The train rattled on, leaving the Kanda district behind, but the image of the accident site lingered in Agung's mind—not as a cinematic "hero moment," but as a gritty, unvarnished piece of reality.
Back at the station, the driver of the delivery van—a middle-aged man in a faded uniform—had finally crawled out from behind the wheel. He stood in the street, his hands trembling as he stared at his vehicle. The side of his van, where Agung had braced his roll, was a mess of crumpled metal, dented inward by the sheer, blunt force of Agung's body weight and the momentum of the rescue.
The man touched the mangled steel, his jaw slack. He looked around the scene, searching for the person who had hit it—perhaps imagining a car or a heavy bike had caused the damage. But there was no debris of a crash; just a dented van and a puddle of transmission fluid.
He didn't know that the "dent" was left by a man who had been a god just hours ago, a man who had channeled the weight of his own guilt and the physical force of a desperate, human need into a single, kinetic impact. To the driver, it was just a mystery—a bizarre, impossible dent that would cost him his job or his paycheck.
On the train, Agung felt a sudden, sharp pang of guilt in his chest, one that had nothing to do with his bruised ribs.
"He's going to get fired," Agung whispered, staring at his reflection in the dark train window.
Maki followed his gaze, understanding immediately. "You didn't break his van because you were careless, Agung. You broke it because you were saving a life. That is the price of being present in the real world. Things break. People get hurt. You can't fix every single ripple you create."
"But I have a quadrillion dollars," Agung muttered, his fingers drumming against his knee. "I could buy him a hundred vans. I could build him a fleet."
"And if you do that—if you track him down and throw money at the problem—you're telling him his life and his livelihood are just things you can 'edit' at will," Umi said firmly. "That is exactly the mindset the 'Deadbeat' had. You want to be a man? You accept the consequences of your actions, even the messy, inconvenient ones."
Agung fell silent, the weight of the "non-magical" world settling in. He realized he couldn't just snap his fingers to make the van driver's day better. He had to learn how to exist without trying to "solve" reality with his infinite resources.
The train hissed to a stop, the doors sliding open to the humid, salty air of Odaiba.
As they stepped off the platform and into the bustling station terminal, Agung saw it—the first sign that the narrative was no longer his.
Directly in front of the station exit, a massive digital billboard was playing a loop of an idol concert. It wasn't the high-production, magically enhanced performance he had once "Created." It was raw, glitchy, and imperfect. And there, standing in the center of the terminal, was a group of Nijigasaki students, holding flyers and looking exhausted.
One of them—a girl with sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes and a messy ponytail—was leaning against a pillar, nearly asleep on her feet, while a younger girl with a determined face was shaking her arm, trying to get her to wake up for the flyer distribution.
It was Kanata.
But she wasn't waiting for him. She wasn't a character in *his* story. She was struggling to get through a Tuesday afternoon in a train station, oblivious to the fact that the man who had abandoned her was standing just twenty feet away, bruised, bandaged, and holding a duffel bag.
Agung froze. The "Infinite Stamina" in his blood felt useless. He couldn't just walk up and deliver a speech.