That brings an end to the story. After Amagami left, I made my way to Manabe Regional Hospital. The doctor who saw to my cut let me know that I got off easy, the damage to my nerves would heal retively quickly, so long as I don't use that arm much. Upon being asked how I got such a bad gash, and such a big bruise on my back, I made up a story about how I fell on a patch of ice, and scratched my arm on a fence post on my way down. The fact that my under shirt's sleeve was cleanly ripped off, however, made it hard to believe, not that he pressed it much further. All I got was a prescription for pain medicine, a few stitches, and a warning to watch out for ice on my way back. They probably thought I was some clueless tourist who underestimated the cold weather, that truthfully pisses me off, Tokyo may not be icey but it gets damn cold too, but that's way better than being suspected of something suspicious.

  After that, I made my way to the manga cafe I had reservations for, and stayed up te eating ice cream and reading a manga series I'd put off. Despite my penchant for overly flowery nguage and thought provoking monologues, it was an Isekai I thought sounded fun. Yup, a big swirly cone of matcha soft serve, an Isekai about an Idol and her number one fan creating Idol culture in a medieval setting, and looking at whatever nonsense I could think up in a cramped little cubicle. If you expected me to have some deep retrospective after speaking to the embodiment of my own will given form, well, I'm not a protagonist like I said. You're dealing with that kind of boring guy, sorry to disappoint.

  But I did change from that, it made me see how much I lied to myself, it made me see what I really wanted, aside from punishment for failing him. One day, I can let myself accept whatever karmic justice the universe can cook up, but for now, I want to find people like me. I want to try to do what I can with the ckluster life lived so far. I'm not better, that's far too soon, I'm going to do better. As much as I want him to hate me, Tatsu would only hate me if I let myself get hurt. I owe it Raijin too, even if that was just a part me, he saved me. Even if at the end of the road, I face a genuine hell for failing, from now on, I'll do what I should have been doing all this time.

  Living.

  The ride back was long, boring. The ferry ride was painfully slow, and the ck of service made me miss the manga I had just had in my fingertips not but a few hours prior. I managed to finish 10 volumes over the course of st night, by the way, awful compared to the numbers I used to pull. Thankfully though the train allowed me to finally use the internet, and to my shock, my Chaos server had a change. Or rather, someone missing.

  AmalgaYangtzhe left without a word, much to everyone's confusion. They always seemed busy, so the assumption was personal life had taken priority over a hobby.

  I however, made a realization. Amalga Yangthze, was a lot like a name I heard. Amalgamation, an English word's first half, sounds a lot like Amaga. And Yangthze... well, that was the Kanji used for her name. There could only be one person who could fit such an awful name, such an awful record and attitude.

  Amagami Ikue. This whole time, you were the one who challenged my logic, the one who pushed me to better expin myself. That smug punk, was the even more smug punk genius girl, Amagami Ikue. But why leave? It'd make it easy to contact each other like this?

  Proof. She doesn't need to find a kindred spirit anymore, a friend. God, what an idiot. Knowing how prideful she was, she probably left so before I could find out how stupid her online handle was. I chuckled to myself, staring at my phone, before finally messaging in the chat.

  Redman: She finally surrendered to my logic!

  Mu: She?

  Crap! I used a female pronoun!

  36RROW!!!: I always nyew she was a girl! :3 Nyehehe!!!

  MisoUdon: You two always fought, you should find them and apologize!

  HanaHanabi: Please let's not fight ourselves.

  Why should I apologize to that stubborn ass?! Well, I guess there's one thing I want to apologize for.

  I managed to get back super te, due to me sleeping in, complicated transfers, and the long commute in general. Instead of going to my dorm, I made my way back to my family home, and crashed in my old bed. And that, my audience, is where I am now.

  Ah, my childhood bed. How I neglected you during exams, how I treasured you on zy summer days, how many memories do we have together? Just firm enough, just soft enough. A western style bed, put against my east-most wall, with a bnk wall over my head. I pull my bnket up, and sigh. After everything that happened, I deserve a nice long break. Ah, I deserve this, I'm going to be zy for the rest of my break. No work, no college, no nothing. Raijin busted his ass to give me this one bit of rest in my overly busy life. I was going to use this time to research until my eyes fell out of my head, but a few days to myself? Forget that records room! This bedroom is my heaven! Enlighten me, oh sweet bed!

  I hear the sound of my door handle clicking, and see it pulling down suddenly. Oh no, what'd I do now? I shut my eyes, pretending to sleep should cover it. I hear the door swing wide open, the knob smacking against my wall, making the door vibrate. I hear a loud huff, and furious stomps headed towards me.

  "Nii-sama!" I hear the shrill and furious procmation of my darling little sister, Tsubaki. She was named after the Camellia flower, while fitting the naming convention used for my sisters, all of their names have the character for "tree" in their names. Why I was excluded? Beats me. Do I mind? No, I find the idea of having the character for tree in my given and family name to be more than a bit redundant. A tad boring, wooden even, I'm ashamed of that pun. "It's almost noon, get up!" The particur spelling of her name also includes the kanji used for "celebration" in it, which is ironic. She's such a killjoy, so, on that topic, I'm not moving a muscle. If I seem like I'm deep asleep she might just leave me alone, for once. "You have five seconds!"

  "Five!" She's not going to do anything.

  "One!" Wait, she didn't even try to cou-

  With a loud smack, I feel a long thin object sm directly down onto my nose, making me let out an involuntary squeal.

  "What the hell!" I shout, grabbing my injured nose, and looking up at my sisterly attacker.

  My sister Tsubaki is a first year in High School, going on second year by the start of April, four years my junior. From what my big sister has told me, my parents went through a rough patch during my early childhood, not that I wanted to know when my parents stopped and resumed having sex. At school I've heard she's always been the ideal senior, a udable junior, an incredible cssmate, and the greatest student you could ask for. She became her css's rep almost immediately, and was given the offer to become vice president of the student council come April. All in all, she's a model student.

  She's also extremely aggressive, only at home, of course, but when she is she can only be described as 150 centimeters of fury. Speaking of which, that broom she's holding is coming towards my head.

  With a yet another loud thwack, she sms it onto the top of my skull, rattling the gray matter inside around like rocks in a tumbler. That is to say I feel it becoming smoother every second!

  "I'm already up, what is wrong with you Tsubaki!?"

  "Oh, I'm sorry Nii-sama." She narrows her eyes, stabbing me with that icy gre of her's. "I thought you were mumbling in your sleep, so I gave you another hit to wake you up."

  "I shouted that, you little psycho!"

  "You should have been louder. Or better yet," She puts the broom along her jaw, resting on it with a look conveying only murderous intent. "if you didn't sleep half the day away none of this would have happened!" A vein fres on her forehead, oh she's mad!

  "It's a day off! I can do what I like in my free time."

  "Oh, like barging into the house only I take care of in the middle of the night, without so much as a hello, and sleeping half the day away while I go to school?" Wait, if it's only half the day, why is she home then?

  "Oh Tsubaki, you were so worried about your big brother that you got off of school early to check on me?"

  Tsubaki lifts the broom over her head, she's aiming for my groin this time!

  "H-half day?"

  "Yes. The school year is almost over, so we were allowed to go home early." That lucky guess saved a life, or billions if you want to get specific. "I was hoping to see my ADULT older brother doing something around the house that he rarely visits, but it seems like I was being optimistic."

  She's right, I only ever stay the dorm, it's been ages since I came home. Maybe that library trip was the kind of wake up call I needed. "I'll handle dinner." I mumble, oh wait I got hit for 'mumbling' before, I should say that louder.

  Tsubaki, however, stops me, giving me a curious look. "Just like that? Why are you so proactive so suddenly?" Wait so you could hear that?! You were just looking for an excuse to hit me!

  "I got my arm cut off."

  The broom hit my head so fast that I almost didn't feel it, but the sting afterwards certainly was felt.

  "I-I meditated on my life..."

  Tsubaki lowers the broom, and sighs. "Seems like those trips you take finally did something for you." Even if I rarely come home, keeping that a secret is almost impossible with such a nosy family. "Well... just talk to us, ok? It's irresponsible to leave your family in the dark about your life, which you do."

  "I promise, from now on I'll try to stay here when I can." When I'm not in the thick of research that is.

  Tsubaki seems skeptical, but lowers her shoulders, pushing up her thick rimmed gsses. "Alright. Since you offered, you'll help me with chores, Nii-sama."

  There it is again! I recoil, grabbing my wounded heart. The heartache, the pain! That dreaded change to my wonderful life!

  "What is wrong now?"

  "What's wrong!? Nii-sama!? What's wrong is that every time you say that my heart breaks!"

  When she was a kid, I was called the healing phrase, the one that gave me the motivation needed to handle anything! Nii-chan! It gave me life, hope, it saved me! But tragedy, middle school brought change in such a cruel way, she started to call me Nii-san, SAN! And now? I get this damned respectful title, a curse upon my soul!

  "Why can't you call me Nii-chan anymore!" I say, fighting back tears.

  "Because I'm not a kid."

  "That doesn't stop Sakura!"

  "Then have her call you that, idiot!"

  "But you used to say it with a lis-"

  I went about my chores with a lisp myself, that time she smacked me in the face so hard I swear I saw stars. Or, rather I should say my brutish little sister hit me so hard in the skull that it rattled the neurons in my head in such a way that they emuted them. Sakura got back shortly after, unlike my cold youngest sister Tsubaki, she's always been very clingy with family. Latching onto me upon seeing I was home for the first time in a month. I got the dreaded question of, "Why are you talking funny Nii-chan?" The best I could come up with?

  "I bid my ton."

  A sinner, that title has become more and more fitting as time has gone on, and the scenario I found myself in has become nothing more than a memory. I truly do not have a definitive answer for why the library became what it did, a distortion in the space time continuum fueled by the uncertainty of human cognition. But I have a theory, one I will never tell Amagami, should I meet her again.

  Her father was responsible in some way for the anomaly, his distorted view of reality, of his life after his very human failure had invited some sort of phenomenon beyond the human comprehension. Or, maybe it is exactly that, an anomaly relying solely on human comprehension, and nothing more. I did digging in the cafe, only a little before I quit, didn't want to pry too much, it turns out her father had a lone interview with a nearby university's school newspaper, the only thing I could find.

  He was asked about his library, the one he had commissioned. The bastion that would finally give some sort of acknowledgment to Manabe, anything to warrant as much as a passing comment from someone. An unseen city, unobserved, not even noteworthy enough for news to travel outside it's ice covered roads. He burned everything he had, and more. Using every st asset, loans, gifts, favors, anything to get the money for this. How a small town professor could scrounge up a quarter of the capital needed for that abomination is still beyond me, but that's wholly irrelevant. What is, is a quote.

  "It's a bit of Heaven, meant for everyone." Knowing what I know, that has a particur sting that I cannot put to words. A bit of Heaven, I'm sure he thought that way. That in some way, the world owed him, that he was entitled to have something close to his wife here on Earth. But it changed, distorted, became corrupted. It failed, fell from his grasp, and plunged him into an abyss of despair. His slice of heaven was taken, the city giving it to whoever wanted it, letting it become the odd hodgepodge it was. A mockery of the tribute, a dream turned into a nightmare, the only thing he had left of his soulmate other than sweet memories. His bit of Heaven changed in his eyes, and became the opposite. Hell.

  But he used the same terminology Amagami had, Judeo-Christian Heaven and Hell. Yet, the being that I saw, it fit how I'd imagine the ruler of Naraka to look. I sound crazy, but I think chalking it up to my overactive imagination expins it perfectly. Amagami rightfully pointed out that Kasutra wasn't the 4th Hell, but the 2nd. But, that library wasn't normal, it's ground floor was the 3rd, all depending on the entrance one used, but still. I think the reason it seemed so much like Naraka to me, but Hell to Amagami isn't a matter of belief, but perspective. The two of us had delved into a dead man's Hell, an unoccupied space no longer holding it's tormented, with a sinful goal in the distortion's eyes. To deny the reality we lived in, mocking the idea of a library by searching for something fictional in it's non-fiction. Like going to an American food pce and ordering Curry Rice.

  We fed into an anomaly, one that we both accepted so casually, like drifting through a dream, because we were trapped in our own delusions about ourselves. The undetermined Hell. Is it Buddhist Naraka, or Christian Hell? Guess all it took was which street we took. What we believed we deserved. Yet, why? Why did she think she deserved to be in hell? I don't know, nor do I think that's my right to know, she never pried into what torments me, nor should I to her.

  What matters is that what I did ended the distortion, the nightmare Amagami's father created is just a memory, one that left me with a scrape and a bruise. I must look insane, accepting something so out of our own reality so casually, but that's who I am. Kinda boring, huh?

  Tsubasa University campus, covered by the shadows of skyscrapers blocking the setting sun to the west, the concrete forest of Tokyo creates such dreary sights at times. A few days ter, I made my way back to campus, even after everything, my mission to record what happened to the Vanished hasn't changed. Well, maybe in a way it did, because a troublesome woman met a boring guy like me.

  "Akagi-san, right?" A voice from behind me asks, shattering my focus. I turn, to see an unfamiliar woman, though I think I may have seen her around campus. The woman is tall, with dark skin, a long brown ponytail, and is wearing a dark blue track jacket, and short basketball shorts. How the hell isn't she cold?! Her eyes meet me calmly, bright amber, almost yellow, like the sun setting to the west. Her calm expression tells me that her sudden calling out to me isn't me being in the way, ruining the mood with my presence, or even to accuse me of something unfortunate. In fact, she looks eerily calm.

  "Ye-yeah, that's me. Can I help you?" I wrestle with my own tongue not to stutter as I speak to this stranger. That damn stutter of mine.

  "Sort of. You're a liberal arts major, right?" How in the world did she know that? Wait has she been watching me, should I fttered or scared? Or aroused, but I am a bit ashamed to think that. "I've seen you leaving Yamanaka's on my runs." Thought too soon!

  "Y-yeah," I stare down at the ground, unnerved by her continuous gaze. "that's me I guess." You guess? You either are or aren't a liberal arts major you nuisance.

  "Hm." The woman out of the corner of my eye raises her chin up, her gaze now aimed down at me as I face the ground more and more, unable to look at her for more than a moment. God I can feel her judging me, stripping me of everything I'm worth to see my ck of anything noteworthy. Just leave me alone. "I see, was hoping you could confirm if the rumor's true."

  "Rumor?" I look up, meeting her unnerving attention.

  "I see, guess you didn't hear." She tilts her head to her right. "Heard that some famous person joined the liberal arts program here. Apparently they got in just by calling the dean." A famous person going here? Famous enough that our dean's just letting them start csses over a single call?! This isn't some accimed university, no this is a public school, nothing ever notable happens. That must just be a baseless rumor spread by some excitable soon to be first years.

  "F-famous person? What like an actor?" That'd be kind of cool, though wait, if they're that famous there might be reporters pestering my css! Oh god they're gonna ask me something? What would I even say!?

  "No."

  "An athlete?" Maybe it's only an athlete looking to settle down after an injury. Oh dear god that's even worse actually! I'd be getting compared to a down on their luck underdog pursuing something out of their field when the best I can muster is a "I'm enrolled to pursue a personal project." Worthless ass response!

  "Nope."

  "F-former politician?" What the hell even is that question!? What did some dinosaur decide that he suddenly has a passion for humanities!?

  "Are you ok? You're crouched down." That I am, I was so horrified by the though I almost curled up onto the floor.

  "T-thigh cramp..." Why did I use a muscle reted excuse to someone clearly on a sports team!?

  "Oh. No. What I heard was that they're some kind of scientist." A scientist? Not just a science student, someone already considered a scientist?

  "Do you know their name?" I ask, tilting my head to the side.

  The woman pauses, looking up at the sky, as the sun sets, her eyes seemingly glowing in the darkness. "No, I wasn't paying attention. But my whole team was talking my ear off about it." I see, morbid curiosity from an uninterested party. If the whole school is talking about them, they must be famous. Joy, that's going to put eyes on me.

  A famous scientist? Someone popur enough that it's causing an uproar in the student base? It can't be? Why would she come here? She already has a degree in Quantum Mechanics! She's a step away from working at some illustrious b reshaping how the world is viewed!

  "A-Amagami... Ikue?"

  "Huh, yeah. That name's kinda hard to forget." Didn't you forget it? "I Thought you didn't know?"

  Amagami, did you enroll here to see me? What are you thinking, you idiot! "L-lucky guess!" I need to find her!

  Without another word, I run past the athletic girl, running down the walkway towards the building I so often visit, to keep up the appearance of a studious young person. Amagami, you klutz! You could have just given me your social media! You could have just given me your number, as presumptuous as that sounds! I barrel towards the twilight lit building, seeing a pale red stairway that resides on the hill at the foot on the building.

  I skid to a stop, seeing a familiar figure at the top, waiting with her hands above her head, stretching casually. I look up, seeing a long head of flowing hair, lit by the streetmp, it looks bright orange. "Ah, I was waiting for you." She says, as if what she'd done wasn't completely ridiculous. My legs are suddenly killing me.

  "Wh-why... why are you here?" I ask, looking into those blue eyes, that seem green in the lightning. "H-how did you know I attend this pce?" Was it deduction? Was she able to find out where I attend school, my teacher, all of that just by our brief meeting?

  "I looked you up, you pine cone." Ah, that's completely fair. She found my barren social media I use to apply to part time jobs. But even an insult from her right now seems like a blessing. Amagami Ikue, AmalgaYangtzhe. Also who calls someone a pine cone? Did she mean pinhead?

  "Did you apply so we could be friends?" Childish, but I don't care really.

  "No." She shakes her head, and crosses her arms proudly. "I simply became deeply interested in social studies and humanities after our outing." She smiles, that same cat-like grin. "But it turns out, you were already a year ahead of me!" Her voice is bubbly, it only briefly reached such peaks in the library, but on our liberation her true soul bleeds through her words. "I've found myself in quite the situation. I'm simply out of my element, Ren-kun." She gives me a knowing look, a smug smirk, and a sidewards gnce that says to read between the lines.

  I begin to ascend the steps, stopping just before her, looking up into her warm presence, I feel more at home than anywhere I've ever been. Looking at her, she's even wearing lighter colored clothes. A pink blouse under her dark gray jacket, with a white ribbon. She wore such muted clothes just a few days ago.

  "So, as my Senpai... I was hoping you would let me be your research partner." She steps forward, rubbing my bruised cheek. "You don't want to let your cute Kouhai down, right?" I see, you did all this so you could be by my side, this is your proof.

  I can't help but smile like a loon, I must look like an idiot. "I'd be honored," I reach out, and flick her nose, enough that she actually recoils. "Yangtzhe-chan."

  Amagami's face turns bright red at that, her soft expression vanishing as an angry scowl forms. "Sh-shut up ok! I picked that when I was 15! I thought it was cool!" That's what it takes to break the facade of the unbreakable genius, is it? And that's why you left the server too, isn't it? You klutz.

  "I can't let my Kouhai down!" I point up at her, making her stare at my extended finger with a look of confusion. "So be ready to learn the ropes, my skeptical friend!" I must look like a loser.

  Amagami smiles, her face still red from my embarrassing nickname. "I expected nothing less, idiot."

  The thing about stories, is that they have to end. But the thing about life, is that it's a ridiculous story that never stops even if you wish it would for just a moment. So, with one story ending, let's see what ridiculous nonsense you have next.

  To put it in simpler terms. That brings an end to the story. The thing about some stories...

  Is that lead right into another.