OVERWRITE: Echoes of Astrea

I’ve always felt most comfortable sitting in the corner, somewhere nobody would bother looking.

The teacher hadn’t even finished calling out the next name to come up to the front of the class when I was already lowering my head, pretending to be busy looking for something in my bag. Not because I wasn’t ready. I just never liked being the reason dozens of pairs of eyes turned toward the same spot—and that spot was me.

My name is Ron Astrea, and that night, New Year’s Eve, I was far from home. The cold wind cut through my thin coat, carrying the smell of fireworks and gunpowder along with faint laughter from somewhere in the distance. The whole city was busy celebrating a fresh start, while I was climbing a quiet stone staircase toward an old shrine on the outskirts of Tokyo. Typical me. Running off somewhere quiet right when everyone else was having the time of their lives.

The shrine was quiet. Paper lanterns swayed gently, casting a warm orange glow. I stood in front of the altar, tossed a coin into the offering box, then took a deep breath. I pressed my palms together and closed my eyes.

Hopefully this year stays nice and easy. Hopefully nothing gets complicated.

That was all I prayed for. Simple, right? What I didn’t know was that a few minutes later, my life would stop being normal—and it would never be normal again.

The sound of the wind disappeared.

Not faded.

Disappeared.

Even the sound of my own breathing vanished for a moment, before coming back with a different rhythm—faster, heavier.

The calming scent of incense suddenly turned into something far more piercing.

Blood.

Burning metal.

Thick dust that made my lungs tighten.

The warmth from before was gone too, replaced by a biting cold that seeped all the way into my bones.

I tried to open my eyes, but my entire body was completely stiff. When I finally managed to, the world I knew was already gone.

I was standing on cracked, blackened ground. The sky burned red, split apart by a massive crack glowing with something strange. The skyscrapers around me were warped and melting like candles. Fear slammed into my chest, thick and endless.

If this was a dream, why could I smell blood this clearly?

“...Heh. So, it’s time, huh?”

That deep, raspy voice cut through the howling wind. I turned around, breathing hard.

A few meters ahead of me, a grown man was sitting against a chunk of concrete. His armor was destroyed, his clothes torn and stiff with dried blood. A gaping wound split open across his chest. His face was covered in soot and scars, but his eyes... they were a faded silver.

His face felt familiar.

Not like I’d seen him at school or passed him on the street. It was stranger than that. Like I’d seen that face before—as my own.

He looked at me with a faint smile, the kind worn by someone who was completely exhausted with life.

“Come here, kid. Give me your hand.”

My brain told me to run, but my legs moved on their own, as if something was guiding them. My hand trembled violently as I reached toward him.

My fingertips touched his cold fingers.

And the world exploded.

Not sound.

Not light.

Memory.

A burning sensation pierced through my palm, traveled through my veins, and set every nerve in my head on fire. Fragments of unfamiliar images slammed into me one after another, far too fast for me to make sense of:

Someone with a face exactly like mine, standing alone in the middle of a city that had been reduced to ash.

The same hand, gripping something sharp, soaked in blood all the way to the wrist.

The same red sky, but this time seen from a different set of ruins.

And at the end—something enormous, its shape impossible to make out, knocking another version of me to the ground for the very last time.

“Remember... Ron... don’t let Earth-1819B... fall...”

“AAARRGH!”

I woke up with a violent jolt.

My breathing was ragged, like I’d just been dragged up from the bottom of the ocean. I collapsed onto the wooden floor of the shrine. The night wind was blowing again, and the New Year’s bells could be heard faintly in the distance. Everything was quiet again. No blood, no red sky, no dying man.

But my temple was throbbing like crazy, cold sweat covered my entire body, and my chest was burning, like someone had just injected liquid metal straight into my heart.

I got up on shaking legs, ran out of the shrine, and pushed through the cold night all the way home.

The whole way back, I could still feel the coldness of that man’s hand clinging to my skin like it refused to leave. When I got to my room, I tried to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes, his face appeared again.

And the scariest part—I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew him.

The next morning, sunlight slipped through the gaps in the window. My body felt better, though there was still something strange weighing on my chest.

I stopped in front of the mirror before leaving my room. I stared at my own face longer than usual, searching for whatever resemblance had made my skin crawl the night before. I couldn’t find anything. Just my own face, with a pair of sleep-deprived eyes.

It was also my birthday. Sixteen years old, finally.

“Ron! Come downstairs and eat breakfast before you go jogging!” Mom called from downstairs, her voice still as cheerful as ever.

I went downstairs, and there was already an omelet on the table with a little candle burning on top—I mean, Mom always made a big deal out of little things like this. Dad just nodded from behind his newspaper and said, “Happy birthday.” Short and simple, but the way he showed affection had always been through little things, like quietly adding extra food to my plate.

“Big bro Ron is sooo old now,” Mei, my eleven-year-old sister, teased with a smug grin.

“Shut up. You’ll get there soon enough,” I shot back, and she immediately pretended to sulk while continuing to eat.

A normal breakfast. A normal morning. I didn’t say anything about the dream from last night. What was the point of worrying them over something I didn’t even understand myself?

To keep my thoughts from constantly circling back to last night’s nightmare, I decided to stick to my usual routine: a morning jog.

The early-year air was pretty refreshing. I followed the quiet sidewalks around the neighborhood, and after thirty minutes of running, I stopped at a small park. I sat down on a wooden bench, wiped the sweat from my forehead, then let out a long breath.

That’s when my vision suddenly blurred a little.

Out of nowhere, about two meters in front of me, a faint blue translucent panel appeared in midair. There was no projector, no device anywhere near me. The panel simply floated above the ground, like it didn’t need anyone’s permission.

In the middle of it, a row of red numbers began counting down:

[ QUANTUM COUNTDOWN ]

[ 03 : 09 : 01 : 00 ]

Three days, nine hours, one minute, zero seconds. At least, that’s what it looked like if I was reading the format right.

I rubbed my eyes over and over, waved my hand in front of it, and even covered one eye just to make sure this wasn’t some weird effect from the sunlight. The panel was still sitting there in my field of vision. Persistent little thing.

Someone else jogged past nearby. I secretly watched their reaction—if they looked shocked too, then this thing was actually real. But they just passed by like normal, not seeing anything except me sitting there blankly on the park bench.

So I was the only one who could see it.

And somehow—that was more terrifying than if the panel had been visible to everyone. I didn’t want people thinking I was weird. I didn’t want to become the subject of everyone’s gossip. So I decided to keep quiet and tell no one, hoping this was just some side effect of not getting enough sleep that would disappear on its own.

Day one, I tried to ignore it.

Day two, I started secretly checking whether it was actually going down whenever nobody else was around.

Day three, I stopped treating it like some kind of visual disturbance. The numbers were dropping steadily, way too precisely to be written off as bad eyesight. I started counting down along with the panel whenever I ate, whenever I was in class, whenever I was about to sleep—quietly wondering what would happen when the numbers finally hit zero.

Until finally, the last second arrived.

That afternoon, I was standing at a Shibuya intersection, surrounded by a sea of people crossing together as the light turned green. The giant screens on the surrounding buildings were still blasting colorful ads like nothing was wrong.

The numbers on the panel had finally reached their limit:

[ QUANTUM COUNTDOWN ]

[ 00 : 00 : 00 : 01 ]

[ 00 : 00 : 00 : 00 ]

One of the giant screens on a building suddenly flickered into static, a fraction of a second before every other screen went dark at once.

CLICK.

A sound like some giant switch being flipped echoed inside my head.

KRAAAKKK!

The deafening sound of shattering glass erupted from the sky. Everyone at the intersection stopped and looked up at the exact same time. I looked up too, and my heart felt like it had stopped beating.

The blue afternoon sky tore open. A black crack hundreds of meters long split across it, jagged like a fault line on the surface of the earth. Violet light and thick gray smoke burst out from within, covering the sun.

“W-what is that...?” someone beside me whispered, their voice trembling.

Before panic could even break out, something began falling toward the ground from the darkness behind the crack.

BOOM!

One of them landed exactly ten meters in front of me, crushing a car flat as dark fluid sprayed from its mangled interior.

Its shape was impossible for my brain to process. Its body was pitch-black, glistening like wet metal, but up close, its texture looked more like shards of black glass fused into a single, seamless armor. Some parts moved with the flexibility of living muscle, while other parts made a sound like metal grinding against metal whenever they shifted. From the gaps in its body, a faint red light glowed, almost like eyes—or maybe they weren’t eyes at all. I had no idea.

People collapsed onto the asphalt, either unconscious or simply too late to run. Cars crashed into each other across what had been an orderly intersection. Store windows shattered everywhere. The smell of smoke and something metallic filled the air. Just a few seconds ago, this place had been packed with people heading home from work and tourists busy taking pictures.

Now it was nothing but screaming and people running in every direction.

The creature in front of me turned with a metallic screech. The red light on its body locked onto me, standing frozen in the middle of the chaos. One of its arms transformed into a sharp blade, dripping with dark fluid, ready to cut me in half.

I couldn’t run.

My legs wouldn’t move.

I’m going to die.

Fear completely took hold of me, but at the same time, the left side of my chest began to burn.

BZZZZT!

The nerves in my eyes throbbed. The panel that had been displaying the countdown suddenly vanished, replaced by large text flashing rapidly:

[ WARNING: FRACTURE FAULT DETECTED ]

[ NEURAL SYNC: 1.2% ... 4.8% ... 12.0% ]

[ CONVERGENCE CORE : ONLINE ]

[ WELCOME BACK, RON ASTREA - EARTH-1819B ]