Sleep offered no escape. It was just a different kind of static, a murky, dreamless expanse where the memory of a featureless face flickered at the edges of my consciousness. I woke up with a gasp, my heart hammering against my ribs, the phantom sensation of falling still clinging to me. The morning light was filtering through my blinds, slicing the room into bars of grey and gold. It was a normal Tuesday.
My first coherent thought was not about school, breakfast, or the crushing weight of existence. It was a desperate, frantic scramble through the files of my own mind.
Silver hair. Long, shimmering silver hair.Ice-blue eyes. Unsettlingly cheerful.A disheveled uniform ribbon. A strange, weightless way of moving.Yuki Amasawa.
The name settled in my mind, and I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding. I remembered. The relief was so profound it felt like surfacing after being held underwater. For a terrifying moment, I'd been afraid that she, too, would be gone. A weird dream my mind had concocted to explain away the first erasure, only to be wiped clean by the system's morning maintenance check.
But she was still there. A ghost in my memory. The thought was both a comfort and a terror. It meant I wasn't alone. It also meant that everything she'd told me was real. The erasures, the Phenomenon, the thing in the mirror. My reality was officially broken, and the only other person with a copy of the original instruction manual was a girl who claimed to be a system error.
Getting ready for school was a surreal exercise in paranoia. Every familiar object in my apartment seemed to mock me. The family photo on the living room shelf—was there always just the three of us? The gaps between the books on my shelf—were they always that wide? My world had been stable and solid my entire life, a predictable landscape of boring facts. Now, it felt like a stage set where props could be removed at any moment, and the rest of the cast was trained to act as if they were never there.
The walk to school was worse. The usual sea of faces was now a collection of potential ghosts. Any one of these people could be the next to vanish, their existence scooped out of the world, leaving behind nothing but a phantom ache in the heart of someone who wouldn't even know why they were hurting.
I scanned the crowds, the hallways, the entrance gate. I was looking for a flash of silver hair. A part of me, the logical part that was currently screaming in a soundproofed room in the back of my mind, told me this was pointless. If she was invisible to everyone else, she could be standing right next to me and I wouldn't know it until she chose to be seen. But I looked anyway. I needed the confirmation.
Classroom 2-B was the same as ever. A cacophony of meaningless chatter. But today, the noise didn't feel mundane. It felt fragile. I slid into my seat, my eyes immediately locking onto the empty desk in front of me where Kenji Sato used to sit. The void was still there, a chilling, perfectly normal-looking patch of nothing. No one gave it a second glance.
My gaze then shifted to Hina Yuzuki. She was at her desk, staring out the window, her usual explosive energy contained and muted. Her fiery side-ponytail seemed to droop. Her best friend Saki's desk, two seats away from her, was also empty. Another void. Unlike Sato's desk, which had been in the back-row territory of the socially invisible, Saki's had been in the lively central territory. Its emptiness felt more pronounced, yet still, no one seemed to notice. It was like staring at a painting where one of the central figures had been expertly painted over with the background scenery.
Hina's friends were trying to talk to her, but she was giving one-word answers, her knuckles white where she gripped a pen. She looked like a person shivering in a cold draft that only she could feel. The phantom ache. Yuki's words echoed in my head.
Where was she?
I put on my headphones, the silence they offered now feeling less like a shield and more like an amplifier for the static in my own head. I needed to find her. The thought was an obsession. Without her, I was just a crazy person. With her, I was a crazy person with a co-conspirator, which was a significant upgrade.
I lasted until the lunch break. The moment the bell rang, I was out of my seat. I didn't go to the cafeteria or the roof. I followed a hunch, a whisper of logic based on her parting words: start with the things that are forgotten.
I made my way to the old school building, a section connected to the main campus by a covered walkway but rarely used. It was slated for demolition next year and currently housed only a few dusty storage rooms and the ghosts of forgotten school clubs. The air here was cooler, stiller. The floors creaked. The light was dim. It smelled like chalk dust and time.
I found it on the second floor. A door with a faded, hand-painted sign: "Literature Club." The sign was peeling, the paint cracked. This had to be it. It felt like a place the world had begun to forget. I pushed the door open.
The room was exactly as you'd expect. Desks and chairs were covered in white cloths, looking like a graveyard for furniture. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with yellowed paperbacks. A thick layer of dust covered everything, sparkling in the single beam of light cutting through a grimy window.
And sitting in the middle of it all, perched on a dust-covered desk as if it were a throne, was Yuki Amasawa.
She was holding an old, leather-bound book, reading it with casual interest. Her silver hair seemed to gather what little light there was, creating a soft halo around her. She looked up as I entered, her ice-blue eyes crinkling in that familiar, unsettling smile.
"Took you long enough," she said, her voice echoing slightly in the quiet room. "I was beginning to think you'd forgotten me."
"The thought crossed my mind," I said, my attempt at a detached, sarcastic tone undermined by the sheer relief flooding my system. "That or I'd finally gone completely insane and invented you."
"A beautiful, mysterious silver-haired girl who understands your unique suffering? That's a pretty high-quality hallucination, Kaito Hoshino. You should give your subconscious more credit." She closed the book, a soft thump that sent a puff of dust into the air. "So. Did you sleep well?"
"Like a man on death row," I said, walking further into the room. "I saw it. The thing you mentioned. The reason people get erased."
Yuki's smile tightened just a fraction. "In a reflection?"
I nodded, the memory of the blank, featureless face sending a shiver down my spine. "It was just for a second. And there was this... feeling. Like I'd lost something huge."
"The Forgotten," she murmured, her gaze distant. "That's what it feels like to be in its presence. It's not a person. It's not a monster. It's more like... a universal force. A cosmic janitor. It tidies up reality by sweeping the dust under the rug. The dust, in this case, being people."
"And it's tidying up more often," I said, thinking of Saki.
"Yes." Her expression was grim. "Two from the same school in as many days is... unprecedented. The system is definitely unstable. Which brings us to our next exhibit." She hopped off the desk, her movements silent. "Hina Yuzuki."
"I was watching her," I said. "She looks... broken."
"She is," Yuki said, her voice losing its playful edge and taking on a clinical precision. "Think of a person's existence as a heavy object sitting on a rubber sheet. When that object is removed, the sheet snaps back. But for those standing right next to it, the sheet still vibrates for a while. They feel the motion, the tremor, the leftover energy. Hina Yuzuki is standing at the epicenter of Saki's erasure. Her soul is vibrating with the memory of a friendship her mind can no longer access. It's a special kind of hell."
"So what do we do?" I asked. The question felt ridiculous. What could we, a boy who shouldn't remember and a girl who shouldn't exist, possibly do?
"For Sato and Saki? Nothing," she said, the words blunt and cold. "You can't recover a deleted file that's already been overwritten. But we can try to understand the why. Why them? Why now? And maybe, just maybe, we can find a way to stop the next deletion. Our first step is to analyze the aftershocks. We need to get close to Hina Yuzuki."
"And how do you propose we do that?" I asked. "She's the emotional core of the popular kids' group. I'm... me. My attempts at social interaction are generally considered a violation of the Geneva Conventions."
Yuki laughed, a sound like tiny bells in the dusty room. "Oh, this is going to be fun. You're going to have to do the one thing you hate more than anything else in the world, Kaito Hoshino."
"Solve the metaphysical mysteries of the universe?"
"No," she said, her icy eyes gleaming with mischief. "You're going to have to talk to someone."
Observing Hina Yuzuki was like watching a tragedy unfold in slow motion. With Yuki as my invisible co-commentator, the rest of the school day turned into a painful documentary on the nature of grief.
"Notice how she keeps her bag on the empty seat next to her?" Yuki's voice whispered, seemingly coming from just over my shoulder, even though I was sitting in class and she was nowhere to be seen. "Saki always sat next to her on the train. It's a subconscious habit. Her body remembers the space her friend is supposed to occupy."
During P.E., Hina, normally a dynamo on the volleyball court, was clumsy and distracted. She kept glancing towards the benches, a frown on her face.
"She's looking for her water bottle," Yuki explained. "But she's not thirsty. Saki was the one who always forgot her water and had to share Hina's. Hina's brain is running a script for a program that no longer exists."
The most painful moment came after school. I followed Hina from a distance, with Yuki trailing after me like a phantom. Hina walked to a vending machine, her steps heavy. She inserted her coins, pressed a button, and two cans of iced tea clattered into the slot.
She bent down and picked them both up. Then she stood there, staring at the two identical cans in her hands. Her expression was one of profound, utter confusion. It was the face of someone who has woken up in a foreign country with no memory of how they got there. Why did she buy two? One was for... for who? She looked around, as if expecting to see someone standing next to her, waiting for their drink.
But there was no one.
Her shoulders slumped. She looked so lost, so small. She dropped one of the cans into a nearby recycling bin with a clatter, her movements jerky. Then she walked away, not even opening the one she kept.
"This is cruel," I said, my voice low. I wasn't talking to myself.
"The Phenomenon isn't cruel or kind," Yuki's voice replied from beside me. "It's just indifferent. Like gravity. It doesn't care if you're not ready to fall."
I watched Hina's retreating form, the bright sunflower pin on her bag seeming like a cruel joke. She was the opposite of a sunflower right now, wilting and turning away from the light.
"I have to talk to her," I said. It wasn't a question anymore. It was a conclusion. Leaving her like this, trapped in her own head with a ghost no one else could see, felt like a crime.
"Well, there she is," Yuki said, pointing. "Your damsel in emotional distress. Go on, be her knight in shining, socially-awkward armor."
Hina had stopped by the school shoe lockers, leaning against the wall, her head bowed. Now or never.
My heart felt like it was trying to beat its way out of my chest. This went against every instinct I had. My carefully constructed walls, my headphone firewall, my entire philosophy of non-interaction—I was about to detonate it all. For a girl I barely knew. For a reason I couldn't possibly explain.
I took a deep breath and walked towards her.
"Yuzuki-san," I said.
She looked up. Her warm brown eyes were red-rimmed and guarded. "Hoshino-kun? What do you want?" Her voice was brittle.
"I..." My plan, which was tenuous at best, completely evaporated under her hostile glare. I had no idea what to say. 'Hey, I know you're secretly going insane because your best friend was deleted from reality by a cosmic janitor, but don't worry, my possibly-imaginary ghost girlfriend and I are on the case.' Yeah, that would go over well.
I decided to go with the direct approach. It was all I had.
"You're forgetting someone, aren't you?" I said, the words quiet but clear.
Hina's entire body went rigid. Her eyes widened, a flicker of raw shock cutting through her defensiveness. "What... What did you just say?"
"You feel like something's missing," I pressed on, my voice gaining a bit of confidence. "Like there's a hole next to you where a person should be. You're doing things and you don't know why. You're grieving, but you don't know who you're grieving for."
Every word I spoke seemed to land like a physical blow. Her face paled, and her tough exterior began to crumble. "How... How do you know that?" she whispered, her voice trembling.
"Because I remember him," I said. "The boy who sat in front of me. Kenji Sato. He's gone too."
Hina stared at me, her mouth slightly agape. For a moment, a sliver of desperate hope appeared in her eyes. The look of a drowning person who has just seen a piece of driftwood. She wasn't crazy. Someone else saw it too.
"So I'm not... I'm not making it up?" she asked, her voice cracking.
"You're not."
And then the moment was shattered by a third voice. A voice dripping with condescension and lazy amusement.
"Well, well. What do we have here? Hoshino, trying his hand at consoling the heartbroken. That's a new one. I thought your only hobby was checking the structural integrity of window panes with your forehead."
Renji Kurobane was leaning against the lockers a few feet away, one hand in his pocket, a smirk playing on his lips. His narrow, amber eyes flicked between me and Hina, taking in the scene with an air of detached superiority. I hadn't even heard him approach.
"Kurobane," I said, my tone flat. "Don't you have something to be fashionably late for?"
"Always," he said with a lazy shrug. "But this is far more entertaining. What's the problem, Yuzuki? Did your boyfriend forget your anniversary?" He shot a pointed look at the empty space beside her. "Oh, wait. You don't have one, do you? My mistake."
Hina flinched as if he'd slapped her. "Shut up, Kurobane!" she snapped, her grief instantly transmuting into white-hot anger. "You don't know anything!"
"I know you've been acting weirder than usual," he countered, pushing off the lockers and taking a step closer. His eyes were sharp, analytical. He was watching her, and me, far more closely than his casual demeanor suggested. "Moping around, talking to yourself. If you're having a mental breakdown, maybe you should see the school counselor instead of pouring your heart out to the resident zombie." He gestured to me with his thumb.
"I'm not crazy!" Hina yelled, her voice echoing in the corridor. Tears were welling in her eyes, born of frustration and fury.
"Could have fooled me," Renji said coolly. "You're getting all worked up over nothing. There's no one to miss. You've always been this loud and annoying all by yourself."
His words were targeted, precise, and unbelievably cruel. He was dismissing her pain, her very real suffering, as a figment of her imagination. And in doing so, he was reinforcing the very fear that was tearing her apart: the fear that it was all in her head.
"Get out of here," I said, my voice dangerously low. I took a step forward, placing myself slightly between him and Hina. I wasn't a fighter, but his casual cruelty had ignited something cold and angry inside me.
Renji raised an eyebrow, a flicker of surprise in his fox-like eyes. "Protective, are we? How touching." He gave a final, dismissive smirk. "Whatever. This is boring anyway." He turned and sauntered off, his hands back in his pockets, leaving a trail of emotional wreckage in his wake.
Hina was shaking, her fists clenched at her sides. The tears she'd been holding back finally spilled over, silent tracks down her freckled cheeks.
"He's right," she choked out. "I'm... I'm going crazy."
"No," I said firmly. "He's wrong. What you're feeling is real. The person you're missing was real." I paused, then asked the question that mattered. "What was her name?"
Hina squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating. A look of intense pain crossed her face. "I... I don't know," she whispered, her voice filled with despair. "I can't remember her name. I can't remember her face. But she was... she was my best friend."
She finally broke, sinking to the floor and burying her face in her knees, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
I stood there, useless and awkward, a profound sense of inadequacy washing over me. Yuki was right. This was a special kind of hell. I looked down at the weeping girl, then at the empty corridor where Renji had disappeared.
From the corner of my eye, I saw her. Aoi Serizawa. She was standing at the far end of the hallway, partially obscured by a corner. Her notebook was open. She'd been watching the entire exchange. Our eyes met for a fraction of a second. There was no emotion on her face, just cold, silent observation. Then, she made a note, closed her book, and walked away.
The static in my head hissed, louder than ever. We weren't just dealing with a cosmic janitor anymore. We were attracting an audience.
I eventually managed to coax Hina to her feet and lead her to a deserted bench in the courtyard. She had cried herself out and was now just hollow-eyed and silent. I bought her a can of warm cocoa from a different vending machine, and she held it in her hands, absorbing the warmth.
Yuki materialized next to me on the bench, her form shimmering into existence like a heat haze. Hina, lost in her own world, didn't notice my slight flinch.
"Renji Kurobane," Yuki said, her voice a thoughtful murmur. "He's an interesting one. He protests too much."
"He's a sadist," I countered.
"No," she said. "He's afraid. Did you see his eyes? He wasn't just being cruel for the sake of it. He was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince her. He's another one who feels the vibrations, but his defense mechanism isn't grief. It's aggressive denial."
I thought back to the previous day, seeing him glance over his shoulder at nothing. She was right. He sensed the gaps too. But instead of questioning them, he was trying to pave them over with cynicism.
My attention returned to Hina. She was staring at the sunflower pin on her bag.
"We were supposed to get matching ones," she said suddenly, her voice barely a whisper.
"Matching what?" I asked gently.
"These." She touched the pin. "There's this little shop near the old shrine. It sells handmade charms. She... my friend... she saw one she really liked. But they'd sold out. The old lady who runs the shop said she'd make another one for her. We were supposed to go pick it up yesterday after school." Her voice hitched. "I went home instead. I don't know why. I just... forgot."
My eyes met Yuki's. Her expression was sharp, intense.
An old shop. A forgotten promise. A handmade object.
Start with the things that are forgotten. That's where the echoes are the loudest.
This was it. A tangible lead. A physical object that was tied to the memory of a person who no longer existed. What happens to a promise when the person it was made to is erased? What happens to an object created specifically for them? Does it vanish? Or does it, like Yuki, get stuck halfway?
"Hina," I said, my voice urgent. "This shop. Do you remember where it is?"
She nodded slowly. "By the Misaki Shrine. It's a small place, down a side street."
"We need to go there," I said.
She looked up at me, confusion warring with exhaustion in her eyes. "Why? What's the point? She's... gone."
"Because maybe she's not entirely gone," I said, leaning forward. "Maybe there's a piece of her left. An echo. Proof. For you. So you know you're not crazy."
It was a long shot, a desperate gamble based on the words of a ghost girl and a half-baked theory about metaphysical echoes. But it was the only thing I had to offer. It was better than nothing.
For a long time, Hina just stared at me. I could see her mind working, weighing the crushing despair of doing nothing against the terrifying, fragile hope of what I was suggesting.
Finally, she gave a slow, hesitant nod. "Okay," she whispered.
A fragile alliance was formed. A boy who remembered too much, a girl who had forgotten almost everything, and a ghost who was trapped in between. The three of us against a world that was determined to erase every trace of what we were looking for.
"One more thing," I said, looking at Hina. "Her name was Saki. Saki Fujimura. She had short brown hair, and she always complained that her part of the bento was smaller than yours. She was your best friend."
I was relaying information I had only passively absorbed through my usual detached observation. But saying it out loud, I felt the weight of it. I was giving Hina back a piece of her own memory, a stolen treasure.
Tears welled up in her eyes again, but this time, they weren't tears of confusion or frustration. It was the clear, sharp pain of remembrance. "Saki," she whispered, testing the name on her tongue. It was a name she knew better than her own, but had been unable to reach until now. The phantom ache had been given a name.
And that, I realized, was the first step. You can't fight an enemy you can't name. And our enemy wasn't just the Forgotten. It was the forgetting itself.