Kenji groaned as consciousness returned like a physical weight. He pushed himself up from the cold, hard stone, his brow furrowed as he realized he had been sleeping on the polished floor of the ancient throne room.
Huh? How did I—?
Sensing a heavy gaze, he looked up. Perched upon the dark, jagged stone throne was the silver-haired boy. Up close, his beauty was even more alien—moonlight-spun hair and skin so pale he looked like a master-crafted doll from a forgotten fairytale. He sat with a terrifying, effortless grace, his violet eyes looking down at Kenji with a mixture of emptiness and faint, clinical curiosity.
Kenji's eyes widened as the memories of the massacre returned. The room was unnervingly clean now; the blood and bodies were gone, leaving only the wooden crates stacked against the far wall.
The silence stretched, turning the air thick. Kenji, feeling the creepiness of the boy's stare, decided to break it.
"Um... yo," Kenji said, scratching the back of his head. "You're the kid who saved my butt a few days ago. I, uh... I wanted to say thanks."
The boy didn't blink. He remained expressionless.
Rude bastard, Kenji thought, though he forced a friendly smile. He looked away, uneasy. "Say, do you know how I got here?"
"The Old Fox brought you," the boy replied. His voice was a melodic chime that made Kenji's skin crawl.
"Ray? Why would the old man do that?" Kenji asked, suspicious. That old bastard and his pranks—
"You're dying, mongrel."
Kenji's head snapped back to the throne. "I'm what?"
The boy didn't repeat himself. A flicker of dark amusement danced in his violet eyes.
"That isn't funny," Kenji growled.
"You're right," the boy mused, standing up. "It isn't funny. It's amusing—especially what's about to happen next."
"What—?"
Before Kenji could finish the question, an explosion of agony erupted from his core. He collapsed to his knees, his body buckled by a force that felt like it was trying to turn him inside out. He coughed, and a spray of black, oily blood splattered onto the pristine floor. Then came the bile. He vomited more of the black ichor, staring at the puddle in absolute horror.
"What... what is happening?"
The boy stepped down the stairs, his voice carrying a streak of cruel delight. "As I said: you are dying, mongrel."
Kenji was on his hands and knees now, shivering. He looked at his arms and saw them—black, vine-like veins stretching from his elbows to his knuckles. They throbbed with a rhythmic, stabbing pain. He looked at the boy, who was now sitting on one of the lower steps, watching him like a scientist observing a dying insect.
"Why?" Kenji gasped. "Why am I dying?"
"You are dying from multiple failures acting in sequence," the boy explained nonchalantly. He tilted his head. "Do you know your origins, mongrel?"
"Origins?" Kenji's mind was too clouded by pain to grasp the word.
The boy sighed, a sound of pure arrogance. "Dumb mongrels. I mean: do you know who your birth parents are?"
Kenji retched again before answering. "I never met them. I read my dad's diaries... I don't know anything about my mom."
"The world is a brutal place, mongrel. You see, Witches are only supposed to bear female children. But strangely, your mother—who I suspect was a Witch—gave birth to you. A male." The youth spoke as if he were discussing the weather. "Usually, a child like you dies a slow, agonizing death from Hashi Suffocation or mutates into a grotesque monster of flesh to be kept as a pet. You were fated for both."
Kenji's vision blurred. A lie. He's lying. But the black blood on the floor felt very, very real.
"Someone thought fast," the boy continued, enjoying the look of despair on Kenji's face. "They brought you to this island—a place where the Hashi is thin—just in time to save you. Your body evolved to survive. It learned to purge any Hashi that entered you to prevent the suffocation. It made you durable, stronger... a mundane blessing. But then, you absorbed that Dark Being."
The boy moved closer, his violet eyes glowing. "Your body treats Hashi as a disease. But that little one you took in is forcing your body to absorb raw, unfiltered Hashi—which is a natural poison. To the world, you were invisible. Now, you are a walking mistake. A sickness the world is trying to cure."
Kenji slumped, blood beginning to leak from his nose and beneath his fingernails. "So... I'm suffocating in poison?"
"Precisely."
"And the poison... is the world itself?"
"You're quite smart for a mongrel," the youth noted.
"But why now?" Kenji whispered. "Why today?"
"The veins show the process is complete. The Being's influence on your mind sped up the rot."
Kenji fell to his side, his strength vanishing. "Then why was I brought here? Wasn't it for you to help me?"
The youth grinned. "Yes. It was."
"Then why aren't you?"
The boy was quiet for a heartbeat. "Because I don't want to."
Kenji laid in the puddle of his own blood, the silence of the room ringing in his ears. "Why?"
"Do I require a reason not to do something?" the boy asked apathetically.
"So you just want to... watch me die?"
"It will be an interesting sight. A Unique one in fact."
"Why?" Kenji asked one last time.
The youth stared at the moonlit ceiling. "Because I... despise humans."
Kenji let out a weak, rattling laugh. "You talk as if you aren't one yourself."
He tried to move his limbs, but they only twitched. The paralysis was setting in. He was a prisoner in a breaking body.
"Tell me," the boy said, leaning over him. "How did you bond with that thing? The dark being."
Kenji's mind drifted back to the crates, to the cold. "I don't know. It spoke. I agreed. Then... I had the power."
"Was it worth it?" the boy asked. "Was it worth this?"