Gotoh Se stared at the movie poster on the sliding door, illuminated by the light shining on it. It was already 2 am in Berlin, but she was wide awake and not at all sleepy.

It was the 2017 Indian film "Secret Superstar" directed by Advait Chandan. Zaira Wasim, who played Insia, was smiling brightly on the poster, while Aamir Khan, wearing sunglasses and a fur-collared hooded down jacket, played Shakti Kumaarr.

After the release of "Secret Superstar" in Germany, Gotoh Se had gone to the cinema alone to watch it three or four times, always crying her eyes out as she left the theater.

Insia, a solitary girl living under the shadow of her father's addiction to domestic violence, had a dream of loving guitar and music. Although she had the encouragement of her mother and her friend Chintan, she knew her father, with his deep-rooted feudal mindset, would never support what he considered an insane hobby.

So the introverted Insia's only way to express her musical value was to upload her guitar solo videos to YouTube. To prevent her father, classmates, and acquaintances from seeing her, she covered herself with a black veil and scarf as she sang and played guitar.

Later, Insia's guitar solo videos became more and more popular on YouTube, and even her classmates began to speculate about the identity of this mysterious guitar prodigy on their way to and from school.

Gotoh Se felt that Insia was just like her. Although she didn't live under the shadow of domestic violence like Insia, their similar personalities and unwavering pursuit of their dreams in music made her feel that Insia was actually another version of herself living in India.

But she hadn't met her own Shakti Kumaarr in life, or even had a friend like Chintan in reality.

Whether it was her time in Tokyo six years ago or her life in Berlin today, she felt like a child standing by the roadside, curiously watching the traffic representing other people's laughter and tears whizzing past.

She had always been an outsider in this world.

A sudden wave of fatigue swept over her, quickly overwhelming her consciousness.

Gotoh Se closed her eyes, and in the darkness, her breathing gradually became even.

---

"お姉ちゃん." ①

She seemed to hear someone calling to her.

Gotoh Se looked at Orne Santos in front of her , whose deep green eyes were fixed on her, but she heard this Japanese phrase ringing in her ears. The phrase lingered on the horizon:

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"Mors ultima ratio."

Santos suddenly spoke, uttering this seemingly irrelevant sentence with a cold laugh. The intense chill made her feel the temperature around her drop by several degrees Celsius in an instant.

Gotoh Se was a tenth-grade student at Kreativitäts Gymnasium - Lichtenberg in Berlin. She had taken a few Latin elective classes at Kreativitäts Gymnasium -Lichtenberg, but she had given up the elective course early due to its difficulty and switched to English.

"But she also recognized the Latin proverb Santos had spoken, which had left a deep impression on her. It was the first Latin proverb that the Latin teacher who claimed to be from Kassel had written on the blackboard during the first Latin class.

Oddly enough, Gotoh Se had forgotten everything she had learned in subsequent classes, but only that proverb remained firmly in her memory.

"Death is truth," Santos repeated in his mouth. Gotoh Se couldn't help but step back, watching Santos' face gradually distort into a chaotic vortex that almost completely sucked her in.

"お姉ちゃん!" The sound of Japanese exploded, twice as loud, and Gotoh Se looked at everything around her becoming blurry and distorted with that sound of Japanese.

Gotoh Harizawa watched her sister suddenly jump up from the tatami mat like a zombie, gasping for air with big mouthfuls, tiny beads of sweat on the tip of her nose.

Harizawa seemed to have seen her sister in this state countless times before, and she just pulled a helpless smile: "Sister, today should be the last day of your school's spring break. You have to go register today, or you'll be late."

Gotoh Se's chaotic consciousness was split open by Harizawa's words like a long knife. She began to grope and then put on her typical blue tracksuit.

Gotoh Harizawa watched her sister put on her clothes and stand up from the tatami mat. She suddenly pulled out a croissant and threw it to Illy.

Gotoh Se caught the croissant steadily, looked at it in her hand, and then looked at Hoshizawa Harizawa: "Harizawa, are you... not going to school today?"

"Our school doesn't have registration until tomorrow, sister. Hurry up, Aunt Berthas took a day off, so there was no one to make us breakfast this morning. I only found this in the fridge.

Mom and Dad haven't come back from Frankfurt, and Uncle Alt also went with them. So, sister, you have to take the subway to school today."

"Okay..."

Gotoh Harizawa rattled off this sentence, and upon hearing Gotoh Se's answer, she nodded and said:

"I'm going out too, sister. I'm going to Friedrichstrasse with Minte and the others. Oh, don't forget to bring your Gibson guitar."

"Okay..." Gotoh Se responded lightly, watching Harizawa's black ear-length hair flash by her and her room door. She put the croissant in her pocket, pulled open the cabinet door with a "whoosh."

The jet-black Gibson Black Card 1968 leaned against the cabinet wall. She put the guitar into a black guitar bag and carried it on her back.

After a simple wash and grooming, she ran out of the house all the way. Although Gotoh Se's driving skills had reached a very high level among ordinary people, she knew that at age 15, she was far from able to take the driving test.

The legal age for obtaining a driver's license in Germany is 18, which means that she cannot unleash her superior driving skills in the daylight. It is destined to belong only to the underground racing dynasty.

KreativitätsGymnasium-Lichtenberg obviously took into account the problem of rush hour on weekdays and scheduled registration for Sunday mornings.

The subway carriages that were usually packed like sardines were now empty. Only a few elderly people were sparsely seated in the carriage, and some of them were still reading traditional newspapers.

It was one of Germany's authoritative media, "Sueddeutsche Zeitung". Gotoh Se caught a glimpse of a prominent bold headline on a newspaper:

"Intense collision between underground street racers and police vehicles in Mitte district, resulting in the death of two officers, and the mastermind behind the race has been arrested."

Her heart shivered.

Cousins Muller, the "Berlin Grey Wolf," had been arrested. She unexpectedly thought of that dream and the deep green pupils of Orne Santos.

She had only met Orne Santos a few times, just becoming acquainted with his face at her father's business gatherings or holiday parties. She didn't have a good impression of the Brazilian man who liked to smoke marijuana.

One could even say she had an inexplicable fear of him. Especially after last night, when the Brazilian man's intense hostility towards her and his violent drifting skills in the alley almost led her to her death.

She didn't know where she had offended him.

She had also become an enemy of the "Berlin Grey Wolf" Cousins Muller last night. She had never met Muller, but she had seen his eye-catching orange-yellow Ford Mustang. There were probably only a few racers in Berlin who hadn't heard the furious roar of its V8 engine.

She had inadvertently offended Harvick Davision of "Avatar", Cousins Muller of "Berlin Grey Wolf", and Orne Santos of "Las Vegas".

It seemed that the world always harbored deep malice towards solitary people, even if they had done nothing wrong. Solitude itself was a sin.

The subway car began to brake, and Gotoh Se turned her head to look out the window.

Lichtenberg had arrived.