A breathless wind whispered through a sky that was not a sky.
Suspended in a sea of shimmering black, a figure wrapped in worn bandages stood alone atop a crumbling plateau of light. His chest rose with strain, shoulders heavy like they carried the weight of a dying world. His face—what little of it peeked from beneath the wrappings—was beautiful, painfully so, as if even decay had no power to mar what the gods once carved.
Eyes, dulled by time and pain, watched stars spiral in reverse across the heavens.
"This... will... be the last, it seems..."
His voice broke. Weak. Final. And as it faded into the void, the light beneath him flickered—once, then collapsed, swallowed by a silence more ancient than time itself.
---
Tokyo, present day.
Kai Atsuya trudged down the same alley he always took home, the flickering neon signs reflecting off wet pavement as he cut through the narrow passage between two convenience stores. He still had the apron marks on his shirt from another late shift at RocketBurger, the smell of grease and disappointment clinging to his uniform like a second skin.
Another day of being invisible. Another eight hours of customers who looked through him like he was furniture, of a manager who found new ways to make him feel worthless, of dreams that felt more distant with each passing shift.
The night air was cool against his face as he walked, his sneakers splashing through shallow puddles that reflected the city lights above. His phone buzzed in his pocket—probably another notification about overdue rent, or maybe his mom asking why he hadn't called. He ignored it. Some conversations were better avoided.
Tokyo never truly slept, but this part of the city grew quiet after midnight. The salary workers had caught their last trains home, the convenience stores hummed with fluorescent loneliness, and the streets belonged to people like him—the forgotten ones, the night shift workers, the invisible masses who kept the city running while everyone else dreamed.
Kai pulled his jacket tighter as a gust of wind swept through the alley. His apartment was still ten minutes away, and the thought of another night spent staring at the ceiling, wondering if this was all there was to life, made his chest feel tight.
He'd always imagined that seventeen would feel different somehow. More significant. Instead, it just felt like more of the same—school, work, sleep, repeat. No friends who really knew him, no girlfriend who cared about his existence, no hobbies that felt meaningful. Just the grinding monotony of survival in a world that didn't seem to notice he was there.
*Maybe that's all some people get,* he thought, kicking at a discarded can that rattled across the empty street. *Maybe some of us are just meant to be background characters in other people's stories.*
The thought should have depressed him, but tonight it just felt like accepting reality. Not everyone could be special. Not everyone got to be the hero.
That's when it started.
A flutter in his chest. Subtle at first, like his heart had skipped a beat. Then another. Then a jolt—sharp, rhythmic, like someone was drumming directly on his ribcage from the inside.
Kai stopped walking, his hand instinctively moving to press against his chest. "What the—?"
The sensation intensified. Not pain, exactly, but pressure. Like something was trying to claw its way out from behind his sternum. His breath came in short gasps as his heart hammered against his ribs with a rhythm that felt wrong, foreign, like it belonged to someone else entirely.
The alley around him began to blur at the edges. The neon signs flickered in patterns that hurt to look at directly, and the walls seemed to ripple like water disturbed by an unseen hand. The familiar concrete beneath his feet felt suddenly unstable, as if the very foundation of reality was shifting.
"The hell is happening to me?" he gasped, stumbling backward against a wall that felt too warm, too alive.
His vision twisted. The straight lines of the buildings curved and warped into impossible geometries. The night sky above began to bleed colors that had no names—purples that sang, golds that whispered, silvers that tasted like starlight.
The pressure in his chest exploded outward, racing through his veins like liquid lightning. Every nerve in his body screamed as something fundamental about his existence began to change. His legs gave out, and he collapsed to his knees on pavement that was no longer pavement but something that pulsed with its own heartbeat.
The world tilted. Gravity forgot which way was down. Reality cracked like glass, and through the fissures, Kai glimpsed something vast and terrible and beautiful beyond comprehension.
Then the alley folded in on itself, dimensions collapsing into a single point of impossible light, and Kai fell—not down, but through into darkness that swallowed him whole.
When awareness returned, it came slowly, like surfacing from the deepest part of an ocean where light had never dared to venture.
Kai found himself standing—floating?—in a place that defied every law of physics he'd ever learned. The space around him stretched infinitely in all directions, yet somehow felt intimate, enclosed, like being inside the heart of a star.
The sky above—if it could be called a sky—bled silver and violet in patterns that shifted and flowed like liquid metal. Stars danced across this impossible canvas, but they weren't distant suns. They were closer, more alive, pulsing with rhythms that seemed to echo his own heartbeat.
Before him, across a field of grass that sparkled like crushed emeralds and sang with voices too beautiful for human ears, stood a figure that made his breath catch in his throat.
Tall and ethereal, draped in robes that seemed to be woven from captured moonlight and starshine. The being's face was hidden beneath a hood that cast shadows deeper than midnight, but from within that darkness, two points of blue light burned with the intensity of collapsed stars.
The figure's presence was overwhelming—not threatening, but vast. Like standing before an ocean and suddenly understanding how small you truly were. Ancient beyond measure, carrying the weight of countless ages in the slope of his shoulders.
When he spoke, the voice resonated not in Kai's ears but directly in his mind, each word carrying harmonics that made his soul vibrate like a struck bell.
"I'm sorry."
The words carried weight beyond their meaning—centuries of regret compressed into two simple syllables. Sorrow so profound it made Kai want to weep for reasons he couldn't understand.
"You have to be him. You have to be the 12th."
"Twelfth what?" Kai tried to ask, but his voice made no sound in this place between worlds. The question formed in his mind, desperate and confused, but before it could take shape, the figure raised one hand.
Reality began to crack around the edges, hairline fractures spreading across the beautiful sky like a mirror struck by an invisible hammer.
"Time is running out."
The words echoed through dimensions Kai couldn't see, carrying a urgency that made his newly awakened spirit tremble. The cracks in reality spread faster, and through them leaked something dark, something hungry, something that had been waiting far too long to be free.
The figure's form began to fade, becoming translucent as the very fabric of this realm started to unravel.
With a violence that felt like being born in reverse, the vision shattered.
Kai hit solid ground with enough force to drive the air from his lungs, his body slamming into earth that felt too real after the ethereal realm he'd just experienced. The taste of copper and ozone filled his mouth as he rolled onto his side, coughing up dirt that sparkled with residual magic.
For several long moments, he could only lie there, his entire body trembling as his mind struggled to process what had just happened. The transition from that impossible place to this solid reality felt like being dunked in ice water after basking in warm sunlight.
Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself up on shaking arms and tried to make sense of his surroundings.
He was in a forest. But not like any forest from Earth.
These were titans among trees—living towers of wood and bark that stretched so high their tops disappeared into a canopy thick enough to block out whatever sky existed above. Their trunks were massive beyond comprehension, so wide that dozens of people holding hands couldn't have encircled them. Veins of soft, pulsing light ran through their bark like visible bloodstreams, and the very air around them hummed with energy that made his skin tingle with static electricity.
The ground beneath him was carpeted with grass that glowed faintly in the perpetual twilight, each blade seeming to contain its own spark of life. Flowers that had no earthly equivalent dotted the landscape—blooms that sang with tiny voices, petals that shifted color as he watched, stems that swayed to music only they could hear.
Behind him, visible through gaps in the massive tree trunks, loomed something that defied comprehension.
A wall.
But calling it simply "a wall" was like calling the ocean "some water." This was a monument to impossibility, a barrier that seemed to stretch endlessly in both directions and rise so high that its peak disappeared into the strange twilight above. Each stone block was the size of a building, fitted together with such precision that not even air could slip between them.
Kai struggled to his feet, his legs unsteady on ground that felt simultaneously solid and somehow more real than anything he'd ever touched. He was wearing nothing —his shirt and pants, shoes, phone, wallet, all the mundane artifacts of his old life had simply vanished as if they'd never existed.
The forest around him was alive in ways that Earth's wilderness could never be. Every plant, every insect, every mote of pollen floating in the air seemed to carry enough magical energy to power entire city blocks. The very atmosphere pressed against his skin like a gentle but persistent reminder that the laws of physics here were more like polite suggestions.
A sound broke through the forest's ambient symphony—a low, rumbling growl that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Every instinct Kai didn't know he possessed suddenly screamed warnings throughout his nervous system.
From between two of the massive trees, something emerged that belonged in nightmares rather than any natural ecosystem.
It looked like a bear—if bears could grow to the size of shipping containers and had been redesigned by someone with a very creative understanding of terror. Its fur was black as the space between stars, shot through with veins of pulsing red energy that made it look like a living constellation of malevolence. Eyes like molten gold fixed on him with the focused intensity of a predator that had found exactly what it was looking for.
When it opened its mouth, revealing teeth that looked like they'd been carved from black volcanic glass, saliva dripped to the forest floor and hissed where it landed, eating small holes in the glowing grass.
This was a mana beast—somehow, he knew the term without being taught it—a creature that had absorbed so much magical energy that it had transformed into something beyond natural law. And it was looking at him like he was the most delicious thing it had encountered in centuries.
Kai couldn't breathe. His legs, which had been perfectly functional moments earlier, now felt like they'd been replaced with water. His hands trembled so violently that he couldn't have held a weapon even if he'd had one.
The beast rose up on its hind legs, revealing a height that would have let it peer into second-story windows. Its growl deepened, becoming something felt in the bones rather than heard with the ears. Muscles bunched beneath its supernatural fur as it prepared to charge.
Time seemed to slow as Kai watched his death approaching. In that stretched moment, he found himself thinking not of his family or his dreams or any of the things people were supposed to think about in their final seconds. Instead, he thought about how unfair it was. To be pulled from his ordinary, miserable life into this magical world, only to die within minutes of arriving.
*I never even got to find out what the 12th means,* he thought with bitter clarity.
The beast lunged, covering the distance between them with impossible speed.
Kai closed his eyes, not wanting to see his own death approaching.
The attack never came.
Instead, the world erupted in fire.
A wall of flame so intense it turned the twilight forest into blazing noon consumed the creature mid-charge. The heat washed over Kai's face like standing too close to a bonfire, and the smell of burning magic filled the air with ozone and copper. The beast didn't even have time to scream—it simply vanished in a burst of light and heat that left nothing behind but ash and the acrid smell of incinerated mana.
Kai coughed, his eyes streaming from the sudden brightness and smoke. When his vision cleared, he found himself staring at a sight that would be burned into his memory for whatever remained of his life.
A figure stood where the beast had been just moments before. Human in shape but clearly something far more significant in reality. Tall and effortlessly elegant, with a bearing that suggested he could have been comfortable commanding armies or attending royal ceremonies with equal ease.
A long black coat draped over his shoulders, the fabric so dark it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. His clothes beneath were practical but well-made—the kind of garments that spoke of wealth and the practical needs of someone who expected to face danger regularly.
His blonde hair caught the forest's strange illumination, tousled as if he'd just walked through a windstorm but somehow managing to look perfectly styled anyway. His face was sharp and aristocratic, with the kind of bone structure that belonged in classical sculptures, and an expression of casual confidence that suggested he'd never encountered a problem he couldn't solve.
But it was his eyes that truly captured Kai's attention.
Purple. Not the deep violet of twilight skies or the pale lavender of spring flowers, but a bright, electric purple that seemed to glow with its own inner light. They were impossible eyes, the kind that didn't just see you but understood you, catalogued your strengths and weaknesses and potential in a single glance.
Those incredible eyes locked with Kai's across the space between them, and in that moment, recognition hit him like a physical blow.
As Kai's gaze met those beautiful purple depths, he felt his breath catch—the same ethereal shade he had seen in that impossible realm between worlds.