Shirase Rinna… that white-haired, amber-eyed brat who sneered at him on the train, calling him “a loser stuck in a cramped train for life”… He had been played by her.
Similar.
Too long.
A girl.
He couldn’t swallow that debt.
Then in this abandoned park, he saw that girl before him.
White hair, amber eyes, a little white dress… a striking resemblance to the Shirase Rinna in the photo that had been spreading wildly through the group chat.
If he looked closely, the height was off—much shorter than the recorded data on Shirase Rinna.
There were also some differences in the facial details… the chin was sharper, the bridge of the nose more defined.
He remembered the intelligence said Shirase Rinna was an only child, with no younger sister.
But in this chaotic afternoon, with the terror of his narrow escape still not fully faded, his brain didn’t dwell on the big picture.
But who could guarantee that her father didn’t have an illegitimate daughter out there?
He had seen this kind of cliché plot countless times in those third-rate TV shows, and at this moment, it suddenly felt incredibly reasonable.
He leaned toward the girl.
Sumire lifted his eyes and coldly looked at the man approaching him, his brow furrowing slightly.
“Get lost.”
Sumire’s voice was that of a boy before his voice change, not yet fully deepened—soft, with a bit of underdeveloped tenderness, indistinguishable in gender.
In front of Hisaki, he would deliberately make his voice softer and more ingratiating, but now it automatically switched to a flatter, more suppressed tone.
When the man heard this voice, his smile grew more confident.
A little girl, alone in an abandoned park, with no one around… wasn’t that like a piece of fat delivered right to his door?
He couldn’t beat Kurose Hisaki, but facing a child who didn’t even look five feet tall, there was no way he could be overpowered.
He reached out and grabbed Sumire’s arm.
The grip of an adult man transmitted through the long-sleeved fabric of the little white dress to Sumire’s upper arm, fingers digging hard into the humerus, the force so strong that it left a few impressions through the cloth, pressing into the skin.
The man dragged Sumire back into the space under the Octopus Slide, pushing him down onto the corrugated cardboard.
Sumire’s back hit the edge of the cardboard, a few strands from the white wig slipping off his shoulder and landing on the wavy ridges of the cardboard.
Some time passed.
Inside the Octopus Slide, it was so quiet that only the rustling of tiny creatures crawling through cracks in the concrete wall could be heard.
Then a scream exploded from inside the Octopus Slide—hoarse, shrill, filled with incredulous fear.
The sound lasted only a short time, but it echoed through the muggy air of the abandoned park several times before fading completely.
Then there was nothing.
Sumire stepped out from under the Octopus Slide.
In his hand was a folding knife… the blade no more than three inches long, but honed razor-sharp, with a streak of blood still dripping down it, falling onto the weeds in the gaps between the paving stones.
His fingers—those slender hands praised as “very pretty and cute”—had a few drops of dark red blood splattered on the back of his hand, almost dry now, glaringly stark against his fair skin.
The pure white little dress was stained with dirt and blood, a small section of the lace on the hem torn by something, and the bow at the back was crooked.
He looked down at himself, frowned.
He didn’t bother cleaning the blood from his clothes, just glanced at the back of his hand, then walked to the corner of the wall, plucked a few grass leaves, and wiped it casually.
His mood turned irritable.
If he went to see sister in this imperfect state, would she think he was sloppy?
Would she think he couldn’t even wear a dress properly?
He stood still for three seconds.
A disgusting, perverted pedophile uncle wasn’t worth him wasting any more thought here.
He pulled out his phone and dialed the Kurose family’s private line.
It rang for less than a second before it was answered.
Sumire spoke a few low words into the phone—very softly, with no inflection, just stating a simple, clear request.
“Abandoned children’s park, inside the Octopus Slide. Dispose of the body.”
The person on the other end didn’t ask any unnecessary questions, just gave a short reply and hung up.
In about ten minutes, professionals would come to clean up the place, erasing every last trace of the man’s existence.
Then he put the phone back in his pocket and turned toward the park exit.
As he walked past the rusted pair of iron gateposts, sunlight spilled onto his white wig again, the amber-colored contacts reflecting an unreal, pretty glimmer in the midday light.
He needed to buy a new white dress, get rid of this bloodstained one, and change into fresh clothes before going to see his sister.
After Sumire left, the abandoned park returned to its forgotten stillness.
Sunlight leaked through the few cracks in the Octopus Slide, illuminating the corpse that lay crooked on the ground inside—head separated from body, the neck cut clean and precise, showing that the slash had been made without a moment’s hesitation.
This man, with that tongue he thought so clever, had commanded over a hundred people to surround the Kurose family’s eldest daughter, only to be terrified by the sound of those hundred-plus people falling, and had scurried away to hide in this abandoned park two kilometers away.
He had evaded the rusty, bloodstained steel pipe in Kurose Hisaki’s hand, evaded the pool of blood covered in cement dust in the blind corner of the second floor of Sunshine Town, but he could not escape the folding knife carried by a twelve-year-old boy—a blade from the same bloodline.
His eyes were still open, his pupils reflecting the faded pink paint inside the Octopus Slide, and a piece of gray-blue sky cut into an irregular quadrilateral by the cracks above.
The time came to five o’clock in the evening.
At the other end of the city, the Kurose estate. The stone lanterns in the front garden had been lit one by one.
The sliding doors of the Guest Reception Main Building were wide open.
Rinna was sitting on the tatami.
Hisaki leaned in from behind Rinna. Rinna stared at her own knees, which were pressed together on the tatami, her mood unexpectedly decent.
The fear that had accumulated in that deathly blind corner, and the loud crying in that second-floor hallway bathed in afternoon sunlight—all of it had been drained away with the tears.
Hisaki’s embrace was like a pump that worked only for her, sucking out everything that had been clogged in her chest without leaving a drop, leaving behind only a rare, light calm.
Hisaki sat to her left, very close.
She reached out and gently brushed the back of Rinna’s hand resting on her knee with her ring finger, checking her temperature…
Hisaki’s brow furrowed imperceptibly, but she said nothing.
She simply pressed her hand lightly over Rinna’s and didn’t move it away.
Rinna turned her head and glanced at Hisaki.
Rinna looked back down at her own knees, thinking about the doctor in her mind.
It was a few minutes before five o’clock. The doctor Hei Luan Yu Si had brought in from abroad should be arriving soon.
She was a little curious what they looked like… male or female?
Old or young?
Stern or gentle?
But what made her happier was that her body might finally be saved.
If she could slowly restore her physique through treatment and recuperation to a level where she could stand alongside normal people, then maybe she wouldn’t need to keep putting on those flirtatious little brat performances anymore, wouldn’t need to scold office workers on the train as “fodder,”
wouldn’t need to tear apart the lives of strange uncles in shopping mall cafés.
Wouldn’t need to accumulate those malice points anymore. Her system would probably lose its purpose and disappear.
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