Chapter 35: Unravelling Threads Of A Told Tomorrow

Chapter 20: Holiday Unease

As the turbulent second school year drew to its uneasy, hunger-tinged close, marked by Commandant Ide’s increasingly brutal regime within the internment camp rather than a traditional school break, the announcement of the term break and the departure of most students brought a tense, almost desperate kind of relief to those not deemed high-priority detainees. The ferries arrived, grimly efficient transports now, ready to carry the bulk of the student body back to the mainland, away from the island’s oppressive atmosphere of fear and scarcity, at least for a few precious weeks. The Committee, it seemed, was rotating its "assets."

Arthur Ainsworth, once again, found himself in the strange position of choosing to stay on the nearly deserted island. This time, however, his decision was not born of a lonely vigil over a lifeless body, but out of a complex, unspoken necessity. Michiru Inukai, though much recovered from her miraculous, near-death experience and subsequent regeneration, was still not deemed "fit for mainland reintegration" by the island's skeletal medical staff, who were themselves Committee operatives. She opted to remain, finding a quiet solace in the island’s sudden emptiness and, Arthur suspected with a complicated mix of protectiveness and trepidation, feeling a continued sense of fragile security in his and, surprisingly, Nana Hiiragi’s proximity.

Nana Hiiragi’s situation was, as always, more precarious and externally dictated. Just days before the scheduled departure of the main student body, she received a terse, undeniable summons – not a polite request, but a clear, unambiguous order delivered via a new, untampered Committee phone that had been “provided” to her. Commander Tsuruoka required her presence on the mainland. Immediately. Her face was a mask of grim resignation when she informed a worried Michiru and, by extension, a deeply suspicious Arthur. Despite her profound emotional turmoil, her shattered faith in the Committee, and the fragile, unspoken shift in her relationship with Michiru and even Arthur, she was still tethered by invisible, unbreakable chains to her handler.

Her reluctant departure left Arthur and Michiru in a strange, almost surreal state of quietude on the nearly empty island. The oppressive atmosphere of fear lifted slightly, replaced by a vast, echoing stillness. Arthur found himself falling into an unexpected role: caregiver, companion, and reluctant guardian to the gently recovering Michiru. They took slow, careful walks along the less treacherous coastal paths, Michiru’s laughter, when it occasionally, shyly surfaced, a sound as precious and rare as a blooming desert flower. He would listen, often for hours, as she spoke of her simple hopes for a peaceful future, her quiet joy in the small beauties of the island’s resilient nature – the wildflowers pushing through cracks in the concrete, the intricate patterns of lichen on the ancient stones. He, in turn, shared carefully edited, heavily censored fragments of his old life in England, tales of rainy afternoons, lukewarm tea, and the quiet, predictable rhythm of an existence that now felt like it belonged to another man, in another lifetime. A strange, almost domestic peace settled over them, a fragile bubble of normalcy in the heart of a deeply abnormal world, though the underlying tension, the knowledge of Tsuruoka’s ever-present shadow and Nana’s uncertain fate, was a constant, unspoken hum beneath the surface.

Nana’s meeting with Tsuruoka took place, not in a conventional office, but deep within the cold, sterile, and windowless confines of his isolated military base on the mainland. Standing before him in his severe, impeccably pressed uniform, his face an unreadable mask of polite inquiry, Nana found a sliver of her old defiance, a spark of the new, desperate courage born of her recent traumas. “I can’t keep doing this, Commander,” she stated, her voice surprisingly steady, though her hands were clenched tightly at her sides. “The killing… some of them… many of them… they’re not all enemies. They’re just… children. Scared children.”

Tsuruoka regarded her with an unblinking, reptilian gaze, his lips curved in a faint, almost imperceptible smile that did not reach his cold eyes. He seemed entirely unphased by her hesitant rebellion. “Your newfound sentimentality is a significant weakness, Hiiragi,” he said, his voice dangerously soft, each word a carefully polished stone dropped into a deep, dark well. “The mission parameters are clear, precise, and unchanged. Your personal feelings, your… moral discomforts… are entirely irrelevant to their successful execution. Or have you perhaps forgotten the severe consequences of… significant underperformance?” The veiled threat, unspoken but utterly potent, hung heavy in the sterile, climate-controlled air.

It was then that Tsuruoka, with a casual, almost dismissive gesture, introduced Mai. She was a young girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen, with enormous, sorrowful brown eyes that seemed to absorb all the light in the room, and an almost palpable air of profound, recent grief and bewildered vulnerability. Tsuruoka explained, with a distinct, chilling lack of compassion, that Mai’s beloved grandmother, her sole guardian, had recently passed away, leaving her a modest but, for some, tempting inheritance, and that Mai was now… tragically adrift, alone, and susceptible. He then instructed Nana, his voice regaining its usual crisp, commanding tone, to train the girl. “Make her efficient, Hiiragi. Make her focused. Like you used to be, before your… unfortunate decline in operational standards.”

Over the following emotionally fraught days, Nana found herself in the bizarre, almost surreal position of playing reluctant mentor to the silent, grieving child. It was a horrifying parody of her own indoctrination. She soon discovered, through Mai’s innocent, tearful, almost incoherent confessions during their stilted “training” sessions, that the girl was being systematically, cruelly conned out of her small inheritance by a manipulative, older girl – a former, expelled student from the island academy, Nana learned with a jolt of cold recognition – whom Mai had unfortunately encountered in her grief-stricken vulnerability. A protective instinct, fierce, unexpected, and deeply unwelcome to Nana’s Committee programming, rose within her. This young, heartbroken, traumatized girl was a victim, not a weapon to be callously sharpened and then discarded for the Committee’s bloody, inscrutable purposes.

Nana made a difficult, dangerous decision, one that was a direct act of insubordination, however carefully she planned to conceal it. She meticulously tracked down the con artist, a cynical, remorseless young woman living comfortably and extravagantly off Mai’s stolen money in a flashy city apartment. The confrontation was brief, brutal, the killing clinical, a chilling, unwelcome echo of Nana’s past lethal efficiency. But this time, Nana knew with a strange, defiant clarity, the motive was not blind obedience, not fear, but a twisted, desperate form of protection. She had eliminated a predator to save a lamb, even if it meant dirtying her own hands further.

When she next faced Tsuruoka, her face was a carefully composed mask of dutiful obedience. “Mai’s initial field training is complete, Commander,” she reported, her voice betraying none of her internal turmoil. “She… successfully neutralized the target who was financially exploiting her. Showed surprising initiative and a commendable lack of hesitation.”

Tsuruoka’s thin lips curved into that familiar, chillingly knowing smile. Whether he truly believed her, or simply chose to accept the satisfactory outcome regardless of the details, was impossible for Nana to tell. “Excellent, Hiiragi,” he said smoothly. “It seems your own… recent operational slump… hasn’t entirely dulled your invaluable training abilities. You are to return to the island school for the start of the new term. There are… new students arriving. And new directives.” Mai, he informed her with casual indifference, would be assigned her own separate “mission” shortly. Nana felt a sharp pang of guilt and fear, wondering what terrible fate awaited the young girl she had tried, in her own compromised, desperate way, to shield from the Committee’s insatiable maw.

During one particularly brutal, psychologically invasive debriefing session with Tsuruoka, where he relentlessly dissected her recent performance on the island – her failure to eliminate more designated targets, her inexplicable emotional volatility, her new, unwelcome tendency towards independent thought – Nana found herself deflecting, almost instinctively. Seeking to shift his critical, penetrating focus, or perhaps genuinely perplexed and troubled by Arthur’s continued, disruptive presence in her life, she mentioned him. “There’s a student, Commander,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “Tanaka Kenji. He has a… a very strange and unusually specific Talent for predicting future events. He’s… unpredictable. Disruptive. He seems to know things he shouldn’t, things he couldn’t possibly know.”

Tsuruoka’s usually impassive expression flickered with a spark of genuine, predatory interest. A student who could accurately predict the future? That was a variable of immense potential value, or considerable potential threat, that he hadn’t fully accounted for. He made a silent, mental note: Kenji Tanaka. This boy might indeed require further, more direct investigation. His file would be moved to a higher priority.

Back on the nearly deserted island, Arthur Ainsworth and Michiru Inukai continued their quiet, fragile existence, unaware of the dangerous ripples their actions, and Arthur’s mere existence, were creating in the wider, unseen world. Arthur found a strange, almost domestic rhythm in caring for Michiru, in their shared solitude. He read to her from the few English books he’d found in the school’s dusty, forgotten library annex, his voice a low murmur in the stillness. She, in turn, tried to teach him simple Japanese phrases, her gentle laughter at his clumsy pronunciation a rare, welcome sound. It was a temporary, precarious peace, an eye in the storm. Yet, beneath the surface calm, the knowledge of Tsuruoka, the omnipresent Committee, and Nana’s uncertain, perilous fate lingered, a constant, unspoken promise of storms yet to come. And unknown to Arthur, his name, Kenji Tanaka – or perhaps even Arthur Ainsworth – had just landed with a quiet thud on the desk of a very dangerous, very interested man.

Chapter 26: Reunion in the Rain

The chaotic, premature end of the third school year on the island had seen Arthur, along with the other bewildered and traumatized student survivors, unceremoniously dumped back onto the mainland like so much unwanted refuse. For him, it meant a grim, dispiriting return to the life he had briefly, miserably known before his forced return to the academy: the anonymity of the teeming city, the gnawing ache of poverty, and the soul-crushing, repetitive labour of a sprawling construction site on the urban fringe. The bitter irony wasn’t lost on him; he was now walking the same path of grueling menial toil, enduring the same casual cruelties from foremen and co-workers, that Kyouya Onodera had apparently walked before his own arrival on that cursed island. He endured the harsh, unforgiving conditions, the meagre, often insufficient pay that barely covered the rent for a shared, squalid room in a decaying lodging house, and the constant, wearying taunts from his fellow labourers who mocked his still-halting Japanese and his foreigner’s awkwardness. Each day was a fresh testament to his unwanted, unwelcome survival. His phone, his former lifeline to communication and understanding, had been confiscated during the island evacuation, leaving him to navigate this complex, indifferent world with only his painfully limited vocabulary and a profound, isolating sense of linguistic inadequacy.

Months bled into one another, a dreary, monotonous procession of exhausting physical labour and long, lonely nights spent staring at the cracked ceiling of his cramped room. He heard nothing of Nana, nothing of Michiru, nothing of Kyouya. The island, and the unspeakable horrors it held, began to feel like a distant, terrible fever dream, its sharp edges softened by time and the sheer, grinding drudgery of his current existence.

One particularly bleak, miserable evening in late autumn, as a cold, persistent, sleety rain lashed the city, relentlessly turning the streets into slick, reflecting rivers of neon and grime, Arthur trudged wearily away from the cacophonous, muddy construction site. His body ached with a bone-deep exhaustion, his spirit felt numb, hollowed out. He took a shortcut through a narrow, dimly lit, garbage-strewn alleyway, more to escape the biting, rain-laden wind than to save any appreciable time. And there, huddled in a recessed, darkened doorway, trying desperately to find some meagre shelter from the relentless downpour, was a figure he recognized instantly, despite her ragged, filthy clothes and the haunted, almost feral terror in her eyes. Nana Hiiragi.

She looked up with a start as he approached, her eyes – those once bright, violet, calculating eyes – widening in shocked, terrified recognition. She was thinner, almost skeletal, her once vibrant pink hair now lank, faded, and plastered to her skull by the rain, her face smudged with dirt and etched with a weariness that went far beyond mere physical exhaustion. She looked like a cornered, wounded animal, a desperate fugitive who had finally run out of places to hide. On top of a nearby overflowing, reeking rubbish bin, a scrawny, spectral white cat sat preternaturally still, its intelligent, luminous eyes fixed on them both, seemingly entirely unfazed by the driving rain or the charged atmosphere in the narrow alley.

“Tanaka-kun?” Nana whispered, her voice hoarse, cracked, barely audible above the drumming of the rain, disbelief warring with a flicker of raw, desperate fear, and perhaps, Arthur thought with a jolt, a tiny, almost imperceptible spark of desperate, unwelcome hope. She looked utterly broken. She began to stammer, incoherent words of regret, of apology for… for everything, her body trembling violently.

Arthur, his own weariness a heavy, sodden cloak upon his shoulders, cut her off, his voice flat, the English words falling like chips of ice in the damp, cold air. “Save it, Hiiragi. Just… save it.” He saw the last vestiges of fight, of defiance, go out of her. She sagged against the grimy, graffiti-covered wall, the rain plastering her thin clothes to her shivering frame.

“Tsuruoka,” he began, speaking slowly, deliberately, still in English, knowing she had some comprehension, and needing the precision of his own tongue for what he had to say. “Commander Tsuruoka… he killed your parents, Nana. Not you. He did.” He saw her flinch as if he had physically struck her, her eyes widening in stunned, uncomprehending horror. “He hired two Talented criminals to do the job, individuals with existing convictions, easily manipulated, easily controlled. They were likely… disposed of… after they’d served their purpose. Silenced. Standard Committee operating procedure.” Nana stared at him, her mouth agape, rain dripping from her chin, her breath catching in her throat. “Your parents,” Arthur continued, his voice relentless, a grim, emotionless recital of terrible truths. “They supported Talents. They were actively opposed to Tsuruoka’s ideology, his methods, his growing power within the Committee. He decided not only to eliminate them as a threat but, as the ultimate, monstrous act of revenge against their memory, to take their only daughter and twist her, mold her, into the very thing they fought against. It was so much easier to shape you, to control you, if you could be blamed for their horrific murders, wasn’t it? If you truly believed yourself a monster from the very start.” He saw the dawning, unutterable horror in her eyes as pieces of her shattered, manipulated past began to align with his brutal words. “You running to that police station, a terrified child clutching your own father’s severed head… the accusations, the recriminations you faced there… that was all part of Tsuruoka’s meticulous, diabolical plan. The reason you were shunted from one uncaring, abusive foster family to another. It was all designed to break you, to isolate you, to make you utterly pliable, to make you his perfect, unquestioning weapon.”

He paused, letting the crushing weight of his words sink into her already fractured psyche. “You could have asked more questions, Hiiragi,” he said, his voice softening almost imperceptibly, a hint of weary sorrow creeping in. “You could have done more research. Yes, many Talents are bad, dangerous, destructive. But it was never your place to be their judge, their jury, and their executioner.” He looked her directly in the eye, his gaze unwavering, trying to convey the full import of his next statement. “And Talents, Hiiragi,” he added, his voice dropping to a low, pointed near-whisper, “they don’t have a monopoly on doing bad things.” The implication that he knew she, Nana Hiiragi, the Committee’s most feared assassin of Talents, was herself entirely Talentless, hung heavy, unspoken but deafening, between them in the cold, rain-swept alley. “Now, perhaps, after everything, you finally understand the full, terrible extent of my ‘Talent.’ My ‘predictions.’ And believe me, Hiiragi, things are going to get much, much worse. For all of us.”

Nana, looking utterly numb, her face a mask of dawning, unbearable truth and profound, world-shattering despair, finally spoke, her voice a mere breath, almost lost in the relentless drumming of the rain. “I’ve seen them… Tanaka-kun. I’ve seen… the Enemies of Humanity.”

Arthur, who had almost turned to leave, to walk away from her and the vortex of pain and violence she represented, froze in his tracks. Her words, so quiet, so full of a new, specific terror, stopped him cold. He knew, with a sudden, sickening lurch, where this was heading, to the most bizarre, the most terrifying, the most inexplicable aspect of this twisted, nightmarish world. He turned back slowly to face her, the rain dripping from his hair, from the collar of his thin jacket. He struggled for a moment with his limited Japanese, then resorted to blunt English again. “Tsuruoka. He’s shown you, hasn’t he?” he asked, his voice grim. “Two of them, I’d wager. Two of those… monsters. And he told you that Talents don’t truly die when you kill them? That they just… change? That they turn into those things?” Nana, her eyes wide and haunted, brimming with a fresh, unspeakable horror, nodded slowly, a single tear tracing a path through the grime on her cheek.

“He was telling you the truth, Nana,” Arthur said, his voice heavy with a weariness that seemed to age him decades in that moment. “Up to a point, at least. My own… additional information… it may not be entirely precise, you understand. It’s… fragmented. But from what I’ve managed to piece together, from what I remember… when a person with a Talent reaches a certain point in their life – late teens, their twenties, sometimes as late as their forties, it varies – their Talent can undergo a kind of… profound, often terrifying metamorphosis. Think of it as… as puberty, but with new, often unstable, uncontrollable superpowers. A secondary, more monstrous blossoming.” He saw the flicker of horrified understanding in her eyes. “Unfortunately, from what I know, it’s not long after that stage, that secondary manifestation, that they can… they can transform. Become those creatures Tsuruoka so proudly, so callously, displayed for you. The process, I believe, can also happen, perhaps even accelerate, if a Talent appears to be dead to our eyes, like Etsuko, the girl he showed you in that body bag. Their essence, their Talent, it just… festers, corrupts, transforms.”

He saw the recognition of Etsuko’s name, the confirmation of her own terrible experience in Tsuruoka’s charnel house, reflected in Nana’s horrified gaze. “I don’t know what the Committee’s ultimate, endgame plan is, Nana,” Arthur admitted, running a hand through his wet hair. “I truly don’t. But I strongly suspect Tsuruoka will use – or perhaps already is using – these so-called ‘Enemies of Humanity’ as a potent, terrifying tool. Maybe, just maybe, it’s to keep the current Japanese government in power, by presenting these monsters as a constant, existential threat that only he, and the Committee, can manage, can protect them from. Or, and this seems far more likely given his megalomania, once he’s successfully eliminated all other Talents he deems problematic or uncontrollable, he’ll use these monsters, these transformed Talents, to try and take over the world himself.”

He looked at Nana, her face a canvas of shock, dawning comprehension, and utter, soul-crushing despair. “He played you, Nana,” he said, his voice softer now, almost gentle. “From the very beginning. He played us all.” With that, Arthur Ainsworth turned and began to walk away, his shoulders slumped, leaving Nana Hiiragi alone in the cold, dark, rain-lashed alley to absorb the full, crushing weight of his devastating revelations. As he reached the grimy, graffiti-scarred end of the alley, he glanced back, a brief, almost involuntary movement. Nana was slowly, unsteadily, pushing herself to her feet, a small, broken figure in the vast, uncaring city. The scrawny white cat, which had been watching their entire exchange with an unnerving, almost sentient stillness from its perch on the overflowing rubbish bin, hopped down with a silent, graceful leap and, with an almost imperceptible flick of its tail, began to follow Nana as she stumbled out of the alley and disappeared into the rainy, indifferent labyrinth of the darkened city streets. He knew, somehow, with a certainty that settled like a stone in his own weary heart, that their paths, his and Nana’s, were still destined to cross again. The island’s dark, insidious tendrils reached far, even into the deepest, most anonymous shadows of the sprawling mainland.

Chapter 8: A Head in the Classroom

Arthur managed to slip back into the hushed, pre-dawn stillness of the dormitory just as the faintest hint of grey was outlining the window frames. He looked like something dredged from a nightmare – his clothes were torn, caked with mud, and stained with darker, more ominous patches he refused to identify. His face was smudged with dirt, his hair matted with sweat and grime, and a wild, haunted, almost feral look burned in his eyes. He moved with the stiff, jerky movements of someone pushed far beyond their physical and emotional limits.

He quickly, furtively, bundled the obscene canvas satchel, with its horrifying, weighty contents, into the dark recesses at the bottom of his rickety wardrobe, beneath a pile of seldom-used spare blankets. Then, he made his way to the communal showers. He scrubbed himself raw under the steaming water, trying to wash away the physical filth and the clinging, fetid odour of the night’s gruesome ordeal, but the mental contamination, the profound sense of self-loathing and violation, felt indelible. His hands, when he eventually managed to stop their violent trembling, still felt slick with an imaginary residue.

He skipped breakfast, the mere thought of food threatening to bring up the meagre contents of his stomach. He spent the early part of the morning in a dissociated daze, sitting rigidly on the edge of his bed, the image of Shinji’s lifeless, accusing eyes and the horrifying, sickening thud of rock against decaying bone replaying in an endless, torturous loop in his mind. He had to do this. He had to see this terrible, self-appointed task through. There was no turning back now. The die was cast.

The opportunity he’d been dreading, yet grimly anticipating, came during a long, unstructured free period before lunch. Most of the students were in the classroom, the usual low hum of chatter, the rustle of textbook pages, and the occasional burst of laughter filling the air with a deceptive sense of normalcy. Mr. Saito was at his desk at the front, spectacles perched on the end of his nose, diligently grading papers. Yūka Somezaki was present, huddled at her usual isolated desk near the back, looking even more pale and drawn than usual. She kept darting nervous, frightened glances towards Arthur, her hands twisting restlessly in her lap. She clearly hadn’t slept well after his ominous “warning” the previous day.

Arthur took a deep, steadying breath, the air feeling thick and heavy in his lungs. He retrieved the heavy canvas satchel from his room, its grim weight a palpable reminder of his night’s work. He walked to the front of the classroom, the satchel held carefully in front of him. The low hum of chatter gradually died down as students noticed him, their expressions shifting from indifference to curiosity, then to a dawning unease. He looked tired, dishevelled, and profoundly grim – a stark, unsettling contrast to his usual awkward, almost invisible demeanour. He placed his phone on a nearby empty desk, its screen lighting up.

“Yesterday,” his translated voice began, the synthesized Japanese tones cutting cleanly through the sudden, expectant silence, “I mentioned my growing concerns about the activities of the ‘Enemies of Humanity’ and their potential operations on the north side of this island. Last night, I took it upon myself to investigate those concerns further.”

He paused, letting the tension build, his gaze sweeping slowly across the room, taking in the rows of young, now apprehensive faces. He looked particularly tired, his eyes bloodshot, his posture radiating a bone-deep weariness that was entirely genuine.

“The encounter was… more harrowing than I could have possibly imagined,” he continued, his voice via the phone carefully measured, almost flat, which only served to heighten the underlying menace. “They are more dangerous, more depraved, than any of us can truly comprehend. It seems they may have found a new, terrifying weapon… or perhaps, a new, unholy method for creating their soldiers.” He let his gaze linger for a charged moment on Yūka Somezaki, whose eyes were now wide with a dawning, visceral horror. She looked like a trapped animal. “They may be… reanimating the dead. Or perhaps… the dead are their new weapon.”

A collective, sharp intake of breath, a series of stifled gasps, went through the classroom. Horrified whispers erupted, quickly shushed by the sheer gravity of his pronouncement. Mr. Saito looked up sharply from his papers, his expression morphing from mild irritation at the interruption to genuine alarm.

Arthur slowly began to walk down the central aisle between the rows of desks, the canvas satchel held carefully, almost reverently, in front of him. Students leaned away instinctively as he passed, a mixture of fear and morbid curiosity on their faces. He could feel Nana Hiiragi’s sharp, intensely analytical gaze on him, a silent, probing question in her eyes. Kyouya Onodera’s stare was equally intense, unblinking, his usual impassivity overlaid with a flicker of something that might have been cold, scientific interest. Arthur stopped when he reached Yūka Somezaki’s desk.

Her face was chalk-white, devoid of all colour, her breath coming in shallow, rapid, audible gasps. She looked like she was about to bolt, her eyes darting wildly between Arthur, the ominous bag, and the distant, unreachable sanctuary of the classroom door.

“I brought back… evidence,” Arthur’s phone announced into the suddenly tomb-like, suffocating silence of the room. With a deliberate, almost ceremonial movement, he lifted the heavy, cloth-covered satchel and placed it directly onto the polished surface of Yūka’s desk. The top of the bag was loosely tied with a drawstring, but a horrifyingly familiar, vaguely spherical shape, still partially obscured by the stained canvas, was sickeningly evident. A hint of dark, matted hair. The pale, obscene curve of a decaying forehead. The unmistakable, ghastly outline of a human head.

Yūka Somezaki stared at the bag, her eyes fixed, unblinking, on the dreadful shape within. A strangled, gurgling whimper escaped her lips. Her body began to tremble violently. Then, she let out a raw, piercing, animalistic scream that seemed to tear through the very fabric of the room, a sound of pure, unadulterated terror and shattered sanity. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she slumped sideways, fainting dead away, her chair crashing to the floor with a deafening clatter.

The classroom exploded into utter chaos. Students shrieked, some scrambling back from their desks in blind panic, knocking over more chairs, their faces contorted in horror and disbelief. Mr. Saito rushed forward, his own face a mask of horrified disbelief and dawning anger. “Tanaka-kun! What is the meaning of this outrage? What have you done?!” he babbled, his voice cracking.

Kyouya Onodera was on his feet, not joining the general panic, but moving with a grim, purposeful stride towards Yūka’s desk, his eyes narrowed, fixed on the dreadful bag and its horrifying contents. Nana Hiiragi, however, remained seated, a preternatural calm amidst the pandemonium. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her pen, her gaze flitting with sharp, analytical intensity between the bag, the unconscious Yūka, and Arthur himself. A chillingly thoughtful, almost appraising expression settled on her face. Arthur had just thrown a live, decapitated grenade into her carefully managed hunting ground, and she was trying to understand the trajectory, the motive, the potential fallout.

The immediate aftermath was a blur of hysterical shouting, terrified crying, and Mr. Saito’s increasingly desperate, high-pitched attempts to restore some semblance of order. The dreadful bag and its horrifying contents were quickly, and with much trepidation, removed by a shaken, pale-faced Mr. Saito himself, who then had Yūka carried off to the school infirmary by two equally terrified older students. Arthur found himself being sternly interrogated by a visibly furious Mr. Saito and another grim-faced teacher in the corridor, his phone struggling to keep up with the barrage of angry questions and accusations. He stuck rigidly to his story: he had found the reanimated corpse, a clear and undeniable sign of the ‘Enemies of Humanity’ at work on their very doorstep. He was merely presenting irrefutable proof of a dangerous new threat. He was met with profound disbelief, horrified condemnation for his barbaric methods, and stern warnings about vigilante actions, but no one could deny the sheer, visceral horror of what he had unveiled. The image of that bag, that shape, would be seared into their minds for a long time.

Later that day, after the initial chaos had subsided into a sort of stunned, fearful quiet, Nana Hiiragi, driven by a potent mixture of cold suspicion, intellectual curiosity, and the pressing need to understand this new, unpredictable variable that Arthur Tanaka represented, visited Yūka in her dormitory room. Yūka had been discharged from the infirmary but was clearly in a state of profound psychological distress, sedated but still babbling incoherently about Shinji, about monsters with decaying faces, about heads in bags.

Nana, seeing an opportunity to probe Yūka’s shattered psyche and perhaps confirm her own suspicions about the girl’s true Talent, began her subtle, psychological torment. "The dead are restless, aren’t they, Somezaki-san," Nana might have said, her voice a soft, sympathetic, almost hypnotic coo, as she sat beside Yūka’s bed. "They whisper things to me sometimes, you know? Especially around those who are… close to them. They say… they say Shinji is lonely. They say you should join him. They even whisper… that you should kill me before I tell everyone your dark secrets."

This, Arthur surmised from his anime knowledge, was the point at which Nana would have feigned terror at her own “revelations,” fleeing dramatically into the nearby woods, deliberately goading a terrified and now highly suggestible Yūka into sending her reanimated servitors (likely lesser zombies she’d created from small animals or perhaps even older, forgotten human remains from the island’s lightless past) after her. Nana would have then easily evaded them, using the orchestrated chase to confirm Yūka’s necromantic Talent beyond any doubt. She would have then confronted the distraught Yūka, expecting to force a full confession about the arson that had killed the real Shinji, before delivering her own fatal, poisoned strike.

But things didn’t go exactly as Nana might have planned, or as Arthur had recalled from the source material. Arthur’s brutal, shockingly public display with Shinji’s severed head had already done irreparable damage to Yūka’s carefully constructed delusions. The foundation of her morbid obsession had been shattered. When Nana confronted her, after the feigned flight and the easily evaded pursuit of a few pathetic, shambling creatures, Yūka was already broken, a hollow shell of her former self. She confessed to the fire, yes, her words tumbling out in a torrent of guilt, self-loathing, and raw terror, but her confession was interspersed with horrified babbling about Shinji’s true, decaying face, the unimaginable horror in that canvas bag, the monstrousness of it all. She wasn't just confessing a crime; she was reliving a profound, sanity-shattering trauma.

Nana, poised to strike, her poisoned needle glinting faintly in the dim light of the dorm room, hesitated. Yūka was a wreck, utterly defeated, her spirit seemingly crushed beyond repair. There was no fight left in her, no defiance, only a raw, pathetic, abject misery. Killing her now felt… empty. Almost unsporting. This wasn’t the calculated elimination of a dangerous, hidden threat; it was like putting down a wounded, whimpering, already dying animal. Perhaps Tsuruoka wouldn’t even count this as a proper, satisfying kill, not with the target already so mentally and emotionally destroyed by another student’s grotesque actions. Nana, for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate, reasons that felt uncomfortably like a nascent, unwelcome flicker of pity or perhaps even a dawning, unsettling doubt about her own mission, slowly lowered her hand. She left Yūka Somezaki to her madness, a broken toy she no longer had any interest in.

Later that night, alone in her room, tormented by the fractured images of Arthur’s terrible evidence and Nana’s insidious whispers, Yūka Somezaki, in a final, desperate act of denial or a desperate plea for reassurance, tried one last time to summon Shinji. But the image Arthur had so brutally seared into her mind – the decaying, unrecognizable horror in that bag, the vacant eyes, the lolling jaw – had irrevocably tainted her Talent, her connection to her morbid fantasy. When Shinji’s ghostly form flickered into existence before her, it was no longer the romanticised, beloved boyfriend of her carefully nurtured delusions. It was a leering, putrescent corpse, its eyes vacant pits of horror, its flesh sloughing from its bones, its silent scream an echo of her own shattered sanity. She saw, for the first, horrifyingly clear time, what she had truly been embracing, what she had truly become.

The disgust, the self-loathing, the sheer, unadulterated terror, were overwhelming. With a choked, animalistic sob, Yūka screamed at the horrifying apparition, revoking the necromantic energies with a violence that shook her to her core, letting Shinji’s ghastly form dissolve into nothingness for the final, absolute time. She collapsed onto the cold floor, weeping, her body wracked with convulsions, and vowed, with every fibre of her broken being, never again to touch the cursed, defiling power of necromancy.

Arthur, unaware of the specific details of Nana’s subsequent interaction with Yūka, only knew that Yūka Somezaki remained alive, albeit a profoundly changed, withdrawn, and terrified shell of her former self. He had, through a horrifying, morally grey, and deeply traumatizing act, indirectly saved a life from Nana Hiiragi’s list. The cost to his own psyche, however, was mounting with every passing day. He was no hero; he was just a desperate, frightened man playing an increasingly deadly game with pieces of his own sanity, in a world that seemed determined to strip him of every last shred of his former self. And he knew, with a chilling certainty, that his actions had not gone unnoticed by the island's true predator.

Chapter 22: Mainland Purgatory

The mainland was a brutal, disorienting awakening into a new kind of hell. Stripped of the insular, albeit perilous, structure of the island academy, and now, crucially, without his phone translator which had been casually confiscated by a bored Committee agent during the chaotic disembarkation, Arthur found himself utterly adrift in a sea of indifferent, uncomprehending faces and a language that was now an almost impenetrable barrier. The yen he’d had in “Kenji Tanaka’s” school uniform pockets had been minimal and was quickly exhausted on a few meagre portions of rice balls. He was just another nameless, homeless youth, lost and invisible in the sprawling, pitiless concrete jungle of a large Japanese port city. His limited, halting Japanese, learned through painful necessity on the island, was woefully inadequate for navigating this complex new world.

Days blurred into a miserable, exhausting cycle of gnawing hunger, damp cold, and the constant, weary, often fruitless search for some form of shelter from the elements or a discarded, half-eaten meal in a fast-food restaurant’s overflowing bin. He slept in darkened alleyways that stank of stale urine and rotting garbage, under the echoing concrete arches of bridges, the ever-present fear of discovery by police patrols or less savory, predatory elements of the city’s underbelly a constant, unwelcome companion. He missed Michiru with an ache that was a physical pain in his chest; her quiet presence, her unwavering kindness, their shared, fragile peace during the last island break, had been a small, precious light in his otherwise oppressive darkness. Now, that light was extinguished, and he was stumbling blindly.

A few desperate, soul-crushing weeks into this miserable existence, as he was huddled in a damp shop doorway, trying to escape a biting, persistent late summer rain, a sleek, anonymous black car with tinted windows purred to a silent halt beside him. A man in a sharp, impeccably tailored dark suit emerged, holding a large black umbrella with practiced ease, shielding himself as he approached. He addressed Arthur by his island name, his Japanese precise and formal.

“Tanaka Kenji-kun?” the man inquired, his voice polite but utterly devoid of warmth or inflection, his eyes cold and appraising as they took in Arthur’s ragged, rain-soaked appearance. “My employer has taken an active interest in your current welfare. He understands, through various channels, that you may be… experiencing some temporary difficulties adjusting to mainland life.” He paused, allowing Arthur to absorb the implications of being so easily found. “He is, therefore, prepared to offer you refuge, assistance, a chance to rebuild your life under more… favorable circumstances.”

Arthur stared at the man, then at the opulent, waiting car, a stark symbol of power and influence in this grimy, indifferent street. He didn’t need his phone to translate the chilling intent behind the polite words. This was the Committee. This was Tsuruoka, reaching out with a silken, poisoned glove. “Who… who is your employer?” Arthur managed, his own voice raspy and weak from disuse, the Japanese words clumsy and heavily accented.

“A concerned benefactor,” the man replied smoothly, his expression unchanging. “He believes that Talented individuals like yourself, particularly those who have endured the… unique rigors of the island program, deserve ongoing support and guidance, not abandonment.”

Arthur almost choked on a bitter, hysterical laugh. Support. Guidance. From the very people who ran a death camp for unsuspecting, Talented teenagers. “Tell your ‘concerned benefactor’,” Arthur said, the English words a sudden, angry torrent from his lips, before he caught himself and forced out a stumbling, defiant Japanese reply, “that I… I appreciate the offer… but I prefer to manage my own affairs. I require no assistance.”

The man’s thin lips curved into the faintest, most chilling of smiles. “A most regrettable decision, Tanaka-kun. My employer is not accustomed to having his… generous offers so readily dismissed. This opportunity may not present itself again.” He produced a plain, unmarked white card from his inner pocket, offering it to Arthur. It held a single, untraceable phone number. “Should you reconsider your position.” Then, with a slight, almost imperceptible bow, he returned to his car, which slid silently away into the rain-swept streets, leaving Arthur alone once more, shivering in the damp doorway, the card quickly turning to sodden pulp in his trembling hand. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he’d made the right, the only, choice, but the brief, chilling contact, the effortless demonstration of their reach, left him profoundly shaken and with a renewed sense of being hunted.

Meanwhile, many miles away, Commander Tsuruoka was indeed displeased. Not only had this Kenji Tanaka anomaly refused his "generous" offer of controlled reintegration, but Nana Hiiragi, his once-star asset, was proving increasingly problematic, her operational effectiveness compromised by sentimentality and doubt. During a particularly harsh, psychologically invasive debriefing session following her return from the island after the truncated second year, Tsuruoka informed Nana that her next assignment would be a return to the island academy, with a new, carefully selected intake of students. He then fed her a meticulously constructed, entirely false narrative: “Kenji Tanaka has become a dangerous rogue element, Hiiragi. His so-called prescient abilities are unstable, making him a unpredictable threat. He has evaded all our attempts at compassionate control and assistance. He is now, regrettably, considered a significant threat to the integrity of the program, potentially even to wider national security interests if his abilities fall into the wrong hands. Your primary, non-negotiable objective for the upcoming term will be his swift and permanent elimination. There will be no failures this time. Is that understood?” Nana, still reeling from her own recent traumas and Tsuruoka’s chilling manipulations regarding Mai, had listened with a pale face, her mind a maelstrom of conflicting emotions and a growing, terrifying dread. Arthur, a threat to national security? The haunted, weary boy who had so tenderly cared for Michiru’s lifeless body? It didn’t track, not at all, yet Tsuruoka’s orders were absolute, backed by the implicit threat of unimaginable consequences should she disobey.

Arthur, entirely oblivious to Nana’s new, horrifying directive concerning him, eventually, through sheer, desperate persistence, found work. It was grueling, back-breaking, spirit-crushing labour on a sprawling construction site on the city’s outskirts, hauling bags of cement, shoveling rubble, mixing concrete under the relentless summer sun. The pay was insultingly minimal, barely enough for a shared, flea-ridden bunk in a crowded, squalid flophouse that reeked of stale sweat and cheap alcohol, and a daily bowl of watery, tasteless noodles. His days became a monotonous, exhausting blur of brutal physical exertion and profound mental despair. He was Kenji Tanaka, anonymous construction grunt, his past life as Arthur Ainsworth, respected (if unfulfilled) accounts clerk, a fading, almost unbelievable dream; his time on the island, with its constant terror but also its strange, intense connections, a recurring, vivid nightmare. He thought often, achingly, of Michiru, wondering where the Committee had taken her, if she was safe, if he would ever see her gentle smile again. The hope of it was a distant, flickering, almost extinguished candle in the vast darkness of his current existence. The irony of his current occupation, he sometimes thought with a bitter twist of his lips, was that this was the kind of life Kyouya Onodera had apparently endured before his own arrival on that cursed island.

His miserable reprieve, such as it was, didn’t last. One sweltering evening, as he trudged wearily back towards the dubious sanctuary of the flophouse, his body aching from head to toe, his spirit numb with exhaustion, a dark, unmarked van screeched to a halt beside him on the deserted, dusty road. Before he could even register the threat, before he could think to run, several grim-faced figures in plain, dark clothes erupted from its sliding door and bundled him inside with brutal, practiced efficiency. He struggled instinctively, a desperate, futile thrashing, but they were strong, their movements coordinated, their grips like iron. A rough cloth, smelling faintly of chemicals, was pressed hard over his face, a sweet, cloying, sickeningly artificial scent filled his nostrils, and the ugly, indifferent world dissolved into a suffocating, unwelcome blackness.

He awoke, gagging and disoriented, in a bare, sterile, windowless room, strapped tightly to a hard metal chair. A single, painfully bright spotlight shone directly into his face, making him squint. Tsuruoka himself wasn’t present – Arthur was clearly not yet deemed worthy of the commander’s personal attention for this particular stage of his “re-education” – but a subordinate, a cold-eyed, stern-faced woman in a severe, dark military-style uniform, stood before him, her arms crossed, her expression devoid of any discernible emotion.

“Tanaka Kenji,” she stated, her voice flat, impersonal, chillingly devoid of inflection. She consulted a thin file in her hand. “Or perhaps, given your rather… unusual background, you currently prefer the designation Arthur Ainsworth?” She didn’t elaborate on how they might know his original name; the casual, confident implication of their far-reaching, invasive intelligence network was, in itself, a potent form of intimidation. “You have proven to be a persistent, and rather tiresome, inconvenience, Mr. Ainsworth. You were given a generous opportunity to cooperate with our organization. You unwisely declined.”

She took a step closer, her shadow falling over him. “Our organization has a significant, long-term investment in the island program, and its successful outcomes. Uncontrolled, unpredictable variables such as yourself cannot, and will not, be tolerated indefinitely. You will be returning to the island academy for the next academic year, with the new intake of students.” Her lips curved into a smile that held no warmth, only a cold, clinical menace. “Consider this your final opportunity to demonstrate your potential utility to the Committee. Or, failing that,” her smile widened fractionally, “to be… neutralized, shall we say, in a more controlled, predictable, and entirely deniable environment. The choice, as they say, is yours. Though, I suspect, largely illusory.”

Arthur said nothing. There was nothing left to say. He was trapped, a terrified, exhausted pawn being forcibly moved back onto the bloodstained, treacherous board.

The journey back to the island was a disorienting, humiliating blur of sedatives, blindfolds, and the gruff, dispassionate presence of his Committee guards. When he finally stumbled off the transport vessel onto the chillingly familiar pier, the sight of the imposing school buildings, nestled amidst the island’s unnervingly lush, verdant landscape, filled him with a profound, soul-deep sense of dread and utter resignation. A new intake of students, fresh, innocent faces full of naive hope or nervous apprehension, were already disembarking from another, larger ferry, their excited chatter a grotesque counterpoint to his own internal despair. The Third School Year was about to begin, and Arthur Ainsworth knew, with a terrifying, inescapable certainty, that he was now not just an unwilling observer or a clumsy, desperate interferer, but a designated, marked target. And this time, he had no phone, no easy means of communication, and very few allies left.

posting nothing but ai and hate in main tags/on others posts isnt gonna get you very far on tumblr

That is a great question. But needless to say, it's nothing to care about.

Nana is a dislikable character - that's what this account is for.

Chapter 36: An Idea Forged in Unreality II

He looked at them, his gaze steady, his heart pounding in his chest. “It’s a long shot. A horribly dangerous, probably insane long shot. But it’s a start. It’s an idea. And right now, frankly, it’s the only one I have that doesn’t involve us just… waiting in this damp, cold cave for Tsuruoka’s agents to eventually find us and pick us off one by one.”

He let out a slow breath, the weight of his own audacious proposal settling upon him. He, Arthur Ainsworth, former accounts clerk, a man whose most daring act in his previous life had probably been disputing a parking ticket, was now seriously suggesting infiltrating a secret government death camp for super-powered teenagers to foment rebellion based on a half-remembered Japanese comic book. The sheer, unadulterated madness of it was almost enough to make him laugh, or weep. It was hardly a board meeting strategy session back in… well, anywhere remotely normal, he thought with a grim internal shake of his head. The utter bizarreness of asking a group of traumatized children and young adults for ‘better ideas’ on how to dismantle a tyrannical shadow regime, huddled in a makeshift shelter in what felt like a never-ending, surreal, and increasingly dangerous May… if he wasn’t living this waking nightmare, he would never in a million years believe it.

Arthur ran a hand through his already dishevelled hair. “Look,” he said, his voice infused with a weary but unyielding earnestness, “anything we decide to do, anything we can do, it won’t be quick. And it certainly won’t be easy.” He met their wide, stunned eyes one by one. “But something needs to be done. We can’t just hide here forever. We can’t let Tsuruoka and The Committee win, not after everything, not after what they’ve done, what they plan to do.”

He squared his shoulders, a flicker of the old, pragmatic Englishman surfacing through the layers of trauma and disbelief. “That’s my proposal. My… one idea.” He offered a small, almost apologetic shrug. “Unless, of course, anyone else has any better ideas?”

The fire crackled, its small, hungry sounds loud in the sudden, profound silence. The weight of his words, the sheer, almost suicidal audacity of his plan, hung heavy and palpable in the damp, smoky air of the cave. Arthur had laid his desperate, improbable strategy on the table. Now, he could only wait for their reaction, for their judgment, for their decision on whether to embrace this madness, or to seek another, perhaps even more perilous, path.