Not BGM: Hsin and Suoming Combat Showcase

===

Act 1: 『Two Masks』

 #001 Chapter One: Prologue 

TL : Cnine

ED/PF :

Part 1

《...W-wha... whaaaat? G-good... goo... morning...》

　 It was a morning at the very beginning of spring, winter having only just come to an end.

　 The air, chilled through during the night, was being swept away by the morning sunlight and the gentle spring breeze. 

　It was a fresh, peaceful morning. Birds chirped merrily as though enjoying a conversation of their own, playfully hopping and fluttering along the telephone wires.

　In an entirely ordinary family home, a two-storey house that was neither particularly spacious nor particularly cramped, a boy in his early teens was asleep in a six-and-a-half-tatami Japanese-style room.

　If one had to say anything about his appearance, he was reasonably good-looking.  

　He was still at an age when he hardly knew what he ought to do to make himself look presentable. And yet, perhaps because he had already taken the trouble to carefully shape his eyebrows, he looked oddly more polished than one might expect.

　But that was about it. The boy slowly opened his eyes.

　He had only just woken up.

　 Under ordinary circumstances, it might have been a fresh and pleasant start to the morning.

　 But this was not one of those circumstances.  Approximately fifteen centimetres above his face, as he lay on his back, something was floating there, peering down at him.

　It was a presence that might have been mistaken for an evil spirit, its eye sockets completely black.

　 The boy had only just woken up, and yet there he was, face to face with such a thing. 

　The strained, rasping sound he had heard a moment earlier was apparently something this creature had been trying to communicate to him. 

　Still half-asleep, he gradually came to understand this. 

　Once his eyes had slowly found their focus, he smiled gently.

「Is there anything else you wanted to say?」

《―― Th-thank... th-thank yooooou~》

「I see. Yeah. Thank you, too. I’ll remember your life for you.」

《Thaaank... yooou...》 

　The echoing voice slowly brushed against his ears. 

　To anyone unfamiliar with it, the voice would have been enough to make their skin crawl. 

　The presence, something that could easily have been mistaken for an evil spirit or some other supernatural creature, nevertheless began to crumble away, dissolving into nothing before the boy’s quiet gaze. 

　Only then did the boy finally sit up, scratching his head as he rose. 

「... Whoa, careful now...」

　The sensation he had experienced in that night’s “dream” had caused his sense of things to become slightly misaligned.

　 He stumbled for a moment, managing to regain his balance, then took a deep breath and switched gears.

　 He left his room, walked along the corridor, and made his way down the stairs.

　―― Perhaps it’s because there were so many new things in this “dream” for the first time in ages. It might have stuck with me more deeply than I expected.

　 Thinking this, the boy walked through the familiar house, paying slightly more attention than usual to the movements of his body.

　 Eventually, he passed through the open door of the washroom and stood before the mirror. Then he sighed when he saw, reflected in it, the figure of a woman with long hair swaying around her, her entire body pure white.

「That’s a bit too much. You really shouldn’t do things like that.」

　He muttered the words softly, almost rolling them around inside his mouth.

　 The white figure seemed satisfied and quietly faded away. Once he had confirmed that she was gone, the boy took some mouthwash into his mouth. He rinsed, washed his face with water from the tap, wet his hands and ran his fingers through his hair to push it back and tame his bedhead.

　 He spat out the mouthwash, scooped up some more water in his hands, put it into his mouth, and rinsed again.

　The white figure seemed to be the sort of spirit who was aware that it was a ghost and actually enjoyed being seen. 

　Whether it had grown bored with the boy’s indifferent reaction or had simply had its fill, it seemed to have left the area. 

　Looking at his own face reflected in the mirror, the boy applied some moisturising lotion to prevent his skin from drying out. 

　He could not remember who had told him that this sort of skincare was important.

　Even so, he had somehow come to feel through “one of the dreams” that he ought to start taking care of his skin while he was still young.

　Ever since then, he had kept doing it, because without it, his skin somehow felt tight.

　―― Still... I haven’t been getting confused lately. It’s started to feel more like a simulated experience. It has been a while, though... since I traced someone else’s life.

　 Feeling once again that the face reflected in the mirror truly belonged to him, the boy thought about this alone. 

　The boy had been like this ever since he was old enough to understand the world around him.

　When he is awake, he can see “things that are not human” and hear their voices.

　 When he sleeps, he relives the “life they lived when they were human” of the “things that are not human” he encountered and which followed him home that day.

　 Although it is described as reliving those lives, it does not mean that he literally experiences an entire lifetime within a single night’s “dream”.

　 Instead, during these experiences, the boy becomes the protagonist. It is as though his consciousness melts into that of the “thing that is not human” when it was still human, allowing him to race through a revolving lantern of memories. 

　Within that revolving lantern, the person’s history, way of thinking, principles for action, and so on are experienced as though they were simply his own natural way of being.

　 If the life is something he has never experienced before, it naturally leaves a deep impression. 

　When he says that he “went too deep”, he is referring to the slight discrepancy that arises in his mental state when he relives such a life. 

　After experiencing thousands of “dreams”, he eventually noticed this pattern himself. 

　When a “dream” involved emotions or experiences similar to those of a previous dream, the experiences simply accumulated within him. He never had the sensation that he had truly entered too deeply into someone else. 

　Perhaps because he has lived this kind of life, even from a young age he came to physically experience the accumulated experiences and mentality of “someone else’s life”. As a result, it would be fair to say that he matured mentally at an abnormal speed.

　And the ones who showed him their “dreams” would disappear the following morning after thanking him.

　Perhaps it was because their desire to tell their story remained so strong. Once they had finally been heard, they would vanish, seemingly satisfied. 

　What the boy was left with was an “experience he should never have experienced” and “someone’s precious feelings”. 

　And yet, “himself” remained there, unchanged. 

　So, somehow, he could simply take it in stride, thinking that it felt rather strange, as though he had experienced some sort of immersive attraction.

「―― Morning, Kyouya.」

　Suddenly, someone called his name and greeted him from the side. The boy, Kyouya Kisen, turned towards the source of the voice.

「Morning, Mom.」

「What sort of “dream” was it today?」

「Ah, yeah. Well, today’s person was――――」

　 Kyoya told his mother, Mutsumi, who had spoken to him, about the “dream” without hiding anything from her.

　 Mutsumi listened as she washed her face. She glanced at Kyouya through the mirror, then smiled softly, an expression of relief appearing on her face.

「―― What’s the matter?」

「… No, it’s nothing. I was just thinking how glad I am that you’re still you.」

「What’s that supposed to mean? That I might stop being me?」

「Your “dreams” could lead to that if things went wrong. And the things you see are things ordinary people can neither see nor hear. You’re coming into contact with things like that. Of course I’d worry that you might change, wouldn’t I?」

　From Mutsumi’s point of view, Kyoya was a strange child.

　 Ever since he was little, he would stare into empty space and react to something no one else could see. Once he was old enough to understand himself, he began saying strange things after every night’s sleep, such as, “I was a police officer,” or, “I went to war.” Things like that.  Things that no child his age should have had any reason to say.

　The stories he told were far too realistic to be dismissed as the sort of fantasies peculiar to children. Before long, he had acquired knowledge far beyond his years, along with insights that seemed to come from experience.

　As a result, Mutsumi ended up getting divorced.

　To the man who had been her husband, and Kyoya’s father, Kyoya might be way too frightening from her ex-husband's perspective.

　But Mutsumi was different.

　She had once heard that the surname Kisen, her family name could be traced back to a bloodline descended from itako(medium).

　Naturally, that was only a matter of roots. Mutsumi’s mother had been born in Aomori, but Mutsumi herself had been born and raised on the outskirts of Tokyo. Kyoya was the same. She simply knew that, in terms of their ancestry, they supposedly carried such blood.

　Neither she nor anyone else in the family had ever undergone any sort of training associated with it. It was nothing more than a little piece of hearsay, something to bring up in conversation, a bit of trivia and nothing more.

　And yet, it seemed that whatever this power was, Kyouya possessed it to an extraordinary degree.

「Hey, Kyoya. Why don’t you try training in that sort of thing after all?」

「Haha, I think I’ll pass on that. It’s not as though I want to make a living doing that sort of thing.」

「Oh, really? You might become incredibly popular, you know. They say psychics like that help with criminal investigations overseas.」

「You’ve got a bad habit of taking things you hear on television at face value, Mom, even when you don’t know whether they’re actually true.」

　It was a peaceful spring morning.

　Kyouya had only recently become a second-year middle school student.

　And the spring that would bring yet another great change to the life of Kyouya, a boy who had already walked a somewhat unusual path through life, was about to begin.