"What was there to be afraid of about thunder and rain? Uzo couldn't control the weather. If anything, this only proved that what was happening now had nothing to do with him."
Hashimoto Maya hid in a room that looked very safe, took a sip from his teacup, and steadied his nerves.
He gazed at the lit residential building in the distance and muttered, "This kind of weather always reminds me of that terrifying thunderstorm on the plane... But what does that have to do with me? As long as I firmly refuse to show up and avoid contact with anyone else, I won't be dragged to center stage."
Thinking of this, and of the two guards still running around outside for a group of students and not yet back, Hashimoto Maya let out a pitying, sympathetic sigh. "...Good luck."
Just as he was about to return to his bed and sit down for a rest, a frantic figure suddenly ran past the corridor dozens of meters away outside the window.
"...?"
Hashimoto Maya's heart skipped a beat. He looked again and again, confirming that it really was a person. ...Running out alone in the middle of the night? Did this person have a death wish?!
He was silently shocked, completely forgetting that he, too, had once been a cold-blooded maniac who roamed alone through the depths of the night, taking down one organization target after another with a single knife strike.
Though he had no evidence, Hashimoto Maya seemed to see a bad premonition about to come true—an invisible curtain hanging over the heads of every islander was slowly being drawn open.
A few minutes earlier.
Matsuzaki Haru returned to her room without even turning on the light. She strode into the restroom, splashed cold water onto her