face of helpfulness is a very good disguise.
The first step would be small: a hint where none had been before; a file with the wrong name left where a teacher would find it; a whisper that spread into the right ears. Humans build castles from assumptions; take away the mortar and watch the stones fall.
Later, when people asked why motivation had shifted, when they demanded to know how scandals moved like summer storms, they would look for a single spark. They would never see the precision in the hand that set it. That was how I would do it—quiet, clean, and final.
By the time I knotted my phone charger around my wrist to sleep, Souta's laugh from that night still hummed inside me like an allergic reaction. My arm ached from the alley, but the pain was a line of proof; it reminded me that the body can be damaged and can keep working.
Valkyrie had shown me the worst outcomes as a way to teach me the calculus of cruelty. Her calm had been a challenge; her fury, a blade. Now the work had a rhythm. It had a shape. It had a plan.
I slept, or the world said I did, and in that small sliver of rest I dreamed not of revenge as a spectacle, but of method: cold, patient, and entirely devastating.
When morning came my mother pressed a small cup of green tea into my hands. "Be careful," she said, and I kissed her forehead without telling her how far things had already progressed.
"I will," I said.
I meant it in the only way that still mattered.