Translated into standard English:

In the old transit station the lights were too sharp and the hum too loud. Strangers drifted past without looking twice.

Touma was used to trouble. He was tired of it, and he was not heroic. Trouble outside could still be outrun; trouble that started inside the skull could not.

He noticed the man in the gray coat first—procedural, efficient, already reaching. One hand closed around a small-built teenager’s wrist. The other slipped inside the coat. The boy stood rigid, school bag still on his shoulder, face blank with terror.

The headache was already blooming. That was the first warning. Extra edges appeared on everything—vending machines, tiled floors, the air itself. For half a second the world held still. Then the second half arrived: a paper-knife edge of thought, a pin driven clean through the inside of the world, the private appointment with gravity that no one else could see.

It was not gallantry. It was recognition.

Six steps.

“Hey.”

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

Then the unthink hit—clean, quiet, and cruel. The man’s grip released. The boy stumbled free. Relief flooded in for half a second.

The second half arrived right behind it: a memory hiccup, a sudden loss of familiarity, the sense that something load-bearing had been taken and would not be given back.

The boy’s identity, and whatever prior connection existed, stayed withheld.