Note: Someone pointed out a mistake I made at the end of chapter 2 — My bad. The ending has been changed, please reread it before continuing ( • ᴖ • ｡)
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After being thrown against the wall, Souta began to pull himself up, visible irritation crossing his face. "Rei... that's no way to treat your father," he said, visibly annoyed. Rei, in that moment, couldn't have cared less about the curse standing in front of him.
From the instant his body began to produce and consciously use cursed energy, his mind reached a state of absolute clarity — sharp and still in a way he had never experienced before. His technique didn't come to him as something new. It came as something that had always been there, waiting at the edge of his awareness, refusing to be acknowledged. It flowed through him without resistance, without the repulsion he had grown used to, and settled into his existence as though it had never belonged anywhere else.
"Are you even listening to me, you little shit?" Souta snapped, growing more irritated by the second. Rei barely heard him. His mind had drifted back to his father's books — to that world of sorcerers and curses that had for so long seemed like the work of a man who had lost his mind. Now, with cursed energy running through his veins as though it had always known the way, that world felt less like fiction and more like a truth that had simply been waiting for him to catch up to it.
His hand extended over the other without him asking it to. The index finger and thumb of each hand closed — without ever quite touching.
"Domain Expansion..."
Rei's voice resonated through the room, followed by total silence. Souta's eyes snapped open and in that instant he lunged toward him.
"Ijou (Anomaly)."
His voice echoed as though it were a reflection of itself — as though the sound had arrived before his lips had moved.
Rei opened an incomplete domain, using the small apartment as the boundaries of the space. Souta felt the reality around him shift — yet at the same time, nothing had changed. He couldn't move, but he could. His feet were on the floor and on the ceiling at the same time. The world filled with contradictions that didn't ask to be resolved. Up was down, down was up — yet up had never stopped being up. Nothing made sense. Everything made too much.
"Father." Rei's voice came from everywhere and nowhere — his mouth never moved. "You were never truly mad." Rei was standing beside him, yet Souta could still see him standing in front. He had never moved. But he had. "In fact... it turns out no one was saner than you."
For a moment, Souta seemed to understand. Not the domain, not the technique, not what was happening — but something simpler and more final. His eyes, the ones set too high in that face that wasn't quite a face, found Rei's for the last time.
And in that instant Rei moved — or didn't move. Inside the Ijou it was impossible to know for certain. The blow didn't come from one direction; it came from all of them and none of them at once. It wasn't a fist, it wasn't a technique with a name or recognizable form — it was a resolved paradox. The contradiction that was Kagami Souta, a man who had loved his son and wanted to kill him, who had been sane and mad at the same time, who had died and kept existing, finally reached its natural conclusion. The cursed energy sustaining him neither exploded nor scattered — it simply could no longer decide whether it existed or not, and faced with a question it couldn't answer, it chose to disappear. The ill-fitting skin, the impossible bones, the face that was and wasn't his father's — all of it dissolved slowly into the air, like dust that had been waiting for that moment to be released.
The domain shattered. Reality became one again.
"Thank you for raising me well," Rei said to no one in particular. A smile that was almost compassionate crossed his face — the first genuine smile in a long time, and the saddest one of all. "But our story together ends here."
He paused.
"Father."
The silence that followed was different from before. It was no longer the tense silence of something about to happen — it was the silence of something that had ended.
Rei didn't move for a moment whose length he couldn't measure. His ribs reminded him of their existence with every breath, punctual and precise. He had fresh blood on his forehead and the apartment around him looked like the result of a very bad decision made in a very small space. None of that bothered him particularly.
What did bother him was the dust.
Something lingered in the air — barely perceptible, almost nothing — where his father had been. Rei stared at it longer than necessary. He had spent years visiting that man in a white room, trying to find in his eyes something of the father he remembered. He never found it. Now he understood why.
Kagami Souta had never been mad. He had simply been lost in a world no one else could see.
He thought about the Sunday visits. About the way that sometimes, on the worst days, there had been something in his father's eyes that still seemed like him — something small and lost that looked at Rei as though it wanted to apologize for something neither of them knew how to name. Now he understood that look too. Souta had always known what was coming. He had tried to prepare him in his own way — a terrible, broken, unforgivable way — but he had tried.
Rei wondered, not for the first time, whether he was headed to the same place.
Then he wondered whether that was necessarily a bad thing.
He stood up slowly, ignoring the crack of his ribs. He picked up one of the books from the floor — the first one he found, it didn't matter which — and held it for a moment, feeling the familiar weight of the paper in his hands. He had read them so many times he could recite them from memory. They had been his only window into that world for years, the only proof that what he saw in the streets wasn't a product of his own madness.
He set them down where they were.
He didn't need them anymore.
He wiped the blood from his forehead with the back of his hand, took one last look at the destroyed apartment — the damaged walls, the broken furniture, the small space where he had grown up and where everything had ended and begun at the same time — and then looked toward the door.
Toward the outside. Toward Tokyo. Toward a world of sorcerers and curses and things that shouldn't exist but did anyway, a world of madness with its own rules that until recently he had believed was nothing more than fiction.