—Snap.
The thick, worn-covered book landed on the messy work desk with a dull thud. The sudden absence of its weight felt more real to Kyouya than its presence ever had in his hands. The cold glow from the office monitor illuminated the final words still echoing in his head, demanding resonance.
'He died as he lived. With eternal arrogance.'
The man behind the desk let out a long sigh. Kyouya, an exhausted modern office worker, felt that sigh wasn't just the release of breath—it was as though every letter in that story had just stolen another year from the remnants of his mortal soul.
"Finally over, huh…"
His hand lazily reached for the long-cold coffee mug and drained it to the dregs, tasting the bitter grounds. But even his favorite coffee tasted bland now. No rush of satisfaction, no euphoric relief of climax. Just… an ending that felt deeply unsatisfying.
"So it ends like this, huh… Either the laws of fictional worlds are a bit too exaggerated, or this story was overly ambitious," he muttered, his voice hoarse and dry.
Ding!
His phone lit up beside the keyboard, displaying the time: 23:13. The piercing notification sound yanked him back from fictional marble ruins into the very real gray cubicle.
[Meeting at 8 AM tomorrow. BE THERE. NO EXCUSES] – Damn Boss 🖕
[Can't back up today's report, bro. Cover for me, as usual] – Piece of Shit 💩
Kyouya stared flatly at the screen, emotionless. An exploitative boss, coworkers who only know how to dump work. In this real world, everyone is busy surviving by stepping on each other and exploiting one another. A gray game with no clear heroes or villains—just opportunists and victims.
And Kyouya? He was just one pawn too tired to move anymore, a mechanism that kept turning purely out of inertia. He picked up the thick book again and stared at it for a moment.
"Might as well just kill them, huh…"
The words slipped lightly from his lips. A thin, nihilistic smile appeared—then vanished, replaced by his usual flat expression.
"Prison sounds boring," he added.
He set the book down beside the monitor with a final thud. The dramatic fictional death had concluded, and all that remained was the daily grind of living.
He grabbed his backpack, his gaze sweeping over the disgusting remnants on his desk. The only question that felt substantial enough to fill the void of exhaustion and emptiness:
"…What should I eat when I get home?"
The most urgent decision of the midnight hour. A question as boring as his own life—a trivial anchor before he had to return to the slow hell ready to devour him alive the next morning.
His phone vibrated again beside the keyboard—another noisy notification. Kyouya didn't need to look. He knew it was just more digital garbage: leftover work that chased him even after official hours, or maybe useless promotional messages. All of it was just manifestations of a world that never stops—a giant cubicle where life is reduced to meaningless tasks.
"What if there was no money? What would the world look like?" he muttered, but logic immediately dismissed the thought. "Probably somewhere between peace and chaos. It's not something you can answer easily without experiencing it from every angle—especially not when you have to redesign and force all of humanity to follow new rules. Almost impossible."
•••
After finishing his report, he let out a relieved breath, tidied his desk, grabbed his briefcase, and forced his heavy body to stand. His body felt like an old diesel engine that required painful effort just to start. The monitor's light left a bluish-green shadow under his swollen eyes. 01:32.
The office—an open-plan space with a low ceiling that felt like an elegant cage—was deserted. Only the hum of the AC, the sporadic clacking of keyboards from one or two employees doing insane overtime, and the collective groan of the building bearing the weight of its worshippers.
Kyouya walked slowly. His footsteps swallowed by the insulting gray carpet. He moved like a reluctant shadow that had long ago severed ties with any desire for life. Inside his briefcase—besides the cold, heavy company laptop—was that thick, worn-covered book: The Greatest Hero.
Kyouya had brought it home to analyze again. It was part of his job—understanding characters from works he was assigned, dealing with annoying fan requests.
Sometimes he loved his job. Sometimes he hated it. But at least it gave him an excuse to spend tedious work hours reading when he was just being lazy. In The Greatest Hero, every character had a satisfying arc. But if he had to pick a favorite, it would be Darion over Kanata. Why?
To Kyouya, Darion was the embodiment of pure will—no matter how cruel that will might be. A villain who lived with twisted integrity. He never pretended to be good. He never hid behind fragile social ethics. He fought for what he wanted. In a fictional world that too often promised shallow justice, Darion was the cruelest form of honesty.
"Someone who dares to take, instead of just waiting to be given or exploited," Kyouya murmured, his voice swallowed by the empty corridor.
The contrast was painfully clear. In his office, there were only opportunists stabbing small knives into each other's backs—stealing ideas, dumping responsibilities, licking superiors. They had no pure will. Most of them just had disgusting survival instincts—a gray-zone game of staying afloat. That was worse than magnificent evil. It was cruel mediocrity.
Ironically, Kyouya was someone who had resigned himself to that mediocrity. He had no desire to change. The part of him that once wanted something had died long ago; his purpose was now unclear.
Kyouya pressed the elevator button. The metal doors opened, reflecting a man who looked like a walking corpse with a loose tie. His face was the portrait of defeat.
I look as bad as a broken doll, he thought, mocking himself as the elevator descended.
He stepped into the lobby, greeted by the sharp, refreshing night air—far better than the recycled office atmosphere. Outside, the city's aggressive lights blazed.
He walked toward the bus stop, his mind still processing Darion's death.
"Died as he lived," Kyouya repeated. A perfect ending for a fictional character, yet it left a void in the heart of its cynical reader. What was left?
…I shouldn't be thinking or analyzing right now. Just stop thinking for a moment. Ugh, my head hurts.
The midnight bus stop was quiet—only two or three other tired faces waiting, each wrapped in the same exhaustion and alienation. Kyouya boarded, took a window seat. The slow-moving streets, glittering with bright lights, looked like a river reflecting fake moonlight and stars. Kyouya preferred real nature. Slowly, he closed his eyes for a moment.
When he got off at his stop—a few blocks from his apartment—the clock showed past midnight. The bus hissed away with its air brakes, leaving Kyouya in sudden silence.
Under a flickering streetlamp at the corner, a delivery courier—a young man in the company's signature orange jacket—was crouching amid a scattered pile of cardboard boxes. His face showed frustration; sweat beaded on his forehead despite the cold night air.
The cause of the chaos? A pitch-black shadow—fast and agile—had just slipped into the darkness of an alley after accidentally tripping the courier's foot. A black cat. The classic symbol of bad luck, a tiny mystical intervention of chance. The boxes, stacked too high, had toppled. Small packages and envelopes lay scattered across the sidewalk.
"Haa… what rotten luck."
The courier sighed deeply, muttering a quiet curse. The black cat was the trigger, but how do you hold an animal accountable? Impossible—so he alone had to clean up the mess.
Kyouya, who should have just walked past, paused for a second before slowly continuing—then stopped again.
Annoying, he thought. Not my problem. I'm tired. I want to go home, eat, and sleep. Then start the cycle all over again.
But there was something worse than exhaustion: the sight of chaos left behind and the refusal to acknowledge systemic failure. Leaving the courier alone to clean up a mess that wasn't entirely his fault—at an hour meant for rest—was a passive sin. It was admitting he didn't care. And for Kyouya, who deeply hated a world where everyone stepped on everyone else, simply walking away felt like participating in the very small evil he despised.
Fuck it. He didn't want to be another self-serving opportunist. He didn't want to become the same trash as the rotten people he'd known in life—even if his reason wasn't altruism.
This isn't kindness. This is just refusing to become any filthier than I already am, Kyouya concluded bitterly. With a quieter sigh than the courier's, he walked over.
"Need help?" he asked, voice hoarse. He didn't try to sound friendly. It was a cold, formal question.
The courier's face snapped up, eyes widening with surprise and deep gratitude. "Huh? Yes? Oh—thank you so much, sir. Sorry if I'm troubling you and taking your time."
Kyouya gave a small nod at the young man's rare, genuine politeness—something almost extinct these days. He crouched, set his briefcase aside despite the pain in his knees, and began gathering the scattered packages.
He picked up a plastic bag containing something hard—maybe a book or cheap electronics. Its weight felt honest. This was honest struggle. The courier was fighting to make sure someone got their purchase, to meet the demands of the consumer world, to earn his daily wage.
This is one of the good ways to 'live fiercely,' Kyouya thought, comparing the courier to Darion.
Darion fought to reach the pinnacle of power, spilling blood and overturning order. The courier fought just to survive within the order, against gravity and time. Both struggles—opposite in scale—demanded the will to keep moving forward in the cycle of life.
If he thought about it… the courier was perhaps a little like Kanata in some ways. Kanata initially fought for himself—before later fighting for the people he loved.
Kyouya finally finished restacking the boxes into a more stable pile, making sure the corners aligned. The courier frantically checked his delivery list, making sure nothing was missing. They worked in awkward silence for a few minutes, accompanied only by the scrape of cardboard and tired breaths.
When all the boxes were back on the courier's small trolley—now far more stable—Kyouya stood. His joints screamed, reminding him again how prematurely aged his body felt.
I'm aging too fast…
"Done," Kyouya said.
The courier's face lit up. He bowed slightly. "Sir, thank you so much. Really—if you hadn't helped, this would've taken forever. Thank you again, sir!"
When the words 'thank you' came out, Kyouya felt a strange urge—almost like mild nausea. That gratitude, so sincere and innocent, felt undeserved by someone like him.
He hadn't helped out of kindness. He helped because he refused to walk away from chaos, because he was sick of himself if he became one of those who only cared about their own comfort. It was an act born of tired nihilism, not passionate altruism.
"No need," Kyouya replied flatly, avoiding the courier's eyes. "I just happened to pass by."
The courier insisted. "Still—thank you, sir. That really helped. You're a good person."
Kyouya gave a short nod. The words 'good person' stung his ears.
He watched as the courier hurried off, pushing his now-stable trolley, disappearing into the night to finish his last deliveries.
Under the streetlamp, Kyouya stood alone again. The physical exhaustion he'd briefly forgotten while stacking boxes now hit him twice as hard. That fleeting human interaction in the middle of the night had opened a floodgate of thoughts.
Good person…
Kyouya knew he wasn't a "good person." His mind was too full of sarcasm, his heart too drained by routine, his idealism dead too long to bear that title. He was just a man trying to live decently until death came for him.
Insisting on living decently.
Kanata's early words spun in his mind. Not "live correctly" or "live successfully," but insisting on living decently. It was a quiet struggle. There was always a fundamental difference in the kind of fight people chose.
Darion insisted on living—but by demanding and taking, refusing to bow to fictional limits. He was immoral fierce living. The courier's struggle—with sweat and cardboard—felt honest. It was raw existential persistence. Those who insist on living decently in the real world, honestly, are often the most vulnerable. They cling to ethics and hard work, while above them, the office opportunists play with money and influence. Taking opportunities isn't wrong—but some people use the dirtiest, most cunning methods, hurting everyone around them.
Maybe that's why the world can never be completely beautiful.
He picked up his briefcase. Its familiar weight returned—the physical echo of his soul's burden. He looked up.
His head tilted toward the vast night sky.
The night sky. In the countryside, or in the past, it would have been a black curtain studded with millions of points of light—stars that felt like promises, reminders of infinite cosmic scale, and perhaps a little hidden wonder holding the deepest secrets.
But here, in this aggressive big city, there were no stars.
City light. Streetlamps, screaming billboards, office windows leaking wasted electricity—they had created a thick blanket that killed the sky. Light pollution.
The stars had been erased—not by natural mist, but by humanity's success in creating light. Humans, in their ambition to illuminate every corner, every crevice, to conquer "darkness"—for those eager to learn, for those afraid of the dark—had, in the end, only succeeded in blinding themselves to the grandeur above.
True wonder, the majestic cosmic beauty, had been banished by the false dawn we created ourselves. Eternal beauty replaced by fleeting utility. We became too busy with life below to see the scale of Existence above.
To his eyes, the sky wasn't just black. It was emptiness coated in illusion. A canvas that should have been full of meaning had become an empty space that absorbed light.
In that emptiness, all of Kyouya's reflections—about Darion, about the courier, about himself—began to fade. Everything became small and trivial. What's the difference? A villain who died gloriously or a courier who struggled diligently—both were just tiny specks beneath an indifferent pitch-black canvas. So why… why should he change? When the world itself doesn't care?
"If it were 'her'… would 'she' hit me for talking nonsense again?" he asked no one in particular, yet his eyes carried a distant longing.
He took a deep breath, ending his useless contemplation. His mind went blank. Physical exhaustion had won. It silenced the last of his thoughts as he walked toward his apartment.
To be continued.