Chapter 33: the hello to earth
The familiar scent of chalk dust and old wood hit Alan's senses first, a stark, jarring assault after the metallic blood and ozone stench of Entity 70's realm. He blinked, his vision swimming as it adjusted to the mundane, sunlit classroom. Desks were in orderly rows. A half-erased English grammar diagram lingered on the whiteboard. The dull hum of the air conditioner was a soothing monotone compared to the glitching screams and silent footfalls of the realm they'd fled.
For a single, dislocated second, the five of them—Kaguro, Kamiko, Kashimo, Bachi, and Alan—stood frozen in a tight cluster just inside the classroom door, Tarameki's limp, blood-soaked form slumped between Kamiko and Bachi. The portal's glow had vanished from their backs, leaving only the ordinary world.
Then the world snapped into focus with a brutal, mundane clarity.
Mr. Hikawa, their perpetually tired English teacher, was mid-sentence, pointing a worn-out marker at the board. "—the subjunctive mood, which expresses a wish or a hypothetical, is often signaled by words like 'if' or 'I wish'…"
He trailed off. The marker slipped from his fingers, clattering to the floor. Every student in the room turned to stare.
Kamiko's mind, still wired for the frantic, survivalist calculus of the haunted schoolhouse, saw only threats and exits. His face, smudged with grime that hadn't existed moments before Entity 404's final command, twisted in frustration. "If it is another dimension apart from the real world," he muttered, voice low and frayed, "I will just commit suicide."
The bleak declaration, meant for his friends' ears only, hung in the sudden quiet.
Bachi, his own body aching with phantom blows and the weight of the man they carried, latched onto the tension. Deflection was his oldest weapon. He forced a grin, nodding toward Alan. "Kono Amerika no seishinbyō-shitsu-sha wa sore o rikai dekinaidarou," he cracked, his Japanese clumsy but the meaning clear: This American psychopath probably wouldn't understand it anyway.
It was a stupid, tension-breaking joke from a simpler time. A wave of nervous, hysterical laughter erupted from the five of them. It was too loud, too sharp, a release valve for terror that had no other outlet. They laughed until Alan's eyes watered, until Kashimo wheezed, the sound alien in the quiet room.
Mr. Hikawa's shock broke. "This is an English class," he stated, voice thin with confusion, "not a Japanese class."
Then the fuller reality crashed over him. His eyes darted across their faces—Kaguro's pale intensity, Kamiko's defensive scowl, Bachi's strained grin, Kashimo's shell-shocked gaze, Alan's haunted eyes. He took in their disheveled state, the stark, dark red soaking the shirt of the unconscious man they supported.
He stumbled back a step, knocking his chair over. "What… what! Kaguro, Kamiko, Kashimo, Alan, and Bachi… what are you all doing here?" His voice rose to a panicked squeak. "Didn't you disappear?"
The spell of normality was shattered. The class, which had been a tableau of boredom, erupted into buzzing whispers.
From the back, a voice laced with mocking glee pierced the noise. Tumika, ever ready with a dig at Kaguro, snorted. "They became the Invisible-Kurugi!"
Invisible-Kurugi—the fictional anime hero with the power of invisibility. The comparison, meant as an insult, was so absurd, so utterly removed from the months of subjective horror they'd just endured, that it triggered another brittle wave of laughter from their group. The classroom descended into chaos, a cacophony of questions and jokes, the English lesson utterly forgotten.
"What, you think I did not know Japanese?" Alan shot back at Bachi, playing along, clinging to the script of their old dynamic like a life raft.
Kamiko, eyes still wild, leaned in. "No, because you are an American psychopath. Your mommy is a psychopath, your daddy is a psychopath." It was a brutal, insensitive callback to Michelle and Johnson, a joke that would have been unthinkable weeks ago. Now, in the crucible of shared trauma, it was just another piece of the nightmare to be exorcised through harsh laughter. They howled, the sound raw and painful.
Kashimo, who had been silently scanning the room for glitching walls or grinning children, finally spoke, his voice flat. "At least we are in the right dimension."
"The hell, man?" Kaguro snapped, the strategist in him hating the loss of control. "You killed the vibe."
Mr. Hikawa, a lenient man at the best of times, was utterly out of his depth. He waved his hands weakly. "Quiet! Everyone, quiet!" He turned his bewildered gaze back to the five. "What… what was that by the way? The dimension thing? And all of that?" His eyes flickered to Tarameki. "And who the hell is this… this corpse?"
The word 'corpse' landed like a physical blow. The laughter died instantly.
Kamiko's face hardened. He adjusted his grip on Tarameki's arm, feeling the terrifying coolness of the skin beneath the blood. "He gave his life to save us," Kamiko said, his voice no longer joking, but hollow and final.
A heavy silence fell over the room. The truth of it settled on the five of them with a weight that stole their breath. In the frantic escape, in the shock of return, they hadn't checked. They had hauled him, a symbol of their own survival, without feeling for the pulse that had already stilled.
Kaguro's analytical mind, which had been calculating social strategies, now turned inward with cold, sickening precision. He fought for six hours. In that realm… where a minute is an hour here… The math unfolded in his mind, a horrifying equation. Six realm-hours. Multiplied by sixty… Three hundred and sixty Earth hours. Fifteen days. The man in their arms hadn't just fought for six hours. From the perspective of his body, his endurance, his will, he had been in a relentless, bloody battle for fifteen continuous days. He had held a crumbling line against an endless tide of monsters, alone, for over two weeks of unending combat, all while bleeding out.
Kaguro didn't share the calculation aloud. He just looked at Tarameki's peaceful, exhausted face, and a new kind of guilt, deep and seismic, took root in his gut. This wasn't just a death. It was a sacrifice of unimaginable scale.
The class's mocking whispers turned to murmurs of uneasy awe. Students stood up, peering at the fallen man. Some, sensing the profound gravity in the air, had tears in their eyes. The sight of his vulnerable, blood-drained form was a stark, sobering truth in the middle of their ordinary school day.
The five friends made a silent pledge, their eyes meeting over Tarameki's body. It was a vow woven from guilt, respect, and a fury that had no earthly target. They would not let this be wasted. They would find his killer—not a who, but a what. Entity 70. They would eliminate it. They would burn its glitched dimension to the ground.
---
The next day was a blur of grim procedure and surreal normalcy.
Tarameki's body was taken away. The school authorities, baffled and horrified, covered the costs of a swift, anonymous funeral. There was no family to contact, no records to find. He was a man out of time, a ghost who had fought his way out of hell only to die on its doorstep. The five attended, standing together in the back of the small, quiet ceremony. They were the only mourners who knew the truth of his war.
At school, they became instant, uncomfortable celebrities. The story had warped in the retelling—a mysterious stranger, a tragic accident, the five heroes who tried to save him. They were bombarded from every hallway.
"What happened to you?"
"Why were you gone?"
"Where did you go?Really, though."
It was an endless, polite interrogation. The school felt less like a place of learning and more like a panopticon, every glance a question they were forbidden to answer truthfully.
---
The return home was a different kind of battle.
Kaguro's house was a tense tableau of intellectual disbelief. He laid out the facts as clearly as he could: the realm, the time dilation, the entities, the rescue. His mother, a pragmatic woman who worked in data analysis, listened with growing alarm, not at the story, but at her son's apparent break from reality.
"Kaguro,this is… this is very detailed for a delusion," she said softly, placing a hand on his forehead as if checking for fever.
"Call Bachi.Call Kamiko," Kaguro insisted, his voice strained. "Ask them. Hear the same story."
A series of hushed,bewildered phone calls followed. The corroboration didn't bring belief, but it fostered a terrified uncertainty. She didn't ground him forever, but the look in her eyes—fear for his sanity—was a punishment all its own. The strict attention she promised was a leash of concern.
At Kamiko and Alan's home, the dynamic was different. Kamiko, bearing the dual burden of witness and protector for his adopted brother, stood firm. He presented a united front with Alan, their stories matching in every haunted detail. Their mother, who had already weathered the storm of Michelle and Johnson, saw the same deep, tremulous trauma in their eyes that she'd worked to heal before. She didn't fully believe the supernatural details, but she believed in their terror. "I don't understand this… Fujism, these entities," she said, pulling them both into a tight hug. "But I believe you are telling me your truth. And that truth has hurt you." Her solution was not grounding, but a vigilant, worried closeness. They were not prisoners, but patients.
Bachi's mother was a wall of flat denial. "Stop this nonsense,You were lost, you got into trouble, and now you're spinning fairy tales."
He repeated the story the next day,and the next, his voice losing its usual smooth charm, becoming dull and insistent. The consistency wore her down. On the third evening, she sat him down, her face pale. "I… have been in online forums. Researching local cults after what happened with Alan's mother. There are people… believers in this Fujism. They tell stories." She took a shuddering breath. "Their stories… the details are different, madder. But the core… the layers of reality, the demons with numbers… it's the same shape of madness as yours." She hadn't come to believe in entities, but she had come to believe that her son had stumbled into the same terrifying folklore that ensnared lost souls. It was a belief born of maternal fear, not understanding, and it came with a promise of therapy and watchful eyes.
Kashimo's homecoming was the most physically abrupt. The initial slap of maternal fear and relief stung his cheek, a shocking return to a simple, human world of rules and consequences. His explanation of other dimensions and eye-headed monsters was met not with debate, but with a profound, dismissive sorrow. "Oh, Kashimo," his mother sighed, the anger draining away into exhausted concern. "Lying to cover a mistake is one thing. But building such a ridiculous, elaborate fantasy…" She forgave the absence, but she mourned what she saw as his broken grip on reality. He was forgiven, but he was now a fragile thing in her eyes.
The exhaustion was total. They had survived cosmic horrors, only to find their sanctuaries transformed into soft prisons of concern and doubt. The trauma was a permanent resident within them, a cold stone in their guts. The brief, chaotic joy of their return to the right dimension had evaporated, replaced by the wearying slog of being seen as liars or lunatics.
As they each lay in their beds that night, staring at their familiar ceilings that now felt like flimsy illusions, the same unanswerable questions cycled in their minds, cutting through the fog of parental negotiations and schoolyard fame: Will Entity 404 go to war against the Midnight Demon? Will he take the threat seriously? Or was his alliance with the false Midnight Demon, whoever that was, still somehow in play?
The peace they craved was a phantom. This day of consequences was just a temporary, chaotic lull.
The final blow came not as a glitch in reality or a whispered threat, but through the banal, terrifying machinery of adult authority. Simultaneously, on each of their parents' phones, a notification chimed with official finality.
It was from the school principal. The message was identical for all:
'We will meet at 2:30 p.m. tomorrow in the main conference room. Please ensure your son is present. This is a mandatory summit regarding their prolonged absence and the concerning incident. Sharp attendance is required.'
Chapter 23 ends
To be continued