[MA 15+ - Contains graphic violence, psychological horror, and disturbing imagery, and suicide]
The library had become Mahitaro's sanctuary and prison in equal measure.
Dust motes danced in columns of afternoon light that slanted through high windows, each particle suspended in its own tiny orbit, indifferent to the desperation unfolding below. The air held that particular staleness of sealed spaces—old paper slowly decomposing, the chemical tang of preservation treatments, decades of human breath absorbed into wood and binding.
Mahitaro sat hunched over a table buried under newspapers, his posture resembling something broken and badly reassembled. His notebook lay open before him, pages covered in increasingly frantic handwriting. Dates circled so many times the paper had worn thin. Names connected by arrows that doubled back on themselves. Question marks that multiplied like blood cells, spreading across margins until they consumed entire pages.
Unsolved stabbing near Yoyogi Park, victim 17, suspect cleared due to lack of evidence. Missing student, Shibuya district, last seen walking home from cram school.
Paranormal investigator claims pattern in recent deaths, interview deemed unreliable.
Each article, each fragment of information, had seemed promising at first. A thread he could pull that might unravel the whole nightmare. But every lead dissolved under scrutiny, leaving only more questions and the growing certainty that he was searching for something deliberately hidden from view.
His pencil—worn down to a nub from hours of note-taking—slipped from his fingers. It rolled across the desk with a hollow sound that seemed impossibly loud in the library's muffled quiet, then dropped to the floor with a distant clatter.
Mahitaro didn't retrieve it. His arms folded on the table, his forehead lowered onto them, eyes squeezing shut against the burning sensation of exhaustion and failure.
"Why can't I find anything?" The whisper barely disturbed the air. "Why can't I..."
The weight pressed down—Eruto's smile frozen in that final moment, his mother's trembling voice asking him not to break himself, his own repeated failures accumulating like stones in his chest. He'd thought research might give him leverage, some small measure of control over the nightmare. Instead, it had only emphasized how powerless he was, how small against whatever force kept resetting his suffering.
Maybe I should give up, the thought arrived with seductive gentleness. Just wait for the reset. Let it happen. Maybe if I stop fighting, stop caring, it won't hurt as much.
His breath hitched. The familiar pull toward surrender, toward the rope and the silence that followed. It would be so easy. He'd done it before. His body knew the routine.
Movement.
The sensation registered peripherally—a shift in the library's stillness, barely noticeable but somehow wrong. Mahitaro's eyes opened to slits, his head still resting on his arms, his vision limited to the small slice of world directly in front of him.
Between the towering bookshelves, partially obscured by shadow, someone sat cross-legged on the floor. A student, based on the uniform. They held a book balanced casually on one knee, reading with the kind of relaxed posture that suggested they'd been there for some time.
At first, nothing seemed unusual. Students occasionally used the library. The figure was just another person seeking quiet space.
But something made Mahitaro's stomach clench. Some primal recognition operating below conscious thought, the way prey animals sense predators before seeing them.
He lifted his head slowly, carefully, his body moving with the deliberate caution of someone who'd learned that sudden movements attracted attention. His eyes focused, adjusting to the dimmer light between the shelves.
The student's hair caught what little light reached that corner—and it was wrong. Not brown or black, not even bleached blond like some delinquents sported. It was red. Impossibly, unnaturally red, the color of arterial blood or emergency lights, vivid enough to seem like it generated its own illumination.
Mahitaro's breath stopped.
The face. He knew that face. Not clearly—the memory was fragmented, damaged by the trauma of multiple resets. But the shape of it, the particular configuration of features, triggered recognition deep in his hindbrain.
This was the one. The shadow at the edge of every tragedy. The whisper spreading rumors. The architect of frames so perfect they'd condemned him repeatedly. The one who'd been there—always there—just outside his clear vision, orchestrating his damnation.
And now, here. In focus. Real. Undeniable.
The red-haired student's eyes flicked up from the page. For one crystalline moment, their gazes locked.
Those eyes weren't right. The color was normal—dark brown, almost black—but the quality behind them was fundamentally wrong. Too cold. Too sharp. Too knowing. They looked at Mahitaro with the clinical interest of a researcher observing a specimen, and something else underneath. Amusement, maybe. Or hunger.
Mahitaro's hand pressed flat against the desk, fingers splaying as if to anchor himself to reality. His heart hammered against his ribs hard enough to hurt. His mouth went dry, tongue thick and useless.
Finally, his mind screamed. Finally, I've found you.
The red-haired student closed the book with deliberate slowness. The sound of pages meeting echoed like a door shutting. Then he stood, movements fluid and unhurried, the kind of confidence that came from knowing there was no real threat.
His mouth curved into a smile—small, knowing, deeply wrong. It was the expression of someone who'd just realized they'd been caught but found the situation amusing rather than concerning.
You shouldn't have seen this, that smile said without words.
Mahitaro tried to stand, his chair scraping against the floor, but his legs refused to cooperate properly. They'd gone weak, rubbery, his body operating on pure adrenaline and terror in equal measure.
The student reached into his pocket. The movement was casual, almost lazy, but something about it made every survival instinct Mahitaro possessed start screaming.
His arm flicked. A blur of motion too fast to track properly.
Something small and metal whistled through the air.
Mahitaro registered impact before pain—a sharp sensation at his temple, like someone had pressed a hot needle against his skull. Then the pain arrived, sudden and all-consuming, and his vision exploded into white static.
His knees hit the floor. The world tilted sideways. Through the ringing in his ears, he thought he heard footsteps approaching, casual and unhurried.
Then nothing.
Consciousness returned in fragments.
The taste of bile coating his tongue. The familiar texture of tatami against his cheek. The smell of his own vomit, already cooling into the woven straw.
Mahitaro's eyes opened to his bedroom ceiling, that same map of cracks he'd memorized across multiple lifetimes. His stomach convulsed, and he turned his head just in time to void what little remained in his system, adding to the puddle already staining the floor.
The reset. Again.
But this time was different.
The memory didn't fragment or blur as previous deaths had. It remained sharp, crystalline, carved into his consciousness with scalpel precision. The red hair. The impossible eyes. The knowing smile. The casual violence of that thrown object.
I saw you, Mahitaro thought, the realization arriving with the force of revelation. I finally saw you. I know you exist. I know you're real.
He pushed himself upright, his body shaking—not with weakness or despair, but with something that burned hotter. His hands clenched into fists so tight his fingernails bit into his palms, breaking skin, drawing blood that welled up in perfect crimson crescents.
"They can reset me all they want," he whispered to his empty room, his voice trembling but alive with something that had been absent for loops. "They can kill me. They can erase me. But I saw you. I SAW YOU."
The despair was still there—it was always there, a constant background radiation of suffering that had become inseparable from his existence. But now it had company. Something sharper, more dangerous.
Purpose.
For the first time since the nightmare began, Mahitaro wasn't just surviving. He had a target. A face to hunt. Evidence that the loop wasn't random chaos but orchestrated horror, which meant it could be disrupted.
He would uncover the truth. He would make Eruto's death mean something. He would destroy the red-haired student.
Even if it killed him a thousand more times.
Night fell without Mahitaro noticing the transition from day to darkness.
He lay in bed, staring at nothing, his body present but his mind trapped in obsessive loops of memory. Every time he closed his eyes, the face burned behind his lids—red hair like arterial spray, that knowing smile, those inhuman eyes that had looked at him like he was already dead.
His hands curled against his chest, knees drawing up toward his stomach in an unconscious defensive position. The clock on his wall ticked with mechanical precision. Each second a small death. Each minute bringing him closer to the cursed date when everything would collapse again.
Questions spiraled through his mind like vultures circling carrion. What if the killer had noticed his recognition? What if the reset had been triggered specifically because he'd seen too much? What if knowing the truth made no difference—what if Eruto still died regardless of what Mahitaro did?
The thoughts crushed him, pressing down with physical weight. His hands moved to cover his ears, trying to block out the sound of his own spiraling thoughts, and he began to rock slightly, a self-soothing motion learned from too many breakdowns.
"Stop it... just stop it... I can't..." The whisper was barely audible, more breath than voice.
His throat closed. Tears burned behind his eyes, hot and insistent. He hated himself for being weak, for being small, for being so fundamentally broken that even revelation couldn't overcome the accumulated damage.
But even through the storm of self-loathing and despair, one thought remained—a shard of glass buried in mud but still capable of cutting:
I saw him. This time, I saw him.
And that single truth kept him from completely disintegrating.
Morning arrived with his mother's voice through the door—soft, worried, edged with the particular fear parents develop when their children start showing signs of breaking.
"Mahitaro? Breakfast is ready. Please come out today. Don't stay in there all morning again, alright?"
Mahitaro's hand hovered over the doorknob, trembling slightly. Every fiber of his being wanted to retreat, to sink back into his sheets and let the loop run its course without his participation.
But then Eruto's face appeared in his mind—not the dying version, but the living one. The smile that had been genuine before blood filled his mouth. The words that had been meant as comfort before they became haunting accusation.
You don't have to carry everything alone.
His grip tightened on the doorknob until it hurt, metal digging into his palm.
"Okay," he said quietly. "I'm coming."
School became a different kind of battlefield.
Mahitaro moved through hallways with heightened awareness, every sense operating in overdrive. Each face he passed could be the red-haired student in disguise. Every laugh or whisper could be coordination for the next attack. The world had become hostile territory where the enemy wore familiar shapes.
He took his seat at the back of the classroom, positioning himself where he could observe the entire space. His notebook lay open, but the frantic scribbles had been replaced with something more organized—systematic lists of names, locations, behavioral patterns. An investigation rather than desperate grasping.
The whispers started almost immediately. He'd become a curiosity, a cautionary tale, the weird kid who looked like he'd seen ghosts.
"Why does he look so pale?"
"Isn't that the kid who..."
"Creepy."
Each word was a small knife, reopening wounds that had never properly healed. But Mahitaro forced himself not to flinch. If he wanted to stop the loop, if he wanted to expose the murderer, pain was just another cost he'd have to pay.
That night, alone in his room with his parents asleep down the hall, Mahitaro retrieved an old box cutter from his drawer. The blade was dull from years of use, spotted with rust. He extended it with a soft click that seemed too loud in the silence.
His reflection in the metal looked hollow—sunken eyes, bloodless lips, the face of someone who'd died repeatedly and been denied rest.
He pressed the blade against his palm, feeling the cold bite. Not hard enough to cut—not yet. Just enough to remind himself that he could bleed, that he was still physical, still real despite the loop's insistence otherwise.
"This isn't to die," he whispered to his reflection. "Not this time. This time it's to fight."
Two days later, walking back from the library with notebooks clutched against his chest, Mahitaro saw it.
A reflection in a shop window—there for just a moment, a flash of impossible red among the ordinary browns and blacks of passing pedestrians.
His breath caught. His legs almost locked, every instinct screaming at him to run, to hide, to pretend he hadn't seen anything.
But he'd come too far. Endured too much. This was what he'd been waiting for.
He followed.
The red-haired student walked with casual ease, a book held loosely in one hand, flipping pages as he moved. People passed him without a glance, flowing around him like water around a stone, as if some unconscious instinct warned them away.
Mahitaro's heart hammered so hard he could feel his pulse in his throat. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the cool evening air. His hand found the box cutter in his pocket, fingers closing around it like a talisman.
The student turned into an alley. The sky had darkened to deep purple, the transition between day and night when shadows grew long and threatening. Trash bins lined the walls, overflow bags spilling refuse that gave the air a sweet-rotten smell.
Mahitaro hesitated at the alley's entrance. This was a trap. Had to be. But what choice did he have? Turn back and wait for the pattern to repeat? Or follow and maybe—finally—get answers?
He stepped into the alley.
The red-haired student stopped walking. Closed his book with deliberate precision.
"Persistent." The voice was calm, conversational, carrying a note of genuine appreciation. "You shouldn't be here."
Mahitaro's throat went dry. The box cutter felt impossibly small in his hand, inadequate against the casual threat radiating from the figure ahead. But he forced words out anyway, his voice cracking with the effort.
"Who... who are you? Why do you keep doing this? Why Eruto? Why me?"
The student turned slowly, deliberately, drawing out the moment. When his face came into view, that smile was already in place—too sharp, too knowing, carrying implications Mahitaro's mind refused to process fully.
"You finally saw me." The words held satisfaction, as if this was a milestone he'd been waiting for. "Took you long enough."
Mahitaro stumbled back half a step, his shoulder hitting the alley wall. His vision blurred with tears he refused to let fall.
"What do you want from me?!" The shout came out broken, desperate. "Why do you keep resetting me?! Why do you keep killing them?!"
The student tilted his head, regarding Mahitaro with that same clinical interest from the library. His eyes caught the dim light, reflecting it back in a way that seemed wrong, inhuman.
"You'll find out soon. But for now..."
His hand moved—that same casual flick. Something small and silver caught the last of the day's light as it spun through the air.
Mahitaro dodged—barely. The blade—it was a blade, he realized with sick certainty—cut across his cheek. The sensation was sharp and cold, followed immediately by warmth as blood welled up and began trickling down his face.
He screamed, stumbling, his hand swinging the box cutter in a wild arc that came nowhere close to connecting. His knees gave out. The concrete rushed up to meet him, rough and cold through his uniform.
Above him, the red-haired student laughed. The sound was genuine, delighted, the way someone might laugh at a particularly good joke.
"You're not ready," he said, each word carefully enunciated, and stepped closer.
Mahitaro's notebooks scattered across the alley floor, pages tearing loose, his desperate research soaking up gutter water and oil stains. His body felt weak, trembling with fear and adrenaline crash, the box cutter slipping from his nerveless fingers.
But even through the haze of terror, even with blood running down his face and the taste of failure sharp on his tongue, he forced himself to look up at that face.
"I don't care..." His voice was barely above a whisper, hoarse and trembling but steady underneath. Blood dripped from his chin, pattering onto the concrete. "How many times I fail... I'll never stop. I'll never let you win."
For a moment—just a brief flicker—the student's expression shifted. The cruel amusement softened into something harder to read. Curiosity? Respect? Something else entirely?
Then he leaned down, close enough that Mahitaro could see the inhuman quality of those eyes up close, and whispered:
"Then keep struggling, Mahitaro. That's what makes this fun."
The world went black.
Consciousness returned with the familiar taste of bile.
Mahitaro gasped awake in his bed, his stomach immediately convulsing, tears already burning his eyes before he fully registered being alive again.
But something was different.
His hand moved to his cheek—and found wetness. Warmth. His fingers came away red with blood that shouldn't exist, that should have been erased by the reset like every other injury.
The cut remained. Still fresh. Still bleeding.
Proof.
Evidence that couldn't be denied or dismissed as trauma-induced hallucination. The loop was real. The red-haired student was real. And somehow, impossibly, Mahitaro had brought something physical back from the previous iteration.
His stomach heaved again, bile and blood mixing on the tatami, but through the physical misery something else burned. Not hope—he'd learned that hope was dangerous, fragile, too easily crushed.
But determination. Resolve. The kind of stubborn refusal to surrender that had nothing to do with optimism and everything to do with spite.
Even if it cost his life a thousand more times. Even if he had to crawl through blood and ash and endless repetition. He would face this. Would fight this. The real nightmare had only just begun.
TO BE CONTINUED...