“So, Himura-kun…do you wish for a new world?”

That question reverberated through Hiraku’s mind, paralyzing him with its tempting possibilities. Was this truly a question? Or was it an invitation, to a world far removed from his own? That electric tingle became a chill, as he gazed in the girl’s golden eyes.

They were resolute, truthful. The eyes of someone many times worldlier than himself.

“I d-”

“Then congratulations!”

In an instant, that grave expression of hers was discarded like a mask, and the cherry blossom girl bowed self-indulgently. Her hands weaved through the air, and with a flourish, she pulled out a letter from out of nowhere.

“From now on,” she declared, “Say good bye to your lonely world and hello to one where you live together with a beautiful, intelligent teenage girl!”

Hiraku frowned. “You a magician or something?”

“What else could I be? A wizard?”

He swallowed his displeasure and took the letter, noticing his father’s stamp in the corner. From his parents, huh?

“Didn’t know I had a cousin,” he muttered as he read silently. “Would have remembered a name as flashy as ‘Purify Crying Winds’.”

“Well, can’t be as bad as Scarlet Village Pioneer, Himura-kun~”

“Shut up, Kazanari-san.” He sat down once more. Apparently, she was going to attend the same school that he had been, and his dad thought he’d be nice to his sister-in-law and throw Kazanari Shinobu into his suite. It was a tidy, if not uncharacteristically generous explanation, and it didn't sit well with him. Shinobu being on the patio before he came home could be explained by the landlady opening up the door for her when she arrived, but…

“Where’s your luggage?”

“Oh, you know, my dad’s the CEO of a software company, so I generally just buy what I need with his credit card!”

“…no wonder you’re not concerned about breaking the table. Damned rich privileged brats, pointlessly pampered by the wealth of their elders…”

“Sorry, what was that?”

“Oh, nothing, Kazanari-san. Just talking to myself.”

“Oho, must be a habit developed from loneliness….” A smirk surfaced on her child-like face as she hopped back down, sitting opposite to him. “Well then, Himura-kun, I’ll be in your care now! Please show me around town!”

Ugh, this ‘cousin’ of his really was a pain in the butt. He’ll have to call his dad about it afterwards and confirm. Lifting open the cover of his book once more, he said, as if responding to an overeager child, “No, I’m busy. Go find yourself a map and do it yourself.”

“Uwah, so cold~”

“You saw me beat up that fatass from earlier, didn’t you? What did you expect, that I had a soft side underneath?”

“Well, you haven’t made any advances on me yet…”

Hiraku rolled his eyes. “Cause I’m not interested.”

“Ehhhhh?” Shinobu covered her mouth in mock surprise. “Don’t tell me you’re…but, wait, that makes sense then! So that’s why you were on t-”

Was that really the response of a normal, rational girl with common sense? “Shut up. You misunderstood me.”

“Don’t worry about it~ We live in a modern society that’s very tolerant to same-sex relationships!”

“Listen, what I meant is that, even if you look cute and all that crap, you’re annoying as hell. Maybe you’ve made yourself a male harem in middle school because kids think with their dicks more than their brains then, but here? Learn to shut the fuck up or they’ll do it for you. The nail that stands out gets hammered down, and people would be more than willing to smash you into bits.” With a derisive snort, he turned away from her, finally going back to his book.

It wasn’t that he particularly hated how talkative the brunette was. He had grown sick of the ‘peaceful’ quiet of his suite after the first week spent there, but Shinobu needed to understand that her bubbliness and her jokes wasn’t something that society would appreciate after she grew up. Eccentricity wasn't taken well in a boring world of logic, after all.

An uncomfortable silence descended, a silence broken only by the cawing of crows off in the distance and the flipping of the page. In the corner of his eye, he could see her body shaking.

The blue-haired youth twitched.

Was she…crying?

A mixture of regret and apprehension surfaced. He did go a little too far, huh? He sighed, scratched his head, and finally turned back to face her. “Look, I’m sorry for going so far, bu-”

Shinobu wasn't crying. She was laughing without making a sound, clutching her stomach as she violently shook. There were tears in her eyes, and her cherry blossom hairclips waved about, as if blown by a wind that wasn’t there.

And when she finally noticed him, the audacious girl only gave voice to her laughter.

Hiraku could feel his face burn up, and he repressed the urge to flip the table into her face. He glowered, his lavender eyes sparking with a dangerous light. But Shinobu didn’t care, and she laughed until she was wheezing, wiping tears out of the corners of her eyes.

“Oh man, sorry about that, but it was simply too damn funny!”

“I was serious.”

“Still joking around, Himura-kun? ‘The nail that stands out gets hammered down’? Do you seriously believe that? That’s coming from someone who plays at being delinquent?”

“Those are two different things.”

“Oh, how? If you actually cared about what people around you thought, if you were actually afraid of getting hammered down, why skip school and beat up thugs?”

“At least I’m self-aware.”

Shinobu spread her arms out, as if challenging him. “Wowzers, that’s mighty pretentious of you, Hiraku! Just admit it already, you criticize other people in order to make yourself feel more special!”

He scoffed at her words, folding his arms. “What, you think you know everything about me just because we’re related?”

“Nope,” she admitted, almost too readily, “But it’s normal to think that you’re a special snowflake that’s better off than the sheep of society, right? What was it called again? That middle school thing were you indulge in self-delusions? Chuu-”

Bang.

Hiraku’s fist slammed into the table, a lance of pain racing up his hand from the impact. He ignored the pain as he stood up. “I’m going to get food now,” he said, gritting his teeth.

Her words hit too close to home, and that pissed him off. She spoke the truth, and he wouldn’t be the type of juvenile brat to deny that, but he still needed a walk or he might invert her face.

He needed to calm down and relax. After getting food, he’ll call his dad and figure out a way for Shinobu to live somewhere else.

Jamming his feet into his shoes, Hiraku pushed open the door and headed out. The sun was in his eyes, and he turned them away, pulling the door shut with his feet.

As he descended the exterior staircase, he stopped.

“Why are you following me?”

“You didn’t say I couldn’t.”

Hiraku clicked his tongue. He couldn’t tell whether or not she was faking that expression of remorse, but for now, he’ll take it at face value.

He exhaled deeply, before his tone became grave.

“If you so much as speak a single word before we get there, I’ll head back home and we can starve together.”

“Got it, sir!”

“And you’re paying for dinner tonight.”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“…you’re a rather tall nail, aren’t you?”

“Thanks, but you’re the taller one here, sir!”

Unexpectedly, a smile crept up on Hiraku’s face, and, upon seeing that, Shinobu brightened.

Not bad.

Maybe they simply gotten off the wrong foot.

Afternoon rays painted the roads a warm orange, and a deluge of students headed back home from club activities. Compared to noontime, it was so much busier on the streets. A groups of friends chatted side by side. Baseball club members sped by on bikes, pedalling back to a home that promised a warm meal. A spotted cat caught the attention of three high school girls on top of a stone wall, and gorged itself on lunchtime leftovers.

And, though Shinobu wasn’t able to completely keep her mouth shut during the walk to the convenience store, Hiraku pretended not to notice. He was hungry, after all.

The Apple Rabbit was a family-owned convenience store located ten minutes away from the apartment, a white-plastered building that had fresh fruits and flowers displayed outside the shop like a grocery store. The two of them strode through the automatic doors, and into the fluorescently lit interior.

Like a true corner store, there was nothing outside of food and newspapers. Aisles were filled with snacks and soda, a colorful display of empty calories. Though the cherry blossom brunette lingered over them, Hiraku paid it no attention, for what he desired was in the very back.

It was currently the afternoon. The Apple Rabbit was an establishment that endorsed its ‘fresh, made-on-location’ bento boxes, but, right now, there were no dinner bentos.

Due to that, the only bentos available were the ones that hadn’t been sold during lunch. The ones that, after losing their ‘freshness’, were now on a discount. A glorious discount that traded food quality for food quantity.

Hummed happily, the growing boy lifted up three tonkatsu meals out from the refrigerator, balancing them on top of each other.

“No wonder your suite is so full of trash,” Shinobu remarked, whistling at the contents in his hands.

“That’s funny, coming from someone with a basket full of candy.”

As if fearing that he’d confiscate them, she took a step back. “I’m the one that’s paying, so I get to decide!”

“Well, technically, your father’s credit card is doing that.”

“Well, he gave it to me, so it’s mine!”

“Whatever, just explain to him that I’m not the one who did so much damage to his credit card statement at the end of the month.”

“Sure, I’ll tell him that you forced me to buy all that~”

If looks could kill, the look that Hiraku gave her…would only have tickled.

“Anyways,” the young girl continued, “Help me carry this, Hiraku! It’s super heavy, you know!”

He smirked. “Just like how heavy you’d be after eating all this, eh, Shinobu?.”

She pouted at his words, but didn’t say anything else as he received the shopping cart from her. The weight actually surprised him. When was snack food packaging so damn excessive?

He had to admit, though, that perhaps his niece wasn’t that terrible of a human being. She was probably the same type of person as himself, except she chose to mock humanity, as opposed to hate it. Well, no, mocking might be the wrong term here. As Shinobu playfully bounced from one section of the aisle to the other, catching the eyes of curious shoppers, Hiraku revised his impressions.

She was someone who enjoyed humanity’s faults, and cared not for its judgments.

“Better than myself, I suppose.”

At the cashier’s counter, she turned around once more and called out, shamelessly, “Get over here already, slowpoke!”

As he brought over the basket laden with snacks and meals, he cringed at all the attention that was suddenly pointed in his direction. Damn brat, not understanding the difference between an indoors voice and an outdoors one…

“Really, would it kill you to keep quiet?”

“Didn’t you know? Freedom of speech is a basic human right!”

“…tch. And silence is golden.”

“But it isn’t diamonds~”

The cashier coughed then, directing the couple’s attention towards the cost displayed on the machine. He forced an apologetic smile towards the pimpled part-timer, before checking it out.

Except…there was something off with the numbers.

More specifically, they weren’t numbers at all.

Hiraku blinked. Letters?

“Hmm, what’s wrong, Hiraku?” The concern in Shinobu’s voice sounded hollow as she looked up at him.

Her eyes made contact with his own, and he could see the clarity in them, an assured certainty that only confused himself further. Didn’t she see those nonsensical letters too?

Abruptly, his vision flickered, and he blinked rapidly, wiping away whatever had gotten in them. Damned dirt specks, flies, or what other shit was in the air. His lavender eyes were still a little blurry when he looked up towards Shinobu.

“Oh, it was n-”

The boy froze.

What?

What was this?

Afternoon rays painted the interior of the Apple Rabbit orange, and the blood of its customers painted it red.

There was no longer Shinobu, the pimple-faced cashier, or the shoppers.

Only a mess of corpses, and a monster that performed the duty of a reaper.