The insistent chirping of the alarm clock was, as it so often was for high school students, the first unwelcome assault on Ren Takakura's senses. Another Saturday. For many, this heralded a brief respite from the rigors of academia, a chance for leisure or perhaps dedicated study. For Ren, however, Saturdays had recently begun to feel less like a reprieve and more like a prelude – a quiet intake of breath before the next inexplicable event decided to make its presence known in his increasingly strange life.
Ren slapped the snooze button with a practiced apathy that had become his default response to the morning. The ceiling of his perfectly average room greeted him – sturdy, white, and blessedly unjudging of a young man who increasingly felt the desire to stay in bed until noon, not out of laziness, but out of a weary apprehension for what the day might hold. His life, up until a few weeks prior, had been similarly unremarkable. School, homework, the occasional aimless weekend spent with a book or wandering the familiar streets of Kuoh Town. Kuoh Academy was just a school; Kuoh Town was just a town. But then, things had started to get… peculiar. The kind of peculiar that made the mundane feel like a thin, cracking veneer over something deep, unsettling, and utterly beyond his comprehension.
A sigh, heavy with a weariness that seemed too profound for his seventeen years, escaped him as he finally dragged himself out of bed. The floorboards creaked a familiar greeting, a small, normal sound in a world that felt increasingly off-kilter. His room was as it always was: a desk cluttered with textbooks he found himself staring at more than actually reading, a bookshelf mixing light novels that offered fleeting escapes with more textbooks he was supposed to be mastering, and a window looking out onto a quiet suburban street. Everything was in its place, a snapshot of a typical teenage boy's existence.
Except, of course, for the faint, almost invisible scorch mark on the corner of his desk that shouldn't have been there, a blemish that had appeared one night after a particularly frustrating session with his physics homework. And then there were the dreams. Fragmented, jarring images that left him waking in a cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs as if trying to escape his chest, phantom sensations of a horrifying impact and the screech of tires echoing in the hollows of his mind. They felt less like dreams and more like… dislodged pieces of something else, something visceral and terrifying from a past he couldn't quite grasp, a life that didn't seem to belong to him.
He shook his head, a gesture meant to dispel the thoughts, though it rarely succeeded. Dwelling on them only invited a headache, a dull throb that was becoming an unwelcome but frequent companion.
Downstairs, the usual Saturday morning sounds were a comfort, a symphony of domesticity. His parents, blissfully unaware of the strange currents tugging at their son, were likely in the kitchen, discussing neighborhood gossip or the merits of different brands of fertilizer for the small garden out back. Explaining the oddities that had begun to cling to Ren like a second, invisible skin wasn't an option. The idea of casually mentioning, "Hey Mom, Dad, pretty sure I accidentally set my homework on fire with my bare hands the other day, and also, I keep having these really vivid, not-great dreams about dying in a horrific traffic accident. Pass the soy sauce?" was so far beyond the realm of possibility it was almost laughable. If he weren't so deeply unsettled, he might have found a dark humor in it.
Ren got dressed in his usual weekend attire – jeans and a plain t-shirt. His reflection in the mirror showed the same Ren Takakura as always: average height, average build, dark hair that perpetually fell into his eyes no matter how often he tried to tame it. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance, nothing that screamed "protagonist of an unfolding supernatural drama." If anything, he looked like he could use a significant amount of sleep. Which was undeniably true.
"Ren! Breakfast!" his mother's voice called from downstairs, a cheerful, normal sound that momentarily cut through his unease.
"Coming!" he called back, attempting a tone of similar cheerfulness that felt a bit like wearing clothes a size too small.
Breakfast was, predictably, itself. Toast, eggs, miso soup. His father was absorbed in the morning newspaper, occasionally grumbling about some political inanity. His mother hummed softly as she tidied the kitchen, a picture of serene domesticity. Ren ate quickly, a familiar knot of anxiety tightening in his stomach, an eagerness to get out into the semblance of his routine, to seek out the familiar and the mundane.
He usually met Kosaki Onodera on Saturdays. Kosaki was… Kosaki. Kind to a fault, a little shy, with a gentle smile that always seemed to reach her warm brown eyes. She was perhaps the only person at Kuoh Academy who consistently went out of her way to be nice to him without any apparent ulterior motive. They weren't dating, not in any formal sense – the thought of navigating something as complex as romance on top of everything else currently plaguing his mind was enough to make his head spin – but they often walked to school together, shared notes, and sometimes just hung out on weekends, talking about nothing in particular. She was a comforting presence, an anchor to the days before the strangeness began its insidious creep into his life.
"I'm heading out to meet Onodera-san," he announced, grabbing his bag from the chair where he'd tossed it the previous evening.
"Alright, dear. Don't be out too late!" his mother said, her smile warm and untroubled.
If only she knew. "Too late" was the least of his worries these days.
The walk to the park where he and Kosaki usually met was uneventful, a small mercy for which Ren was grateful. The sun was shining with a gentle warmth, birds were chirping their complex melodies in the trees lining the streets – the whole idyllic Saturday morning package. Kuoh Town itself was a fairly large place, a sprawling mix of quiet residential areas like his own, a bustling downtown district filled with shops and restaurants, and older sections where ancient temples and shrines stood as silent witnesses to the passage of time. Kuoh Academy, their school, was one of its more prominent landmarks, a sprawling campus that, until recently, had represented nothing more to Ren than the place he went to learn about calculus and classical Japanese literature.
He spotted Kosaki sitting on their usual bench near the fountain, a book resting in her lap. She looked up as he approached, her gentle smile instantly making the knot in his stomach loosen just a fraction. There was a simple, uncomplicated goodness about Kosaki that Ren found himself increasingly reliant upon.
"Takakura-kun! Good morning!" she greeted, her voice soft and pleasant, like the rustling of leaves.
"Morning, Onodera-san," Ren replied, managing a smile that felt a little more genuine this time. "Whatcha reading?"
She held up the book, its cover adorned with a fantastical illustration of dragons and wizards. A popular fantasy series. "It's really good," she said, her eyes lighting up with enthusiasm. "The main character just discovered he has a hidden power, and he's trying to learn how to control it…"
A weak, almost involuntary smile touched Ren's lips. "Sounds… interesting." The words felt hollow, a pale imitation of actual engagement, even to his own ears. The parallels were a little too close for comfort.
Kosaki tilted her head, her brow furrowing slightly with a familiar look of concern she often directed his way lately. "Are you okay, Takakura-kun? You seem a little tired again today."
"Just a bit," he lied, a practiced ease to the falsehood now. "Late night studying, you know how it is." If by studying, he meant staring at his ceiling for hours, replaying the impossible events of the past few weeks and wondering if he was slowly losing his mind, then yes, exactly like that.
They chatted for a while about trivial things – the upcoming school festival, the difficulty of their latest history assignment, a new bakery that had opened downtown and was rumored to have excellent cream puffs. It was nice. Normal. For a few precious minutes, the encroaching weirdness that had become Ren's constant companion receded, and he could almost believe life was still simple, still predictable.
Then, a sleek black car, the kind that looked like it belonged in a movie about spies or very important business people, pulled up near the park entrance. It gleamed under the morning sun, its windows tinted too dark to see inside. A couple of tough-looking men in impeccably tailored dark suits got out, their movements economical and precise. They respectfully opened the back door.
A girl emerged.
She was tall, with striking blonde hair that cascaded down her back like a waterfall of spun gold, and piercing blue eyes that seemed to scan her surroundings with an air of impatient authority. Her Kuoh Academy uniform, identical in design to Kosaki's, looked… different on her. Sharper. More expensive, somehow, as if woven from finer threads. She was, in a word, stunning, a vibrant splash of color and intensity against the peaceful backdrop of the park. And she looked utterly, completely out of place.
"Who's that?" Kosaki whispered, her eyes wide with a mixture of awe and apprehension. The book lay forgotten in her lap.
"No idea," Ren said, a knot forming in his stomach, a familiar premonition of disruption settling over him. A new transfer student, perhaps? And one who clearly didn't travel light, or without a significant degree of protection.
The girl's gaze, sharp and appraising, swept over them dismissively, as if they were nothing more than uninteresting features of the landscape. She barked a short, clipped order at one of the suited men, who nodded deferentially, his face impassive. Then, with an air of someone who owned the very ground she walked on, and perhaps the park itself, she strode into the manicured greenery, her entourage trailing at a respectful, almost invisible distance.
Her arrival felt like a disturbance, a ripple in the fragile calm Ren had been trying to maintain. The ordinary Saturday morning, which had briefly offered a semblance of peace, suddenly felt charged with an unfamiliar, electric tension. Ren had a sinking feeling that this girl, whoever she was, was going to be anything but ordinary.