Classes had ended. The bell had rung long ago, but the classroom still held that thick, viscous silence that only appears after everyone has already mentally scattered to their small lives. Chairs scraped against the floor, notebooks rustled, and someone in the back row quietly laughed at someone else's joke. Genzo slowly zipped up his backpack, adjusted the strap on his shoulder, and turned to Renji. His face was calm, almost lifeless, but something rare flickered in his eyes a hint of guilt.
"I'm heading to training today," he said quietly but clearly. "Sorry about yesterday. My mood was… completely off. I didn't mean to take it out on you. Sometimes everything just builds up, and I don't even understand where it comes from. It's like someone else wakes up inside me and starts speaking in my place."
He stepped closer and unexpectedly hugged Renji firmly, almost like a man would, but there was something awkward and teenage about it. Both of them blushed slightly. Renji felt the warmth of another body, the smell of sweat after a long day, and cheap school soap. Genzo pulled away first and looked toward the window.
"Alright… see you tomorrow. Don't get into anything without me, okay? I'm serious."
"See you tomorrow," Renji replied almost in a whisper. "And… it's fine. I understand."
Genzo nodded, looked at him once more as if he wanted to add something but changed his mind, and walked off in one direction across the schoolyard. Renji went the other way. The air after the rain was heavy and damp, saturated with the scent of wet earth, the distant sea, and something metallic, as if the entire city was slowly rusting from within. Renji walked slowly, still feeling that brief warmth on his chest. A strange thought circled in his head: "Sometimes even we, this broken, try to pretend we're normal… at least for a few seconds, until we remember who we really are."
In the dark corner of the alley, right behind the high school wall where the streetlights barely reached, two figures stood. Kaoru and Ria. Kaoru had long stopped looking like an ordinary schoolgirl. She looked like a real woman confident, cold, with a sharp gaze that cut like a blade. Her hair was neatly styled, her skirt slightly shorter than allowed, her posture straight, as if she had already decided everything that needed to be decided in this life.
She spotted Renji and called out without raising her voice, but loud enough for every word to cut in:
"Hey, idiot! Come here. Quickly."
Renji stopped. His heart clenched in its familiar, dull way. He knew that voice too well since he was thirteen. Since the day Kaoru first hit him for real. She beat him brutally: breaking fingers so the pain would last, hitting his head so bruises hid under his hair, leaving marks in places no one would see. When he tried to tell anyone, teachers, parents, the police, no one believed him. "How can a girl beat a boy that badly? You probably provoked her. Stop making things up."
He reluctantly approached, feeling everything inside him tighten into a hard, cold knot.
Kaoru leaned in and, without any warning, slammed her fist into his stomach with all the force she could put into her small hand. The blow was sudden and heavy, like a brick slamming into him. The air was knocked out of his lungs. Renji doubled over and dropped to his knees, gasping for nothing. Kaoru leaned lower, grabbed him by the hair, and kicked him in the head, calculated, not too hard to avoid a concussion, but enough for his vision to darken and the pain to become sharp, clean, and almost pleasant in its clarity.
"Look at yourself," she said in a calm, almost gentle voice that held not a drop of pity. "You're just a regular faggot. Weak. Pathetic. You know, I would have killed you back then when I found out your grandfather desecrated my mother's corpse. From that very day, I wanted to destroy everyone even remotely connected to you. Everyone. Blood for blood. Pain for pain. And I'm not joking."
Renji, still hunched over and breathing heavily, replied quietly without raising his eyes:
"I would only be glad."
Kaoru fell silent for a moment. Then she nodded, as if she had heard something important and long-awaited.
"Fine. I'll grant your wish. But not today. Later. When you least expect it. When you decide everything is already behind you and you can finally breathe easy. That's when I'll come."
Renji didn't take her words seriously. Just another threat in a long line of threats he had heard hundreds of times. Ria stood a little to the side, arms crossed over her chest, silently watching. Her eyes were empty, like those of someone who had already seen this a thousand times and had long stopped being surprised.
"Let's go, Kaoru," she said calmly. "That's enough for today. We still have things to do. No point wasting time on him."
Kaoru straightened up, brushed her hands as if shaking off dirt, and looked at the sunset. The sky burned bright orange, almost bloody. It was beautiful. But her eyes remained empty and dark. Like those of a person who knew neither mercy nor compassion. Neither regret nor forgiveness.
Time is neither a line nor a circle. It is a wound that bleeds memories backward. We are all just larvae feeding on its edges, thinking this is what life is. We don't understand that every blow, every scream, every drop of blood is merely a way to make time flow faster. To widen the wound. So we can finally see what hides behind it. Something enormous, nameless, merciless. And the more we strike, the closer we come to the edge of that wound. But we never step over it. Because beyond that edge, there is no longer any "us."
Detective Itsuki stood on that same tiny island. Around him lay decaying corpses already swollen, with black, glossy skin and a sweet, heavy smell of decomposition that soaked into clothes, hair, and lungs. He slowly dug out several damp documents from under the rubble of a concrete wall and examined them carefully. One of the corpses belonged to a guardsman from the 167th squadron of the French army. Itsuki sat down beside it, staring into the empty eye sockets where small insects were already crawling.
Memories surged suddenly, like an old, scratched film someone had turned on without permission and without sound.
Belgium, 1942. The height of the war in Europe, when the cold darkness had already begun devouring everything alive. Four guardsmen sat on an old stone bridge in a small forgotten village. They were eating canned food fish and herring straight from the tins, scraping out the last crumbs with knives. One of them, with a dirty face and a scar across his cheek, smirked into the void while looking at the gray sky.
"Hey, brothers… We've been sitting here too long. The Russians' reinforcements will arrive soon. I think there'll be something worth seeing. Maybe we'll finally see how the world really collapses. Not like children like adults."
The others nodded silently. They finished eating, stood up, tossed the empty cans into the black water under the bridge, and walked further down the road into the fog. The memories cut off abruptly, like a severed wire.
Itsuki sighed, took out his phone, and called the junior detective.
"It's all empty here," he said in a flat, lifeless voice. "Nothing new. No traces. We can close this island. Let it rot further. It seems to like it."
"Got it," the junior replied shortly. The call ended without goodbye.
The night was bottomless. Absolute. The kind where even the stars looked like holes in the black fabric of reality.
At that time, Kaoru and Ria had already gone to the airport. The car sped along the nighttime highway, headlights cutting through the darkness like knives.
"Let's go to the airport," Kaoru said, looking out the window. "Someone important is arriving today. Finally, things will start moving."
Ria smirked, not taking her eyes off the road.
"Yes. Finally, you bitch. That bloody retribution will come. We've waited too long. Too patiently."
They arrived at the airport. In the arrivals hall, Kim was already waiting for them, a very tall guy in a plain black T-shirt, holding a large suitcase. Almost the same age as them. With him were two girls: Mina with bright pink bobbed hair that stood out sharply in the dim light, and Oota with long white hair falling over her shoulders like snow. They all shook hands firmly, like men, without smiles or extra words.
"Greetings, dear friends," Kaoru said calmly, looking each of them in the eyes. "It's been a long time. Too long. But I'm glad you finally came."
Ria only smirked at the corner of her mouth.
"Nice to return to the old business. The real one."
And in the car, another guy, Ken, was already sitting. He didn't get out, just nodded from the window without saying a word. They were all twisted monsters. Each of them had committed the worst acts one could imagine: things not spoken aloud even in the darkest chats, things after which the soul never returns. And now they had gathered together again. Like a pack that had smelled fresh, warm blood.
The night continued. Dark, bottomless, hungry. And somewhere in this night, something new was already beginning to tick. Something that would make the world a little blacker. And none of them knew or wanted to know that this "something" was already watching them from within.