Here’s a **prose** reconstruction, preserving the sequence, tension, and deliberately withheld details.

***

Touma noticed the boy because the man holding his wrist was trying too hard to make it look ordinary.

The headache was already blooming.

That was the first warning.

He stood in the old transit station with his hands in his pockets, watching people find reasons to look somewhere else. The lights were too sharp. The vending machine’s hum was too loud. Everything seemed to have extra edges, as if the world had been cut out badly and the scraps were still attached.

Then came the second warning: that pressure behind his eyes, the feeling of something inside his skull turning toward a thought that wasn’t his.

Touma started walking.

Away would have been sensible. He was good at away. Trouble outside his head could usually be outrun, provided you spotted it early and didn’t waste time being proud.

Trouble inside his head came with him.

The man wore a gray coat. He had the boy beside a service gate, one hand closed around the boy’s wrist, the other tucked inside his coat. He wasn’t shouting or pulling. He had the patient, procedural manner of someone correcting a small administrative mistake.

The boy was a small-built teenager with a school bag hanging from one shoulder.

He wasn’t struggling.

Touma looked at his face and understood that this was worse.

There was nothing on it that asked for help. Nothing calculating distance or looking for an opening. Just blank terror, so complete that even the possibility of resistance seemed to have disappeared.

Touma knew that look.

It was not gallantry. It was recognition.

Six steps separated them.

He took them before he could turn the decision into an argument.

“Hey.”

The man in the gray coat looked up. His grip tightened. His other hand stayed inside his coat.

And there it was—not a voice, exactly, but the shape of an intention, sharp enough to catch against Touma’s own thinking.

Keep moving. Keep the kid quiet. Finish the handoff.

Touma was tired. His head hurt. He wanted, with an intensity that almost made him laugh, to have remained someone passing through a station.

Instead, he reached.

Not for the man’s arm.

For the thought.

It was like setting a paperknife to the edge of something that should not have had an edge.

He found the intention holding the next moment together and unthought it.

For an instant, the pain became a pin driven through the inside of the world.

The man’s hand opened.

He stared at his own fingers. The boy stumbled backward, caught his heel, and seemed to have a private appointment with gravity. Touma caught the strap of his school bag before he hit the floor.

For half a second, there was relief.

The wrist was free. The hand inside the coat had stopped moving. The boy was upright, breathing, close enough for Touma to hear the air catch in his throat.

For half a second, it had worked.

Then the second half arrived.

Something hiccupped in Touma’s memory.

There was no crash, no great blank space announcing what had been taken. A connection simply failed to complete itself.

He looked at the boy.

The terror was still there. So was the school bag, the narrow wrist, the face that had made Touma cross the station without stopping to think.

He knew that face had meant something a moment ago.

Now it was only a face.

Touma waited for the recognition to return.

The vending machine hummed. People kept walking.

Whatever had been there was gone with a clean, quiet cruelty.