Chapter 14:
HITLESS - GIRL DESERVE TO DIE
Rain came down like punishment.
Sheets of it, slicing through the neon glare, blurring the faces of strangers who barely looked at me. Every step I took left a small wound in the puddled streets, only to be swallowed instantly. The city was a bloodstream, and I was a clot trying to move against its flow.
My stomach screamed louder than the sirens. A cavernous, hollow ache twisting inside me like a live wire. Fifteen years. Fifteen years of rationed trays, cold rice, water that tasted of metal and despair. Hunger wasn’t just a sensation now—it was a creature. Clawing at the lining of my gut, whispering: Feed me or die.
I followed the smell first.
It hit me on a crosswalk—a ghost of warmth in a concrete wasteland. Savory, rich, alive. Pork broth simmering, garlic crushed fresh, soy tang. My feet moved before my brain did, through a maze of signs and steam vents until I saw it: a ramen shop, lantern light bleeding onto the rain-slick sidewalk, curtains swaying like a siren’s call.
The warmth hit me when I pushed through the noren curtains. A tidal wave of heat, noise, and human life. Chatter. Laughter. A baseball game screaming from an old TV. For a second, I stood frozen at the threshold like a man peering into heaven—or hell. Fifteen years in silence, and now this chaos burned against my eardrums.
“Oi, irasshaimase!” The waitress barked without looking at me. Her voice was a gunshot.
I stumbled forward, coat dripping, shoes squelching. Water pooled under me as I slid onto a stool at the counter.
The smell was a knife now, carving me open. Pork fat. Noodles boiling. Soy and scallions riding steam into my lungs. My fingers gripped the counter so hard they ached.
Then the bowl landed.
God, that bowl. Golden broth shimmering, noodles coiled like sleeping serpents, pork slices marbled with fat, an egg split open like a secret. Steam rose in tendrils, curling into my face like incense from some ancient altar.
I didn’t thank her. I didn’t even breathe.
I snatched the chopsticks and dug in.
The first bite was violence.
Scalding heat, fat sliding across my tongue, salt detonating like fireworks. I choked and coughed and shoved more in before I’d even swallowed. The broth burned my throat raw. Tears leaked from my eyes—not sadness, not joy, but something primal, something from the marrow.
The shop noise dimmed. The city dimmed. There was only me, the ramen, and the black hole inside me swallowing everything it touched.
Second bite. Third. Slurping so loud heads turned. I didn’t care.
Fourth. Fifth. Broth dripping from my chin, running down my hands. Chopsticks clattering against the bowl like bones in a graveyard.
Whispers started. Phones came out. Screens lit up.
The man at the counter is eating like an animal.
Let them film. Let them tweet. Dignity is for men who aren’t starving.
Fifteen years in a coffin and now the taste of pork fat was more sacred than any prayer.
---
Halfway through the bowl, the dizziness hit.
The hunger beast had fed—but now my body remembered exhaustion. Muscles screaming, head spinning, blood sugar detonating after famine. My vision began to smear like wet paint.
I reached for the water glass. My fingers missed. Knocked it over.
It shattered on the tile, water bleeding across the counter like a crime scene.
The waitress yelled something, sharp, distant.
My head slumped forward. The ramen blurred into a golden swamp.
And in the glass shards, I saw it—
My reflection.
Not the man who kissed Aiko’s forehead goodnight fifteen years ago.
This face was carved from stone. Eyes hollowed by years, jaw wired with rage. A stranger wearing my skin.
What have you become, Rei?
A voice whispered inside me.
A beast.
---
The phone in my pocket buzzed. Once. Twice. Three times.
Like a heartbeat.
The words from before pulsed in my skull:
Seven years. For every year, a truth.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
I tried to reach for it. My arm felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. The world tilted.
The lights streaked. The voices drowned.
Then nothing.
---
Black.
Not like the void of the room.
This blackness was alive.
It had teeth.
---
Dream Fragment
The ramen bowl floats in darkness.
Inside it: not noodles, but strands of black hair.
A small hand reaches up from the broth, pale fingers clutching.
“Aiko?”
The broth turns red. A voice hums:
One knock, then three…
The sound becomes screams.
And then my own reflection rises from the surface, grinning, lips smeared crimson.
“It’s done,” it says.
My voice.
Always my voice.
---
And then—a different voice, cutting through the dream like a blade:
“Hey. Hey! Wake up!”
Warmth. Hands shaking me. The smell of shampoo, citrus and rain.
The dark dissolved into fractured light.
A face swam into view.
Soft lines, wet hair clinging to her cheeks, eyes wide and sharp.
Young. Too young.
“Jesus, you’re burning up,” she muttered.
Her voice was real. Not static. Not a ghost.
For the first time in fifteen years, I felt human hands on me.
And that terrified me more than the box ever did.
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