Author's Note:Watch what Kaito's substance does the moment Ayumi's mother appears. It's instinctive, not conscious. Also—Akira speaks more in this chapter than the last three combined. Ask yourself why.
POV: Kaito Endo
Word Count: ~1,900
Kaito had seen some weird shit in the three days since his awakening.
His own substance nearly suffocating him. Takeshi reversing a thrown pencil mid-flight during training. Akira phasing through a solid wall like it was made of air. The greenish-blue mist responding to his anger in ways that felt almost alive.
But watching Ayumi Sakamoto's face cycle through a dozen different people in the span of five seconds while golden light poured off her skin like liquid sunshine?
That was new.
And deeply, deeply uncomfortable.
Not because of the transformation itself—though that was objectively disturbing, seeing someone's features blur and shift like reality couldn't decide what shape she was supposed to be. But because of the expression on whatever face she was wearing.
Pure terror.
The same terror Kaito had felt three days ago when his own essence had manifested for the first time, when the shell had formed around him and the air had started running out and he'd been absolutely certain he was going to die alone in his bedroom over a broken glass raven.
He recognized that fear.
Hated that he recognized it.
Hated more that seeing it on someone else's face made something twist uncomfortably in his chest.
"You," Ayumi managed to say through the transformation, her voice echoing strangely like multiple people speaking at slightly different frequencies. "You're the—he's the—"
She couldn't seem to finish the sentence. Her eyes—currently the wrong color, currently belonging to someone else's face—locked onto Kaito with an expression that combined horror and rage and something that might have been betrayal.
Like his presence here was somehow the worst part of this nightmare.
Fair enough. He'd earned that.
From deeper in the apartment, a woman's voice called out, casual and completely oblivious:
"Ayumi? Who's at the door, sweetie?"
Ayumi's eyes went wide—currently back to her own face for a fraction of a second before shifting again. Panic spiked across her features, and the golden glow intensified in response.
"My mom," she whispered, voice shaking. "She can't—I can't let her see me like—"
But it was too late.
A woman appeared in the doorway to what was probably the living room, and Kaito's first thought was that she looked like a ghost.
Not literally—not like Akira when he phased, translucent and half-present. But metaphorically. Like someone going through the motions of existence without actually being there. Bathrobe hanging loose on a too-thin frame. Hair unwashed, probably for days. Eyes unfocused in that specific way that suggested depression more than exhaustion.
She looked so much like Ayumi that the resemblance was almost painful.
Or rather—Ayumi looked so much like her. Same face structure, same dark hair, same delicate build. This was what Ayumi would look like in twenty years if the weight she carried crushed her completely.
The woman blinked at the three boys standing in her entryway, then at her daughter who was currently wearing someone else's face and glowing like a nuclear reactor.
For exactly three seconds, nobody moved.
Kaito felt his essence respond without conscious thought, greenish-blue mist wisping from his hands in an instinctive defensive reaction. Beside him, Akira had gone slightly translucent at the edges, ready to phase. Takeshi's shimmer activated, that telltale distortion in the air that meant his reversal ability was primed.
Three essentials, powers manifested, ready for—
"Oh," Ayumi's mother said, voice flat and pleasant. "Are your friends staying for dinner? I should probably get dressed if we're having company." She looked down at her bathrobe like she was just now noticing it. "And maybe put on some real clothes. Give me ten minutes."
She turned and shuffled back toward what was presumably her bedroom, completely oblivious to her daughter's supernatural transformation happening three meters away.
Didn't even blink at the golden glow.
Didn't react to the face-cycling.
Didn't see anything wrong at all.
The door closed behind her with a soft click.
Silence.
"She can't see it," Ayumi whispered, staring after her mother with an expression of complete disbelief on whatever face she was currently wearing. "How can she not see it? I'm glowing. My face is changing. How—"
"Sometimes normals don't," Akira said quietly.
It was the most words Kaito had heard him speak at once since they'd met. Usually Akira communicated in gestures, meaningful looks, and the occasional monosyllabic response. Full sentences were rare.
Ayumi's head snapped toward him, golden eyes wide. "What?"
"Their brains filter it out," Akira continued, still in that same soft monotone. "Rationalize it as something explainable. A trick of the light. Stress hallucination. Anything except the truth." He paused, grey eyes studying Ayumi with uncomfortable intensity. "Only other essentials can perceive manifestations clearly. It's a built-in defense mechanism. Keeps the world from collapsing into chaos."
"But she saw three strange boys in our apartment," Ayumi said, voice rising slightly. "That's definitely not normal. That should have gotten some kind of reaction—"
"She noticed that part," Takeshi said, already moving past Ayumi into the apartment with the confidence of someone who'd done this before. "Just not the glowing supernatural transformation part. Her mind is protecting itself from information it can't process. Come on. Let's get you to the kitchen before your mother comes back. We need to work on getting you under control."
Ayumi shot one more desperate glance toward her mother's bedroom, then followed Takeshi on legs that looked like they might give out any second.
Kaito and Akira trailed behind.
The apartment was small but organized in a way that felt desperate rather than comfortable. Everything in its place, but the places themselves were showing signs of neglect. Dishes piled in the sink despite the rest of the kitchen being immaculate. Laundry folded and stacked on chairs because nobody had the energy to put it away properly. The kind of order that came from one person holding everything together through sheer willpower while another person slowly fell apart.
It reminded Kaito uncomfortably of his own aunt's apartment in the months after his father's accident. Before Aunt Yuki had pulled herself together for Hana's sake.
In the kitchen, Ayumi was gripping the counter like it was the only thing keeping her upright. Her hands were white-knuckled where they weren't obscured by golden glow, and her face had stopped cycling through different appearances quite so rapidly but the transformation still looked unstable—features sharp one moment, soft the next, aging up and down like her body couldn't quite remember what it was supposed to look like.
A bowl of rice sat on the counter next to a dropped paddle.
Normal rice now, but Kaito would bet anything that a few minutes ago it had been something else.
"This is insane," Ayumi said, voice shaking badly enough that the echo effect was getting worse. "This is completely insane and I want it to stop and I want you all to leave and I want to pretend this never happened—"
"Can't do that," Kaito said before he could stop himself.
Three pairs of eyes turned toward him. Ayumi's gaze was particularly hostile, golden light flaring brighter in response to her spike of anger.
He held up his hands in a placating gesture, letting the greenish-blue mist coil around his fingers. Might as well be useful instead of just standing here making things worse by existing.
"Trust me, I tried," he continued, keeping his voice level even though Ayumi looked like she wanted to strangle him. "Spent three days thinking I could just ignore it and it would go away. Pretend the manifestation was a one-time thing, go back to normal life, forget it ever happened." The mist swirled, responding to the memory of that suffocating shell. "It doesn't work. The essence is part of you now. Has been since the fragment bonded with you, probably weeks ago without you even knowing. It was just dormant until today."
Ayumi turned to look at him properly for the first time since opening the door, and there was so much anger in her expression—layered over the fear, tangled with the panic—that Kaito actually took a step back.
"Don't," she said, and her voice was doing that multiple-people-speaking-at-once thing again. "Don't talk to me like we're friends. Don't act like you have any right to be here, to see me like this, to—" Her voice cracked. "You humiliated me two days ago. Made me a joke in front of the entire class. Made me feel..."
She didn't finish the sentence, but she didn't need to.
Kaito knew exactly what that air blast had felt like. Intimate. Invasive. Wrong. He'd calculated it that way deliberately, engineered the pressure and angle and timing for maximum humiliation.
And now he was standing in her kitchen watching her literally fall apart, watching her lose control of the one thing she'd spent years perfecting, and the look on her face—
The greenish-blue mist tried to manifest more fully without his permission, responding to emotions he didn't want to examine.
Guilt, maybe. Or something worse.
Kaito shoved it down.
"You're right," he said quietly. "I don't have the right to be here. And if you want me to leave, I'll leave. Takeshi and Akira can handle this without me." He met her eyes—currently her own, currently filled with tears and rage. "But they brought me because I've been exactly where you are right now. Three days ago, I was on my bedroom floor, trapped in my own power, suffocating, absolutely certain I was going to die. And the only reason I didn't was because these two showed up and talked me through it."
The golden glow flickered, unstable.
"So yeah," Kaito continued. "I'm an asshole who humiliated you for no good reason. I'm the last person you want to see right now. But I also know what it's like when your body does things that shouldn't be possible and you can't make it stop. And I can either help, or I can fuck off. Your choice."
Silence in the kitchen except for the sound of Ayumi's ragged breathing and the distant murmur of her mother's TV from the living room.
Then Ayumi's transformation accelerated catastrophically.
Her entire body shifted, features and build morphing so rapidly it was impossible to track the changes. Tall, short, male, female, young, old, faces and bodies that couldn't possibly exist in one person but somehow did, all fighting for dominance—
And then she collapsed to her knees.
The golden glow sputtered out like a candle in the wind, and when she looked up her face was back to her own—streaked with tears, gasping for breath like she'd been underwater.
"Make it stop," she pleaded, looking at Takeshi with desperate eyes. "Please. I don't want this. I don't want any of this."
Takeshi knelt beside her immediately, not touching but close enough to be grounding.
"I know," he said gently. "I'm sorry. But Ayumi, listen to me—the essence responds to emotional intensity. Fear makes it spike. Panic makes it uncontrollable. You need to calm down."
"How am I supposed to calm down when my entire body just turned into ten different people and there are three boys in my kitchen and my mom is going to come out of her room any second and everything is falling apart—"
"One thing at a time," Takeshi said. "First, your transformation. It's not random even though it feels that way. Your ability is pulling from your subconscious—people you know, people you've seen, people you want to be or are afraid of becoming. Right now it's cycling because you're not directing it consciously. You're just... reacting."
"I don't understand."
"Then let us show you."
Takeshi held out his hand, and that familiar shimmer appeared above his palm. "My ability is reversal. Attacks come at me, I send them back. It manifested from my core truth—my need to protect, my desire to undo damage, my wish that I could reverse time and save the people I've lost." He dismissed the shimmer. "Everything I am psychologically is reflected in this power."
He gestured to Akira.
The silver-haired boy hesitated for just a moment, then placed his hand on the kitchen counter. Slowly, deliberately, he let it phase through the solid surface until his entire forearm had disappeared into the countertop.
When he pulled it back out, there wasn't even a scratch.
"Intangibility," Akira said quietly, grey eyes fixed on Ayumi. "Phase-shifting. From my need to disappear, to not be seen, to slip through the cracks of other people's lives." His voice was soft but there was weight underneath it. "I'm a ghost in my own existence. My power makes that literal."
Both of them looked at Kaito.
Right. His turn.
Kaito let the greenish-blue mist coalesce more fully around his hands, the substance swirling and shifting in response to his intent. Still nowhere near perfect control, but better than three days ago.
"Substance manipulation," he said, meeting Ayumi's tear-stained gaze. "I can create matter in three states—gas, liquid, solid." The mist condensed slightly, showing the transition. "It comes from..."
He trailed off, not wanting to finish that sentence. Not wanting to be that vulnerable in front of someone who already hated him.
But Ayumi was looking at him with something that wasn't quite anger anymore. More like desperate curiosity, the need to understand overriding her justified rage.
"From my need to control my environment when my emotions feel uncontrollable," Kaito finished quietly. "To create barriers between myself and the world. To shape reality into something manageable when my internal life is chaos." The mist swirled. "I spent nine years building walls. My power makes them literal."
Ayumi stared at all three of them, breathing still ragged but starting to stabilize.
"So my power," she said slowly. "The transformation. It's because I..."
"Because you adapt yourself to what others need," Takeshi said. "Because you've spent so long being whoever people want you to be that your power literally makes you into other people." His voice was gentle but honest. "It's not a weakness, Ayumi. It's an ability that could be incredibly versatile once you understand it. But you need to learn what it's reflecting before you can control what it's doing."
"I don't even know who I am anymore," Ayumi whispered. "I've been everyone else for so long—perfect daughter, perfect student, perfect friend—I don't remember how to just be... me."
The words hung in the kitchen, raw and honest.
And Kaito, despite everything, despite the fact that she had every reason to hate him, felt that uncomfortable twist in his chest again.
Because he understood that feeling too well.
The sense of having built so many layers of performance and deflection that the core self had gotten lost underneath.
The fear that if you stopped pretending, stopped maintaining the mask, there might not be anything real left at all.
His mist coiled tighter around his fingers.
From the living room, Ayumi's mother's door opened.
Footsteps.
Ayumi's eyes went wide with fresh panic.
[To be continued in Chapter 6...]
Author's closing note:Kaito's mist responded when Ayumi's mother appeared. Did you notice? It wasn't conscious. Also—Akira gave the longest explanation. He NEVER does that. What made this different? Theories below 👇
Next update: [1/20/2026 GMT+8:00 20:30]
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