Loop's Aftermath

Once again, a complete failure. We tried ending our lives together to escape this cursed loop, but it was all for nothing. The truck driver whether dead or alive doesn’t matter. He isn’t even connected to the loop. He has no memories of it, no awareness of the nightmare we’re trapped in. If he were the cause, then his survival or death might have shattered the cycle. But no, he’s just a bystander in this cruel theater. It’s just us. Me and that girl from my class. I don’t even know her name and I never cared to know. I kept my distance from the normies, the ones who looked down on me. Yet, she kept throwing herself into danger, trying to save me over and over for a complete stranger like me. Maybe that softened me, just a little.

The main reason our failures come from one immutable truth that we can’t recall the exact incident before the moment or by the start of the day. We’re always trapped in a desperate race against time, scrambling to act before the truck comes. Avoiding the truck is futile. Even if we split up, one of us will always get hit. It’s like the world itself craves our deaths. I lost count of the loops long ago and resigned myself to this fate. I should be 56 by now and married, with children, sharing warm moments with my family. Instead, I’m here a hollow shell, a maniac condemned to endless suffering. Not just me her too. She shares the same punishment, dying again and again in this relentless cycle.

And then, the cat.

I saw it again this time. Something about it fills me with unexplainable rage. I wanted to strangle it with my own hands, to watch its lifeless body fall limp in my grip. These violent urges weren’t there before. I used to be...normal. But every time I come across that cat, a bloodlust rises in me, uncontrollable and primal. I clenched my fists tightly, forcing myself to move on without feeding my onigiri from lunchbox. As I reached the usual stretch of dimly lit road, my thoughts cleared, and there she was again.

Her.

“Haha...hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!”
The laughter exploded out of me, uncontrollable, hysterical, deranged.

She just stared. A blank, empty look, as if all life had drained from her eyes. She didn’t even flinch at my laugh or insanity. She used to look at me with pity, then determination, then anger. Now, it’s like I don’t even exist to her. 

Sometimes I think about taking her, forcing myself on her soulless body to end my frustration. Would she even resist in this state? She’s plain, not beautiful by any stretch, but the lifelessness in her makes her seem like a doll something to use and discard. But I stop myself. Those thoughts aren’t mine. They belong to the loop, the madness clawing at the last scraps of my humanity.

Today, though, something changed.

I laughed because, for the first time, my awareness of the loop came back earlier. Just by a moment. It’s small, almost insignificant, but it means one thing "we’re closer to breaking the loop."

"Hey do you know what? All this time I wonder why I never asked your name, even though you knew mine I never thought of asking even we had chat together in these loops, it's so funny."

"..."

"Say what would you do if I molest you here right now."

"..."

"I am glad for whatever you did before but I had enough of this shit."

"..."

"If by today the loop doesn't ends then that means by the next loop it definitely will."

"..."

This time her soulless body made an expression, her eyes got just wide as I say and with that the truck again crushing me and she was staring at the wall unconscious. I died again.

<new loop>

I encountered the cat again but this time I hold it in my arms.

"Look how innocent you look, aw I understand why people likes cat but do you know I started hating for a reason."

I gently pet it with a smile and slowly gauge it's one eye, the cat starts to skreeeth with pain, the scream echoed but I didn't stop.

"every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day,   same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, every day same day, Sigh-"

I broke one of her paws. Then the second. The third. And finally, the fourth. She fought back, her claws raking deep into my hands, leaving gashes that bled profusely. The blood dripped, pooling on the ground, splattering across both of us until the world seemed painted in red. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. The sharp screeches of her agony weren’t cries of suffering to me they were music. A dark, haunting melody echoing in my ears.

“Now then,” I whispered, gripping her fragile body. “Everything ends here.”

Crunch.

The sound of her neck snapping was deafening. Her lifeless body went limp in my hands, and for a moment, there was silence.

But then, I heard a noise behind me. Slow, deliberate footsteps.

I turned, and my blood froze. It was him the truck driver.

I’d seen his face countless times, always blank, always unaware. But now, tears streamed down his cheeks, carving paths through the grime on his face. His eyes weren’t empty they were filled with rage, disgust, and an unbearable sadness. He looked at the cat in my hands, its broken form dangling limply, and then back at me.

“You... Kimino...” His voice cracked, trembling with raw emotion. “What a horrible sight... YOU BASTARD! WHY DID YOU KILL HER..my Ki..mino?!”

His scream echoed through the night, shaking me to my core. The words struck like a hammer, reverberating in my skull. He wasn’t just a bystander this time. He knew.

For the first time in countless loops, something different happen. Something had shifted, and the loop was unraveling in ways I couldn’t control. Judging by his reaction, the way he screamed her name it was clear the cat was his pet. Pieces began to fall into place. Yet I felt nothing. No guilt, no regret. We survived, by sheer luck or something darker. It wasn’t the loop that trapped us it was the trigger. The cat. She had been the reason all along. I got triggered after seeing her, my nerves wreck and got the consciousness right before feeding her and that changed the pattern of the loop where I didn't actually feed it. Just as the road was trigger that made us realize this time the cat made me realize it sooner probably because I was fixated on her from before.  The revelation should have been liberating, but it left only emptiness. I was sure if tomorrow comes, then this day will end.

The truck driver called the police, his voice trembling with fury as he explained what he’d witnessed. They brought me in for interrogation. Two hours under harsh lights and cold stares. Yet, in the end, they did nothing. I’m 17 still a minor under Japan’s juvenile law. No matter how monstrous my actions, I was shielded by the law’s definition of childhood. They couldn’t treat me as an adult, even if I felt far older inside after getting stuck in that loop for that long. The officers called my parents and explained over phone, on the other side of the phone their faces heavy with pity and judgment. “Your son needs psychiatric help,” they said. “This behavior isn’t normal.” They released me after two hours, leaving behind only questions and a hollow reprimand. I walked home alone, the night heavy and silent around me. As I neared the place where everything had begun, I saw her.

She was standing there, half-past nine, under the same dim streetlight that had borne witness to our countless deaths. Her posture was lifeless, her expression vacant. It was as if she wanted the truck to come, to take her, to end it all.

My teeth clenched at the sight. I hated seeing her like this. Once, her eyes burned with defiance, a desperate resolve to save me—even as the loop dragged us both into despair. Now, that fire was gone, extinguished by countless failures. She was broken. I approached her slowly, the weight of the moment pressing down on me. She didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge my presence. Her gaze was fixed on the road, waiting for the inevitable. Wordlessly, I pulled out my phone and shoved the screen near her face. The numbers on the clock glowed brightly in the darkness. Her eyes widened, tears streaming down her cheeks as she stared at the time. Something flickered in her expression, a spark of recognition, of disbelief. This moment was new. Unexpected. Completely unlike the loops we had endured.

For the first time in what felt like an eternity, the world shifted.

“Here’s the theory I’m ending this with,” I said, my voice cold and matter-of-fact. “This loop started with me. It all began because I fed the cat an onigiri or what I thought. She was probably sick, and her owner the truck driver was panicking as he rushed to the vet. In his desperation, he drove recklessly. And on this cursed street, we both fell victim to his misfortune.”

I paused, watching her face. Her expression was frozen in shock, her lips trembling as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. I continued, the explanation spilling out like a confession I no longer cared about.

“I don’t understand how something so simple could create a godforsaken loop like this. But yeah, that’s it. It was the cat’s fault. She was the trigger. I noticed something had to be different, something had to change. Even when I didn’t feed her in the second-to-last loop, the event still occurred, the driver still hit me. That’s when I realized it wasn’t the onigiri. The cat was already sick, and no matter what I did, she would drag us into this nightmare. The De Ja Vu I felt was earlier this time, unlike normally I felt De Ja Vu after feeding the cat, my consciousness came after seeing the trigger, which was the cat...was it by luck? or by science? or I am just dumb, I have no idea."

I let out a bitter chuckle, the sound hollow in the still air. “So I did the only thing left to do. I killed her. Snapped her neck. And it worked. The event changed. The truck driver didn’t hit us. Instead, he called the cops on me and probably went home to mourn his precious pet.”

Her body stiffened, her hands trembling as she tried to process my words.

“Argha—” she choked, her voice catching in her throat. She couldn’t finish. The shock had rendered her mute.

I leaned in closer, a smirk tugging at my lips. “Pfft. Hahaha. What’s wrong? You need to speak up more. Oh, and by the way... I never asked your name before, did I?”

"Hibgh..."

She bit her tongue, silencing whatever response she might have had. Without a word, she turned and walked away, her steps slow and heavy. I didn’t follow. I didn’t even know where she lived, and honestly, it didn’t matter. If I’d accompanied her, her parents might’ve gotten strange ideas, and I had no desire to complicate things further. So I let her go.

On my way home, I realized something unsettling: the way I spoke, the way I thought it had changed. I used to be introverted, withdrawn. But after more than fifty years of loops, deaths, and madness, I’d stopped caring about anything as trivial as social norms. The endless suffering had chipped away at whatever I once was, leaving behind this... version of me. A person I barely recognized.

When I got home, my parents erupted. Their rantings was palpable, their words sharp and relentless. They shouted about what I’d done to the cat, about how monstrous my actions were. They refused to let me eat, their judgment stinging far less than it should have. I didn’t argue. I went straight to bed and let sleep take me.

Before drifting off, a thought lingered in my mind.

“I still don’t know her name... Well, whatever. If she comes to school tomorrow, I can just ask her directly.”

Even after all the horror, all the broken loops and shattered realities, a part of me still longed for normalcy. I wanted to go to school. To live an ordinary life.

“Shiou-ku...” A familiar voice.

“Ka...na...mi...” I muttered the name in a hoarse, sour whisper.

I woke with a jolt. The name echoed in my mind like an alarm, piercing the stillness of the room. Kanami. My Kanami. She was back. No, she wasn’t back. She had never been here.

During the loops, Kanami had been absent. Not once did she appear. It wasn’t that she’d vanished, it was that I had stopped calling her. She wasn’t real. She had never been real. Kanami was a figment of my loneliness, a phantom born of desperation of loneliness. But in time, as the cycles of loop dragged on, I had forgotten her. Engulfed in the chaos, I had abandoned her, left her to fade into the recesses of my mind. And yet, here she was again. Not in reality, but in my thoughts, in my dreams, whispering to me as if to remind me of the person I used to be. Perhaps the time loop girl filled my emptiness which led me to forget about her.

I sat up in bed, the weight of her name pressing down on me.

“The loops… they weren’t part of this world,” I murmured. “They couldn’t have been. It’s absurd to think the entire Earth could be trapped in a loop because of a mere cat.” I let out a bitter laugh. “Hilarious, really.”

But even as I tried to dismiss it, the thought lingered. What if we had been trapped in a separate dimension? A pocket of reality disconnected from this world, governed by its own rules? That theory made more sense than anything else. The cat, the truck, the Deaths, Hey were all pieces of a puzzle that didn’t relate to the laws of Earth. With no clue of why it occurred and unable to crack the reason I got out of my bed to start another day continuing daily life. 

And yet, the scars remained. In this world, in my mind, and in hers.

I washed my face and got ready for school, acting as though nothing had happened.

“You are worthless. A complete psychopath... I’m ashamed of birthing you.”

Those were the words of my mother, Oishi Kisahara, her voice dripping with disgust as she avoided even looking at me.

I stayed silent. What could I say? Arguing wouldn’t change her mind, and I had no energy to try. At dinner, my father didn’t say a word either. He avoided meeting my gaze, the tension in the room suffocating. My mother didn’t speak to me again after her earlier outburst. I quietly ate the omurice she’d cooked, hurried and half-hearted, before leaving the house. The school loomed ahead, and for the first time in a long while, I wanted to be there. School was something I used to hate. But after the loops, I found myself yearning for it. Not for the classes or the monotonous lessons, but for the possibility of experiencing it differently this time. A new start. I wanted to talk to people, to connect even if the thought felt foreign. More than that, I wanted to see her. The girl who had been with me in the loops. We had broken through together, survived the nightmare. I wanted to talk to her properly, to understand her. But as I glanced around the classroom, I realized she wasn’t there. She hadn’t come.

Not that I was worried for her, of course. It was just... disappointing.

The classes passed as usual, though they felt strangely short. After experiencing decades of time compressed into endless loops, the pace of a single day felt almost insignificant. It wasn’t that I remembered everything from the loops my memories were fractured, blurred like the edges of a dream. But something lingered, an awareness etched into my body. A sense of the endless suffering we endured. A deep, unsettling consciousness of time itself. The girl, however, was different. She didn’t just feel it she remembered everything from the time of loop. From the moment she stepped onto that road, where the accident always happened, her memories returned. Every loop, every death, every agonizing moment came flooding back to her, no matter how many times the day reset. It was fascinating. Horrifying, but fascinating. Why her? Why did she retain everything while I was left with only fragments? And what caused the loop in the first place?

Even now, with the loop broken, those questions gnawed at me.

But I pushed them aside. There were no answers, not yet. And for now, I had to live in this world, as broken and fragile as it was.

It was lunch break, and I was idly scrolling through my phone, reading about the “grandfather paradox” out of curiosity. It had no relation to the situation I’d been in, but time loops, paradoxes, these concepts felt oddly relevant to me now. As I skimmed through an article, a sharp, sweaty stench invaded my nose, familiar yet elusive. I couldn’t place it.

“Oi, Kisahara,” a gruff voice interrupted. “Let me borrow your phone for a day. I got an old man I can scam pretendin’ to be some bank manager. Guy’s thick-headed as hell. Isn’t that hilarious?”

I looked up from my phone and turned toward the voice. A tall guy, probably six feet or more, loomed over me. His presence radiated a thug-like energy, the kind that screamed trouble. He was the sort of person most would avoid at all costs.

The smell was his.

But his name, his face I couldn’t remember. My gut told me I knew him, maybe even dealt with him before. But after fifty years or however long it had truly been in the loops faces, names, and memories blurred together into a mess of forgotten fragments.

“But won’t that cause me problems if they track my phone instead of you?” I replied, keeping my voice calm.

He narrowed his eyes, clearly not expecting me to talk back. People like him thrived on intimidation, and I wasn’t playing along.

“Kisahara, you got guts, huh? Talking back like that. Did you forget what happens when you cross me? My punishments for your sins?”


Sins. 

The word twisted in my mind, conjuring flashes of the cat, the snap of its bones, its anguished cries. My greatest sin wasn’t tied to this thug, and yet his accusation made my chest tighten. Before I could respond, he grabbed my collar, yanking me toward him. His sweat-stained face was inches from mine, his breath hot and sour as disgusting.

“Are you gay for me or something? You gonna kiss me?” I smirked, my voice mocking.

His expression froze, his mouth twitching slightly as if his brain was struggling to process the words.

“...”

Silence.

I stared back, unflinching, watching the confusion ripple across his face. In another life, before the loops I would’ve been terrified of someone like him. But now? After countless deaths and endless suffering, his threats felt insignificant. His violence, no matter how brutal, would be nothing compared to what I’d already endured.

That was the last thing anyone in the class expected from me as the quiet guy who used to blend into the background. My old self was long gone, consumed by the endless loops and the agony they brought. These people knew nothing of what I had endured, nothing of death’s cold embrace, nor the madness that came with it.

The thug before me, writhing in pain, was nothing compared to what I’d faced. Death was far scarier than this walking pile of meat.

All eyes in the classroom turned to me as I smirked at his pitiful rage.

"Say you know what pain is? Punishment and judgement is? you know what you talking about right? Pretty intellectual stuff coming out  from a lump of disgusting meat like you." Not holding back with my words I pushed my knee towards his jewel with a smack his giant crumbled on floor with pain.

•-----------------------------------•

Without hesitation, I drove my knee into his jewels while he was still holding my collar when I said that gay word just to distract him. The satisfying smack echoed in the room as his massive frame crumpled to the floor. That's what happen in split of second. But I didn't stop and kicked him more six times.

“Ah, my bad. I might’ve hit too hard,” I continued, my tone mocking. “I was saving my energy to inflict more pain later, but, oh well—”

Before he could recover, I shoved my shoe toward his face. He twisted away, clutching himself in agony, but I wasn’t done. My foot struck his nose, blood splattering on impact, before I planted it firmly in his mouth.

“Mfffgh! Mffgg!” He moaned in pain.

“Aah~ satisfying,” I murmured, leaning down slightly to meet his panicked gaze. “I don’t know who you are, but this was self-defense... right? RIIIIIIIIGHT? you were the one who picked up a fight with me RIIIIIIIGHT?????”

The classroom was eerily quiet for a moment before the murmurs began.

"Kisahara-kun had to go though more, he finally is pissed"

"Yeah, Rikuto deserved it anyway, stupid ass guy."

"It was just he reacted to self defense, yes Rikuto bought it on himself, scumbag."

All I could hear them trash talking, but then I realized the pest scumbag who used to borrow my stuff, money, furthermore he broke my bicycle even after I came repairing it countless times. This pest used to borrow my stuff without returning it. Money, pens, even my bike, which he broke more times than I could count. Just another parasite I’d tolerated in the old days getting bullied in class. But as they ignored how I got bullied now they are ignoring him. Even teachers don't want to get involved as they have to deal with school's reputation too.

I glanced down at Rikuto, still groaning in pain. No one was stopping me.

Should I torment him more?

I lifted my foot, ready to dropkick his stomach when the sharp sound of a ringtone interrupted me.

An opening song from Domestic Kanojo anime.

The class froze, watching me as I casually pulled my phone from my pocket. An unknown number. Without hesitation, I answered.

“Hello.”

A distorted voice rang in my ears, her voice.

“###########.”

It was familiar, so familiar it sent a shiver down my spine. My lips curled into a small smile as a wave of ecstasy swept over me.

“I’m waiting for you,” I said calmly, my voice laced with amusement. “I’m in class right now. Let’s meet at the park near the school.”

I ended the call without waiting for a response. Luckily the call calmed me down that I even forgot about the dirtbag that I was stepping on.

Something interesting had finally shattered the fragile monotony of my life. And I welcomed it with open arms. Whatever awaited me at the park, it felt like a part of my fate.

My smile didn't fade...