At its base: a glowing platform, two small figures — one very tired, one very still.
watching back .
The entity had a name.
MNEMOSCOPUS: THE THOUSAND-EYED WITNESS.
Its central eye was enormous — cross-shaped pupil, ancient and lidless, surrounded by a crown of smaller orbiting eyes that drifted lazily like planets around a sun.
Below it, barely visible in its shadow, a figure stared upward. With the expression of already regretting looking.
"Never dare gaze directly upon a deity,"
the entity intoned, its voice carrying the resonance of something that had existed long before the concept of warning,
"...unless you seek suffering."
"I've been curious about you ever since you fell into Makai. My gaze has always lingered upon you."
"Never in my elongated existence," it said, its many eyes contracting and expanding with the rhythm of its speech,
"have I ever come across a being such as yourself."
Its gaze pressed down. deeply interested,
"I know much about you. More than you know yourself... but I want to see more..."
One of its orbiting eyes drifted closer, peering. The cross-shaped pupil of its central eye dilated.
"Let me have a glimpse,"
"And taste your story."
It opened the way a wound opens — slowly, then all at once. The space peeled apart like the membrane of a great eye, revealing an interior that was neither inside nor outside anything, and both at the same time .
...
2 YEARS BEFORE THE HAMATSU INCIDENT.
"We all have a different definition of living."
Residential buildings sat quiet in early morning , its concrete edges softened by overcast light. Just the ordinary architecture of an ordinary day in an ordinary city .
"Experiences create who we are, good or bad, loud or quiet. Each one stacks on the last... shaping who we later become."
In the darkness, three beeps. Then silence. Then three more.
"Looking back, I feel nothing."
The alarm read 05:00. [[Kuroshiraga Arufa]] was already awake, which said less about his sleep schedule and more about the fact that he had never quite developed the habit of being unconscious at the times other people expected.
He lay on his side, staring at a small card — flipping it idly between his fingers, the movement unhurried, the motion of someone whose hands needed something to do while their brain was elsewhere.
The markings on his torso caught the dim light.
"...For I have nothing to look back to."
".. most humans fail to realize that the pain from their experiences isn't a leaderboard. Different wounds hurt in different ways...comparison doesn't heal anyone."
He reached over and clicked off the light.
"These are the words I apparently left myself."
"I long for growth. However, it's a concept I am incapable of attaining..."
Growth is a scar that remains after the wound has closed. If the scar disappears every morning, the body forgets it was ever hurt — and learns nothing.
"For the past eleven years... my memories of the previous day are always getting blocked."
He walked to school with the unhurried pace . The street was damp. People passed him , off to their respective destinations .
The ones who did stare found something about his white hair or the blankness of his expression unusual, and quickly found better things to focus on.
"Like a wall is built at the end of each day. An eternal feeling of reaching a dead end."
The markings on his chest and arm had been there as long as he could remember — which, given the circumstances, was not saying much.
He dressed around them every morning. He thought about them every morning. He arrived at no conclusions every morning.
The street was the usual organized chaos of a busy morning, voices, the faint smell of someone's breakfast. Kuro moved through it the way he moved through most things: present without quite participating.
Then: a crash followed by a plume of dust that rushed towards kuro standing alone side the pavement .
A commotion. And in the middle of it, a man dark hair in a long braid, glasses slightly askew, he wore a white linen shirt with the long sleeves folded up to his elbow
on his right hand was a was seemed to be a broad sword , its hilt was white and its blade was transparent ,its was made of glowing pale yellow plasma that exuded pulses and discharges of small bolts of lighting , the energy of someone who had ...decided to solve a problem loudly and on sight . he was already mid-technique.
His body arced low, electricity crackling at his fingertips as he activated her ability with practiced ease.
INTERMEDIATE ARTS.
IGNITION: ELECTROPERFORATIVE DISCHARGE.
The discharge connected. A Dreadspawn, cylindrical in shape with what seemed to be open mouthes, and within in those mouthes where a singular eye and at the zenith of this creature was a large mouth with numerous teeth...was severed in two .
The man straightened up, adjusted her glasses, and turned.
he looked at Kuro.
"It's odd. Are you not running?"
"Are you not afraid?" he said.
His tone was the tone of someone who expected the answer to be yes and was already preparing to be mildly annoyed by it not being.
"..."
"What was there to be afraid of?" Kuro said.
"Oh?" he studied him with the particular focus of someone who had spent a career reading rooms and was now encountering a room that made no sense.
"I didn't see anything worth running from,"
he looked at him. He looked back.
Somewhere nearby, a third party made a small "hmm" sound.
Meanwhile, the man's colleague sharp-faced, tall, the energy of someone who kept a running tally of things ... turned to her with a satisfied look.
"Yes! With that, we've met our hundredth quota. Good job."
"It's only natural," he replied: "Hell yeah!"she added.
...
"Or maybe," Kuro lampooned, the thought slipping past the surface of his expression without leaving a trace
, "there was something I couldn't see."
Kuro watched them for a moment, then looked away, something quiet moving behind his expression.
From across the street, the woman from before watched him walk. Her arms were crossed. Her expression was the expression of someone adding information to a mental file.
"What a strange kid," she said.
...
"I wish I could get rid of this curse and value what I've seen, what I've experienced."
"I kind of, for some reason, know what my age, name, and basic routines are."
He walked the return route home the way he always did — instinct guiding him along roads that felt familiar in a way that had nothing to do with memory.
On the crossing ahead, a mother walked with a small child, their pace unhurried, the child's head swiveling with the enthusiasm of someone to whom everything was still new and worth pointing at.
"Mommy, look over there," the child said, in the carrying voice of children who have not yet learned that pointing is considered impolite.
Kuro clocked the look. He had been clocked before. He kept walking.
"I might be missing something here, though. Maybe I need some sort of trigger?"
He turned it over in his head, considering and discarding.
"No. It can't be that simple. Perhaps I'm not seeing the bigger picture."
"I can't keep leaving like this. Maybe I should do some research. If I found a solution, I might have left myself notes or a clue."
He paused mentally on the thought.
"This isn't normal. It seems too patterned. Also..."
"Mommy, why does his hair look like that?" the child asked.
The mother ... dark-haired, patient ,glanced toward the white-haired figure disappearing down the street, then back to her daughter.
"Everyone is born unique, including yourself."
The child processed this with the solemnity it deserved. "So we should all respect others for their differences?"
Kuro had not quite moved out of earshot.
"If only everyone thought that way," he said, quietly, to himself.
The confrontation was already in progress by the time Kuro noticed it.
An elderly man holding in his right hand walking stick, robes, the general demeanor of someone who had lived long enough to develop a very specific kind of dignity, was bumped into by a figure with large headphones and the particular energy of someone who had decided they were in the right and was going to stay there regardless of evidence.
"My apologies,Pardon me," the old man lamented.
The old man pardoned himself
"Use your eyes!"
"You f**ing gaijin...."
"Let me knock some sense into that expired head of yours," the headphone figure muttered, squaring up.
The figure with headphones had taken personal offense and raised his fist to strike the old man .
Kuro walked into it without particularly deciding to.
"Calm yourself," he said.
"I never knew I'd see a man-baby," kuro lampooned .
.
The headphone figure snapped, rounding on him.
"Get lost, kid! This doesn't concern you!"
"Funny," Kuro thought. "It feels like I'm saving him instead of the old man."
"Who the hell is this kid," the headphone figure muttered, thrown by the sheer lack of reaction.
Meanwhile, the old man himself had apparently had enough. He straightened, eyes sharp beneath the creased weight of his age.
A group of bystanders at the edge of the scene shuffled nervously.
"Ayame?..." Her mother looked backward as she noticed her daughter let go of her hand to head toward the comotion.
The girl had crouched down on the pavement, hugging something to her chest small, round, clearly important in the way only things that belong to children can be important. She looked distressed.
Nearby, the old man's belongings were scattered across the ground, rolling with quiet indifference toward the gutter. he moved to collect them with more dignity than the situation required.
The small girl... Ayame, apparently , had already made the executive decision to assist. She crouched beside the old man and began picking things up with the focused seriousness of a child who has been given a task.
"The old man needs help picking these up," she announced.
"Here you go."
the girl raised the bag filled with what was scattered along the pavement ,now neately placed in the partially transparent bag ...
"Bless you, child," he said to Ayame's retreating back after he had collected his belongings , then turned to Kuro.
"Thank you, young man. You should get that hand checked out, too."
"Will do," Kuro said.
"It does sting a little, though."
...
As Ayame retreated to her mothers side , she realized something was missing .
"My [[Fukitsu plushy zipper]]!" Ayame declared, with the gravity of someone reporting a national emergency.
It was, indeed, missing. She turned on her heel immediately, scanning the street with methodical intensity.
"Maybe this way," she decided, and was already moving before the sentence was fully out.
"I might have dropped it somewhere."
"Mom, hold on — this might be my plushy!" she called, sprinting toward a small object at the edge of the road.
A low, building thunder. The kind that doesn't belong on a pedestrian street. Kuro turned.
The old man turned. The sound arrived before the explanation did - and then the explanation arrived: a truck, enormous, moving far too fast down a road that had people in it, with a small girl standing directly in its path, arms raised, her recovered plushy clutched triumphantly above her head.
"I found it!" Ayame announced.
"Yey."
The headlights were already filling the street. The truck's wheels were already screaming. Ayame's mother understood what was happening approximately one second before it was too late to do anything about it, and that one second was the worst second of her life.
"AYAME!" , she screamed with horror as she run towards her daughter.
Kuro was already moving.
He didn't think about it.
There was nothing to think about — just the distance, the speed, the angle, and a body that had spent eleven years doing things it didn't consciously direct.
His foot hit the pavement hard. He crossed the space between himself and the small figure in a fraction of a second, his arm sweeping her clear as the truck's grille filled his entire field of vision.
Kuro was still in mid air after landing on , and slipping on the zipper stirred at the approaching truck and looked at the driver seat .
"What tha—"
"It's empty?!" His eyes found the cab a heartbeat before impact.
Nobody was at the wheel. ...
it was, moving with the flat intent of something that had been pointed at a target and released.
"Never mind that. At least she's safe."
As he was briefly airborne ... time seemed to have slowed down and the head lights of the truck illuminated everything .
Two silhouettes,Bright light, and the motion blur of the source of light
At the moment the truck was about to collide with kuro , it seemed to move adjacently to its right in what seemed to be a fraction of a second
and where it had stopped was where [[ayame]] was , still airborne ,
...the truck proceeded to move forward with incredible speed and smashed into ayame
As maybe a result of the force behind the impact , her body was swashed to a mangled pulp of flesh, bone and blood that sprayed everywhere
"What is happening..." kuro who had now landed on the side of the pavement lampooned with chaotic thought filled with horror and confusion
The truck passed by him, its side panel printed with neat lettering: NEVER MISS MY TARGET. And behind those lettering was an image of bug spray .
Ayame's mother was already screaming. She crossed the road in a rush, fell to her knees. Kuro lay on the ground, face-up, the contents of the moment catching up with him slowly.
"AYAMEEEE!!" the woman screamed with despire .
— END OF CHAPTER IV —