Prologue | What goes up must come down
( tw: suicide, heights, blood, eye trauma )
A video feed plays on your watch. It looks to be the cafeteria, and in it is one lone figure. Brown hair, blue jacket, black uniform pants — Kyojji Nagase, SHSL Sprinter. He slips in, looking anxiously around the room as he navigates it. His path leads him towards one of the tables, his trembling hands resting upon the back of one of its chairs. He looks out towards the nearby window, but whatever he is thinking is obscured. Did he look tranquilly at that sight? Scared? He takes it in for a few moments, and you could trick yourself into believing a calm has entered the scene, but you know.
You know something must come.
You watch that serene energy leave him as he picks up the chair and in a blur of speed, he is beating the window with it. The glass cracks, but he does not relent. Filled with a frenetic energy, the chair is swung again and again. In no time at all, the window is broken, glass shards shattering in what could be described as a beautiful mess accompanied by the sound of Kyoji’s scream turning from one of anger to horrific pain.
Kyoji staggers back, dropping the chair and falling to a kneel as he brings his hands up to his face. Specks of his blood litter the floor, but he soon rises again, too soon perhaps, but time is of the essence. If he wants something, he has to do it now surely.
He plants one of his palms against the floor and pushes himself back up to his feet, a bloody half-print staining the cafeteria where his hand had been. Adrenaline-fueled steps bring him to the broken window where a great blue sky expands before your — his — eyes, and it is a truly brilliant sight to behold.
For a split second, you see it. You see him turn his head back, wary of who might be behind him, and you are given the first clear shot of his face. It is marred by his blood, splatters and cuts decorating it. But despite the very serious wound he has sustained, one that still bleeds and demands from him, all his green eye speaks is some kind of horror — what lies behind them? Something between despair, fear, and resolution altogether…
You suppose it matters not.
He turns, looking down at the world just beyond him, and he soon reaches for it. He jumps and accepts his plummet, and he simply becomes no more.
Twenty-five point six meters. A fall height that has spelt fatal for many before him. His descent is surely not kind to him, and that fact alongside the last view of his face is what sticks with you even as the video cuts out. You have watched the athlete’s final moments, his decision, just as Daichi Sasanari has told you about.
Kyoji Nagase, the Super High School Level Sprinter, is dead.













