A Silent Step

【Episode 1: The Worn-out Wings, the Quiet Bottom of the Peat】

In the darkness, only a pale blue light illuminated Tatsumi’s face. Staring at the glittering virtual world projected on the TV screen, his fingertips simply pushed the controller buttons, completely devoid of emotion.

On the screen, the character ran flawlessly without failure, obeying every input. It was a quiet, cold, yet "comfortable space" enclosing him—keeping him safe from the fear of getting hurt in the real world.

"There is no need to get hurt anymore."

Tatsumi whispered, hugging his knees. He had not given up from the start. He had frantically tried to fly—starting businesses, job hunting, seeking new relationships—only to be slammed down each time by the cold wall of reality.

He had challenged, and failed miserably, time and time again. Each time his beloved mother denied his attempts, his heart was deeply wounded, sinking into profound sadness. His wings were now completely frayed, leaving him with no strength to take even a single step outside.

Suddenly, the bedroom door opened without a sound.

Standing in the sliver of incoming light, his mother, Aya, did not even make eye contact with Tatsumi. Wordlessly, she set down a massive, dusty, and soot-stained lump of canvas heavily into the corner of his room.

She did not seek her son’s permission. She offered no explanation. It was a climbing backpack—a kissling—belonging to his late grandmother, Chiyo.

Aya loved Chiyo from the bottom of her heart. Because she loved her, Chiyo’s binding dominance was painful and suffocating; she detested it. Torn between love and hate, unable to discard it yet unable to bear its weight herself, Aya simply placed her mother’s heavy keepsake in her son’s room. It was a wordless prayer, hoping that one day, like his name Tatsumi—"to stand on one's own"—he might rise above this curse.

The door clicked shut coldly. Immediately after, as if to justify her silent, abrupt action, Aya’s thin voice echoed through the wooden barrier.

"See? It turned out exactly as I said! If you hadn't chased after those useless challenges, listened to me, and just stayed quiet, you wouldn't have been hurt. Give up already."

Those overprotective words pierced his chest like a silent, deep violence. Yet, Tatsumi did not know then how deeply that denial was rooted in his mother's own fear and love.

"When the bond turns into a curse."

He had no way of knowing the true weight of those words yet.

In the darkness that reclaimed the silence, Tatsumi stared at the massive backpack abandoned in the corner.

The backpack his mother loved and yet intensely detested, the one she averted her eyes from. Seeking the warmth of his beloved grandmother, Tatsumi—who was losing his soul in the "comfortable space" of the game—reached out his hand to the rugged canvas, drawn like a magnet.

The metal buckles were covered in red rust, rough and cold. The moment he grabbed the straps and tried to lift it, the forgotten, mud-stained weight of real life surged heavily through Tatsumi's fingertips.

"What is this... so heavy..."

It was the overwhelming "mass" of this physical world, something that never existed within the programmed game.

Tucked into the side pocket of the backpack was Chiyo’s soot-stained, hardened climbing journal, handwritten in her youth.

Holding his breath, Tatsumi turned the dusty pages.

His fingertips felt the roughness of the paper. A faint, ancient scent of soot and mud tickled his nose.

As his eyes traced the faded ink of her handwriting, Tatsumi’s imagination broke through the walls of his dark room, beginning to paint a vivid picture of the distant past in his own mind.

It was Tokyo, immediately after the war, a desolate burned-out wasteland. Ten-year-old Chiyo was rubbing her freezing, small hands together under the dim, feeble light of peat—deitan.

"No matter how freezing it gets, stand up and take a step forward."

In a brutal world where she had lost her parents and feared starvation, the vow ten-year-old Chiyo had imposed upon herself was her sole beacon of survival, even if she had to crawl through the mud.

Behind that cold vow lay a clumsy, yet desperate will to survive. Tatsumi turned the pages further.

On the very first page, in Chiyo’s youthful, powerful handwriting, it read:

"With my own feet, I shall stand beneath a sky of unveiled truth."

The moment he touched those words, something caught violently in Tatsumi's heart.

In the virtual world of the video game, a push of a button returned desired results with absolute perfection, free of any friction. But this backpack, which his mother could not even bring herself to discard, held the genuine, mud-stained weight of real life.

Tatsumi gripped the heavy strap of the backpack tightly once more. Were the pains of his failures, the wounds of his frayed wings, not proof that he had desperately struggled to stand on his own outside the game?

"Grandmother, Mother... I am..."

In the cold darkness enclosing the room, a tiny, burning ember was beginning to ignite the frozen stove deep inside Tatsumi's chest.

📖 Next Chapter:https://note.com/ttukumoo/n/n858bdfd560cc
🌐OriginalJapanesehere:https://note.com/juicy_laelia8513/n/n0baa8d47422c

"Thank you so much for reading to the very end!"💗