A tense, nerve-wracking month crawled by, bleeding from the anxious heart of May into the oppressive, humid heat of mid-June in what would have been, in Arthur’s old life, the summer of 2028. Arthur Ainsworth, Nana Hiiragi, and the ever-enigmatic Jin Tachibana had found a precarious, fleeting anonymity in the sprawling, indifferent depths of Tokyo, moving frequently between a series of increasingly dilapidated, anonymous safe houses procured by Jin’s surprising and unnervingly effective network of unseen contacts. Their life on the run was a grim tapestry woven from constant fear, whispered conversations, shared, meagre rations, and the ever-present shadow of Tsuruoka’s inevitable pursuit.
The atmosphere in the country, meanwhile, had grown uglier, more poisonous by the day. Anti-Talent hysteria, deliberately fanned by sensationalist media outlets controlled by or sympathetic to the Committee, and further inflamed by a series of carefully orchestrated, highly publicized incidents attributed to rogue, "dangerous" Talents, had reached a terrifying, fever pitch. The government, citing an escalating threat to national security and public order, had passed sweeping new emergency legislation, granting sweeping, almost unchecked powers to newly formed special security units. The internment camps Jin had warned of were no longer a whispered rumour, a shadowy future threat, but a stark, brutal, and rapidly expanding reality. Posters appeared overnight on city walls: stern, ominous warnings about the "Talent Menace," urging citizens to report any suspicious individuals or unusual abilities to the authorities. Radio talk shows and television news programs were filled with inflammatory rhetoric, expert panels discussing the "inherent instability" of Talented individuals, and thinly veiled calls for their segregation and control "for the good of society."
Arthur and Nana had settled into an uneasy, almost claustrophobic cohabitation in their current hideout – the back rooms of a small, long-shuttered and forgotten noodle bar in a decaying industrial district, its windows boarded up, its air thick with the smell of dust, disuse, and their own shared anxiety. Their conversations were often strained, punctuated by long, uncomfortable silences filled with the ghosts of their past and the looming dread of their future. They were trying, hesitantly, awkwardly, to forge some kind of functional working relationship, sharing fragmented, painful memories from the island, attempting to understand the true extent of Tsuruoka’s monstrous manipulations. Arthur still found it incredibly, almost impossibly difficult to reconcile the subdued, haunted, and seemingly genuinely remorseful Nana Hiiragi before him – the young woman who now flinched at loud noises and wept silently in her sleep – with the cold, efficient, ruthless teenage assassin he had first encountered on that cursed island. Nana, in turn, visibly struggled with the sheer weight of Arthur’s quiet, unspoken knowledge of her past, his occasional, inadvertent English pronouncements a constant, unwelcome reminder of the depth of his insight, his very presence a mirror reflecting her own suffocating self-loathing.
They were in the middle of one such tense, circular discussion, Nana hesitantly recounting a half-remembered detail about Tsuruoka’s early indoctrination methods, Arthur listening with a grim, weary patience, when the boarded-up back door of the noodle bar suddenly splintered inwards with a deafening crash.
Before either of them could fully react, before Arthur could even scramble to his feet, the small, dark room was swarming with black-clad, heavily armed Committee agents, their faces hidden behind impersonal, menacing gas masks, their movements swift, brutal, and terrifyingly efficient. Arthur and Nana barely had time to register the assault before they were viciously subdued, their desperate, futile struggles silenced by harsh, barked commands, the painful pressure of stun batons, and the brutal, practiced efficiency of highly trained government operatives. There was no escape. The roundup, Jin’s dire prophecy, had begun in deadly earnest.
Arthur next found himself blinking dazedly against the harsh, unforgiving glare of fluorescent lights in a vast, echoing, and terrifyingly crowded processing centre, the air thick with the metallic tang of fear, unwashed bodies, and institutional disinfectant. He was fingerprinted with rough, indifferent hands, photographed like a common criminal, forcibly stripped of his ragged civilian clothes, and issued a drab, numbered, ill-fitting prison uniform. He caught a fleeting, horrifying glimpse of Nana, her face pale as death but her expression one of grim, almost stony resignation, being herded into a separate line by two armed guards. Then she was gone, swallowed by the chaotic, terrified throng.
The internment camp itself, when he finally arrived after a long, jolting journey in an overcrowded, windowless transport vehicle, was a monument to despair. It was a desolate, sprawling, hastily constructed complex of prefabricated barracks and grim concrete bunkers, surrounded by multiple layers of high, electrified fences, stark, skeletal watchtowers manned by heavily armed guards, and an almost palpable aura of hopelessness. It was a place built to crush spirits, to extinguish hope, to reduce human beings to mere numbers.
Within days of his arrival, amidst the hushed, fearful whispers and the constant, grinding misery of camp life, Arthur heard the news he had both dreaded and somehow expected. Kyouya Onodera was here, captured in a separate, equally brutal raid in another city. More astonishingly, and a small, sharp, painful joy for Arthur, he learned that Michiru Inukai had also been swept up in the Committee’s merciless nationwide purge, her quiet, unassuming life on the mainland, where she had been living with distant relatives, violently, inexplicably interrupted. They were all here, it seemed, the key surviving pieces of the island’s cursed, tragic legacy, brought together once more by Tsuruoka’s machinations, confined in this new, even more horrifying circle of hell.
The camp was under the iron-fisted command of a man named Ide – Commandant Ide, as he insisted on being addressed. Ide was a tall, imposing figure with cold, fanatical eyes, a neatly trimmed grey moustache, and an unshakeable, almost religious belief in the inherent danger and genetic inferiority of Talented individuals. He would often address the new arrivals during their initial processing, his voice amplified by loudspeakers, spewing forth a venomous stream of anti-Talent rhetoric, justifying their imprisonment as a necessary measure to protect the "purity and safety of normal society."
Commandant Ide, Arthur soon learned through the camp’s terrified grapevine, took a particular, sadistic, and almost scientific interest in Kyouya Onodera. Reports of Kyouya’s extraordinary immortality had, it seemed, reached him, and Ide appeared determined to personally test its limits, to find a way to break the unbreakable boy, perhaps even to discover the secret of his regenerative abilities for the Committee’s nefarious purposes. Kyouya was dragged from the already harsh conditions of the general prison population and subjected to weeks of relentless, systematic, and increasingly brutal torture in a special, isolated detention block known only as “Ward Seven.” The methods employed there were whispered to be horrific, designed to inflict maximum, unendurable pain and complete psychological disintegration. Yet, Kyouya endured, his body, though repeatedly broken, always regenerating, his spirit, though undoubtedly battered and traumatized, somehow remaining defiantly, stubbornly, unyieldingly intact.
News of Kyouya’s unimaginable ordeal, though heavily suppressed by the camp authorities, inevitably filtered through the camp’s hushed, fearful rumour mill, adding another deep layer of visceral terror and utter despair to the prisoners’ already wretched existence. Arthur felt a particular, agonizing helplessness; Kyouya, for all his aloofness, his cold detachment, had become a stoic, if distant, and surprisingly reliable ally.
Then, one dark, moonless night, during a period of unusually intense camp-wide lockdown, a small, heavily guarded unit within the infamous Ward Seven was unexpectedly, almost silently, breached. Not by an external force, not by a prisoner uprising, but seemingly from within the camp’s own impenetrable administrative structure. Jin Tachibana, who had, with his usual uncanny, almost supernatural skill, somehow managed to either evade capture during the initial roundups or had deliberately allowed himself to be interned, quickly infiltrating the camp’s complex bureaucracy using his high-level, if now presumably compromised, Committee contacts, orchestrated a daring, almost suicidal rescue. He, with the help of a few carefully chosen, strategically placed individuals within the camp staff whom he had either bribed, blackmailed, or perhaps even genuinely persuaded to his cause, neutralized the guards around Kyouya’s solitary confinement cell, his movements precise, silent, and lethally efficient. He managed to extract Kyouya from the bloodstained, nightmarish torture block.
Kyouya Onodera, emaciated, his body a canvas of fresh, horrific wounds that were already, almost visibly, beginning to heal, his white hair matted with sweat and dried blood, but his eyes still burning with an unquenchable, defiant light, was brought under the cover of darkness to the crowded, squalid barracks section of the camp where Arthur, Nana, and Michiru were housed. His sudden, almost miraculous arrival was a profound shock, but also a tiny, desperately needed spark of something akin to hope in the suffocating darkness. Jin Tachibana had proven his extraordinary capabilities, his enigmatic reach, once more, his influence extending even into the black, beating heart of the Committee’s most brutal prison system.
“Commandant Ide is a fool,” Jin commented quietly to Arthur later, after ensuring Kyouya was safely hidden amongst a small, fiercely loyal group of prisoners who had sworn to protect him. “He believes that pain is the ultimate master, the only true language of control. He doesn’t understand resilience. He doesn’t understand that some spirits, like some bodies, simply refuse to break.”
The unexpected reunion of their core group – Arthur, Nana, Michiru, and now Kyouya – was deeply, profoundly bittersweet, overshadowed by the grim, unyielding reality of their indefinite imprisonment. Nana, her face a mask of complex, conflicting emotions, tended to Kyouya’s initial, horrific wounds with a quiet, almost reverent efficiency, her movements surprisingly gentle. Michiru, her eyes wide with sympathy and a quiet, horrified understanding, offered what little comfort she could, her gentle presence a small solace in the overwhelming brutality of their situation. Arthur watched them, these familiar, battered faces a stark, painful reminder of all they had lost, all they had endured, and all they still stood to lose. The internment camp was Tsuruoka’s new, even more unforgiving crucible, designed to break them, to categorize them, to ultimately, inevitably, eliminate them. But with Kyouya’s miraculous rescue, a fragile, almost invisible seed of defiance, of resistance, had been unexpectedly, improbably, planted. The only question that remained was whether it could possibly survive, let alone hope to flourish, in such barren, toxic, and relentlessly hostile soil.
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