No point overthinking it.
Time to get to work.
Kazuki focused his mind, sending his consciousness diving straight into the System space.
Familiar with the routine by now, he tapped the card he had just drawn.
A second later, the sterile void vanished, and his soul was pulled into a sprawling campus bathed in a gentle rain of cherry blossom petals.
The previous otaku card had possessed an exclusive space as well, but it had been little more than a cramped, suffocating box.
This territory stretched out with a wide, stunning expanse.
Following the System’s faint guidance, he handled the winding paths and finally located the young version of Himeko waiting inside an empty classroom.
Judging by her relaxed posture, she had been expecting him.
Seeing him enter, Himeko pushed off the desk she had been leaning against.
Her amber eyes curved into a bright, welcoming smile.
A high ponytail cascaded over her shoulder, and she wore a crisp school uniform complete with a neat bowtie, radiating an unstoppable, vibrant youthful energy.
“Should I call you Master, Lord…
or Shujin?”
“I have to admit, you are truly beautiful.” Kazuki swept an appreciative gaze over her before shifting his tone, cutting straight to the point.
“But you know the reality of this.
You are just a card.
There is no need to play these mind games with me.”
Himeko stared right back at him.
Suddenly, she covered her mouth and let out a light, airy laugh.
“Of course.
Being able to turn into a card and be drawn by you, I certainly know that I am no longer alive.
But I can’t exactly wail and beg you not to let me disappear, right?
Optimism is engraved in my very bones.
Even if my wish isn’t fulfilled, I have absolutely nothing to regret.”
Kazuki closed his eyes, crossed his arms over his chest, and shook his head.
“Your mindset is a hundred times stronger than that otaku from the last card.
But I came here today mainly to ask one thing.
What exactly do you mean by that ‘feeling of being alive’ written in your wish?”
Himeko turned away.
Her leather shoes clicked softly against the floorboards as she walked to the window, gazing out at the cherry blossoms drifting across the sky.
Bright sunlight washed over her features, yet when she tilted her head up, there was no trace of an actual sun to be found.
“The feeling of being alive…” Her voice softened, carrying a heavy, unconcealable melancholy.
“It is just wanting to taste what it is like to be a living person again.”
She pressed a hand against the glass.
“To leave this world that couldn’t be any faker, to open my eyes and see the real universe properly again, to feel the joys, angers, sorrows, and happiness of the people around me, and to…
truly live once more.”
She paused, looking up at the artificial skylight that hung forever outside the window without a true source, and softly recited a line from Tagore.
“The sunset is like a miser, hiding its last gold.
It seems like…
I lost the ray of light that belonged to me a long time ago.”
Listening to the deep loneliness woven into her words and watching the slight droop of her eyelashes, Kazuki let out a quiet breath.
He answered her with another line from the same poet.
“If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.”
He held her gaze and nodded, his tone firm.
“Understood.
There are still two empty slots in the Himeko card slot.
I will keep you.
I might have to borrow your identity later to transform anyway.”
With a single thought, he severed the connection to the System space.
His consciousness slammed back into his physical body.
The time in reality was exactly the same as the moment before he entered; not a single fraction of a second had moved.
Kazuki coughed twice, silently cursing in his head.
‘Damn it, why does this broken System make the echoes in these cards so realistic?’
The lingering loneliness in Himeko’s eyes just now was enough to make even a heart of stone ache.
Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he raised a hand, tapped the otaku card he had extracted from the Void Ranger, and selected delete.
The space within that card had been suffocatingly tiny, and the man trapped inside had long since suffered a complete mental breakdown.
He simply could not hold on anymore.
Kazuki had seen the alternate timeline of that Void Ranger.
In that specific world, he wasn’t some unlucky bastard twisted into a monster for the Antimatter Legion; he had loving parents and a younger sister who clung to him constantly.
As for why his peaceful life had been reduced to a mere card, the System had refused to offer a single word of explanation.
Kazuki didn’t know if deleting this card counted as murder, or if it was a merciful release for a shattered soul.
But at the very least, the heavy guilt of imprisoning someone for a lifetime lightened just a fraction.
He wandered aimlessly through the safe cabin.
Every researcher he passed harbored an irrepressible panic in their eyes.
Low, muffled sobs drifted from the shadowy corners of the room.
These people were all outstanding geniuses on their respective home worlds, carrying the hopes of entire planets.
Yet, upon arriving at the hidden-dragon-crouching-tiger Herta Space Station, they were reduced to ordinary staff members.
Now, stripped of their prestige, their only fear was dying a meaningless death at the hands of the Antimatter Legion.
The feeling of being alive…
Kazuki chewed on those words.
Looking up, he spotted the team leader who had brought him into the safety cabin earlier.
The man was gesturing in rapid sign language to a female researcher, smiling brightly.
It was a scene completely out of place amidst the chaotic blare of the station’s alarms, as if the destruction outside didn’t exist.
The female researcher beside him kept her lips pursed, not making a sound, but the corners of her mouth curled upward.
The sheer panic in her eyes had dissipated by more than half.
Curiosity piqued, Kazuki walked over.
“Big brother, what a coincidence.
What are you doing?”
The researcher glanced over and recognized him immediately.
He didn’t mind Kazuki’s bloody, messy appearance in the slightest.
Instead, he gripped the female researcher’s hand tightly and offered a warm smile.
“This is my fiancée.
She’s a researcher from the Department of Immersia.
Her race has a natural defect; she is congenitally deaf and mute.
Even with a Synesthesia Beacon injected, she can’t speak or hear normally.”
He looked back at her affectionately.
“When the Legion rushed in just now, she could only see the alarm lights flashing everywhere and people running around in terror.
She couldn’t hear the roars and explosions, so she was actually a bit less panicked than the rest of us, but she was still scared.”
“I was just using sign language to tell her: Don’t be afraid, I am here, we will definitely be fine.”
As he spoke, he tightened his grip on his fiancée’s hand.
The two looked at each other and shared a quiet, resilient smile.
Boom.
It was as if a spark ignited in Kazuki’s mind.
The ‘feeling of being alive’ that he had been struggling to comprehend suddenly snapped into crystal clarity.
Suppressing the sudden surge of excitement, he smiled at the couple.
“Sister-in-law is so gentle.
I wish you two a long and peaceful life!”
Before leaving, he casually asked if he could borrow a set of cosmetics, claiming it was an emergency request for Ms.
Himeko.
The researcher didn’t hesitate for a second.
He rummaged through his fiancée’s bag, pulled out a compact set, and handed it over.
Kazuki thanked him profusely, turned around, and jogged off toward a secluded section of the cabin.
Ducking into an empty storage corner, Kazuki scanned left and right, confirming there were no cameras or wandering eyes.
Only then did he focus his mind and activate the [Student Himeko] card.
A second later, his figure wavered like a mirage.
His body shifted, transforming perfectly into the appearance of [Student Himeko], complete with cascading red hair and a lithe, athletic figure.
Almost simultaneously, the voice of the young Himeko rang directly inside his head, vibrating with an irrepressible sense of novelty.
“Is this my perspective after transforming?
I can actually see things through your eyes…
By the way, where exactly is this?”
Kazuki didn’t rush to answer her.
His hands moved with lightning speed, popping open the borrowed cosmetics and starting to apply makeup in front of a small pocket mirror.
Drawing the eyebrows, blending the eyeshadow, applying the lipstick…
his hands moved with practiced, mechanical precision.
He replied slowly through their mental link.
“This isn’t the solar system.
In this universe, there are countless brilliant civilizations.
In the place I am right now, if I want to look at the starry sky, I just have to lift my head.”
The moment those words echoed in her mind, a sharp gasp erupted in his head.
Himeko sounded like a boiling steam engine, puffing and panting, completely overwhelmed, as if she were about to faint from the sheer, unadulterated happiness of finally touching the stars.