Chapter 177 Interlude – Nightmare
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
”Uu… aahh…”
What had even started all that bullying? He still didn’t know. To the adults it might’ve looked like some huge, serious issue, but from the eyes of the kid he’d been back then, it had felt like nothing—just some tiny, pointless spark.
Northeastern United States, Rhode Island — ten years ago.
”Uwehhaha! Choppaaaaari!!”
The first one who came for him had been one of the Korean kids in his class, jabbing a finger at him like he’d just found an enemy soldier. “Apologize for what your ancestors did to *my* ancestors!” he’d screamed, and at first, Ayumu had just… ignored it.
”Guizuuu!!”
Then came one of the Chinese kids, obsessed with forcing his mother tongue on everyone, the kind of loud know-it-all who made your ears hurt. Looking back, Ayumu still wondered if that kid or his family had ever even gotten real American citizenship—or if they were just illegal immigrants pushing fake brand clothes, because honestly, his shirts had always reeked of cheap dye.
”Hey!! Jap!!”
The Black kids weren’t much better. Maybe they were just poor and bitter at the world. They’d been called “negro” and “n****r” and all kinds of ugly names by others, and yet they seemed to love throwing insults around even more than they loved food.
But even they hadn’t been the worst.
No—the ones who truly terrified him were the kids whose parents had slipped illegally from Central or South America or Eastern Europe into the country, given birth there, and lucked their way into American citizenship.
Those kids had been sharp-edged like broken glass. Even as children they’d been dabbling in drugs, buying and selling them like it was candy, and—somehow—getting their hands on pistols with the serial numbers filed off, using them for actual robberies.
He’d been just a kid, and they had scared him down to the bone.
At first it was just sudden shoves in the school corridor, or a fist slamming into his back out of nowhere. But it had escalated—demands for money, and if he refused, they’d beat him as a group. They’d even framed him for breaking windows or smashing classroom vases.
And one day, after too many days of that hell, he’d found himself standing in the pesticide aisle of a hardware store, staring at a bottle with phosphonate esters—used as flame retardants and plasticizers—and the thought had just… slipped in.
(*If I had this… I could kill them all. And then this hell would be over.*)
Looking back, it had been a moment of madness. But that day, the idea had hatched in him—he would try to make an organophosphate nerve agent. Tabun.
He’d planned it all out in his tiny shaking hands: mix phosphonic acid and ethanol with an acid catalyst to make ethyl phosphonic acid monoester, then synthesize diethyl phosphorocyanidate from cyanide and organophosphates, and from that, make tabun.
”Fufufu♪ Now I’ll kill them all… huh? Wait… is that almond smell… is that hydrogen cyanide leaking? I thought I purified this batch with the Andrusov method… huh…?”
He hadn’t known the precursor was that corrosive. He hadn’t known it could turn into a poison gas.
He remembered the liquid—thin, pale brown—dribbling from the container as he panicked, tearing open the windows, trying to vent it out, and then… nothing.
Darkness.
(*T/N: A precursor is a substance present before the final product is created in a chemical reaction.*)
(*Also, apparently tabun precursors had to be kept only in quartz or silver-lined containers, and for the final stage you needed a double-layered glass reactor with pressurized air circulating between the layers. He hadn’t known any of that.*)
By some twisted luck, the westerly winds that day had scattered the gas fast, and while the neighborhood had erupted in chaos, he had survived—because the “tabun” he’d made was full of impurities, barely poisonous at all. No one had died.
But people had pointed fingers after that. Whispered.
And around then, his parents’ already bad relationship had cracked further. It got so bad they couldn’t stay there anymore.
Even as a kid, he’d understood that much.
He’d rolled his eyes into the back of his head, gone all white, and just… gone limp. ( ꒪Д꒪) Dead-eyed. (Totally his fault.)
They’d fled, and the place they landed was his mother’s country—Japan.
That was when his surname had changed from Kenzaki to his mother’s family name, Sanai.
At first, arriving in Kobe had been thrilling—his mother’s homeland, a fresh start.
But it had been hell there too.
He remembered his very first self-introduction in middle school. The teacher had called his full name, and, like he’d been taught, he’d stood and said it proudly: “Sanai Peter Ayumu.”
It was the Christian name the parish priest had given him when he was born.
The whole class had burst out laughing.
And when he’d gotten mad, they’d only whispered, *”He’s crazy,”* and that had been it.
Tacks in his shoes. Tacks on his chair. Gossip. Silence. Isolation.
Bullying, all over again.
He had failed his middle school debut. Completely.
Why. WHY. It made no sense!
But the worst part—the absolute worst—was her.
His eternal nemesis.
Miyake Yuka.
She had gone to the same middle school.
Because of her, even high school had become a nightmare, every day lived on edge, waiting for her next move.
”St—stop it! Miyake!! Quit it!! Quit spreading rumors about meee!!”
The words tore out of his throat as he shot upright in bed, gasping, the dream still clinging to him like cold spiderwebs.
”…Haah… it was… just a nightmare,” he muttered, clutching his sheets, “…though honestly, my real life’s been nothing but nightmares too…”
Ever since he’d come to this otherworld, death had brushed him more times than he could count. He’d been hunted, nearly killed, over and over.
Out here, anywhere the government’s reach didn’t quite stretch was crawling with bandits, mafias, robbers—like lawless pockets of Africa.
And where there *was* government, it wasn’t much better.
It was a dictatorship for the powerful, a system even North Korea’s generals would envy.
This world was like someone had stuffed all the worst parts of Africa and the Korean peninsula into a single unhappy meal and called it a country.
…If he *had* to name one small mercy, though, it was that unlike the north, at least this place had enough food to go around.
…Small mercy.
He poured the chilled water into a glass, the ice cubes clinking softly like tiny bells as they tumbled in. For a moment he just stood there, staring at the way the cold mist curled down the glass, the way droplets slid down its side and splashed onto the table.
Then he tipped it back in one go.
The shock of it hit like a slap—icy, sharp, slicing through the sweat and leftover fear clinging to him from the dream. His throat clenched, then loosened, and he let out a long breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
”…haa…”
The glass landed with a soft thud on the table. His fingers slipped off its rim, still trembling faintly as if the nightmare had sunk into his bones.
And then, without another word, he sank back down onto the floor, letting the cool wooden boards press against his skin, grounding him as the echoes of old screams and laughter finally, finally faded to static.
Notes:
• Peter – Gruff ex-merc knight, hired in Ayumu’s early army build. First seen in chapter 173. Keeps cordial distance from nobles, mentors younger troops. Known for saying: ‘Save the speeches—win the fight.’
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
Thanks for reading.
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