The banner was closing in four minutes.
Kuze Rei knew this the way he knew most things — precisely, calmly, and with the full weight of someone who had been tracking the countdown timer for the last six hours. He sat at the back of the gymnasium during PE class, shoulders against the wall, phone angled low against his thigh, thumb hovering over the pull button with the focused stillness of a surgeon.
Four minutes. One pull left on his daily free ticket. The limited SSR rate was at five percent — statistically, one in twenty. He had done thirty-eight pulls on this banner across the last two weeks and received nothing above B-rank. His pity counter sat at thirty-eight. Sixty-two pulls until guaranteed SSR. He was not close enough to wait for pity, but he was not far enough away to feel comfortable skipping.
The calculation was simple. Pull now on the free ticket. Accept whatever came. Move on.
Around him, PE class happened. Sneakers squeaked on polished hardwood. Someone called a foul that nobody agreed with. A teacher's whistle cut through the noise twice in rapid succession. Rei registered all of it the same way a weather station registers wind — present in the data, irrelevant to the function.
He pressed pull.
The animation loaded. Colored light swirled on the small screen. He watched it without expression, the same way he watched every pull — not with hope exactly, but with the particular attentiveness of someone who understood that attention changed nothing and paid it anyway.
B-rank.
He looked at the card for exactly one second. Filed it. Closed the app.
Four minutes and twelve seconds wasted, counting the time before the pull. He would not get those back.
He was putting the phone in his pocket when the ball hit him.
It arrived without warning — no shout, no whistle, no sound of footsteps approaching — just a sudden white-hot impact against the left side of his skull that snapped his head sideways and sent him sliding down the gymnasium wall in a way that was neither graceful nor dignified. His phone skidded. The back of his head met the floor. The fluorescent lights above him became a smear of white and then, very quickly, nothing at all.
The last thought Kuze Rei had before losing consciousness was: I should have pulled yesterday.
The darkness was not dark.
It had a floor — smooth and luminous, extending in every direction without walls or ceiling or any visible boundary. Light came from beneath the surface, gold and steady, tracing the geometry of a basketball court in clean burning lines. The three-point arc. The paint. The center circle, glowing brighter than the rest, pulsing with a rhythm that felt less like electricity and more like something breathing.
Rei stood at half court.
He looked down at his hands. His phone was gone. He was wearing his school uniform — the same one he'd had on thirty seconds ago in a gymnasium where people were playing basketball badly and nobody was paying attention to him. His shoes were the same cheap pair he bought at the end of last year when his old ones finally split along the sole. Everything about him was exactly as unremarkable as it had always been.
He looked up.
At the far end of the court, something stood.
It had the shape of a person. Broad-shouldered. Absolutely still. It existed in the space between shadow and substance — not invisible, not solid, something in between that the eye kept trying to resolve and couldn't quite manage. The air around it was different from the air everywhere else. Heavier. More serious. The kind of atmosphere that gathered in the final seconds of a tied game when everyone in the building understood that whatever happened next would be the only thing they remembered.
In one hand it held a basketball.
Not spinning. Not bouncing. Just held, the way you hold something you have always owned and will never lose.
It looked at Rei.
Rei looked back.
The silence lasted exactly as long as it needed to. No longer.
Then it spoke.
The voice was not loud. It didn't need to be. It arrived the way a perfectly executed shot arrives — already done, already certain, the result established before anyone had finished watching. Low. Unhurried. Every word landing with the weight of something that had been considered for a very long time before being said.
"You've been pulling on the wrong banner."
Rei opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I don't know what that means," he said, because it was true.
The figure was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of someone gathering words, but the silence of someone allowing a statement to exist in the space between two people before moving past it.
"You've been spending your time and your attention on something that will never give you what you're actually looking for," it said. "Games don't do that. They take. They're designed to take. The real banner — the one with the pull rate worth chasing — is somewhere else entirely."
"Where," Rei said. Not a question exactly. More an acknowledgment that information was being offered and he was prepared to receive it.
The figure raised its free hand and gestured, once, at the court beneath their feet.
The glowing lines pulsed in response.
"Here," it said. "Everything you're looking for — the optimization, the progression, the system that rewards attention and patience and the willingness to study what other people ignore — it's here. It has always been here. You just hadn't looked at the right screen."
Rei processed this.
"Basketball," he said.
"Basketball."
"I've never played."
"I know."
"I have no coordination. My PE teacher stopped putting me in games in the first year of middle school because I was, and I quote, 'a liability to both teams simultaneously.'"
"I know that too."
"Then why—"
"Because," the figure said, and something in the quality of its stillness shifted — not movement, just weight, a settling, "the court doesn't care what you were. It never has. The only question the court asks is what you do next."
The basketball left its hand.
It crossed the length of the glowing court in a slow arc — not the physics of a real throw but something intentional, something that wanted to arrive. Rei watched it come. He didn't move. He didn't reach. His hands simply rose to meet it, and the leather was warm against his palms in a way that felt less like catching and more like recognition.
The moment the ball touched his hands, every line on the court blazed gold.
Then—
The gymnasium ceiling came back first. Fluorescent tubes. A water stain shaped vaguely like a prefecture. Three faces looking down at him with expressions ranging from concern to barely concealed amusement.
"Dude," said one of his classmates, a boy named Toda whose primary contribution to PE class was complaining about PE class. "Are you dead?"
Rei sat up slowly.
His skull announced its recent trauma with considerable enthusiasm. He pressed two fingers to the left side of his head and found a lump forming with impressive efficiency. The gymnasium swam once, then settled. His phone was three feet away, screen cracked along one corner in a diagonal line that he calculated would spread to the full display within approximately two weeks.
The gacha banner had expired while he was unconscious.
He stared at this notification for a moment. Then set the phone face-down on the hardwood.
"I'm fine," he said, to no one in particular.
Toda didn't look convinced. Neither did the PE teacher, who was crossing the gym toward him with the particular expression of someone calculating whether this incident required paperwork.
Rei got to his feet before the teacher arrived. He established that his legs worked, that his vision had cleared, and that he could recall his student ID number without difficulty, which he considered an adequate neurological baseline. He told the teacher he was fine. The teacher told him to sit out for the rest of class. Rei sat.
He sat against the wall where he had been sitting before, in the same position, and looked at the gymnasium with the same expression he always wore — calm, quiet, faintly disengaged.
Except now, in the lower right corner of his vision, where there had been nothing before, there was something.
Text. Gold. Clean-edged and precise, rendered in a font that looked like no notification he had ever seen on any phone or computer screen in his life. Visible only when he focused on that corner. Invisible when he looked anywhere else.
He focused.
FULL COURT GACHASystem Initialized.Player identified: Kuze Rei.Welcome to the only banner that matters.Your first pull is waiting.Step onto the court.
Rei read it once. Twice. A third time with the methodical attention he gave to anything that required understanding before action.
Then he looked across the gymnasium.
At the far end, the girls' basketball team was running a passing drill. Precise. Fast. Choreographed by weeks of practice into something that looked almost effortless from a distance.
At the front of the drill, calling the rhythm, catching every pass and redirecting it with the casual authority of someone who had never once questioned whether she belonged exactly where she was — Hina Shirasaki. Captain. Second year. The specific reason Rei had chosen this particular wall to sit against during every PE class for the past four months.
She didn't look at him.
She never looked at him.
Rei looked at the notification in the corner of his vision. Then at the basketball that had hit him, sitting inert ten feet away on the hardwood. Then at his hands, which had caught something in a dream and still felt faintly warm.
He picked up the ball.
It was heavier than he expected.
Or maybe he was just noticing the weight for the first time.