'Sunday: 27th November: 05:59:58'

You want to know what’s worse than failure?

It’s bad enough to be one of the unfortunate ones. For whatever reason, it’s decided from the very get-go that you won’t ever reach the starting line. You’ll catch glimpse of a dream for a moment, and then forget it.

Like a wish upon a shooting star.

It’s bad enough.

But it will never hurt like doing everything you were supposed to do, and falling just short.

You can do all the right things. Go through all the right motions, as long as you think it’ll deliver you something.

But life doesn’t work that way.

In the end, someone who wants what you want, who wants what you have, will want it more.

All it takes is a moment lost. A kilogram off. An inch awry.

It isn’t enough to win, if you don’t want to feel that terror.
Once-in-a-lifetime opportunities are everywhere.

If you want anything more than once-in-a-lifetime annihilation, you have to win by a mile.

Every time.

You have to win until your lead is unrecognisable.

Until you… Are unrecognisable.

Otherwise…

¥¥¥

Sunday

27th November

05:59:58

The alarm didn’t even go off.

Somehow, Naoki Katsumada could feel tension in the air. It was the only sensation, the only recognition he had of himself - his hand hovering in the exact position to tap his phone quiet before the device had any chance to caw its first notes from his bedside.

He was up, before he let himself experience anything else.

He was upside-down, doing pushups, burpees, squats, pumping and flexing every muscle and bone. Breathing hard, and then slowing himself, going deep.

Fifteen minutes meditation, though he’d barely been awake long enough to have any thoughts to meditate away. But he couldn’t skip it a second day in a row.

He just sat there, breathing.

Come to think of it, he’d never even looked up how to do this properly.

But even if watching the thoughts that were now bubbling up go by proved useless to his mind, he could his body gulping greedily at the stillness, trying to conduct its final repairs before he was up and moving around.

Naoki always seemed to wake up just shy of tired.

Not that he wanted to compare, but sleep debt really was the truest kind.
The hours he had yet to catch up on still weighed on him, and wobbling up from his mat felt far less controlled than Naoki would’ve liked.

His nervous system was still recovering. His grip strength was at 65%. His alertness levels were sub-par, and his mood was low.

He always seemed to be inches away from the brink.

“Good.” His voice cracked, as he muttered.
Best to just ignore that.

He didn’t want to turn to his desk so soon, but he needed to clear this morning’s messages as soon as possible.

He flipped his sheets square back over a single bed in the corner of his apartment, and sat down in his office chair, booting up his workspace.

‘What about the phone numbers?’

The first of the notes Takiguchi had left last night, and he’d already been sniffed out.
He never did get to making any of those calls…

That hadn’t been urgent, had it?

As he tried to think up the best response, he was already reading the next.

‘Nvm. I’ll just get a bot to do it.’

It’d taken 3 minutes for Takiguchi to answer his own question, and overnight a long line of contact details had vanished from the spreadsheet.

Resting a shredded back against his comparitively miniature chair, Naoki wondered about the logistics of having a bot perform outgoing voice calls. Had his usefulness been preserved by automating away that particular slog, or hadn’t he just come one step closer to being replaced by a browser extension?

Not that it mattered now, but it did hit him, a few moments later.

Ohhhh. A text-bot.

Maybe that’d been what Takiguchi had in mind from the start.

He’d worked himself into an immobile mess thinking about sending out 250 cold-calls, as if it was still the 1960s.

Had Takiguchi seen that coming, too? Maybe this whole time had been part of one of his business partner’s pranks.

A wistful sigh chanced Naoki’s lips, a hope that maybe this meant he didn’t have a whole heap of tasks to tear through before he had to leave to meet MAKIT.

Nope.

“—Gah…”

Scrolling down, and down, and down, the light temporarily left Naoki’s eyes until he reached the bottom of today’s to-do list.
Some of them he could chunk apart and save for later, maybe even tomorrow…

His stomach was already rumbling, practically panging in on itself. His entire body ached, like a piece of industrial cable that had been tortured by a giant until it was frazzled into stringy pieces, and he wanted to conduct another several dozen minutes of amateur meditation in his bed.

“… Focus.”

But for some reason, he stuck it out.

After all, there was still a faint smoulder at the back of his mind.

More than the gnaw of boredom, or the dreaded low-sleep workout he’d had to endure before finally ending his day, it was that subtle flicker of insecurity that threatened to burn enough that he sat still, and set his eyes on the first task.

¥¥¥

The shower was ice-cold.

The trick to bearing with it was to get into the water before you had a chance to question yourself, your sanity, your morality.

Naoki focused on breathing. You had to, otherwise you’d start hyperventilating.

The truth was, he liked how it felt.

He hated entering the cold. But once he was inside, he found himself wanting to stay. Maybe to see how long he could last, or maybe because he was acclimatising.

No longer than necessary.

Just when he was figuring out how to deal with it, he stopped the water.

The air stung with renewed strength against wet skin, and despite the feeling that he was shrivelling around himself, Naoki felt his body tensing, almost swelling to meet the barrier between him and winter.

It was an exquisite feeling, a display of the muscular pinnacle shaped by his brief morning workout and the cold. Even if nobody were there to witness it.

Again, Naoki had to question himself.

Did he regret that?

¥¥¥

He didn’t have to urge himself to focus. Naoki was on edge. Everything about making an excursion for reasons other than groceries or gym felt novel, and so all the details leapt out at Naoki.

His station, check. His route, calculated down to the minute.

But more than going out to the far edge of Tokyo to Adachi city, it was the fact that the entity stretching itself over the rest of today’s schedule was a total black box.
It could take an hour. Or it could take four, or eight, or twelve.

And on the day where his landlady needed to collect her monthly payment, each of those options placed Naoki in an increasingly bad spot.

First things first.

He breathed, at the front door. Even before he set off on any excursions, he had a stop to make. He counted the notes he’d recovered from his personal safe, down to the very last one left inside.

“Alright.”

The door clicked open, and he searched the first corner of the spacious complex hallways for Mrs. Senzaki’s office.

The décor of this place resembled a hotel somewhat, despite the paintstaking efforts Naoki had taken to find an apartment that wasn’t distractingly luxurious. There were always lamps aglow the closer they went to the office, warm, cozy, though the lights and carpet felt sequestered from the world.

As he neared the door, there was a faint sound from the other side. Humming, or even singing.

Naoki hadn’t visited this part of the complex enough to get used to it. He knocked, though the only reply was another muffled note.

“A~ Aa-aaaayaaa—”

It wasn’t Mrs. Senzaki’s voice.

Cautiously, he thought, as he went to open up. He never knew what he might find on the other side.

But for once, Naoki surprised himself. He’d been right to err on the side of drama, as he stepped into the office to find a girl undressing.

—Damn...

The first thing he noticed, beyond the obvious divide between a large, baggy red sweater and the shapes of skin under a cute black bra, was how excellent the toning on her thoracolumbars were. Her waist was slender, but she clearly had some strength on there, and he could even see her obliques from behind.

Damn!

He didn’t need to glance away. Thankfully, he thought, as he tried to bring his attention span back out of a tailspin. The situation quickly clarified, as the sweater came off and a thinner undershirt fell back down over the girl’s torso.

“Mhm-mmm-aaaa… Smokey...”
The girl hummed.

Creak.

The door sang, in response.

And she froze.

Oh, boy.

“H-hello?”

Luckily, she made no bones about greeting Naoki. Her face poked underneath her arm, still holding the sweater over the ends of her wrists.

Upside-down, her frown at least looked benign enough to give Naoki some emotional room to think.

He’d just witnessed something that somehow seemed significant. Should he call it?
Was this his chance to carve some sexual tension out of the stubbornly ordinary day-to-day?

Yeah. Nothing about that sentence tasted right in his head.

“Hi.” Naoki nodded. “I’m — Naoki Katsumada. Room 220F, I was just looking for Mrs. Senzaki… It’s about the rent—”

“That’s Ms. Senzaki.”

The girl eyed him up, her frown shifting across a brief palette of other expressions, before becoming a very-much intentional repeat of the original.

Huh?

“Ms.…?” Naoki echoed. “Sorry, I don’t follow.”

“My grandma’s out at the moment.” Her frown played out again, before she seemed she couldn’t resist, and the corners crept upward. “The esteemed ‘Mrs.’ Senzaki, that is. She needed to get some checkups done, so the one you’re actually looking for is me.”

C’mon. Play ball.
‘—Sure you shouldn’t’ve played harder to get?’
‘—Well, yeah? I’ve been searching for you all my life.’
‘—Your abs are incredible, by the way.’

To varying degrees of projected success, a number of routes played up in the mammalian matter at the back of Naoki’s head.
If he hadn’t been wearing his public-facing mask, he would’ve rolled his eyes.

“Is that so?” He simply smiled. “Well, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you what I owe you, after coming all this way.”

“Well now, how kind.” As Naoki made his way inside, she span delicately, despite tripping herself up on one of the chairs arrayed around her perch in the middle of the desk. “L-let’s see here… Thank you…”

The girl sat in the middle of an array of electric heaters, each of them running with enough power to heat a room by itself. It was no wonder she was de-layering. Her choice of using the table as a chair was a little peculiar, though.

She counted the notes. Recounted them. Eventually, she glanced up.

“S-sorry. One sec…”

She lay them flat on the desk.

“Thirty… Thirty-one… U-um, Mr. Katsumada?”

He raised his complexion, giving every reasonable sign he was listening.

"There’s only 320,000 here. Where’s the rest?”

Ah.

He bowed. “Sorry about the misunderstanding. I informed Mrs. Senzaki yesterday, but I’m still waiting on receiving the rest.”

“O-oh…” Unsure if it was a look of relief or disappointment on her face, Naoki pegged it down to the latter. “When, um, do you expect to have it by, just out of interest? –It’s totally okay if, um…”

“Today.” He said. “Don’t worry, I’ll have the rest by the end of today.”
The conversation could have floated to its conclusion given that, but he waved the bubble back up into the air.
“How long do you plan to stay out here? Just out of interest.”

She fanned herself with the tips of a few fingers, searching the edges of her fringe for her retort.

“I don’t have classes today, so maybe I have time. How long should I be waiting?” Ms. Senzaki settled with.

Naoki made a three-quarters turn away, and a quarter-turn back, with a gentle shrug.
“Surprise me. But leave me a note when you go.”

“Sounds—” The girl laughed, clearly about to formally shake her head. “Like a classroom message? Those are so goofy..."

“Until next time, then, maybe.” Naoki smiled, and turned back into the hallway.

"See ya."

The door closed slowly behind him, leaving a puff of over-heated air to drift along behind him, tailing him down the hallway. Even compared to the ambient warmth of the cushioned hallways, it felt like a whisper of something a notch above in temperature lingered.

So one might’ve thought.

But all Naoki felt was the smile, setting over his face like iron.

Today.

It almost didn’t matter by what time he returned.

He’d already been forgiven for the sum that was missing, an amount he still wasn’t fully sure how he’d lost.
But forgiveness wasn’t enough.

It didn’t matter catastrophic, how painful the catch-up would be afterwards.

He was coming back with the rest of his rent in-hand.

He was getting it by today.