For Mori Tetsuya — loving Amano Mari was an act of philosophical rigor.
He had fallen for her mind. In a world of intellectual complacency, Mari was the only person who treated his arguments with the beautiful violence they deserved. When he built a logical fortress, she found the one brick laid crooked. When he presented a syllogism, she questioned its very premise. Their dates were less about holding hands and more about dismantling Kant over coffee. Love for Tetsuya — was a shared fearless gaze into the abyss of a difficult question. Their relationship was his one, stable axiom in a universe of chaotic variables.
Until the axiom began to contradict itself.
It started with small paradoxes, tiny unprovable theorems that inserted themselves into his daily life. A set of house keys which he could swear on a stack of Plato's Republic he had lost, would reappear in his bag. When he'd mention his relief, Mari would simply look at him, her gaze serene and unwavering.
"But I already gave them to you, Tetsu. Don't you remember?"
It wasn't a question. It was a statement of a fact that belonged to a different timeline than his.
Then came the quiet prophecies, whispered with the same casualness as commenting on the weather.
"You should take an umbrella today."
She'd say, pointing at a sky of flawless blue. By noon, a freak monsoon would be drowning the city.
"That train feels wrong. Let's wait for the next one."
She'd murmur, tugging his sleeve. He'd later scroll through the news to see that very train had been stalled for an hour, trapping hundreds. He'd tried to file it under 'hyper-intuition'. But his gut knew that wasn't it.
The rationalizations were failing. The foundation was cracking. And the phenomenon that truly terrified him, the one that threatened to shatter his entire worldview, was what he could only describe as discontinuity.
Last week — at a packed festival — she had excused herself to buy taiyaki. Tetsuya leaned against a railing, tracing the path to the food stall with his eyes. He blinked, and a voice chirped from directly behind him.
"Sorry! They were almost out of the custard ones."
It was Mari, holding two fish-shaped cakes, steam curling into the air. She had come from a geometric impossibility. The space behind him had been a solid brick wall.
He couldn't bear the weight of it alone. So he cornered his two closest friends in the cramped dusty clubroom, the late afternoon sun streaming through a window that offered a glimpse of the Nagasaki Harbor in the distance. they had unofficially named the "Philosophy & Heresies Club".
Otsuka Riku was meticulously cleaning a microscope lens, the very picture of empirical focus. Across the small table, Kanda Yuria — whose family had been Christian in Nagasaki for generations — was humming a quiet hymn, tending to a small potted plant she'd brought in to "improve the room's spiritual aura".
Tetsuya took a shaky breath.
"I think my relationship is having a metaphysical crisis."
He laid it all out. The keys. The weather. The trains. Riku didn't even look up from his lens, but the corner of his mouth twitched in amusement. Yuria stopped humming, her face a canvas of pure empathy. Then Tetsuya got to the core of his terror.
"And she… she breaks physics. Casually."
He whispered, the words sounding like blasphemy.
"She walks around a corner and appears behind me. She vanishes from a crowded library aisle and reappears at the front desk. There are no steps in between. It's just... Point A, and then Point B. The line connecting them doesn't exist. Logic is breaking down around her and she doesn't even notice."
The only sound was Riku polishing his lens with a soft, rhythmic squeak. He finally set it down and looked at Tetsuya, his expression a perfect blend of pity and clinical diagnosis.
"Tetsuya..."
He began, leaning forward like a doctor about to deliver bad news.
"Let's apply Occam's Razor, shall we? What is the more parsimonious explanation? (A) Your girlfriend is a reality-warping entity who violates the laws of spacetime for trivial tasks, or (B) You are experiencing severe inattentional blindness, likely exacerbated by confirmation bias?"
He tapped his temple.
"You expect something weird to happen, so your brain filters out the mundane data, like her walking down a different aisle, and presents you with a conclusion that fits your hypothesis. It's textbook cognitive bias."
Yuria placed her hand gently over Tetsuya's, her touch warm and grounding. She completely ignored Riku's jargon.
"It sounds like you're scared, Tetsuya-kun."
She said softly.
"Not because you think Mari-chan would hurt you, but because you're afraid of not understanding her. But love is a mystery to be lived in. It is an act of faith. Instead of asking your head for an explanation, maybe you should ask your heart what it feels?"
...
Riku's clinical diagnosis and Yuria's gentle faith were just noise. They couldn't drown out the low hum that had become the background music of his reality.
"Cognitive bias? An act of faith?"
No. It felt more fundamental. It felt like watching a beautiful painting and noticing the perspective was mathematically wrong.
He had to know. The uncertainty was a logical fallacy he could no longer tolerate.
He found Mari after school, tending to the class's planter of wilting petunias. The afternoon sun sliced through the empty classroom, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air like tiny, chaotic stars. She looked so achingly normal.
"Mari."
He began, his voice barely a tremor in the quiet room.
She turned, her face lighting up with that effortless smile he had cataloged and cherished.
"Tetsu! Ready to go home?"
"In a minute..."
He closed the distance between them, his heart a frantic, trapped thing against his ribs.
"The festival. The library. The other times. Tell me how you did it. There was a wall behind me. There was no path. Don't... don't treat me like I'm stupid, Mari. Just tell me.
Mari's hand stilled. The effortless smile on her face faltered, a subtle shift in her deep eyes betraying a momentary, profound hesitation. She let out a soft sigh — a sound that seemed to carry the weight of ages. She finally turned to face him fully, her expression stripped of its usual playful cheer.
"The truth isn't something I can tell you, Tetsu. It's something you have to... see. And even then, it doesn't make sense. It's not supposed to."
Her voice was quiet.
"It's just... easier to say things that are simple. Things people can understand."