New World. The Rooftop
The portal opened without warning.
There was no sound, no flash — the air above the school rooftop simply compressed into a single point, then tore apart like ripped fabric. From the tear wafted something alien — ash, blood, ozone.
Takashi stood over Hisashi's body.
His hands were still trembling. Rei wept on her knees beside him, and her cries were the only sound on the entire rooftop. He had just killed his best friend — with his own hands, with a wooden bat, because there had been no other choice. Because Hisashi was no longer Hisashi.
He did not immediately understand what he was seeing.
First — an enormous bulk covered in green scales. Then — blood, a great deal of blood, bandages torn loose along the creature's flank. Then — two people beside it. A man with an axe. A woman in the rags of what had once been a dress, with a pulsing mark on the back of her hand.
Takashi did the only thing a person could do who had just killed his best friend and now stood face to face with a monster.
He attacked.
The wooden bat rose — and came down on the creature's side. The green scales cracked. The creature roared — a high, almost bird-like shriek — and jerked aside.
The man with the axe stepped between them.
Takashi could not stop in time.
The axe traveled short, almost without a backswing.
Arthur did not even have time to think — his body did everything on its own. Muscles trained long ago in lessons that had once seemed pointless fired before his mind could catch up. A short step forward. Weight transfer. A movement from the shoulder.
And that was all.
He stood and looked at what had happened — and tried to find something, anything, inside himself. Any reaction. Any response.
Nothing.
There was no revulsion. No satisfaction. Not even that cold, mechanical detachment he remembered from his former life — when he had signed papers that sent people into oblivion and felt roughly the same as a table feels.
Just — silence inside. Familiar. As old as he was.
The boy sat down on the concrete. Slowly, almost carefully — as though he was tired and had decided to rest. His eyes looked down at his own chest with the expression of someone trying to understand the conditions of a problem he had just been given. Then they stopped. Glazed over. And everything alive in them — left, somewhere, quickly and finally, the way warmth leaves a room when a window is opened in winter.
Arthur watched this.
He watched attentively — as attentively as he had once, in his former life, watched rare animals in enclosures. With a naturalist's interest. With a collector's coldness.
And he caught himself at it.
And stopped.
Because inside — where there had always been emptiness, where he was used to finding only a smooth, cold surface without a single crack — something had shifted. Barely noticeable. The way the air changes before a storm — no clouds yet, no wind, but the skin already feels that something is coming.
He closed his eyes.
Not because it was painful to look. Not because he wanted to hide from what he had done. He simply felt — he needed to close them. As if something inside him had quietly asked for it.
White mist.
He did not know what he had expected. Perhaps darkness. Perhaps nothing. But there was mist — white, dense, alive with some quiet life of its own. Not cold, not warm. Not frightening, not beautiful. Simply — vast. As if inside him there was more space than outside.
And in that mist — a sprout.
Straight. Alone. Reaching upward out of the white emptiness.
And from it — a single branch.
His only branch. His human branch. His true body, his foundation, his anchor through all the worlds he had crossed and would cross. It looked alive — warm, pulsing, real.
But within it — he felt it if he looked long enough and deeply enough — something dark. Not outside. Not beside it. Inside the branch itself, in its core, like a darkness locked within a living tree. It did not move. Did not speak. Only breathed — slowly, heavily, to a rhythm that did not match his own heartbeat.
Sleeping.
The Brain of Cthulhu.
It had not died during the Altar's explosion. It had simply — retreated inward. Gone quiet. Hidden inside the human branch the way a beast retreats into hibernation. And while it slept — Arthur was free. While it slept — the tree belonged to him.
Arthur looked at this — at the sprout, at the branch, at the darkness within — for a fraction of a second. Then he felt something akin to that sensation when you walk in the dark for a long time and suddenly, ahead, a light appears. Still distant. Still unclear what it is. But — it is there.
He opened his eyes.
The rooftop. A Japanese school. The sun was tilting west and coloring the concrete the shade of old rust. Beside him — Veridis, breathing heavily, her emerald eyes tracking him through the pain. Behind him — Mens; he could hear her saying something in her own language, rapid and bewildered.
But her mark was pulsing.
He saw it at the edge of his vision — the sign on the back of her hand, identical to his, glowing a little brighter than usual. She felt the rhythm. That very rhythm — slow, heavy, sleeping deep inside the human branch. She heard her god even through the slumber. Even through the explosion, and another world, and an incomprehensible language around her.
She awaited the awakening.
He hoped it would not come too soon.
And before him — a girl on her knees between two bodies.
He looked at her.
He knew her.
Not personally. Not from this life. From another — the one where he had sat for nights before a screen and watched people who did not exist, and envied them. Envied not their strength, not their beauty — simply the fact that they could feel so loudly it was visible even through a monitor.
Miyamoto Rei. Second year. The spear. Father — a police officer. Takashi — a childhood love, a bond that had managed to become something more before everything collapsed.
He knew her better than she knew herself.
And it was strange — to stand before a person you know inside out, and to understand that to her, you are simply a stranger with an axe and bloodied hands.
Rei lifted her head.
Her eyes were red — not from magic, not from infection, simply from tears. She looked at the stranger standing over Takashi's body and tried to understand what she saw. A man. Alive. With an axe in his hand and an absolutely calm face.
That calm was more terrifying than anything else.
「あなたは誰ですか.なぜ彼を殺したんですか.」
(Who are you. Why did you kill him.)
Arthur listened.
The words passed through him like water through a sieve — some settled, some passed straight through. He caught "dare" — who. Caught the intonation of the question. The rest crumbled into sounds he had heard once, in the meeting rooms of a Tokyo office, behind glass walls, from people who did not know that he understood roughly every third word.
Roughly.
「あなたは私の言っていることが分かりますか.」
(Do you understand what I am saying.)
She spoke fast. Too fast — the words melted together into one long wave, and he only managed to snatch the sharp edges.
From below, a sound was rising. Low, many-voiced — not shouts, not words, something in between. He knew this sound. Or rather — he recognized it, because in his former life he had watched enough films to understand what it meant.
He walked to the edge of the rooftop and looked down.
The courtyard was full of them.
He stood and watched — calmly, methodically, counting and assessing. Somewhere in his chest, very quietly, almost inaudibly — something akin to interest. Alive. Genuine.
He looked at Veridis. Then — at the wall. Then — at the fire escape on the western side of the roof.
He leaned over the edge — the first flight was clear, the second too. He could not see further down.
「何をしようとしているんですか.」
(What are you going to do.)
Rei stood behind him. He had not heard her approach.
He pointed at the fire escape. Then — at Veridis. Then — a downward gesture with his hand.
Rei looked at the fire escape. Then at the dragon. Then back at the fire escape.
「あの生き物はどうするんですか.大きすぎる.」
(What about that creature. It is too big.)
Arthur did not answer — not because he did not want to, but because he was still deciding himself.
He walked over to Veridis and crouched before her.
He placed his hand on her muzzle — gently, as always. Not because he feared her reaction. It was simply the only way he knew — slowly, without sudden movements, giving her time to decide for herself.
She did not pull away.
She half-closed her eyes for a second — the long, scaly eyelids dropped and rose — and then looked at him again. Emerald. Alive. Slightly dulled by pain, but alive.
He looked at her and thought.
Not about a plan. Not about the fire escape, or the distance, or the angle of the fall. He thought about the fact that she had come for him. Across the entire forest, through the night with the Crimers, through the portal into a foreign world — she had simply come. Without explanation. Without reasons he could fully understand.
He did not know what to call it.
In his former life, he had no word for it — not because the word did not exist, but because the thing it described had never applied to him. Loyalty? Attachment? Something older than both words, something from a time when people and beasts had not yet been divided onto different sides?
He did not know.
He only knew she was wounded. That her wing was held together by sheer will and dried bandages. That every breath of hers came with an effort she carefully concealed — but he had already learned to read her by the small things: by the slight twitch at the tip of her tail, by the way she sometimes shut her eyes for a fraction of a second not from weariness but from pain.
And he was about to ask her to jump.
From the height of the third floor. On a damaged wing. Onto asphalt.
Something tightened inside.
Not strongly. Not the way it does for people who know how to fear for others — he did not know how, had never known how, that required practice he did not have. But something tightened nonetheless. Quietly. Almost imperceptibly. As if the sprout in the white mist swayed in a wind that was not there.
He looked down — at the courtyard, at the asphalt, at the distance.
Then he looked at her.
And she understood.
He saw her understand — by the way the muscles tensed beneath her scales, by the way she slowly rose onto all four paws despite the pain. She folded the damaged wing as tightly as she could against her body and walked to the edge — slowly, carefully, with that particular care with which one approaches something one fears.
She was afraid.
He saw it. Saw it in the way she stared downward — for a long time, without looking away, as if trying to convince herself of something. Her tail was pressed to the ground. Her nostrils flared.
And still she stood at the edge.
Because she trusted him.
Arthur stood beside her and said nothing — not because there was nothing to say, but because any words here would have been smaller than what was happening. He simply stood there. Beside her. So that she knew he saw.
With a gesture, he signaled Rei and Mens — move back.
Mens stepped back wordlessly. Rei — after a second's hesitation.
Veridis looked down.
She looked for a long time.
Then — she jumped.
It was not beautiful — he knew it would not be beautiful, had prepared himself for it, but still, something in his chest lurched when she vanished beyond the edge of the roof. The damaged wing spread for a fraction of a second — he saw it jerk, saw it try to catch the air — and fail. Not fully. It only slightly softened the landing.
The impact was dull. Heavy. The asphalt received her without mercy.
One second.
Arthur did not breathe.
Two seconds.
Then she stirred.
Slowly, with difficulty — but she stirred. A forepaw. Then a hind paw. Then she raised her head — and looked up at him.
Alive.
He exhaled.
And only then understood that he had been standing at the edge all that time, staring downward — motionless, not noticing Rei beside him, nor Mens behind him, nor the sounds from the school below. Simply staring. Waiting. And something inside him — that very thing that had tightened when he had asked her to jump — slowly loosened again.
That was also a feeling.
He did not know its name. But it was real.
「すごい」, Rei breathed beside him.
(Incredible.)
Arthur did not answer.
He looked at Veridis below — at how she stood on all four paws, swaying, but standing — and thought that in his former life he had collected rare things. Minerals. Animals. Everything that was inaccessible to others.
He had thought he understood the value of rarity.
But this was different.
This was not rare.
This was — his.
Then he moved toward the fire escape.