Here we gooooo!!!
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Mr. Harrison stood at the front of the classroom, a dry-erase marker hovering loosely in his grip. The whiteboard behind him was full of vectors, velocity equations, and a poorly drawn diagram of a car driving off a cliff that was supposed to represent projectile motion.
He tapped the board.
"Do you have any doubts about the class today?" he asked. His voice was flat, the tone of a man who had asked this specific question four times already this morning.
Twenty-five faces stared back at him. Blank. Empty. It was the kind of silence that wasn't born of concentration, but of absolute, hollow vacancy. To them, Harrison might as well have been reciting the tax code in ancient Sumerian. A fly buzzed against the window pane, desperate to escape. It was the only thing in the room showing any initiative.
Harrison rubbed the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut for a second. He exhaled a long, ragged breath that ruffled his mustache.
"If not," he said, opening his eyes to the sea of indifference, "then I have an important announcement to make."
He paused for dramatic effect. Nobody leaned in, nobody cared.
"For your test tomorrow, remember to go through the three laws of motion. Understood?"
The reaction was delayed, like a bad internet connection. Then, the realization hit.
"We got a test tomorrow?!"
The shriek came from the back. Taylor. Of course, it was Taylor.
Harrison's shoulders slumped. The remaining hope in his posture evaporated. "Yes, Taylor. I have been announcing the exact same thing, at the start and end of every class, for the last four weeks. It is on the syllabus. It is on the whiteboard. It is in the email I sent to you."
Taylor blinked, looking genuinely betrayed. "Wait… so is it open book?"
"No."
"How many questions?" Taylor asked, voice rising in panic.
Harrison straightened up slightly. A procedural question. He could handle procedural questions. At least it showed some interest. "Finally, a relevant question. Based on the material we covered... there should be around six to seven questions."
The silence held for exactly one second.
Then, the back row erupted.
"SIX-SEVEN?!"
It wasn't out of shock. It was the meme. It was that stupid, viral clip that had been circulating on TikTok for a month. Three boys in the back corner slammed their desks, howling with forced laughter, pointing at each other as if they'd just discovered peak comedy.
"Six-seven questions! He said six-seven!" one of them yelled, wiping a fake tear from his eye.
Harrison stared at them. He looked at the marker in his hand. He looked at the door.
"Why the fuck did I become a teacher?" he muttered. It wasn't a question for the class. It was a question for God.
He didn't dismiss them. He just dropped the marker into the tray, grabbed his coffee mug, and walked out of the room three minutes early.
The bell rang moments later, a shrill scream that cut through the sudden chatter.
In the front row, Wade didn't look up. He didn't join the laughter, and he didn't watch the teacher leave. He just reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of battered, over-ear noise-canceling headphones, and clamped them over his ears.
Click.
The world went mute. The stupidity of the back row, the gum-chewing girl, the panic about the test — it all vanished, replaced by calming songs.
He stood up, slinging his backpack over one shoulder. Wade was fifteen, with hair the color of dirty straw that he couldn't be bothered to style, and eyes that always looked half-shut. He moved with the energy of someone who wanted to spend exactly zero extra seconds in public.
Dumbasses, he thought, eyes fixed on the floor tiles as he navigated the maze of desks.
He walked straight to the exit, weaving through the groups of students clogging the hallway without making eye contact. Wade was a loner in his class. He wasn't bullied, he wasn't popular, he wasn't even really noticed. He was just... there. The local orphan kid who got good grades and didn't talk.
That was the strategy. Get the grades, keep the head down, secure the full-ride scholarship to the state university, and get the hell out of this town. It was a simple plan.
The afternoon sun hit him as he pushed through the double doors. He adjusted his headphones, turning the volume up until the bass rattled his skull.
The walk to the orphanage was a twenty-minute trek through the suburbs. It wasn't a bad place, all things considered. "Sunnyvale Group Home" sounded like a mental asylum, but it was decent. The state funding was consistent, the beds were clean, and the staff left you alone if you didn't cause trouble. In this day and age, having Wi-Fi and three meals a day was a luxury Wade knew better than to take for granted.
He pulled his phone out as he walked, his thumb automatically drifting to Instagram. He needed to zone out. The physics test wasn't a concern; he'd memorized the laws of motion two weeks ago.
So he scrolled.
Cat video. Ad for sneakers. Someone's lunch. Politics. Ad for a mobile game.
He paused.
A reel started playing. High-octane music blasted through his headphones, syncing with the frantic animation on the screen. It was an edit from the latest season of My Hero Academia. Green lightning crackled around a kid with messy hair, along with a guy with an explosion for a face.
The animation was crisp. Fluid. You could feel the weight of the hits just by watching.
Damn, Wade thought, slowing his pace slightly. Bones Studio really went all out on this one.
He let the loop play again. He'd never actually watched the show. He knew some of the characters — everyone knew All Might and Deku — but he'd always written it off as generic shonen trash. He was more of a One Punch Man guy, though the latest season of that had been a visual disaster.
That OPM animation was so ass, he mused, critiquing the memory of the slide-show fight scenes. Maybe I should actually give MHA a go. It's about time. Plus, the manga ended, right? No waiting ten years for a cliffhanger resolution.
It seemed like a solid plan for the weekend. Binge-watch five seasons, ignore the real world, maybe order a pizza with the allowance money he'd saved.
He hovered his thumb over the 'Save' icon on the reel.
The vibration in his headphones was the only warning he got. It wasn't the sound of a horn — his noise cancellation was too good for that — but the deep, bone-shaking tremor of something massive displacing air.
He looked up.
He didn't see a truck. He didn't see a driver. He saw a wall of chrome and radiator grilles occupying his entire field of view.
"KID, WATCH OUT!"
The scream was faint, muffled by the music.
Wade's brain fired a command to his legs: Jump. Move. Dodge.
But physics, the subject he had just aced in his head, was a cruel mistress. Inertia was a law, not a suggestion. A body at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
The truck was the unbalanced force.
"Wha — "
The word died in his throat. There was no pain. Pain takes time to travel from the nerves to the brain. This was faster than biology.
There was a violent, jarring impact that felt less like being hit and more like the entire universe suddenly shifting three feet to the left.
Then, silence.
Have you ever been thrown into a calm sea?
Not diving in. Not swimming. But simply existing one moment on dry land, and the next, being suspended in the deep, crushing dark of the ocean.
Imagine that, but strip away the cold. Strip away the pressure of the water. Strip away the stinging of salt in your eyes.
Now, take away the eyes.
Take away the skin.
Take away the ears.
That was where Wade existed. Or rather, where he didn't exist.
He was floating in a void. It wasn't black, because black is a color you see. This was the absence of visual input. It was the color of a blind man's nightmare.
Am I dead?
The thought echoed, but not in a skull. It just resonated in the concept of his consciousness.
I have to be. Unless the hospital has really good drugs.
He tried to move a finger. He couldn't find his hand. He tried to scream. He couldn't find his mouth.
Panic, cold and sharp, tried to seize him. This was it. The afterlife. Eternal nothingness. Just him and his own thoughts, forever.
How long has it been?
Time was broken here.
One second passed. Or maybe it was a century.
Two seconds.
Ten minutes.
A year?
There was no heartbeat to count. No breath to measure rhythm. Just a flat, endless expanse of now.
Wade's panic began to dull, eroding under the sheer weight of the boredom. If this was Hell, it was a surprisingly bureaucratic one. No fire, no brimstone, just an eternal waiting room without any magazines.
He started to think back. His life. Fifteen years. Not a long run.
I didn't even clear my browser history, he thought, a sudden spike of mortification piercing the void. Great.
Was this judgment? Was he being weighed?
I wasn't a bad kid, he reasoned with the darkness. I mean, I didn't donate to charity, but I didn't burn down orphanages either. I punched that fat kid, Jenkins, in the fifth grade, but he was trying to steal my lunch money. That's self-defense. That holds up in court.
He waited for a rebuttal. A demon. An angel. A voice.
Nothing.
Just the crushing weight of isolation.
Okay, this is getting old, Wade thought, the frustration mounting. If you're going to torture me, at least give me something to look at. A white wall. A heavy metal album cover. Anything.
As if the universe had been waiting for a request, the void rippled.
It wasn't a sound. It was a sensation, like static electricity washing over a limb he no longer had.
A light tore through the nothingness.
It wasn't a gentle sunrise. It was a flashbang. White, pure, and blinding.
Wade mentally flinched, bracing for the image of God. A bearded man on a throne. A multi-armed deity. A wheel of burning eyes. He was ready for judgment.
The light coalesced. It swirled, condensing into a shape in the center of the white space.
Wade focused his non-existent eyes.
There, sitting on a floor made of clouds, panting happily with its tongue lolling out, was a dog.
A Golden Retriever.
It looked soft. Impossibly fluffy. Its tail thumped rhythmically against the nothingness, creating ripples of light. It looked at Wade — or the spot where Wade's consciousness was hovering — and tilted its head, letting out a soft woof.
Wade stared.
What the fuck?
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So who was it?? I know it just the first chapter but let me know! Powerstones and comments are greatly appreciated.