The family viewing room is a tomb of noise.

Gray plastic chairs are bolted to gray linoleum in neat, terrible rows. The air is recycled, cold, and smells like industrial cleaner and the sharp, sweet tang of other people’s anxiety. A massive screen dominates the far wall, currently showing a shimmering, empty logo for the Hinaro Tournament. To its left, a smaller digital ticker scrolls the names of the fifty entrants in a silent, relentless loop. I find him. Contestant 28: Shiro Ninemora. The letters are a punch to my throat.

Mom’s hand is a vise on my shoulder. Dad stands ramrod straight beside her, his arms crossed so tightly the fabric of his jacket strains. We are a small island in a sea of other families, all wearing the same frozen expressions. Hope and terror, mixed and set into concrete. I clutch the aquamarine rose at my throat. The metal is warm from my skin, the gem cool beneath my thumb. Serenity and courage. Protection during travel. Shiro’s voice from yesterday is a ghost in this sterile room.

“They’ll show him,” Mom says, not to anyone. “They have to show each contestant at the start. It’s in the rules.”

The rules. The arbitrary, nonsensical rules of a thing that appeared out of nothing seven years ago. A dungeon, a circus, a meat grinder dressed up in neon lights and booming announcements. My stomach is a hard knot. I press the rose charm into my palm until the prongs bite.

The screen flickers. The logo dissolves. Two figures appear, men in crisp, identical suits with smiles so wide and bright they look painful. The volume blares to life.

“GOOD MORNING, HINARO!” one booms, his arms spread wide as if to embrace all of us through the screen. The sound is too big for the room. It vibrates in my teeth.

They begin the roll call. A cavalcade of names and numbers, peppered with jokes that aren’t funny, stats that mean nothing. Contestant 4, a woman from the Northern District, gets a comment about her hair. Contestant 12, a man twice Shiro’s age, is called a “veteran of life’s little surprises.” The laughter from the announcers is a canned, hollow sound. I watch their grinning mouths, the perfect white of their teeth. They look like puppets. Something moves wrong around the edges of their jaws.

My inner monologue is a silent scream. *Just say his name. Just get to him. Let me see him.*

“And now, a young man with fire in his step!” the second announcer chirps. “Contestant 28! Give it up for Shiro Ninemora!”

We erupt. Our small island trembles. Mom’s shriek is raw in my ear. Dad’s cheer is a deep, short bark. My own voice gets lost in the torrent, a thin thread of sound. On screen, a shot appears. It’s a close-up, taken from some camera high above a vast, grassy starting line. Fifty figures are staggered in lanes. And there, in lane 28, is my brother.

He’s looking up, right into the lens. His dark red hair is spiked perfectly, defiant. He’s wearing simple gray athletic gear. His face is set, not with the cocky grin from yesterday, but with a fierce, focused calm. His brown eyes are fixed on something far beyond the camera. He looks older. He looks like a stranger. He looks like a contestant.

*That’s not you,* I think, my nails digging into my palms. *That’s the you for them. Where’s the you who carried me home?*

The announcers rattle through the remaining names. The final name echoes away. A sudden, absolute silence falls in the viewing room. The only sound is the muffled hum of the projector and the ragged sound of my own breathing.

“And now… for our first match!” The screen splits. On one side, the announcers, leaning forward with theatrical intensity. On the other, an aerial, sweeping shot of a landscape that makes my blood go cold.

It’s a forest, but wrong. The trees are a dense, bruise-purple canopy, so thick it seems to swallow the light. Gashes of deep shadow crisscross the earth beneath—the caverns, gaping maws of darkness. In the far, far distance, on a solitary hill, a tiny white flag flickers. The scale is monstrous. It’s a distance that would take days to cross on a clear road. This is not a road. This is a trap.

“A simple race!” the announcer crows. “First to the flag claims the points! But beware the green! The forest is… *lively*!”

They cut back to the starting line. The fifty contestants are coiled springs. Shiro is in a low stance, his fingers brushing the grass. The camera zooms in on his face. A bead of sweat traces a path from his temple to his jaw. He doesn’t blink.

“Contestants… GET READY!”

The words are a drumbeat. My heart hammers against my ribs in frantic, off-rhythm protest.

“GET STEADY!”

Shiro’s shoulders tense. The muscles in his forearms cord. The aquamarine at my throat feels like a stone, dragging me down into the cold floor.

“GO!”

The sound is a physical shockwave. A roar. The figures on screen explode forward.

Chaos. Immediate, brutal chaos. The cameras cut rapidly, dizzyingly. A man in lane 7 trips and is trampled. A woman veers left and plunges directly into a fissure that wasn’t there a second before, her scream cut short by a crunch of metal and bone from the speakers. I flinch, a full-body spasm. Mom makes a wet, choking sound.

“Find Shiro,” Dad barks, his eyes glued to the screen, darting, searching. “Find him.”

The director finds him. A shot, from behind. Shiro is a bolt of gray, pumping his arms, his stride long and eating up the grass. He’s not the fastest. Not the slowest. He’s holding the center of the pack, his head on a swivel. *He’s assessing,* I realize. *He’s not just running. He’s thinking.* The thought is a fragile flare of warmth in my chest.

The grassy plain ends at the tree line like a cliff edge. The purple canopy looms, an impenetrable wall. The front-runners hit it first and vanish, swallowed by the gloom. Shiro reaches the edge a heartbeat later. I see him hesitate. Just for a fraction of a second. He looks left, right, at the dark mouths of the nearest caverns yawning from the earth beside the trees. His eyes narrow. Then he does something no one else has done.

He doesn’t go into the forest. He veers sharply right and leaps.

He leaps straight down into one of the caverns.

Mom screams. A short, sharp burst of air. My own breath stops. The camera angle switches to a shot from inside the cavern mouth, looking up. Shiro’s figure plummets, down into the black. The screen goes dark for a heart-stopping second.

Then a new camera feed flickers on, green-tinged and shaky. Night vision. It’s from a camera on Shiro’s shoulder, or helmet. The perspective is his. We are falling with him.

The walls of the cavern rush past, slick with phosphorescent moss that paints everything in eerie, swimming green light. It’s not a sheer drop. It’s a slope, steep and treacherous. Shiro is half-running, half-sliding, his boots skidding on the wet stone, his arms out for balance. The roar of the crowd above is gone. The only sounds are the harsh grate of his breathing in our ears and the terrible, rushing whisper of the descent.

*He’s insane. He’s brilliant. He’s going to die.* The thoughts crash together in my head.

The cavern floor rushes up. He hits it knees bent, rolls through the impact with a grunt that vibrates through the audio feed, and comes up in a crouch. The night-vision camera pans. We’re in a tunnel. The air is thick, misty. The ground is flat. It stretches ahead into darkness, but it’s clear. No roots, no undergrowth, no pits.

Shiro starts to run. A steady, ground-eating pace. The tunnel is a straight shot under the forest.

A sob hiccups out of Mom. This one is pure relief. Dad’s hand finds hers, squeezes. My own eyes are dry and burning. I can’t blink. I am inside that green-tinted screen. I am in the tunnel with him. I can smell the damp, mineral air. I can feel the jar of his footsteps in my bones.

On the main screen, a split-screen view shows the chaos above. Contestants are tangled in vicious, thorny vines that seem to move. Others are fleeing from shimmering, insect-like swarms. One man is simply lost, running in circles beneath the same twisted, mocking tree. The forest is eating them.

And Shiro is running beneath it all. Unseen. Alone.

His breathing is the only soundtrack. In, out. In, out. A metronome in the dark. He doesn’t speak. He just runs. The tunnel seems endless. Minutes stretch. The family room is utterly silent, every soul tethered to that green, bobbing point of view.

Then, light. A pinprick ahead, growing. The end of the tunnel. Shiro pours on speed. The camera flares white as he bursts out into the open air.

The view switches back to the aerial. He’s emerged from a cavern mouth on the *other side* of the massive forest. The flag hill is right there. A clear, sloping meadow between him and it. He’s ahead. He’s the first one out.

A collective gasp ripples through the viewing room. My heart soars, a wild, painful bird in my chest. *He did it. He’s going to win.*

Shiro doesn’t hesitate. He sprints for the hill. The flag whips in a breeze we can’t feel. Fifty meters. Thirty. His face on the big screen is a mask of pure exertion, lips pulled back from his teeth, eyes fixed on the prize.

Ten meters.

The ground in front of him erupts.

Not from an explosion. From beneath. The earth heaves upward, and something climbs out. It’s a construct of roots and packed soil, shaped roughly like a man, but three times Shiro’s height. A guardian. A final, stupid, brutal joke.

Shiro skids to a halt. The thing lumbers toward him, each step shaking the earth. The camera closes in on his face. For the first time, I see it. Not fear. Fury. A raw, blistering anger that twists his features. He didn’t come this far for a trick.

He doesn’t run around it. He doesn’t try to fight it. He looks past it, at the flag. He looks at the creature. At the hill. I see the calculation flash in his eyes, swift and deadly as a knife.

He runs *at* it.

The creature swings a massive, clubbed arm. Shiro dives under the blow, the wind of it ruffling his hair. He hits the ground, rolls, and comes up already sprinting again, not away, but straight up the creature’s leg. He uses the root-like textures as handholds, scrambling up its back like a squirrel. The creature bellows, a sound of grinding rocks, and tries to reach for him.

Shiro reaches its shoulder. He plants his foot. And he leaps.

It’s not a jump. It’s a flight. He soars through the air, arms outstretched, gray against the bright sky. The camera follows him in a slow, beautiful, terrible arc. For a second, he is suspended. For a second, he is free.

He lands in a rolling tumble on the hill slope, just below the flag. He doesn’t stop. He staggers to his feet, stumbles the last few steps, and his hand closes around the white cloth.

He yanks it from the ground.

A triumphant fanfare blares. The words “CONTESTANT 28 – VICTOR” flash across the screen in blinding gold.

The family viewing room explodes. People are screaming, crying, hugging. Mom collapses into Dad, weeping. Dad is laughing, a shaky, disbelieving sound. The noise is a wall.

I am silent. I am watching the screen. The camera is on Shiro’s face. He’s leaning on his knees, gasping for air, the flag clutched in his fist. He looks up, directly into the lens. He’s searching. His eyes, brown and fierce, scan the unseen crowd, the cameras, the sky. They are looking for something. For someone.

Then he smiles. It’s not his cocky grin. It’s smaller. Tired. Real. He brings his fist, the one clutching the flag, to his chest. Right over his heart. He holds it there for a beat. Two.

He’s not looking at the crowd. He’s looking at me. He knows I’m watching. This is for me.

The screen cuts to the celebrating announcers. The moment is gone. The noise of the room rushes back in, but it’s distant, muffled, as if I’m at the bottom of a deep, dark well. I touch the blue rose at my throat. The gem is hot. My cheeks are wet. I didn’t feel myself start to cry.

He won. He’s alive. He’s brilliant and brave and he won.

So why does the cold in my bones feel deeper than ever? Why does the image that lingers behind my eyes are not of his victory leap, but of the darkness of that cavern, and the silent, singing boy on the stairs who looked at me like I was already in mourning?

The family room empties around us, a slow drain of shouting relatives and weeping strangers, leaving behind the smell of spilled soda and cold metal chairs.

Shiro isn’t coming home.

The announcement crackles over the arena’s intercom, tinny and final. All victorious contestants are to report to the competitor’s barracks for processing and preparation for the next round. There is no goodbye. The screen that showed him, breathing hard and smiling, is now just a flat, dark rectangle.

My parents are buzzing, a hive of relieved energy. Dad claps me on the shoulder, his hand heavy and warm. “See? He’s through! First match down!” Mom is already talking logistics, her voice a rapid-fire stream about dinner, about celebrating, about the commute home. The twins, Kaito and Lina, are nine-year-old hurricanes of motion, reenacting Shiro’s leap across the stained carpet. “And then I jump off the dirt monster!” Kaito yells, launching himself off a chair.

I force a smile onto my face. It feels like a plastic mask, stiff and unconvincing. “Yeah,” I say. The word is ash in my mouth.

We spill out of the arena’s underbelly into the late afternoon glare. The city of Hinaro swallows us back into its noise and shadow. The walk to the tram is a blur of concrete and neon. I tune out the twins’ play-by-play, my parents’ planning. My hand finds the blue rose at my throat. The aquamarine is cool again, lifeless. A stone. Not the live, hot coal it felt like in that viewing room.

On the tram, pressed between a man smelling of grease and the window, I feel eyes. A specific, crawling weight on the back of my neck. I turn, my heart a trapped bird against my ribs. The car is a mosaic of tired faces, staring at phones, at the floor, at nothing. No silver eyes. No boy singing a silent song. Just the ordinary, crushing crowd.

But the feeling doesn’t leave. It follows me up the stairs to our apartment block, a ghost in the stairwell’s buzzing fluorescent light.

Dinner is loud. Spaghetti and garlic bread. The kitchen is warm, yellow-lit, a scene from a hundred other nights. Dad toasts with fizzy lemonade. “To Shiro! First of many!” The glasses clink. The twins slurp noodles dramatically. Mom beams, the worry lines around her eyes softened for the first time in weeks.

I move food around my plate. The tomato sauce looks too red. Metallic. I think of the earth guardian, of roots and soil. I push the plate away. “Not hungry,” I murmur when Mom looks over.

“Adrenaline crash,” Dad says wisely, nodding. “Happens to the best of us.”

They talk about summer plans. The beach tomorrow. A real outing, a distraction. The twins cheer. I nod along. My mind is a locked room, and inside it, a single image plays on a loop: Shiro’s eyes, scanning the camera lens. Not triumphant. Searching. Desperate to connect. The smile he gave was real, but it was the smile of someone who has just run a very long way, and knows the road is endless.

He looked like a contestant. Not like my brother.

The beach the next day is a postcard. White sand, turquoise water, a sky so bright it hurts. I sit on our striped towel, knees drawn up, and let the noise of the world wash over me. Kids shrieking in the surf. Radios playing pop songs. The sizzle of sunscreen on skin.

Kaito and Lina are building an elaborate sand castle, a fortress with moats and towers. “This is the arena,” Lina declares, patting a central mound. “And this little shell is Shiro!” She places a speckled periwinkle on top.

I watch the shell. The tide is coming in to fastand colder then normal. A thin, foamy finger of water creeps up the sand, fills the moat, and undermines the castle wall. The tower with the shell on top lists, then collapses silently into slurry.

Lina shrieks, not in dismay, but in delight. “It fell! Let’s rebuild it bigger!”

I look away, out to the horizon where the sea meets the sky in a seamless, blinding line. The vastness should make me feel small. Instead, it makes me feel trapped. The entire world is this arena, and the water is just another kind of wall.

We are home by three, salt-crusted and sandy. The apartment feels too quiet after the roar of the ocean. The twins shower first. I stand in the living room, dripping on the hardwood, and stare at the blank television. In an hour, it will show me my brother again. Show me what he has become in a single night away.

At 4 PM precisely, we gather. The couch sags under our weight. The room smells of coconut sunscreen and damp hair. The screen flickers to life.

The announcers are different today. A man and a woman, their voices slick and cheerful as game show hosts. “Welcome back, Hinaro! Oh an do we have a show for you today!” the woman excitement. “Round Two promises even more excitement! Today’s challenge: Gem Heist!”

The camera sweeps over a new landscape. Not a forest, but a ruined, urban-looking zone. Crumbling concrete buildings, twisted metal scaffolds, alleys choked with rubble. It’s painted in the same surreal, overly vivid colors—moss a violent green, rust a bloody orange. The contestants are already there, grouped into four color-coded teams of ten. Shiro is in blue. A patch on his sleeve, a number on his back. 28.

My stomach clenches. He looks… rested. Clean. His spiked dark red hair is neat. He’s listening intently to a tall woman on his team, nodding. This is a strategy huddle. This is not the boy who carried me home from school.

“The rules are simple.” The male announcer chims in, his voice almost sounding giddy.” Each team has a base with a large, glowing gem. Steal another team’s gem, bring it back to your base. You lose your gem, you’re out. First team with at least one gem wins. But watch out!” the male announcer chuckles. “The Zone isn’t just gonna sit pretty!”

As if on cue, the ground near the yellow team’s base shudders. A geyser of acidic-looking green fluid erupts, spraying the area. Contestants scatter. The game hasn’t officially started, and the land is already attacking.

“Get ready… get steady… GO!”

Chaos. The blue team, Shiro’s team, moves as a unit at first, a quick, disciplined rush into the cover of a half-collapsed parking garage. I see Shiro take point. He’s not the fastest, but his movements are economical, sure. He checks corners. He signals with a sharp chop of his hand. Two teammates flank him.

“Look at him,” Dad breathes, pride thick in his voice. “Natural leader.”

He is. That’s what terrifies me. Where did he learn this? He played sports, but not like this. This isn’t a game. This is tactical. Survival.

The feed splits. We watch multiple angles. A brutal skirmish breaks out between red and green in an open plaza. It’s not a race. It’s a fight. Fists, kicks, the environment used as a weapon—someone is shoved into a wall of brittle, glowing fungus that erupts in a cloud of paralyzing spores.

My eyes are glued to Shiro’s corner of the screen. His team is moving silently through the skeletal remains of a department store. They’re hunting the yellow team’s gem. He pauses by a shattered display window, his reflection a ghost in the glass. His face is utterly focused. Calm. The cocky grin is gone. In its place is a flat, analytical determination. It is a face I have never seen before.

He points. Two teammates dash across an open alley. A tremor runs through the building. From the ceiling, a cluster of what look like metallic vines drop, snapping like whips. Shiro doesn’t flinch. He’s already moving, grabbing a piece of rebar and jamming it into the mechanism the vines are sprouting from. It grinds, sparks, and the vines go limp.

He did that without thinking. Like he knew.

They find the yellow base in the basement level, guarded by three players. A fight ensues, short and brutal. Shiro doesn’t throw the flashy punches. He uses leverage, momentum, the debris around him. He trips one opponent into a slick of that same green fluid. The man screams as it sizzles against his skin. The sound is cut off as the feed mercifully switches away.

My nails are digging into my palms. I taste blood. I’ve bitten my cheek.

The blue team secures the yellow gem. It’s a pulsing, citrine-colored crystal the size of a grapefruit. Shiro takes it. He tucks it under his arm, and they retreat, not the way they came, but through a ventilation shaft he pried open.

They are almost back to their blue base when they are ambushed. The red team, missing their own gem, desperate. It’s a messy, close-quarters brawl in a narrow corridor of shattered tile. Someone gets hold of the yellow gem. It’s wrenched from Shiro’s grip. It clatters to the floor, rolling toward a crack that opens into blackness.

Shiro doesn’t hesitate. He dives. Not for the gem. For the red team player nearest the crack. He tackles him, a full-body impact that drives the air from the man’s lungs and sends them both crashing into the wall. The man’s head cracks against concrete. He goes still.

Shiro rolls off him, scoops up the gem, and is running before the man hits the ground. His teammates form up around him, a living shield. They make it to their base. The blue gem is still there, glowing safely. Shiro slams the yellow gem into a slot next to it. A siren blares. “BLUE TEAM – ACQUISITION!”

A number shows up at the top of the screen 30 people left in the tournament. 

The camera zooms in on his face as the victory notice flashes. He’s breathing hard. Sweat paints his temple. There’s a cut on his jaw, welling a single, perfect bead of blood. He swipes at it absently, looks at the red smear on his thumb.

Then he looks up, directly at the camera drone hovering nearby. His eyes find the lens. The fierce focus is still there, but it’s receding, like a tide pulling back. Something else is coming in. Not the tired, real smile from yesterday. This is hollow. Empty. He just knocked a man unconscious without a second thought. He just won.

He lifts his hand, the one with his own blood on it. He doesn’t make the heart gesture. He just gives a single, slow, deliberate nod.

The feed cuts. The announcers are celebrating Blue Team’s clever play. My family is cheering again, but it’s quieter this time. Subdued. They saw it too. The tackle. The way that man fell.

I don’t cry. The cold in my bones has solidified into a permanent, glacial core. I touch the blue rose. It’s not hot. It’s ice-cold. A dead weight.

He won again. He’s moving forward. He’s becoming something the tournament needs him to be. Something sharp. Something that doesn’t hesitate.

I sit in the ringing silence after the TV goes dark, and I understand the boy on the stairs now. I understand his song. It wasn’t a warning about death. It was a dirge for the living. For the person who walks into the arena, and the thing that walks out.

My brother is still in there. Somewhere. But I just watched him leave, one brutal, efficient victory at a time.