Before The Ripple

The clock read 4:05 A.M.

Reina lay with the sting of the hour still under her skin, heart beating as if it were trying to outrun the memory. The mattress sagged with her weight; the room smelled faintly of rain and the cheap detergent she never bothered to replace. Her hand trembled when she moved it, the lantern-shaped bruise of adrenaline still hot near the hollow of her wrist.

Outside, Akihabara breathed in slow, ordinary rhythms — a single drop of rain finally falling from a frozen string and splitting into two on the sill. In the living world the night kept going, unaware.

Inside her small apartment, the silence sat heavy, full of things that had been said and things that wouldn’t be said again.

“‘The one who still dreams’… who are you?” she whispered into the dark, words almost swallowed by the cheap fan’s weary breath.

No answer came. Only the small, constant noise of water tracing gutters and the thin tapping of rain. She lay back, pillows twisted behind her head, and tried to arrange the fragments of the minute into an order she could understand. 

Faces flickered at the edge of her mind — a man’s, a child’s?, water — but nothing congealed into anything she could name.

She pictured the sword: the warmth of the hilt, the way the blade had thrummed like a living thing. The incantation burned faintly on her tongue. She could still taste ash and salt. When she closed her eyes the city unfurled in flashes: an alley that smelled like oil, a boy who screamed, a lantern that had whispered too much.

Exhaustion crept in like someone pulling a blanket over the world. Not the pleasant kind — the kind that dissolves your edges and leaves you raw. Reina let it take her, curling one leg under the other, fingers pressed to the spot where the sword had left its shadow on her skin.

She slept like a body that had expected not to wake — deeply, jagged breaths measuring the minutes.

At 6:00 A.M., the alarm at the other end of town screamed like an indictment.

Kazutoro Hayashi’s hand flew out of the sheets with automatic precision. He slapped at the phone, thumb fumbling the screen until the noise gave up. For a second his room was a blur: the small apartment, the posters tacked to the wall, the half-drained mug with congealed coffee at its bottom. He tasted iron and yesterday’s ramen in his mouth.

He sat up slowly, letting the slow tide of sleep pull free from his limbs. The scratch along his forearm — thin, crusted — ached when he stretched. He flexed his fingers as if testing whether they were his, and the memory of the night when he entered the 25th Hour for the first time rose: suspended rain, the red umbrella at the intersection, the way time had felt elastic and dangerous.

“Not again,” he muttered to himself, more to fill the quiet than because he believed it.

He moved through his morning like a man tracing a familiar poem. He cracked the window open to breathe in the dawn, the air sharp with bakery smell and wet concrete. The city exhaled: scooters hummed, a faraway train sighed, someone shouted a greeting in the stairwell. Normal sounds that steadied him.

Kazu shuffled to the small bathroom, washed his face until the skin was cool, and studied himself in the mirror. His eyes were a touch too bright; the bags under them sat like tired punctuation marks.

The scratch on his arm pulled at the edge of his sleeve; he rewrapped the bandage with neat, expert fingers. Habit had given him a rhythm even his nerves obeyed.

He dressed in the clothes he’d left slung over the chair the night before — running shoes by the door, hoodie half zipped. The idea of his morning run flashed like a promise and he let it win: even fractured nerves could find clarity when measured in steps.

Outside, the city smelled like a half-remembered childhood: frying oil, fresh bread, diesel from an early bus. Kazu took the first steps into the light. Even before the rhythm of his feet set in, the world felt slightly offset — the colors a fraction too saturated, a distant hum that he couldn’t name. He blinked it away. You go running. You breathe. That was the contract with mornings.

His route was familiar enough to be second nature — past the bakery where the old man waved at the window, down a narrow lane crowned with vending machines, through the patch of park where kids sometimes abandoned their scooters. He counted his breaths the way some people counted sheep: in sets of four, a cadence that steadied the pulse in his throat.

The run cleared the cobwebs; his shoulders loosened; his legs warmed. He let his mind drift to trivial things. The exam he had in two days. The new anime Miki had joked about during the evening shift. The fact that Hana always ordered the same table by the window. The scratch on his forearm, proof the night had not been a simple dream, kept coming back like a stubborn footstep.

At half his usual distance he stopped for water at a vending machine — the cans inside fogged slightly with condensation.

He craved a chocolate bar more than the protein he’d intended; an impulse from the night’s strange liberty. He shook a coin loose from his pocket and the machine chirped obediently. For a sliver of a second he imagined the vending machine frozen mid-drop — a ridiculous thought that made him smirk.

Back in his apartment, the shower steamed the small room into a blur of white. Hot water unknotted his shoulders and thawed the residue of fear in his muscles. He scrubbed his hair and felt, absurdly, cleansed. Clean could be a kind of armor. He dressed in the jeans and hoodie he’d planned for campus and fixed the bandage again with a neat roll of tape.

Breakfast was a bricolage: toast scorched at the edge, a fried egg, a cup of coffee he drank standing up in the kitchenette. He checked his phone. No new messages except a sticker from Mr. Sato about the neighbor’s cat sitting in the hall. The ordinary lightness of small interactions buoyed him. He texted back with a thumbs up without thinking how much steadier he felt because of it.

By 7:10 he was out again, cutting across the small shops, waving at familiar faces. Mr. Sato opened his door as usual and hollered, “Morning, Kazu! Don’t forget your coffee!” Kazu grinned and promised to drop by that afternoon after his first shift.

He walked to campus with an easy pace, not a run today but a walking pulse that allowed thoughts to bounce quietly in his head. The campus came alive piece by careful piece: vending machines, students arguing about deadlines, a cluster of bikers revving. The day wore its usual colors and the ordinary acted like a balm.

In the lecture hall, he settled into his usual spot — back row, near the window. He took out his notebook and pens, prepared to let the professor’s voice knit itself into his notes. The chalk squeaked; the professor wrote formulas on the board. Kazu let the knowledge arrive the way laundry folds onto a chair: eventually it would be arranged and useful, even if the act of folding was slow and imperfect.

“Hayashi?” the professor called, not unkind. “You looked lost during the last example.”

Kazu blinked and laughed. “Sorry, sir. Got up late.”

A few classmates smirked. He answered the questions, caught what he could, and when the professor paused he felt the same tiny anxiety tightening — the 25th Hour is a memory he couldn’t fully explain, a shadow of something that might be waiting at 3:59AM again.

He told himself there were a million rational answers: stress, exhaustion, vivid dreaming. He focused on the mundane: notes, a coffee mid-lecture, a quick exchange with Takeshi about the seminar’s group project.

The lecture ended. The hallway filled with noise — chatter, the slap of shoes, the usual post-class blur. Kazu adjusted his bag and turned to the corner a bit too quickly.

Someone collided into him.

Books scattered. He caught one before it hit the floor — slim, with a pale blue cover that smelled faintly of rain.

“Ah— sorry,” came a quick voice. A girl bowed lightly, her dark hair falling forward as she crouched to pick up the rest.

Kazu shook his head, offering the book back. “No, it’s fine. My fault, I wasn’t looking.”

She looked up for just a moment — red eyes glinting faintly under the hallway light, strands of black hair brushed with a hint of crimson — and smiled, a polite, fleeting expression before she hurried past with her papers.

Kazu watched her go, still holding the ghost of her voice in his ears. She was cute. Wonder what year she’s in.

He realized he was smiling a little to himself and immediately straightened, embarrassed, adjusting the strap of his bag before heading the other way.

Work at the café flowed like a practiced dance. Miki teased him about his early morning futility and Hana slid into her usual seat by the window with an exaggerated sigh of relief. “You’re late,” she chided with a grin. Kazu shrugged, disarmed by her familiarity.

Even in routine there were threads from the night: an odd chill at the corner of the café, a reflection in the glass that took one extra fraction of a heartbeat to follow him. He dealt with them the same way he dealt with the scratch on his arm — a practical bandage. The world needed his work, his small competence, the way he lifted trays and made exact latté art for a five-year-old who wanted a heart in steam foam.

The evening shift at the family restaurant followed; he moved through orders, joked with Riku about the impossible miso ramen preferences, steadied a child who dropped a toy. There were small mercies: a sincere “thank you” that warmed him more than the salary ever would, a teenager’s goofy appreciation for his mock bow.

In those little exchanges he found reasons to continue the long hours: warmth, connection, shared brief humanity.

Late into the night, the restaurant emptied and the lights grew soft. Kazu wiped down the last table, slid his apron off, and felt the weight of a day folded neatly into habits. He clocked out at 3:30 A.M., the city now softened under drizzle.

He felt the familiar tug of the route to home — and the old, foolish hope that maybe tonight he would see the umbrella figure again. Not because he wanted an explanation, but because the oddity of it had become a small, prickly belonging.

He turned to the last corner toward the intersection. The street lamps hissed faintly, halos bent by rain. No umbrella this time — only a dark stretch of asphalt and the whisper of wind.

Then, just for an instant, something moved.

A shadow — too tall, too thin — cut across the far end of the crossing. Kazu froze. His breath caught, pulse ricocheting. He ran forward, shoes splashing against wet pavement.

“Hey!”

Nothing. Only the sound of his own echo. The street was empty.

He looked down — and realized he was standing again at the center of the intersection. The traffic light flickered, confused between red and green. The air grew heavy, like glass beginning to bend.

He turned toward the nearest shop window — a digital clock glowed behind it.

3:59 A.M.

His breath hitched. The air cracked, soundless but deep, like ice breaking underwater.

Kazu staggered back, crouching instinctively as the world shuddered. The rain froze mid-fall. His reflection in the glass stuttered, lagged — and then smiled back a half-second too late.

A sharp inhale. Eyes wide. Realization setting in like a returning fever.

He was back.

The 25th Hour had come again.