Morning at Sobu High arrived like any other... sunlight sliding down the glass, the bell with its ordinary chime, the slow migration of half-awake students toward their desks. Yui fluttered in with a bright "good mooorning," her voice carrying across the room; Yumiko complained about something as trivial as hems on a winter blazer; Hayato's orbiters laughed a second too hard at a joke that had never truly landed. Life wore its usual mask and wore it well.
Ras sat near the window, watchful without seeming to watch. The world reflected in the glass, his face, the row of desks, the pale sky. But the reflection didn't quite match the rhythm of the room. It lagged by a breath. Corners bent where corners had no right to bend. He knew the signs now.
A ripple touched the air in front of his eyes.
The Book-UI unfolded in a whisper of light only he could see.
> [Routine Scan: Mild spatial fluctuation detected.]
[Status: Non-hostile. Observe.]
This is the new abilities that Ras just redeemed after gaining enough points trhough emotions...
He blinked the notification away. The teacher droned about proofs; chalk rasped against slate. When two students started whispering a rumor three rows over, the room's reflection in the window caught them one beat late, then hurried to catch up. The mask of normality tried very hard at Sobu. It just wasn't perfect anymore.
He took notes with a steady hand. Calm was a craft, not a mood.
By lunch, the edges of reality had smoothed, the glitchiness content to simmer under the surface. He ate on the rooftop in the thin, clean light. A breeze lifted loose paper like gulls over water. For a minute, the world felt easy.
Or is it?
---
After classes, Yui's laughter trailed out of the corridor, and the last scrape of chair legs echoed down the hall. Ras was alone at his desk, sliding his notebook into his bag when the UI returned. This time it didn't whisper; it burned.
> [System Alert: Full Space Crack detected.]
[Location: Sobu High Courtyard.]
[Entities Identified: Gastrea ×8.]
[Danger Level: C.]
[Public Exposure Risk: High.]
Eight. Not insects, not ghosts, not the soft wrongness of reflections, but bodies from a world that had no business touching this one. He set his bag strap over his shoulder, smoothed his sleeve, and walked toward the door, unnoticed.
Calm wasn't a feeling. Calm was a decision.
---
Karakura - Elsewhere, the Same World
Night pressed down on Karakura Town, the kind of coastal darkness that gleamed with sodium lamps and neon signs. A Hollow's scream tore the air. Ichika Kurosaki moved through the noise like a blade through silk, a white trail of pressure and intent. Steel cut mask; mask split light. Fragments fell and vanished.
Another Hollow lunged from the mouth of a narrow alley. Her pulse didn't spike. The cut was efficient, the follow-through cleaner than last week, her breath measured against a heartbeat she kept on purpose. Hollowfication gnawed at her core like a second heartbeat, but discipline was a language she spoke better every day.
A page of newsprint whipped past on a stray gust, slapped across her shin, stuck for an instant to the wet alley floor. Her eyes flicked down because her eyes always flicked down-to everything. The headline was smudged but legible.
Éclair's Record-Breaking Signing Stuns Tokyo: Futabasha Welcomes New Phenomenon.
She stood there with the blade vertical, point down like a post, and the night seemed to shift its weight. A name she'd filed as "Ras" slid neatly into "Éclair," the way a sheath accepts a sword that belongs to it. Tokyo and Tokyo were the same Tokyo. Not parallel. Not mirrored. The same.
She flicked her blade clean, lifted the newspaper with two fingers, and let it go. Paper skittered down the alley like a crab.
"…So you're here," Ichika said to nobody, to the city, to the idea of a boy with a composed voice and an simple smile. "Fine."
She didn't open the Guild Chat. She didn't need a chorus. She preferred the single note of knowing.
And then she kept moving.
---
The Courtyard
The courtyard at Sobu was empty of people, full of light. Evening lit the tall windows like honey. Leaves clicked together. For a second, it seemed the UI had lied.
Then the air at the center of the yard unraveled.
A jag of black glass cut through space and hung there, humming. Reality tried to knit itself shut around the cut and failed. From inside the tear came the skitter of too many legs, the chemical reek of corrosion, a stutter of clicking like teeth chattering on iron.
The first Gastrea pulled itself through the wound-carapace slick and black, segment by segment externalizing as if turned inside-out. Its mandibles opened with a fluid squeal. A second followed, then a third, claws scraping the flagstones. Eight in all, fanning out, half circles inside the school's neat rectangle of stone.
The UI resolved without a tremor in his vision.
> [Objective: Neutralize Gastrea ×8.]
[Constraint: Prevent public exposure.]
"Understood," Ras said softly, like a man agreeing to sign for a package.
He lifted one hand and pressed his palm lightly toward the ground. Mana moved. Space answered.
The dome slid into place.... A violet sphere so thin it was almost an idea, curving from the courtyard's edges up and over them, a sealed bubble that caught the slant of evening and held it. Outside the dome, a teacher crossed the far breezeway, phone to ear, voice animated; a pair of first-years jogged toward the gate. Inside, the world was a held breath.
A simple yet important abilities that he learnt through Gojo.... To not disturb his peace at his highschool life.
'Hikigaya Hachika should be glad that I learnt this and not introduced troubles to her life, lol!'
Proto-Domain: active.
The first two Gastrea charged as if they'd truly believed the world belonged to them. Ras didn't move his feet.
"Magic: Arrows."
Five bolts of light stitched the air, faultless as geometry. One Gastrea folded mid-leap, the second crumpled in a dying slide; both evaporated into fine black dust that never touched the stones.
Six.
A clawed shape skittered up the dome's inner wall, using the curvature the way a lizard uses a ceiling. Ras rotated his wrist and flicked two fingers toward it.
"Magic: Javelin."
The spear formed and flew in the same heartbeat. It rammed through the creature's thorax with the clean percussion of a mallet on hardwood and pinned it like a specimen to the shimmering arc of the barrier. It shrieked until Ras put a clean Arrow through the center of its head and the sound cut off.
Five.
The remaining cluster changed tactics. They spread into a crescent to press his flanks, crawled low, hopped high, a choreography of swarm logic. Ras exhaled the smallest measure of air and stepped his left foot back by half a shoe's length.
"Magic: Impact."
The shockwave broke over the courtyard like a silent drum. It hit the crescent in three places, flipping one long-bodied Gastrea onto its back, staggering another into a low skid, crushing the forward rush of the third as if its sprint had struck a pane of glass.
Ras buried three Arrows into the overturned one's joint gaps-hip, neck base, mid-thorax... and it fell apart like poor carpentry.
Four.
One of the larger bodies recovered from the shock and came in with real speed, the kind of straightforward attack that trusted size. Its foreclaw glanced his sleeve and threw off a hiss of acid that would have pitted steel. Ras caught the mandibles in one hand, not with strength but with timing, the way a conductor catches a downbeat.
"Magic Absorb."
Light flooded his palm and moved up his arm in rivulets. The enemy's aura wasn't simply siphoned; it was converted, rendered clean, added to his interior ledger. The Gastrea withered as if it had aged a century in a breath. He let it go in time for it to disintegrate on its own.
"Thanks for the donation," he murmured.
Three.
They'd learned he could break a rush. They tried a different shape. One drew his eye with feints and quick darts, one circled for a flank, one hugged the ground so low its carapace kissed stone. He let them make a pattern of themselves. When the center lure lunged, he didn't bite; he raised his hand not at it but past it.
"Magic: Storm."
The sky within the dome bowed to his call. Wind arrived in a ring that collapsed inward, shuddering with pale lightning that looked like piano wire. Arcs found the flanking body first, crawled the seam lines between plates, and then leapt to the low crawler, biting into its legs. The storm wasn't a hammer; it was a thousand needles. Movement slowed. Armor split along lines designed for stress and not for grace.
He walked forward through the storm's soft fury and put two Arrows into the lure's eyes. It flailed once and stopped.
Two.
They came anyway, because the arithmetic of a swarm never uses subtraction in time to matter. The nearer one snarled with more sound than menace. He cut across it with Impact again, the wave tuned tighter this time... less push, more snap. Carapace cracked against the dome with a sound like a dropped plate. He finished it with an Arrow before it slid to the stones.
One.
It tried to flee. Interesting. Some things recognize a food chain when they find themselves at the wrong end of it.
"Magic: Javelin."
The spear nailed its hind limb to the stone. It screamed, high, thin, a wire under tension. He didn't walk closer; he didn't raise his hand for a coup de grâce. Calm was deciding how much noise the day deserved.
"Magic: Finale."
Mana gathered along the dome's inner curve as if the barrier were a huge lens and light itself obedient. The circle lit the courtyard floor... intricate, precise, geometric arcs etched in brilliance-then everything rushed in toward the pinned creature at the circle's center. For one breath the world was only white.
When white subsided to color, there was nothing left to see. No scorch. No ash. Not even a mark that would provoke questions from a curious custodian with a broom and a habit of noticing.
The dome's violet thinned. Air pressed in from the outside, equalizing pressure; sounds returned- the scrape of a chair leg somewhere, the slam of a door, a bird cutting a line across the sky.
> [Objective Complete: Gastrea ×8 eliminated.]
[Public Exposure: None.]
[System Points: 1200.]
[Guild notes: Thankyou for your hardwork.]
Ras adjusted his cuff and considered whether the mark on his sleeve was actual acid or only the memory of one. He rubbed it with his thumb; spotless. The uniform's enchantment quietly did exactly what it had been made to do.
"Messy," he said at the exact volume of someone commenting on rain, "but effective."
He turned toward the breezeway just as the Book-UI flickered a new pane. This one he hadn't asked for nor does he knows.
> [Guild System Notification: Space Crack activity resolved.]
[Location: Sobu High (Chiba).]
[Threat: Gastrea ×8.]
[Resolution: Eliminated.]
And then, a half-heartbeat later, the Guild Chat caught fire.
---
Guild Chat
> Gojo: "Wait. Sobu High? As in your school?"
> Gojo: "Ras, you there? Tell me that wasn't an evacuation drill with special effects."
Ras watch the chat scroll. It was like watching a river if a river had strong opinions.
> Kazumi: "Called it. Chiba from my world?? Aqua owes me three apologies and a refund."
Ainz: "Escalation noted. Your world's barrier integrity is trending downward."
Satsuki: "Careful for a follow up, Plan accordingly."
Ichika: "…..."
And then Lin, whose messages came in pairs, then in bursts.
> Lin: "No-hold on-this says Gastrea. At a high school."
Lin: "That can't be right. Ras is supposed to be mortal."
The word hung there with its own gravity. Mortal. The version of him that belonged to a small service club and quiet sarcasm, to rooftops and bento and afternoon light. That version was true; it simply wasn't the whole. She had loved the honest fraction and was catching sight of the rest.
> Lin: "Ras. Please explain."
He typed three words and a period. Clarity fit in small containers when you packed it correctly.
> Ras: "It's okey, I've Handled. No casualties.... thanks to a certain white-haired sis in the group @Gojo"
For five seconds the chat did something rare. It paused.
Then Gojo recovered first, as she always did, using levity to set a new floor for the conversation.
> Gojo: "I leave you alone for one afternoon and you open a private theater for special-effects bugs? Rude."
Gojo: "Also: nice job."
Yaya spammed foods.jpg . Kazumi promised nothing and complained about everything. Ainz posted a block of practical recommendations nobody would read until they had to; Satsuki clipped each sentence with a scalpel and handed them back sharper. Ichika typed nothing else; she didn't need to. Lin posted, then deleted, then posted again.... a stray spiral of punctuation and apology and are you okay? tucked inside exclamation points.
Ras closed the chat. You don't put out a flame by blowing at it.
---
Walking
He left the courtyard with a student's gait... steady, unremarkable, and cut past the empty baseball field, where dust rose from his shoes and settled back without complaint. The sunset put a coin of gold on every window. Breath moved in his chest like the tide in miniature.
A commuter tram clattered along the elevated track beyond the gym. He matched its rhythm for half a block, then let it go.
He turned down the narrow street that ran behind the station convenience store. The owner was putting out crates. A black cat measured him and made no report. Somewhere, someone overcooked garlic and it didn't smell bad at all.
He paused at the vending machine outside the store and considered the rows of drinks with a care that would have looked like indecision to anyone else. Choices reveal character; he preferred not to reveal too much. He punched the button for canned coffee and heard the thud inside the machine that has always sounded like a heart deciding to beat again.
The can was cold. The aluminum caught the last of the day.
"Odd-jobs keep multiplying," he said, not loudly and not softly, the way he might note that spring follows winter even in years when it feels late.
He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.
He lifted the can against his mouth, took the first swallow, and kept walking before the night had a chance to mistake him for someone who had nowhere to be.
---
Karakura
Ichika finished with the last of the city's evening shadows and stood on a rooftop, halfway between a crane and a satellite dish. The newspaper page lay folded in her pocket, not because she needed it but because rituals anchor meaning.
Her phone buzzed. She didn't open the Guild; she opened the weather, stared at the cloud map until it looked like reiatsu drawn by a bored god. Then she closed it too.
She looked toward where Tokyo would be if cities were visible across distance the way mountains are. She didn't squint. She didn't smile.
"Seems like I need to quickly get my Hollowfication under control"
She stepped off the roof, and dissapeared.
---
Lin
Lin Xueyao sat alone in a room lit by a desk lamp and the unsafe glow of a monitor, the Guild manager's dashboard floating in front of her like a cathedral window. She scrolled through query logs that told her nothing useful and server statistics that only said everything is increasingly awake.
Her notes from months ago: "Ras: mortal. service club. sarcasm. canonical ordinary"-looked like a postcard from a vacation she'd taken as a child and misremembered. She didn't like having been wrong. She disliked even more the thought that she'd been right in a smaller way than she'd wanted to be.
The System's notification was unambiguous. The crack had happened. The threat had names: Gastrea. The elimination had been marked: Completed.
She rubbed the heel of one hand against her sternum, as if the muscle there had grown a knot. She wanted to be angry. Instead, she was impressed without permission.
"Canon diverges," she told the empty room. "Or canon was never a rule. Only a rumor."
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Sobu's courtyard the way he had seen it: eight bodies and a dome of quiet, a boy who writes about borrowed time and still holds the leash of his own.
She opened her eyes and typed a single line into a draft she didn't send.
> Manager Note: Ras is not solely what I believed. Adjust expectations. Watch with respect.
Then she deleted the last sentences, because respect doesn't need emphasis, and saved.
---
Ras
Chiba loved its lights. They wrote a second city on the first city and asked you to believe both. Ras walked under the lamps one by one and let them decide whether to illuminate him as a student, an author, a sorcerer, a variable the world had miscounted. He didn't argue with their choices.
At the corner by the tram stop, a small distortion opened and snapped closed like a fish's mouth testing the surface. He watched it go. The Book-UI did not appear. Not every twitch needs a diagnosis.
He put the empty can into the recycling slot without missing the mouth. The machine's polite ping felt like an answer to a question that hadn't been a question at all.
Someone jostled past him and muttered an apology he didn't require. He nodded anyway. Courtesy is also a craft.
When he reached his building, he paused in the entryway because pausing is an art too. He listened. The city breathed. The world held. The dome of evening had thinned to a film and would be torn by morning and re-knit by noon. He didn't need the Book-UI to tell him that truth.
Tomorrow would contain a classroom, a window, a reflection that tried to keep up, and something on the other side of the reflection that never would.
He keyed the door and stepped inside.
The chapter closed itself.