Arthur’s grotesque and shocking presentation with Shinji’s severed head had undeniably sent profound shockwaves through the student body and the teaching staff. It had also, in its own horrific way, achieved one of his desperate objectives: Yūka Somezaki was broken, her necromantic Talent voluntarily renounced, and thus, she was no longer an immediate, practicing threat that Nana Hiiragi might feel compelled to eliminate. However, Arthur knew this act of desperate intervention wouldn’t stop Nana for long. She was a force of nature, a meticulously programmed killer, and she would simply recalibrate and move on to other names on her unseen list.

And so she did. Perhaps driven by a need to understand or neutralize one of the most overtly powerful Talents on the island, or maybe even by a flicker of genuine curiosity that occasionally surfaced beneath her assassin’s programming, Nana Hiiragi found herself accepting an unexpected invitation. Kyouya Onodera, the aloof, white-haired boy who had bluntly declared his immortality upon arrival, had invited her to his small, somewhat dilapidated house on the outskirts of the main school grounds. It was an unusual gesture from the solitary Kyouya, and Nana, ever watchful for an opportunity to assess a potential threat or gather intelligence, had agreed.

Arthur only learned of this visit later, through the island’s surprisingly efficient student rumour mill – whispers of Nana being seen heading towards Kyouya’s secluded cottage – and by his own grim piecing together of the explosive events that followed.

During Nana’s visit to Kyouya’s surprisingly cluttered and book-filled house, as she’d excused herself to use his small, old-fashioned bathroom, she was reportedly struck by an almost overwhelming olfactory assault – the cloying, combined scent of various strong, masculine toiletries: harsh antiseptic soaps, pine-scented shampoos, a bracingly powerful aftershave, all mingling in the small, poorly ventilated space. When she casually commented on the rather potent aroma, remarking that he must have a fondness for particularly fragrant products, Kyouya had merely looked blank, a slight frown of confusion on his face. He claimed, with apparent sincerity, that he didn’t smell anything particularly strong or out of the ordinary.

It was then, Arthur deduced, that Nana, with her razor-sharp observational skills and intuitive understanding of human tells, realized Kyouya Onodera suffered from anosmia – the partial or complete inability to smell. A critical weakness, hidden in plain sight.

This discovery, Arthur knew, would have immediately sparked a deadly, opportunistic idea in Nana’s cold, calculating mind. Kyouya’s older, somewhat neglected house, unlike the more modern dormitories, still utilized bottled gas for its heating and cooking appliances. Anosmia meant he wouldn’t detect a gas leak until it was far too late. It was a perfect, almost untraceable method of elimination for an otherwise unkillable target.

A day or two after Nana’s seemingly innocuous visit, a powerful, ground-shaking explosion ripped through the northern, more secluded part of the island, sending a roiling plume of black smoke billowing into the clear afternoon sky. Panic, a now familiar companion to the students, flared anew. Teachers, their faces pale with alarm, rushed towards the site of the blast. Arthur’s heart sank with a sickening thud; he knew immediately where it had occurred, what it signified. He could almost picture Nana, arriving at the scene with a carefully orchestrated display of shock and concern, perhaps even feigning an attempt to "rescue" Kyouya, all the while expecting to find his scattered, incinerated remains among the smouldering wreckage.

Instead, she would have witnessed the utterly impossible: Kyouya Onodera, emerging like a phantom from the smoking, demolished ruin of his home, his clothes scorched, his skin blackened, yet already regenerating before her very eyes. Cuts would have been sealing, burns fading to new pink skin, his white hair dishevelled but his body remaking itself with an unnerving, silent speed.

Later, Kyouya, with his characteristic, infuriating stoicism, would have calmly confirmed to a stunned, undoubtedly seething Nana that yes, he was, for all intents and purposes, immortal. Her meticulously planned assassination, exploiting a cleverly deduced hidden weakness, had failed spectacularly against a Talent that trumped even her lethal precision. For Nana, it must have been a deeply frustrating, almost insulting setback, another name she couldn’t cross off her list. For Arthur, hearing the fragmented, awed accounts of the explosion and Kyouya’s miraculous survival, it was another grim confirmation of the established script, a small island of terrible predictability in the chaotic, churning sea of his new reality. Kyouya Onodera was a problem Nana couldn’t easily solve.

While Nana was grappling with the Kyouya problem and the aftershocks of Arthur’s classroom stunt, another, quieter tragedy was inexorably unfolding, one that Arthur felt with a particular, poignant helplessness: the fading life of Touichirou Hoshino. Arthur remembered Hoshino vividly from the anime – a frail, gentle-faced boy with a shy smile and a Talent for cryokinesis, who was, by his own quiet admission to a few trusted classmates, slowly, inexorably dying of an aggressive, untreatable form of cancer. His time was short, regardless of Nana Hiiragi’s murderous intervention.

Arthur felt a particular, unexpected pang of sympathy for Hoshino. He knew the boy didn’t have long, and the thought of Nana callously cutting that already tragically short life even shorter, purely to meet some unseen, monstrous quota, filled him with a quiet, impotent rage. It struck too close to home, perhaps – the specter of mortality, the unfairness of a life curtailed. He’d tried, in his awkward, phone-assisted way, to find Hoshino during breaks in the days following the Yūka incident, hoping to offer some small, stilted comfort, perhaps even a vague, reassuring “prediction” of a peaceful passing to ease the boy’s final days. But Hoshino, increasingly weak, was often secluded in his room, resting, or had simply wandered off to find a quiet spot to be alone with his thoughts and his pain. He was proving difficult to find.

And then, Arthur was too late.

News, carefully managed and somberly delivered, filtered through the school via a visibly grieving Mr. Saito: Hoshino Touichirou had been found dead. The official story, corroborated by a “traumatized” but “brave” Nana Hiiragi, was that Hoshino, in a bout of melancholic restlessness, had wandered off from the main school grounds, seeking solitude in one of the island’s many natural caves. Nana, ever the caring class representative, had noticed his absence and, filled with concern, had gone looking for him. She’d found him deep within a dark, damp cave, just as they were suddenly, inexplicably attacked by shadowy, indistinct figures – the ubiquitous “Enemies of Humanity.” Hoshino, in a final, heroic act of self-sacrifice, had apparently tried to protect Nana with his ice Talent, but had been fatally stabbed in the struggle. Nana herself, she tearfully recounted, had sustained a “defensive wound” to her forearm – a shallow, suspiciously neat cut – while “bravely” fighting off the attackers before fleeing to report the terrible tragedy.

It was a neat, almost plausible story, playing perfectly into the prevailing atmosphere of fear and paranoia that the school authorities seemed keen to cultivate. But Arthur knew the sickening truth. Nana had found Hoshino alone in that cave, likely in his final, pain-wracked hours, and had murdered him with her poisoned pen-knife, a quick, “merciful” elimination to tick another name off Tsuruoka’s list. The self-inflicted wound was merely a theatrical prop, a cynical flourish to solidify her alibi and paint herself as both a heroine and a fellow victim.

Kyouya Onodera, who had also been present among the group of students and teachers to whom Nana recounted her harrowing tale, had listened with his usual unnerving, impassive expression. But Arthur, watching from the periphery of the shocked gathering, saw the almost imperceptible narrowing of Kyouya’s eyes, the way his gaze lingered for a fraction too long on Nana’s artfully bandaged “wound.” Kyouya was suspicious. He didn’t buy Nana’s overly dramatic, conveniently vague story, not entirely. The pieces weren’t fitting together neatly enough for his sharply analytical mind.

For Arthur, Hoshino’s death, and the fabricated narrative surrounding it, was another heavy, suffocating blow. He hadn’t even been able to offer a single kind word, a moment of shared humanity. He was a man who supposedly held disruptive glimpses of the future, yet he was constantly, frustratingly outmanoeuvred by the brutal, unfolding present. He retreated to the relative anonymity of his dorm room that evening, the phone idle in his hand, the English words of frustration, grief, and self-recrimination dammed up inside him, untranslatable by any app, comprehensible only to the silent, judgmental ghosts of his own conscience. He was an unwilling passenger on a ship of fools, sailing straight into a maelstrom, able to see the waves crashing ahead but with his hands bound, unable to steer clear of the jagged, waiting rocks. The weight of his terrible knowledge, and his profound, repeated inability to act effectively on all fronts, was becoming a leaden cloak, threatening to drag him down into the depths of despair.