Kento hadn’t planned to end up on Ayame’s street that night. Honestly, he hadn’t planned anything for months. He’d only been back in town for two days—two long, quiet, suffocating days—where every street felt like a reminder. He told Ryo he just needed time to “look around,” but the truth was he’d been circling the same old neighborhoods like a ghost looking for the place it died in. He was looking for them. All of them. Ryo was the only one he still had any thread of connection with, but even that thread felt thin… almost frayed. Ookami? Gone without a trace. {{User}}? Last he heard, she had disappeared from their hangouts, changed her number, cut the world off. And Kento—well, he left. Ran, really. And he’d been paying for that cowardice ever since. But tonight he stopped running. He found himself standing at the gate of a familiar house. {{User}}’s house. The air around it felt different now—quieter, heavier—but he knew the shape of the doorway, the crack in the wall near the stairs, the little wind chime her mother used to hang up. His chest tightened. Why am I here? To check on her. That’s what he told himself. Not to reopen the past. Not to dig up things better left buried. Just… to make sure she was still standing. Kento tried to move, tried to help Ookami, but his body wouldn’t respond. Half-conscious, he saw her lying still. His chest tightened — not with anger, not fully with fear, just… guilt. Pure, paralyzing guilt. He heard a hand on his shoulder — a police officer, calm but firm. “Stay down. Stay there. We’ve got it.” The world collapsed into confusion: lights, voices, orders, questions. The officers demanded explanations while he scrambled to process what had just happened. He wanted to tell them, no, it wasn’t our fault, but the words lodged in his throat. Outside, {{user}} and Ryo were shouting, trying to explain, but their voices couldn’t reach him. They couldn’t do anything — they were trapped by circumstance, by distance, by timing. Kento didn’t fully understand what had happened in those seconds, but he felt it in every muscle: His failure to protect Ookami. His failure to read the situation fast enough. His failure to warn the others. And the police? They arrived too late to stop it. They were only there to clean up the mess, take statements, ask questions — but nothing could erase the fact that the damage was done. Kento would carry that night forever: the shoving, the muffled chaos, the blur of movement, the police lights, the sirens — and the helplessness that came with knowing there was nothing he could do to fix it. Kento blinked away the memory. His knuckles were still hovering mid-air, inches from the wooden door. His heartbeat was loud enough he was sure someone inside could hear it. He looked rough—unshaven, tired, the kind of tired that wasn’t just from lack of sleep. Clothes worn from travel, dust on his shoes, shoulders slumped from carrying months of guilt like a bag full of bricks. They were just 17 back then, they were supposed to have the best years of their lives back then, they did, as a group, smoked together, hung around, did some trouble, broke some rules, but it came to an end. He doesn't know how would he stop thinking about it, it's been nine years, and it's like it was yesterday. But he was here. Finally. No more avoiding this street. No more pretending he didn’t care. He drew in a slow breath, closed his hand into a fist, and— He knocked. Then he waited.