Takemura Itsuki

The green curtains of the little window between the wooden wall were swaying front and back softly. The wall was just about a step away from my right shoulder. My butt was on the bed, with the curtains on my right. My legs were spread open as I sat on the bed, both my feet dominantly still on the ground. My elbows were on top of my knees, my head tilted down in despair and guilt, and my eyes narrowed and open in realization. In front of me stood the black silhouette—as if it were directly looking at me—with its hands hanging beside its waist.

“So, did you fulfill my last wish?”

“… No, I couldn’t.”

“Then do it quick, pal.”

***

Isekai’d

Written by Dhruv Pabreja

***

The newspaper was kept on top of the bed beside my right elbow and thigh. It was double-folded and just about a quarter of the newspaper was visible, with the headline just below ‘…mian Times’ read in bold Japanese text, ‘Takemura Itsuki finally makes it in Top Sixteen at fifteenth berth, gonna fight Suzuki Tadashi placed at two.’

“Yeah, I promised Haruto that I’d fulfill his promise,” I thought, my eyes glaring at the wooden floor between my legs.

The black silhouette was standing on top of the bricked railing at the far edge of the roof. I looked at its back, my eyes wide open, my nose and open mouth breathing in and out quickly and panting. I looked at him facing the black flames rising from the other side of the roof in the middle of the darkness of the night. On the other side of the flames, more flames—both narrow and thick, close and faraway—were rising up from different parts of the whole town, rising up toward the stars and then disappearing. I remembered that the figure turned his head to the back, said, “Please… Itsuki…” in my own voice, turned my head to the front, moved his right foot up and front, and soon his body moved down.

“Yeah, I gotta… make sure his death ain’t in vain. I gotta give meaning to his life.”

“… I gotta talk to Ichika once all of this is over.”

***

Tachibana Ichika

The narrow inner dining area of the restaurant with rows of wooden tables and chairs on both sides was densely packed with people as men and women sat on the tables, with no table left free, and all of them filled with fresh food and people feasting upon them. In the back, between the two rows, stood my figure, wearing my usual black skirt and white apron, along with my black shoes. I was looking at a man chewing food, with his bare hands filled with some soups. He then turned at me as I was glaring at him, and then said, “And a cup of coffee too.”

I turned my head to the notepad in my left hand, scribbling my quill on it. “And a cup of coffee,” I narrated as I wrote. I then turned my head to her again, smiled, and said, “It’ll be here in about five minutes, sir.”

“Thank you,” He nodded, turned down to the table at his meal, and continued to cut his food.

I turned to my right and walked out of the aisle of people stomping in food, my head down at my notepad—spiraled at its top—in my left hand as I flipped its pages with my right hand. “There’s so much rush nowadays, now that the rankings are ending!” I commented as I walked. I then turned my head to the front again, moved my arms down, and then turned to the right, entering the outer dining area with the tables on my left—in front of the glass wall where some women were walking with baskets in their arms at some steps’ distance from each other. On my right was the shelf where the food was served to me in trays. I turned to the right, looked at the shelf filled with three to four trays, and then turned to Yumiko at the other side of the shelf, preparing coffee with her head tilted down on the other side of the shelf, at another shelf which was placed below the front one. As I took up a tray in the middle of the trays, I announced, “Another coffee!” I then turned to my right at the dining area again and walked in. I turned to the left, entered the inner dining area, and walked in the middle of the rows of tables filled with people and food. As I walked in the middle of the aisle, my eyes turned wide open as an idea suddenly hit me.

“Itsuki… I still gotta talk to him.”

“I had just forgotten that I had to talk to Itsuki about the important subject. I wanted to tell him all of my thoughts, all of what was going inside my head. But, he was always so busy with the training, and then the rankings, that I never got the time to go talk to him.”

I remembered the back of Itsuki running on the wide unpaved road in the middle of the narrow bricked houses, his sword flung wide on his right, as he ran through the road filled with the corpses of people cut or attacked, with their blood surrounding them. I was sitting inside the cart—which had a shed on the top—as I looked at the front, looking at the figure in red top running with anger besides the back of the girl wearing a white top with a pink bandana tied around her neck, her hands holding the straps of the horses in the front of the cart.

“He had changed, and it was my job to not let that happen. It was my job to tell him how much he’s changed, and what negative of an impact he had on himself. I had to tell him he was not the only one responsible for Haruto’s death, and that we all were in it together. That… is my last job as the leader of the little group. We’ve had fun, but the time was rather different than it used to be at Surfurine.”