The Shinkawa family ran a high-end hospital. Shouichi's father had graduated from a prestigious university overseas and had years of surgical experience. He brought that same precision and severity into everything around him: the operating room, the white hospital, and their wealthy home. His mother was a professor at a famous university, and the glasses she wore only made her look colder.
The two of them treated the operating table and the desk as their battlefields, and in that sense, they suited each other perfectly. To other people, their marriage was simply what happened when two elites met. Natural. Proper. A perfect match.
Many people dreamed of suddenly meeting their own princess while walking down the road. Most of them never thought about the other possibility: becoming someone else's chosen prince.
From a young age, Shouichi understood the difference between geniuses and ordinary people.
Geniuses kept moving deeper into the field they had chosen. From time to time, they threw things away, even if that was the price of moving one step further.
His father often spent the night at the hospital, dealing with one thing after another. As hospital director, what he operated on was no longer only with a scalpel, and the people he directed were no longer only nurses and assistants. His mother also had lectures to attend and academic work to handle. There was no doubt that even after achieving success, the two of them were still tirelessly completing themselves.
Always moving closer to perfection.
Their lives had not been smooth all the way to this point, so they had accumulated experience. Experience, in turn, made everything more efficient.
Both of his parents understood very well how to make their child better.
A child was the crystallization of themselves. Also... their most precious creation. That almost craftsmanlike obsession with making him finer, making him better, had already driven his parents to plan many things long before Shouichi was even born.
Before conception, for example, his father went months without smoking or drinking, making full use of all the knowledge and convenience he had as a doctor. His mother adjusted her emotions and made every preparation she could before and after the pregnancy.
At last, Shouichi was born.
But he was a weak baby. A month after birth, he had gained less than six hundred grams.
Their precious creation had met a setback before it had even begun to be shaped, but that did not discourage them. They still poured love and effort into him. They had confidence. Their child would surely become even more outstanding than they were, because people were born to grow. If a person could not even move forward, then there was almost no meaning in it.
Feeding a weak child was different from feeding an ordinary one. They were pickier, lost their appetite more easily, and ate slowly. His father drew up a personal diet for him, while his mother took charge of coaxing and encouraging him through meals.
Everything seemed to be moving in a better direction.
Except for temperament.
Shouichi was not confident like his parents. If anything, he was timid.
That irritated his father. With that kind of personality, the boy could not even walk with his head up. He hoped the environment would change him, so he sent Shouichi to a school focused on sports. It was not academic competition, but the urgent pressure of physical competition that might push him forward, and exercise might also make up for his frail body.
However.
Shouichi did not show the tenacity his father wanted.
In the fifty-meter dash, he finished last.
In the hundred-meter dash, he finished last.
In the relay, his leg dragged the whole team down.
These were real failures. Maybe they were small ones, but children did not understand manners, and they would not hold back just because he was the young master of a hospital family.
The tightness in his chest, the rusty taste filling his nose, and that repeated feeling of being watched every time he was the only one left on the track. It was another extreme form of being in the spotlight.
Everyone else had reached the finish line. Only he was still stumbling forward, and every pair of eyes staring at him felt like invisible pressure.
He wanted to quit. But just as he was about to raise his hand, he saw his father standing off to the side with his arms folded, watching him without expression.
His father's gaze was nothing like the others' mocking looks. It was more like... a bayonet.
In the end, he withdrew from that school. It was his father's decision. His father could see that Shouichi was not suited to that kind of competition, and that under that kind of pressure, resentment would never grow into motivation inside him.
After that, Shouichi was given a life split between medical study and extracurricular skills. After all, as the child of an excellent doctor and an excellent scholar, he was naturally expected to absorb the best of both. And one day, he would have to inherit the large hospital that was almost the flesh and blood of his father's life's work.
Still, Shouichi was not locked inside a huge house, facing nothing but rigid teachers all day.
He had his own holidays. He had companions he knew. In summer, he went out to catch cicadas. In winter, he had snowball fights in the park.
Because his parents were elites.
They understood... what childhood required.
What truly made them begin to doubt him was still what Shouichi lacked: the personality they had, the urge to move forward.
By the book.
He studied by the book. Learned other skills by the book.
He even played with other children by the book, never daring to take a joke too far, never organizing anything himself. He simply followed behind the king of the kids.
It was not supposed to be like this.
His parents had made the plan. His parents had decided how he should walk. Yet when they saw Shouichi moving exactly as they had imagined, they felt something was missing.
And while they focused so much on their son's growth, their own lives had also been delayed. They, too, had stopped moving forward.
Shouichi's frail health never improved. He caught colds and coughed easily.
Everything seemed to prove that this son would never become the radiant existence they had first imagined. Out of helplessness, they eventually accepted that failure, recorded it carefully as a failure, and drew new experience from it.
...
The boy walked with his head lowered along a street dyed red by the slanting evening sun. A small backpack hung from his shoulders, and behind his thin body stretched a long shadow like a slender bamboo stalk. His decent clothes were stained with a little dust, and the back of the hand clutching his backpack strap had faint bruises on it.
He had fallen by accident. He had not been bullied.
Why was his first feeling after getting hurt relief that it had not been bullying?
He looked at the pebbles by the roadside. There were no classmates or friends walking with him.
Once, after being bullied by the king of the kids, he had gone home crying to his parents. His stern father had been furious and had even taken the matter to the school. At the time, Shouichi had been happy. Only after he came home again and saw the even worse look on his father's face did he realize something was wrong.
That expression showed irritation.
Because what the other children had done was only a moment of interest, imitating the fights from a sumo program on television. Timid Shouichi had been knocked down cleanly in a single move. Lying on the ground, he heard those familiar laughs, and that hurt far more than the pain in his body.
What truly angered his father was Shouichi's own cowardice. He had not even had the courage to stand up and challenge the other boy again. Instead, he had run home in shame, wearing a miserable face and hoping his parents would vent his anger for him.
And after his imposing father went to the other child's parents to vent that anger, Shouichi seemed, for a while, to be abandoned by the children who had once been his friends.
"He can't take a joke."
"He gets upset over one little joke."
"We can't play with him anymore... My mom said his family is scary."
But more than any of that, what hurt him most was the feeling of his father's gaze after he returned home.
The gaze of someone looking at a failed product.
His face tightened.
Suddenly, he did not want to go home.
He was afraid his family would see the wound on his hand, ask what had happened, and then he would have to see that expression again.
Thinking that, he lifted his foot and turned onto another road branching away from the way home.
It led toward the Shinkawa family's hospital, the hospital he was supposed to inherit.
...
The smell of disinfectant in the air was not unfamiliar. He had come here many times. He had been born here, and treated here as well. As the director's child, he could have walked in with his head held high. Yet the moment Shouichi entered the hospital, he lowered his head even further, hiding the bruise on the back of his hand as if he were hiding something shameful.
With his eyes lowered, he crossed the lobby, passed through the corridors, and rode a crowded elevator to a higher floor. He knew the way well enough to reach a private room without thinking. The door was half open. He carefully pushed it wider and peeked inside.
The room was not large, but the air-conditioning flowed comfortably through the quiet space. The clean room was arranged in white and green. A floor-to-ceiling window faced the door, giving it an excellent view of the scenery outside. At the center, on the hospital bed, an old man in a patient's gown was holding a book and reading with great interest.
Shouichi hesitated for a moment, then walked in softly.
The old man noticed him. His gaze left the book, and when he saw Shouichi, his white mustache lifted with a kind smile.
"Little Shouichi, what brings you here? Did you come just to visit me?"
The boy nodded. The old man's attitude made him feel a small pang of guilt. After all, he had only come here because he did not want to go home yet, almost like he was running away.
"Yes..." His gaze shifted to the IV stand beside the bed. Clear liquid flowed through the thin plastic tube, steadily entering the old man's body through the needle in the back of his withered hand.
"Mr. Ando, are you feeling all right?"
"Oh, I'm just a bag of old bones. No need to ask if I'm all right. If I were all right, I wouldn't be lying in this hospital bed." Mr. Ando laughed. "You, though, come here and let me see if you've grown any taller."
Shouichi obediently went over. Up close, the wrinkles on the old man's exposed arms, legs, and face were even clearer, like bark that had lost its life. The old man held out a hand almost as thin as Shouichi's. One was healthy and rosy. The other was fragile, like a dry branch.
"You have grown... Children grow so fast. Your body is better than before too, isn't it?" the old man said, pleased.
Then he noticed the small injury on the back of the boy's hand.
"What happened?"
"I fell by accident."
"That must hurt. Wait here. I remember there should be some medicine around. I'll put some on and rub it in for you. It will feel much better." As he spoke, the old man tried to get up, paying no attention to the IV tube swaying with his movement. Shouichi hurriedly held him down.
"It's just a small injury, Mr. Ando... You're the one who..."
He stopped halfway.
The old man before him had cancer. Late-stage cancer.
He should have been very sad. After all, he was one of the senior doctors at this hospital, and when Shouichi was young, he had cared for him many times. To be defeated and have his life taken away by the very illness he had fought all his life... the boy felt sad just thinking about it.
"Tch, it's only cancer. I've worked in this field for so many years. I've seen hundreds of cases like it." The old man, however, did not seem to mind at all. He waved it off lightly.
"Huh...? Can it be cured?" Shouichi asked.
"Mm... well, when it's late stage." Old Man Ando scratched his pale hair.
Shouichi pressed his lips together.
"Th-there has to be some way, right? You're an excellent doctor, and so many people in this hospital respect you, including... including my dad. Everyone can think of something together!"
"But almost everything I'm receiving now, including what you can see, is futile treatment." Ando looked at the anxious boy and gently stroked his thick hair, smiling at an unhurried pace. "Precisely because I am who I am, I understand my situation better than anyone. If they had not insisted on keeping me here, I would have stopped lying in this place long ago."
"If your illness is that serious, where would you go instead of staying in the hospital?" Shouichi asked, confused.
At that, Ando seemed to grow lively. He picked up the book and showed its cover to Shouichi. It was a magazine, a travel magazine.
"I'm going to Santorini, in the Aegean Sea!" he said, full of spirit.
"...?"
"There is no island in the Aegean more mysterious or special than Santorini. Legend says it is Atlantis, the lost civilization destroyed by a volcanic eruption around 1500 BC. That means the whole island is full of volcanic terrain. The beaches are not only beautiful, they even have special black pebble beaches and black sand beaches. It gives the Aegean vacation a completely different feeling!"
"Mr. Ando...?"
"I have wanted to go for ages, but when I was young, I did not have the money. Travel is no fun if you do not have enough money, you know. Now that I have worked hard all these years, I can finally throw everything aside and go."
"No, that's not the problem..." Shouichi could not help saying. "You're sick right now. Very sick."
"I know. Sick enough that I'm about to die," Old Man Ando said with a firm nod.
Shouichi felt as if he was going to lose his mind.
"But that is exactly why I have to hurry and go to the place I have always wanted to see, Little Shouichi." The old man smiled gently.
He set aside that almost ridiculous mood, softened his voice, and spoke with care.
"I have seen futile treatment more than once. Patients on the verge of death are kept alive with every cutting-edge technology available. They are cut open, fitted with tubes, connected to machines, and constantly filled with medicine. You can see that very scene in the ICU of this building, and the cost of treatment is frighteningly high. That is torture."
"Putting a patient through medical procedures you already know will cause suffering is itself a kind of torment. As a doctor, I have been trained not to show personal emotion in medical work. But now it is me. I am both doctor and patient."
Ando said this quietly.
"So I finally decided to break the rules, just this once."
"My own diagnosis is that there is no hope. If so, why should I spend the last of my time as a lump of flesh kept alive by machines, instead of using that time to go to the holy place of my dreams?"
"B-but I don't want you to die..." Shouichi grabbed him desperately.
"Who doesn't die?" Ando said. "And if you did not die for hundreds or thousands of years, would you still be human? That would not be a god either. It would be a monster."
"For a person, having one identity and walking it all the way to the end is already wonderful enough. Life is hard to begin with. If someone had to live one life after another, over and over, would that not be terribly exhausting?"
The old man patted his shoulder.
"Find a path and walk it to the end. Maybe life is that simple."
"If there really were that many paths to choose from, a person would be worn out. In the end, they might not even know which way to go, or where they were supposed to end up. Look at me. I'm different. I will end up in Santorini. How wonderful is that? Beaches, beautiful women, bright sun, blue sea."
He smiled as he wiped away the tear that had slipped down Shouichi's cheek before the boy could stop it.
"Oh, oh, crying again. You have been a crybaby since you were little. No wonder that stubborn father of yours gets so angry."
"But... he is wrong too. No person's path can replace another's."
The old man murmured this.
"Little Shouichi, where do you want to go in the future?"
"I don't know..." Shouichi lowered his head. "Dad already said my little brother will inherit the hospital later."
"Then isn't that perfect? You can do whatever you like."
"But... I don't know."
"Then why not Santorini too?" Old Man Ando laughed heartily and patted his shoulder. The motion was broad, but the strength behind it was pitifully weak. Shouichi could even feel the old man's uncontrollable trembling.
...
Later, Mr. Ando refused everyone's kindness. He insisted on leaving the hospital, and Japan, and boarded his final flight to the Aegean Sea.
He sent many photos back to his colleagues.
The old man sat on the beach in the sun, wearing sunglasses and holding a beer. Young people came and went around him, and he laughed with complete abandon.
Two months later, his remains were brought back by Shouichi's father.
The death of the old man who had cared for Shouichi since childhood passed without much commotion.
Even though many people respected him.
Even though he had walked his own path well.
...
"My path...?"
A hoarse voice came heavily from beneath the skull mask.
"Ha... hahaha. The path I chose in the end was the path of escape."
"I escaped reality. Escaped my parents. Escaped into this place."
He held his cold rapier and walked forward, step by step.
"From one virtual world to another... together with you, I have escaped through so many worlds like this."
"How many professions have we changed? How many identities?"
"Do you have an answer yet...?"
His voice trembled as he asked.
"Tell me."
Tell me.
Tell me.
"Satoru!!"
Why did he still keep committing crimes?
Because if he did not, he could no longer keep running.
He could no longer maintain that pitiful pride born from escaping reality.
I have no way of knowing what Didos said to you.
So now, I am recreating that stage.
So...
Let me hear it too.
He thrust Buzzing Octave again and again, as if he would never tire.
It should not have landed. The Satoru before his eyes had already gone far beyond him, so far beyond that he could not even see his back.
But...
It landed.
Feeling the impact in his hand, Shouichi froze.
"It is hardly an answer. Just the resonance between useless failures who cannot bear reality... then the self-questioning that comes from pity for a fellow player, and... the courage granted by someone who happened to appear at exactly the right time. In the end, it is nothing more than turning around and facing the real world."
The man before him, Satoru, was breathing hard. Shouichi's blade had truly pierced through his virtual body.
Even so, Satoru raised his head. On that face trembling from some unknown pain, he forced a smile and spoke to him.
"Shinkawa, we... should have gone home a long time ago."