---
Flames erupted across the floor like a living spell diagram, lines of molten red carving up the tatami in perfect, vicious geometry.
Stiyl Magnus stood at the center, cigarette still hanging from his mouth, eyes glowing like coals.
Touma ducked backward just as a burst of fire shot from the circle beneath him, barely avoiding being turned into toast.
Kazuki didn't move.
He stood off to the side, eyes narrowed, watching everything.
Stiyl's movements. The timing between spells. The temperature shifts. The breath-to-cast ratio.
He watched and processed. Calculated.
But something was wrong.
"That shouldn't work," Kazuki muttered.
Index was behind him, trembling, her hands clenched at her sides. "He's using rune magic… He's anchoring glyphs into the room…"
Kazuki's brain burned, trying to track the logic.
There was power. There were triggers. Visual cues, runic sources, elemental effects.
But the output wasn't matching the input.
Nothing obeyed proportionality. Cause and effect bent backward.
He kept trying to quantify it. Predict it.
And failed.
Stiyl wasn't casting in patterns.
He was casting in contradictions.
This isn't just broken physics, Kazuki thought. It's unmeasurable.
Touma lunged forward again, swinging his right hand—but Stiyl vanished into a burst of heat and reappeared behind him, flame dagger ready.
Kazuki grabbed Index's hand.
"We need to go."
"What? No! Touma—"
"He can't protect you if he's worrying about us!"
He scooped her into his arms in one clean motion.
"K-Kazuki?!"
But he was already running—out the hallway, down the stairs, past a curtain of smoke and flickering symbols that shouldn't be stable, but somehow were.
---
Outside, the night air hit him like a cold slap.
He didn't stop running until they were two blocks away, tucked behind a vending machine alley where the streetlamps buzzed weakly and no one looked twice.
He set Index down gently, leaning on the wall as his pulse slowed.
"You left him behind," she said, half accusing.
"He's not defenseless," Kazuki said. "You are."
She looked down. Her lip quivered. "You don't understand. I'm not just a girl. I'm a—"
"No, you're not."
His voice cut through her words like a scalpel.
Index blinked.
Kazuki's eyes were sharper than ever now. Focused. Angry—not at her, but at the lie she believed.
"You're not some library. You're a human being. With a human brain."
He tapped his temple once.
"And I know the brain. I know its limits. Its elasticity. Its potential."
Index's lips parted slightly. "But the church said—"
"No. They lied."
He took a breath.
"103,000 grimoires. Yes, that's a ridiculous load of information. But with compression, abstraction, neural translation? It's not beyond feasibility. Not enough to 'overwhelm' a brain. Not even a bit"
"Then why—"
"Because it gives them control," he said flatly. "They tell you your brain will overload, so you stay scared. They tell you memory resets are for your protection, so you don't resist. But they're not protecting you. They're protecting their secrets."
Index looked like she'd just been punched in the soul.
"They said I'd die if I didn't let them reset me…"
Kazuki's voice dropped low.
"Maybe it's not your brain they're afraid of. Maybe it's your memories."
Index stood frozen, barely breathing.
Her robe fluttered in the breeze.
Kazuki stepped back, looked at the sky for a moment—stars barely visible behind the city glow.
"There's something deeper in this. I don't know what yet. But that story? That 85% lie? It doesn't add up."
He looked at her again.
"You're more than a storage unit. Don't let them convince you otherwise."
For the first time since she'd arrived, Index didn't say anything.
She just nodded. Slowly.
As if her entire world had just shifted a few degrees.
---
Back at the apartment, Kazuki could already picture the fight, Touma charging headfirst, getting knocked around, probably winning anyway through sheer stubbornness and miracle-breaking hands.
Kazuki wasn't that kind of fighter.
But this?
This was his battlefield.
Finding the cracks in the story.
Dissecting the impossible.
And protecting what mattered while no one was looking.
---