Kaito Harumasa hated Wednesdays.
It wasn't the way they squatted in the middle of the week, making the weekend feel like a mirage, nor was it the endless meetings always scheduled for that day. He hated Wednesdays because, without fail for the past three years, that was the day every single one of his designs got slaughtered.
"Too imaginative."
Mr. Sasaki's words still rang inside the twelfth-floor conference room of Akagi Architecture Firm. The pot-bellied man hadn't even bothered to look at Kaito while saying it; his eyes were glued to his phone.
"The client wants something more practical. Safer." Sasaki flicked Kaito's presentation tablet away with one finger, as if the fifteen-story apartment tower with its integrated rooftop garden were nothing more than a toddler's crayon scribble. "This is too risky. The structural costs for that vertical green system would explode."
"But my calculations already—"
"Harumasa-kun." Sasaki's voice dropped an octave; danger sign. "You've been here three months. Time you learned one thing: architecture isn't art. It's business. Clients want concrete boxes they can flip fast. Understood?"
Kaito's fists clenched beneath the table. His nails scraped the cheap wood-veneer surface.
"…Understood."
"Good." Sasaki stood; his belly bumped the table's edge. "Revisions in two days. Cut decorative elements by sixty percent, swap the skylights for standard windows, and—oh, right—scrap the entire rooftop garden. Too much maintenance hassle."
When the conference-room door closed with a soft, final click, Kaito stared at his tablet. Three weeks of all-nighters, forty-seven structural simulations, five full sketchbooks—now reduced to lines that were "too imaginative."
He shut the tablet down before the urge to hurl it across the room won.
✦ ✦ ✦
11:47 p.m., Kaito's studio apartment.
The architect's desk lamp, already leaning like a drunk, lit a battlefield: empty ramen cups, crumpled balls of failed sketches, three monitors frozen on a CAD crash from an hour ago.
Kaito flung his stylus into the chaos.
"Practical. Safe. Concrete boxes that sell fast," he echoed in a bitter, mocking imitation of Sasaki. "Why not just design a nuclear bunker? Definitely safer and more practical."
His hand found the one sketchbook on the desk that didn't belong to the pile of work. His private one. The one Sasaki and every client would never see.
He opened it at random.
A clock tower with exposed gears on the outside, wrapped in spiral suspension bridges that should have been structurally impossible—yet in his mind, it stood proud. Another page: a cathedral whose glass roof formed entire constellations, engineered so morning sunlight would project the night sky onto the marble floor.
All designs that would never exist.
"Too imaginative," he muttered again, voice raw this time.
Kaito dropped his forehead to the desk. He no longer cared about the avalanche of papers. His eyes burned—three straight days without proper sleep, plus the weight of frustration that had been piling up since graduation.
When was the last time he had actually loved this job?
The question floated as consciousness slipped away. The overheating laptop fan became soothing white noise. Half-dreaming, he pictured a city—no clients, no budgets, no one telling him "too imaginative."
A city that belonged only to—
✦ ✦ ✦
CRACK.
Kaito jolted awake, heart hammering. Not the alarm—the wall clock still read 02:13. The sound had come from the wall.
CRACK. CRACK.
Thin fissures spider-webbed across the plaster. What froze him wasn't the cracks themselves, but the light leaking through them.
Gold. Not yellow bulb-light or harsh fluorescent white—pure, eye-searing gold.
"Earthquake—?" The word died as the floor shuddered. But this wasn't a normal quake. The vibrations had rhythm—like a colossal heartbeat beneath the building's foundation.
His monitors flickered. The crashed CAD window suddenly sprang back to life, but what appeared wasn't his apartment design. It was a blueprint he had never drawn: a circular structure of impossible geometry, covered in symbols he didn't recognize yet somehow felt he should.
Then, from laptop speakers that weren't even on, came a voice.
Not human. Not mechanical.
It sounded like an echo inside a cathedral with no walls—like wind blowing through endless corridors.
"…Architect… left behind…"
Kaito stumbled back from the desk. His spine hit the wall—and he realized his fatal mistake.
The wall behind him was no longer solid.
Concrete had turned liquid, a thin membrane ready to tear. The golden light blazed brighter, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut. He tried to step forward, away from it, but gravity flipped sideways.
Or maybe the apartment spun.
Or maybe reality itself cracked.
The last thing he remembered was falling—not down, but sideways—through a wall that should have been unbreakable. His hand clutched instinctively, and what it grabbed was his sketchbook.
Then only golden light, the sensation of being torn apart, and a silence so absolute it felt like screaming.
✦ ✦ ✦
When Kaito opened his eyes again, the first thing he noticed was that he was still breathing.
The second: this was not his apartment.
He lay on cold gravel. The sky above was dull gray, shrouded in thick fog that moved wrong—swirling slowly, as if something inside it was watching.
Kaito forced himself upright. Every muscle screamed, but nothing was broken. A miracle, considering he had just… fallen? Been sucked through? Teleported?
"This isn't possible," he muttered. His voice sounded too loud in the stillness. "Overtime nightmare. Has to be."
But the gravel biting into his palms felt too real.
He stood and looked around.
He was in the middle of ancient ruins.
Not modern ruins—towering stone pillars ten meters high, some still standing, others toppled at angles that defied physics. Walls covered in eroded geometric carvings that hurt to look at directly.
And the architecture was wrong.
He couldn't explain it in words, but his architect's instincts screamed. Proportions violated every basic principle. Those pillars were far too slender to support the remaining ceilings. Door arches curved at angles that should have collapsed centuries ago. A staircase rose at seventy degrees—impossible for any human to climb.
Yet everything still stood.
"Where am I…?"
A rustle behind him answered.
Kaito spun—and froze.
Something emerged from behind a fallen pillar. Not human. Roughly human-shaped, one-eighty tall, but its body was carved from stone and golden light—the same light that had bled from his apartment wall. A half-finished golem: parts solid, parts translucent, golden energy pulsing beneath stone skin like blood.
No face—just a smooth surface with two glowing hollows. Eyes, maybe.
It advanced.
Slow. Relentless. Like a machine given one directive: identify threat, eliminate.
Kaito's legs moved before his brain caught up. He ran.
Gravel sprayed under his shoes, breath ragged, heart slamming against his ribs. Behind him, the stone golem's footsteps echoed—heavy, unhurried, never stopping.
He darted around collapsed walls, vaulted debris, sprinting blind through the labyrinth of ruins. Lungs burning. Vision tunneling.
Nightmare. Has to be a nightmare.
His foot snagged—root or crack—and he tumbled. His back slammed into a pillar, driving the air from his lungs.
When his blurred vision cleared, the golem stood three meters away.
It raised an arm. The stone limb reshaped into a jagged blade.
Kaito couldn't move. Body locked. Mind screaming run, legs numb.
The blade descended—
And stopped.
One centimeter from his throat, frozen mid-air. Not because the golem changed its mind, but because something held it.
Light.
More precisely—golden lines forming geometric patterns in the air. Patterns Kaito recognized.
A blueprint.
The lines assembled into a translucent square shield of pure light, hovering between him and the golem. Dimensions, annotations, specifications—all shimmering like a hologram.
"What the…?"
The golem tried to pull its blade free. The shield held. The creature stepped back; its stone body vibrated—confusion?
Kaito looked down at his hands.
His private sketchbook—somehow still clutched since the apartment—was open to a page that had been blank.
Now, in glowing golden ink, the exact same shield blueprint floated on the paper.
But Kaito hadn't drawn it.
Or… had he?
His hands shook, yet part of his mind felt tethered—like an invisible string connecting his thoughts to those golden lines.
The golem attacked again, this time with a brutal stone fist. The shield cracked; shards of light rained like broken glass.
Without thinking—wall.
In the sketchbook, golden lines raced across the page, forming a new blueprint. In reality, a three-meter translucent barrier erupted from the ground, separating Kaito from the golem.
The creature struck it. Fractures spidered, but the wall held.
Kaito stared—at his hands, the book, the light-structure he had apparently just… created? How? This violated every law of physics, logic, reality—
CRASH.
The light-wall shattered.
The golem stepped through the wreckage, more aggressive. Its stone body trembled; the golden cracks flared like rage.
Kaito scrambled up and ran again. But this time his mind raced too. The light structures were real. The book responded to his thoughts. It was like drafting blueprints—only they manifested instantly.
Then—
He stopped running. Turned to face the approaching golem.
His fingers danced over a blank page without touching paper, yet golden lines appeared. He visualized the simplest trap he'd drawn hundreds of times: a pit with a thin cover.
Blueprint complete. A fraction of a second later, the ground beneath the golem collapsed.
The creature plunged three meters, hitting bottom with a thunderous crash. Stone cracked; golden light bled brighter.
But not enough.
It began climbing, stone blades sprouting from its arms like pitons.
Kaito cursed—something he rarely did, but the situation clearly qualified for exceptions.
"Fine. You want something sturdier?"
He pictured a cage—not just a hole, but a solid stone box with no doors, no windows. A prison cell.
Golden lines blurred with speed. Nearby rubble trembled, lifted, flew, and assembled itself according to his will.
In ten seconds, a four-meter cube of seamless stone stood in the middle of the ruins, the golem sealed tight inside.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
It pounded from within. The walls shuddered, but held.
Kaito collapsed to his knees, gasping. His hands shook violently. His head throbbed like it had been hammered. Worst of all—he could feel the new structure. Feel every joint, every stress point, every tiny flaw.
As if it had become an extension of his own body.
"What's happening to me…?"
The pounding inside the cube slowed, then stopped.
Silence returned. The gray fog still swirled overhead. The impossible ruins still stood.
And Kaito Harumasa—frustrated architect who, five hours ago, had only wanted to sleep in his cramped apartment—now knelt on alien ground with a sketchbook that turned imagination into reality.
He stared at the glowing blueprints filling its pages.
Then, in a hoarse voice, he laughed.
Not a happy laugh. The laugh of a mind refusing to process reality anymore.
"Too imaginative, huh…" he whispered to the book in his hands. "Guess now I get to be as imaginative as I damn well please."
Overhead, the fog spun faster, as if accepting the challenge.
Far in the distance—barely visible through the mist—the silhouette of a half-collapsed tower emitted the same golden light.
Something in this world was waiting for him.
NOTES:
- HIDDEN ESSENCE: ???
- NEW BLUEPRINTS RECORDED: [Basic Barrier], [Pitfall Trap], [Stone Confinement]
- SYSTEM STATUS: …Initializing…