The bell rang, not with urgency, but with a slow, echoing chime that rolled through the halls like the exhale of something ancient and tired.
School was over.
Toyotaro Miracle High was over.
The chatter of students poured out into the warm, amber light of late afternoon—soft voices, sneakers scuffing on tile, backpacks slung lazily over shoulders. It was the usual end-of-day symphony, filled with half-laughed jokes and the dull static of exhaustion. Somewhere, a vending machine coughed out a lukewarm soda. Somewhere else, someone said goodbye like it was just another day.
But the building stood still in the places where no one was looking.
Its walls held more than chalk dust and exam stress. The air inside its lecture halls—especially the old ones—felt heavier than it should've. Like something had settled in the stone. A memory. A shadow. A name.
Toyotaro Miracle High was, by all official accounts, the most renowned high school in Japan. A place built not just for brilliance, but for the strange—for those who looked at logic and said, "I'll build my own." It boasted the highest acceptance rates into universities that didn't even exist on normal maps, the most relentless academic gauntlet, and a staff made up of half-ghosts and rumored ex-operatives. Some said the chemistry teacher used to work on chemical warfare in the '80s. Others claimed the head of the library could read sealed Vatican documents without permission.
And still—none of that was the weirdest thing about the school.
What was strange was how normal it looked. Beige hallways. Fluorescent lights that hummed a little too loud. Water fountains with buttons that never really worked. And bathrooms that always smelled like someone had just cleaned them—but not well enough.
In one of those bathrooms, the kind with flickering mirrors and sinks that sputtered once before surrendering to a slow stream, water was splashing rhythmically.
Splash.Splash.Splash.
Shotaro Mugyiwara stood hunched over the sink. The water pooled into his cupped hands before he brought it up to his face with a practiced motion. He didn't look into the mirror when he did it—he rarely ever did.
Just the steady rhythm of water and breath.
A ritual. Quiet. Familiar.
He pulled his face up, droplets clinging to his jawline, his red eyes dull under the buzzing overhead light. The air smelled faintly of bleach and something older—rusted pipes, maybe. Or the kind of exhaustion that clings to tiled walls after too many long days.
He wiped his face with the hem of his white shirt under the maroon blazer of his uniform, unconcerned with wrinkles or the wet patch it left against his chest.
"Hiroki's gone home," he muttered to himself, voice low and even. "His mom—who probably hates me more than she hates Hitler—is making him help out with some errands in Tokyo. Chess competition or something."
He didn't sound bitter.
Just observant.
Detached.
He reached for the faucet again, then paused—letting the silence stretch a little too long.
"He'll be back tonight."
A pause.
"Probably."
He glanced at the mirror, not quite meeting his own gaze, then looked away again before turning off the tap with a flick of the wrist.
"And Bird's busy," he added. "Javelin throw club. Convenient timing."
He leaned against the sink edge, arms braced, back slightly arched as though holding himself in place against gravity's judgment.
The water still dripped, echoing in the quiet.No one else was around.Just him.And the weight that followed him when the laughter ended and the halls emptied.
Toyotaro Miracle High was a strange place.
But the strangest thing in it was never the curriculum.
It was the boy washing his face with holy detachment in a too-bright bathroom on the third floor—As if he were scrubbing off reality itself.
"OK then," he began talking to the mirror
Shotaro Mugyiwara has a 'ritual' of sorts where he, once a day, talks to a mirror about his life because a mirror wouldn't try to understand him & fail at it, leading to judgment; he can just be himself.
He leaned forward, bracing his arms against the chipped porcelain edge of the sink, his spine curved like a bow under strain. The tile beneath his feet was cold, and the overhead light buzzed in its flickering hum—an unsteady rhythm that filled the silence with a kind of restless heartbeat.
The water tap still dripped.Drip. Drip. Drip.Each drop echoed like the tap was keeping time for something older than clocks.
The mirror in front of him was streaked with years of careless cleanings and humidity ghosts. It didn't reflect his face so much as it remembered it—his pale skin, silver-white hair hanging damp across his brow, and those tired red eyes that always looked like they were born blinking at a funeral.
He exhaled. Let the silence bloom around him.
Then, like clockwork, he began.
"Okay then," he murmured.
He wasn't talking to himself. Not exactly.
He was talking to the mirror. And not because he expected it to talk back.
He did it because the mirror wouldn't pretend to understand him.
It wouldn't ask questions. Wouldn't misunderstand. Wouldn't pity.
It would just listen.
And for a boy like Mugyiwara Shotaro, that was more mercy than most people could offer.
"My name is Sho-
[Shotaro: journey of a hero that kept moving forward]
Mugyiwara," he said. His voice was steady, almost ceremonial. "Age fifteen. Born January thirtieth, 2008. I'm an Aquarius. My height is seven feet, eleven inches. Or two hundred and forty centimeters, if we're being precise."
He paused, looking at his reflection—not examining it, just… sitting in it. Like one might sit in a familiar chair.
"I was born to Hashirama and Himawari Mugyiwara. My mother was still a virgin when I was born."
Another pause.
The fluorescent bulb above him flickered, then calmed.
"The night I was born, the sky was clear—so clear it looked like it had been scrubbed. Stars like glass shards, sharp and still. The nurses said the room got colder when I cried. That the monitors flickered. That power failed across two wards."
A slow, almost imperceptible shrug followed.
"But I was never really a good person."
There was no bitterness in his tone. No anger. Just a detached honesty, like he was reading a sealed report aloud.
"I was born with too much sentience. Too much mind for a body that small. My lucidity… it wasn't human. I think I skipped something in development—like innocence."
He studied his face. Not for answers. Just for signs of change.
"I was what they call super sane—I always knew what I was doing. From the start."
A breath.
A blink.
"Despite being 'the messiah,' I was a sadistic, petty baby," he admitted, his voice thinning into something brittle. "Caused problems not for fun. Not for curiosity. Just because I could."
The mirror didn't flinch. It never did.
"I had free will. And I used it to cause pain. Not because I was broken. But because I had power. And no one could have stopped me ever."
He exhaled again. Not in relief. Not in regret.
Just because it was the next breath in a ritual he never dared to skip.
The bathroom light buzzed above. The water tap still dripped behind him.
But in that strange hush—the kind that lingers only after truth has been poured into cold tile and glass—
Shotaro stood still.
Completely still.
The mirror in front of him didn't show his reflection.
Not because the light was bad.
Not because the angle was off.
But because it couldn't.
Not this mirror.
Not any.
Every reflection was its own closed world, its own flickering shard in the vast kaleidoscope of the Mirror World—a realm where every mirrored surface formed a thin, breathing layer of alternate realities.
But none of those worlds had him.
Because there is only one Shotaro Mugyiwara.
Across all dimensions. Across all reflections. Across all recursive simulations.
Only one.
So he stood there, speaking not to his reflection,but to absence itself.
To the void where a mirror should have shown him something.
Like he was confessing into a hole the world had forgotten to fill.
Like he was reminding himself—quietly, with each syllable—that he was still here,even if the world refused to reflect him back.
His voice broke the quiet like the tick of a metronome inside a cathedral.
"For the first three years of my life," he said, "humans didn't look like humans to me."
He didn't blink.
"They looked like insects."
He stared at the vacant glass.
"My father—a docile praying mantis.My mother—an earwig.My sisters: a two-faced ladybug, a second praying mantis, and… a noisy cockroach."
The names didn't sting. They didn't mock.
They were memories carved into soft clay, turned over in his hands so many times the edges had worn smooth.
"I've asked myself why," he continued. "Lately. Often."
He lifted a hand—not to touch the mirror, but to hover near it.Like one might reach toward something already gone.
"I think it's this—"
A breath.
"Strong people… they should see those weaker than them as equals."
His fingers curled slightly.
"I was born stronger than any human. Stronger than any insect. And I didn't see the difference between them."
He paused.
The mirror remained blank. Still. Waiting.
"Because when you're at the top of the mountain," he whispered, "everything below just blurs together."
The words were barely spoken, like wind carving truth into stone.
"That's what gods must see. No men. No bugs. Just… shapes. Soft things. Beneath them."
A silence fell, as if the mirror understood something deeper than language.
And then:
"If I were stronger than gods," Shotaro said, quieter now, "I would treat them the same way I treat a man. Or a bug. Because up there—"
He looked up, toward the flickering light above him.
"There is no difference left to see."
He dropped his hand.
The water in the faucet dripped once.
The tiles didn't echo anymore.
He stood there, in that dim, humming bathroom where the corners never quite met right and the mirror offered only blankness—no reflection, no echo, no double.
Just Shotaro.
Alone.
And somewhere in that stillness—between the slow drip of the faucet and the dry whisper of fluorescent light above—he exhaled again.
Low. Tight. Tired.
He wasn't just talking to the mirror.
He was unraveling.
Letting out the nerves, the panic, the tension that crawled under his skin like static—day after day, hour after hour—pressing deeper into him because there was nowhere else it could go.
Because in this world—his world—Shotaro Mugyiwara couldn't open up.
Not to Hiroki, who'd only try to fix things with dumb jokes and fists.Not to Bird, who'd nod and throw a metaphor that made too much sense and not enough.Not to teachers, or friends, or gods.
Because when you were you—and "you" was something that didn't even exist in mirrors—how could anyone really listen?
They'd try. He knew they would.And they'd fail.Because they weren't built to carry this.Because what lives in him would only break the hands that tried to hold it.
So he spoke here.
Not to be heard.
But because the mirror didn't lie.And more importantly—the mirror didn't ask questions.
"I'm nervous," Shotaro muttered. His voice was a quiet crack across porcelain—low, sharp, fragile. "Paranoid. Always tense."
His shoulders were hunched, shirt damp from where he'd wiped his face, as if he were trying to rub himself out of existence in layers. His red eyes stayed locked on the blankness of the mirror, on the place where his reflection should be but never was. That absence felt louder than the silence.
"I'm afraid," he said, "of being seen as a god."
A breath. Slow. Shaky.
"I want to stay an insect. Gods are indifferent. Insects aren't. Insects feel. They scatter when you chase them. They try to live. Gods? They just watch."
He tightened his grip on the edge of the sink, fingers pale and trembling slightly.
"I don't consider myself a good person. I don't feel like one. I think I'm immoral—an immoral person who just happened to put on the 'good guy' mask and forgot to take it off."
He laughed, but it was hollow. A sound with no home behind it.
"Who knows," he said, "maybe one day I just decide to be what I was as a baby—a powermad, indifferent, sadistic piece of shit. It's still in there, I think. Hiding in the wiring."
His words spilled now, faster, deeper. Like a dam cracking from the weight of too many unspoken truths.
"Am I altruistic because I want to be? Because I chose to be? Or am I just following a stupid prophecy—some half-forgotten myth about me being the 'second coming of the messiah'?"
His eyes flicked up to where his reflection should've been.
"I ask myself that every day."
A pause.
"Every single time someone calls me by that name—'the man they call'—I wonder if that man even exists. Or if I'm just the echo of someone else's legend."
He swallowed hard, and his next words came out thinner, hoarser.
"Sometimes I wonder if I'm even real."
He looked down. Hands flat against the basin now, shoulders rigid, spine drawn taut like a wire.
"I have schizophrenia," he said, matter-of-fact. "Or something close enough. I see my old master sometimes—her face. The one she made right before she died. That look of pure hate. The one she gave me at the end of the Battle of the Chosen Ones."
He dragged a hand down his face, smearing whatever was left of the water there, as if trying to wipe her out of his skin.
"And sometimes…" His voice grew quiet. "Sometimes I get these episodes where it all comes back."
He lifted his gaze again—unflinching, almost blank.
"Everyone starts to look like insects again. Just like when I was three."
He didn't cry.
He didn't scream.
He just stood there, talking to the mirror that would never speak back.
Because in this world—the world where Shotaro Mugyiwara existed—he couldn't say these things to anyone else.
He couldn't afford to.
He couldn't let anyone know that the strongest boy in the world didn't always know who he was.That he was afraid of himself.Afraid of what he might become.Afraid that the mirror was the only place he could tell the truth—because the mirror didn't need him to be a leader, or a warrior, or a messiah.
It just needed him to stand there.And whisper back.Nothing.
"I need to get out of here," he muttered under his breath, each word laced with tension. His voice barely carried above the lingering silence of the bathroom, but the urgency wrapped around it like a tightening cord. He took one last deep breath—his lungs fighting to stay still—and pushed himself off the sink.
The door creaked slightly as it opened, letting in a thin shaft of hallway light that spilled across the cracked tiles behind him.
And with the first step he took into the corridor, he became himself again.
Not the boy who talks to mirrors.
But the version the world expects.The version he's learned to slip into like a coat.The one with that deadpan face, unreadable and mildly annoyed.That expression—part smug, part exhausted—like he just overheard your entire life story and decided it wasn't worth commenting on.
The hallway was full now. Students lingered along lockers, some shuffling books, some pretending not to glance at him, others failing at it completely. Conversations died as he walked past. Others ignited just after he passed. Whispers.
He didn't need to try hard to hear them.
Shotaro Mugyiwara had superhuman hearing.
He heard everything.
"He's scary.""Freakish height...""Those eyes—""Like a demon.""God, why does he even go here?""Is he even Japanese?"
The words cut, not because they were new, but because they never stopped.
And even if they didn't think he was listening, they all knew who he was.
He'd for last couple weeks helped people around the city.
But still—still—they whispered.
He sighed through his nose, face unmoving. Not angered. Not surprised. Just... dulled by the repetition.
"Ugly?" he thought to himself. "That's rich."
He wasn't ugly. Not by any objective measure. He knew that.
In fact, back in Musashino Yamato City's Red Light District—where he'd grown up under Akagitsune Rin—people used to call his face a "silent kind of beautiful." A haunting, cold-cut kind.Eyes like dying embers.Lashes too long for someone so violent.A mouth that always looked like it was suppressing a smirk or a scream.
But this wasn't the Red Light District.
This was Japan's stigma. Cleaned-up, polished, box-checking Japan. A place where sameness is comfort and anything else is quietly filed under other.
Shotaro was tall—nearly eight feet. He towered over most teachers. His skin was darker than average, not enough to draw attention in the dark, but enough to make strangers ask where he was "really from." His hair was silver, not dyed, just wrong. His eyes were red—not metaphorically, not emotionally—just red.
He was 100% Japanese.
Born here. Raised here. Bled here.
But Japan didn't look at him and see a countryman. They looked at him and saw a mistake.
A walking glitch in their collective design.
And worst of all—they didn't even see a person anymore.
They saw a thing.A force.A beast.A God.
And that last one—that word—that was the one he hated most.
Because being a monster meant people feared you.But being a god meant they worshipped you while stripping you of your humanity.You weren't allowed to be tired. Or afraid. Or broken.You weren't even allowed to bleed.
You just had to endure.
And never ask for help.
Shotaro walked slowly, his gait calm, deliberate, predatory only in how quiet it was. But inside?
He wanted to scream.
Instead, he whispered to himself with a dry chuckle:
"Anime and manga really did a damn good job hiding the dark side of this society."
No one heard it.
But he didn't need them to.
He already knew what they saw.
Not a boy.Not a student.Not a kid who'd seen too much and felt too little.
But a symbol. A weapon. A walking myth.A God in the skin of a teenager.
And of all the things people feared in himthat was the one he feared most too.