Fortunately, the elevator was waiting when I got to it, so I pressed the button for the third floor where the seminar room was. As the door closed, I slumped against the wall. I tried to catch my breath during the short elevator ride and sort through what had just happened in my head.

It wasn’t just the girl who called me Senpai this time. The blonde had acted like she knew me too. What was up with that? Did I have a look-alike running around? That seemed like the most reasonable explanation.

But...

“Sorawo, what happened to your eye?”

That girl...she’d used my name.

The short-haired one that called me “Kamikoshi-senpai” had too.

Had I met them...somewhere?

“That can’t be right...”

No matter how out of it I was, or how disinterested I was in other people, I’d never forget meeting someone so ridiculously gorgeous. In fact, despite having only seen it briefly just now, her face was already seared into my brain.

When I closed my eyes, there she was in the darkness behind my eyelids, looking at me with concern. Even though it was only a memory, I felt restless, and opened my eyes. When she looked at me like that, there was nothing I could do...

The elevator arrived on the third floor. I raced out before the doors finished opening, dashed down the hall, and sprang through the open door to the seminar room. The wall clock read half past one, on the dot. I’d made it just in time, but the professor and the students were all already seated, so my last-minute mad dash was still embarrassing. But still, while they all sort of stared at me the moment I came in, no one said anything. Relieved, I sat down in an open seat. There were twelve students, myself included.

The room was well lit, with large windows. Behind me were steel bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling, crammed tight with both Japanese and foreign books. We sat in pipe chairs around some tables that were laid out in a square.

Once I had pulled everything I would need to take notes out of my bag, I was finally able to settle down.

Then, as if he had been waiting...

“It looks like it’s time. Let’s get started, then,” the professor said casually.

His name was Abekawa. He was the head of this university’s Department of Cultural Anthropology. He was a young, well-groomed man who wore a suit, tie, and silver-rimmed glasses. At a glance, he looked like an employee at a major company. His face was pretty heavily tanned, though. That spoke to how much time he spent outdoors.

“Last time we met, the discussion largely centered around what we, the professors, will require of you. I asked you all to introduce yourselves briefly, but there was little time for you to touch on your own focus and interests. Here in this cultural anthropology seminar, you will each dig into a theme of your own choosing, and ultimately produce a graduation thesis. This will be a valuable opportunity to exchange opinions with your fellow students, so please do not hold back when you speak to one another. The same goes for when you speak to me. Now, I’d like to hear what themes each of you plan to explore. We’ll go clockwise, starting from me. Go ahead. You may remain seated.”

“Oh! Okay!” the student who had suddenly been called on replied. He was a placid boy who looked like he belonged in the humanities.

“I’m Arayama. Um, my topic is still pretty vague...”

“That’s quite all right.”

“Okay, well, I’m interested in African culture, particularly their cuisine...”

“You did mention that. What was it that aroused your interest in it?”

“Well, when I was in high school, we had a transfer student from Rwanda. When we asked him to make some of his national cuisine for the culture festival, he was really troubled. He said there was no Rwandan food worth making for us. But when I asked for more details, that wasn’t true at all. He taught me about some genuine Rwandan home cooking. He never really seemed convinced it was worth sharing, though. Now, if I was in a foreign country, and people asked me to share Japanese food, I’m sure that I could come up with something. Maybe sushi, or sukiyaki, or something like that. So, it occurred to me, maybe the way they think about the food of their homeland is completely different. And that’s what got me into it.”

“Hmm, I see. That is interesting. So you developed an interest in African cuisine, but instead of a cook, you chose to become a cultural anthropologist. Why is that?”

“Huh...? Now that you mention it...I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about that.”

“That may be a key point. For you, food was not, primarily, something that you ‘make.’ Now, why is that...? Even among fellow Japanese people, the way that you think about food, and the way that mothers who have to prepare food for their families every day think about food may be completely different. If you limit your study to how Japanese people and Rwandan people think about food, it won’t be that interesting. I’m sure this was drilled into all of you during your first two years, but Ethnography, the way we investigate questions in cultural anthropology, places great value on the researcher’s personal experience. That is the greatest difference between our field and sociology or other fields that study modern society. So, Arayama-kun, your own approach to food is something that transcends a single individual’s intuition. It is at the core of your theme. I think it will be interesting.”

From there, the discussion continued with the topic of food as culture. Like how, in the modern day, ramen and curry are totally Japanese dishes, but if you’re asked to introduce Japanese cuisine to foreigners, are they what would come to mind? Or how ramen is presented as a Japanese dish overseas. Or how the Rwandan genocide might have influenced their cuisine. Or how, in China, the Cultural Revolution resulted in the suppression of many traditional dishes, but they weren’t lost completely... Once the discussion had spiraled off in all sorts of directions, we moved on to the next person.

I sat there in silence as the other students took turns talking about what interested them, or commenting on others’ topics. I was impressed by how much they could all talk. Even the first guy, despite saying he only had a vague idea of his theme, had a proper story for how he’d gotten into it...

I nervously waited until, finally, my own turn came around.

“Okay, next.”

“Ah... I’m Kamikoshi. Mine’s still super vague, but...”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“How about studying cuteness...? You know how each culture thinks different things are cute? I mean, the taste in characters is totally different in each country. But recently Japanese characters have started to become more popular in other countries. Like Hello Kitty. I was thinking that maybe things have changed...”

That was a palpable confusion in the room. The other students, who had shown no real interest in me up until this point, all stared at me with evident surprise. So did Professor Abekawa. I trailed off, bewildered.

“Um... Is something wrong?”

“You are Kamikoshi, right?”

“Uh, yes?”

“You don’t want to do ghost stories?”

“Huh...?”

“In your introduction last week, you said you were interested in true ghost stories. Every year, there’s someone who wants to do youkai, so I was talking with the other professors about how our youkai specialist this year was fresh and interesting.”

“You...were?”

Was that what I talked about last time? I must have been really tense or something. My memory of it was kind of vague.

“I do think that cuteness is an interesting topic in its own right, but you’ve always been interested in true ghost stories, haven’t you? What brought on this change of heart?”

“Erm...”

“Some folklorists are fed up with the tendency to immediately associate the study of folklore with youkai, so they might tell their students they can’t study them, but...we’re not like that here. Because cultural anthropology is a field where you can study anything that humans do. If you’re satisfied with this change of topic, it’s fine, but if you are still struggling to decide, I think you should give it careful thought.”

A number of students around the table nodded in agreement.

“It sounded pretty neat when you were talking about it last time.”

“Yeah. I mean, I never even knew that ‘true ghost stories’ was a genre.”

“I used to read collections of scary stories from the internet all the time, so hearing you talk about it really took me back.”

I was perplexed by this unexpected show of support. Up until now, I’d just assumed they thought I was a weirdo.

It was true that I was interested in true ghost stories. Judging by what everyone was saying, I must have talked about that during our seminar last week. Yet, for some reason, I’d removed it from my list of potential themes...

Why?

My hand unconsciously reached for the eye patch over my right eye.

Something felt wrong. How long had my eye been like this?

Since last week.

When last week?

When was it? I didn’t know. How was it on the day of the seminar? What about before then?

How could this be? Losing sight in my dominant eye should have been a huge deal, and yet I couldn’t remember it happening.

That blonde flashed through my mind again.

She talked as if she knew me.

Had we met last week, maybe?

Did something happen to me at last week’s seminar?

If so, then what...?

In the middle of my confusion, I suddenly felt eyes on me, and looked up.

One of the students sitting across from me diagonally was staring.

He was a guy with close-cropped hair. His posture was weirdly good. I probably recognized him because he’d been at the last seminar too, but he left a stronger impression than the other students. Did we talk? I felt like he’d said something to me after the seminar, as I was leaving the classroom... No, was that a dream?

When our eyes met, he blinked before looking away.

My head felt kinda fuzzy. It was like there was a fog over part of my brain. As I struggled to remember despite that, a certain word surfaced from my memories.

That’s right. He said he was Templeborn...

2

Templeborn... Templeborn...?

I walked through the hall, cocking my head to the side in thought.

What did that mean? What was so special about having been born in a temple?

Did he introduce himself during the previous seminar? I feel like he did. I mean, if you think about it, he must have. It was the first class. Maybe he said it then.

Since he was born in a temple, he was going to make religion his theme? No, he didn’t say anything about that during today’s seminar. He was doing something more normal, like...

“Huh...?” I came to a stop, confused.

What did that guy say he was doing?

I could remember what the other students said they’d chosen as their theme if I tried. They’d all been pretty interesting, after all.

The first guy was interested in African cuisine, and the guy who went after him was doing concepts of beauty and ugliness. Next was the sociology student who was interested in the culture of temporary workers and full-time employees, and after that was...Twitter as a cross-cultural intersection, I think? After that was the fan communities of the male idols of each nation in Asia, then me, and then games as a tool for communication, and then, uh, next was that thing, and next was...

“Huh? Uh, what was ‘that thing’?”

I couldn’t remember. I had no recollection of what the Templeborn guy had said.

I remembered what the people before and after him said. But what about him, sandwiched in between them...?

I imagined that guy sitting there, silent, while everyone else was talking. Like no one else could see him.

Nah, that couldn’t be right...

I closed my eyes tight, trying to conjure up that scene from memory. They wouldn’t just skip over him. He had to have said something.

I tried to imagine him speaking to everyone. Was the way he spoke boyish, masculine, polite? Well, what really mattered was the fact that he had to have spoken about his interests and the theme of his research. How did the professor and the other students react?

I couldn’t remember a thing...

The scene in my mind changed, this time to one where only he talked, and the others stared at him with no expression, as if they were staring into the void...

It creeped me out so much I opened my eyes.

“Weird...”

I shook my head back and forth. I’d imagined that scene out of nowhere, and then gotten freaked out all on my own.

I was the only one left in the halls here, which were kind of gloomy even in the middle of the day. Feeling uneasy somehow, I started to walk, rushing down the stairs.

If I was going to act like this, then I should have just tried to talk to Templeborn-kun after class. But how would I have struck up a conversation? “Hey, you’re that Templeborn guy, right?” Like, who would even say that? Well, the fact of the matter was that Templeborn-kun cleared out of there right away, so I wouldn’t have had the chance anyway.

I walked down to the first floor and headed outside. It was reassuring to be in a place with other people, but I still felt out of sorts. Was there something I’d forgotten? Come to think of it, I still had no clue what was up with those two I ran into before class, and—

“Ah!”

I had been looking down as I walked, but now I raised my face to look around. I’d been careless. If those two were still convinced that I was someone else, they might come after me again. It wouldn’t be surprising if they were waiting to ambush me after class.

But contrary to my expectations, they were nowhere to be seen. Hopefully, they’d given up, or the misunderstanding had been resolved. I walked a little quicker, hoping I’d be able to get back home before anything else weird happened. The seminar that just ended was the only class I had to attend today.

I ate soba with mountain vegetables in the cafeteria, and bought some sweet buns from the store. My wallet was more flush with cash than I would have expected. Weird. There were five 10,000 yen bills in there. Had I just made a withdrawal? Did I usually walk around with this much? Come to think of it, how much was in my account now? I couldn’t remember off the top of my head, but I had a feeling that I wasn’t in a particularly tight spot financially.

Huh?

Was that right? Uh...

“Hrm...?”

I cocked my head to the side as I walked out the gate, and headed down the road the buses used on my way home. It was an arterial road in the suburbs, and always busy. There were large trucks whipping past me.

As I walked along the sidewalk, thinking to myself, a woman in a red dress was walking towards me. She was pretty, and caught my attention. Then again, that blonde girl had been gorgeous too. Still, that red dress stood out. You needed confidence to pull off a look like that.

I was so focused on the woman walking towards me that I jumped into the air when someone suddenly honked their horn behind me.

Without realizing it I had wandered out into the road. As I hurriedly returned to the sidewalk, the luxury car that passed me turned on its blinkers and came to a stop just ahead.

Whoops, I was totally out of it. I couldn’t complain if that guy was mad at me...

I was planning to apologize, but then the door opened, and a tall man stepped out. He was thin, but not in a way that made him seem weak. I got the impression the man was very flexible. He wore a tailored three-piece suit, and his arms were covered in tattoos...

A yakuza...?!

My blood ran cold as I realized things had just gotten real bad. The man walked over, looked down at me. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I-I’m sorry! I should have been paying attention!”

“No, Kamikoshi-san—”

“Uh, yes?!”

This guy was calling me by name too! Why?!

As I panicked, the back door of the car opened, and another person stepped out. The blonde from before! She strode over, walking past the yakuza to stand in front of me.

“Come with us.”

“Huh? What are you talking—”

“Just do it.”

She seized me by the arm, and dragged me towards the car. I’m being abducted! I dug my heels in and tried to resist.

“Stop! Let go of me!”

“Please, Sorawo, just calm down and listen to—”

I grabbed the tote bag hanging from my shoulder and went to swing it at her as hard as I could. It was heavy, full of textbooks and stuff, so I figured it’d make her back off, but because of the weight, I couldn’t lift it very well. It came in at a much lower angle than I expected, slamming hard into her waist.

“Urgh...” The blonde groaned, but she didn’t let go of my hand. I was going to go for another swing, but the momentum caused something to slip out of my bag, and it fell to the street with a clatter.

My eyes were drawn to the black luster of the hunk of metal now lying on the asphalt.

It was a gun, sticking halfway out of a khaki holster.

A gun...?

Did a gun just come out of my bag?

As I stiffened, unable to keep up with the events that were unfolding, the yakuza quickly crouched down and picked up the weapon. For a moment, I thought I was about to get shot, but he left it in the holster, holding it so that no one would see.

“Why is there a gun...?” I mumbled in a daze.

“That’s your gun, Sorawo,” the blonde told me.

It made no sense, and I just sort of stared at her. With a terrifyingly serious expression on her face, she continued.

“Listen. You’re not in your right mind now, Sorawo. I think you’re suffering from amnesia.”

“Am...nesia...?”

“I’m not your enemy. Trust me.”

I stood there stunned for a moment, unable to look away from the pleading look on her face.

Amnesia? Me...?

Sure, that would explain some things. Actually, there were a whole lot of things that made no sense otherwise. My right eye which I’d gone blind in but couldn’t remember when, my research thesis which had changed at some point without me realizing it, the strangers who seemed to know me...and, as the finishing blow, the gun that was in my bag for some reason.

I spoke slowly and cautiously as I tried to sort through it all inside my head.

“Okay, so...what are you, then?”

“Huh?”

“If you’re not my enemy, then what are you to me?”

Her grip on my arm tightened. Then, in an angry tone, she said, “We have the closest kind of relationship in the world.”

“Huh...?” I was taken aback. That was a heavier response than I’d expected. “We...do?”

“Yes!” she suddenly snapped at me.

What was her problem...? She was pretty, but also scary. Was she from a yakuza family or something?

With an irritated glare, the blonde pulled my arm again.

“Just get in the car already! We need to get you checked at the hospital!”

“Uh, but...”

“No buts! If you hit your head or something, that’s serious! Come on!”

Even if I’d taken a blow to the head, I wasn’t stupid enough to get in a yakuza’s car. The normal thing to do was either run, or call for help. If I really wanted to go to a hospital, I could do that myself.

What made me hesitate was the look in her eyes. Although she seemed irritated, her drooping eyebrows and moist eyes told me she was incredibly concerned about me.

“Okay...” I nodded hesitantly, and I could feel her grip loosen.

“Get in...” she said again, and I reluctantly let her lead me into the back seat.

The yakuza returned to the driver’s seat, and politely informed me, “I will be taking custody of your firearm. It will be returned to you once you’ve regained your memory.”

“R-Right...”

The door closed and locked, and then the car drove off.

The blonde was still holding my arm. I could feel her staring at the side of my face the whole time. She seemed worried I was still going to try and escape. If things seemed dicey, I planned to throw myself out of the car at an intersection, so she was right to be.

“Um, my hand hurts,” I tried complaining, but that only made her more worried. She tightened her grip without another word. Maybe I should have kept my stupid mouth shut.

My name is Sorawo Kamikoshi. I’m just a plain, ordinary student attending university in Saitama.

Or at least that’s how it was supposed to be.

What in the world’s gonna happen to me...?

3

The car’s powerful engine roared as we got onto the highway. I looked at the GPS; we were headed towards the center of the city. The blonde and the yakuza were both totally silent, so I did my best to endure the awkwardness for the forty or so minutes it took before we finally entered an underground parking garage.

“After you,” the yakuza said, unlocking the car doors. I was apparently expected to get out on my own, so I stepped out of the car onto the nondescript concrete. The blonde got out too, still holding my arm.

The yakuza went on ahead to the elevator. He waited for the two of us to follow, and then pressed the “Close Door” button once we were inside. Using a small key, he opened a panel beneath the buttons, using the buttons inside it to operate the elevator. Once we began ascending, the panel closed again.

“This is a hospital...right?”

The building I saw outside before we entered the garage did say something about health insurance in its name, but the parking lot had been practically deserted, and it didn’t feel much like a hospital.

“It might be more accurate to call this a private medical facility,” the yakuza replied politely.

“So it’s not a hospital, then,” I said firmly, and the blonde interjected.

“It’s fine.”

“How is this fi—”

“Nobody here is your enemy, Sorawo. Trust me.”

I was put off by her pleading tone. I don’t know how I was supposed to trust her when she hadn’t given me any reason I should, though...

The elevator stopped on a floor with white walls that shone brightly under the fluorescent lights. A chemical smell assaulted my nostrils. I could be reasonably convinced that this was a medical facility, at least.

“This way,” said the yakuza.

I followed him into an examination room. A man in a white coat who was sitting at the desk there looked up when we entered. His head was smooth, and he wore glasses. From the way he dressed, I could assume he was a doctor.

“Hey, Kamikoshi-san. Have a seat,” the doctor greeted me casually. I slowly sat down in the chair he’d indicated.

“So...you know me too, huh?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ve examined you a number of times before. I hear you’ve lost your memories?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

The yakuza and the blonde didn’t leave the room. They stood next to the wall, watching me. Their eyes made it hard to relax.

“What happened to your eye?” the doctor asked.

“I couldn’t see with it...”

“When did that start?”

“Last week, probably...?”

“You don’t remember that either?”

“Not very well.”

“Did you go to the hospital?”

“No, not yet.”

“Why not?”

I vaguely shook my head. I wasn’t entirely sure of that myself. Maybe because I didn’t know what caused me to lose my vision, I had been hesitant to try and explain it to other people.

“Would you mind if I took a look? Can you take off the eye patch?”

“Uh, sure.”

As I removed my eye patch, I noticed the blonde leaning in to take a look from the side. She gulped.

“Your eye color...!” said the blonde.

“Hrm,” the doctor grunted. He had a difficult look on his face as he brought a penlight up close to my right eye. It didn’t feel bright. “Your right iris is drained of color... It was so blue before, but now it’s gray.”

“Blue?” I asked.

“Yes. Here’s how it was a little while ago.”

In most of the photos he showed me, the blue was so deep it seemed artificial.

“This is my eye...?”

“You said this started last week. Did you hit it? Or were you experiencing any sort of illness or off-feeling?”

“No, nothing.”

I heard running in the hall, and then the door to the examination room was flung open as a short woman rushed in. I thought she was a child, but she wore an adult’s spring coat. As she turned to look at me, her eyes widened.

“Sorawo-chan! What happened to you?!”

Oh, look. Another person who knows me.

“Uh, hi...” I said, bowing politely. The woman now looked even more disturbed. Had that been the wrong response?

“I was having trouble getting in touch, and then this happens... Why didn’t you answer your phone? Even if you have no memories, you could still have taken my call, couldn’t you?” the short woman asked.

The blonde nodded in enthusiastic agreement. Had both of them been trying to contact me?

“I’m sorry, um... It’s ’cause I was scared...”

“Of what?” the short woman asked.

“My phone was full of nothing but numbers and names I don’t know, and that really freaked me out. I turned it off and haven’t touched it since.”

“Oh, so that’s why...” The blonde seemed satisfied with that explanation.

With all of us making a lot of noise in his examination room, the doctor raised his hand to speak. “Save the talk for later. I want to run some tests first. Do you mind, Kamikoshi-san?”

“How much is this going to cost?” I asked.

The doctor seemed caught off guard by the question, but he immediately lowered his voice and, in an exaggerated whisper, told me, “If you’ll do it now, it’s free.”

“Okay, let’s do it.”

The doctor shooed everyone else out of the room so we could get started. I got changed into a patient gown, and we started with all the usual health checkup stuff like drawing blood, testing blood pressure, and taking X-rays. After that, I was led around to a number of different rooms. They took pictures of cross sections of my head with a large, donut-shaped machine, and had me look into a machine with a lens that did things like flash lights at me and blow air at my eye... A nurse who seemed to have appeared from out of nowhere helped with all of this, so in between the tests, I asked if she knew me.

“Yes, of course. We’ve met a number of times,” the nurse said.

“Oh, I see...”

“You rushed in here with your guns once to save us, you know. It was very cool.”

I did what now...?

I think it took more than an hour to get through all of the tests and questions. When I returned to the chair in the examination room and sat across from the doctor, the blonde, the yakuza, and the short woman were all there.

The doctor, who had been glaring at the test results on a large display, furrowed his brow as he turned to look at me.

“In regards to your eyes...you’ve lost vision in your right eye. The strange thing about it, though, is that there’s nothing unusual about that eye aside from the loss of color in your iris. It’s not injured, and the lens, optic nerve, and conjunctiva all show no sign of illness. The color’s just drained away, and now you’re blind.”

“Blind...”

It was a heavy word, now that I heard him say it.

“I didn’t find anything unusual with the rest of your body either. There were no signs of apoplexy, cerebral hemorrhaging, or hematoma, and no trace of any blunt trauma to the head. You’re the picture of health, the same as the last time I saw you.”

“But she’s lost her memory?” the blonde asked, causing the doctor to put on a difficult expression.

“During consultation, we confirmed that she doesn’t remember anyone here, the existence of DS Research, or anything to do with the UBL. But there didn’t seem to be any problems with her memories of university or her daily life. It’s partial amnesia—or selective, rather.”

“What’s the cause?” I asked.

“There’s no brain damage, and while you’ve lost vision in one eye, there aren’t signs of paralysis anywhere else, so we can likely rule out a vascular cause as well. It depends on how you look at the slight impairment in reasoning and judgment, but... It’s possible to have a concussion without external injuries, so if that’s what happened, it’s just a matter of waiting for you to recover, but there is also the possibility of early-onset dementia. It’s a difficult case, but if you need me to make a diagnosis, I suspect dementia with Lewy bodies and recommend a detailed examination.”

“Dementia...?!” I exclaimed.

Okay, that was a shock. Not only had I lost my vision, I had dementia too? At my age?

“Sorawo...”

The blonde came closer, taking my hand as she looked at me with moist eyes. I looked up at her, feeling forlorn.

“You don’t remember me at all?” she asked.

“Yeah...” I answered honestly. The blonde looked like she was going to cry. She was really worried—for me. I was still having a hard time believing I’d been close to such a beautiful girl, but everything from the way she looked at me to the way she interacted with me was filled with concern. It didn’t feel like she was lying to me.

The short woman’s brow furrowed too. There was a bitter look on her face. She seemed worried, but also angry. At me, maybe? I don’t know.

“You and I were really close, right?”

When I asked her that, the blonde gulped. “Yeah...”

“I’m sorry for not remembering.”

“No...” The blonde shook her head. I kept talking as I tried to sort through my thoughts.

“The closest kind of relationship in the world... That’s what you said we had, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Does that mean we’re, uh, you know...” I swallowed before hesitantly asking, “Going out, or something, maybe?”

“Huh...?” The blonde stiffened. She just stopped still, not even blinking as she looked at me.

“H-Huh? Was that not it? I figured it was something like—”

“Why did you think that?” the blonde asked, impassive, her eyes fixed on me.

“Uh, well, if it’s the closest kind of relationship in the world... I was guessing that we were lovers, maybe?”

The strength drained from her hand and it fell away from mine.

“Huh...?”

As she gazed at me, speechless, I got scared.

“Um...”

The next instant, there was a shock to the left side of my face. It took a while before I realized I’d been slapped.

“Nishina-san...?”

“Hey, what’s wrong with you?!”

The yakuza and the short woman shouted from behind her, but it looked like the blonde couldn’t hear them. She looked at me with a sort of dazed expression on her face, the hand she’d slapped me with still raised.

She swung it again, whacking me in the side of the head.

“Ow...! What gives?!” I shouted, rising to my feet. The blonde grabbed me.

“Stop! What?!” I protested.

I wasn’t so much angry as confused. She’d had this bewildered look on her face the whole time, and I had no idea how I was supposed to react. Instead of getting angry over her slapping me, I got scared because I had no idea what was making her do it.

“Nishina-san, what has gotten into you?” the yakuza asked as he placed his hands on her shoulders from behind. The blonde didn’t even turn to look at him.

“Sorawo’s broken,” she mumbled before slapping me again with an open hand. I think she was aiming for my head, but couldn’t reach because the yakuza was holding her shoulders. Instead, her hand pressed against my face with limited force.

“Mmph...!”

As I turned my face to the side and shook her off of me, my anger finally caught up.

“That hurts! Let go!” I shouted angrily, slapping away the arm that kept stubbornly reaching out towards me.

“Calm down, you idiot! What are you fighting here for?!”

The short woman rushed forward, putting herself between the blonde and me. That didn’t stop the blonde from still trying to slap me.

“Because she’s broken...” the blonde said with empty eyes.

“Well, hitting her’s not going to fix it! She’s not a vintage electrical appliance, okay?!”

“You don’t know that! Maybe it will! I mean—”

The blonde stopped mid sentence, as if she had suddenly realized something. An expression returned to her dazed face. As she blinked repeatedly, her eyes, which had seemed to be looking nowhere in particular before, regained focus.

“I mean, I’ve fixed her before!” she declared, pulling the glove from her left hand. I doubted my own eyes when I saw the translucent hand that revealed. It was a beautiful, clear hand, made of some material that was neither glass nor water.

Everyone stared as she raised her left hand up high, and...

Slapped my right cheek again.

“Ow! Why you...!”

“I told you to cut that out! I understand how you feel, but knock it off!”

“Nishina-san, please, calm yourself.”

“Yeah! If you keep hitting me in the head—”

There was a lot of yelling and a scuffle seemed ready to break out until the blonde shouted, “Shut up!”

The tension in her voice made the whole room fall silent.

“Be quiet,” she said in a more subdued tone. “Let me focus.”

The blonde pressed me against the wall.

“Hey! Don’t push me!” I protested.

The blonde, standing a head taller than me, looked down. “Stay put, Sorawo.”

“Huh? What?”

“I’m going to touch you with my left hand, so don’t move.”

“What are you trying to—”

She pushed me against the wall, paying no heed to my words. Her translucent left hand came closer, but slowly this time. What was going on with that thing? Were the lights I saw dancing inside it an illusion?

Her hand touched my face.

“Eek!”

It’s cold! My body tried to recoil, but the wall was behind me.

“Stay still.”

She held me in place with her right hand as her left crawled across my face. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed to be focusing on the feelings in her palm.

“It’s...not inside...but it feels like...there’s something there...”

She was mumbling nonsense. It didn’t sound like she was talking to me.

“No...? That’s not it... Is something missing...?”

What is she even doing...? I wondered.

Everyone else seemed too dumbfounded to stop the blonde. As I watched with some trepidation, her fingers pried my right eye wide open. I started to panic, for obvious reasons.

“Whoa! Hold up! That’s my eye!”

“Suck it up.”

“You’re kidding me, right?!”

The terrifying thing is: she was serious. A cold finger passed between my eyelids to touch the surface of my eyeball. I involuntarily cringed.

Huh...?

It didn’t hurt. I felt a goopy sensation from the surface of my eye, but that was all.

Had I lost my sense of pain along with my vision? I stood there, helpless, as she slowly touched my eyeball. While it didn’t exactly hurt, the unfamiliar sensation was giving me goosebumps.

Then, I felt something even more horrifying.

The finger that had been stroking the surface of my eyeball pushed inside.

“Ahhh!”

I let out an involuntary scream. Her finger’s in my eye! I couldn’t see it myself, but based on how it felt, I couldn’t imagine it being anything else. It still didn’t hurt, but that wasn’t the problem here. There are some things you just don’t do!

“What’re you doing?! Stop!”

“Shut up! Don’t move!”

When I panicked and started shouting, the blonde yelled at me as if she was the one who had any right to be upset here.

Seriously, what’s her problem...?!

Her finger probed the inside of my eyeball. It sunk deeper inside my head... Whoa, hold on, has she reached my brain?!

When that thought occurred to me, and I was about ready to pass out, I heard the blonde whisper, “Found it...”

I felt her fingers twist around even deeper inside my eye.

There was this soft sensation, like something had been released. It was almost like when you undo a particularly tight knot in a plastic bag.

The contents of that bag came gushing out. A bubbling, popping sensation like carbonated water spread through the right side of my face. It was like that pins and needles sensation in a leg that’s gone numb. The sensation left me gasping as she extracted her finger.

“Guh...!”

The pain came back at the same time as that intense numbness. It was like when you got an eyelash in your eye. I held my face and doubled over. An endless stream of tears gushed from my right eye.

The pain gradually receded as I stayed put. It was still throbbing, but it wasn’t so bad I couldn’t open my eye. I hesitantly did so.

“Ah...”

I saw my own hand in my teary vision.

My right eye...it could see.

As I looked up, the name of the first woman to enter my vision slipped from my lips.

“You’re Toriko...”

Toriko let out a gasp, staggering, then plopped herself down in the chair I had been sitting in just a little earlier.

“Sorawo-chan...? Did your memory come back...?”

I looked around, trying to respond to Kozakura, but there was another sharp pain, and I covered my eye.

“Wh...What’s going on with my eye?”

As I stumbled, Migiwa lent me some support, then helped me to sit down on the examination table.

The doctor moved my hand aside and shone a light into my right eye.

“It’s healed...if you can call it that, in this situation,” the doctor said, still sounding only half-convinced. When I looked into the mirror he gave me, my iris had regained its aberrant blue color. The white of the eye was bloodshot, and the area around it was swollen, probably because of the finger that had been shoved in there.

“You can see, right?”

“I can.”

“And how about your memory? Do you know who we are?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the faces in the examination room. Toriko, Kozakura, Migiwa, and...

“Huh...?”

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m sorry, um, I can remember everyone but you and your nurse’s names.”

“Yeah... We may not have ever introduced ourselves.”

“Oh, okay, that’s fine then.”

“It is, huh?”

Toriko sat hunched over in the chair, still looking totally out of it. Her breathing was shallow, and she looked, wordlessly, towards me.

“Toriko, what’s wrong...?” I asked, concerned.

Toriko let out a long sigh. “I’m beat...”

“You’re beat?”

“I had to focus super hard...”

Toriko looked down at her left hand. With sluggish movements, she tried to put the glove back over her hand, not having done anything to her finger since it came out of my eye.

“Ah! You can’t put it in there like that,” the nurse said, hurriedly offering her a disinfectant wipe. She just had to wipe it off? That was the problem here? That seemed kinda weird, but maybe the nurse had lost her composure too. Nobody in the room knew how to react to the nasty violence or the dramatic treatment of my disease.

In an attempt to get things back on track, the doctor spoke up. “For now...I think we should examine your eye once more. To check that it hasn’t been injured...”

4

They gave me another checkup, but my eye was unharmed. Its color had returned, and with it my memories... If I were to try and describe what had happened, I could only say, “I got better.” Nothing unusual showed up in the new cross-sectional images they took of my head either.

“That finger must have been all the way into her brain, though...” the doctor mumbled to himself as he stared at the monochrome images. “I’m going to prescribe some anti-bacterial eye drops, just to be safe. Get some rest, and we’ll see how things develop. If anything feels strange, contact us immediately.”

“Strange how...?”

“An off-feeling in your eyes, headaches, dizziness, nausea, fainting spells, fatigue, sluggishness...”

“Even if I just feel sluggish? Isn’t that setting the bar a little low?”

“Listen, the eyes are almost like a part of the brain that’s been exposed to the outside. People die from a single blood vessel in the brain bursting, so we have to take even minor symptoms seriously.”

“Uh, sure...”

For some reason, I got a whole lecture before he finally let me go.

As I left the examination room, said my thanks, and closed the door, I couldn’t help but think, They were all super concerned about my eye and brain, but no one was worried about all the times I got slapped in the face. I mean, sure, they had bigger things to worry about. I get it. But you just don’t hit a person’s face like that...

As I walked towards the lobby in front of the elevator, feeling disgruntled, Toriko, Kozakura, and Migiwa who were sitting in the waiting room all turned to look at me.

“Sorawo!” Toriko shouted as she got up and ran over and hug me.

I awkwardly returned the embrace. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

“Sorry for worrying you,” I said.

“You better be.”

“Oh, and thanks... For healing me.”

I thanked her and tried to move away, but Toriko held on and wouldn’t let me go.

Uh... What am I supposed to do in this situation? Do I hug her back tighter? But Kozakura and Migiwa are looking. That’d be embarrassing.

For lack of a better option, I tried slapping Toriko lightly on the back. She didn’t get mad, so it probably wasn’t the totally wrong response.

“How did you know what to do?” I asked.

“I just did what came naturally...” Toriko replied, her face still buried in my shoulder. It tickled my neck when she spoke there.

“It was natural...for you to plunge your finger into my eye?”

“I dunno... When I was touching your face, my finger sort of started probing on its own.”

“Oh, okay... Can I ask one more question?”

“Sure.”

“Why did you hit me?”

Toriko tensed up.

“Well?”

“I mean, you were acting weird, Sorawo.”

“I’m sure I was, but you were acting pretty weird yourself.”

“It fixed you before.”

“When?”

“With the Kunekune.”

I hadn’t expected her to say that, so I was confused. Thinking back, she was right. When I looked directly at the Kunekune and started going insane, Toriko had slapped me to my senses.

“Th-That doesn’t mean you should just do it out of nowhere...”

“What, then? Do you want me to apologize?”

“Huh?”

Toriko suddenly let go of my arm, moving away and looking down at me with a cold expression on her face.

“What... What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Sorawo, do you remember what you said?”

“Huh...?”

Before she hit me? What did I say?

Erm...

...

We looked at one another for a while, neither of us saying a word.

“That...doesn’t count,” I replied cautiously. Toriko nodded, letting no expression show on her face as she did.

Toriko headed back to her seat and I followed. I plopped myself down next to her.

“What did the doctor have to say?” Kozakura, who was sitting across from us, asked.

“He didn’t find anything particularly wrong with me.”

When I gave her the short version, Kozakura frowned skeptically. “Really?”

“He did give me some eye drops, though.”

Kozakura looked even more incredulous.

“If there are no problems, then that is good,” Migiwa said, looking closely at me as he spoke. “But it is hard to believe after what we saw.”

“What do you mean?”

“It has been a while since I last saw a finger shoved into a human eye.”

Scary.

He must have sensed I was weirded out, because Migiwa tried to recover by adding, “Oh, it was a long time ago. And I only saw it that one time.”

That additional detail didn’t do anything to help. I wondered what happened to the person, but the story was probably not going to be anything I wanted to hear, so I decided not to ask.

“Is your face a little swollen?” Kozakura asked, leaning in to look a little closer.

“Is it obvious?” I asked.

“Not that obvious, but you maybe should put something cold on it.”

“I will go fetch something,” Migiwa said, rising from his seat and then disappearing down the stairs.

I cast a sideways glare at Toriko.

“See. It’s because you hit me so much.”

“Sorry...” This time she meekly apologized, her shoulders slumping in dejection.

“No, I understand. I mean, I get the urge to punch Sorawo-chan pretty often myself.”

“Kozakura-san?”

“But I’m glad you don’t have dementia. Because if you did have dementia with Lewy bodies, that would kind of make sense.”

“The doctor said that too. What is that?”

“I’m sure the doctor could explain it better than me, but...”

Despite saying that, Kozakura did explain.

“Lewy body dementias occur when aggregations of protein called Lewy bodies form in the brain’s nerve cells. There are three major effects. The first is impaired cognitive function. Your ability to understand the situations and conversations you find yourself in is impacted, and you feel dazed a lot of the time. The second is Parkinson’s disease. You experience rigidity of movement, autonomic dysfunction, and difficulty controlling your body. The third...is visual hallucinations.”

“You start seeing things?”

“Yeah. Like a person you don’t know staring at you from the ceiling. Or a mouse, a snake, or some other creepy creature crawling around on your dinner table. Or a dead family member sleeping in your bed...”

Just talking about it must have scared her, because Kozakura shuddered.

“That’s...a lot like a spiritual phenomenon, huh?”

“I know, right? But it’s a hallucination. Even though it feels absolutely real to the person experiencing it. I know I specified visual hallucinations before, but there can be non-visual ones too. The feeling of someone touching you, hearing voices when there’s no one else around, sensing someone standing behind you... You might mistake a stain on the wall, or a wrinkle in the sheets, for someone’s face; the walls or ground might look warped and distorted; you might see a door or staircase that shouldn’t be there; or have a thief that doesn’t exist break into your house and steal your things...”

Toriko, who had been staring at her hand in silence, suddenly looked up. “Hey, isn’t that like...”

Kozakura smiled faintly. “You noticed? Yeah, that’s right. In the beginning, I suspected that experiences with the Otherside might be caused by dementia with Lewy bodies. In fact, you can explain most ‘spiritual phenomena’ with hallucinations caused by dementia with Lewy bodies. Especially those experienced by elderly folks in the hospital.”

“Oh, yeah, you hear a lot of stories of people seeing something like the grim reaper when they’re on their deathbed,” I said, recalling a number of hospital ghost stories I had read. “But it’s a little tough to write it all off as dementia and hallucinations, don’t you think? It’s not just the elderly who experience ‘spiritual phenomena,’ after all. Even if you assume it’s because the disease manifested at a young age, it would eventually progress and be discovered.”

“Well, yeah. When multiple people experience the same thing at the same time, and there’s ample physical evidence, it’s going to be impossible to write off the Otherside as a hallucination.”

Around that point Migiwa came back and handed me an ice pack wrapped in a wet towel. I pressed it against my face. The cold felt nice against my skin, which was inflamed from being hit.

“So...what happened?” Toriko asked me once we had relaxed a bit longer.

“Yeah, I’m not too sure about that myself,” I replied. “Something happened around the same time as my seminar last week, and after that I lost my vision in my right eye, and all my memories of the other world.”

“You can’t remember what it was?”

“Maybe it’s still blocked.”

Toriko leaned a little closer to me, so I pulled back.

“You can keep your finger out of my eye, thanks.”

“I was just trying to take a look at it.”

“Seriously, it’s nothing for you to stare at.”

While I tried to avoid Toriko looking at my face, Kozakura got angry.

“Take this seriously. It’s pretty clear you didn’t just hit your head or something. Your right eye...got deactivated, I guess you could say? I’ve never seen anything like that before. Something serious involving the other world must have happened.”

“Well, yeah, I know that. It’s just that no matter how hard I think about it, my memories of whatever it was are completely—” I started to say, then realized.

I did remember. Just one thing. One element in my memories was blatantly out of place.

“It’s T-san,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Who?”

“T-san the Templeborn!”

My sudden shouting earned me a dubious look from Kozakura. She repeated, “T-san the Templeborn...? You mean that T-san?”

I nodded.

“That’s right. The Templeborn was in my seminar. I didn’t notice it at all when my memories were gone, but now that I think back, that guy was totally T-san.”

Toriko awkwardly tugged on my sleeve. “Hey, who are you talking about? Someone you know? I’ve never heard of this person before.”

“Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t have...”

T-san the Templeborn is a famous internet meme. To explain it simply, he’s sort of an anti-ghost-story hero. There’s a bunch of stories, but they all play out in the same way.

First, they start as normal ghost stories. Like, there’ll be a ghost causing traffic accidents, or the storyteller’s girlfriend will be possessed by a floating head, or their friend will be pulled underwater by a black shadow at the beach.

Then, just as the storyteller finds themselves in peril, their coworker, “T-san,” will get up and shout, “Hah!” He fires a bead of light from his hands and blasts the ghost, or incinerates the floating head, or whatever. The spooks are defeated in an instant. T-san makes his dashing departure, and the narrator is left saying, “Damn, the Templeborn is cool.” The end.

That explanation made Toriko cock her head to the side.

“Is that net lore? It’s not scary at all, right?”

“Not all net lore has to be scary... Well, it’s just a joke. It starts as a ghost story, and then makes you laugh with the punchline. There are a lot of variations on it because it’s so easy to rework. You can end pretty much any ghost story with T-san showing up and going ‘Hah!’ and people will laugh.”

“I thought you hated that kind of stuff, Sorawo?”

“Yeah.”

I used to think a lot about how “true” ghost stories were. I was harsh on minor inconsistencies that made them seem fabricated, and downright indignant when people used them for jokes. Even I have to admit I was a total pain in the neck, but I couldn’t help myself.

“So this T-san was there? In your seminar?” Kozakura asked and I nodded.

“Probably. I even remember him introducing himself as being born in a temple.”

“Huh? That’s all?”

“Kozakura-san, have you ever had anyone introduce themselves by saying they were born in a temple? I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that comes up under normal circumstances,” I told a skeptical Kozakura. “I don’t remember anything else, but that one thing stuck in my mind. I met him again during my seminar today, but there’s something weird about that too. If I try to remember what we talked about, I get a little fuzzy-headed, and though I can just barely remember his face, I don’t recall his name...”

“But you don’t remember people’s names most of the time, do you?”

“Urgh... Okay, yes, that’s true.”

“You’re not interested in other people to begin with, Sorawo-chan.”

“That’s true too, but...”

“I can remember them!” Toriko piped in.

“Oh, yeah? Well, I guess you’re in charge of that from now on, then, Toriko.”

“You shouldn’t be outsourcing that,” Kozakura said with a sigh as she leaned back in her chair. “Okay, even if we assume this guy really is T-san the Templeborn... What does he do? He’s originally a being that wrecks ghost stories, right? Wouldn’t that make the basis for his actions fundamentally opposed to the monsters in the Otherside?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I agreed.

In our encounters with the Otherside before now, almost without exception, they had tried various methods of terrifying us. I don’t know how intentional that was, but...uh, actually, I don’t even know if they had intentions to begin with. Still, T-san seemed out of place. He wasn’t scary in the least, for one thing.

“May I say one thing? I apologize if I am off base here, but...” Migiwa began with a long preamble, then continued. “Is there any possibility that this T-san is opposed to other entities on the Otherside? If the net lore that he is based on is one that destroys ghost stories, then perhaps T-san is acting in line with the original text?”

“You’re suggesting Otherworld entities might be hostile to one another? Hmm, I guess you could look at it that way. But I dunno...” I said.

“If that’s the case, it’s possible that your amnesia might have been caused by something other than T-san, Sorawo-chan,” Kozakura said.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe T-san went ‘Hah!’ and saved you from something from the other world that was attacking you.”

“If that did happen, it would mean my memories didn’t come back even after he helped me.”

“Well... T-san’s not omnipotent, right?”

“He’s not just not omnipotent, he’s totally useless!” Toriko interjected. “She was blind, and had lost her memories, including of me...”

When I heard the indignation in Toriko’s voice, I thought, Oh, so that’s why you hit me. She was like, How dare you forget me. I’ll never forgive you. Or something like that... In that case, it was somewhat understandable. If I’d been in her position, I’d have been mad too.

“Perhaps...we could also consider the possibility that the T-san that Kamikoshi-san encountered is not an Otherside entity, but a Fourth Kind.”

I was caught off guard by Migiwa’s suggestion. “That never occurred to me... It’s true there have been Fourth Kinds who followed the text of existing ghost stories, like the jumping man at the Farm. Maybe it’s possible a Fourth Kind could have become the Templeborn.”

“Become the Templeborn... Uh, what? What would that mean?” Kozakura asked.

“Like, he gained exorcism powers, or something like that...”

Kozakura scowled and cut me off there. “No, this is making me kind of uncomfortable. I don’t think that any further speculation based on your vague memories is going to be helpful.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. But that one memory of having met T-san the Templeborn is very clear. So...”

“In that case, we’ll need to find out who he is for sure.”

“You’re being awfully proactive this time, Kozakura-san. That’s unusual,” I said.

“Huh? If we don’t sort this out, you’ll fall behind on your studies, and your health will be up in the air too, right? Don’t act like this is none of my problem!”

“I-I’m sorry.” I ducked my head as she shouted at me with a serious look on her face. “Well, then... Should I look into him?”

“How?”

“We’re in the same seminar. I’m sure there’ll be opportunities for us to meet.”

“Sorawo, I’ll go with—” Toriko started to say, but I shook my head.

“I can do this on my own. I mean, you must be busy with your own studies, Toriko. Your third year just started.”

“Well, yeah, but...”

“It’s okay. I’ll be careful. And I won’t hesitate to call you on days you’re free.”

“Okay...”

Kozakura, who had been watching that exchange between Toriko and me, took a deep breath and stood up. “Well, time to head home. C’mon, Sorawo-chan, make sure you say your thanks. Can you do that?”

“Yes, I can do that!” I replied indignantly. “Um, Migiwa-san, I’m really sorry to have troubled you like this.”

“Oh, think nothing of it. If you need some extra hands, please contact us at once.”

I couldn’t help but smile a little as I imagined Migiwa—who looked like anything but a law-abiding citizen—and the beefy Torchlight contractors lurking around campus.

“Ah ha ha... I appreciate the thought, at least. Thank you.”

I stood up and was getting ready to leave when it happened. I put away the gun that had been returned to me, shouldered my bag, and looked up to see a pair of black eyes staring at me. I stopped dead in my tracks. A child’s head had sprouted from behind the sofa that Kozakura was sitting on. When she noticed my line of sight, Kozakura turned to look. She screamed and jumped out of her seat, skillfully bounding over the low table between us as she evacuated to where Toriko and I were in an instant.

“Huh? Oh, hey, it’s the girl from before.”

Apparently Toriko hadn’t noticed her before now either. The girl we had brought back from beyond Hasshaku-sama’s gate had been standing behind the sofa for who knows how long.

“O-Oh, that kid...” Kozakura said between heaving breaths. She shook her head vigorously.

The girl kept peering over the sofa at us without a word. She was wearing a set of light pink pajamas.

“She’s still at DS Research?” I asked, and Migiwa seemed concerned.

“So far, we have been unable to ascertain her identity. We are looking all over, though.”

“Is it okay to let her walk around like that?”

“Even if we lock the door, she always slips out at some point...”

“Huh...? Isn’t that bad? You’ve gotta lock her up proper—Oof!”

A powerful blow from Kozakura’s elbow cut me off and I doubled over in pain.

“Wh-What was that for?!”

“She’s in the room, okay? Watch your mouth.”

“I was just thinking it’s dangerous to let a kid roam around here.”

“So we don’t even know her name, huh?” Toriko asked. “What do you call her? She must have some sort of temporary name, right?”

Migiwa shook his head. “None in particular.”

“No way,” Toriko said.

“Because she has never shown any indication that she understands what we say to her.”

“Does she get violent? It wasn’t easy getting her into the bath at my place...” Kozakura said.

When we brought the kid back to the surface world, she was filthy. The black dress she’d worn was practically a rag too, so we’d taken her to the bath in Kozakura’s house, and the three of us worked together to wash her from head to toe. She resisted, of course. Eventually, she ran out of energy, but it had been exhausting for the three of us too.

“Fortunately, she is not that rebellious now. We provide her food and a place to sleep, which has gradually eased her wariness of us. It took some work to get her toilet-trained. I put her excrement in the toilet bowl, and taught her with gestures, so now she uses the toilet on her own three times out of five.”

“Wait, you’re the one teaching her that, Migiwa-san?” I asked.

“It worked out that way... I leave more delicate matters to the nurse, of course.”

Toriko crouched down, meeting the little girl at eye level. “Hey, little girl, could you tell us your name?”

The girl looked back at Toriko with no expression. Toriko tried asking again.

“Do you understand? I am Toriko. Next to me is Kozakura. This is Sorawo. Over there is Migiwa.”

She pointed to each of us, carefully enunciating our names. Then, she pointed to the girl.

“Who are you?”

“I’m not Michiko.”

We were all shocked when she suddenly spoke after being silent for so long.

“What did she just...” Migiwa blurted out, surprised. The girl turned to him and said it again.

“I’m not Michiko. Take a closer look, old man.”

Then her lips drew taut again, and she looked up at me.

“Well, I guess we’ve established she’s not Michiko...” Kozakura murmured, bewildered. “You sure she doesn’t understand us?”

“No, that was...” I said, looking at Toriko as I did. She nodded back at me. “...something I said a long time ago. When we met Abarato.”

“This girl...she seems to know our past conversations, and she repeats them,” Toriko explained.

“Huh...?” Kozakura said.

“It was like that when we first found her too. She repeated a conversation between me, Toriko, and you—”

“Huh?! Why am I getting roped into this?!”

“Don’t ask me.”

Toriko turned to look back at me and Kozakura arguing. “Hey, don’t you feel bad for her, not having a name?”

“We’ll find out who she is eventually,” I said, but Toriko gave me a dubious look.

“You sure about that, Sorawo? We found her on the Otherside. I’m thinking she might not be an ordinary girl.”

“If she’s not an ordinary girl, then what is she?”

“I dunno...”

I’d given some thought to where the girl might have come from.

“She’s not Abarato’s daughter. We know that much, at least.”

“Yeah, he didn’t seem like he had a kid,” Toriko agreed.

“We looked into it, and the Abaratos had no children. It was just the two of them,” Migiwa added.

“And the wife...?” I asked.

“Missing. We could find nothing about the individual the two of you met.”

“I knew it...”

I thought back to our conversation with “Michiko Abarato” in the café. At this point, her face was a blurry memory. I wasn’t even confident the meeting had happened at all.

“This is gonna sound super weird, but...could Abarato have changed into her, or something like that...?” I said hesitantly, but Toriko shook her head.

“I don’t think so. I mean, they have nothing in common.”

“Well, yeah, I know that, but...”

Having seen the dramatic changes that contact with the Otherside could have on a human body as many times as I had...I couldn’t discard the possibility that, just maybe, that was what had happened.

Surprisingly, Kozakura nodded as if she understood. “Honestly, I thought something similar.”

“Huh? You too, Kozakura-san?”

“Yeah... To be honest, when you two first brought her back, I thought she was a shrunken Satsuki for a moment.”

Toriko inhaled sharply, and looked away. It was like she felt guilty about something.

“Hmm...” I replied, looking at the back of Toriko’s head.

“That’s impossible, though,” Kozakura added apologetically. “Their faces don’t look all that similar.”

“Oh, I see. Not that I’d know anything about that.”

There was an awkward silence. I had an idea of my own, but I didn’t share it with them.

In that place with the massive setting sun, when we chased the girl inside the mound of trash, I felt like I was chasing a younger version of myself. It might be because my doppelgänger ordered me to go after her, or at least I got the impression it did, but I saw myself in the way the girl was desperately running away.

I wasn’t a little girl when I was running away from my brainwashed relatives and the cult they’d fallen in with, it was actually a period of a few years when I was in middle and high school, but I might have projected the helplessness I felt then onto the fleeing child. Once I realized that, it was too embarrassing to tell anyone.

“So, what are we gonna do about her name?” Toriko broke the silence. Oh, yeah, that was what we were talking about, huh?

“I’ll give her one,” I said, and Toriko and Kozakura both looked at me with surprise.

“You, Sorawo-chan?”

“That’s unusual.”

“You don’t mind, right?”

“It’s fine by me.”

I didn’t want to let Toriko and Kozakura, who were still hung up on Satsuki Uruma, be the ones to name her. I’d had a similar thought before when I grew my hair out. Maybe these two just had a weakness for long, black hair. I doubted it, but I couldn’t completely discard my suspicion.

“Did you come up with a name?” Toriko asked.

“Hmm. If she says she’s not Michiko, let’s call her ‘Not Michiko,’” I said casually, without much thought. They both gave me a pretty harsh look, and I flinched. The joke wasn’t that funny, apparently.

“Just kidding. I’ll come up with a proper name.”

“You’d better,” Kozakura said insistently.

When I looked back at the little girl, she scrunched her face up as if my eyes were blinding her. Then, turning her head to look away, she tottered off.

“Time to head home, I guess...” Kozakura said listlessly, and Toriko stood up.

“Well, we’ll be off now. Thank you again for—” I tried to say my goodbyes, but Migiwa suddenly seemed to remember something.

“Ah! Come to think of it, there was one more thing I’ve been forgetting.”

Interrupted again. I just couldn’t seem to leave, huh?

“Since we have both of you here... Runa Urumi has regained consciousness. Did you want to see her?” Migiwa asked.

I turned to Toriko. I had already seen Runa Urumi the last time I came.

“We don’t have any reason to, right?” I suggested.

Toriko thought about it for a moment before looking up.

“I’d like to see her.”

“Huh? Seriously?”

“I want to know how she feels now.”

It was the same reason I had decided to meet Runa Urumi last time.

5

We followed Migiwa as he led us to the ward for Fourth Kind contactees. Each side of the hallway was lined with rooms that were somewhere between hospital rooms and prison cells. There was a large window for each room, and they had a system somewhere to control their transparency. Most were clouded at the moment, and it looked like a heavy mist hung in the room beyond the glass. Occasionally, a shadow would move in the thick, white fog; it was like walking through an aquarium where every tank was filled with smoke. Runa Urumi’s room was at the end of that long hallway.

Had she noticed our approach? Runa Urumi stood on the other side of the large window, waiting. She wore a light green patient gown that resembled a yukata. The marks left on her cheeks, drawn taut by the stitches, looked like an exaggerated smile.

Runa narrowed her eyes as she looked at us. Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear her voice. From what Migiwa had told me, they had a Fourth Kind patient in the past who let out horrible screams, so the room had been completely soundproofed. Only a deaf nurse was allowed inside.

Runa seemed well aware that we couldn’t hear her, because she picked a tablet off the desk and began writing on the screen with a stylus.

“I’m tired of watching Netflix. This is boring.”

“Picky, aren’t we?” Kozakura muttered in exasperation.

“Just let me go online.”

“You know that’s not happening.”

“You’d just have to disable my mic. Please.”

The only things in the room were a simple desk, a bed, and cases full of clothes underneath it. There were some books and notepads on top of the desk, along with a container with no lid, full of stationery and other small items. Maybe because her face had healed, the medical equipment had been taken away, and it was less of a sickroom than a cell for solitary confinement. Yeah, it did seem like she might die of boredom in there.

If I looked at this from an objective viewpoint, DS Research was detaining a minor with no legal basis. That said, knowing everything she’d done, I wasn’t feeling overly sympathetic.

Even if you only counted the people she’d directly brainwashed with her Voice, there were still dozens of victims. She’d made them cast aside their friends, families, and workplaces to follow her orders and engage in illegal activities. How many relationships had she destroyed, and, by extension, how many people had she made miserable? Hundreds? Maybe over a thousand? Although we’d rescued her on an impulse, it might have been better to let her die there.

But we went and saved her...

“Can she hear us out here?” Kozakura looked up at Migiwa and asked. Migiwa checked a panel near the window before answering.

“It is off at the moment, but I can turn on the microphone so you can speak to her.”

“Turn on the mic,” Toriko said. Migiwa nodded, then touched the panel.

The speakers in the room must have made a noise. Runa’s gaze went to the ceiling.

Toriko stepped forward, standing facing Runa on the other side of the glass. Runa looked back to the window.

“How do you feel about Satsuki?” Toriko asked without any lead in. Runa cocked her head to the side.

“Huh?”

“You worshipped her, right? But after what she did to you—”

“You mean this?”

Runa traced the scars on her cheeks, smiling.