Location: Just Outside of my Apartment

Time: 10:16 PM, February 14th 2108

There was an unmarked envelope resting against the door to my apartment. I spent far too long trying to figure out if there was any justifiable reason to throw it away without checking the contents.

There wasn’t.

And up to that point I was having a decent day. There wasn’t even any construction that night. I couldn’t remember the last time that happened.

Ignoring the voice coming from my shoulder telling me to forget about it, I picked up the envelope and tried opening it cleanly, but quickly gave up and just ripped the end off. Inside there was a single piece of paper with a single sentence.

‘You’re being targeted.’

I recognized the handwriting, but at the time it didn’t matter. Feigning calmness I put the paper and envelope in my pocket and turned around, walking back towards the elevator. If I was being watched I didn’t want to draw attention to my actions. I needed to casually make it back somewhere safer. I wasn’t sure how many people lived in my building, but it was too many to expose to whatever was coming after me.

I pushed the down arrow at the elevator and the doors opened instantly.

My body was paralysed as I furiously thought of my next move.

When I was getting off the elevator earlier someone was getting on. That was only a few minutes earlier. What are the odds someone else needed to come to my floor in that short of a time frame? The elevator shouldn’t have been on my floor.

They were already here.

I decided to abandon my strategy of calmness. I moved away from the elevator and started sprinting. My target was the large window at the end of the hall.

I expanded a barrier beside the window, causing it to shatter. I jumped out of the freshly formed opening and created a series of horizontal barriers that I used like steps to safely reach the ground.

Maintaining my momentum, I crossed the street and started running through the construction site that’s plagued my nights and mornings for the past year.

Something hit the barrier I had surrounding my body and sent me flying through the frame of a partially constructed building.

“Male. That should have killed you. Your barriers are proving to be an even greater insult toward me than I imagined. I have uncovered your deceit.”

I rolled over and saw the man, or maybe god, that came to kill me.

“Sorry, but I’ve always been a disappointment. I don’t have anything to confess though.”

The only thing Enki ever talked to me about was finding relics, and I only told him the truth. What did he think I was being deceitful about? Did I really seem like that kind of guy that would have access to anything that important?

But trying to figure out why Enki was still trying to kill me was an afterthought. Rather than the situation I was in, my thoughts were focused on how I’d been misled all day. I was the victim of deceit.

“Have any plans? Let’s go together? Are you busy after this? Want to go somewhere else?”

She definitely said all those things. Tricking me into thinking I was actually having the kind of experiences everyone dreams of on one of the days I try to forget every year.

But I was wrong. That note from earlier was written by Kazuko. If he left such a note for me, he almost certainly already told Kanon. She knew I was being targeted by the man she’s hunting, so she happily paraded me around as bait, making sure to never leave my side.

“You know, you could have brought this up.” I was talking to the woman who didn’t bother helping me up.

“Sorry.” She didn’t sound very apologetic.

Oh, I didn’t mention it, but I wasn’t alone. From the first scene in this epilogue to the last one, Kanon was with me. She hadn’t left my side for the entire day. And her patience paid off. There he was, standing before us.

“No, I’m not interested in apologies.”

I wasn’t just saying that. Being tricked, misled, misunderstood, I’d experienced them so much I wasn’t bothered in the slightest. If anything, finding out the truth was less stressful than the idea that a woman might actually spend the day with me. Unsurprisingly, even at the end, moving toward the beginning, this was nothing more than an epilogue on lies.