Chisa

She spent her six-year-old summer riding on her father's shoulders.

The night breeze carried the mingled scents of fireworks and grilled squid from the festival stalls. With a marshmallow stick in one hand, little Chisa pointed toward the sky with the other. Goldfish-shaped lanterns swayed in the breeze, and fireworks blossomed overhead. She saw red threads tied to people's wrists stretching and intertwining, weaving into a warm, invisible web that softly enveloped the festival crowd.

"What wish did you just make, Chisa?" her mother asked, the fireworks reflected tenderly in her eyes. Chisa's cheeks were sticky with apple syrup as she puffed them out and proudly declared, "I want to be like Mom! To make the prettiest paper cuttings so I can keep every precious, happy thing—"

Her twelve-year-old summer was different. That year, her world fell into silence all of a sudden.

Her father was away on endless business trips, and the refrigerator door was plastered with her mother's shift schedules. Over time, she grew used to the cold beeps that greeted her at the other end of the line.

"It's okay. I can take care of myself," little Chisa whispered to herself. With such resolution, she lifted the pot lid and decided to make herself a lemon-scented sukiyaki hotpot. The prepared meal package on the table read in bold print: a healing dish for a family gathering.

The broth began to bubble, filling the room with the rich scent of beef and vegetables. Steam fogged the windows. Turning her face to the misted glass, Chisa saw only her own faint, lonely reflection. No laughter, no clink of glasses.

"For a family gathering."

Such a gentle phrase, she thought, and yet so very far away.

Her fifteenth summer smelled of pencil shavings and loneliness.

One afternoon, the ceaseless rain of the tsuyu season briefly relented. Carrying a stack of books to return, Chisa crossed the courtyard and passed the equipment room. From behind the door came muffled sobs. Through the narrow gap, she glimpsed her classmate Ritsuko cornered by three girls, her shirt blotched with ink, her eyeglasses shattered on the floor. The head of them pressed a lighter to the embroidered name on her uniform, filling the air with the bitter stench of scorched fabric.

It reminded Chisa of the frog in biology class, pinned flat to the dissection tray, limbs splayed, yet its heart still beating futilely. Before she could think, her hand had already acted. She pushed the ajar door open and drew out the scissors she always carried.

That small pair of scissors had been her mother's faithful companion throughout her career and was passed down to her. Now, it pointed at someone's face for the first time.

"Let her go," she demanded.

Retribution came swiftly. By the next morning, her desk was carved with "idiot." Her locker overflowed with shredded textbooks. But the worst part of it was the blurred faces—no sooner than when she tried to see who had tripped her did she realize every face around her had melted into smears of color. The doctor's report read "psychogenic visual recognition disorder." In the wake of her awakened Forte, her brain had cut loose the thread that allowed her to recognize faces.

In that moment, she heard a faint snap—not the brittle break of nerves, but like the sound she heard when the strings of her goldfish lantern snagged on a tree during a festival years ago. The warm, vibrant threads that once bound people together unraveled, falling away in a rain of broken fragments.

When her scissors shredded the final note filled with malicious words, rain hammered the classroom windows. Chisa stared at her hazy, flickering reflection on the window and suddenly realized that growing up meant learning to cut out every loose thread herself—lantern strings tangled in branches, the kite string unwinding between her and her parents, or the cruel arcs frozen on her bullies' lips.

The rainy season stretched on. Cicadas rose with the mounting summer heat. Clutching her scissors, Chisa began to imagine a path she could carve on her own: a path perhaps lonely, but true to her heart. The one she would never need to turn back from.

In her sixteenth summer, dark clouds stretched endlessly, and rain came pouring down. Thunder weighed against her eardrums as she stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Resonator Monitoring Center.

"Did you hear me?" The voice was sharp with discontent. Chisa lifted her gaze, only to find the speaker's features dissolving into nothingness.

"Loud and clear," she replied to the void.

The collar clicked shut around her neck, bearing the cold touch of surveillance equipment.

When the storm finally subsided, she set out for home. Cutting through the park, she came upon a boy crying beside a slide, clutching a snapped kite string. In her vision, the kite caught in the treetop stood out with uncanny clarity: three branches formed a natural lock, and if the far-right one was severed—

"Hold there," she stopped the boy from tugging the string. His eyes widened. With a soft snap, the branch split, and the kite drifted down, alighting gently in his arms.

"Thank y—" His cheer broke off at a shrill cry. "M-monster! Stay away from my child!"

Following the woman's terrified gaze, Chisa then became conscious again of the collar biting cold against her throat.

It wasn't a big deal. She told herself she should be used to this by now.

She could see the kite's frame, the trajectories of raindrops, or even the currents of electrons surging through the storm clouds with such clarity, but she could never see through others' faces or their hearts.

She turned and was about to step into the rain, but a small tug caught her sleeve. The boy had wriggled free from his mother's grasp. He pressed a packet of star-shaped candies into her palm. "Here. This is for you! My teacher says only the brave get star candy, so…"

The plastic wrapper crackled faintly in her hand. Chisa stared at the boy. His face was still a blur, yet it glowed, like fireflies circling lanterns in a festival long ago.

"Mom says people with these collars are bad," He leaned closer, whispering. "But I don't believe her. The way you cut that branch? It was so cool."

Chisa paused, then crouched to pat his head.

The device against her throat stayed still. Her Resonance Spectrum was showing a rare, steady curve. Like a summer sky after the storm, a hint of light finally broke through.

"...!"

Chisa jolted awake from the nightmare, cold sweat soaking her back. In a daze, her side still throbbed with a sharp, phantom pain that clawed at her nerves.

But her flesh was unbroken, unlike in the dream. Drawing a deep breath, she pressed a hand to her chest, trying to calm the frantic pounding of her heart.

It had been two months since she was trapped in Honami. Her body was slowly adjusting to the endless loop day after day, but each night the nightmares dragged her soul deeper into the abyss.

She turned her head toward the sofa. Sumika lay fast asleep, one hand slipping from the cushion, the other resting beside an open notebook scrawled with numbers and scribbled notes.

Outside, the rain fell in relentless torrents.

By the time Sumika woke up, dusk had already descended. The storm had weakened. Faint stars dotted the ink-blue sky, like silver nails scattered carelessly across the cold night. Still yawning, she followed Chisa into a convenience store. While Chisa carefully gathered food and supplies from the shelves, she turned to find Sumika absorbed in the flickering sign overhead, notebook and pen already in hand.

"Chisa, look at this—" she whispered, voice brimming with restrained excitement. "It's just the same as last time! The time, the flicker rate... Everything matches! If we can just gather a few more samples... these data will let us uncover the pattern behind the loop!"

Catching the brightness in her eyes, Chisa unconsciously clenched her fists. In her palm lingered the sensation of yesterday's cut when she severed the Tacet Discords' threads, a cold shiver, like the snapping of silk.

Whenever she drew her scissors and used her Forte, crimson lines surfaced in her vision—the threads of life, visible only to her. Unlike the warmth of human veins, these threads reeked of decay. They pursued the Left Behind, tearing them apart and dragging those fragile lives into yet another loop alongside the Lament.

Chisa studied her reflection on the window: a face calm, almost pale, but with a single ember still burning in her eyes.

Yesterday, here in this very store, she had crossed paths with the same girl again. The one she met every loop, who always shared her snacks so earnestly, never once realizing that she bore the iridescent glow of the Left Behind. Perhaps it was that fragile but unyielding kindness that kept Chisa from accepting that this city had been forever imprisoned in the past.

The night stretched long, but dawn would always come.

When the first light finally broke through the leaden clouds, she thought she could hear the trembling hum of threads. Pressing her hand to her chest, Chisa knew that when the next loop began, everything would reset once again.

But that was fine.

As long as the scissors remained in her grasp, as long as the fragments of warmth had not been completely forgotten...

She would keep walking forward until the day she could finally cut through the nightmare and sever the snare.

In the afternoon, a drizzle pattered against the window.

Chisa stood by the floor-to-ceiling window of the Spacetrek Archive. At eighteen, she finally had the leisure to listen to the rhythm of the rain—not the monotonous cadence of Honami's looping rains, but the natural raindrops of Lahai-Roi. Fresh, alive, tinged with a faint sweetness in the air. It was the kind of rain that would casually soak a school uniform left drying on a balcony, or drench an unsuspecting student on the way home.

Steam curled gently from the coffee on her table. With her scissors, she unpacked a bag of sugar... Yes, she still carried them everywhere, though now they were used more for pruning potted plants or opening parcels. The sugar dissolved into the dark surface of the cup. Beyond the window, a few students in bright yellow raincoats splashed through puddles. Their vivid color pierced the gray veil of drizzle, stirring memories of days spent facing endless loops and relentless beginnings—of someone who once walked beside her to the destination of the endless loop, cutting a path through the long night; and of someone who chose to tread countless false paths alone, turning herself into a cornerstone of truth.

When the rain eased, Chisa stepped out of the Archive with a book in her arms. The damp evening breeze lifted her freshly cut hair. The campus stretched before her, alive with the soft after-rain glow. A group of students from the Department of Engineering was engaged in a heated debate over a hovering device. Someone noticed her through the thinning mist, waved brightly, and called her to join—

She watched these young, fervent souls, companions beneath the same sky, all bound for the same sea of stars. And she realized, with striking clarity, that she was no longer a wanderer lost in an endless loop. Her life, after a period of stagnation, had already rejoined the rushing river that carried everyone forward.

She had truly left that endless summer behind.

Taking a steady step, she walked toward her new future.