There was nothing the young man could do. Alone, he sank to the ground, pressing his back against the cold wall as if it were the only thing keeping him tethered to reality—a wall that could crumble and swallow him at any moment.
"I… I can't, I can't, I can't! I don't want to die… I don't want to…" he whispered, his voice barely more than a trembling shadow of sound.
"Ishīda… Ishīda…"
The words floated through the air, fragile and impossibly familiar. He looked up, and his heart froze. There she was—his mother, her smile like sunlight piercing through the heaviest storm, her voice soft and warm, wrapping around him like a long-lost embrace.
But reality pressed against the edges of the vision, a cruel reminder of what was lost. She had been gone for years, taken by lung cancer when he was only nine. Her presence here felt like a ghost suspended between memory and impossibility, a fleeting warmth in a world turned cold.
As he finally looked up, he saw a man in a hospital bed. He wore a white coat over simple scrubs, a surgical mask covering his mouth, and a stethoscope hanging around his neck—a doctor in the sterile quiet of the hospital room. Sunlight streamed through the window, illuminating the pale walls and casting soft shadows across the bed.
"Ishīda," the young man murmured, his voice quiet and curious. "Where am I? Wasn't I just being attacked by monsters? And what about the man…?"
A warm hand touched his right arm. Looking in that direction, he could barely make out the face of the person because of the sunlight streaming in. Outside the window, the dusty world had vanished, replaced by a vibrant green garden, with butterflies and small insects floating slowly in the golden light. For a moment, he was distracted by the peaceful scene.
"Ishīda, do you remember who I am?"
Now he could see her face clearly. It was his sister, her eyes wide with worry, tears barely held back.
"Ishīda… Ishīda… I thought you died… leaving me alone."
Ishīda curiously replied, "What do you mean?"
His sister Tsuki stared at him for a while and then told him the truth:
"About 2 weeks ago a loud noise happened—a bang! When it happened, I was with Hina in school, studying for our exams. When the bang struck, I saw something… something like a portal to another world. It pulled in the people and things that were nearby, and then it vanished.
But two days ago another portal appeared. This time it didn't absorb everything around it, but instead released the people it had taken.
I couldn't bear to watch… it was a massacre—skin, bones, and organs torn apart, exposed as if their flesh had been ripped away.
You and another man were the only ones who survived. But right after the portal appeared again, we saw how the man disappeared at incredible speed as he was flash stepping..
Right as finished speaking, a loud scream echoed outside…