The fluorescent lights of the convenience store flickered with their usual dying rhythm, casting sickly shadows across aisles of instant ramen and energy drinks. Kaito Yamada stood behind the counter, his fingers drumming an anxious pattern against the worn plastic surface as he avoided eye contact with the customer fumbling for change.
Don't look at me. Please don't look at me.
"Keep the change," the salaryman muttered, snatching his cigarettes and beer before stumbling toward the exit. The automatic door chimed—that cheerful electronic melody that Kaito had grown to hate over six months of late-night shifts.
11:47 PM. Thirteen minutes until his shift ended. Thirteen minutes until he could return to his apartment, boot up his computer, and disappear into the only world where he didn't feel like his lungs were being crushed.
Kaito exhaled slowly, the breathing technique his therapist had taught him three years ago. In for four, hold for four, out for four. It barely helped anymore. Nothing really helped except the numbing isolation of his one-room apartment and the glow of his monitor.
He was seventeen years old and had been dead inside for so long he'd forgotten what living felt like.
The door chimed again.
Kaito's shoulders tensed instinctively, his gaze dropping to the scanner in front of him. He heard the footsteps—small, quick, accompanied by a woman's tired voice.
"Ryu, stay close to mama, okay? We're just getting milk and then going home."
"But I want the chocolate one!"
Against his better judgment, Kaito glanced up. A young mother, probably in her early thirties, dark circles under her eyes that matched his own. She worked nights too, he guessed. Had to, judging by the way she checked the price of every item she picked up. Beside her, a boy no older than five bounced with the boundless energy only children possessed, completely unaware of his mother's exhaustion.
Must be nice, Kaito thought, then immediately felt guilty. To be so innocent. To not know yet how cruel the world is.
He'd been like that once. Before his parents' divorce. Before his father remarried and forgot he existed. Before his mother started drinking away her child support checks. Before Kaito learned that sometimes, being invisible was safer than being seen.
The mother and son disappeared into the back aisles. Kaito returned to his phone, scrolling mindlessly through social media—watching other people's lives play out in carefully curated squares of fake happiness.
11:51 PM.
The door chimed again. Kaito didn't look up. Footsteps, heavier this time. Adult male. The acrid smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke preceded the customer like a warning.
"Oi, kid. Where's the whiskey?"
Kaito's throat constricted. The voice was too loud, too aggressive. He forced himself to point toward aisle three without making eye contact.
"Speak up! Can't hear you!"
"Aisle three, sir," Kaito managed, his voice barely above a whisper. His heart hammered against his ribs. Please just go. Please just leave me alone.
The man grunted and stumbled away. Kaito's hands trembled slightly as he gripped the counter. He hated this. Hated how every interaction felt like walking through a minefield. Hated how his body reacted to simple conversations like they were life-threatening situations.
Pathetic, he told himself. You're pathetic.
His therapist would tell him that self-deprecation wasn't helpful. But his therapist had stopped seeing him four months ago when his mother forgot to pay the bills. Again.
11:54 PM.
The mother and child approached the counter, the boy clutching a carton of chocolate milk like treasure. She set down her items—regular milk, instant curry, discounted bread—and pulled out a worn wallet.
"Will this be all?" Kaito asked, falling into the script. Scripts were safe. Scripts meant he didn't have to think.
"Yes, thank you."
He scanned the items mechanically, each beep a countdown to freedom. The total came to 847 yen. The woman counted out exact change, and Kaito noticed her hands were shaking slightly too. He wondered what her story was. What kept her up at night. What regrets haunted her.
Then he stopped wondering, because caring about people only led to pain.
"Thank you for your patronage," he recited as she gathered her bags.
The boy tugged at his mother's sleeve. "Mama, can we get ice cream tomorrow?"
"We'll see, Ryu. Come on."
They walked toward the exit, the child skipping despite the late hour. The mother paused at the door, turning back with a small, tired smile.
"You have a good night, okay?"
Kaito blinked, surprised. When was the last time someone had wished him well? He nodded awkwardly, and she left.
11:58 PM.
Two minutes. Kaito began his closing routine—straightening newspapers, wiping down the counter, counting the register. The drunk man was still browsing in the back, probably deliberating over which cheap whiskey would most efficiently erase his problems.
The door chimed.
Kaito looked up instinctively—and his blood froze.
The mother and child from before stood outside the store, waiting at the crosswalk. The light was red. The boy was pointing at something across the street, bouncing excitedly.
And then Kaito saw it.
The delivery truck, speeding down the road. Too fast. The driver slumped over the wheel. Asleep. Drunk. Dead. It didn't matter which.
What mattered was the trajectory.
What mattered was the little boy who chose that exact moment to break free from his mother's hand and run into the street, chasing after a ball that had rolled off the sidewalk.
Time crystallized.
Kaito watched the mother's face transform from tired patience to absolute horror. Her scream cut through the glass, through the night, through every layer of protection Kaito had built around his heart.
The boy was in the middle of the road.
The truck was ten meters away.
Eight meters.
The mother running, but too slow, always too slow—
Kaito's body moved before his mind caught up.
The door chime sounded almost peaceful as he burst through it. His legs pumped, feet slapping against the pavement. He wasn't athletic. He wasn't fast. He was a shut-in who barely left his apartment except for work.
But somehow, he reached the boy.
Six meters.
Kaito grabbed the child, feeling the small body collide with his chest. For one perfect moment, he held another human being, felt the warmth, the weight, the reality of another life.
Four meters.
He threw the boy toward the sidewalk with everything he had. Watched him tumble to safety into his mother's arms.
Two meters.
Kaito tried to move. His legs wouldn't cooperate. He looked up and saw the truck's grille, saw the brand name, saw a crack in the windshield shaped like a star.
Oh, he thought with strange clarity. This is how I die.
One meter.
Impact.
Pain.
Not the sharp, immediate kind. Worse. The deep, grinding agony of bones breaking, organs rupturing, systems shutting down. Kaito was aware of being airborne, then hitting pavement. The sky spun above him—city lights blurring into abstract art.
He couldn't feel his legs.
Couldn't breathe properly.
Tasted copper.
So this is what dying feels like, he thought distantly. Underwhelming.
Voices. Screaming. Footsteps running toward him. Someone was crying. The mother? He hoped the boy was okay. Hoped he wasn't traumatized. Kids were resilient, right?
His vision darkened at the edges, narrowing to a tunnel. At the end of that tunnel, he saw the convenience store's flickering sign. 24 HOURS. Always open. Never closed. Like the universe itself.
I never got to finish my shift, he thought, and almost laughed. They're going to dock my pay.
"Hang on! Someone call an ambulance!"
Too late for that, Kaito wanted to say, but his mouth wouldn't work. Blood pooled beneath him, warm and sticky. He was getting cold.
I wonder if this counts as suicide, he mused. I did choose to run into traffic.
But no. He'd saved someone. That had to count for something, right? In seventeen years of existing, he'd finally done something that mattered.
Maybe this is okay, he thought as the darkness grew. Maybe this is enough.
A face appeared above him. The mother, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was saying something, but the words were muffled, underwater. Behind her, the boy clutched her neck, face buried in her shoulder.
Good, Kaito thought. He's safe.
The darkness swallowed the light.
Kaito Yamada's heart stopped beating at 11:59 PM on a Tuesday night in April. The paramedics arrived four minutes too late. His mother was notified at 2:37 AM and didn't answer her phone. His father learned about it three days later and didn't attend the funeral.
Seventeen people came to the service. Sixteen were coworkers and distant relatives who barely knew him. The seventeenth was a young mother with dark circles under her eyes and a five-year-old boy who left a chocolate milk carton on the grave.
On the tombstone, they engraved: KAITO YAMADA. 2007-2024. BELOVED SON.
They were wrong about the beloved part. But they got the dates right.
Death, Kaito discovered, was not the end.
It should have been. He'd expected nothing—a void, an absence, the same emptiness he'd felt while alive but permanent.
Instead, he woke up.
Not woke, exactly. He had no body, no physical sensation. But he was aware. Conscious. Thinking.
What the hell?
He existed in a space that was neither light nor dark. White void stretched infinitely in all directions, or perhaps in no directions at all. Concepts like up and down seemed meaningless here.
Is this heaven? he wondered. Hell? Purgatory?
"None of the above."
Kaito's consciousness jolted. The voice had come from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. It was neither male nor female, neither old nor young. It simply was.
"Who—" he tried to say, then realized he had no mouth. Who are you?
"A question with many answers. I am a system. I am a process. I am a choice."
That's not an answer.
"Isn't it?" The presence seemed amused. "You died, Kaito Yamada. Seventeen years, four months, and thirteen days. A life cut short. A story unfinished."
I know I died. I was there.
"Indeed. You made a choice in your final moments. You prioritized another's life over your own. Interesting, given your general disposition toward existence."
I didn't have a 'disposition.' I just... didn't care.
"Precisely. You didn't care about living. Yet you cared enough to die for a stranger. A contradiction. A spark. A qualification."
Qualification for what?
The void rippled. Kaito felt something shift in the fabric of this non-place.
"For a second chance."
Images flooded Kaito's consciousness. Vast landscapes of impossible beauty. Cities of white stone and golden spires. Forests where trees touched the sky. Mountains that pierced the clouds. Magic—actual, genuine magic—woven through reality like threads in cloth.
And darkness. A spreading shadow consuming the light. Monsters and demons and cruelty that made Earth's worst atrocities look quaint.
"The world of Elaria," the voice explained. "A place of wonder and horror. A world at war. A world that requires... heroes."
Heroes? Kaito would have laughed if he could. You've got the wrong guy. I couldn't even look people in the eye.
"Yet you ran into traffic to save a child. Curious contradiction, don't you think?"
That was different. I didn't have time to think. If I'd thought about it, I probably would have frozen.
"Perhaps. Or perhaps, when stripped of time and choice, your true nature emerged. The question is: which is more real? The Kaito who hid from the world, or the Kaito who died saving it?"
Kaito had no answer to that.
"You are being offered a choice, Kaito Yamada. Return to the cycle—be reborn in your world without memory, start fresh, fade into the cosmic background. Or... accept summoning. Go to Elaria. Live again. Fight. Struggle. Perhaps find what you never had in your first life."
And if I refuse both?
"Then you rest. True death. Complete cessation. No pain, no fear, no existence. The void you expected."
That doesn't sound so bad.
"Doesn't it?" The voice was quiet now. "After seventeen years of numbness, you finally felt something in your last moment. Fear. Purpose. Connection. Are you truly ready to return to nothing?"
Kaito considered this. Remembered the weight of the boy in his arms. The mother's face. The strange peace that had filled him as he died.
I don't want to be a hero, he thought. I'm not hero material.
"Few are, initially. But Elaria does not require perfection. It requires those willing to try."
What about my world? My mother?
"Your mother will grieve for three weeks, then return to her bottles. Your father will feel mild guilt for six days. Your coworkers will forget you within a month. You left no large footprint, Kaito Yamada. Perhaps in Elaria, you might."
That's brutal.
"That's honest. I deal in truths, not comforts. So. What is your choice?"
Kaito floated in the void, consciousness untethered. He thought about his apartment—that single room with dirty dishes and unwashed laundry. His computer with half-finished games and unwatched anime. The convenience store where he'd spent so many nights counting down the minutes until escape.
Nothing worth returning to.
Nothing worth remembering.
But that boy—Ryu, his mother had called him—that boy would grow up. Would remember, maybe, the stranger who saved him. Would live because Kaito had died.
If I go to this Elaria place, he thought slowly. Will I have to talk to people?
"Extensively."
Will I have to be... social?
"Extraordinarily so."
Will I have power? Magic? Something to protect myself?
"Yes. Though what kind depends on your soul's nature."
And if I fail? If I'm too weak or scared or useless?
"Then you fail. But at least you will have tried. At least you will have lived."
Lived. Strange word. Kaito had existed for seventeen years but never truly lived. Maybe, in another world, with another chance...
I'm going to regret this, he thought.
"Probably," the voice agreed, and now it was definitely amused. "But at least you'll be alive to regret it."
Fine. I accept. Send me to Elaria. Make me a hero or whatever. Just... can you at least make me good at talking to people? Please?
"That, I'm afraid, you'll have to learn yourself. But I can promise you this: you will not be alone. Four others have accepted this same choice. Four other souls, each broken in their own way, each given a second chance."
Other people? Kaito's consciousness recoiled. I have to work with other people?
"You'll need each other. Elaria is not kind to heroes. Together, you might survive. Apart, you will certainly fail."
This was a terrible decision.
"Most important ones are."
The void began to collapse. Light erupted from nowhere, blinding and absolute. Kaito felt himself pulled, stretched, reformed. Pain seared through his consciousness as reality reasserted itself—bones and blood, neurons and nerve endings, all the uncomfortable machinery of physical existence.
He tried to scream but had no lungs yet.
"One final gift," the voice whispered as Kaito was torn away. "Your pain in life was feeling too much and expressing too little. In Elaria, your power will reflect this. Use it wisely, Kaito Yamada. Use it well."
Then the white void shattered into a million fragments of light, and Kaito Yamada fell through the spaces between worlds, hurtling toward a second chance he hadn't asked for but had chosen anyway.
His last thought before consciousness faded was remarkably mundane:
I really hope they have decent internet in this fantasy world.
They did not, as he would soon discover. But they had something far more dangerous: hope, responsibility, and people who would refuse to let him hide.
The fall ended.
The summoning began.
And in a cathedral in another world, five circles of light began to glow as five broken souls were given one more chance to become something greater than their pain.