The clinical white of the institution fades to the bruised purple of a Tokyo dusk. The automatic doors sigh shut behind Takemichi Hanagaki, the sound severing his last official tie to the world that called him insane. The air is sharp, clean, and terribly empty. He stands on the steps, clad in donated clothes that don't quite fit, holding a thin packet of discharge papers that whisper of "managed delusional disorder."

Free.

The word echoes hollowly in the vault of his ribs. He had screamed his truth until his throat was raw: the leaps through time, the blood on his hands, the weight of a captain's armband, the warmth of fists bumping his own. He spoke of Mikey's darkness and Draken's sacrifice, of Baji's smile and Kazutora's pain. He mapped the constellation of Toman—Pah-chin, Peh-yan, Mitsuya, Chifuyu, Hakkai, Angry, Smiley, Mucho, Sanzu—only to have their names filed as symptoms. Fixations. Fantasy personas.

"You just wanted to be a hero, didn't you, Takemichi?" the kindest doctor had said, her voice a soft, pitying blanket meant to smother. He'd clawed at it. "I'm not insane! PLEASE! I JUST WANT TO SAVE YOU! TELL ME WHAT I'VE SEEN, WHAT I'VE DONE, IS REAL!"

But the world answered with soft restraints and pills that blurred the edges of his memories, making even him wonder. The Black Dragon war, so vivid—the heat of the battle, the grit in his teeth as he stood between Taiju and Hakkai... was that just a desperate mind's masterpiece?

He takes a step, then another, his body moving on an instinct deeper than memory. The city murmurs around him, a river of indifferent lights and faces. People call him insane. But is he? Insanity is a break from reality. But what if his reality has simply... unmoored? What if he's a bookmark left in the wrong volume of history?

He has nowhere to go. His old apartment is a lifetime away, occupied by a stranger who never time-leaped. His parents' home is a ghost of a normal life he can never reclaim. The Musashi Shrine, his north star, is just a place now. If he went, would he find empty silence? Or a group of teenagers who'd look at his grown, weary face with wary suspicion?

He stops at a crosswalk, the same one, he thinks dizzily, where the car hit him. Or didn't. The red light bleeds into the twilight.

Where is he going to go now?

The answer doesn't come as a thought, but as a current in his blood. A pull. He isn't going to a place. He is going to find.

He will find them. Not the boys he knew, but the men they might have become. He will walk every street of Shinjuku, Shibuya, and every ward until he sees a glimmer of Draken's dragon in a passing biker, or hears an echo of Mikey's name in a street rumor. He will search for the legend of Toman in the underworld's whispers. He will look for Chifuyu's earnest eyes, Mitsuya's sharp style, the shadow of Sanzu's smile.

He has no plan, no gang, no proof. Only a conviction that is, itself, the definition of madness to everyone but him. The doctors said he just wanted to be a hero. They were wrong. He didn't want to be one. He was one. He is one. A hero without a world to remember his deeds is just a man with a desperate heart. And perhaps that's all he ever was.

Takemichi Hanagaki squares his shoulders. The walk signal flashes green. He steps into the stream of the city, a lone, unstable atom searching for its lost molecule. His journey isn't over. It has just reset, on the hardest difficulty setting yet: a reality that has forgotten him. He will make it remember. Or he will go down crying for his friends, a true and rightful captain to the last, even if the only one who knows it is the man they call insane.