Something just moved in his stomach...
He glanced down. The hole... when he stabbed himself back in the hospital... A snake crawled out of it.
The sight of it only horrified him more.
His entire body throbbed with a relentless ache, a constant reminder of his failure and disconnection. Strangely, he found he could exert control over the lifeless shell that was once him, as if he were navigating a lucid dream. With his eyes shut tight, he sensed the Erythal crimson coursing through only his left eye, but with darkness wrapped around him, he grasped the fleeting power to manipulate his own dead body.
Yet, in that moment, a gnawing desperation clawed at him—the urge to know if Saito, Aurel, and the others still drew breath or if they too were lost in the abyss he inhabited. The thought twisted in his gut, a mixture of hope and dread. What if they were alive while he remained a hollow remnant, shackled to self-loathing, forever haunted by the choices that had driven him to this wretched state? The weight of his emotions crushed him, a suffocating testament to the futility of existence, as he wrestled with the reality of his own disintegration.
He can't breathe (even though he's controlling his dead body… but still feels it).
Dirt in his mouth, nails breaking as he claws upward.
He got up on the surface.
He realized one thing by now... "Erythal Crimson doesn't care about life or death… only existence."
Haruka: "Dirt..." as he glanced over his fingers.
"Cold," as he felt the wind caressing his body softly under the moonlight.
"My fingers won't move. No… they are moving."
He started to walk... and each step hurts.
He managed to go to his house... Jake's house.
He glanced through the window... Jake's usual smile wasn't visible... but his face showed regret more than sadness.
He was chopping something... "probably meat, I guess,"—thought Haruka.
Glancing at the window's reflection only made his blood go colder... well, he is technically dead, so it is cold anyway.
His eyes were bleeding, and his face had taken on an oddly shaped appearance. From his forehead, the skull was visible, and he was completely naked. He felt both humiliated and scared. This was the worst thing a man could witness: his own dead body moving while he remotely controlled it, watching it decay.
He approached a nearby dustbin, searching for any clothes, even though he was dead and most of his body parts were rotting. It didn't matter because this was the reality humans had to face. The first thing that struck him when he saw his reflection was not the fact that his dead body was decomposing, but rather that he was naked.
He found some torn clothes... dirty, but they will work for now. He wore them... they might help his rotten body feel less pain.
He was controlling a dead body.
A soul was inside a shell where it doesn't belong anymore. When one abandons their house, they are not welcome again.
He was walking through the alleys... making sure no one saw him. He knows everyone's address. So he proceeded to check each one.
Going in front of Marcus's house, the house was as quiet as ever. Marcus should live on the 2nd floor. So Haruka carefully climbed the tree next to Marcus's window... seeing his bed was empty.
He thought maybe Marcus was in the washroom or downstairs. But when he checked downstairs, all he heard was sobbing noises.
A woman and a man... two people...maybe more...sobbing.
Not knowing the reason, the curiosity got the better of him, and he went near the window.
He saw a woman crying... middle-aged.
"I have always... loved... my son..."
The man replied,
"We did..."
Unaware of the context behind those words, Haruka felt a cold wave of dread wash over him, praying to God that they weren't speaking of Marcus. As he peered closer, despair tightened around his chest like a vice. The woman was nestled in the man's embrace, holding a picture of Marcus—a cruel reminder of what he had lost and the depths of his own worthlessness. It was as if the universe reveled in his inadequacy, a relentless echo of his own self-loathing that whispered he would always be on the periphery, never truly belonging.
Losing all hope, Haruka stopped stalking like a creep.
He was now sure.
His best friend, too, was not alive in this universe.
Haruka thought to himself.
"How could... so many deaths happen so quickly?..."
"I wonder if... Saito and others are safe..."
He kept running, propelled by a desperate urgency toward Saito's house. As he approached, he paused, glancing through a window into the main room. There it hung, a picture of Saito, surrounded by wilted flowers—a morbid tribute that only deepened the ache in his chest.
But the house held no solace; despair gnawed at him like a ravenous beast. Instead of searching for answers within that hollow shell, he turned toward the graveyard, that silent resting place where memories went to decay.
With each agonizing step, he scanned the gravestones, desperate to find the names that had become his burdens. He began at his own grave, the sight of it prompting a torrent of self-loathing that washed over him like a cold wave. And then—Yume's grave, stark and unyielding. Tears blurred his vision, yet they felt too thin to adequately express the turmoil within him. It was as though he were bleeding from a wound deeper than flesh; the taste of his own tongue mingled with the bitterness of decay and regret.
The names on the graves mocked him with their permanence, each etched letter resonating with the weight of his failures. "Saito... Naoki... Aurel... Marcus... Fuyuki." Each name was a reminder of lives lost—lives that had slipped through his fingers, leaving behind only echoes of what once was.
Grappling with the jagged shards of his own despair, he longed to escape the grip of his Erythal Crimson, a curse that had twisted his very essence into something grotesque.
He knew it... It can't be any coincidence... everyone he loved died... But there again, Jack was safe.