He was.
An empty classroom, to be more precise.
Wooden desks stood in neat rows. A dusty green chalkboard dominated the front wall. Sunlight poured in through wide windows, shadows stretching across the tiled floor. Ceiling fans spun above in slow, lazy circles.
He blinked at the scene, utterly baffled. 'What the hell is happening...?'
"—ah! You're awake!"
He flinched.
The voice was high-pitched. Cheerful and sweet. He turned his head slowly, hesitant.
Apparently, the classroom wasn't empty after all.
Just right to his left, a girl leaned over him with starry eyes, cotton candy hair tied into signature twin buns, and a neatly pressed school uniform.
He recognized her immediately. His eyes widened.
Ai Hoshino
Kazuto momentarily forgot how to breathe.
It wasn't because he was starstruck or emotionally compromised—let's not be dramatic—but because his brain was trying to process data it didn't even remember storing.
That face. That uniform. That hair—God help him, those twin buns.
"You looked like you were having a really weird dream just now," she said, tilting her head, all sugar and sunshine. "You okay, Kazuto-kun?"
'...Kazuto-kun?'
His eyes dropped instinctively to his own body.
Black school trousers. A white-collared shirt. A loosely tied necktie. A student ID badge hanging from a lanyard around his neck.
'Kazuto… That Kazuto Kurohara?!'
The only Kazuto he knew—outside of himself—was the protagonist of his currently serialized fanfic. The one he'd been aggressively updating night after night to stop the algorithm from throttling his engagement into oblivion.
Kazuto Kurohara: a high schooler with supposedly sharp observational skills, a tragically average backstory, and an utter lack of gentlementary. In short—him, but fictionalized. Which meant—
His gaze snapped back to the girl. Ai Hoshino. The childhood friend. Aspiring idol. Secretly in love with the protagonist since elementary school. Overflowing with emotional availability. Hyper-supportive. Statistically single. Designed with excruciating care for demographic appeal and emotionally optimized for peak reader retention.
And she was currently smiling like any of this made sense.
Well, maybe to her, it did.
He, on the other hand, could only come up with three explanations:
1. He was unconscious and his brain had defaulted to escapist nonsense as a coping mechanism.
2. His blood sugar had tanked so hard it triggered hallucinations.
3. He had somehow been forcibly inserted into his own fanfiction.
Option three was, objectively, the best scenario.
He rose to his feet slowly, the metal legs of the chair dragging noisily against the linoleum floor.
"Kazuto-kun?" Ai called out, a hint of concern in her voice.
He didn't answer.
He was too busy suppressing a grin and internally throwing confetti. 'No more job!'
He'd been emotionally dead there anyway. Anything outside of writing had always felt like some kind of forced labor sentence—just with fewer chains and more Excel sheets.
His family was long gone. That particular subplot had ended years ago. His dad disappeared first—figuratively at first, then quite literally. Mum followed not long after. The rest was silence, and then rent.
Extended relatives had the collective emotional range of a printer manual and the same level of usefulness. He bounced around for a bit—some couch here, a spare room there. Eventually, he stopped asking and people stopped offering. As for friends—well, they'd gradually thinned out the moment his emotional responses stopped being algorithm-friendly. But here—
He glanced at Ai. She returned his look, head tilted, a little puzzled.
In this world, he had a childhood friend with borderline concerning levels of affection, a school uniform that actually fit, and—most importantly—not a single overdue bill in sight.
'It's a heaven!'
Kazuto let out a short breath of laughter and sank back into his seat. "Sorry, Ai. I was just having an epiphany there."
"Alright... if you're sure," she said, though her cheeks puffed slightly with uncertainty. "You looked a bit out of it. I thought maybe you'd hit your head or something."
"Fortunately, that doesn't seems to be the case."
"You sure?" She leaned in, shielding her eyes with her hand as if examining him under a spotlight. He instinctively leaned away. "You've got that... I dunno, vaguely existential expression a second ago. Do you know what day it is?"
He had to admit: he was having a bit of trouble keeping his actual reaction in check.
He was still a guy, after all. And when a girl like Ai Hoshino leaned in this close—no matter how detached he tried to be—it would've been biologically dishonest not to react. If it didn't, he'd have to seriously re-evaluate his sexuality.
Anyone who wouldn't was either lying or gay.
That said, he wasn't that tense. Just—appropriately alert.
He exhaled.
"...That's just my face, Ai."
She giggled. "Still snarky. That's a good sign."
Without warning, she reached for his tie and adjusted it with clinical familiarity. "You're lucky I woke you up. We've got ten minutes until the entrance ceremony, you know?"
'Right. April first. First day of first year.'
That was the start of the story.
No one could know the truth.
Not Ai.
Not the others he knew would show up soon.
He exhaled quietly through his nose, though the faintest smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. Despite some tension rising in his chest, there was a strange and subdued sense of contentment brewing beneath it.
His actual school life had been anything but fulfilling. Most of it was spent suppressing impulses, regulating expressions, and maintaining operational silence. Keep the head down, mouth shut, emotions boxed. The reason is insignificant enough it didn't need to be addressed.
If this was a rerun, he had no intention of repeating the same behavioral script.
This time, he'd proceed with reduced internal safety protocols.
Before he could finish outlining a tentative action plan, however, something shifted at the edge of his vision. A faint flicker—then, a semi-transparent interface slid into view.
"…?"
✦ FicWriter+ ✦
A/N: Rate it from 1 to 10, with the reasoning as well, if possible. That'll help me covering what's lacking from the story.
7+ Advanced Chapters: https://www.patreon.com/c/YvisEV
Words Count: 977