Revolution or Revenge

Yuzuki Chiba stood in the dull light of the abandoned laboratory’s hallway; her gaze locked on the glass wall separating her from Tsukishima Miyuu. Strapped to a table, unconscious and still, Miyuu didn’t look anything like the reckless, gorilla girl Yuzuki had fought with so many times.

She looked fragile. Human. Vulnerable.

Yuzuki’s hands trembled at her sides, damp with sweat. She clenched her fists until her nails bit into her palms, focusing on the sting to steady her breathing. She hated how she felt—like her stomach had turned itself inside out. The sight of Miyuu like this made her chest tighten in a way she couldn’t explain. She should feel... satisfied, shouldn’t she? At the very least, indifferent. Instead, her insides churned uncomfortably.

Behind her, muffled voices buzzed from the computer room. Her father’s voice cut through the noise as he barked orders to his team. The sound of keyboards clicking and machines buzzing filled the air as they worked to launch the virus. The plan was already in motion—soon, bots all over Harmonia City would spiral into chaos.

This is what she’d wanted. What her father had wanted.

Right?

If this worked, her father would finally win. He’d have his revenge on Zenith Industries, on Gaia, on everything that had made their lives a living hell. Their family could be normal again. They could be happy. Couldn’t they?

So why did it feel like she was standing on the edge of a cliff, about to fall into darkness? Why did it feel like she’d already fallen?

She pressed a trembling hand to the glass, her reflection staring back at her—distorted, fractured, just like everything else in her life. Miyuu didn’t move. Didn’t wake. Didn’t fight.

Yuzuki Chiba was born into a house where anger wasn’t just in the air—it was the air. It was suffocating and impossible to escape. Noboru Chiba, her father, had built that atmosphere brick by brick with his grudges, his failures, and his obsessive need to blame someone else for both. He’d poured all of that venom into her, handed it down like an inheritance she hadn’t asked for but couldn’t refuse.

His obsession with the Tsukishimas, Gaia, and Zenith Industries wasn’t just petty rivalry. It was forged in the ashes of Genesis Corporation, their family’s once-thriving empire. In the days when Genesis ruled the market, they’d made their fortune selling technology powered by Voltherium, a rare and highly efficient energy core mined from a hazardous asteroid belt near Earth’s solar system.

Voltherium was revolutionary, a game-changer that powered cities, vehicles, and advanced technologies with unmatched efficiency. It was a miracle. A miracle with a body count.

The miners who harvested Voltherium rarely lived long enough to collect their pay checks. Radiation exposure, lethal accidents, and catastrophic malfunctions were standard occupational hazards. Noboru Chiba had dismissed it all as “the price of progress,” a line he’d repeated so often it felt like company policy.

And then Gaia got involved.

The government AI, with its inconvenient habit of putting people over profits, declared Voltherium unsafe. The evidence was overwhelming—radiation poisoning wasn’t just killing miners; it was creeping into the environment, causing sickness and death on a scale no one could ignore. Gaia banned its use, and the market for Voltherium collapsed overnight.

While other companies adapted, pivoting to safer alternatives with Zenith Industries’ help, Genesis stood its ground—stubborn, unyielding, and doomed.

Noboru Chiba didn’t see Gaia’s decision as a logical response to a global crisis. No, he saw it as a personal attack. He refused Zenith’s offers to help them transition to Kyronite Crystals, the safer energy source mined from deep ocean trenches on the water-covered planet Oceanus Abyssus. To Noboru, accepting their help was worse than failure. It was surrender.

So, he dug in his heels and poured the company’s resources into developing a new proprietary energy core. Something that could outshine Voltherium, outpace Kyronite, and shove Zenith’s success back in their faces.

Years passed. The breakthrough never came.

Genesis bled money. Its reputation crumbled. They managed to stay afloat by selling metals mined from other planets, but without a flagship product, they were just a husk of what they’d once been. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough for him.

The shame twisted Noboru, consumed him. He became bitter, obsessive, a man so blinded by his grudge that he dragged everyone around him into it. Yuzuki’s mother, once the polished face of the family’s social elite, retreated into denial. She couldn’t cope with their fall from grace, couldn’t handle the whispers at events they were no longer invited to. Eventually, she stopped going out altogether, falling into a deep depression that left her as much of a ghost as the company they’d lost.

Yuzuki had grown up in the shadow of that bitterness. Genesis’s failure was a wound her father refused to let heal. And now, he was trying to patch that wound with revenge.

Her thoughts snapped back to the present as she heard her father's from the room behind her. “Initiate phase two!” Noboru barked from the computer room. “I want every bot in Harmonia City under our control within the hour.”

Yuzuki flinched at the sound, her stomach twisting into a knot. The plan was unfolding, step by step, just like he wanted. She should feel... happy, she supposed. Or vindicated.

But all she felt was trapped. And staring through the glass at Miyuu’s unconscious form only made it worse.

When Yuzuki transferred to Harmonia University, it was like stepping out of a smog-filled bunker and into a sunlit field for the first time. She didn’t realize how toxic her family’s world was until she wasn’t drowning in it anymore. Harmonia was everything her home wasn’t—calm, structured, clean. For the first time in her life, she felt like she could breathe without choking on someone else’s anger.

The student council made it even better. They noticed her. Actually noticed her. They praised her when her grades improved, when she started socializing more, when she did anything that hinted at effort. They noticed things she didn’t think anyone ever could. Not her father, who was too consumed with revenge to care about anything else. Not her mother, who had all but disappeared into the abyss of depression. No one.

For the first time, Yuzuki felt seen. And for a while, that was enough. She threw herself into her studies, her routines, her new life. She told herself she’d left her family’s darkness behind, that she was becoming something better. Someone better.

Then Miyuu showed up.

Miyuu, the SEED student. The lowlife with a rap sheet and a bad attitude, who somehow waltzed into Harmonia like she belonged there. Miyuu, the delinquent with a temper that could ignite a room faster than an ungrounded power core. Miyuu, who—by every logical metric—was inferior to Yuzuki in every way.

So why? Why had the student council stopped noticing her? Why were they suddenly fawning over Miyuu?

Why did they let someone like her taint Harmonia City?

Miyuu didn’t belong here. She didn’t belong in Yuzuki’s new life. She belonged in a cage, in a zoo, far away from Harmonia. Certainly, far away from Yuzuki.

When her father caught wind of it, everything changed. For the first time in Yuzuki’s life, Noboru Chiba looked at her like she mattered. Like she was something more than a failed extension of his ambitions. He praised her when she told him about Miyuu. For a brief, shining moment, Yuzuki basked in the warmth of his approval, a feeling she’d been chasing her whole life.

And she wanted more of it. No matter what it cost.

She’d been so damn proud of herself when she’d convinced the Crown to invite Miyuu to the Circuit Pit. That was step one. Step two? Manipulating that idiot Kaoru into installing the virus in his butler bot. And when she pulled it off, it felt like pure, unfiltered, nothing-can-stop-me-now victory. Her father had even told her she’d done a good job. For once, he made her feel like she wasn’t a complete failure.

She thought he was proud of her.

Her father had pitched the plan as simple: get Miyuu expelled. The virus would cause just enough chaos to keep her at the Circuit Pit long enough for the student council to catch her in the act. No one had mentioned the bot turning into a homicidal maniac—or that there was a real plan lurking underneath the one she’d been sold.

Yuzuki gritted her teeth as the memory clawed its way back. She’d been hiding in the vents, recording everything for her father like a dutiful soldier, when it all went to hell. The bot went full murder mode. It nearly killed Miyuu. Worse, it almost took out the entire crowd of students watching the fights.

And what did the student council do? They didn’t blame Miyuu. They didn’t punish her. They didn’t drag her off to face the consequences she so obviously deserved. No, they doted on her. Hugging her, bandaging her wounds, fussing over her like she was a lost kitten.

It made Yuzuki feel sick. And not just because of the botched plan. Watching Miyuu bask in the attention felt like swallowing broken glass.

But the worst part? The bot started its self-destruct sequence. Grand Écrasant was seconds away from levelling the entire Circuit Pit and taking a good chunk of Harmonia City with it. Yuzuki had been frozen, barely breathing, as she watched the bot sit up, its energy core overloading.

But Miyuu stopped it. Somehow, she stopped it.

Her father had never planned for that. He hadn’t told her the bot was programmed to explode. He hadn’t told her she was supposed to die in the chaos. Her near-death wasn’t a mistake. It was the plan.

Grand Écrasant’s detonation was supposed to turn Yuzuki into a tragic martyr. Her death would have been the spark, the “tragedy” to shatter the public’s trust in Gaia and Harmonia. And while society reeled from the supposed failure of its perfect systems, her father would rise as the voice of the revolution, weaponizing her memory to his advantage. Oh, and as a bonus, the explosion was meant to deliver a crushing blow to Renjiro Tsukishima by stealing his daughter in the most violent way possible.

But Miyuu surviving? Stopping the explosion? Saving Yuzuki—the very person who’d tried to destroy her? That wasn’t part of the plan.

And when her father saw Miyuu’s true nature—when her status as something more than human came to light—it changed everything. Miyuu wasn’t just an annoying girl anymore; she was the key to his plans.

Yuzuki had been a fool. Her father had never looked at her before, never really seen her. Why did she think that would change? She wasn’t a part of his revolution. She wasn’t even a supporting player. She was just another disposable piece on the board, useful until she wasn’t.

Now all she could do was stew in the knowledge that the person she’d tried to ruin had saved her life—and that her father had been willing to sacrifice her all along.