Chapter 33: return to a sweet home
The transition was not a violent lurch, but a seamless, silent substitution. One moment, the five of them were stumbling through the calming portal, the weight of the unconscious Tarameki a grim anchor between Kamiko and Bachi. The next, they were simply… standing. The coppery scent of blood and the ozone crackle of a dying realm were replaced by the faint, familiar odors of chalk dust, old wood, and industrial floor cleaner.
They were in their classroom.
Sunlight, real and warm, streamed through the large windows, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. Rows of empty desks faced a whiteboard filled with half-erased Japanese grammar diagrams. The clock on the wall ticked with a soft, rhythmic click. It was utterly, blessedly normal.
For a single, heart-lifting second, they dared to believe Entity 404's power had been absolute. He had not only saved them but rewound time, placing them back at the exact moment they had left. The entire ordeal—the haunted city, the tournament, the glitching schoolhouse—felt like a fleeting, collective nightmare.
That illusion shattered with the creak of the classroom door.
Their homeroom teacher, Ms. Tanaka, stepped inside, a stack of papers in her hand. She froze mid-step, her eyes widening behind her glasses as they landed on the five students who had materialized out of nowhere. Her mouth fell open. The papers slipped from her grasp, fluttering to the floor like startled birds.
A silence, thick and disbelieving, swallowed the room.
Ms. Tanaka's hand flew to her chest. "You… you're… back?" she stammered, her voice a high-pitched whisper of pure shock. "But… how? The police… everyone has been searching for you since yesterday!"
The word hit them like a physical blow. Yesterday.
Kaguro's analytical mind, which had been calculating their re-entry point, short-circuited. "Yesterday?" he repeated, the word feeling foreign on his tongue.
Bachi's grip on Tarameki tightened instinctively. The man groaned softly, still unconscious, a stark and bloody anomaly in the pristine classroom.
Before any of them could form a coherent thought, the school's morning bell erupted in a shrill, deafening clangor. It was the bell for the first period to end.
The hallway outside, silent a moment before, exploded into the chaotic, vibrant noise of student life. Lockers slammed, voices shouted, and the thunder of hundreds of footsteps echoed like a stampede. The door to their classroom was flung open by a student rushing past, who did a comical double-take, skidding to a halt to stare at them.
The news spread faster than a virus.
Whispers turned into pointing fingers. The crowd in the hallway swelled, curious faces pressing against the door and windows. The five of them stood at the center of a rapidly tightening circle of gasps and murmurs.
"It's them!"
"Where did they come from?"
"Is that blood?"
Through the gawking crowd, the school principal, Mr. Yamada, and two police officers who had been stationed on campus pushed their way into the room. Their expressions were a mixture of profound relief and utter bewilderment.
"Kaguro? Kamiko? All of you…" Principal Yamada's voice was trembling. "We thought… we feared the worst. The entire city has been looking for you. Where have you been?"
The five exchanged a frantic, silent look. A unified, unspoken pact passed between them: Tell them nothing. The truth was a door that, once opened, could never be closed. It would lead to psych wards, laboratories, and a lifetime of being labeled insane.
Kamiko, ever the quickest to fabricate under pressure, spoke first. "We… we don't know, sir," he said, his voice convincingly shaky. "The last thing I remember is being in class, and then… everything went black. We just woke up here a minute ago."
It was a flimsy story, full of holes, but it was the only one they had.
The lead police officer, a stern-faced man with a weary gaze, stepped forward. "You don't remember anything? Nothing at all?" His eyes scanned them, lingering on their disheveled clothes, the dirt smudged on Kamiko's cheek, the faint, fading scratches on Bachi's arms. His gaze then dropped to Tarameki, and his professional composure cracked. "And who is this? Is he injured?"
"We found him," Alan blurted out, his voice small. "We don't know who he is. He was just… with us when we woke up."
The officer's radio crackled to life. "Unit 7, report. Have the missing juveniles been located? Over."
"Affirmative," the officer replied, his eyes never leaving Tarameki's limp form. "All five are present. We have a sixth individual, an unidentified male, unconscious and requiring immediate medical attention. Requesting an ambulance at the school. Proceed with caution."
The next hour was a blur of controlled chaos. Paramedics arrived, carefully loading Tarameki onto a stretcher and whisking him away to the hospital under police escort. The five friends were separated, ushered into different, small administrative offices for questioning.
The story they had to stick to was simple, repetitive, and utterly unbelievable, even to themselves: We don't know. We blacked out. We woke up here.
Their interrogators were patient at first, then increasingly frustrated. They were asked about the last 24 hours, about their families, about enemies, about any strange occurrences. They stuck to the script, their faces masks of confused innocence.
The breaking point came when the head of school security, a man named Sato, entered the room where Kaguro was being questioned. He placed a laptop on the table.
"We have reviewed all security footage from the entire campus," Sato said, his voice flat and final. "From the moment you were last seen in this classroom yesterday, to the moment you reappeared today. There is nothing."
He turned the screen towards Kaguro. It showed a time-lapse of the empty classroom. The light from the windows shifted from morning sun to afternoon glow to evening darkness, and back to morning again. Desks stood empty. The clock ticked. Nothing moved.
"You never left this room," Sato stated, his voice low and intense. "According to every camera, at every entrance and exit, you were in this classroom for over twenty-four hours. But you weren't. The cameras show an empty room. You are not on any footage entering, and you are not on any footage leaving. You simply… vanished from reality, and then you reappeared."
He leaned forward, his eyes boring into Kaguro's.
"So, I will ask you one more time. Where were you?"
Kaguro felt a cold dread seep into his bones. This was worse than anyone finding evidence. This was no evidence. They had become ghosts in the machine, a logical paradox that the modern world was utterly unequipped to handle. Their alibi was impossible.
When they were finally released to their families late that afternoon, the reunions were tearful, hysterical, and shadowed by a deep, unspoken fear. Their parents clung to them, sobbing with relief, but their eyes held a question that had no answer.
The five were eventually gathered back at Kamiko's new house, the one he now shared with Alan. The mandatory counseling session with a stern, disbelieving school psychologist was over. The police had left, for now, promising to follow up after Tarameki was conscious and could be questioned. They were alone for the first time since their return.
The living room was silent. The weight of the last two days—the twenty-four hours of hellish dimensions and the eight hours of intense, real-world scrutiny—crushed down on them.
Alan was the first to break. He sat on the floor, his knees drawn to his chest, trembling uncontrollably. The mask of confused innocence he'd worn for the adults dissolved, leaving raw, unvarnished terror. "They don't believe us," he whispered, his voice cracking. "They'll never believe us. They think we're lying. Or crazy."
Kashimo, who had been pacing like a caged animal, slammed his fist against the wall. "Of course they don't believe us! We told them we blacked out and teleported! What did we expect?" The frustration in his voice was a thin veil for his own terror.
"It's the cameras," Kaguro said, his voice hollow. He sat on the sofa, staring at his hands as if they belonged to a stranger. "The CCTV. It's the proof that we're telling the truth, and the proof that makes us look insane. We didn't just disappear from school. We disappeared from reality itself. We are a system error."
Bachi, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, finally spoke. He was looking out the window at the quiet, normal street. "It's not over," he said softly. "The police… they're confused now. But they won't just drop this. A man covered in blood appeared out of thin air with five missing kids. They'll be back. With more questions. With… doctors."
The word 'doctors' hung in the air, more terrifying than any monster they had faced.
Kamiko let out a bitter, humorless laugh. "So what's the plan? We stick to the story? We all get committed to the same psychiatric ward? We become a case study?"
"We have no other story," Kaguro replied, his tone grim. "The truth is a one-way ticket to a padded cell. Our only hope is that Tarameki wakes up and has a better lie than we do. Or that he doesn't wake up at all." The cold pragmatism in his voice shocked even himself.
The reality of their situation was a prison more confining than any realm of darkness. They were back on Earth, but they were more trapped than ever. They were home, but they were aliens in their own lives. The dimensions had spat them back out, but the marks they left were invisible, psychological scars that would never heal.
They had survived gods and monsters, only to be defeated by the unyielding logic of a security camera. The world thought they had been missing for a day. But they knew the truth. They had been to hell and back, and the only thing waiting for them upon their return was a different kind of nightmare.
The sun set outside, casting long shadows across the room. The five of them sat in the growing darkness, not speaking, each lost in the terrifying realization that for them, the normal world had become the most dangerous realm of all.
Chapter 33 ends.
To be continued