[ Kaiji POV.]
The mop hits the floor with a wet slap and the smell of industrial cleaner that's never been anywhere near an actual lemon, crawled straight up my nose.
I drag it across the white tiles in long, tired stretches. It's 10:47 PM. The combini hums around me, that specific high-frequency buzz of refrigerator units that I've stopped hearing consciously but still feel in the back of my head after four hours. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, Shinjuku's street lights smeared gold and white across wet pavement. It rained earlier, nobody told the weather forecast, apparently.
"Kaiji"
My manager, Kuro-san, leans out from behind the register. He's fifty-three, built like someone carrying the energy of a man who peaked in high school and has been defending that position ever since "Drink something cooler after this. And restock the onigiri, Yamamoto called in sick so you're covering his closing checklist too"
I stopped mopping as I sighed "That's an extra hour. My shift ends at eleven."
"Time and a half," he says, like that settles it, and disappears back behind his register before I can point out that time and a half of eight hundred yen is still eight hundred yen with extra steps.
I look at the mop as it has nothing useful to offer.
This is my life three nights a week. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Four hours each shift, eight hundred yen an hour, which sounds like it should add up to something meaningful by the end of the month but somehow never quite does after rent and groceries and the occasional desperate purchase of something that makes the apartment feel less like a waiting room.
The cooler takes another twenty minutes. I reach into the back of the refrigerator unit to shuffle yoghurt drinks into the front row first in, first out, the eternal law of convenience store refrigeration and the cold crawls up my wrists and settles deep in my elbows. My fingers go numb by the third shelf.
Outside, a salaryman in a soaked suit presses his face against the window, checks the time on the wall clock visible through the glass, and walks on without coming in.
At 11:03 I clock out, shrug my jacket over the uniform because there's no point changing for a twenty-minute walk, and grab a rice triangle from the clearance shelf on the way out. Tuna mayo. Slightly dented on one corner. Twenty percent off with staff perks.
The night air hits me like a damp cloth cool and heavy, still carrying the memory of rain, the street smelling of wet concrete and exhaust fumes and the hot fat venting out of the ramen place across the road. I crack open the coffee I bought before clocking out, take a sip. It's a little too sweet. I drink it anyway because it's warm and I paid for it.
I have exactly three friends. Tanaka, who I met in first year at university and see twice a month if the schedules cooperate. Miki, who texts me memes at two in the morning and has never once talked to me in person. Reiji, who moved to Osaka in April for work and sends long voice messages I listen to on commutes, his voice slightly distorted from the recording, always starting mid-thought like I was already there from the beginning. We don't see each other anymore. We say we'll fix that but don't fix it.
Life is a series of good intentions that keep rescheduling.
My apartment is a seventeen-minute walk from the combini. I've timed it. Eleven months of the same route and I walked calmly with jacket collar up, coffee in hand, brain hovering somewhere between conscious and not.
I walked past the pachinko parlour haemorrhaging noise and neon into the street even at this hour, the machines audible from twenty metres away, that relentless electronic clattering of steel balls. Then walked straight, past the park with the broken fountain, and then the crossing on Haruda Street.
The light went green as I stepped off the curb to put an end to the handicap match with my never ending thoughts.
Then white four-tonner truck moving at sixty in a thirty zone didn't bother to brake, and I don't have time to register the headlights before the impact picks me up off the ground entirely.
My coffee spinned sideways with my body carving through the air and then the asphalt comes up fast and the sound is enormous with a deep crunch that I feel in every bone, and then it stopped with a long scraping skid like it would reverse all this.
I was on my back, staring up at a yellow streetlight. There was no sensation of pain left as the streetlight blurred along with my consciousness.
Damn you, Truck kun!
---
"I'm alive?"
I surface slowly, layer by layer, the way you come back from a very deep sleep with the cold registering first, pressing into my face.
Blood was everywhere, not just on the floor surface.
I push myself upright and my arms shudder with the effort, palms scraping on the surface. I check my chest first, same instinct as you'd check your pockets after a fall, one hand pressed while waiting to make sure it's there or gone.
A heartbeat answered back with a subtle knock.
I let the breath out through my mouth and looked up.
The sky was red.
This wasn't a place at which you'd point and call beautiful. No sun. No moon. The blood simply existing, pressing everything flat beneath it, turning the world into a single terrible painting with one colour and too much of it.
The landscape spreads out around me was flat dark with stone bleeding into red mist at every horizon, rock formations jutting from the surface at every angle which was too sharp, like broken bones pushing through skin. The silence has quite unsettling. It's like way deep water presses, filling the ear canals with something just below the threshold of sound.
I stood up slowly, after I realised there were no doors, no paths, no signs. No welcoming committee, apparently. So adventurous.
"Dead at eighteen. No savings, no degree, no anything worth leaving behind" I pause "But still better than mopping late nights for low pays"
I waited briefly, for something to respond until I picked a direction and walked because standing still in a place is worse than dying.
---
The formations rise on my left as I move and I clock them as rock without really looking, keep walking. But something about them keeps snagging at my eye, a wrongness that my brain keeps flagging and I keep dismissing and after another minute I stop and actually turned to have a look at it
Skulls.
Tens of thousands of them, stacked and compressed under their own sheer weight into formations that climb twenty, thirty metres into the red air. The pressure of accumulation has worn the sides near-smooth, and at the peaks they're jagged where the piling gets uneven.
I stand there and the mist coils slowly around the base of it like it has nowhere better to be.
There's a point where something is too vast and too wrong for a normal reaction, and your mind just goes very still. I'm at that point. I stand there and I look at them and I don't think anything useful for a while.
Then I noticed the light.
At the crown of the nearest formation, seated between the topmost skulls like a capstone placed there deliberately with something pulsing. Not bone. Not stone. It catches the ambient red and does something different with it, something bright like the difference between a wall reflecting a fire and the fire itself like it has been doing this for a long time and expects to keep doing it.
I look at the giant embedded crystal for a moment.
'Don't' says the part of my brain that kept me alive for eighteen years.
'You were hit by a truck forty minutes ago' says the rest of it 'The worst-case scenario has already occurred'
Second argument wins, decisively. I walk to the base of the formation and start climbing because I had nothing else to do.
It wasn't pretty. The skulls shift and grind beneath my feet, a low hollow clacking that rolls out in every direction and echoes off nothing and just keeps going, and the slope steepens fast enough that I have to lean into it and use my hands, fingers scrabbling for purchase on a surface that is smooth and curved and completely uninterested in helping me.
I have to dig into the narrow gaps between skulls to get any grip at all. I don't look down. I keep my eyes on the crystal, pulsing above me, and I push through until my palms are scraped and my knees ache and I'm breathing hard, hauling myself up the last metre and crouching in front of it.
Up close, it's smaller than the distance made it seem. Fist-sized. Uncut, irregular, the shape of something that has never been touched by anyone who wanted to change it. When the pulse fades it goes nearly black, a coal-dark, lightless red-black. When it brightens, the glow comes from deep inside it and turns the surface translucent, and I can see something moving in there like a slow eye.
I reached out for it in hopes to get some information about this place.
The fine edge of the crystal catches my fingertip before I've made full contact. I pulled back on instinct. A single bead of blood wells up from the tip, dark in this light, almost black.
It fell and hit the crystal's surface, spread thin and got absorbed.
The pulsing stopped abruptly followed by complete silence. The mist went perfectly still, then the crystal opened with the light inside blooming outward and the air in front of me filled with something between smoke and luminescence, curling and building, and then it solidified, snapping into focus all at once and I'm looking through a window that wasn't there a second ago into a room somewhere else entirely.
Stone walls dense with shelves. Jars containing things I can't name. Instruments of glass and metal and something else. Bundles of dark material hanging from hooks. Candles burning in greens and deep violets and a white so intense it seems to shiver.
A woman kneeled in the centre of the floor.
Long dark hair fell across her face. She wears something layered and dark and old, fabric that moves like it has its own agenda. Her hands rest on her thighs and she is absolutely still, not the stillness of sleep or peace.
A boy lies at her feet.
He was around the same age as me. Dark-haired, slight. He's folded against the cold stone floor in a way that means nothing is holding him up anymore completely limp, like a coat that's slipped off a chair. His chest rises. Falls. Rises. Each breath thinner than the last, each exhale a little longer coming back from.
The witch reaches forward, unhurried.
In her hand was the crystal. Same dark red. Same slow pulse, same one I touched upon it
She presses it to the boy's chest.
The sound he made was of something being taken from a person who has nothing left to give and is giving it anyway because they have no choice. His fingers curl once, weakly, against the stone. His back arches backward. The woman doesn't move or blinks. She held the crystal there with the focused patience of someone completing a task they've done many times before.
I watch the colour leave his face.
It goes the way a screen dims when the battery runs out, steadily, like the living warmth draining out of his cheeks and lips and the skin beneath his eyes. His fingers uncurl. His breathing shallows to almost nothing.
When it's done, the woman rises. She holds the crystal up in the candlelight and studies it with the expression of someone checking a job against its specifications. Satisfied. Already somewhere else in her head.
Then the vision bleeded through the screen I was witnessing all this unfold.
Red pours in from every edge at once swallowing the room and the shelves and the candles and the woman and the boy until there is nothing left of any of them, just a wall of red in the air in front of me.
While I was still on my knees the skulls beneath me shifted like a trapdoor and I lurch forward and grabbed fingers clawing for anything and found nothing. Smooth curved bone in every direction, nothing to catch on, nothing to hold. The skulls rise around my ankles with a grinding roar that I felt in my chest, and I shove my arms out and scream something that the red air takes and swallows, and they close around my shins, my thighs, my waist, pressing in from all sides, cold and relentless.
I shove and fight and it doesn't matter, and they rise past my chest and over my shoulders and close over my head and the dark comes down like a hand over a candle flame.
My last thought, compressed into the shrinking gap of available consciousness, is that whoever designed this place needs to hear some very serious feedback.
---
The room assembles itself around me in pieces.
Small. Tidy in the specific way of someone who is used to feeling in control of cleanliness. A desk against the far wall with textbooks stacked flush at the edges, a water bottle with the label half-picked-off down one side, a pencil cup that's shaped like a cartoon bear and has clearly been there since middle school.
A window above the desk is showing a sky the particular shade of dark that means somewhere between three and four in the morning, and outside, the amber wash of a single streetlight falls across a quiet residential street. A school uniform hangs over the back of the desk chair, pressed and patient, the academy crest on the breast pocket sharp-edged and clean.
Nothing here, was mine.
My shirt was soaked plastered to my chest and back and sides like it has made a permanent decision about staying there. My hair was matted against my forehead. When I pushed it back with a shaking hand, my fingers come away wet. I sit with that for a moment, then swing my legs off the bed and stand up. The floor under my bare feet was cool and slightly rough, and it smells like straw and the faint ghost of old fabric and someone else's ordinary life.
I'm heading for where I think the bathroom might be when the desk mirror catches the glimpses of me.
I stopped in my tracks as a stranger stared back from the mirror.
A young teen boy with dark eyes of someone who hasn't slept right in a while. Dark hair pushed up wrong on the left side from the pillow. A jaw that's still making its final decisions about what shape it wants to end up. He looks like someone who has had an absolutely terrible night, which is accurate, and he is looking at me with exactly the expression I can feel on my own face with the specific blankness of a brain that has hit the edge of its processing capacity and is buying time.
I raise my right hand slowly.
He raised his.
I hold it there for a second. Watch him hold his. The streetlight outside the window doesn't move, and the room doesn't move, and we stand there on opposite sides of the glass and regard each other in the three-in-the-morning silence.
I turn away. Sit back down on the edge of the bed. Lean forward with my elbows on my knees and stare at the floor between my feet.
"It looks like the truck kun does send people to different worlds " I say quietly. To the floor. To nobody "Whoever you were, right, I'm sorry I don't know your name. I don't know why it's me in here and not you. But I'm not wasting this life like my previous one"
Then all of a sudden seventeen years of someone else's life simultaneously, crashed into my skull like a flood through a broken wall. Not impressions. Not vague feelings. Complete memories, fully formed, specific and concrete, all stacked on top of each other with no gaps and no mercy.
It took me a while to register all that at once.
When I finally sat up, I learned about my new name of this new identity that I was given.
Ren Unohana.
This was his room.
I look across at the uniform on the chair. Read the crest on the breast pocket properly this time.
"Kuoh Academy"
I went through his memories deliberately, like flipping pages, looking for specific names and they surface without resistance.
Rias Gremory.
In A school corridor, fluorescent light, the flash of red hair as she turns away at the exact moment Ren happened to look up. Then Akeno Himejima. Near a window in the library, a quality of playfulness like he remembered. Ren had watched both of them the way most of the school's male population did, from a respectful, helpless distance, with the bone-deep understanding that certain people simply don't belong in the same category as everything around them.
I sit with that as they could wait as I go through my priorities.
Then finally after I went through each and every memory about this Academy and town, I came to realize I was in.
"High School DxD"
I needed nobody to confirm it.
I knew this world. I knew what was underneath this, the devil territories, the fallen angel politics, the other factions held the world by agreements that are older than the buildings above them. I know what dangers that lied, and how fast it moves once it starts, and what it does to anyone caught nearby who isn't ready. There's a lot I need to figure out. A lot I need to do before this town starts moving.
But something on my right hand has been pulling at my attention since I got up off the floor and I've been avoiding it but I can't keep avoiding it anymore.
I turn my hand over and look at it properly.
A ring on my ring finger. I've never owned a ring in my life. Dark metal band, undecorated except for the stone set into the face of it, was a small crystal, with an irregular uncut.
Pulsing.
It had the exact rhythm. The exact colour. The same one I swear I see moving somewhere inside it, deep in that red place.
My finger moves toward it and I felt the fine edge catch before I've made full contact, and the bead of blood wells up at the tip of my ring finger, and I watch it fall onto the stone's surface, and I think:
Yeah. Obviously. What else would it do?
Something drops from it and it hits the tatami with a thud as I stare down at it between my knees.
A Book?
I reached down and pick it up.
It's cover was of leather. Dark metal clasps run across the front, ornate, embossed with different patterns across it.
I sit cross-legged on the bed of a dead stranger's bedroom, in a body that doesn't belong to me, in a world that was supposed to be fiction, and I hold a grimoire that fell out of a ring on my finger, and I looked at it.
Because there, set into the centre of the cover was pressed flush into the dark shifting leather like it had always been there, like the book had been built around it was same damn crystal.
The same one from the formation. The same one on my finger. I know its shape very well now, the specific uncut angles of it, the way the light moves through it rather than off it.
And with this the thought that settles into me, is that this, all of it, the truck, the realm, the skulls, the vision, the ring, this body, this world, none of it was an accident.
Something brought me here deliberately.
And whoever it was, they've been planning this for a very long time.
I am gonna find out who is this person and why they brought me into this world.