Yinoh's POV
I was still toweling my hair after my shower, humming a tune I couldn't quite name. I couldn't stop smiling. My cheeks actually ached from it, but I didn't care.
Hashy and I were fine.
The awkward distance that had been stretching between us all morning finally snapped. There were no more cold shoulders, no more of that icy wall that had made me feel like I was walking beside a stranger. It was just us again—the way it was always supposed to be. I felt a sudden, violent relief, like someone had finally sliced through a knot in my chest that had been tightening since we met at the alley. I could finally breathe without feeling like the air was full of glass.
Honestly, the day had been nothing short of torture. I'd spent every period biting my tongue until it throbbed, forced to look away every time our eyes met. My hands felt restless, my fingers twitching with the reflexive urge to reach out and tap his shoulder like I'd done a thousand times before—only to have to clench them into fists under my desk.
I even tried to lose myself in a manga sketch during the Technology Advancement lecture, desperate to focus on anything else, but my pen had a mind of its own. No matter how hard I tried to draw someone new, every character ended up with that same familiar, messy hair and that specific, piercingly serious look he gets whenever he's lost in thought. It was like my subconscious was refusing to let him go, even if he was the one pushing me away.
And sitting at the front of the bus instead of the back row... that stung. I could feel him behind me, staring at the space where I should've been. Every bump in the road, I had to tell myself: Don't look back. Don't run to him like you always do.
But now, the air was clear. I felt like I could've floated home.
I tossed my towel toward the bed and pulled a shirt over my head—or tried to. My arms were still tangled in the sleeves when the world suddenly tilted. The air tightened, turning heavy and cold, like someone had pressed pause on reality.
I froze. "Eh...? Did the power go out?"
The atmosphere felt hollow, like the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. Then came the sound—a low, rhythmic distortion, like the very fabric of the neighborhood was glitching.
I ripped the shirt down and sprinted to the window.
A beam of violent blue light was hemorrhaging out of Hashy's front door. It was sharp and bright, cutting through the dusk like a jagged crack in the universe. His windows were glowing, too, their edges trembling as if the house itself were struggling to breathe.
My stomach dropped so fast I felt dizzy. "Hashy?"
I wasn't thinking anymore. I bolted. I nearly wiped out on the stairs and didn't even stop for shoes. I left my own front door wide open, my heart slamming against my ribs like a panicked bird in a cage.
Please be okay. Please be okay. Please—
I sprinted across the walkway, the pavement cold and sharp against my bare feet. "HASHPH—"
My voice cracked as I reached his gate. The door was swaying on its hinges, as if something—or someone—had just torn through it. I swallowed hard, my pulse thundering in my ears.
"H-Hashy?" I tried again, my voice shorter this time. Terrified.
I stepped inside and forgot how to breathe.
The hallway was flooded with blue light—pulsing, twisting spirals of energy that looked too sharp, too deliberate to be natural magic. It felt intelligent. It felt like it was watching.
And there, in the center of the storm, was Hasphien.
He was frozen. Not just standing still, but anchored, like a statue carved out of the air. It wasn't a human kind of stillness; it was the stillness of an object being processed by a machine.
"Hashy!"
My voice bounced uselessly off the shimmering walls of light. Instinct took over—the reckless kind he was always scolding me for. I raised my hand, calling the wind. It responded instantly, a howling gust that swirled around my glowing palms. I threw the weight of the gale toward him, desperate to knock him out of the circle—
And the light simply... bent it. The wind flowed around the blue pillar as if my power didn't even exist.
Then the glow surged. It flared into a blinding, vertical pillar that swallowed him whole.
"HASPHIEN!!"
The light vanished.
It didn't fade; it snapped out of existence, like someone had yanked the world's power cord. The hallway plunged back into the dim twilight. No hum. No crackle of energy. Just the sudden, violent silence of an empty house.
The things that had been caught in the vacuum—papers, pens, splinters of wood—fell all at once. They clattered to the floor in a chaotic, mocking rain. Books lay sprawled like dead birds. Drawers hung open, ripped out of the walls.
But the spot where Hasphien had been standing was perfectly clean. The floorboards were polished and bare, as if the world refused to admit he'd ever been there at all.
My hands shook so hard I had to ball them into fists. "Hashy..."
The name came out broken, a jagged sound that didn't belong to me. I'm the guy who jokes. I'm the one who finds a laugh when things get heavy, the one who cracks a smile to keep the shadows back. But the air here was too thick, too cold for a laugh to survive. My whole chest felt like a hollowed-out shell, the contents scooped out and replaced with lead.
I stepped forward, the sharp crunch of glass biting into my bare foot, but I barely felt it. I kept moving until I reached the center of the room—the exact spot where the light had claimed him.
He was right here. I was supposed to ask him to the arcade tomorrow to make up for the hell of today. We were supposed to be fine. We were supposed to be back to normal. Instead, I was standing alone in the wreckage of his life, staring at a floor that offered no answers—only the lingering, ozone scent of a boy who was gone.
I knelt, my nails digging into my palms until I felt the sting of blood.
"Hang on, Hasphien," I whispered, my voice hardening. The fear was still there, but beneath it, something else was waking up. Something jagged and sharp. "I'm coming. I swear I'm coming."
The jokes were gone. The lightness was dead. Whatever that light was—whatever took him—it wasn't ordinary. And I was going to tear the sky apart until I found where it went.