"Narasao Tarosono!!!"
The name ripped through the thin mountain air of the rooftop, hanging there like a curse.
Trizha stared at Zackier, her mind spinning into a frantic, disjointed whirl of confusion.
That name... it tasted like copper on her tongue.
She felt the phantom weight of it, a memory buried under layers of trauma and school-day mundane.
She had spoken that name before, hadn't she?
Not recently, but in a dream—or a nightmare—she couldn't quite grasp.
"My name is Nomoro Ketatsuki, just for the record," Nomoro said, his voice straining with the effort of keeping his guard up.
Zackier let out a short, skeletal scoff, his eyes dancing with a cruel, skeptical light.
"Shut up. The name 'Nomoro Ketatsuki' is nothing more than a convenient mask," Zackier spat, his steps deliberate and rhythmic as he closed the distance. "It's the alias you Flaws always reach for whenever you feel the need to hide your true, wretched identity from the world. I didn't expect you'd inhabit the lie so completely that you'd abandon your real name, but I suppose that's just the hallmark of a naive child playing at being a hero."
He didn't stop.
He walked with his hands still tucked into his pockets, his gaze anchored to Nomoro's face, searching for a crack in the persona.
"Using that name, believing in it... it's an insult to the hierarchy," Zackier continued, his voice dripping with condescension. "You should be ashamed to cower behind a borrowed life."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Nomoro replied flatly, though his knuckles whitened as he clenched his fists.
"That doesn't matter," Zackier countered, his grin widening. "You're meant to forget. That is precisely why you don't remember."
Nomoro cautiously lifted his arm, shielding Trizha as Zackier drew closer.
Trizha watched them, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
She began to pick herself up from the concrete, her eyes darting between the two men, until she felt Nomoro lean back slightly toward her.
"Trizha, look behind you," he whispered, the words barely audible over the wind.
Trizha glanced over her shoulder.
The heavy steel door—the one Nomoro had burst through moments ago—was still slightly ajar, a sliver of darkness promising a way out.
"I left the door open," Nomoro muttered, his focus never leaving Zackier. "Run. Now. I'll cover for you, trust me."
Trizha looked at his back, a surge of nervous energy sparking through her limbs.
She nodded, her throat too tight for words, and then she bolted.
She turned her back on the confrontation, her sneakers slapping against the roof as she sprinted toward the door.
It was now or never.
Zackier's expression immediately drained of all amusement, turning into a mask of cold, unreadable stone.
He didn't chase her; he simply shifted his center of gravity.
He bent his knees slightly, his gaze intensifying until it felt like a physical weight on Nomoro's chest.
"I'll make this fast," Zackier muttered.
And then, he vanished.
A dash so high-speed it left a blurred trail in the moonlight, his knife leading the way like a silver fang.
Nomoro, anticipating the strike, took a sharp step back, pivoting on his heel.
He drew his right fist back, gritting his teeth so hard they felt like they might shatter, and launched a punch fueled by every ounce of his remaining strength.
The air hissed as the blow swung wide.
Zackier had ducked at the last possible millisecond, the punch passing harmlessly over his head.
With the grace of a dancer, Zackier used his own forearm to intercept Nomoro's arm mid-swing, guiding the momentum upward and leaving Nomoro's ribs wide open.
Zackier's grin returned, a flash of pure delight. "Too slow—"
He swung his knife in a lateral arc, aiming to disembowel the boy.
But Nomoro wasn't finished.
Reacting with a desperate, animalistic instinct, he reversed the trajectory of his swing.
Instead of fighting the upward momentum, he snapped his elbow back and twisted his torso, delivering a powerful backward-swinging punch.
Zackier felt the wind of the hit and danced back, his eyes sparkling with fascination.
He was starting to understand.
This wasn't just a brawl; it was a style built on heavy, failing hits that were salvaged and turned into reversals.
"You're a clumsy one, aren't you?" Zackier chuckled.
He didn't finish the thought.
Nomoro had used the momentum of the failed reversal to pull his other fist forward in a blinding follow-up.
CRACK.
The punch buried itself into the right side of Zackier's face.
Nomoro let out a guttural scream, stepping deep into the strike to drill his knuckles into Zackier's jaw.
The impact staggered the elegant man backward.
Nomoro didn't give him a chance to recover.
He lunged forward, grabbing Zackier by the lapels of his dark suit and pulling him inward.
A barrage of punches followed—savage, unrefined, and relentless.
Nomoro hammered at Zackier's chest, stomach, and face, his fists moving in a blur of desperation.
Zackier seemed to reel under the onslaught, his head snapping back with each hit, gasping for air as the "Symbol of Loneliness" unleashed a decade of repressed fury.
A few yards away, Trizha reached the door.
She reached out to grab the handle, her breath coming in ragged gasps, but a sudden, violent image flashed in her mind.
It wasn't a memory of the classroom.
It wasn't the first day of school.
It was a fragmented vision of a different sky, a different time, and the name Narasao Tarosono echoing through a void.
She stopped.
Her body felt heavy, as if the concrete were pulling at her ankles.
"Why do I feel like..." she whispered to the wind, her expression crumbling into one of deep, agonizing trouble as she turned to look back at the fight. "...I shouldn't be leaving him alone?"
The name rang a bell in the deepest basement of her soul.
If she hadn't met him for the first time at school... then where?
And why did the thought of walking through that door feel like a betrayal of a promise she couldn't remember making?
Meanwhile, Nomoro let out one final, lung-bursting scream.
He poured everything into a final, overhead blow, aiming to knock Zackier into unconsciousness and buy them the time they needed to disappear.
But his fist didn't connect.
Zackier's hand moved like a viper, snapping shut around Nomoro's wrist inches from his face.
The barrage stopped instantly.
The rooftop went silent, save for the whistling wind.
Zackier lifted his head.
His face, which should have been a pulp of bruises and broken bone, was perfectly, mockingly unharmed.
His sinister grin was wider than ever, his eyes bright with a terrifying clarity.
He hadn't been struggling; he had been studying.
"Kidding," Zackier whispered.
Nomoro froze, his heart dropping into his stomach.
He tried to yank his hand back, but Zackier's grip was like an industrial vice.
It felt as though his fist had been fused into a block of solid lead.
"How unfortunate," Zackier said, his voice smooth and terrifyingly calm. "Don't you find it tragic? The idea of delivering your absolute maximum strength so early in the game, only for it to be utterly futile. You're just a child afraid of the dark, swinging wildly because you're terrified of what happens when the lights stay off."
Zackier's hand began to tighten.
The sound of shifting bone and tearing tendons filled the air.
"I thought you Flaws were wise," Zackier hissed. "But you're just pathetic."
Nomoro's mouth fell open in a silent scream of agony as his hand was crushed within Zackier's palm.
Trizha watched in horror, her legs trembling.
She saw the despair in Nomoro's eyes.
She saw the iron pipe lying near the door—a potential weapon.
She could help.
She could fight.
But the fear was a physical wall.
If she failed, she'd make it worse.
She'd get them both killed.
She turned back to the door, her mind screaming at her to run, to survive, to leave the responsibility behind.
She took a step toward the exit, casting one final, guilt-ridden look back at Nomoro.
He wasn't shouting.
He wasn't begging.
But as their eyes met, a voice echoed in her mind—not through the air, but through the connection.
「Don't leave me here... with a decision at hand...!」
Trizha's breath hitched.
The double-thinking vanished, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity.
She reached down and snatched up the iron pipe, her fingers gripping the cold metal.
"I'm going to run," she thought, her jaw-setting. "I'm going to run down there, I'm going to find help, and I'm going to bring the world down on this man. I will run away with the weight of this responsibility!"
She lunged for the door, her hand reaching for the empty air of the threshold.
Zackier, still holding Nomoro by his shattered hand, glanced over his shoulder.
.
.
.
.
.
"Like that'll happen."
.
.
.
.
.
The world slowed to a crawl.
The moonlight seemed to dim as Zackier lifted his free hand, extending a single finger toward Trizha's fleeing form.
At the tip of his finger, a spark of sickly, pinkish light began to gestate.
It hummed with a discordant energy—the sound of a thousand distorted heartbeats, an amalgamation of stolen, twisted emotions.
「"Alterlity: Lovestruck."」
Nomoro, realizing the danger, tried to throw a desperate punch with his left hand to disrupt the casting, but his fist began to lose its cohesion.
The skin felt like it was melting away, pulled toward the gravity of the sphere as it expanded.
Lovestruck.
It is a power that exchanges the emotion of one person in return for a different emotion in desire of the user, and that stockpiled emotion is amalgamated into nine more emotions to form a sphere that brings the concept of 'struck' into existence.
An ability that only works when the victim is aware of their presence or the concept of Love will be meaningless if another isn't there…
.
.
.
.
.
"Emoplotion."
.
.
.
.
.
The word was a trigger.
Once released, so is 'struck', becoming the reason for one's destruction.
The sphere didn't just fire; it erased the space between Zackier and his targets.
The explosion was a miniature sun, a pink-and-white supernova that erupted directly in front of Nomoro's face.
The shockwave was a physical hammer, slamming into him and carrying him backward.
The air pressure was so intense it stripped the gravel from the roof and shattered the nearby pipes into shrapnel.
It held the concentrated fury of a missile strike within the radius of a single room.
Trizha was thrown forward, her arms shielding her face as the heat scorched her skin.
The impact slammed her against the doorframe, the steel door screeching as it was forced shut and the lock fused into place by the sheer heat.
She collapsed, her ears ringing, her vision swimming with black spots.
Slowly, she lowered her arms.
The rooftop was a ruin of twisted metal and smoke.
And there, slumped against the wall, was Nomoro.
His body was a map of trauma.
The explosion, triggered at point-blank range, had shredded his clothing and scorched his skin.
But it was his face—the features she was just beginning to remember—that were the most unrecognizable.
He was a mask of red, breathing in shallow, wet rattles.
Trizha scrambled toward him, falling to her knees in the debris. "Nomoro! Nomoro, look at me! Wake up!"
She nudged his shoulder, her hands coming away slick with blood.
She leaned closer, her heart stopping as she saw the extent of the damage.
The boy who had just saved her was fading, his life leaking out onto the cold concrete.
Trizha backed away, her hand over her mouth, a sob tearing from her throat.
"No... no, please..."
The tears finally came, hot and blinding.
He was gone.
He is dead.