For most seventeen year old teenagers, the world was a noisy place.
It was filled with chatter about the latest games, gossip about who was shooting their shot at whom, or complaints about school assignments that were ridiculously difficult.
But for me, Ryuu, the world had already died when I was fourteen.
I sat right beside the window, in a strategic spot for people who had chosen to become nothing more than background characters in the social world.
“Ryuu, aren’t you going to the cafeteria?” one of my classmates asked as he walked past my desk.
I simply shook my head without taking my eyes away from the screen.
“No. You guys go ahead.”
People in my class knew me as the guy who did not care about anyone else.
Some even thought I deliberately acted cold just to look cool.
But the truth was, I simply had no energy left to pretend that I cared about meaningless things.
My soul had already been completely drained by the storm of my past.
Everything started four years ago, on a night that initially seemed completely ordinary.
That night, heavy rain poured from the sky.
It was the kind of dark night where spoiled teenagers would usually spend their time listening to music through headphones inside their warm rooms.
I, with all the arrogance of a wealthy fourteen year old kid, locked my bedroom door and ignored my mother’s gentle knocks as she came to bring me a glass of warm milk.
I considered their attention and affection nothing more than unnecessary interference with my privacy.
Then, the silence of the night was shattered by the deafening sound of glass breaking from the first floor, followed by a hysterical scream unlike anything I had ever heard before.
Before my brain could even process what was happening, my bedroom door was violently kicked open.
My mother, the woman whose concern I had always considered annoying, stood there while gasping for breath.
Her white nightgown had already changed color, soaked in a thick, metallic red liquid.
She said nothing.
With the last bit of strength she had left, Mother grabbed my shoulder and roughly dragged me to the room next door to get Rin, my little sister who was crying in fear.
Then she pushed the two of us into a wardrobe inside the storage room.
“Ryuu, don’t come out, no matter what happens! Protect your little sister!”
Those were my mother’s final words.
Her voice trembled from the pain, but her eyes held an unshakable determination.
Through the darkness of the tightly closed wardrobe, I heard my father and mother standing side by side in front of the hallway.
They spread their arms wide, becoming a fragile human shield before a brutal barrage of gunshots tore their bodies down to the floor.
I curled up in the darkness, desperately covering Rin’s hysterical cries with my hand so the killers outside would not hear us.
My tears fell silently, mixed with unbearable guilt because the glass of milk I had rejected only minutes earlier had now become a regret that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
That night, the selfish and arrogant brat I once was died together with my parents’ blood.
At fourteen years old, I was forced to be reborn as the head of a family whose childhood had been violently ripped away.
However, fate apparently was not satisfied with watching me crawl through the dirt.
One year after that incident, when I had finally grown accustomed to waking up before dawn to handle household paperwork and learning digital work just to survive, the second storm arrived without mercy.
Rin, the only reason I still had to live in this world, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
The insurance money left behind by our parents, which I thought would be enough for our future, disappeared completely within months to pay for chemotherapy and medicine that cost an absurd amount of money.
I became a tireless monster.
I learned digital work day and night until my eyes became bloodshot from burst blood vessels caused by extreme exhaustion.
I slept only two hours a day on a hard folding chair in the hospital, with my laptop resting on my lap and the cheap coffee burning my stomach.
While other teenagers were busy thinking about relationships, fashionable clothes, or game rankings, I fought desperately against the death rate displayed on the hospital monitor just to buy Rin one more day to breathe.
But humans could never defeat a fate that had already been written with black ink.
On an extremely cold night, during the darkest hours before dawn, the noisy sound of the heart monitor suddenly changed into a single flat tone.
Biiiiiiip…
I jolted awake from my shallow sleep and immediately grabbed Rin’s tiny fingers.
They were cold.
Cold like ice.
Her pale face had become incredibly thin due to the disease consuming her body, yet her lips formed a peaceful smile as if she wanted to tell me that she was no longer in pain.
Inside that silent hospital room, my little sister’s tiny hand slowly slipped away from my grasp.
She left this world without ever getting the chance to enjoy her youth.
Leaving me alone, becoming nothing more than ashes in the middle of this cruel world.
I fell to my knees beside her bed, only able to cry.
I could not scream.
My supposedly genius mind suddenly became completely paralyzed after realizing one bitter truth:
All the lines of computer code I had struggled with day and night were still not enough to hack my own sister’s life away from the hands of death.
I desperately wished this was only a dream and that I would wake up soon.
Since that day, I swore I would never allow myself to depend on or care about anyone again.
I locked my heart tightly.
Until this afternoon, when the break bell rang and the atmosphere in the classroom suddenly became noisy.
The desks in the front row were immediately surrounded by students.
The familiar laughter of boys trying to show off echoed everywhere as they attempted to gain the attention of the one person sitting at the center of the crowd.
There, surrounded by people who admired her, stood Charlotte.
She was the “Goddess” of our school.
Her appearance was elegant beyond words.
Her jet black hair flowed beautifully, framing her perfectly proportioned face.
Every time she spoke, her voice sounded gentle and carefully composed.
Someone placed a strawberry milk box on her desk, and Charlotte responded with a sweet smile that instantly made the boy blush.
She looked like the main character of a romance novel.
Smart, popular, loved by everyone, and living a flawless life without a single imperfection.
From the dark corner of the classroom, I leaned my back against my chair and watched the circus with narrowed eyes.
My mind, which was used to reading thousands of lines of code and searching for computer bugs, immediately noticed something wrong with that beautiful scene.
When the group of boys turned their attention away and started laughing together, I saw it.
For a fraction of a second, the corner of Charlotte’s lips dropped.
Her straight posture suddenly collapsed, as if she was carrying a burden weighing dozens of kilograms.
An overwhelming exhaustion appeared in her tired eyes as she stared blankly at her desk.
Her right leg beneath her school skirt trembled slightly, not because of nervousness, but because her muscles had already run out of energy.
However, the moment one of her friends spoke to her again, Charlotte immediately straightened her shoulders, lifted the corners of her lips, and displayed her most beautiful smile as if nothing had happened.
She was acting.
That was my thought as I watched her with cold eyes.
I knew exactly what kind of mask she was wearing.
It was the same mask I used when hiding my tears and exhaustion in front of my dying little sister.
The mask of someone whose world was collapsing inside, but was forced by circumstances to continue smiling on the outside.
A few minutes later, the bell rang and class resumed.
I decided to leave for a moment and wash my face in the restroom at the back corridor, hoping the cold water could reduce the dizziness in my head caused by staying awake all night.
When I walked back through the school hallway, which had become quiet because the students had already returned to their classrooms, my steps slowed down.
From the opposite direction, Charlotte was walking alone.
Both of her hands carried a stack of thick textbook assignments that looked quite heavy.
The distance between us gradually disappeared.
Just as I expected, as a “Goddess” who had to maintain her reputation of being kind and perfect toward everyone, even toward invisible spirits hiding in the corner of the classroom like me, Charlotte immediately put on her best smile when our eyes met.
“Eh, Ryuu. Just came back from the restroom?” she greeted me with a cheerful voice, sounding incredibly friendly and natural.
I stopped right beside her.
I did not return her smile.
I simply stood there silently, staring directly into her beautiful eyes.
Receiving such a cold response from me, Charlotte became slightly awkward, but she still tried to maintain her perfectly symmetrical smile.
“I’m heading first, Ryuu. These books need to be delivered to the teachers’ room quickly.”
“Your hands are trembling,” I interrupted shortly.
My voice was flat, almost emotionless.
That short sentence made Charlotte freeze in place.
Her beautiful smile suddenly stiffened, creating an invisible crack in her perfect mask.
My eyes lowered, focusing on the tips of her fingers that had turned white from gripping the books too tightly.
It was a mechanical effort to prevent the stack from falling because the muscles in her arms had actually already reached their limit.
Not only that, from this close distance, the thin layer of makeup on her face was not enough to hide the faint dark circles beneath her tired eyes.
Charlotte swallowed.
Her chest rose and fell with slightly shortened breaths.
For the first time, the panic in her eyes was clearly visible before me.
She was no longer looking at me as a classmate.
She was looking at me as a frightening stranger who could see the thing she desperately wanted to hide from the world.
Normally, boys who passed by her would look at her with admiration or nervousness.
But my gaze?
I looked at her as if I knew everything.
As if I was looking at a reflection of myself, someone slowly dying while carrying an unbearable burden.
“G crazy, these books really are heavier than I thought, haha…”
Charlotte tried to laugh softly, a defensive laugh that sounded painfully fake to my ears.
She quickly looked away, avoiding eye contact with me.
“I’ll go first, Ryuu. The bell is about to finish.”
Without waiting for my answer, she hurriedly walked past me.
The soft scent of her vanilla perfume remained briefly in the empty hallway, clashing with the cold aura I emitted.
I turned slightly and watched her back straighten stiffly again when she passed a teacher at the end of the hallway, instantly putting on the Goddess’s mask once more.
I let out a long sigh and placed both hands inside the pockets of my gray pants.
Her arrogance in refusing to show weakness truly disgusted me, yet at the same time, it awakened something deep inside my chest.
To be continued-