The Weight of the Backpack
The school hallways of Seiho High were a torrent of sound and color, but for Akazuchi, they were just noise. At thirteen years old, he was already an expert at occupying negative space, clinging to the edges of the walls like a shadow. His posture was a permanent slump, his eyes downcast, shielded by a curtain of unkempt dark hair. Every step was a conscious effort, his backpack—filled with heavy textbooks and his perpetually battered coding laptop—feeling less like a carrier of tools and more like a sack of stones tethered to his back.
He saw himself as an outsider, a designation he'd earned and now cultivated with deliberate, defensive silence. He'd learned quickly that if you showed people you didn't care about social connection, they were less likely to try and break you.
His latest defense mechanism was his "bad outlook." If someone accidentally brushed past him, he wouldn't apologize or flinch; he would simply stare ahead with an expression of profound, weary disgust, as if the intrusion was an offense against the natural order of his misery. This intentional aloofness usually sent others scrambling away, confirming his belief that closeness led only to pain.
Today, however, the target practice was particularly cruel.
The Logic Gate of Despair
Akazuchi was sitting alone during the lunch break in the library's furthest corner, his coding laptop open. The screen glowed with lines of clean, elegant Python—the language that spoke to his soul.
Code was life. Code was perfect. It followed rules. It didn't lie, it didn't betray, and it offered infinite possibilities within its defined parameters. His dream wasn't just to be a great coder; it was to be an Architect of Imagination, using code to create immersive worlds that could release others from the shells of everyday society and bring genuine, unburdened smiles.
He was currently working on a simple 8-bit game, a tiny project about a lonely star traveling through a colorful nebula, searching for its twin. It was simple, bright, and an agonizingly hopeful reflection of the connection he longed for but feared.
A sharp, painful THWACK against the back of his head snapped him out of the nebula.
His laptop wobbled, threatening to crash. His heart seized. He didn't turn around. He just tensed, waiting.
"Look, the Crypt Keeper is actually alive!" sneered the voice of Tetsuo, a thick-necked bully known for his dull mind and casual cruelty. Tetsuo and his two laughing cronies stood over him, their shadows falling across Akazuchi's fragile star.
Tetsuo snatched a small, spiral-bound notebook—Akazuchi's dream journal where he sketched game concepts and wrote algorithmic poems.
"What's this? 'The Binary Dream'?" Tetsuo laughed, tossing the book to his friend, who fumbled it near a spilled juice box. "This freak wants to be a coder! What are you going to code, Akazuchi? A program to make people hate you faster?"
Akazuchi finally looked up, his face a mask of stone. He didn't plead. He didn't beg. He simply glared, injecting all the raw, self-loathing conviction he had into the silent message: Go away. You are not worth my energy.
But today, Tetsuo was dedicated. He snatched the laptop. "Nah, I bet he's coding something super stupid, right?"
Akazuchi's carefully constructed shell cracked. That laptop was his lifeline, his refuge. "Give it back," he managed, his voice a dry, reedy whisper that broke.
"Oh, the Crypt Keeper speaks!" Tetsuo mocked, holding the laptop high. He saw the open code. "What is this, space garbage? Look at these lines of nonsense! Why don't you code yourself some friends, freak? Maybe a friend who doesn't smell?"
Tetsuo made a wide, sweeping gesture, and in that moment of clumsy showing-off, the heavy laptop slipped. It hit the corner of the table with a sickening CRACK before tumbling to the floor.
Akazuchi didn't move. The world went silent. It wasn't the sound of the crash that hurt; it was the sudden, devastating finality of the broken machine. His gateway to imagination, his only stable world, was now just a pile of plastic and shattered pixels.
Tetsuo and his friends, momentarily stunned by the destruction, quickly lost interest and sauntered off, laughing about the "accident."
Akazuchi slowly sank to his knees, his hands trembling as he gathered the pieces. The screen was cracked, the hinge snapped, the hard drive making a quiet, ominous click, click, click sound.
Is this it? The thought echoed in the silent, hollow core of his heart. The universe rejecting the dream?
The Trauma's Root
The pain of the broken laptop wasn't new; it was merely the latest iteration of a pattern that began a year ago.
The trauma wasn't a single explosive event like Hikata's; it was a slow, systemic poisoning by shame and failure, starting when Akazuchi was twelve years old.
He remembered the early days of high school: hopeful, bright-eyed, already coding dazzling, simple apps and games for his phone. He wanted to share the wonder of binary worlds. But his attempts at connection were met with ridicule. His quiet demeanor, his intense focus, and his inability to read social cues made him an easy target.
He tried to share his passion. He tried to show his code—the elegant, beautiful logic that brought worlds to life. But the other kids saw it as weird, incomprehensible, and a reason to mock.
Memory Flash 1 (The Rejection): He showed a group of kids his star-travel game, hoping for collaboration. They just laughed. "It's just dots, Akazuchi. You think that's cool? Go outside. Get a life." He was trying to offer them the key to his imagination, and they threw it in the dirt.
Memory Flash 2 (The Physical Humiliation): The bullying escalated. Not just words, but physical shoves, tripped legs, and the calculated destruction of his schoolwork. They called him the "Logic Loser."
The worst part wasn't the pain he felt, but the pain he inflicted on his family.
His parents, good-natured but deeply stressed, reacted with frantic worry. They tried to fix him with money and resources. They bought him new clothes (which the bullies immediately ruined). They bought him better, more expensive laptops (which only made the bullies more jealous). They enrolled him in expensive coding boot camps and therapy sessions, sacrificing their own financial stability.
Akazuchi remembered the tension in their small home: his mother crying over the bills, his father drinking late into the night, both of them constantly arguing over whether they were failing their son.
The emotional gruesomeness: Akazuchi, seeing his parents slowly crumbling under the stress of trying to fix him, started to believe he was the bug in the system. He decided that to save them, he had to be an intentional outsider—a broken child they could eventually give up on without guilt. His despair became a perverse form of self-sacrifice.
I am the problem. If I push them away, they will stop suffering.
The Path Forward, Powered by Code
Hours later, the rain was falling hard, a cold, miserable curtain washing over the city. Akazuchi was walking home, the broken pieces of his laptop wrapped in a plastic bag. His dream felt like it was dying, drowned by the water and the sheer hopelessness of his present.
Give up. Just let the shell close entirely. The logic is sound: coding brings joy, but expressing that joy brings pain. Therefore, stop expressing.
He heard his mother's distant, tearful voice in his head: "Just keep going, sweetie. You love it. Don't let them take that."
He looked at his soggy plastic bag. Inside, amidst the broken plastic, was a flash drive—the perfect, preserved code for the lonely star game. The logic was sound, the binary was clean, and the dream still existed.
He stopped under the meager shelter of a decaying awning. His despair was a heavy, physical weight, but the existence of that code—the proof of his internal, untainted world—was a tiny, stubborn source of warmth.
I love coding.
He loved the way logic could birth infinity. He loved the way a simple line of code could create a vibrant color or a moving world. He loved it so much that the physical pain, the bullying, the isolation, and even the financial strain on his family, couldn't completely extinguish the internal flame. He was moving forward anyways, despite all the suffering. His dream of using coding to bring genuine smiles was still the brightest light in his dark life.
He kept walking, shoulders still slumped, heading toward the only place he thought might offer a chance to fix the core components: the local electronics repair shop.
But the rain was too hard. The street was too flooded.
The Shelter and the Serendipity
Akazuchi was forced to take shelter. He ducked into the nearest covered entrance, a small awning extending from a worn-looking storefront. It wasn't the electronics shop. It was an weary, slightly dusty place with a faded sign: Hukitaske Pharmacy.
It looked glossy and easy to enter, but a single, soft light glowed inside.
Akazuchi leaned against the wall, shaking off the rain, cradling his broken machine. He was still lost in the binary logic of despair. He knew he was a failure. He knew he was a burden. He knew his code was probably meaningless.
He looked up at the sign, then through the window. Inside, a lone figure stood behind a counter, meticulously wiping down glass beakers. The person was tall, with striking blue hair and intense violet eyes.
It was Akio Hukitaske.
Akio looked up, his movements clean and precise, like an elegantly written algorithm. His intense gaze swept over Akazuchi, not with judgment, but with the familiar Pharmacist's Insight—the chemical diagnosis. Akazuchi, covered in rain, despair, and the shame of his broken dream, felt instantly exposed, but not mocked.
Akio spoke, his voice low and devoid of unnecessary inflection, cutting through the sound of the rain.
"Your external structure is compromised," Akio stated, not as a question, but a fact. He gestured to the plastic bag. "And your core operating unit is damaged. Do you seek a repair, or simply a dry harbor?"
Akazuchi could only stare. He wasn't confused by the words, but by the lack of malice. This wasn't bullying; it was an observation.
"I... I need a repair," Akazuchi mumbled, clutching the bag tighter. He had come here because of the rain, but he was about to meet the only person who would ever understand that his "repair" wasn't just physical.
The journey has begun, driven by the binary logic of despair and the desperate need for a patch.
(The screen cuts to black.)...