Hyakki stared at the wall.

  He lay on his side on his bed, loosely hugging a pillow as he contemplated his life. He was back in the apartment rather than the dorm. It was small with only two bedrooms and a kitchen, adorned with minimal furniture and bare walls. His duffel bag lay half open on the floor where he had dropped it, long hair splayed behind him across the sheets as he lay motionless in the quiet.

  After a moment, he lifted the pillow and lightly smacked it against his face repeatedly, as if that might physically compress the internal screaming into something manageable.

  One of his classes had been rescheduled—a simple administrative change that now created a very clean window of time where he was free, in the same area as Akio. The thought alone sent a cold, involuntary jolt through him.

  I am never going to live this down.

  He lowered the pillow and buried half his face into it, exhaling into the fabric. He had been avoiding the Twin Hounds obsessively, both as a civilian and in mask. It felt like being slowly circled by two silent predators who had decided not to lunge yet, not because they couldn’t, but because they were waiting.

  Creating distance had been the strategic move. It gave him space to maneuver, to act without immediate interference. But strategy wasn’t the whole truth. The real reason was simpler: he was afraid of Dawn.

  He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

  “...but I can’t just disappear,” he muttered to himself, the words barely audible in the still apartment.

  His motives for returning as the Hollow had never been about ego, notoriety, or some abstract attachment to chaos. It was about something very specific: Artificer Viscera.

  The masked figure had left almost no trace. He rarely appeared, spoke little, operated in sterile environments with surgical detachment. He had a history of experimenting on people and anyone who interested him. At one point he had even been quietly endorsed by Erebos before vanishing from public awareness. But Hyakki knew better. Men like that did not retire. They waited.

  Viscera had been involved in the surgery on his eye—the procedure that had “restored” his vision. If Viscera was still operating, then there were other victims, other children waking up to something unnatural threaded into their nerves. No one else was hunting him. No one else even seemed to remember him.

  Hyakki pressed the pillow over his face again, but this time he didn’t smack it. He just held it there, breathing steadily into the fabric.

  It wasn’t optional. He couldn’t disappear. Because if he did, Viscera would keep working—and Hyakki would never forgive himself for letting that happen. Every movement he had made over the past months aligned with that singular objective.

  Unfortunately, Viscera was not the only complication in his orbit.

  Hyakki exhaled through his nose and stretched an arm over his head, staring at the ceiling as if it might offer guidance. Vex Larain was suspected of having collaborated with Viscera in the past, though the details were murky. Hyakki was fairly certain they were not currently working together, but that did not make Larain any less of a problem.

  He kept running into the creatures. Swarms of them.

  They were half mechanical, half organic, fused grotesquely with a substance that resembled the inky black of the M.A.W., except altered—thicker, slicker, wrong in a way that made his skin crawl. Their bodies were loosely structured, lacking proper skeletal integrity, which made direct strikes inefficient. Cut one in half and it would simply fold, twitch, and reassemble itself as if inconvenienced rather than injured.

  They were shaped like a warped fusion of rat and hyena. Bodies low to the ground, elongated limbs, mechanical jaws permanently parted in something that resembled a grin. No eyes. Just metal and modified flesh. A green diamond glowed at the center of their foreheads, pulsing faintly like a tracking beacon. When they moved in packs, they communicated through sounds disturbingly close to hyena laughter.

  The only saving grace was that the M.A.W. worked exceptionally well against them. Infection consumed both the mechanical components and the organic tissue alike. When he unleashed it fully, the swarms disintegrated under his control, eaten from within by the same force that had once protected him as a child.

  This was precisely why he kept stepping in.

  Larain’s creatures did not just roam—they spread. They multiplied. And worse, hidden within their mechanical jaws were thin, retractable needles designed to inject something into unsuspecting civilians. He did not know what that substance was. He did not want to find out. So he cleaned up. Every time.

  And that brought him, inevitably, to Aira.

  Hyakki rolled back onto his side and hugged his pillow to his chest, staring blankly at the wall.

  Why was she there. WHYYY???

  He buried his face into the pillow with a muffled groan. She had walked straight into the perimeter without noticing. The swarm had already begun circling behind her, closing in from the shadows. There had been no clean way to extract her without risking infection or allowing the creatures to flank.

  So he had done the only thing that would guarantee she ran. He showed himself and summoned an Anomaly—something large, distorted, terrifying enough to override her curiosity and force her into survival mode. He had watched the fear bloom across her face. He had watched her run.

  Hyakki pressed the pillow harder against his face.

  He had felt so awful afterward that he had done something monumentally stupid: going to the store to buy noodles. Summoning Anomalies always left him hungry; it burned through him in a way that left his hands shaking and his thoughts unfocused. He had told himself it was practical, that he needed the energy.

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  Instead, Aira had run straight into him outside the store. Terrified. Crying. Shaking. He had no choice but to comfort her, and in doing so, he had accidentally reinforced her trust. Psychologically manipulated her into feeling safe with him.

  Hyakki’s voice came out muffled and scandalized. “I literally had food at home. What is wrong with me??”

  The sound of keys turning in the lock pulled him faintly from his spiral. The door opened, followed by the familiar rhythm of someone setting down bags and shrugging off a coat. Still lying on his side with his face half buried in the pillow, Hyakki spoke without looking up.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  There was a brief pause at the doorway of his room. “Hi, son. Did you climb through the window?”

  “The door was locked,” he replied, voice muffled against fabric.

  “You didn’t tell me you were coming back.”

  He lowered the pillow and exhaled slowly, staring at the ceiling. “I just felt like visiting for a few days.”

  Hyakki rolled onto his back to look toward the doorway. Namon stood there as he always did—tall, steady, tanned skin warmed by the hallway light, strong jawline framed by thick blond hair that fanned slightly like a lion’s mane. Golden eyes observed him calmly over reading glasses perched low on his nose. The same hands that had stitched him back together after the near-death incident years ago. The same man who had chosen to adopt him afterward. Biology and medicinal sciences professor. Methodical. Patient. Infuriatingly perceptive.

  “Always glad to have you home,” Namon said gently. “Do you not like your roommates?”

  Hyakki shook his head. “No. They’re both great. The dorm just felt… busy.”

  Namon leaned slightly against the doorframe. “Have you made any friends?”

  “Yeah. I have a few.”

  “What about that Aira girl from before? Are you still friends?”

  Hyakki stiffened almost imperceptibly. He stared up at the ceiling and hugged the pillow a little tighter against his chest. “We are. But I… don’t really want to see her right now.”

  There was a small shift in Namon’s posture—the subtle, unmistakable confusion of a parent trying to reconcile data. “Why? I thought you two were close.”

  The despair he had been suppressing began creeping back in, slow and suffocating. He searched for words that did not expose too much, that did not unravel everything.

  “She’s… too nice to me.”

  Namon blinked. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  Hyakki turned onto his side again, facing the wall, retreating into the safer geometry of blank paint. “No. It’s not.” He paused, then added flatly, “Also, her older brother doesn’t like me. So there’s that.”

  “Why? Did you two get in a fight or something?”

  Hyakki stared at the wall, expression blank. “Something like that.”

  “Surely you could apologize and sort it out?” Namon offered reasonably.

  Hyakki closed his eyes. “It’s not that simple.”

  Namon stepped a little further into the doorway, folding his arms loosely. “What did you fight about?”

  “Her.”

  There was a brief pause, then Namon spoke again. “Ah,” he said, nodding once. “I see. That’s pretty normal. He’s just protective.”

  Hyakki felt a flicker of dread begin to rise.

  “You have a good heart, son,” Namon continued warmly. “Older brothers can be intimidating. Especially when they think someone is getting close to their little sister. It happens. Young love tends to make things complicated.”

  Hyakki’s eye twitched. He buried his face into the pillow with a frustrated groan. “It’s not like that. We’re not dating. I don’t have a crush on her.”

  “I thought you did,” Namon replied, genuinely confused.

  “That was before, Dad,” Hyakki muttered into the fabric. “I stopped liking her ages ago. Now she’s just… a friend.”

  Namon considered this carefully. “Then why are you so worried about her brother? If you’re not dating, his approval shouldn’t really matter.”

  Hyakki slowly lowered the pillow and stared at the wall, trying to articulate the truth as carefully as he could. “It… does matter. Like a lot, at least to me.”

  Namon’s brow lifted slightly. “Why is that?”

  Hyakki exhaled slowly. “It’s just—he’s really scary, and every time I see him I don’t know what to do. Like, do I say something? Do something? I don’t know. And I’ve been seeing him a lot recently, even outside of school.”

  He paused, breath unsteady before continuing more quietly. “I need his approval. I don’t know if I can keep living like this, because if he doesn’t like me, it would just be… bad.”

  Namon didn’t answer immediately. Hyakki could feel the weight of the silence, could feel his own fingers tightening slightly around the pillow. The words he’d said were technically true. In some impossible universe where the Dawn Hound forgave him, maybe he would be spared. But that wasn’t happening. He couldn’t even forgive himself. The thought alone made something cold coil in his chest.

  Then Namon spoke, voice gentler.

  “Son, I understand. You’ve always been on the quiet side. You care deeply—more than you let on. It’s all right. You don’t have to hide it from me.”

  He adjusted his glasses with complete sincerity.

  “It’s okay to be gay.”

  Hyakki blinked once. Then he slowly rolled over until he was facing his father, expression utterly deadpan. “I’m not gay.”

  Namon remained perfectly calm. “You are avoiding a girl because you’re emotionally invested in her brother.”

  Hyakki processed that sentence, horror and despair filling him at once. “No—what? Why would you say it like that?? That’s not even—”

  He rolled back onto his side and shoved his face into the pillow, releasing a muffled, dying sound of protest into the fabric.

  From the doorway, Namon spoke with gentle finality. “Anyways, I’m going to make dinner. Does chicken pasta sound good?”

  Hyakki remained where he was as he listened to the sounds of Namon moving around in the kitchen. It was absurdly domestic, and somehow that made everything worse. He stared into the darkness of the fabric, still trying to process the psychic damage his father had just inflicted on him.

  It was infuriating that he couldn’t say the real reason. Every attempt to explain himself had twisted into something that sounded like dialogue ripped from a poorly written romance drama. But he would never risk letting Namon find out he was the Hollow. He had already been shunned once in his life, he was not strong enough to endure that again.

  With a slow, tired exhale, he rolled onto his back and lifted the pillow above his face, holding it there with both hands as it cast a dim shadow over him. He just felt… trapped. He didn’t blame Akio for hating him. If anything, he thought it was justified. He had tried to kill Aira. He had spent months beside her, laughing with her, calculating the exact parameters under which he would end her life and nearly succeeded.

  His chest tightened with a sharp, heavy twist of guilt. He hated that he had done it. He hated it even more that, after everything, Aira still trusted him. And what he hated most of all was the quiet, traitorous part of him that still missed her kindness.

  If he could go back and stop himself, he would do it without hesitation. But the past did not change, no matter how much he wished it would. So the Dawn Hound hunting him now didn’t feel random. It felt like retribution.

  His gaze lowered slightly, unfocused.

  I deserve it. I deserve whatever’s coming.

  But then the memory returned—the Dawn Hound standing over him on the rooftop. The handshake, the polite smile. The pale blue eyes that were completely cold, clinical, and decisive.

  Hyakki’s chest tightened. Fear shot through him again, fresh and unfiltered. He slammed the pillow down over his face and screamed into it, voice muffled and strangled. “I’M SO DEAD—”

  From the kitchen, Namon called back with perfect calm, “That’s great, son. You want soup?”

  Hyakki lay there for a few more seconds, staring at nothing through the pillow as despair slowly settled into something duller and more manageable. Eventually, he removed it and pushed himself upright. He still felt unsteady, still hollowed out by guilt and dread, but exhaustion was beginning to override both.

  He stood and made his way toward the kitchen.

  At least he would be having good food tonight.

  ─ ? NEXT CHAPTER POV ? ─

  Lillianne