Morning in apartment 4A—a concrete box far too expensive for the promises of life it offered—was always greeted by a cold silence. A silence broken only by the forced hiss of the electric kettle, like a labored breath. Kyouya, a thirty-seven-year-old man whose eyes had long lost their spark and grown accustomed to staring into emptiness, forced his heavy eyelids open.
Exactly 06:00. No alarm. Kyouya didn't have the luxury of that simple amenity. His biological clock had been calibrated by a soul-draining work rhythm.
He moved with painful automation. Struggling to push his exhausted body off the mattress, he became aware of the stiffness spreading like frozen roots from his neck down to his lower back—the lingering aftermath of lifting and stacking cardboard boxes.
Listlessly, he grabbed a towel and shuffled to the bathroom.
The shower was brief and emotionless. The cold water slapping his skin was the only honest stimulant strong enough to make him conscious. After finishing and dressing neatly enough, he ate breakfast: a piece of dry toast without butter, accompanied by bland black coffee made from the cheapest grounds he could buy.
It wasn't that he couldn't afford decent food. He could. He had plenty of money in the bank. He just didn't use it. He wanted to save it for his old age. Retire in peace—that was the endgame.
06:45. He was ready. Faded flannel shirt, jeans, and a pair of boots whose soles had worn thin—tangible proof of the distance he'd walked from his apartment to the place called hell. His steps were heavy; every footfall seemed to resist both Earth's gravity and his existential burden, a passive refusal of his own life's momentum.
Before closing the door, his hand moved on the most important habit—a simple act. He watered the tiny cactus on the windowsill. Then he left the apartment, slipped Bluetooth earphones into his ears, and unleashed static music.
Not to drown out external noise—the outside world had long ago become meaningless background. These walls were built to blur his world, to muffle the most dangerous murmur of all: the voice inside his own head. Cynical questions about purpose and other empty ramblings that surfaced unbidden.
As Kyouya walked along the dew-wet main street, the overcast day seemed to mock his boredom—a thick gray sky promising neither rain nor sun, just meteorological mediocrity. His sleepy eyes unintentionally caught the giant neon glow plastered across the facade of a luxury office building a few blocks from his apartment.
It was a digital billboard advertising World Line—the globally trending fantasy visual MMORPG. Blue and gold light burst from the ad, a visual anomaly slicing through the morning gray. The scene was pure fantasy: dragons, crystal towers piercing the sky, a heroic figure wielding a glowing sword as though he were the manifestation of divine will.
Bold text read:
A New Life Begins Here. Get Your Droid Now and Explore This Virtual World With Me!
A New Life. Kyouya stared at it with tired cynicism.
The most expensive false promise there is, he thought, recognizing World Line as a wildly successful illusion. A polished capsule. A Droid pod. Those who escaped there merely traded a concrete prison for an imaginary one. What's the difference?
I do like reading fantasy novels. But living in one? Not appealing. Running from reality is just as bad as passively facing it. To me, they're essentially the same thing. Ironically, he himself was one of those who passively faced reality. He knew what was right, what was wrong—but he never moved. Pathetic.
"Becoming Darion Villiers took courage—even if it was fiction. Becoming a World Line hero only requires a credit card and a refusal to face your own failures," he muttered.
Ironically again, Kyouya was one of the 'creators' of that very illusion. The division he worked in—which developed the pink-and-optimism-drenched otome game Clover Lovers—fell under the same corporate umbrella that birthed World Line.
More precisely, Kyouya's job was designer and animator, so he was responsible for a lot. Reading books was also a side task: analyzing them so Clover Lovers' plot could intersect meaningfully with The Greatest Hero's storyline. Though he quite enjoyed reading, that didn't mean he wouldn't eventually grow sick of it.
Still, it was his job. At least the pay was worth sacrificing almost all his time staring at screens that inevitably made his eyes hurt. Plus, the fans' requests were genuinely exhausting.
What's so great about red-flag characters? Kyouya couldn't fathom why people kept demanding them—even harassing poor employees assigned to those tasks. In the end, the work got dumped on him—a designer and animator who now also had to become a narrative planner—just because he was the 'model employee'! What next? Was he supposed to be capable of everything!?
If not for the high salary, he would have committed a crime under this level of stress long ago.
He sighed. "Damn rich people," he repeated, referring to the main investor who funded and pushed all these ambitious ideas. The same investor who had backed the fantasy novel The Greatest Hero—which had completely flopped because it was "too ambitious" or "poorly promoted."
The Greatest Hero. A novel set in the same world as Clover Lovers—a naive attempt to inject epic grandeur into a dating game. It failed. World Line was the redemption. The whole idea had been one person's vision; the company—including Kyouya—was merely forced hands bringing someone else's dream to life.
The story was interesting, but people usually didn't want to read anything complex. Most preferred accelerated pacing and brief explanations… which only birthed generic, trashy, trope-heavy stories. That thought made him sigh again, because he knew firsthand how hard it was to satisfy people who first demanded more, then got angry and blamed everyone behind the scenes. Finding a masterpiece was difficult—especially when pressure to polish everything perfectly often ruined it all. The idea itself was cheap; executing the idea well was expensive and required time.
He quickened his pace, too tired for more thinking. He had to bury his thoughts for now. Kyouya walked toward the subway station. He didn't see the rushing faces around him—just a moving mass, atoms driven by the momentum of necessity, just like him. The damp morning air felt thick and suffocating.
•••
07:05. He reached Shinjuku-sanchome Station—a labyrinth of steel and concrete packed with thousands. Pushing, friction, the mingled stench of sweat and perfume created a revolting sensation. Kyouya's sharp senses caught it all.
Mondays were always this crowded.
He navigated the packed platform, seeking the edge spot—closest to silence, though silence had long departed.
Amid the mixed odors, Kyouya's nose caught something foreign, something utterly out of place in the underground chaos: the scent of forget-me-not flowers. A small bloom that usually smelled faint. Here, in the middle of the uproar, it came through clearly—cold, like a strange, mystical warning.
Weird. It's still late summer... whatever, probably just perfume, he thought.
He waited for the Marunouchi Line train, his gaze blank, piercing the dark tunnel wall. The static music in his ears reached its peak—high-frequency shrieking that isolated him in his personal noise bubble.
Kyouya checked his phone to see the schedule on the app he used. The app was updating, so he had to wait a moment. The new feature: a 'Wish Tree.' Childish.
"Wish, huh?"
He glanced briefly at the feature before his fingers moved to type something—just as the arrival announcement rang out: a dry, mechanical voice. The crowd behind him began surging forward with collective impatience.
Tch... where's the station staff who's supposed to be on duty? he thought, glancing left and right.
But at that moment, something happened. A small, trivial push struck his left shoulder. Just an accidental touch—the momentum of another life colliding with Kyouya. But for a body already on the verge of physical and mental collapse, that push was the trigger. His exhausted frame had no time to brace itself; gravity simply yanked him forward, past the yellow warning line.
In what felt like an eternity, the noise in his earphones still roared in his brain. Kyouya faintly heard the approaching train's horn—the familiar threat—and the strong metallic smell.
He saw the iron rails below, mossy tiles, and the bottomless black gap.
Just like that? his mind whispered. A tiny nudge from a random stranger ends it all?
As he fell, his limp body reacted with unexpected instinct. Kyouya's head turned slowly. He didn't look forward toward the oncoming train. He looked back—over his stumbling shoulder—toward the crowd that had just pushed him.
In the stretched fraction of a second before terror, his passively pale face caught something.
An anomaly glimpsed from behind his back. Something that shocked him more than the approaching death. All emotions—shock, disbelief, fear—merged in his widening eyes, posing one stupid question at the very end of his life.
"Huh?"
What did Kyouya witness in that moment? An unspoken question, a mystery embedded in the crowd's collective panic.
THUD!
The sound was loud and painful—his kneecaps slamming into the filthy rail stones. The cold, sharp sensation crawled upward, but it was already too late. At the same instant, a shockwave far greater than any ordinary train struck him. From inside the tunnel came a far louder boom than any horn, followed by the screech of metal grinding against concrete.
CRACK!!
It wasn't just impact. It was the sound of bone snapping, flesh torn apart by suddenly shifting rails or the steel wheels that had reached Kyouya. A fast, brutal, very real death. No drama, no final dialogue—just a chaotic physical end.
His body was thrown, merging with the dirty rails. Around him, muffled howls and panicked screams rose, mixing with electric hissing, the smell of burning copper, and smoke. The explosion itself sounded ambiguous—perhaps the train had hit something, or perhaps the push behind him had triggered a darker, larger chain reaction.
The chaos was an acoustic shockwave, proof of an event far beyond a mere accident...
Kyouya's vision—or whatever remained of his consciousness—now locked onto a small object beside his paralyzed, freezing head.
His phone.
It had been smashed and lay on the stones, spiderwebbed cracks across the screen, thick blood splattered on its surface—blood that had sprayed from the fresh wound that had just ended his existence.
The phone was still on. It didn't ring—still connected to the Bluetooth earphones in Kyouya's ears, where the white noise had now faded, replaced by a calmer song.
The screen showed the music app. The song title, its sound slowly dying down.
Mili - 'In hell we live, lament'
Before the track switched to 'My Creator'
In the dim background light, the most banal reality tried one last time to breach his defenses. Screams, smoke smell, and loud booms from the station sounded muffled—damped by the earphones and his narrowing focus. Everything became indistinct background.
All his remaining awareness fixed on the sudden notification that appeared on screen. Overlapping messages from the contact he'd nicknamed "Piece of Shit 💩". But he could no longer hold on. His whole body hurt so intensely that the pain had dulled. Consciousness faded faster than wind.
The messages came one after another, burying the previous ones.
[23 Nov 07:08] Piece of Shit 💩: Sorry for bothering you all this time.
[23 Nov 07:08] Piece of Shit 💩: I was just pissed because you never got angry.
[23 Nov 07:08] Piece of Shit 💩: Are you a robot or what?
[23 Nov 07:09] Piece of Shit 💩: My way might've been wrong, but you're really like a rock and it's annoying as hell.
A hot splash of blood—source unknown—fell onto the screen, soaking the cracks and slightly blurring the text, as though marking that belated confession.
[23 Nov 07:09] Piece of Shit 💩: This time I'll finish all the division's tasks for you and treat you to lunch as my apology. Ciao at work, buddy.
A belated offer of redemption from an opportunist who, it turned out, still had a shred of conscience. The irony—so fundamental it almost could have made Kyouya laugh—if he still had the physical ability, or even the awareness to know the message existed.
Right after the last message appeared, the green phone icon blinked on screen.
Incoming Call: Piece of Shit 💩
The call rang silently—because no one would ever pick it up. Not now. Not ever.
To be continued.