Shinseki No Ko To Otomori Dakara -

The construction was postponed. Not canceled—Kaito wasn’t naive. But postponed. And in the postponement, a small miracle: Tanaka’s daughter, alive after all (the memory had warped his guilt), received a phone call that night. “I’m coming to see you,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

“And?”

He pushed through the rotted door.

Kaito had never asked to be born between worlds.

Kaito returned to the shrine as dawn broke. The spring was still muddy. His mother’s voice was still faint. But the shimenawa rope around the sacred tree had grown a single new twist of green. shinseki no ko to otomori dakara

“You must leave,” she said one autumn morning, her presence a cool breath on his neck. “The highway construction reaches the forest’s edge. By spring, they will dig through my spring. I will become silence.”

It looked like him, but older. Wearing armor no human had worn in five centuries. Its eyes were his mother’s—deep, green, endless. The construction was postponed

Kaito set the cup on the ground. “Then you will have to walk through me.”