After being roped into trigonometry by Yuma, he had no desire to go to any of his later classes. Vector had taken one look at the problems and quickly gave up. He didn't understand any of it at all, it was all useless figures on a piece of paper. He hadn't really paid attention in his classes while he was faking to be Yuma's friend, and any homework could be marked with full points with one flash of Limited Barian's Force.

What was up with these worthless human problems?

He'd taken to wandering aimlessly through the halls, his own thoughts clogging up his head. He felt cold, numb and so, so confused.

"Hey! There you are!" He hardly had time to react before something hit him in the back, sending him stumbling forward, before he could fall, an arm snapped around him and yanked him back up. He had an insult prepared on his tongue before he saw Alit's huge grin. "Come on, everyone's waiting. Finally skipping class, are you? I knew you had it in you!"

Vector would have protested, but he couldn't break out of Alit's grip and was forcefully dragged down the hall to a large table where all the Emperors sans Nasch and Merag sat in their school uniforms, chatting amongst each other. So they were all human too, and still managed to find each other, Vector mused to himself. They seemed to perk up at the two of arriving, and smiled at them both.

After being hauled quite literally into a chair and slapped hard on the back by Gilag, Vector suddenly found himself pummeled with Alit's rapid fire complaints about the unfairness of detention. Everyone was exchanging pleasant banter, sometimes even turning to Vector for input.

Hey… wasn't this really wrong? Weren't they supposed to be wondering about the fate of the three worlds? Why were they here discussing weekend plans? Shouldn't they be cursing him out? He looked at everyone at the table, and not a single person gave him a dirty look.

How genuine. How disgusting.

"So, karaoke Friday sounds good to you? Come on, you've got to say yes! We've got to outvote that downer Durbe!" Alit eagerly slung his arm around Vector's shoulders, giving him a friendly punch in the arm.

They're all here, all smiling and none of this is happy, none of this is good, stop it, stop it-

"Shut up."

Alit blinked in confusion, a smile still on his face. "Huh?"

"I said, shut up."

Everyone at the table stared at Vector, now sporting a horrific snarl on his face as his entire body trembled with rage. "Why are you being so nice to me? You hate me, don't you? All of you hate me! Yeah, that's right, all of you should. I did terrible things to all of you! There's absolutely no reason we we should be playing friends like this! Do you pity me or something?" He probably looked like a madman, but for some reason once he had started, he couldn't stop growing more and more hysterical. "Yeah, that can be the only reason why any of you would want to deal with me. You all want to laugh at me because I failed, right? I failed, and you're here to rub it in my face! Well, it worked, okay? So stop pitying me!"

Nobody spoke a single word. The silence was a perfect time for Vector to quickly take everything back, put on a smile and eagerly declare that he was just kidding all along, but he couldn't get the act on his face.

One of the chairs squeaked back, and Mizael stood up from his seat. He didn't seem to want to shove his hand through Vector's head, but there was a solemn sternness on his face that made Vector flinch slightly. "You're right. We should stop."

Alit opened his mouth to say something, but Mizael shook his head. "You always looked unhappy whenever we talked about Ryoga, so we thought we should try hanging out with you too. But I guess that was a bad idea. That's what we get for trying to work with childish ingrates."

"Mizael!" Durbe yelled, but the blonde didn't stop.

"Well? I thought you didn't want to be with us anymore. So why are you still standing around?"

Vector didn't need to be told twice. Before he knew it, he was running as fast as he could, he didn't care where, just anywhere, away from everyone and everything. He didn't know how long he ran, but he didn't stop until he couldn't see another person in sight. Nobody would find him under an empty underpass, so he crawled up the slanted ground off the road and huddled down until the metal of the bridge was sweeping his head.

"Who does Miza-chwan think he is, anyway?" Vector grumbled to himself, picking up a chipped piece of concrete and throwing it as far as he could. "Stupid, stupid dragon obsessed idiot! Good for nothing, worthless piece of imaginary trash! Ingrate, huh? How dare he! Of all things!"

He knew he shouldn't have broken character and yelled at them. It was useless yelling at something who didn't even remember, or didn't even know what he was talking about. Mizael was always a prideful egotist who spat out ugly words, but- but that he was…childish?

No, that's impossible. After all, Vector was a conquering king, one that took up the sword and plundered as many countries as he could get his hands on. As a Barian Emperor, he could manipulate whole families into full blown warfare to ruin each other's lives. Human, Astral, Barian, God alike, he was able to make them dance on his strings for a while. Could a child construct multilayered schemes so complex that not even his fellow Emperors could see the end of it? Could a child free a God with nothing but his own will?

And yet, somehow, despite reassuring himself, Vector didn't smile.

He heard the low hum of a motorcycle coming down the road, but he didn't look up. He'd stop throwing rocks for just a second, let them pass, and go back to thinking. It's not like he had anywhere to be.

The engine dulled down, and he heard a sharp, "Hey! Hey, you up there!" He looked up, spotting a tall woman standing with her arms crossed, glaring right at him. He recognized her from his days of pretending to be human, Yuma's journalist sister- Akara? Akari, that was it. "You're that Shingetsu boy Yuma's friends with, right? Get down here!"

He wasn't going to obey some stupid human woman, but he couldn't look too suspicious in front of adults, or else he'd be hauled away to some hospital somewhere. So much for being alone. He slid down to her and quickly switched his voice, "What are you doing all the way here?"

"What am I doing here? What are you doing here?"

"I," think of a lie, think of a lie, "I had a fight with my friends."

"You've got to be kidding-" she let out a sigh, and shook her head, but eventually hopped back on her bike. "Come on, I'll take you home."

Home. Right. He had one of those.

He didn't argue and let her drive him wherever. He couldn't fly back to the Barian World, and he no longer had his Rank-Up cards to brainwash people into letting him live in abandoned houses. Home was the Barian World that he never cared about. Home was his crumbling castle for a past life that seemed like a faraway dream.

Akari stopped the motorcycle in front of a house he'd never seen before. She looked at him, so it must be the place where the him of this world lived. He thanked her and hesitantly opened the door, peeking inside. It was a hallway he hadn't seen before, and a staircase that lead upstairs to assumably the bedrooms. He wandered around the first floor, trying to take in as much detail as possible of this strange new place. He could hear the sink running and the salty scent of grilled fish hit his nose. He followed the sound until he found the kitchen, and spotted two people standing there that made his mouth clam up.

He'd recognize them anywhere, no matter how many centuries passed, from his mother's long hair and slender figure to his father's gruff air. They weren't wearing the royal dress he remembered, but that was so, so long ago, and they were both seamlessly relaxing here as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

His backpack must have fallen onto the floor, because his mother turned and smiled sweetly at him. "Oh, Rei, I didn't hear you come in. Well, don't just stand there, I made you some toast." She sounded exactly the same, full of life, her white dress without a drop of scarlet.

Clouds were clotting his head, letting him be lead thoughtlessly forward into the chair next to his father. A piece of mildly burnt toast was placed in front of him, and he looked back at the woman that served it, just in case he had mistaken her in profile. No, it was really her. What…was this? What sot of cruel joke was this?

His father didn't smile, even in this place. Vector would have said it was a relief, but he tossed that thought away the moment it came into his head. His father was always a stern man, cold, cruel and violent. It became suddenly hard for Vector to swallow his food.

"Rei."

His father's sudden voice snapped Vector out of his thoughts. "Yes?"

"I've been doing some thinking, and I think we need to have more father-son bonding time."

Vector hated to admit it, but he flinched even after all this time. Those words meant he did something his father didn't like. If Vector ever did something his father didn't like, no matter how small, he'd be dragged aside and beaten until he apologized. His father was the king, after all, so all of the servants would turn a blind eye to it, and pretend it wasn't happening. Sometimes, when he was tired of hitting Vector, he'd get some of the servants to kick him instead. After a while, it wouldn't even matter if Vector covered the bruises up with jewelry, he still wouldn't be fit enough to give speeches to the public.

But here his father was no king. The neighbor's house was close by, and they'd easily hear Vector if he started crying, so maybe his father was planning to take him into the basement and beat him there. Well, Vector grimly thought, if his father hit him on the head or kicked him in the hips, then Vector's school uniform would cover up most of the bruising, even if he went swimming.

Vector tried his hardest not to sigh, but all that came out of his mouth was a dejected, "Yes."

"I figured we could go out and have ramen at that new stand that's getting popular. You don't have plans this weekend, do you?"

"Uh…no. No, I don't."

"Good, I thought you'd take the weekend to see that Tsukumo boy. Maybe you've finally given the Kamishiros a break!" He let out a hearty laugh, and his mother chimed in with a light chuckle.

Vector sat there stunned. Never in his entire life had he heard his father laugh so jollily, not even when he'd come back raving drunk with tales of conquest. His father could be lying just like the rest of them- no, his father was never that kind of man. Rather than slowly toying with Vector, he'd take the straightforward route and slam his son's head against the wall.

He reached and touched his father's shoulder, feeling the curve of flesh under his palm.

Real. Actually real.

He suddenly excused himself, saying he'd finish his snack later, and dashed upstairs to the room marked with Shingetsu's name. He slammed and locked the door behind him, and flung himself onto the bed.

"This isn't real, this isn't real," he kept muttering to himself. These weren't his parents, they were the parents of the Shingetsu that lived here. There's no way his mother would laugh along with his father's jokes, and there's no way his father would look so jolly. They weren't his parents, they were just someone else's, someone else's, his parents were buried in a dim, forgotten graveyard somewhere far away…

He'd been humiliated a thousand times under Nasch's rule, but this- this was the absolute worst. He didn't have his Numbers and he couldn't even transform. He couldn't even travel back to the nonexistent Barian World, and his parents were alive. Before he knew it, he felt like he'd swallowed a lump of lead, and he dug his fingernails into the bedsheets, biting down hard on the pillow. The great and powerful Barian Lord Vector, cried until he'd run out of tears, and denied every moment of it.

His reflection in the mirror was just like he remembered it, but he looked so pathetic and tired. The skin underneath his eyes were already dark and ringed, so splotchy, ugly and human. He tugged them down, watching the redness of his eyelids with an apathetic melancholy before dropping back onto his bed.

Human, huh?

He couldn't push away the uneasiness in his chest, his heart of sinew and not pink rock thudding dully against his ribcage. Worst case scenario, go. What if, by some cruel roll of the dice, he was stuck in this hell forever? He looked at his hands, fleshy, granite marks rubbed against his pinkies from smudging pencil on paper, wholly human. These were his hands now, the hands of a young human boy struggling through trigonometry problems and sporting a strong deck. How ordinary.

Yeah, that's right. Ordinary, an normal human without royal blood or a powerful title.

Back where he was a Barian, Vector was real and 'Shingetsu Rei' was make-believe, but here it was just the opposite. In this place, Shingetsu Rei was real and 'Vector' was nothing but a childish fantasy. So where exactly did that leave him? He was Vector, and he was definitely a real person, but everyone else in this place only knew 'Vector' as a character in a story told by five year olds. But he was real. He wasn't some prince in a story- wait, he was technically a prince in a story, but that all actually happened, he was just a couple centuries old, that's all.

So in a place where everyone acknowledged 'Vector' as fake, how was he going to exist?

Ah. Nothing had changed. He was no longer being battered to pieces, but he was still fighting for his life. If he forgot who he was, who Vector was, then he'd truly die. Here Vector was reduced to nothing more than an idea, and the only way to kill an idea is for him to forget 'Vector' ever existed. If an idea is spread to many people, it lives on, but here, nobody else would possibly believe him. The burden of his own existence was a sin he had to bear by himself, just like always.

Nothing changed.

Maybe this place was really nice. He didn't have to work at warding off glares or forgive him for the horrors he committed, and everyone seemed to get along really well. It wasn't impossible for him to live like this in peace, scrub his hatred down a little bit, and enjoy the silence.

…He didn't want to be happy with this. He couldn't let himself be satisfied with such a strange world, but the very least he could do is make himself comfortable in this prison. Tomorrow he'd go apologize to Mizael and the rest of them, and maybe Durbe could teach him some math. He'd ask his parents for a bento to take to school tomorrow, and he could eat it together with Yuma and all his friends.

Ahh, he was in hell.