Author's Note:The auxiliary volume was uploaded later than expected due to unforeseen technology issues. Thank you for your patience—everything is now in place. Stay tuned for Chapter 2 on Sunday and please comment if you want your ideas to potentially be included!
Chapter Zero: Before The Hearth
Ruichi Kusura had always felt like a placeholder in someone else's story.
Not a protagonist. Not even a side character. Just a name in a ledger—marked present, marked silent, marked irrelevant.
The school hallway was empty, but the echoes of the day still lingered. Laughter from the popular kids. The scrape of chairs. The low hum of fluorescent lights that never quite masked the tension in his chest. He walked slowly, backpack slung low, eyes scanning the lockers like they might offer answers.
They didn't.
He reached the computer lab and paused at the door. The air inside was still, untouched. He stepped in, letting the door close behind him with a soft click.
Before he sat down, Ruichi reached up and touched the brim of his cap—black, worn, turned backward like always. It had become part of him, a shield against attention, a signal to stay out of his way. He wore it like armor, not fashion.
But tonight felt different.
He turned the cap forward, hesitated, then pulled it off. The air felt colder without it. He looked down at the fabric in his hands—familiar, safe—and then set it gently on the desk beside him.
He didn't know why, but it felt right.
He sat down at the far terminal, the one with the cracked monitor and the sticky spacebar. It didn't matter. He wasn't here to impress anyone. He was here to finish something.
A personal project. A codebase he'd been building for months—not for grades, not for praise, but for clarity. It wasn't a game. It wasn't a hack. It was a mirror. A way to track patterns, behaviors, decisions—his own and others'. He wanted to understand why people did what they did. Why cruelty was so often rewarded. Why he felt invisible even when he spoke.
He typed slowly, deliberately. Each line of code was a confession. Each function a question he couldn't ask aloud.
Outside, the wind picked up. A storm was coming, but he didn't notice. His focus narrowed to the screen, to the logic unfolding in front of him. He was close now. The final module was compiling. A behavioral map. A predictive engine. Something that could show him what came next—not just for others, but for himself.
He paused.
What did he want to see?
He thought of his mother, her tired eyes and quiet disappointment. He thought of the teacher who called him "wasted potential" without ever asking what he cared about. He thought of the boy who shoved him last week and laughed when Ruichi didn't fight back.
He thought of the silence that followed him everywhere.
Ruichi leaned back in the chair, letting the hum of the machine fill the room. He felt something shift—not in the code, but in himself. A readiness. A fracture.
He reached for the keyboard.
The screen flickered.
And everything went dark.