Hoshino Ei parted her lips slightly and said something, softly.
Her voice was too low.
Or perhaps the wind was too loud, and the clouds were throwing down another thunderclap, and her words were light enough to be snatched away by the weather.
In the end, Nanami Kira had heard nothing at all.
So they let the silence settle between them, and went on standing there in silence for a long, long stretch. They looked at the sky. At the clouds. At the mountains. Lavender-scented time drifted past them, unhurried.
He checked his watch. One minute left.
"Then let's say goodbye here."
Kira spoke quietly, his eyes on the sky.
"Once time reverses, you'll lose everything that happened across these four days. Our business is concluded. There's no need to drag it out."
He held the black umbrella. Raindrops shivered along the ribs, scattering tiny droplets into the air.
The rain had eased. Fine threads of water slanted down in dense webs across the sky.
His tone was as level as that rain—pattering, never hurrying, falling quietly.
"You've obtained the power of the Arrow. I don't care what that ends up being."
"Leave it at that. After time resets, we're strangers. Do whatever you want. Just don't disturb my life."
His eyes stayed fixed on the horizon.
"I know what the difference is between me and so-called humans. I have no sorrows and no joys. I want a life as simple as still water—that's my one and only aim. For that I would throw everything away."
"But I can't quiet my instincts. I can't quiet my nature. And so my nails grow without end, and so I turn every last person away."
"Everyone is born tethered. There's always some chain fastened to the soul. It grinds us down. We struggle inside it."
Thirty seconds.
"Just as Hasegawa Kaede was born needing to feed on the souls of others—and so he sank into his own search for a quiet life, and in the end he drowned in it."
Kira lowered his eyes. The pale blue of his irises looked like blue silk. Rain hung in strands behind him.
"That is my own Heavenly Restriction."
Hoshino Ei's wine-red eyes looked up at him, like a fawn's.
"It was never a good thing, being picked up by me. Once time reverses, you'll have no memory of this. You can do whatever you want—even push me to the edge of despair again, if you can manage it."
"But..."
His voice dropped. Through the curtain of rain, he met her eyes, and said—carefully, precisely:
"I will not hold back the next time. Because we are even. And for a quiet life I will cast anything aside."
"I'll kill you."
Thunder split across the clouds again.
Neither of them spoke. Only time moved, second by second, edging toward the rim of the old day.
"When we meet again—can you tell me what happened in these four days?"
Hoshino Ei lifted her face. Snow-white hair spilled down her back to her slender ankles. She looked him in the eyes.
"Then I wouldn't push you to despair."
Rain slicked her skin. In his head, Kira reached for that image again: a stray kitten, abandoned in the rain.
"Do you think that's possible?"
His voice held steady. No hesitation at all.
"I don't show my hand to anyone. For a quiet life I ignore every ethical limit, every promise."
"If the secret of the time reversal got out, my quiet life would be finished in earnest."
"I never trusted you. And now we're even..."
"So I'll simply have to keep despairing alone."
"Actually, I know myself. Even if Mahito, Hanami, Gakuganji—all of them—are dead in the next loop, the me I used to be won't give up."
Hoshino Ei cut in, her voice soft.
"So the only one who has to despair, in the end, is me."
She tilted her head. Her eyes glinted playfully.
"So let me—in the next stretch of time—use everything I have to push you to the edge of despair."
"It's fine if you kill me. I'm already happy. You showing up here, like this, means the old me already succeeded."
"I can die happy."
A light wind lifted her long hair. It scattered in the air like snow.
"Mm."
Kira folded his umbrella. The rain fell on him too. He pulled his eyes away from her.
Turned. His boots stepped into the puddles, sending ripple after ripple rolling outward.
This was a forest. Hanami's dead body was dissolving into points of light, one by one, falling onto the withered trees. Under the drifting rain, everything began to grow. A faint smell of the rainy season hung in the air.
It was exactly what Hanami had wanted: to become a Sage in death.
Ten seconds until Time Reshaping.
Kira walked deeper into the trees. His figure thinned against the forest mist. Fainter. Fainter still.
Eight seconds.
Seven seconds.
Six seconds.
"Kira-kun."
His feet paused.
"You knew my memory would be reshaped. Why go through all that just now—trying to convince me to give up?"
"You know that conversation meant nothing. And isn't that exactly what you hate most?"
"I was only talking to myself."
Silence.
Five seconds.
From behind him came the sound of running feet. A fall. A scramble back up. Bare feet pressing down into wet maple leaves.
Kira's body leaned slightly forward. Something had wrapped itself around him from behind. Tight—tight enough that she seemed to be trying to press herself into him.
The rain pattered down.
"I'm still not at peace... Thinking about it—after I'm gone, you'll go back to being with other hands—I can't stand it. Jealous enough to go out of my mind."
Her cheek was pressed against his back. Trembling, just barely.
"I thought I was ready, but I'm not. I'm that greedy. I don't want to die. I don't want to die!"
Three seconds.
"Hoshino—"
Kira looked back at the girl behind him. Her eyes were shining. Crystalline red. Like lakes at dusk, his reflection caught in them.
Hoshino Ei drew in a breath. She used up every last scrap of courage she had in her life, and held him tighter, and whispered into his ear:
"I want to hold you—while I'm alive."
Two seconds.
"I don't want to be killed by you ever again. Kira-kun."
These were the words that the wind had swallowed before.
Time's up.
The world began to remake itself.
The bomb planted four days earlier detonated. The long river of time was blown into two segments. Upstream the channel still carried water, because the source of the river lay upstream. But downstream became rootless, the river dried, the channel withered. An abandoned timeline.
The channel remained, though. That was the memory of time. Put another way: fate.
However the new river chose to run, however it twisted and turned, in the end it must pour back into this channel. Fate cannot be changed.
Hoshino Ei held him. At the end of time. At the edge of the old day.
What was gone was gone. What had fallen would rise again.
"I no longer regret you finding me. Being picked up by you."
Just as the rain will end, and the withered trees will put out leaves, and summer will always be scorching, and the cicadas will always sing their summer song.
"Falling in love with you—beyond all hope of cure—was always a curse."
Epilogue
August 21. Monday. Two-thirty in the afternoon.
It was a blazing summer day.
A dense, airless heat that no wind could carry away. The sky hung heavy and low. The air shimmered. Birches rattled their leaves. Pools of green shade trembled against the pavement. Cicadas screeched their brittle, piercing cries.
The sea was still that deep, deep blue. Transparent. A swath of silk dropped across the coast, reflecting the clear sky above.
Everything was growing. Flourishing. Alive.
Who could have guessed.
Four days from now, this city would meet a terrible storm.
Typical summer, isn't it?
Kira stood, settled the check, and walked on, facing into the sunlight. He turned at a corner of the street—
And, as if to himself, said:
"Come out."
"Ehehe. I've been found by Kira-sensei already?"
A girl with white hair and red eyes leaned out from behind the corner and stuck out her tongue.
This was the beginning of everything.
From here, the world begins.
End of Volume 2 — Heavenly Restriction
Volume 3 — A New World — begins.