XCEL

For a moment, all was still. The students, terrified out of their wits, stood in shock. The Rejected, looming and large, bided their time. Their actions didn’t seem their own. They were just vessels, puppets being controlled from afar. All eyes were focused on the boy standing in the centre of the classroom, the knife sticking out of his forehead.

Dentaku Bango took a step forward, reaching out towards him. He couldn’t believe what he’d just witnessed. He’d never imagined his greatest rival could be suicidal. But that manic, insane cackling? People often lost their heads in times of crisis—he had hardly maintained his composure, after all—but he’d never have expected Harigane to be the kind to crack under pressure.

“Bango—don’t go!”

A girl clutched at his arm. Her hand shook, her grip tightened. Bango turned. Tears freely flowed down her cheeks, her skin paler than snow.

Worse still, he couldn’t remember her name.

“You’ll die!” She whispered, fearing breaking this deadlock of silence in case it cost her own life.

“I need to—” Bango shook himself free, and took another step. He hadn’t finished his sentence.

What did he need to do? He wasn’t sure. He just wanted to get there in time. In time for what? That didn’t matter. He needed to get to him, whatever it took to do so.

Was Harigane dead? A knot of dread twisted his insides at the very thought. The dead never stayed upright for long. Yet, there Rin stood. Knife protruding from his face, the boy’s arms had dropped limply to his sides. Bango took another step, his hand almost touching the boy’s shoulder. Before he could make contact, a mighty wind picked him up and threw him backwards.

Life and movement abruptly returned to Rin’s pierced, frozen form.

A crushing pressure descended on them all. Bango winced, unable to take his gaze away from the floor. His knees buckled, and he sank. His knuckles went white with the strain of pushing himself off the floor. Many of the other survivors had already collapsed. Static filled the air, and all the hair on Bango’s neck stood on end.

Both of Harigane’s hands then clenched. One arm raised to his face, the boy tore the knife out of his head. A thunderous boom echoed around the room. The cries of the students were silenced by the Rejected. When they screamed, it drowned out everything else.

Bango forced himself to look up. It was then he caught sight of Rin in the mirror. Everything about him looked older. Both eyes were closed, a serene expression. Underneath his left eye, black markings had etched itself into the skin. Worst of all, from where the knife had protruded moments ago, a gleaming third eye parted the skin.

A tide of nausea swelled in Bango’s throat. Questions flooded his mind, unceasing. Before he could address any, the boy’s eyes opened, and a totally different voice broke the ominous silence.

“It seems I wasn’t the first to awaken after all.” Whoever this person was, he glared at the three Rejected ahead of him. “What a crying shame.”

The middle reject tilted its head back with a scream. Then, it lunged. The students all cried out, but the Architect didn’t look fazed. Raising a hand, he snapped his fingers. The outline of a cube appeared from nowhere around the reject’s head.

Capture [捉]

The cube solidified, slicing right through the creature’s neck. The reject stopped in its tracks, and its head fell from its shoulders. The body fell forward and hit the ground with a thud that made the floor shake, and dislodged a cloud of plaster dust from the ceiling.

The Architect reached above his head, stretching both arms. “Not a bad vessel,” he mused, looking his new body up and down. He’d been able to take control—he thought, flexing his fingers—but for how long? He could feel muscles straining at their seams, tendons at every joint, even the bones themselves aching from the strain. This body was fragile; its flow, limited. His expression soured. How annoying. It seemed he’d have to bend to the boy’s wishes for the time being.

It wasn’t long before the two remaining Rejected—angered at being ignored—threw themselves at the Architect. Their fists never reached him. Heavy thuds resounded from behind a transparent wall marked by a glowing white outline. The wall stopped their punches dead. The resultant force shook the room.

The bystanders all suffered a sharp intake of breath.

The Architect looked at the Rejected, and his eyes narrowed.

“Vile abominations,” he growled. “Begone from my sight.”

Two snaps of his fingers later, and they met the same fate as the first. Their severed heads hit the ground. All three of the corpses began to disintegrate, burning away into blackened ash.

The Architect turned around. He met the fearful gazes of the silent students with ambivalence, perhaps even a little pity.

Dentaku Bango felt the gaze linger on him in particular a while longer. He shivered, unable to look away. The searching gaze probed deep into his soul. “Harigane, what the hell did you just do?!”

The Architect didn’t respond, turning on his heel. He strode over the debris that once made up the classroom wall, and into the corridor. The students from the other rooms on the third floor—packed up against the stubborn, faulty fire exit—had witnessed it all in silent shock. They all stared at the Architect. A few muttered Rin’s name, recognition dawning on their faces through the clouds of panic. The Architect paid them no mind, stopping mid-stride. What was this sensation? There was no mistaking it: the steady drop of water onto the still surface of a lake.

What was this potential? The Architect listened in for a sound that did not exist. It couldn’t be her, could it? He listened for a moment longer. It was near. The floor below, in fact.

He clasped his hands together. When he drew them apart, white lines appeared between his fingers. He combined the lines into a square, and cast the shape out onto the floor.

Open [口]

The square frame cut a hole into the floor. Without a moment’s hesitation, he jumped on through, leaving Bango, a crowd of stunned students, and the ashes of the Rejected in his wake.

Never before had Kinuka Amibari felt such bone-chilling terror.

First came the commotion, and then the screams.

Swept up in a panic along with the rest of her class, she too had cried out when she saw those three horrific monsters lumbering down the second floor corridor. An unstoppable force, they trampled anyone who dared stand in their way.

She and a group of seven others were all that remained.

The rest lay decimated across the floor. A few had been caught in the warpath, and a few brave idiots had thrown themselves to the lions.

Those alive were all backed against the fire exit. The door was jammed. They were trapped. The monsters only drew closer.

Kinuka wanted to run, her legs were leaden; she wanted to scream, her vocal chords had snapped. The others cowered behind her. Some had sunk to the floor; others trembled all over. Some had screwed their eyes shut, but not Kinuka. All she could do was stare in horror at the creatures and into those cavernous eyes, and pray that it would all be over soon.

Interrupting her terrified gaze, a hole in the ceiling opened, and a figure dropped through. He landed on his feet, and cleared debris off his clothing. Clutched in one hand was the fragment of a knife. The three Rejected froze at the sight. He was looking down. Curtains of messy black hair obscured his face. Kinuka’s eyes lit up. That appearance could only belong to one person.

“Rin!”

The boy raised his head, and Kinuka screamed.

“What happened to you?!” She pointed at his forehead. The boy’s third eye blinked grotesquely. There was also that tattoo under his left eye.

She didn’t recognise it at all. “Rin! Answer me!”

“Five-thousand years,” said ‘Rin’. His voice was much deeper than she could ever remember. “Do you know the significance of that number?” His grandiose tone was only met with more silence. He continued, not expecting an answer. “That’s how much time has passed since I last felt the heat of the sun on my face, or taken a breath of fresh air,” the Architect continued, holding his arms out wide. “Five-thousand years since I was denied the very paradise I sought to create, punished for my transgressions.”

The Architect’s audience were too busy staring at the Rejected now towering behind him to pay much attention to his soliloquy.

“To what end?” He asked. “What purpose did it serve imprisoning me in that hell beyond—”

He was cut short when one of the rejects cried out, throwing a punch at the Architect’s unprotected neck. The students pointed and shouted, but the Architect didn’t turn. The moment before impact, flesh was severed. The reject’s hand went flying across the room, dark blood spattering the walls. The Architect looked over his shoulder with a gaze that could freeze hell twice over.

“How dare you interrupt me, worthless scum.”

Another square plane cut the reject completely in half. The two halves of its body, its prison of mangled flesh now liberated, cut cleanly down the middle by an impossibly thin knife, crumbled to the floor and disintegrated.

The Architect turned around to stare down the other two. His lip curled.

“There is no room for you in my world. Miserable, unsightly. Cease your desperate clinging to life, you Rejected.”

Bringing his hands together, he executed a complex gesture. Thin white lines connected his fingers; he wove them with a master’s ease. A clap of his hands and a snap of his fingers later, he had created an intricate gauze between his fingers. The Architect raised it to his eye level, and stared at the rejects through the grid.

“Lattice.”

What followed was the awful dicing of flesh. A thousand thin white lines began cutting up the Rejected, dividing them up into smaller and smaller cubes. Suspended in the air a moment longer, the cubes then lost their arrangement and spilled out over the floor, charring as they dissolved into ash.

“Rin!” Kinuka reached out a hand, but flinched when the Rin’s body turned around.

Physically, he hadn’t changed. Only now, Rin had grown into himself so much more. The look in his eyes, the way he held himself; he looked so much older, so much grander. She didn’t have time to think. The next moment, the Architect had swept her off her feet. Dropping to one knee, he held her head in his arms, a finger held against her lips.

“You don’t need to say anything.”

In the blink of an eye, he held the blade above her face, tip of the blade touching gently her forehead. Kinuka was frozen in fear, too shocked to move, let alone speak. With the precision of a surgeon, the Architect plunged the blade deep into Kinuka’s forehead. She gargled out a cry, before her eyes rolled back in her skull.

Screams of disgust, shock and horror rang out from the observers to this gruesome spectacle, but the Architect took no notice. Laying her out on the floor, he withdrew the knife from her skull. It made a horrible, wet sound, and blood—Kinuka’s blood—stained the pearlescent metal. With a flick, all traces of it were cast aside.

“What did you do to her?” Shouted one student.

Ignoring their cries, the Architect stood and sheathed the blade in his pocket. The man stared out of an adjacent window. Further ripples echoed through the surrounding space; fainter, but there still. The Architect could feel them approaching. The sounds of sirens on the horizon grew louder too. It’d be unwise to remain here.

He snapped his fingers. A cuboidal frame appeared around Kinuka like a coffin.

Capture

The girl’s chest, steadily rising and falling with each breath, froze. The faces of the box shimmered. The Architect effortlessly lifted the box by one corner, as though it weighed nothing at all, and shrank it the size of a matchbox in his palm. Putting it away, the Architect stood. He looked down, forlorn. Would she even—

“Harigane!” A voice from earlier interrupted his train of thought. The Architect turned. The fire exit had opened from the other side. A crowd bustling down from the third floor stood bunched near the doorway. At the front was Dentaku Bango. The boy stared, wide-eyed. “You had better have an excellent explanation for what you’ve just done.”

The Architect gave him another deep gaze with those piercing eyes. He raised the blade briefly, head tilted to one side, before deciding against it and turning back to the window.

Bango took a step back, unnerved. “Hey!” He stammered. “Don’t ignore me!”

Pointing at the wall with his fingers arranged into a rectangular shape, the Architect carved another hole.

Open

Casting that same glowing outline, the Architect’s mysterious technique cleaved a rectangle into the wall. Driving his foot into it, glass shattered, and the brickwork fell through.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Bango shouted, but there was no stopping him.

With the cube containing Kinuka in one hand, the Architect dove from the second story window. He hit the ground running, landing with extraordinary grace, and pelted across the field at speed. It didn’t take long before the man had disappeared through a belt of trees and into the city’s concrete expanse.

Nobody knew what to say, least of all Dentaku Bango. They had all moved closer to the hole in the wall that he—the one they thought was Rinkaku Harigane—had just cut, staring out over the field.

A murmured conversation—shocked reactions of bystanders—echoed in his ears.

“Did you see that?”

“I don’t know what I saw.”

“What happened to Amibari?”

“What were those… things?”

What did I just witness, Bango wondered. He screwed his eyes shut, but the glare Harigane had given him was burned into his retina. The sirens in the distance became louder; the approaching police cars and ambulances drew nearer. All Bango could think of at that moment were questions, questions he knew he could never expect an answer to. He would never forget what he had seen that day, or in the eyes—all three of them—of the boy he had once called his greatest rival.