VOLUME #2 - EPISODE 8
[NARRATOR: Every tragedy has ripples. Every broken person leaves fragments of their damage in the people around them. Today we meet one of those fragments—shaped like a person, carrying pain like a weapon, convinced that destruction is the only language left that makes sense. This is where things stop being sad and start being dangerous.]
The Figure At The Gym
Monday evening, after most students had gone home, Riyura stayed late to help clean up after Subarashī's latest "ultimate technique demonstration" which had somehow resulted in three broken windows and a ceiling tile lodged in the basketball hoop.
"How does this even happen?" Riyura muttered, sweeping glass into a dustpan. His purple hair was disheveled, his yellow star hairclip barely hanging on, his crooked red bow tie covered in dust.
The gymnasium was quiet except for his cleaning sounds—the soft scrape of the broom, the tinkle of glass fragments, the distant hum of the building settling into evening silence.
Then he heard it. Footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Wrong. Riyura turned. Standing in the gym doorway was someone he'd never seen before.
Tall—maybe six feet—with a frame that suggested either athletic training or the kind of leanness that came from forgetting to eat. Pale skin that looked like it rarely saw sunlight. Dark hair falling across a face that was carefully expressionless, like someone had learned to turn off emotions the way you'd turn off a light.
But the eyes. The eyes were what made Riyura's breath catch.
Empty glass. That's what they looked like. Not sad. Not angry. Just... void. Like looking into windows of an abandoned house where something terrible had happened and nobody bothered to clean up after.
The stranger wore a school uniform from a different institution—dark blue instead of Jeremy High's colors—and carried himself with the careful stillness of someone who'd learned that movement attracts attention and attention brings pain.
"Can I—" Riyura started, trying to inject his usual cheerfulness into his voice. "Can I help you? The school's technically closed. If you're looking for someone—"
"I'm looking for Yachaziku Muzaki," the stranger said. His voice was soft but somehow threatening, like velvet wrapped around broken glass. Riyura's grip tightened on the broom handle.
"He's a teacher here. Are you a former student or—" "I'm his son." The words dropped like stones into still water. "His—" Riyura blinked. "Muzaki-sensei has a son?"
"Had," the stranger corrected. "Past tense. He stopped being a father around the same time he stopped being functional. I just came to see if the rumors were true. If he really is teaching again despite being—" A pause. "—despite being what he is. A filthy murderer."
The way he said it—clinical, detached, like discussing a broken appliance—made something cold settle in Riyura's heart.
"What's your name?" Riyura asked carefully.
The stranger tilted his head slightly, considering whether to answer. "Kaiju," he said finally. "Kaiju Minuwa. I took my mother's name after she left. Seemed appropriate. Cutting ties with failures."
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: Okay. Red flags. So many red flags. The way he talks about his father like an object. The emptiness in his eyes. The careful stillness that suggests violence held back by willpower alone. This person is dangerous. Not in the obvious way. In the way that creeps up slowly and destroys everything before you realize what's happening.]
"Why are you here?" Riyura asked, setting down the broom, positioning himself between Kaiju and the interior of the school without making it obvious.
"To observe," Kaiju replied simply. "To see if he's really still pretending to be human. Still pretending those twelve deaths actually meant something." His empty eyes fixed on Riyura.
"You're one of his students. Tell me—does he teach well? Does he function? Or does he just exist in front of a classroom, going through motions while his mind replays burning children? Because their death meant something, something that turned my life into literal hell and now It's effected my entire damned family."
The words were surgical in their cruelty. "He's—" Riyura tried to find words. "He's struggling. But he's trying. He shows up every day—" "Showing up isn't the same as living," Kaiju interrupted. "It's just a prolonged form of dying. Trust me. I watched him do it for years. I can tell he's the kind of person who would kill without hesitation. So he deserves his life to be literal hell."
He took a step forward. Riyura held his ground, though every instinct screamed to back away.
"After the crash," Kaiju continued, his voice still soft, still terrible, "my father stopped existing as a person. He became a grief machine. Wake up. Cry. Stare at walls. Apologize to people who weren't there. Repeat. Day after day. Year after year. For some foolish dead students."
His hands clenched slightly—the first real movement Riyura had seen from him.
"My mother tried. Jeez, she tried. Therapy. Medication. Support groups. Being a good wife. Nothing worked. He just kept sinking. And we—we were supposed to sink with him. Supposed to revolve our entire lives around his trauma while our own needs became invisible."
Kaiju's voice took on an edge.
"I was eleven when the crash happened. Eleven when I lost my father. Not to death—that would've been cleaner. I lost him to guilt. To ghosts. To twelve names he'd mutter in his sleep instead of talking to his actual living son."
"That must have been—" Riyura started. "Don't," Kaiju said sharply. "Don't sympathize. Don't try to understand. I don't want understanding. Understanding changes nothing."
He stepped closer, and Riyura could see it now—the carefully controlled rage beneath the empty exterior. Like a fire burning at the bottom of a frozen lake.
"My mother eventually left. Couldn't handle being married to a corpse. I went with her. We changed our names. Started over. Pretended we'd never been part of his life."
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"But you can't really escape trauma, can you? It follows. Infects. Becomes part of your DNA. I grew up watching my father destroy himself. Learned that emotions were dangerous. That caring led to collapse. That the safest way to exist was to feel nothing."
Kaiju's hand moved to his pocket, and Riyura tensed—but he only pulled out a phone.
"I've been watching the school for three days," Kaiju said, showing Riyura photos on his screen. Pictures of Muzaki arriving at school, leaving, sitting alone in empty classrooms. All taken from a distance with telephoto precision.
"Collecting data. Observing patterns. Trying to determine if he's genuinely trying to recover or just waiting to collapse again." "That's—" Riyura's voice hardened. "That's stalking. That's disturbing. You can't just—"
"Can't what?" Kaiju's expression didn't change. "Can't observe my own father? Can't try to predict when he'll inevitably fail again? Can't protect myself from being dragged into his next breakdown?"
He pocketed his phone.
"You seem like someone who cares. Someone who probably thinks he can help people by being aggressively optimistic and friendly. My father probably likes you. Probably feels like you're a reason to keep trying. Why he left his family to rot. And that truama carried with me and my mother. And now I wanna see that moron dead."
Kaiju took one more step, close enough now that Riyura could see the fine lines of exhaustion around his eyes.
"But here's what you need to understand: my father is broken beyond repair. Whatever you're trying to do—whatever light you think you're offering—it won't work. He's a black hole. He'll absorb your kindness and give nothing back. He'll take and take until you're as empty as he is."
"That's not—" Riyura protested. "It's true," Kaiju said flatly. "I know because I tried. For years. I tried being the perfect son. Getting good grades. Not causing problems. Being endlessly supportive. And you know what it got me?" His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper.
"A childhood spent tiptoeing around a ghost. A mother who left because she couldn't compete with dead students. And a psychological profile that includes 'emotional detachment,' 'trust issues,' and 'potential for violence when triggered.'"
The last phrase hung in the air like a threat.
"I'm not here to hurt anyone," Kaiju clarified, though his tone suggested otherwise. "I'm just here to observe. To document. To prove to myself that my decision to cut ties was correct."
He turned to leave, then paused at the doorway. "Tell my father I was here. Or don't. It won't change anything. He stopped seeing me as a son years ago. I'm just another name on his list of failures. But for some reason my emotions can't keep me away from the fool. I just want him to die and rot in a grave already."
"Wait—" Riyura called out. But Kaiju was already gone, disappearing into the winter evening like smoke dispersing into darkness. Riyura stood alone in the empty gymnasium, his heart pounding, his mind racing with questions and concerns and the terrible recognition of seeing someone else's trauma manifest as carefully controlled danger.
[NARRATOR: And that's our introduction to Kaiju Minuwa—the son who learned emotional shutdown as a survival strategy, who weaponized his pain into calculated distance, who carries his father's trauma like inherited poison. He's not a villain. Not exactly. He's something more complicated: a victim who's convinced that becoming empty is the same as becoming safe.]
The Report That Changed Everything
Riyura found Muzaki in the teacher's lounge, staring at a cup of cold coffee like it held answers. "Sensei," Riyura said carefully. "Someone was here. Looking for you." Muzaki's hand trembled slightly around the cup.
"Who?" "He said his name was Kaiju. Kaiju Minuwa. He said—" Riyura paused, unsure how to deliver this. "He said he was your son." The coffee cup slipped from Muzaki's hands.
It hit the floor with a crash that seemed impossibly loud in the quiet room, brown liquid spreading across linoleum like spilled thoughts.
Muzaki didn't move to clean it. Didn't acknowledge it had happened. Just stared at the spreading stain with eyes that had gone even more hollow than usual.
"Kaiju," he whispered. "He's here. Why is he here?" "He said he was observing you. To see if—" Riyura struggled with the words. "—to see if you were still broken." Muzaki laughed. A terrible sound—sharp and broken and completely devoid of humor.
"Still broken. Of course I'm still broken. I'll always be broken. And he—" His voice broke. "He knows that better than anyone. He watched me break. Watched me fail as a father while trying to process failing as a teacher. Watched me choose ghost children over my living son."
He looked up at Riyura with eyes that held nothing but guilt layered upon guilt. "I don't blame him for leaving. For taking his mother's name. For cutting ties. It was the healthy choice. The smart choice. I was—I am—toxic. Everything I touch turns to ash." "That's not—" Riyura tried.
"It is," Muzaki interrupted. "You don't understand. After the crash, I couldn't—couldn't function as a parent. Couldn't see Kaiju without seeing the twelve who died. He was eleven. Alive. Growing. And I resented him for it."
The admission came out like vomit—awful and necessary. "I resented my own son for being alive when twelve others weren't. How's that for parental failure? How's that for destroying relationships?" He stood slowly, navigating around the spilled coffee without really seeing it.
"If Kaiju's here, it's not for closure. It's not for reconciliation. He's here to confirm what he already knows—that I'm still the same broken failure who couldn't save students and couldn't be a good father."
Muzaki walked toward the door, his movements mechanical.
"Don't try to help him, Riyura. Don't try to fix our relationship. Some things are meant to stay broken. Some distances are permanent. Got it kid." He left. And Riyura stood in the teacher's lounge, staring at spilled coffee and feeling the weight of accumulated trauma—parents, their children, and now his own secondhand grief for both.
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: This is worse than I thought. This isn't just one broken person. It's generational trauma. A father who can't heal infecting his son with patterns of emotional shutdown and isolation. And I—I don't know how to help either of them. Don't even know if help is possible when the damage runs this deep.]
The Confrontation That Never Happened
That evening, Riyura convinced his friends to help him search for Kaiju. They split up across the school grounds, checking every hiding spot, every corner where someone might observe without being observed. Yakamira found him first—sitting on a bench outside the school gates, perfectly still, watching the building like a scientist studying a specimen.
"Kaiju Minuwa," Yakamira said, his analytical mind already assessing threat levels. "Son of Yachaziku Muzaki. Age approximately seventeen. Demonstrates signs of emotional detachment, trauma response, and potential violent ideation."
Kaiju turned his empty glass eyes toward him. "You must be Riyura's brother. The one who tried to kill him. The one who's learning to be human again after years of perfectionist isolation."
Yakamira's expression didn't change, but something flickered in his pale gray eyes. "How did you—" "I research," Kaiju said simply. "Before coming here, I learned everything about Jeremy High. Its students. Its patterns. Its collection of broken people pretending to be functional." He stood slowly.
"You're all the same. Trauma survivors clinging to each other because misery loves company. Thinking that shared pain creates bonds. But all it really does is spread the infection."
The rest of the group arrived—Riyura, Miyaka, Subarashī, Shoehead, Headayami—forming a loose circle around Kaiju, not threatening but present. "Why are you really here?" Riyura asked. "It's not just observation. You want something."
Kaiju was quiet for a long moment.
"I want to know if he's worth saving," he said finally, his voice so soft it was almost lost in the winter wind. "My father. I want to know if there's anything left of the person he was before the crash. Before the guilt. Before he chose ghosts over his living family."
His hands clenched.
"Because if there is—if there's even a fragment of the person who used to read me bedtime stories and teach me about constellations and laugh at stupid jokes—then maybe I was wrong to leave. Maybe I abandoned him when he needed me most."
The emptiness in his eyes cracked slightly, revealing something raw underneath. "But if there's not—if he's truly just a shell going through motions—then I need to know that too. Need confirmation that walking away was mercy, not cruelty."
"So you're here for yourself," Miyaka said quietly. "Not for him."
"Yes," Kaiju admitted without shame. "I'm here for myself. Because his trauma has been defining my life for six years and I need—I need to know if I can finally stop carrying it." Riyura stepped forward carefully.
"What if the answer is both?" he said. "What if he's broken but still has fragments worth saving? What if he's not the father you remember but not completely gone either?"
Kaiju's eyes narrowed.
"Then what? I'm supposed to build a relationship with a fraction of a person? Accept scraps of childhood for when I deserved a whole parent?" "Maybe," Riyura said. "Or maybe you walk away again. But at least you'd know. Really know. Instead of spending years haunted by questions."
The winter wind picked up, carrying away words that didn't have answers anyway.
Kaiju looked at them all—this collection of damaged teenagers who'd somehow found each other—and something in his carefully constructed emptiness shifted.
"I'll think about it," he said finally. "But I'm not promising anything. Not forgiveness. Not reconciliation. Just... consideration." He walked away into the darkening evening, leaving the group standing in confused silence. "That went better than expected," Subarashī said eventually.
"Did it?" Shoehead replied. "Because from where I'm standing, we just met someone on the edge of either healing or breaking completely. And we have no idea which way he'll fall."
Riyura watched Kaiju's retreating figure disappear into shadows. "Neither does he," Riyura whispered. "That's what makes it terrifying."
[NARRATOR: And so we've planted the seeds for the next phase of this tragedy. Father and son, both drowning in separate oceans of grief, close enough to reach each other but not knowing if they should. Kaiju represents what happens when childhood trauma calcifies into high school days emotional shutdown. When self-protection becomes self-destruction. When the only way to survive pain is to stop feeling anything at all. Volume 2's climax is building. And when it breaks, it's going to shatter everyone involved.]
TO BE CONTINUED...