Kageyama Kyuusei was trying his hardest to sleep. This was objectively a terrible decision, because trying to sleep meant being alone with his thoughts, and his thoughts were currently a hostile, embarrassing entity.
He had cycled through every conceivable position: starfish, fetal curl, facedown martyr. Nothing worked. The house was silent, his family long asleep. He was left with the low hum of the refrigerator and the mental replay of his own humiliation.
"This is so embarrassing," he muttered into the dark.
The entire evening had been a recursive loop. He, Kageyama Kyuusei, spirit-slayer and professional disaster, had given his personal phone number to a girl. Under duress, yes. But Aoi had engineered the exchange with the cold precision of a chess master forcing checkmate. It wasn't a request; it was a logical trap, and he'd walked right into it. A tactical defeat disguised as a functional exchange.
And now he was... socially, existentially embarrassed. He was, for all school-related purposes, a somewhat normal guy. The female contacts in his phone were a census of obligation and chaos: his mother, his little sister, and... HER (a category of chaos all its own). He mostly tried to ignore her, damning her name only when a mission went sideways. Which made Aoi's number the first actual number from a girl that wasn't familial or professionally catastrophic.
He opened his contacts. Aoi Rin (LIABILITY / DO NOT ENGAGE). Her profile picture was a small, delicate white bird perched on a branch. It looked peaceful. Innocent. A complete fabrication.
A stupid, unbidden thought surfaced.
Should I... text her?
He immediately choked on his own saliva, coughing violently into his pillow. WHAT AM I THINKING?! Text her what? 'Hey, just confirming you haven't started a blog about the hidden spirit world yet?' That was engagement. That was exactly what her 3.7% probability message was designed to provoke.
He slammed the phone face-down as if it were a live insect.
Ping.
His entire body went rigid. A notification. In the dead of night. His heart performed a complicated, panicked maneuver. Is it her? Did she somehow sense my moment of weakness? Is it a spreadsheet of follow-up questions timestamped for maximum psychological impact?
He grabbed the phone.
It wasn't her.
It was HER.
'u up?'
A groan escaped him, long and suffering. "Perfect."
'No. I'm asleep. This is a sleep-text.'
'liar. u thinking about the cute normie from school 😏'
'How do you even know about that? Did the Handler file a report titled "Kageyama's Operational Incompetence #742"?'
'maybe~~~ so? is she cute? send pic 🤭'
'No. Go away. Are you drunk?'
'Noooooppeeeee <3'
'You're typing like you've been mainlining sugar.'
'If you want me to be drunk I might consider it... 😏'
'Are you roasting me? Is that what this is?'
'u asked for it shithead. heard u gave ur number away. smooth move. never took u for a player 😎'
'You know, I might just quit. Leave the country. Change my name.'
'Noooo my baeeeee i need to tease my handsome king 👑'
'All these "praises" feel worse than any insult I get at school. Also, weirdo, why are you texting a minor? 😂'
'We're in the same year, dumbass'
'I'm 17. You turned 18 this year. That makes you an adult harassing a child, technically.'
'Not my fault ur birthday is on the last day of the year, lil babe. Makes u more fun to tease.'
'Go to sleep. You need to be sober to inevitably send me to my doom tomorrow.'
'fine. dream of meeee 😘💤'
'I'll have nightmares. Guaranteed.'
He threw the phone to the foot of the bed. The exchange was normal, which was somehow worse. It meant the news of his "Aoi Situation" had already circulated through the organization's gossip mill. His shame was now official, bureaucratic, and had emojis.
He stared at the ceiling. The brief distraction was over. His mind snaked back to the white bird profile picture. To the sharp eyes behind the cute smile. To the message calculating his eventual breakdown with a smiley face.
She wasn't just a liability. She was a black hole of perceptive curiosity, and he was caught in her gravitational pull. He had to file a report on her "stability" by 0800. What was he supposed to write? 'Asset demonstrates alarming analytical competence and used statistical modeling to verbally dismantle my operational cover. Stability: terrifyingly high. Recommended action: reassign to a different, more mentally stable agent (anyone but me).'
As exhaustion finally began to pull him under, one last, clear thought floated to the surface.
Tomorrow, he'd have to see her again. And she wouldn't be waiting for a text.
She'd be waiting for answers.
He pulled the pillow over his face and screamed into it, silently.
Sleep, when it came, offered no refuge. He dreamed of argumentative trees and a small white bird perched on his katana, tweeting out a running commentary of his failures in perfect, polite Japanese.
Meanwhile, in the room of a not-normal normal girl
Aoi Rin's room was a monument to ordered intelligence. Books organized by subject and frequency of use, study schedules color-coded on a wall planner, a desk so clean it seemed to repel dust. Tonight, however, a beautiful, chaotic anomaly had spread across its pristine surface.
She was, as she had been ever since returning home, spectacularly out of character. The calm, collected, perfectly performative Aoi was gone, replaced by a version of herself she hadn't felt since childhood: giddy, unrestrained, and vibrating with discovery.
The shock of the courtyard had worn off, leaving behind a pure, thrumming excitement. The hidden world was real. And she, Aoi Rin, had not only found it, but had, according to the tired man in the suit, a brain attuned to it. Her intelligence, her perception, her drive to understand they weren't just personality traits. They were features. It was the most validating diagnosis imaginable.
And at the center of this new, wonderful puzzle was Kageyama Kyuusei.
Her perception of him had undergone a violent, complete rewrite. Before today, he was a background variable: Kageyama Kyuusei (Held-back. Often late. Mildly stinky. Socially inert. An unsolvable mystery).
Now, the data had been spectacularly recontextualized.
The sweat? Not from a missed bus. From a life-or-death battle.
The tiredness? Physical and spiritual exhaustion from nightly patrols or whatever "Slayers" did.
The evasiveness? Operational security.
The calluses? From gripping the hilt of a Catalytic Katana.
She doodled in the margin of her new, secret notebook, the one labeled "Project K.Y." in neat lettering. She'd started with a quick, analytical sketch of the tree-monster, labeling its writhing branches and core trunk. But her pen had drifted. Now, next to the tree, was a much more dynamic sketch: a stylized figure, leaping, a sleek line representing a sword in mid-swing. The figure had messy hair and a determined, cool look in his eyes. She'd even added little speed lines.
Kageyama Kyuusei, Spirit Slayer.
It had a nice ring to it. It made the sweat seem... heroic.
She flipped to a fresh page, writing headers.
'CATALYTIC KATANA: Properties? "Catalytic" implies it enables or accelerates a reaction. Spiritual reaction? Energy conversion?'
'WARDS: Dimensional folds. Perception filters. Sensory dissonance for non-attuned. (I am "attuned"!!)'
'THE DEVICE (Handler's): Spiritual signature scanner. Clearly custom. Organizational tech level seems high, funding questionable (based on Handler's suit).'
She was writing so fast her handwriting, usually perfect, developed a frantic, joyful edge. This was better than any exam, any puzzle box, any logic game. This was real. And her brain, her wonderful, suddenly-explained brain, was lighting up, connecting dots she hadn't even known were there.
She looked at her phone, lying screen-up on the desk. The last message displayed was her own, the one with the 3.7% probability and the smiley face. She felt a flicker of that same smug satisfaction. It was a good move. It established a tone she wasn't a scared victim; she was an interested party. A professional interested party.
Her thumb hovered over his contact, Kageyama K. (Handler-lite). She was burning to ask a dozen more questions. About the Agency, about spirit grades, about where he trained.
But she stopped herself. The 3.7% message was a strategic strike. Bombarding him now would be tactical noise. He was resistant, skittish. He needed to be... managed. Her goal was no longer just to extract information. It was to gain access. To become not a liability to be monitored, but a resource to be utilized.
She put the phone down, a new, calm smile on her face. The initial fan-girl euphoria was condensing into a solid, determined plan. She would be so useful, so observant, so undeniably helpful that he would have no choice but to bring her deeper into the fold. She would make herself indispensable.
Outside, the moon was high.
Next Morning
Kageyama Kyuusei was currently walking to school with a girl.
This was not by choice. This was by what felt like cosmic decree. Aoi Rin had simply materialized at the corner near his house, as if she'd cross-referenced municipal records, bus schedules, and his known sleep-deprivation stagger to calculate his optimal intercept point.
"So," she began, falling into step beside him as if they did this every day. Her voice was bright, carrying a curiosity so potent it felt like a physical pressure. "The catalytic function. Is it a permanent enchantment on the blade, or does it require a charge? Do you have to, like, meditate with it?"
Kageyama kept his eyes on the sidewalk cracks, counting them like a mantra. "I hit things with it. They die. That's the function."
"But the catalytic part implies a process. Does it convert spiritual energy into a physical cutting force? Or does it weaken the spirit's cohesion on a metaphysical level?"
"I don't know. I don't have the manual. It's sharp on one side and expensive on all sides. That's my working knowledge."
She huffed, a sound of pure intellectual frustration. "How can you use a tool and not understand its fundamental principles?"
Great, she's moved from 'what' to 'why.' This is worse. He could feel her gaze on his profile, analyzing. She's trying to decide if I'm stupid or just stubborn. He was fine with both, as long as it made her stop.
He's ignoring me again. Or trying to. Should I use the Cute tactic? Yesterday's resistance must be wearing down. Deploy strategic pout in three, two...
She slowed her step, letting her shoulder bump his lightly. When he glanced over, she'd mastered an expression of wide-eyed, innocent confusion. "But Kageyama-kun, it's so fascinating. Don't you want to know? You must have wondered..." Her voice softened, tilting up at the end.
For a split second, it worked. The earnestness in her big, hazel eyes, the slight tilt of her head it was a masterclass. He felt a stupid, reflexive urge to answer, to be the one who solved that cute little frown.
Then his survival instinct, honed by years of dealing with trickster spirits and a certain Skull-Emoji menace, kicked in. He blinked, and the spell broke. "Nice try. Zero out of ten. Your eyes didn't even glisten. Amateur."
Aoi's perfect pout dropped instantly, replaced by a look of grudging respect. "Hmph. Noted. So, who teaches you? Is there a... sensei? An organization? Are there others at our school?"
He shrugged, aiming for nonchalance but landing somewhere in 'vaguely constipated.' "There's... guidance. And yeah, there are others. Not everyone with a pulse is normal." He immediately cursed internally. Too much. Why did you say that?
Her entire being lit up. "Others? At school? Who? Is it someone I know?" Her mind was clearly racing, scanning the student body for likely candidates.
"Forget it. You'll find out soon enough, probably. News travels fast in... our circles. You're kinda famous now. 'The Latent who walked through a Ward.'" He said it with a grimace.
"Famous?" she echoed, and to his horror, she looked delighted. "So there's a community? With communication? Is there a newsletter?"
"There's a chain of misery and gossip, and you're the newest link. Congratulations." He sped up, but she matched him effortlessly.
"But you don't seem to enjoy it," she observed, her tone shifting from excited to analytical. "The learning, the understanding. You treat it like a chore. Why?"
He sighed, the question hitting a different, weirder nerve. "Aoi, when you flip a light switch, do you sit there and marvel at the electrical grid? Do you ponder the quantum tunneling in the wires, or do you just expect the light to come on?"
"I do," she said, utterly serious. Her voice lost its playful edge, gaining a quiet, fierce intensity. "I want to understand everything. The grid, the tunneling, the physics of the filament and the psychology of the person who invented it. It gives me passion. It makes me understand the universe and how it works. It makes me feel... less blind."
He stopped walking and looked at her then, really looked. The morning sun caught in her hair, but her eyes were fixed on some distant point of principle. She meant it. Her curiosity wasn't just a hobby; it was her way of being. Of wrestling a chaotic, confusing world into a system she could comprehend. For the first time, he didn't see a liability or an annoyance. He saw a kind of driven, terrifying honesty.
It was more intimidating than any cute act.
He had no rebuttal for that. So he just grunted and started walking again. "Well, I just want the light to come on. Understanding why hasn't made my job any easier, and it usually just gives me a headache."
They reached the bus stop. A crowd of students stood in a disgruntled cluster. The bus, visibly packed to the windows, wheezed past them without stopping.
Aoi stared as it disappeared. "You... you weren't entirely lying."
"The 'too many people on the bus' part is usually true," he said, a hollow victory. "The 'that's why I'm late' part is usually a cover for the 'I was busy getting screamed at by a shrub' part. Now we're late. Come on."
He took off at a brisk jog. After a moment of surprise, she followed, her loafers slapping against the pavement. "You're choosing to run? We could wait for the next one!"
"The next one is in twelve minutes. It will also be full. We run, or we're late. Your choice." He didn't slow down. "Though you already made your choice, didn't you?"
"What do you mean?" she asked, keeping pace beside him with surprising ease.
"You have a car. Your mom drops you off. But you 'happened' to be at my walking route this morning. You chose the bus, knowing it was unreliable, knowing it increased the probability of this." He gestured between them as they ran. "Alone time. Q&A time. You orchestrated a logistical failure to create a debriefing window. It's kinda pathetic."
Aoi Rin, for the first time since he'd known her, was speechless. Her breath hitched, but not from the run. Her carefully constructed scenario, her logical play for a private audience, had been not only anticipated but laid bare. By him. The guy she'd classified as 'operationally competent but socially obtuse.'
He saw the shock on her face from the corner of his eye and felt a petty, profound satisfaction. "What, you think you're the only one who notices things? I have to profile potential threats for a living. You're just a very... chatty one."
She recovered quickly, but the smugness was gone, replaced by a new, sharp appraisal. "I miscalculated."
"Yeah," he panted, pushing his speed a little. The school gates were in sight. "You did. Now keep up. And save your next round of twenty questions for after first period. I need at least ten minutes of silence to mourn my dignity."
They hit the school grounds in a final, desperate sprint. The warning bell had already rung, its echo seeming to vibrate in the very concrete beneath their feet. Aoi, with a last burst of speed born of pristine athleticism and a terror of blemishing her record, slipped through the main entrance just as the final tone faded.
Kageyama, by contrast, made a conscious, catastrophic decision.
He saw her cross the threshold, her ponytail swinging. Good. She's on time. Nothing ties us together. To sell the lie of their non-association, he forced himself to break stride, to drop into a fast, panting walk for the last twenty meters. It was a tactical delay, a sacrifice of seconds to maintain operational secrecy.
It was the worst calculation of his life.
He reached the door to their classroom just as the second, definitive bell began its first, shrill note. He grabbed the handle.
It didn't move.
The door opened inward, and standing just behind it, a human wall in a brown corduroy jacket, was Watanabe-sensei. He wasn't holding the door. He was simply occupying the space where it needed to swing, his arms crossed, his face a monument to profound disappointment. The bell finished ringing. The silence that followed was absolute.
"Kageyama," Watanabe-sensei said, his voice not loud, but carrying to every corner of the now-silent room. "The bell."
"I... I'm right here, sensei. The door..." Kyuusei gestured weakly.
"The bell," Watanabe-sensei repeated, as if explaining gravity to a particularly dense rock, "signals the start of class. You are on the wrong side of it. Therefore, you are not in class. You are late."
Aoi, already seated and barely winded, watched from her desk. Her expression was schooled into polite neutrality, but her eyes were laser-focused on the scene. She saw his damp hair, his still-heaving chest, the eight strategic seconds he'd sacrificed that had now doomed him. You fool. Your priorities are backwards.
"But sensei, I was literally touching the handle when it rang! It's a technicality!" Kyuusei protested, the professional arguer of technicalities with tree monsters now utterly helpless before the iron law of school bureaucracy.
"Time is not a technicality, Kageyama. It is the one impartial judge. You have been judged." Watanabe-sensei finally moved, not to let him in, but to pull a small notepad from his pocket. He made a slow, deliberate mark. "One late mark. First day of the term. A promising start. You will wait in the hall for the duration of first period. We will discuss your relationship with impartial time afterward."
"Wait in the? For the whole period?!"
"The lesson has begun. Your entry would be a disruption. This is the consequence." With that, Watanabe-sensei slowly, firmly, closed the door in Kyuusei's stunned face.
Click.
The sound of the latch engaging was the loudest thing Kyuusei had ever heard. He stood there, alone in the empty hallway, the muffled sound of Watanabe-sensei beginning his lecture seeping through the wood.
He was late. Officially, pointlessly, avoidably late. He'd outsmarted himself. To avoid looking connected to the cute, smart, suspicious girl, he'd literally handed himself a punishment. And she was in there, warm and on-time, probably already taking notes on his behavior as a case study in flawed decision-making.
He leaned his forehead against the cool door.
My job involves killing supernatural beings, he thought, despair washing over him. And I was defeated by a corduroy jacket and my own stupid pride.
Inside, Aoi glanced at the closed door, then down at her notebook. Under her neat notes for Literature, she wrote a single, private line in the margin.
Observation: Subject prioritizes operational secrecy over practical outcomes, even to his own severe detriment. A critical vulnerability? Or a deeply ingrained protocol?
She underlined severe detriment twice. Then, because she was fair, she added a small, almost imperceptible checkmark next to her earlier hypothesis about his predictable lateness. The data, as always, didn't lie. Even when he was actively trying to outthink her, he still ended up right where her models predicted.
The hallway floor was cold. Kyuusei slid down to sit against the wall, his bag beside him. He had forty-five minutes to contemplate the sheer, cosmic irony of his existence.
It was going to be a long period.
Time passed.
Or at least, something that felt like its cruel, malnourished cousin was limping by. Kageyama was convinced a time-related spirit was squatting in the hallway, personally stretching each second into taffy. He was a blot of living despair against the cheerful, institutional paint.
He pulled out his phone, a tiny rectangle of muted chaos.
The Handler.
A terse, pre-dawn confirmation. 'Report received. Monitor Asset. Do not be late to class.' (The last part felt like a taunt now.)
Mom.
A cheerful sticker of a dancing vegetable and a message: 'Do your best today, Kyu-chan! ♪' It made him feel simultaneously warmed and utterly pathetic.
Little Sister.
A screenshot of his class list from last year with a poorly drawn crying face on his photo. The caption: "Going for the two-peat? 😂" He didn't respond.
Aoi Rin.
The last message was still her 3.7% probability forecast. He stared at it. The smiley face was a tiny monument to his current failure.
And then, at the bottom, pulsing with ominous energy...
HER.
A free-range monster. A calamity the higher-ups knowingly unleashed upon the world. Specifically, upon him. Their one and only containment strategy: "Let Kageyama deal with it. He seems to attract this kind of thing."
The notifications were a timeline of his humiliation.
'Lmao imagine being late again only cuz you didnt want to be seen walking with a girl. priceless.'
'Not the time.'
'Isn't it weird tho? I saw from different sources that you two knew each other before~'
'Being SEEN walking together and TALKING with a girl are different threat profiles.'
'Wow so smart my king 👑 analyzing threat profiles of a normie girl. ur so hot when ur professional.'
'K.'
'Wow you sound hot like that.'
'Never EVER text me again.'
'Cant if my loser is acting the way I like~'
He stared at the screen, a new, profound tiredness settling in. He typed the first thing that came to mind, a blunt instrument swung in desperation.
'U have a kink or sum.'
The typing bubbles appeared. Then they stopped. They appeared again, stuttered. A long pause.
Oh crap, he thought, a cold splash of regret. Did I actually break it? Did I finally hit some weird, emotional nerve in whatever passes for her heart?
The bubbles showed up one last time, for a solid ten seconds. No text came through.
Instead, a single audio message appeared. He groaned. This was worse. Was it a rant? A hissed threat? He put his ear to the phone, bracing for impact, and pressed play.
For the first two seconds, there was silence. Then, a sound. A choked, shuddering gasp.
Then, full-blown, unhinged, wheezing laughter. It was the kind of laugh that had no business coming from a human vocal cord, a cackle that bounced between glee and utter madness, punctuated by snorts and the sound of someone probably slapping a table.
"HAH! AHAHAHAHA! OH MY GOD! A KINK! FOR YOUR! YOUR MISERABLE EXISTENCE! AHAHAHAHA!" Her voice, distorted by volume and hysteria, finally choked out. "You, you stupid, I can't breathe! That's the best thing you've ever said to me!" The audio ended with a final, dying giggle.
Kageyama lowered the phone. He wasn't offended. He wasn't even annoyed. He just felt... clean. A strange, crystalline clarity washed over him. Compared to the eldritch, emotional whirlpool that was HER, Aoi Rin, with her probability forecasts and anatomical doodles, was a refreshingly straightforward problem. A logic puzzle. A liability, yes, but a rational one.
Honestly, he thought, a grim smile touching his lips, this interaction literally gave me strength. The sheer, absurd contrast was a lightning bolt to his demoralized soul. He had one impossible, chaotic monster in his phone he was powerless to stop. He had another, curious one in the classroom he was now obligated to manage.
One of these was, technically, his job.
He stood up, dusting off his trousers as the bell for the end of the period finally, mercifully, rang. The door opened, and Watanabe-sensei gave him a look that promised a future, lengthier discussion about Time and Respect.
But Kageyama wasn't listening. He was looking past the teacher, into the classroom, where Aoi was calmly packing her bag. She glanced up, meeting his eyes. Hers held a question. His, for the first time, held something resembling a plan.
He was still dead tired. He was still in trouble. He was still babysitting a human anomaly.
But as he shouldered his bag and prepared to be scolded, he had a new resolve. He would teach Aoi Rin something today. Not because he wanted to. But because dealing with a rational, if overly perceptive, liability was a paradise compared to managing the alternative.
"Thanks, dumbass," he muttered under his breath, to the monster in his pocket. "You actually gave me motivation."
He stepped back into the classroom, the target of everyone's stares, and prepared to begin his first official, grudging lesson for his new Asset.