Mahito

When I first saw him, I only thought he was a strange man.

He looked human, but his body was covered in strange stitches, like a crudely mended rag doll.

Back then, I thought he was cosplaying some obscure character, or was into some kind of underground culture.

Tokyo was so big, it had all kinds of strange people. One more hardly mattered.

But after spending time with him, I realized that wasn't it.

Not at all.

It happened at a movie theater.

To see the newly released cult film "Worm Man 3," I had gone three stops by train to this independent theater known for screening niche films.

I bought an adult ticket-even though I had only turned sixteen last month, the ticket clerk barely glanced at my student ID, just lazily tore off a ticket and handed it over.

Fine by me. Saved me explaining.

The "Worm Man" series was garbage in the eyes of mainstream critics, trash that desecrated the art of cinema.

But I didn't care.

In those twisted limbs and deranged plots, I actually found a strange kind of peace.

Maybe because the madness in movies was, at least, honest madness.

There weren't many people in the auditorium.

Few people watched this kind of movie to begin with, and this was a weekday afternoon screening.

I counted roughly seven or eight people, including myself, scattered sparsely across an auditorium that could seat a hundred.

But none of that mattered.

What mattered was that I liked this movie, so I would quietly watch it to the end.

Twenty minutes into the film, when the protagonist, Worm Man, first shed his skin and was reborn in the laboratory, voices came from the front rows.

They belonged to a few high school students in another school's uniforms, two boys and a girl.

They had been chatting quietly since the movie started, but now they were getting louder.

"That's so gross... What are these effects? They're not worth a penny."

"Stop talking and watch. I think it's pretty interesting."

"What's interesting about it? It's all slimy. I'm going to puke up my dinner."

Stop talking.

I said it in my head, my lips moving, but the sound caught in my throat and wouldn't come out.

As usual.

Then a phone rang.

It was the sugary singing of some popular idol, especially grating in the quiet auditorium.

"It's Tsubasa," one of the boys said, his tone boastful.

Turn your phone off in the theater.

"Hey, what's up?" He answered without the slightest intention of lowering his voice.

"What, now? We're watching a movie... Yeah, that 'Worm Man' thing. It's absolute crap. Where are you? Shibuya? Wait for me. I'll be right there."

He started gathering his things, his plastic bag rustling. The girl beside him complained quietly, "Huh, we're leaving? The movie isn't over yet."

"What's there to watch in this crap? Come on, let's go. There's a party over at Tsubasa's."

They stood, the sound of their seat cushions springing up echoing through the auditorium.

One boy lit a cigarette, his lighter's flame flickering in the darkness.

That was when I saw him.

A figure appeared out of thin air beside those high school students.

When had he walked over? I hadn't heard any footsteps at all.

He leaned close to them, a strange smile on his face.

But strangely, the students seemed completely unaware of him. They kept gathering their things, putting on their jackets, laughing and talking, as though he didn't exist.

Then I heard his voice.

It was very soft, very gentle, but every word reached my ears clearly.

"You lot..." he said, tilting his head as though studying some interesting little animals, "need to follow the rules."

He reached out and touched each of the three students on the shoulder.

The motion was light, like a casual pat between friends.

But the instant he touched them, all three froze.

The talking stopped.

The laughter stopped.

The sounds of packing up stopped.

The auditorium suddenly became terrifyingly quiet, with only the slimy sound effects of Worm Man shedding his skin remaining.

Then the strange man's figure slowly vanished, as though dissolving into the darkness.

Just as when he appeared, there was no warning and no trace.

I sat in my seat, my heart pounding wildly in my chest.

My eyes were fixed on the three motionless high school students in the front row.

A few seconds later, they began moving, but not to keep packing up and leave.

They began twisting.

The boy who had answered the phone-his face began swelling like an inflating balloon.

The bones beneath his skin made faint cracking sounds. His eyeballs bulged out of their sockets and hung against his cheeks like two rotten grapes.

His chin disappeared, his whole face turning into a blurry ball of flesh with no distinguishable features.

The girl beside him had her neck stretched like a rubber band, twisted into an impossible curve.

Her arms bent backward, her fingers long and thin like a spider's legs, scratching unconsciously at the air.

The other boy's body split down the middle, like a doll torn apart.

They made sounds.

As though something was stuck in their throats.

Screams? I couldn't tell.

I stood and walked toward the front row, step by step, toward those three things that were no longer human in shape.

When I reached them, I stopped and looked down.

At that swollen face without a chin-I knew that face.

No, I had known it.

Just last week, he had pinned me inside a bathroom stall and burned my hair with a lighter, saying, "Vermin should be burned to death."

At the girl whose neck was twisted like a braid-she was on the Student Council, always wearing a crisply ironed uniform and smiling as she told the teachers, "Yoshino skipped class again. It's really worrying."

But her notebook was full of drawings of me being bullied, with words written beside them.

"Die."

"Trash."

"Disgusting."

At the boy split down the middle-he was their friend, always following them around like a faithful dog.

He rarely did anything himself. He just watched, laughed, and recorded it on his phone.

Now they had become this.

They looked nothing like humans.

Only then did I realize-the person with stitches on his body wasn't human.

That was why he could do things humans couldn't.

For some reason, I should have been afraid of that.

But I wasn't.

I turned and rushed out of the auditorium, through the exit passage, and out of the theater.

The street was busy with traffic and hurrying pedestrians. The world was terrifyingly normal.

I searched the crowd, looking all around, as though searching for something important I had lost.

Finally, in an alley behind the theater, I found him.

He stood deep in the alley with his back to me, gazing up at a sliver of sky showing between the tall buildings.

Sunlight fell on the stitches covering his body, and those threads wriggled faintly, as though alive.

I stopped, panting, and looked at him.

He seemed to sense my gaze and slowly turned around.

He still wore that innocent smile, as though he hadn't been the one who had turned three people into monsters in the theater.

I confronted him.

"Mm," he began, his voice as gentle as ever, "I did it. What do you want to do? Teach me a lesson?"

He walked toward me with light steps, as though out for a stroll.

He stopped two paces in front of me and tilted his head, studying me.

"Were they special to you?" he asked, his tone giving no hint whether he was serious or teasing. "Friends?"

Friends?

The word made me want to laugh.

I opened my mouth, wanting to say something, but the sound caught in my throat, just as it had in the auditorium.

I knew those high school students.

No, more than knew them.

We attended the same high school, in the same year, even sharing a classroom for some lessons.

But my memories of our "time together" were entirely one-sided.

The stink from the soles of their shoes when they trampled me underfoot.

The feeling of a beetle's legs scraping my throat when they forced me to eat it while it was still wriggling.

The reflection of my own humiliated face in the water when they shoved my head into a toilet.

The dull thud of bones hitting the ground when a group surrounded me and kicked and beat me.

The pungent smell of ink when they wrote on my face with a marker.

The vibrations of my phone announcing countless new messages when a video of me crying and begging for mercy was passed around the class group chat.

Were they special to me?

No.

They were nothing but trash.

Just like the teachers at school who turned a blind eye, just like this world so cold it was suffocating-

All trash.

I wanted that kind of power too.

I wanted to trample them underfoot too, to watch them twist and warp, to watch them turn from "human" to "inhuman," to watch them experience the same despair as me.

To see fear on those faces that always wore mocking smiles, to see those neat uniforms stained with filth, to see the phones in their hands fall and shatter on the ground-

I wanted to see it.

A flame rose inside me.

Not a flame of anger-anger was too shallow.

It was something deeper, something darker, burning up from my marrow, through my flesh and skin, until even my eyes burned.

I understood that this was my wrath.

It had built up for sixteen years, accumulating from the day I was born, burning quietly at school, at home, in every corner where no one could see, until finally, at this moment, it erupted-

Wrath.

So I raised my head, looked straight at the inhuman being before me, and used every bit of strength I had to force a sound from my trembling throat.

"Something like that..."

My voice was hoarse, but clear.

"Could I do it too?"

He-Mahito-smiled.

A smile carrying a certain satisfaction and anticipation, as though he had seen through everything in my heart.

"Of course you can," he said, reaching out and resting his hand lightly on my shoulder.

Then he asked my name.

"What's your name?"

For some reason, I answered honestly.

"Junpei Yoshino."

He took another step forward, closing the distance between us.

"Junpei."

He called me by my name. Not my surname, but my given name.

Warmly, naturally, as though we had known each other for a long time.

Only looking back now did I understand that, from that moment, I had set foot on a path of no return.

But that came later.

His name was Mahito, and even though we had only just met, he called me "Junpei" so familiarly.

It felt... a little awkward.

But for some reason, I didn't dislike it.

Afterward, with Mahito by my side, I awakened some mysterious power.

He said it was a Cursed Technique, a possibility hidden deep within my soul.

He could reshape the body and touch things deeper still-like the brain, like the soul.

He guided me, drew out my potential, like a gardener tending a peculiar plant.

I also gradually came to understand what he was.

Mahito was a cursed spirit.

A curse born from human hatred, fear, malice, and despair.

An amalgamation of negative energy, a manifestation of the dark side.

But he understood me.

He understood how suffocating every day I spent at school was, how miserable my life was.

He understood that I wanted power not for a moment's satisfaction, but to bring about complete change.

To change my circumstances, change the way I saw the world, even change the world itself.

So...

I considered Mahito my closest companion.

The only one who didn't treat me as a "monster," but instead became a "monster" alongside me-

My companion.