Chapter Text
The taste of copper and concrete dust was the last thing Momo Ayase registered before the world went white.
Not the blinding flash of an explosion or the searing beam of a laser—just white. A colour so absolute it didn’t feel like light, but a physical weight pressing against her eyeballs. She couldn’t hear the Kur’s shrieking. She couldn’t feel the crushing pull of Empty Space expanding around them. She couldn’t hear Okarun screaming her name as she held the shield together with everything she had.
Then, just as suddenly, gravity reasserted itself with a cruel thud.
The shield was down. Momo stumbled, her knees cracking against hard asphalt. She gasped, sucking in a lungful of air that tasted entirely wrong. No blood. No burning plasma. Just… car exhaust and the scent of a nearby yakitori stand.
“Miss Ayase!”
She looked up. Okarun lay a few feet away, flat on his back. He scrambled upright, eyes wild behind his glasses, which were miraculously still on his face. He wasn’t transformed.
“Are you hurt?” He gasped, scrambling toward her on his hands and knees. “Where are they? The Kur—where did the Empty Space go?”
Momo didn’t answer. She was staring at her hands. They were shaking, not from adrenaline, but from a sudden, bone-deep cold. She reached inward, trying to grasp that familiar, burning well of spiritual energy that lived in her core.
Nothing.
It wasn’t blocked. Wasn’t suppressed. Just gone, like it had never existed at all.
“Okarun,” she whispered, her voice cracking. She looked at him, then past him.
The city block was intact. No buildings crushed by interdimensional parasites. A pedestrian walked by, staring at his phone, completely unbothered by the two teenagers kneeling on the sidewalk.
“Okarun,” she said again, louder, panic creeping into her throat. “Try it.”
“Try what?” He looked at her, then down at his hands. He understood. Clenched his fists, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to summon Turbo Granny’s power.
For ten seconds, the city was quiet save for the hum of traffic.
Okarun opened his eyes. They were just his eyes. No glowing red pupils, no wisps of Yokai energy. He placed a hand over his chest, feeling a heartbeat that was strong, steady, and painfully human.
“It’s gone…” he breathed, face going pale. “I can’t feel Turbo Granny’s power.”
A heartbeat. Lungs. Everything above the waist accounted for. Below the waist was a different question, and a public sidewalk was not the place to find out.
Momo looked down the street. A mother pushed a stroller along the pavement. No aliens. No ghosts. No chaos. Just an agonizingly, suffocatingly normal Tuesday afternoon.
“Yeah,” Momo said, voice hollow. “Thought so.”
Okarun stood up first. He offered his hand, and she took it without thinking—the kind of automatic gesture that comes from months of pulling each other out of danger.
“Okay,” he said, forcing his analytical brain back online. “Okay. Let’s not… let’s not panic. Let’s think about what we know.”
“What we know,” Momo repeated flatly.
“We were fighting the Kur. The Empty Space was expanding. You had your psychic shield up around us. Then…” He faltered. “Then white.”
“Then this.”
He nodded slowly, eyes scanning the street. A convenience store. A laundromat. A bicycle chained to a pole. Everything exactly where it should be, like someone had painted a backdrop of the city and forgot to add the monsters.
“Where is here, exactly?” Momo asked. She didn’t recognize the block, but the architecture was right for their city. Same power lines. Same narrow sidewalks. Same slightly crooked telephone pole on the corner.
Not snapped in half by a Kur battle suit or melted by alien weaponry.
Just a crooked telephone pole in a world that didn’t need an excuse for it.
Okarun’s hand drifted unconsciously to his side. His fingers found the spot where he’d been wounded in his first encounter with the Kur. The wound that left him crumpled on the ground, blood seeping into dirt. The wound that should have killed him.
His fingers found smooth, unbroken skin.
He pressed harder. Nothing. No tenderness. No heat. Not even a scar.
The absence of pain was disorienting. His body had been bracing for it—the low, constant throb he’d carried since he awoke from his coma, the way every breath pulled at torn tissue, the white-hot flash whenever he moved too fast.
Now it had stopped, and the silence was worse.
There was another part of his body he would definitely need to check later.
His arm dropped. His hand brushed the side of his pants. There was a familiar weight in his pocket. He froze.
Slowly he reached inside and pulled out an object he hadn’t thought of in months.
A phone.
His phone. The very same one that had been destroyed the day he and Momo met. He’d never replaced it. Never had a reason to. Everything had gotten so strange so fast that a phone seemed like a relic from a previous existence.
But here, in his pocket, was his cheap, slightly scuffed flip-phone. A charm he’d never seen before dangled from one side—a little green plastic alien head.
“Miss Ayase,” he said, voice low.
She was already reaching for her own pocket.
Her phone was there too. It was in a pink case with cat ears, but when she pulled it out, it was unmistakably the same smartphone a Turbo-Granny-possessed Okarun had teleported through that day. She turned it over. The lock screen showed a photo of her with two girls she didn’t know, all three making peace signs at a crepe shop.
“What is this?” she asked. “My phone was destroyed months ago.”
“Mine too.”
They stared at the devices like they were live grenades.
“It’s like… this world put them there,” Momo said, “because teenagers are supposed to have phones.”
Okarun opened his flip-phone with a thumb that wasn’t quite steady. The screen lit up. Contacts. Call history. Text messages. A wallpaper photo of a sunset he’d never taken.
“April 15th,” he said, reading the date. “3:47 PM. It’s still the same day.”
Momo was already scrolling through contacts with frantic thumbs. Aira Shiratori came up quickly in the alphabetical list, with a little anime avatar next to the name. She hit call before she could think.
It rang. Once. Twice. Three times.
“Moshi moshi?” Aira’s voice came through, bright and alert and utterly oblivious.
“Aira!” Momo blurted. “Aira, where are you?! Are you okay?! What happened with the Kur—did the Empty Space—”
There was a pause. Not confused. Annoyed.
“…Ayase? From Class 2-B? How did you get my number?”
The words hit Momo like a slap.
“What?”
“Like, we’ve literally never talked? And what are you even asking about—” A small uncomfortable laugh. “Sorry, is this some kind of prank? Did Sana put you up to this?”
“We’ve never talked,” Momo repeated.
“I mean, we’re in the same year? So I know who you are obviously—you’re like, popular—but it’s not like we’ve ever hung out.” Aira’s tone shifted from annoyed to genuinely weirded out. “Look, I’m at the mall with my friends. If this is a bit, it’s not funny. Don’t call again.”
The line went dead.
Momo stood perfectly still, the phone pressed against her ear long after the call ended.
Aira Shiratori— who had screamed herself hoarse fighting alongside her, who had faced down aliens with nothing but pure stubbornness and a body that could bend reality, who had bled for her—had never spoken to her before. Not “didn’t remember.” Didn’t know her.
She was just “Ayase from Class 2-B.” Popular. Untouchable. A stranger.
“I have Sakata-san’s number,” Okarun offered after a moment.
“Try it.”
He did. Momo watched his face as the conversation played out—short, awkward, punctuated by long silences on Okarun’s end.
“Yeah. Okay. Sorry, my mistake.” He closed the flip-phone with a snap. “He knows who I am since we’re in the same homeroom, but he was confused about why I was calling him. Said we’ve barely spoken.”
“Because in this world, you haven’t.”
Okarun didn’t argue.
Momo looked at the pink cat-eared phone in her hand. The lock screen photo of herself with strangers grinned up at her, three carefree girls at a crepe shop in a world where nothing bad ever happened.
She wanted to throw it into traffic.
Instead, she put it back in her pocket.
“Home,” she said. “I need to see Grandma.”
The walk to the shrine took twenty-two minutes. She counted every one.
Nothing attacked them. Nothing followed them. No cold spots, no shadow movement, no distant sound of something inhuman breathing. The streets were clean. The crosswalks functioned.
As they walked, Momo checked her contacts again. She found Jiji’s information—he still lived in Byakuja Village. It made sense. If the Evil Eye situation never happened, there was no reason for his family to move back to their city.
Okarun didn’t say anything for most of the walk. He turned his flip-phone over and over in his hands, studying the little green alien charm like it held answers.
“Someone picked this out,” he said at one point. “Or this version of me did. I guess some part of me was still drawn to this stuff.”
“Or the world just assumed you would be.”
“Maybe.” He tucked the phone away. “I don’t know which option is sadder.”
Beyond the rice paddies, the shrine’s torii gate came into view.
It was just a gate.
Ever since her powers awakened, the torii gate hummed. Not audibly, but spiritually—a low, constant vibration Momo had grown accustomed to feeling the way most people feel sunlight. It was the boundary marker, the threshold between the mundane and the sacred, and it had weight.
Now it was concrete. Just concrete, with a talisman pasted on one side, fading in the sun.
Momo stopped under it. Okarun stopped beside her.
“Do you feel anything?” she asked.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
She stepped through.
The shrine grounds spread out before her, neat and well-maintained. Swept stone path. Dirt yard with scattered grass patches. The shrine building at the end of the path, storage building on the right, and the home where she lived with her grandmother on the left.
Momo walked toward the house, footsteps loud on the stone path. The door was open—Grandma tended to leave it open during the day, said it was bad for the spirits to feel unwelcome.
The spirits.
Momo’s throat tightened.
“Grandma?” she called. “It’s me.”
“I’m in the storage building,” came the voice from behind. “Sorting incense. If you’re going to complain about the smell again, the door works both ways.”
Momo turned.
Through the open door, she could see Seiko Ayase kneeling on the floor, surrounded by boxes of incense sticks and bundles of dried herbs. A cigarette rested between her lips as she sorted them into smaller containers with the same practiced efficiency she’d always had, her hands moving automatically while her eyes stayed focused on the task.
Smoke drifted through the room, mixing with sandalwood incense into something bitter and stale.
But as Momo approached, she barely saw the incense.
She saw the face.
In the world Momo remembered, Seiko Ayase looked like a woman in her thirties. Youthful. Radiant. Sharp-featured and sharp-tongued, with an energy that could fill a room and a beauty that made people do double-takes when they learned she had a teenage granddaughter. Only her snow-white hair alluded to her age. The contracts with the local gods had preserved her.
This woman was not that woman.
The bone structure was the same. The way she held her jaw, the set of her shoulders—those were familiar. But her face had lines. Not deep ones, but the kind that belong to a woman in her sixties who has lived a full, ordinary life. Crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. A slight hollowing of her cheeks. Faint vertical creases around her mouth from decades spent drawing smoke from cigarettes.
The fingers holding the cigarette were yellowed where nicotine had stained the skin over years.
She looked like a woman who had never made a contract with anything.
“Momo.” Seiko didn’t look up. Her voice carried the same authority Momo remembered, but now there was a roughness under it, a permanent smoke-worn rasp. “You’re home early.” She took the cigarette from her mouth and exhaled slowly through her nose. “Did club activities get cancelled?”
Momo couldn’t speak. She stood in the doorway, staring at her grandmother’s face. It was like years of protected youth had simply been edited out. Unwritten. Like the gods who had held Seiko in their palms had never existed, and time had simply done what time does.
“Momo?” Seiko looked up. Her eyes were the same dark, sharp, perceptive eyes Momo had always known. They hadn’t aged. They were the one feature that still looked exactly like her.
But the expression in them was guarded. Not cold, but careful. The expression of a woman who had learned not to expect warmth from this particular visitor.
“Are you going to stand there all day, or are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Grandma,” Momo said. Her voice cracked on the word.
Something flickered across Seiko’s face—surprise, maybe, or the ghost of a softer emotion—but it was quickly smoothed away. She took another drag from the cigarette, then coughed once into her fist. The familiar, dry cough she’d probably ignored for decades.
“Well, that’s new.” Her voice came out rougher. “You haven’t called me that in months.” She stubbed the cigarette out in the tray with practiced force and immediately reached for another from the pack beside her knee. “If this is about money, the answer is the same as last time. The shrine doesn’t run on goodwill, and popularity doesn’t pay for electricity.”
“It’s not about money.”
“Then what?” Seiko lit the new cigarette with a cheap plastic lighter, the flame briefly illuminating the lines in her face. She inhaled deeply before fixing Momo with a sharp look through the smoke. “You look terrible. Have you been eating? You look like you haven’t been eating.”
Momo opened her mouth. Closed it.
How do you ask your grandmother—the woman who taught you everything you know about the spiritual world, who stood between you and horrors you couldn’t imagine, who was the most powerful person you’d ever met—if she remembers any of it?
“Grandma, I need to ask you something.”
“Then ask.”
“Do you know what a Yokai is?”
Seiko’s hands paused on the incense bundle. Just for a moment.
“Of course I know what a yokai is.” She took the cigarette from her lips and spoke around a faint rasp in her throat. “I run a shrine, Momo. I’m not illiterate.”
“What about psychic power? Spiritual energy? Aura manipulation?”
The pause was longer this time. Seiko set the incense down and rubbed absentmindedly at her chest before taking another drag.
When she looked up, her expression had shifted from guarded to something more complex—suspicion layered over curiosity layered over something that might have been hope, though it was buried so deep Momo almost missed it.
“Why are you asking me this?”
“Because I need to know if you can still—”
“Still what, Momo?” Seiko’s voice sharpened, rough as sandpaper around the edges. Not angry. But sharp. The voice of a woman who had spent too many years defending herself from ridicule. “Still sense things? Still channel energy? Still commune with spirits?” She stood up, one hand braced briefly against her lower back as a dry cough interrupted her mid-motion. “You already told me your answer to that. In detail.” Another cough. She waved away the lingering smoke with visible irritation. “In front of the entire neighborhood, if I recall correctly.”
Momo froze. She had called her grandmother a fake once, but that’s not how it happened.
In the real world—the supernatural world—Momo had been proven wrong so spectacularly that she had no choice but to apologize.
But in this world, there had been no proof. No revelation. No shared danger to bridge the gap.
Just a granddaughter who had called her grandmother a fake, and a grandmother who had never been given the chance to be vindicated.
“Grandma, I—”
“I’m going to make tea,” Seiko said, turning away. “You clearly need to sit down. And I need to not have this conversation standing up, because my back is killing me today.”
She walked toward the kitchen. Her gait was measured, slightly stiff—the walk of a woman whose body had not been supernaturally maintained. Momo watched her go and felt something crack inside her chest.
Okarun, silent the entire time, stepped close. His voice was barely a whisper.
“Momo. Is she…?”
“She’s not her,” Momo whispered back. “She looks like her. She sounds like her. But she’s not her.”
“Maybe she is,” Okarun said gently. “Maybe she’s just… a version of her that didn’t get to be extraordinary.”
Momo didn’t have an answer for that.
They sat at the kitchen table. The room smelled faintly of curry and cigarette smoke soaked into old wood.
Seiko poured tea with the same precise, unhurried movements Momo remembered, but her hands were different. Thinner. More fragile. The hands of a woman who had sorted incense and swept shrine grounds and lived an ordinary life for decades, instead of the hands of a woman who had wrestled with forces beyond human comprehension.
Every so often she paused to clear her throat into a closed fist. A half-finished cigarette smoldered in the ashtray beside her teacup, sending a thin ribbon of smoke curling toward the ceiling.
Momo didn’t touch her tea.
Okarun sat very still, trying to make himself small. Seiko had given him a single appraising glance when Momo brought him inside—a glance that said so this is the boy—and then proceeded to ignore him entirely, which was somehow more intimidating than any supernatural threat they’d ever faced.
“Now,” Seiko said, settling into her chair with a small wince. “You’re going to explain what’s actually going on. And you’re going to do it without the dramatic pauses, because I’m too old for dramatic pauses.”
“You’re not old,” Momo said automatically.
Seiko barked out a short laugh that dissolved halfway into a cough.
“I’m sixty-three, Momo. That is, by any reasonable metric, old.” She took another drag. “Now talk.”
So Momo talked.
She told Seiko everything. The Kur. The Empty Space. The battle. The white light. Waking up in a city that was too clean, too quiet, too normal. Reaching for powers that weren’t there. Finding phones in their pockets that shouldn’t exist. Calling friends who didn’t know them.
She told her about the shrine. About how the torii gate used to hum. About how the grounds used to feel alive.
She told her about the yokai and the aliens and the curses and the powers and the months of chaos that had defined her entire life.
Seiko listened.
She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t smirk. She didn’t say I told you so. She smoked quietly through most of the story, cigarette slowly burning between yellowed fingers as smoke coiled through the kitchen light. Her dark eyes were fixed on Momo’s face as she listened to every word.
When Momo finished, the kitchen was quiet except for the clock on the wall. Tick. Tick. Tick. A perfectly normal clock keeping perfectly normal time.
Seiko took a sip of her tea.
“Yokai,” she said. “Aliens. Psychic powers. An interdimensional battle. And you expect me to believe this.”
“I don’t expect you to believe it. I’m telling you what happened.”
“What happened, by your account, is that you and this young man were pulled into an alternate reality where the supernatural doesn’t exist, and you’re the only two people who remember the original world.” Seiko set her cup down. “Do you understand how that sounds?”
“Yes.”
“It sounds like a delusion. Or an excuse.” Seiko’s voice was clinical, detached—the voice of someone who had spent a lifetime studying spiritual phenomena from an academic angle and knew how to separate observation from conclusion. “I’ve read case studies of people who convinced themselves they’d been transported to other worlds. It’s not uncommon among those with a predisposition to—”
“I called you a fake,” Momo interrupted.
Seiko stopped.
“And you were right,” Momo continued. Her voice was steady, but her hands were shaking in her lap. “I called you a fake, and I was wrong. You aren’t a fake. You’re the most powerful medium I’ve ever known. You have contracts with the local gods. They give you amazing powers—”
“Stop.” Seiko’s voice was quiet. Not angry. But final.
Momo stopped.
Seiko looked at her for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes—something that wasn’t skepticism, wasn’t dismissal. Something that looked almost like pain.
“I’ve spent forty years chasing this stuff, Momo.” Seiko’s voice softened slightly, though the rasp never disappeared. “Shrines, archives, old records, half-crazy mountain priests—all of it.” She paused to cough into her hand, longer this time.
She looked down at the cigarette between her fingers.
“And in all that time, I have never—never—experienced anything that I could call conclusive proof of what I was looking for.”
The words landed like stones in still water.
“No spirits,” Seiko continued. “No Yokai. No divine intervention. Just stories. Just folklore. Just the accumulated weight of human belief with nothing behind it.” She leaned back in her chair with a tired creak from the wood beneath her. “I’ve made my peace with that. Mostly.” A dry laugh escaped her. “Some days are harder than others.”
Momo felt something cold settle in her stomach.
Forty years of devotion. Forty years of faith. Forty years of being the “weird shrine lady” who believed in things that didn’t exist.
And her own granddaughter had called her a fake.
“I believed in you,” Momo whispered. “In the other world, I mean. I saw what you could do. I knew you were right.”
Seiko looked at her. The guarded expression cracked, just slightly—just enough for Momo to see the woman underneath, the one who had wanted so badly to be proven right that she’d built her entire life around the hope of it.
“That’s a nice thought,” Seiko said softly. “But it doesn’t help me.”
She stood up, her knees cracking again, and stubbed out her cigarette before clearing the tea things.
“Dinner is at seven,” she said, her voice returning to its practical register. “I’m making curry. You—” she glanced at Okarun—“can stay and eat with us, I suppose. You look like you haven’t eaten in days.”
“Thank you, Ayase-san,” Okarun managed.
“Momo’s friends call me Seiko. But we haven’t been properly introduced, have we?” A faint, wry smile crossed her face. “I’m Momo’s grandmother. Obviously. I run this shrine. I study folklore. I have no magical powers, despite what certain people may have accused me of.”
The smile faded.
“Now. If you’re quite finished with the apocalypse story, I suggest you both wash up.”
She left the kitchen.
Momo sat at the table, staring at the place where her grandmother had been sitting.
“She didn’t believe me,” Momo said.
“She didn’t disbelieve you,” Okarun said carefully. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Yeah. A disbeliever would have laughed. Or gotten angry. Or called a doctor.” Okarun leaned forward. “She listened to every word, Miss Ayase. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t mock you. She asked questions. That’s not the reaction of someone who thinks you’re crazy.”
“It’s the reaction of someone who wants to believe but doesn’t know how.”
Okarun was quiet for a moment.
“Maybe,” he said. “But that’s still more than anyone else has given us.”
Momo wanted to argue. She wanted to say that Seiko’s doubt was worse than Aira’s confusion or Kinta’s indifference, because Seiko was supposed to be the one who understood. But the argument wouldn’t come. Because Okarun was right, and because Momo could still see the look in her grandmother’s eyes.
Forty years of nothing.
Momo had taken for granted that Seiko’s faith had been validated. In the world she remembered, it had been—loudly, violently, undeniably. But in this world, Seiko had carried that faith alone for decades, and the universe had never once answered her.
And Momo had called her a fake.
“I need some air,” Momo said.
She went out the back door and sat on the engawa. Okarun followed shortly after but gave her space, leaning against a wooden pillar a few feet away.
The evening was calm. A breeze moved through the trees that lined the property—normal trees, ordinary trees, not the kind that harbored spirits or whispered secrets. Just maple and cedar doing what trees do.
“Okarun?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Live in a world where nothing means anything.”
He was quiet for a while. Then he slid down the pillar until he was sitting, his legs stretched out in front of him.
“I keep thinking about my parents,” he said. “My mom left a voicemail. I listened to it three times.” He stared at the sky. “In the world I remember, we barely spoke. My parents are always abroad on business trips, so I practically live alone. They’d call to check on me, but really only cared that I was keeping my grades up. I used to wish I could connect with them more, but… Well, our lives just became so chaotic that I pretty much stopped thinking about it.”
He pulled the flip-phone from his pocket and turned it over in his hands.
“Here Mom is asking about my day. Not just school, but about what I did, the latest cryptid articles, what I plan to have for dinner. She sounds happy. Says she’s excited for her and Dad’s next visit. I have a phone with her number in it, and I could call her, and she’d be glad to hear from me.” He closed the phone. “And I can’t do it. I can’t call her. Because it’s not her. It’s a version of her that was written to fill a gap. A version that never had a son who got cursed by a Yokai.”
The silence sat between them for a moment.
“…Maybe,” Momo started, “maybe your parents really do care about you in our world. Maybe they’re just better at showing it here.”
“Maybe. But that’s the problem.” He looked at her. “If I can’t tell whether their love is real or manufactured, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or manufactured. I’ll never trust it either way.”
Momo understood. She understood so completely it hurt.
They sat in silence as the sky turned from blue to orange to purple.
A crow landed on the torii gate.
Momo noticed it peripherally—a dark shape settling onto weathered concrete, still and watchful. She turned to look at it.
It was large for a crow, feathers so black they seemed to absorb the fading light. It sat perfectly motionless, one bright eye fixed on them.
“Crows are common,” Okarun said, following her gaze.
“Very common.”
“This doesn’t mean anything.”
“No.”
The crow sat there, watching them with an intensity that belonged to something considerably larger than a bird.
Momo held its gaze. For a moment—just a moment—something flickered at the edge of her awareness, like the memory of a presence.
Then the crow turned its head away, and the feeling vanished.
“We should go back inside,” Okarun said. “Your grandma is making dinner.”
“Yeah.”
Momo stood, brushing off her skirt. She glanced back at the torii gate one more time.
The crow was gone.
No wingbeats or rustle of leaves. Just an empty gate fading into the dusk.
Dinner was quiet.
Seiko’s curry was good—better than good, rich and warming with a heat that built slowly—and Momo ate without tasting it. Okarun ate like someone who’d barely eaten in days, which, technically, was true.
Seiko ate with the composed efficiency of someone who was used to eating alone. She didn’t try to force conversation or ask questions about Momo’s story. She just ate, refilled their bowls when they were empty, and cleared the dishes when they were done.
“Thank you for the meal,” Okarun said, bowing from his seat.
“You’re polite,” Seiko observed. “Momo could learn from that.”
Momo didn’t respond.
“You can sleep in the spare room,” Seiko told Okarun. “The futon is in the closet. Momo, your room is the same as it’s always been, assuming you haven’t destroyed it.”
Momo almost smiled. Almost.
“Grandma?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m sorry. For what I said before. About you being a fake.”
Seiko paused in the kitchen doorway. Her back was to Momo, and for a long moment she didn’t move.
“I know,” she said finally. “Goodnight, Momo.”
She disappeared down the hallway.
Momo lay in her room, staring at the ceiling.
It was her room. Same walls, same window, same slightly lopsided shelf where she kept her magazines. But the magazines were different—fashion and pop culture instead of the supernatural journals and eyewitness accounts she’d started collecting. There was a familiar poster above her headboard of her celebrity crush, Ken Takakura, but the walls were also adorned with idols she didn’t recognize. None of the spiritual diagrams or alien sighting maps she’d pinned up.
She pulled out the pink cat-eared phone and scrolled through the photo gallery. Hundreds of pictures. Selfies with girls she didn’t know. Food photos. A video of a school festival. A candid shot of Okarun reading in the library, clearly taken without his knowledge, from an angle that suggested the photographer had been hiding behind a bookshelf.
Momo stared at that last one for a long time.
Even in this world, apparently, she’d been drawn to him.
She set the phone face-down on the floor and closed her eyes.
Behind her eyelids, she saw the white again. That absolute, suffocating white that had swallowed the battlefield and spit out this too-clean world.
She wondered if her friends were out there somewhere—not the hollow versions in this world, but the real ones. Jiji. Aira. Kinta. Vamola. Mr. Shrimp. Even the Serpo, Rokuro. All of them, still fighting the Kur in a battle that Momo and Okarun had been stolen from mid-swing.
Were they looking for them? Did they even notice they were gone?
Or had the white swallowed them too?
Sleep came slowly, and when it did, it was full of light.
Outside the shrine, on the torii gate that marked the boundary between the mundane and the sacred—a boundary that now led nowhere—a crow settled in for the night.
It didn’t sleep.
It watched the house with sharp, black eyes, glossy feathers barely stirring in the wind. The shrine was quiet. The grounds were still. No spiritual energy moved through the air, no gods dwelt in the trees, no spirits wandered the stone paths.
Just a crow on a gate in a world that had forgotten how to be afraid.
And if anyone had been close enough to hear—and no one was—they might have caught a sound that didn’t belong.
Not a caw. Not a call.
Something almost like a word.
Almost like a name.
Almost like: Ayase.