The drive home from Dr. Ito's clinic was a journey through a silent, screaming void. The city lights of Tokyo, usually a vibrant, chaotic river of life, blurred past the car windows like the last fleeting thoughts of a dying man. Inside the vehicle, the silence was a physical pressure, a suffocating weight woven from the threads of impossible joy and a terror so profound it had no voice.
Elena Kisaragi sat in the passenger seat, her body turned halfway towards the back. Her face was a tragic masterpiece of tear-streaked mascara, her eyes, red-rimmed and wide, fixed on Samantha. Every few minutes, she would reach back, her hand trembling, to press her palm against Samantha's forehead. It wasn't a gesture of comfort. It was a test. A desperate, repeated confirmation that the feverish warmth of illness, a constant for seventeen years, was truly gone. The love in that touch was a brand, searing and possessive.
In the driver's seat, Kenjiro Kisaragi gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were bone-white. He stared straight ahead at the road, but his mind was clearly miles away, lost in the smoking ruins of the night.
"Sami," he said, his voice deceptively calm, the sound swallowed by the oppressive quiet. It was the calm of a man calculating the cost of a war he hadn't known he was fighting. "Those boys… from the warehouse. What school were they from?"
The question landed like a stone in the pit of Samantha's stomach. She felt the cold, perfect recall of her 'Eidetic Kinesis' skill superimposing the image of Saito Kenji's cheap, ill-fitting uniform over the dark upholstery in front of her. The crest of a dragon coiling around a sword. Tensei Academy. A school infamous for its delinquents. She knew the name. She knew his face. She could feel the memory of his greasy voice, the phantom sensation of his crony's shattered ribs beneath her knuckles.
The lie felt like swallowing shards of glass. "I… I don't know, Otou-san," she forced out, her voice a rough, unfamiliar thing. "It was dark. I couldn't see their uniforms clearly."
Each word was a betrayal, a fresh layer of filth caking her soul. She was lying to protect them, but it felt like she was poisoning them with the same breath.
Just as the last syllable left her lips, a sound no one else could hear chimed in her mind.
TING.
It was not the triumphant chime of a mission completed. It was sharp, cold, and judgmental. A translucent screen flickered into life at the edge of her vision, its text a stark, simple indictment.
[New Passive Skill Acquired: Deception (Rank: F)]
[Description: The ability to formulate falsehoods directed at those who trust you implicitly. A useful, if disappointing, talent for a vessel of the System.]
Samantha's breath hitched. It wasn't a reward. It was a scar. The System wasn't just a tool; it was a silent, cosmic arbiter, and it had just found her wanting. The knowledge that her necessary lie had been quantified, judged, and filed away as a character flaw made her stomach churn with a fresh wave of nausea.
The house, when they arrived, was no longer a sanctuary. For seventeen years, it had been her sickroom, a comfortable prison of soft blankets and quiet routine. Now, the locks had changed. It was a new kind of prison, one fortified not by walls, but by her parents' frantic, overwhelming love.
"Right," Elena said, her voice brittle with forced cheerfulness as she ushered Samantha inside. "Straight to bed for you. You've been through a terrible ordeal." She took Samantha's school bag, her eyes lingering on the phone clipped to the side. With a swift, decisive motion, she unclipped it. "And no screens tonight. You need to rest your eyes. Your mind. Doctor's orders."
She was inventing the rule on the spot, a desperate attempt to exert some small control over a world that had spun violently off its axis.
"Your mother is right," Kenjiro added, his voice a low rumble from the doorway. He looked exhausted, aged a decade in a single night, but his eyes were sharp, vigilant. "And we'll leave your bedroom door open. Just a crack. So we can hear you… if you need anything."
And there it was. Her two lifelines to the impossible world she now inhabited—her phone and her privacy—were severed in a single, loving stroke. She was grounded. Not by anger, but by a terror so profound it had become its own form of tyranny. She felt the invisible chains of their concern wrapping around her wrists, her ankles, her throat.
She nodded numbly, the lie about needing rest heavy on her tongue. "Okay, Kaa-san, Tou-san."
As she walked up the stairs, each step feeling like it was weighted with lead, she passed Ren's room. The door was closed, the silence from within a heavy, accusing presence. He wasn't there. He was in a hospital bed, broken and bruised, because of her. Because someone was hunting her.
A nervous, shimmering light appeared beside her as she reached her own doorway. Mochi materialized, his usual manic glee replaced by a look of theatrical, hand-wringing concern.
"Well, well, contractor!" he whispered, his psychic voice a buzz of static in her exhausted mind. "It seems your current situation has been… tactically compromised. Your parents' well-meaning-but-ultimately-counterproductive security protocols have just upgraded the 'Practice Date' mission from 'Socially Awkward' to 'Impossible-Difficulty Stealth Espionage.'"
He did a little loop-the-loop in the air. "Hope you've been practicing your ninja skills, Sam-chan. Because that six-day timer is still ticking down. No pressure!"
The taunt was a cruel, perfect summation of her new reality. Her parents' love was now a mission-level obstacle. Every protective gesture was another bar on her cage.
Sleep was an impossibility. Her body, humming with a strange, foreign energy, rejected the very notion of rest. Her mind was a chaotic maelstrom of System notifications, the memory of Akemi's cold fury, Liza's flirty, complicated texts, and the looming, five-star threat of the 'Purification' mission.
She lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the quiet sounds of the house. The soft creak of her father pacing in the living room below. The murmur of her mother on the phone, likely canceling all of Samantha's appointments for the next month. The crack of light from the hallway, slicing through the darkness of her room, was a constant, yellow-eyed sentinel.
She couldn't do this. She couldn't be trapped here. Not with the clock ticking.
After an hour that felt like a century, she slid out of bed, her movements slow and deliberate. The 'Way of the Intercepting Fist' skill wasn't just for combat; it had given her a profound understanding of balance and weight distribution. She moved across her bedroom floor without making a single sound, a ghost in her own home.
Her destination: the upstairs bathroom. Her one, guaranteed sanctuary of privacy.
She feigned a trip, moving down the hall with the practiced shamble of a sleepy girl. She saw her father look up from the base of the stairs, his eyes sharp and questioning even in the dim light. She gave him a weak, tired smile and a small wave before slipping into the bathroom and, with a soft, final click, locking the door.
Leaning against the cool wood, she let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, her heart hammering against her ribs. The absurdity of it all was a bitter pill in the back of her throat. Hours ago, she had faced down a room full of violent thugs without flinching. Now, she was hiding from her parents like a teenager sneaking out to a party.
She slid down to the floor, pulling her knees to her chest. Beneath a loose floorboard under the sink, a secret she'd kept even from herself for the last year, was her emergency kit. A small Ziploc bag containing a few ten-thousand-yen bills and a cheap, untraceable burner phone. She'd bought it after watching one too many spy movies, a paranoid fantasy from a girl whose life had been anything but exciting. Now, it was her only lifeline.
She powered it on, the cheap LCD screen glowing with a faint, blue light that felt like a profound betrayal in the darkness. Her fingers, steady and sure, flew across the keypad. She had to do this. She had to deal with the Liza situation.
Sam: Hey. You up?
The reply was almost instantaneous, a testament to the fact that Liza, too, was likely lying awake, her mind buzzing.
Liza: Sam-chan?! OMG! I was so worried! Your mom just texted me a novel about how you're home safe but I'm not allowed to call or visit?! Is everything okay?? Is Ren-kun okay?!
Samantha felt a pang of guilt. She was dragging her friend into this, even tangentially.
Sam: It's complicated. Ren-nii is stable. I'm okay. Mostly. Listen, about what you said earlier… in the cafeteria… about "practice"…
Her thumb hovered over the send button. This was a minefield. One wrong word, and she could detonate the fragile, confusing new dynamic between them.
A new message popped up before she could send hers.
Liza: …Practice? Ohhh. THAT. 😉
Samantha's heart skipped a beat.
Liza: You know, for someone who was 'just doing a dare,' you didn't taste like you were just following instructions.
The words hit Samantha with the force of a physical blow. There it was. The confirmation. The kiss, the real one, the one born of adrenaline and desperation and some darker, System-fueled impulse, had meant something more to Liza. It wasn't a joke. It wasn't a dare. It was a catalyst. The flirty, teasing tone of the text did nothing to soften the terrifying implications. This wasn't a side quest she could ignore. It was now a part of her main story.
Liza: Sooo if you're asking me to hang out again, my answer is totally yes. But it's on you. The price of practicing with an expert kisser like me is one triple-decker strawberry parfait from that place in Shibuya. With extra Pocky. 😘
Samantha stared at the screen, a low groan escaping her lips. She now had a confirmed "practice date" with her best friend, a date she had to somehow attend while being grounded under maximum-security parental lockdown. This was impossible.
Needing air, she stood up and peered out the small, frosted bathroom window. The street below was quiet, bathed in the familiar, lonely orange glow of the streetlights. It was a perfect picture of suburban peace.
Then she saw them.
Two students, their dark blue Jounan High uniforms marking them clearly even from a distance, were walking on the opposite sidewalk. They seemed to be arguing, their gestures sharp and angry. Then, one of them shoved the other.
It wasn't a normal shove. It was a spasm. A jerky, unnaturally vicious movement, like a puppet whose strings had been violently yanked. There was no weight behind it, just pure, twitching malice. The student who had been pushed stumbled back, not with anger, but with a look of genuine shock and hurt, clutching their shoulder.
The aggressor stood frozen for a second, staring at their own hands as if they were alien things. Their expression, even from this distance, was one of pure, horrified confusion. As if their own body had betrayed them. Then, they shook their head frantically and hurried away, practically fleeing the scene, leaving their friend dazed and looking physically unwell under the streetlight.
It was a small, deeply unsettling tableau. A moment of casual violence that was fundamentally wrong. It was the first symptom. The first sign of the plague. It wasn't a monster with claws and teeth. It was a sickness of the soul, a virus of inexplicable rage, and it was already spreading.
Her thoughts were vaporized by a sudden, violent intrusion.
A klaxon, silent but deafening, blared in her mind. Her entire vision was consumed by a flash of blood-red light, the familiar blue of the System interface replaced by an emergency broadcast of pure doom.
[!! MAIN MISSION #3: THE JOUNAN HIGH PURIFICATION !!]
[Objective: Identify and Neutralize the source of the 'Rage Contagion' corrupting the student body.]
[Threat Level: Unidentified. Proceed with Extreme Caution.]
[Time Limit: 29 Days, 17 Hours, 42 Minutes… 41… 40…]
[Penalty for Failure: Culling Protocol Activated. All infected hosts will be… purged.]
Purged.