The silence in the Kazehaya house was a living thing. It breathed in the dust motes dancing in the afternoon sunbeams and exhaled through the quiet hum of the refrigerator. For Rei Kazehaya, this silence was his most constant companion, a heavy blanket that had settled over his life the day his parents' car met a patch of black ice. That was a year ago. Now, the silence was just a part of the architecture, as integral as the walls and the roof.
He moved through the house like a ghost, his routine a series of quiet rituals. Wake up, toast, school, convenience store for dinner, homework, sleep. Repeat. The generous life insurance his parents had left was a cage of comfort, providing for his every need while ensuring he didn't need anyone. Friends from school offered condolences that faded into awkward greetings and eventually, nothing at all. He didn't blame them. He had become an island, and the tides of high school life had simply washed around him. Loneliness wasn't a visitor anymore; it was the sole occupant of the house, and he was merely its guest.
It was on a sweltering Saturday, while undertaking the long-avoided task of cleaning the attic, that his life fractured. The attic was his father's sanctuary, smelling of sawdust, old paper, and forgotten projects. Tucked away in a heavy wooden chest beneath a pile of old photo albums was an object that didn't belong. It was a mask, but only the top half, crafted from a material that looked like bone but felt colder, heavier. It was stark white, shaped into the upper jaw of some predatory canine or wolf, with jagged edges where teeth should be. It radiated a palpable emptiness, a chilling void that seemed to drink the warmth from the air.
He'd never seen it before. His father had been a history teacher, not a collector of occult artifacts. Curiosity, a feeling he hadn't truly felt in a year, pricked at him. He reached out, his fingers tracing the sharp line of a fang.
The moment his skin made contact, a bolt of white-hot agony shot up his arm. It wasn't a burn; it was an invasion. A torrent of raw, untamed energy flooded his senses, carrying with it an eternity of solitude, a loneliness so vast and crushing it made his own grief feel like a fleeting shadow. The world dissolved into a cacophony of whispers and a blinding light before plunging into absolute blackness.
When consciousness returned, it was slow and syrupy. He was on the attic floor, the sun having shifted, casting long shadows across the room. The mask was gone. He pushed himself up, his body aching as if he'd been run over. A sharp, stinging sensation on the left side of his neck drew his attention. He stumbled to a dusty mirror leaning against a wall and stared. Fused to his skin, just below his jawline, was a sharp, white fragment of the mask, a piece of the beast's jawbone now a permanent part of him.
But that wasn't the only change. His mind was a chaotic library of new information, of instincts he'd never known. He understood. The mask was a Hollow, a lost soul, and its essence—its power and its pain—had merged with him. It had been drawn to the echo of its own desolation within him. The aspect of death it embodied was Loneliness, and now, it was his.
He felt a pull in his hands, an energy begging for release. He focused on it, his heart hammering against his ribs. With a thought, two objects materialized in his palms, coalescing from the very air. They were pistols, sleek and pitch-black, their design both elegant and menacing. They felt impossibly real, heavy and cool in his grasp. He knew, with an instinct that defied logic, what they could do.
Driven by this new, primal impulse, he made his way to the backyard, the overgrown grass swallowing his footsteps. He raised one of the pistols, aiming at the thick trunk of the old oak tree his father had planted. He squeezed the trigger. There was no gunshot, no recoil in the traditional sense. Instead, a crimson orb of energy gathered at the barrel's tip before erupting in a searing beam. The Cero, a voice in his head supplied. The beam struck the oak, and for a silent moment, nothing happened. Then, the section of the trunk he'd aimed at simply… vanished, disintegrated into nothing but smoking splinters. The power was terrifying, exhilarating. He felt a drain on his own energy, a deep-seated weariness that told him this power had a cost.
Then he remembered the mask itself. He lifted his right hand, the black pistol dissolving into motes of spiritual energy. He swiped his hand across his face, a gesture that felt as natural as breathing. The bone-white mask materialized over his features, clicking into place. The world sharpened. The scent of damp earth, the buzz of a fly fifty feet away, the subtle shift in air pressure—it was all magnified a hundredfold. His own spiritual pressure, a concept he now understood intimately, skyrocketed. He felt faster, stronger, a predator in a world of prey. The silence of his life had been replaced by the howl of a lonely beast.
Weeks passed. He learned to control it, to suppress the spiritual pressure so he could walk through the world unnoticed. The pistols, the mask, the Ceros—they became his secret, another layer of isolation. And then, one mundane Tuesday afternoon, the fragile reality he had constructed was shattered again.
He was walking his usual route home from school when he saw them. A girl with brilliant auburn hair and gyaru like style, gesturing wildly as she spoke. And a boy, lanky and awkward, who seemed to vibrate with nervous energy.
"…and that's why ghosts are empirically more verifiable than unsubstantiated UAP sightings!" the girl, Momo Ayase, declared with the confidence of a seasoned prosecutor.
"But the sheer statistical probability of extraterrestrial life, combined with declassified government documents, points to a far more logical conclusion!" the boy, Ken Takakura, retorted, pushing his glasses up his nose.
Rei froze mid-step. The names, the faces, the absurd argument—it was all ripped from the pages of Dandadan, a manga he had devoured in another lifetime, before the silence. It couldn't be. Transmigration? A fictional world? After becoming a human-Hollow hybrid, the idea wasn't as insane as it should have been. He watched them, a cold knot tightening in his stomach. They were real. The aliens, the yokai, the Turbo Granny… it was all real.
A part of him, the part that still craved connection, felt a bizarre pull. But the rest of him, the part that had been forged in loss and reforged by the Hollow, screamed in protest. He had his own power to master, his own demons to keep leashed. Getting involved in their brand of supernatural chaos was a death sentence, or worse, an invitation to a life even more complicated than his own. He was an observer. A ghost. He had to stay that way.
He watched as they made their ridiculous bet and stormed off in opposite directions—Okarun toward the haunted tunnel, Momo toward the UFO-sighting hotspot at the abandoned hospital. He could feel the faint thrum of spiritual energy emanating from the tunnel, a siren's call to the Hollow within him. But he resisted. He turned his back on them, on the story he had stumbled into, and walked the other way. He walked back toward the quiet house, toward the familiar embrace of the silence, unaware that in a world as loud as this, even the most determined ghost cannot remain unseen for long.