Yuuto Pov:
The world has a habit of muffling sound when you don't expect it. One moment, my heart was a frantic bird beating against the cage of my ribs, and the grimy wall of the gym was cold against my back. The next, a voice cut through the noise—a voice like chilled steel.
It belonged to Rin Kanzaki.
Her shadow fell over us, an eclipse in a school uniform. She didn't look angry. She didn't look anything at all. That was the terrifying part. Her face was a placid lake, and you just knew that somewhere, deep beneath the surface, a monster slept.
The lead delinquent, a third-year whose name I'd never bothered to learn, took an involuntary step back. His bravado evaporated like morning mist. "K-Kanzaki… What's it to you?" he stammered, trying and failing to sound tough.
Kanzaki didn't even glance at him. Her dark, intense eyes were fixed on the space just over his shoulder, as if he were nothing more than a mild obstruction. "One," she said, her voice dangerously quiet.
The boy's friends were already shuffling their feet, looking for an escape route. They exchanged panicked glances. This wasn't the easy shakedown they had planned.
"We were just talking," the leader mumbled, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
"Two," Kanzaki said, and this time, she took a single, deliberate step forward. The motion was fluid, economical, and filled with a terrifying promise.
That was all it took. The leader squeaked, a sound wholly undignified, and practically tripped over his own feet to get away. His two cronies scattered like startled pigeons. In less than five seconds, the space was empty. The lingering scent of cheap cologne and fear was all that remained of them.
And then there was just her. And me.
The silence that descended was somehow louder than the confrontation itself. Rin Kanzaki stood there for a moment, her posture perfectly straight, her hands unclenched at her sides. The late afternoon sun caught the edge of her sharp jawline. She looked like a statue carved from iron and ice.
Then, without a word, without even a glance in my direction, she turned and walked away. Her long, black ponytail swung behind her, a single, decisive slash in the air.
My throat was dry. I watched her retreating back, the crisp lines of her uniform shrinking with distance. My book, a well-loved copy of Soseki's Kokoro, lay face-down on the dusty concrete. I bent to retrieve it, my fingers trembling slightly as I brushed a smudge of dirt from the cover.
"Th-thank you," I managed to call out, my voice barely a whisper.
But she was already gone.
I wasn't built for confrontation. My body was a fragile piece of architecture, prone to sudden, inconvenient collapses. A childhood spent more in hospital waiting rooms than on playgrounds had taught me the art of avoidance. My chronic condition wasn't dramatic or tragic, not in the way of the novels I loved to read. It was simply… limiting. A low-grade fever that never quite broke, a persistent ache in my chest that warned me against running, against shouting, against feeling too much of anything all at once.
So, I'd learned to live in the margins.
As I walked back through the now-empty school corridors, the echo of my own footsteps sounded lonely. I was used to it. I ate lunch alone on the roof, not out of some brooding desire for isolation, but because it was easier than explaining why I couldn't share a bento box heavy with fried food. I spent breaks in the library, not because I was antisocial, but because the quiet hum of the air conditioner was kinder to my lungs than the boisterous chaos of the classroom.
People in Class 2-A didn't bully me. They didn't even dislike me. They mostly just… forgot I was there. I wasn't invisible. I was just… out of focus. A background character in the vibrant, noisy story of their high school lives.
And that was fine. I had my books. I had my quiet corners. I had mastered the art of being unobtrusive.
Which was why Rin Kanzaki's intervention made no sense.
She was the absolute center of every room she entered. The Iron Queen. Kanzaki the Crusher. She was a creature of myth and legend, a focal point of fear and admiration. We occupied not just different social circles, but different universes.
Statistically speaking, I had a better chance of being struck by lightning than of being noticed by someone like Rin Kanzaki. And yet… here we were.
Why? The question circled in my head, a stubborn moth fluttering against a windowpane. Why would she, a being of overwhelming physical presence, bother with someone defined by his physical absence? It didn't compute. It was like watching a hawk swoop down to protect a field mouse from a couple of loud sparrows. It was a disruption in the natural order of things.
The library was my sanctuary. It smelled of old paper, lemon-scented wood polish, and silence. The tall shelves were like ancient trees in a sacred forest, their branches heavy with the fruit of a thousand stories. Here, the frantic rhythm of the outside world slowed to a gentle, steady heartbeat.
"Amamiya-kun, you're here late today."
I looked up from the checkout counter to see Mrs. Sato, the school librarian. She was a small, kind woman in her late fifties, with laugh lines around her eyes and a cardigan permanently draped over her shoulders, even in the summer.
"Just returning this," I said, sliding the book across the counter.
She scanned the barcode, her eyes twinkling. "Did you eat? You look a little more pale than usual."
"I'm fine, Sato-sensei. Just… thinking."
"Thinking doesn't fill the stomach," she said with a gentle sigh, stamping the book. "At least have a juice box before you go home. My treat." She gestured to a small fridge she kept behind the desk for emergencies, which, in her mind, included quiet boys who read too much.
"Thank you."
I took a seat at my usual carrel by the far window, a carton of apple juice in my hand. I tried to lose myself in a new book, a collection of poetry this time, but the words swam on the page, refusing to form coherent thoughts.
Instead of stanzas and verses, I saw a flash of dark eyes. I heard a low, steady voice counting down.
"One… Two…"
It was the calmest threat I had ever heard. There was no anger in it, no theatrical rage. Just a simple statement of fact. If you do not move, I will break you. It was the voice of someone who understood her own strength so completely that she had no need to embellish it.
I kept circling back to that moment our eyes had met in the classroom this morning. I'd felt it then, too. A flicker of something that wasn't fear. It was… recognition? No, that wasn't right. It was as if she had looked at me and seen, for a fraction of a second, not just a pale boy by the window, but a person.
And my own heart, that traitorous, unreliable muscle, had given a strange little lurch in response.
My condition meant I was permanently excused from P.E. class. Usually, I would spend the period in the infirmary, reading on one of the cots. But today, a restless energy I couldn't explain had me sitting in the library, my gaze fixed on the sports field below.
It was a clear, bright afternoon. The rest of Class 2-A was engaged in a chaotic game of soccer, their shouts and laughter drifting up through the open window.
But my eyes were on a solitary figure at the far end of the track.
Rin Kanzaki wasn't participating in the game. She was practicing kicks against a worn-out striking pad held by the gym teacher, who looked both impressed and slightly terrified. Her movements were mesmerizing. Each kick was a study in controlled violence, a whip-crack of motion that started at her hip and ended with a solid, echoing thwack against the pad. There was no wasted energy, no superfluous flair.
She moved like a storm in perfect form—every motion restrained thunder.
Watching her, I saw more than just power. I saw discipline. I saw repetition. I saw a loneliness that felt startlingly familiar. The other students gave her a wide berth, their game stopping whenever she moved too close. She was among them, but not with them. Her focus was so absolute, so intensely internal, it created its own impenetrable barrier.
We're not so different, the thought came, unbidden. My walls are made of glass and fragile health. Hers are made of iron and sinew. But we're both just prisoners of our own design.
As if she could hear my thoughts from across the field, her practice came to a sudden halt. She stood straight, brushing a strand of dark hair from her face, and her head turned. Her gaze swept across the school building, past the empty classrooms, and then, impossibly, it stopped on the library window.
On me.
Our eyes met.
This time, it wasn't a fleeting, one-second glance. It was a sustained connection across a hundred meters of open air. I couldn't read her expression from this distance, but I knew she saw me. And for the first time, I didn't feel the urge to look away. Something unspoken, a silent acknowledgment of… something, passed between us. The moment stretched, thin and humming, before the gym teacher said something and she turned back to the pad, her focus instantly restored.
My breath escaped me in a slow, shaky exhale. The apple juice sat forgotten on the desk, its sweetness lost on me.
Later, when the final bell had rung and the school had mostly emptied out, I was still in the library. The world outside the window had softened into the orange and purple hues of twilight. The air was calm. My thoughts had finally settled. Rin Kanzaki was still a puzzle, but she was no longer a disruptive one. She was just… a new, unexpected variable in the quiet equation of my life.
I was deep into my book, the words finally holding their shape, when a shadow fell across the page.
My head snapped up.
Standing on the other side of my carrel was Rin Kanzaki. She was in her school uniform, her bag slung over her shoulder. Her presence filled the small, quiet space, making the air feel thick and charged.
In her hand, she was holding my copy of Kokoro.
She placed it gently on the desk between us. It made a soft, final sound against the wood.
"You dropped this," she said. Her voice, without the backdrop of a threat, was just a low, neutral hum.
I stared at the book, then back at her. My mind went completely blank. All the poetic observations, all the quiet analysis, evaporated. "...You kept it?" The words came out sounding breathless, stupid.
A barely perceptible shrug lifted one of her shoulders. "Wasn't mine to throw away."
A beat of silence passed. My heart was doing that frantic bird thing again. I had to say something. Anything.
"Thanks," I managed, my voice steadier this time. "For earlier. I didn't… expect that."
Her gaze was direct, unwavering. It was like being pinned by a beam of light. For a long moment, she just looked at me, and I felt as if she were seeing every weakness, every frailty I had spent a lifetime trying to hide. Then, her expression shifted, just a fraction. It wasn't pity. It was something harder to define.
"Next time," she said, her tone flat and final, "don't let yourself get surrounded like that."