NIKE -Blue Lock-

White room

"I don't care what your name is. Now go away. And don't approach or let Nicklaus approach you for a while, understand?" he said in his emotionless tone, turning to me when he noticed my silence at his question.

He raised an eyebrow.
"Understand?" he asked again, staring at me with those creepy giant eyes of his that looked like those of the monsters in the closet.

I bit the inside of my cheek, pulling straight and not answering the question. As I closed the door behind me, remaining alone in the empty, sad corridors of the building, my fist finally hit the wall.

"What the fuck..." I whispered through clenched teeth, staring with as much intensity as distraction at my knuckles against the wall.

"The hell is wrong with these people."

Hours later
Nicole's pov

"PORCA PUTTANA, JINPACHI FAMMI USCIRE." I shouted now for the umpteenth time, my voice scraping like plow teeth digging into earth, like the four tips of the fork screeching against a plate.

I threw the thousandth punch against the metal door that had been closed behind me, ignoring the blood left by my knuckles, now surrendered to a sad fate without purpose or meaning.

"JINPACHI."

Screaming his name was futile. Screaming was futile.

No one could hear my cries, my pain, my anger, and my despair from behind that reinforced door. Not that a closed door was needed to hide me from others.

No one would be willing to find me: whether I was in a room with no exits or in an unobstructed field of flowers.

I pressed my warm forehead against the icy metal of the security door, letting my pupils stare at a random spot on the gray surface.

It had been perhaps four hours... at least four hours that I had been in that place where silence could be broken only by my breaths, and where light illuminated me from all sides, preventing me from orienting myself even by using my shadow.

It made me nauseous.
Being in a place so white, so bright, so flat, with no windows and no shadows, no voices and no sound.

I felt like I was going mad.

The feeling of being trapped in a place with no way out, a feeling that always lingered in my soul, was no longer just a feeling.

It was concrete, real.
And for the first time, it was not my old man who had imprisoned me, or myself.
It was Ego Jinpachi, a stranger.

Perhaps it was a reminder: a reminder that no matter how much I pretended to be free, I never would be.

From nothing and no one.

I lowered myself until my knees touched the white floor of the room, putting my palms in front of my eyes to find a modicum of darkness in that oppressive, blinding brightness.

Perhaps I was so used to the darkness that I now found it more comforting than the light.

The image of the boy with orange hair and sharp but large autumn leaf-colored eyes appeared in that black background. And I was grateful that after all that time I could see something, anything other than the blinding white that illuminated my dirty, broken body.

Wild Card... Kunigami Rensuke.

That hero who did nothing but believe he was protecting me, and then fell into purgatory precisely because of me, returning to me as a plaything with no hope and dreams other than to destroy me.

If only he had known that there was nothing left to destroy.

It's not like we talked a lot....