—Dai’s POV—

More than a year has passed since I started training and every time I finished a session, the day later I was way too tired to even get up, that was a serious problem since I also had to work. During my second session, Nysilia said I should just leave the job since it would make me an easy target and slow down the training a bit. But fortunately, I was able to make a lot of progress and keep doing a good job as a teacher; obviously, there were some nuisances, like other Zonnikies, way stronger than me, wanting to kill me but Nysilia would step in and scare them off or straight up annihilate them. So far we met 5 Zonnikies and weirdly enough, she didn’t make me eat their flesh by hiding them in the food I ate and I’m sure of it since I didn’t feel any change.

Talking about her, while I can’t still fully understand her true intentions, there are times it seems she’s hiding too much from me, like every time I die because of one of what she calls “Training dummies”, which are copies of the enemy she defeated, she looks at me with sadness and when I tried to ask her why she has that reaction she answered 

“It reminds me of…other things. Nothing important.”

Another time, she was watching the news channel, they were talking about a girl, apparently a Zonniki, who was killing criminals around the world and when I asked Nysilia if that girl was going to be dangerous in the future, she simply answered “Probably” and refused to answer any other question, while looking at the news in silence. 

The next few days we saw other news about the girl and I tried to ask something about her, but she straight up threaten to kill me painfully if I don’t stop with these “dangerous questions”. At this point, her threats aren’t as scary as before since I’m used to them and she probably noticed that, every time she fails to scare me she ends up being embarrassed and doesn’t look at me for the whole day.

She usually doesn’t leave my side just to defend me against an eventual attack, but one day she had to disappear for a few days because of some important matter she had to attend and I decided to take advantage of this to research that girl on Gugle.

 —26th September 2026— 

That day, after finishing my day of work, I remained at school a bit more to start with the research from a computer in the teacher’s room, meanwhile, the students were all leaving to return home and just a few were remaining to clean their classrooms.

While I could find news for almost every month, mostly about criminals dying and just a few about the girl's appearance, the news stopped completely from August 16th and only on September 23rd there was something new. A house in Arizona(USA) was frozen with the family in it, rumours say that it could be the same girl who killed criminals because of the way everything was frozen, since it seemed too unnatural in every way, while the people who support the girl’s action tried to defend her by saying that it couldn’t be because she only targets bad people and that family didn’t commit any criminal record.

The other suspicious thing was a missing member of the family, a certain Sophia, who went missing a year before this incident and one day returned home. Just like this, without having injuries, traumas, nothing.

According to the neighbours, they only knew about the girl’s return from the mother since the daughter only left the house with family, while her friends knew about her reappearance but they couldn’t meet her because she was always busy with something and then she disappeared again. 

At the end of the article, there was a photo of the girl, with brown hair and black eyes with a description saying “Sophia, 25 years old, this is the last photo of her before disappearing a year ago”.

There was also another piece of news even more recent than that one, on September 25th, in the Tokyo Detention House, 22 criminals, who were waiting for their trials, got attacked; 21 were killed in horrible ways and just one survived but with heavy injuries, only for him to die a few hours later in the hospital. The detention guards didn’t give any other info about the incident.

Before that event, Japan was the only country that remained untouched by these “mysterious deaths”.

“Sophia’s disappearance might be connected to all these deaths and I can’t exclude the chance of her being a Zonniki, which gives me one question. Is she actually the real Sophie or someone else happened to awaken in her body before dying? ” I murmured.

During the past year, I learned from Nysilia that Zonnikies can have children and their powers can be awakened only with mental and physical training, similar to what I’m doing, but for them, everything should be a lot easier thanks to their parents’ race. For these reasons, the question was more than legit but it also created another one

“If she isn’t Sophia and another soul took over her body, there should be a Zonniki who made a pact with the new owner and helped with the awakening…is this other Zonniki the reason why Nysilia acted strange? Or maybe there is something even bigger behind?” while I continued murmuring to myself the door slowly opened and footsteps interrupted my thoughts. When I looked towards the door I saw, Misato, one of my students, coming closer to my desk. She had a darker skin colour than most students in the school and her facial structure was also different, including the eyes that seemed slightly bigger. She was born in Japan to an Indian father and a Japanese mother. She had both her arms hidden behind her back.

“Hi, Ahuja-san. Do you need something?” I asked her and without saying anything, she handed me a little wrapped box.

“A gift?” I said surprised “But why?” I looked at her still surprised. And she seemed slightly nervous

“W-Well…You helped me a lot when I first arrived here, even when other girls tried to bully me…and I heard that tomorrow is your birthday…maybe I should have waited.”

She has always been shy, but when she first arrived at this school, at the start of the first semester, she was even shier and because she wasn’t fully Japanese, some girls decided to pick on her. But one day I noticed their actions and decided to intervene, only after talking with the bullies’ parents everything was resolved.

I smiled while looking at the gift “Thank you.” 

I removed the wrap and opened the box, there was a beautiful metal watch inside and only by looking at it, it was clear it wasn’t cheap.

“That’s beautiful. It must have been pricey.” I said amazed while putting it on my wrist. 

“W-well, yeah it was but this is not just my gift, it’s also from my parents…they too wanted to thank you for what you did.”

“I see.” I said while still smiling “Thank them for me. It’s surely a nice surprise.”

I saw her smiling for a moment “I wanted to give you this gift tomorrow, but I was worried I would have forgotten and…you know already tomorrow will be my last day here right?”

I nodded “Yeah, I heard your father found a new job in Belgium and you’ll leave on Monday”

“Rumours travel really fast between colleagues…” she said sarcastically and seemed less nervous. She looked at the clock on the wall “I have to go back home! Have a good evening!” she immediately ran away and shortly after, I decided to go home too.

‘I want to gift them something…I’ll think about it tomorrow’

———

When I arrived home I thought of finding Nysilia cooking something as any other day since she really loves doing that apparently, but even if she still wasn’t there, I wasn’t worried, as this isn’t the first time she is away for a few days(even tho, it’s still something that happens rarely).

I wasn’t hungry so I decided to go to sleep, but before that, I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, because since I started training my whole body strengthened a lot, and even my jawline developed a bit without doing anything. My eyes remained this shiny yellow like they were made of gold, every time I look at them through the mirror I remember the memories of the Emperor I saw during my first training and then…I reconnect with reality. I remember that before all this, there used to be another soul in this body and I was another person too in the past, I still haven’t found out who I was before, and the only time I tried to ask Nysilia for some hints on where to search about it, she shut me off by saying 

“You are still a weak little worm who is not ready for the truth, wait patiently or I’ll cut your legs.” At that time it didn’t seem just a threat but a promise and I decided to just forget about it.

After ascertaining there were no big changes in other parts of my body, I wore my pyjama and went to sleep.

—28th September 2026—

After doing my simple morning routing, including not losing the metro for just a few seconds, there was still a little stretch of road to go and I decided to walk calmly, while looking at the watch Misato gifted me and smiled

“Right. Today is my birthday. I forgot about it.” I stayed with my gaze low on the watch. But as I was walking, I noticed the air was becoming colder the more I went closer to the school and when I raised my head, what I saw was absurd. The school was completely frozen, there were soldiers from the Self-Defence force in front of the gates and when I tried to look over the walls surrounding the school, I saw some of the students completely frozen with some of them slowly breaking apart. My heart sank even more when I started recognizing those faces and remembering their names, I became quite affectionate to them. 

I quickly ran to one of the soldiers.

“What is happening here?” I asked one of the soldiers in front of the school’s gate.

He looked at me like he was analysing me from the head to the toes and then answered “That’s classified information. Are you one of the teachers?”

I nodded “Can I at least know-”

The soldier interrupted me “I can’t tell you anything and it’s better if you stay away from this zone. We don’t know what may happen-”

A girl’s scream coming from the school interrupted him and after hearing that, my body started moving on its own and while I tried to surpass the gate, another soldier stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.

“What are you trying to do? This area is off limits-”

I looked at him, I could sense his blood circulating in his body and started controlling it, as I did this his hand slowly got off of me and I surpassed the gate. Another soldier tried to stop me but the one I was controlling hit him in the face with the back of his rifle; while I was running towards the entrance of the school I could hear the soldiers arguing and took advantage of that moment to go inside, where the situation was even worse than outside. It was full of frozen students and as I tried to gently touch one of them, he shattered immediately. I immediately looked away and thought “I have to find the culprit…” I closed my eyes and concentrated, I was trying to sense the enemy’s aura and shortly after I found it, the person was on the third floor but…

“A black aura.” I thought.