There!

Whatever the chubby kid made of the truth he had begun to piece together, the person he envied might not have considered it anything to envy.

Last night had felt like a nightmare brought on by a raging fever.

He couldn't help it. The feeling of high-voltage current coursing through a living body—it burned! It burned like hell!

Luo Chuanyi was curled up alone in a corner of an abandoned work shed beside the Sumida River. He still wore the hoodie he had pulled off someone's clothesline. Honestly, it was much too big: the cuffs covered half his hands, the hem fell past his knees, and it carried a faint smell of mothballs mixed with cheap laundry detergent.

But at this point, he couldn't worry about that.

After all, running around stark naked was hardly a hobby most normal people would admit to.

Even in Growing Form, Kamen Rider Kuuga possessed enough limited control over matter to keep his clothes intact as they changed with his transformation. That was to say nothing of his ability to turn matter into weapons in his various forms—

But if you went and fried your own clothes by grabbing a live wire, there was nothing to be done!

He looked down at his hands. They seemed no different from an ordinary person's, with grime still under his nails and even a few flecks of asphalt lodged there from when he had braced himself against a wall to leap between buildings.

Who would have guessed that, just over ten hours ago, those same hands had been wrapped in a white substance like an insect's shell and pressed against a high-voltage cable carrying more juice than a certain yellow electric mouse's Thunderbolt?

Life had a funny way of working out.

He sighed deeply. The burning pain