Chapter 1: The Bell That didn't Echo.

It wasn't a special day. That's what made it even worse.

And the afternoon of the day was always an orange. Some scribbles intersected on the whiteboard owing to instruction in which no one was interested. We were speaking of land reforms or rice tax or whatever. Haruto didn’t care. Several electric fans were whining around in the air and just enough to keep anyone from passing out.

By the window he was on the third desk. There was this nick and a chip in the wood of the desk that his thumb followed when he wanted to zone out and got bored. He was looking with half his eyes, and a crow was half sitting on the railing of the rooftop just across the courtyard.

It was the day when minutes didn't feel real.

Somebody sneezed behind him and there came a couple of squeaks. Ishikawa was scribbling in the right margin of his note book. Haruto stared at a school uniform that was like a robot. Ayaka had her earbuds inserted in her long black hair and was shaking her head to the music that only she could hear.

Same old classmates. Same old classroom. Same old day.

And yet...

The world was sort of coated with plastic. Everything appeared and sounded good, but did not feel good.

Haruto looked up at the clock above the black board, it was 2:53pm.

It was the last bell now only a few minutes off-- the one, which meant go home, and all were surreptitiously wishing for it. He could not even have been in the mood.

He heaved a sigh and looked through the window once more.

The sky over the window was an uninspiring grey-blue, blue as before a storm. The gray light was damp gray, as in a photograph left outside too long.

The crow remained and stared at him.

Haruto frowned.

It really wasn’t a special day.

That is not what happens to the online tales when a truck crashes and the protagonist who is now dead finds magic and a harem. Haruto was not anticipating anything. He is only seventeen years old and reasonably average both in school, appearance and popularity. Bullies and crushes and goals are absent, it's just a child floating into high school, like a leaf in a river.

Soon nobody remembered his name: Haruto Seno. In the other class he always mixed him with Haruki up and he could never tell the two.

Another glance at the clock: 2:57 pm.

He moved his pen about in the notebook. He had already smeared the ink and failed to do so again. The word assignment seemed to be even more unfavorable. He didn’t bother to clean it up.

More minutes passed. He was able to feel the crow fluttering in other places and then flying away.

Haruto watched it go.

Then— the bell rang.

But something was off.

No chatter. The chairs were a mess. There was not a sigh of relief or feet stirring. Just silence.

Haruto blinked.

Nobody was moving.

Ayaka was holding the phone between fingers. The pencil of Ishikawa floated above his roof. The sneezers at his behind had not even pulled hands back.

Everything had stopped.

The coolers whirled above, but they were as distant as if they reclined in water.

Haruto stood up slowly.

“…Guys?”

His voice didn’t echo. It sounded too forced.

He moved up and touched Ayaka. She was muted and concrete, yet immobile, like the crusty video frame.

He turned to Ishikawa. Why, and the same, open lips mid-laugh.

Haruto steadied himself.

Was this a prank? A hallucination?

He glanced at the door.

It was closed.

His hand shakingly moved towards it. The handle end of his fingers was everywhere, and he realised that he could feel a pulse something deep and mighty had just struck the base of the universe.

He opened the door.

There was no hallway.

Just fog.

It was white like a breath on the glass and came rushing like a nearly silent and sluggish creature--almost there. Neither smoke nor cold, it was not weight, but slipped down your bones and sometimes you could hear none of it all, but it whistled in your ears.

The fog swept by, rolling into the classroom.

And then— the lights went out. Haruto felt his heart pound. A jerk clenched his fists and a mist began to rise up through the floorboards enwrapping the desks. There was no daylight ever, then there was this big white spark that blasted into his eyes.

He picked up his blue backpack and hugged it hard. The wind became viscous, chilly and scratched his throat. Now he closed his eyes and the white pulsed behind his eye.

“Stop, stop it”, he said, and received no answer. He pressed his back against a wall, into the stiff plaster, attempting to hold onto something.

Then the fog shifted. A cloud of fog became a somewhat resemblance of an actual thing, facing the desk of the teacher. Haruto sat down in a chair probably with his heart racing and the flavor of metal in his mouth.

It was a description of a man, with bowed shoulders, a face that was no more than white with blood running into the bulletin board. Haruto could not even move or speak. The form lifted a foot, and jumped, and turned to fog around Haruto.

He would have liked to become smaller, go drift away, but he was kept in place by an unknown force. Someone was approaching, but Haruto could hear the steps. Like the flash that he saw led through the back of the eye, there was a road at night, teeth at night, a mouth opening and closing.

The teacher, trying to cry out his name, could not because his tongue was frozen. Something hanging over the desk of Ishikawa directly flung at him. Haruto groaned and this zipping thing struck his palm. It possessed objects with sharp, jerky fingers, glass caps at its ends, hovering above his face before pressing against him.

The thing bent forward. Haruto drew a sharp breath, with the cramping of his heart in his ribcage at this wildness of light and shadow creatures proposing their names to him. He was unable to open his eyes, move or wink.

The thing tilted its head. And that is when it talked, not audibly, but in his head. It was a voice as clear and as resonant as rust being knocked off rusty metal.

“You are out of place.”

Haruto closed his eyes and gave aching movements. He was floating down the desk not minding much.

The fog stenched, pulled inward like water down a drain, and the figure tore through stands of white light, circling him--tight, humming, alive.

“You were not chosen.”

Haruto’s thoughts spun.

“Chosen by who?”

Was he out of time to be here? Why was he here?

He was cold, angry, in pain. Like a stab but as though something is being torn out of him.

“Yet you remain.”

The room blurred around him. Ayaka’s skin turned as glass. Ishikawa’s doodles were ash. Everything began to fail.

And then— a sound. Kinda like a chime. Soft. Familiar. A bell, but not the school bell. One of those old bells; and this time they were ringing. And it was not the voice of the person outside the door, but it was more indefinable and aged. Such a scream of some distant spot.

It reverberated in him, then—

Nothing. Just darkness. Just weightlessness.

A second word came to his mind as he slept upon that black chair, and that was:

“Find the missing. Or be unmade.”

Just as he was fainting away he could hear in the hollowness something--then little flutterings of wings. A crow. So over the white, a dot on the great light, it disappeared into the fog.

This had touched Haruto, but at what, he did not exactly know. He had seen it before--not today only. Many years ago his mom had died and this landed on his window and stared in the rain. And once again, as his dad had an accident. That same crow. Why did it have to appear in the stories?

Then, as it would seem a strange accident, he felt something cold and common on his wrist. And his cheap, digital, plastic band watch still was ticking. Now it was merely ashes and glass again.

And in the moment before he lost all sensation, the display flashed:

3:00 PM.

Over and over.