Years passed after the night the gunshots swallowed the apartment across the hallway, yet Omoshiro never truly escaped that sound because Theta refused to let memory decay naturally, preserving every vibration with surgical precision inside his mind until recollection became indistinguishable from present experience, and as adolescence slowly carried him toward adulthood, the tragedy felt like something eternally happening somewhere beneath the surface of existence, repeating forever inside the deeper chambers of perception where time lost the ability to move forward correctly.
The apartment complex remained unchanged externally.
The same fluorescent hallway lights continued flickering during sleepless nights, the same elevators groaned beneath mechanical exhaustion while carrying emotionally exhausted residents between identical floors, and the same gray concrete walls absorbed thousands of isolated human lives without ever learning any of their names, yet Omoshiro himself no longer belonged naturally within ordinary human scale.
Theta evolved continuously.
At first its range expanded.
Eventually he stopped hearing people merely as sound and began experiencing them as living psychological structures unfolding around him constantly, every heartbeat carrying emotional cadence, every breath exposing subconscious tension, every footstep revealing hidden exhaustion, injury, anxiety, desire, resentment, loneliness, grief, and intention. Human beings no longer appeared singular to him. existed as a singular existance.
By seventeen years old he could hear conversations occurring nearly one kilometer away if he concentrated properly, Crowded places became unbearable labyrinths of emotional noise where thousands of overlapping internal worlds collided violently inside his awareness at every moment.
Train stations felt like standing beneath waterfalls made entirely from human thought.
Hospitals sounded like cathedrals of restrained despair.
Schools resembled ecosystems of insecurity hidden beneath artificial laughter.
Shopping districts carried rhythms of compulsive distraction so overwhelming they sometimes made him physically nauseous.
The world never became silent again.
And still, despite all that power accumulating inside him year after year, despite his body gradually surpassing ordinary biological limitations through Yin reinforcement so natural he barely noticed it anymore, despite possessing enough destructive capability to level entire districts if he ever truly abandoned restraint, Omoshiro never pursued conquest, revenge, domination, or purpose.
He simply continued living.
That was perhaps the most frightening thing about him.
There existed no grand ambition inside his heart.
Most people believed extraordinary power naturally created extraordinary desire, but Omoshiro disproved that assumption entirely because his emotional exhaustion had reached depths where even ambition itself felt distant and abstract, like an instinct belonging to another species entirely.
He worked part time inside a shopping mall several train stations away from his apartment, spending most evenings reorganizing inventory and handling customer assistance with quiet mechanical efficiency, while overhead speakers repeated the same cheerful corporate melodies every hour beneath artificial lighting designed to imitate warmth without ever truly creating it.
His coworkers feared him without fully understanding why.
It was not his appearance alone, although his unnaturally calm gaze unsettled people quickly once prolonged eye contact occurred. It was the sensation surrounding him, the uncomfortable intuition that conversations somehow became transparent near his presence, as though lies weakened around him involuntarily.
Employees whispered about him constantly.
Some called him arrogant because he rarely joined conversations.
Others called him depressed because his expressions remained emotionally distant even during social interaction.
Several girls admitted finding him attractive before eventually describing him as frightening afterward, unable to explain why his silence felt less shy than immeasurably detached.
Omoshiro heard all of it.
Every whisper.
Every assumption.
Every judgment muttered beneath lowered voices inside break rooms or storage corridors.
Theta delivered every word directly into his consciousness whether he desired it or not.
Still, he never reacted.
Because eventually he understood something deeply tragic about human beings, namely that most people did not actually speak to communicate truth. They spoke to reinforce emotional comfort inside themselves. Their conversations resembled mirrors more than bridges, endless attempts to stabilize fragile identities against the unbearable uncertainty of existence.
So he allowed them their illusions.
One rainy evening after closing hours, while neon reflections stretched across wet pavement outside the shopping center like fractured veins of artificial color, Omoshiro stood alone beside a vending machine listening absentmindedly to the surrounding city.
Thousands of lives unfolded simultaneously around him.
A married couple argued quietly three apartment blocks away about financial debt they could no longer hide from each other.
A teenage boy cried silently inside a public restroom after failing university entrance exams for the second consecutive year.
An exhausted nurse riding the late train contemplated whether continuing life still possessed meaning after watching too many patients die in succession.
A lonely office worker rehearsed imaginary conversations in his head because real emotional intimacy had become so unfamiliar that he no longer remembered how to approach another human being honestly.
The city breathed endlessly.
An ocean of invisible suffering hidden beneath routine.
And standing in the center of all that emotional noise existed Omoshiro, carrying enough power to tear the entire district apart through force alone, yet feeling absolutely no desire to do so.
His physical body evolved alongside Theta naturally over the years, adapting unconsciously to the immense Yin circulating through his existence. His reflexes surpassed human comprehension to the point where falling objects appeared suspended midair during moments of concentration, while his musculature carried deceptive density beneath his relaxed frame, capable of generating catastrophic force despite outwardly appearing lean rather than imposing.
There were moments where his perception accelerated so violently that entire seconds stretched into unbearable lengths, allowing him to witness microscopic details hidden beneath ordinary motion, raindrops deforming against pavement surfaces before impact, muscles contracting beneath strangers' skin before they changed direction while walking, insects altering flight trajectories according to shifts in atmospheric pressure.
And still he folded shirts.
Still he stocked shelves.
Still he listened politely when customers complained about insignificant inconveniences with the seriousness of people who had never encountered genuine catastrophe.
One coworker once asked him why he never became angry.
Omoshiro no longer expected anything from reality at all.
Late at night, after work ended and the city descended into quieter rhythms, he often walked alone through empty streets beneath dim traffic lights while cold wind carried distant fragments of human existence into his awareness endlessly.
The day the tree appeared, Everything changed
The first videos spread through social media during early morning hours, shaky recordings taken from apartment balconies and crowded intersections, showing what initially resembled an impossible atmospheric distortion rising somewhere beyond the distant horizon, a dark vertical shape partially concealed by clouds and morning fog.
Most assumed it was fake.
Then helicopters started appearing.
Then military convoys.
Then live broadcasts interrupted normal programming.
Omoshiro watched the first confirmed footage while standing inside the employee break room of the shopping mall, surrounded by flickering vending machines and the stale smell of reheated food, while several coworkers argued nervously around a mounted television broadcasting emergency reports with growing instability beneath the reporters' professional voices.
The camera zoomed toward the structure.
And for the first time in years, Omoshiro felt genuine confusion.
Theta expanded instinctively toward the image on the screen, his perception attempting to dissect the phenomenon the same way it dissected ordinary existence, searching for patterns hidden beneath appearance, searching for emotional resonance, structural logic, atmospheric consistency, yet the tree resisted interpretation entirely.
Something infinitely stranger.
The longer he stared at it, the more his perception began slipping against itself, because the tree possessed a presence that behaved almost paradoxically, appearing stationary while simultaneously giving the unbearable impression of continuous motion.
Theta encountered something it could not immediately understand.
And that terrified him.
But beneath that terror existed something else.
Excitement.
Real excitement.
A feeling so unfamiliar after years of emotional numbness that Omoshiro initially failed to recognize it correctly, standing motionless in the break room while his heartbeat accelerated subtly beneath his chest, his eyes fixed entirely on the screen as military helicopters circled the expanding structure like insects orbiting a sleeping god.
Coworker, laughing nervously while staring at the television – ''There is absolutely no way this is real, right?''
Another employee responded immediately, attempting humor purely to suppress fear.
Coworker – ''Maybe the world is coming to a end.''
Omoshiro said nothing.
He left work halfway through his shift without explanation, ignoring management calls, ignoring confused voices following him through the corridor as automatic mall doors opened toward the gray afternoon outside, while his mind remained entirely fixed on the impossible structure now dominating every screen across the country.
The train ride home felt surreal.
Every passenger carried the same tension inside their bodies, phones glowing in trembling hands as endless videos replayed from different angles, each recording somehow making the tree appear even less understandable than before. Theta flooded him with overlapping emotional frequencies from everyone surrounding him, fear, fascination, religious awe, denial, excitement, existential dread, while conversations spread through the train car like fractures spreading across glass.
A middle-aged businessman quietly muttered prayers beneath his breath.
Two teenagers argued whether the footage was advanced CGI created by the government.
An elderly woman stared silently through the train window with tears forming in her eyes, whispering something about judgment day.
Omoshiro absorbed all of it absentmindedly.
His focus remained elsewhere.
When he finally returned home, he immediately opened the curtains fully for the first time in months.
And there it was.
Even from that distance, partially obscured by the dense architecture of Tokyo's endless skyline, the tree dominated the horizon with impossible scale, its upper structure disappearing somewhere beyond visible atmosphere while massive branches stretched across the heavens like continental fractures splitting the sky apart.
The city beneath it looked microscopic.
Insignificant.
For hours he simply stood there watching.
Night eventually arrived, yet the tree remained visible even in darkness because floodlights, military spotlights, helicopter beams, and distant city illumination constantly traced portions of its incomprehensible structure, creating the sensation that humanity itself had become trapped beneath the shadow of something ancient enough to ignore civilization entirely.
He stopped going to work after that.
Days passed.
Perhaps three.
Perhaps four.
Time lost coherence once obsession fully consumed him.
He barely slept, surviving mostly through cold leftovers and bottled water while continuously alternating between staring at the real structure through his apartment window and monitoring live broadcasts across television and internet streams.
Late one evening, while rain quietly struck the apartment windows and a live helicopter feed displayed another close aerial recording of the upper branches twisting through storm clouds like veins across heaven itself, Omoshiro suddenly heard something that interrupted his concentration entirely.
A knock at his door.
And what he sensed beyond the door caused his expression to change.
DREAD.
Standing outside his apartment there was SOMETHING.
The moment Omoshiro sensed Yin beyond the apartment door, something subtle shifted inside him, a disturbance so small that another person would never have noticed it, yet for him even microscopic emotional changes felt like entire weather systems moving through consciousness. His hand slowly moved toward the handle while Theta expanded naturally through the surrounding space, spreading through walls, steel beams, electrical systems, and concrete structures hidden beneath the apartment itself while collecting information from the presence standing beyond the door.
Then he looked through the peephole.
The first thing he noticed was red, although it was not simply the red of hair or eyes because Theta had long ago changed the way he perceived people. The man standing outside looked around casually with both hands buried inside his pockets, red spiked hair rising in uneven directions, while crimson eyes reflected the hallway lighting beneath a military communication device attached around one ear.
Akashi, scratching the back of his neck while speaking to himself – ''So, it is here that this guy lives huh... I really do not know about this honestly, because beating random weaklings never does anything for me.''
He looked toward the apartment number once more before knocking again against the door.
Akashi – ''Heyyy, Omoshiro is here? If you are, I know you have Yin so come outside already because I need to bring you somewhere, and there is probably paperwork involved at some point which already sounds horrible.''
Another knock echoed through the apartment.
Akashi, sighing while leaning slightly against the wall – ''Please have something worth my time here because this mission is boring the shit out of me, and I refuse to believe I traveled all the way here just to babysit another person.''
Silence lingered for several seconds.
Then the apartment door slowly opened.
Omoshiro stood there.
Empty eyes met red ones.
For several moments neither spoke because Theta immediately encountered something unusual, something that disrupted its natural process of understanding people. Normally emotions unfolded before him like exposed machinery, revealing their mechanisms through pulse changes, muscular tension, blood movement and subconscious fluctuations hidden beneath behavior, but Akashi felt unstable in a way he had never experienced before.
Excitement moved through him.
Everything shifted continuously, like several emotional identities occupying the same body and casually exchanging places with one another without warning.
Akashi smiled.
Akashi – ''Oh, so there you are.''
Omoshiro stared at him quietly before speaking.
Omoshiro – ''What exactly is this supposed to be.''
Akashi stretched his arms while beginning his explanation, speaking with an almost disturbing casualness considering the absurdity of everything leaving his mouth, as though discussing hidden organizations, supernatural abilities and world-changing events carried the same emotional weight as discussing weather forecasts.
He spoke about Yin and people capable of surpassing ordinary biological limitations. He explained Federation X and its purpose. He talked about strange incidents spreading throughout Japan, about battles, and eventually he arrived at the massive tree currently rewriting humanity's understanding of reality itself. Information that should have sounded absurd instead carried a strange solidity because Akashi spoke without attempting persuasion. He spoke with the confidence of someone recalling experiences rather than explaining theories.
Throughout the entire explanation Omoshiro remained silent while Theta naturally expanded around Akashi's presence, attempting to understand an unfamiliar existence standing directly before him. He never interrupted and never questioned anything being said, yet beneath his still expression countless observations continued moving through him because this conversation represented something fundamentally different from everything he had experienced until now.
For years reality unfolded before him like an equation whose answer became obviou , but standing before him now existed a variable he could not immediately solve, and that uncertainty created a subtle disturbance within his thoughts.
Eventually Omoshiro looked directly into Akashi's eyes.
His eyes remained fixed on Akashi.
Omoshiro – ''This is the first time I have actually seen someone similar to me.''
Akashi looked strangely happy hearing that.
Akashi – ''First time huh?.''
His grin widened.
Akashi – ''And if you come with me, I can guarantee amazing fights too.''
Omoshiro looked at him for several moments before responding.
Omoshiro – ''I have no interest in fighting because eventually everything reaches the same destination. Spending energy proving superiority over another person feels worthless.''
Akashi stared at him for several seconds before laughing, although the laughter carried no mockery.
Akashi – ''Maybe you are right and maybe everything eventually turns into dust nobody remembers, but fighting is fun so theres that.''
He pointed toward Omoshiro's chest.
Omoshiro said nothing.
Several minutes later both walked outside the apartment complex while cold evening air moved through surrounding streets and distant city lights reflected across wet pavement from earlier rainfall. Traffic still moved through intersections and ordinary people still walked sidewalks beneath the impossible shadow hanging over the heavens.
Then Omoshiro stopped walking.
The tree stood there.
Even larger now.
Its branches extended further through cloud layers while massive structures stretched across the heavens with impossible scale, creating the sensation that the sky itself had become occupied by something alive.
Omoshiro's eyes slowly widened.
Omoshiro – ''It became larger again...''
Akashi barely looked upward.
Akashi – ''Yeah it keeps growi...''
Then he stopped.
Because he noticed Omoshiro's eyes.
Akashi slowly smiled.
Akashi – ''Wait a second... You really like that tree huh.''
Omoshiro continued staring upward.
Akashi placed both hands behind his head.
Akashi – ''Interesting thing actually, because I know a lot about that tree, but unfortunately I only tell important information to people capable of defeating me in a fight.''
Omoshiro slowly turned.
Stared directly at Akashi.
One moment he stood beside Akashi.
The next moment his fist already occupied the space directly before Akashi's face.
Akashi's eyes widened slightly as instinct immediately took control, his head moving several centimeters to the side while avoiding the attack at the final possible instant.
Behind him, the entire street exploded.
Concrete ruptured violently as compressed force erupted forward like invisible artillery impact, tearing asphalt upward while parked vehicles lifted entirely from the ground. Windows shattered across nearby buildings and traffic lights twisted apart from their foundations while a pressure wave continued through the district, ripping signs from stores and causing distant alarms to scream into existence.
Akashi slowly turned his head toward the destruction behind him before looking back at Omoshiro.
Then he smiled.
Very widely.
Akashi – ''Oh... not even a count to 3?.''