My eyes snap open. Not to the slow creep of dawn, but to a jolt, as if I've been shoved back into my own body. My heart isn't just pounding; it's a frantic, trapped thing trying to beat its way out of my chest. Another nightmare. Damn it. I was right—the storm is here. The calm from yesterday was a lie, a temporary lull. But this wasn't the throne room, no blurred figure. This was sharper, more vicious. A memory, not a hallucination.
I was in the car again. The one from three years ago. The sound wasn't a memory's echo; it was fresh. The metallic shriek of tearing steel, the explosive pop of glass, the sickening crunch of the impact—it was all louder, closer, tearing through me as if it were happening for the first time. My parents' faces flashed—Mom, pale, a single streak of blood tracing a path from her temple, her eyes wide with a fear I'd never seen before. Dad's hands, white-knuckled on the wheel, straining against a force that had already won. Then, nothing. The void. And I was back, gasping, the real world swimming back into focus, the phantom sounds still ringing in my ears.
The clock on my desk glowed a malevolent 3:00 a.m., its red numbers painting the cracks in my ceiling a faint, bloody color. Then the pain came. Not a dull throb, but a sharp, cruel twist behind my eyes, as if a blade was being worked into my skull. My vision swam, the room tilting.
My hands were shaking, gripping the damp futon. Sweat had soaked through the thin sheets, clinging to my skin like a cold, second skin. A weight was pressing on my chest, a physical anchor trying to drag me back under. I was panting, the sound obscenely loud in the silence, my pulse a wild, runaway drumbeat. It felt too real. My body was still there, in that twisted metal cage, trembling, even though my mind knew I was free.
Mom's face wouldn't leave me. Pale, desperate. Her voice, a ragged whisper in the memory: Live, Rei. Her arms had been around me, a final, futile shield against the collapsing world. Then, cutting through that fragile memory, another voice. Low, mocking, utterly alien. You'll break. You'll lose. It wasn't hers. It wasn't my father's. It wasn't even the figure from the throne room. This was new. Cold. It felt like it was laughing at me from the inside.
My jaw clenched, my teeth grinding with a pressure that sent fresh waves of pain throbbing through my head. No. I won't break. I won't lose. Never. The thought was a shard of ice, cutting through the hot fear, giving me something solid to hold onto. I'm still here. I'm still breathing.
I forced air into my lungs, a slow, deliberate pull that fought against the tightness in my chest. My hands were still trembling, but I focused on that single, defiant thought.
I pushed myself up. My legs felt weak, unreliable, as if they'd forgotten how to hold my weight. I stood, forcing them to lock, to steady. The sharp pain in my head receded, leaving behind a hollow, cold emptiness in its wake. It was a familiar void, a space where something should be but wasn't.
I made a fist, willing the tremors to stop. A tight, reflexive smile pulled at my lips. It held no warmth, no happiness. It was a baring of teeth. A challenge thrown at the darkness. Break me? They can try. I'll outlast the nightmares. I'll outlast the voices. All of them.
I moved carefully, each step a test. The floorboards felt treacherous. The first step onto the staircase produced a low groan from the old wood. A powerful sense of déjà vu washed over me, so strong it was disorienting. Had I dreamed this?
My skin prickled. I paused, my palm flat against the cool, rough plaster of the wall. Another step, slower, more deliberate. The soft sound of my socks on the wood was the only rhythm I could trust. My shadow, a distorted giant, stretched and wavered on the wall beside me, a silent, shifting companion in the faint light from the street.
Another step. Then another. The narrow stairwell felt like it was tightening around me. At the bottom, the door waited. Paint peeling in long, thin curls. The doorknob, scratched and worn from a thousand turns. A flimsy barrier.
I grabbed the knob. The metal was cold. I turned it and stepped out.
The night air hit me like a physical slap—cold, damp, carrying the clean, wet-concrete smell of recent rain. It was a shock to the system, pulling me fully out of my own head. Tokyo at this hour was a different city. Quiet, but breathing. The air was cool and heavy, laced with the distant, greasy smell of a closed ramen stall.
My shoes hit the pavement. Step. Step. Step. The sound was sharp, definitive. A rhythm I created and controlled.
The neighborhood slept. Dark houses with blank, curtained windows. A diner a block away had a flickering neon sign, its intermittent buzz a faint, electric insect noise. The smell of old soy sauce and grilled meat clung to the air.
A crumpled flier, an ad for a gyoza stand with faded red lettering, skittered across the path. I pulled my hood up, my hands buried deep in my pockets, becoming just another shape in the darkness. Unseen. Streetlights cast weak, yellow pools of light, creating deep shadows between them. I walked on, toward the distant hum of the city's heart.
I stopped.
My breath hitched. The footpath ahead was a mess of cracked and uneven concrete, illuminated by a single streetlamp that emitted a tired, persistent hum. My eyes, trained to notice irregularities, caught it immediately: a slight rise in the asphalt just past the path, a bump no more than two centimeters high. Most wouldn't see it. I did.
A piece of gum was stuck to the curb, pink and flattened into a shiny stain. A trivial detail, yet it lodged in my mind with the same stubborn clarity as the chipped corner of my shogi board. Then, in the distance, lights. Red and white, moving fast. A truck. Its engine wasn't just a sound; it was a growing vibration I could feel in my teeth. It was moving too fast. Sixty, maybe seventy kilometers an hour. Reckless.
My heart slammed against my ribs, a heavy, jarring impact that seemed to echo in the silence. The sound was deafening, then it would fade, only to return louder, a frantic drumbeat trying to escape the cage of my chest.
Why now? After the nightmare, after the figure, after clawing back some semblance of control—why this truck, this moment?
The world didn't just come into focus; it sharpened to a painful, excruciating degree. The hum of the lamp above wasn't a background noise anymore—it was a high-pitched screech grating directly on my nerves. The steady drip... drip... drip from a leaking drainpipe was a countdown. The truck's roar wasn't just growing closer; it was consuming everything, vibrating up through the soles of my feet, shaking my bones. I wasn't just hearing it; I was feeling it, a physical pressure, as if the world was collapsing in on me all over again.
My body locked. Every muscle pulled taut, my shoulders a rigid line of tension, my legs frozen. Adrenaline, cold and sharp, flooded my system, making my skin prickle and my fingertips go numb and distant. This was beyond fear. This was something deeper, something primal, a system-wide alarm screaming that death was coming.
My mind was screaming too, but not with panic. With data. It was the same hyper-clarity I experienced in the final, decisive moments of a shogi match, seeing the entire board ten moves into the future. It was the instant a complex physics problem resolved itself into an elegant, inevitable solution. But this was not a game. This was my life, and the equation ended in zero if I failed.
My brain was operating on its own, faster than conscious thought, assembling a three-dimensional map of my immediate world with terrifying precision. The road: a thirty-two-centimeter drop from the footpath. The footpath itself: a web of cracks, one particular fissure six steps ahead wide enough to catch a toe. The curb: that slick, pink gum, a hazard. The lamp: its flicker could disrupt my depth perception. The truck: sixty-eight kilometers per hour, trajectory unwavering, a projectile of immense mass and velocity on a direct course.
I saw it all, not as a chaotic scene, but as a series of interconnected variables. This wasn't panic; it was my mind's last, best defense. Forcing the chaos into a structure I could understand, a problem I could solve. I've always done this—broken the world down into manageable pieces. But this puzzle's solution was binary: live or die.
I ran simulations in my head. A jump to the left: the gutter was deep, my ankle could turn, and I'd sprawl directly into the path. A dive forward: the timing had to be perfect, a miscalculation of a tenth of a second and I would be under the wheels.
The numbers flashed, unbidden—velocity, distance, time—a brutal physics lesson where a failed calculation meant my body became part of the data set. The truck was an immutable fact, a lesson in momentum that ended in a red smear on the asphalt.
One wrong move. Just like the crash.
The memory returned, not as a thought, but as a full-sensory assault. The smell of spilled gasoline. The taste of blood. My mom's voice, a desperate whisper, Live, Rei, tangled with the cold, mocking voice from the dream: You'll break. You'll lose.
I can't let it win. I won't.My breath hitches, a sharp, painful catch in my throat that feels like a rib breaking. For one fractured second, I am in two places at once. I am the boy in the wreckage, the scent of gasoline and blood thick in my nose, shards of the windshield glittering like fallen stars embedded in my arm. And I am the boy on this rain-slicked road, staring into the blinding eye of an oncoming truck.
The seconds are grains of sand in an hourglass about to shatter. The truck's roar isn't just sound anymore; it's a physical force that vibrates in the fillings of my teeth, that presses against my eardrums until they threaten to burst. Its headlights are twin suns, bleaching the color from the world, and I can feel the heat of its engine from here, a wave of promised annihilation.
My mind is screaming, a white-noise siren of pure instinct, but my thoughts are not frozen. They are a frantic, desperate calculation. What is the move? The options spin through my consciousness, a cascade of doomed shogi plays against an opponent who has already declared checkmate.
Run forward? Suicide. The truck's momentum is a wall. My legs are leaden, too slow against physics. Run back? The distance is a lie; the truck is already here. Yell? The street is a vacuum. Tokyo sleeps behind its walls, a city of millions where no one will hear you die. That mocking voice from the dream laughs again, a soundless, internal sneer. See?
My hands clench into fists so tight my nails break the skin of my palms. The sting is sharp, clean, a pinpoint of real pain that anchors me to this single, terrible moment.
Give up?
The thought is a serpent, quiet and cold, slithering up from the depths. Just let it happen. Stop fighting. Is this it? After the metal concert of the crash, the endless nights of nightmares, the throne-room visitation from a figure who told me I held a power to kill with words—is this the punchline? A wet street, a anonymous truck, a stupid, meaningless death? It's almost funny in its absurd pointlessness. What was the purpose of all that suffering, all that strange revelation, if it all just culminates in being erased by a random vehicle? Why did I even walk out here tonight? Did some part of me, the broken part I keep locked away, lead me here hoping for an end? Hoping the constant, grinding pain would just… stop?
The thought hits with the force of a physical blow, doubling me over internally. Why is this happening? Why me? The old, bitter question, the one that has burned in the ashes of my life since I was fourteen. Why do I get all the pain? All the loss? I was just a kid in the back seat, laughing with my mom about some stupid, forgotten joke. I didn't do anything wrong. It was someone else's mistake—a swerve, a moment of inattention—that shattered my world. I am just the consequence, the living scar left behind, forced to carry the ghosts, the voices, the relentless echoes. Why should I have to die for a mistake that wasn't mine? Why does the world keep finding new ways to try and crush me?
The anger that surges up then is a cleansing fire, hot and fierce, scorching away the cold fear for a single, vital moment. I am so tired of it. Tired of the phantom pains, the questions that lead to darker questions, the sheer, grinding unfairness of it all. I want to scream at the sky, to demand an answer from the silent, indifferent universe. Why do you keep taking? What did I ever do to you?
But there is no time for rage. No time for self-pity. The truck is here. The lights are blinding. The roar is the only thing left in the world. I am wasting my final seconds.
Five seconds.
My mind is still a racing engine, but something deeper shifts. A gear engages in my soul.
No.
The word is not a shout. It is flat. Final. It comes from a place that did not die in the crash, that the nightmares could not touch, that the mocking voice cannot reach.
No.
I didn't survive that metal coffin. I didn't lose my parents, my past, my entire world, just to surrender to a truck on a empty street. I have too much left. I have Apex Academy. I have the memory of beating Kaito, of proving I am not just a victim of my trauma but a master of my mind. I am a player. A fighter. I think of Kaito's relentless smile, the way he rose after every defeat, undeterred. I think of the quiet, mundane safety of Aunt Hana's apartment, the familiar soy sauce stain on her kitchen table—a life, however fractured, that I am still building.
This is not how my story ends.
I won't waver. Not now. Not ever. I will face this truck. I will face the nightmares. I will face whatever comes next. And I will win.
My eyes, which a moment ago were wide with terror, now narrow. The world, which was a blur of light and noise, snaps into a hyper-defined clarity. My gaze locks onto the small, two-centimeter bump in the asphalt—a tiny, insignificant flaw in the city's construction. A chance. Then my eyes snap back to the truck, its massive grill glinting like a row of predator's teeth in the harsh light.
The frantic calculations in my mind don't stop; they align. The chaotic map of variables, the crack in the pavement, the slickness of the gum—snaps into a single, inevitable solution. The path is clear.
Two words slip from my lips, calm and certain, swallowed whole by the truck's deafening roar.
"Found it."
My eyes remain fixed on the truck, on the blinding lights, and I brace myself. Not for the impact, but for the action. The fear is still there, a cold, hard knot in my stomach, but I push it down, beneath the certainty, beneath the resolve. The map is drawn. The move is chosen.