They left the high school at 3:42 and took the direct route to the sanctuary.

The afternoon sky was clear, and the streets were less crowded than they had been that morning. Ophélia walked with the same pace as always, upright and unhurried, but Takeshi noticed she wasn’t looking at the buildings with the same intensity she had during the trip there. She was calmer now. Not uncomfortably silent, but the silence of someone focused on processing what they were seeing.

Takeshi didn’t interrupt that.

After several minutes, Ophélia spoke.

"Is the cafeteria always that loud?"

"Yeah."

"And people don’t find it annoying?"

"I guess they get used to it, since most of them have been going there for years."

Ophélia nodded, and they kept walking.

Two blocks before reaching the sanctuary, Takeshi spotted a small ice cream shop on the right side of the sidewalk. It was open, and there weren’t many people inside, so he stopped.

"Have you ever had ice cream before?"

he asked.

Ophélia looked at him.

"Once, when I was little, someone brought some to the sanctuary, but I don’t really remember what it tasted like."

"Then let’s go in."

The shop had a long display case with twelve flavors.

Ophélia stood in front of it and studied it with the same attention she’d given her notebook during history class. She read every label, looked at the colors, and didn’t say anything for nearly a full minute.

The employee behind the counter waited with a neutral expression.

Takeshi waited too.

Ophélia frowned slightly.

"How am I supposed to know which one to pick if I don’t know what they taste like?"

"You can ask for samples."

Takeshi replied.

"How many can I try at once?"

"As many as fit on your cone."

Ophélia looked back at the menu.

"What if I choose wrong?"

Takeshi looked at her for a moment.

"Ophélia, we can come back whenever you want, and if it turns out you don’t like this one, you can just pick a different flavor next time, so there’s no such thing as a wrong choice."

She processed that, and something in her posture shifted slightly, as if a small tension had finally loosened.

She looked at the display one more time and pointed at the first two flavors on the list, vanilla and strawberry.

"Those look delicious."

The employee prepared the cone with one scoop of each. Takeshi paid before Ophélia could take out any money and ordered a chocolate one for himself. Then they went back outside.

There was a wooden bench near the shop. Ophélia sat down and looked at the cone for a moment before taking her first bite.

She didn’t say anything right away. She kept eating slowly, watching the street while she did.

She saw a car drive by, a woman carrying a large bag cross to the other side of the street, and a kid riding a bike speed through the bike lane without slowing down. Ophélia watched all of it with the same attention she’d shown in the high school hallway that morning.

Takeshi ate his ice cream at an unhurried pace and let the silence continue.

After a while, Ophélia spoke without taking her eyes off the street.

"When I was younger, I used to read about how people lived outside the sanctuary. Mostly books. Some of them described really ordinary things, like going to school, eating somewhere with other people, walking down a street without any particular destination."

She paused.

"I knew those things existed, but I had no way of understanding what they actually felt like. They’re the kind of things people do without thinking because they’ve always had access to them."

Takeshi said nothing, and she continued.

"Today I went to class, took notes, ate in a cafeteria, walked through a crowded hallway, and now I’m sitting on a sidewalk eating ice cream."

She lowered her gaze to the cone for a moment.

"I know that for most people, that’s completely normal, but for me it isn’t..."

She turned her head toward Takeshi.

"Thank you for today. Not just for coming with me to the sanctuary this morning, but for everything else too. The questions you answered, the cafeteria, the ice cream." 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

A brief pause.

"This is the best day I’ve ever had in my life."

She said it without dramatics. Without the tone of someone trying to get a reaction. It was a direct statement, accompanied by a sincere smile.

’Yeah... I guess that reaction makes sense coming from someone who spent her whole life locked away in that place...’

Takeshi looked at her. She was holding the cone in her hand, her green eyes fixed on him, waiting for a response without pressuring him. There was no weight in her expression.

’What the hell is she expecting me to say!?’

Then he thought about it for a moment.

’Well... I guess it wouldn’t be so bad to tell her she can always count on me... probably.’

Takeshi opened his mouth to respond, but he never got the chance to say anything.

The sound was short and sharp.

Ophélia jerked forward violently, dropping the ice cream cone onto the ground.

It took Takeshi less than a second to register what had happened: someone was standing behind the bench, their face covered by a dark cloth that revealed only their eyes, and in their right hand was a knife with blood smeared across the blade.

Takeshi summoned Eclipse.

The sword appeared in his right hand with the exact weight and shape he remembered from the previous times. He moved around the bench toward the attacker in a single step.

The attacker looked at the sword, then lowered their gaze to the ground.

On the sidewalk, directly beneath their feet, was a shadow that didn’t belong to any surrounding light source. The attacker stepped into it and sank inside as though the ground were no longer solid, without a sound, without resistance, leaving nothing behind.

Takeshi reached the spot where they had been standing half a second later.

No one was there. There was no trace left, and the shadow on the pavement was gone.

Eclipse remained in his hand. Takeshi looked down the street in both directions, but the sidewalk looked exactly the same as before: a woman walking in the distance, a store with its metal shutter halfway down, no movement out of the ordinary, and the attacker nowhere in sight.

Takeshi remained standing there with the sword in his hand and the empty space in front of him.