Oh boy this is gonna be a long fic. Buckle up
I need to reread everything in cote honestly go give me time for this fic (:
Anyway let's get to it.
—
They teach us to count without numbers.
The wall clock doesn't tick. The lights never hum. Footsteps are muffled rubber and felt. Meals arrive with no clatter. You learn to measure a day by your own cycles: the spread of warmth in a muscle, the fade of soreness, the way hunger goes from a polite knock to an ache you can name.
They call me B-14 in the beginning. Fifth generation, Group B, fourteenth seat. Later they start using "Takuya" when a psychologist argues that naming increases compliance. I learn both the number and the name, and I decide neither belongs to me. Both are inventory tags.
By six, I'm outpacing the lap leader by half a stride and a breath. By seven, I break down the fake door in the emergency drill faster than anyone else and they swap it out for reinforced hinges. By eight, I'm sparring with older kids because mine are too easy to read. By nine, the doctor says my resting heart rate is a "reassuring constant."
By ten, I commit my first crime.
It's small. You wouldn't even notice unless you lived here. The morning run is twenty laps of the inner track, then twenty of the outer. On the eighteenth outer, the girl beside me—thin, hair clipped short so it won't catch on Velcro—stumbles. She doesn't cry. Crying earns time in the white room inside the White Room. She just breathes wrong and goes down like her strings were cut.
The trainer doesn't move. The trainers only move to enforce or to heal. Encouragement is a contaminant.
I slow. It's automatic and not. I have never been taught to slow for anyone. I am the fastest on this course and speed is worship here, but the sight of her on the floor is wrong in a way that scrapes across my nerves like sand.
"Get up," the trainer says.
She pushes to her knees and trembles there. Her hands skid on the rubberized surface.
On the nineteenth lap, I come up beside her again. I'm not supposed to be there. I should be a blur ahead. I angle my body so the trainer can't see her face, take her wrist, and set it on my sleeve. We run like that, her weight a small pull on my forearm. It throws off my form, my times, my everything.
We cross the line with the middle of the pack. The trainer's eyes pass over us without interest.
Later, in the correction room, interest is all I get.
Correction is bright and quiet. They think pain works best against noise. I learn to count again, not with numbers but with the way my body anticipates what is coming. They ask me why I impeded my own performance. I say I thought I would motivate her. They ask me what "motivate" means. I say "increase output." The lie is close to the truth, so it scans.
They make me watch myself on a screen. I keep my face flat. I keep my breath even. I do not say: I moved because the wrongness of her on the ground was larger than the rightness of my lap time. I do not say: if the point here is to create an unbeatable product, you should worry about what breaks your product, and that girl's collapse was a broken seam. I do not say: I chose to be useful to the whole.
I learn. Correction is not a punishment; it's the tax you pay for refusing to be a blade and trying to be a helping hand.
I don't stop paying it. I just pay it smarter. I help in ways that don't trip the camera's simple algorithms: pass the last cup of water across the table without looking at the hand that takes it, slow half a pace while crossing camera blind spots so someone else can tuck in behind me, break down a problem aloud in group work so anyone who listens can lift the method without asking. The White Room calls those behaviors "noise." I call them "proof I'm a person."
They teach us to fight in a room with mat floors and walls that forgive. At eleven, I'm moved to the advanced rotation: irregular strikes, grappling, tools. My body learns how to enter and exit someone else's balance. I've never had a hobby; if I had, fighting would be it. I'm good at reading tells. I'm better at removing my own. The mirror shows me a boy with no wasted motion.
The day I spar with an older boy called K-03 and put him on the mat three times in under a minute, the instructor claps once. Once is a lot here. "Again," he says. I make it four.
At twelve, I see him for the first time—not the son, but the father. The owner of the project. The man who walks like the floor tilts to greet his feet. He stands behind glass with hands in his pockets and says nothing. The staff around him talk too much to make up for it. "Sir, the fifth gen's top metrics are exceptional," one says. "Subject B-14 - Yagami Takuya shows especially—"
I don't hear the rest because the man's eyes pass over me like I'm a graph. Not even a person on a graph. A series of points that will either stay in a line or deviate, and if they deviate too far he will erase the axis and draw another.
Hatred doesn't arrive as a thud. It's a slow pressure, like a bruise you don't notice until you bump it twice. At first it's abstract—an opposition to a system that speaks through fluorescent lights and antiseptic—and then it finds a face. His. The father of the boy they mention in whispers. The son who already left this place by proving he could carry it with him.
They compare us to him. The fourth generation miracle. The data set you can't catch.
I don't hate him for that. I hate the man who designed a room where comparison is more important than oxygen.
A girl named Ichika shows up in my thirteenth year like a glitch in the program. A girl who walks like she's on a stage and talks like she's talking to an audience even when she's talking to you. Her file marks her A-rank. She is all sharp edges and flickering grins, and when she says Ayanokōji's name, the color in her voice is the kind you only hear in religious stories.
"You admire him?" I say.
"I worship him," she says without shame, then tilts her head at me. "So it's you prodigy.... Nice to meet you."
No one has ever called me prodigy here. Only "asset." It lands strangely. I shrug. "I'm a title with legs."
She laughs like I've told a joke and slides into the training rotation as if she's always been there. On day three she draws a knife in a drill and disarms me with a motion so clean I'm impressed even as I'm correcting for it. On day four we do scenario cards, and she plays her parts with an actor's joy: seduction with a wink, intimidation with a smile, neutrality with the kind of stillness that makes rooms uncomfortable. The staff love her. Of course they do. She was made to be looked at.
I don't talk about rebellion. You don't utter treason in a room built to overhear. But I do develop a small habit of breaking the script in ways too subtle to tag. She poses a question out of order. I answer it in a way that changes what they should test next. Our collaboration looks like compliance. It is, in a way. It is also practice for doing what we want while making them think it was their idea.
At fourteen, a new psychologist asks me if I have any "resentments." The word is clinical, padded. I say "no" because it is both a lie and a survival skill. What would I say if I said yes? That I resent the man who carries his son like a sword and sees the rest of us as the sharpening stone? That I resent a building that tries to live inside your head? That I resent the children half my size who look at me like I am a god when I am just a bigger victim?
I do not resent the boy, the fourth gen. He escaped. If I ever meet him, I'll ask him how much of the Room he still hears when he sleeps. If he says "none," I'll know he's lying.
At fourteen and a half, I stop being the fastest on the track because I stop trying to be first at anything that doesn't matter. It alarms the trainers. They think I'm plateauing. They schedule more corrections. I ace the cognitive batteries to shut them up: pattern recognition tests that look like tile mosaics, reaction time tasks that are trying to find where my ceiling is, moral puzzles designed to measure whether I will choose the trolley track marked "self" or the one marked "group."
I choose the track marked "human" whenever I can get away with it. When I can't, I choose the one that leaves me free enough to choose again later.
The girl from the lap day is older now. Stronger. She passes me in the hallway sometimes and doesn't look. Not because she's ungrateful, but because gratitude is a language we're not allowed to speak here. It feels like a victory anyway.
I keep a list in my head of small victories: sneaking sugar packets out of the kitchen and planting them where I know a tired kid will find them, hiding a soft eraser in the pencil bin so the boy with the tremor won't smear every line, telling a joke with no punchline during a team exercise so the strict girl with the tight braid will crack a smile and lighten the room by a fraction of a degree. These are my rebellions. They're not much. They are what I can carry.
Fifteen comes with a knock.
I'm in the quiet hour, the one the trainers pretend is unstructured to see how we self-organize. I'm disassembling and reassembling the same cheap pen to keep my hands from showing my thoughts. The door opens without permission because permission here is decoration, not function.
"Yagami," says Instructor Yanagi. He's always Yanagi to us. Never "sir." Authority here belongs to roles, not names. He's carrying a folder with a tab the color of surgical tape. "The Director wants a word."
The Director doesn't "want words." The Director assigns scripts. I stand anyway and follow because that is what one does if one wants to stay in the part of the story where one can act.
The briefing room is brighter than the others, as if light itself is impressed by the reputation of the person who uses it. Glass. Table. The kind of chairs designed to look ergonomic and feel like compliance. Behind the glass stands the man. The father. His eyes make the ceiling lower.
Ichika is already seated at the table. She's folded into herself in an artful way that still lets you see the line of her jaw. She flicks a glance at me and then shifts to a look of predatory attentiveness that probably delights the observers behind the glass.
Yanagi sets the folder down. The tab reads: ANHS / First-Year Intake. Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School. The place the theories go when they want to pretend they're roads.
"Your objective," Yanagi says, "is to enroll under the prepared cover. You will integrate into the natural hierarchy, advance your positions, and, at the appropriate moment, remove a target."
"Remove?" I say, because making them define their euphemisms is one of the small joys I'm allowed.
"Expel," he says. "Force out. The school has rules. Learn them. Use them."
Ichika's pupils dilate a fraction. "the target?" she asks, voice too smooth.
Yanagi looks toward the glass. The man beyond it does not nod; he simply is nodded to. "Ayanokōji Kiyotaka," Yanagi says.
Ichika inhales like she's been handed a relic. She hides it well, but I hear it because I'm listening for her. Her worship isn't a weakness here; it's a tool. She will use it, or it will use her.
I keep my face a sheet of paper. Inside, the pressure finds a new shape. Not hatred for the boy. For the hand that throws him at us like a test and throws us at him like a knife. For a father who wants to prove his philosophy on the backs of children until the sky itself agrees.
"Understood," I say, because the White Room trains its blades to say "understood" when a target is painted on another human's chest.
"We will monitor your performance," Yanagi continues. "Metrics will be delivered weekly. Contact will be minimal. In the event of compromise, the institution denies involvement."
Of course it does. The institution is a fog. It only condenses into bodies when it needs to move furniture.
"Any questions?" Yanagi asks.
Ichika lifts a hand like a student who knows she'll be called on. "Do we have to share a class?"
"Not necessary," Yanagi says, eyes flicking to the program coordinator behind the glass. "But proximity aids effect. Our source recommends higher classes with less risk of expulsion"
The corner of Ichika's mouth sharpens. That letter matters to her because she cares about status. The letter doesn't matter to me because letters are paint.
I look at the glass again and let myself imagine the crack. Not in the pane—in the idea of it. The first hairline line that only shows up when the light hits a certain way.
"Noted," I say.
The folder is pushed toward us. Alias details, entrance exam cover scores, even small embarrassments crafted to make our stories feel real: a fake childhood nickname, a supposed food allergy, a list of "favorites" I didn't choose.
Ichika flips through hers with nimble fingers. She hums under her breath when she finds the line that says hobby: admiring excellence. It's so on the nose I almost laugh. Almost.
Yanagi waits for us to finish skimming, then adds, "Two additional constraints. First: under no circumstances will you use methods that cause legal exposure. Second: the target must not suspect institutional involvement. If he does, the operation fails."
He doesn't say why. He doesn't need to. The man behind the glass isn't training a successor. He's trying to erase the proof that his method created something that can walk away.
We stand when we're meant to stand. The meeting ends the way meetings end here: with nothing said that wasn't required and nothing acknowledged that wasn't data.
In the corridor, the air tastes like the place: clean enough to make you wonder what it's hiding.
Ichika bumps my shoulder with her knuckles. "We're doing it," she says, and for a breath I can't tell if her smile is joy at an assignment or joy at being allowed to point herself at the myth she loves.
"We're leaving," I correct softly.
She tilts her head. "Same thing."
"Not for me."
We walk the long white hall back to training like we haven't just been handed a new shape to live inside. My stride gets looser the farther we go. Not because I'm happy about the task. Because the door I've been pretending isn't there for years has a handle now, and my hand is already memorizing the angle.
I will play my part. I'll wear their face. I'll pass their tests. I'll sit in their perfect classroom and watch the boy the White Room can't stop talking about, and if I have to play antagonist to his story to pull this off, I'll do it. I won't hate him for it. I'll hate the thing that made both of us instruments.
And when it's time, I'll do something the White Room didn't plan for.
I'll choose the track marked human.
Before lights-out, I go back to the track by myself. No orders. No trainer. Just the soft oval and the habit of moving through it. I run one lap at a pace that would make the old instructor clap once. I run a second at the speed of the day the girl fell and I pulled her forward by the wrist. On the third, I stop and look at the door at the far end of the hall that doesn't exist yet but will soon enough, and I promise the child I was that when I walk through it, I won't walk alone forever.
When I sleep, the room tries to climb into my head. I let it climb one rung and then another and then I pull the ladder away. Tomorrow they'll drill us again. Tomorrow we'll keep being sharpened.
But today I have a mission that isn't theirs.
Leave. Learn their school. Smile. Nod. Watch. And when the moment comes, turn the knife around.
The White Room taught me to be a quiet engine. Engines can power anything. Even an escape.