Erika glanced around the room first, disoriented, searching for something. Then recognition hit. Both hands flew to her mouth, eyes wide, her whole body shaking violently.
She dropped to her knees, shoulders heaving in silent "sobs," curling into herself, radiating theatrical grief.
It was textbook. Every beat in the right order, every gesture pulled from the manual.
To a layperson, it might have looked impressive.
To anyone who knew better...
Mai shook her head inwardly.
Too performed.
Every movement, every expression screamed at the audience: Look at me. I'm doing sadness now. It was imitation, technique stacked on technique, hollow and flat.
Saito didn't even let her finish the three minutes. "Enough. Erika, who exactly are you performing for? You lost the love of your life, not your perfect attendance bonus. Sit down."
Erika's face flushed scarlet. She retreated into the group, humiliated.
Several more girls tried after her. One spent the entire time staring blankly while tears ran down her cheeks like a broken faucet. Another punched the floor and thrashed her fists, channeling something closer to a daytime soap opera than grief.
They all made the same mistake: trying to express the deepest, most interior of emotions through the loudest, most external display possible.
Saito's expression darkened with each attempt. The pressure in the room kept dropping.
"Next." His voice carried undisguised disappointment now, edging toward anger.
Nobody moved.
Then his gaze landed on Mutsumi.
"You. Wakaba. You're up."
Every pair of eyes in the room locked onto the girl who'd been standing apart like she belonged to a different scene entirely.
Curiosity. Anticipation. But mostly the petty satisfaction of watching someone else squirm. They all wanted to see what kind of talent this golden child, so favored by the president and the legendary "Fujiwara-sensei," actually possessed.
...
Mutsumi didn't react. She might not have heard her own name.
The girl beside her nudged her elbow, and only then did she stir, lifting her gaze as though waking from a dream.
She walked to the center of the room. Unhurried. No deep breath, no visible preparation.
She stood there.
One second. Two. Ten.
Nothing. Her eyes were the same as always, vacant, looking through every person in the room at some fixed point in the void.
Restless murmurs rippled through the group. Someone stifled a laugh, convinced the princess had frozen, that she had no idea what to do.
Mai's pulse spiked.
No.
She's not doing nothing.
She's dissociating.
Pulling herself out of reality, completely, deliberately.
Saito's expression sharpened too. He watched Mutsumi with full attention.
A few seconds passed.
Mutsumi moved.
Slowly, she raised her right hand.
The fingers were slender, pale to the point of translucence. Her arm lifted halfway and stopped, suspended in the air, fingers curling slightly inward, reaching for something.
It was an ordinary gesture. The kind you'd make to touch someone's shoulder.
But it froze the room solid.
Her hand hung there, fingertips trembling so faintly it was almost invisible. As though expecting a response. A familiar warmth. Something solid to hold onto.
There was nothing.
Mutsumi's eyes stayed empty.
But Mai understood what she was seeing.
That wasn't emptiness. It was the dead calm that comes after pain has burned through everything and left nothing behind.
No sadness in those eyes. No anger. No tears.
Because people who've truly sunk to the bottom don't scream.
Seconds crawled by.
Mutsumi's hand stayed suspended, motionless, a stone sculpture weathering in real time, holding the shape of reaching for someone who wasn't there. As if the moment she stopped reaching, that person would be truly gone.
Then her hand fell.
Not a sudden drop. A dead leaf drifting earthward after the last trace of life had been wrung from it, sinking with the slow inevitability of something that had simply run out of strength to resist.
The instant her palm came to rest, her body swayed, as though the final vertebra holding her upright had been pulled free.
Through all of it, not a single tear. Her expression barely changed.
But from her corner, Mai felt a chill lance up from the soles of her feet to the crown of her skull. Goosebumps erupted across her skin.
She's incredible.
More devastating than any tears or screaming could ever be.
What Mutsumi had shown wasn't the explosive moment of loss.
It was what came after. Day after day, year after year, hollowed out by an emptiness that never stopped carving. The numbness of being flayed alive by despair so constant it became mundane.
The reflex of reaching out at some unguarded moment, because the body still remembered, and closing your fingers around nothing. Again. And again.
A brokenness so deep that grief itself had grown exhausted.
"Very Good."
Saito's voice, rough and low, broke the silence. A single word, barely above a murmur.
Two syllables that outweighed every critique he'd delivered all day.
He stared at Mutsumi. In those sharp eyes that had assessed thousands of performers, something surfaced for the first time: shock, admiration, and threaded through both, a sliver of something close to fear.
Just like her mother.
The other girls stood frozen, unable to process why a performance where "nothing happened" had earned Saito's highest praise. But the despair Mutsumi had radiated was undeniable. They'd felt it in their chests.
The laughter had died completely.
Terrifying talent.
Mai watched Mutsumi and felt sick.
It wasn't just the resources.
She had a gift that made your skin crawl.
That marrow-deep sorrow, that fractured quality of a soul ground to pieces and forced back together, had been "performed" by a teenager.
There's something real underneath that, isn't there?
Mai's mind conjured the image of Mutsumi's face, that surface so perpetually still it never rippled.
What kind of cruelty does it take to give someone a soul that heavy? That hopeless?
In that moment, the way Mai looked at Mutsumi shifted completely.
No longer a well-connected rival. Something else entirely: the complex knot of emotions you feel standing at the base of a mountain you know you'll never climb.
Mutsumi Wakaba possessed a talent that towered over everyone in the room.
A girl like that was destined to blaze across the industry, limitless and blinding.
Mai could already see it. In the near future, this girl named Mutsumi Wakaba would shake the entire entertainment world.
...
Another week passed.
She couldn't stop replaying Mutsumi's performance from that day.
She began watching Mutsumi during every session, almost without realizing it.
And the more she observed, the more that admiration curdled into something closer to despair.
It was after an intense dance class.
The studio air was thick and sticky, sweat and perfume mingling into something cloying. Every girl had collapsed where she stood, careful makeup wrecked by perspiration, revealing the tired, unvarnished faces underneath.
A roomful of aspiring idols who'd looked flawless an hour ago now gasped for breath without a shred of composure, hair plastered to cheeks and necks.
Mai leaned against the wall in her corner, chest heaving, sweat dripping from the ends of her hair onto the floor.
Her eyes drifted to Mutsumi out of habit.
Mutsumi sat on the floor nearby, breathing a little harder than usual. She picked up a clean towel and scrubbed it across her face with careless, almost rough strokes.
When the towel came away, Mai's breath caught.
Bare skin. Every mask stripped away.
Under the studio lights, Mutsumi's complexion had the quality of fine porcelain: flawless, luminous, without a single visible imperfection. The sheen of sweat didn't diminish her. It glazed her cheekbones with a delicate film of moisture, lending her the look of a white rose just after rain.
Her features were already exquisite, the kind of geometry that seemed deliberately, impossibly designed. Without a trace of makeup, that cold, striking beauty only sharpened. The high bridge of her nose carved a perfect profile. Those golden eyes, usually so distant, had narrowed slightly from exhaustion, softening the aloofness into something drowsy and fragile.
She wore the same plain white training clothes as everyone else, but on her frame the simplicity only emphasized what was beneath: the long neck, the clean lines of her collarbones, the proportions that defied reason. Even sitting casually on the floor, legs stretched out, every line was effortless.
And that cool, untouchable quality made her stand apart from every other girl in the room as though she'd wandered in from another world.
"Hey, look at her..."
"Her bare face is unreal..."
"How is her skin like that? I look like death warmed over and she's sweating like it's a photoshoot."
"That's just not fair..."
A cluster of girls who'd been chattering nearby fell progressively quieter as they caught sight of Mutsumi without makeup. One by one they went silent, hands drifting self-consciously to their own faces, oily and blotched where their foundation had melted away. They looked down, unable to bear the comparison.
Mai didn't look away.
She stared, committing every detail to memory.
Resources. Talent. And now even her bare face is on another level.
Does someone this perfect actually exist?
She's going to be the biggest star of this generation.
Of that, Mai no longer had any doubt.
And what about me?
In terms of looks, Mai knew she wasn't lacking.
But when it came to skill and connections...
It was common knowledge that child stars tended to develop bad habits in their craft. And resources? She had none. Zero.
On top of all that, her condition was getting worse by the day.
What am I supposed to do?
The anxiety gnawed at her, darkening her thoughts.
...
That day, when all the training sessions were over, the girls left in pairs and small groups, chattering about where to shop that evening, what to eat.
Laughter and conversation filled the hallway. None of it included Mai.
She walked at the tail end of the crowd. No one greeted her. No one glanced back.
A transparent shadow trailing the current of bodies, close enough to touch, belonging to none of them.
She stepped into the changing room, tired, ready to peel off her sweat-soaked training clothes.
A staff member poked his head in. "Hurry up, everyone! The building's fire suppression system is getting serviced tonight. Full evacuation in ten minutes!"
The girls called back acknowledgments and picked up their pace.
Mai changed quickly, shouldered her bag, and headed for the door.
The staff member, as if she were completely invisible, pulled the changing room door shut from the outside. The lock clicked into place.
"Wait! Someone's still in here!" Mai shouted on instinct, rushing forward, hammering on the door with her palms.
From the other side came only the sound of retreating footsteps and casual conversation.
"Everyone out?"
"Yeah, yeah. I checked. Not a soul left."
Not a soul left.
Mai's hands slid down the door.
She pressed her back against the cold metal, sank to the floor, and buried her face in her knees.
Again.
This feeling of being deleted from the world.
She was right here. Shouting. Pounding on the door. And in everyone else's reality, she didn't exist.
She didn't know how long she sat in the dark changing room.
Cell signal was spotty this deep in the building, cutting in and out. Every call she tried failed to connect.
Minutes bled away. Through the window, the sky shifted from the amber of dusk to deep indigo, and finally to the solid black of true night.
The entire building sank into silence.
Eventually, she gave up calling for help.
She dug through her bag and found a sturdy hairpin she'd once used to pry open a stuck locker. Kneeling in the dark, she felt her way to the lock.
She'd picked up the bare basics of lockpicking years ago, playing a spy in a thriller during her child-star days. After countless failed attempts, her fingers aching and raw, the lock finally gave with a small, clean click.
The door swung open.
The corridor stretched before her, empty, lit only by the green glow of emergency exit signs casting a sickly pallor over everything. It looked like a scene from a horror film.
The elevators were all shut down. The stairwell doors were locked.
She was trapped.
Loneliness and fear closed around her like a fist.
Then, at the edge of her vision, she caught it: a thin sliver of light bleeding through the gap beneath the stairwell door on the top floor.
The top floor?
Where the president's office and private lounge are?
Someone's still here this late?
Like a drowning person spotting driftwood, she moved toward the light on instinct, climbing the stairs one step at a time.
The higher she went, the deeper the silence, until the only sounds were her own heartbeat and footfalls, amplified to deafening in the empty stairwell.
She reached the top-floor corridor.
The light spilled from the room at the far end, the exclusive lounge reserved for the company's highest-tier talent and most important guests.
The door was ajar.
Mai held her breath and crept closer.
If someone was still inside, maybe she could ask for help.
She brought her eye to the gap in the door.
Inside, bathed in soft, warm light, Seiji Fujiwara lounged on a wide leather sofa, posture casual and unhurried.
Across from him, in a separate armchair, sat Mutsumi.
She'd changed into a simple white sundress and held a book in her hands, reading in silence.
The scene was still and harmonious, like an oil painting of quiet luxury.
Mai let out a breath of relief.
Fujiwara-sensei and Mutsumi.
She was about to summon the nerve to knock and ask for help when she saw something that would burn in her memory forever.
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