Two minutes earlier.
The emergency service corridor behind the café's stockroom was dim, the light barely reaching the corners.
Chris had just led the girls around the bend.
Before Kamuro Masumi — who had been trailing directly behind him, fingers instinctively clutching the hem of his jacket from sheer nerves, and who had been on the verge of whispering at him to slow down and stop spooking himself — could even open her mouth.
Chris went still. One hand came up: stop.
Everyone fell silent. Held their breath. Strained their ears.
From somewhere below in the dark stairwell, a sound was drifting up — dry, rasping, the quality of a voice scraping across gravel, two rough surfaces grinding out something that barely qualified as a whisper.
"We've... probably run into the worst possible thing," Amikura Mako said, swallowing hard, forcing her voice down to almost nothing. The tremor in it gave her away anyway.
"We should run. While it hasn't noticed us yet."
Kamuro Masumi's instincts kicked in before she could stop them — she stepped back, and in doing so, ended up in front of Chris, putting herself between him and the darkness below.
"We don't know what we're dealing with yet. Blindly turning our backs on a monster is too dangerous."
Chris kept his gaze fixed on the blackness below, brow furrowed, wearing the look of a man in deep, conflicted thought.
"...You three, fall back behind the door. I'll hold the rear."
At those words, the hand Kamuro Masumi had clamped onto his shoulder went rigid. She looked at him — and something in her expression, usually so carefully guarded, shifted into something that could only be called reverence.
Even Amikura Mako, whose composure rarely cracked, was visibly moved.
Only Shiina Hiyori opened her mouth.
She felt uncomfortable leaving Chris behind alone — but under the crushing weight of reality, as the only one here with no extra lives to burn, she genuinely didn't have the nerve to volunteer to stay. All she could do was tuck that gratitude somewhere quiet inside herself and hold onto it.
She was just working up the courage to say thank you.
When — from the previously still corridor below — the sharp, rapid sound of boots striking concrete broke the silence.
Tap. Tap.
Shinaa Hiyori's expression changed instantly. The motion of rising to her feet stuttered. Even her breathing slowed to almost nothing.
What none of them knew: that silence below had been genuine. The Silence hadn't detected any of them at all.
Chris had simply decided the atmosphere was sufficiently seasoned — and in a quiet moment between breaths, used his telekinesis to reach through the dark and slap the creature across the face.
The Silence — smacked out of nowhere by an invisible hand — snapped to alertness, and began climbing the staircase toward them.
Chris smoothed his expression instantly, leaned over the railing, and stole a glance at the pale, featureless head emerging around the corner below.
He didn't make a sound. He pulled out his phone — already set to silent — and typed fast, then held the screen up for the group to read:
[This creature... I think I remember something about it. It can rewrite human perception. The moment you look away from it, every memory connected to it gets wiped. I had absolutely no recollection of it before — but the second I laid eyes on it just now, it was like something unlocked in my head.]
Kamuro Masumi took the phone, read it — and went completely blank. She typed back with frantic fingers:
[Then what do we DO?! If we just run, won't we forget it the second we turn around, then stumble back here in a daze and walk straight into it?!]
Shiina Hiyori and Amikura Mako leaned in to read the screen — and in doing so, instinctively pulled their eyes away from The Silence below.
In that fraction of a second, both girls' expressions went vacant. A brief, disorienting blankness swept through their eyes. They looked at the phone screen in front of them with complete confusion, already on the verge of asking aloud what was happening and why they were standing here.
Kamuro Masumi — who had never dared look down in the first place and was therefore the only one who'd been spared — went white with terror at the sight of them.
She lunged forward without thinking, slamming both hands over the two girls' mouths before either could make a sound, eyes wide and screaming at them in silence.
Unfortunately, she only had two hands.
In the chaos, Chris's phone slipped from between her fingers.
Clatter.
The clean, sharp sound rang out in the hushed stairwell like a gunshot.
Kamuro Masumi's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
Below, the shadow snapped its head up. A face with no features turned toward the railing — toward all of them.
"...Well."
Chris sighed.
Then, in one motion, he planted a hand on the railing and vaulted over.
The moment The Silence raised its head and opened its mouth, he was already falling — and he drove his foot down with the full force of his descent, a crushing kick straight into that pale, eyeless face.
[Ding.]
[Heart of Steel — Passive — Colossal Consumption activated. Maximum health increased by 24.]
The Silence was sent flying by the sheer momentum of the blow, slammed into the corner of the wall, and crumpled into something resembling peaceful, infant-like sleep.
Chris let a suitably relieved expression settle onto his face.
Twenty-four health... meaning the base physical damage on that kick was somewhere around two hundred? Hard to say if that's high or low for this thing.
But everyone knows — in any MOBA worth its salt, the most celebrated items are always the ones that stack infinitely. Heart of Steel, Garen's Q, that whole family.
And on top of that — Heart of Steel had given him something else entirely.
When the item had first refreshed into his possession, Chris had noticed his system interface unlock six new slots — laid out exactly like an equipment panel from League of Legends.
He'd unlocked the Trap Zone back when he first drew the Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, but that had its limitations. This equipment panel was different: anything slotted into it became passively active without needing to be physically carried.
From this point forward, the risk of blowing his cover by pulling mysterious objects out of nowhere in public was essentially eliminated.
Now that's a glow-up.
By then, the three girls upstairs had finally processed what they'd just witnessed.
Kamuro Masumi stared at Chris — who had just kicked a monster unconscious — with her jaw hanging so far open it was in genuine danger of detaching.
Wait — is that... allowed?
The sheer gap between expectation and reality had her head spinning. A thought crept in unbidden: So you can take these things down without a combat suit... if they're this weak, does that mean I could—
"What are you three standing around for?"
Chris shoved the coffee-and-cinnamon powder packet he'd prepared earlier into The Silence's mouth without looking back, and called up at them:
"Get down here and find me two pieces of rope. God only knows when this thing wakes up."
"Huh? Oh — oh, right!"
Kamuro Masumi jolted out of her daze and spun to head back the way they came.
"Wait."
A slender hand caught her sleeve.
Shinaa Hiyori held her in place and said quietly:
"You can't go. The moment you look away, you'll forget it exists."
"And once you've forgotten — what's going to stop you from forgetting why you left in the first place?"
Kamuro Masumi blinked — then it hit her, cold and immediate, like ice water down the back of her neck.
"Right — oh god. Then what do we do?"
"Use this."
Amikura Mako didn't waste a syllable. She was already shrugging off her school blazer and untying her ribbon, clearly intending to twist them into a rope.
"I've got it handled. That's not necessary."
Chris's voice floated up from below.
"Just come down and give me a hand. Wrap something around its fingers — I'm pretty sure this thing can discharge electricity through them."
And so.
When Horikita Manabu, Nagumo Miyabi, and Ayanokoji Kiyotaka — and the rest of the group, all braced for a desperate, brutal fight — finally came around the corner.
They were greeted by this scene: The Silence, hog-tied on the floor, thoroughly and comprehensively humiliated.
Chris heard them coming. He dusted off his hands and straightened up.
In the instant his gaze left The Silence—
A brief fog passed through his eyes.
It cleared almost immediately.
But that single, critical detail did not go unnoticed by the two watching from just a few steps away: Horikita Manabu and Nagumo Miyabi.
"As you can see."
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka looked down at the creature on the floor.
"This thing gradually rewrites human cognition. The moment your line of sight breaks from it, any memories associated with it are forcibly sealed away."
Chris heard this, and performed a perfect impression of a man hearing something for the first time.
He glanced down with an expression of dawning realization mixed with genuine surprise.
"Ayanokoji? You got dragged in as an uninvited participant too, huh..."
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka stepped closer.
He looked at The Silence on the floor — mouth stuffed with a powder packet, bound head to toe with improvised restraints, hands encased in a pair of small leather boots that were very obviously a girl's.
Even Ayanokoji Kiyotaka, who had seen a great many things, could not entirely suppress the raise of an eyebrow.
His expression, however, remained level.
"...Lucky, I suppose. I ran into the upperclassmen almost immediately, so I followed along."
"Is that so." Chris offered no opinion either way.
Horikita Manabu adjusted his glasses, his gaze lingering on Chris for a moment.
"Given that looking away causes forgetting."
"Then to safely see this exam through and preserve our memories — we'd need to keep one of these creatures alive as a fixed reference point. An anchor?"
Nagumo Miyabi noticed Horikita Manabu's attention on Chris, and the corner of his mouth curved.
He didn't particularly care.
With Ichinose Honami as his intelligence source, he was naturally well-informed about the first-year situation — and well aware of who Chris was.
By comparison...
The one who genuinely had his interest right now was Ayanokoji Kiyotaka — a complete blank slate who had started from zero, and yet had seen through the creature's mechanics in no time at all.
Under Nagumo Miyabi's quietly attentive gaze.
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka paused.
"Keeping a live specimen... isn't the only option. As long as we engage the moment we sight one of them — before we have a chance to look away — that should work just as well."
"If that approach is viable."
____
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