The sea did not roar the day he died for the second time—it whispered.
Tomu Hikawa was a name known only to a handful in the local region. A quiet young man from a family with money but no legacy. He had recently completed his undergraduate studies in biomedical science and was apprenticing under a private heart surgeon in Tokyo. Life was planned, practical, predictable.
Until the accident.
They said he fell off the edge of the pier during a late-night walk. The reports were simple. Clean. Emotionless. Witnesses saw him sink beneath the waves. For minutes, he did not resurface. When the coast guard pulled his body out, he had no pulse. No breath.
And yet, something else happened that no machine could measure.
At the same moment Tomu's molecular pulse ceased, a second pulse—one buried in a boy who once lived as Gorou Amemiya, then reborn as Aqua Hoshino—surged forward through the thin veil between realms.
Aqua's final moments were filled with a swirl of contradiction. He had fulfilled his revenge. The man who destroyed Ai was no longer walking this Earth. But in doing so, Aqua had detached from everything else. Kana. Ruby. The dream of a life that was never meant to be built upon hatred.
As he drowned, Aqua realized: he still wanted to live.
His desire wasn't a scream—it was a concentrated will. A tether. A molecular command broadcast from one dying vessel into another nearing death.
A collision of timelines occurred in silence.
The sea was quiet that morning.
Waves lapped gently at the jagged rocks of the southern coast of Japan, where a man named Tomu Hikawa was pulled from the water just after sunrise. His body had been found drifting face-down as a young woman and a boat managed to finally reach the young man, the currents trying to take him deeper, but the molecular universe had a different plan. The rescue team didn't know it, but something far more unusual had happened than a simple drowning.
Tomu had died. If only for a moment. And when he came back—he brought someone else with him.
In the hospital, machines beeped rhythmically beside him. Nurses passed by, charting vitals and whispering over clipboards. But within the stillness of Tomu's unconscious mind, another storm was taking shape.
A voice. Familiar. Detached. And determined.
*"I'm still here... I'm not done yet."*
He didn't recognize the voice at first, but flashes began to stir. The scent of backstage powder. The blinding lights of a stage. The ache of revenge. Ruby's tears. Kana's trembling voice. And the weight of an oath made in a past life—*"I'll return. I'll protect them."*
Tomu's hands twitched.
Tomu opened his eyes three days later.
The hospital room was dull and metallic. IV tubes in his arm, a slow beeping from the monitor. The nurse called for the doctor as he stirred, but Tomu barely heard it. Inside his mind, something strange unfolded.
He blinked rapidly. Not out of confusion. Out of recognition.
His body was intact, but within him, something else had awoken.
"Where… am I?" he whispered. But even as he asked the question, part of him already knew.
Two weeks passed.
Tomu recovered quickly, though doctors were baffled at how his cognition had sharpened. His aptitude, memory, and reaction time improved beyond previous benchmarks. A quiet boy became hyper-observant, more aware than anyone around him.
And each morning, when he looked in the mirror, he whispered a name not found anywhere in his family registry.
"Aqua."