Yet it was necessary to acknowledge that Riona was not flawless and perfect either. She was not flawless in the dreamy fairytale way that Hiyori's fantasy ached to surround her with, such as a well-wrapped present covered in bright paper and a glittering ribbon. Rather, the girl who exuded heat and radiance like a sun rising in the morning and walked elegantly as if she were a living jingle bell had her own darkness and intricacies as well. Among those darknesses, one of them suddenly broke the atmosphere, splitting the air right before them without any preceding warning or signal.
It started in the most subtle way, almost imperceptibly, like the soft rustling of the wind as it starts to lift over the calm and quiet face of a secluded lake. There was a fleeting movement, a mere flicker of the eye, followed by a fleeting whisper of her shoulder that suggested something more sinister brewing beneath the surface. The next moment, out of the blue, a harsh and jarring sound erupted from her mouth, harsh and loud and involuntary—"FUCK—!" The words were completely out of context and jarring to the sweet, innocent voice they issued from. This was not the voice one would expect of the girl, who had her hair tied up with a pretty ribbon, wearing her demure pink tracksuit and bright blue bow. She was not the same girl who had just been chattering excitedly about table tennis and newspaper deliveries with an air of cheerful abandon and pride.
ASSHOLE—!" she spat the word out in a raw, nasty curse, her whole body shuddering momentarily as if it had been electrified by a spark of wire. Her eyes widened into horrified shock and incredulity, and her hands flew up to her lips as if to catch herself in the act of disobedience and rebellion against her own good sense.
Hiyori blinked, caught in the middle of a step. Amaya didn't flinch—just spun, still with arms crossed, still with eyes a little softer. Not pitying, not stunned. Just still, like a person who'd weathered storms and learned not to be scared.
Riona stood there, shaking with anger, her fists clenched tightly at her sides with rage. Her body twitched involuntarily once, and then again—"Stupid! Shitshitshitshit, DAMN TOAST!!" She cried out in anger, her face flushing a deep, angry red as her voice cracked under the enormity of the tension of her feelings. "I'm sorry—sorry—I'm—I'm really sorry," she gasped in short, agonized breaths, hunching over slightly in a desperate bid to soothe herself, even as her breathing came coarse and uneven, betraying her anguish.
She did not weep, but her face was marked with the unmistakable expression of one who was perilously close to it. It was not sorrow that had taken her to the edge of this outburst, but a crushing feeling of shame. She was like one who had dropped a fragile plate in a crowded room of strangers and knew she would never get the opportunity to explain the circumstances of her careless drop of the plate that brought her to that place.
"Hey…" Hiyori hesitated and took a step forward, a feeling of doubt creeping upon her as her previous sense of superiority was crumbling before her very eyes in real-time. "What's happening?"
"Tourette," Amaya said, without hesitation, bluntly, as if she were only naming a song that sometimes played in the background, unwanted but somehow familiar to her.
Riona nodded stiffly, her eyes cast down. "I have tics. They come and go. I try to get it to stop. Sometimes it just blinks. Sometimes it's this."
There was a silence in which nothing was spoken. Only the distant thud of shoes on the early morning street, the caw of birds on telegraph wires, and the sun still low behind a line of buildings.
Hiyori had no idea what to tell her. She didn't have a script for this. She had learned how to gossip, how to form alliances, and how to play politics in the student council and café drama—but not this. Not imperfection unmasked.
And then, much to everyone's surprise, she took the initiative and made the first move herself.
With a careful movement, she dove into the bottom of her jacket pocket and pulled out the bottle of electrolyte water, something she hadn't really realized she was carrying until this moment. "Here," she said, her eyes a little furtive and not quite looking at Riona. "You're sweating."
Riona blinked, still struggling to breathe, and then took it in both hands as if it were some kind of sacred offering. "Thanks…," she whispered.
"You were absolutely amazing just now," Hiyori quietly breathed, still beyond belief about what she had witnessed. "It was like—your leg was up in the air and everything else that happened was incredible."
"I continue to be truly amazing," Riona said with a bright smile that flickered through the final subtle tremor of her shoulders. "It's just that I come with some unexpected surprise features now."
That made Amaya smirk. A rare one. Small. Real.
And for the first time that morning, the three of them simply stood there in silence together—not stuck in place, not uncomfortable, but more so very much in the moment, feeling some kind of pause that somehow the whole world was drawn into, holding its collective breath, expecting the inevitable wail that would follow. The roadway ahead of them was swamped with the alternating smells of wet cement and dry smoke from exhaust, while the morning sun streamed in through languid angles that sliced between the tall electric poles. In that tiny corner of the city's chaos, a weird trinity came together.
"You know," Amaya started to say in a surprising display of eagerness, her tone falling to a virtual conspiratorial whisper, as if what she was about to reveal was perhaps a little bit scandalous or taboo, "Shotaro has been diagnosed with ADHD, OCD, and schizophrenia. At least, that's what he says. And then there's her." She nodded discreetly in Riona's direction, who was busily fiddling with her ribbon but otherwise didn't seem to be listening to the exchange between her and Amaya. "She has Tourette's syndrome."
Hiyori furrowed her brows in confusion and disbelief. "Could you please explain what you are even talking about at this point?"
Amaya shrugged her shoulders indifferently, allowing her words to drift like clean laundry hung out to dry on a single gust of air. "If they were ever lucky enough to have a child of their own, it would stand to reason that it would be Forrest Gump."
Hiyori's mouth fell open slightly—not in shock, but simply because she was in that moment of her argument with the statement. "Honestly, I don't really like the prospect of that guy just going on and producing and potentially bringing more people who are just like him into the world. That's certainly somewhere I would rather not be headed or going."
She was trying to be carefree, trying to squelch the soft light of something more—envy, perhaps, or perhaps it was that old pain in the middle of her chest that she only felt whenever she saw others find a sense of purpose and meaning that had eluded her. Shotaro was a whirlwind of constant motion, always changing the dynamic between him and others, and more unsettling was how he did it with a face as white as a ghost and with words that sounded as if they were from another era altogether. He had an odd talent for staying in people's minds, giving them a presence without ever making a conscious effort to do so.
In that instant, Riona jerked suddenly, involuntarily; her head jerked hard to the side as a sudden and small but shrill and piercing bark burst forth from her lips—"What. What. SHUT UP! What… are you literally speaking? FROG LEGS—!" Her voice cracked mid-tic, and she felt her breath suddenly get caught in her throat as she blinked wildly, her shoulders jerking backward from the overwhelming sensations. She still stood, though, sporting that same smile, which seemed to threaten to return once more even as her lungs still desperately struggled to keep up with what her mouth was attempting to say.
Amaya stood in front of her, her face sporting that enigmatic and unreadable calm that she had whenever the mood was too thick and tangible. "You're still walking," she said in a tone that was laced with soft confidence.
With my legs," Riona said in a proud tone to her voice, even as her breathing continued in short, ragged gasps, as though she were trying to appear serene after just going through a sudden but intense rollercoaster of emotions within her head. "Still here."
And for a moment, no one said anything. Hiyori's eyes darted back and forth between the two people—Amaya, who seemed to have an air of unbending seriousness and unbreakable hardness, and Riona, who seemed to be radiating heat like the sun and looked like she was about to burst like firecrackers that sparkled with energy—and realized that maybe Shotaro was the most dangerous person around in the school setting. because of his sheer ability to affect others' perception of him.
The sound of gravel softened under their feet now, the road narrowing into a ribbon between rice paddies and quiet groves, the air so clean it almost stung their lungs. Morning light spilled through gaps in the treeline, catching in dew-beaded grass, washing the world in an amber hush. Birds chirped like they hadn't heard of cities, and distant wind chimes sang faintly from a porch no one could see.
It was the kind of peace that snuck up on you. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just there—like a memory of something good that you never lived.
Riona was the first to speak, because of course she was. "It's so quiet out here," she said, her breath warm and featherlight. "Like the trees know how to keep secrets." Her eyes sparkled, and her ribbon danced with her steps, as if it agreed. "When I run here, it feels like I'm being hugged by the whole island. Like everything's saying 'You're safe now.'"
Amaya snorted, but it wasn't cruel. "You sound like a postcard."
"It's true, though!" Riona beamed. "I think the wind out here is different. In the city, wind is always in a hurry. Out here, it just exists."
Amaya's eyes narrowed as she scanned the fields, her pace steady but her heart distant. "I don't trust places this calm," she murmured. "It's like when the music cuts before something goes wrong in a horror film." Her voice curled at the edges, half-smiling, half-haunted. "But... I get it. There's something pure about it. Like this is what the world was before people started ruining it."
Hiyori, still running just behind them, let their words wash over her like static, not ready to commit to either tone. She was sweating through her hoodie, hair sticking to her jaw, and yet somehow the rural quiet—punctuated only by cicadas, breeze, and the occasional dog barking somewhere far off—had slowed the storm inside her just a little.
"It pisses me off how nice it is," she finally said. "Like... the world doesn't care if we're angry or sad. It just keeps going. Trees keep growing. Rivers keep flowing. Birds keep chirping like nobody just got their heart ripped out yesterday."
Amaya raised an eyebrow. "Someone rip your heart out?"
Hiyori didn't answer, but her eyes flicked toward Riona and then ahead—toward where the road bent and dipped, where the rooftops of the city were still far away, and the shadow of Shotaro's legend waited like a goddamn mountain.
They ran past an old woman watering flowers in her wooden sandals. She waved without words. Riona waved back like a daughter.
"I think I could live out here forever," Riona said, soft and glowing.
"I think I'd lose my mind," Amaya said, dry as dust.
"I think," Hiyori whispered, "I'd finally shut up long enough to hear what I really want."
And for a while, they just ran.
Not in competition. Not in fear.
But like three girls chasing something beautiful across a field of silence.
But Musashi No Yamato was not heaven. Not exactly. Not when you pulled away the veil of mountain mist and the gentle, somnolent hills. The island wore peace as a borrowed jacket—uneven, temporary, a fiction everyone pretended to believe so they could go to bed at night. The rural areas murmured tranquility, yes. With its rice paddies and slow bikes and grandmothers dangling daikon from balconies. But peace out here was only distance. Not purity. Not safety. Just distance—from the stench.
The city proper, the true face of Musashi No Yamato, was one where women stepped off the sidewalk when men walked behind them. Where each alleyway was like it held its own story, and the vast majority of them had blood in them. Where crime wasn't the norm—it was the currency. Murder. Drugs. Kidnapping. And worst of all—rape. Repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly.
Hiyori Toyotaro pounded the ground in silence, her dirt-kicking shoes a slow rhythm, but her thoughts weren't carrying her ahead. They were sliding backward. Into darkness. The notorious cases hung on her mind like brambles in the skin.
The Nanakusa Dorm Incident. She recalled. Everyone did. A girl was discovered half-naked in her college dorm stairwell, shaking, ripped, blood around her ankles. The rapist was never apprehended, but people said it was someone within the dorm. A neighbor. A student council member. Perhaps more than one. The girl attempted to hang herself the following week.
And there was the Yoshino Park Horror. Three junior high school girls forced into the woods by a group of older delinquents, raped for hours, taped, and then dumped. One of them bled to death inside. The other two? Relocated to other prefectures. Vanished from the map like they'd never lived. But everyone remembered.
There was the Komorebi Slum Incident. A five-year-old. A five-year-old. Discovered in a broken karaoke booth, raped, abandoned to perish. The press censored the facts, but everyone tiptoed around saying them anyway—raw, like open sores, like it was too much for the papers but not too much for teenagers at sleepovers.
And that's why no girl ever went walking by herself after 7 PM. That's why all girls carried pepper spray or house keys protruding between her fingers like claws. That's why mothers implored daughters not to wear skirts too short. That's why people never made eye contact on the train. Because men weren't individuals in the city. They were statistics in the making.
She slowed, the air drawing heavy around her as thoughts she didn't want crept into her blood. The city… the bulk of Musashi No Yamato… was a thrum of horrors set in neon and tower lights. A place where the wrong backstreet meant your last moment, where sirens weren't reassuring but verification. People didn't live there unless they had no choice. Most worked from the countryside. Caught the train in at dawn, held on to routine, and ignored the junkies nodding on benches, the missing persons posters on telephone poles, and the chalk marks rain struggled to wash away.
Recalled the Mikazuchi Girl case.
A girl her age. Missing for weeks. Discovered in a gutter outside a pachinko parlor with her belly slashed open and her organs spread out around her like flowers. They never caught whoever did it. The papers reported maybe a gang. Maybe a cult. Maybe no one would ever find out. Her mother wept so hard at the funeral she was hospitalized. That was the image that stuck with Hiyori—not the blood, not the flowers of blood—but the sound grief could be louder than death. It filled her ears still.
And then there was the Tenjin Line Butcher as well. A guy who rode a packed train at 8 AM and stabbed three people in the throat in silence before getting off at the next station and disappearing into thin air. Never apprehended. No motive. No modus operandi. Just violence. For nothing.
And everyone knew about the Seaside Brothel that got raided last year. Twelve underage girls were found chained in a karaoke basement. Nine of them were never identified.
Hiyori's mouth was dry, her jog faltering. "This island's sick," she muttered before she could stop herself.
Riona glanced back, confused by the sudden edge in her voice. "What?"
Amaya didn't turn. "She means the city. She's right."
The wind ceased playing for an instant, and the golden serenity that had soothed their backs seemed colder in some way. A mist that had not been there before began curling low around the trees like the island breathed out something acrid.
Japan was always proud to be a safe country. Shimmering streets under vending-machine glow, unlocked doors, kindergarteners wandering alone with neon packs and cartoon umbrellas. The mirage of order prevailed throughout the archipelago. But this island, Musashi No Yamato, was a splinter in the tooth of that mirage. Its rural expanses pretended at peace, but the reality seethed near the mainland. And the city in its center had long since started to rot.
Statistically, crime was "barely above the national average." That's what the headlines read, printed in thin, antiseptic font. But the air told a different story—the sort that couldn't be counted in data points. It stank. Of fear. Of sweat. Of something darker. Something feral. And everybody who lived here knew: numbers were lies when shadows had teeth.
They ran silently along a rural lane, pebbles crunching under scuffed sneakers, the morning light trapped in spiderwebs that shivered on fences. But the silence did not last.
Riona's smile—usually soft and sunflower-bright—faded at the edges. Her ribbon waved, and she looked straight ahead, not at either of them. "I know bad things occur," she said, her voice lower than normal. "But I think there are still good people. There has to be. Like Shotaro."
Hiyori exhaled something halfway between a cough and a laugh, dry as nails. "That's the rub, fool. He is good. And that sort of good does not last in an environment like this one. They'll break him. Reconstruct him into something new. Or worse—kill him for not being one of them."
Amaya didn't stop running. Her lips twitched like she was swallowing a sermon. "He's not good," she said, breath steady. "He's immoral. But he chooses to be good. That's what makes him dangerous."
"Yeah?" Riona stared at her with something obstinate shining behind her eyes. "Then explain why the crime rate fell the moment the Ronins claimed the streets. Even before there was some vigilante smashing heads and taking people to the cops. The city changed. It felt observed. Like God had eyes again. You know why? Because it was him."
"They don't fear the law," she continued, face flushed, "they don't fear the police. They fear Mugyiwara." Her tone wasn't loud, but it fell like thunder anyway.
Hiyori didn't protest. Couldn't. She simply grumbled, almost to herself. "As much as I despise him… he's needed. He's a parasite. But Mother doesn't think so."
There was a pain in her words she didn't want the others to know—because deep inside, her loathing was a bitter one that only flourishes in the shade of admiration.
Amaya's breath caught. Her feet never missed a step, but her voice became that tone she reserved for lecturing ghosts. "How accursed a people must be," she breathed, "to need a god among them to prevent them from tearing one another apart.
She gazed upward, eyes not expecting but defying. "But isn't that always the tale?" she said, as if there was someone above who owed her an explanation. "Every faith, every religion. One clean thing—one man—to remind the rest of us that we are beasts who slip on skin and guise and imagine it makes us holy."
The wind swept across the fields, bearing the smell of wildflowers and manure and far-off gunpowder. They continued running.
And in that instant, they didn't say anything anymore. keeping the entire island aloft on his back.
They veered off the gravel path into the woods without meaning to. The trees stretched taller here—thin-limbed and swaying, with sunlight fractured in soft, mournful beams through the canopy like godlight slipping through cathedral glass. The deeper they went, the more the road and the city and all the screaming noise of civilization melted away. It was just the forest now. Pine needles underfoot. Breath on air. Girls laughing about nothing in particular.
"Do you think black nail polish makes me look like I write suicide poems?" Amaya asked, half-mocking, half-serious.
"I think your face does," Hiyori shot back with a smirk, panting a little from the jog.
Riona giggled, arms swinging gently at her sides, her ribbon bouncing behind her like a flag of childhood. "I think it looks pretty," she said, earnestly. "Like you're being honest, not hiding anything. That's brave."
They laughed—real laughter, not forced. Not ironic. The forest almost seemed to warm with it.
And then Riona stopped.
No sound. No scream. Just stopped.
Her feet dug into the dirt, sneaker soles scraping earth as her body turned unnaturally rigid, like the giggles had been vacuumed out of her lungs in a single second. She stared—up. Past the girls. Past the branches.
"…Oh," she whispered, voice so small it nearly didn't make it past her throat.
Amaya turned next. And then Hiyori.
The silence was violent.
There it was. Hanging.
A man. Maybe thirty. Maybe fifty. It was impossible to tell because the face was swollen, dark, slack-jawed. His body dangled from a frayed rope looped over a tree branch high above, just barely swaying. Like the wind didn't quite know what to do with him. Like it was embarrassed to be touching a body. The eyes were half open, as if he'd died trying to keep watching something.
The laughter from earlier hung dead in the air, replaced by the rustling of leaves and the faint creak of the noose in the wind.
No blood. No violence. Just absence.
Hiyori took a step back. She'd seen crime scenes before. Her mother had dragged her through reports like bedtime stories. But something about this felt…off. Personal. Quietly apocalyptic.
Riona didn't move.
Her lips trembled, just once. "Is he…?"
"Yeah," Amaya said, her voice flatter than the dirt. "He's gone."
There was no panic. No screams. Just three girls standing in a forest, staring up at a man who had once wanted to keep breathing and now didn't. The most horrifying thing wasn't the death. It was how peaceful it looked. Like the world itself hadn't noticed he'd left.
"Why…" Riona's voice cracked. "Why would someone do that here?"
Hiyori swallowed, heart loud in her ears. "Because it's quiet," she said. "And it takes too long in the city. Too many people. Too many interruptions."
"It's an epidemic," Amaya murmured, more to herself. "Every year. Every forest. They hang themselves like lanterns and hope someone looks up."
They didn't speak for a long time. Just stood there, girls who were supposed to be talking about lipstick and boys and brunch plans.
Japan didn't talk about it. Not in the open. But everyone knew. The forests weren't just trees. They were graveyards for the quiet kind of pain. The pain that couldn't scream, couldn't fight, couldn't even ask for help. The pain that wrote no notes. That just…stepped away. And vanished into the roots.
Eventually, Riona bowed. Deeply. A perfect ninety-degree angle. Her ribbon trembled. "I hope wherever you are now," she whispered, "you aren't hurting anymore."
Amaya looked away. Hiyori's eyes stung.