Chapter 1
Prologue — The Day I Died
They tell you your life flashes before your eyes when you die. They lie.
There was no montage of childhood memories, no slideshow of regrets. There was only a blinding shock of heat, followed instantly by a freezing, numbing cold that swallowed my limbs whole. My world didn’t end with some profound realization. It ended with pure, suffocating physical disorientation.
Huh. So this is what dying feels like.
I couldn’t draw a proper breath. Every attempt felt like sucking air through a crushed straw, bringing up only the thick, metallic taste of blood at the back of my throat. I knew I was lying on pavement — I could feel the rough asphalt scraping my cheek — but I had zero context forwhy. The panic came first, loud and overwhelming, long before any actual facts caught up.
Then came the sound. Footsteps — heavy, measured, entirely unhurried. Nearby, a car door stood wide open, its warning chime dinging into the quiet night.
Kaede’s safe, at least. That’s something.
That steady, calm pace was the wrongest part of all. Someone who’d just stumbled onto a dying man would be running, screaming. Whoever this was, they weren’t panicking.
Which meant they’d expected this.
A girl’s voice drifted down to me, shaking — not with grief, I understood dimly, but with a shock that hadn’t caught up yet to what it had just watched happen. “Kenji... you could have hit me too.”
“Nah, don’t worry.” His tone wasn’t just calm. It carried a faint, sick trace of pride. “I had the angle perfectly calculated.”
Calculated.
The word rattled against my fading consciousness. It didn’t fit. Nobody talks about angles during a random, tragic hit-and-run. I knew the name Kenji — it sat right on the tip of my mind, a name I should know intimately — but the connection frayed before I could pull it in.
Before I could finish the thought, the world cut to black.
Six hours earlier, my life was entirely unremarkable.
The blare of my ringtone shattered the quiet of my apartment mid-raid. I cursed under my breath, dropping my controller — but the caller ID gave me pause.
"Yo, Haruto.” Kenji’s voice boomed through the speaker the second I picked up. “Change of plans tonight. You in on a double date? Kaede and I are meeting up with a friend of hers — we need a fourth.”
My gut reaction was to make an excuse and sink back into my chair. I was a homebody, comfortable in my isolation. But looking at the glow of the monitor, a sudden wave of loneliness hit me. I didn’t want to just be the punchline — the guy who never leaves his room.
“Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. “Alright. Count me in.”
I spent the next forty-five minutes over-deliberating my outfit before settling on something I hope dread as effortlessly casual. I even left early, arriving ten minutes ahead of schedule, chest tight with awkward, hopeful energy.
When Kenji and Kaede arrived, they brought the fourth: a girl named Hana.
The moment we were introduced, real hope flared in my chest. Hana was pretty, quiet, reserved. But almost immediately the signal shifted — a brief hesitation in her smile when our eyes met. Not malicious. Just the strained, polite mask of someone being nice when she wasn’t particularly interested.
Yep. Already rejected. Called it.
The afternoon dragged into evening and the date fizzled out entirely naturally — no drama, no argument, just two people who clearly didn’t click. In a strange way the lack of sparks was reassuring; it ruled out any sudden, chaotic jealousy later. We were just mismatched puzzle pieces.
As night fell, Kenji and Kaede smoothly peeled off, claiming an errand to run, leaving me to walk Hana home alone. At the time it felt like a wingman move, giving us space.
In hindsight, it was the isolation beat. I’d been perfectly engineered into position.
We walked in near silence until we reached the quiet, dim residential street near her apartment.
“Hey, Haruto?” She stopped, looking up with a soft, apologetic expression. “I’m sorry about today. The setup — it was a bit forced, wasn’t it?”
I rubbed the back of my neck, laughing it off. “A little. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’d still like to be friends, though. If that’s okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling something in my chest unclench that I hadn’t noticed clenching. “I’d like that too.”
It was a brief, gentle moment of real connection. It was taken from me a fraction of a second later.
The roar of an engine tore through the quiet street. Headlights blinded us off the wet asphalt. The car slowed slightly, like it meant to pass safely by — false relief — then the engine screamed as the driver slammed the accelerator, surging straight for the sidewalk.
Instinct moved before thought could. I shoved Hana clear of its path.
Then the impact. The heat, the cold, the suffocating inability to breathe.
I was right back where I started — on the ground, tasting blood, listening to that open door chime.
“Kenji... you could have hit me too.”
“Nah, don’t worry. I had the angle perfectly calculated.”
Hearing it again, with the last six hours fresh in my mind, the pieces slammed together with violent clarity. The date’s natural fizzle. Kenji steering us apart. The car slowing, then surging. This wasn’t an accident.
It was an execution.
And in that final, fading second, the true motive pierced the fog. Kenji didn’t care about Hana. He didn’t care about the double date. He knew about my account — the one with three years of trades in it, worth more money than he’d made in his life, under a name none of my friends had ever bothered to ask about. Why would they. Why would the guy who never left his room have anything worth taking.
He knew. That’s the whole reason.
Some friend you turned out to be.
The betrayal burned hotter than the pain — one last, searing flash of rage — and then my consciousness tore completely away from the pavement.
There was no floating in the void. No meeting with a god. Just darkness, total and absolute, and then, nothing at all.
