CHAPTER 5 — Island 2

From above, it looked exactly like an anthill someone had violently stirred with a stick.Perched high on the edge of a cliff, a lone boy watched the chaos unfold.Below him, a desperate group was fighting in the middle of a dense cluster of trees—four candidates against two, fire element against earth element. Farther away, on a narrow strip of sand, two figures circled each other cautiously without daring to engage. Elsewhere, a dirty, crackling flash of lightning streaked across the ground near the beach, and a shadow collapsed.The boy could see all of it with a crystal clarity that no ordinary human eye should have allowed.In front of each of his pupils floated a perfectly still disk of water, curved to the exact millimeter, thick in the center and thin around the edges. They were two liquid lenses suspended precisely three centimeters from his face, remaining completely unmoving despite the heavy wind blowing on the cliff. Every so often, one of them thickened ever so slightly, and a distant image drew closer.He had messy orange hair. He wore a navy-blue jacket with white lapels, its sleeves rolled up to reveal a vibrant orange lining, and a light-colored belt tied neatly around his waist. He was fourteen years old.Beneath the water floating in his eyes, two black crosses could be seen."Well, damn," Cephas grimaced, his voice low. "They're really going at it, those idiots."The water lenses suddenly broke apart, falling like ordinary rain onto the cold stone.He remained there, staring at the horizon without focusing on anything in particular. His jaw tightened."Damn Astre..." he muttered. "I swear I'll have your head."Suddenly, a sharp prickling sensation touched the back of his skull.Someone was there. Behind him.His eyes slid coldly to the left. Someone was falling straight from the sky, aiming directly at him.Just a few meters away, the attacker triggered a violent explosion. The air compressed instantly beneath his palms and shot forward in a single, massive wave, powerful enough to rip dust from the solid ground for ten meters and beyond.The blast struck an invisible wall.Cephas hadn't even moved his hand. A layer of compressed air hung right in front of him—flat and thin, but so incredibly dense that the explosion slammed into it like solid stone and died there.The other boy landed lightly on his feet. He stuck out his tongue, running it from one corner of his mouth to the other, and started talking at a frantic pace:"Don't you think this is wonderful? They're giving us a glorious chance to unleash our murderous impulses..." His whole body shuddered with excitement. "Ahhh! I feel incredibly alive. I've already killed five, and unfortunately for you, you're next!"Cephas looked at him the way someone might watch rain falling on a window."Five.""Five!""And you actually counted them.""Of course I counted them! It's much more fun when you engrave them permanently into your memory!" The boy spread his arms wide, delighted that someone had finally asked. "You know what's great? There won't be an investigation. No trial. No family showing up at my door crying. Nothing! There are five thousand of us in a place where nobody has a name, and in two hours, there'll only be a hundred left. No one will ever know which of us did what."He tilted his head with a twisted smile."This is the only place in the entire world where we're allowed to do this."Cephas莉 blinked slowly. "No.""Hm?""You're not allowed to." Cephas took a calm step to the side, unhurried, intentionally placing the empty space of the cliff behind him instead of the other boy. "They simply took away the punishment. That's not the same thing. And you're far too stupid to know the difference, which is exactly what they were hoping for."The boy's sadistic smile dropped instantly. "What are you—""I don't have time to waste on you."The ground suddenly moved. Not as a solid mass, but as tiny particles.Fine, dry dust rose violently from the ground around the boy's legs and clung to his skin, layer after layer. It quickly crawled up his calves, his thighs, and his torso. He struggled fiercely, but the earth stuck to him like glue. Every time he tore an arm free, the dirt he displaced refused to behave like ordinary dirt."Huh..." He flailed his arms wildly. The dust followed his movements. "Hnnngh... what the hell is this?!"He tried firing an explosion downward to blast it away. The air shot out, but the heavy dust simply absorbed the impact and settled right back into place around him."You're compressing air," Cephas said calmly. "You need something solid in front of you for that to be useful. In short, it won't do shit against this."The earth rose relentlessly over the boy's terrified face.And then, the ground closed over him completely, like water closing over a dropped stone.Silence returned to the cliff. The wind swept the remaining dust toward the open sea. Cephas remained perfectly still for a moment, staring at the spot where the ground had just sealed itself."Five," he repeated to himself quietly.Then, he turned around and continued walking.On the exact opposite side of the island, something was burning fiercely in the sky.Fireballs—ten or more—were launched one after another, accelerating halfway through their flight and exploding violently wherever they struck the earth.Ayo dodged them with ease. She was a fourteen-year-old girl, roughly 159 centimeters tall, with dark-brown skin and black curly hair styled in a voluminous afro held back by a purple headband. Her orange eyes were marked with distinct circles.She was currently in the air, falling headfirst under perfectly controlled movement. Her arms were held tight against her body, and her purple cape snapped loudly behind her like a flag in a storm. She barely changed her direction. A small gust of air beneath her hip, another beneath her shoulder—just enough to shift her trajectory by thirty centimeters—and every single explosion passed harmlessly through the space she had just left.Below her on the beach, the boy launching the attacks was completely losing his mind."Stop! Don't come near me, you good-for-nothing!" He launched the fireballs faster, but with far less precision. Two of them collided in midair, exploding halfway between them and hitting absolutely no one. "You're trash! You don't have the right to touch me!"Ayo said nothing.Maybe that was the most terrifying part for him. She was falling straight toward him, getting closer and closer without uttering a single word, her expression perfectly neutral, as if she were simply walking down a flight of stairs."Are you listening to me?! I'm an X! You're just a Circle! Do you understand what that means?!" A fireball passed so close that it singed a stray strand of her afro. "It means this fight was over before it even started!"He screamed, panic overtaking his voice. "Don't come any clo—"Then, he suddenly smiled."You thought you had me, huh?"A massive sheet of fire materialized beneath his feet. The fiery particles collided, compressed into a single point, and instantly released.He shot forward so incredibly fast that the air cracked loudly behind him. Ayo didn't have time to react.He crossed paths with her in midair, and his sharp blade sliced cleanly through her neck before he landed three meters away in a crouch, smiling widely without looking back."Yeah. That's the difference..." His voice suddenly caught in his throat. "...between a worthless Circle and an X."He coughed violently. Thick blood spilled onto the white sand in front of him.He looked down at his own body in horror.There was a hole in his side. A massive, real hole, as wide as a plate, right where his ribs should have been."How..." He spat blood again. "...how did you do that?"Ayo stood right behind him, completely unharmed, her purple cape hanging straight down her body."Since the beginning of the fight, I've been maintaining a zone around myself," she said, refusing to turn around. "A volume of raw, saturated air. This volume has been surrounding me from the very start."The boy trembled violently, his strength fading."And all this time, you've been throwing fire at me," Ayo continued. "One barrage after another. How many? Thirty? Forty? Fire consumes oxygen, and it gives something toxic back in its place. You spent the entire fight poisoning the very air you intended to enter when you came after me."She finally raised one hand, palm upward, as if weighing something invisible."Every time you almost reached me, you replaced a little more breathable air with something that couldn't be breathed. And it didn't disperse because I was holding it firmly in place. I spent this entire fight doing one single thing: maintaining that volume of air without letting it poison me.""But I hit you... I cut your neck—""No." She let the word fall coldly by itself. "When you crossed the boundary into my zone, you went from normal air into a pocket where almost nothing was left. Your blood became acidic instantly. Your brain started shutting down. It doesn't take hours; a few seconds are more than enough for your vision to blur and your judgment to collapse."She paused, looking over her shoulder."You thought you were accelerating. You thought you were cutting me in half. You saw exactly what you intended to do because that was the last image your brain had available when it gave out. In short, you were merely projecting your own intentions."There he had been.The moment he reached her, he had completely stopped. He was suspended in the air for a full second, his eyes wide open but seeing absolutely nothing, his mouth slack, and one arm half-raised in a attacking gesture he had never finished, while his dying body tried to understand what was happening to it.Ayo had then fired a condensed mass of air straight at him, leaving the gaping hole in his side."A wind attack," she said flatly. "I didn't need to aim. You were standing right next to me."The boy dropped heavily to one knee. "How come... you weren't hallucinating too?""I wasn't breathing."He let out a laugh that came out as a wet gurgle. "Since when?""Since the exact moment you started calling me trash." She adjusted her collar. She wore a long purple tunic-coat with a high collar, loose and flaring toward the bottom, with wide sleeves ending in broad black cuffs. "You talked a lot. That gave me more than enough time."He laughed again, but the laugh turned into a desperate choke. "That's impossible... How does a piece of garbage like you know all this?"Ayo's expression didn't change. But somewhere deep behind her eyes, a dark memory opened.She was younger, trapped inside a sealed glass chamber.Outside the glass, two men in sterile white coats were looking down at a clipboard. One of them smiled in a way that didn't match the cold words coming out of his mouth.“The confusion appears well before the loss of consciousness. Look at the curve.”“And the hallucinations?”“Systematic once they pass that specific threshold. The subject sees exactly what she expects to see. We've successfully reproduced it fourteen times out of fifteen in the alpha batch.”“Fascinating. And the fifteenth subject?”“The fifteenth stopped breathing.”A long silence fell.“On her own?”“On her own. Put it in the official report. The higher department will be very interested.”Knock. Knock knock.The young Ayo turned her head to the right.In the neighboring glass capsule, another little girl with blonde hair had pressed her palm firmly against the glass. Her face was right there, so close, yet it refused to come into focus, as though it had been blurred by the passage of her memories.She wiggled her fingers. A little, innocent wave."Come on. Die," Ayo whispered to the present.The boy collapsed face-first onto the sand. Ayo remained perfectly still for a moment, her hand still resting on her high collar. Then, she adjusted her purple cape and walked away into the shadows.Elsewhere on Island 2, another boy walked casually among the freshly fallen bodies.He stopped in front of one, tilted his head, and smiled with a perfectly fake, exaggerated sympathy."Poor idiot. The goal of this test is to survive, not to fight, obviously." He spread his hands wide. "And thanks to my unique ability, I can make it out without a scratch."He kicked the corpse roughly in the head, burst out laughing, and continued on his way."Seriously! You people are absolute idiots. Hahahaha!"Zack entered the deep cover of the trees and slowed his pace, placing his hands comfortably behind his head.Seriously. All you have to do is think for three seconds.The rules said there would be one hundred candidates left at the end. They didn't say the one hundred best. They didn't say the one hundred who killed the most people. They simply said one hundred.He stepped easily over a large tree root.So, the winner is whoever is still standing when the time runs out. Not whoever worked the hardest. And my ability lets me see a glowing energy corresponding to exactly how dangerous a person is. The more dangerous they are, the greater and larger their energy appears.He blew a stray strand of hair away from his eye.I just have to run away from all the big energies, and boom. Survival is mine.The thick forest suddenly opened onto a steep cliff. Below it stretched a small, beautiful beach—a quiet cove enclosed by two rocky points.Someone was down there.A fourteen-year-old girl was crouching right at the water's edge, wearing a neat green-and-white dress. Her bright pink hair was styled into two braided buns on the sides of her head, from which two extremely long pink braids descended, almost dragging through the white sand. She picked up a seashell, turned it carefully in the sunlight, then gently set it down. She picked up another.She had already lined up about ten seashells in front of her on the sand, perfectly ordered from smallest to largest. Distinct circles marked her eyes. She was smiling happily.Zack stopped dead in his tracks. "Hm?" He grimaced. "Is she completely stupid or what? In an environment ruled by the primal law of predator and prey, she should be taking shelter instead of playing tourist."A slow, arrogant smile returned to his face."I have a great idea. I'll sneak down and attack her. And maybe, if she's too weak, I'll just kill her. That'll teach her a lesson."He crouched low behind a thick bush. "But first, let's see just how dangerous this little pink-haired girl actually is."He activated his ability. On the beach below, the light suddenly changed.What Zack saw rose instantly from the sand and kept rising skyward. It passed the tall rocks, passed the tree line, passed the very cliff where he was currently crouching, and kept going higher into the atmosphere.He raised his head completely, desperately searching for its top.There wasn't one. The energy was infinite.A cold bead of sweat ran slowly down his temple. "......"Below on the beach, the girl lifted another seashell toward the golden sun, narrowing her eyes in absolute delight."Okay," Zack whispered, his voice trembling. He slowly began to back away without taking his eyes off the beach for a single second, placing each foot as carefully as if he were walking on fragile glass. "I'm going to pretend I didn't see anything, get my ass out of here, and run as far away from this girl as humanly possible."He turned around and walked away briskly, his shoulders hunched in fear."I guess I needed that sudden lesson in humility after all."