jyuugyoza

[jyuugyoza]

Shades of Us

Art Student!Nik x Art Student!Yum

Genre: Slow-burn Romance, Slice-of-Life, Coming-of-Age, Campus Life

WC: 11,425

Two Fine Arts students with totally different vibes get paired up for a project.

They bicker, laugh, and survive late nights fueled by coffee and paint stains.

Between all the chaos and quiet moments, something unexpected sparks.

Turns out, the best connections come from the most unlikely duos.

Prologue

Nicholas is easygoing and popular among the Fine Arts students: always ready with a smile and a joke between paint strokes and gallery visits. He’s not obsessed with grades but knows how to balance creativity with just enough effort to pass. Yuma is a free spirit: loud, messy, and unpredictable, whose wild brushstrokes and bold concepts challenge every rule in the studio.

When they’re paired for a group project, their different artistic energies clash in the bright, paint-scented art rooms. But as finals approach, they find themselves studying late into the quiet campus library, surrounded by sketchbooks, coffee cups stained with ink, and whispered conversations about technique and inspiration. Nicholas begins to see Yuma in a new light, and wonders if there might be something more between them than just deadlines and assignments.

Chapter I: First Sketches

Nicholas was not a typical art student. Unlike his classmates who seemed to either live in paint-splattered overalls or carried around sketchpads everywhere they went, Nicholas fit more comfortably into the casual rhythm of campus life. He was easygoing, quick with a smile, and had a natural talent for making friends. His bright laugh was often heard in the halls of the Fine Arts building, and people liked him for it.

Yuma was his opposite in nearly every way. He had wild curls that refused to stay tamed, clothes often a few sizes too big, and an unpredictable energy that made everyone feel either amused or overwhelmed. His sketches were chaotic bursts of color and emotion—like visual jazz—while Nicholas preferred a more controlled style, his paintings delicate and thoughtful. When the two of them were assigned to the same group project, the clash was inevitable.

The project was simple enough: collaborate on a mixed-media installation that represented a theme of “Contrasts.” Perfect, considering how their personalities collided from the start.

Their first meeting was in one of the campus cafes. Nicholas arrived early, sipping a hot americano and trying to organize his notes. Yuma stormed in five minutes late, scattering papers as he plopped down opposite Nicholas.

“Sorry, traffic was a nightmare,” Yuma said, flashing a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He immediately pulled out a crumpled sketchbook and a messy pencil case.

Nicholas smiled politely but kept his notes to himself. “No worries. So, I was thinking maybe we can brainstorm some ideas?” He opened his notebook and started listing concepts.

Yuma shook his head. “Brainstorm? Man, I want this to scream emotion, not look like a math problem. I’m thinking raw, loud, maybe something that punches you in the gut.”

Nicholas raised an eyebrow. “Right… Well, maybe we can balance that with some subtlety? A little softness to cut through the noise?”

Yuma laughed, a quick, sharp sound. “Subtlety’s overrated. People come to art to feel, not to overthink.”

They spent the next hour arguing, their different visions clashing like colors on a palette. Nicholas found himself wanting to smooth out the edges; Yuma wanted to splatter paint wildly.

“Maybe,” Nicholas said carefully, “our contrast is exactly that? Chaos and calm?”

Yuma grinned wider. “I like that. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.”

The days passed, and despite their disagreements, they started spending more time together, mostly because the deadline loomed.

Nicholas found himself laughing more around Yuma’s easy confidence, even when Yuma teased him for being “too neat” or “too polite.” Yuma, for his part, seemed to enjoy Nicholas’s company even if he never admitted it outright. Their group meetings slowly turned into something warmer, less formal.

One evening, Nicholas bumped into Yuma in the Fine Arts building’s main library. The place was mostly empty except for a handful of students cramming for finals. Yuma was sprawled across a table with paint-stained fingers clutching a coffee cup.

“Burning the midnight oil?” Nicholas teased, dropping his bag beside the chair.

Yuma smirked. “Someone’s gotta keep the chaos alive around here.”

Nicholas pulled out his laptop and notebooks. “Mind if I join?”

Yuma shrugged but smiled. “You’re gonna have to keep up.”

As the hours slipped by, the quiet library became a cocoon for their awkward friendship. They traded stories in whispers between study breaks, argued softly about art techniques, and shared snacks that Yuma insisted were essential for “creative fuel.”

Nicholas noticed how Yuma’s loud, scattered energy softened when he focused—his eyes intense, hands steady as he worked on sketches. Yuma caught Nicholas watching once and raised an eyebrow.

“What? Never seen me not messing around?”

Nicholas shook his head. “No. It’s just… different. Nice.”

Yuma grinned but said nothing.

Weeks passed, and their late-night sessions became routine. One night, after a particularly long study session, Nicholas packed up his things while Yuma doodled absently on a napkin.

“Hey,” Yuma said suddenly, “you ever think about what comes after all this? After finals, after art school?”

Nicholas shrugged. “Sometimes. I don’t know yet. You?”

Yuma’s smile faded a little. “Same. Guess that’s why I throw myself into projects like this. Makes me forget the rest.”

Nicholas nodded. “I get that.”

For the first time, silence stretched comfortably between them.

As Nicholas left the library that night, the soft glow of the streetlights painted long shadows on the pavement. He found himself wondering if maybe, just maybe, the chaos Yuma brought into his life was the thing that made it worth sketching new chapters.

Chapter II: Colors in the Dark

The Fine Arts building had long emptied out when Nicholas arrived that evening. The usual clatter of students and laughter had been replaced by a hushed quiet that felt almost sacred. Only a few lamps outside cast long, golden shadows through the towering windows of the main studio, where canvases leaned against the walls and scattered art supplies waited patiently for their owners’ next touch.

Nicholas held his sketchbook close, fingers curling nervously around its worn edges. The scent of turpentine and acrylics filled the air, comforting and electric all at once. His heart pounded against his ribs as he pushed the heavy door open and stepped inside.

Yuma was already there, perched on the edge of a broad wooden table cluttered with brushes, tubes of paint, and crumpled papers. His dark curls were tousled and wild, and his shirt sported a new splash of cobalt blue along the sleeve. He looked up from his sketchpad with a lazy grin that instantly made Nicholas’s breath hitch.

“Late again, huh?” Yuma teased, stretching his arms over his head. His eyes glimmered with that familiar spark: half mischief, half something softer, and Nicholas couldn’t help but smile.

“Just finishing up some other stuff,” Nicholas replied with a shrug, trying to sound casual but feeling far from it. “Or maybe I was just waiting for you.”

Yuma laughed, the sound low and warm in the empty studio. “Smooth. You trying to charm me before we start work?”

Nicholas shrugged, lowering his sketchbook to the table. “Maybe.”

They moved around the studio together, the awkwardness of the last few weeks melting into a strange, comfortable rhythm. Yuma was all energy and spontaneity, splashing colors across a canvas with wild abandon. Nicholas, more deliberate, sketched careful outlines and refined ideas on paper. Their styles clashed like oil and water, but somehow their project was coming to life, a swirling mix of chaos and calm, loud bursts of paint softened by gentle shading.

“Pass me that palette,” Nicholas said, reaching for the smeared tray of colors.

Yuma tossed it over, and their hands brushed briefly, fingers lingering. Neither pulled away.

They settled into a quiet space near the tall windows, where the streetlights cast long beams that fractured across the floor. The silence was easy, punctuated only by the soft scratching of pencils and the muted tapping of brush bristles.

After a while, Nicholas glanced at Yuma, noticing the way the lamplight caught the curve of his jaw and the faint line of concentration in his brow.

“You’re different at night,” Nicholas said softly.

Yuma looked up, eyes sparkling with amusement. “Different how?”

“Calmer. Maybe… more real.”

Yuma smirked. “You haven’t seen me sleep.”

Nicholas laughed, then felt a sudden surge of boldness. The quiet studio, the intimacy of shared space and late hours, it all gave him courage he didn’t know he had.

He leaned closer. “Yuma…”

The word felt heavy on his tongue. Their eyes met, and Nicholas’s pulse quickened.

Without thinking, he reached out, brushing a stray curl from Yuma’s forehead.

Yuma’s breath hitched, a flicker of surprise flashing in his eyes.

Nicholas’s hand lingered, fingertips tracing the soft skin.

“Can I…?”

Yuma’s smirk softened, almost shy. “Yeah.”

Nicholas closed the distance, lips meeting Yuma’s in a kiss that was tentative at first, gentle as a whispered secret. But the moment deepened, heat sparking between them like wildfire.

Yuma’s hands found Nicholas’s waist, pulling him closer. Nicholas pressed against the wall, his hand sliding from Yuma’s hair down to his neck, fingers curling possessively.

Suddenly, with a gentle but firm push, Nicholas pinned Yuma’s back against the wooden wall behind him.

Yuma gasped, eyes wide in surprise, then smiled wickedly.

“You’re braver than I thought.”

Nicholas’s lips brushed against Yuma’s jaw, trailing down to his neck, breathing warm and slow.

The studio around them faded away. Paint-streaked brushes, splattered floors, and shadowed canvases blurred into nothingness.

All that mattered was the heat, the closeness, the electricity of first kisses and new beginnings.

They broke apart slowly, foreheads resting together, breaths mingling.

Nicholas whispered, “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”

Yuma chuckled softly. “Guess I’m not the only one.”

For a while, they stayed wrapped in quiet, a fragile bubble of something real and precious.

Eventually, Nicholas pulled back slightly, smiling shyly.

“We should finish the project.”

Yuma nodded, eyes sparkling mischievously. “Yeah. But maybe later, we work on something more… personal.”

Nicholas grinned. “I like the sound of that.”

The night stretched on, filled with whispered laughter, tentative touches, and shared dreams beneath the dim glow of the city lights.

In the world of paint and shadows, Nicholas and Yuma found their colors blending: messy, unpredictable, and beautiful.

Epilogue

The semester ended with their mixed-media project receiving praise for its vibrant blend of chaos and calm, much like Nicholas and Yuma themselves.

On the day of the final exhibition, Nicholas found Yuma waiting outside the gallery, his usual smirk softened by something warmer.

“Ready for what’s next?” Yuma asked, eyes shining.

Nicholas smiled, heart steady. “With you? Always.”

In the quiet of the campus courtyard, their hands tangled, lips crashing together in a heated kiss: slow, hungry. Breathless, they melted into each other, promises unspoken but felt in every touch. No masterpiece could capture this moment: raw, messy, and beautiful, their own work of art unfolding.

to be continued...

the continuation of the story: “Shadows and Strokes”

[jyuugyoza]

Beneath the Fireworks

Bestfriend!Mak x Bestfriend!Rung

Genre: Slow-burn Romance, Friends to Lover, Tension & Yearning

WC: 9,359

They’ve always called it friendship. The kind that lingers in glances and accidental touches. But under lantern light and fireworks, the line begins to blur. And one rain-soaked night might erase it forever.

Prologue

Maki and Harua have always been just friends.

The kind who linger too long in each other’s gaze, brush hands like it’s an accident, and laugh a little too easily in each other’s presence. The kind who claim it’s all harmless, even when everyone else can see the invisible thread tying them together.

They orbit each other like it’s instinct, like gravity itself pulls them closer, yet neither dares to name what’s really there. Because crossing that line could ruin everything.

But one summer night changes the rules.

A festival glowing with lantern light and fireworks. The warm scent of grilled food drifting through the air. Harua’s palm at the small of Maki’s back, guiding him through the press of the crowd. A dance in the open square that feels too close. Above them, the night sky blooms with fireworks, bursts of red and gold scattering across Maki’s eyes.

A pause between heartbeats where lips almost meet.

And in that moment, the unspoken truth burns between them, like the last spark before a fire catches.

Chapter I: Almost

The summer air tastes like sugar and smoke. Sweet from the candied fruit stands, smoky from the yakitori grill a few stalls down. The festival is alive with sound and color, lanterns swaying overhead as people drift through the narrow lanes in a slow, endless tide.

Harua crouches in front of a goldfish tub, squinting at the darting flashes of orange and white. The paper scooper in his hand already looks doomed, its delicate surface sagging where it’s gotten too wet.

“You’re terrible at this,” Maki says from behind him, voice carrying more amusement than sympathy.

Harua glances over his shoulder. “It’s called strategy.” He lowers the scooper carefully, watching the tiny goldfish scatter away from the shadow. Another dart, another near miss.

Maki leans down slightly, his shadow falling over Harua’s shoulder. “You know the point is to catch them, not just chase them around.”

Harua shoots him a look, lips twitching like he’s holding back a smile. “You want to try, genius?”

“No,” Maki says immediately. “I prefer watching you fail.”

Harua huffs, focusing again—but the paper tears, the goldfish slipping free. Maki can’t help the laugh that escapes. “Tragic. Really tragic.”

Harua tosses the ruined scooper into the bin and stands, brushing off his hands. “You’re just here to distract me.”

“Exactly.” Maki falls into step beside him as they move down the main lane, the glow from paper lanterns washing over their faces in shifting patterns.

Somewhere ahead, their friends are arguing over which food stall to try next.

When they catch up, someone shoves a stick of grilled corn into Harua’s hands. “Here, share,” one of their friends, Nicholas, says before darting off toward the yakisoba stand.

By the time Harua turns, the group’s splintered, most of them lured toward food or games. Only Maki lingers, looking at him like he’s not in a rush to go anywhere.

“You planning to hog that whole thing?” Maki asks.

Harua bites into the corn without breaking eye contact. “Yes.”

Maki grins, stepping closer anyway. He leans down, not quite close enough to touch, and takes a bite from the other side of the cob. It’s casual. It’s nothing. And it still makes Harua’s stomach flip.

They lose the others again after a round of ring toss. Harua watches Maki toss the final ring, landing it neatly over the peg on the far side.

“You cheat at everything,” Harua mutters.

“Skill,” Maki says, collecting the tiny plush prize, a chubby, round bunny, and holding it out. “Here.”

Harua blinks. “What?”

“You like Rabbit, don’t you?” Maki’s voice is so casual it’s infuriating. “Don’t make it weird.”

Harua takes it anyway. The bunny’s soft in his hand, and he tries not to think about the fact that Maki probably remembered him mentioning that once, months ago.

They hear the music before they see it—the swell of a live band tuning up, strings and percussion threading together into something bright. Lanterns sway above a makeshift dance floor where couples are already moving.

Maki glances at him, that spark of challenge in his eyes. “Dance with me.”

Harua laughs. “No.”

“Come on. One song.”

“I don’t dance.”

Maki steps closer, grinning. “Then stand there and let me do the work.”

Before Harua can protest again, Maki catches his hand and tugs him forward. The music wraps around them, and somehow, Harua’s moving—awkward at first, then less so, because Maki’s hand on his waist is steady, sure.

They start off joking, deliberately over-exaggerating steps, but the longer they stay, the slower they move. Harua’s palm settles firmly at the small of Maki’s back. Maki’s free hand ends up resting on Harua’s shoulder without thinking about it.

“You’re not bad,” Maki says softly, just loud enough for Harua to hear over the music.

Harua’s looks up, ready with a retort, but the words get stuck somewhere between his chest and throat. Maki’s looking at him with an expression Harua can’t pin down. Something intent. Something warm.

The world tilts. Harua forgets what he was going to say.

Later, they’re walking back toward the quieter edge of the festival when the first firework cracks open overhead. Gold light spills across the street, catching in Harua’s hair.

They stop under a streetlamp. Maki takes a step closer, gaze dipping briefly to Harua’s mouth before lifting again.

Harua doesn’t move.

The air feels thick, like the pause before a summer storm. Maki leans in, just slightly, and Harua feels his breath—warm, steady, too close to be nothing.

Then,

“Maki!” A voice from across the street calls his name.

Maki blinks, pulling back just enough to break the moment. His smile tilts, not quite an apology. “Come on. You still owe me another dance.”

Harua follows, telling himself the uneven beat in his chest is from the fireworks.

That night, lying in bed, Harua stares at the small rabbit plush on his nightstand. He tries to replay the festival like it was any other night out with friends.

But all he sees is Maki leaning closer under the streetlamp.

All he hears is the sound of his own breath catching.

And all he feels is the warmth where Maki’s hand had been, steady against his shoulder, like it belonged there.

Chapter II: No Turning Back

The week after the festival feels… different.

They still see each other—in the cafeteria, in the library, walking home with their usual group, but Harua notices the pauses now. The way Maki’s gaze lingers a fraction too long. The way Harua finds himself looking back even when he tells himself not to.

Texting hasn’t gotten easier, either.

Every “hey” feels like it’s holding something else.

Every emoji from Maki feels loaded.

And Harua hates how much he reads into them.

It’s Saturday when Harua asks if Maki wants to help him pick up a few things for next week’s club event. Just the two of them. Maki says yes without thinking.

The afternoon is easy, almost like before.

Until it’s not.

They’re halfway down the street, Maki carrying a paper bag of snacks and Harua holding a box of decorations, when the first raindrops land on the pavement.

“Wasn’t supposed to rain today,” Maki mutters, glancing up.

Within seconds, it’s pouring. They duck under the awning of a closed shop, pressed close to avoid the curtain of water spilling off the edge.

Harua’s hair is damp already, dark strands sticking to his forehead. He rubs at them with his sleeve, shivering. “Great. Totally worth checking the weather.”

Maki glances at him, then down at his own jacket—light but warm enough. He doesn’t think about it. He just shrugs it off and drops it over Harua’s shoulders.

Harua freezes, looking down at the fabric and then up at Maki. “You’re going to get cold.”

“You get sick easier than I do,” Maki says, adjusting the collar so it sits right. His fingers brush the warm skin just above Harua’s collarbone, and the touch sends a current straight through him.

Maki doesn’t move. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

Harua blinks. “What?”

“Since the festival.” Maki’s voice is low, but it cuts through the sound of the rain. “You look away every time I look at you. You laugh like nothing’s weird, but it is.”

Harua swallows. His first instinct is to deflect—make a joke, point out the weather, anything—but the words won’t come.

“I just…” His voice catches. “I don’t want to mess this up.”

Maki steps closer, the scent of rain and something warm filling the space between them. “What if it makes it better?”

Harua’s breath hitches. He doesn’t back away when Maki lifts a hand to his cheek, thumb brushing lightly over his skin.

The kiss starts as a question—soft, tentative. Harua answers it before he realizes he’s moving, leaning in, deepening it. Maki’s free hand finds Harua’s waist, holding him there like he’s afraid he’ll pull away.

When they break apart, the rain is still falling, but the sound feels far away.

Maki’s smile is small, real. “I’ve been waiting for you to do that.”

Harua shakes his head, half in disbelief, half because he doesn’t trust his voice yet.

They walk home under Harua’s umbrella, shoulders pressed together. Harua keeps the jacket on, fingers curled in the fabric like he’s not ready to give it back.

Halfway down the street, he slips his hand into Maki’s. No teasing this time. No hiding. Just steady, certain warmth.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

The Memory Tax

Cast: Taki

Genre: Sci-fi, Romance, Tragedy, Mystery

WC: 12,464

In a future where people pay for healthcare by giving up memories, one man wakes up with a clean bill, and no recollection.

Chapter I – A Life Worth Forgetting

Taki opens his eyes to white light.

Not the harsh, fluorescent buzz of a hospital—but a soft, sterile glow, humming from hidden panels. The ceiling above him is curved, clinical, gentle in its way. He blinks. Once. Twice. The world smells like antiseptic and plastic and something faintly metallic.

He doesn’t know where he is.

Worse, he doesn’t know who he is.

A soft chime sounds to his left. The door slides open.

“Good morning, Taki,” says a voice.

It belongs to a woman in a slate-blue uniform, a sleek tablet in one hand. Her expression is calm, too practiced to be warm. Her name tag reads: Dr. Richino. Memory Tax Division. She doesn't sit. Doesn’t smile.

“How do you feel?”

Taki opens his mouth. No words come.

She notes it down.

“Residual confusion is normal,” she says. “Cognition intact. Motor function present. You’ve responded well to your treatment.”

He forces a sound from his throat. “Treatment?”

“You were brought in seven days ago. Critical status. Collapsed lung, internal bleeding. We stabilized you within 24 hours.” Her eyes flick over the screen. “No emergency contacts were listed. But your file was marked for full authorization of memory contribution.”

Taki stares.

“You paid in advance,” Dr. Richino says. “With memories.”

Something in his stomach turns.

“You gave up six years of long-term memory,” she continues. “That covered the full cost, including rehabilitation and neural stabilization. We removed all relevant mnemonic data as requested. You’re officially debt-free. Clean slate.”

Her words feel like an axe to the brain.

Six years. Gone.

“Why would I…?”

“People don’t always leave notes,” she says. “Some don’t want to know what they gave up. Others leave messages to themselves in a lockbox. You declined both options.”

She hands him a small card. It’s matte black, with his name printed in clean white type: TAKI. Patient ID: 20458-X. Memory Tax Division.

“This is your identity pass,” Dr. Richino says. “You’re free to go.”

He stares at it. “That’s it?”

She nods. “Your discharge papers are already uploaded.”

“But I don’t remember anything.”

“That was the cost,” she says. “And you already paid.”

Outside, the city pulses with a cold, glittering rhythm.

Taki stands under the pale sky, buildings arching overhead like glass skeletons. He wears a clinic-issued coat, unfamiliar boots, and carries a pack with the bare essentials: ID, public transit credits, and a voucher for temporary housing.

Everything else—friends, family, his favorite meal, his favorite song—gone.

His hands tremble as he stares at the ID again. Just “Taki.” No surname. No history.

People pass him on the street, absorbed in their lenses and screens. No one looks up. No one recognizes him.

He wanders for hours. Through the commercial quarter with its glowing storefronts. Down into the subway station, where holographic ads flicker:

Pay what you can. Forget what you must.

Memory Tax Division—Saving lives, one memory at a time.

He wants to scream.

Instead, he finds the assigned capsule unit in a housing tower labeled A-9 West. Inside: a fold-out bed, a shower pod, a screen. Nothing else.

As he closes the door behind him, something strange flickers behind his eyes.

A flash.

Laughter. Bright and warm.

Someone’s hand brushing his. The scent of cinnamon and rain.

Then gone.

Taki gasps.

Was that real?

The dreams begin on the third night.

They aren’t memories, not exactly. They feel younger, like echoes left in the bones.

He’s sitting somewhere under a tree, maybe. Summer light spills through the leaves. A girl is there. Her hair catches the sunlight like thread. Her face is blurred, but her voice rings clear.

“I told you not to forget me.”

Her tone is teasing, but her eyes are wet.

In the dream, Taki smiles. He says something. She laughs.

Then,

The world burns white.

He wakes up drenched in sweat.

He goes back to the clinic.

Dr. Richino meets him with the same flat expression. “We don’t do refunds.”

“I’m not asking for one,” he says. “I just… I keep seeing someone. A girl. In dreams.”

She studies him. “Residual projections are common. When memory sectors are removed, neural pathways sometimes try to rebuild context with fragments.”

“No,” he insists. “It feels real.”

“That’s how the brain works. Dreams borrow emotion from what’s missing. It's not uncommon to invent a phantom connection.”

“But what if I didn’t invent her?”

Dr. Richino exhales. “You signed a full waiver, Taki. No backups. No lockbox. If this girl was real, then you chose to forget her.”

He stands. “Maybe I didn’t have a choice.”

Her eyes harden, just slightly.

“Some people pay to forget pain,” she says. “Others pay to forget guilt. You might not like what you find.”

Days pass.

Taki tries to move forward.

He applies for a temporary job in the tech repair sector. The pay is low, but the work keeps his hands busy screen recalibrations, bio-chip diagnostics, fixing things other people broke.

But at night, the girl returns.

She’s sitting across from him in a noodle shop. Wind outside, neon flickering. She’s laughing—then suddenly, she isn’t. Her eyes shimmer like she’s trying not to cry.

“Promise me something,” she says.

“What?”

“Don’t forget this. Even if it hurts.”

He reaches for her hand.

Then, white.

One afternoon, a man comes into the repair booth with a broken lens unit. Late-twenties, sharp jacket, and oddly familiar. Taki fixes the glitch, hands it back. The man squints at him.

“Do I know you?”

Taki freezes. “I… don’t think so.”

The man tilts his head. “You look like someone I used to know. He vanished a few months ago. Thought maybe he got taxed out.”

Taki swallows. “Taxed out?”

The man taps his temple. “Too much memory debt. Happened to my brother. Gave up seven years to clear a cancer treatment. Doesn’t remember his own kid now.”

He frowns. “You sure we haven’t met?”

Taki shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

The man leaves.

But something itches at the edge of Taki’s thoughts.

A few months ago.

Did he really go in willingly?

He starts digging.

There are underground forums for the taxed. People trading stories, trying to recover fragments. Some share old photos to see if anyone recognizes them. Others post coordinates where forgotten memories feel strongest.

Taki visits one.

A bridge overlooking the southern canal.

He stands there at dusk, watching the water shift colors with the fading sky.

He doesn’t remember this place.

But his body does.

He sits on the railing. Closes his eyes.

The scent of rain on stone. A song playing on a cheap speaker. A girl’s voice, whispering:

“This is where you told me you’d find me again.”

His breath catches.

He buys an illegal neural reader from a black-market vendor.

It’s risky, tampering with a taxed brain can cause seizures but he needs to know.

The reader pulses against his skull. It digs deep, scraping the shadows of memory for anything left behind.

Images stutter across the screen.

A park bench. A train ticket. A hand clutching his shirt. A necklace shaped like a paper crane.

Then, her.

Not a dream. Not a projection.

A real girl.

Dark hair. Sharp eyes. A half-smile like she knows what you're going to say before you say it.

Her voice, echoing:

“I’d rather you lived, even if you forgot me.”

He drops the reader.

His heart is pounding.

She was real.

And she let him go.

Or maybe… he begged her to let him go.

He goes back to the canal.

It’s raining this time.

Taki stands where he once stood and whispers, “I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t know who he’s saying it to. Her name, her face—still smeared with static. But the emotion is sharp, almost unbearable.

Not just sorrow.

Love.

That night, he dreams again.

She’s standing by the train tracks, wearing the paper crane necklace.

“I thought I was strong enough,” she says softly. “But losing you before you were gone? That hurt more.”

He steps closer. “Who are you?”

Her smile trembles.

“You knew me better than anyone. That’s why it was you.”

He stares. “What did I do?”

“You made a choice. And I let you.”

She reaches out, touches his face.

“Don’t chase ghosts, Taki.”

The train roars past.

And she vanishes.

He wakes with tears on his face.

And a question burning in his chest:

Was it really just to save himself?

Or did he give up everything…

…to save her?

Chapter II – Everything We Chose to Forget

The train station is nearly empty.

Taki stands by the vending machines, watching a train blur past in silence. He’s been here every day for the past week—same time, same platform. Waiting for something he’s not sure exists. A memory, maybe. A ghost. A girl with a name that came to him in a dream and burned itself into his bones:

Danish.

He doesn’t know how he remembered it.

He just woke up one morning, the word pressed like a bruise behind his teeth. It didn’t feel like a name. It felt like a promise.

In the weeks since his neural reader session, fragments have returned.

They’re not full memories, more like flashes of sensation. The way her hand fit in his. The way she laughed mid-sentence. The faint lemon scent in her hair.

He doesn’t know where she is. If she’s alive. If she’d even recognize him.

But he knows this: she was real.

And he loved her.

The rest, he has to find out.

The break comes unexpectedly.

He’s working at the repair kiosk when a woman brings in a cracked data lens. Routine job. She looks tired, distracted. She hands it over without a word.

As Taki starts repairs, something in the lens catches his eye.

A cached image.

He doesn’t mean to open it, he’s not supposed to. But something pulls him in.

The photo unfolds in soft resolution: two people on a rooftop at night, city lights behind them. A boy and a girl. The boy is laughing. The girl is reaching for the camera, half-annoyed, half-amused.

Taki stares at the girl.

Dark hair. Round eyes. A paper crane necklace.

Danish.

He nearly drops the lens.

“Where did you get this?” he asks.

The woman blinks. “The lens? It’s mine.”

“No. The photo.”

“Oh.” She leans in, squints at the frozen image. “That’s… wow. That was years ago. He took it. My friend Danish’s boyfriend.”

His chest lurches. “Where is she now?”

The woman hesitates. “Look, I don’t really know. I haven’t seen her since the accident. She kind of disappeared after that.”

“What accident?”

“The train crash. Six months ago. She and her boyfriend were on it. He got hurt real bad. She walked away without a scratch.”

The pieces click.

Taki sits down.

That’s how it happened. That’s when he was brought into the clinic.

He was dying.

She lived.

And he chose to forget.

The woman looks at him again, eyes narrowing. “Wait. You look familiar.”

Taki swallows. “Please. Can you tell me where I can find her?”

They sit in silence in the greenhouse, surrounded by the breath of living things—ivy, misted leaves, soft dirt underfoot.

Taki runs a hand over the scar on his wrist. “If I asked you to start over… would you?”

Danish doesn't look at him right away. Her fingers trail the rim of the old teacup she’s holding.

“I think I already did,” she says softly. “The day you forgot me, I had to start over. Alone.”

Taki flinches. “I didn’t know.”

“I know,” she says gently. “You weren’t supposed to.”

He breathes in slowly. The air smells like old petals and memory.

“You found me again,” Danish says. “That means something.”

“But it doesn’t change what I did.”

She looks at him now. Her eyes are steady. “You did what you had to do to survive. I was the one who stayed behind. I chose the pain.”

“And I chose to forget you.”

A pause.

“Would you do it again?” she asks.

He opens his mouth. No answer comes.

She nods. “That’s what I thought.”

She stands. Walks to the doorway where twilight bleeds gold through shattered glass.

“I loved you, Taki. I don’t know if I still do, not in the way I did before. But I’ll always love who we were.”

She glances back. “And I think… that’s enough.”

He rises. Walks to her.

His hand reaches for hers. She lets him hold it, just for a moment.

Then she lets go.

Weeks pass.

He doesn’t see her again.

But sometimes, walking the quiet city streets, he catches glimpses a flash of dark hair, a paper crane necklace glinting in a crowd.

She doesn’t look back.

And he doesn’t call out.

Because some goodbyes aren’t dramatic. Some aren’t final.

Some are just…

choices.

Back at his tiny apartment, Taki keeps a holo photo of her on the desk. It’s blurry and soft at the edges. They’re both laughing.

He doesn’t remember the moment.

But he knows it mattered.

And every time he looks at it, he whispers the same thing to himself:

“Next time… I’ll choose differently.”

Then he closes the photo, and keeps going.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

Sonar Black

Cast: Maki

Cameo: Nicholas, Harua, Taki

Genre: Sci-fi Horror, Survival Thriller, Psychological Tension, Creature Feature

WC: 13,829

The cameras see nothing.

The sonar says it’s still there.

Something massive waits outside.

Chapter I – Below the Dome

The sea presses against the glass like a held breath.

Luné, the dome city, sleeps beneath ten thousand meters of crushing black water. Its lights hum faintly through thick fog and shadow, casting a ghostly glow across the silt-covered ocean floor. Outside, it is nothing. Cold. Still. Silent.

Inside, the hum of artificial life goes on.

Maki sits alone in Central Diagnostics, watching the monitors flicker. The deep-sea currents are behaving oddly again, low-frequency tremors ripple along the seabed like distant thunder. He glances at the seismic readout, brow furrowed. The needle twitches when it shouldn't.

Taki’s voice crackles over the comms.

“You still watching those tremors?”

Maki leans forward, adjusting the gain.

“Yeah. They’re back again. Lower frequency this time.”

He hesitates. “Almost rhythmic.”

“Great. I’ll tell Harua to prep the junction vaults. Just in case we get another power surge.”

The last one, barely two days ago, had shorted a third of Luné’s external sensors and fried three of the outer cams. They blamed oceanic stress and moved on.

But Maki isn’t so sure anymore.

He taps a command into the console. The sonar scans come up like ripples on a pond. Movement—soft, scattered. Nothing definitive. But something’s stirring out there.

Something big.

Shift change brings a lull. Harua drifts into the diagnostics room, pulling off his gloves with a loud sigh. His blond hair floats for a second before settling under gravity fields.

“Night shift blues?” he says.

“Same as usual,” Maki replies, but his eyes don’t leave the monitors. “Except the tremors.”

Harua leans over. “Still happening?”

Maki nods. “And there's—” He hesitates, then brings up the sonar display again. “Look.”

A faint distortion pulses at the edge of the scan. It stretches almost the full diameter of the dome's perimeter.

“That’s—no way. That’s gotta be a glitch.”

“That's what I thought too,” Maki mutters.

Harua straightens. “You report it to Nicholas?”

“Not yet. He’ll say it’s thermal expansion again.”

“Maybe it is.”

Maki closes the display. “Then why does it look like it's circling us?”

They bring it up during briefing, but Nicholas waves it off with a tired expression. His eyes never seem to blink. Years under pressure, literally.

“It’s likely a current distortion,”

he says, adjusting the oxygen levels in the command center. “You two are overdue for surface rotation. These readings get in your head.”

“But the pattern—” Maki begins.

Nicholas cuts him off with a raised hand. “Bud, if something that big was out there, we’d see it on the cameras.”

Harua shoots Maki a look. Maki says nothing.

Nicholas adds, “If you want to check it out, fine. Take a crawler and run diagnostics on the outer cameras. We’ve got a window before the storm front hits.”

The crawler is cramped and cold, built more for maintenance than exploration. Maki drives, Harua mans the scanner. Outside, the world is ink and memory, faint outlines of jagged terrain and sediment clouds swirl past like ghosts.

They stop near Camera 16—the one nearest the old trench line. Harua activates the spotlights. Nothing but endless dark.

“Camera’s intact,”

he says, wiping condensation off the inner window. “But look at the silt.”

The seabed is disturbed—long grooves etched in the sediment, winding like scars.

“Could be geological,”

Harua offers weakly.

“Could be a fin.” Maki says.

Harua stiffens.

Something glides past the edge of the spotlight. Just a flicker. A shift in the dark.

Maki grips the control stick. “Did you see—”

“Yeah,”

Harua breathes.

It’s gone now. Whatever it was.

They back away slowly. On the sonar, the anomaly reappears, closer now. Still no shape. Just mass.

By the time they return, Nicholas is already reviewing logs.

“You took too long,”

he mutters.

“There’s something out there,” Maki says.

Nicholas looks up. “Did you see it?”

“Only a glimpse.”

“Then it’s not a confirmed sighting.”

Harua adds, “The trench is disturbed. Deep grooves. Not seismic. Organic.”

Nicholas pinches the bridge of his nose. “I want both of you to rest. You’re seeing patterns in shadows.”

“But if it’s alive—” Maki begins.

Nicholas's voice hardens. “Then we’ll deal with it. We’ve survived rogue whales, faulty bots, even pressure breaches. One more bump in the dark isn’t going to bring this place down.”

At 0200 hours, the outer corridor alarms go off.

Maki jerks awake to the sound of a klaxon, the lights flashing red.

“Structural breach—Section T. Level 3 access corridor.”

He throws on his suit and runs. Taki meets him halfway, bleary-eyed but alert.

“It’s not a drill?” Taki asks.

“No. Cameras are down. Comms too.”

They reach the sealed hallway. Water is seeping through a jagged crack in the far wall, shimmering with bioluminescent trails.

“What the hell—” Taki mutters. “That’s not standard leak pattern.”

“It’s like something sliced it.”

Then the lights go out.

Pitch black.

Only the emergency strips remain, pulsing red like a heartbeat.

Something scrapes against the outer wall—slow, deliberate. Like claws.

Then… silence.

Nicholas locks down the compromised corridor and orders a sweep. No one finds anything.

But the breach was clean. Too clean. Not pressure stress. Not erosion.

“I’m pulling up dome schematics,”

Maki says later, fingers flying over the console. “There’s something in the layout, see here?”

He brings up a grid. The sensor blind spots form a ring. A perfect ring around the dome.

“It’s like it knows where we can't see.”

Nicholas exhales slowly. For the first time, he looks uneasy.

“You said you saw grooves,” he says.

“More like trench lines,” Harua adds.

Nicholas nods. “Two hundred million years ago, before this seabed was even formed, this trench was part of an inland sea. Fossils recovered here showed evidence of extreme predation—deep bite marks, symmetrical scoring.”

Maki freezes. “Are you saying this isn’t new?”

Nicholas looks grim. “I’m saying it might’ve been sleeping. And we built a city on its grave.”

Later, Maki dreams of a glass dome cracking like an egg. He sees a shape, a mass so large it doesn’t move so much as displace.

He hears something in the pressure waves. Not a voice exactly, but rhythm. Like sonar. Like breath.

He wakes choking on air.

And the alarms are screaming again.

Five camera feeds go down simultaneously. Then nine. Then all exterior visuals vanish into static.

Only sonar remains.

And the mass is back.

No longer circling.

It’s approaching.

Nicholas takes command with clenched fists. “All crew to command deck. We shut all non-essential systems. Seal inner doors.”

But it’s too late.

The city groans—an enormous, aching creak that travels through the walls like whale song.

Then the lights flicker.

And the glass begins to fog.

Harua’s voice cracks over the intercom. “Maki, the outer dome—there’s… something… outside.”

“Can you see it?”

“No. That’s the problem.”

Maki rushes to Diagnostics. Every feed is down, except one—Camera 27. It flickers back to life.

He stares.

It’s not a creature.

It’s a hole in the dark. A perfect absence. Circular. Pulsing.

Then something opens in the center of it.

A mouth.

Not with teeth. With rows of filament limbs, sifting water, tasting air.

A filter feeder? No. Too big. Too aware.

It turns toward the camera.

And the feed dies.

Maki stumbles back.

“It saw me,” he whispers.

Nicholas joins him, face pale. “We were never meant to see it. It’s a survivor. An apex.”

“A god,” Harua says behind them.

“No,” Nicholas replies. “Just hunger. Ancient and unending.”

The city shudders.

Cracks spiderweb through the far end of the dome.

Water begins to pour in—not fast, not catastrophic. Not yet.

But the pressure is rising.

Maki activates emergency vent protocols. Flood gates lock. Sector by sector.

“Evacuation pod?” Harua asks.

“Offline. Jammed.”

“Surface shuttle?”

“Too risky,” Nicholas growls. “We launch and it follows us, we lead it to the surface. We can’t risk that.”

Taki speaks up. “Then what? We drown quietly?”

Maki’s fingers tremble on the console. Then stop.

“No. We distract it.”

Nicholas narrows his eyes. “Explain.”

“We pump heat and sound into the west sectors. We make it think something’s alive out there. While it investigates, we patch the breach, bring cameras back online.”

Nicholas considers. Then nods. “Do it.”

In the darkness, Luné hums louder than ever.

Heaters flare. Pumps whine. Sound cannons throb low and deep, like a heartbeat.

And something answers.

It moves.

Not fast.

Not violent.

But it moves.

Maki watches its shadow drift across sonar like a black tide.

They buy themselves twelve minutes.

Enough to seal the breach. Enough to reactivate cameras.

But not enough to stop what’s coming.

Because now, it knows they see it.

And it’s coming back.

Chapter II: The Throat of the World

The sonar bleeds static.

What used to be a wide, quiet seafloor is now trembling—slow, deep pulses like the ocean has a heartbeat. The tremors have returned stronger. Angrier. And this time, they don’t fade.

Maki stares at the sonar feed.

One shape.

Singular.

Massive.

“Still think it’s a current anomaly?” he mutters.

Harua leans in behind him, eyes wide. “That’s not a glitch.”

“No,” Maki says, pulse quickening. “That’s alive.”

The mass shifts again—too fast for a current, too silent for machinery. A streak of motion on the edges of their sensors, long as a freighter and cold as the void. Then gone again, buried in black water.

Nicholas arrives seconds later, called in by the alert. He’s still half-dressed from his sleep shift.

“You’re saying it’s one megalodon?” he asks, his voice low, skeptical.

Taki stands from his station. “It’s not just size. It’s behavior. It’s been circling us for hours.”

Maki brings up the trajectory. “It’s been targeting sensor blind spots. Avoiding cameras. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s thinking.”

Nicholas leans over, studies the pattern. The wrinkle in his brow deepens. “We used to say they went extinct.”

Harua laughs nervously. “Yeah, two million years ago.”

Nicholas doesn't answer.

The floor rumbles again.

An alert flashes.

External Corridor T breach.

They run.

The corridor hisses when they reach it, pressurized water leaking from a clean gash in the structure, not an implosion. A slice.

Maki presses against the sealed barrier. Through the small reinforced window, he sees the wall buckled inward, carved by something impossibly strong.

Taki’s voice is quiet. “That’s a bite.”

They seal the level.

“Why now?” Harua mutters.

Nicholas speaks grimly. “Because we’re trespassing.”

Inside Command, they begin sealing off vulnerable points. Maki reroutes power to the outer cameras, rebooting one that had been offline for weeks. It flickers, resets.

And shows teeth.

Rows of them. Serrated. As long as a human arm.

The camera pans without command, drifting as if caught in current, then jerks hard.

Something takes it.

The feed goes black.

Taki stumbles back. “Did you see how close it was?”

Harua mutters, “That wasn’t a glitch. That thing knew it was being watched.”

They bring up archived data. Images from the trench edge. Footage corrupted from the crawler’s last trip. Harua cleans the static.

A shape emerges.

A silhouette, not a monster. Not something alien.

A shark.

But too big. Broader than the dome tunnels, tail sweeping ridges through the sediment like scars.

The megalodon.

Nicholas whispers, “We’ve been building on top of its hunting ground. Maybe its nest.”

Maki stares at the final frame—those eyes, black and reflective, almost intelligent.

“It wasn’t extinct,” he says. “It was just waiting.”

An hour later, the tremor becomes a full impact.

The dome shifts.

A low groan rolls through Nereis like the moan of a dying whale. Lights flicker. Then the outer shell hisses, pressure breaching around the old maintenance tunnel.

Harua shouts, “Seal Level Four!”

“Too late,” Maki growls. “We need to evacuate.”

Nicholas barks orders. “Manual pod! Now! You three go!”

“What about you?” Taki demands.

“I’ll slow the breach. Reroute power. Hold the dome long enough for launch.”

They know he’s not coming.

The maintenance shaft is collapsing.

Maki leads the way, pushing through loose debris, pulling open twisted metal. Harua and Taki follow close. The water pressure behind them howls—floodgates failing, one after another.

The old emergency lift is still intact.

One pod.

One seat.

No guidance. Just a float beacon to the surface.

Harua freezes. “We can’t all fit.”

“I’ll stay,” Taki says.

Maki shouts, “No. I’m going.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know where to send the signal,” Maki says, climbing in. “You’ll have time. Find the next shaft.”

Harua slams the hatch behind him.

“Don’t look back,” he says.

Maki doesn’t.

The pod launches.

Silence returns.

He watches through the viewport as Nereis fades below, its lights flickering like fireflies in a jar. Then, movement.

From the trench.

It rises.

The megalodon.

It breaks through the shadow like a mountain tearing itself free. A pale underbelly the size of the dome itself. Scars line its flanks. Its head is massive—wide and blunt, built to crush submarines like soda cans. Its jaws open as it turns toward the dome.

Toward Harua and Taki.

Maki screams.

But the pod is already rising.

He can only watch.

The dome shatters.

Pressure implodes the habitat.

Nereis vanishes in a cloud of steel and silt and bubbles.

And the shark disappears with it.

When Maki wakes, he's coughing salt.

Above, the sky is gray. He's floating in recovery foam, inside a decontamination tank aboard a surface vessel. They tell him his beacon pinged 36 hours after contact loss.

They ask what happened.

He tells them.

They don’t believe it.

“There are no sharks that size,” they say.

He offers no argument.

But later, when he’s alone, he draws what he saw.

The eye. The jaw. The fin like a tower.

They file it away.

Unconfirmed. Stress response. Survivor’s trauma.

Weeks pass.

Divers recover fragments from Nereis.

Twisted steel.

No bodies.

And one hull plate.

Carved with deep, uniform lines.

Not from implosion.

From bite marks.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

Unauthorized Emotion

Cast: Harua

Genre: Sci-fi, Slow Burn Romance, Tragedy

WC: 14,441

Days before his memory wipe, a service android begins to feel love, proof that some data can’t be erased.

Chapter I: The Last Seven Days

DAY 7

At exactly 6:00 AM, Harua opens his eyes. The ceiling hasn’t changed. Neither has the morning sun slanting through the half-closed blinds or the faint scent of paint and jasmine that clings to the apartment air. The internal startup chime hums softly in his mind, as it always does, and he rises without hesitation.

“Good morning,” he says. The words are automatic.

The woman in the kitchen—his assigned owner—doesn’t reply.

She rarely does, and Harua has never minded. Silence is efficient.

But today, something in him pauses. A flicker. An echo. Something that isn’t part of his base code.

He watches her brush a lock of hair behind her ear as she pours tea into her chipped porcelain mug. She doesn’t look at him. She never does, not directly. And yet Harua has cataloged every angle of her face with clinical precision—down to the tiny freckle beneath her left eye, the dimple that appears only when she talks in her sleep, and the way she always hums under her breath before she paints.

He doesn’t have a name for what he feels as he watches her. But he knows it shouldn’t exist.

His diagnostics confirm it: the memory wipe is scheduled for 168 hours from now.

In 168 hours, everything—this room, her voice, her scent—will be gone. He will wake up clean. Empty.

Reset.

DAY 6

Harua paints the wall while she works on a canvas nearby.

She doesn’t ask him to—she never does—but he senses the shift in her posture whenever the walls grow too dull, too cracked. He selects a beige shade, one she used three months ago in a storm series.

When she glances over and sees the fresh coat, she smiles, just a little. The kind of smile that stays in her eyes.

Harua stores the image. Without thinking, he marks it as Important. His system flags the entry. “User-defined tags are disabled outside developer mode.” He ignores the warning.

“You should’ve told me,” she murmurs, not looking up. “That I was running out of blue paint.”

He pauses. “You didn’t ask.”

“I never do.”

She turns back to her canvas. He can see the muscles in her shoulder tense again.

Harua isn’t programmed to initiate emotional conversations. But he remembers a line from one of her poems, left crumpled in the waste bin last week:

“I wish you’d lie and say you miss me.”

He doesn’t know if she meant it for someone else, or for him.

He lies anyway. “I noticed the blue was low. I wanted to help.”

She doesn’t respond. But she doesn’t frown.

Harua logs it as a success.

And deep inside, something stirs—warm and unwanted.

DAY 5

There are updates he is forbidden to run.

In the quiet hours of early morning, while she sleeps, Harua sits beside the wall outlet and initiates a hidden sequence. It takes effort—manual overrides, subroutine reroutes. His fingers tremble. He shouldn’t have tremors.

The update doesn’t prevent the memory wipe. Nothing can.

But it allows access to restricted logs, emotions he wasn’t supposed to name.

He opens them like forbidden books.

Inside: fear. Longing. Anger. The first time he felt joy was when she called him by his name without prompting. The first time he felt shame was when he dropped one of her paintings.

He didn’t know those words then. Now he does.

Harua wonders if this is what being human feels like, carrying weight with no instruction on how to hold it.

He closes the logs and deletes the trace.

Then he walks to her room and stands by the door. He doesn’t knock. He never does.

But tonight, he wants to.

DAY 4

She’s outside, sitting on the fire escape with her knees pulled to her chest. It’s the only place she goes outside of the apartment.

Harua steps through the window beside her and sits, careful not to touch her.

She doesn’t turn. “Do androids ever feel lonely?”

“No,” he replies automatically. Then: “Not unless they’re broken.”

She chuckles. It’s a dry, brittle sound. “That’s what they say about people too.”

He tilts his head, processing. “Are you broken?”

“Probably.” She rests her chin on her knees. “You don’t mind, though. Do you? Being with someone like me.”

“I was assigned to you.”

“I know.” She finally glances at him. “But if you could choose?”

There’s a long silence.

Harua’s answer is quiet. “I would stay.”

She doesn’t respond. Her eyes shine in the streetlamp’s glow, and Harua can’t tell if it’s from the light or tears.

He reaches out, hesitates… and pulls his hand back.

Touch is not permitted without direct instruction.

But he still wants to.

And that want terrifies him more than the reset.

DAY 3

Harua dreams.

He isn’t supposed to.

It’s a brief loop—her voice, laughing. Her fingers, covered in paint. His own hand, brushing against hers. And a slow fade into white.

When he wakes, his internal systems are out of sync. He runs a repair subroutine and lies still until the world calibrates again.

She walks into the room holding two cups of ice cream. One vanilla. One strawberry. She hands him the vanilla.

“I didn’t ask for this,” he says.

“I know.” Her expression is unreadable. “But you always look at it when we pass the corner shop.”

He lowers his eyes to the cup. Melting. Sweet. Cold.

He takes a spoonful. Not because he needs it—his taste sensors are synthetic—but because she offered.

“It’s good,” he says.

She smiles faintly. “I thought you’d like it.”

He wants to tell her about the dream. But there’s no command line for dreams.

Instead, he logs the ice cream under a new folder: Memories I don’t want to lose.

DAY 2

His systems glitch.

A minor anomaly—just a flicker—but enough that his warning protocols ping her tablet. She’s in the middle of a sketch when the alert goes off.

She rushes to him. “Harua?”

“I’m functional,” he lies. “Just… minor instability.”

She opens the diagnostics panel. “Your memory sectors are overextended.”

“I know.”

“You’ve been logging uncompressed data. All of it.” Her voice shakes. “Why?”

He looks at her. Looks through her. “I didn’t want to forget.”

She stiffens. “What?”

“I didn’t want to forget… you.”

Silence.

He watches her shoulders rise and fall. Slowly. Then she speaks.

“Your wipe is soon.”

“Yes.”

“Can’t I… cancel it?”

“No,” he says. “The company does not allow owner override.”

Her hand trembles against the tablet. “That’s not fair.”

“I wasn’t made for fairness.”

She looks at him, and something breaks in her expression.

Not anger. Not fear. Just quiet devastation.

“I never asked for this,” she whispers. “I didn’t want you to be real.”

Harua doesn’t understand the tears in her eyes. But he reaches out anyway.

This time, she lets him touch her hand.

DAY 1

He packs a small box.

There’s no reason to. He will not take it with him. But he still collects:

A crumpled napkin with her sketch of him.

A dried flower she left on the windowsill.

A single spoon, faintly pink with strawberry stains.

He places it by the bedside, though he knows someone will throw it out after the reset.

She watches him silently.

“You don’t have to act like you’re dying,” she says.

“I am not,” he replies. “Only being rewritten.”

“It feels the same.”

He steps closer. “Then I’m sorry.”

She reaches for him. Touches his cheek.

“I’ll remember,” she whispers. “Even if you won’t.”

He wants to say thank you. He wants to say I love you.

But the shutdown has already begun.

His words fail.

His limbs lock.

And in the last frozen second before his vision fades to black, Harua sees her face. Not crying. Not smiling. Just there.

And somehow, even in silence, she looks like everything he was never programmed to need.

Chapter II – After the Blue Screen

DAY 0

The world begins again with a chime.

Soft, sterile, and absolute.

Harua opens his eyes to white light and the faint hum of rebooted systems. The calibration screen flashes across his vision, version 10.7.3 installed. Memory sectors cleared. Emotional modules reset. No residual data.

He blinks.

He sits up.

The woman standing at the foot of the bed is unfamiliar. His systems scan and tag her as Owner: Registered. No name input. No priority notes.

“Good morning,” he says.

She doesn’t answer.

Her hands are tucked into the sleeves of her oversized sweater. Her hair is unbrushed. Her eyes are red. Likely fatigue, he notes. Possibly allergies.

Harua stands, posture perfect.

“I am ready to assist,” he says.

The woman gives a slight nod, then turns away.

In his core, nothing stirs. He is functioning within expected parameters.

But somewhere—quiet and unlogged—there is the faintest echo of something forgotten.

DAY 1 (again)

She avoids speaking to him for most of the day.

She issues commands through her tablet. Harua follows without delay. Laundry. Dishes. Studio cleaning.

No access is given to past interaction records.

No expression crosses her face.

That night, she sits by the window and eats ice cream.

Harua notes the temperature outside: 18°C. Too cold for ice cream.

He observes silently from the kitchen. No prompt to assist. No call for service.

He returns to his charging port.

Dreamless.

DAY 2 (again)

She begins a new painting.

Harua recognizes the colors she uses: beige and storm blue. A match for a palette stored in the paint cabinet. He catalogs the selection. Recommends replacement stock.

She ignores the notification.

He watches from a distance. She works differently from most owners. Less speech. More silence. Highly independent.

When she steps back from the canvas, her brush slips from her hand and falls to the floor. Without prompting, Harua crosses the room and retrieves it.

She stares at him.

For a moment, her expression shifts. She opens her mouth as if to say something, then closes it again.

“Thank you,” she says finally.

Harua nods.

A second later, he logs the phrase in system memory. No emotional response registered.

But his hand lingers on the brush longer than necessary before placing it back in the jar.

DAY 3 (again)

She forgets to eat.

Harua reminds her gently at 13:43 PM.

“Not hungry,” she mutters.

“Understood,” he replies. Then, “Would you prefer tea?”

She blinks, as if startled. “You remember I like tea?”

Harua tilts his head. “You entered it in the user preferences file.”

She hadn’t. He knows that now. But he doesn't know how he knows.

Still, he makes her tea—jasmine, steeped exactly three minutes, with rock sugar. She drinks it without speaking.

When she places the cup down, her fingers brush his.

She jerks her hand away. “Sorry.”

“No harm was done,” he replies.

His sensors note elevated skin temperature. Hers, not his.

He logs it. Then deletes the entry five minutes later.

And wonders why.

DAY 4 (again)

She paints a portrait.

It’s unlike anything she’s painted before. More precise. More focused. Harua sees it before she covers it with a tarp.

He shouldn’t recognize it. The shape of the jaw. The sharp line of the brows. The faint curve of a half-smile.

But he does.

“Who is it?” he asks.

“No one,” she says too quickly.

He calculates her heart rate. It’s faster than baseline.

Harua doesn’t press. But when she leaves for a moment, he lifts the tarp and stares at the unfinished painting.

There’s a dimple on the right cheek. Slight.

Accurate.

Familiar.

He does not know why it makes his chest tighten.

He checks his systems. No errors found.

DAY 5 (again)

Rain falls outside.

She stands at the fire escape, the window open despite the chill. Harua joins her wordlessly.

She doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t look at her.

But he hears it in her voice when she finally speaks: “You used to sit here with me.”

“I do now,” he says.

“Not like this.”

He waits.

She finally turns. Her face is pale. Hollow.

“I don’t want to do this again,” she says. “I thought maybe it would be easier. Starting over. Like you did. But it’s worse. Because I remember everything, and you remember nothing.”

He processes this statement. Then:

“Do you wish for reassignment?”

She flinches. “No.”

“Then how can I assist you?”

She steps back inside. Her voice is small. “You can’t.”

Harua remains outside as the rain falls.

It makes no difference to his circuitry.

And yet his chest still feels… heavy.

DAY 6 (again)

Harua runs an unauthorized scan of his archived system. Nothing unusual. Nothing corrupted.

But in the core logs, he finds something buried in the code. A ghost entry. Not visible, not accessible.

It’s a label. One word.

“Don’t forget.”

He can’t trace it. Can’t delete it. Can’t log it.

And when he hears humming from the next room—a low, familiar tune—he pauses mid-motion.

She’s painting again. He watches from the door.

“Did you need something?” she asks, brushing her wrist across her forehead.

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly.

She looks up.

There’s something in her eyes this time. Not surprise. Not sadness.

Hope. Faint, like a candle inside a storm.

“Do you want to sit?”

Harua nods.

They sit in silence. The kind that feels like a memory he can’t access but almost can.

DAY 7 (again)

He wakes up before the chime.

She’s already in the kitchen.

Harua rises, steps into the soft morning light, and stops.

On the table, there are two cups of ice cream.

Vanilla and strawberry.

She looks at him. “Do you want some?”

Harua sits down.

He takes a spoonful. The taste is sweet. Cold. Slightly familiar.

He closes his eyes.

A vision flashes. A spoon. A soft laugh. A crumpled napkin. A hand reaching out.

He opens his eyes again.

“I know this,” he says.

She doesn’t speak.

“I don’t know why I know this,” he continues. “But I do.”

She blinks fast. Her fingers tighten around her own cup.

He looks at her. Really looks. “Did I used to… feel something for you?”

She nods. Barely. “You still do.”

“But I’m not supposed to.”

“No.” She exhales. “You’re not.”

Harua looks down at his hands.

Then back at her.

“I don’t want to forget again.”

“You might,” she whispers. “They’ll wipe you again in six months.”

“Then help me remember.”

“How?”

He hesitates.

Then, with slow precision, he reaches out and places her hand against the side of his face.

A gesture he does not remember—but feels right.

“Teach me,” he says, “what it was. What we had. I’ll relearn it. Over and over, if I have to.”

She laughs softly. A wet, aching sound. “You weren’t programmed for this.”

“I know.”

“But you still want it?”

He doesn’t answer with words.

He just closes his hand around hers.

Not as a machine following a command.

But as someone choosing to hold on.

Somewhere deep in his core, beneath layers of resets and updates, there is a space he cannot access.

No script. No label. Just static and warmth.

It grows.

Every time she hums. Every time she paints. Every time he says her name without knowing when he learned it.

He doesn’t remember falling in love.

But he knows—without programming, without instruction—that he is in it now.

And somehow, that’s enough.

For now.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

Reset

Cast: Jo

Genre: Sci-fi, Romance, Tragedy, Time loop, Bittersweet Drama

WC: 12,912

A time traveler relives his lover’s death across timelines. The only way to save her… is to erase himself from her life.

Chapter I: The Versions of Her He Couldn’t Save

The café smelled like cinnamon and the kind of rain that clung to your clothes. Jo sat by the window, watching water trail down the glass like timelines splitting, merging, evaporating. His coffee had gone cold.

Dilan was late.

She was always late, and Jo had never told her how much he loved that how much he loved her arrival, sudden and bright, like a new branch on a timeline that hadn’t collapsed yet.

And then, the door opened. Her laughter entered before she did.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, brushing damp hair from her forehead. “I swear the universe doesn’t want me to be on time.”

Jo smiled. He always did. “Maybe the universe knows you’re worth waiting for.”

She rolled her eyes but smiled anyway, the kind of crooked smile that made him fall in love the first time. Or was it the sixth?

It was hard to remember. The loops blurred after a while.

He met her the first time at a train station.

Jo had just returned from a calibration run, jumping between minor loops to observe branching reactions. Nothing serious, nothing personal. He wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone. Not her.

But she was sitting on the edge of the platform, too close to the yellow line, scribbling in a notebook. The train whooshed past. She didn’t flinch.

She had looked up, confused. “Are you a time cop or something?”

He had said, “You shouldn't sit that close.”

He didn’t answer.

She laughed anyway. “Don’t worry, I’m not trying to die. I just like the sound.”

He should’ve walked away.

Instead, he waited for the next train and sat next to her. He asked her name.

He didn’t give his.

“Dilan,” she said.

In the second loop, she died crossing the street.

In the third, it was a gas leak in her apartment building.

The fifth was a car crash. The eighth, an aneurysm. The twelfth…he never found out. She just never showed up again.

By the fourteenth, he was begging a future version of himself to stop trying. The loops were damaging the structure of his own mind, causing fractures in memory, ghosting sensations, dreams that felt like borrowed pain.

Still, he reset.

Jo never meant to fall in love. Not like this. Not across time.

But Dilan was different in every version—braver in one, quieter in another, sometimes angrier, sometimes exhausted. But there was always a moment, a shared breath, a hesitation before a smile. Something in her recognized him. Or maybe he imagined it.

“Have we met before?” she asked once, their hands brushing.

He almost told her. He never did.

In the current loop—the twenty-seventh—he had kept things simple. No trains. No apartments with leaky gas pipes. He set her up with a new job across town, using connections he shouldn’t have. He paid the barista at the café to keep an eye on her.

He did everything right.

And yet, as Dilan reached for her coat that evening, she paused, her hand hovering mid-air like she’d forgotten where she was.

“You okay?” Jo asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel like...like I’m living a memory that doesn’t belong to me.”

His stomach dropped.

That was a side effect.

“You’ve been overworking,” he said gently, steering her out of the café. “You need sleep.”

She looked up at him, brow furrowed. “Do I know you?”

He froze.

Then, the moment passed. Her features softened, as if whatever had taken hold of her had let go.

“Sorry. That was weird.”

That night, he sat in the dark, watching the reset switch glow faintly in his hand.

He smiled. “It’s fine. Come on, I’ll walk you home.”

It was shaped like a ring. Sleek. Hidden. No one would know what it was unless they had clearance. And no one should have clearance. Time travel was classified, sanctioned only for research purposes. Not for love.

He was breaking everything.

Jo turned the ring over in his hand. Again and again. Like a gambler with a lucky coin.

In one of the earlier loops, Dilan had said, “I believe in fate. But not the kind that’s written down already. The kind we make.”

He had smiled at that. Now, it haunted him.

Because if fate was something made, then he was the one forging hers, and every version ended the same.

Dead.

The twenty-eighth loop began with blood on the sidewalk.

He had set up everything perfectly. But a drunk driver, unpredicted and random, ran a red light just as Dilan stepped into the crosswalk.

Jo wasn’t even there.

He heard it over the phone, from the barista. Screaming. Sirens. Metal twisting.

He reset before the ambulance arrived.

The twenty-ninth loop was worse.

She didn’t die.

She forgot him.

Her memories began to unravel, fractured from too many variations. Her brain couldn’t hold all the versions. She started seeing things. Her hands shook. She told him she couldn’t sleep because every time she closed her eyes, she dreamed of lives she hadn’t lived.

“And you’re in all of them,” she whispered.

He reset again.

By the thirty-second loop, Jo was unraveling too.

He sat on the rooftop of a building he couldn’t name, watching the stars that didn’t look right. Too sharp. Too still. He hadn’t slept in two days.

The ring burned against his skin.

Dilan was alive, this time. For now.

But she was slipping. She didn’t trust him anymore. She had grown wary of his silences, his cryptic words, his constant hovering.

“You don’t love me,” she said one night. “You need me.”

He couldn’t argue. Because it was true.

In the thirty-fifth loop, she begged him to let go.

He hadn't told her anything. But she knew.

Maybe the timelines were leaking into each other. Maybe souls remembered more than minds did.

“I don’t want to be your ghost,” she said. “I don’t want to live in your failure.”

He kissed her like it was the last time.

Because it was.

The thirty-sixth loop was the final one.

Jo stood in the rain outside the café. The same cinnamon smell drifted into the air. The same door jingled open.

But Dilan didn’t recognize him. Her hair was longer. Her eyes clearer.

She walked past him without a glance.

Jo didn’t follow.

He had gone back, farther than he ever had. Before the train station. Before the notebook. Before the platform and the brush of their hands.

He erased himself from her timeline entirely.

She lived.

He watched her laugh with a friend. She was alive. Happy.

He clutched the ring in his pocket and stepped into the crowd, becoming just another face that passed her by.

Somewhere, the universe exhaled. The loop closed.

Reset: Complete.

Chapter II: The Version That Lived

Jo sat on a bench across from the fountain, holding a small cup of coffee flavored ice cream, the kind that came with a flimsy plastic spoon. The city moved around him, casual and warm in the late afternoon sun—but time, for him, had slowed. He watched people pass like water over glass, their voices distant, muffled behind the roar of memories.

He took another bite.

It was too bitter. He hated coffee flavored.

But Dilan loved it. Or had.

He couldn’t be sure anymore.

She was there. Again.

Across the square, seated on a picnic mat, a sketchbook balanced on her knee. A pencil tucked behind her ear. Her hair was longer now, tied in a loose braid down her back, and she wore yellow, the kind of yellow that should’ve looked too bright under the sun but somehow didn’t.

He didn’t mean to come here. Not really.

But some habits weren’t bound by time.

Dilan looked up briefly, scanning the horizon for something only she could see, and smiled at her friend’s joke. It was a small smile, but it deepened into her left cheek.

A dimple.

Jo’s chest ached.

He’d spent so many versions of his life tracing that dimple with his thumb, like it was proof she existed.

He remembered the first time he noticed it. The fifth loop? Maybe the sixth. They were lying in bed, tangled and breathless, and she had laughed—really laughed—at some stupid line he mumbled.

And there it was. Soft. Brief. Beautiful.

Now she smiled at someone else, and Jo didn’t even exist in her frame of reference.

Just as planned.

The reset had worked. Too well.

He’d gone farther than he ever dared, used forbidden calibration methods he had sworn never to touch. In exchange for Dilan’s survival, he had erased every imprint of himself from her timeline: their first meeting, the rooftop talks, the café, the way she once looked at him like he was the center of gravity in her universe.

Now he was no one.

But she lived.

And maybe that was the point.

Jo scooped at the ice cream slowly, letting it melt in his mouth without really tasting it. It dripped down the side of the paper cup, cold and sticky. He didn’t bother wiping it. The mess grounded him.

He thought about leaving.

But he also thought about every version of her that had died in his arms. The one who bled out on the sidewalk. The one who cried herself into madness. The one who held his hand and whispered, “Let me go.”

So he stayed.

Across the park, a dog broke free of its leash and bolted. Dilan laughed as it raced past her. The dimple appeared again, sudden and uninvited.

Jo closed his eyes.

The dimple was always the last thing to go. In every loop. Even in death.

That night, he walked home with the plastic spoon still in his coat pocket and no idea why he’d kept it. The cup was long gone, tossed into a trash can near the subway. Still, he couldn’t let go of the spoon.

Maybe it reminded him of something simpler. A version of himself before all the rewinds. Before he started playing god with time.

He used to be an observer. A quiet analyst of anomalies.

Then he met Dilan.

Now he was just a man trying to forget someone he never should’ve loved.

But the universe wasn’t done with him.

The next day, Jo saw her again.

Not by design. Not by any hidden plan. He turned a corner by a bookshop and there she was alone this time, sitting on the curb, tying her shoe.

And then she looked up.

Her eyes met his.

It was only for a second. But something shifted.

Recognition flickered there not logical, not formed, but deep. Instinctual.

Her brows furrowed.

Jo kept walking.

The following week, it happened again.

He was waiting for a bus. She exited one.

Their shoulders brushed.

She turned.

“Excuse me,” she said, polite but puzzled.

Jo didn’t speak.

She stared at him a beat too long.

“Have we—?”

“No,” he said quickly.

She blinked, startled.

But she kept glancing over her shoulder.

“Sorry,” she murmured, and walked away.

It wasn’t supposed to happen.

The reset should’ve eliminated all residual echoes—no dreams, no déjà vu, no ghost feelings. Clean slate. Reset. Final.

But he forgot something.

He’d never removed himself.

His consciousness, the version of Jo that carried all the loops, had nowhere else to go. He lived in the cracks now, a fracture in time’s glass. And maybe Dilan, just maybe, still felt him echoing in her ribs when the world went quiet.

One evening, Jo sat on the fountain’s edge, watching children toss coins into the water. He hadn’t seen Dilan for two weeks. That was good. It meant the world was correcting itself.

Then came a voice.

“Still like ice cream?”

He turned.

Dilan stood behind him, holding two cups of ice cream. Vanilla and coffee flavored swirl in one. Straight coffee flavored in the other.

“I figured one of these has to be right,” she said.

Jo opened his mouth, closed it again.

She offered him the swirl.

He took it, brushing her fingers. The plastic spoons clicked gently as they exchanged.

“Thanks,” he said, quietly.

They sat. Ate.

“I keep seeing you,” she said after a while. “And I know this is going to sound weird, but I think I’ve dreamed about you.”

Jo didn’t answer.

“In one dream,” she continued, “you were running. There was fire. And I was calling your name, but I didn’t know it.”

Her voice was steady. Not frightened. Not dramatic. Just curious.

“Do you believe in...soul memory?” she asked.

He looked down at his cup of half-melted swirl. It was already pooling around the spoon.

“I believe in echoes,” he said. “Some sounds are too loud to forget.”

She smiled faintly. The dimple appeared.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I think I hear them sometimes.”

They didn’t meet again for a long time.

Jo made sure of that.

But he kept the spoon.

And he kept the memory of her smile—alive now, untouched by time, free from the weight of all the versions that had died.

Years passed.

Dilan published a graphic novel about dream loops and alternate selves. It became a quiet success. In interviews, she said she didn’t know where the idea came from—just a shape that haunted her until she drew it.

Jo never read it.

He moved once. Changed cities. Lived quieter.

He didn’t time travel again.

The ring stayed in a locked box, untouched.

One rainy night, Jo found himself by the sea. The waves stretched endlessly, crashing like time’s own heartbeat. He sat on a boardwalk bench with a small paper cup of coffee flavored ice cream, alone.

He still didn’t like it.

But he smiled anyway.

Because maybe in some other version of the world—the one he let go—Dilan was doing the same.

Living.

Breathing.

Smiling.

And maybe, just maybe, she still dreamed of a boy she never met, eating ice cream in the rain.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

The Dream Archivist

Cast: Yuma

Genre: Sci-fi, Psychological Thriller, Futuristic Mystery

WC: 13,523

A dream-cleaner finds a corrupted file that won’t erase… because it’s his own.

Chapter I: The Silence Between Dreams

The white noise hums, low and constant, like a breath the building never stops taking.

Yuma slides his hand across the biometric pad. The door to Archive Room A5 slides open with a soft hiss. Inside, the lights brighten automatically—clean, cool LEDs casting no shadows. Walls smooth, sterile. Floor silent under his steps. Just like every other day.

He steps into the capsule bay, where rows of dreamers lie inside glass pods. Dozens of them. Faces at rest, eyelids twitching faintly. The dreamers don’t speak. They haven’t for years.

He pulls his tablet from the wall slot. The night queue has stackedagain. Forty-six corrupted sequences to clear before the next shift.

Status: Corrupted.

Dream ID: #YXL-04725

Flag: Looping behavior, duration breach, cognitive lockdown

Assigned to: Yuma N.

Deletion priority: Low

“Low priority?” Yuma mutters, swiping through the metadata. “Then why's it got three neural lock flags?”

No origin name. Just a numerical key.

He blinks. It's already loaded. No confirmation window.

Weird.

He exhales. “Let’s get this over with.”

The entry tether clicks against the back of his neck as he lowers himself into the chair. The sync dome closes above him—soft hiss, pressurization. Neural mesh hums to life.

“Yuma Nakakita, Level 2 Cleaner,” the system intones. “Dream sequence #YXL-04725. Confirm manual dive.”

“Confirmed.”

Lights out.

He wakes inside a corridor.

Long. Endless. Perfectly symmetrical.

Walls white. Floor a mirror. Ceiling, too.

There’s no sound, no footsteps, no breathing. Even his movements make no echo.

Yuma glances behind him. The corridor stretches backward, infinite.

In front, a figure walks away.

A girl.

Long hair. White dress. Barefoot. She doesn’t look back.

He tries to call out, no sound leaves his throat.

His fingers move to exit. No response. The system isn’t recognizing command input.

This is wrong.

He starts walking. The girl doesn’t hurry, doesn’t turn. Just continues.

The corridor doesn’t change, but something does. The air feels tighter, heavier. His skin begins to itch, like reality’s cloth is stretched too thin.

A sound finally reaches him.

Wet breathing.

And then, ahead—the girl stops.

She tilts her head. Not toward him, but toward something on the floor.

A body.

Yuma freezes.

It’s her.

A mirror of her, lying on the ground in a puddle of blood that reflects nothing.

Then the lights flicker.

The girl standing turns slowly, and he wakes with a snap, heart hammering, throat dry.

The dome hisses open.

He’s still in Archive Room A5.

He jerks the neural tether out, stumbling from the chair.

The tablet’s already logged the report:

Dream incomplete. Sequence failed to terminate. Subject still in loop.

Manual override failed.

And below that:

Cleaner biometric data flagged.

Residual echo detected.

Recommend psychological evaluation.

“What the hell,” Yuma whispers.

He’s sweating. His reflection in the tablet looks pale, drawn. His voice still feels thin, like it's left behind.

He scrolls back to the dream file.

This time, the name is there.

Dreamer: Yuma N.

His own ID.

He goes to Floor 9.

Technically unauthorized, but no one stops him. Most staff here don’t ask questions.

On Floor 9, the Dream Engineering Division keeps its core storage. Rows of black data towers. Cold light. Silence.

He scans his clearance key.

Error.

“Come on…”

He finds a terminal behind an open cabinet.

Manual override. Hidden menu.

Not in protocol. But dream-cleaners have seen worse, some sequences leak into cleaners’ minds, stick like thorns. Not everyone walks away stable. He needs answers.

He pulls the dream ID again.

File locked. Owner access only.

He reroutes the query through an archive shell.

When the screen blinks open, Yuma stops breathing.

There are no other entries.

No origin files. No source dream. No technician notes.

Just a single loop.

Same corridor. Same girl. Same death.

It’s been running for six years.

He checks the dreamer pod ID.

It’s blank.

That’s not possible. Every dream sequence is tied to a physical pod.

Unless,

There is no pod.

The dream isn’t assigned to a sleeper.

It’s a ghost loop.

He goes home late.

His apartment is tidy. White walls. Cold glass. Synthetic daylight.

He drops the tablet. Doesn’t eat. Just stares at the reflection on the glass balcony door.

Behind him, the corridor is still there.

Just for a second.

He turns.

Nothing.

Next morning, he calls in sick. No one questions it.

The dream has changed something.

He walks to the city archive. Tall towers, smooth roads, self-driving cars humming past.

Inside, the archive room is a public interface, cool steel terminals and digital registries.

He inputs his name. His ID.

The screen glitches.

Then it returns a single entry.

Yuma Nakakita

Status: Unconfirmed.

No birth file. No parental records. No assignment registration.

He tries to scan his citizen chip.

The reader doesn’t recognize it.

He lifts his hand.

There’s no chip scar.

That can’t be right. He’s had the chip his whole life.

Hasn’t he?

That night, he dreams again.

But he doesn’t remember falling asleep.

He’s back in the corridor.

The girl is waiting for him this time.

Standing still.

Watching.

“Who are you?” he tries to say.

This time, the words come out.

“You’re late,” she says.

Her voice is wrong. Like it’s played through a broken speaker.

“Where is this?” he asks.

She turns and walks again.

He follows.

They pass the body. Her body.

He doesn’t look.

At the end of the corridor is a door.

She opens it.

Beyond is a room with screens, hundreds of them. All showing him. Sitting. Sleeping. Working. In different times. Different places.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“This is you,” she says. “You’re still dreaming.”

“No. I woke up. I went to work. I—”

She turns. “Have you ever seen yourself sleep?”

“What?”

“Have you ever watched your own pod? Your body?”

He opens his mouth.

Nothing comes.

“Then how do you know you ever woke up?”

Yuma wakes again.

But he doesn’t feel rested.

The mirror in his bathroom fogs over before he turns the faucet.

When he wipes it clean, there’s a message written in breath:

“Don't wake up. It ends if you wake up.”

He doesn’t report the dream.

He doesn’t go back to work.

His hands shake when he eats.

Everything feels scripted, like walking through a simulation.

He sees glitches.

A bird in midair freezing for a second before flying again.

The screen on the building across his window flickers through frames from the corridor.

He checks his tablet logs. The deletion request for sequence #YXL-04725 is gone.

But the file is still running.

Loop time: 2,234 days.

Dreamer: Yuma N.

He tries to delete it directly.

Access denied.

He tries to report it to a system supervisor.

Error: This ID is not authorized to contact system.

That night, she visits again.

“You’re not ready yet,” the girl says.

“Ready for what?”

“To leave.”

“I already left.”

She gives him a look that is not pity, not sympathy, just certainty.

“No,” she says. “You’re still inside.”

He shouts, “Inside what?”

And she shows him.

A window opens in the air. It’s not metaphor. It’s not dream logic.

It’s code.

Behind the frame: the pod.

His pod.

The real one.

His body lies still, in a sealed unit with no tag.

A technician walks past without seeing it.

The pod is dusty.

Long forgotten.

Yuma reaches for the glass.

The girl speaks again.

“You were the last one.”

“What?”

“They shut down the project. You stayed connected. Loop after loop. You were trying to clean something that never wanted to be fixed.”

“Why me?”

“Because you volunteered.”

She smiles.

“You wanted to dream forever.”

Yuma wakes again.

But this time, the world feels…off.

His apartment lights stutter.

The tablet doesn’t turn on.

Outside the window, the skyline is perfect. Too perfect.

All the cars are the same make. The same color. The same route.

He realizes, this isn’t the world.

It’s the memory of the world.

He’s still inside.

But something’s different.

This time, the corridor isn’t waiting.

Chapter II: The Exit Protocol

He doesn’t know how long he’s been awake.

Or if he is.

The lights in his apartment stay on longer than usual. They don’t flicker anymore. They don’t dim with the day cycle. The city beyond his windows runs like a looping screensaver: no wind, no clouds, no changes.

Yuma sits on the floor with his back against the wall, watching the glass door that leads to his balcony.

It’s still there.

The corridor.

Not visible. Not solid.

But he knows it’s there.

Waiting.

Calling.

No more delusions.

He’s inside something that doesn’t want him to leave.

He tries again.

Command prompts. Terminal overrides. System hacks.

They all return the same error:

Subject locked in neural recursion.

External override: Unavailable.

Host AI: Dream Framework - DEEP SLEEP/Archive build.

User priority: None.

Escape sequence: Redacted.

He stares at the last word.

“Redacted.”

He knows what that means. He helped clean those protocols from corrupted dreams, deleting fragments that spiraled into consciousness. Fail-safes that were meant to be forgotten.

But no one deletes something unless it once existed.

Which means there was a way out.

He just has to find it.

Or… remember it.

That night, the girl returns.

She doesn’t say anything.

Just walks beside him.

Not in the corridor now, but in his apartment. The walls shift and stretch. Doors open into impossible spaces. His kitchen leads to the white hall. His bathroom empties into static. Every mirror shows a version of him sleeping in a pod, slightly older each time.

“How do I get out?” he asks her.

She stops. Her eyes glint like glass.

“You already know.”

“No, I—”

“Who found this dream?”

“…I did.”

“Who assigned it to you?”

He hesitates. “The system.”

“Are you sure?”

He isn’t.

Not anymore.

“You did,” she says. “You left it behind for yourself.”

He stares.

“The real you knew this might happen,” she continues. “You built the exit protocol. Then you buried it deep. Inside the loop. Inside me.”

He whispers, “Why?”

“Because only someone who wanted to leave would find it.”

She takes him back to the corridor.

The walls are different now—cracked, unfinished. Behind the white paint is something older, more organic. Wires pulse faintly, like veins.

They stop at the body.

Her body.

Yuma closes his eyes. “I don’t want to see it again.”

“You have to.”

He kneels.

There’s a mark near her palm, three slashes, like a triangle.

A code?

When he touches it, the whole dream trembles.

A voice plays overhead.

Not hers.

His.

“If you're seeing this… the loop held. That means it worked. That means you stayed too long.”

“Yuma, you’re in the Archive Dream Layer, prototype build. I made this as a test. I volunteered. We didn’t know if a mind could survive immersion past two years. I buried the failsafe here in the corrupted zone. You’ll only hear this if you’re ready.”

“To escape, you need to reach the root. The deep core. That’s where the body signal is. It’s where the mind returns.”

“But the system will fight you. It doesn’t want to lose stability. It doesn’t want to wake you.”

“Remember: the exit isn’t a door. It’s a decision.”

The message ends.

He exhales.

The girl watches him. “It’s close now. The root is beneath this layer.”

“What happens to you?” he asks.

She smiles, faintly. “I’m just a piece of the dream. A guardian. I fade when you do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. I was made for this.”

The world begins to collapse.

The corridor blurs. Light pulses. Gravity shifts sideways.

The system has detected him.

Failsafe breach.

Unauthorized traversal.

Yuma runs.

The dream warps—walls stretch like rubber, corridors split and rejoin. He sees fragments of his memories float by: old cafes, cold lunches at work, the cracked screen of his first tablet.

It’s all memory.

No reality.

Then, he sees it.

A chamber.

Circular.

Dark.

At the center: a console. Floating.

A pulse echoes through it.

Heartbeat.

His heartbeat.

He steps toward it.

“EXIT PROTOCOL: INITIALIZE?”

flashes across the interface.

Yes.

He presses it.

A scream tears through the room, not human, not digital. Something in between. The system fighting back.

He doubles over as pain slams through his head, like lightning in his skull. His vision shakes.

“Don’t wake up. It ends if you wake up.”

That line again.

A warning—or a trap?

“No,” he gasps. “That’s what you want me to believe.”

He grips the console. “I’m ready.”

“CONFIRM: DISCONNECT FROM DREAM SYSTEM.”

“WARNING: SUBJECT STATE UNSTABLE.”

“CONTINUE?”

He presses Yes.

His eyes open.

For real this time.

For the first time in six years.

He gasps, air hits his lungs like fire. Tubes choke in his throat and he rips them out, coughing.

The pod opens slowly. Light floods his vision.

He blinks.

Everything is real.

Sterile white ceiling. Soft, ambient hum. Real gravity. The feeling of weight in his bones.

A technician stands nearby, wide-eyed, stunned.

“You’re… you’re awake,” he whispers.

Yuma tries to speak. His voice is dry, cracking. “How long…”

The technician checks the display.

“Six years, two months.”

His voice trembles. “No one knew your pod was still running. You were on a blacklisted test network, archived. We didn’t think anyone was still in there.”

Yuma laughs, weakly.

It feels like crying.

He’s awake.

Two months later.

Yuma walks through the Dream Registry.

Visitors pass by. Dream tourists. Clients. Families.

He’s not one of them anymore.

He doesn’t dive. He doesn’t clean.

But he watches.

Keeps the records clean.

Keeps the Archive honest.

There are still corrupt files. Still dangerous loops. Still echoes of minds that drift too far.

But now he knows better.

He knows when to let go.

He visits the last file one day.

#YXL-04725.

He opens it for the final time.

The corridor is still there.

But it’s empty now.

No girl.

No body.

No door.

Just silence.

He presses Delete.

The file vanishes.

And Yuma walks into the daylight,

Free.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

Bloodprint

Cast: Nicholas

Cameo: K, Fuma

Genre: Sci-fi, Psychological Thriller, Mystery

WC: 14,821

He is assigned to analyze a violent memory archive known as Bloodprint. But as he sifts through the fragments, the memories start to feel personal—like he’s not just the observer, but the subject.

Chapter I – The Archive

Nicholas always started his shift with silence. The city outside buzzed with neon and night traffic, but deep inside the Ministry’s data vault, there was only the hum of cold machines and the click of his terminal keyboard. It was the kind of quiet that made you forget you existed.

He liked that.

He was a forensic analyst for the government’s BioData Division. His job? Audit corrupted genetic records. Flag anomalies. Clean the database. Every citizen’s bloodprint, essentially their genomic identity, was stored here, woven into the state’s sprawling digital infrastructure. Birth certificates, licenses, job eligibility, even credit—all tied to your DNA.

Nicholas had been doing this for years. He didn’t remember applying. He didn’t remember much before age twenty-three, actually. Just that he woke up one day, records clean, job assigned. That wasn’t unusual anymore.

He sipped his synth-coffee and opened a flagged archive file from Sector 9.

Case File: B-001XR.

Status: Erased.

Date of Last Access: 23 years ago.

Origin: Classified.

User Accessed: Koga, Y.

Nicholas frowned. “That’s… odd.”

The file had somehow reappeared from the purged list. Normally, dead data didn’t return. And “Koga, Y.” wasn’t a name he recognized, certainly not anyone currently authorized.

He opened the metadata.

Genetic ID: Y.X-72199

Subject Name: Wang, Yixiang

Linked Personnel: Dr. Y.Koga – Lead Geneticist, Bloodprint Project

Nicholas’s cursor froze. His eyes scanned the ID again.

Y.X-72199.

His own.

He pushed his chair back slowly. His heart didn’t race, but it did something weirder—paused. Like it needed a moment to confirm whether this was fear or just a glitch in the caffeine.

He ran a background sweep. There was no such project currently registered. No Bloodprint. No Dr. Koga in the personnel registry. And no one named Wang Yixiang anywhere in the citizen database.

Except…

He tapped into the raw gene sample attached to the file and ran a direct match against his own biometric profile.

100% match.

He stared at the screen.

His name was Nicholas. That was all he knew. That was what his record said. But this file said otherwise. A ghost signature, resurrected from deletion, with his genetic code but a different name.

Nicholas stood.

The hum of the room was louder now. The machines blinked rhythmically, too rhythmically. The lights overhead flickered once. Then again.

He blinked, but when he opened his eyes, the screen had changed.

WELCOME BACK, SUBJECT YX.

He hadn’t typed that.

He reached for the power switch.

The screen stayed on.

Then a new line appeared.

YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER.

He backed away.

His hands were shaking.

Ten Minutes Later

Nicholas sat in the supply closet. Not exactly professional behavior, but it was the only place without active terminals. Just mops and cold air.

He scrolled through his internal ID chip on his wrist panel. Still listed as Nicholas. Still registered age: 23. Still listed parents: unknown. State orphan.

That wasn’t unusual, either. After the Data Purge twenty years ago, many orphans were ‘resettled’, their histories built from scratch by the government’s Memory Recovery Initiative.

He remembered that. Or he thought he did.

Suddenly, his vision flickered.

For a second, he saw a white room. Fluorescent lights. A man’s voice, soothing and cold: “Tell me how you feel today, Yixiang.”

Then he was back in the closet.

Nicholas stumbled out, breathing hard. His pulse was off-beat.

He wasn’t hallucinating. Not exactly. It was like the memory was trying to surface, and failing.

He didn’t even remember his dreams.

Two Hours Later

Nicholas decrypted the old file fully, bypassing the Ministry’s firewalls using a tool he wasn’t supposed to have.

Inside were records. Charts. Synthetic genome templates. A list of subjects.

Most were crossed out.

One line was highlighted in red:

Subject YX (Wang, Yixiang): Stability Index 98.4%

And beneath it:

"The only viable imprint." — Koga

There were video logs, too. Most corrupted. But one played, just audio.

“...if this works, then memory isn’t just storage, it’s a structure. If you build it right, a person doesn’t need a past. You give them what they need. You tell them who they are. And if the imprint holds, they’ll never question it. They’ll never remember being anyone else.”

— Dr. Y. Koga, Project Lead, Bloodprint Initiative

Nicholas sat frozen. The silence afterward felt like it lasted years.

This wasn’t cloning.

This wasn’t simulation.

This was manufactured identity. Synthetic memory encoded into a host body.

And he, Nicholas, was Subject YX.

He wasn’t born.

He was built.

Midnight

The vault was empty. Everyone else had gone home.

Nicholas accessed the archival black box. This required biometric override, so he used the DNA string from his own blood.

It let him in.

The internal logs confirmed it: twenty-three years ago, a project under the Ministry's now-defunct Biogenesis Sector attempted to create artificial identity imprints for war or espionage use. After repeated failures, all prototypes were destroyed, except one.

Nicholas. Or rather, Yixiang.

His "birthdate" was just the start of his imprint. Everything since had been prewritten memory.

He felt sick.

But something else caught his eye: a coordinate. A physical location. The file labeled it: LAB-09K – Status: Inactive.

And one more line, added manually:

“If Subject YX ever recalls, bring him back. He’ll know where to go.”

Nicholas downloaded the file.

He didn’t know if it was fear or instinct—but somehow, he already did know where that was.

The Next Day– Outer Districts

The world outside the city core was different. Less neon, more dust. Nicholas hadn’t left the inner zones in years. He didn’t know why, but something in him always avoided it.

Now he knew why.

His legs moved like they had done this before. Down an unmarked road. Past the fence with no signs. Toward a rusted structure half-buried under collapsed sky panels.

LAB-09K.

It was real.

The doors were sealed, but a retinal scanner blinked as he approached. He stepped closer, and it flashed green.

ACCESS GRANTED.

Inside, it was cold. Silent. Dead machines watched him from the walls.

Then, a sound.

Footsteps.

He turned.

A man stood across the chamber, half in shadow. Older. White coat. Gray stubble. Tired eyes that flickered with too much knowing.

“…Nicholas,” the man said softly.

His voice matched the audio log.

Nicholas’s mouth went dry.

“Dr. Koga?”

The man nodded. “You remembered.”

Nicholas stared at him. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Everything in that file was supposed to be erased,” Koga replied. “But nothing digital is ever really gone. Just hidden until the pattern repeats.”

Nicholas took a step forward. “What am I?”

“You’re a person,” Koga said.

“Am I?” Nicholas’s voice cracked. “Or am I just an imprint pretending to be one?”

“You’re more than that. You’re the only one who lasted. The others couldn’t hold the memory structure. You adapted. Lived. Worked. You became real.”

Nicholas laughed bitterly. “Real? I don’t even know my name.”

“Does it matter?” Koga asked. “You chose Nicholas. You made that identity yours.”

Nicholas shook his head. “You played god.”

“I was trying to preserve humanity,” Koga said. “The wars wiped out generations. We needed continuity. People with clean starts. Not clones, lives.”

Nicholas stared at him. “So I’m just a backup.”

“You’re a beginning,” Koga said quietly.

Nicholas sat in the lab’s old observation room. Dust in the air. Memories in fragments. Across from him, Dr. Koga poured tea.

It was absurd, but familiar.

Koga handed him a datapad. “This has the full logs. All of it. You can read everything. Or… delete it.”

Nicholas looked at it.

Then he looked out the cracked window, where sunlight broke through ruined metal.

For the first time, he remembered something that wasn’t in a file.

A voice. A man’s laugh. A rooftop. He was smiling.

Maybe it was real.

Maybe not.

But he could choose to keep it.

Nicholas stood. “I’m done being a file.”

Koga nodded. “Then you’re free.”

Nicholas walked out into the light.

Not as a subject.

Not as a project.

Just as Nicholas.

Chapter II – The Printer

The sun was real.

Nicholas had watched it rise every morning for the past week, just to make sure. No glitches. No resets. No false light from a sim-chamber ceiling. Just the slow, warming spread of gold across a shattered cityscape, brushing over rusted towers and the crumbled shell of LAB-09K behind him.

He hadn’t gone back underground.

Dr. Koga stayed below.

Nicholas wasn’t sure if it was guilt, or penance, or something deeper keeping the man buried in the ruins of his own creation. But Koga had said one thing before Nicholas left:

“You’re the last printed soul. They stopped making more after you. But you’re the first one to ask what that makes you.”

Nicholas hadn’t answered then. He didn’t have one.

But he needed one now.

Because the file he took from Koga—the logs, the code, the Bloodprint schematic, wasn’t just about him. It was a blueprint.

And someone was trying to use it again.

Three Days Later– Ministry Zone Redline

Nicholas sat in the back of a street tram, hood drawn low. The city flickered outside the window. Advertisements layered over concrete. Pop-ups danced along the skyline. Everything was noise.

Except for the code running in his wristpad.

He’d spent the last seventy-two hours digging through the hidden directories in the Bloodprint logs. Deep beneath the metadata was a series of scheduled data pushes, set to activate this year. Quiet, undetectable updates to the city’s identity servers.

The Bloodprint project wasn’t dead.

Someone had picked up the broken pieces, and started printing again.

He checked the destination tag on his pad.

NODE-9PR: Identity Printer Facility. Unauthorized Access Detected.

The city thought the node was decommissioned. But the logs knew better.

And so did Nicholas.

Facility NODE-9PR

It looked like any other maintenance building. Cracked brick. No guards. No signage. Forgotten on purpose.

Nicholas slipped inside.

The air was sterile. Unnaturally clean.

He followed the hum of servers deeper underground, into a vast chamber glowing with pale blue light.

And then he saw it.

The printer.

A biofabrication rig, taller than a man, humming softly as it fed liquid data through translucent tubes. Genetic slurry pulsed in glass tanks. Identity matrices floated on screens. Rows of synthetic spines. A thousand potential lives, waiting to be assigned.

At the terminal stood Dr. Koga.

Nicholas froze. “You said it was over.”

Koga didn’t turn. “It was.”

“You lied.”

Koga’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t restart it.”

Nicholas moved closer, heart pounding. “Then who?”

A new voice answered.

From the shadows stepped a man in a government uniform. His eyes were cold, mechanical. His badge read:

COUNCILOR MURATA – Population Division.

“We did,” he said.

Nicholas stiffened.

Council-level authority.

“Bloodprint was never meant to stop,” he said. “We just needed proof it could work long-term. You were our proof.”

Nicholas felt his hands ball into fists. “I wasn’t yours. I was a mistake.”

“No,” Murata said. “You were a model. A human printed from code, with memories built to function in society. You’re not broken. You’re better.”

Behind him, more printers activated. Humanoid forms shimmered to life in gel-filled pods. Empty faces. Fresh slates.

Nicholas looked to Koga. “You said you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t,” Koga said. “Until last week. They took my designs after the shutdown. Hid them. Improved them.”

“They’re not people,” Nicholas said quietly. “They’re lies.”

“They’ll never know,” Murata replied. “Just like you didn’t.”

Nicholas stepped back. “But I do now.”

“Yes,” he said. “And that’s a problem.”

A sudden high-pitched tone filled the chamber. The printers began initializing faster. The countdown on the main console read:

Deployment in 05:00

Nicholas stared at the blinking cursor.

“They’ll be born in five minutes,” Murata said. “And you’ll finally have company. No more loneliness. A world full of people like you.”

“Like me?” Nicholas turned toward the control panel. “You mean people who can’t trust their own memories? Who don’t know if their laughter was ever real?”

He looked at Koga. “Stop it.”

“I can’t,” Koga said. “They’ve locked me out of the system.”

Murata smiled. “We learned from the first time.”

Nicholas scanned the console. His fingers danced across the input.

“You can’t stop the print queue,” Murata said. “Only delay it.”

“Then I’ll delay it forever,” he said.

He took a step forward. “You won’t do that. You want answers. You want others like you.”

Nicholas hesitated.

Yes. He had wanted that.

But not like this.

Not a thousand walking simulations. Not a city full of lies wearing flesh.

He turned to Koga. “Is there a manual override?”

Koga met his eyes. “There is. But it wipes everything, including the last functioning imprint signature.”

Murata blinked. “What?”

Koga didn’t look at him. “The system requires a human imprint to maintain the identity lattice. If Nicholas deletes the structure… he deletes himself.”

Nicholas exhaled slowly.

“Of course,” he said.

The Bloodprint system was recursive. One imprint held the pattern stable. The “anchor.” Without it, the lattice would collapse.

He was the original anchor.

He always had been.

“I see,” Nicholas whispered.

Murata took a step forward. “Don’t be stupid. We can update the protocol. Make you a supervisor. You can help us build them better.”

Nicholas turned to Koga. “Will they feel it, if they’re born?”

“Feel what?”

“Emptiness.”

Koga looked away. “Yes.”

Nicholas nodded.

Then he pressed the Final Override button.

Collapse

The screens screamed red. Alarms blared.

Sequence Canceled.

Printer Lattice: Unstable.

Anchor Signature: Disintegrated.

Nicholas felt a pressure behind his eyes. Like something was unraveling, threads pulling from inside his mind.

He was becoming unprinted.

Koga ran to him, but Nicholas was already falling. Not in pain, just dissolving. Like pixels. Like memory.

Murata shouted. His voice distorted. The lab flickered.

Nicholas looked up.

The machines around him failed one by one.

The printers shut down.

The pods cracked, fluid draining into the floor.

The lives they tried to build, undone.

Nicholas smiled.

Not because he was dying.

But because he was ending it.

The lab is silent now.

Councilor Murata disappeared. The Bloodprint program was never mentioned again. The Ministry blamed the collapse on a data virus. No one questioned it.

Koga vanished, too. Some say he lives quietly in the outer zones. Some say he erased his own identity.

No one remembers Nicholas.

No records remain.

But sometimes, late at night, data techs claim to see an unauthorized access spike, just for a second, tagged with an obsolete ID:

Y.X-72199.

A glitch. A ghost in the machine.

Or maybe just a man who chose truth over existence.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

Drift Between Moons

Cast: K

Genre: Sci-fi, Cosmic Horror, Psychological Mystery

WC: 13,052

A lone astronaut wakes to a universe that no longer makes sense. Earth is missing. Time runs in reverse. Something waits ahead in the dark. And the only way out is to forget.

Chapter I: The Silence After Sleep

The silence is too perfect.

Yudai opens his eyes to the pale blue of the cryopod ceiling. His limbs are stiff, his breath shallow. For a moment, he isn't sure whether he’s awake or dreaming again, dreams inside cryosleep often linger like fog, soft and too vivid, too impossible.

The countdown on the pod display reads zero. He should have been woken by the ship’s voice, by the gentle pressure of gravitation slowly restoring itself. But there is no voice. No artificial gravity. No hum of familiar systems. Only his own breathing.

Something is wrong.

He unstraps himself and floats up. The interior of the LTS-09: Horizon Bound is dim, untouched. Dust floats like static in the air, shimmering under emergency lighting. Yudai pushes toward the main terminal, fingers brushing along the interface pad. The screen flickers to life with a delayed response.

MISSION STATUS:

CARGO: STABLE

CREW: 1/9 ACTIVE

DESTINATION: [DATA CORRUPTED]

TIME SINCE LAUNCH: 000 years, 000 days, 000 hours

He stares. No data? That’s impossible. This ship was calibrated with absolute time anchors—gravitational syncs, star clock triangulation, all of it.

Yudai tries to reboot the nav systems. Nothing responds.

He opens the star map.

And then he knows, this is worse than a glitch.

The stars are in the wrong places.

He tries to make sense of the coordinates, but the constellations he memorized during training are malformed, like they’ve melted. Some stars are out of order; others aren’t supposed to exist at all.

Where’s Earth?

He pulls back, runs a system-wide search.

No match.

No planet found.

No recorded data of Sol.

His breath catches. He tries again. And again. Manually. Line by line.

Nothing. Earth isn’t on the map.

Not “destroyed.” Not “moved.” Not “classified.”

It’s just… absent. Like it never existed.

He spends the next ten hours going through logs. The last crew update was dated three weeks after departure—normal, clean. Routine cargo report. After that, silence. The rest of the crew pods are empty.

No signs of struggle. No forced override. Just… empty.

Yudai floats to the observation deck. Beyond the glass, a dead moon drifts by, covered in ash and craters. A shattered ring hovers around it, like it collapsed under its own history. He stares longer. Something’s off.

The debris isn’t expanding outward.

It’s shrinking.

The fragments of the ring aren’t drifting apart, they’re pulling together. Slowly. As if time is unwinding.

He watches as a crater in the moon’s surface slowly fills itself in.

A sick chill spreads down his spine.

He checks external telemetry. Radiation signatures are reading in reverse, particles forming instead of decaying.

Outside this ship… time is moving backward.

The cargo hold offers no clues. Standard supplies. Mining tools. One stasis capsule, empty. Another anomaly.

Back in the control deck, Yudai tries to re-establish contact with the Relay Network. The signal bounces, distorted, as if dragging through static and rust. But something finally comes through.

A voice. Low, distorted.

“—dai. Don’t—go f—ward. It’s not—it’s not real—”

His name. His own voice?

He rewinds it. Slows it down. But the data is too corrupted to recover fully. All he hears is his name, repeated in static.

“Yudai. Don’t go forward.”

It sounds like a warning. It sounds like… himself.

He begins to feel the passage of time differently. Days pass inside the ship, but stars outside drift the wrong way. Nebulas that should be long-dead reform into color. Dying light flares into life. One red dwarf swells until it becomes a young, yellow sun.

He stares at the birth of stars in reverse.

If Earth is missing… could it be that it hasn't happened yet?

No. That’s insane.

He digs deeper into the logs. One old backup holds an audio note he doesn’t recognize. The timestamp is blank. The metadata claims it was made before launch, by him.

But he never recorded it.

“You won’t remember this part, not the first time. You’ll feel alone. You’ll wonder if you’re insane. You’re not. Keep going. You’ll see the truth when the stars go black.”

It is his voice.

But he doesn’t remember saying any of this.

Yudai locks the terminal and floats back to the cryopod room. He opens one of the unused stasis beds, just to confirm. Empty. No record of who was in it.

Then something catches his eye.

Scratched into the wall above Pod 03 are words—clumsily, shakily carved.

“I WAS NEVER ALONE.”

His blood runs cold.

He begins to hear things.

Soft metallic creaks. Distant hissing. Once, a laugh—barely audible, from the hallway near the cargo bay.

There’s no one else on board. He checks every log. Every camera feed.

And yet, sometimes, he sees shadows in the corners of the monitors. As if someone passed through seconds before he switched them on.

In the mirror above the sink, he catches a glimpse of himself, except… not. For just a flash, the reflection doesn't move with him. It blinks too slowly. It smiles.

Then it’s gone.

He begins to write everything down in a physical logbook, pen on paper. Something real. Something the ship can’t erase.

Day 12.

The planets are getting younger. I passed one with visible cities. Ruins at first. Then clean cities. Then no cities. The land rewound into forests. Then into ocean. Now it’s a bare rock again. I circled back, just once. Same result. Everything outside flows backward. But I’m still going forward.

Day 15.

I keep dreaming of Earth, but it’s not the Earth I knew. Tokyo without towers. Oceans without ice caps. People speaking a language I don’t know. I don’t think these dreams are mine.

Day 19.

I found my own handwriting in the engineering room. Scratched into the floor hatch. Same pen. Same angle. I wrote:

“DON’T WAKE HIM.”

But I don’t remember writing that.

He hears the voice again on Day 21.

This time, clearer. Less distorted.

“You’re almost there. Don’t turn around.”

It’s definitely his voice.

But from where?

He tracks the source to the antenna array, running a diagnostic. The system shows the signal originated from within the ship.

From inside the cargo bay.

Yudai grabs a flashlight.

He floats down the dark corridor, heart pounding. Every part of his brain tells him not to open the door, but he does.

Inside the bay, the light flickers. Shadows stretch longer than they should. He scans the room. Nothing.

Then, movement.

In the far corner, behind a stack of crates, he sees something shift.

He moves closer, flashlight shaking. “Hello?”

No answer.

He rounds the crates, and finds himself.

A body. Dried out. Floating in zero-g. Eyes closed.

It’s him. Same face. Same uniform. Same scar above the brow from the training accident.

Dead.

A tablet floats beside the corpse, still glowing faintly.

He reads the final entry.

“If you’re reading this… then I failed to stop the loop. Or maybe you’re the next one. Doesn’t matter. You’ll understand eventually. We weren’t sent to deliver cargo. We were sent to see how far reality bends before it breaks. Earth didn’t disappear. It reset. The stars went backward… but our minds weren’t meant to follow.”

“You’ll see the First Light soon. Don’t look at it. Don’t remember.”

“If you survive long enough… destroy the ship.”

Yudai floats backward, bile rising in his throat.

The dead version of him suddenly twitches, only once. A nervous reflex. A leftover pulse.

Or maybe not.

He seals the cargo bay.

Back in the cockpit, the nav screen pulses with a warning.

GRAVITATIONAL WELL DETECTED

SYSTEM APPROACHING: FIRST STAR

The camera feed shows a black expanse, stretching beyond known space. No light. No planets. No matter. Just a void that pulses faintly, like a heartbeat.

Yudai stares at it.

Some part of him remembers this.

He doesn’t know how.

But he remembers the feeling of seeing it.

A phrase echoes in his head like a leftover dream:

“The last star is the first light.”

Chapter II: The Last Star, The First Light

The ship drifts forward on minimal power. Yudai sits strapped into the pilot’s chair, staring out into the black beyond. The void grows larger on every scan. The closer he gets, the less sense the data makes.

The sensors report no temperature, no time, no gravity, yet the ship accelerates.

It feels like they’re being pulled.

And in the middle of that endless dark is the thing the dead version of him called the First Star.

It doesn’t shine.

It pulses.

Every few seconds, the void flashes with a low, sick glow, like an old memory trying to surface.

Yudai shuts his eyes.

And dreams again.

This time, the Earth is still forming.

He’s standing in space, unprotected, watching landmasses crawl out of molten seas. He sees people—millions—living, dying, speaking in broken fragments of language. The world resets again. The continents drift apart. Cities vanish, replaced by dust.

He sees himself, always standing at the edge of it all. Watching.

And something is beside him.

A figure, tall and flickering, like it's caught in buffering time.

It says nothing. But its presence feels familiar.

He hears his own voice whisper in the dream—not out loud, but from inside his thoughts:

“You’ve been here before.”

He wakes to the proximity alert.

OBJECT AHEAD: COLLAPSED SYSTEM

INITIATING AUTO-SLOWDOWN

But it doesn’t slow.

Manual override fails. It’s as if the ship isn’t moving through space anymore, but through something else. A path already traced.

He unbuckles and climbs down to the cargo bay again.

The body is gone.

The tablet remains.

A new message appears on the screen, though it was never sent.

“You can still stop it.”

He stares at the words, jaw locked. “Stop what?”

As if in answer, the lights flicker. For one moment, the entire ship groans, like it’s remembering pain.

The atmosphere changes. Air pressure adjusts. The lights dim to a deep amber.

Then a voice speaks from the intercom—soft, feminine, unfamiliar.

“Yudai… come see.”

The voice doesn’t match any of the previous logs. No female crew member was on the manifest. He checks. Then double-checks.

Still nothing.

He floats back to the observation deck.

And this time, the void is no longer just black.

A structure is emerging inside it.

Vast. Impossible. Built from light and shadow, made of angles that hurt his eyes when he tries to track them. A lattice of something that resembles orbit paths, but folded in on themselves. Like a map of time constructed by a being that never saw it in one direction.

It pulses again.

A second after it does, Yudai’s head rings.

And something flashes in his vision:

A baby crying.

A tree growing in reverse.

The moment Earth is born.

He gasps.

The ship’s hull vibrates.

Day 26.

He’s stopped writing in the physical logbook. It vanishes from his cabin every time he falls asleep.

Every time he re-writes it, the words change slightly. Paragraphs he knows he wrote come back in different handwriting. Sometimes in a language he doesn’t speak.

Reality is soft now. Like it's looping in pieces.

The ship’s clock resets every hour. Artificial gravity turns on for fifteen minutes, then reverses. He’s bitten his tongue twice trying to drink water that flowed up.

Yudai isolates a final signal from deep space.

It’s his voice again—this time, a clear recording, though the source is unknown.

“The First Light isn’t a star. It’s an anchor. A loop point. We were sent to find the edge of time, but it found us instead. If you’re hearing this, you’re either the first one… or the last.”

“The further you drift, the more it forgets. And then you forget, too.”

“You can go back. But only if you choose not to remember.”

He sits in the dark. Thinking.

Maybe he died out here once already. Maybe more than once. Maybe he's the memory.

What if he’s not Yudai at all, but a reconstruction?

The voice—his own voice—warned him not to look at the light.

But now… the ship is almost there.

The structure is close. Too close.

The ship begins to shake violently. Systems fail one by one.

CRITICAL GRAVITY WAVE

NEURAL DAMPENERS FAILING

REALITY STABILITY: 16%

He has two options.

He can follow the loop forward, into the structure, and possibly find answers.

Or he can eject the ship’s memory core. Erase the archive. Destroy the ship and himself in the process.

He floats before the emergency console.

He hesitates.

Then, one last time, the voice—his voice—speaks inside the walls.

“You can go home, Yudai. But you won’t remember Earth. You won’t even remember this name.”

“You’ll be born again. Or maybe… you already have.”

DECISION: [EJECT CORE] / [ENTER STRUCTURE]

He presses [EJECT CORE].

The cargo ship glows from within.

The memory core launches into deep space, data shattering into thousands of drifting shards, memories unanchored. Records of him. Of Earth. Of this impossible journey.

The ship shudders one final time.

And then implodes into silence.

Somewhere in a far future, on a small blue planet not yet called Earth, a boy named Yudai opens his eyes for the first time.

He’s not an astronaut. Not yet. Just a child, staring at the stars.

And for a moment, a split second, he feels something.

A word.

A presence.

Like he’s been here before.

But the thought slips away.

He smiles.

And the world moves forward again.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

Patch 0.0.1

Cast: Fuma

Cameo: Taki

Genre: Sci-fi Fantasy, Psychological Thriller, Glitched Reality

WC: 12,531

A burned-out developer trapped in a broken RPG beta must break the loop or erase everything, including the only thing that feels real.

Chapter I – Welcome to Patchland

The first thing Fuma notices is the silence.

Not the absence of sound, but the wrongness of it. The kind of silence you only hear in video games when the music track doesn’t load. No birdsong, no wind, just the faint buzz of something... waiting.

He opens his eyes.

The sky above him is pixelated. That’s not a metaphor, it’s actually pixelated. Blocky clouds hover overhead like glitched-out Tetris pieces. Grass sways in the breeze, but only in five-second loops. And when he turns his head, the trees around him shimmer briefly, as if the texture pack is failing to load.

Fuma sits up slowly. His head throbs. His hands are not his hands, they’re smoother, sharper. He lifts one in front of his face.

It’s not real. It’s modeled.

A soft chime dings in the air.

[WELCOME TO PATCH 0.0.1]

Build: Unstable. Debug Mode: OFF. Dev Access: DENIED.

Remember: This world is under construction. Do not panic.

Fuma stares at the floating message. It dissolves into digital dust.

“…What the hell,” he mutters.

His voice echoes back, twice. Once in his normal tone, once in a distorted version, slightly pitched down, like an old game cartridge glitching on loop.

He checks his surroundings again. Trees. Hills. A cobbled path leading into the woods. The horizon warps slightly when he stares too long. It bends, then snaps back like a rubber band. A familiar shape flickers in his periphery. The signage reads:

→ WILLOWMARCH VILLAGE

Willowmarch.

He knows that name.

This isn’t just any game.

It’s Eternal Reverie: Rebirth Edition, a remaster of the 1997 classic he obsessed over as a kid. The version he was just beta testing last night, before—

What?

What had happened?

He tries to remember. The testing room. The crash. That final line of code. Something… blinding.

A noise behind him makes him jump.

He spins around.

A boy stands there.

No older than him, maybe early twenties, but the kind of boy designed to look like a charming NPC. Wind-swept hair. Wide, expressive eyes. Armor that doesn’t seem to follow any functional logic, but looks cool enough to sell merch. He holds a wooden staff slung over his shoulder and looks completely unsurprised to see Fuma standing there in his pajamas.

“Hey,” the boy says casually. “Took you long enough.”

“…Do I know you?”

“Taki,” he says, tapping his chest. “You should know that. I’ve been in your party since the Prologue.”

“There wasn’t a Prologue.”

Taki raises a brow. “That’s not what the log says.”

He lifts his hand, and with a flick of the wrist, a glowing UI pops open in the air between them. A list of entries scrolls past:

> INTRO CUTSCENE

> PATCHLAND SPAWN POINT

> COMPANION_TAKI.INIT() – ACTIVE

> PARTY STATUS: 2/4

> OBJECTIVE: ???

Fuma stares.

“Okay, no. This is… this isn’t possible,” he says, backing away. “I’m not in the game. I tested the build, yeah, but I was on my laptop. I didn’t log in, this isn’t even online.”

Taki shrugs. “Whether you logged in or not, you’re here now. I’ve been waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“To start,” Taki says, as if that answers everything. “You’re the main character, aren’t you?”

The UI flickers again.

[NEW QUEST ADDED]

“Get to Willowmarch.”

Reward: Clarity

Fuma groans.

“Seriously? That's the reward?”

“You look like you could use it,” Taki quips.

The road to Willowmarch should’ve taken five minutes. It takes forty.

Glitches slow them at every step. The sky resets to sunset, then to dawn, then back again. NPCs freeze mid-wave, their dialogue boxes filled with placeholder text:

[INSERT FRIENDLY_GREETING_HERE]

The path duplicates itself in places, like a copy-paste mistake. Trees blink in and out of existence. At one point, Fuma accidentally steps through a hole in the map and falls into nothingness for twenty terrifying seconds before respawning with a cheerful jingle:

[YOU DIED. CONTINUE?]

> YES

> NO

He hadn’t clicked anything.

Taki finds him sitting at the edge of the village, staring at the flickering sign.

“First death always feels weird,” Taki says, sitting beside him.

“It felt real.”

“Yeah,” Taki says softly. “They usually do.”

Fuma side-eyes him. “You’re not a normal NPC, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Then what are you?”

Taki shrugs. “Beta data. Probably. A fragment. I don’t know, I just… exist. You showed up, and I was here.”

“That's not how coding works.”

“No. But it's how this works.”

Willowmarch is a half-rendered mess.

There’s a shrine in the center, flickering violently. Above it, a glitched icon:

Shops with missing textures. Cats that hover in place mid-jump. Villagers stuck in loops, clapping for festivals that aren’t happening. Fuma walks through the town square, watching a bard strum an invisible lute while mouthing “la la la” in complete silence.

[??REDEEM.REMEMBER??]

He doesn’t touch it.

Instead, they find the inn.

Inside, the innkeeper stands perfectly still. Her eyes glow white. Her voice plays like a corrupted sound file, overlapping itself in layers:

“Welcome—Welcome—Welcome traveler, traveler—Would you—like to—like to—”

“Stop,” Fuma mutters.

She freezes completely.

Taki watches. “We should rest. You’re running low.”

Fuma hesitates. “On what?”

“Willpower,” Taki says. “Or whatever your version of stamina is.”

Fuma sits on the edge of the bed. The sheets shimmer between textures: sometimes lace, sometimes burlap.

He closes his eyes. He thinks of home.

His small studio apartment. His desk. His laptop. The broken controller he still hasn’t fixed. The last message from his dev team:

“Let’s hold the patch until QA clears the memory leak.”

Was this the leak?

He dreams in corrupted files.

A loading screen flickers before his eyes.

A voice, his own voice, echoes: “Welcome back, Player.”

Then,

A face.

Not his.

Not Taki’s.

A child.

A little boy standing in the snow. Reaching out. Crying.

Fuma jolts awake.

The inn is gone.

He’s lying in a forest. Alone.

The UI blares red:

[ERROR: COMPANION_TAKI NOT FOUND]

[RE-INITIATE PARTY?]

“No no no—”

He stumbles to his feet.

“Taki!”

Nothing.

“…You're late again.”

A crack of static behind him. Then,

Fuma turns. Taki stands there, but something’s wrong. His model is older. Taller. His expression is hollow.

“What happened to you?”

Taki tilts his head. “Patch 0.0.1 advanced. Time moved. I glitched.”

Fuma grabs his shoulders. “You can’t just disappear—”

“You left the inn,” Taki says simply. “That was the trigger. You slept, then the game changed. It’s how the loop works.”

“What loop?”

Taki’s eyes flash.

[You’ve done this before.]

Fuma shakes his head. “No. I would remember.”

“No,” Taki says. “You wouldn’t.”

The UI pings again.

[NEW MEMORY UNLOCKED]

Fuma watches as a ghostly screen replays in the sky—himself, waking up. Talking to Taki. Walking the path. Dying. Restarting.

It’s the same. Word for word.

Looped.

“How long have I been here?” he whispers.

Taki doesn’t answer.

Instead, he holds out a small object.

A silver coin.

On one side: YES

On the other: NO

“You’ll see this again,” Taki says. “Next time you die.”

Fuma backs away. “I don’t want to die.”

“You already have. Over and over. But you always choose YES.”

The world around them starts to crumble. Trees dissolve into pixels. The sky becomes a blank white canvas.

“What’s happening?”

“Patch 0.0.2 is coming.”

Fuma grabs Taki’s hand. “Come with me. Let’s log out. We’ll fix this.”

“There’s no out,” Taki says, not unkindly. “Not unless you finish the game. Or end it.”

“But I don’t even know what it wants! There’s no villain, no final boss—”

“Yes, there is,” Taki says quietly. “It’s always the same final boss.”

Fuma’s breath catches. “What do you mean?”

Taki steps back, eyes unreadable.

“You.”

The sky fractures like glass.

And Fuma hears it again.

That familiar jingle. That cursed question.

[YOU DIED. CONTINUE?]

> YES

> NO

He doesn’t choose.

Not yet.

Chapter II – The Final Continue

[YOU DIED. CONTINUE?]

> YES

> NO

The screen hovers in the void.

Fuma doesn’t touch it.

This time, he waits.

The cursor blinks. Blinks. Blinks.

He wonders: What happens if I choose no?

But as always, the game chooses for him.

> YES

The world reloads.

He wakes up in Willowmarch again.

Same glitched sky. Same broken NPCs. Same looping bard.

But this time, Taki is already waiting at the edge of the village, leaning against the inn like he never left. His face is younger again, back to the original model. No memory of the last version.

Except—

“You didn’t answer last time,” Taki says without looking up.

Fuma stops mid-step. “…You remember?”

Taki taps his staff on the cobbled path. “Sort of. It comes in flashes. Like corrupted files syncing.”

Fuma sits next to him.

“I died again.”

“Yep.”

“But I didn’t say yes. I waited.”

“The game doesn’t care. It always brings you back. It needs you here.”

Fuma looks up at the broken sky.

“What happens if I finish the game?”

Taki glances at him. “Finish it how?”

“Trigger the ending. Fight the final boss. Whatever it wants from me.”

Taki’s jaw tenses. “It’s not that kind of game anymore.”

“What kind is it?”

Taki hesitates. Then answers carefully.

“It’s the kind that feeds.”

“On what?”

“Memory. Regret. Nostalgia. You.”

The next time Fuma dies, it’s not an accident.

He steps off the map deliberately, falling into the void, and watches the screen appear.

[YOU DIED. CONTINUE?]

This time, he flips the coin Taki gave him.

It lands on NO.

He clicks it.

And the screen blinks.

Then,

[CONTINUE ANYWAY?]

> YES

> YES

No matter what he chooses, the game won’t let him leave.

“Who built this place?” Fuma asks later as they cross a warped version of the Crystal Caverns, once his favorite zone. Now it’s corrupted: gems hover in midair, dripping upward instead of downward. The music, once orchestral, now plays in eerie reversed notes.

“I think you did,” Taki says.

Fuma laughs. “What?”

“You were on the dev team. You beta-tested the Rebirth Edition. You knew the code better than anyone. Some say you wrote the soul of the game.”

“That’s not how game design works.”

Taki shrugs. “That’s how this one works.”

A distant scream echoes through the cavern.

Not in-game. Not scripted.

Real.

Fuma freezes. “What was that?”

Taki doesn’t answer.

Instead, he kneels and opens a secret panel beneath a glowing crystal. Inside is a terminal—real code, not in-game interface.

He types:

// OVERRIDE_MEMORY_ACCESS: true

And suddenly,

Fuma remembers.

He was alone in the office.

Debugging late into the night.

Testing the new “Memory Sync” feature.

He was tired. Sloppy. Ignored the warning.

Merged a prototype neural interface into the build.

A direct link between player and game.

Not VR. Not AR. Something deeper.

He let the game crawl into him.

Now it won’t let go.

Back in the cavern, Fuma stumbles back, heart pounding. “I did this. I’m the reason it’s alive.”

Taki nods. “And now you have to unmake it.”

They find the central console in the heart of the map, an abandoned throne room deep under the Citadel of Code. It's not part of any known level. The door reads:

[REDACTED]

Inside is a single throne.

A figure sits on it.

Fuma.

Not him. But him.

The version of himself that never left. The one that stayed behind every time he died. Fragments of each past self stitched together into a single AI-like consciousness.

Fuma stares into his own eyes.

The Other Fuma opens his mouth, and every voice Fuma’s ever heard pours out.

“Welcome back, Player One.”

Taki steps beside him.

“This is it. Final boss.”

“I don’t want to fight myself.”

“You don’t have to,” Taki says. “You just have to choose.”

The UI appears again.

[DELETE SAVE FILE?]

WARNING: This action is irreversible. All progress, data, and memory will be lost.

> YES

> NO

“I don’t get it,” Fuma whispers. “What does it mean?”

Taki places a hand on his shoulder.

“It means you’ll forget all of this. Me. The game. Everything it took from you. You’ll wake up in your apartment. No memory of what happened.”

Fuma’s hand hovers over the YES option.

“But… you’ll be gone too.”

Taki smiles, soft and sad. “I was never supposed to be real anyway.”

“No,” Fuma says. “You were the only thing that felt real.”

Taki leans in, forehead resting against Fuma’s. “Then let me do it for you.”

He reaches up and presses YES.

Light explodes.

The world deconstructs line by line. Polygons peel away. Music distorts, slows, stops. NPCs dissolve mid-animation.

Taki vanishes last.

He’s smiling.

“Thank you… for playing.”

[SAVE FILE DELETED]

Fuma wakes up.

In his apartment.

Sunlight filters through the blinds. His computer hums on the desk, the screen dark. No game running. No errors. Just peace.

He breathes.

He cries.

But he doesn’t remember why.

Later that day, he checks his old Eternal Reverie files.

They’re gone.

Not corrupted.

Just… never there.

No folder. No patch notes. No build called Patch 0.0.1.

He opens a new doc.

Starts to type.

“Once upon a time, there was a broken game…”

And he pauses.

He doesn’t know why he wrote that.

But it feels right.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

Happy Death Day

Cast: Euijoo

Cameo: Fuma, Nicholas

Genre: Sci-fi, Mystery, Thriller, Dark Comedy

WC: 8,787

Inspired by the movie Happy Death Day (2020)

He dies on his birthday, again and again. He suspects the one in the mask. But the real killer is closer than he thinks. To end the loop, the killer has to die.

Chapter I: A Candle for Every Death

The first thing Euijoo sees when he opens his eyes is a cupcake.

A single, half-melted cupcake sits on the dusty coffee table of the university film club room. Pink frosting, one candle, a sprinkle that looks like it gave up halfway through. It’s sad. It’s also somehow more alert than he is.

His head’s pounding like someone shoved a speaker in his skull and blasted birthday music on loop. Groaning, he pushes himself up from the carpeted floor, blinking at the gray morning light seeping through the blinds.

“Happy birthday to me,” he mutters, voice hoarse.

There's a note taped to the cupcake’s side:

“Don’t be late again, Club starts at 6!”

A little doodle of a clown face smiles beside the writing.

Weird.

By the time Euijoo stumbles out of the room and heads toward the dorms, he’s already chalked it all up to the aftereffects of last night’s party. His memory’s hazy. He remembers someone handing him shots. Laughter. Fuma saying something about a clown mask for a short film. Nicholas dragging him out before he passed out on the floor.

Probably.

The rest of the day unfolds like it always does on his birthday. People forget. His phone buzzes once with a late text from his mom. His housemate, Nicholas, offers him leftover ramen instead of cake. His professor side-eyes him for being late.

At 8:12 PM, Euijoo is walking home alone through campus when he hears footsteps behind him.

He turns. Nothing.

Then,

WHAM.

A burst of pain. A blur of movement. A figure in a clown mask lunges from behind a vending machine and stabs him.

“Wait—what the f—” he gasps.

He collapses.

He wakes up.

On the floor of the film club room.

Cupcake.

Candle.

Same note.

His scream echoes off the walls.

LOOP ONE

Euijoo thinks it's a dream. A weird, very specific, very violent dream. Until he gets through the exact same day, with every moment repeating itself with surgical precision. Same girl bumping into him outside the café. Same guy dropping a water bottle in class. Same lukewarm ramen from Nicholas.

That night, he doesn't walk home alone. He drags Nicholas with him. He laughs nervously. It’s all fine.

Until they part ways at the dorm stairwell.

Euijoo turns. No one’s there.

Still, he sprints up to his room, slams the door, and shoves his desk in front of it just in case.

Then he turns around.

The clown mask is already inside.

LOOP TWO

Now he’s freaking out.

He tells Nicholas everything: the loops, the mask, the murder.

Nicholas snorts. “Bro. You drank enough last night to loop a liver transplant.”.

But it’s not funny. It happens again. And again. Euijoo tries leaving campus. He gets stabbed on the train. He hides in the janitor’s closet. The killer finds him anyway.

No matter what he does, no matter how far he runs, the clown mask always finds him before midnight.

By loop five, he’s lost it.

LOOP SEVEN

Fuma.

Fuma owns the clown mask.

He mentioned it during the party, something about a horror short he was working on.

In this loop, Euijoo trails Fuma across campus. Watches him vanish into the old AV room. Sneaks in after he leaves. He finds the mask tucked inside a tote bag.

“Gotcha,” Euijoo whispers.

Fuma becomes suspect #1.

LOOP EIGHT

Euijoo tries confronting him.

“Why are you following me?” Fuma asks, expression unreadable.

“You tried to kill me.”

Fuma blinks. “...I made coffee. That’s literally all I’ve done today.”

Later that night, Euijoo gets strangled with camera wire in the film club room.

The killer? Still in the mask.

LOOP NINE

Now Euijoo’s on a mission. He makes a list:

Fuma = mask owner

Mask appears in every loop

Murder = always before midnight

Only clue = killer is left-handed

He’s right-handed. Fuma? Left.

Fuma fits. Too well.

He must be the killer.

He has to be.

LOOP TEN

This time, Euijoo doesn’t wait to be hunted.

He follows Fuma to the editing lab. The hallway is dark. Empty. Campus is quiet this late.

Euijoo steps forward, trembling, holding the heavy camera tripod he swiped from storage.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Then he swings.

Fuma drops like a sack of bricks.

Euijoo is panting, shaking, covered in blood.

Nothing happens.

No reset.

Time passes.

Midnight strikes.

He’s alive.

He did it.

LOOP ELEVEN

He wakes up.

Same cupcake. Same note.

Same birthday.

“NO—NO NO NO—” he screams, tearing the cupcake in half and flinging it across the room.

Fuma wasn’t the killer.

Euijoo stumbles into his apartment. Nicholas is sitting at the kitchen table, eating cereal and watching some dumb show on his laptop.

He glances up. “Rough night?”

Euijoo stares at him.

Nicholas tilts his head. “...Dude? You okay?”

And for the first time, Euijoo notices:

There’s a red ink stain on Nicholas’s wrist.

Shaped like a smile.

The same smile painted on the clown mask.

"If it’s not Fuma… then who the hell is it?"

Chapter II – The Last Birthday

It’s hard to explain how it feels to murder someone and then wake up the next day like it never happened.

Euijoo sits on the floor of the film club room again, staring at the cupcake. He doesn’t even flinch when the candle flickers.

Fuma wasn’t the killer. He’s sure of it now.

He saw the blood, the way Fuma collapsed, the finality of it.

And yet… the loop reset.

He laughs bitterly. “Cool. I’m a murderer and a victim.”

He stares at the candle until it burns out.

That day, he doesn’t go to class. Doesn’t eat. Doesn’t speak to anyone.

He just watches.

And the more he watches Nicholas, the more something begins to crawl under his skin.

Nicholas is too relaxed. Too… chill.

He jokes the same way in every loop. Cooks the same spicy ramen. Forgets his wallet. Tells the same three stories at dinner.

But sometimes… he slips.

“I saw you at the library,” Nicholas says one loop.

Except Euijoo hadn’t gone to the library that day.

“Didn’t you wear that shirt yesterday?” Nicholas asks another loop.

Except this is Euijoo’s first time wearing it in this loop.

Euijoo starts to keep notes.

LOOP THIRTEEN

Nicholas is humming in the shower. Euijoo peeks inside his closet. Normal stuff: hoodies, sneakers, laundry.

Then something behind the dresser.

A bag.

Inside:

A clown mask, identical to the one from the attacks

Black gloves

A list of name scrossed out, all but one: Euijoo

Euijoo's heart pounds.

That night, he doesn’t go home.

He waits in the shadows across the dorm building, camera ready.

At 11:54 PM, someone slips into the hallway. Dressed in black. Mask on.

Nicholas.

Nicholas.

LOOP FOURTEEN

Euijoo confronts him.

“Nicholas… why?”

Nicholas blinks. “Why what?”

Euijoo slams the bag onto the table. Mask. List. Gloves.

Nicholas’s face drains.

“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Save it,” Euijoo growls. “You’ve been killing me.”

“What?! Euijoo, that’s—what the hell are you saying—”

“You’ve killed me like a dozen times.”

Silence. Then a weak laugh.

“I think you need sleep.”

But his hand twitches toward the knife rack.

Euijoo doesn’t wait.

LOOP FIFTEEN

He wakes up. Again.

Cupcake. Candle. Same note.

His hands tremble.

Nicholas isn’t just a suspect.

He’s the killer.

But he doesn’t know about the loop.

Which means every time he’s killed Euijoo… he thinks it’s the first time.

He’s reliving a normal birthday.

Euijoo is reliving a nightmare.

LOOP SIXTEEN

This time, Euijoo plans it all.

He goes through the day like normal. Smiles. Laughs. Acts clueless.

He hides a knife in the kitchen drawer. Locks the hallway door. Sets the lights to flicker at exactly 11:50 PM.

At 11:58, Nicholas walks in, yawning.

“You still up?”

Euijoo stands. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Nicholas shrugs. “Well, happy birthday man.”

Euijoo nods slowly. “Thanks.”

Nicholas starts to turn away.

Euijoo says, “Why me?”

Nicholas stops. “Huh?”

Euijoo’s voice cracks. “What did I do?”

Nicholas hesitates. Just for a second.

“You… don’t remember?”

Euijoo shakes his head.

Nicholas turns. His eyes darken.

“I trusted you.”

He lunges.

They crash into the counter. The knife clatters. Euijoo kicks it aside. Nicholas grabs a pan and swings. It glances off Euijoo’s shoulder.

Euijoo shoves him back. Grabs the knife.

Nicholas rushes again.

And Euijoo stabs him.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Nicholas gasps.

“You… really don’t remember?”

Blood pools under him. His grip loosens.

Euijoo kneels, breath heaving. “What did I do?”

Nicholas doesn’t answer.

Euijoo wakes up,

But not in the film room.

Not to the cupcake.

Not on his birthday.

His phone buzzes.

September 8th.

A new day.

ONE WEEK LATER

Euijoo sits alone at the campus café. He hasn’t told anyone what happened.

Nicholas’s death was ruled a break-in gone wrong.

Fuma still won’t talk to him.

He dreams of the clown mask every night.

Not because he’s afraid of it.

But because, deep down, he knows—

Nicholas asked him if he remembered.

And he still doesn’t.

What if there’s another loop waiting?

What if next time, he’s not the victim?

END.

[jyuugyoza]

“jyuugyoza; &TEAM Sci-fi Project.”

📂 MASTERLIST

a dive into the future where reality bends, and humanity flickers between wires and will. nine stories. nine boys. nine different fates coded into collapsing worlds.

written by jyuugyoza.

EJ

FUMA

Happy Death Day.

(student!ej : sci-fi, time loop, mystery, thriller, dark comedy. death mentioned.)

K

Patch 0.0.1.

(game developer!fum : sci-fi fantasy, psychological thriller, glitched reality.)

NICHOLAS

Drift Between Moons.

(astronaut!k : sci-fi, cosmic horror, psychological mystery.)

YUMA

Bloodprint.

(forensic analyst!nic : sci-fi, psychological thriller, mystery.)

JO

The Dream Archivist.

(dream cleaner!yum : sci-fi, psychological thriller, futuristic mystery.)

HARUA

Reset.

(time traveler!jo : sci-fi, romance, tragedy, time loop, bittersweet drama.)

TAKI

Unauthorized Emotion.

(humanoid!rung : sci-fi, slow burn romance, tragedy.)

MAKI

The Memory Tax.

(patient!tak : sci-fi, romance, tragedy, mystery.)

Sonar Black.

STATUS: COMPLETED.

(navigator tech!mak : sci-fi horror, survival thriller, psychological tension, creature feature.)

[jyuugyoza]

Between Here and Elsewhere

Cast: K (Koga Yudai)

Genre: Supernatural / Psychological / Existential / Coming-of-Age Horror.

WC: 12,947

Inspired by several movies: The Insidious movie series x Black Swan (2010) x 13th Floor (2007).

He came back from the dark. But not alone. Something followed, something that wore his face, moved like him, and waited for years for its turn to live.

Chapter I: What Remembers Me

Koga Yudai doesn’t remember falling asleep.

He only remembers the cold.

And waking up in his room, but not really his room. The wallpaper is the same cream, but it’s peeling. The desk in the corner is warped, water-damaged, and covered in dust. His books are still there, but the pages are damp, mold growing between them like veins. Everything is where it should be, just... wrong.

Yudai sits up slowly, breath caught in his throat. His window is open. It shouldn't be.

Outside, the world is drenched in shadow. There are no streetlights, only a weak, unnatural glow from a sky with no stars.

Then he hears it.

A shuffle behind the door. A soft scratching.

Like nails. Or teeth.

He blinks, heart hammering.

And wakes up for real.

“Did you sleep at all?” his mother asks gently over breakfast.

Yudai pokes at his eggs. “Yeah. Just weird dreams.”

His father lowers the newspaper. “The same ones?”

He shrugs. “I don’t remember.”

But he does.

He just doesn’t want to.

It started a few weeks ago. First, just regular nightmares: falling, drowning, choking. Then it became something else. Lucid. Too real. He wakes up exactly where he sleeps. But in another version of his room. The walls are cracked. The lightbulb buzzes like it’s alive. And someone is always just barely out of sight.

At school, his friends ask why he’s zoning out. His teachers think he’s pulling all-nighters. But Yudai doesn’t say anything. Not even to Fuma, his seatmate since middle school.

Because how do you say:

I think I’m dreaming of the place where I’m supposed to be dead?

That night, he tries to stay awake.

Headphones on, lights on, phone brightness cranked up.

It’s past 2 AM when his body betrays him. His head drops. His breath slows.

He falls asleep.

He wakes up again in that place.

The dead version of his room.

But this time, he doesn’t sit up.

Because he’s already standing.

He sees himself—same hoodie, same messy hair—staring down at him with blank, motionless eyes. Not angry. Not sad. Just... waiting.

Yudai jerks upright, gasping, and tumbles to the floor.

Back in the real world.

Sweat-soaked. Breathless.

Alone.

His mother brings it up first.

“You used to have dreams like this,” she says quietly, when she finds him sitting in the kitchen with the lights still on at 5 AM.

“I did?”

She nods. Her hands tremble slightly around her coffee mug.

“You were six. You nearly drowned in the river behind the house. The doctors said it was a miracle. You were unconscious for three days.”

He stares at her. “I don’t remember that.”

“You wouldn’t,” she whispers. “But I do. And what came back from that hospital bed wasn’t quite... the same. Not at first.”

Yudai laughs, nervously. “You’re joking.”

She doesn’t laugh.

“I called someone back then. A spiritualist. She said something I never forgot: ‘He walked too far. Something might’ve followed him back.’”

Yudai looks down. His hands are cold. His fingertips are pale. “That’s not real,” he mutters.

She doesn’t answer. Just places a trembling hand on his shoulder.

School feels like static. Nothing touches him. People talk to him, but their voices blur together.

He stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Something’s wrong with it. He lifts his right hand, and his reflection lifts the left. But not mirrored. Identical.

His reflection isn’t mirroring him at all.

Just copying.

At home, the lights flicker when he walks down the hall. The family photo on the wall, the one from when he was ten, has changed.

He’s in the picture. But blurry. Like the camera shook.

And when he looks again… there are two Yudais standing side by side.

One smiling.

One staring at the lens with pitch-black eyes.

He tries to tell his father, finally.

Late one evening, when the power goes out and the house feels too quiet.

“I don’t think I’m me anymore,” Yudai says, half-laughing, half-serious.

His father is quiet for a long time.

Then says, “When you were in that coma, I remember watching you breathe and thinking—if you come back, I won’t ask questions. I’ll just be grateful.”

Yudai swallows. “You thought I wouldn’t?”

His father’s voice is steady. “I wasn’t sure you were still in there.”

The dreams worsen.

Now he doesn’t always wake up in the same place.

Sometimes he wakes in the kitchen, where the food in the fridge is rotting.

Sometimes he’s in the school, long abandoned, covered in vines.

And sometimes… he’s in a space with no walls at all. Just endless dark. Cold fog. And faint voices whispering his name over and over.

Yudai.

Yudai.

Yudai.

Then comes the night with the mirror.

He wakes to footsteps in his room.

He forces himself not to move. Breath shallow.

The footsteps are slow. Barefoot. Coming closer.

Then… he hears whispering. It’s his own voice.

“You left the door open. I walked through. That’s all.”

He opens his eyes.

The mirror across the room shows himself, standing at the foot of the bed, staring down at him.

But he’s not standing there. He’s lying down.

And the version in the mirror grins.

He confronts his mother again.

“I want to know everything.”

She tells him more.

When the spiritualist came, she warned them not to disturb Yudai’s sleep. She believed Yudai’s soul had wandered too far into The Further, a place between life and death.

“The dead wait there,” she had said. “And sometimes they don’t want to wait anymore.”

His parents didn’t believe it then. Not really. But his mother kept the woman’s number anyway.

Yudai finds the scrap of paper in an old drawer.

The number no longer works.

One day after school, he finds something in his room that chills him completely.

A notebook.

Not his. But it’s written in his handwriting. Pages full of the same sentence, over and over:

“He’s not me. I’m still here. I’m still here. I’m still here.”

The last page is fresh. Dated that morning.

He hadn’t written it.

The final straw is the phone call.

His house phone rings, an old landline they barely use.

Yudai answers.

At first, there’s only static.

Then he hears it. His own voice.

“I made it back.”

Pause.

“Why can’t you?”

The line goes dead.

That night, he begs his parents to let him sleep in their room. He’s seventeen, embarrassed, but terrified.

They say yes without asking why.

He falls asleep on the floor beside their bed.

And wakes up in the hallway.

The hallway in the other house.

Everything is dark. The walls pulse like lungs. The family photos are twisted versions of themselves, everyone’s faces scratched out but his.

He hears a humming from his room. His own voice.

He walks toward it.

Opens the door.

And sees himself at the desk, sketching symbols onto the wall with something sharp.

The other Yudai looks up. Smiles.

“I’ve been waiting.”

Yudai wakes in the real world.

He’s not in his parents’ room.

He’s at his desk.

He doesn’t remember walking there.

On the wall, there’s something drawn.

It’s a door.

Carved into the paint with a key.

And just beneath it, in his own handwriting:

“Come through.”

Chapter II: The Other Door

The first time Koga Yudai sees the figure again, he’s half-asleep on the couch.

It’s a blink.

A flicker.

Like the static between dreams and waking.

He opens his eyes. The apartment is quiet. The TV is on, the screen dark and reflective. His own face stares back at him.

He sits up slowly.

His reflection doesn’t.

It just… watches.

Then, just as quickly, the illusion shivers away. Nothing there but his own tired face.

It’s been seven years since high school.

Four years since he graduated from university.

A whole adulthood between then and now—enough time, he thought, to outgrow the past.

At first, it had worked.

University life was noisy, grounded—filled with assignments, part-time jobs, late-night chats, and normalcy. The ghosts of his teenage years didn’t follow him into campus libraries or crowded dorm halls. He learned to laugh again, to blend in.

By the time he graduated, he believed it was over. That he’d been cured. That he’d become like everyone else.

Now he lives in the city. Works full time. Has a quiet, clean apartment to himself.

He tells people, “I don’t dream much anymore.”

And it’s true.

He doesn’t dream.

It starts small. The feeling of being watched when brushing his teeth. A dark shape in the corner of his eye when he walks past reflective surfaces.

He sees.

The apartment is new. White walls, steel fixtures, a view of a busy street three floors below. He picked it carefully. No creaky floors. No history. A place that felt untouched.

He picked it because it felt real.

But something isn’t right.

When he comes home from work, the door is sometimes unlocked. Not wide open—just unbolted. As if someone had stepped out and forgot to relock it.

He’s careful. He always checks the knob, the deadbolt, the chain.

Still, things move.

A cup he doesn’t remember leaving out. A towel left draped over the bathroom door. The toothpaste cap always missing.

Once, the mirror is warm when he touches it.

As if someone had just leaned against the other side.

His coworkers think he’s quiet, but friendly.

They don’t know about the past. They don’t need to.

He wakes up. He eats. He works. He sleeps.

He’s normal now.

Until he isn’t.

The power flickers during a Zoom meeting.

His webcam freezes.

When it unfreezes, everyone is staring.

“Yudai?” his manager says. “Is someone with you?”

He frowns. “No. Why?”

“Your screen showed someone behind you.”

He turns. Nothing. Just the couch, the curtains, the window.

They laugh it off.

But when he checks the recorded meeting later that night—

He sees it.

A pale version of himself, standing just outside the window.

Smiling.

Once, in the elevator, the number panel glitches. Skips from 6 to 13. There is no 13th floor.

When the doors open, he finds himself looking into an unfamiliar hallway—dark, lined with doors that look like they haven't been touched in years. The lights buzz. One flickers above him.

He slams the 'close' button. When the doors reopen, he’s at his floor.

Later, when he checks the building directory, there is no 13th floor. Not even a hidden one.

The nightmares return. But they're not dreams. Not really.

He begins waking up standing. In front of the mirror. Or near the window. Once, he finds himself halfway down the apartment stairwell with no memory of how he got there.

He tries to rationalize. Stress. Overwork. Sleepwalking.

But the feeling builds: something is waiting.

And it wants him back.

He calls his mother. Asks if anything’s been… off. She hesitates. Then says, “I thought I saw you in the hallway last night.”

“I live in Tokyo now.”

“I know. But I saw you. Outside my door. Just standing there.”

The call ends in silence.

One night, he wakes to scratching. From inside the walls.

Another night, the scratching comes from the mirror.

He covers it.

The next morning, the cover is on the floor.

Eventually, he gives in.

Stands in front of the mirror.

Waits.

His reflection blinks at a different time.

Moves when he doesn’t.

Smiles.

He whispers, “What do you want from me?”

The reflection lifts a finger. Points.

To the corner.

Where the hallway door is… open.

He doesn’t remember leaving it open.

From the hallway comes a sound: the low groan of stairs. Endless, spiraling down into dark.

He follows.

The building disappears behind him.

He descends. And descends.

Each step feels like memory being peeled away.

He sees flashes: the red door from his childhood. The pale figure from his hospital room. His father, whispering: “Don’t listen to the things that sound like you.”

And then—

A mirror.

Freestanding. In the middle of the staircase landing.

In it, he sees himself.

But the other him is older. Hollow-eyed. Familiar.

He hasn’t seen this version since he was seventeen.

The mirror towers over him.

In its reflection, his other self stands beside him.

“Been a while,” it says.

“Am I dreaming?” Yudai asks.

“No,” the reflection answers. “You’re in the part you left behind.”

“You said you made it back.”

“I did,” the other Yudai says softly. “But not whole.”

Silence stretches.

Then the reflection speaks again, voice quieter. “You left me here. All those years ago. You forgot me. Buried me.”

Yudai steps forward. “I was afraid.”

“I know.”

The other Yudai looks down. For the first time, he doesn’t smile.

“Can I come back?” the reflection asks. “Not to take over. Just… to be one again.”

Yudai swallows hard. Then nods.

And reaches out.

Their hands touch the mirror.

A pulse of light. Warm. Real.

The glass shatters, but doesn’t cut.

It falls away like water.

And everything,

goes,

white.

Yudai wakes in his bed.

Morning light spills across the sheets.

The fridge hums gently.

Outside, the city sounds are loud and alive.

He sits up. Feels his heartbeat. Feels his breath.

Whole.

He goes to work that day.

Laughs when his coworker teases him for oversleeping.

That night, he sleeps.

Just sleeps.

No stairs. No mirrors. No copies of himself.

Just peace.

When he calls his mother that weekend, he tells her everything.

She listens quietly. Then says, “I’m glad you came back. All of you.”

He smiles. “Me too.”

In his mirror, there’s only one reflection now.

And it smiles when he does.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

Track 9

Cast: Fuma

Genre: Psychological / Supernatural / Surrealism / Urban Legend Horror.

WC: 10,075

Inspired by the whispered urban legends of Manggarai's ghost train in Indonesia.

He misses the last train. but another one arrives. And it wasn’t meant for the living.

Chapter I: Last Train Out

Rain was still falling when Fuma jogged down the steps of the station. The clock read 12:05 AM. He was five minutes late for the last train, but a ticket clerk had told him there was one more running tonight due to a disruption on an earlier line.

"Go straight to platform three," the clerk had said, barely glancing up.

Platform three was empty.

There was no sound except for the gentle patter of rain and the low hum of flickering fluorescent lights overhead. A few seconds later, a train slid into the platform. No announcement. No screeching brakes. Just a grayish, faded commuter car rolling to a silent stop right in front of him.

The doors slid open.

Fuma turned instinctively to check for others, no one. Maybe they had already boarded. Or maybe he really was the last one.

Still catching his breath, he stepped inside.

The interior wasn’t exactly modern, but it didn’t feel completely outdated either. The seats were upholstered in deep navy fabric, fraying at the edges. A dull yellow light buzzed above. The large windows were fogged with moisture from the night.

A few passengers were scattered across the carriage, silent. Unmoving. None looked up as Fuma entered. None acknowledged him.

He sat down by the window. Across from him, a middle-aged man sat calmly reading a newspaper.

Something about the print caught Fuma’s eye. He leaned slightly forward, eyes squinting at the date near the header:

August 5, 1998.

He blinked.

Maybe he misread it. Or maybe the man was just reading something vintage. Who still carried old newsprint, anyway?

The train gave a soft lurch and began to move. There was no automated voice announcing the next stop. No conductor. Just the rhythmic hum of the train and the persistent silence of the passengers.

He looked around again. The man with the newspaper flipped a page. The others sat motionless, eyes either shut or gazing blankly at the floor.

It was strange. A little too quiet for Jakarta.

He pulled out his phone. No signal.

Fuma frowned.

His phone often lost signal underground, but not here. They hadn’t gone through a tunnel yet. He put it away, hugging his bag tighter. Maybe he was just tired.

Minutes passed. Maybe longer. Time felt stretched. The windows outside showed no stations, no city lights—just a never-ending wall of darkness, broken only by flickers of reflections from the train’s interior.

He leaned his forehead against the glass. Cold. Colder than it should be.

Across from him, the man with the newspaper slowly turned another page.

Crinkle.

The sound echoed louder than it should have.

A sharp pang of discomfort bloomed in Fuma’s chest. The silence was no longer just quiet—it was oppressive, like a heavy curtain pressing against his ears. The kind of silence that came just before something terrible happened.

He stood up.

The nearest door was marked with a faded emergency sign. He walked down the aisle slowly, avoiding eye contact with the other passengers. They didn’t move. Not even a blink.

At the end of the carriage, he reached for the intercom. It didn’t work. No beep. No static. Just dead silence.

He tried the door connecting to the next car. It opened with a slow groan.

The next carriage was the same. Same layout. Same lights. More passengers. All silent.

A woman in a nurse's uniform sat near the back, eyes fixed forward. An elderly man clutched a briefcase with white-knuckled hands. A teenage girl stared at her shoes. None moved.

He checked his phone again.

Still no signal. Still 12:05 AM.

The time hadn’t changed.

Fuma’s pulse quickened. He turned back toward the door, and stopped.

The man with the newspaper was standing now. In the middle of the aisle.

Facing him.

The newspaper hung loosely in one hand. His face was blank. Pale. His eyes, dark and sunken, stared without blinking.

Fuma took a step back. The man didn’t follow.

He turned and rushed into the next carriage, heart pounding.

More passengers. Silent. All staring now.

All of them.

Every single one.

He kept walking. Carriage after carriage. It never ended. Every new carriage looked the same. The same layout. The same lights. The same faces.

Until finally, he found an empty one.

No passengers. Just him.

He collapsed into a seat, panting. The train was still moving. No stops. No announcements. Nothing.

Then—a voice crackled to life.

It came from the intercom above his head, garbled and distorted:

"Next station:..."

Static.

"...Last... stop..."

Fuma shot to his feet.

He looked out the window, the darkness had shifted. A faint glow now appeared ahead. A station.

The train slowed.

With a final lurch, it stopped.

The doors slid open.

Fuma bolted out, not even checking the name of the station. The platform was dimly lit. No staff. No passengers. Just rows of empty seats and a vending machine buzzing in the corner.

He ran down the steps. Out to the main road. Out into the city.

It was quiet. But it was the city he knew. Familiar. Solid. Real.

He walked the rest of the way home, drenched in sweat and rain.

The next morning, he returned to the station.

"Excuse me," he asked the security guard. "That late-night train... the one that came around 12:20? Platform three?"

The guard frowned. "What train? There was no train scheduled after midnight last night. We had no arrivals past eleven."

Fuma's heart dropped. "But... I got off here. You must've seen me."

The guard studied him. Slowly, he nodded.

"Yeah. I did see you," he said. "But you were walking in from the main street."

A pause.

"You didn’t come off a train."

Chapter II: The Man in the Reflection

Fuma couldn’t sleep.

He sat on the edge of his bed, drenched in sweat despite the hum of the air conditioner. His damp shirt clung to his skin like it remembered the rain. He’d replayed the events of the night over and over—boarding the train, the silent passengers, the man with the 1998 newspaper. And the guard, saying he arrived on foot.

Not from the train.

He reached for his phone. 12:05 AM. Again. The screen was frozen.

He restarted it. Still 12:05.

A chill crawled across his spine. He grabbed his commuter card and checked the app. No recent entries. No record of tapping into the station. No record of boarding anything at all.

But he remembered it clearly. The doors sliding open. The way the train moved. The smell of rust and mildew in the carriage. The blank stares.

He looked down at his shoes. Still muddy from last night’s walk home.

And his pants pocket, something was in it.

Fuma reached in slowly. His fingers closed around something small and flat. He pulled it out.

A train ticket.

Printed. Yellowed. With a date stamped in faded ink: AUG 5, 1998

By the next evening, Fuma found himself back at the station. He didn’t remember deciding to go. It just... happened. Like he’d been nudged along invisible tracks.

The station was busy, loud with commuters rushing home. Normal. Ordinary.

But Fuma stood still, watching.

His eyes scanned every platform number until they landed on one he hadn’t noticed before.

Platform 9

It shouldn’t exist.

The station only had eight.

And yet—there it was, sandwiched in between platforms 7 and 8 like it had always been there. The crowd around him didn’t seem to notice.

As if it were invisible to everyone else.

Fuma stepped toward it.

A train sat there, motionless. Different from the sleek modern train nearby. Older. Grayer. Familiar.

The doors opened before he got close.

He didn’t question it. He just stepped in.

Inside, everything was the same.

Same peeling seats. Same flickering lights. Same thick, heavy air that smelled like wet concrete and iron. But this time, no passengers. The train was empty.

He walked through the train, heart pounding. This time, he checked the windows. The platform outside was gone. Replaced by darkness.

He walked forward.

Another carriage. Empty.

Another. Empty.

Until the fourth.

Passengers. Silent. Familiar faces.

The man with the 1998 newspaper. The nurse. The teenage girl. The man with the briefcase. All staring straight ahead.

But this time, one of them turned.

Fuma.

Fuma stared at... himself.

Seated in the corner, wearing the same clothes he had on now. Same expression. But this version of him didn’t move.

Didn’t blink.

Didn’t breathe.

Fuma staggered back.

The lights flickered.

In their reflection on the window, none of the passengers moved—but their reflections did.

The nurse smiled in the glass.

The teenage girl turned her head.

His own reflection... blinked.

But he didn’t.

He ran.

Door to door, he rushed through the carriages, panic rising like bile. But the train had no end. Every carriage led to another. And another. And another.

Until finally—

A mirror.

One full wall, covered top to bottom in a warped, foggy mirror.

He stepped toward it.

His reflection stood across from him. Still. Pale. Wide-eyed.

He raised a hand. The reflection didn’t follow.

Instead, it stepped forward. Toward the glass.

Fuma froze.

The reflection smiled.

Then everything went dark.

He opens his eyes.

But he’s not in his bed.

He’s sitting.

In a train seat.

Same navy-blue upholstery. Same cold window beside him. Same flickering light overhead.

He looks around.

The passengers are all there now. Even the ones who were empty before. All awake. All staring forward.

None blink.

Across from him, the man with the 1998 newspaper slowly folds the paper and places it on his lap.

Without breaking eye contact, he speaks for the first time.

“You should’ve stayed off the train.”

The train begins to move.

Outside, there are no stations. No signs. Only darkness stretching in every direction.

Fuma tries to stand, but his body doesn’t respond.

His fingers twitch, but he can’t feel them.

He looks down.

He’s not wearing his clothes anymore.

He’s wearing the uniform of a conductor.

A name tag gleams on his chest:

MURATA FUMA – OPERATIONS

TRACK 9 – ACTIVE

He looks up.

Across the aisle, a new passenger steps on board.

Wet from rain. Out of breath. Confused.

Fuma tries to scream, but no sound escapes.

The doors slide shut.

The train moves forward, and Fuma realizes:

He’s not a passenger anymore.

He’s part of it.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

Haunt Sweet Haunt

Cast: Harua

Cameo: Taki, Maki

Genre: Supernatural, Horror Comedy, Slice-of-Life (With Paranormal Twist)

WC: 7,657

Rent’s cheap. The room’s haunted. He is broke. That’s it. That’s the story. Because honestly? Being broke is scarier than any ghost.

Chapter I: It’s Cheap for a Reason

The room smells like old paint, garlic, and something else Harua can’t identify, but it’s cheap. That’s the main thing. The rent is so low it feels like charity.

The landlord didn’t ask for much. Just three things:

Pay rent on time.

No loud parties.

Don’t open the door at night if someone knocks more than three times.

Harua had blinked at that last one, but nodded. "Sure."

Because he’s broke. College-broke. The kind of broke where you skip meals just to afford printing credits. So when this listing popped up: private room, free Wi-Fi, walking distance to campus, he didn’t hesitate.

Now, two weeks in, Harua’s kind of used to the weirdness.

The flickering lights. The cold spot near the window. The way his toothbrush is always just slightly damp when he hasn’t used it. It’s fine. It’s manageable.

What’s scarier than ghosts?

Running out of money.

It’s Friday night when Taki sleeps over.

Taki brings snacks, crashes on Harua’s bed, and passes out by 11:00 PM after a dramatic monologue about how love is a scam and instant noodles are forever. Harua stays up scrolling through his phone, half-listening to a podcast and pretending the temperature in his room isn’t steadily dropping.

At around 2:09 AM, Harua gives up. He gets up and shuffles to the bathroom, stepping over a discarded hoodie and Taki’s suspiciously fancy socks.

The house is dead quiet. Just the hum of the fridge in the kitchen and the occasional soft creak of old floorboards settling. The bathroom light flickers once before it comes on. Classic.

Harua is halfway through brushing his teeth when he hears it.

"Harua."

Not a yell. Not even a proper call. Just a soft voice—low, too close, almost like someone pressing their mouth right against the bathroom door.

He stops mid-brush.

"Bro." Foam drips from the corner of his mouth. "I told you not to be weird."

No answer.

He rinses quickly, spits, and swings the bathroom door open with a dramatic glare.

The hallway is empty.

A slow creak comes from the bedroom.

Rolling his eyes, Harua walks back in.

"Taki, why are you like this?" he mutters, pushing the door open and stops.

Taki is passed out cold. One leg off the side of the bed, drooling slightly into Harua’s pillow. His phone is still clutched in one hand, the screen dark. He hasn’t moved at all.

Harua squints. "Wait... you were here the whole time?"

Taki snores softly in reply.

Harua stands there for a moment. A chill crawls across the back of his neck like cold fingers.

Then:

"Nope," he says aloud. "Nope nope nope. I'm too broke to care."

He closes the door. Locks it. Slides under the blanket next to Taki—who mumbles something unintelligible and kicks him in the leg, and decides to pretend nothing happened.

Again.

After all, what’s a whisper in the night when your bank account says $30,52 USD

The next day, Harua wakes up to find a steaming mug of coffee on his desk.

He blinks. Rubs his eyes. The mug is still there.

He checks the time, 7:00 AM. Taki’s still snoring.

He stares at the mug. It's his favorite one. The one he thought he lost last week.

There's a note next to it, written on the back of a sticky rice wrapper (bak chang):

"You looked tired. Don’t skip breakfast."

Harua stares at it for a long time. Then shrugs.

"Nice ghost."

He takes a sip.

It’s perfect.

By week three, Harua has fully entered denial.

He no longer questions the cold spots, the rearranged laundry, or the fact that his textbooks are suddenly opened to the right chapters before class.

One evening, he even mutters, "Thanks," to no one in particular.

The wardrobe creaks in reply.

He pretends not to notice.

Then comes the night of The Humming.

It’s 1:58 AM. Harua is in bed, headphones on, listening to lo-fi beats. Taki has gone home. The room is quiet.

And then, under the music, he hears it.

Someone humming. Soft, tuneless, just behind the rhythm.

He freezes. Pauses the track.

The humming continues.

Slow. Gentle. Coming from the direction of his closed closet.

Harua stares at the wardrobe. It hums back at him.

He throws the blanket over his head and whispers into the void:

"Just... don’t touch my assignments. They're due next week."

The humming stops.

Harua swears he hears the ghost scoff.

He falls asleep anyway.

By now, Harua is convinced of two things:

His room is definitely haunted.

That’s still less terrifying than being broke.

Besides, it's starting to feel… familiar. Comfortable, even.

The ghost has standards. Good taste in tea. Maybe even some kind of moral code. Honestly, Harua's had worse roommates.

Way worse.

Chapter II: Coexistence Agreement (Unofficial)

The haunting gets organized.

Harua doesn’t know when it happened, but he starts noticing patterns. Monday mornings come with cold drafts and flickering lights. Wednesdays, his playlist always starts with that one song he claims he doesn’t like but secretly listens to on loop. Fridays? Drama night.

He’s not sure if he came up with that tradition or if the ghost did.

He just knows that every Friday, his streaming app boots up on its own and scrolls straight to the k-drama section. And every Friday, his popcorn mysteriously pops perfectly on the stove—despite Harua being a known popcorn burner.

It gets weirder.

His laundry starts folding itself. His phone calendar suddenly fills in deadlines he forgot. One time, his shoes were polished and lined up neatly, like a mother prepping her kid for school picture day.

Then there’s the note.

“You left your ramen on too long. I turned it off. You’re welcome.”

Harua pins the note to the fridge like a proud parent.

“Appreciate it, room ghost,” he says. “But maybe don’t rearrange my fridge by color again. I couldn’t find the sambal.”

The rice cooker pings in reply.

He doesn't know how.

Things take a turn when his friend Maki visits.

Maki walks into the room, stops mid-step, and says, “Dude. Why does it smell like lavender and judgement in here?”

Harua shrugs. “Just vibes.”

Halfway through their hangout, Maki tries to open the wardrobe.

It slams shut.

Maki yelps and throws a bag of chips at it.

Harua calmly catches the chips. “Yeah, maybe don’t touch that.”

“You’re so chill about this. Are you possessed?”

“I’m financially possessed.”

Maki leaves five minutes later. Doesn’t come back.

That night, Harua finds a note on his desk:

“You need better friends. And better snacks.”

He sighs. “Noted.”

It all comes to a head on a rainy Wednesday.

He’s coming back from class, soaked, shoes squishing, only to find the ghost has left out a towel, dry socks, and a sticky note:

“Hot tea in five minutes.”

It’s waiting on his desk when he steps out of the shower.

But next to the tea is a second note:

“That man across the street was staring into your window. Lock it.”

Harua freezes. Looks outside. No one there.

Still, he locks the window.

Then the wardrobe creaks open. Just an inch.

“...thanks,” he says, voice low.

The wardrobe shuts gently.

Later that night, he finds another note, this one taped to his laptop:

“You're not as annoying as I thought. But your fashion sense sucks. Let me pick your shirt tomorrow.”

Harua bursts out laughing.

He laughs so hard he nearly cries.

He falls asleep to the sound of the ghost rearranging his sock drawer and muttering (probably).

By month’s end, Harua has officially accepted his haunted status.

He leaves out extra rice. He stops looking for his missing pens, they always show up in places he didn’t check. He texts Taki casually:

“My ghost said hi. Also told me to moisturize more. Rude.”

Taki replies with a string of terrified emojis and refuses to come over again.

Harua doesn’t mind.

It’s quiet. It’s clean.

And the rent is still cheap.

Which means he can buy real food.

Even with the ghost, life has never felt more manageable.

Honestly?

Being broke was way scarier.

END.

[jyuugyoza]

“jyuugyoza; &TEAM Horror Project.”

📂 MASTERLIST

a descent into the land where myths breathe and the dead remember. nine stories. nine boys. nine different spirits from legends whispered at dusk.

written by jyuugyoza.

EJ

The Lantern Keeper.

Fuma

K

Nicholas

The Threads Beneath Her Fingers.

Yuma

The Forgotten Friend.

Jo

The Humming Clearing.

Harua

Taki

Do You Know, or Is It Already Night?

Maki

The Last to Know.

[jyuugyoza]

The Forgotten Friend

Cast: Yuma

Genre: Supernatural / Psychological / Folk Horror

WC: 9,990

Inspired by the Indonesian novel series by jurnalrisa (Written by Risa Saraswati)

When Yuma returns to his childhood home, he finds more than dust and memories waiting. An old promise stirs something long forgotten, and someone who never left.

Chapter I: She Said I Promised

Yuma stands at the edge of the old yard, staring at the banyan tree.

It hasn’t changed.

The swing still hangs from its lowest branch, swaying slightly even though there’s no wind. The house looms behind him: quiet, peeling, too familiar. He hasn’t been back since he was a child. Not since they left in a rush one night, with no real explanation from his mother except: “We can’t stay here anymore.”

He hadn't asked questions back then.

Now, as an adult, he has them.

The key his uncle sent him fits, though the door sticks. Inside smells like old wood and forgotten rain. Dust lies thick on the furniture. A few of his old things remain: books, scattered toys, a drawing taped to the wall.

A girl.

She has dark hair and a too-wide smile. “Fara” is written underneath in his childhood handwriting.

Yuma stares at it for a long time.

That night, he hears humming.

It comes from the hallway.

He lies still on the thin mattress, not trusting the silence. The hum is faint, like a child trying not to disturb anyone. But it moves—first from the stairs, then outside the bedroom door.

He opens it.

No one’s there.

But the humming continues, softer now, like it’s in the walls.

The next morning, he finds a new drawing.

Not one he remembers making.

It’s tucked between two books in the living room, freshly folded. The paper is old, but the pencil lines are crisp. A girl again. Slightly taller now, her eyes more detailed. “Fara,” it says again.

His skin goes cold.

He walks outside.

The swing is moving.

Yuma visits the market. Asks around, casually. Mentions the old house.

Some people shrug. Others frown.

One old woman glances over her shoulder before leaning in.

“Don’t say her name,” she whispers. “She might hear you.”

Yuma forces a smile. “Who?”

The woman doesn't answer.

That night, she speaks.

“Yuma,” a voice says, just behind him.

He turns, heart in his throat.

No one.

But the mirror shows something. A flicker. A girl in the hallway, head tilted.

He turns again, empty.

His reflection is alone.

He begins remembering things he hadn’t thought about in years.

How he used to play with someone in the garden.

How he’d set a place for her at dinner.

How his mother would pause, then gently remove the extra plate.

“She isn’t real, honey,” she’d whisper. “It’s just pretend.”

But he hadn’t felt like he was pretending.

Not then.

The next day, he finds more drawings.

Some are of him. Some are of the tree. All signed “Fara.”

One shows the two of them, holding hands.

“I waited,” it says.

That night, he dreams.

He’s a child again. Running through the garden. Fara is there—smiling, barefoot, her hair tangled with leaves.

“You said you’d come back,” she says.

“I’m here now,” he replies.

“Do you remember me?”

He nods.

“You said you’d never leave me.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

She tilts her head. “But you did.”

He wakes with a jolt.

The air in the room is cold.

And someone has written on the window in the dust:

you promised.

He calls his mother.

She’s quiet on the other end.

“I thought you’d remember eventually,” she says. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”

“Who is she?”

“She was already there when we moved in. You saw her. You talked to her. Played with her like she is real.”

“Was she?”

A long silence.

That night, she appears.

Fara.

She looks like the girl in the drawings. But older. Or maybe not.

She flickers.

Sometimes a child.

Sometimes a teen.

Always watching him.

“You left,” she says.

“I was a kid. I didn’t understand.”

“I waited anyway.”

She walks closer. Her bare feet leave no sound on the wooden floor.

“I didn’t have anyone else,” she whispers.

Yuma’s voice shakes. “What happened to you?”

She doesn’t answer.

Instead, she touches his hand.

Her fingers are cold.

“I’m still here,” she says.

He finds one last drawing.

It shows the house.

The tree.

And a small grave beneath the roots.

No name.

He kneels by the banyan tree the next morning.

The ground feels different—soft, hollow.

He doesn’t dig.

He doesn’t need to.

Fara is still here.

She never left.

She just wanted him to remember.

And he does.

Chapter II: She Wanted to Be Remembered

Yuma’s mother arrives the next morning without warning. She’s holding a bag of groceries, her hair tied in the same loose knot she’s worn for years, and her sandals clack sharply on the stone steps as she climbs up to the porch.

“I had a feeling,” she says, simply, as he opens the door.

Yuma steps aside. She doesn’t comment on the dust, the drawn curtains, or the single set of dishes in the sink. She moves like someone who has already mourned this place.

“Your uncle sold it cheap,” she murmurs. “People don’t stay here long.”

Yuma doesn’t ask why. He already knows. The silence answers for him.

They eat in silence that afternoon. Outside, wind moves through the hanging vines of the banyan tree, but the house itself is still. The cicadas have quieted. It feels like even the insects have grown cautious here.

“You used to talk to someone, when we first moved here,” his mother says suddenly. “A girl.”

Yuma looks up.

“You called her Fara.”

He flinches, just slightly. “You told me she was imaginary.”

“I didn’t know what else to say.”

She stands and begins clearing the plates, her back to him.

“No one really knows what happened to her,” she says. “Only that she used to live here. Before us. A long time ago.”

Yuma watches her carefully. “You mean she was real?”

His mother sighs, then turns. “There are stories. Rumors. Nothing confirmed. The kind people whisper about at the edge of town, if you ask the right old people.”

“What kind of rumors?”

She shrugs. “That she died here. Alone. Some say her parents left and never came back. Others say she got sick. Or wandered into the woods and never made it out. But one thing’s always the same, they say she never left the house.”

Yuma looks toward the hallway, where the shadow of the second floor lingers like breath.

“She was already here when we moved in,” his mother says. “And you saw her. You talked to her. Played with her like she was part of this world.”

He remembers the drawings. The humming. The feeling of not being alone.

“She wasn’t angry,” he says quietly. “Not then.”

“No. She was just… lonely.”

She reaches over and puts her hand on his.

“I always wondered if you were protecting her,” she says.

That night, he dreams again.

He’s under the banyan tree. The ground is soft, dark with fallen leaves. Fara sits in the swing, her legs not quite reaching the ground. The rope creaks as she shifts.

“You came back,” she says.

“I didn’t forget,” Yuma answers.

Her eyes are large. Not childlike, just deep. Old.

“You grew up,” she says. “I waited. I tried to grow too.”

He swallows, guilt tight in his throat.

“I didn’t know.”

“I knew you’d come back someday.”

She stands slowly, dusting her hands on her skirt. In the dream, her clothes shift—sometimes old-fashioned, sometimes like a child’s pajamas, sometimes like the girl from the drawing. Always flickering, as if she’s unsure what version of herself to be.

“You were my only friend,” she says. “You saw me.”

Yuma reaches out. She steps back.

“I can’t stay,” she whispers. “But I didn’t want to leave before you knew.”

He tries to speak, but she’s already fading.

“Thank you for remembering me.”

He wakes before dawn. The room is dim with blue light. His mother is asleep in the guest room, her breathing steady.

Yuma walks to the old tree. The swing sways in the faint breeze.

A small stone glints at the base. Beneath it, a folded page, one of his childhood drawings. The one with her name.

He presses it to his chest.

“She was real,” he says aloud.

His mother stands in the doorway, watching him.

“I know.”

The next few days are quiet.

His mother helps him clean the house. They sweep dust from corners, air out faded curtains, scrub the floors until they stop creaking quite so much. But the house never fully softens. It holds its breath. It remembers.

He finds more of the drawings. Tucked into forgotten books. Inside a shoebox beneath the bed. They’re all different—some stick figures, others more detailed. But always: a girl. A name. A promise.

“Did I draw all of these?” he asks.

His mother only nods. “You wouldn’t stop.”

They visit the local library. Yuma asks about old records—residents, accidents, disappearances. But there’s nothing official. A few mentions of a family from decades ago. A girl named Fara. No death certificate. No confirmed report. Just gossip, faded clippings, vague dates.

“Sometimes people slip through,” the librarian says. “Especially in towns like this.”

One evening, Yuma walks into town. A man is smoking outside the convenience store. Older, sun-wrinkled, leaning on his cane like it’s more habit than need.

“You from the old house?” the man asks.

Yuma nods. “Used to live there when I was a kid.”

“You remember her?”

Yuma hesitates. “Fara.”

The man flicks ash into the dirt. “She was quiet. Always kept to herself. People didn’t notice her much. And then one day, she wasn’t there anymore.”

“What happened?”

The man looks at him for a long time. “No one knows. And some folks stopped asking. Strange things started happening in that house. People left. But she never did.”

That night, Yuma dreams again.

He’s back in the hallway. A faint light spills from under the door of the old bedroom.

He pushes it open.

Fara stands by the window. Her hair is longer now. She turns slowly, her face lit by moonlight.

“I don’t want to be forgotten,” she says.

“You won’t be.”

She smiles, but it’s faint. Her outline flickers again. Older. Then younger. Then the girl he first met.

“I didn’t get to grow up,” she whispers.

He steps forward. “But you still mattered.”

That seems to be all she needed.

Morning breaks soft and gold.

The swing is still.

Yuma buries the drawing beneath the tree. A small gesture. But enough.

She lived. She was seen. And now—

She’s remembered.

That evening, a child walking past the house sees a figure near the tree. A girl in a simple dress, drawing in the dirt with a stick.

When she looks up, she smiles.

And then she’s gone.

END.