The sky above Kagetsu High looked like it hadn't slept in decades—gray, heavy, and silent.
Just like Ren Redorox.
Students flooded through the school gate, laughing, shouting, complaining about homework. Ren walked through the same gate, but the world never seemed to acknowledge him. He wasn't invisible… yet everyone acted as if he were.
Ren preferred it that way.
He tugged lightly at the collar of his dark uniform, the morning breeze brushing through his black hair. His eyes—cold, calm, and unreadable—carried a depth no teenager should have.
Inside that silence, he whispered to himself:
"If I show them who I am… I wonder if anything would change."
He already knew the answer:
Nothing.
Ren had a talent for everything—academics, sports, music, memory, logic. A frightening level of perfection, as if he were sculpted to be a prodigy. But he hid it. Every score was average on purpose. Every athletic test done slowly. Every question avoided, every spotlight dodged.
A perfect human pretending to be someone ordinary.
Because the last time he shined, the world took everything away from him.
His parents' accident.
The blood.
The rain.
The night he became the guardian of his younger siblings—Yume, the innocent dreamer, and Kaito, the timid little brother.
He was eleven when he became the adult of the house.
---
Ren slid open his shoe locker. A folded piece of paper fell out.
He crouched to pick it up, expecting the usual: someone else's name, the wrong locker, or maybe trash.
But it wasn't a mistake.
It read:
"I know what you are."
His fingers froze.
The hallway noise blurred into a cold hum.
For the first time in years, something pierced the shell he lived in.
Was someone watching him?
Had someone noticed what he worked so hard to hide?
Ren exhaled, letting the paper fall back into the locker.
"Peace never lasts… not for people like me."
He headed to class, eyes calm yet sharpened, like a blade waking from sleep.
---
Class 2-B was the usual theater of noise: desks clattering, gossip echoing, chairs scraping.
Ren took his seat at the very back—his sanctuary. He placed his headphones around his neck, though he never played music during school.
The homeroom teacher entered, and the room immediately tensed.
"Settle down, everyone."
Ren didn't look up. He didn't need to. He sensed things—people—the way others sensed weather.
But today, something was different.
He felt watched.
A faint sound: someone stepping closer.
A chair scraping beside him.
He turned.
A girl he had never seen before sat next to him—pale, sharp-eyed, her expression half-curious, half-knowing.
"You're Redorox, right?" she asked, as if confirming a rumor.
Ren's heartbeat stuttered.
No one talked to him.
No one even tried.
"Yes," he said quietly, voice smooth but distant.
Her eyes didn't blink.
"Then you got the letter."
His chest tightened ever so slightly.
She leaned closer, whispering:
"Your life is about to change, Ren. Someone like you can't run from destiny forever."
Her words felt too heavy for morning conversation.
Ren stared out the window, the sky reflecting in his eyes.
"I'm not afraid of change," he whispered. "I'm afraid of what I'll become if I stop holding myself back."
The girl smiled faintly—like someone who had been waiting for that answer.
"Good," she said.
"Because the world is about to need you."
Ren didn't understand.
Yet deep inside, something long asleep began to stir—a slow awakening.
A quiet hunger for the truth of why he was born the way he was.
And somewhere far away, unnoticed by the carefree city of Kagetsu, the gears of fate began to move.
---
That evening, Ren returned home to the small apartment where Yume and Kaito waited.
Yume tugged his sleeve the moment he entered.
"Onii-chan! Welcome home!"
Her smile—warm, fragile—was the one thing that kept him breathing.
He ruffled her hair gently.
"As long as I can protect them… I don't care what happens to me."
It was his vow. His chain. His strength.
But the world rarely respects the wishes of someone special.
And Ren Redorox was far too special to be left alone.
When he walked to his room, a second note slipped out from beneath the door.
"You cannot hide forever.
The truth is coming."
Ren closed his eyes.
The air felt colder than winter.
The kind of cold that reminded him of a certain song—a lonely rhythm, a soft ache, a whisper of someone longing to feel alive.
The feeling of Sweater Weather…
the calm before the storm.
He crumpled the note.
"Fine," he murmured. "If fate wants me… then let it come."
And so began the quiet unraveling
of a perfect boy
in an imperfect world.