"Margaret!?"
The name burst from Trizha's throat like a frantic prayer as she reached out, her fingers catching the fabric of a student's shoulder.
She forced the person to spin around, her heart leaping with a desperate hope fueled by the familiar shade of dark hair and the slender silhouette.
But as the girl turned, the hope died instantly.
It wasn't Margaret. It was a complete stranger—a female student whose face twisted into a mask of sudden, sharp indignation at being handled so roughly.
"How dare you!?" the student snapped, her voice high and brittle with shock.
She pulled her shoulder away as if Trizha's touch were infectious, her eyes glaring with a cold, judgmental fire.
Trizha's own eyes widened, her pupils shrinking in a flash of pure, unadulterated mortification.
She recoiled as if she had been burned, her hands flying up into the air in a gesture of total surrender.
Behind the offended girl, a group of her friends began to snicker and giggle, their muffled whispers like stinging hornets in Trizha's ears.
"S-sorry! Wrong person! Entirely the wrong person!" Trizha stammered, her voice cracking under the weight of her social catastrophe.
Without waiting for a response or a second look, Trizha bolted.
She stormed off into the depths of the Mirror Maze, her face burning with a heat that felt like it could melt the glass.
Damn it, damn it, damn it, she chanted in the silent cathedral of her mind.
She wanted to vanish, to dissolve into the reflections until she was nothing more than a silver glint.
Before the group of girls could even finish their mocking laughter, a shadow fell over them.
A voice emerged from the gloom behind them—a voice that was undeniably gentle and deep, yet carried a vibration of danger that set their instincts on edge.
"Hello," the voice murmured. "Did any of you happen to see a girl with blonde hair run past just now?"
"Uh, yeah. She went that way just a second ago—" The student who had been grabbed began to answer, pointing down the hall. She paused dramatically as she turned her head to face the speaker.
Her words died in her throat, her jaw going slack as she realized exactly who was standing there.
It was Nomoro.
The "Demon."
The boy whose reputation was written in whispers of blood and violence all across their school halls.
The laughter from the group vanished instantly.
Fear, cold and paralyzing, washed over their faces as they collectively took a synchronized step backward.
They stared at him in a heavy, suffocating silence, their breaths hitching as they waited for a threat that never came.
Nomoro took in their terror with a tired, hollow expression. He didn't growl; he didn't glare.
He simply offered a small, weary look that carried a silent message: It's fine. I'm used to it.
"It's fine..." Nomoro said softly, his voice barely a ripple in the stagnant air.
He didn't wait for them to overcome their shock. He pushed past the group, his movements purposeful and determined.
He began to run in the direction Trizha had taken, his face a mask of iron-willed resolve.
He had to end this.
He had to bridge the chasm of their conflict, even if it meant being treated like a monster by every person he encountered along the way.
***
It was a strange, poetic inversion of their lives.
One was backing away from the world, and the other was being forced back by the world itself.
In their last encounter, they had gone their separate ways—Trizha had been the one forced to deal with the pressure of others, while Nomoro had been left to the isolation of his own thoughts.
But now, the roles had shifted.
Trizha was desperately trying to isolate herself, to find a corner of the world where no one could see her failure, yet she was constantly pulled back into the fray.
And Nomoro was desperately trying to connect, to reach out and mend a broken bond, yet the world continued to recoil from his touch.
Their motives had been replaced, swapped in the dark like cards in a magician's trick.
Yet, despite the swap, the core remained identical. Both were fueled by the same agonizing need to apologize.
The focus had shifted from Trizha's guilt to Nomoro's redemption, a seesaw of emotional weight that kept the air in the maze thick with tension.
Previously, it had been a story of two people—a boy and a girl lost in the glass. But the narrative was expanding now, drawing in the others like a whirlpool.
In the quiet, sterile confines of the waiting center, Margaret sat in self-imposed exile.
She was trying to still the trembling in her hands, to rebuild the walls of her deadpan facade so her friends wouldn't have to witness her vulnerability.
She was doing exactly what she had done her entire life: trying to perfect herself so that a judgmental society would finally stop looking for her flaws.
Elsewhere, Wyne sprinted through the thickening crowds of the festival.
Her heart was a drum in her ears as she searched for Trizha, her eyes scanning every face with a frantic intensity.
She was a woman on a mission to bring the trio back together, to restore the unit before the night could tear them apart forever.
It was a cruel irony; while some stories at the park were just beginning under the evening lights, hers felt like it was racing toward a jagged conclusion.
Nomoro continued his pursuit, reaching out for Trizha when no one else would.
To him, the judgment of the crowd was a secondary concern. This was his burden, his mistake, and he would break every mirror in this house if it meant he could finally make things right.
And then, there was Trizha.
She was the nexus of all their stories, the point where all their motivations collided.
She was unaware of the weight she carried, but she embodied every piece of their struggle.
Like Margaret, she wanted to hide and perfect her image after the sting of embarrassment.
Like Wyne, she felt the desperate pull of her friends, a longing for the safety of their shared history.
And like Nomoro, she was driven by a burning need to fix the errors of her own making, to reconcile the girl she was with the girl she wanted to be.
So... what was her true motivation in this moment?
It was a volatile mix, a shifting tide of emotions.
Whichever feeling reached the surface first would determine the final serve of her fate.