The Spilled Ones (Kobore-mono)

[darkrednotmaroon]

Chapter 0 - Muscle Memory

I'd been wrestling with the same goddamn riff for forty minutes.

'I Want You (She's So Heavy).' The Beatles. Lennon's desperate, obsessive chanting over that slow, grinding descent into chaos. It was the kind of song that made you feel like the floor was tilting, like gravity was just a suggestion, like everything solid could turn liquid if you held the note long enough.

My knockoff Fender Stratocaster, bought secondhand at a Hard-Off in Kichijoji, the body scuffed in places the previous owner had tried to sand down and given up on, rested heavy against my thigh. The amp was off. I wasn't trying to wake the whole neighborhood. Just my fingers moving, muscle memory, the strings biting into calluses I'd been building since junior high school.

A-minor. Slide to A-flat.

Bzzzt. Bzzzt.

The vibration cut through the silence like a blade.

I froze, fingers still pressing the frets, and glanced over at my desk. My phone, a silver Docomo flip with the antenna stub and the blue-backlit external screen, was shivering against a stack of unopened school textbooks. The tiny monochrome display on the front showed one word.

Nacchi.

Nanase.

My stomach did something complicated, something between a flip and a clench, and I reached over, flipping the phone open with one hand while the other still cradled the guitar neck.

The screen loaded. Line by agonizing line.

From: Nacchi, Subject: —, Received: 20:07

"Jouchi, I think we should stop seeing each other. We've barely seen each other lately. And I think I want to focus on my studies in the second year."

I read it again.

And again.

The words didn't change. They just sat there, pixelated kanji and katakana on a 2.4-inch TFT screen, completely indifferent to the fact that they'd just reached into my chest and pulled out something vital.

A breakup text. On a Sunday night.

With the Beatles still echoing in my skull and a half-empty can of Pocari Sweat going warm on the floor beside me.

Outside the window, the distant rumble of the Keio Line cut through the quiet, that familiar, mechanical heartbeat of the neighborhood, the steel wheels grinding against the curve just before Kamishiro Station. The 20:17 semi-express to Shinjuku, punctual to the second, its two-tone departure chime echoing across the rooftops like a question nobody had asked.

I let the guitar slide off my leg. It hit the floor with a dull thunk, the strings ringing faintly in protest, and I just sat there, back against the bed frame, phone open in my hand, staring.

Seven months. That's how long we'd been together.

And I use the word together very generously.

Our relationship, if you could even call it that, had never really been a relationship.

Not the way Kenta and Yui were a relationship, with the obvious neck bruises and the matching phone straps, and the way Kenta would brag about shit I didn't need to hear. Not the way Ryo and Aiko were a relationship, with the constant bickering and the jealousy spirals and the dramatic conciliations that played out over long, emotionally exhausting text exchanges.

No.

Me and Nanase?

We were two nervous otaku orbiting the same niche interests from a safe, respectable distance.

We talked about L'Arc~en~Ciel. Hurry Xmas had just dropped, and she had opinions about hyde's vocal range that she could articulate for twenty minutes straight without stopping for air. We debated whether the Chimera Ant arc in Hunter × Hunter was Togashi's masterpiece or a self-indulgent mess. We picked apart every new and past One Piece chapter, Water Seven and Enies Lobby, oh God, those two arcs were giving us life. And Thriller Bark, she'd send me wall of text theories about Moria's Devil Fruit that I'd read three times just to hear her voice in my head. Turned out she was right all along.

But that was it.

That was the totality of our romance.

In seven months, we'd gone on exactly two and a half dates.

The first: Inokashira Park, late autumn, the leaves turning that shade of brownish-gold that made everything look like a watercolor painting. We'd walked the path around the pond in awkward, agonizing silence, the space between our shoulders a charged and miserable void, until a pigeon swooped down and stole the melonpan right out of her hand. She'd yelped. I'd laughed. For about thirty seconds, the tension had broken, and we'd just been two kids, laughing at a bird.

Then the pigeon was gone, and the silence came back, and neither of us knew what to say.

The second: a movie. Some forgettable romance playing at the Toho Cinemas in Fuchu. She'd wanted to see it. I'd agreed because I'd have agreed to watch paint dry if it meant sitting next to her in a dark room for two hours. We'd shared a popcorn, separate hands, carefully avoiding each other, like there was an invisible forcefield around the bucket. When the love confession scene happened on screen, I'd felt her tense up beside me, her whole body going rigid like a guitar string pulled too tight, and I'd stared at the screen so hard my eyes hurt, pretending not to notice.

And the hand-holding. That happened exactly once.

The second; point five: Winter. Late January. We were sitting on a bench near the Inokashira pond, not far from the very same spot where the pigeon had committed its crime. Our breath fogged in the cold air. She was wearing mittens, hand-knit, probably by her mother, and her fingers looked so small, so fragile, like something I needed to protect.

I don't know what came over me. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was the way the setting sun caught the edges of her hair, turning it into something out of a shoujo manga. Maybe I was just tired of being afraid.
I reached over and took her hand.

Her fingers tensed immediately. A full-body flinch, like I'd touched her with an electric wire. But she didn't pull away. Not at first. She just went very, very still, and her hand sat in mine like a small, frightened animal that wasn't sure whether to run or freeze.

Two minutes. Maybe three. The longest three minutes of my life.
I could feel every micro-movement. The twitch of her index finger. The way her pulse beat, rabbit-fast, against my palm. I wanted to say something, anything, but my throat had closed up, and my brain was just a loop of is this okay, is this okay, is this okay.

Then she pulled her hand back. Not harshly. Just carefully. Deliberately. And then, out of pure reflex, I guess, her fingers drifted up to the side of her head, aiming for a strand of hair that wasn't there.

Her hair was cropped into this neat little pixie cut, short enough that her ears and the nape of her neck were always visible. There was nothing to tuck. Nothing long enough to catch between her fingers. But she still made the motion anyway, fingertips brushing the air just above her ear, chasing a ghost of a habit she'd probably picked up back when her hair was longer.

It took her half a second to realize what she'd done. Her cheeks flushed the faintest shade of pink, and she dropped her hand back to her lap like it had committed some kind of crime.

She smiled, that quick, awkward, desperately-trying-to-recover smile, and said something about the temperature dropping, maybe we should head back.
I didn't say anything.

But I think that was the moment I fell for her a little harder, in the dumbest possible way.

And I never tried again.

Not because I didn't want to. God, I wanted to. I wanted to hold her hand until our fingers fused. I wanted to know what it felt like to have her head resting against my shoulder, her hair smelling like whatever shampoo she used, the soft weight of her body against mine.

But every time I got close, every time the distance between us shrank to something smaller than a meter, the fear would kick in. The questions. The second-guessing.

What if she pulls away again? What if she doesn't want this? What if I'm pushing her into something she's not ready for? What if I'm just some creep who can't take a hint?

So I kept my hands to myself, and I sent her a little 'x' at the end of every mundane text.

It was a kiss we both learned from Maitantei Conan.

And I told myself that was enough.

It wasn't.

And the last two months?

The last two months, I'd been trying to change things. Subtly. Clumsily. The way a nineteen-year-old boy with zero game and no template for what 'romantic escalation' even meant tries to change things. I'd drop hints in our texts, "I wish things could be more… you know… real between us," hoping she'd pick up on what I couldn't say directly. I'd let my messages linger on topics that skirted the edge of physical, emotional, something-deeper-than-friends-who-share-manga-recommendations.

I wasn't being subtle.

I knew that.

She had to know that.

And Nanase, Hasegawa Nanase, second-year student in the elite academic track at Asakaze Minami High, the kind of public school that fed directly into Tokyo University and Kyoto University and Kyushu University, the kind of girl who'd been scoring in the top five percent nationally on practice exams since junior high, Nanase was not stupid.

Shy? Yes. Socially awkward? Most of the time. The way she hunched her shoulders forward, that nekoze posture, cat-back, like she was constantly trying to fold herself into a smaller, safer shape, was practically a visual signature of her discomfort in her own skin.

But not stupid.

She'd understood what I was hinting at.

She had to. And it had scared her.

Probably. Most likely.

Not because she was cruel. Not because she didn't care. But because the thought of physical intimacy, the thought of being expected to provide something she didn't know how to give, was probably more terrifying to her than failing an exam. Exams had rules. Exams had study guides. You could prepare for an exam.

There was no cram school for being someone's girlfriend.

And so, faced with a boyfriend who was clearly, desperately, pathetically signaling that he wanted more than just text chains about J-Rock and JUMP manga, she'd chosen the path of least resistance.

Eject.

I took a long breath. Let it out.

My thumb moved across the keypad, pressing buttons by feel without really looking.

"You serious, Nacchi?"

Nacchi. Her pet name. The one I'd come up with in our second month, back when everything still felt new and shiny and full of possibility.
It felt wrong to use it now, a cheap, manipulative jab, a reminder of what we used to be, but the pettier, more wounded part of my brain typed it anyway. We still called each other that anyway.

Sent.

Three minutes. Four. The phone buzzed.

"Yeah, Jouchi. I really do want to focus on my studies. We can still be friends, you know? I'm fine with texting like we always do, talking about anything."

Translation: I can't give you what you want, and the pressure is making me run for the hills, but can we please keep living in the same comfortable, passionless bubble we've always inhabited? Just without the label of being in a relationship.

That was the problem, wasn't it?

She wanted 'friendly.' She wanted 'otaku pen-pals who occasionally meet up and never touch.'

And I, despite my Revolver mop cut, despite the guitar and the somewhat edgy western music preference, despite the fact that I'd deliberately chosen the Bunkei, Humanities track just to avoid the soul-crushing grind of Math III by Fujisawa, I was still a guy. A juvenile with a functioning pulse and a brain that had, increasingly, been going to very non-otaku places when I thought about her.

Kenta and Yui had been doing it since month three. Ryo bragged about stuff that made me want to bleach my own ears. Even Takeshi, Takeshi, who looked like a sentient block of tofu and had the charm of a wet rag, had apparently gotten to second base with his girlfriend at a karaoke box near the station two weeks ago.

And here I was.

Seven months.

Two dates. One hand-hold on an extra date you couldn't even call a date, since it was just us hanging out casually after meeting up with mutual friends, Keira and Anri.

And a break-up text on a Sunday night.

I didn't reply. I just stood up, grabbed my sweater, pulled on whatever jeans were within reach, and walked out of my room.

---

The Yamaha Jog coughed twice before the engine caught, and I let it idle for a moment, the handlebars vibrating under my palms, the red plastic body scuffed from two years of questionable decisions and one memorable incident involving a curb and a rainy night in October last year.

The streets of Kamishiro-cho were quiet. Residential. The kind of quiet that felt less peaceful and more like the town itself was holding its breath. I passed the closed shutters of the shoutengai, the flickering vending machines that stood sentinel on every other corner, the FamilyMart with its neon green-and-blue sign cutting through the dark.

By the time I pulled into the empty lot near the 7-Eleven, the one on the edge of the neighborhood, the one with the low concrete wall that had become our unofficial headquarters, it was quarter to nine.

The boys were already there.

Six silhouettes sprawled across the wall and the asphalt. Some sitting. Some standing. The orange glow of the store sign caught the edges of their faces, flickering slightly as the fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead.

None of them went to Kamishiro High. These were the Ichi-chu survivors, Kamishiro Municipal First Junior High, the alma mater we all shared, the place where our particular brand of aimless semi-delinquency had been forged.

We'd scattered to different high schools after graduation, but the geography of our houses hadn't changed, and neither had the gravitational pull of this parking lot.

Kenta spotted me first.

"Jouchi~!"

His voice cut through the night with the precision of a surgical instrument designed specifically to annoy me. He was perched on the concrete wall, legs swinging, a can of Melon Soda dangling from one hand. His grin stretched wide.

And of course he called me that.

'Jouchi' was supposed to be for Nanase only. These guys had a terrible sense of humor timing.

"What's with the face, Jouchi? How's Naaah, Naaah, Naaah, Naaah, Naaah~ cchi?"

He dragged out the nickname in a sing-song of Hey Jude's na-na-na, the syllables dripping with mockery, the same stupid tone he'd been using since the day I'd first told them I had a girlfriend and found out we had pet names for each other.

And he sang it out of tune, he just took a sad song and made it worse.

A few of snickers from the others followed.

I dropped onto the concrete beside Ryo without saying a word. The wall was cold through my jeans. I reached over, plucked the half-burned cigarette from between Ryo's fingers, and stuck it between my lips.

Ryo raised an eyebrow but didn't stop me.

I inhaled.

Mild Seven.

That first hit always burned, a sharp, chemical bite at the back of the throat, the kind that made you want to cough if you weren't used to it. I was used to it. Not because I was a real smoker. Real smokers bought their own packs and smoked in the morning and got cranky when they ran out.

I was just a social smoker. A situational smoker. The kind of guy who only lit up when there was something to forget, something to push down, something to fill the hollow space where words should have been.

I exhaled. A slow, deliberate cloud.

"You know… " I muttered.

Ryo leaned forward, squinting at me. His hair was dyed a shade of brown that looked permanently unfinished, like he'd started bleaching it and then given up halfway through.

I didn't continue my words.

I took another drag. Let the smoke sit in my lungs for a second.

"Wait, what? She finally realized you don't give two shits for manga unless it's One Piece, or what?" Ryo gargled at me.

"Or what," I said, and the corner of my mouth pulled into something that was technically a smile but felt more like a wound.

Silence.

Then the whole crew burst out laughing. They knew.

Not the cruel kind. The other kind. The kind where a bunch of guys who've known you since you were a pimple-faced fifteen-year-old with a bad haircut acknowledge, in their own emotionally stunted way, that your life has just taken a spectacular nosedive into the absurd.

Takeshi was leaning against the vending machine, a can of Boss Coffee, the Rainbow Mountain blend, the one with the guy in the hat on the label, dangling from his fingers. He had the build of someone who'd played baseball in junior high and then immediately stopped all physical activity the moment he entered high school. His chin tilted up, eyes narrowing with the self-satisfied expression of a detective about to crack the case.

"What did you do?" He took a sip of his coffee. Grinned. "You ask her to do something kinky? Soap-play? You finally scare poor Nacchi off, huh, Jouji?"

Something in my chest cracked open.

And I laughed.

A real laugh. The kind that started deep in my gut and ripped its way out before I could stop it, loud and raw and maybe a little bit unhinged.

"Hahah… Man… Fuck you…"

I shook my head, still chuckling, and took another drag.

"I wish. I wish it was like that."

---

The house was dark when I got back. Eleven past twelve. My parents' room was at the end of the hall, door closed, no light leaking from the crack underneath. My mom had gone to bed hours ago, and so had Mio and Shouta. My dad wasn't in the house; he lived out of town where he worked in Osaka.

My mom was the kind who operated the house on a strict schedule, dinner at seven, news at nine, lights out by ten-thirty, but she'd long since given up trying to enforce that schedule on me.

My dad was the cool one. He introduced me to The Beatles. He caught me smoking around a month ago only from one sniff at dinner, he only laughed, then invited me to smoke with him outside of the house. My mom went Super Saiyan.

I kicked off my shoes in the genkan, the familiar scent of old wood and faint incense washing over me, and padded up the stairs to my room.

The guitar was still on the floor where I'd left it.

The can of Pocari Sweat was warm now, the condensation long evaporated, a faint ring of moisture staining the floor.

And there, on my bed, was my phone.

The external screen was blinking. A tiny blue light, rhythmic and insistent, like a heartbeat trapped in plastic.

I sat down on the edge of the mattress. The springs creaked. I flipped the phone open.

Two new messages.

The first, timestamped 21:28, was exactly what I'd expected.

"Jouchi, are you upset? I'm sorry. : ("

Of course. She felt guilty.

Nanase, even while dumping me via text, was still too fundamentally decent to just walk away without checking on the emotional collateral damage. The colon, the parenthesis, the simple devastating syntax of a text representing guilt, looked up at me from the screen, and I hated how much it made me want to text her back.

The second message. 21:30. Two minutes later.

Just two words. Three.

"Oyasumi, Jouchi. x"

I stared at them for a long time.

Every night. Seven months. Goodnight texts and good morning texts, and at the end of every single one, without fail, that little 'x'.

It was our ritual. Our constant. The one thing in our relationship that had never wavered, never pulled back, never flinched.

Looking at it now, after everything, it felt less like affection and more like just a habit.

I sat there, the screen's blue glow casting long shadows across my face, my thumb hovering over the keypad. I thought about typing something. An explanation. A confession. Something to make her understand that I wasn't angry, I was just tired. Tired of the distance. Tired of the 'x's. Tired of wanting something I couldn't name and couldn't ask for. And I still didn't want to quit.

Four minutes. Five.

In the end, I just pressed the button.

"X"

Capitalized, because the first romaji letter will always be.

No oyasumi. No Nacchi. No explanation.

I sent it.

Then I closed the phone, set it on the floor beside my pillow, and let the dark swallow me whole.

Tomorrow was Monday. Second week of the new term. I had a homeroom teacher who almost certainly regretted ever being assigned my class, 2-B Bunkei, Humanities, I'd coasted into purely to avoid the nightmare of advanced mathematics, and a seat near the back of a classroom full of classmates I'd never bothered to get to know, but made some friends already, somehow. Some of the GTA kids, my nakama from 1-B, were there too, thankfully. I missed Gorosen already.

Somewhere across town, in a house that smelled of incense and old books and the quiet, crushing weight of parental expectations, Nanase was probably already asleep. Her phone resting on a perfectly neat nightstand. Her textbooks stacked in order of tomorrow's classes. Her breathing slow and even and untroubled.

She'd wake up in the morning. See my reply. And maybe feel a little sting. Or maybe she'd just breathe easier, relieved that the hard part was over.

I didn't know which one hurt more.

But none of it mattered.

None of it would matter, because in less than twelve hours, on a perfectly ordinary Monday morning, the world would crack open like an egg, and I'd spend the rest of that day wishing, with every fiber of my being, that the biggest problem in my life was still just a stupid, lonely little 'x' on a flip phone screen.

 

[darkrednotmaroon]

Chapter 1 - Ground Zero

My phone buzzed.

Not the aggressive, sustained vibration of a call. Just a single, polite little jolt against the mattress beside my pillow. I cracked one eye open. Pale spring light was bleeding through the gap in my curtains, painting a soft stripe across the ceiling.

The air carried that faint morning chill, the kind that lingered through mid-April, winter's last stubborn breath before the rainy season rolled in.

I fumbled for the phone, thumbing it open.

From: Nacchi, Subject: —, Received: 06:33

"Ohayou, Jouchi. x"

I stared at the screen for a long moment, the blue glow burning into my half-awake retinas.

The 'x' was still there.

After everything last night, the breakup text, my bitter one-word reply, she'd still sent it. Like clockwork. Like muscle memory. Like the ritual was too deeply embedded in both of us to stop, even when the thing it was attached to had already crumbled.

And honestly?

I felt relieved.

Not happy. Not hopeful. Just… the knot in my chest loosened a fraction. Enough to breathe. Enough to function. Enough to roll off my bed and actually face the day instead of burying myself under the covers and pretending Monday didn't exist.

I sat up, dragged a hand through my hair. Still the same Beatles mop I'd been sporting since third year junior high, that shaggy bob that made me look like I'd walked off the Revolver album cover and straight into second-year homeroom.

I surveyed the damage.

Guitar on the floor. Empty Pocari Sweat can staining the floor. My reflection in the dark screen of the old CRT TV across the room: a bit stocky, olive-skinned, the kind of tan that came from spending most of junior high school outside when I should have been in juku, cram school.

But I did go to juku for a short while. There was a time I couldn't reason with my mom.

At 167 centimeters, I wasn't exactly towering over anyone, but I'd made peace with that somewhere around the end of first high-school year.

Everything was exactly as I'd left it, which was somehow both comforting and pathetic.

One thing was different, though.

I smelled like stale cigarette smoke and regret.

Right. I hadn't showered last night. Too busy wallowing.

By the time I'd scrubbed the Mild Seven stench off my skin and thrown on my uniform, the standard gakuran navy blazer, white shirt, navy pants that pooled a little at the ankles because finding a size that fit my height without alterations was apparently impossible, it was creeping past seven. I grabbed two balls of onigiri from the kitchen, a plastic cup of water, ignored my mother's pointed look and shaking head about my late-night wandering, and headed for the genkan.

I saw Mio as I walked pass the sofa. She slumped herself, still in her pajamas.

"Don't you have school?"

"Your sister is sick, Jouji," said my mother from behind the kitchen.

"Yeah, Jou-nii… I'm not feeling great…" She muttered from under the pillow.

"You believe her?" I turned and asked my mother, grinning. I knew my sister.

My mother only snickered back.

"Shouta's still asleep?"

"Yep. He couldn't sleep well last night. Said he missed your dad."

"Hahah. Chichiue was home last Friday and Saturday. That kid never grows up. You're too soft on him, Okaachan."

"Heee? Stop calling your father that, Jouji." She giggled.

"I will. When he decides to shave that ridiculous jidaigeki moustache. He is so proud of it. I don't understand him."

My mother laughed.

---

The Yamaha Jog was parked in its usual spot beside the house, red plastic body damp with morning dew. I swung a leg over, twisted the key, and let the engine sputter to life. As it warmed up, the little two-stroke coughing and rattling like an old man clearing his throat, I flipped open my phone again.

Onigiri, and time to reply.

I couldn't just leave her hanging. Not after last night. Not after that 'x' this morning.

If we were really going to end this, or not end this, or whatever the hell we were doing, we needed to at least talk about it face to face. That was the bare minimum.

That was what decent human beings did.

"Nacchi, ohayou. Sorry I fell asleep on you last night. I was kind of a mess, hehe. Anyway, if we're gonna talk about this, let's at least meet up. Just once. x"
I hesitated before adding the 'x.'

Then I added it anyway.

Sent.

The Jog was warm now. Onigiri, done, water, done. I shoved the phone into my blazer pocket, snapped the visor of my helmet down, and pulled out onto the narrow residential street.

---

7:18.

Last night's 7-Eleven. The lot was empty at this hour.

No Kenta. No Ryo. No Takeshi leaning against the vending machine with his Boss Coffee and his unsolicited commentary. No Junpei, Sora, and Aoi.

Yes, two of my closest friends name from Ichi-chu were Sora and Aoi.

Apparently it made an interesting combination which didn't have anything to do with the color and the sky as of late.

Just the morning sun glinting off the store windows and a bored-looking clerk restocking the onigiri shelf inside.

I parked the Jog in the usual spot, wedged between the concrete wall and a stack of empty drink crates, and started the walk to school.

Kamishiro High, like all public high schools in Japan, had a strict no-scooter-on-campus policy. Whether students or staff, all the same. Something about "student safety" and "setting a proper example," which really just meant the someone didn't want the parking lot turning into a bosozoku, a biker gang convention.

Fair enough. The school had its share of yanki types already; no need to give them a fleet of vehicles.

So every morning, I parked here and walked the remaining five hundred meters. Past the shoutengai, still shuttered at this hour. Past the municipal library, its windows dark. Past the row of cherry trees that lined the school road, past peak bloom now, but still holding on, pale pink petals scattering across the pavement with every breeze like nature's own confetti.

By the time I pushed through the main gate, it was 7:25.

Early.

Too early, honestly. But that was the trade-off for beating the train crowd.

The hallway was quiet. A few early arrivals, mostly sports club kids, already in their practice gear, moving with that exhausted but purposeful energy that came from running laps before sunrise.

I went upstairs. I nodded at a couple of familiar faces and slid open the door to 2-B.

Empty. Well, almost empty. A few bags at a few desks. But none of the people who mattered.

I made my way to my seat, second row from the back, window side, the prime real estate for napping without being too obvious about it, and dropped my bag on the desk.

Dodo's seat beside me was vacant. The two desks in front of me, Sera and Ren, were similarly abandoned.

Figures. Dodo and Sera probably wouldn't show until the absolute last minute. And Ren. Well, Ren operated on her own schedule, which was only tangentially related to the official school timetable.

I pulled out my phone. No new messages.

Nanase still hadn't replied.

Part of me, the rational part, knew it was too early. She was probably getting ready for school. Probably hadn't even checked her phone. Probably had her hands full with her impossibly neat morning routine and her impossibly neat textbooks at Asakaze Minami High, where the elite track students probably didn't stay up until eleven smoking their friends' cigarettes and moping about their romantic failures.

The other part of me, the irrational, needy, pathetic part, kept checking the screen anyway.

Menu, back, menu, back.

I lasted about five minutes before the exhaustion won.
My head hit my folded arms. My eyes closed. The pre-class murmur of the building, distant footsteps, sliding doors, the occasional burst of laughter, blurred into a low, fuzzy hum.

Sleep took me like a freight train.

Until…

"OHAYOU, JOUJI~!"

The voice detonated directly into my right ear.

I snapped upright so fast I nearly headbutted the desk in front of me. There was a small puddle of drool on my blazer sleeve that I desperately hoped nobody else had noticed.

Standing beside my desk, grinning like a maniac, was Dodo.

Doujima Daisuke, but nobody, and I mean nobody, had called him that since the first week of first year. He'd earned the nickname 'Dodo' within about fifteen minutes of our first homeroom together, courtesy of his uncanny ability to walk into walls, trip over air, and generally navigate life with the grace of an extinct flightless bird.

Tall, lanky, and perpetually rumpled, his uniform always looked like it had been folded by someone who'd only heard about the concept of folding through vague rumor. His hair stuck up in the back in a way that was either deliberate or the result of never owning a comb.

"Morning, Netarou," he said, dropping into the seat beside me. "Nice drool."

Netarou. A sleepy boy.

"Not drool. Spring condensation," I said.

"From what? Your mouth?"

From the desks in front of me, two more voices joined the assault.

"Jouji, you're literally the first one here every day and you just sleep through it." Sera, Serizawa Akira's sharp-tongue said. She has even a sharper set of eyes, her dark hair cut in a no-nonsense bob that suited her no-nonsense personality. She twisted around to face me, arms crossed. "Why do you even bother showing up early?"

"Traffic," I said.

"You don't take the train."

"The moped traffic. Very congested. You wouldn't understand."

She rolled her eyes, a gesture I'd come to recognize as her primary form of communication, and turned back to whatever she was scribbling in her notebook.

Beside her, Ren, Akimoto Ren, leaned back in her chair, tilting her head at an angle that gave her a clear view of my face. Her eyes narrowed, the way they always did when she was piecing something together.

I knew that look.

"You look like crap," she said.

"Thank you, Ma'am. I try."

"No, I mean…" She studied me for a moment longer. "Did something happen?"

She was sharp. Always.

But here's the thing about me: I'm not the kind of guy who walks around with a gloomy face. Apathetic? Sure. Half-asleep? By design. But sad? That wasn't my default setting. I was the class clown, or at least one of them. The guy who'd crack a joke during a boring lecture, who'd do impressions of the teachers in the hallway, who'd make Dodo laugh so hard he'd snort his milk coffee out his nose.

So when something was actually wrong, the people who knew me, really knew me, could tell.

Dodo. Sera. Ren.

My core gang inside the bigger gang, GTA kids.

The four of us had been a unit since the first week of first year. Class 1-B, 2007 intake. And 1-B had been… something special.

It started with our homeroom teacher. Tanizuka Goro. Fifty-nine years old, perpetually one cigarette away from retirement, a man who looked at the school rulebook the way most people looked at expired coupons, with mild, dismissive disinterest.

Gorosen, we called him. Goro-sensei compressed into something that felt less formal and more like the name of a tired old dog who'd seen too much and cared too little.

And he was, without question, the best teacher I'd ever had.

Not because he was passionate, or inspiring, or any of that stuff they put in teacher recruitment brochures.

He wasn't.

He taught History with the enthusiasm of a man reading a grocery list, and he spent most of homeroom sitting at his desk with his iPod earbuds in, listening to, as far as I could tell, exclusively Western music from before 1982. Perfectly aligned with my direction.

The Beatles. The Stones. Dylan. Zeppelin. Bowie. The Who. The list could go on. He'd lent me CDs from his personal collection, stuff you couldn't find at the local TSUTAYA, and that was how I'd fallen into the rabbit hole of classic rock.

My dad introduced me; Gorosen rebuilt me.

The man hated everything made after the 80s with a passion that bordered on religious conviction.

No, Gorosen was the best because he didn't pretend to be anything other than what he was: a tired old man who'd somehow ended up in charge of forty teenagers and had decided, somewhere along the way, that the best approach was benign neglect.

Attendance? Write your own name on the sheet. He wasn't going to check.
Announcements? He'd hand them to me or Rena and let her read them out while he stared out the window.

Discipline? He'd catch kids smoking behind the gym or on the rooftop, bum a cigarette off them, and then tell them not to get caught by anyone else.

The man was a disaster. A glorious, chain-smoking, rule-ignoring disaster.

And somehow, his complete refusal to enforce any kind of authority had forged Class 1-B into the tightest, most ridiculous, most fiercely loyal group of students in the entire school.

We called ourselves the GTA.

Goro Tanizuka Association.

Yes, we stole the name from a video game. Yes, it was dumb. But it fit. And no, nobody cared. By the end of first year, every single student in 1-B, all forty of us, was a card-carrying member of the dumbest, biggest, most unofficial, most inexplicably beloved school gang in Kamishiro High history.

Second year had scattered us across different classes, Bunkei — Humanities, Rikei — Science, the various electives, but the GTA bond held.

You didn't survive a year of Gorosen's homeroom without developing a certain… loyalty.

"It's nothing," I said to Ren, forcing a grin. "Just didn't sleep great."

Her eyes stayed narrowed for another second. Then she shrugged and turned back around.

She didn't believe me. But she also knew better than to push.

The sliding door at the front of the classroom clattered open, and the ambient chatter died instantly.

Takeda-sensei swept in like a minor weather event.

She was, objectively speaking, attractive. Early forties, the kind of woman who'd clearly been stunning in her twenties and had aged into something more… formidable. A figure that drew attention from the male student body, myself included, I wasn't going to pretend otherwise, but she dressed so conservatively that even thinking about it felt vaguely inappropriate. High-necked blouses. Ankle-length skirts. A wedding ring she wore like a warning label.

She was also, unfortunately, kind of terrifying.

"I hope everyone had a productive first week," she said, setting her attendance book on the podium with a decisive thwack. "Because we're in second week, and I'm already hearing complaints from the faculty lounge about noise levels in the Bunkei corridor. I won't name names." Her eyes swept the room. They lingered on Dodo for approximately half a second longer than anyone else. "Yet."

Dodo shrunk in his seat. I suppressed a grin.

"Announcements." She flipped open a folder. "First, morning assembly. Sports ground. Eight-thirty sharp. This is the official start of the academic year, the first-years are fully integrated as of today, and the principal has a few words he'd like to share. Try to look alive."

A collective groan rippled through the room.

"Second, club recruitment begins this week. Third, the library is closed for inventory until Wednesday. And fourth," she looked up, her expression shifting into something marginally less stern, "I'm told the vending machines in the east wing have finally been restocked. Try not to start a riot."

A bigger ripple. This time, more positive.

"That's all. Don't be late to assembly," She snapped the folder shut, glanced at the clock, 08:25, and strode out of the room with the same brisk efficiency she'd entered.

The moment the door slid shut behind her, the class dissolved into low murmurs. People started pushing back chairs, gathering their things, drifting toward the hallway in small clusters. Assembly. Sports ground. Eight-thirty.
I, however, had other plans.

Namely: I was still exhausted. The almost-an-hour-long nap before homeroom had only made things worse, the kind of short sleep that leaves you groggier than when you started, your brain wrapped in cotton wool and your eyelids fighting a losing battle against gravity.

Dodo was already on his feet. "Coming? Wanna go behind the gym and bum one?"

"Five more minutes," I mumbled, already lowering my head back to my arms.
"You're gonna be late."

"When am I not?"

He snorted. "Always?"

Fair point.

I was dimly aware, through the haze of half-sleep, of Dodo, Sera, and Ren exchanging glances above my head. There was some laughter. A comment I didn't quite catch. And then footsteps, receding, as the classroom emptied out around me.

The last thing I heard before consciousness slipped away was Ren's voice, drifting back through the doorway:

"Sleep well, Sleeping beauty."

And then I was gone.

Then I woke up.

Something was wrong.

I woke up not to a voice, or a jostle, or the obnoxious buzz of my phone, but to silence.

The wrong kind of silence. The kind that didn't belong in a school building on a Monday morning during assembly.

I lifted my head slowly, blinking against the fluorescent light. The classroom was empty. My cheek was stuck to the sleeve of my blazer. The clock on the wall read 08:35.

Five minutes past the start of assembly.

And I couldn't hear anything.

No Baldy-Matsu, our principal's voice echoing through the whole school PA system. No shuffling feet. No coughing. No bored students whispering to each other in the back rows. The outdoor assemblies at Kamishiro High were never quiet. They were massive, chaotic, seven hundred students packed into a space designed for maybe five hundred, the sound of the microphone always a little too loud, feeding back every time someone bumped the speaker stand.

Nothing.

Just silence. The heavy, unnatural kind that presses against your eardrums.
I sat up fully. My neck was stiff. My mouth tasted like sleep. My phone was on the desk where I'd left it, screen dark, no new notifications.

Then I heard it.

A scream.

Not the jokey kind. Not the "Kenta, stop it!" kind. The real kind. High-pitched. Raw. A girl's voice, tearing through the spring morning from somewhere below, the direction of the sports ground.

My stomach dropped.

I was on my feet before I'd consciously decided to move. The chair scraped backward, clattering against the desk behind me. My hand went to my phone.
But before I could take a step, the classroom door slammed open.

Rena.

Ichinose Rena.

A GTA friend.

More than… actually…

Right now, Rena was standing in the doorway of 2-B, and she looked nothing like the composed, teasing, slightly-gyaru girl I'd known for over a year.

Her uniform was disheveled. Her hair was a mess, the pinky bleached streaks tangled, the loose socks twisted around her ankles like she'd been running. Her eyes were wide, rimmed with red, on the verge of tears.

She was shaking. And nothing shook her.

"Jo… Jouji?!"

Her voice cracked on my name.

And then she was across the room. I don't even remember her moving, just the impact, and her arms were around me, clutching at my blazer like I was the only solid thing left in a world that had suddenly turned liquid.

"Rena-chan, what the…"
"I was… I was in the washroom… with Mika-chan…" Her voice was muffled against my shoulder, coming out in ragged, gasping bursts. "And then… and then she just… she was gone, Jouji. Mika-chan just vanished. We were talking, and I turned around for one second, and she wasn't there, the stall was empty, and there were other girls in there too, and they're all gone, I checked every stall, every single one, and it's just…"

"Rena-chan. Slow down."

"…I ran out and the hallway was completely empty. Nobody. No footsteps, no voices, nothing. So I went to Bunkei, to 2-C to find someone, anyone, and Chisaton was there, just sitting at her desk, staring at her hands like she didn't even know where she was. I called her out, 'Chisaton, Chisaton!' and she didn't even look up. She should be able to hear me, I was right in front of her. She just kept going 'hah… heh… hah…' like some kind of brok…"

"Chisato? Our Chisato?"

I couldn't hear the 'n' clearly.

She nodded. A jerky, desperate motion. No words. Just the nod.

There were at least two Chisato in our year.

But this one was definitely ours.

Chisaton. Kikuchi Chisato. GTA. First-year Class 1-B, now in 2-C next door.

"…and then on the stairs, Yua-chan was just sitting there, crying, completely frozen. I tried to get her up but she wouldn't move, she couldn't even talk, she just kept shaking her head…"

"Rena-chan."

I gripped her shoulders, firmly, not hard, and pushed her back just enough to look at her face. Her eyes were darting. Her breathing was shallow and fast. On the edge of hyperventilating.

"Breathe," I said. "Just breathe. I'm here."

She took a shaky breath. Then another. Her hands were still fisted in my blazer.

I released her shoulders and moved toward the window.

The classroom looked out over the sports ground, second floor, clear view of the main assembly area. I pressed my palm against the glass, feeling the cold seep into my skin, and looked down.

That was chaos.

Not the noisy, energetic chaos of seven hundred students. The wrong kind of chaos. A scattering of girls, maybe between twenty to thirty, running in different directions with no apparent purpose. Some screaming. Some crying. Some standing frozen like their feet had been nailed to the ground. One girl was collapsed in the middle of the open space, completely motionless, her dark hair fanned out around her head like a spilled inkwell.

I recognized her immediately.

Fumiko.

Tanaka Fumiko. Second-year. We'd been in different classes last year, she was in 1-F, I was in 1-B, but you didn't need to share a homeroom with Fumiko to know who she was. Everyone knew who she was.

Even from up here, you couldn't miss her.

And now she was lying motionless in the middle of an empty sports ground, and the assembly formation lines painted on the dirt stretched out around her like open wounds, utterly vacant.

Where were the seven hundred students?

Where were the teachers?

Where was Baldy-Matsu and his crackling microphone voice?

The PA speakers stood silent. The morning sun, pale and indifferent, glinted off the windows of the surrounding buildings like nothing was wrong.

"Rena-chan…" My voice came out steadier than I felt. "What in the fucking fuck is happening?"

She didn't answer. She was standing beside me now, arms wrapped around herself, staring at the same impossible scene.

My phone buzzed.

The sound cut through the silence like a blade. I yanked it out of my blazer pocket, flipping it open with hands that had suddenly forgotten how to be steady.

I played guitar and sang, and I had played some cheap gigs.

My hands were accustomed to the nerve before performing, not crisis.

From: Nacchi, Subject: —, Received: 08:39.

"Jouchi, I'm scared."

My blood went cold.

Nanase. At Asakaze Minami. On the other side of town.

I hit reply before I'd finished reading the message. My thumbs were clumsy, stumbling over the keys.

"Nacchi, are you okay?"

Sent.

"Jouji…" Rena was staring at my phone. "Who… Is.. Is she okay?"Rena caught on at first glance.

She knew Nanase. I didn't answer.

Instead, I grabbed her hand, cold, trembling, and pulled her toward the door.

"Let's go."

"Go.. Go where? Jouji, what's happening?"

"I don't know," I said. And it was the most honest thing I'd said all morning.

"But we're not staying here."

We stepped out into the hallway.

The corridor stretched in both directions, rows of classroom doors, bulletin boards plastered with club recruitment posters, the faint smell of floor wax hanging in the still air, and it was utterly, completely empty.

No students. No teachers. No footsteps. No voices. Every door we passed was either closed or hanging slightly ajar, revealing glimpses of empty desks and abandoned bags.

Halfway down the stairs, we found her.

Manami Yua.

She was slumped against the wall near the stairwell landing, legs splayed out, back pressed against the cold painted concrete. Her face was wet, not just tears, but the raw, blotchy aftermath of someone who'd been crying so hard she'd stopped making sound. Her breathing came in shallow, hiccupping gasps.
I knew her immediately.

Everyone in our year and above knew Manami Yua. She was one of the eyecatchers, the kind of girl whose name came up in locker-room conversations, the kind of face that made first-year boys walk into doors since a week ago. And she was attached. Firmly, publicly, somewhat-nauseatingly attached to Donda, the ace striker of the Soccer Club, a guy whose legs moved faster than his brain and whose ego was roughly the size of the Tokyo Dome.

They'd been together since the middle or even early first year. The soccer ace and the eyecatcher. A Kamishiro High fairy tale.

Right now, she didn't look like anyone's fairy tale.

"Manami-san."

I knelt down in front of her, keeping my voice low. Steady. She wasn't a friend, we'd never been in the same class, and our social circles barely overlapped, but she wasn't a stranger either. She was one of us. A second year. And right now, that was the only credential that mattered.

"Manami-san, can you hear me?"

Her eyes found mine. Glassy. Unfocused. She made a sound, a half-sob, half-whimper, but no words came out.

Beside me, Rena crouched down, her voice softer than mine. "Yua-chan. Yua-chan, it's me. Rena. Can you stand? We need to move."
A flicker of recognition. Barely.

"Manami-san." I put enough weight into my voice to pull her attention back.

"Listen. You can't stay here in the stairwell. Go back up to 2-C. There's someone there, Kikuchi Chisato. Chisaton. From GTA. You know her, right? She's in your class."

A pause.

Then a tiny, shaky nod.

She had to know Chisaton, or at least Chisato. Everyone in 2-C should have known Chisaton by now. She's also quite pretty. Very pretty, actually. Chisaton was just as popular as Yua in her own way, another 'princess' of our year, she just never acted the part.

"Go to her. Sit with her. Wait for us there. Or," I glanced toward the stairs leading down, "follow us if you can walk. But don't stay here alone. Okay?"

Another nod. Her legs moved, slowly, uncertainly, one hand bracing against the wall for support.

Beside me, Rena squeezed my arm. "Jouji…"

"I know."

We didn't have time to escort her. Whatever was happening, whatever had emptied this school in the space of minutes, was still happening. And somewhere in the sports ground below, Fumiko was still lying motionless on the dirt.

And somewhere across town, Nanase was scared.

And I still hadn't heard back.

"Stay with Chisaton, Manami-san," I said, straightening up. "We'll come back for you."

We left her climbing unsteadily toward 2-C and took the stairs down. The stairwell echoed with our footsteps.

Mine. Rena's. Nobody else's.

In a building designed for seven hundred students, that I had spent a year enrolled in, this silence was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.

 

[darkrednotmaroon]

Chapter 2 - Assembly

Rena and I pushed through the heavy double doors and stepped onto the sports ground.

The sky was this pale, washed-out April blue, the kind that looks warm until the wind cuts through your blazer and reminds you winter hasn't quite packed its bags yet. The cherry trees along the path were still holding on, scattering the last of their petals like they were charging admission for the privilege of walking underneath them.

On a normal Monday morning, this sports ground would have been a chaos of footsteps and gossip while ignoring Baldy-Matsu's speech.

But right now?

Right now, it was a scene out of a bad disaster movie.

A cluster of girls, maybe fifteen, twenty of them, had formed a tight, nervous circle near the central planter, others scattered around. Their uniforms blurred together in a sea of navy and white, some crouching, some standing with their arms wrapped around themselves like they were trying to hold their own ribs in place. The air was thick with sniffles and shaky breaths and that particular brand of whispered panic that only high school girls can produce at industrial scale.

At the center of it all, flat on the ground, head cradled in someone's lap, was Fumiko.

And the person doing the cradling?

Shimizu Umi, from 2-F.

I recognized her instantly. Not because we'd ever spoken, we hadn't, not really. But Umi was one of those girls you just knew, even if you'd never exchanged a single word. The kind of presence that registered on some subconscious frequency the moment she walked into a room.

Short straight black hair. And a uniform that looked two sizes too big, the blazer sleeves swallowing her wrists, the hem of her skirt hanging well below her knees like she'd borrowed it from an older sister who actually wanted to pass her dress code inspection.

Yamato Nadeshiko. The real deal. Super pretty. The kind of girl who could probably stop a fistfight just by looking vaguely disappointed.

We'd met a few times during class-rep meetings.

Right now, though, that serenity had a crack running through it. Her face was pale, her brow furrowed, and she was gently stroking Fumiko's forehead with a tenderness that made my chest ache in a way I absolutely did not have time to process.

"Ah… Shimizu-san." My voice came out raspier than I intended. "How's Fumiko-chan?"

Umi looked up. For a split second, our eyes met, and I caught something flickering behind the calm, fear, yes, but also this steely determination, the kind you only see in people who've decided that panicking is a luxury they can't afford right now.

She shook her head.

"Still unconscious," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "I've been trying to wake her, but nothing."

Beside me, Rena dropped to her knees, her pleated skirt billowing against the cold stone. Her hand found Fumiko's shoulder, shaking it gently. "Umi-chan? Fumiko-chan… Fumiko-chan… wake up…"

There was a crack in Rena's voice. A hairline fracture. And for Rena, who could charm her way out of a burning building, who'd once talked the sukeban of Kamishiro High into being her friend, that was more terrifying than any scream.

I scanned the crowd.

Kouhai. Senpai. A few girls I vaguely recognized from my own year. Some faces were tear-streaked. Others had that hollow, thousand-yard stare of people who'd seen something they couldn't yet process. A few were just whispering to each other in frantic little bursts, their words tangling together into a low-frequency hum of distress.

All girls.

Every single one of them.

Before I could follow that thought any further, the crowd on the far side of the sports ground shifted. Someone was pushing through, not gently either, the kind of shouldering that said get out of my way, I'm bigger than you.

And then he was there.

Donda.

Toudou Daichi. Ace of the Soccer Club from our year. Yua's boyfriend. One of the jocks. But a good one. The kind who actually earned his popularity instead of just coasting on it. He was in 2-C, not my class, but our paths crossed enough through mutual friends from GTA and the Bekesu boys.

We'd smoked on the same rooftop, passed each other in the same corridors, nodded the same wordless nod. But we'd never actually talked. Not once that I could remember.

And in his hand?

A half-eaten croquette.

Because of course.

"Jo… Jouji?!" His eyes were wide, the whites showing all the way around. Bits of potato were still lodged in his cheek. "Fuck, man! This is insane! I bailed on assembly, right? Was hanging out behind the gym equipment shed with the Bekesu boys and some of the senpai from Rushifa. Then, poof, everyone just vanishes. Just… gone! I'm smoking by myself, and the next thing I know, I hear screaming coming from over here." He gestured wildly with the croquette, flinging a crumb into some poor kouhai's hair.

"Where the hell is everyone? Why's it just… why's it only girls here?"

I stood up slowly. My knees popped, too much crouching, too much stress.

"I don't know, Donda. I was supposed to be late for assembly too. I was on my last minute nap in the classroom. Woke up and…" I spread my hands helplessly. "This."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Shit."

We stood there for a moment, two second-year boys in matching navy gakuran, staring at a group of confused and terrified girls, neither of us knowing what to say. The croquette hung limply from Donda's fingers, suddenly forgotten.

And then another figure emerged from the crowd.

Small. Scrawny. Maybe half a head shorter than me, and that was saying something, because I wasn't exactly the Jolly Green Giant with my height.

His hair was a mess, the kind of deliberate bedhead that said I'm in a band before you even saw the calluses on his fingers. His uniform was too big for him, or maybe he was too small for it, the sleeves bunched up around his wrists like he'd borrowed it from an older brother and hadn't quite figured out the proportions yet.

I knew that face. Barely.

The orientation concert. The freshmen had put together a band, all nerves and tuning problems and the kind of earnest, slightly-too-loud performance that makes you cringe and applaud at the same time. They'd covered Oasis. 'Stop Crying Your Heart Out.' Good song. Terrible execution. The bassist had nailed his parts, though, even when the vocalist was flat and the guitarist had clearly forgotten the bridge.

But they were my kind of people.

That bassist was standing right in front of me.

"Oi! You! Kouhai!" I pointed at him, my voice carrying across the sports ground.

"What's your name?"

He didn't flinch. Didn't look scared, either, just confused, which honestly was the most rational reaction any of us could have summoned at that moment.

He straightened up a little, squared his shoulders.

"Ma… Makoto, Senpai. Arai Makoto. From class 1-D."

He bowed. Not the deep, formal ninety-degree bow you'd give a teacher; just a quick, respectful dip of the head. Nervous, but not paralyzed. The kind of kid who was used to being overlooked, but not used to being afraid of it.

I nodded. "Makoto. Okay."

First-name basis right off the bat. He didn't seem to mind. If anything, some of the tension drained out of his shoulders, a kouhai who'd just been acknowledged by a senpai in front of a crowd, and not in the 'hey, freshman, go clean the club room' kind of way.

Three boys.

Me. Donda. And Makoto, the scrawny bassist from 1-D.

That was it.

That was the sum total of the male population left in my sight.

And somewhere out there, somewhere in the empty hallways and silent corridors, Yua, Donda's girlfriend, was waiting in 2-C with Chisaton, and Nanase was texting me from Asakaze, and everything I thought I knew about how the world worked had apparently decided to take a sick leave.

Donda's head snapped up like a dog who'd just heard a distant whistle.

"Yu… Yua?! YUA?!"

He was shouting into the crowd. Searching faces. The desperation in his voice was raw, unguarded, the kind of thing a guy like Donda would never show in normal circumstances, but these weren't normal circumstances, and his girlfriend was missing, and all the social armor in the world couldn't protect you from that.

No one answered.

Rena turned around.

"Donda." Her voice was gentle, gentler than I'd ever heard her. "Yua's okay. She's not gone. Jouji and I found her in the stairwell earlier. She was… she was in bad shape. Crying. But we told her to go back to your classroom, 2-C. Chisaton's with her. You know Chisato, right? From GTA?"

Donda's shoulders sagged. For a second, I thought he might actually collapse. His fist unclenched. The croquette, miracle of miracles, was still intact, though its structural integrity was looking increasingly dubious.

"I gotta…" He started to move, already angling toward the main building.

I grabbed his arm.

"Wait. Help me get Fumiko inside first." I glanced down at the girl in question, her face still flushed red, her breathing shallow, Rena and Umi still hovering over her like guardian angels. "If we leave her out here in this cold much longer, she's going to get worse."

Donda looked at Fumiko. Then back at me. Then at Fumiko again. His jaw tightened. I knew exactly what was going through his head, the same thing that had been going through mine since the moment I saw her lying there, her chest rising and falling in a slow, unconscious rhythm.

Fumiko, of all people. Fumiko with the impossible figure. Fumiko who was basically a walking gravitational anomaly in a school uniform.

Fumiko had that enormous physical trait any healthy teenage boy would ogle like idiots the moment they saw her.

But he didn't say it. He just nodded.

"Janken?" I said, forcing a smirk. "Winner gets the head end."

It was a stupid thing to say. A completely idiotic, wildly inappropriate thing to say. But that was the point. If I didn't inject some kind of stupidity into this situation, if I let myself actually think about the scale of what was happening, I was going to lose it. And if I lost it, who else was gonna come to Nanase?

Donda stared at me. Then, slowly, a grin split his face, the kind of grin you give someone you've seen around for a year, same rooftop, same yanki-friends, same cigarettes, but never actually exchanged a real word with, suddenly realizing they might not be as much of an asshole as you thought.

"You're such an asshole," he said, and laughed as a bit of croquette fell out of his mouth.

I was already raising my hand. "Rock, paper…"

My phone buzzed.

"Hold on."

I flipped it open. The external screen glowed blue.

From: Nacchi, Subject: —, Received: 08:51.

"Jouchi, I'm okay. I'm with Yumi-chan. We were at assembly and everyone just disappeared from the field at once. There are maybe twenty of us left here. Some people are hysterical, some fainted."

The phone was still working. That was one good thing, at least, the cell towers hadn't collapsed, the network hadn't gone dark. The world wasn't completely broken.

Yet.

I just realized this and my mind went down the rabbit hole for a split second.

The spiraling rabbit hole of what ifs.

The bad what ifs.

To the worse what ifs.

But I shook my head quick.

Stop!

I hit the call button without even thinking.

She picked up on the second beep.

"Hello, Nacchi?"

"Jouchi…" Her voice was a wreck, thin and trembling, the kind of sound you make when you've been crying so long you've run out of tears and all that's left is the rawness. "I'm scared…"

"Nacchi. It's the same here at Kamishiro High." I pressed the phone tight against my ear, as if I could somehow reach through the signal and pull her close. "But thank God you're okay. Yumi too." I swallowed. "What's the situation? How many guys are there? And where exactly are you at now?"

Her voice wavered as she repeated what she'd already texted: twenty people, mostly girls. And then she added something that made my jaw tighten.

"There's one guy from 2-D, Ebara-san, and one from the third-year, Ninomiya-san. They're trying to take charge, but Ebara-san keeps yelling at everyone. He yelled at Yumi-chan earlier. He's so cruel. We.. We' just moved to classroom 1-A."

I closed my eyes. Ebara. I didn't know the guy personally, but the name rang a bell, and not a good one. Some loudmouth from one of the sports clubs, probably, the kind of guy who thought volume was a substitute for leadership.

"Nacchi. Listen to me." I kept my voice low, steady. "Stay there in the classroom. Don't move. If the phone signal cuts out and you've gone somewhere else, we'll end up looking for each other and never finding anyone. I'll come to get you as soon as things here are under control. Just stay with Yumi. Wait for me. Okay?"

A long pause. A sniffle.

"O.. okay, Jouchi."

"Jaa."

The call clicked off.

Rena was watching me. She'd been observing the whole exchange, the way her eyes narrowed at the edges, the slight tilt of her head, told me she'd already pieced together most of it.

"Nanase? She okay?"

I nodded, glancing at her.

Rena exhaled. A long, slow breath.

I crouched down beside Rena and Umi, who was still watching over Fumiko with that steady, unblinking vigilance. I kept my voice low, meant only for them.

"Rena-chan, Shimizu-san." I glanced toward the main entrance. "We're gonna lift Fumiko-chan and move from here. Closest classroom to the shoe lockers, Class 1-A. I want you both to take down names. Everyone here. What class they're from. Everyone."

I turned. "Oi. Makoto."

The kid's head snapped up. I crooked a finger, and he scrambled over, dropping into a crouch beside me.

"You're a first-year," I said. "Help me get everyone in order. We're moving to 1-A."

He nodded, quick and sharp. Good kid.

Rena bit her lip. "Jouji, wouldn't it be better to take Fumiko-chan to the infirmary?"

I shook my head. "A bit too far, Rena-chan. And I prefer everyone to stick around."

She didn't argue. I straightened up and raised my voice, letting it carry across the ground.

"Okay! Everyone here, calm down. We're moving to the first-floor corridor. Class 1-A. Closest room to the entrance. We stay there for now." I looked at Donda.

"Donda and I will carry Fumiko. Let's go."

He was already moving into position. No complaints. No jokes. Just a nod.

"Alright." I pocketed the phone. "Janken first, though. No more distractions."

Donda squared up. The croquette was on the ground now, abandoned. We locked eyes.

"Jan-ken-pon!"

His hand: rock.

My hand: paper.

I won.

"Tough luck." I was already crouching, positioning myself at Fumiko's shoulders.

"You get the feet."

Donda grumbled, but he took his position. As I slid my arms under Fumiko's back, my hands brushing against the fabric of her blazer, I became acutely, and I mean acutely, aware of a certain logistical complication.

Kamishiro High's most famous physical feature was currently unconscious and cradled in my arms.

Don't think about it.

Do not think about it.

I could feel Donda trying not to laugh. His shoulders were shaking.

One accidental brush. Soft.

My face went deadpan, the expression I'd perfected over years of not reacting to things I very much wanted to react to, and I locked eyes with Donda, crumbled.

I snickered. Wryly.

"If you say a single word…"

He didn't say anything. He just grinned, the bastard.

We lifted together. Fumiko's dead weight was heavier than she looked, but between the two of us, she came off the ground easily enough. The crowd parted. Rena and Umi flanked us, guiding the way, and behind us, a slow procession of girls, kouhai, senpai, year-mates, began to trickle in the same direction.

We moved toward the main entrance. Past the shoe lockers. The corridor beyond was dark and silent, the kind of silence that felt solid, physical, like a wall you could press your palm against. The row of classrooms stretched ahead, their sliding doors all closed, their windows staring blankly into the emptiness.

Class 1-A was the closest. First door on the left from the entrance and shoe-lockers.

Inside, it looked like any other classroom, thirty-odd desks in neat rows, a blackboard with the remnants of their first Friday of high school still scrawled across it, the faint, chalky smell of academia clinging to the air.

Umi immediately grabbed a random bag from one of the front-row desks and balled it up as a pillow, easing Fumiko's head onto it with a tenderness that was almost maternal.

Rena and Umi started moving through the crowd, tapping shoulders, jotting down names on a scrap of paper Rena had pulled from any bag nearby.

I pulled them aside before they could get too far.

"Rena-chan, Shimizu-san." I kept my voice low. "When you're taking attendance, ask them one more thing. Does anyone have a medical condition that needs special attention? Asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, anything like that. But ask quietly. One by one. Don't let anyone else hear."

Rena's brow furrowed. "Why keep it secret?"

Umi, however, was already nodding. She got it. If twenty-some panicking girls learned that one of their own had a seizure condition and no immediate access to medication, the fragile calm we'd managed to scrape together would evaporate like mist in the sun.

"We'll handle it," Umi said softly. "We will be discreet."

Rena still looked confused, but she didn't argue.

Donda, meanwhile, was already at the door. "Jouji, I'm going upstairs. To 2-C. Yua."

"Don't forget Chisaton."

He nodded and disappeared into the corridor.

That left Makoto.

He was standing awkwardly by the door, looking like a stray puppy who wasn't sure if he was allowed inside. I beckoned him over.

"Makoto." I clapped a hand on his shoulder. The kid flinched but didn't pull away.

"You're the only guy in this room right now. These girls are scared. Some of them are still crying. I need you to stay here and keep an eye on things until Donda and I get back. Got it?"

He swallowed. Nodded. "Where are you going, Senpai?"

"I'm going to search the school. Make sure nobody else is left outside."

He nodded a few times quickly.

And then I was gone.

The corridors of Kamishiro High had never felt this empty.

I walked. First floor, classroom after classroom, all dark, all silent, the desks still arranged in their neat little rows like the students had just stepped out for a moment and would be right back. But they wouldn't be. Somewhere between the morning bell and now, around maybe seven hundred students and staff had simply vanished, leaving behind maybe twenty, thirty of us at most.

Second floor. Same story. The windows let in pale, indifferent sunlight. The lockers stood open in places, abandoned bags either on the floor or on the desks. A single indoor shoe, left behind in someone's desperate rush, sat in the middle of the hallway like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence nobody had finished.

A door slid open down the corridor. From 2-C.

Donda stepped out with Yua on one arm, and Chisaton followed them from behind. Yua's face was blotchy from crying, but she was walking. Chisaton looked shaken but functional, somehow. I nodded at them, and Donda nodded back, Chisaton also nodded. No words needed.

I kept climbing. Third floor. Same story. Didn't even bother checking all the rooms.

Rooftop access. The door was open, and the wind up there was fierce and cold, whipping through the chain-link fence. Empty.

The bench where I'd sometimes squeezed in with the GTA boys, Dodo, Akira, Issei, others, and the Bekesu Boys crew, Donda among them, sneaking cigarettes between classes while the senpai from Rushifa and ZAKO of the third-year held court, all of them now graduated, Takeo, Rena's boyfriend, among the loudest of that senior yanki crew… that bench sat forlorn and unused.

The rear building. Student Council room. Club rooms. I passed the Manga and Pop Culture Research Circle, the so-called "Otaku Club," Manken, where I'd signed up in first year purely because I needed an extracurricular that wouldn't complain if I slept through meetings or spent the whole time reading One Piece on a secondhand couch. The door was ajar; through the gap I could see the old CRT TV they used for anime marathons still humming with static.

Nobody there. The audio-visual room where I'd spent countless hours in first year, attending class-rep meetings, trying not to fall asleep while the Cultural Committee president droned on about the upcoming festival.

The pool was a sheet of glass, so still I could see the bottom tiles perfectly, a row of lane ropes floating motionless like they'd been frozen mid-stroke.

The gymnasium was somehow worse. The basketball hoops still had their nets hanging slack, the floor polished to that mirror sheen the volleyball club always demanded, and my footsteps echoed off the high ceiling in a way that made it sound like someone was walking ten paces behind me.

I circled the perimeter of the school grounds, following the old concrete wall that separated Kamishiro High from the houses beyond. I stopped there and just listened.

Nothing. No bicycle bells, no kei car engines, no mothers yelling at their kids to hurry up. The world outside the wall was as silent as the world inside it, and that was the moment the last little part of me that had been hoping this was some kind of elaborate TV dokkiri prank with some newly-found technology quietly packed its bags and left.

All empty.

All silent.

By the time I arrived at the door to 1-A again, I stopped at the little glass window by the door, something in the atmosphere had shifted inside.

The hysterics had stopped. The crying had been downgraded to a soft, background tremor of sniffles. And Fumiko, finally, was awake.

She was sitting at a desk, leaning heavily against Umi's shoulder. Her face was still that alarming shade of red, and her breathing hadn't quite steadied, but her eyes were open. That was something.

Umi had one arm wrapped protectively around her. Rena was still making her rounds, checking names, murmuring quiet questions. And across the room, seated in clusters or slumped against the walls, were the rest of them.

Chisaton, Yua, and Donda had settled in.

Makoto was with some of his peers, talking to them.

I recognized more faces now that my brain had time to process.

Those from my year. Some above me, the senpai, some below me the kouhai.

I leaned against the doorframe and let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

Three boys. Twenty-something girls.

Somewhere across town, Nanase was waiting for me in another classroom, in another silent school, just as scared and just as confused.

Somewhere out there, the rest of the world might still be turning, the trains might still be running, the vending machines might still be humming. The cherry blossoms still scattering across empty playgrounds were the only thing I was sure of.

 

[darkrednotmaroon]

Chapter 3 - Casting Call

I slid off the doorframe and walked inside.

The air in 1-A had settled into something different from the sports ground.

Not calm. Nothing about today was ever going to be calm again, but… controlled. The kind of quiet you get after a storm has passed and everyone's still huddled under the eaves, waiting to see if another one's coming.

They were scattered across the desks like someone had upended a box of mismatched pieces and hadn't gotten around to sorting them yet. Some sitting. Some slouched. A few still had their arms wrapped around themselves, but the full-body sobbing had stopped.

Now it was just sniffles. The wet, shaky aftermath.

Rena was near the window, a crumpled sheet of paper in her hand, still making the rounds. Umi had Fumiko propped against her shoulder.

Fumiko's eyes were open now, glassy and unfocused, but open. That red flush hadn't left her face, and her breathing still came in shallow little sips, like she was afraid the air might run out if she took too much at once.

That uniform, always a size too tight, not out of vanity but because she'd probably never thought about it. That long curtain of hair, the bangs framing a face that always looked faintly puzzled, like she'd just wandered into a conversation she hadn't been invited to.

Donda was in the corner with Yua tucked against his side. His arm was around her shoulders, big and awkward and way too tight, but she wasn't complaining. Her face was buried in his blazer, and his perm, that godawful chaos of tight curls, was somehow even more disheveled than before.

Chisaton sat a desk away from them, staring at the blackboard like it held the answers to questions nobody had asked yet.

And the senpai. The third year. Some that everyone easily would recognize.

Anzai Nagisa-senpai. The most famous girl in school. The Queen. The Idol. And somehow, impossibly, also the most humble. She was kneeling beside a sobbing kouhai, her hand resting on the girl's back, her expression gentle and unhurried. She radiated the kind of calm that wasn't forced or performative, it was just there. Natural. Like being a good person was a reflex she'd never had to think about.

Not far from her, a stark contrast, was Asou Fumi-senpai. Small. Blonde streaks in her dark brown hair, tied up in a bun. The uniform modified just enough to skirt the edge of the dress code without technically breaking it, a slightly shorter skirt, a looser ribbon, the sleeves of her blazer rolled up to show off a cheap silver bracelet.

She was the sukeban. The girl boss of Kamishiro High, who'd once cornered Rena in the first-year hallway and torn into her for making eyes at third-year boys.

And Rena, being Rena, had somehow walked out of that encounter with a new friend and an official stamp of approval from her circle, including Nagisa-senpai.

She was leaning against the far wall with her arms crossed, surveying the room with the expression of a general who'd seen worse and wasn't about to let a little mass disappearance rattle her chain.

And then there were the Student Council girls. The ones I recognized from those endless class-rep committee meetings in the audio-visual room.

Taniguchi Riko-senpai, the PE rep, average build, unassuming at first glance but with a figure that had a way of making the gym uniform look considerably more interesting than the school intended.

Matsushima Marina-senpai, the Cultural Committee rep, with her wire-rimmed glasses and her perpetually thoughtful and bright expression.

Abe Airi-senpai, from Health and Sanitation, fitting, given the circumstances, her hair tied back in a practical ponytail, a first-aid kit already open on the desk beside her.

They were already working. Already organizing. Already being the kind of leaders that student council elections promised but rarely delivered.

The Student Council triumvirate were huddled in quiet conference, figuring things out while consoling their friends and kouhai at the same time.

And Makoto.

The kid from 1-D. The bassist. He was standing near his first-year girl friends, like a personal guard. Shoulders squared. Jaw tight. Trying very hard to look like he wasn't as terrified as he obviously was to the girls.

I respected that.

And those first-years, mostly, clustered together at the back of the room like baby birds who'd fallen out of the nest and hadn't figured out what to do about it.

Entirely new faces.

But the two of them, though, two of them I recognized.

Not because I'd ever spoken to them. But because you couldn't not recognize them.

Kujou Karin.

She'd been impossible to miss since the orientation ceremony last week. Not in the loud, attention-grabbing way and more like she'd walked into the auditorium and the air had just… shifted.

Karin had the kind of face that made you do a double-take and then immediately feel vaguely guilty about it. Sensual wasn't the right word, that implied something deliberate, something performed, but it was the only word my juvenile brain could summon. She looked older than the rest of the first-years, not in a weathered way, but in a been-there-done-that way. Like she'd already read the script for high school and found it boring.

Her uniform was regulation on paper but somehow not in practice, the ribbon a little looser than intended, the skirt hem a centimeter shorter than the dress code probably allowed. Not gyaru. Not yet. But the seeds were there. Give her two or three weeks, and she would have run straight into Fumi-senpai's orbit, either as a protégée or a rival, and honestly, I wasn't sure which possibility was more terrifying.

But right now, all that rebel energy was banked. Karin sat near the window with her chin resting on her palm, staring out at the empty courtyard with an expression that was impossible to read. She wasn't crying. She wasn't trembling. She was just… watching.

And beside her, almost comically out of place by contrast, was Saitou Asuka.
The first-years' very own miracle. The kind of girl who walked into a room and made every second-year and third-year boy suddenly forget how to breathe.

She'd been the undisputed primadona of the incoming class since the moment she stepped onto the stage at orientation, and the scary thing was, she didn't even seem to know it. Or if she did, she didn't care.

Asuka was beautiful in the way that made you want to use words like kawaii and actually mean them. Big eyes. Perfect posture. Hair that caught the light in ways that seemed physically improbable. Her uniform was immaculate, pressed, tucked, tied exactly according to the dress code illustration in the student handbook. The kind of girl who probably returned her library books on time and never forgot her indoor shoes.

And yet, and this was the part that made me feel vaguely uncomfortable to notice, she was sitting close enough to Karin that their shoulders were almost touching.

Two girls from opposite ends of the first-year social spectrum, drawn together by nothing except the apocalypse that might have just happened.

And then it snapped back to me.

Shit. Nice one, Jouji. Sixty minutes into the end of the world and you're already cataloguing first-years.

I forced my eyes to keep moving.

And that was when it hit me.

It made me bit my bottom lip.

Not a thought. Not a realization. A physical sensation, a cold prickle that started at the base of my skull and crawled downward, vertebra by vertebra, until it settled somewhere in my stomach like a stone.

Every girl in this room was beautiful.

Every. Single. One.

I scanned the faces again, slower this time, actually looking instead of just registering. The senpai. The kouhai. The girls from my year, some of whom I'd never even spoken to, and whose names I'd never bothered to learn because thirty-eight GTA kids in 1-B was already overwhelming.

All of them fit. All of them looked healthy.

Not one face that fell below the invisible median. Not one body that looked underweight or overweight. No acne scars. No features that made you want to politely look away.

It was like someone had gone through the school with a casting director's clipboard and only kept the ones who made the cut.

The chill spread to my shoulders.

I thought about the two girls from my own class, 2-B. The ones I'd barely registered last week because I'd been too wrapped up in my inner GTA gang, too comfortable in my little bubble of Dodo's snorting laughter and Sera's eye-rolls and Ren's quiet perceptiveness.

What were their names?

One had shoulder-length hair, clean and straight. Shy posture. Glasses she kept pushing up her nose. I thought her name might be Shizuka.

Kawamura? Kawamoto? Something with a kawa..

And the other, a bit taller than me, with long dark hair she wore in a single braid down her back. Madoka. Higashi Madoka. That one I was maybe seventy percent sure about.

They were both beautiful too.

Stop it.

I blinked. Hard.

This was insane. This was absolutely, certifiably insane. I was standing in a classroom full of girls who all looked like they'd been plucked from a gravure magazine's new year issue, and the only other two boys in the room were a soccer striker with a perm and a scrawny bassist who still hadn't figured out how to fill out his uniform.

Three boys. The rest are girls. And all of them…

"Jo.. Jouji…"

Rena's voice cut through the spiral of my freight train of thoughts.

She was standing in front of me, holding out the crumpled sheet of paper. Her fingers were trembling, just slightly, the kind of tremor you'd miss if you weren't looking for it.

But I was. I was looking at everything now.

"This is everyone." Her voice was steadier than her hands. "Total… Total is thirty-three people. Three boys," she swallowed, "the rest are girls."

I gulped. I took the paper.

The handwriting was Rena's definitely, a little rushed, a little shaky, but legible. Names. Classes. Laid out in neat little rows like the world still made sense and this was just another roll call on just another Monday.

Attendance — Kamishiro High, Classroom 1-A

First year

1. Saitou Asuka — 1-A
2. Morikawa Ayano — 1-A
3. Fujiwara Kaede — 1-C
4. Arai Makoto — 1-D
5. Nakajima Hana — 1-D
6. Kujou Karin — 1-E
7. Nomura Yuki — 1-E
8. Ogawa Miki — 1-E
9. Tanabe Aoi — 1-F

Second year

1. Suzuki Sayaka — 2-A
2. Shigeru Jouji — 2-B
3. Kawamura Shizuka — 2-B
4. Higashi Madoka — 2-B
5. Kikuchi Chisato — 2-C
6. Manami Yua — 2-C
7. Toudou Daichi — 2-C
8. Takahashi Moe — 2-D
9. Shimizu Mai — 2-D
10. Yamamoto Eri — 2-E
11. Shimizu Umi — 2-F
12. Tanaka Fumiko — 2-F
13. Ichinose Rena — 2-F
14. Kobayashi Rina — 2-F

Third year

1. Anzai Nagisa — 3-A
2. Asou Fumi — 3-A
3. Taniguchi Riko — 3-B
4. Matsushima Marina — 3-B
5. Abe Airi — 3-D
6. Ishikawa Rie — 3-D
7. Oonishi Saki — 3-E
8. Sakamoto Miho — 3-E
9. Tsuchiya Nao — 3-F
10. Yoshida Haruka — 3-F

I read through it twice.

Three boys. Me, Donda, and Makoto.

And thirty girls. All of them.

All of them…

I folded the paper and tucked it into my blazer pocket.

I got this. I have to.

I clapped my hands together.

The sound cut through the low-frequency murmur like a blade. Heads turned. Sniffles stopped. Even Fumiko's glassy eyes drifted vaguely in my direction.

"Ehem."

I took a step forward, toward the center of the room. Toward the teacher's podium, not because I wanted to stand at it, but because it was there, and right now, anything that looked like authority was probably a good idea.

"Guys," My voice came out steadier than I thought.

"Senpai."

A deeper bow toward the third-years. Nagisa-senpai, who met my eyes with that gentle, unshakeable calm. Fumi-senpai, who raised one eyebrow like she was reserving judgment. Riko-senpai, Marina-senpai, Airi-senpai, and the others, all watching, all waiting.

"Kouhai."

I turned slightly, dipping my head toward the first-year cluster in the back, Makoto, Asuka, Karin, and the others whose names I'd just learned and already felt responsible for.

"My fellow year-mates."

I addressed Rena, Chisaton, Donda, Yua, Fumiko, Umi, those two of my new classmates, Shizuka and Madoka, and the others.

Every pair of eyes in the room locked onto me.

"I'm Jouji. Shigeru Jouji. Class 2-B. Please call me Jouji."

Straight to my first name. There's no reason for formality anymore.

"Look."

I let the word hang there for a second. Buying time. Thirty pairs of eyes and not one of them was blinking.

"I'm not saying this means I'm in charge or anything. That's not what this is." I shoved my hands into my blazer pockets, partly for comfort, partly so no one would see they were shaking. "I already checked the whole school. Main building. The rear building. The gym. The club equipment sheds. Every washroom, toilets. Even the ones at the pool."

A beat.

"There's no one else. Just us."

I let that sink in. It sunk into me, too, saying it out loud.

"And the guys…" I jerked my thumb toward Donda, still cradling Yua in the corner, then toward the back where Makoto was on watch duty of the girls. "It's just me, Donda, and Makoto."

"Three of us. That's it. If I don't at least try to speak up…"

I trailed off. Shrugged.

"Well. That'd be pretty stupid, right?"

Someone let out a shaky breath. Might have been a laugh. Might have been the opposite. Hard to tell anymore.

"Some of you know me. Maybe. And I know some of you." I turned slightly, scanning the second-year cluster. "Uh… we're in the same class. Right? Kawamura-san. Higashi-san."

Shizuka, the one with the shoulder-length hair and glasses, flinched like I'd thrown a baseball at her forehead. Her cheeks went pink. She pushed her glasses up her nose in that nervous tic. She nodded.

Madoka just nodded. Slow. Measured. Her braid shifted against her back.

"Now, if you all don't mind… Can I call out your names so at least we can all be sure that no one's left behind?" I said.

Ripple of nods.

Then I started calling all of them, one by one.

My voice found cracks every once in a while in between names.

"Look." I turned back to the room at large after everyone was checked.

"I don't know what happened. None of us do. This is insane. I don't know if it's aliens, or the apocalypse, or some kind of supernatural seinen manga bullshit. I don't know. I didn't even see it happen."

I paused. Might as well be honest.

"I was asleep during assembly."

A few blinks. A few uncertain glances.

"Yeah. I know. My friends ditched me in the classroom, actually no, I decided not to go with them for five more minutes nap, so I slept through the end of the world." I let a dry, humorless smile tug at the corner of my mouth.

"Rena-chan found me. By the time I woke up, everyone was already…"

Rena, still standing near the window, looked down at her shoes. The crumpled attendance sheet was back in her hands even though she'd already given me the copy. She was holding onto it like a lifeline. For the first time, I saw that the pink streak in her hair didn't fit her expression.

"And, uh…"

Here we go.

"I have a girlfriend."

Beat.

"No. Ex."

Beat.

"No. Still girlfriend. She broke up with me last night but I haven't responded yet. So technically…" I waved a hand vaguely. "Point is. She goes to Asakaze Minami. I called her earlier. It's the same over there. About twenty people left. Two guys. The rest girls."

I could feel Rena's eyes on me. I didn't look back.

"So this isn't just Kamishiro High. It's not just us. Whatever this is…"

I pulled out my phone. Flipped it open. The screen glowed blue in the fluorescent light of the classroom.

My thumb froze over the keypad.

"Fuck."

The word came out before I could stop it. I held the phone up so they could all see, which was sort of pointless.

It was one of my what ifs. Now it wasn't.

The little antenna icon in the corner was gone. Just… empty space where the bars used to be.

"Signal's dead."

The murmur that rippled through the room was sharper than before. Panic with an edge. A few girls immediately checked their own phones, the snap of flip-phones opening, the chirp of tiny screens lighting up, and then the same hollow silence as one by one they all realized.

"Yeah." I closed my phone and shoved it back in my pocket. "I think… I think we have to assume this didn't just happen at Kamishiro. Or Asakaze."

I scanned the room.

"Does anyone else have anything to add? How was it during the mass disappearance? The vanishing?"

Silence.

And then, from near the window…

"I was in line."

Karin's voice was lower than I expected. Not deep, exactly, but… textured. The kind of voice that didn't need volume to carry. She hadn't moved from her spot, chin still resting on her palm, eyes still fixed somewhere in the middle distance.

"Just standing there. Waiting for the principal to finish whatever he was saying." She shrugged one shoulder. "Then suddenly, everyone was gone. Like someone pressed pause and deleted everyone."

No tremor. No tears. Just a flat, matter-of-fact delivery that was somehow more unsettling than if she'd been weeping.

Fumi-senpai snorted from her spot against the far wall.

"Same here." She uncrossed her arms, gesturing vaguely with one hand. The blonde streaks in her hair caught the light. "I was laughing my ass off in the back row, not listening to a single word Baldy-Matsu was saying. Casual Monday. Talking over him." A wry smirk. "Then, poof. Exactly what the kouhai said. Silence. And the only person left anywhere near me was Nagisa, two rows up."

Nagisa-senpai nodded, her expression unreadable. She didn't add anything. She didn't need to.

Riko-senpai, Student Council, sharp-eyed, already looking at this like a puzzle to be solved, cleared her throat.

"There wasn't any kind of… effect. Special effect, like in films or anime. No light. No sound. No distortion." She spoke carefully, choosing each word like she was placing pieces on a chessboard.

Yua's voice came next, muffled against Donda's blazer. She'd pulled her face out just enough to speak.

"I was walking down to the assembly, with Natsu-chan and Chika-chan. We were talking about… I don't even remember what. Something stupid. And then…" She swallowed, "…they were gone. Everyone around me. Just… gone. There was a lot…"

Chisaton nodded. Still staring at the blackboard. When she spoke, her voice was louder than the others as usual. All necks turned to her.

"I was still in the classroom. Borrowing lip gloss from…" She stopped. Blinked. "I was borrowing lip gloss. From… umm… one of my friends. And then she wasn't there anymore. The lip gloss was still in my hand."

She held up her palm like the evidence was still there.

And typical Chisaton, I bet she couldn't even remember whose it was.

No one said anything for a long moment.

Then Makoto shifted near the door.

"Senpai." His voice cracked slightly on the second syllable. He cleared his throat, tried again. "I was… I was late. Running late. Me and my two friends were getting our outdoor shoes from the lockers before heading outside. I was bent down fitting in one of my shoes, and when I stood up…"

He stopped. His jaw worked for a second, like he was trying to chew his way through the memory.

"They were gone. Both of them. Just… gone. And everyone else around us."

"The weird thing was, Senpai…" He continued, hesitated.

"What?"

"One of my friends, Kenji, one of his indoor shoes was still there. Just one. The one he had put in the locker."

That detail landed somewhere in my stomach and stayed there.

One shoe.

What the hell?

I stared at him. Still. Cringing my face.

My brain was trying to assemble these pieces into something that made sense and coming up with precisely nothing. One shoe left behind in the locker. No light. No sound. One moment there, the next, erased.

I filed it under problems for later and forced myself back to the present.

"Okay." I rubbed the back of my neck. "So they really did just… vanish. Not like abducted by alien-beam or something. Not dragged off. Just…" I snapped my fingers. " …gone?"

A few nods. No one looked happy about the confirmation.

What's this? Thanos?

"Has anyone managed to contact family? Relatives? Friends outside school?"
A wave of head-shakes rippled through the room.

"I did."

One of the first-years. A girl I barely recognized until I called her name before. She was Yuki, small, mousy, with her phone clutched in both hands like a talisman.

"I… I'm Nomura Yuki. From 1-E. Please call me Yuki."

Polite.

"I… I was texting my friend. From junior high. She goes to Kamishiro Nishi now." Yuki's voice was thin but steadier than she looked. "She said… she said it's the same there. Everyone disappeared. She said…" Yuki squinted at her phone screen, even though there was no signal to check. "She said all that's left are girls, except three boys. Like… us."

A pause.

"And then I tried to text back and the signal was…" She held up her phone helplessly.

Kamishiro Nishi High.

Kenta, Takeshi, Junpei, Aoi. Are you guys alright? I thought to myself quick before dread swallowed me up again.

Something cold settled into the base of my spine and made itself at home.

And that made three schools. Three high schools, same pattern. Overwhelmingly girls.

"Alright."

I turned back to face the whole room. Thirty-three people. Three boys. Thirty girls.

All of them looking at me like I was supposed to know what the hell to do next.

"Here's what it comes down to. We have two choices."

I held up one finger.

"Option one. We stay here. Wait for help. Police. JSDF. Whoever. Stay in one place so if anyone comes looking, they find us."

I held up a second finger.

"Option two. We leave. Go home. Check on our house, our families."

And there it was.

The shift in the air was immediate. Faces that had been blank with shock suddenly cracked open. Fear. Hope. Desperation. A dozen voices started to rise at once.

"My mom…"

"My little brother…"

"I need to…"

"Please, I have to…"

"…grandmother lives alone…"

I raised both hands. The voices didn't stop, but they lowered. Barely.

"I get it. Believe me. I want to check on my family too." Okaa-chan. Mio. Shouta. They flashed through my head in quick succession, images I couldn't afford to dwell on right now. "But here's the problem. Where does everyone live?"

A pause.

Hands started going up. Answers came in a messy chorus.

"Kichijoji…"

"Mitaka…"

"I'm in Tachikawa…"

"Kamigawa…"

"Nishi-Ogikubo…"

Two stations. Three stations. Some even further. On a normal day, these were nothing. Twenty, thirty minutes on the bus or Keio Line. But this wasn't a normal day. No phones. No way of knowing what the stations looked like. No way of knowing if the trains were even running.

Rena, who'd been quietly taking mental notes through the whole exchange, stepped forward.

"How many of us live close? Walking or cycling distance?"

I raised mine and we counted hands.

It didn't take long.

Eleven.

Out of thirty-three, only eleven people lived close enough to the school to walk or cycle home without needing a train or a bus.

Me. Chisaton. Fumi-senpai. A handful of others whose names I was still memorizing.

The rest, more than twenty people, were stranded.

"Okay." I exhaled slowly, running a hand through my hair and mess it up.

The mop was felt less Revolver now, more like Disintegration-era Robert Smith.

"Eleven people. That's… that's workable."

I looked toward the far wall. Toward the girl with the blonde streak and a presence that can shut you up just from being present. Partly because of that, partly because she was one of the eleven.

"Asou-senpai."

I moved toward the back corner of the classroom, away from the main cluster, closing in on where she stood.

Fumi-senpai's eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch. "Shigeru."

"Can I talk to you for a second?"

Fumi-senpai pushed off the wall and followed. No hesitation, no questions. But something in her expression had shifted. A flicker. Barely there and gone.
All eyes were on us for a split second.

We stood near the window, voices low.

"Here's what I'm thinking," I said. "I need to check the outside first. See what's out there. The streets. The neighborhood. Whether…" I paused. Swallowed. "Whether it's just the schools or…"

"…or everything." Fumi-senpai finished the sentence I didn't want to finish.

"Yeah."

Her eyes were sharp, unblinking, held mine for a long moment.

"You've thought this through."

It wasn't a question.

Fumi-senpai's arms were still crossed, but something in her posture loosened. Just slightly.

"I also need to grab my Jog," I said. "It's parked at the 7-Eleven. If things are… if it's safe out there… then I'll come back, brief everyone, and send the eleven of us who live close. In groups. Check our houses. Then, worst case, come back here."

Fumi-senpai nodded. "And the other twenty-two?"

"They stay here. Doors locked. Someone capable in charge." I glanced toward the corner. "Donda's solid. Rena-chan's been holding it together since this started. And Shimizu-san, Umi, she's got a better head for crisis than half the third-years I know."

"You mean half the third-years in this room."

Fuck. Wrong choice of words.

"I didn't say that." I held my grin.

"You didn't have to." An almost-grin flickered from her. "I'll handle it."

She turned back toward the room.

"Alright, listen up!" Her voice cut through the low hum of conversation like a hot knife. Every head turned on us again. Fumi-senpai had that effect.

"Shigeru and I are scouting outside. Just the two of us. While we're gone…"

She's going too? Of course.

She scanned the room. Her eyes landed.

"Donda. Soccer kid." The soccer ace straightened. "You're in charge of everyone. Rena. Shimizu Umi. You're with him. Anything happens, anything at all, you three make the call. Not Nagisa. Not Riko. You."

A ripple of surprise went through the third-year cluster. Nagisa-senpai's expression didn't change, if anything, she looked faintly relieved.

Rena blinked. "Fumisen, I…"

"You kept your head when everyone else lost theirs," Fumi-senpai said flatly. "Don't make me repeat myself."

Rena closed her mouth. Nodded.

Umi. Shimizu Umi, Yamato Nadeshiko incarnate, still cradling Fumiko's head, met Fumi-senpai's gaze with that steady, serene expression. She didn't argue. She just nodded in quick succession, as if being appointed to a crisis leadership position by a third-year sukeban was a perfectly normal Monday occurrence.

A few girls exchanged glances. The weight of those words settled over the room like a second ceiling.

"Donda." I nodded as I turned heading towards the door with Fumi-senpai behind me. Donda casually nodded back, but his eyes were sharp.

I started walking toward the door and stopped for a second. Makoto was still standing there beside the first-year clusters.

"Makoto."

"Senpai."

"Hold the fort."

He straightened up so fast I thought his spine might snap. "Y.. Yes, Senpai!"

I paused, then walked towards him. Pat his upper-arm a little bit harder than I intended.

"You're doing fine, by the way. The bass thing, too. 'Stop Crying Your Heart Out' was the only song that didn't fall apart at orientation."

His eyes went wide.

"You… You saw?"

"Everyone saw it. I'm just the only one telling you the truth."

I let go, walked back towards the door and slid it open before he could figure out how to respond.

Behind me, I heard Fumi-senpai's boots on the linoleum following.

Just the two of us strolling out of the classroom to an empty hallway.

The hallway swallowed us whole. After the weight of thirty-three people crammed into one room, the silence outside felt like a physical thing. Thick and cold and completely uninterested in whether we'd make it back.

And somewhere in that silence, Nanase was probably waiting for a call I couldn't make anymore.

 

[darkrednotmaroon]

Chapter 4 - Shocker
"Wait."

I stopped halfway down the corridor.

"My bag. I need my bag. Everything's still there, my Jog key, too."

Fumi-senpai raised an eyebrow but didn't argue. We climbed the stairs to the second floor, our footsteps echoing in the empty stairwell like we were the last two people on earth.

Which, for all I knew, we almost were.

2-B was exactly how Rena and I had left it.

Desks in their neat little rows. Chairs pushed in, or not, depending on whose they were. The chalkboard still had whatever notes Takeda-sensei had scrawled last Friday. And the bags.

Bags everywhere.

Dodo's beat-up nylon backpack slumped against his chair like he'd be back any second. Sera's tote, the one with the little cat charm she'd bought in Harajuku, hanging from her desk hook. Ren's meticulously organized satchel, the kind that probably had color-coded folders inside. All of them. All still here. All waiting for owners who weren't coming back from assembly.

I didn't let myself look too long.

Fumi-senpai stood in the doorway, arms crossed, scanning the room with an expression I couldn't read. Maybe she was thinking the same thing I was. Maybe she wasn't. Hard to tell with her.

I grabbed my bag from beside my desk. The same grey knockoff messenger bag I'd been using since third-year junior high, frayed at the corners, the strap held together with duct tape and stubbornness. Inside: one spiral notebook that served every subject because I couldn't be bothered with multiple. My CD player, a Sony Discman that skipped if you breathed on it wrong. Two records I'd grabbed on my way out the door this morning: Blur: The Best Of and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

"That everything?" Fumi-senpai's voice echoed slightly in the empty classroom.

"Yeah."

I slung the bag over my shoulder and we headed upstairs to get Fumi-senpai's.

All the same in the third floor.

Then we headed down.

The main entrance was dead quiet. Our footsteps on the linoleum. The distant hum of the vending machines. Nothing else.

I checked my phone as we walked. The screen still glowed blue. 9:47.

About an hour since everything went to hell.

No signal. Just that empty little antenna icon, mocking me.

We stepped outside. The courtyard stretched before us. Empty now, the last cherry blossom petals scattered across the stone like confetti from a celebration nobody had attended. The sky was still that pale, indecisive April blue.

And then I remembered.

"Asou-senpai. Wait here."

I didn't wait for her response. Just took off running toward the sports ground.

The field was worse than it had ever been.

You could see where they'd been standing. The assembly formation, class markers still planted in the grass, little placards on metal stakes: 1-A, 1-B, 1-C.

Don't think about it.

I made a beeline for the equipment shed, the big metal container near the soccer goalposts that also served the baseball club and the track-and-field team.

The door was unlocked. Of course it was. Who locks up during morning assembly?

Inside: Soccer balls. Hurdles. Relay batons. And…

There.

Four metal baseball bats, leaning against the corner rack. Aluminum alloy. Scuffed from practice but perfectly functional. I grabbed one in each hand, swung them once to feel the weight.

Not for baseball.

Fumi-senpai was right where I'd left her, chewing gum with the slow, deliberate rhythm of someone who'd been doing it since junior high and had long since stopped caring if teachers noticed.

She saw the bats.

And she grinned.

Not the smirk from before. Not the cool, guarded half-expression she'd been wearing all morning. A real grin, the kind that reached her eyes and said finally, someone who gets it.

"Here, Asou-senpai." I held one out to her.

She took it. Gave it an experimental swing, one-handed, wrist-casual, like she'd done this before and wasn't about to pretend otherwise.

"You really do think ahead, don't you?"

"Hngh…" I rested my bat across my shoulder. "I'm on a mission with the sukeban of Kamishiro High. Can't disappoint the Queen."

The words came out before I could stop them, that default setting my mouth had, the one that got me in trouble more often than it got me out of it.

She barked out a laugh. Actually laughed. Swinging her bat in a lazy figure-eight.

"Queen? The hell are you talking about? Nagisa is queen." She jerked her thumb toward the main building. "What does that make me? Demon Lord?"
The reference was obvious. Nagisa-senpai. the Queen of Kamishiro High, an uncontested title she'd held since before last year's third-years had even graduated.

Part of Fumi-senpai's crew, technically, but anyone who thought that made her a delinquent, had clearly never spoken to her. She was humble. Genuinely, almost absurdly humble for someone whose wink could launch a thousand war ships.

Underclassmen wrote her poetry. The Idol of idols.

And Fumi-senpai, feared more than loved, respected more than admired, the sukeban nobody wanted to cross. Different thrones. Same kingdom.

"Ha.. hahah. Whatever." I shrugged, still walking. "To me, if a girl's cute, pretty, adorable… she's a Queen. Or a Princess. Simple."

Her chewing stopped for half a beat.

Then resumed, faster. Harder.

Her face was red.

Not the faint pink of mild embarrassment. A proper flush. The kind that started at the cheekbones and spread outward, the kind she was trying very hard to chew her way through.

She smirked.

I'm so fucking dead.

"Sh… shit. Hahah." I stared back, straight ahead, very deliberately not looking at her. "Sorry, Asou-senpai. You know. End of the world. Fucking nerves, right?" I gestured abruptly.

She laughed again. Louder this time. And she didn't say anything about it. Didn't call me out. Didn't shut me down. Just kept walking beside me, swinging that bat, gum-snapping rhythm slightly faster than before.

If anything, and I might have been imagining this, my brain wasn't exactly running at baseline right now. If anything, she looked… pleased.

We walked through the school gate.

---

And the world outside was wrong.

Not wrong in the way the empty school was wrong. That was contained.

Expected, almost, a building full of vanished students was terrifying, but it was a terror you could wrap your head around.

Because that was what the school was, at night.

I'd ridden past the school plenty of times after dark.

A single location. A single event.

This was different.

The street in front of Kamishiro High should have been busy. Maybe not Shibuya-busy, not on a Monday morning. But cars. Delivery trucks. The occasional motorbike. Mothers on bicycles with shopping bags. Salarymen trudging toward the station. The background hum of a residential-commercial district going about its Monday.

Instead: nothing.

Just the street. The buildings. The parked cars lined up neatly along the curb. A bicycle leaned against a railing. A vending machine humming to itself, still glowing, still stocked.

No engines. No horns. No voices.

"No cars..," I murmured, more to myself than to Fumi-senpai. "No bikes…"

She was scanning, too. Eyes sharp, bat resting on her shoulder now, gum-chewing slowed to something more contemplative. The street stretched out ahead of us, broad and empty and deeply, fundamentally wrong.

"But the ones that are parked here are fine," she said slowly. "Everything's… neat."

She was right. That was the weirdest part, not just the emptiness, but the tidiness of it. If drivers had vanished at the wheel, there should have been collisions. Cars run up onto curbs. Motorbikes on their sides. The chaos of suddenly-unmanned vehicles.

Instead, every existing car was parked. Every motorbike was on its stand. Every bicycle was leaned or racked.

Then I stopped walking.

Oh shit.

My eyes went wide.

Empty roads. Parked cars. One shoe.

No fucking way.

"Oi! Shigeru?!" Fumi-senpai called me out from five, six steps ahead.

"Ye.. Yeah… Sorry…" I continued catching up to her. "I.. got caught up with something…"

"What?"

"I.. I'll tell you later."

A cat slunk across the road. Paused. Stared at us with the unmistakable judgment of all cats everywhere. Then continued on its way.

Birds. A few crows on a power line. Sparrows in the shrubs.

Animals were fine. Just no humans.

The 7-Eleven was about five minutes from the school gate. Close enough to be our unofficial hangout spot, far enough that the teachers couldn't be bothered to chase us there. I'd spent probably a hundred nights in that parking lot, leaning against my Jog or the vending machine, drinking whatever was on sale, talking shit with the Ichi-chu crew until midnight.

And there it was. Familiar green-and-orange sign. Automatic doors. Fluorescent glow spilling onto the empty sidewalk.

And beside it, in the little parking nook behind the store…

"Thank God. My Jog."

My red Yamaha Jog. Faded. Scratched up. The seat cover had a tear I'd patched with electrical tape. The left mirror was slightly crooked from the time Dodo had knocked it over trying to sit on it. Two years of abuse and it was still the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

Fumi-senpai wasn't looking at the Jog, though. She was scanning the main road, Kamishiro-chuo-dori, Kamishiro central street, the one that should have been lined with morning traffic. Her jaw was tight.

Nothing. Just storefronts. Shuttered stalls. A few businesses with their lights on, doors open, no one inside.

"The konbini's open," I said. "Twenty-four hours. Obviously."

She followed me inside.

The 7-Eleven was surreal.

Lights on. Refrigerators humming. The oden warmer bubbling gently in the corner. All the shelves fully stocked: onigiri, sandwiches, melonpan, bento boxes lined up like nothing had happened. The cash register was on. The Slurpee machine was spinning.

Just… no cashier. No customers. No old lady taking forever to count out exact change.

I walked straight up to the Slurpee machine, grabbed the biggest cup they had, and filled it with the blue flavor, the one that tasted like chemicals and childhood and made your tongue turn the color of a Smurf for three hours.

"Ahh!"

The brain freeze hit immediately. Worth it.

Fumi-senpai stared at me like I'd just sprouted a second head.

"Are you insane?"

"Insane?" I took another sip. "Look around, Asou-senpai. Who's gonna yell at me? Fujisawa?"

Math teacher. The strictest, most terrifying human being to ever pace a classroom. He'd taught me last year and I'd barely survived because I couldn't laze and clown around him. If I'd gone Rikei, I would've had him again for Math III. One more reason Bunkei was the right call.

Fumi-senpai snorted. Then, slowly, like she was trying very hard not to be amused, she walked over, took the cup out of my hand, filled it again, and drank.

"Ahh."

Her cheeks were still pink.

I had to stay sane. Whatever the cost. Whatever it took. If that meant treating a konbini like my personal living room while the world outside had apparently ended, then fine. Great. Pass the Slurpee.

She set the cup down and started wandering the aisles. Picked up a few packs of gum. Some candy. Tossed them into her bag.

"Oi, Shigeru. We heading back soon?"

"Wait."

I walked to the cigarette counter.

Glass case. Fully stocked. Mild Seven. Seven Stars. Lark. Hope. All of it.

I reached behind the counter, because what were they gonna do, stop me?

And grabbed maybe fifteen packs of Mild Seven. Tossed them into my bag.

"Shigeru?!"

"What? I smoke." I was already tearing open a pack, pulling one out, lighting it.

"Socially, though. But after all this?"

I took a long drag. Right there. In the middle of the 7-Eleven. Under the fluorescent lights. In front of the onigiri.
Exhaled.
"Hahh… Fuck. Smoking indoors in a 7-Eleven is something else."

She cracked. Laughter, real, full-bodied laughter; burst out of her like something she'd been holding in since this morning and couldn't keep down anymore. She walked over, grabbed the cigarette from between my fingers, took a drag of her own, and handed it back.

Of course she smoked. Of course she did.

"You're something else, Shigeru." She shook her head, still smiling.

"It's crazy, isn't it?" She continued.

"Yeah, well." I took another drag. "My friend Takeshi, face like a block of tofu, two nights ago he was bragging to the whole gang about finally getting to second base in a karaoke box. Tongue and everything. And I remember sitting right there," I pointed out to the concrete near the vending machine outside, "thinking, there's no way anything could be crazier than this guy having a girlfriend."

Fumi-senpai was already laughing again.

"And then this." I gestured vaguely at the empty store, the empty street, the empty world. "So… can't get any crazier." Another drag as I shrugged.

She leaned against the counter, cigarette trailing smoke, shaking her head.

She pulled one cigarette from the opened box and lit it for herself.

A drag.

Two.

When she looked at me again, something in her face had shifted. The careful, guarded mask she'd been wearing all morning, the sukeban armor, the don't-mess-with-me energy, had cracked open just enough to let something else through.

"When it happened…"

Her voice was quieter now.

"…the vanishing. When everyone disappeared. If Nagisa hadn't snapped me out of it…" She took a long drag. Exhaled slowly. "I froze. Completely. I was standing there, watching girls run around screaming, and I couldn't move. Couldn't think. I've never frozen like that. Never. Not once."

She laughed, but there was no humor in it.

"I thought… this is it. Karma finally caught up. For everything I've done. Everyone I've messed with." Her eyes were fixed on some point in the middle distance. "I've never been that… afraid. I admit that."

"And then you showed up. You and Rena. Shimizu was already down there. And the soccer kid, Donda. Handling Fumikoppai. Handling everyone. Taking charge. Meanwhile me, Nagisa, Riko, the whole third-year, we were just standing there like idiots. Frozen."

Fumikoppai. That was the third-years' nickname for Fumiko, a reference to her enormous feature that was about as subtle as a brick through a window. None of us second-years used it. It just felt… wrong, coming from her peers. Like an inside joke we hadn't earned the right to.

Another drag. Longer this time.

"Haha. Fuck."

I didn't say anything for a moment. What was there to say? The sukeban of Kamishiro High, the girl who'd probably made half the school's girl population cry at some point, was admitting she'd been scared. That was huge.

That was the kind of moment you didn't ruin with a joke.

So I ruined it with a recurring joke.

"Well, you know, can't really blame you. Like I said. Takeshi. A living tofu. Second base. Karaoke box." I shrugged. "If I can survive that mental image, you can survive this."

She stared at me.

And then she laughed. Hard. Loud. The kind of laugh that echoed off the convenience store walls and probably scared the cats outside.

"Fuck you, Shigeru." But she was smiling. A real smile, one that reached her eyes and stayed there. "You're clever."

The sukeban of Kamishiro High just said I was clever.

I felt about three centimeters taller. Which put me at a very respectable 170.

Not the best day of my life. But I'd take any win right now.

Then she walked over to the front counter.

And grabbed every box of condoms on the display rack.

"Heh?!"

My cigarette nearly fell out of my mouth.

"Wha… Senpai?!"

"Just in case," She said it like she was grabbing extra napkins. Utterly matter-of-fact. Utterly unbothered. She opened my bag, my bag, mind you, and started stuffing them inside. One box. Two. Five. Ten. There had to be at least twenty boxes in there by the time she was done.

"Just… in case…" I repeated, because my brain had apparently decided that parroting was the best it could manage right now.

Why does it feel like she's flirting with me?

Nah.

Nah.. She's definitely flirting with me.

Shit.

Physical response. Involuntary. Completely. Totally. One hundred percent.

Nanase…

Nanase…

Nacchi.

Gone. Mostly.

I zipped my bag with slightly more force than necessary and walked toward the front of the store. Needed air. Needed to not be standing next to the condom display while Fumi-senpai looked at me like that.

Like what, exactly?

Not sure.

But like that.

We stood outside the 7-Eleven, cigarettes trailing smoke into the empty morning.

My Jog was waiting patiently in its spot. The street stretched out in both directions. Nothing moving, nothing making a sound.

The Slurpee was still cold in my hand. The Mild Seven was still burning.

"Asou-senpai. There's.."

"Fumi."

I blinked.

"Call me Fumi."

She wasn't looking at me. Eyes fixed on the empty intersection ahead. But her voice was different. Softer. Or maybe not softer, just less hard. Less like steel.

"Fumi-senpai…"

"Fumi."

"Nghh… Fumi-chan…"

"Fuck you!" She laughed, that same real laugh from before.

I couldn't help grinning. "Come on. Fumi-tan." I escalated deliberately. Pushed it. Because at this point, what were the rules anymore?

"I really am going to kill you."

But her face was burning. Bright red. Cheeks, ears, even her neck; the flush had gone nuclear. And she was smiling so hard it looked like it hurt.

Damn it. She's fucking cute.

"Ergh… It just feels weird, okay? Bear with me." My own smile wasn't going anywhere either. "Fumi-tan."

"Whatever." She looked away, but the smile stayed.

I took a breath.

"I've got a theory."

The shift was immediate. Her smile didn't disappear, but it settled, her eyes sharpening, her posture straightening. Listening.

"A stupid one. And I'm not telling the others yet." I took a drag. "I'm still hoping someone's coming to save us. Government. Police. JSDF. Some random 7-Eleven employee who happened to be in the bathroom."

"And?"

"And…" I gestured at the street with my cigarette. "Makoto's story. His friend, Kenji, whatever his name was. One indoor shoe still in the locker. The other one, gone. Along with him."

Fumi-senpai nodded slowly.

"Kenji was holding one shoe. Putting the other one away. The one in the locker stays. The one in his hand goes with him. And now," I waved at the empty road. "No crashed cars. No overturned bikes. Everything neatly parked. Nobody vanished mid-drive."

Her eyes narrowed. "You're saying… the people who disappeared took their stuff with them?"

"Not necessarily their stuff. The stuff they were touching. Stuff they were using." I tapped ash onto the pavement. "But think about it. If I'm an alien, or some kind of tokusatsu evil organization… like SHOCKER…" She nodded at SHOCKER, "… or whatever. And I'm abducting people, hundred thousands of people, do I really want all their cars? Their motorbikes? Their shopping bags? Some dude who was mid-cigarette? Some poor bastard in a toilet with his shit still hanging halfway out his ass?"

She cracked even before I got to finish my last sentence, a sharp, involuntary bark of laughter that she didn't quite manage to suppress.

I laughed with her.

To be fair. I surprised even myself.

"The poor toilet bastard," she said, shaking her head. "I'm gonna be thinking about the poor toilet bastard all day now." But even through the laughter, her eyes were still sharp.

"That's…" She trailed off after her laughter receded.

"Absurd?"

"Yeah."

"Everything about this is absurd. That's the point."

She nodded. Conceded.

"So here's the theory." I took one last drag and crushed the cigarette under my heel.

"You know what a multiverse is? Another universe theory? Pocket universe?"

"Don't talk otaku stuff to me!" She was laughing again, but it was the laugh of someone who was following along despite herself.

"But you know SHOCKER!"

"Old Kamen Riders are cool."

Damn. She knows shit.

"Okay, okay. Simple version." I held up my hands. "Imagine there's another world. An exact copy of ours. But empty. No people. Just… the stuff. Mirror world, Kamen Rider Ryuuki? No? The buildings. The parked cars. The 7-Eleven. Everything. And at a certain moment, the moment of the vanishing, that empty world took a snapshot of our world. Registered every inanimate object in our world. Every car. Every bike. Every shoe in a locker. And it froze at that second."

She was staring at me now. Not laughing. Still confused.

"And when the snapshot happened," I said, "it only captured what was still or not in someone's possession, in a sense. Parked cars. Bikes on their stands. Shoes in lockers. Empty buildings and everything in it. But anything that was moving, any car being driven, any motorbike and moped on the road, any bicycle someone was pedaling, that one shoe in Kenji's hand, the snapshot didn't register them. They were in motion. They belonged to someone. So they weren't frozen and brought into the copy." I met her gaze.

"And when it finished… we didn't stay behind in the real world. We got pulled across. Into this one. The empty one."

Her eyes went wide.

"So the people who vanished…" She trailed off.

"…aren't the ones who vanished." I finished her sentence, met her gaze. "We are. We're the ones who disappeared from the real world. And we got dumped here. In this… empty copy."

The words hung in the air between us.

A crow cawed somewhere in the distance. The Slurpee machine hummed inside the 7-Eleven. And Fumi-senpai just stared at me like I'd solved a riddle she hadn't even known she was trying to crack.

"Shige… Jouji."

"Yeah?" She called me by my name.

"That's…" She shook her head slowly. But she wasn't dismissing it. She was processing it. Turning it over. Testing the edges.

"I know," I said. "Stupid."

"Yeah." She pulled out another cigarette, lit it, exhaled. "But it fits."

It did.

"Fumi-tan."

I crushed the last of my cigarette under my heel.

"Don't tell the others about this yet. This is just theory and I'm not a hundred percent sure of it." I looked at her. "I still want to be optimistic. Someone's coming to save us. And this whole thing is…"

She nodded. No argument. No pushback. Just a single, quiet nod as if saying she understood.

Then she smacked my arm.

Hard.

"Ow! What…"

"You called me that again." She wasn't even looking at me. Just smiling at the empty intersection like it had told her a joke.

"You said I could call you that!"

"Fumi. Not that."

"You didn't say no to Fumi-tan."

"I'm saying it now."

"Too late. Registered. Filed. Official."

She smacked me again. But she was grinning.

---

I walked over to my Jog. The red poor old moped looked even more battered in the morning light. the scratches on the side panel, the electrical tape on the seat, the crooked left mirror that was basically a permanent reminder of Dodo's existence. I swung my leg over, pulled on my helmet, a black half-helmet that had seen better days and possibly better decades, and turned the key.

The engine coughed once. Twice. Then caught with that distinctive two-stroke rattle I'd been listening to since my first high school year.

Fumi-senpai climbed on behind me without a shred of hesitation.

No helmet, I didn't have a spare. Because why would I ever need a spare helmet on a Monday morning? I didn't expect apocalypse.

"You're not wearing a helmet."

"You noticed."

"If we crash…"

"Then don't crash."

Fair enough.

She wrapped her arms around my waist. Again, no hesitation, no awkwardness, like this was just another thing that happened in the apocalypse, and I pulled out of the 7-Eleven parking lot onto Kamishiro-chuo-dori.

The main street was a ghost.

I'd seen it empty before. Late nights, early mornings, the dead hours between midnight and dawn when even the konbini felt lonely. But this was different. This was ten in the morning on a Monday, and Kamishiro-chuo-dori should have been alive. Delivery trucks. Buses. Housewives on bicycles. The old man who ran the tofu shop should have been out front hosing down the sidewalk. The pachinko parlor should have had its neon buzzing, luring in the unemployed and the eternally hopeful.

Instead: Nothing.

We passed the tofu shop. Hose coiled neatly on the ground. No old man.
The pachinko parlor. Neon off. Doors closed.

A row of houses with their morning laundry still hanging on the balconies. Shirts, skirts, a Totoro towel that would never get brought in before the afternoon rain.

The bus stop outside the station had a timetable fluttering in the breeze. The 10:15 to Kichijoji. Scheduled. On time. Never coming.

I twisted the throttle harder.

The Jog whined up to forty-something, faster than I'd ever pushed it, faster than it probably wanted to go. The wind bit at my cheeks. Fumi-senpai's grip around my waist tightened, and I felt her chin rest on my shoulder as her body closing in against my back. Not romantic, nonetheless soft.

Focus on the road, Jouji.

No helmet meant the wind was trying to blind her.

We took the long loop, north up the main street, past the FamilyMart and the closed-down ramen shop that had been 'renovating' since 2006, all the way to the residential edge where the houses started getting bigger and the apartment blocks gave way to actual yards. Then west, past the elementary school, empty playground, swings moving slightly in the wind, and south again, circling back toward Kamishiro High.

Every street. Every corner. Every traffic light cycling through its colors for an audience of zero.

Same. All the same.

Dead city.

By the time we rolled back through the school gate, the Jog's engine was making a sound I didn't entirely trust, and my fingers were stiff from gripping the throttle.

We parked just right outside the main building entrance, which under normal circumstances, this would mean an instant top-tier school rule violation.

But riding my moped with a girl for the first time, and it was not even Nanase, or Rena, but the sukeban of Kamishiro High herself was stranger than anything registered under normal umbrella.

Fumi-senpai slid off the back and stretched her arms over her head like she'd just gotten off a roller coaster.

"Not bad, Jouji."

"She's a classic."

"I was talking about the ride, not the bike."

She walked toward the main entrance before I could figure out what to do with that.

I followed her inside.

 

[darkrednotmaroon]

Chapter 5 - Borrowed

Classroom 1-A had transformed.

Not in any dramatic way. Nobody had redecorated. But the energy in the room had shifted from terrified huddle to uneasy camp. Someone had pushed a few desks together. Bento boxes were scattered across them. The kind you'd find in a konbini, grabbed from the staff room fridge or someone's abandoned lunch bag. Snacks. Onigiri. A few bottles of Pocari Sweat and cold green tea.

Donda was sitting on a desk in the center of the room, an ad-hoc collection of drinks spread around him like a konbini had thrown up on his lap. A baseball bat, highly likely to be grabbed from the equipment shed where I was getting mine and Fumi-senpai's, leaned against the desk beside him. He'd been handing out Pocari Sweat and cold green tea like some kind of soccer-playing Santa Claus.

That vending machine in the corridor near the shoelockers. Its glass front was a spiderweb of cracks with a hole now, and I was pretty sure I knew exactly which baseball bat had done the honors.

Makoto was still with the first years, but he'd relaxed enough to actually sit down.

Nagisa-senpai was talking quietly with Riko-senpai and Marina-senpai. Rena and Airi-senpai were talking with some of the kouhai, including Karin and Asuka.

Umi fed Fumiko something from a bento box. Her color was better, her eyes actually tracking movement now.

Yua and Chisaton were livelier.

And the others, doing other things. Other than just existing.

It wasn't normal. Nothing about this was ever going to be normal.

But it was… something.

I walked to the center of the room. Fumi-senpai took her usual spot against the far wall near where Nagisa-senpai and Riko-senpai were. We'd fallen into a rhythm without ever discussing it.

"Alright, everyone."

The low murmur died down.

"Asou-sen.. Fumi-senpai and I went outside to check things out." I pulled off my helmet, set it on the nearest desk. "We did a loop from the 7-Eleven, up Kamishiro-chuo-dori, all the way to the residential district, and back around. It's.."

I paused.

How do you describe a dead city without sounding like a horror movie trailer?

"Umm… It's empty. All of it. Every store. Every konbini. Every office building. No cars on the road. No motorbikes. No bicycles mid-ride. Nothing crashed. Nothing burning. Just… silent."

It was impossible.

"Which means we can travel fast if we have to. Roads are clear. No obstacles. No traffic."

Fumi-senpai pushed off the wall.

"For the eleven of us who live close and want to check on your families, we can do that now." She crossed her arms. "But I've been thinking. We should grab mopeds. From the houses around here. Among the nine of you, anyone who can ride, raise your hand."

Hands went up. There were a lot.

Among the eleven of us, mine was already accounted for. Fumi-senpai's too. Chisaton, still pale but way more present than she'd been an hour ago, raised hers. Yamamoto Eri from 2-E, a girl with a sharp bob cut and the kind of forearms that suggested she played a sport, raised hers. Ishikawa Rie-senpai from 3-D, tall, athletic, track team probably, raised hers. Suzuki Sayaka from 2-A, who I still knew almost nothing about except that she'd been quietly helping Rena with the attendance, raised hers. And Tsuchiya Nao-senpai from 3-F, a third-year with short dyed-brown hair and an undercut raised hers.

Seven riders.

Seven bikes for eleven people.

"Good." Fumi-senpai nodded. "The four who can't ride, you'll be riding pillion. Everyone else who's leaving sticks close. We find mopeds in the houses near the school. We don't go far. And we don't go alone."

Fumi-senpai snapped her fingers.

"Soccer kid. You're coming with us to find the mopeds."

Donda straightened from his desk-throne. "Yeah, alright."

He walked towards me.

"The streets are really empty? 7-Eleven?"

"Yep." I tossed him my bag. "See for yourself."

He caught it one-handed, striker reflexes, and unzipped it. His hand went straight past the Discman, past the albums, and emerged with several packs of Mild Seven.

"Nice."

Grin. Big one. The kind that made his perm look almost intentional.

Then his hand went back in and came out holding a box of condoms.

The grin got bigger.

Fuck. I forgot.

"No shit." He looked at me. Then at Fumi-senpai. Then back at me. "You two were busy."

Fumi-senpai made a face.

I went, "It's not.."

He was already pocketing three packs of Mild Seven. Then he grabbed two boxes of condoms and held them up like trophies.

"Two?" I said. "You planned ahead."

"Always." He winked at Yua who sat next to Chisaton.

And Yua, still pale, still shaken, still tucked into herself like she was worried she might fall apart if she unfolded, let out a small, involuntary chuckle. The kind that surprised even her. Her cheeks flushed, and she buried her face back against Donda's gakuran, but the laugh had happened. Some would have heard it.

Chisaton looked at Yua rather confused.

She didn't get it. I knew.

Donda and Yua had been together long enough. They'd done it plenty. At this point, there wasn't much left to be embarrassed about, which was probably why the embarrassment still hit her anyway.

Some girls who'd noticed were pretending very hard not to notice. Rena included. I could feel their eyes and grin snickering away from either the main scene.

"Kouhai." Fumi-senpai pointed at Makoto. "Band kid."

Makoto shot to his feet so fast he nearly knocked over his chair. "Y.. yes, Senpai!"

"You're staying here. Taking care of everyone. Holding the fort. Whatever Jouji called it." She jerked her thumb toward the door. "You're the only man until Donda and Jouji get back. Got it?"

"Yes, Asou-senpai!"

"Good."

I couldn't tell if Makoto was terrified or honored. Probably both.

"Everyone who's coming, for the eleven, and Donda, let's move." Fumi-senpai was already walking toward the door, bat swinging casually at her side. "We're going on a moped-hunt."

---

The first house was a two-story place about three minutes from the school gate. A typical Kamishiro family home with a small garden, a bicycle parked out front, and a nameplate on the gate that read Tanaka in neat kanji. Not related to our Tanaka Fumiko, probably.

The front door was locked.

"Sorry about this, Tanaka-san," I muttered, and swung the baseball bat into the doorframe near the handle.

The wood splintered. The door swung open.

Donda let out a low whistle. "Damn. You really are committed."

"Wait until you see me smoking inside 7-Eleven." I chuckled.

He chuckled back.

We filed inside, me, Donda, Fumi-senpai, Chisaton and the others, and immediately took our shoes off in the genkan because some habits were too deeply ingrained for even the apocalypse to break.

"Sumimasen!" Chisaton called out to the empty hallway, bowing slightly as she stepped up into the house. "We're really sorry!"

"We're not robbing you!" Yamamoto Eri added, which was technically true but also technically false depending on how you looked at it.

"We're borrowing!" That was Suzuki Sayaka, who had apparently decided to become our legal counsel. "Borrowing with intent to return!"

The house was spotless. A family lived here, photos on the wall, a kid's crayon drawing on the fridge, slippers lined up neatly by the back door. The kitchen still smelled faintly of miso soup from breakfast.

Don't think about it.

We checked the shed in the back garden. No moped. Just a lawnmower and some gardening tools.

"Next house," Fumi-senpai said.

---

The second house, Suzuki on the nameplate, no relation to our Suzuki, definitely, had a tiny garage.

A pristine white Honda Today. The 50cc kind. Keys hanging on a hook by the door.

"Yes!" Donda pumped his fist. "That's what I'm talking about!"

He quickly got on it.

"A Suzuki household that owns a Honda," I muttered. Some of them giggled.

"Can you even ride?" I turned to Donda.

"How hard can it be?"

Fumi-senpai shot him a look. "You break it, you walk."

He did not break it. He did, however, nearly drive it into a telephone pole within the first ten seconds, which was impressive given that the telephone pole was not in any way in his path.

"I'm fine! I'm fine!"

"You screamed." Fumi-senpai snorted.

"I didn't scream. I wailed. I do that when I fail to score."

---

The third house had a Yamaha Jog, forest green, older than mine, but running.
Tsuchiya Nao-senpai claimed it within about three seconds of seeing it.

"I had one just like this in junior high," she said, already checking the fuel gauge.

I liked her.

"Stole my brother's all the time."

"You stole your brother's bike, Senpai?"

"He stole my CDs. Fair trade."

I liked her even more.

She was punk-rock incarnate.

---

The fourth house we hit was a small apartment on the ground floor of a two-story building. No garage. But there was a Suzuki Let's parked under a tarp on the side of the building. The kind of bike someone's grandmother used to run errands, all practicality and zero style.

Ishikawa Rie claimed it without a word. Just pulled off the tarp, checked the ignition, and nodded once like she was accepting a quest in an RPG.

---

The fifth house, mid-sized, modern, with a carport, gave us absolute gold.
A Yamaha Passol. Bright yellow. Almost brand new. The kind of scooter that probably cost more than my Jog had cost new in 2005.

"Dibs," Chisaton said quietly, but still loud, and for the first time since this morning, there was something like life in her voice.

She sat on it, adjusted the rear-mirrors, and turned the key. The engine purred.

"Chisaton, you're smiling!"

"Huh?"

She blinked. Turned her head toward me with genuine confusion, not denial, not deflection. She simply hadn't heard me.

Donda snorted from somewhere behind me. I bet he'd been trying to figure out if the rumor was true, the one that had been spreading through 2-C, along with Yua.

You had to raise your voice to reach her sometimes. Nobody in GTA knew if it was medical or not. She'd never said, and nobody had ever asked. It was just… Chisaton.

"I said you're smiling," I repeated, louder.

She blinked again. Then, slowly, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud she hadn't noticed was there, she realized. She grinned. That grin I had known for more than a year now every time we snapped her back to reality.

"…Oh."

Any guy outside GTA would've melted from that smile.

---

Donda and I took the sixth house together while the others kept searching the adjacent house.

The nameplate said Yamada. The door was unlocked.

"Sorry for the intrusion," Donda said, bowing to no one. "We'll bring it back. Probably. Hopefully."

"We keep apologizing to an empty house."

"Yeah, well." He shrugged. "Feels wrong not to."

I agreed.

He headed for the kitchen. I headed for the back door. The garage was a separate structure, and inside, covered in a thin layer of dust, clearly not ridden in months, was a Honda Dio. Black. 50cc. The seat had a crack in it, and one of the mirrors was missing, but the tires had air and the key was in the ignition.

"Found one!"

From outside the house: "Me too!"

One of the girls found one, from the seventh house.

I walked back in to find Donda standing in the Yamadas' living room, holding a Yamada family photo album.

"Hey, Donda."

"What?"

"Put that down."

"I just wanted to see who lived here." He closed it carefully, set it back on the shelf.

"They look nice. Yamada-san. His wife. Two kids. Dog."

Dog.

I just realized it. No pets.

I thought about the Suzuki house a few doors back. The cat tower in the corner of the living room. The empty food bowl by the back door. The first Tanaka place before also had a doghouse in the yard, wooden, hand-built, the kind a dad puts together on a Sunday while his kids watch.

My brain started doing that thing where it connects dots I didn't ask it to connect.

"You think they're okay?" Donda's voice was quieter now, nonetheless felt like a gut-punch snapping me back to reality. "The Yamadas?"

"I… I don't know."

"Yeah." He rubbed the back of his neck.

"Yeah."

And then, because he was Donda, and because silence was apparently not something his brain could tolerate for more than five seconds.

"Hey. You think this Yamada guy had a porn stash?"

"Donda."

"I'm just asking! Every dad should have one!"

"We're leaving. Now. Get on the Dio. We'll get back later. The dog's not here." I smirked.

"Nice."

---

We regrouped in the street outside the seventh house. A modest one-story with a carport that had clearly been converted into a storage space.

Seven mopeds lined up on the empty road.

My red Yamaha Jog, the original, the battered veteran. Fumi-senpai's commandeered Honda Today, white and gleaming, but already splattered with mud from Donda's near-telephone-pole incident. Nao-senpai's forest-green Jog. Rie-senpai's grandmother-spec Suzuki Let's. Chisaton's bright yellow Passol, she was still sitting on it, one hand resting on the throttle, looking almost peaceful. Donda's black Honda Dio. And Eri's find from the seventh house, a silver Suzuki Love, small and compact, the kind of bike you could parallel park in a broom closet. Sayaka was the only rider without a ride, because we got Donda with us, and we all knew Donda by now.

Ego as big as the Tokyo Dome, otherwise he wouldn't make ace striker when he was still mere first-year, skill alone wouldn't suffice. And the best thing about him is that he could suppress his ego when truly needed.

This one, he'd earned to have some fun.

Apparently, he always wanted a moped. And the apocalypse sort of gave him the chance.

Twelve kids. Seven bikes.

We stood there in the middle of the empty street, surrounded by houses whose owners we'd apologized to in whispers and empty rooms, with stolen keys in our pockets and the weight of thirty-three lives balanced on a plan that had been thrown together with duct tape and desperation.

"Not bad," Fumi-senpai said, surveying the lineup. "Not bad at all."

We were officially bosozoku now. A biker gang.

Donda revved the Dio. It sounded like an angry lawnmower.

"I'm keeping this one," he said.

"You almost crashed the white one into a pole," I grinned.

"Almost. Didn't. That's what counts."

Fumi-senpai sighed, the long, exhausted sigh of someone who was rapidly realizing she'd appointed this man as one of the few people in charge.

"Let's go," I said, swinging onto my Jog. "Brief everyone. Then the eleven of us head out."

The moped fleet rolled back through the school gate in a loose formation that was somewhere between a biker gang and an elementary school field trip.

Donda kept revving his Dio unnecessarily, apparently convinced that loud engine noises made up for the fact that his top speed was about forty kilometers an hour. Rie-senpai was riding with perfect, almost aggressive posture, back straight, both hands on the grips, looking straight ahead like she was taking her driving test. Chisaton on the yellow Passol looked like she was in a commercial for something aspirational, springtime, youth, the freedom of the open road, except the road was empty, and the world might have just ended, and she had failed to hear any of it.

---

I killed the Jog's engine and walked toward the main entrance. Behind me, engines cut out one by one.

The twelve of us rolled back into Classroom 1-A like a biker gang that had collectively flunked its driving test. Which, to be fair, was pretty much what happened.

"Whoa! Sweet!"

I stepped through the door and stopped dead. Behind me, the moped-hunting expedition piled up in the hallway, helmets under arms, still buzzing from the open road.

Someone had turned our sad little refugee camp into a restaurant.

Desks were pushed together into one long table running the length of the room. Plates. Chopsticks. Steam rising from fresh rice in those plastic school-lunch containers, the kind that always smelled faintly of industrial sanitizer but somehow still made your stomach growl. Bento boxes, the fancy ones, not konbini leftovers, were spread across the table like a potluck where everyone had brought their A-game.

Umi, Shimizu Umi, was nowhere to be seen.

Rena was in the thick of it, weaving between desks with a stack of plates, her expression locked into what I can only describe as Hostile Hospitality Mode. She caught my eye for half a second and nodded once, acknowledgment, not greeting, then went right back to arranging ceramic-ware like she was defusing a bomb.

"Rena-chan," I grinned at her, "this rice is actually hot?"

She nodded without looking up. "Umi-chan, Marina-senpai, and a few others cooked in Home Ec. The side dishes are from everyone's bento boxes. We pooled everything."

Pooled everything. Right. Because that was what you did when the world vanished. You pooled your tamagoyaki and your chicken karaage and you made lunch for thirty-three people in a high school kitchen that technically nobody had permission to use.

God, I love these people.

The room felt different. The eyes were still puffy, nobody was pretending this morning hadn't happened, but people were talking. Actually talking. The kind of low, earnest conversation you only get between strangers who've just survived something together. Nagisa-senpai was laughing at something Riko-senpai said. A few girls I hadn't remembered the names of yet were smiling, tentative, fragile smiles, but real ones.

Credit where it was due: Nagisa-senpai and Riko-senpai had a gift. They could bridge anyone to anyone. The Queen and the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications, running diplomacy while I was out stealing mopeds.

"Now that's cool." Fumi-senpai's voice behind me, approving. "That's my girl right there."

She was looking at Rena with something that, on anyone else's face, you might call pride. Rena just nodded and smiled, a real one this time.

Makoto came through the door with his arms full of bento boxes he'd clearly liberated from neighboring classrooms.

"Extra side dishes, Senpai!"

His voice had actual energy in it now. Not the shaky, trying-to-be-brave energy from this morning. Real energy.

"Makoto…"

I clapped him on the shoulder. He'd earned it. The kid had held the fort while we were gone. Solo. With twenty girls and exactly zero warning. Fumi-senpai nodded at him too, her version of a standing ovation.

He straightened a little. Good.

Donda didn't bother with any of that.

He made a beeline for Yua, who was carefully arranging chicken katsu onto plates with the precision of someone who'd been roped into school festival food prep one too many times. His hand shot out and snagged a piece.

Smack.

Yua's palm connected with the back of his hand without her even looking up. Donda just laughed, that big, stupid, striker's laugh, and Yua's expression flickered for half a second before she shook her head and kept working.

Silver-marriage energy, the two of them. Minus the marriage. Minus the twenty-five years. This was their normal.

I looked around the room. Classroom 1-A. The rest of the kids. We were holding on.

It was almost enough to make me forget.

Almost.

Three things were still gnawing at the back of my skull.

The obvious one, Nanase, across town at Asakaze, silent since the signal died, with that one called Ebara. And the other thing. The animal thing. Birds in the sky, wild cats in the alleys, all present and accounted for, but no pets. No dogs. No domestic cats. Nothing that belonged to anyone.

It quite fit the mirror-world theory. If inanimate objects got snapshot-copied based on whether they were being held or used at the moment of the vanishing, then maybe animals owned by people would not be copied as well, only wild animals, or maybe some of them. But then what about the rules for humans?

What about us?

I looked around me.

Us.

And the last thing…

But… What?

I couldn't think straight. The smell of hot rice was doing something to my brain.

Lunch first. Existential dread later.

 

[darkrednotmaroon]

Chapter 6 - Foundation

We ate.

All thirty-three, as the rest filtered back from wherever they'd been, crammed into Classroom 1-A, which now looked less like a classroom and more like a family restaurant that had given up on fire codes. Desks shoved together. Someone had found paper cups for the green tea. Chopsticks were passed around like communion.

It wasn't happy. Not really. There were still silences that stretched too long.
Someone, I couldn't see who, sniffled quietly into their rice. But we were eating. Together. Hot food, shared food, food someone had made with their own hands in a kitchen that wasn't supposed to be ours.

We all knew the same thing without saying it: we had to hold on. For the people who weren't here. For the people we were going to find.

Afterward, nobody had to be told. Plates were collected. Desks were pushed back into their original rows. Trash was bagged. Someone wiped down the surfaces. Not a single person sat there doing nothing.

Thirty-three kids. Barely adults. And we cleaned up after ourselves like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Maybe the apocalypse brought out the best in people. Or maybe we were all just too exhausted to be lazy.

I stood at the front of the room again. My second speech of the day.

"Right." I scratched the back of my neck. "I just wanted to say… thank you. Seriously. Thank you to everyone for holding it together. For being strong, no longer crying, long enough for us to eat a decent meal." I gestured toward the hallway, toward the Home Ec kitchen somewhere in the rear building. "Thank you to Shimizu-san, Matsushima-senpai, and everyone who coordinated lunch. I…"

I trailed off.

Chisaton was staring out the window.

Not daydreaming. Not lost in thought. Just staring. At the row of mopeds parked near the main entrance. Her yellow Passol gleaming in the afternoon sun.

"Chisaton." Normal volume.

Nothing.

"Chisaton…"

Still nothing. Rena's hand was already creeping up toward her mouth. She knew what was coming. Yua and Donda exchanged a look, the kind of look that said, oh, so the rumor's true.

"CHISATON!"

"Haaa? Huh?" She whipped around, grinning wide, utterly unbothered.

Then she burst out laughing, big, unselfconscious laughter, the kind that rolled through the room and took everyone with it.

Rena lost it. Full-on table-slapping. Yua's eyes flicked to Donda, who nodded solemnly, confirming without words: yeah, the GTA girl really is a little deaf.

A few others started laughing too. Confused laughter at first, the kind where you're not quite sure if you're allowed to find it funny, or even if it was funny at all. But it was funny. It was always funny for more than a year I had known Chisaton.

"Alright, everyone." I was still laughing.

"Chisaton, 'ton.' You get it?"

Faces around the room shifted as realization dawned. It wasn't just a cute nickname, though it's already unusual and probably a try-hard to sound like Narumin for Narumi, or Mizukin for Mizuki.

Kikuchi Chisato, gorgeous, athletic, 167 centimeters of good-natured sunshine, she'd earned that cute 'n' suffix with no effort from any boys, or girl friends. However, you had to raise your voice a bit when you talk to her, almost at all times. So… Chisaton, ton-ton.

Rena was absolutely dying. Chisaton shot her a mock glare from across the room, what's so funny? But the smile never left her face. Yua was giggling properly now. Donda was holding back, which for Donda was basically heroic restraint.

Karin, sitting not far from Chisaton near the window, had a knowing smirk spreading across her face. Fumi-senpai was grinning. Nagisa-senpai, Riko-senpai, even Umi, back from the kitchen, still slightly flushed from the stove heat, or that was how I perceived it, was smiling. The first smile I'd seen on her all day.

Fumiko, next to her, just looked confused. Which was… very Fumiko.

"Here's the thing." I got myself under control. "When you talk to Chisaton… you just have to be a little louder. That's all," I said it at normal volume. Those who understood were already smirking.

"Chisaton…" Louder.

"Haa? What, Jouji?" She beamed at me, voice pitched a little too loud herself.

I leaned forward slightly. The room leaned with me.

"Gentsuki ni notta kibun wa dou."

How did you feel riding the moped?

Chisaton blinked twice. Her expression froze, that half-second of processing delay I'd seen a hundred times and never thought to explain.

Then her eyes went wide.

"WHAT?! I'M DEAD?! AM I? Are we dead? So… so THIS is the afterlife?!"

Complete silence.

She'd heard tenshi ni natta kibun wa dou.

How does it feel to become an angel?

The room detonated.

I doubled over. Rena was pounding the desk so hard I thought the wood might crack. Fumi-senpai's laugh was full-bodied and genuine, the one she let out on the 'poor toilet bastard.' Yua finally broke, clutching Donda's sleeve for support. Donda, liberated by the fact that everyone else was laughing too, let his guard down entirely.

Shimizu Umi lowered her head and laughed. Quietly, almost privately, but it was real.

Nagisa-senpai had her hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking. The Queen, caught completely off-guard.

Riko-senpai wasn't even trying to hide it, her laughter bright and infectious, the kind that made you want to laugh harder just hearing it.

Makoto was doubled over near the door, one hand braced against the frame like his knees might give out.

Karin had her face buried in both hands, but the trembling shoulders gave her away. Asuka, the sunflower from the first-year who'd barely said three words since the vanishing, was giggling behind both hands, her eyes crinkled.

Eri from 2-E, moped-hunter number four, the one with the sharp bob, was leaning against the wall, wheezing. Nao-senpai, undercut punk-rock attitude, had her arms crossed and her head thrown back, laughing at the ceiling like it owed her money.

Marina-senpai had given up on dignity entirely, slumped against a desk with one hand pressed to her stomach, tears streaming behind her glasses.

To be fair, in Japanese, 'becoming an angel' was just a polite way of saying you'd kicked the bucket.

Everyone laughed.

Everyone except one person.

The girl every male senpai and half the graduating class of 2007 had in their crosshairs all year long, but none of them ever pulled the trigger, because she was so genuinely, profoundly, almost supernaturally innocent that approaching her felt like trying to graffiti a shrine.

The contrast in her features was enough to make any guy drool at first sight.

The older girls had formed a protective ring around her since day one, under Fumi-senpai and her circle's jurisdiction.

She was too pure. Too blank. Too unaware of her own presence to function in normal society without people looking out for her.

Fumiko.

She looked around the room with her big, earnest eyes making her expression a picture of genuine concern.

"Chisato-chan," she said, her voice soft and utterly, devastatingly sincere. "We're not dead. We're still alive. I only fainted earlier, and Umi-chan and Rena-chan helped me."

"Ouch!" She pinched her own arm.

"See? It hurts. So we're alive."

Oh no!

The room erupted again.

No mercy.

We laughed until our stomachs hurt. Until tears, real tears, the good kind, streamed down faces that had forgotten how to do anything but cry.

And Chisaton, still grinning her radiant, slightly confused grin, just watched us all lose our minds, apparently perfectly content not knowing what the joke was until Fumiko continued.

"Besides," Fumiko said, turning to Chisaton again with clueless eyes, "Jouji-kun asked you about the moped, didn't he? Why would you think you were dead, Chisato-chan? Gentsuki, gentsuki ni notta.."

Chisaton's mouth fell open.

The grin didn't disappear, it got wider, if that was even possible, but now it was accompanied by her head slowly dropping toward the desk. The dawning realization of a year-long running gag finally catching up with her.

"Ah!" She shot up. "Damn it! Jouji! Rena-chan!"

Rena was already crying again, the good kind. The kind where you can't breathe.

And just like that, the running gag was alive and well, it carried on. From GTA, the whole last year of 1-B, to the apocalyptic emergency camp Classroom 1-A at Kamishiro High, Chisaton's ears hadn't changed. Neither had the people who loved her for it.

She grabbed her bag and relocated from her spot near the back window to the front row, right in front of where I was standing. She always sat in the front row in class, too. She knew. Sitting close meant she caught most of what was said, and nobody had to yell.

Most of the time.

Only the three of us are GTA here, me, Rena, Chisaton. And to some extent, seeing Chisaton's face light up like that, I felt something loosen in my chest. Every scrunched-up, tear-streaked face in this room had just brightened because of her. She'd always had that effect on people, even when she couldn't hear half of what they said.

"Alright, guys. Enough…" I raised a hand, still fighting off residual laughter.
"Chisaton's moved to the front row, so I can start for real now."

Scattered giggles. But they settled.

Chisaton and Fumiko should form a manzai group.

"Okay." I exhaled. "Here's where we are. We all know there's nothing to do right now except wait. Wait for help. From anywhere. From anyone."

A pause.

"But I can't let you just sit here and be sad. Or confused. Or lost. Lunch is done. Outside is still empty. You know about the mopeds, six of them, borrowed, as Sayaka-san so legally phrased it."

A ripple of laughter from the moped-hunting crew. I glanced at Suzuki Sayaka and used her first name deliberately, Sayaka-san. Before the vanishing, she'd have been Suzuki-san in the hallway. Or more likely, someone I'd never spoken to at all until graduation day. She caught my eye and smiled. She looked okay. Way better than this morning.

The mood had lifted. The room felt less like a funeral.

But I couldn't afford to stop being realistic.

"In a few minutes, I, Fumi-senpai, Chisaton, and eight others are heading home. We'll move in a group. We'll plan the most efficient route. And after that…"

Here it was.

"I'm asking for permission to go to Asakaze. To get my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. Maybe still girlfriend." I scratched the back of my neck. "I'll bring her back here if I can. I know it's selfish. I'm sorry. I…"

"Hey, Jouji!"

Fumi-senpai cut me off before I could say another word.

"If you don't go get your girlfriend, or ex, or whatever the fuck she is to you right now… just stop being pathetic!" She turned to the room. "Don't apologize. Everyone here is grown up. They can take care of themselves."

It wasn't a question. Nobody answered except with nods.

But those nods, Rena's nod, Nagisa-senpai's nod, Marina-senpai's nod, Umi's, Karin's, even the mousy Yuki's, every girl in the room, they mattered.

Fumi-senpai had just handed me permission to be selfish, and the room had signed off on it.

"Yeah… Thanks." I cleared my throat. "One more thing. I'm not going to sweet-talk any of you. We need to expect the worst."

Silence.

"Sorry. But we can't act like help is definitely coming. I need us to work together. Watch out for each other. Care for each other. Right now…"

I stopped.

"I'm not even sure I'll find my family when I get home. Not after I just robbed, sorry, borrowed six mopeds from empty houses around the block. With no people. Not even pets. Just… nothing."

"My mom. My little brother and sister…"

My hands started shaking so I put them in my pockets immediately.

Shit.

I shouldn't mention them.

I can't cry. Not here. Not in front of them.

I dragged in a long breath through my nose, but my eyes were burning. A few of them had already looked down. Some were wiping their faces.

"Ehem." I cleared my throat hard. Blinked rapidly. Forced the tears back where they came from.

It worked. Barely.

Grin. Grin, Jouji.

Even for a little.

"That's why I'm asking you to be strong. So far, I've seen everyone hold on. You stopped crying. We just ate a solid lunch together. Yoshinoya was never that packed. That must mean something."

A couple of small, fragile chuckles.

"That's why I believe there's nothing we can't do as long as we hold on to each other. Right now, all we have… is us."

They nodded. All of them. Hands went up to wipe away tears that had escaped despite everything. But nobody was sobbing. Nobody was breaking.

If anything, I saw the ghosts of a smile on more than a few faces.

"Okay." I straightened. "Quick briefing. Fumi-senpai, Donda, Rena-chan, Shimizu-san, Anzai-senpai, Taniguchi-senpai, Matsushima-senpai, Abe-senpai, Makoto, and… Kujou Karin."

Karin jolted when her name came out of my mouth. She pointed at herself like I might have the wrong person.

"Yeah, you."

I'd chosen them based on what I'd seen today, how they moved, how they acted, how they held themselves together when everything was trying to pull them apart. These were the people we all could lean on right now.

Fumi-senpai stepped forward and stood beside me. "Everyone whose name Jouji just called, gather in Classroom 1-B. Everyone else, stay here. Keep supporting each other. Talk. Gossip. I don't know, argue about whether Takuya Kimura is still hot, or if Namie Amuro's new single is overrated. Whatever keeps you sane."

A few surprised laughs. Fumi-senpai's mind was running on the exact same wavelength as mine now.

"Chisaton!" Fumi-senpai continued. Loud.

Chisaton shot to her feet, crisp and immediate, zero delay, zero surprise. She was in the front row. Everyone else in the room jumped and giggled.

Except her. To Chisaton, that was a perfectly normal speaking volume. Fumi-senpai noticed, too, her lips twitched.

"And you. Soccer kid's wife."

She pointed at Yua, who was still sitting next to Donda.

"Manage your friends, kouhai, and senpai here. You're both in charge."

Chisaton and Yua locked eyes across the room and nodded at the exact same moment, like they'd rehearsed it. No hesitation. No questions. Just two people who understood exactly what they were being asked to do.

"Let's go," Riko-senpai said, already tugging Karin, who still looked slightly stunned, by the sleeve. Marina-senpai, Nagisa-senpai, Airi-senpai, Rena, Umi, Makoto, and Donda filed out after them. I walked at the back with Fumi-senpai.

"Good call, Jouji." Her voice was low, just for me. "Good speech."

She sounded impressed. Actually impressed.

"Fumi-tan… " I whispered back.

We were far enough behind the group. Nobody heard.

"Haaah?!" She whipped her head toward me, cheeks already flushing, glaring like I'd committed a felony. I only chuckled.

"There's something I need to discuss, just with the people I trust to handle Kamishiro High while we're gone."

She nodded. Serious again, just like that.

We filed into Classroom 1-B. Donda was already telling Makoto to pull chairs into a circle near the front. Everyone else pitched in, dragging seats into a rough ring. Two chairs were left open, one for me, one for Fumi-senpai. We sat side by side at the head of the circle.

They already knew why they were here. They just didn't know what I was about to say.

"Alright." I glanced around the circle. "I don't need to explain why most of you are in this room. That includes you, Makoto."

Makoto met my eyes. He understood.

"And Kujou-kun."

Karin straightened immediately. "Ca.. call me Karin, Senpai."

"Karin-kun. I put you here because I trust you to help Makoto bridging and helping the other first-years. So bear with me."

She nodded once, firm, no complaint. And nobody else complained, either. They'd all seen it. Karin hadn't cried once all morning. Her eyes had watered, sure, but she'd been the one consoling the kouhai before Nagisa-senpai and Riko-senpai stepped in. She'd earned this seat.

"I'll get straight to the point. Like I said before, we can't just sit around waiting for someone to save us. We have to take care of ourselves. So we're splitting into teams, and all of you are going to decide how that works."

"Me, Fumi-senpai, Chisaton, and eight others, we'll head out before two. It's one thirty-seven now. We don't have much time."

I turned to Donda.

"Donda. First team, you lead. Scavenge the houses we hit during the moped hunt, plus any we didn't get to. First priority: food. Things that can be cooked. Spices. Seasoning. Second: clothes. Changes of clothes for the girls, they're all still in their uniforms. Third: futons. Every house has them. We need more than fifteen."

Donda was already nodding, his brain clearly running inventory.

"And anything else you think is useful. Use your judgment."

I looked around the circle.

"Second team. Turn Classroom 1-A into a dorm. Your job is to secure every resource in this school. There'll be tracksuits in the club rooms, grab them all. Tonight, cold air is going to seep through the window frames. Find anything you can to seal the gaps, or it'll be freezing. Lay the futons from the raid group, out into one giant mega-bed. All thirty girls. Sleeping together. Close. Body heat."

I looked up.

"That's how you stay warm."

Nobody spoke.

"And we boys will take turn doing the night-watch. Two will be on guard-duty while one will sleep inside the dorm as well, a separated futon away from the mega-bed."

"Please understand this," I scoured around for the eyes of all the girls, "If us, one of the boys would do something inappropriate, you have twenty nine girls and one pretty Demon Lord to kill us on the spot. Just for tonight until we can settle the boys dorm. And I'm not joking." I seriously didn't joke. My expression was flat.

Nagisa-senpai was staring at me with her lips slightly parted. Riko-senpai's eyebrows had climbed halfway up her forehead. Marina-senpai adjusted her glasses like she needed to refocus, while Airi-senpai beside her just fixed her ponytail like she was forced to be ready for anything that will come next.

Makoto, a freshman who'd known me for less than six hours, was staring like I'd just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Karin, beside him, wasn't much better. Her hands were clasped tight in her lap, knuckles white, but her eyes weren't scared, they were focused.

Shimizu Umi, the calmest of us all, just nodded. Gave me the impression that she understood fully why I was the way I was.

Donda grinned wide to Rena. "Was he always like this?"

"Hahah. Shut it, Donda." I snorted. Finally let out a smile.

"No," Rena said quietly with a chuckle. "He was not. Never."

She was looking at me differently.

Not with those usual bubbly, teasing eyes she gets when we're alone. When Rena drops the tough-girl act and goes all kawaii-mode, leaning against my shoulder, voice dropping into that softer register nobody else aside from GTA kids, or Takeo, or some other boys she probably had been closed with ever got to hear.

We'd kept that side of us private.

This wasn't that look. Not even close.

Back then, I was the class-rep because it was funny, the cleverest class clown they could find, elected as a joke, Gorosen being Gorosen approved. She was the class secretary. We'd run 1-B together for a year, and I'd treated it like every other responsibility in my life: with a shrug and a punchline.

"This is new," she said. And she smiled. Small. Almost private. But real.

Fumi-senpai didn't say anything. She just stood beside me, arms crossed, and nodded. Once. Twice.

Donda and Rena's exchange had cracked something open. The tension around the circle loosened a notch. A few people smiled, small, tentative smiles, the kind you give when you're not sure you're allowed to feel okay yet.
"Alright. Any questions?" I looked around.

Nagisa-senpai raised a hand, elegant, unhurried. "Jouji-kun. Is 'Jouji-kun' okay?"

"I'm honored."

Smack.

Fumi-senpai's palm connected with my arm before the grin had even finished forming on my face.

"Okay. Call me Nagisa too… or whatever." Nagisa-senpai laughed. "You're right. I personally agree with everything you've laid out for us. We, Fumi-chan, Riko-chan, Marina-chan, Airi-chan, and myself, are your senpai. And I'm in awe of what you kouhai have managed to do today. You stabilized this situation. For that, I'm forever grateful."

She bowed. Forty-five degrees.

The Queen bowed.

And she was the only person alive with the stamp of approval to call Fumi-senpai, Fumi-chan.

Riko-senpai spoke next, backing Nagisa up. Then Marina-senpai. Then Airi-senpai. One by one, the third-years threw their weight behind the plan.

"We'll brief everyone here and divide teams based on ability," Riko-senpai continued. "Food and kitchen. Logistics and supplies. And medical, we have Airi-chan."

Airi-senpai nodded. That was clearly her domain.

"Umm… If you allowed me, I'd like to handle the kitchen. In Home Ec. With Matsushima-senpai."

We all turned.

Shimizu Umi had raised her hand.

She looked almost embarrassed about it, cheeks faintly pink, eyes somewhere around my collarbone rather than my face. Which was strange, because Umi had been the calmest person in any room since this whole thing started.

"My family runs a small restaurant. In Kamishiro shoutengai. Shimizu Shokudou."

"Wait, the one that's always packed?" Rena's head tilted.

Everyone knew it. Of course they did. It was right by the station, practically across from Musashino Commercial High. I'd walked past it a hundred times.

And yes, always more packed than any chain restaurants on busy hours.

"I've been helping my parents and older brothers in the kitchen since I was eight. I'm used to it." Umi's voice grew steadier as she went. "I still help most evenings after school when I don't have club. I have a key. There are commercial-grade rice cookers, industrial bags of rice, dried udon noodles, dashi stocks, kitchen equipment that's probably a lot more proper than what Home Ec has."

Silence.

"Small my ass, Umi?!" Fumi-senpai burst out laughing.

And that was the thing about Fumi-senpai. She had this aura, she could bypass every layer of Japanese formal social etiquette, jump straight to first names like she'd known you since kindergarten, and somehow it never felt intimidating. It felt like she was giving you more respect, not less.

"Yeah… not small." I was grinning too, shaking my head. "That's the busiest restaurant in the whole shoutengai."

Laughter rippled around the circle. Umi smiled, still a little shy, but there was relief in it now. Relief and something like eagerness.

"If we have time later, we could go get things from there."

"Your brothers, they're all older?" Rena asked. Of course Rena asked. She always dug through a layer of bedrock the moment she felt an inch closer to someone.

"Umm… yes. I'm the youngest of five." Umi's blush deepened. "All of them are boys. I'm… I'm used to watching them fight. In the kitchen. At home."

She chuckled, a small, self-conscious sound, and suddenly a lot of things about Shimizu Umi made sense. I'd said before that she could probably stop a fistfight just by looking disappointed. Turned out it wasn't enlightenment. It was four older brothers and a busy family restaurant kitchen.

"Okay!" Marina-senpai's voice cut through, bright and eager. "I love cooking and baking. I'll handle the kitchen with Umi-chan!"

"Great!" Nagisa-senpai clapped her hands together. "Food and emergency kitchen, decided!"

"Right." I straightened. "Things couldn't have gone better. But they just did. Thank you, Shimizu-san, Anza.. Ow!"

Fumi-senpai had hit me again.

"Enough with the formal crap, Jouji. Use their names."

She was laughing.

"Urgh…" I rubbed my arm, fighting a grin. "Fine. Umi-san. Nagisa-senpai. Marina-senpai. Thank you." Then I kept going. "Riko-senpai. Airi-senpai." I glanced sideways at Fumi-senpai.

"Fumi-tan."

I bowed to her, too, with the most deliberately shit-eating grin I could manage.

The room temperature dropped about ten degrees.

Nagisa-senpai. Riko-senpai. Marina-senpai. Rena. Umi. Donda. Makoto. Karin. Every single one of them frozen mid-breath, mouths slightly open, suspended in the kind of silence that precedes either an explosion or a murder.

Fumi-senpai's arm swung, twice as hard this time.

I expected this.

But she was cackling, and her face had gone full boiled crab.

"Fuck you, Jouji!"

Everyone exhaled. Laughed. The tension that had gripped the room for one awful second dissolved into relief.

"Alright. Twelve, thirteen minutes to two." I stood, still laughing, rubbing my arm. "Let's go."

They nodded. One by one, they rose and filed out of 1-B toward 1-A.
I hung back, bringing up the rear, and suddenly Nagisa-senpai's arm was around my shoulder, pulling me close. Close enough that her not-so-modest chest pressed against my arm. Soft.

She was maybe a centimeter or two taller than me.

"Eh… Na.. Nagisa-sen…"

"You have a death wish, don't you, Jouji-kun?" She whispered it, laughing lowly. I could only laugh back.

"Oh… 'Fumi-tan'?" I managed.

She released me. "Kamishiro no Garasu Ningyou. You do know that, right?"

"Huh?"

"The Glass Doll of Kamishiro." She smiled, still walking as the others disappeared into 1-A ahead of us. "Fumi-chan is feared. Deeply feared among the yankis and gyarus across town after last autumn. She beat six gyarus from Sengawa, alone, on her way home from school. They were trying to kidnap her. Make her a plaything for their yanki boyfriends."

I stared.

"After that, she earned the nickname. Kamishiro no Garasu Ningyou. Sukeban of Kamishiro High. The prettiest sukeban. No boy, from my year, from the year above, would even dream of getting close to her. She was feared and respected. And she was always proud of it." Nagisa-senpai's voice dropped.

"Kouhai like you? They wouldn't even try making eye contact. You know this."

"Ah…"

So… That's how it was…

I had heard at some point last autumn, around mid-October, that Fumi-senpai did something terrible to other high school students. Something like, 'don't mess around with that cute small senpai with the blonde streak,' Dodo or Issei said something along those lines.

But I honestly never thought that her reputation was, yanki-esque town-wide.

"But…" She laughed softly. "I've been best friends with Fumi-chan since our first day of high school. Orientation. I was her deskmate. We're always together." She paused.

"We go way back."

She stopped. Looked at me.

"And no boy. No man. Has ever made her blush and grin that wide over a stupid joke like that. 'Fumi-tan.' Really?"

"Nngh… Yeah. Stupid joke, right? Well…" I laughed. It came out weaker than I wanted.

"You're not even trying. That's the scary part." She leaned in again as she passed me, her chest brushing my arm for the second time.

"Some ZAKO kid, you know, Shun?"

"Shun?" I knew some of their faces but not their names.

"We were just a week through second year, and Fumi-chan was already friends with many ZAKO kids. Rooftop, smoking and all. Shun made a pass at her, disrespectful, a bit too harsh, he thought Fumi-chan was that kind of girl. You get me?" She giggled.

"He ended up running down to the infirmary with blood streaming down his nose," she continued, still giggling. "I was there. I saw everything. All the other ZAKO kids, including my ex, Riku-chan, fell into silence. And since then, she's the sukeban of Kamishiro High. Period. Feared and respected."

"Really?"

Damn.

"For real, Jouji-kun. I knew her. This morning was the first time I saw her froze, scared. And just there in 1-B, was the first time I saw her grinning like…" she paused, "you know like what. And we both know where did that come from."

"Ah…" I pouted, because I didn't want to grin.

"Well, one 7-Eleven date and you turned the world upside down."

"Nghh…"

"If you can't manage to stop being cool like that… I might fall for you too, Jouji-kun. You gotta be careful. All eyes are on you now."

The Queen smiled, mysterious, knowing, utterly unreadable, and walked into 1-A.

My heart dropped straight through my stomach.

The good kind. The stupid, teenage, hormonal kind. I could feel my blood heading south like a train departing Shinjuku Station.

I stood in the hallway for a long moment. Breathed. Got myself together.

Then I walked into Classroom 1-A.

 

[darkrednotmaroon]

Chapter 7 - Permission

Fumi-senpai had already taken position at the front of the room. She'd gotten there ahead of me and launched straight into it. No hesitation, no preamble, no asking permission.

"Alright, everyone!" Her voice cut clean through the low murmur. "Everyone who's heading home, short briefing in 1-B. Follow me now. The rest of you, Nagisa, Riko, Airi, Marina, Rena, Umi, Donda, Makoto, and Karin will brief you here."

She'd dropped every honorific. Everyone was first names now. Just like that.

"Chisaton! Let's go!"

Chisaton was already on her feet while the others jolted every time she was being called out.

Classroom 1-B again. Bigger group this time. The eleven of us who were heading out.

"Jo.. Jouji-kun. Asou-senpai. Here."

Sayaka handed me a sheet of paper. First time she'd addressed me directly, not Shigeru. Straight to my first name. At this point, I'd stopped keeping track. We'd all gotten closer than any of us had any right to be after almost six hours.

Fumi-senpai and I stared at the paper.

Every name. Every address. Every house, written out in neat, slightly rushed handwriting. They'd done this while we were still in 1-B. Fumi-senpai and I exchanged a look, then scribbled our own addresses at the bottom without a word.

"Alright." I spread the paper on the nearest desk. "Most efficient route. Let's go."

Seven mopeds. Ten girls plus me. We mapped it out in under two minutes.
The route curved east from the school through the residential pocket behind Kamishiro-chuo-dori, then hooked north toward Sengawa. Eleven stops.

Morikawa Ayano's house first, closest, barely four hundred meters. Then Fujiwara Kaede. Then Fumi-senpai's. Oonishi Saki-senpai's, at the edge of Shinkawa. Rie-senpai's above the shuttered dry-cleaning shop. Chisaton's, tucked deep in the Midorigaoka pocket. Then Nao-senpai's near the river. Eri's squeezed between two commercial buildings. Takahashi Moe's traditional bungalow with the bonsai. Sayaka's with the red American mailbox as written.

And finally mine. Farthest out. 1.7 kilometers.

I stared at my own address on the paper. Last stop.

"Okay." Fumi-senpai straightened. "We're going now. Two-oh-two. About one to one-and-a-half hours. Grab valuables, food if you have it, practical clothes, underwear, anything useful. We move as one group, seven mopeds, eleven people. Nobody splits off. Understood?"

Everyone nodded.

Chisaton nodded too. She was sitting right next to Fumi-senpai. No way she missed any of that.

We filed out of 1-B. People scattered to grab bags from their homerooms. I hung back in the hallway, watching Classroom 1-A reorganize itself in real time.
Two groups now. Donda's scavenge team, him, Umi, Marina-senpai, Karin. And the internal resource team, Rena, Nagisa-senpai, Riko-senpai, Airi-senpai, Makoto. They were already deep in it, delegating, pointing at lists, moving with the kind of purpose that hadn't existed four hours ago.

Donda broke away from his group and dropped onto the chair next to me. I was halfway through a bottle of Pocari Sweat.

"Jouji." Big grin. The one that meant trouble.

"What." I grinned back. I already knew.

"When we go back to those houses." He waggled his eyebrows. "I'm bringing back supplies. You know what I mean."

I snorted. "Be discreet. Don't let the girls see. And all the OzaMari and AyuNao DVDs are mine."

"Fuck you!" He burst out laughing.

"There's gotta be laptops with DVD players somewhere in this school."

"Obviously. Staff room. Audio-Visual room. We'll find 'em."

"I found some in staff's room already by the way." He snickered.

"No shit…" I just grinned, shaking my head.

---

I stepped outside for a smoke. The main entrance. Mopeds lined up in the afternoon sun. Everyone was still getting ready, bags, helmets, last-minute bathroom runs. I leaned against the wall and let the nicotine do its thing.

The door swung open.

Rena walked out alone.

She didn't say anything. Just crossed the distance and wrapped both hands around my arm, the way she always did when we were alone. Familiar. Easy. Her shoulder pressed against mine.

"Jouji."

I tensed immediately. Every single time. It didn't matter how many times she'd done this, my body still reacted like it was the first.

Rena was lean, the wiry, restless kind of lean, like she burned calories just by existing, standing at an even 160 or 161 centimeters, with a style that leaned a little gyaru-ish around the edges. Loose socks. A pink bleached streak in her long straight black hair. The kind of girl who'd been popular in junior high not because she tried to be, but because she simply didn't give a damn either way.

What mattered, what actually mattered, was that Rena and I had been close since late winter of first year. The kind of close where you share secrets you wouldn't tell anyone else. The kind of close where she'd lean against my shoulder during lunch break and nobody would say anything, because it was just… us. The kind of close where we'd talk about our respective relationship disasters, hers with Takeo, mine with Nanase, and somehow feel less alone.

The GTA kids all knew about it, the secret closeness, the 'are they or aren't they' that everyone whispered about but nobody ever asked directly. But it wasn't like that. It couldn't be. We both knew where the lines were, and we both had reasons not to cross them.

"Rena-chan…" I exhaled smoke, trying to sound normal. "Hahh…"

"So." She didn't let go. "You're going to bring Nanase back here, right? Guess we can't do this anymore, huh?"

Just like that. No filter. Zero hesitation.

"Hee? Hah… Come on, Rena-chan." I took another drag chuckling. "You know how I feel about her. If I don't do something about it… it won't feel right."

She nodded, her cheek still resting against my shoulder. "Did she really break up with you last night?"

"Sort of… Yeah…" I stared at the row of mopeds. "I haven't answered her yet. She did it by text. Super heartbroken. In the end, I just asked if we could at least meet once. Properly. Even though… I still don't want to. I want to… You know… I don't know… Work it out?"

"So that's how it is." Rena's voice was flat. "Short hair. Big tits. You'll really do anything for your type, huh?"

My God.

She'd never even met Nanase. Everything she knew came from our private chats, late-night texts, classroom gossip, the kind of stuff you only told someone you trusted completely.

"Shut up!" I burst out laughing.

"And Fumisen?" She was finally teasing it, whispering.

"Ah, that… y.. you kno.."

But she cut me off.

"Jouji…" Her voice shifted. Quieter. "I broke up with Takeo again, too."

"Seriously?"

"Mm-hmm." She nodded against my shoulder. "He doesn't want to go to college. Doesn't want to work. Said he wants to 'rest' after twelve years of school. We had a huge fight last week. I broke up with him again. He didn't care this time. Rich kid. You know how it is." A bitter little laugh. "I hadn't told you yet because we haven't had time alone since classes started…"

"You could've texted, Rena-chan."

"Ah… yeah. Probably would've been the same. I'd rant to you for hours, then end up back with him anyway… But now…" She trailed off.

"People vanished."

"Mm-hmm."

"Mm-hmm."

I didn't have anything else to say.

"But, hehe." Her voice brightened, deliberately, I could tell. "You're pretty cool today, Jouji. It's insane. The GTA chairman who couldn't care less about his own class. Every class-rep committee meeting, you'd sit there spacing out, forgetting everything the moment it was over. You never once gave a speech in 1-B that didn't end with a punchline. And now…" She squeezed my arm tighter. "Now you've turned total chaos into something that actually makes sense. I don't know you anymore."

"Stop it. It doesn't make any sense. At all." I chuckled.

Then she leaned closer, whispering.

"Washroom? I'm soaked, Jouji." She was grinning, ear-to-ear.

"Let's!" I grinned at her back.

She cracked up. Full-on laughter.

It wasn't the first time she'd teased me like that. Probably not the last, even if I was about to bring Nanase here. Rena teased hard. Always had. She crossed lines and never once failed to make me tense up. But I'd learned to fire back, play along.

We both knew it was a joke. Nothing happened between us. Nothing would.

I had Nanase. She'd had Takeo. Simple.

But the thought of it though.

But again…

Beneath her laugh, I knew what was really there. The same thing that was beneath mine. A facade. Trying desperately to be normal in a world that had stopped being normal some hours ago.

The main entrance door opened.

"Jouji! We're read.."

Fumi-senpai stopped dead.

Rena's arms unlocked from mine at approximately the speed of light. A little too late. Way too late.

Fumi-senpai's grin spread slow and dangerous as she walked toward us. Chisaton, behind her, just shook her head with a knowing smirk and kept walking passed us. I caught a few other glances from the convoy girls, Sayaka in particular, whose expression said she was filing this away for later.

Great.

"Rena's your girlfriend too? Not just the Asakaze girl?" Fumi-senpai's eyes narrowed.

"N-no, Fumisen… We're just close. We were… same class last year."

Fumi-senpai's smirk didn't budge. "Kid, I'm not naive." She laughed. "You really are something, huh, Jouji?"

I couldn't tell if she was angry. She didn't sound angry.

"Fumi-tan… seriously. Me and Rena-chan, we're just close friends. From 1-B. GTA." I laughed, took another drag.

Fumi-senpai plucked the cigarette straight from my fingers and took a drag herself. "Bullshit. And you…" She pointed at Rena. "…you are dating some third-year, alumnus, ZAKO crew. Ta… Taku.."

"Takeo," Rena supplied, barely holding in laughter.

"Yeah! That guy. The one with the onion face." Fumi-senpai cackled.

"Fumisen!" Rena lost it.

I was laughing too. Hard.

Then Fumi-senpai grabbed my arm, tight, her chest pressing against me. She yanked me toward the mopeds.

"Oi! Fu.."

"Alright, enough. When your girlfriend gets here," She turned back to Rena, still laughing, "no more clinging to him like this. Don't want no drama, got it?"

"What about you, Fumisen?!" Rena was still cracking up. She teased back.

Damn, Rena-chan.

"Her girlfriend isn't here yet." Fumi-senpai said it completely deadpan. Then laughed.

"Nanase. Her name's Nanase." Rena's grin was devilish. "Short hair. Big tits."

"Rena-chan!"

Fumi-senpai snickered. "My tits are big too. Quite, anyway." Fumi-senpai looked at me, utterly shameless.

"Wanna touch them and compare, Jouji?"

"Wha.. shut up! Let's go!" I tried to pull away.

I didn't try very hard.

---

We rode.

Seven mopeds in loose formation through streets that still didn't feel real. No cars. No bicycles. No old ladies walking their dogs. Just the buzz of 50cc engines and the wind and the buildings, houses and shops and apartments, all standing exactly where they should be, all completely empty.

The first stop was Morikawa Ayano's. Four hundred meters. She dismounted from Fumi-senpai's Honda Today and stood outside her own front gate like she was waiting for permission to enter. Fumi-senpai went with her. The rest of us waited on the road, engines idling.

Nobody spoke.

The silence was worse than the riding. When we were moving, there was wind and noise and the need to watch the road. When we stopped, when someone walked up to their own front door and pushed it open, the silence crept back in.

Ayano came out a few minutes later. A bag. Her eyes wet. She climbed back onto the Honda without a word.

We kept moving.

Fujiwara Kaede's house. Older. Showa-era. A persimmon tree in the garden. She went in with Chisaton. Came out carrying a small duffel and something wrapped in cloth, a photo frame, maybe.

Fumi-senpai's house. Modern. Dark-gray concrete. Frosted glass. She went in alone. Didn't take long. Came back out with a single bag and an expression that told me exactly nothing. She swung onto the Honda and revved the engine.

"Next."

That was all.

I didn't ask.

Oonishi Saki-senpai's, a pale blue two-story with a small garden she didn't look at as she walked in. Ishikawa Rie senpai's, the dry-cleaning shop, the iron staircase. Each stop the same ritual: one or two people walking into an empty house, the rest of us waiting in the road like a funeral procession that hadn't decided if it was moving or standing still.

And then, Chisaton's.

Tucked deep in the Midorigaoka pocket. Older Western-style frame house. Cream paint faded from years of sun. Ivy creeping up the brick chimney. A glass wind chime hanging silent from the front eave.

Then I remembered at that exact time. About Chisaton's dad.

"Chisaton… Hey…" I called out to her, not loud enough.

She didn't answer. Just walked straight in.

So I followed her through the front door, Fumi-senpai followed me.

The inside was spotless. Ordered. The home of someone who believed in structure and discipline. One wall had a framed commendation. Another had a photograph, Chisaton as a junior high student, Ichi-chu alumnus, same as me, grinning beside a man. Not just any uniform. The rank insignia of a chief.

"Fumi-tan…" I kept my voice low. "I need to talk to Chisaton for a sec."

"What?"

Chisaton emerged from her room. Her eyes were red. Puffy. But she wasn't crying now.

"Chisaton." I walked closer, normal volume.

"What, Jouji?" Her voice was soft. The creaks were still there.

"Your dad's a police, right? Could you… check his study? Or his room? There's a chance, maybe, he might have… a firearm."

"Jouji! Are you crazy?!" Fumi-senpai's voice cut through the quiet.

"I'm not." I met her eyes. "Can't get any crazier. Remember?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it. "Fair… fair point." Even the Glass Doll of Kamishiro looked unsettled.

Chisaton stared at me. "Jouji. You… You're serious?"

I nodded. "Your call. I know this is hard. It's hard for all of us. But if there's something like that here, we need to secure it. Before anyone else finds it. Any other, what.. umm… kobore-mono."

The word spilled out through my mouth just like that.

It was the first time I'd used that word. The spilled ones. The dropouts who slipped through the cracks of whatever cleared out the world.

"Kobore-mono?" Chisaton muttered. She hadn't heard my theory yet. I only nodded to reply.

"Kobore-mono," Fumi-senpai repeated quietly, testing the weight of the syllables on her tongue.

"Yeah. Any better suggestions? 'The unvanished' sounds too much like a bad sci-fi movie."

She nodded, a grim, faint smirk touching her lips. No argument.

Kobore-mono it is.

Chisaton held my gaze for a long moment. Then she turned and walked into her parents' bedroom. We waited. The wind chime outside didn't make a sound.
She came back shaking her head.

"Nothing, Jouji. Asou-senpai." She looked rather relieved. "I've never seen my dad bring a gun home. They're not supposed to."

I exhaled. Didn't realize I'd been holding it for countless of times today.

"Okay… Hahh…"

"Let's continue."

We left Chisaton's house behind.

And the streets swallowed us whole again.

I didn't know how else to describe it. Midorigaoka was a quiet neighborhood on a normal day, sleepy, residential, the kind of place where the loudest sound was someone's grandmother sweeping the front step. But this wasn't quiet. This was absence. The kind of silence that pressed against your eardrums like you'd suddenly changed altitude.

No bikes leaning against fences. No laundry flapping on balconies. No old man walking his Shiba Inu at two in the afternoon like he'd done every day for the past forty years.

The vending machines still hummed, their fluorescent glow the only proof electricity still existed in this town, but nobody was buying cold drinks.

Nobody was buying anything.

The shadows had grown sharper as the afternoon crept forward. Around half past two, the April sun still hung high enough to bleach the pavement white, but there was a thinness to the light, that pale, crystalline quality of early spring that makes the world look like a freshly developed photograph no one's claimed yet. Except photographs had people in them. This was a movie set after wrap. Props in position. Actors gone home.

A crow cawed somewhere above the power lines. I flinched. Actually flinched.

So did Kaede, on the back of Chisaton's Passol. Her hand gripped Chisaton's shoulder tighter.

"It's just a crow," I said, loud enough for the convoy to hear.

Nobody answered. Because a crow was normal. Crows were wild. It was the things that weren't here that were the problem.

We kept moving.

Nao-senpai's place sat near the lower river banks. The ground floor was an open-faced corrugated metal garage packed with old tools, fishing rods, and spare moped parts. The living quarters were on the second floor, up an exterior metal walkway. She went up alone. Came back down with one duffel bag and a jaw set so tight I could see the muscle twitching. She didn't say anything. Didn't cry.

"Next," she said.

Eri's place was squeezed between a shuttered photography studio and an office supply store, three stories, maybe four meters wide, a vertical shoebox. She went in and came out with a backpack and a portable shortwave radio, the chunky kind with an extendable antenna.

"My dad's," she explained. "If anyone's broadcasting…"

"Good thinking," Fumi-senpai said.

Then we moved again.

A traditional Japanese bungalow with a low stone wall and a heavy wooden sliding door. Along the side wall, on tiered benches, maybe twenty bonsai, black pines, a cascading juniper, a miniature maple. Untouched.

Moe stood in front of them for a long moment, touched one leaf with the back of her finger, then went inside. She came out in jeans, jacket and hiking boots, carrying a well-used camping backpack.

"My family camps," Moe said. "Three times a year. I know how to pack."

"You're hired," I said.

She snorted and giggled.

The next one.

A standard two-story brick house with a small patch of green lawn and a bright red American-style mailbox that looked wildly out of place in Sengawa-cho.

"My dad spent a year in the States," Sayaka said, catching everyone staring. "He came back with… enthusiasm."

She went in. Moe and Eri went with her without being asked, the three of them had gotten close during the ride, sharing quiet whispers. They came back out: Sayaka with a sports duffel, Moe with an extra bag, Eri with a folded tarp.
"I have two brothers," Sayaka said. "Their clothes might fit you and the boys at school, Jouji-kun."

She said boys at school like we were planning a club activity. Not survival.

"Thanks, Sayaka-san."

She nodded, then glanced at the paper in my hand, the route map, ink starting to blur.

"Next stop is yours, right, Jouji-kun?"

"Yeah." I looked at my own address on the paper. Last stop before Asakaze. One point seven kilometers from school. The farthest out.

Everyone climbed back onto their mopeds. Engines started..

"Okay, everyone." I raised my voice over the idling engines. "From here, my house isn't far. But you should all head straight back to school, because after my place, I'm going straight to Asakaze. And it's quite far. We better save time. The others back at school definitely need your he.."

"Jouji!"

Fumi-senpai's voice cut through the afternoon air like a blade. Every head turned.

She was glaring at me from the saddle of her Honda Today, both hands gripping the handlebars, her knuckles white.

"We're not splitting. We agreed on this!"

"Fu… Fumi-tan…"

"'Fumi-tan,' my ass!" Her voice climbed. "I'm not having it! We go to your hou.."

"Fumi-tan!"

My voice came out louder than I intended. Sharp enough that she stopped mid-syllable.

The whole convoy went still. Even the crows shut up.

And I didn't think me calling Fumi-senpai Fumi-tan was the cause.

I simply raised my voice at The Glass Doll of Kamishiro.

Something had shifted inside me today, maybe it was the six to seven hours of chaos and uncertainty, maybe it was the speeches, maybe it was just exhaustion burning through every layer of fear I'd ever had.

I wasn't afraid of her anymore. Didn't need to be.

Because I had a reason.

"Listen." My voice dropped. Quiet. Deliberate.

"Fumi-tan, Chisaton, Sayaka-san… everyone." I looked at each of them in turn, Nao-senpai, Eri, Moe, the others whose names I was still learning to not swap with one another. "I know going alone is dangerous. But I'm not gonna put everyone in danger because of my own selfish reasons. It's not right."

I paused. The engines idled. Nobody spoke.

"Back at Kamishiro High, they need all of you there as fast as possible. They need to see that you're safe. That we're all going through the same thing. That the eleven of us who went home this afternoon, we can be proof that they can get through whatever this is. Without having to wonder about their own houses and families. They need closure. Because they can't go home right now."

Everyone was watching me. Moe had her hand over her mouth.

"You guys… all eleven of us… we can make them stronger facing all this. That's one of the reasons I agreed to this, all eleven of us going home. Because from the start, when me and Fumi-tan left school for 7-Eleven… I already knew. We're not gonna find anyone."

Fumi-senpai's expression flickered. Something unreadable.

"The last time I called Nanase, my… when Fumiko passed out on the field, she told me there are two guys at Asakaze. Guys who were yelling at the girls. Girls who were crying and scared. I don't know if I can get Nanase out of there safely. Without problems. And… for the safety of everyone at Kamishiro High… I can't give too much information about us."

I didn't know why my gut was telling me this. But it was.

Information was an asset and it could be weaponized. I understood that much. I watched too many movies.

"What if they're really bad? What if those two guys at Asakaze have already done terrible things to Nanase and the others there? And… would end up doing bad things to Kamishiro High girls too?"

Silence.

Real silence. The kind where you can hear eleven people processing the same ugly thought at the same time.

Chisaton's face went pale. Nao-senpai's jaw tightened. Eri clutched her shortwave radio like a talisman.

And Fumi-senpai…

Fumi-senpai exhaled. A long, slow breath through her nose. Her shoulders dropped, just slightly, but I saw it.

She knew I was right.

"Jouji…" Her voice had softened. The first time I'd heard that tone from her since she'd told me how she froze when the vanishing happened.

"Okay, everyone." Fumi-senpai straightened in her saddle. "You all go back to the school. Tell everyone that me and Jouji went to Asakaze to get Nanase. Nagisa will understand."

"Asou-senpai…" Chisaton's voice was smaller than I'd ever heard it. "Are you sure?"

Fumi-senpai pointed at me.

"Apparently someone gotta look out for our loverboy leader here." Her voice was dry, deadpan. "If he put himself in danger, I'll kill him myself."

She didn't sound like she was joking. But there was laughter, small, tentative, rippling through the convoy. The tension cracked. Just a little. Just enough.
Chisaton nodded. Grinned. She understood.

"Okay, Jouji-kun." Sayaka straightened her grip on the handlebars, Moe and Eri settling behind her. "We'll head straight back to school. You two be careful, okay? Asakaze is pretty far from here." She reached over and patted Chisaton's shoulder. Chisaton just nodded.

"Yes…" Nao-senpai's voice was rough, low, the voice of someone who didn't speak much and made it count when she did. "You two better get back. Real soon."

"Thank you, everyone!" I bowed from the saddle, awkward, unbalanced, probably looked ridiculous.

Fumi-senpai bowed too.

Wow.

The Glass Doll of Kamishiro. Bowing to her kouhai.

They peeled off one by one, Sayaka first, then Chisaton with Kaede on the back, Nao-senpai, Eri, Moe, the others. Five mopeds turning in the road. The buzz of engines fading into the amber afternoon.

Then it was just me and Fumi-senpai.

Two mopeds. Two people. One destination.

"Let's go," she said.

I nodded.