The door clicked shut behind me and I leaned against it, pressing my palm flat against my chest where my heart was doing its best impression of a jackhammer.
Holy shit.
Holy actual shit.
I'd just spent the last forty minutes alone in a bathroom with Hikaru Tanaka, who turned out to be a woman, who turned out to have the kind of body that compression bandages should be illegal for hiding, and who could have absolutely carved me into sashimi if I'd said literally anything wrong. Her Phantom Edge ability meant she could have separated my head from my shoulders before I even registered the attack. Invisible cutting force. Silent execution. The whole nine yards of "ways to die that would make an open casket impossible."
And yet here I stood, alive and intact, with the image of her burned into my retinas like I'd stared directly at the sun.
