Mio

Mio sat with her back against the wall and her hand over the pink scar on her stomach.

The staging platform was empty. Emergency lights overhead, yellow and sickly. The Path A entrance gaped open behind her—stone slabs pulled apart where the wall had sealed it. Beyond the gap, the corridor was dark and quiet.

Paths B and C were still sealed. Stone flush against stone, no light behind them.

She’d been sitting here since her legs gave out. Vitalize had closed the wound, sealed the skin, knit the muscle underneath. But the tissue was raw and the scar pulsed with her heartbeat and every time she shifted her weight the stitching pulled.

She could cast it again. Finish the job. But the green light felt far away and the concrete was cold against her back and she didn’t move.

Inventory.

The System opened up. Vendor trash from the cleared nested incursion filled the first three rows—chitin fragments, crab leg joints, cracked carapace plates.

Things the System had scooped from the chamber floor and thought worthy enough to keep, or to salvage.

She scrolled past them. Most of it was worth a couple thousand Lumens. That much she knew compared to how much she got after the visit to the Marrow after all those incursions she’d done.

One item sat at the bottom of the list, separated from the rest by a blank row.

[Inventory]

Silver Hair Clip (Damaged) x1

Electronic Device (Dirtied) x1

It was a phone. Mio pulled it from Inventory. It materialized in her palm—a white case, scratched at the corners, screen cracked across the lower left.

A cat sticker on the back, half peeled, the adhesive gray with age still warm to the touch. It smelled faintly of tangerines. Chi-chi’s phone.

The screen lit up when she tapped it. Battery at eleven percent. The lock screen was a photo—two girls on a bridge, one taller, one shorter, both squinting against the sun.

The taller one had blue hair.

Mio looked at the lock screen. At the blue-haired girl with her arm around the shorter one. Chigusa had told her about this. In the corridor, on the way down, when they’d traded sisters like currency.

Five-digit passcode to unlock.

Mio tried a birthday—10091, October 9th plus a 1 because people do that. Wrong. She tried it backwards, 19010. Wrong.

She looked at the photo again. The blue hair. Kaoru—dyed blue first, nine years dead, and Chigusa kept buying the same brand.

Five digits. She switched the keyboard to English and typed K-A-O-R-U.

The phone unlocked. Five letters—the first thing a nineteen-year-old with a dead sister types when a screen asks her for a word.

Mio would have typed N-A-N-A-1.

She opened the camera roll. The most recent photos were from three days ago: Chigusa in her Bureau uniform, field jacket open, making a peace sign at arm’s length, orange eyes bright. Behind her, Bannai was eating out of a convenience store bag, caught mid-chew.

Before that, a ceiling shot taken lying down—phone pointed straight up at nothing. Before that, a blurred cafeteria tray: rice, miso, a piece of fried chicken, a thumb in the corner.

Mio scrolled further and the photos changed. Bureau uniforms disappeared. Residential streets replaced corridors.

A school gate. A kitchen counter cluttered with dishes and a rice cooker with a dent in the side.

Chigusa at fifteen, hair undyed, no orange glow in her eyes—pre-Integration, or early enough that it hadn’t settled. She was sitting cross-legged on a tatami floor, holding a textbook open, grimacing at the page. Behind her, a girl with blue hair.

Kaoru was laughing—mouth open, eyes shut, full-throat. She had Chigusa’s cheekbones but her face was narrower, and the blue dye was patchy at the roots, done over a sink, probably alone. She had both arms around Chigusa’s neck, deadweight, leaning back, dragging her sister with her.

Mio scrolled.

Kaoru and Chigusa at a matsuri in matching yukatas, one blue, one red—Chigusa holding two sticks of yakitori while Kaoru stole one. Asleep on a couch with a manga tented over her face, one sock on and one off, a blanket half-kicked to the floor. At the kitchen counter with flour on her nose and a mixing bowl, Chigusa’s reflection in the window behind her, holding the phone, watching.

Then one more: Kaoru making a face at the camera—cross-eyed, tongue out, blurry because she’d grabbed the phone out of someone’s hand.

The photos stopped. Or the scroll continued, but the next image was a different kitchen, a different apartment—Chigusa alone, unpacking a cardboard box. No blue hair in the frame. One pair of shoes at the entrance.

Nine years between one photo and the next.

Mio closed the camera roll. The phone sat in her hand at eleven percent battery, cracked screen showing Chigusa’s home screen—apps arranged neatly in rows, a weather widget reading 14°C for Kokubunji. In the bottom right corner, a clock app with an active timer.

The timer was running.

00:10:47 00:10:46 00:10:45

Chigusa had set it before they entered. If all else fails we dip. Thirty minutes. She’d programmed the alarm, tucked the phone in her pocket, and walked into Path A with a plan to come back.

The plan was still running. The phone didn’t know Chi-chi was dead, didn’t know the blue hair—Kaoru’s color—had dissolved into gray skin and chitin plating. The timer kept counting because nobody had told it to stop.

Mio held it. The screen dimmed to save battery and she tapped it back to life with her thumb.

00:10:12

The stone walls over Paths B and C hadn’t moved. Nobody had come through yet.

Mio closed her eyes. The concrete was cold against the back of her skull, Chi-chi’s phone in her lap, timer counting down to an alarm that would ring for a dead girl. Her Reservoir sat at 234,711 out of 537,500—enough for almost anything.

She didn’t cast.

The timer ticked.

Mio opened her eyes, put the phone in her pocket, and pushed herself up the wall. Her legs took the weight. Her gut wound pulled but held.

She took one step toward Path B’s sealed wall, then two, and on the third her left knee folded sideways and the staging platform came up fast—palms, then chest, then face against concrete.

The floor was cold and she was lying on it.

Then she heard stone grinding. From the floor, cheek against concrete, she saw Path B’s wall pulling apart—rock splitting into slabs, light cutting through the widening gap. A figure walked through the opening, tall, silver-haired, carrying a shape against his chest.

Mio’s vision went gray at the edges. She heard footsteps come close and go past her, heard him lower himself against a wall somewhere behind her, and then nothing for a while after that.

Then came hands under her arms.

Kaito dragged her across the staging platform, boots scraping concrete, gut screaming, and she let him because her legs weren’t doing anything useful. He pulled her to the wall and let her down next to him.

Mio’s shoulder hit the concrete and she sat there and breathed.

Kise was in his lap, the gauze on her right wrist come loose, fingers crooked underneath at angles that hadn’t healed right. Her eyes were closed.

Mio looked at Kaito. Kaito looked at the wall across from them. She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Chi-chi’s phone pressed against Mio’s thigh through the fabric of her pocket, the timer still counting.

The stone over Path C hadn’t moved.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep