Not out of hate.
But out of mercy.
It was late spring. The flowers outside his school had just begun to bloom—wild violets and calendulas that climbed through the iron fence like prisoners staging an escape. It was the kind of day the universe would call merciful.
But mercy was a foreign language to Kai by then.
He sat alone on the rooftop, skipping class—not because he wanted to rebel, but because he couldn’t bear the weight of existing around people who didn’t know how broken he was.
And then she showed up.
Nari Sato.
The girl who hummed while drawing geometric doodles in her textbook margins. The one who once passed Kai a note that read:
“I think silence is a kind of music.”
He never replied.
But he kept the note in his pocket for months, folding and unfolding it until it tore.
Nari didn’t say anything when she saw him on the rooftop. Just sat beside him like it was natural. Like it was fated.
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“You always come up here,” she said. “You afraid of falling?”
“No,” Kai said. “I’m afraid of gravity letting go.”
She laughed, but there was no sound. Just a tremble in her throat. Her fingers drew invisible equations in the air—spirals, fractals, a chaotic language of someone trying to make sense of something unspeakable.
“I see ghosts when I look at people,” she whispered suddenly. “Fragments of who they used to be. Who they might’ve been.”
“And what do you see in me?” Kai asked.
She looked at him.
Really looked.
And said, “I see a boy who’s already preparing to die young.”
Three Days Later.
She wasn’t in school.
Or the next day.
Or the one after.
Then the counselor announced it: “We’ve lost a student.”
No explanation. No name needed.
Kai felt the world slow.
Not like in movies.
More like how a clock stutters when the battery corrodes—resisting forward motion.
He ran.
Not to her house.
To the fence.
To the place where the wild violets had bloomed.
And found them burned.
Scorched.
Erased.
Someone had torched the patch. Whether a gardener or the universe itself, it didn’t matter.
Something beautiful had been killed.
So Kai did what he’d never done before.
He rewrote something.
Not with magic. Not with divinity. Just with rage sharpened into intention.
He pulled out Nari’s old note.
He struck a match.
And whispered:
“If beauty isn’t allowed to live, then I will become the one who decides what dies.”
He watched the flames rise.
And in his mind, something clicked.
The first skill he ever forged wasn’t a weapon.
It was a vow:
“Kill anything that tries to mimic hope.”
That was the day Kai stopped believing in light.
And started becoming its saboteur.
End of Chapter 64