It was after school, near Yamatsuki High’s East Exit.

The sky was melting into a blue cotton candy palette as the last bell rang. Students scattered like cockroaches freed from state-funded learning, and among the chaos walked the human enigma known as Kazuo Takamine—stoner, parkour cryptid, and unwilling protagonist.

He had his hoodie up over his crumped uniform, vape in hand, and the permanent vibe of a guy who just rolled out of a sensory deprivation tank after binge-watching conspiracy documentaries.

Airi stalked him like a hot, overly-polished panther in Prada heels.

“Kazuo~!” she cooed, suddenly appearing beside him like a seductive ghost in heat.

Kazuo didn’t even look at her. “No.”

“I didn’t even say anything yet.”

“You radiate ulterior motives like a microwave with daddy issues. What do you want?”

Airi pulled out her weapon of mass seduction: a handmade bento box in one hand, a fat stack of cash in the other, and a paper bag with a distinct herbal scent in the third (don’t ask how she has three hands—it was metaphorical, okay?).

“I’ll buy you dinner. Then weed. Then a limited-edition PS5 controller signed by that YouTuber you hate-follow.”

Kazuo blinked. “The one who said vaping causes socialism?”

“The very one.”

He paused.

“…What’s the catch?”

She fluttered her lashes like a monarch butterfly who drinks blood. “Just a date. A tiny, insignificant, not-even-legally-binding hangout where you come with me to the café down the street and let me gaze upon your apathetic face for forty-five minutes while you judge me silently.”

Kazuo stared at her like she was a Wikipedia article titled This Bitch Is Lying.

“...You said date.”

“Semantics.”

“You said ‘gaze upon.’”

“Poetic framing.”

“You’re using bribes and emotional blackmail to trap me in a false sense of companionship.”

She tilted her head and smiled. “I learned from the best.”

“…Chika?”

“No. The IRS.”

Kazuo sighed like an ancient monk who just saw two rats mating in his rice bowl. He took a hit from his vape and muttered:

“Fine. But I swear to God, if this ends in a public confession or a musical number, I’m jumping through a window.”

1 day later – Airi and Kazuo entered a popular café named BobaDoom.

The inside of BobaDoom was aesthetic poison: neon lights, skull-themed tapioca art, and Lo-Fi anime girls with shotguns projected on the walls. A small sign read: “No Homework, No Heartbreaks, No Karens.”

Kazuo was slouched on a couch, eyes half-lidded as per usual, sipping a taro smoothie with cinnamon sprinkles on top. Airi sat across from him in a surgically chosen outfit—equal parts gothic librarian and runway CEO—with her legs crossed like a queen plotting interdimensional war.

“This place’s vibe makes me want to commit crimes,” Kazuo said, tapping cigarette ash into a napkin.

“Good,” Airi replied, sipping from her goth matcha latte. “Criminals have better taste in men.”

“Again with the flirting.”

“It’s not flirting,” she said with a smile that belonged in a museum exhibit labeled Red Flags with PhDs. “It’s manifesting.”

Kazuo opened his mouth to respond—then paused.

From the corner of the café, a voice called out:

“Yo, is that Kazu-bro?!”

Rei Iwasaki.

Vice-leader of the Shinbara Kuronuma-kai, top-tier slacker-philosopher, veteran of 7 brawls and 12 JRPGs in the past week, and Kazuo’s eternal ride-or-die.

Behind him followed a shorter figure, timid but curious-eyed, wearing a too-big leather jacket and clutching a mango flavored bubble tea.

Kaito. First year. Junior gang member. Certified sweetheart and one of the three known humans to say “please” to Kazuo and not get mocked.

“Oh God,” Kazuo muttered. “Please no.”

Rei slid into the booth next to him like a charismatic raccoon with ADHD. “Didn’t know you were out with someone, bro! My bad—wait, wait, hold up—is this a DATE?!”

Kazuo facepalmed.

Airi turned with poise, offering her hand to Rei like a diplomat entering enemy territory.

“Pleasure to meet you. I’m Airi. Kazuo’s future wife.”

Kaito choked on the bubble tea he just ordered. Rei coughed so hard he dropped his vape.

Kazuo blinked, looked directly at Airi, and said flatly:

“You’re clinically insane.”

Airi turned to him with the unbothered smile of a woman who ate restraining orders for breakfast.

“You didn’t deny the wife part, though.”

“I was too distracted by the auditory hallucination of my soul trying to escape my body.”

Rei leaned back, grinning. “Yo, this is wild. I like her. She’s like if confidence and narcissism had a baby in a science lab.”

Kaito, still recovering, raised a hand. “Wait, wait, um, excuse me—miss lady person—what exactly are your intentions with Kazuo-senpai?”

Airi sipped her latte and looked the boy dead in the eyes. “To consume his soul, break his emotional barriers, build an empire with him, and possibly name our first child Oblivion, Destroyer of Chika.”

Kazuo pointed at her like she was a feral pigeon. “See?! THIS. THIS IS WHAT I’M DEALING WITH.”

Rei burst out laughing. “This is better than the time that Chika girl tried to tattoo her name on your forehead with a Sharpie.”

Kaito nodded solemnly. “Fucking bitch.”

“I’m surrounded by lunatics,” Kazuo said, finishing his smoothie with the resignation of a man who’d given up on logical outcomes.

Airi gently reached across the table and tapped his hand.

“But I’m your lunatic. Don’t forget that.”

Kazuo stared at her. Blank. Long. His mind clearly running diagnostics on the universe and finding 404: Reason Not Found.

Then he looked to Rei.

“Yo, you still got that edible from last week?”

Rei pulled a gummy bear from his coat like a street magician and handed it over. “Go easy. This one makes you hear colors.”

Kazuo popped it in his mouth without a second thought.

The edible hit Kazuo approximately four minutes into Airi’s next sentence.

“—and that’s why, if we honeymoon in Croatia, we’ll need to invest in flame-retardant sheets.”

Kazuo blinked slowly. “Why would the sheets be—?”

“Passion,” she said, eyes glinting with deranged sincerity.

Kazuo stared into the void, which now had googly eyes and kept whispering “tax fraud.”

Meanwhile, Rei was watching like he’d just bought a front-row seat to a tragic opera starring horny lunatics and the world’s most emotionally constipated stoner.

“You okay, man?” Rei asked, sipping his chaos boba.

“I think the ceiling is judging me,” Kazuo replied flatly. “It keeps whispering ‘you’re her type.’”

Kaito, still trying to process things like a normal, well-adjusted teen, gently raised a hand.

“Um... I know I’m the new guy, but isn’t this kind of... fast? Like, emotionally? Socially? Legally?”

Airi flipped her hair and smiled like a Bond villain who moonlighted as a high-fashion cult leader.

“Love does not recognize time or law, Kaito-kun. Only inevitability.”

“See, THAT’S what cult leaders say,” Kazuo said, deadpan. “Right before the Kool-Aid gets passed around.”

Airi leaned in across the table, dangerously close now.

Her perfume smelled like fresh roses and delusion.

“Kazuo,” she said softly, “how long will you pretend this isn’t real?”

“Until I die. Maybe longer if reincarnation’s a thing.”

She placed her hand over his.

“Do you feel that?”

Kazuo looked at her hand on his like it was a mildly offensive brochure someone handed him on a subway.

“…Yeah. It’s called sweat. Happens when people are overheating from aggressively simping in public.”

Rei snorted so hard boba shot out his nose. Kaito looked like he was watching a deer get hit by a romantic freight train.

Airi’s eye twitched. But she kept smiling, elegant as ever.

“Kazuo Takamine. I know you. You don’t do emotions. You hide behind sarcasm and smoke like a little crab hiding in a dank shell.”

“You’re describing every stoner I’ve ever met,” Kazuo said, lighting a cigarette.

“BUT,” she said, gripping his hand harder, “I see through you. I see the spark. The potential. The soft, vulnerable soul wrapped in all this... nihilism and THC.”

Kazuo blinked slowly, as if buffering.

Then, with the tone of a man who’d been asked to care about something completely unimportant:

“I once ate a bag of mushrooms I found behind a homeless shelter and saw God, Airi. And he told me the same thing I’m about to tell you now.”

Airi leaned in.

“What did he say?”

Kazuo raised his middle finger. “No.”

BOOM. Emotional damage. Like a warhead made of sarcasm.

Airi’s jaw dropped slightly. Even the café’s playlist hiccupped, switching from lo-fi to Gregorian chanting by mistake.

Rei leaned over to Kaito and whispered, “Yo, I think we just witnessed a verbal genocide.”

Airi trembled for half a second.

Then she stood up, collected herself, and said with eerily perfect composure:

“Excuse me. I just need to go outside… and scream into the void for thirty seconds.”

She floated toward the exit with the grace of a goddess mid-mental-breakdown, the boba girls at the counter ducking behind their registers instinctively.

Kazuo sighed, leaned back, and looked at Rei.

“Why do hot girls with big double bonkawonkas keep trying to turn me into their husband?”

Rei shrugged. “It’s the vibe, man. You got that ‘I hate everything but would still rearrange someone’s guts if they asked nicely’ aura.”

Kaito blinked. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Kazuo said, slumping down in his seat, “that I need a lobotomy and a VPN subscription.”