The day after we poked the fabric of reality with a stick, the world had the audacity to be completely, unforgivably normal. Wednesday morning in classroom 2-B was the same dissonant symphony it always was. The sun shone, the teacher droned on about classical Japanese literature, and the people around me worried about exams and weekend plans. It was surreal. It was like having a near-death experience on a roller coaster, only to have the operator ask if you wanted to buy the commemorative photo of your terrified face.
My headache had subsided to a dull, persistent throb behind my right eye, a phantom echo of the static. I'd stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror for a full five minutes that morning, half-expecting to see a featureless mask staring back. But it was just my own tired face, the dark circles under my eyes a little more pronounced than usual. I had become a living, breathing testament to the fact that fighting a metaphysical war against the concept of forgetting is terrible for your sleep schedule.
My gaze drifted to Hina Yuzuki. She was different. The volatile, explosive energy was gone, as was the lost, grief-stricken confusion. In its place was a quiet sort of gravity. She sat straight in her chair, listening to the lesson, a placid sadness on her face. It was the sadness of a confirmed loss, not the insanity of a suspected one. It was real. And hanging from the zipper of her school bag, catching the morning light, was the small, wooden sunflower charm. A tiny, defiant sun in her personal winter. It was our proof. Our first victory. It felt infinitesimally small and impossibly large at the same time.
"She's stabilized," Yuki's voice observed from my left. I'd grown accustomed to her unseen presence, the way she could slip into the space beside me without a sound. "The Artifact is acting as a cognitive anchor. Her mind isn't fighting itself anymore. The emotional output is now matched with a tangible object. It's a closed circuit of grief."
"Is that a good thing?" I muttered, pretending to adjust my headphones.
"It's better than the alternative," she replied. "Before, she was a radio tuned to a dead station, turning the volume up to dangerous levels trying to hear a song. Now, she's just listening to a sad song. It's still painful, but it won't break the speakers."
I processed that for a moment. A closed circuit of grief. A sad song. Yuki had a strange, poetic way of describing the mechanics of a crumbling reality.
The lunch bell rang, liberating us. As students began to form their usual cliques, my plan was to find an empty corner of the roof and try to convince my brain it wasn't actively dissolving. But my plan was, as usual, irrelevant.
As I stood up, a shadow fell over my desk.
"Kaito Hoshino."
The voice was flat, without inflection. I looked up into the impassive face of Aoi Serizawa. Her dark green hair was, as always, perfectly cut. Her glasses were spotless. She held her ubiquitous notebook in one hand, her posture as rigid and precise as a diagram in a geometry textbook.
"Serizawa-san," I acknowledged, my internal alarms starting to blare.
"Your biometric readings appear to be sub-optimal," she stated, her eyes scanning my face with the detached curiosity of a biologist examining a new species of insect. "Pupil dilation is inconsistent, and there are trace indicators of physiological stress. A direct consequence of yesterday's event, I presume."
I stared at her. Not "how are you?" or "what's up?". She'd greeted me with a medical diagnosis. Yuki let out a soft, appreciative whistle that only I could hear. "I like her," she declared. "She's got style."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, falling back on the universal denial that had served me so poorly thus far.
"Negative," Aoi said, tapping a page in her notebook with a perfectly manicured finger. "At 16:47 yesterday, you, in the company of Hina Yuzuki, interacted with a high-resonance anomaly located at the Misaki Shrine. This interaction resulted in a significant stabilization of Yuzuki's emotional state and a corresponding spike in your own deviation markers. The probability of this being a coincidence is 0.003%. I am not a fan of such low probabilities."
My blood ran cold. She knew. She didn't just suspect. She had data. Time-stamped, cross-referenced data.
"We need to have a conversation," she continued, her tone leaving no room for argument. "My observational phase has concluded. It is time to correlate our findings. The science prep room on the fourth floor is currently unoccupied. You have five minutes."
She turned and walked away without waiting for a reply, her footsteps silent and measured. She didn't look back. She didn't need to. She knew I would follow. I was no longer a person to her. I was a data point. And data points don't disobey.
"Well," Yuki chirped, "it seems your fan club is growing. First a ghost girl, now a robot girl. You're cornering the market on strange women, Kaito."
"This isn't a romantic comedy," I grumbled, shoving my hands in my pockets and following the path Aoi had dictated. "It's a horror movie, and I think I just got summoned to the principal's office."
"Don't be so dramatic," Yuki said. "She's not a monster. She's just the first person besides us to have read the error log."
The science prep room smelled of formaldehyde and disinfectant, a sterile, chemical scent that perfectly matched Aoi Serizawa's aura. She was standing by a lab table, her notebook open under the stark white light of the overhead fluorescent bulbs. The door clicked shut behind me, sealing us in the sterile silence.
"Thank you for your punctuality," she said, not looking up from her notes. "Efficiency is crucial when dealing with a phenomenon of this nature."
"What phenomenon?" I asked, deciding to play dumb for as long as possible.
Aoi finally lifted her gaze. There was no emotion in her eyes, just an unnerving, analytical intensity. "Let us dispense with the pretense, Hoshino-kun. It is inefficient. I am referring to the ongoing series of localized existential sublimation events. Or, to use a more colloquial term, the Vanishings."
She said it so matter-of-factly, with the same tone one might use to discuss the weather. It was chilling.
"I have been tracking this phenomenon for 214 days," she continued, turning her notebook around for me to see.
I stepped closer, and my breath caught in my throat. It wasn't just a notebook. It was a research journal, a conspiracy theorist's manifesto written with the precision of a Nobel laureate. The pages were filled with terrifyingly neat handwriting, complex charts, timelines, and social network diagrams that looked like constellations. Names were connected by lines, with dates and probability scores attached.
"I can't perceive the erasures directly, as you apparently can," she explained, her voice a clinical monotone. "My memory, like that of every other normative individual, is rewritten in real-time. However, the Phenomenon is not as clean as it appears. It leaves... statistical ghosts."
She pointed to a chart. "This, for example, is the budget allocation for the school's Go Club. On April 12th, the club's budget shows a 20% surplus with no corresponding drop in membership applications. The records state the club has always had four members. But the budget was allocated for five. A statistical ghost. A boy named Haruki Ito, second year, class C. He existed."
She flipped the page. "Social network analysis of class 2-B. The emotional resonance map shows a sudden, inexplicable cohesion increase around Hina Yuzuki's social cluster on August 4th, the day Saki Fujimura was sublimated. Her friends grew closer to subconsciously fill the void she left. A gravitational anomaly. But your position," she pointed a finger at a node labeled 'KH', "remained static. You are the only individual whose social metrics are not affected by the erasures. You are a control subject. You remember."
It wasn't a question. It was a conclusion she had reached through pure, cold logic.
"I don't know how you do it," she went on, her gaze piercing. "I have hypothesized several possibilities, ranging from a unique neurological condition to your being an agent of the Phenomenon itself, though your adverse reaction at the shrine yesterday makes the latter less likely. For now, your mechanism is an unknown variable. But the fact remains: you are my only window into the primary source data."
"So what do you want from me?" I asked, my voice hoarse. My mind was reeling. She had reverse-engineered the apocalypse.
"A partnership," she said simply. "You possess the qualitative data—the direct, subjective experience of the Phenomenon. I possess the quantitative data—the patterns, the statistics, the fingerprints it leaves behind. Separately, we are fumbling in the dark. Together, we can construct a unified theory of the Phenomenon. We can understand its rules. And perhaps," she paused, a flicker of something almost imperceptible in her eyes, "we can predict its behavior."
"This is insane," I said, shaking my head. "We're high school students. This is... this is a problem for physicists, or... or priests."
"The physicists and priests are being memory-wiped along with everyone else," Aoi countered without missing a beat. "We are, as far as my data suggests, the only two individuals at this nexus point who are aware that there is a problem to be solved. To abdicate this responsibility would be illogical."
"She has a point," Yuki whispered. "The adults are useless in this particular apocalypse. It's always up to the teenagers. It's an ironclad rule of the genre."
I looked at Aoi, at her notebook filled with the names of the forgotten, each one a ghost she'd meticulously cataloged. She wasn't just a cold, calculating machine. She was a historian for a world that kept deleting its own history. She was fighting the same war I was, just with different weapons.
"Okay," I said, the word feeling heavy and final. "We have a deal. What's the first step?"
A small, almost unnoticeable sigh of relief escaped Aoi's lips. "The first step is to analyze a previous event with our combined data sets. A cold case. The erasure of Saki Fujimura and Kenji Sato was chaotic and recent. We need a cleaner data set from an earlier, more isolated sublimation."
She flipped through her notebook to a heavily annotated page. "Case file 0-17. Subject: Ryoichi Tanaka. Third year, president of the Photography Club. Vanished 98 days ago. The event was clean, with minimal immediate social restructuring. However, the secondary effects were significant. The Photography Club, once a highly active organization, collapsed within two weeks. Its vice president and sole remaining active member..." she trailed off, her finger resting on a name.
A name I knew.
"...was Renji Kurobane."
The name hung in the air between us, heavy and charged. Ryoichi Tanaka. The photography club. Renji Kurobane. Suddenly, Renji's entire persona—his biting cynicism, his aggressive denial, his targeted cruelty towards Hina—snapped into focus. It wasn't random malice. It was the lashing out of a wounded animal, desperately trying to pretend its leg hadn't just been chewed off. He was another victim of the phantom ache, but his way of coping was to burn the world down before it could hurt him again.
"Kurobane-senpai," I said, the pieces clicking together. "He was in the photography club?"
"Vice president," Aoi confirmed. "And, according to social proximity charts, Ryoichi Tanaka's closest associate. Their bond was the gravitational center of the club. When Tanaka was sublimated, the structure lost its integrity and collapsed."
"So Renji..." I started.
"Is the Hina Yuzuki of a previous erasure," Aoi finished, her logic sharp and brutal. "With the crucial difference that he had no one to validate his experience. He has likely spent the last three months believing he is suffering from some form of psychosis. His antagonistic behavior is a predictable, if maladaptive, psychological defense mechanism."
"So that's why he warned us to stop digging," I murmured, remembering his words outside the shrine. Sometimes, it's better to let things stay buried. He wasn't talking to us. He was talking to himself.
"Precisely," Aoi said. "He is a valuable source of information, but he is unstable and hostile. Approaching him directly is currently inadvisable. We must first gather more data on the initial event." She pointed to a note on the page. "According to the club's activity logs, their last major project before Tanaka's disappearance was a submission to the Prefectural Student Photography Contest. The theme was 'A Moment of Eternity'."
"'A Moment of Eternity'," Yuki repeated softly. "How fitting."
"The club's old room is in the old building, two doors down from the Literature Club," Aoi stated. "It has been sealed, but I have... acquired a key. I propose we investigate the site for any residual materials. Any photographs left behind by Tanaka could potentially function as an Artifact, similar to Yuzuki's charm."
The plan was logical. It was sound. It was also incredibly dangerous. We were planning to deliberately hunt for an object that could cause the same kind of metaphysical backlash I'd experienced yesterday, a backlash that had felt like my brain was being torn apart.
Just as I was about to agree, the door to the prep room slid open.
And there, leaning against the doorframe with his trademark smirk firmly in place, was Renji Kurobane. My blood froze.
"Well, this is cozy," he drawled, his amber eyes sweeping over the room, taking in Aoi's notebook, the charts, my pale face. "The school's top brain and its resident ghost-seer, holding a secret meeting in the morgue. Planning on dissecting a frog, or just my life?"
"Kurobane-senpai," Aoi said, her voice remaining perfectly level. She closed her notebook with a soft snap. "Your presence here is statistically unlikely. To what do we owe this deviation?"
"Call it a hunch," Renji said, stepping into the room and letting the door slide shut behind him. His smirk didn't reach his eyes. His eyes were cold, hard, and filled with a desperate, cornered fear. "I heard you two whispering. Heard a name I haven't heard in a while."
He looked directly at me. "Ryoichi Tanaka," he said, the name sounding like broken glass in his mouth. "What do you know about him?"
"He was the president of the photography club," I said, my voice steady. "He vanished three months ago."
The smirk on Renji's face vanished completely. He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw the full extent of the damage. The phantom ache in his eyes was a gaping, raw wound. "There was no Ryoichi Tanaka," he hissed, the words a desperate lie. "There was never a photography club. I don't know what kind of sick game you're playing, but you need to stop."
"We know you were his friend," I pressed, ignoring Yuki's frantic mental warnings to back off. "We know you were the vice president."
"Shut up!" Renji lunged forward, grabbing the front of my shirt. He was shaking with a barely controlled rage. "You don't know anything! He didn't exist! None of it existed!"
"His denial is a feedback loop," Aoi observed from the side, with the detachment of a naturalist watching two rams butt heads. "By vocally denying the subject's existence, he is attempting to reinforce his own rewritten memory against the intrusive emotional echoes."
"I said, SHUT UP!" Renji yelled, his knuckles white where he gripped my collar. He was right in my face, his amber eyes wild. "Forgetting is a blessing! Why would you want to dig up a ghost? Why would you want to remember the pain?" His voice broke on the last word, the anger finally cracking to reveal the raw grief beneath.
He shoved me backward, and I stumbled against a lab table. He stood there, breathing heavily, looking at his own trembling hands as if they belonged to someone else.
"Stay away from the clubroom," he whispered, his voice hoarse and defeated. "Stay away from his memory. You have no idea what you're messing with. Some things... some things are erased for a reason."
He turned and fled, slamming the door open and disappearing down the hallway. He left behind a silence that was heavier and more charged than any sound.
I stood there, my heart pounding, the ghost of Renji's desperate grip still on my shirt. He was in so much more pain than Hina had been. Hina's confusion had been a fog; Renji's denial was a self-inflicted wound he tore open every single day.
"Well," Yuki said, her voice subdued. "That confirms it. The Ryoichi Tanaka case is the one. It's the key."
"He's terrified," I said.
"He's not just terrified of remembering," Yuki clarified. "He's terrified of why Ryoichi was erased. His last words... 'some things are erased for a reason.' That wasn't just a warning. That was a confession."
My eyes met Aoi's. She was already writing in her notebook, her expression grim.
"Kurobane's emotional state confirms our hypothesis," she stated. "His reaction to the subject's name was extreme, indicating a deep connection and a traumatic memory conflict. His warning suggests he possesses knowledge regarding the direct cause of the sublimation event."
"You think Renji knows why his friend vanished?" I asked.
"The probability is high," Aoi confirmed. "This elevates the importance of our investigation. The Ryoichi Tanaka case is no longer just a cold case for data analysis. It may be the Patient Zero of the current cascade."
The weight of it all settled on me. This wasn't just a random, natural disaster anymore. Renji's words implied intent. A reason. As if someone, or something, had chosen to erase Ryoichi Tanaka for a specific purpose.
"The photography clubroom," I said, my voice firm. "We need to go. Now."
Aoi gave a single, decisive nod. "Agreed. Kurobane's attempt to dissuade us only increases the likelihood that something of significance remains there."
We left the prep room and made our way to the old building, the same building that housed Yuki's haunt, the Literature Club. The silence of the disused corridors felt different now, imbued with a sense of purpose. We were no longer just victims or observers. We were investigators. A strange, broken team of three: the boy who remembered, the girl who counted the ghosts, and the ghost girl who wrote the rules.
Aoi produced a small, metallic pick and deftly unlocked the door to the photography club. The ease with which she did it suggested it wasn't her first time breaking school rules in the name of research.
The room was dark, the windows covered with thick black paper. Aoi found the light switch, and the room flickered to life under a single, bare bulb. It was a mess. Unlike the neatly shrouded Literature Club, this room looked like it had been abandoned in a hurry. Developing chemicals were left in trays, now evaporated into crystalline residue. Negatives were strewn across a table. An overturned stool lay on the floor. It was a scene of sudden departure.
And on the walls... on the walls were photographs. Dozens of them, pinned up for critique. Black and white prints of cityscapes, portraits of students, abstract shots of light and shadow. They were good. Really good.
"We're looking for his final project," Aoi said, her gaze scanning the room with methodical precision. "The theme was 'A Moment of Eternity'."
We searched the room. I felt a strange sense of trespass, of digging through the remains of a life that the universe insisted had never been lived. On a dusty desk in the corner, I found a stack of photos, separate from the others, held together by a rubber band. They were all stunning shots, but one, on the very top, caught my eye.
It was a photograph of the Misaki Shrine. But it was taken from a strange angle, looking up through the branches of the gnarled camphor tree, the one that sheltered the old woman's shop. The sunlight was filtering through the leaves, creating a sublime, almost divine pattern of light and shadow on the shrine's roof. It was a perfect, fleeting moment captured forever. A moment of eternity.
"I think I found it," I said.
But as Aoi came over to look, Yuki let out a sharp, indrawn breath. "Kaito... look at the photo. Look closer."
I looked again. It wasn't just the shrine. In the bottom corner of the photograph, partially obscured by the shadows of the leaves, was a person. A girl. She was standing with her back to the camera, looking up at the shrine.
A girl with long, shimmering silver hair.
My blood turned to ice. It was Yuki. The photograph had been taken months ago, long before I ever met her. But she was there. Captured on film. An impossible ghost in the machine.
"What is it?" Aoi asked, noticing my expression.
I couldn't answer. I just stared at the impossible photograph, my mind fracturing under the weight of a dozen new questions. Who was Ryoichi Tanaka, really? And what was his connection to the forgotten girl who claimed to have been erased years ago?
The game had just changed, again. We hadn't just found a clue about Renji's past. We had stumbled into Yuki's.