The world is a noisy place.
This wasn't some profound, philosophical revelation I'd had while meditating under a waterfall. It was a simple, observable fact I confirmed every day at 8:22 AM, sitting in classroom 2-B of Kitahama Senior High. The air was a thick soup of overlapping conversations—weekend gossip, frantic copying of last night's math homework, debates over the latest gacha game banner. It was a chaotic symphony of youth, and I, Kaito Hoshino, was the silent audience member with the best seats in the house.
My headphones were, as always, perched over my ears. They weren't playing anything. Music was just another layer of noise, and I preferred my silence pure and unprocessed. The headphones were a social firewall, a universally understood sign that said, "Do not engage." They were the most effective piece of technology I owned.
From my seat by the window, third from the back, I had a panoramic view of the social ecosystem. In the front, the diligent students, their backs ramrod straight. In the center, the main cliques, the gravitational cores around which the rest of the class orbited. And in the back, us—the window-gazers, the sleepers, the manga-readers, the existentially exhausted. The Flotsam.
My eyes drifted across the room. I saw Hina Yuzuki, her fiery side-ponytail bobbing as she laughed loudly at something, her energy so bright it was almost a physical force. She was currently leaning over the desk of her friend, a quiet girl named Saki. A few rows away, Renji Kurobane was already slouched in his seat, his lanky frame folded into the small desk, dyed ash-blonde hair falling over his face as he scrolled through his phone with practiced indifference. He radiated an aura of "I was bored of this conversation before it even began," something I could almost respect. Then there was Aoi Serizawa, sitting perfectly still near the front. Her dark green hair was immaculate, her glasses perched on her nose. She wasn't talking to anyone. She was writing, as she always was, in a simple, unadorned notebook. Her gaze would occasionally sweep the room, analytical and cold, like a security camera cataloging data.
My gaze settled on the desk directly in front of mine. It was occupied by a boy named Suzuki. No, wait. Sato. That's it. Kenji Sato. He had a habit of drumming his fingers on his desk, a nervous, off-beat rhythm that somehow managed to be both irritating and completely unnoticeable to everyone but me. He turned around, his expression apologetic.
"Hey, Hoshino-kun," he whispered, "mind if I borrow a mechanical pencil lead? I'm completely out."
I blinked, my mind taking a moment to buffer the unexpected interaction. I nodded silently, popped open my pencil case, and handed him a single 0.5mm graphite stick.
"You're a lifesaver," he said with a grateful smile, turning back around.
A perfectly normal, mundane, and utterly forgettable exchange. It was the last time I would ever speak to Kenji Sato. I didn't know that then, of course. In life, you never get a notification when the final moments are happening. There's no dramatic music cue. There's just... silence afterward.
The day progressed with the same monotonous rhythm as always. Lessons droned on, the lunch bell rang, more lessons followed. The final bell chimed at 3:15 PM, releasing us from our state-mandated holding cells. As I packed my bag, I noticed Sato had already left, his chair slightly askew. He'd forgotten to return the pencil lead. Or rather, the pencil he'd put it in. A minor debt in the grand ledger of high school interactions. I shrugged it off and headed home.
That was the day the sky broke.
It happened around sunset. I was in my room, staring out the window, watching the clouds bleed from orange to a deep, bruised purple. Then, the color began to warp. The purple deepened into an unnatural, almost violet hue, a color I'd only ever seen in cheap sci-fi anime. The air grew thick and heavy, charged with an oppressive humidity that promised a torrential downpour.
But the rain never came.
Instead, silent lightning began to crawl across the sky. It wasn't the familiar, brilliant flash-and-rumble. This was different. It was slow, deliberate, spreading like cracks in glass, forming intricate, web-like patterns against the violet canvas. It was utterly, profoundly silent. No thunder, no sound of rushing wind. The world outside my window had been muted. The air in my room felt heavy, and a low hum, more a feeling in my bones than a sound in my ears, started to resonate. It felt like the world was holding its breath.
I felt a sharp, stabbing pain behind my eyes, and the hum intensified into a wave of static inside my head. It was the sound of a dead radio channel, a hiss that drowned out all thought. I squeezed my eyes shut, my hands flying to my temples. Just as quickly as it came, it vanished. The sky outside was back to a normal, dusky blue. The oppressive feeling was gone.
I shook my head, chalking it up to a tension headache or maybe a weird trick of the light. A meteorological anomaly. Something to be explained away on the morning news.
But the news the next day mentioned nothing. Not a word about the silent lightning or the violet sky. It was as if it had only happened inside my head.
The next morning, the classroom was its usual brand of noisy. I slipped into my seat, put on my headphones, and prepared to dissolve into the background. My gaze fell on the desk in front of me.
It was empty.
The chair was tucked in perfectly. The desktop was bare. Kenji Sato was absent. It wasn't unusual. People get sick.
But something felt off. The space didn't just feel empty; it felt void. It was a gap in the fabric of the room.
Homeroom began. The teacher, Tanaka-sensei—no relation to the pencil guy, I think—did the roll call. He went through the list, his voice a monotone drone. He read the name before mine, and the name after mine. He never said "Sato."
I frowned. That was strange. Usually, they'd call an absent student's name and someone would pipe up that they were sick.
The feeling of wrongness grew, prickling at the back of my neck. During the first-period break, I leaned over to the girl who sat next to the empty desk, a quiet type named Kobayashi.
"Hey," I said, pulling down one side of my headphones. "Do you know if Sato-kun is sick today?"
She looked at me, her head tilted in genuine confusion. "Sato-kun? Who's that?"
I stared at her. "The guy who sits there," I said, pointing at the vacant desk. "Kenji Sato. You sit next to him every day."
Kobayashi followed my finger and then looked back at me, her expression turning from confusion to mild concern. The kind of look you give someone who just asked you what color the sky is. "Hoshino-kun, no one sits there. That desk has been empty all year."
My blood ran cold. "What? No. He was here yesterday. I lent him some pencil lead."
"Are you feeling okay?" she asked, her voice hushed. "Maybe you're thinking of someone from last year?"
I leaned back in my chair, my heart starting to pound. A joke. This had to be a joke. A really elaborate, pointless prank. But Kobayashi wasn't a prankster. And her confusion was too real.
I spent the rest of the period in a daze. The teacher's words were a meaningless buzz. All I could see was that empty desk. A black hole in the middle of the classroom.
At lunch, my legs carried me to the faculty office on autopilot. I needed proof. Tangible evidence that I wasn't losing my mind. I found Tanaka-sensei organizing a stack of papers.
"Sensei," I said, my voice sounding distant to my own ears.
"Ah, Hoshino. What can I do for you?"
"I was wondering if I could see the class roster for 2-B," I said, trying to sound casual. "I just wanted to check something."
He grunted, pulling a binder from a shelf and flipping it open. "Here you are."
I ran my finger down the list of names. Hoshikita, Hoshino, Hosokawa. My name was there, nestled between two others. There was no Sato. The list was perfectly alphabetical, perfectly sequential. There wasn't even a gap where his name should have been.
"Is something wrong?" Tanaka-sensei asked, noticing my expression.
"The student who sits in front of me... Sato-kun..."
Sensei frowned. "Sato? There's no student named Sato in this class. There is a Suzuki in class 2-D, maybe you're confused?"
"No," I insisted, my voice getting tighter. "Kenji Sato. He was here yesterday. He sits right in front of me."
Tanaka-sensei put a hand on my shoulder. His expression was now one of professional concern. "Hoshino, I think you must be mistaken. That seat has been empty since the semester began. We have an odd number of students in this class. It's always been empty."
His words hit me like a physical blow. Always been empty.
I mumbled an apology and backed out of the office. My mind was reeling. Every single person I asked gave me the same answer. The same look of confusion. The same gentle denial of a reality I was certain of.
Kenji Sato, the boy who borrowed my pencil lead, had not just vanished. He had been retroactively deleted from existence. And I was the only one who had the receipts.
The headache from the previous night returned, a dull throb behind my eyes accompanied by that faint, phantom static. It was the sound of a world with a missing piece.
I needed to get away from the noise. Away from the people whose normal, functioning memories were making me feel like a glitch in the system. I ended up in the one place I was guaranteed solitude: the library.
Not the main reading room, with its studious overachievers and whispering couples. I went to the "Archive," a dusty, forgotten wing on the third floor that housed old periodicals, outdated reference books, and the school's historical records. No one ever came here. The air was thick with the smell of aging paper and silverfish poison. It was perfect.
I sank into a worn leather chair in a secluded corner, pulling my headphones tight over my ears, even though the only sound was the gentle hum of the fluorescent lights. I closed my eyes, trying to force my brain to reboot.
Think. There has to be a logical explanation.
Maybe I'd dreamed the whole thing. A hyper-realistic dream about a non-existent classmate. But the memory was too clear, too mundane to be a dream. Dreams usually have better production values.
Maybe I was the one who was wrong. A misremembered name, a false memory. The human brain is notoriously unreliable. But it wasn't just a memory of a face. It was the desk. The drumming fingers. The conversation. The pencil lead that was still missing from my case.
My head throbbed. The static was getting louder.
"It's an unpleasant sound, isn't it?"
The voice was soft, clear, and impossibly close. My eyes snapped open.
A girl was standing in front of me.
She hadn't been there a second ago. I would have heard her. I would have felt her presence. It was like she had materialized out of the dusty air itself.
She was leaning against a bookshelf, one finger tracing the spine of a faded blue book. She wore our school's uniform, but it was slightly disheveled, the ribbon at her collar tied loosely. Her hair was the first thing that truly registered. It was long and silver, not dyed-blonde or platinum, but a pure, shimmering silver that seemed to catch the dim library light and glow with a soft luminescence of its own. Her eyes were the color of ice, a startling, pale blue that seemed to look right through me. They were unsettlingly cheerful.
"The static," she clarified, seeing my confusion. "The one inside your head. It sounds like a ghost trying to find the right radio station, doesn't it?"
I just stared, my brain struggling to process this new, impossible variable. Who was she? I'd never seen her before. And in a school of a thousand students, I would have remembered her. You don't forget a girl with silver hair and eyes that look like frozen lakes.
"Who are you?" I managed to get out, my voice raspy.
She smiled, a playful, enigmatic curl of her lips. "I could ask you the same thing. But that would be boring. I already know your name is Kaito Hoshino."
My guard went up instantly. "How do you know that?"
"You're the only one who's making the noise," she said, tapping her temple. "Everyone else is quiet. Blissfully, ignorantly quiet. But you... you're broadcasting. Like a lonely lighthouse on a sea of fog."
I took off my headphones, the gesture feeling useless now. "I don't know what you're talking about." It was a weak denial, and we both knew it.
"Don't you?" she said, pushing off the bookshelf and taking a step closer. She moved with a strange lightness, as if she wasn't fully tethered to the floor. "You're looking for someone, aren't you? Someone who isn't here anymore. Someone everyone else has forgotten."
The air left my lungs. She knew. This impossible girl with the impossible hair knew.
"His name was Kenji Sato," I said, the words feeling like a test. A password.
Her smile widened, but it didn't reach her eyes. In them, I saw a flicker of something ancient, something deeply sad. "A new one," she murmured, more to herself than to me. "It's happening faster now."
"What is happening?" I demanded, my voice rising. "Who are you? Are you like me?"
"Like you?" She let out a small, airy laugh. "In a way. But we're also opposites. You're the one who remembers. I'm the one who was forgotten."
I felt my world tilt on its axis for the second time in twenty-four hours. "What does that mean?"
"It means," she said, stopping directly in front of my chair and leaning in, her ice-blue eyes boring into mine, "that if you were to look for me on the class roster, you wouldn't find me. If you asked a teacher about the girl with silver hair, they'd tell you they've never seen me. If you asked my parents... well, they wouldn't remember having a daughter." She said it all with that same unsettling, cheerful smile, as if discussing the weather.
"My name is Yuki Amasawa," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "And as far as this world is concerned, I don't exist."
My brain felt like an overloaded server trying to run a program far beyond its capacity. I followed Yuki out of the library, my legs moving on their own accord. We walked through the empty school corridors, the late afternoon sun slanting through the windows, illuminating dancing dust motes. For the first time, the silence of the school felt less like peace and more like a tomb.
"So," I began, trying to wrap my head around it. "You were... erased? Like Sato?"
"Something like that," she replied, her hands clasped behind her back as she walked. "It happened a few years ago. One day, I just... faded. My friends forgot my name. My desk became an empty space. My key no longer fit in my front door. It's a very strange experience, realizing you've become a ghost before you've even died."
"But... you're still here. I can see you. I can talk to you."
"That's the funny part," she said, turning to look at me. "I was supposed to disappear completely. Most do. They just... pop. Gone. But for some reason, I didn't. I got stuck halfway. A bug in the program, I guess. I'm a residual file left over after the deletion." She looked at her own hands, flexing her fingers. "I'm real enough to myself. But to the world, I'm just a feeling. A sense of déjà vu. A name on the tip of someone's tongue that they can never quite recall."
"And the others? The ones who get erased?"
"They're gone," she said simply. "Their existence is scooped out of reality. Their past, their present, their future. All of it. The world just knits itself back together to fill the hole they left behind, and no one is the wiser."
"Except me," I stated. It wasn't a question.
"Except you," she confirmed. "Which makes you very, very interesting, Kaito Hoshino."
We ended up on the school rooftop, a place that was technically off-limits. The chain-link fence cast long, diamond-shaped shadows across the concrete. The wind was stronger up here, and it whipped her silver hair around her face. She seemed perfectly at home.
"Why me?" I asked, gripping the fence. The city sprawled out below us, a vast, complex machine utterly oblivious to the fact that its components were silently vanishing. "Why can I remember?"
"That's the million-yen question, isn't it?" Yuki leaned against the fence beside me, gazing out at the horizon. "I've been watching this happen for a while. Little disappearances. A person here, a person there. It's always silent. Always seamless. And then you showed up. The first person in years to notice. The first person to retain the memory of the deleted."
"You said I was 'broadcasting.' What did you mean?"
"The 'Phenomenon'—that's what I call it, for lack of a better term—it leaves a sort of... interference pattern. The static you feel. For most people, it's just a flicker. A moment of brain fog they dismiss and forget. But for you, the signal is strong. Your memory of Kenji Sato is an anchor, a solid object in a sea of forgetting. It's fighting against the current that's trying to wash it away. And that fight creates a resonance. One that I, as a fellow anomaly, can perceive."
I thought back to the violet sky, the silent lightning. "Did that have something to do with it? The storm?"
Yuki's playful expression faltered for a fraction of a second. "The storm... The sky does that sometimes, when a big erasure is about to happen. Or when the system is becoming unstable. I think of it as reality showing its seams." She paused, a thoughtful frown on her face. "But it feels different lately. More frequent. More... aggressive."
We stood in silence for a while, the wind the only sound between us. Down below, in the schoolyard, I saw a flash of orange-red hair. Hina Yuzuki. She was standing with a couple of friends, but her posture was strange. She wasn't her usual, boisterous self. Her gaze was distant, and I saw her hand reach out slightly, as if to touch the shoulder of someone who wasn't there. She then looked at her own hand, a bewildered expression on her face, before shaking her head and forcing a smile for her friends.
My breath caught in my throat. Saki. The quiet girl Hina was always with. She hadn't been at her desk today. I'd noticed her absence, but I'd been so consumed by Sato's disappearance that I hadn't thought anything of it.
"Yuki," I said, my voice low. "Hina Yuzuki's friend... Saki... was she...?"
Yuki followed my gaze. Her ice-blue eyes were filled with a somber understanding. "It seems Kenji Sato wasn't the only one."
A fresh wave of cold dread washed over me. This wasn't a one-time glitch. It was a plague. An invisible, silent epidemic of forgetting. And the world was carrying on, blissfully unaware, while the people closest to the victims were left with phantom limbs and wounds they couldn't see. Hina's confusion wasn't insanity. It was grief for a ghost.
My gaze drifted across the schoolyard. I saw Renji Kurobane leaving the school gates, alone. He had his usual look of bored cynicism, but as he walked, he glanced over his shoulder, a quick, almost imperceptible movement. His eyes swept the very spot where Hina's forgotten friend might have stood. For just a moment, his mask of indifference slipped, revealing a flicker of... something. Recognition? Confusion? Fear? Then it was gone, and he was just a cynical high school kid walking home.
And then I saw Aoi Serizawa, standing near the entrance, her notebook in hand. She wasn't looking at Hina or Renji. She was looking directly up at the rooftop. Directly at me. Her expression was unreadable, her eyes narrowed behind her glasses. It was as if she hadn't just seen me, but had been expecting me to be here. She made a small note in her book, then turned and walked away.
The static in my head hissed. It felt like I wasn't just an observer anymore. I was part of the equation. A variable that others were beginning to notice.
"They can't see me," Yuki said softly, noticing where I was looking. "But they can see you. The boy who's talking to thin air. You'll have to be careful."
"Careful of what?" I asked, turning back to her. "Going crazy? It feels a little late for that."
"No," she said, her tone serious for the first time. "Careful of being noticed by whatever is doing this. If you're an error in the system, it will eventually try to correct you." Her words hung in the air, cold and sharp. The implication was clear.
It will try to erase you, too.
I walked home in a daze. Yuki had vanished as silently as she had appeared, leaving me on the rooftop with a head full of impossible truths and a cryptic piece of advice.
"If you want to find answers," she'd said, "start with the things that are forgotten. Old places, old stories, old promises. That's where the echoes are the loudest. And try to remember me tomorrow, Kaito Hoshino. It's surprisingly easy to forget."
The thought was terrifying. What if her existence was tied to my memory of her? What if I woke up tomorrow and she was just a dream, her silver hair and icy eyes dissolving into nothing? I would be alone again, the sole custodian of a truth no one else could see.
When I got to my apartment, I went straight to my room. I needed proof. Proof of my own sanity. I dug through my desk, searching for my yearbook from last year. Maybe Sato had been in my class then. Maybe I could find his face.
I found the yearbook and flipped to the section for my class, 1-C. I scanned the grid of photos, my heart pounding with each face. Nothing. No Kenji Sato.
Defeated, I tossed the book on my bed. My mind was a maelstrom of doubt and fear. Was Yuki real? Or was she a hallucination? A beautiful, silver-haired coping mechanism my fracturing mind had invented to make sense of the impossible. A manifestation of the static.
I stood in front of the mirror on my wardrobe door. I stared at my own reflection. Messy black hair, grey-blue eyes, a face that was tired and pale. You're Kaito Hoshino, I told myself. You are real.
Then, for a single, heart-stopping second, something shifted.
My reflection flickered.
Like a bad television signal. For an instant, the face staring back at me wasn't mine. It had no features. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. It was a smooth, blank expanse of skin, a horrifying mannequin of myself. The static in my head screamed, a deafening roar of white noise. A wave of vertigo and an intense, overwhelming feeling of loss washed over me, so powerful it buckled my knees. It felt like I had forgotten something fundamentally important, something on the scale of my own name or the faces of my parents.
I slammed my eyes shut, and when I opened them again, my own face was staring back, wide-eyed with terror. The faceless thing was gone. But the feeling remained. The feeling of being watched. Not by Yuki. By something else. Something vast, impersonal, and hungry. The thing that lived in the static. The thing that erased people.
The Forgotten.
I stumbled back, my hand pressed against my chest, my breathing ragged. I looked around my room, at my posters, my books, my desk. They all seemed fragile, temporary. As if they could all be rewritten at any moment.
I was standing on the edge of an abyss, a crack in the world that was growing wider every day. Kenji Sato had fallen in. So had Saki. Yuki was clinging to the edge. And something, that faceless thing in the mirror, was trying to give me a push.
My gaze fell on my own reflection again. My name is Kaito Hoshino, I thought, a desperate mantra against the encroaching silence.
For a terrifying, endless moment, I struggled to be sure.