The clear, crystalline singing—tinged with a sorrow so profound it felt almost sacred—echoed through the venue like a hymn descending from the heavens themselves.
It was the kind of voice that didn't merely enter the ears; it seeped into the soul, washing away the grime of everyday existence, cleansing the spirit of its accumulated burdens. For a suspended, breathless moment, it felt as though every person in that vast arena was being gently, irresistibly lifted toward some realm of impossible holiness.
Takahashi Mio stared at the girl on the stage, her lips slightly parted, her body utterly motionless. No matter how much jealousy had been boiling in her veins just minutes before—no matter how fiercely her pride had raged against acknowledging Hojo Shione's superiority—at this moment, her soul was completely, unconditionally conquered. Every note that floated from those lips was an arrow aimed directly at her heart, and she had no armor left to deflect them.
The beautiful, mournful singing flooded her chest with an emotion she couldn't fully name—a hollow, aching sorrow that seemed to resonate with something buried deep inside her. Before she even realized it, her vision had begun to blur. Tears welled up along her lower lashes, trembling, then spilling silently down her cheeks. She didn't wipe them away. She barely noticed them.
It was as if she had been transported backward through time. She was no longer the rival girlfriend, no longer the woman locked in silent combat with this idol for a man's attention. She was simply a girl again—a devoted fan, clutching a glow stick in a cramped live house, looking up at the same radiant figure and thinking: I want to be like her. I want to shine like that.
The memory ached. The present ached. Everything ached, and the music made it beautiful.
In contrast, Shiratori Seiya's heart remained remarkably still. Not cold—never cold when it came to her—but analytical. Observational. He stroked his chin thoughtfully, his eyes tracking the glittering figure on stage with the focused assessment of a craftsman examining a masterpiece in progress.
She's improved. Genuinely, significantly improved.
And honestly, she should have improved. More than half a year had passed since they'd parted ways—since he'd stepped back from her career and left her to chart her own course.
If, after all that time, there had been no growth at all, he would have been forced to seriously reconsider two possibilities: either Shione hadn't been working nearly hard enough during their time together, or the System's S-rank talent evaluation was fundamentally flawed. Both prospects were troubling.
But here, now, the evidence was undeniable. His decision had been correct. Separation had been good for her. Good for both of them, perhaps.
....
Although the songs she was performing today spanned different styles and emotional registers, Hojo Shione was now navigating the transitions with remarkable skill. Her vocal cords shifted smoothly between the bright, bouncing energy of her upbeat tracks and the deep, resonant melancholy of her ballads. The improvement in her vocal control alone was significant—the kind of leap that separated a talented amateur from a true professional.
Moreover, her mastery over the finer details had sharpened considerably. The subtle emotional rises and falls within each phrase. The delicate vibrato she applied to certain words, then withheld from others. The way she shaped silence itself into an instrument, letting pauses hang in the air with perfect, aching weight. These were not the techniques of a singer simply performing notes on a page. This was the craft of an artist who had learned to pour her soul into every syllable.
The arrangement of today's setlist was also intriguing. Shiratori Seiya's intuition prickled.
Is she planning to bookend the concert with the two new songs?
One to open, one to close?
It was a bold structural choice—beginning and ending with unfamiliar material, trusting the audience to be carried along by the strength of the compositions themselves.
...
His intuition, as usual, proved correct. The second song that followed was a previously released track, familiar to the crowd and greeted with thunderous recognition. The pattern held. Old favorites, strategically placed, interspersed with moments of fresh revelation.
As he was mentally cataloguing the setlist structure, a sudden, insistent tugging at his left sleeve pulled him from his thoughts. He turned his head automatically, his gaze dropping to meet Hojo Suzune's wide, glistening eyes.
"What's wrong?" He mouthed the question, keeping his voice low beneath the swell of music.
Seeing his lips form the words, Hojo Suzune lifted her small frame from her seat, pushing herself up on her hands until she could lean close to his ear. Her breath was warm against his skin, and her voice trembled just slightly.
"Seiya... I want to be like Nee-san too..."
She pulled back, settling into her seat once more, but her eyes remained fixed on him. There was no demand in her expression—not quite. Just a raw, naked, desperately hopeful anticipation. The look of someone waiting for a blessing. Or a promise.
Shiratori Seiya studied her for a moment. Then, his eyes crinkled slightly at the corners, and he offered her a gentle, encouraging smile.
"Don't worry. With Suzune's talent, as long as you persevere and work hard, you can definitely reach that stage someday. I believe in you."
That's not what I meant. That's not what I meant at all.
What I mean is... when will you write a song for ME?
When will you pour your genius into something that belongs to only me?
If you gave me what you gave her—if you dedicated yourself to my voice the way you dedicated yourself to hers—I definitely wouldn't be worse than Nee-san. I would shine brighter. I would fly higher. I would make you proud.
Hojo Suzune's lips parted, the clarification trembling on the tip of her tongue. She wanted to explain more clearly, to make him understand the true shape of her longing. But Shiratori Seiya had already turned his head back toward the stage, his profile settling into the familiar, attentive stillness of someone who had temporarily closed a conversation.
She had no choice but to swallow her words. They lodged in her throat like unswallowed tears.
Lowering her head, she let the thoughts churn in silence. And then, slowly, the realization crystallized: Seiya was smart. Smarter than almost anyone she knew. He must have understood what she really meant. The fact that he'd chosen to respond the way he did—with kind, generic encouragement rather than a real answer—was itself the answer.
A gentle, indirect, but unmistakable refusal.
Her slender eyebrows furrowed. Her small hands tightened into fists on her lap. And listening to her sister's voice soar and sparkle and fill every corner of the vast arena... Hojo Suzune felt, for one piercing, crystalline moment, like crying.
In the stage technical room, the atmosphere had shifted from tense vigilance to quiet, growing relief.
Yasukawa Akio, the artist management company's senior director, finally allowed himself to exhale properly after Hojo Shione had flawlessly delivered her fourth consecutive song. The tension that had been coiled in his shoulders since the opening note began to loosen.
Hojo Shione was simply too young.
Young in actual age, yes—barely past twenty. But also young in the life of her career.
The time since her debut had been a sprint, not a marathon. He had spent the weeks leading up to this concert nursing a private, gnawing fear: that inexperience would betray her. That nerves would strangle her voice. That the sheer, crushing weight of her first major solo performance would prove too much for such slender shoulders.
But now, watching her on the monitors—poised, radiant, utterly in command—he realized he had worried entirely too much. The standard wisdom among industry veterans held that if a singer could make it through the first three songs without incident, they had settled into their zone. The zone of flow. The zone where instinct and training fused into something transcendent. After that, the rest of the concert was typically smooth sailing.
He let out a long, audible sigh of relief, the corners of his mouth twitching upward into a genuine, gratified smile. He turned to Fukada Fuyuna, Hojo Shione's personal manager, his voice carrying a note of undisguised wonder.
"It seems that after tonight, Miss Hojo is truly going to soar. She's going to be famous—properly famous. I never imagined she would have such extraordinary on-the-spot control at her age. The way she reads the crowd, adjusts her energy, commands the stage... it's remarkable."
Halfway through his sentence, he noticed the glistening sheen in Fukada Fuyuna's eyes. Tears. Real, unpolished, barely-contained tears were welling up along her lower lashes. She drew a shaky breath, her voice thick with emotion.
"Actually... Shione has always worked incredibly hard. More than anyone knows. Ever since A-Sensei announced he was stepping back from songwriting... she's been under so much pressure. Constant pressure. The media speculating. The company questioning. The fans worrying. She..."
Fukada's voice caught in her throat.
A choked, painful pause.
She pressed her fingers to her lips, unable to continue, the words dissolving into the tight, silent ache of someone who had witnessed struggle from the closest possible distance and could not easily speak of it.
Seeing the depth of her emotion, Yasukawa Akio reached out and patted her arm in a gesture of quiet, fatherly comfort. Then, deliberately shifting the atmosphere, he turned toward Aoki Yayoi—the sharp-eyed representative from the record company—and asked with a lighter, almost conversational tone:
"Miss Aoki, in your professional assessment... do you think Miss Hojo's upcoming album has a genuine shot at cracking the top ten of this year's overall sales chart?"
Aoki Yayoi, in stark contrast to the misty-eyed manager beside her, radiated the cool, composed energy of a woman who dealt in data rather than feelings. Though a trace of genuine emotion flickered behind her eyes, she responded by adjusting her glasses with a precise, practiced motion. After a brief, calculating pause, she delivered her verdict.
"There shouldn't be any significant obstacle. Based on the current momentum and pre-release metrics, we've already logged over one hundred thousand pre-orders. If we layer on the post-concert promotional push and the media coverage tonight will generate..."
"Manager! Director! We have a situation—it's Miss Hojo! Something's wrong!"
Aoki Yayoi's clinical analysis was violently severed by the urgent, almost frantic voice of a staff member bursting into the technical room. Before anyone could react, the monitoring system erupted with a series of harsh, piercing, grinding sounds—feedback, distortion, the unmistakable shriek of audio systems under sudden, severe strain.
'HO HO! SQUEEEEAK!!'
Every heart in the room stopped simultaneously.
The smile on Yasukawa Akio's face didn't just fade—it was obliterated, wiped clean as if it had never existed. He whirled toward the monitor screen, his eyes bulging wide, round, and glassy. The expression on his face was that of a man watching a catastrophe unfold in slow motion, helpless to intervene.
"How is this possible... she was perfect just moments ago..."
Aoki Yayoi was the first to snap into action, her composure hardened into emergency mode. "Logistics team, prepare for potential medical intervention. Security, clear the backstage corridors. Sound team, give me a diagnostic RIGHT NOW—"
Back in the audience, the sudden shift in the concert's emotional trajectory had caught Shiratori Seiya slightly off guard.
When the intermission lights dimmed and the opening notes of the next song began to rise from the speakers, his brow furrowed in genuine surprise.
"Riding on the Silver Dragon's Back."
He had assumed—reasonably, logically—that this song, with its soaring, climactic energy, would be positioned as the grand finale. The emotional peak. The final, devastating blow before the encore.
To place it immediately after the intermission was... unexpected.
Is she trying to jolt the crowd back to full energy? Use the song's intensity to shake off the post-intermission lull and re-engage everyone instantly? It was an aggressive strategy. Risky. But potentially brilliant, if executed correctly.
The crowd, certainly, responded as anticipated. The opening chords triggered a tidal wave of recognition and enthusiasm, cheers erupting from thousands of throats at once.
But then Hojo Shione opened her mouth to sing the first line.
And something inside Shiratori Seiya's chest clenched tight as a fist.
Wrong. Something is wrong.
Others in the audience might not have noticed—not yet, not consciously. This song was beloved, iconic, but its precise melodic architecture wasn't something the casual listener could map out in their head.
But Shiratori Seiya knew this song. Knew it intimately. Knew every rise and fall, every breath, every precisely calibrated interval. He had written it. He had listened to Shione record it dozens of times, guiding her through each phrase until it matched the shape in his mind.
And from the very first syllable... she was off-key. Flat. Her pitch wavering in a way it had never wavered before.
But it wasn't just the melody. Beneath the surface of the notes, Shiratori Seiya could hear something far more alarming: an uncontrolled, involuntary tremor running through Hojo Shione's voice.
The kind of tremor that had nothing to do with artistic choice and everything to do with a body betraying its owner. If her singing earlier had been a heavenly sound, pure and transcendent, then this was the sound of sand being dragged roughly across dry leaves. The beauty was still there—faintly, desperately—but it was being eroded with every passing second.
Her voice cracked. Her vocal cords strained, producing sounds that were increasingly hoarse, increasingly ragged, increasingly wrong. Beside him, both Takahashi Mio and Hojo Suzune had gone rigid with dawning alarm. The three of them exchanged rapid, wordless glances—Seiya's frown deepening, Mio's eyes widening, Suzune's small face crumpling with confused, helpless worry.
The audience, at first, didn't register the problem. They continued waving their glow sticks, continued mouthing the words. Perhaps they assumed this was simply how the live version was arranged—a rougher, more emotionally raw interpretation.
But as the melody continued its relentless ascent, climbing toward the chorus with the unstoppable momentum of a dragon taking flight, the gap between the singer's faltering voice and the soaring instrumental became an unbridgeable chasm. It was no longer possible to pretend.
The venue fell into a creeping, spreading silence.
Then, faint murmurs. Whispered confusion.
What's happening?
Is she okay?
Did something go wrong?
Then—the chorus.
A strange, horrible, utterly inhuman sound tore through Hojo Shione's microphone, erupting from every speaker in the venue simultaneously. A huff-huff-huff, like dying bellows wheezing their last breath, amplified a thousandfold and seared directly into the eardrums of every person present.
On stage, visible now on the massive screens flanking the stage, Hojo Shione's slender body was trembling violently. She was hunched forward, her spine bent at an angle that looked almost painful. Her mouth was moving—forming words, shaping syllables, desperately trying to produce sound from her ravaged throat. The effort was visible in every taut muscle of her neck. The veins standing out against her pale skin. The way her chest heaved with frantic, insufficient breaths.
'HO HO HO! SQUEEEEAK!!'
The sound that finally clawed its way out of her throat was not singing. It was a crow's shriek. Raw. Broken. Piercing. It echoed across the silent, horrified arena like a wounded animal's final cry.
And then—nothing.
The thin, pre-recorded backing chorus continued to play, oblivious. The soaring instrumental melody swelled, majestic and indifferent. But Hojo Shione had no voice left to meet it. She knelt on the stage, one knee pressed against the polished floor, her head bowed. Her lips moved faintly, shaping words no one could hear. The microphone dangled uselessly from her trembling hand.
The music played on without her.
Then, suddenly, she lifted her face. Her eyes—those dark, luminous, tear-filled eyes—scanned the vast, darkened sea of the audience. Searching. Desperately, frantically searching. Until they found their target.
Seiya.
I asked you to watch me carefully... I told you I wouldn't let you down...