[MA 18+ — Graphic themes, psychological distress, implied violence]
The rain fell like memories—slow, deliberate, as if the sky itself was trying to remember how to weep.
Officer Nakamura found the teenager at 3:47 AM, standing perfectly still in the ruins of what the GPS identified as the old Kamisawa Shrine restoration site. The structure had burned down three weeks prior—arson, they suspected, though no culprit had been found. Now only charred pillars remained, jutting from the earth like blackened bones.
The kid wore a school uniform that didn't match any institution in the district. It was tattered, anachronistic somehow, though Nakamura couldn't place why. Perhaps it was the way the fabric seemed to hang on the child's frame, as if the body inside it had given up on growing long ago.
"Hey," Nakamura called out, his voice swallowed by the rain. "Kid. You okay?"
The teen didn't turn.
Nakamura's partner, Officer Yamada, approached from the other side, footsteps splashing through puddles that reflected the neon glow of Neo-Tokyo's distant skyline. Even here, in this forgotten pocket of the city, the 2096 megalopolis bled light into every shadow.
"Thermal scan shows he's hypothermic," Yamada said, checking her wrist display. "How long has he been standing here?" "Long enough." Nakamura reached out, placed a hand on the teen's shoulder. The child's body was cold. Not cold like someone caught in rain—cold like stone that had never known warmth. "Come on. Let's get you somewhere safe."
Only then did the kid move.
He turned his head with mechanical slowness, and Nakamura felt something primal recoil in his heart. The kids eyes were wrong. Not just the color—that strange amber-yellow that seemed to glow faintly in the darkness—but the depth behind them. Like looking into a well and realizing the bottom is miles deeper than it should be.
"What's your name?" Nakamura asked, forcing gentleness into his voice. The teen's lips moved. The rain intensified, drumming against the burnt shrine ruins.
"I don't remember," the kid said finally. His voice was quiet, flat, like someone reading words from a script they'd performed ten thousand times. "I'm sorry. I don't remember anymore."
The police station was all fluorescent light and antiseptic white surfaces. The kid sat in the child services waiting room, wrapped in an emergency blanket that did nothing to warm him, while systems ran their diagnostics.
DNA scan: No match in national registry. Facial recognition: No results. Scan: ERROR. Multiple conflicting data points.
"That's impossible," Yamada muttered, staring at her holographic display. "Everyone in the last century is in the system. Everyone." "Maybe he's from outside the country?" Nakamura suggested, though he didn't believe it. The kids features were distinctly Japanese, and that uniform—weathered as it was—bore the subtle markers of domestic manufacture.
Yamada ran the scan again. Same result. The kid sat perfectly still through all of it, staring at nothing. Or perhaps staring at everything, seeing things no one else could see.
A child psychologist arrived an hour later. Dr. Sato was a kind worker in her fifties, experienced with trauma cases. She crouched down to the kids eye level.
"Can you tell me what happened?" she asked. "Where are your parents?"
The teen's gaze finally focused on her. For a moment, Dr. Sato felt vertigo—as if the ground beneath her had suddenly revealed itself to be much thinner than she'd thought, with an abyss yawning below.
"Dead," the kid said simply. "A long time ago."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Do you have any other family? Grandparents? Aunts or uncles?"
"All dead." "Friends? Anyone who might be worried about you?" The kids expression didn't change, but something flickered behind those yellow eyes. Something that might have been a smile, if smiles could carry the weight of centuries.
"They've all forgotten me by now," he said. The city assigned him to a foster family by morning.
The Tanaka household was located in District 7, a mid-tier residential zone where family units were stacked in efficient modular towers. Not poor, not wealthy. Simply... existing. The kind of place where people lived entire lives without ever being truly seen.
Mrs. Tanaka was nervous when she first saw the kid. She'd fostered children before—runaways, orphans, victims of the Economic Collapse of 2089—but something about this one unsettled her in ways she couldn't articulate.
"We'll take good care of you," she said, smiling too brightly. Her husband stood behind her, silent, uncertain. Their own daughter, Yuki, peeked from behind the kitchen doorway, curious. The teenager bowed with perfect, antiquated formality. Too formal for a modern child. The kind of bow that belonged in historical dramas. "I am in your debt," he said with a hollow voice. The words felt wrong in his mouth. He'd said them before. Many times. To many families. They always forgot eventually.
Mrs. Tanaka showed him to his room—a small space with a sleeping pod, a desk, and a window that looked out over the endless urban sprawl. Lights stretched to the horizon like a circuit board come to life. Somewhere out there, the original shrine had stood. Real. Ancient. Before Tokyo had consumed it, before they'd tried to rebuild it as a tourist attraction, before it had burned again.
Before he'd failed again. "We enrolled you in Nakano Middle School," Mrs. Tanaka said from the doorway. "You'll start tomorrow. The uniform will be delivered tonight. Is there... anything you need?"
The kid stood at the window, his reflection ghost-pale in the glass.
"No," he said. "Thank you." She left. The door slid shut with a slow hiss. Alone, the kid pressed his palm against the window. Outside, a delivery drone passed by, its lights red against the rain. The city breathed. The city forgot. The city moved on. He'd lived through seven Tokyos.
This one was no different.
Nakano Middle School was a brutal ecosystem disguised as an educational institution. The kid—registered in the system as "Ushinau Subete," a name he'd given because it was the only thing that felt true anymore—arrived at 7:45 AM. The other students moved in predictable patterns: clusters of friends, pairs of lovers, isolated individuals hugging the walls like prey animals.
He walked through them like a ghost. Some noticed him. Most didn't.
First period was Modern History. The teacher, Mr. Kobayashi, marked him present without really looking at him. The student next to him—a student with pink-dyed hair and neural interface ports at her temples—glanced over once, then quickly looked away, discomforted by something she couldn't name.
The lecture was about the Edo period. Specifically, the Bakumatsu era—the violent final decades before the Meiji Restoration. Ushinau listened to the sanitized version of history. The textbook version. The one that turned massacres into statistics and suffering into bullet points.
"The collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate was inevitable," Mr. Kobayashi droned, his voice piped through ceiling speakers. "The old ways couldn't survive the pressure of modernization."
Ushinau's hands clenched beneath his desk. The old ways. He remembered those ways. Remembered the weight of a katana in his hands, still slick with blood. Remembered his father's head rolling across wooden floorboards while enemy soldiers laughed. Remembered dragging his childhood friend—Kenji, sweet Kenji who'd loved butterflies and stupid jokes—through mud that had turned red with so much death that the earth itself seemed to be bleeding-...
Remembered Kenji's last breath. Remembered burying him with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. Remembered walking to that shrine three days later, barely alive, and begging for strength...
Remembered the price... "Subete-kun?" He looked up. The teacher was staring at him with mild concern. "Are you alright? You're crying." Ushinau touched his face. His fingers came away wet.
The class was staring. Someone snickered. "I'm fine," Ushinau said. His voice was steady. He'd had centuries to practice steadiness. "I apologize." The tears kept falling anyway.
Lunch period was when the ecosystem revealed its predators.
Three kids from the upper class found him on the roof. The school's rooftop garden was supposed to be off-limits, but rules were suggestions to those who'd learned to ignore them. Ushinau had come here for the silence, for the brief illusion of being somewhere that wasn't drowning in the noise of people who would forget him anyway.
"Hey. New kid." The leader was tall, athletic. Augmented muscle implants bulged beneath his uniform. His name was Daisuke, though Ushinau hadn't bothered to learn it. Names were temporary things.
"You were crying in class. That's pretty pathetic." The other two laughed on cue. Pack behavior. Ushinau had seen it in every era—the strong consolidating power by crushing the weak.
He said nothing. Daisuke stepped closer. "What, you can't talk now? Or are you just stupid?" Still nothing. A hand grabbed his collar, yanked him up. Ushinau let himself be moved. His body felt distant, detached. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut long ago but was still forced to dance. "Maybe we should teach you some respect," Daisuke said.
Then things happened very quickly. One of the other teenagers—overconfident, stupid—threw a punch. Ushinau moved.
Not consciously. Not deliberately. His body simply remembered. Three hundred years of survival instinct compressed into a fraction of a second. He shifted his weight, turned his shoulder, and the punch sailed past his face with millimeters to spare.
The kid stumbled. Lost balance. Crashed into the rooftop railing. Everyone froze. Ushinau stood perfectly still, his yellow eyes wide with something that might have been surprise at his own reflexes. Glowing like a wise sensei.
Daisuke stared at him. "What the hell—" "I'm sorry," Ushinau said quietly. "I didn't mean to." He walked past them. Down the stairs. Back into the school's fluorescent veins.
Behind him, one of the kids whispered: "Did you see his eyes? They were glowing." That night, in his small room in the Tanaka household, Ushinau couldn't sleep.
Sleep had become complicated over the centuries. Dreams were just memories wearing different masks, and all his memories ended in loss.
He sat at his desk and did what he'd done in every era, in every temporary home: he drew.
His hand moved across the paper—real paper, a luxury in 2096—with practiced precision. He drew the landscape he remembered. Rice fields stretching gold beneath summer sun. Mountains where morning mist clung like a lost memory for good. The village where he'd been born, where his mother had sung to him, where his father had taught him to hold a sword properly.
All of it was ash now. Literal ash, buried under four centuries of progress. A knock at the door. "Subete-kun?" It was Yuki, the Tanakas' daughter. She was twelve, curious, innocent in the way only people who'd never known real loss could be. "Are you awake?"
"Yes." She opened the door with a creek. "I heard you moving around. Can't sleep?"
"Something like that." She noticed the drawing. Her eyes widened. "Wow. That's beautiful. Where is it?" "Somewhere that doesn't exist anymore," Ushinau said.
Yuki tilted her head. "Everything exists somewhere. Even if it's just in memory." Ushinau looked at her then, really looked at her, and felt something crack in his emotions. She reminded him of someone. Several someone's. Children he'd known, protected, failed to save. Children who'd forgotten him or died or both. "Do you think," he asked quietly, "that it's possible to remember something so hard that it becomes real again?"
Yuki considered this with the seriousness only people could bring to impossible questions who hadn't lived centuries like he had. "I think... memories are real. Even if the place isn't there anymore, the memory is real because you're real."
She smiled at him. "You're real, right?" Ushinau turned back to his drawing. "I don't know," he said. "I honestly don't know anymore." Yuki lingered another moment, then said goodnight and closed the door.
Ushinau returned to his drawing, adding details only someone who'd actually lived in that era would know. The exact way light fell through shoji screens. The precise angle of a roof tile. The pattern of blood on wooden floors when—he stopped. Put down the pencil.
Crossed to the window. Outside, Neo-Tokyo glittered like a sky fallen to earth. Millions of lights. Millions of lives. Millions of people living and dying and caring and losing and remembering each other.
He pressed his forehead against the cold glass and closed his eyes.
Somewhere deep in the city, in the ruins of a reconstruction of a reconstruction of a shrine that had cursed him centuries ago, something stirred. Something ancient and patient and eternally hungry.
It whispered his name. All of his names. Every identity he'd worn like a mask. Every family he'd lost. Every friend who'd forgotten. Over and over and over and over... Ushinau's reflection stared back at him from the window. A kids face that hadn't aged in three hundred years.
Yellow eyes that had seen empires fall and rise and fall again.
A body that refused to die no matter how many times he'd tried to let it. He whispered to his reflection: "Why am I still here?" The reflection didn't answer. It never did. Outside, the rain began to fall again—slow, deliberate, like the sky trying to remember how to weep for those who'd forgotten how to cry for themselves.
TO BE CONTINUED... [Next Episode: "A Samurai's Ghost in a Classroom"]