八

Symmetry is so, so fragile, it can’t be put back together.

For some reason, a girl, Kana, comes to mind. She was the prettiest girl in my middle school and she revelled in it. Her natural beauty was so evident that you were either jealous of her or in love with her. I heard some of the other girls bitching about Kana, slandering her for not really being that pretty. ‘It’s all the makeup she uses’ ‘ I heard she got plastic surgery’ ‘ It’s only because she can buy those expensive clothes’.

Now, I was no friend of hers but those girls were completely wrong. Yes, she used makeup, she wore expensive clothes and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d had something subtle done to her lips. But not just anyone can do that, she was a work of art painted on a perfectly smooth canvas.

One day, one of the rougher girls, Sae, decided she’d had enough. If Kana was classic art, Sae was graffiti painted on walls of the parliament building; out of place but appealing in her own way. Kana was talking quite openly about how she’d slept with someone else's boyfriend during a free period. Without a single word, Sae stood out of her seat, walked over to Kana and punched her in the face. The connection was clean and Sae was a strong girl so the result was a fractured eye socket and cheekbone for Kana. Kana retaliated and slashed across Sae’s face with the nib of a pen before some classmates stepped in.

It was a couple of months before either of them returned, both needed surgery to tend to their wounds. Sae returned first, a huge scar running across her face. I had to be reminded by someone else that the scar had been a result of the fight and that it hadn’t always been there. It suited her, in a weird way.

The next week, Kana returned. There was an audible gasp when she slid open the door. Her parents had paid for top-notch treatment, doctors had essentially reconstructed the bone in her face to look like it did before. But it didn’t work, the left side of her face was now ever so slightly different from the other. Her nose was bent a bit, her lip seemed fixed differently at the corner, her left eye 1% more closed than the other. She didn’t look right, and everyone recognized it.

This is why the beauty of symmetry is a double-edged sword. It demands perfection, otherwise it will shatter into a million tiny pieces.

“Oi!” I shout across the empty road at Keisuke. He had already been waiting by the time I turned the corner, Morishima is at the gate too. I expect I will have to avoid his chase today too, if I want to get back to the beach as soon as possible.

The two of them raise their heads to look at me as I shout. Unexpectedly, Morishima is silent, simply staring at me like a cat watching a laser pointer.

I wait for something to happen, nothing does. The air feels like supercooled water; still and pure but only until something disturbs it. And just as I’m beginning to think that maybe I should run, an imperfection introduces itself with a thud. A crow falls from the sky in front of me and begins convulsing. And the thing about supercool water is that once an imperfection is introduced, the encroachment of ice is rapid.

When I look back up from the bird, which I had only been looking at for a moment, Morishima is only a couple of feet away from me. He rakes at my throat with his hand as if it were a beast’s claw. I trip backwards and Morishima falls on top of me. Hearing Keisuke just behind, I roll Morishima off me and scramble onto my feet. Keisuke grabs my bag as I try to run and I dislocate my right shoulder slipping it out from the strap.

“Aghhh!”

***

The scream from outside draws my attention but not that of my ‘students’. It’s the turning of my head to the window that causes alarm. None of us were meant to react.

It’s a silly mistake on my part but not a major one as the children leaping at me from their desks are dealt with by a quick clenching of my fist and an ensuing collapsing of their internal structures.

This is what I feared when the day reset a couple of minutes ago. That Ruri girl messed up, bad. When I opened my eyes in the classroom, I found that the students’ eyes were glossed over, all of them waiting for something abnormal after they had been set on standby by their master. That girl (and now me too) have been recognized as cancerous cells invading this supernova.

Normally this wouldn’t be an issue. In fact, if things had gone to plan, this nebula would’ve been crushed ages ago. But that girl wasn’t expected, no normal person could survive in here.

It's not like I have qualms about collateral damage in these situations, I’m just curious. I remember hearing about a white dwarf that got trapped in the orbit of a neutron star, irradiated to such an extent that it turned into a solid diamond the size of the Earth. If that’s the kind of thing we could one day bring back from a neutron star, what could we bring back from inside a black hole?

For the moment I have, I consider if it’s worth it. She didn’t seem like much, just an angry girl with nowhere to direct any of it. But I saw what I saw, there’s something in there if that soul of hers can be started again and I just need to know what it is.

I kick the classroom door off of its hinges, crushing two students behind it. Everyone in the school is converging on me now to stop me from getting to Ruri.

“But nothing can stop me.”

My hands come together to mimic the dragon's mouth and close, shredding the flesh of anyone left standing in the hall.

Dashing out to the halls, I leap through the river of blood I’ve created on my way to the roof. I crash through the door onto it and quickly begin scanning the surroundings to find Ruri. It didn’t take me long to get up here but she hasn’t awakened to any powers yet, a couple of seconds is all it takes to kill a normal person sometimes.

I spot Ruri east of the school, running through the side streets, being chased by Keisuke and the teacher called Morishima. She’s holding her arm as if she’s injured. Her two assailants have split up so that one can chase her to a street where the other will pounce. Moments before they get to her.

“Guess I have no choice…”

I hate doing this, I wish I’d never learned how. But fuck if it isn’t useful.

Locking the joints of my thumb and index finger into place, I create with them something resembling the iron sights of an assault rifle. I follow Kazusa and her pursuer as closely as I can. The teacher is far too close to her to make this safe, I need to choose my moment.

Ruri turns down the final street, Keisuke has blocked off its only exit. It’s not safe but I have to do this now. Focusing my ‘sight’ on the tiny space between Ruri and Morishima, I call to my mind’s eye the sensation of crushing the distance between two points before bringing my fingertips together and snapping my body several hundred meters to the streets below.

I land just between Ruri and Morishima and not inside either of them. It’s so hard not to hurt other people.

Morishima recognizes the situation astoundingly quickly and tries to push me aside, knowing that Ruri is the easy target. I’m stronger than him though and hold my ground, delivering a punch to his jaw that bounces his head so hard that it results in a cervical fracture.

Snapping around to face Keisuke reveals that he’s long gone, as expected. It knows what I am and even a collapsed soul retains a shred of survival instinct.

Next, I swing my eyes down to Ruri, who is writhing in pain at my feet.

“Are you a fucking idiot?” I continue what I was saying before I was cut off by the world resetting.

She doesn’t hear me, just screaming in pain at what looks to be a dislocated shoulder. I’m about at the end of my rope so I grab her arm and push it back into its socket before trying again.

“Are you a fucking idiot?” I ask for the third time.

***

Kai pops my shoulder back into place only so I can properly understand that she’s berating me.

“You’re a psychopath!”

“And you’re an idiot!”

“What did I do wrong?”

Kai double takes.

“Are you sure you don’t wanna die?”

In the distance at either end of this alley, I can see people waiting. They’re clearly scared of Kai but are waiting to pounce the second she leaves.

“This is why I’ll never understand the director’s obsession with teenage girls, no good at taking orders.”

I resist the urge to tell her that she looks younger than I do.

“Come on, say something,” she goads, “tell me why you couldn’t complete the simplest imaginable task; destroying this place.”

“If it’s so simple why won’t you just do it!”

The mistake I just made was obvious the moment the first syllable formed on my lips. This is the sort of glaring error that becomes an anecdote passed down so long that the death involved becomes meaningless beside its brazen stupidity.

ルリの盾

壊れないのに

まだ死んだ

Ruri

Kai's eyes literally turn red as she grabs her right arm with her left as if to stop herself from attacking me.

“I told you! I could’ve ended this whole place ages ago if you weren’t so goddamn weak that you’d go down with it! You. You’re the reason I haven’t done it yet but you’ve just tested the limits of my patience.”

She tosses me a knife from inside her jacket and continues.

“I’m done. I’ll do you the favour of waiting until you die to crush this place. Try and come to terms with your death in the next 12 seconds.”

Kai snaps out of existence and the air turns cold. The people waiting at either end of the alley start sprinting at me. There’s no way I can escape, no windows to jump into, no gap in the bodies to slip through.

I feel my chest seizing up. I want to curl into a ball. Death is inevitable from here.

But I still want to live.

Grabbing the knife I jump to my feet and charge at the oncoming crowd coming from the north. I stab and slice into a couple of them but they quickly overwhelm me. Still, I struggle against their grip as they try to literally rip me in half.

“I don’t want to die!” I scream.

And moments later, any of the horde that were touching me crumple to the ground. Seeing this happen the others take a step back before scattering, retreating to a safe distance to observe me from.

I stand back up and gather myself. Nothing I can come up with explains what just happened. Again, I wonder if perhaps I really died long ago and this is just something that happens in the afterlife.

Walking back out into one of the bigger streets, it seems like every single person in this nightmare is watching me from a safe distance, treating me like I’m radioactive.

With no idea what to do, I wander the streets for hours and they all follow me, crawling around on all fours, along the ground and up the side of buildings like spiders.

Eventually, they all stop in their tracks, as if they’ve found something they want to keep distance from more than me. I look up and expect to see Kai has decided to come back and finish me off but instead, I see that I’ve found myself in front of Ashi-Toku station.

Compelled by an unknown force, I close my eyes and enter.