Episode 1

It was a night when the moonlight was breathtakingly beautiful.

The encounter came out of nowhere.

It arrived without warning — and yet, once that connection was made, I found I couldn’t sever it.

I don’t know how things came to be this way. But the one thing I do know is that meeting her was the turning point that changed my life.

※

“Why are you so useless?!”

A sharp crack rang out, followed by a high whine in my ears.

My cheek and ear burned hot.
A voice like needles cut through the ringing.

“Why — why——”

My mother had crumpled to the floor, knees and forehead pressed against it, sobbing.

Her moods were always shifting, always impossible to manage. I’d been keeping to myself as usual — but that, it seemed, had only irritated her further.

Why does this always happen to me….

Why.
Why……

Ah… I wish my mother would just disappear…….

I slipped out of the room without a sound, holding the dark thing writhing inside me tightly shut.

I’d thought I was managing — thought I had a grip on the terrible feeling. But today, my usual composure had slipped.

Without thinking, my hand reached for something gleaming on the kitchen counter.

The moment I saw the shining blade, a thrill ran through me.

I tucked the kitchen knife behind my back and walked out to stand before my mother, still crumpled on the floor.

Right now, she was completely defenceless.

It’s okay. I can do this.

It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.

I chanted it over and over inside my head. But the ringing in my ears from where she’d hit me was unbearable — a searing pain shot through my skull.

I shook away the noise, tightened my grip on what I held, and steeled myself.

“Mei-chan… I’m sorry——”
“——Huh——”

She’d ruined the careful makeup she’d done for her night shift. Her face was a mess of tears, and she was looking up at me with eyes full of drowning.

In that instant, my heart — which I wasn’t even sure had been beating — lurched into motion at a terrifying speed. I forgot to breathe entirely, and found myself bolting out of the house.

It seemed my conscience was still alive inside me after all.

I spat the dark feeling out into the night and ran headlong down an unlit road, like I was fleeing somewhere far away.

The rain had already stopped, leaving puddles spread across the pavement. I had no room in me to avoid them — I ran at full tilt, splashing through them one after another, the sound following me in wet, slapping bursts.

I cut through a street with few people, then through a narrow path thick with trees — and then I ran straight into someone.

The collision knocked the blade from my grasp. It clattered to the ground with a sharp metallic ring that echoed out into the dark.

My body moved before my mind could catch up.
But I was a beat too late.

The weapon slipped easily into someone else’s hands, and despair swelled inside me.

“Carrying something this dangerous, and running like that… Did you kill someone, maybe? But there’s no blood on it, so not yet, I guess?”

A slightly high-pitched, unsettling voice rang out into the night.

What she was saying should have been alarming — and yet her voice carried something almost like delight.

Just then, the clouds parted, and the moonlight fell across the figure in front of me, bringing her face into sharp relief.

Standing there was a girl in the same school uniform as mine — small, with delicate, striking features.

The rain had stopped, yet her uniform was soaked through, her undergarments faintly visible beneath the wet fabric. There was something strangely bewitching about her.

I said nothing to her question, and she grabbed my arm and pulled me into the grounds of a small, deserted shrine — a park tucked beside it, away from the street.

My heart was hammering. Breathing was difficult. And yet things kept moving in directions I couldn’t follow.

The girl pressed the kitchen knife back into my hands. Her own hands were deathly cold — cold enough that I couldn’t tell if she was alive. Her fingers wrapped around mine, and she pulled my arm toward her, guiding the sharp edge until it was pressed against her own throat.

“If you want to kill someone that badly — then kill me——”
“What?”

Impossible things were happening one after another, and even if my mind had been razor-sharp, it would have been hard to make sense of the situation.
My mind was not razor-sharp.

The only thing I could feel — the only emotion I could identify — was fear at what I was seeing. Because if I moved even slightly, the blade would pierce her throat.

My hand began to tremble.

Looking at me, the girl in front of me gave a small, soft laugh through her nose.

“Hm. So you’re carrying something like this without any real intention.”
“That has nothing to do with you.”

I had no obligation to let a stranger pick apart my feelings, or my circumstances.

Whether it was because I was talking to someone I couldn’t understand, or because her words had genuinely stung — I found myself answering this first-time acquaintance with cold words.

“Oh — you finally spoke.”
“What is going on?”
“I’m Fujishiro Nanoha.”
“That’s not what I——”

I swung my arm in a wide arc, shaking her hand off. Those corpse-cold fingers released me. I quickly wrapped the blade back in its cloth and hid it away.

“What do you mean, ‘kill me’?! Don’t just push a story on me like that!”

She flinched slightly at my raised voice — but almost immediately her expression went flat, and she fixed me with a gaze completely devoid of light.

“I want to disappear——”
“Excuse me?”
“So I asked someone who looked like they might be able to kill. Right, Morishita Mei-san?”

My heart, which had barely begun to calm down, surged again. To be seen with something this dangerous, and then have my name known by the person who’d seen it — my luck was absurd.

“You’re wondering how I know your name. I can tell from your face.”

She gave a strange little laugh and kept her eyes on me. Then she closed the distance.

I tried to step back, but my back hit a tree. I had nowhere to go. But I didn’t want to keep being the only one on the back foot — something combative stirred in me.

“Wanting someone to kill you — that’s asking too much of another. If you want to disappear, just die on your own.”
“Wow. That’s mean. But if I could do that, I would’ve done it already.”

Fujishiro-san had taken the knife from me — on her own — and pressed it against her own throat.

I panicked and moved to stop her. But I realised I didn’t need to.

Her hand was trembling far more violently than mine had been. After a moment, her arm dropped back to her side.

“What about you, Morishita-san? Who is it you want to kill?”
“That has nothing to do with you.”

I had to get away from her. Every instinct I had was telling me: this person is dangerous, get out.

“Come here again.”
“What?”
“I’ll keep your secret if you do.”

Fujishiro-san was swinging the knife back and forth in her hand.

I understood clearly now that she was a girl on the edge.

I wanted nothing more to do with her — but with the knife as collateral, I couldn’t find my voice.

“Don’t you think we’re alike? You want to kill but you can’t. I want to die but I can’t.”

Before I’d noticed, she had closed the distance between us and was peering quietly up into my face.

My heart lurched with a heavy thud. I shoved her shoulder back.

“Give that back to me.”
“Come back here when things get to be too much again.”

I ignored her words, wrenched the knife back, and walked quickly home.