The laboratory was bright and sterile—a world away from the dark vision that had haunted him. Metal tables gleamed under enchanted lights, and shelves lined with glass beakers and arcane instruments stretched to the ceiling. Nogare was strapped to the central table, his wrists and ankles bound with chains that hummed with suppressing magic—weakening his power just enough to keep him from fighting back, but not enough to silence his sight.
They did not beat him. They did not threaten him. They used him.
A hooded researcher stood over him on his first day, holding up a small crystal that projected the image of a man in a cell down the hall. The prisoner's aura was a roiling mix of red and blue—anger and sorrow tangled together.
"What do you see for him?" the researcher asked, her voice flat as paper.
Nogare's eyes focused, and the afterimage flashed before him: the man leading a group of prisoners in a rebellion, guards falling, alarms blaring through the halls. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
"He will try to start a rebellion," he said finally.
Within the hour, the prisoner was taken to the courtyard and executed. Nogare heard the gunshot echo through the stone walls.
Days blurred into weeks. The experiments became routine.
They brought him scrolls detailing upcoming guild missions, unrolling them on a table beside his own. "Where does it fail?"
He looked, and saw the ambush point clearly—bandits hiding in a narrow pass, arrows coated in poison. "Three miles from the eastern checkpoint. There's an ambush."
"Cancel the mission," the researcher told a guard standing by the door. "And issue a containment order for the team already en route. We can't risk them being compromised."
Nogare closed his eyes as the guard left. He'd saved the guild from loss, but condemned a dozen adventurers to death as "collateral."
Another day, they showed him portraits of guild members. "Is he loyal?"
The man in the painting had a murky brown aura, thick and sluggish. Nogare saw him slipping into the vaults at night, stuffing coins and relics into a sack. "He's stealing from the guild."
The man disappeared the next morning. His quarters were cleaned out, his name struck from all records. No one spoke of him again.
With each act of complicity, the weight grew heavier—so heavy that Nogare felt himself cracking under the pressure. To survive, to create a wall between his heart and the horrors he was enabling, he began to change the way he spoke. He began to quantify.
When they showed him a new prisoner, he no longer said "he will betray you." He said "74% probability of betrayal within six weeks."
When they asked about a mission, he didn't say "they will be ambushed." He said "92% chance of catastrophic failure at grid coordinate 47-19."
When they questioned a guild member's loyalty, he told them "38% probability of theft, 22% chance of espionage, 40% likelihood of continued loyalty."
He reduced people to variables, futures to percentages. He spoke in numbers and probabilities, wrapping his sight in the cold language of mathematics. It was a survival mechanism—a way to make the pain feel less personal, less real.
His emotional self began to calcify, like stone forming over a wound. The warmth he'd felt from Haruto, Sakura, and Kaito faded into a distant memory. Even the horror of what he was doing began to dull, replaced by the sharp focus of calculation.
One night, as the researchers left him alone in the laboratory, Nogare stared at his hands—pale and thin, bound to the table. He'd stopped seeing colors around himself long ago, but now he wondered if his own aura would be gray like stone, or if it had turned the same cold black as the futures he was forced to predict.
He was no longer a boy who saw endings. He was a calculator in a cage—turning lives into data, and hope into numbers.