Agung felt the air leave his lungs. Beside him, Maki stiffened, her gaze darting to the girl leaning against the cold marble pillar.
Kanata looked nothing like the glossy, professional idol he had seen in the broadcast archives. Her hair was pulled into a messy, lopsided ponytail, and her eyelids were drooping, fighting a war against gravity that she was clearly losing. She looked small, frayed at the edges, and devastatingly human. Beside her, a girl—likely one of her club-mates—was trying to hand out flyers to uninterested commuters, occasionally nudging Kanata to keep her upright.
"That's her," Agung whispered, his voice cracking. He felt a sudden, sharp ache in his chest—a physical manifestation of the three years he had stolen from her. "The one leaning against the pillar. That's Kanata-chan."
Maki didn't respond immediately. She watched Kanata for a long, heavy moment. She saw the way Kanata's shoulders slumped, the way her hand absentmindedly clutched a small bag of candy as if it were the only thing keeping her grounded. Maki's hand, which had been resting on Agung's arm, tightened painfully.
"She looks like she's about to collapse," Maki murmured, her voice stripped of its usual clinical distance. "Agung... if you walk over there and try to 'fix' this—if you try to buy her a better life, or manifest her a bed, or apologize with a grand gesture—you will destroy her. Look at her. She isn't waiting for a savior. She's waiting for a moment to rest."
Agung nodded, his jaw set. He realized with terrifying clarity that the "Deadbeat" had left her with a deep-seated distrust of anyone who promised "help." If he marched over there like a man with infinite power, she wouldn't see an apology; she'd see another obstacle.
"I'm not going to 'fix' anything," Agung said, his voice low and steadying. "I'm just going to stand here. I'm going to watch her for a second, just to see what a 'real' day looks like for her, without the system tracking her stats."
He reached into his pocket—not for mana, but for his wallet. He pulled out a small, crumpled bill. He looked at the modest vending machine nearby, then at Kanata.
"She's tired, Maki. Not just 'idol-tired.' She's 'life-tired.'"
He took a step forward, but stopped. He felt the weight of his own bandages beneath his shirt—a reminder that he had earned these bruises in the real world, just as she had earned her exhaustion in the real world.
"If I go over there," Agung said to Maki, his eyes never leaving the girl who had no idea he was standing in the terminal, "I have to be prepared for her to hate me. I have to be prepared for her to tell me to get out of her life. And I have to be okay with that."
He looked at his wives—Maki, Umi, Eli, and the others—who were watching him with an intensity that made the surrounding crowd feel like a blur of static.
"Stay here," he instructed, his voice firm. "I'm going to go get a cup of coffee. One for me, and one for her. If she throws it at me, at least I'll have tried to offer something warm."
He started to walk toward the vending machine, his movements slow and deliberate, trying to shed the "God-tier" aura that had clung to him for so long. He was just a guy in a dirty, singed jacket, walking across a train terminal, moving toward a girl who didn't know that the man who had abandoned her was currently trying to figure out how to be human again. As he approaches the vending machine, Kanata shifts, opening her eyes—those heavy, sleepy eyes—and for a split second, her gaze drifts over the crowd and lands directly on him