[MA 15+ — Violence, psychological distress, graphic imagery, trauma]
The morning light filtering through Neo-Tokyo's atmospheric processors was different from the sun Ushinau remembered. Cleaner. Colder. Sterile in a way that made his heart ache with a phantom pain for something as simple as natural dawn.
He'd been staring at the ceiling for three hours when Mrs. Tanaka knocked on his door. "Subete-kun? Breakfast is ready." Breakfast. Such a normal word for such an impossible ritual. He rose mechanically, dressed in the Nakano Middle School uniform—his third day wearing it, though it felt like the three-hundredth—and made his way to the kitchen.
The Tanaka family sat around their table like characters in a play they'd rehearsed their entire lives. Mr. Tanaka scrolled through holographic news feeds. Mrs. Tanaka portioned out synthetic rice and lab-grown fish. Yuki chattered about some idol group performing in District 3.
Ushinau took his seat. No one acknowledged him for exactly forty-seven seconds. Then Mrs. Tanaka blinked, looked at him with mild surprise. "Oh! Subete-kun. Good morning. I didn't see you come in."
It's starting, Ushinau thought. Already. "Good morning," he said quietly, accepting the plate she offered.
Edo Period — Summer, 1867
The memory came unbidden, as they always did. Young Ushinau—fifteen years old, still growing, still believing the world made sense—stood in the training yard of the Subete clan compound. Wooden sword in hand, sweat dripping down his brow. His father watched from the veranda, arms crossed, expression unreadable.
"Again," his father commanded. Ushinau executed the kata. The eighth form of their family style—Tsubame Gaeshi, the swallow's counterattack. His body moved through positions memorized since childhood: stance shift, diagonal cut, pivot, reverse strike.
"Your form is adequate," his father said. "But adequate won't save your life when war comes." "War won't come," Ushinau replied, breathing hard. "The Shogun—"
"The Shogun is a dying person clinging to a dying order." His father's eyes were hard, ancient. "Change is inevitable, Ushinau. The question is whether we adapt or perish." Ushinau lowered his wooden sword. "Then teach me to adapt." His father smiled—rare, brief, like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. "I'm trying to, my son. I'm trying to."
Three months later, his father's head would roll across these same training grounds while enemy forces burned everything Ushinau had ever loved.
Present Day
The classroom felt like a cage made of fluorescent light and judgment.
Ushinau sat in the back row by the window—the classic protagonist seat, though there was nothing heroic about his story. Around him, students lived their temporary dramas: crushes and rivalries, gossip and anxiety, all the small wars of adolescence that would fade into nostalgia.
They didn't know how lucky they were. To be able to forget.
Mr. Kobayashi was lecturing again, this time about the Meiji Restoration. About progress and modernization and the necessary sacrifices of the old world.
Necessary, Ushinau thought bitterly. They always call it necessary when they weren't the ones being sacrificed. "Subete-kun." He looked up. The teacher was staring at him with that calm expression people wore when they were performing concern.
"You've been unusually distracted lately. Is something troubling you?"
The class turned to look. Thirty-two pairs of eyes, all wondering who this strange teenager was and why he always seemed half-present, like a ghost preforming a picture.
"No, sensei," Ushinau said. "I apologize." "Perhaps you'd like to answer the question on the board?" Ushinau looked at the holographic display floating above the teacher's desk. The question glowed in blue kanji: "Why was the samurai class abolished during the Meiji period?"
Something hot and vicious twisted in his heart. "Because," Ushinau said quietly, "we were inconvenient." The classroom went silent. "Excuse me?" Mr. Kobayashi frowned.
Ushinau stood. His chair scraped against the floor with a sound like a sword being drawn. When he spoke again, his voice carried an edge that made several students flinch.
"The samurai were abolished because the new government couldn't control us. We represented an old power structure, old loyalties, old ways of thinking. So they systematically dismantled us. Took our swords. Took our stipends. Took our purpose." His hands clenched at his sides. "And when some of us resisted—when we refused to simply disappear—they hunted us down like animals."
The silence was absolute. "That's... that's a rather personal interpretation," Mr. Kobayashi said carefully. Ushinau realized he was shaking. Realized everyone was staring at him with expressions ranging from confusion to fear. Realized he'd said too much, revealed too much, remembered too much.
"I apologize," he whispered, sitting back down. "I don't know what came over me." But he did know. The memories were getting harder to contain. Three hundred years of grief pressing against the thin dam of his composure, threatening to break through and drown everyone around him.
The student sitting next to him—Mizuki, he'd heard her called—leaned away slightly, as if proximity to him might be contagious. Lunch period. The rooftop again.
Ushinau had learned that certain spaces in schools existed outside normal social geography. Rooftops were liminal zones, places where the invisible rules relaxed slightly. He came here because the sky was visible, because the wind carried scents that weren't entirely synthetic, because he could pretend, for a moment, that he was somewhere else.
Somewhere that no longer existed.
He was halfway through his convenience store onigiri when Daisuke and his pack appeared. "Well, well. The crying samurai." Ushinau didn't look up. He'd seen this pattern play out across centuries. Bullies were universal constants, like gravity or entropy. The details changed—the insults, the methods, the aesthetics—but the fundamental dynamic remained: the strong crushing the weak because they could.
"We've been thinking," Daisuke continued, flanked by his two lieutenants. "Maybe you need a lesson in how things work here." "I understand how things work," Ushinau said quietly. "Do you?" Daisuke grabbed his onigiri, crushed it in his augmented fist. Rice and seaweed exploded between his fingers. "Because you don't act like it. You show up out of nowhere, you freak everyone out with your weird eyes and your creepy silences, and yesterday you made Kenji look like an idiot."
Kenji. The name hit Ushinau like a physical blow. Kenji. His childhood friend had been named Kenji. Sweet, gentle Kenji who'd bled out in his arms while the world burned.
Different Kenji. Different life. But the name—"Are you even listening to me?" Daisuke shoved him. Ushinau stumbled back. His body moved on instinct, finding balance, centering his weight. Old reflexes. Dangerous reflexes.
"I don't want trouble," Ushinau said. "Too bad." Daisuke's augmented fist came at him fast—enhanced muscle fibers providing superhuman speed and force. A normal middle schooler would have been hospitalized.
But Ushinau wasn't normal. Hadn't been normal for three hundred years. His body moved.
Not consciously. Not deliberately. Muscle memory carved so deep it had become part of his bones, his blood, his eternal existence. He shifted left—hidari ni nagare—letting the punch sail past his face. His hand came up, fingers forming the precise shape for a disabling strike to the wrist—kote uchi—but he stopped himself just in time.
If he hit properly, with the technique his father had drilled into him ten thousand times, he would shatter every bone in Daisuke's arm. Instead, he simply twisted, using Daisuke's momentum against him, sending the larger kid stumbling forward into the railing.
The other two attacked simultaneously.
Time seemed to slow. Not literally—Ushinau's perception had simply been honed across centuries of survival. He saw their movements with perfect clarity: one coming high with a wild haymaker, the other going low for a tackle.
*Ue no teki wa oroshi—*strike down from above. Shita no teki wa—he stopped himself again. Forced his body to simply avoid rather than counter-attack. Ducked under the high punch, sidestepped the tackle, moved with fluid economy that made it look easy.
All three kids crashed into each other in a tangle of limbs and swearing.
Ushinau stood perfectly still, breathing controlled, body positioned in a ready stance he'd learned before this school, this city, this entire modern era had existed. "What the hell ARE you?" Daisuke gasped, staring up at him with something that might have been fear.
Ushinau looked at his hands. They were steady. No trembling. No emotion. Just the cold precision of a weapon that had forgotten how to be human. "I'm nobody," he said. "Please. Just leave me alone."
He walked away, leaving them sprawled on the rooftop, confused and humiliated. Behind him, one of them whispered: "Did you see him move? That wasn't normal. That was like... like something from the old vids."
Edo Period — Winter, 1868
The memory seized him as he walked the empty hallway.
Snow falling on blood. That was Ushinau's clearest memory of the day his world ended. Katana's slick with red, watching enemy soldiers systematically execute his clan. One by one. No mercy. No hesitation. Just efficiency.
His mother had died first. He'd seen the gunshot enter her gut while she tried to protect him. Had watched her fall, watched the snow around her turn crimson, watched her hand reach out toward him one final time before going still.
His father had taken twelve of them before falling. Ushinau had counted. Twelve enemies cut down with the perfect form his father had spent decades perfecting. But there were too many. There were always too many.
And Kenji—sweet, stupid, brave Kenji who'd tried to help evacuate the non-combatants. Ushinau had found him in the servant quarters, gutted like a fish, still alive somehow, blood bubbling from his lips as he tried to speak. "Run," Kenji had whispered. "Please, Ushinau... run..."
But where could he run? Everything was burning. Everyone was dying. The world itself seemed to be ending. So Ushinau used his picked up his sword—his father's sword, pried from his father's dead fingers—and he'd fought.
He'd killed three warrior's before they'd overwhelmed him. Had felt a blade pierce his stomach, slide between his ribs, find his lung. Had tasted blood and iron and the metallic flavor of death.
Had fallen into snow that was no longer white. Should have died. But he'd crawled. Through mud and corpses and the ruins of everything he'd ever loved. Crawled for three days through winter cold that should have killed him. Crawled until he reached that shrine, that cursed place where desperate people went to beg for power. After also getting some help from his father.
And something had answered.
Present Day
Ushinau came back to himself standing Infront of a sink, hands gripping the sink so hard the synthetic marble was cracking. His reflection stared back at him. Yellow eyes wide. Face pale. Blood—no. No blood. Just water. Just his imagination painting the present with colors from the past.
He splashed his face. The water was cold. Clean. Nothing like the melted snow he'd used to wash blood from his hands three centuries ago. "Why am I still here?" he whispered to his reflection.
A door opened. A student emerged—one of the quiet ones, the invisible ones who navigated school by staying beneath everyone's notice. The student looked at Ushinau, then looked away quickly, as if eye contact might be dangerous.
"Are you okay?" the student asked. Ushinau almost laughed. Almost screamed. Almost collapsed. "No," he said honestly. "I haven't been okay for a very long time."
The student nodded slowly, as if this made perfect sense, and left without another word. Alone again, Ushinau dried his face and prepared to return to class. To sit through more lectures about history he'd lived. To dodge more fights with people who would forget him. To endure another day of this endless, purposeless existence.
As he walked back down the hallway, he noticed something strange: several students he'd passed earlier walked by him again as if they'd never seen him before. No recognition. No acknowledgment.
The forgetting was accelerating. Soon, even this temporary existence—this borrowed life with the Tanaka family—would dissolve like morning mist. He'd be reset again. Moved to another home. Given another chance to fail at being human. Over and over and over... That night, unable to sleep again, Ushinau sat at his desk and drew.
Not the peaceful landscapes of his youth this time. Not the rice fields and mountains and villages.
Instead, his hand moved across the paper with violent precision, sketching scenes from memory: bodies in snow, burning buildings, his father's final stand, Kenji's blood-soaked smile, his mother's outstretched hand.
He drew until his hand cramped. Drew until tears blurred his vision. Drew until the paper was filled with three hundred years of grief compressed into graphite and memory. A soft knock. "Subete-kun?"
Yuki again. Curious, kind Yuki who would forget him soon.
"You're crying again," she said, standing in the doorway. "I'm always crying," Ushinau said. "Even when there are no tears." She looked at his drawings. Her eyes widened, then filled with something that might have been understanding, though she was too young to truly comprehend.
"Is this where you're from?" she asked.
"I'm not from anywhere," Ushinau said. "I'm from a time that doesn't exist and a place that was erased and a family that's been dead so long even their graves have turned to dust."
Yuki sat down next to him. Didn't touch him. Didn't try to comfort him. Just sat there, sharing the silence. "I think," she said finally, "that you're very lonely."
Ushinau's breath caught. "Yes," he whispered. "Yes, I am." Outside, the city lights glittered like artificial stars. Somewhere out there, the shrine waited. The curse waited. The endless cycle waited to begin again.
But for this moment—this brief, impossible moment—someone was sitting with him. Someone saw him. Someone remembered he existed. It wouldn't last. It never did. But for now, it was enough.
TO BE CONTINUED... [Next Episode: "War Took Everything"]