Night deepened over Tokyo. The city's brilliance was shut out beyond the windows of this aging neighborhood, reduced to a distant, smeared glow.
Mai Sakurajima sat curled into one corner of the sofa.
No lights on. Only the faint ambient spill from outside, tracing the thin outline of her body.
The air carried a stale odor, convenience store instant meals and old furniture dust blending into something faintly unpleasant. A draft crept through the gaps in the old-fashioned window frame, cool enough to make her wrap her arms tighter around herself without thinking.
She'd been in this position for a long time.
The television was off. Her phone lay face-down on the coffee table, screen black. She didn't want to look at it. Didn't want to contact anyone.
Silence. Her own breathing. And the constant, gnawing fear of being forgotten.
It was getting worse.
She felt like an old photograph, its colors being erased grain by grain, fading toward nothing.
In that near-solid silence...
Ding-dong.
The doorbell cut through the room, sharp and alien.
Mai turned her head, confused.
Who?
The thought barely formed before panic flooded in behind it.
The landlady, here to collect overdue rent? She'd already delivered her final warning last week.
Or worse... one of the collection agencies chasing her mother's debts? Those people always found the new address.
Her thoughts tangled into knots.
She held her breath and slid off the sofa without a sound, bare feet meeting the cold floor. No lights. Body pressed to the wall's shadow, she crept toward the door like a startled cat, inch by inch.
Rising onto her toes, she pressed one eye to the peephole.
A man stood in the dim corridor light.
When his face came into focus, her pupils contracted.
Seiji Fujiwara.
He stood there calmly, smiling, as though he knew with absolute certainty that someone was behind this door, and that she would open it.
Mai stepped back half a pace on instinct.
Ding-dong.
The second ring. Unhurried, perfectly measured. It no longer sounded like a question. It was a reminder. A gentle notice that hiding was pointless.
Her breathing came uneven.
She hesitated, then conceded the obvious. If Seiji Fujiwara had tracked down her apartment, he knew she was inside.
...
Thirty seconds later, the door opened.
Faster than I expected, Seiji thought.
"Doesn't seem like you get many visitors."
He stepped inside, his gaze sweeping the cramped, dim, slightly cluttered apartment with a calm assessment.
Worse than I imagined.
His eyes settled on Mai.
"Fujiwara-sensei, what brings you here?" She gripped the hand hanging at her side, knuckles white, forcing her voice into something resembling composure.
He didn't acknowledge the stiffness. Walking past her to the only halfway-presentable piece of furniture in the room, the sofa, he sat down with the ease of a man settling into his own office chair. Legs crossed. Completely at home.
"Being forgotten by the world. That can't feel good."
The words landed soft and flat.
Inside Mai, something plummeted.
Her breath hitched.
He already knows? He's figured out what's happening to me that quickly?
Turmoil erupted beneath the surface, but she fought to keep her expression blank. Only the way her lips pressed into a thin line betrayed the tension coiling through her.
Seiji seemed to see through the mask. He chose not to call it out.
He continued in that same tone, cool to the point of indifference: "And there's the matter of the massive debt your mother took on because of your impulsive decision back then."
If the first sentence had caught her off guard, this one was a hammer blow, striking the place she least wanted touched.
Color drained visibly from Mai's face.
Her mother's resentment. The agency's bankruptcy. The astronomical debt. These were the weight she carried as a daughter, a private guilt and burden buried deep.
He knows about that too?
Is he... coming after me?
She recalled the scattered rumors she'd found online about Seiji Fujiwara, and ice crept into her veins.
"I can solve your problems."
His voice filled the silence with an almost surgical clarity.
No seduction. No embellishment. A plain statement of fact: "Your fading presence. Your mother's debt. All of it."
The first, he already knew the solution to. He'd watched the anime in his previous life. When you had the answer, the rest was simple.
As for the debt, that was beneath trivial for the current Seiji Fujiwara.
Solve my problems?
Mai fell silent. In her eyes, a flicker of hesitation surfaced before she could stop it.
Seiji caught the shift, there and gone in an instant, and gave himself an internal nod.
No wall held forever against steady erosion.
The crack had appeared.
He waited patiently, letting the silence do its work.
"And the price..."
His gaze rested on her face. A smile.
"...is you, Mai Sakurajima."
Time seemed to slow.
Every expression on Mai's face froze at once.
The price... is me?
Her heart sank. Bitterness welled up after it.
Of course.
Honestly, the thought of selling herself had crossed her mind. And if she had to, selling to Seiji Fujiwara, a man who excelled in every measurable way, might not be the worst option.
But almost the instant that thought formed, the image from last night surged back.
The girl called Mutsumi Wakaba. Those exquisite, beautiful eyes, hollow and lifeless as glass marbles.
In a flash, every trace of wavering vanished.
Cold disgust rose from the pit of her stomach.
The fragile hesitation that had begun to take shape inside her burst like a soap bubble.
She raised her head. Her gaze was clear, distant, stripped of warmth.
"Fujiwara-sensei, please leave. I won't sell myself."
She lowered her eyes and refused to look at him again.
Silence reclaimed the room.
This time, what broke it was a quiet laugh, weighted with meaning.
"Heh."
Seiji rose from the sofa.
He didn't walk toward the door. He walked toward her.
Mai's heart skipped.
Is he going to force me?
She tried to step back, but his tall frame had already closed the distance, and there was nowhere left to go.
He leaned down, bringing his lips close to her ear.
"You'll say yes."
Warm breath grazed the shell of her ear, and a wave of physical revulsion rippled through her.
His eyes held the faintly mocking patience of an adult watching a child throw a tantrum.
"I don't think you'll make me wait long."
He straightened. One last look at Mai Sakurajima's cheeks, flushed scarlet with humiliated fury, and at those eyes fighting so hard to hold their defiance.
Beautiful eyes, he thought.
But soon enough, the light in them will go out. And what's left will be obedience and fear.
He turned and walked out.
The door clicked shut behind him.
His presence, that forceful, foreign pressure, seemed to linger in the air even after he was gone.
Mai stood rigid.
Only when the sound of footsteps descending the stairwell reached her from the corridor did the tension snap loose from her body all at once.
The nausea was still churning in her stomach.
Humiliation. Anger. Fear. Helplessness. They pressed down on her chest like a physical weight, too heavy to breathe under.
Her head dropped. Her shoulders began to tremble, and she couldn't make them stop.
...
...
Mai Sakurajima did not let herself drown in the humiliation and fear.
The next morning, she arrived at Asami Entertainment's practice studio earlier than usual.
Before the full-length mirror, she ran through the audition lines for an upcoming school drama, take after take. The role she was going for was the third female lead: a library committee member, outwardly cold, inwardly sensitive.
"I... don't think that's how it happened."
She watched her own reflection, adjusting the micro-calibrations of her eyes, her inflection.
The face in the mirror was still pale, but those striking eyes had rekindled something. A refusal to lose.
Seiji Fujiwara's whispered you'll say yes had lodged in her chest like a splinter.
And it had done the opposite of what he intended. It woke the pride buried in her bones.
Say yes?
Never.
She would stand back up on her own.
That ferocious willpower was, for the moment, enough to suppress the dread gnawing at her edges.
"Ha. A washed-up has-been who got shelved, and she actually thinks she can make a comeback?"
The sneering voice came from the doorway.
Mai's hands paused mid-gesture. In the mirror, she saw the speaker: a fellow trainee named Tanaka, arms folded, leaning against the doorframe, face full of contempt.
Mai didn't turn around. Didn't respond.
In this industry, kicking people when they were down was standard practice. Ever since she'd joined Asami Entertainment, she'd heard no shortage of whispers like these.
She clenched her fist tighter, channeling the indignation and the shame into fuel, and her eyes in the mirror only grew more resolute.
She would prove every last one of them wrong with her talent alone.
Tanaka, getting no reaction, found the game boring. She clicked her tongue, turned, and started to leave.
But a few steps out, her feet stopped.
A bewildered expression crept across her face. She looked back blankly at the empty corridor, then peered into the practice room.
"Weird..." she muttered to herself. "Was I just... talking to someone?"
She shook her head as if dislodging an absurd thought, and walked away with a baffled frown.
Inside the practice room, the resolve on Mai Sakurajima's face froze solid.
The flame she'd just coaxed back to life guttered as though a bucket of ice water had been upended over her head. All that remained was a thin wisp of smoke, barely clinging to existence.
A bone-deep chill crawled from the soles of her feet, up her spine, vertebra by vertebra.
...
The day of the audition.
Mai had put on light makeup, enough to look alert and put-together.
She stood in the crowded venue, surrounded by girls her age carrying the same cargo of dreams and nerves.
They clustered in small groups, running lines together or trading encouragement.
The familiar, energetic atmosphere thawed some of the cold inside her.
Spotting a crew member handing out materials nearby, Mai composed her expression into a polite smile, walked over, and gave a small bow.
"Good morning, Mr. Sato. Thank you for your hard work."
Sato walked straight past her.
He didn't hear her voice. He didn't see her standing there. He moved to the girl behind her and handed over a set of documents with a warm grin. "Looking sharp, Takahashi-san. Good luck out there!"
The smile on Mai's face turned to stone.
She stayed frozen in her bow, alone.
The noise around her seemed to retreat to some impossible distance.
"All right, everyone, quiet down!"
The man running the audition, a middle-aged figure in glasses, walked to the center of the room holding a clipboard.
"If you've received an audition number, get ready. I'm going to call names. When you hear yours, come line up."
"Ami Tanaka."
"Rina Takahashi."
"..."
Mai's heart climbed into her throat. She strained to catch every syllable leaving his mouth.
Name after name, some familiar, some not, called and accounted for.
Until the last one fell.
The man closed the clipboard.
"That's everyone auditioning today. The rest of you are free to go."
She wasn't on the list.
Not once. Start to finish, her name hadn't been called.
How?
She had passed the company's internal review. She'd been cleared for this external audition. Her training instructor had confirmed it personally.
Panic seized her heart.
Abandoning all pretense, she pushed forward out of the crowd and called out: "Wait! I'm Mai Sakurajima! I'm supposed to be in this audition!"
Her voice rang out, conspicuously loud against the ambient chatter, drawing sideways glances from several people nearby.
The man with the clipboard paused mid-turn and frowned in confusion.
He scanned the room, eyes full of bewilderment.
"That's strange... did someone just say something?"
His assistant looked around too, then shook her head. "No. Probably the air conditioning."
"Really?" He adjusted his glasses, shrugged it off. "All right then, let's get started."
They can't see me.
They can't hear me either.
Mai stood rooted to the spot, watching their blank, uncomprehending faces, and a chill more savage than anything before detonated upward from the floor.
The blood in her veins turned to ice.
No...
This can't be happening...
There's been a mistake. There has to be.
Refusing to accept it, grasping for one last thread of proof, she lunged toward a staff laptop sitting on a nearby table.
"Hey! What are you doing?"
The staffer at the keyboard flinched at the sudden movement, but his eyes slid past her, fixing on the empty air behind her.
Mai couldn't hear anything anymore.
Her world had shrunk to the hammering of her own heart and the ragged pull of her lungs.
She grabbed the mouse, navigated to the audition roster, and typed her name into the search bar.
Enter.
The progress wheel spun once.
A single line of text appeared on screen, stark red against white.
No matching records found.
Mai felt the ground open beneath her. She refused to stop. She pulled up the company's internal training database.
Typed her name again.
Enter.
Blank.
Every training record from the past months. Every attendance log. Every evaluation.
Gone.
As though a person named Mai Sakurajima had never set foot inside Asami Entertainment.
She stood there, hand still on the mouse, arm falling limp to her side.
Around her, the audition buzzed on. Trainees chattering with excitement or nerves. Staff shouting directions. The low hum of lighting rigs.
But those sounds were pulling away, growing muffled, as though heard through thick glass, or drifting in from some other world entirely.
One thought echoed through the emptiness of her mind, over and over.
Am I... disappearing?
Grief and helplessness crashed over her like a tidal wave, draining every last ounce of strength from her body.
Her legs gave out. She collapsed to the floor.
No one noticed.
In the middle of a bustling audition venue, surrounded by people coming and going on all sides, not a single person saw Mai Sakurajima crumpled on the ground, quietly weeping.
...
She didn't remember how she left the audition hall.
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