📍 Shinsei High School – Class 3-C – April 3rd
The school bell rang like a funeral chime.
Rei Nakamura slid into his seat in the back row, headphones around his neck, not playing music—just shielding him from the noise of the world.
He didn't care about making friends.
Didn't care about clubs.
Didn't care about school.
What he cared about was silence—and survival.
The teacher walked in, tapping a clipboard.
"Good morning, class. Let's begin attendance."
Rei leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. Same voices. Same classroom. Same peeling paint on the wall. Nothing had changed since last year.
"Aoyama Mina," the teacher called.
"Here."
"Fujimoto Keita."
"Present."
"Rei Nakamura."
"Here.
The list went on. Twenty-three more names. Twenty-three more voices.
Then she paused.
The teacher frowned, flipping back to the first page of the roster.
> "Wait… that's strange. There are 25 names here. But only 24 of you in the room."
The class chuckled.
"Maybe someone's invisible," Kaito joked.
The teacher shook her head, clearly disturbed.
"No, seriously. I double-checked this list this morning."
Rei's eyes moved slowly toward the whiteboard.
Something new was written on it, in thick red marker.
"There are 25 students in this class.
One of you is not real.
Find the 25th… or die."
Laughter faded.
No one had seen the teacher write it.
She claimed she didn't.
No one remembered seeing anyone else near the board.
"Is this a prank?" Aoyama asked
But it didn't feel like a prank.
It felt… wrong. Deeply wrong.
At lunch, everyone whispered.
"Maybe someone sneaked in."
"What if we really did have 25 students?"
"What if… we forgot one?"
That night, Rei opened his middle-school yearbook.
Page 3-C.
Twenty-five students.
Smiling faces.
Names under each one.
But there was one photo without a name.
A blurred face.
He swore that photo wasn't there yesterday.
He blinked. The next second, the face was gone.
--
End of Chapter 1