The left side of the bandages had been torn, probably by the same force that created the wound I could now see through the gap. A gash ran from just below the ribcage to the hip, deep enough to have bled through the bandages and the suit and onto the floor in the thin trail I’d followed from the hallway.

Someone or something had caught Hikaru with a clean lateral strike during training, and instead of going to the medical center like any reasonable human being, Hikaru had walked back to the apartment, climbed five flights of stairs while actively hemorrhaging, and collapsed in the bathroom while attempting to treat the wound alone.

Because of course. Because going to the medical center meant removing the bandages in front of medical staff. And removing the bandages meant exposing the body underneath. And exposing that body meant the end of everything Hikaru had built, the disguise, the escape from Japan, the forged documents, the three-year plan to earn enough power to face down a family that believed women existed to produce heirs rather than wield weapons.

The breathing was wrong. Shallow. Rapid. The kind of breathing that meant either panic or blood loss, and since Hikaru was unconscious, panic wasn’t an option.

"Naomi." My voice came out flat and hard, stripped of the cocky swagger I wore like a second skin. "Go to the medical center. Sprint. Tell them we have a first-year student with a deep laceration to the left torso, significant blood loss, and compromised breathing. Don’t give a name. Don’t give a room number. Just get someone with healing ability here as fast as possible."

Naomi stood frozen in the bathroom doorway, her vanilla drink dangling forgotten in one hand, her pink eyes enormous and locked on the figure on the floor.

"Naomi. Now."

She dropped the drink. It hit the tile and exploded vanilla and cinnamon across the white surface in a spray that I would have found hilarious under literally any other circumstance. She ran. I heard her sneakers slap the apartment floor, the front door slam open, and then the rapid pounding of footsteps fading down the hallway toward the elevator. The sound cut off with the distant chime of doors opening, and then silence.

I was alone with my roommate.

I knelt beside Hikaru and pressed two fingers against the side of her throat, feeling for a pulse. The skin was cool, clammy. Heart rate too fast. The gash continued bleeding in a slow but persistent seep that had soaked through the bandages and pooled in the grout lines between the tiles.

The wound needed pressure, but the bandages were in the way, wrapped so tight around Hikaru’s torso that they functioned less like medical dressing and more like a corset designed by someone who hated the concept of breathing.

The bandages had to come off.

I knew what I’d find underneath. I’d known since the first day, since Hikaru walked through the apartment door with those red eyes and that carefully controlled voice and the posture of someone who’d spent years learning to take up less space than their body actually occupied.

The novel had described what was hidden beneath those compression wraps in gratuitous detail across multiple Chapters, because the author of "Hunter Academy: America’s Elite" had the subtlety of a freight train and the restraint of a golden retriever in a tennis ball factory.

But knowing and seeing are different countries, and I was about to cross the border without a passport.

I found the edge of the bandage where it tucked under itself near the right shoulder and pulled. The fabric was medical grade, wound tight enough to restrict circulation, and saturated with a mixture of blood and sweat that made it stick to the skin underneath like a second layer of dermis. I pulled harder. The bandage came away in a long unwinding strip, peeling off Hikaru’s torso in loops that released the compression one layer at a time.

The first layer came free and the chest expanded slightly, lungs suddenly granted permission to fill completely for the first time in hours. The second layer revealed the upper swell of breasts that the compression had been fighting against all day.

By the third layer, the fabric was so blood-soaked that it came away with a wet, peeling sound that made my stomach clench. I kept unwinding, working as fast as I could without being rough, one hand supporting Hikaru’s head and the other stripping away the evidence of a secret that had been maintained through pain and stubbornness and sheer force of will.

The last loop came free.

Hikaru’s breasts bounced as the final compression released, the sudden freedom sending them into a motion that caught the bathroom light in ways I was absolutely not going to think about right now because my roommate was actively dying on the floor. They were exactly what the novel had described. Full. Heavy.

The kind of proportions that made the 36E designation on Hikaru’s extraction profile feel conservative rather than descriptive. Pale skin marked by the red lines where the bandages had been cutting into flesh all day, nipples a soft pink that darkened at the tips, and a frame that made it immediately, violently obvious that the person lying on this bathroom floor was not and had never been a man.

The gash on her left side looked worse without the bandages compressing it. A clean diagonal slice, four inches long and deep enough to see the layer of fat and muscle beneath the skin. Training injury from a blade or an ability that created cutting force. The edges weren’t clean enough for a real weapon, which meant this came from a sparring session where someone pushed too hard or Hikaru pushed herself too far, refusing to stop despite the damage because stopping meant admitting weakness and admitting weakness meant questions and questions meant discovery.

I grabbed the cleanest towel from the rack above the toilet and pressed it against the wound with firm, even pressure. Hikaru made a sound in her throat, somewhere between a groan and a whimper, the first noise she’d produced since I entered the bathroom. Her eyelids fluttered. Red eyes, unfocused and swimming, rolled behind half-closed lids.

"Stay down," I said. "Help is coming."

Her mouth moved. No sound came out at first, then a whisper so faint I had to lean closer to catch it.

"Don’t... look..."