The night had deepened. Along the tree-lined path of Advanced Nurturing High School, the amber glow of the streetlamps stretched the two figures' shadows long across the pavement.
Sakayanagi Arisu was leaning the better part of her weight against the boy beside her. Every step she took required him to slow his pace to match hers.
This kind of helplessness — the kind that forced her to depend on another person — would normally be enough to irritate a proud queen like her to no end.
But right now, her mood was unexpectedly, almost disturbingly light.
...So that's what it feels like. Healthy legs.
It had only been a simulation. A phantom that lasted all of a few minutes.
And yet the memory was still vivid, still warm — a poison she found herself already craving another taste of.
Looking back over her sixteen-odd years of life, Sakayanagi Arisu had rarely, if ever, felt the sting of regret.
The weakness that came with her congenital heart condition had stolen from her the simple right that other children took for granted — to run freely beneath the open sky.
But when God closes a door, He opens a window.
Precisely because strenuous physical activity was beyond her, she had been given something most people never earn: time. More time than ordinary people could imagine — time to think, to read, to see through the skin of the world and into its bones.
And so she had become what the world called a prodigy. In every pair of eyes that looked at her, she saw the same word written: genius.
Until the day she had been brought to that white room. And there, she had seen him — an existence stripped of all emotion, flawless as a machine. The greatest masterpiece. An artificial genius.
As a swan born to carry the weight of a truly superior bloodline, as someone who had never once doubted her own innate gifts — she could not, and would not, accept something so absurd.
The idea that an ordinary person, through sheer accumulated effort, could surpass the gift one was born with? Laughable. Unacceptable. A heresy against everything she knew to be true.
A true genius was not bound by the body.
And so she had to bury that imitation. Prove, once and for all, the absolute supremacy of bloodline and natural talent.
That was supposed to be the only pleasure worth having across her three years of high school.
But now...
Sakayanagi tilted her chin up slightly, her gaze sliding past Chris's shoulder toward the vast night sky above — and, in the void, toward the black sphere that was no longer there.
As long as I earn enough points...
...even this broken shell of a body can be remade?
If her original fixation on Ayanokoji had been about proving the superiority of natural talent, then what stood before her now was something far more intoxicating: the opportunity to become something truly perfect.
Fill in the last missing piece. Become an unblemished god.
The thought bloomed through her, and the smile at the corner of her lips deepened — until a feverish, almost delirious flush crept into her expression, and the smile took on something faintly unhinged.
That smile, naturally, did not escape the notice of the boy whose arm she was holding onto.
"...Sakayanagi-san."
Chris stopped walking.
"I'm perfectly happy playing the gentleman. But this is obviously not the way back to the dorms."
"It's the middle of the night. Where exactly are you trying to go?"
He paused, his tone taking on a faintly bemused edge:
"Besides, we're not close enough for this, are we? By any reasonable logic, at this point you should be finding some excuse to ditch me before a passing classmate gets the wrong idea."
"Oh?"
Sakayanagi smoothed away the wildness that had been flickering in her eyes. Those pale violet irises seemed to soften, as though a faint mist had settled over them.
She didn't answer the question about their destination. Instead, she reached out and lightly caught the edge of his sleeve between two fingers, her voice taking on a quiet, almost mournful lilt:
"We were fighting side by side just a little while ago. And now you're in such a hurry to put distance between us?"
"Or perhaps..."
She let the pause hang, her voice going soft and honeyed:
"...you've already grown tired of me? This quickly?"
"We've barely even begun..."
"..."
Chris watched this textbook performance of weaponized fragility and gave a slow, silent roll of his eyes.
Tired of her?
This isn't even a route unlock yet. You can't get tired of something that hasn't started.
That was what he thought. What he showed on his face was considerably less.
He let Sakayanagi's little probe go without comment, and redirected his gaze toward the path ahead.
There — the blue-grey stone pavement. The side entrance to the convenience store. The very spot where, not long ago, they had fought a Parasyte.
And yet.
The ground that should have been soaked red with Ryuuen Kakeru's blood was spotless. As clean as if the rain had only just washed it.
Even the vending machine that had been cleaved in half by the Parasyte stood there, completely intact, humming quietly to itself as though nothing had ever happened.
Everything had been reset.
As if the entire thing had been nothing more than a shared, feverish hallucination.
Chris went quiet for two seconds. One eyebrow ticked upward, and a flicker of what looked like genuine surprise passed across his face.
"...Completely untouched, huh..."
"Now that really is... monstrous."
That brief, subtle shift in expression did not escape Sakayanagi Arisu.
Such a polished performance. Such a transparent one.
The girl laughed quietly to herself.
There wasn't the faintest trace of real surprise in those eyes — and yet he wore the face of a man struck with wonder. Just like the other product of that white room. Both of them were the same kind of thing: something fundamentally inhuman, wearing the skin of a person.
But then again...
Since we're both artificial monsters of a kind — I'll let you serve as my very first whetstone, once I've finished filling in my own flaws.
Her mind made up, Sakayanagi dropped the pretense of delicate fragility.
"We both know perfectly well that what happened just now was not a hallucination."
"A large-scale restructuring of physical matter — compared to the instant teleportation that dragged us into that sealed space, this is hardly worth marveling at, don't you think?"
She tilted her gaze toward the glowing sign of the twenty-four-hour convenience store ahead:
"Rather than standing here in awe... isn't the more pressing matter confirming whether that store clerk still exists?"
Chris gave a small nod. He didn't argue.
The two of them walked arm in arm toward the convenience store, unhurried.
They hadn't even reached the entrance before a familiar figure stepped out to block their path.
"Hey. Ryuuen."
Chris spoke first. Sakayanagi took one look at Ryuuen Kakeru's storm-shifting expression and let out a soft, pointed laugh.
"It seems we no longer need to bother checking, Chris-kun."
"As expected — a grudge over being cut in half turns out to be a stronger pull than any desire for the truth."
"..."
Ryuuen Kakeru turned at the sound. His bloodshot eyes locked onto Sakayanagi and stayed there — and for once, remarkably, he didn't explode.
"That mouth of yours..."
Chris let out a quiet sigh. "If he actually hits you, don't look at me."
"My, how cold-blooded."
Sakayanagi feigned a startled gasp and covered her lips with one hand, her tone utterly without remorse:
"A cripple like me could hardly outrun a meathead who isn't weighed down by any baggage, could I?"
"I'm sorry, Chris-kun. I'm afraid I'd only slow you down."
"Shut up, cripple."
Ryuuen's jaw tightened slightly — as though even the energy to be properly furious had been wrung out of him.
His voice, when he spoke, was rough and hoarse. The blade-sharp edge he usually wore like armour was nowhere to be found tonight.
"...He doesn't remember anything."
Ryuuen turned half away from them, his voice dropping to something low and unsettling.
"Looks like his memory's been rewritten. He thinks he just got back from a day off and came in for a night shift."
"Oh my," Sakayanagi murmured. "Then he's currently..."
Ryuuen didn't answer right away.
He took a few steps to the side and looked through the glass window — at the young clerk behind the register, who was smiling pleasantly as he scanned a customer's items, looking every bit the picture of an honest, unremarkable young man.
The monster whose head had split open like a blooming flower less than an hour ago.
"For the moment... I'd say he still qualifies as 'human.'"
"If a thing with that kind of nature knew it had been exposed, it would absolutely clean up any loose ends — anything that knew too much."
"But just now, when it saw me, it smiled and asked if I wanted to buy a discounted bento that was about to expire..."
Ryuuen let the sentence trail off there.
But neither Sakayanagi nor Chris needed him to finish it. The dark, unreadable look in his eyes said everything that the words didn't.
Silence settled over the three of them.
Sakayanagi knew it clearly: her father, for all his authority as the school's chairman, held no power over something like this. Nothing that could rewrite memory at will, or stitch reality back together as though it had never been torn.
This only confirmed what she already suspected about the force behind the black sphere — it was something on an entirely different scale.
As for Chris — he simply didn't care. Not in the way the others did.
For the major players from the original story, he held onto a sliver of humanitarian consideration: pulling them into the sphere's space when their lives were on the line, patching them up, returning them in one piece — rather than quietly replacing them with a copy.
But for the nameless, faceless people who had already 'died' in this sprawling world? The ones he thought of as reset NPCs?
This was the extent of what he could do. Anything more wasn't necessary.
The atmosphere had settled into a strange, uncomfortable silence — and that was when a mildly surprised female voice broke through it from the direction of the convenience store entrance.
"...Huh?"
Kamuro Masumi stepped out of the store, a convenience-store bento in hand — and promptly stopped dead.
There was her princess. The one who was normally so impossibly poised, so above it all.
Leaning against a complete stranger with absolutely zero concern for appearances.
The sheer intimacy of it caught Kamuro so off guard that she nearly dropped her freshly-purchased dinner straight onto the pavement.
Oh no.
Did I just see something I was absolutely not supposed to see?
____
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