[MA 15+ - Contains graphic violence, body horror, psychological manipulation, and extreme distress, and suicide]
The sun died slowly behind Tokyo's skyline, bleeding out in shades of bruised orange and deep purple that painted the concrete in colors that reminded Mahitaro too much of blood. He walked with his hands buried deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched against a weight that had nothing to do with his backpack, everything to do with the accumulated trauma of multiple deaths.
The cut on his cheek throbbed with each heartbeat—a dull, persistent reminder that the red-haired student was real, that he could be hurt, and most importantly, that some things could persist across the loop's boundaries. He'd checked it obsessively throughout the day, fingers tracing the crusted edge of the wound, half-expecting it to vanish and prove he'd imagined everything after reseting.
But it remained. Proof. Evidence, that he may have been looping to much, and that's why even though he looped again. The scar remained. A gift and a curse from looping in a such short amount of days. Or maybe it was because he was not obeying the rules of time itself. And that was his punishment for relying on such a curse for help from looping. Somehow still there. Today, he had a plan. Barisu Vultari.
The name had become a mantra, repeated in his mind during the endless hours when sleep wouldn't come. A student famous since childhood for his theories about temporal anomalies and impossible physics. Mahitaro had studied him from a distance for days—memorizing his schedule, his mannerisms, the way he spoke about reality like it was a puzzle to be solved rather than an absolute truth to be accepted.
If anyone could help him understand the nightmare he was trapped in, it would be Barisu. If I can just explain it, Mahitaro thought as he walked. If I can make someone else understand, then maybe—
He didn't let himself finish that thought. Hope was still too dangerous.
The library greeted him with its familiar atmosphere—dust suspended in columns of fading light, the papery smell of slowly decomposing knowledge, the muffled quiet that made even breathing seem intrusive.
Mahitaro spotted Barisu immediately, hunched over a scarred wooden table in the far corner. His black hair was deliberately messy in that way that suggested either careful styling or complete neglect—Mahitaro suspected the latter. Textbooks surrounded him in defensive walls, pages covered in annotations so dense they looked like abstract art.
This was it. The moment Mahitaro had been preparing for, rehearsing in his mind through countless variations. He would approach, explain the loops, show the wound on his cheek as proof, convince Barisu to help him unravel the pattern.
Simple. Direct. Impossible to misunderstand. Mahitaro took three steps toward the table, his mouth already forming the first words—and then something wrapped around his heart.
Not metaphorically. Not the familiar crushing sensation of anxiety or the hollow ache of depression. This was physical, immediate, wrong. Something cold and substantial pressed against his ribs from the inside, fingers—if they could be called fingers—digging into the muscle of his heart with deliberate pressure.
Mahitaro gasped, the sound strangled, his hand flying to his heart. The sensation was impossible but undeniable—a presence inside his ribcage, squeezing, not quite painful enough to stop his heart but threatening to.
And he could see it.
Through his shirt, somehow visible despite every law of anatomy—a shadow. Dark and pulsing and distinctly hand-shaped, its form flickering like static, but unmistakably there. Unmistakably intentional.
The shadow's outline was familiar in a way that made his stomach turn. The particular shape of the fingers, the casual cruelty in how they gripped—this was the red-haired student's hand, reaching across space or dimensions or whatever impossible boundary separated them, and delivering a message more clear than words:
Do not speak. Not a word. The quistion was why. But that was for another story.
Mahitaro's knees almost gave out. His vision tunneled, spots dancing at the edges. The library sounds—Barisu's pencil scratching, pages turning, someone coughing in another aisle—all seemed to come from very far away.
He tried to speak anyway, forcing air past the constriction in his throat. "I need—"
The shadow squeezed. Hard. His heart skipped, then stuttered into an irregular rhythm that sent panic flooding through every nerve. The pain was exquisite, precise, a demonstration of exactly how easily he could be killed without the red-haired student even being present.
The words died on his lips.
Mahitaro clutched his ribs, trying to look natural, trying not to collapse in the middle of the library floor. His breathing came in shallow gasps. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
He's watching, the realization arrived with sick certainty. Somehow, he's watching. He knows what I'm trying to do, and he won't allow it. All from the sound of my breaths. Even though I know he's not actually here. Otherwise I would sense his dark precense.
The shadow lingered for several more seconds—warning, threat, promise—then dissipated as suddenly as it had appeared. The pressure released. His heart resumed its normal rhythm, though it hammered now with adrenaline and terror in equal measure.
Mahitaro stood frozen, one hand still pressed against his stomach, staring at Barisu who remained oblivious, lost in his textbooks and theories about realities that were tame compared to the nightmare Mahitaro inhabited.
The direct approach was impossible. Literally, physically impossible. The red-haired student had made that abundantly clear. But Mahitaro hadn't survived multiple deaths by giving up easily.
If he couldn't tell the truth directly, he'd have to find another way.
He forced his breathing to steady, counted to ten, then twenty, until the trembling in his hands subsided to something manageable. The depression that had been his constant companion surged back with renewed force—you're trapped, you're helpless, nothing you do matters—but he pushed back against it with something that felt almost like spite.
No, he thought with brittle determination. I've survived worse. I'll find a way around this.
Mahitaro approached Barisu's table again, this time with his words carefully chosen, deliberately vague. He crafted a smile—small, practiced, designed to hide the void underneath.
"Hey." His voice came out quieter than intended but steady enough. "I think you might be able to help me with something."
Barisu looked up, eyes sharp behind his reading glasses, suspicion flickering across his features. He was used to being approached for homework help or as a curiosity, Mahitaro realized. Not many people took his theories seriously.
"Help with what?" Barisu's tone was guarded.
"A project." Mahitaro slid into the seat across from him, moving carefully as if sudden motion might summon the shadow again. "I've been studying patterns. Historical events. Things that don't quite add up. Coincidences that seem too perfect to be random." He paused, choosing his next words with surgical precision. "I think you might understand what I'm talking about better than most people."
Barisu's eyebrows rose slightly. "You mean temporal anomalies?"
The phrase hung in the air between them, loaded with implications. Mahitaro nodded slowly, fighting the urge to say more, to explain everything. He felt the faint pressure against his heart—not the full grip of before, but a warning. A reminder that he was being monitored through breaths. But not being heard, only loop power seemed to hear it. And if it did, it would squeeze his heart once more again.
"Something like that," Mahitaro said carefully. "I've documented some things. Patterns in disappearances, timing inconsistencies, events that seem connected across impossible spans of time." Each word was chosen to hint at the truth without stating it directly. "I thought maybe you could help me make sense of it."
Barisu studied him for a long moment, and Mahitaro wondered what he saw. A desperate kid? A fellow theorist? Someone genuinely interested in the impossible?
"Show me," Barisu said finally, closing his textbook. That night, Mahitaro's bedroom transformed into something between a war room and a shrine to obsession.
Papers covered every surface—maps with locations circled in red, timelines drawn and redrawn until the ink bled through multiple sheets, newspaper clippings documenting unexplained deaths, his own frantic notes attempting to codify the pattern of the loops without actually describing them directly.
Sleep was impossible. Had been impossible for days, maybe weeks—time had become slippery, unmeasurable. Food held no appeal. His stomach was a knot of anxiety and nausea that rejected anything he tried to force down his throat.
The depression sat on his shoulders like a physical weight, whispering its familiar litany: pointless, hopeless, why bother, you'll fail again, everyone dies anyway, you should just give up—but he'd learned to work through it, to function despite the crushing certainty that nothing mattered.
Because maybe if he repeated the motions long enough, eventually they'd accumulate into something that did matter.
Barisu came over once, carefully, his presence in Mahitaro's room feeling invasive and necessary in equal measure. He examined the spread of evidence with the intensity of an archaeologist studying ancient texts, his fingers tracing connections Mahitaro had drawn, lips moving silently as he absorbed information.
"This is..." Barisu paused, searching for the right word. "Remarkable. And disturbing. These patterns you've found—if they're accurate—suggest someone with incredible intelligence. Someone who can manipulate events across significant time spans."
Mahitaro's heart constricted, but no shadow appeared. He was staying within the boundaries, hinting without stating, showing evidence without explaining its true source.
"Yeah," he managed. "Smart. Dangerous."
He wanted to scream the truth—wanted to grab Barisu's shoulders and shake him and explain about the loops, the deaths, Eruto's smile, the red-haired student who killed with casual cruelty. But the phantom pressure against his ribs reminded him of the cost of honesty.
So instead, he guided Barisu through layers of inference and deduction, building a picture from fragments, hoping that eventually the full horror would become clear without him having to speak it aloud.
By the time Barisu left that night—taking copies of some documentation, promising to research historical precedents—Mahitaro sat alone on his floor, surrounded by the scattered evidence of his investigation.
His hands were stained with ink. His eyes burned from hours of reading in dim light. His body trembled with exhaustion and malnutrition and the constant low-grade terror of being monitored by something that could kill him from inside his own heart.
But he didn't cry. Instead, he whispered into the empty room, his voice barely audible even to himself:
"I'll solve this. No matter how many loops. No matter how many deaths. No matter how much pain." His fists clenched, nails biting into palms. "I'll find the red-haired student. I'll stop him. I'll save them all."
The words hurt to say—each one a promise he had no guarantee of keeping, each syllable weighted with the memory of previous failures. "Even if I die a thousand more times..." His voice broke, but he forced the rest out. "I won't give up."
And this time, it wasn't an empty declaration. This time, he had something he'd never had before—an ally, however unknowing. Someone else looking at the evidence, applying rational analysis to irrational horror.
It was a thread. Single, fragile, likely to snap. But enough to begin. That night, lying in bed and staring at his ceiling's familiar geography of cracks, Mahitaro felt the presence at the edge of his consciousness.
The shadow. Not physically manifesting but there nonetheless, watchful and patient and cruel. Waiting for him to slip, to say too much, to cross whatever invisible boundary it had established.
You're watching, Mahitaro thought toward the presence. You think you've trapped me. Made it impossible for me to get help. His hands clenched the sheets.
But I'm still here. Still thinking. Still fighting. You haven't broken me yet.
The shadow seemed to pulse with something like amusement. Or maybe that was just Mahitaro's imagination, his trauma-damaged mind assigning emotion to something fundamentally inhuman.
Either way, the message was clear: this was a game to the red-haired student. Mahitaro's suffering, his repeated deaths, his desperate attempts to escape—all of it was entertainment.
But games had rules. Patterns. Weaknesses.
And if Mahitaro could survive long enough to understand them, maybe—just maybe—he could find a way to stop playing by the red-haired student's rules.
For the first time in countless resets, exhaustion pulled him toward actual sleep. Not peaceful sleep—his dreams would be full of blood and smiles and shadows—but the kind of unconsciousness his body desperately needed.
Tomorrow, he thought as darkness closed in. Tomorrow we'll try again. Different approach. Careful. Patient. I'm not a victim anymore. I'm someone ready to fight.
The depression whispered that he was lying to himself, that nothing would change, that the loop was eternal and escape impossible.
But for once, he had a counter-argument: the wound on his cheek that proved things could persist across resets, and a brilliant mind working on his behalf, even if that mind didn't fully understand what it was working on.
Small victories. Incremental progress. It would have to be enough. Three days later, everything changed.
Mahitaro and Barisu crouched behind the overpass's concrete barrier, watching the intersection below where—according to their calculations—the red-haired student's pattern suggested an attack would occur. The evening had that particular quality of light that Mahitaro had learned to dread, shadows lengthening into weapons, the boundary between day and night where violence thrived.
"We're ready," Mahitaro whispered, though his trembling hands suggested otherwise. His depression clawed at him—this won't work, you're going to fail, everyone's going to die—but he'd learned to function through it.
Barisu adjusted his glasses, his usual calm strained at the edges. "According to the timeline intersections, if he appears, it'll be within the next ten minutes. We stay hidden. Document everything. Don't engage."
Don't engage, Mahitaro thought. As if we could. As if we're anything but insects to him. They waited. Each second stretched, elastic with tension. Traffic hummed below, indifferent to the horror about to unfold.
Then—lightning split the sky despite the clear weather.
The red-haired student materialized in the intersection—not walking into view, not appearing gradually, but simply existing where he hadn't been a moment before. His arms were crossed, that familiar smile already in place, as if he'd been waiting for them to find him.
As if this had all been expected. Mahitaro's stomach dropped. Every instinct screamed at him to run, but his body was locked in place by a mixture of terror and morbid fascination.
"Mahitaro," Barisu whispered urgently. "We need to—" The red-haired student's voice cut through the distance as if he were standing beside them, despite being fifty feet away:
"Your blood lust is pretty high... like my Mahitaro here." Barisu froze. "What—"
The student moved—impossibly fast, crossing the distance in a blur that human physiology couldn't accomplish. His hand extended, something metallic gleaming between his fingers.
A dart. Strange and intricate, glowing with a sickly green luminescence. It embedded itself in Barisu's forehead with a wet thunk. For one heartbeat, nothing happened. Barisu's expression froze, confusion mixed with the beginning of pain.
Then the glow spread.
Green light coursed through his veins, visible beneath his skin like bioluminescent poison. Barisu opened his mouth to scream, but the sound that emerged was more pressure release than voice—air forced from collapsing lungs.
His body convulsed. Once. Twice. Then it erupted. And he became a burning corpse of energy right infront of Mahitaro's eyes.
Not an explosion in the conventional sense—no fire, no combustion. Instead, Barisu's body simply flew apart, as if every cell had simultaneously decided to reject its neighbors. Blood atomized into mist. Bone fragments scattered in a radius that painted the concrete in abstract patterns. Organs ruptured and dissolved mid-air, reduced to organic slurry before they could hit the ground.
The sound was indescribable—wet and tearing and somehow hollow, like reality itself rejecting what was happening. Like he was erased from existance itself. His entire past and his entire future all at the same time, as he burned away into lit ashes.
Mahitaro couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't process what he'd just witnessed. His mind refused to accept that the person who'd been alive beside him moments ago was now decorating fifty square feet of pavement in pieces too small to identify, as they faded to.
The red-haired student turned to him, not a drop of blood on his pristine clothing despite standing at ground zero of the carnage. His crimson eyes—had they always been crimson? Mahitaro couldn't remember—gleamed with something between satisfaction and curiosity.
"I thought you would understand better with this whole reset thing," he said conversationally, as if discussing the weather rather than murder. "But it seems this far in the past wasn't far enough."
Past? Mahitaro's fragmented mind tried to process. What does he mean?
Before the thought could complete, the student's hand moved again. A different dart this time—deep crimson instead of green, pulsing with its own internal rhythm.
It almost struck Mahitaro's temple with surgical precision. But Mahitaro managed to dodge just in time. Mahitaro moved in a flash of speed.
Not consciously. Not through skill or training. But through something more primal—the accumulated rage of every death, every failure, every friend lost, crystallizing into a single moment of perfect reaction.
He twisted. The dart whistled past his ear, so close he felt the displacement of air, and embedded itself in the concrete barrier behind him with a sharp crack.
For one eternal second, both of them froze.
The red-haired student's expression shifted—surprise flickering across features that had only ever shown cruel amusement. His crimson eyes widened fractionally, the first genuine emotion Mahitaro had ever seen on that face.
And something inside Mahitaro snapped.
Not broke—snapped into place. Every loop, every death, every moment of powerlessness and suffering fused together into a single white-hot point of fury that burned away the depression, the fear, the certainty of failure. But that was only gonna be for a bit.
Barisu was gone. Not just dead—erased. Atomized into component molecules, his brilliant mind scattered across pavement like paint. The only person who'd tried to help, who'd believed in patterns and logic and the possibility of understanding, reduced to organic mist.
No more, something roared inside Mahitaro's heart. No more running. No more dying quietly. If I'm going to fall, I'll take you with me.
"YOU!" The word tore from his throat, raw and primal, carrying months of accumulated anguish. "YOU DID THIS! ALL OF THIS! ERUTO, BARISU, EVERYONE—YOU TOOK THEM ALL!"
The red-haired student's surprise melted back into that familiar cruel smile. "Oh? So you finally have some fire—" Mahitaro charged.
No technique. No strategy. Just pure, distilled rage propelling his body forward faster than thought. His hand found a fragment of glass—a piece of light, sharp and dangerous—and he swung it like a blade.
The student dodged, but barely. The makeshift weapon scored across his cheek, drawing a line of blood that was too dark, too viscous, wrong in a way that confirmed he wasn't entirely a normal human.
"Interesting," the student said, but his smile had tensed. "You've never fought back before. Always just died. Screamed. Cried. This is—"
"SHUT UP!" Mahitaro swung again, wild, desperate, each movement fueled by grief formed into violence. "You don't get to talk! You don't get to smile! Not after what you've done!"
His fist connected—a lucky strike against the student's jaw that sent him staggering back a step. Pain exploded through Mahitaro's knuckles, bones possibly fracturing, but he didn't care. The pain was real. The impact was real. For once, he was hurting the thing that had tortured him across infinite iterations.
The student's hand shot out, grabbing Mahitaro's wrist with inhuman strength. His fingers dug in until bones ground together, and he leaned close, his breath cold against Mahitaro's face.
"You think this changes anything?" His voice was calm, but something flickered behind the words. Uncertainty? "You think one moment of defiance—"
Mahitaro headbutted him.
The impact sent stars exploding across his vision, his forehead splitting open, warm blood sheeting down his face. But the student's nose crunched, dark blood spraying, and his grip loosened.
Mahitaro tore free, stumbling back, his entire body shaking with adrenaline and pain and something that felt almost like joy. Because for the first time—the very first time—the red-haired student looked hurt.
"I don't care if it changes anything!" Mahitaro screamed, blood dripping from his split forehead into his eyes, turning the world red. "I don't care if I die here! I don't care if you reset me a thousand more times! You're going to know—you're going to FEEL—that I fought back!"
He charged again, this time going low, tackling the student around the waist. They hit the ground hard, concrete scraping skin, and Mahitaro's hands found the student's throat.
He squeezed.
The student's eyes widened—genuine shock now, no pretense. His hands came up, clawing at Mahitaro's arms, drawing blood with nails that were too sharp, but Mahitaro didn't let go.
"Eruto smiled when he died," Mahitaro gasped out between clenched teeth, tears mixing with blood on his face. "He smiled and told me I didn't have to carry everything alone. And you took that from me. You made that beautiful thing into torture!"
The student's face was changing color, veins standing out against temples. His mouth opened, trying to speak, to breathe. "Barisu was brilliant," Mahitaro continued, his voice breaking. "He was trying to understand. Trying to help. And you erased him like he was nothing!"
The pressure of his grip increased. The student's struggles grew weaker, more desperate.
"My mother tried to save me from myself!" The words came out as sobs now, grief and rage indistinguishable. "She held me when I broke! And you're going to make me watch her hate me again, aren't you? You're going to make me live through losing everything over and over—"
The student's hand shot up—not to scratch or punch, but palm-first against Mahitaro's heart. And then a bunch of energy shot through Mahitaro's body.
The impact wasn't physical. It was something else—pure force that sent Mahitaro flying backward, his body ragdolling through the air to crash against the overpass barrier. Ribs cracked. His spine sent lightning bolts of agony through every nerve.
But he forced himself up. Forced his legs to work despite the screaming pain. Forced his body to stand because lying down meant surrender, and he was done surrendering.
The red-haired student climbed to his feet slowly, touching his throat where bruises were already forming. His expression had lost all pretense of amusement. What remained was something colder, more dangerous.
"You actually hurt me," he said, and there was genuine wonder in his voice. "In all the loops, all the iterations, you've never managed that. The despair actually made you stronger." He tilted his head, studying Mahitaro like a particularly interesting specimen. "How fascinating."
Mahitaro spat blood, his vision doubling. "I'll do more than hurt you. I'll destroy you. I'll find a way. No matter how long it takes, no matter how many times you reset me—I'll learn. I'll adapt. And eventually..." His voice dropped to something lethal. "I'll kill you."
For a moment—just a brief flicker—something like respect crossed the student's face. Then his hand moved, faster than before, retrieving another dart from somewhere in his clothing.
This one glowed with multiple colors, swirling like oil on water.
"You've earned an upgrade," the student said quietly. "Most subjects break completely by now. But you? You're special, Mahitaro. So I'm going to give you a special hell. One you weren't ready for yet, but you've forced my hand. You will understand why I did all this. Even if your ignoring what I'm saying now, trust me... you will undertsand sooner than later."
The dart flew.
Mahitaro tried to dodge again, tried to summon that perfect reaction, but his body was too damaged, too slow. The projectile struck his temple with surgical precision.
The pain was instantaneous and absolute—every nerve igniting at once, his brain feeling like it was being unmade and remade simultaneously. His vision exploded into colors that shouldn't exist, reality fragmenting into geometric patterns that hurt to perceive.
But even as his consciousness shattered, even as the world dissolved around him, Mahitaro felt something like triumph.
I hurt you, he thought as darkness swallowed him. I made you bleed. I made you feel something other than cruel satisfaction. That's worth something. That matters.
And I'll do it again. However many resets it takes. I'll find you. And next time, I'll do worse. The thought carried him into oblivion, a small flame of defiance burning even as everything else went dark.
When consciousness returned, nothing was right.
Mahitaro opened his eyes to a world that was familiar but wrong, like looking at a photograph of a place you'd lived but couldn't quite recognize. The buildings were smaller. The cars different. The air smelled of summer heat and wet pavement in a way that triggered memories he shouldn't have. But he didn't see those memories though. It's like his mind was trying retrieve them, but couldn't overall.
He looked down at his hands. Small. Child-sized. The hands of an eight-year-old. No, his mind rejected even as the evidence was undeniable. No, this isn't possible. I'm seventeen. I'm—
But his body disagreed. He stood on legs that were shorter, existed in a body that predated the loops, predated the incident, predated everything. The red-haired student had reset him. Not to the usual point—the month before the tragedy—but further back. Years back. To childhood.
And then Mahitaro saw him.
Sitting on the curb across the street, tossing a small wooden toy into the air and catching it with casual ease. A child, maybe nine or ten, with that same impossible red hair that defied natural genetics.
Their eyes met.
The child's smile was wrong. Too knowing. Too cruel. The smile of something wearing a child's face but containing something ancient and malevolent underneath.
Mahitaro's breath caught. His mind tried to process what this meant—that the red-haired student had been there all along, present throughout his childhood, watching, waiting, orchestrating events across decades—and failed completely.
Every death. Every loop. Every moment of suffering. Every scar carved into his psyche.
All of it had been building toward this revelation: that he'd never been free. Had never had a chance. The nightmare had started long before he'd been aware of it.
The child on the curb stood, pocketing his toy, that terrible smile never wavering.
And Mahitaro understood with crushing certainty that this—being reset to childhood while retaining his adult memories and trauma—was a new kind of torture. A new iteration of pain he hadn't imagined was possible.
He tried to scream but no sound came. His child's body stood frozen on the sidewalk while Tokyo's indifferent traffic flowed past, and the red-haired child began walking toward him with casual, unhurried steps.
The real nightmare was only just beginning.
TO BE CONTINUED...