They said no one survived Mounagiri Gakuen without learning the rules.
Rule one: never show weakness.
Rule two: don't be different.
Rohan had already broken both.
Mounagiri sat between lush green hills and quiet skies — an elite academy whose gates felt heavier than steel. Getting in was brutal. Staying in was worse.
In a sunlit classroom, two boys were fighting. Desks scraped. Words turned to fists.
Rohan wasn't watching their hands.
He was staring at the thread between them.
It ran taut and red, strong and hot, pulsing. Thick as rope. Bright as flame. Alive.
No. Not again. Don't touch it.
Everyone else saw a fight. Rohan saw a map of colours.
Red: anger.
Green: calm.
Black: distrust or manipulation.
Blue: fear, and the ache it left behind.
And, rarely, gold — a warmth that didn't hurt.
The red thickened, vibrating, ready to snap. Rohan's right hand twitched. Before he could stop himself, fragile white threads unspooled from his fingertips — wobbly, flickering, like cobweb in a storm.
They reached for the red.
The red scorched them instantly. Heat devoured the white. Then it swelled—
—ruptured.
The room exploded into chaos. Shouts. Fists. A lip split, blood dripping bright onto the floor. Fear bled into the air as trembling blue threads wrapped around the boy who froze when the teacher stormed in.
The blue pierced Rohan's chest, turning his own threads heavy, streaked with the same fear.
"He's a Kodokuna," Erik muttered to a classmate.
"What's that?" the other asked.
"A loner," Erik said, with a smile that wasn't kind.
The name stuck.
Kodo — as he called himself — stopped touching threads. Mostly. He carried a sketchbook filled not with scenery, but with the colours he saw every day. It was how he survived.
That afternoon, golden threads filled the classroom, warm as the sunset outside. For a moment, Kodo's heart stirred, his white threads faintly glowing gold.
He tried to join a group.
The gold turned to blue, then to purple — the bruise-colour of old names, old shoves, old stares that said not you. Yellow faded. Faces turned away. The room emptied, leaving only pity's weak white flickers — and those, too, vanished.
Home was different.
The moment he opened the door, Leo — his dog — barreled into him, golden-green threads wrapping around him like a shield. The warmth cracked something inside. A small sob escaped.
Leo whimpered, licking his face as if to say, Be strong, Kodo. I'm always here.
That night, Kodo dreamed of golden threads drifting toward him, slow and warm. He woke startled, wondering why it felt so real.
Morning came. He dressed for school, waved goodbye to Leo, and stepped outside.
Somewhere beyond the hills of Mounagiri Gakuen, a thread had already begun to move toward him — gold, warm, and unlike anything he had ever seen.