The rocky path was slick with the dense, cold mist of the morning. Yui walked, her feet finding the familiar route to the small cove they always visited as children—a place where the waves were a little rougher and the promise felt heavier.
She stood at the edge of the churning, pewter-gray water. The fog had swallowed the horizon completely, erasing the boundary between the sea and the sky. This wasn't just a beach; it was the final, lonely void she had been fighting for two years.
Yui opened her hand. The ten-yen coin felt cold against her palm, no longer warm with the heat of her commitment. It was just a coin.
She held the coin to her lips, pressing their shared vow into the cool metal. It was the last tangible piece of their future, a single deposit on a life that was never built. After two years of silent battle, the weight of the promise had become a torment—a symbol that chained her to a moment in the past.
I cannot keep holding onto this memory made of metal, she thought, the words a jagged edge in her soul. If the promise is still alive, it exists not in this ten-yen coin, but in the heart. You don't need this symbol to find me, Jun. You only need the connection we made.
This was not a plea for a miracle, but a forced, agonizing moment of clarity. She was giving up the symbol to save the spirit.
With a broken, inaudible gasp, she threw it.
The copper disc vanished instantly into the dense fog, without a splash, without a sound, without a flicker of return. The ocean did not move. The void remained silent.
And in that absolute silence, Yui's fortress finally crumbled.
It didn't work.
Two years of denial, two years of immaculate self-control, two years of refusing to shed a single tear of true surrender, culminated in this unbearable, crushing weight. The promise had been broken, not by Jun, but by the physical impossibility of the world.
She collapsed onto the damp, sharp pebbles. Her back hit a cold stone, but she didn't register the pain. She buried her face in her arms and let go of everything. She sobbed for the loss of Jun, for the failure of her devotion, and for the sudden, terrifying emptiness of a future where she had nothing left to wait for. The sound was ragged, desperate, and selfishly loud—a sound the Silent Princess had sworn she would never make.
She cried until her lungs burned and her mind was numb.
A new, cold certainty settled over her. The silence was the answer. The vow was a failure.
If I can't wait for him to come home, then I will go to him.
The thought was not despair, but a terrible, icy-cold logic. If he couldn't come to her, she had to go to him. But a sharp memory cut through the fog of her mind: a summer day by the river, Jun's face serious as he pulled her back from a slippery rock.
"Yui! Stop being reckless! If you disappear, I'll never forgive you, got it? We have a future to build."
His voice—the last true sound of him—was the ultimate argument against her plan. This act was the ultimate betrayal of the promise, but it was the only way left to keep it.
Yui slowly uncurled her body from the fetal position. Her soaked uniform skirt clung to her legs. She stood up, staggering slightly, and looked at the churning water. The waves here were dark and heavy, pulling at the shore like cold hands.
She took one deliberate, heavy step toward the foam-line. Then another. The sensation of the cold water soaking her shoes felt correct, almost peaceful. The ocean had taken him, and now it would take her.
Her mind was completely blank, fixed only on the immediate path toward the gray oblivion.
Then, a sound that wasn't hers.
It was muffled and distant, half-swallowed by the thick mist and her own ragged breathing, but it was insistent: shouting. A cacophony of human voices, sharp and frantic, coming from the public beach access point a hundred meters down the coast.
Yui tried to push the sound away, a distraction from her perfect, terrible despair. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters.
But the voices grew closer, mixed now with a distinct, unsettling sound—the rapid, crunching gravel of boots running, followed by a heavy thud and the immediate, sharp ring of a vehicle's door slamming shut.
Something is happening.
The phrase didn't come from her heart or her mind; it came from the part of her soul that had been tethered to Jun for two years. It was a reflex.
She forced her head up, her vision blurred by tears and the thick fog. Through the gray, shifting curtain, she saw a fleeting, impossible movement: a small cluster of dark figures, fishermen and neighbors perhaps, retreating from the waterline. And then, at the top of the ramp, the indistinct shape of a light-colored van or ambulance, engine rumbling, spinning its tires slightly as it pulled out and raced away from the beach.
It had a hurried, frantic energy, like something precious and fragile had just been snatched from the maw of the sea.
Yui scrambled to her feet, her legs screaming from the shock of the collapse. Her heart hammered against her ribs, no longer with grief, but with a terror that tasted like pure adrenaline.
Did they find something? Did they find a clue?
She ran toward the access point, her skirt snagging on the rough rock. By the time she reached the smooth, wet sand where the crowd had been, only three people remained—a young, bewildered police officer speaking into a radio, and two older locals staring blankly at the sea.
"Wait! Excuse me!" Yui gasped, her voice raw.
The young officer turned, seeing the high school girl—wild-eyed, disheveled, and completely soaked from the waist down.
"Hey! Miss?" The officer frowned, his concern shifting from the scene to her. "Why are you here? You're soaking wet. Go home, the visibility is terrible."
"What did you find?" she demanded, ignoring the caution, her eyes wide with a desperate, terrible need. "What was just taken away?"
The officer hesitated, rubbing the back of his neck, his face pale. "We... we found a body, miss. On the foam-line. Not a body, exactly. A boy." He paused, looking at the two locals, who merely shook their heads, unable to speak. "He was alive. Unconscious. They rushed him straight to Atami Central Hospital."
Alive.
Yui didn't hear the rest of the sentence. She didn't hear the word unconscious or the name of the hospital. Her world had narrowed to a single, shattering truth.
The sea had taken her vow. And it had given something back.
"The boy," she whispered, her voice a desperate plea. "How old was him? How did he look?"
The older fisherman sighed, looking toward the misty water, his expression a mixture of profound shock and a dawning, fearful recognition.
"He was aged. About seventeen, maybe. Looked like he just finished a walk. He was soaked through, but... he was breathing. And he was pale. But that's not the thing..."
He trailed off, unable to voice the thought.
Yui didn't need him to. She was already running, running away from the beach, toward the main road, toward a hospital miles away, with a single, insane certainty burning through her exhaustion:
The world lied. The vow was never broken.