The first thing I noticed was the sound.
Not the car horn. Not the scream.
The sound was my own heartbeat, punching in my ears like it was trying to escape my chest.
You're going to die, some quiet part of me said.
The rest of me was too busy shoving the little girl out of the road to reply.
Her backpack slammed into my arms. My shoes scraped asphalt. The headlights flooded my vision, bright enough to burn the world white.
I didn't even feel the impact.
Just—
Cut.
Like someone took scissors to reality and snipped.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on my back, staring at…sky?
Gray. Flat. Too still.
Clouds weren't drifting. They were hanging, like they'd been painted there and forgotten.
"…Did I…live?" I muttered.
My voice echoed weirdly, like the air was an empty hallway.
I sat up. My uniform shirt was clean. No blood. No twisted bones. My body felt…normal. Just a lingering heaviness in my chest where the headlights had been.
The street around me looked like the same intersection from before. Crosswalk, traffic lights, convenience store on the corner. A bus stop.
But everything was washed out. Like someone had turned the world's saturation down to fifty percent.
Also, the cars weren't moving.
They lined the road, frozen mid-commute. People inside them, staring straight ahead, blinking. A guy on a bike hung in mid-pedal, wheel motionless. The convenience store door was half open, caught between open and closed.
My skin crawled.
"Okay," I said quietly. "Either I'm dead, or I finally snapped from midterms."
Something flickered at the edge of my vision. I turned.
A man in a dark suit was walking down the sidewalk toward me.
Only "walking" was being generous.
His body moved like it remembered how walking used to work but couldn't quite commit. One leg swung too far, the other dragged. His head lolled at a crooked angle, eyes rolled up so only the whites showed.
His teeth were too many. All visible. All wrong.
He passed right through the frozen bicyclist without reacting.
I stared at the ghost-suit-zombie-thing.
It turned its head toward me with a slow, grinding motion. Our eyes met.
Every hair on my body stood up.
"…Yeah, no," I said. "I'm definitely dead."
The thing grinned wider and changed direction.
Straight toward me.
Running seemed smart.
I scrambled to my feet and bolted down the sidewalk, sneakers slapping the ground. I dodged a frozen old lady with grocery bags and cut between two unmoving cars.
The air felt thick, like I was running underwater. The gray sky pressed down, heavy and close.
I really wished this was some kind of stress dream.
As I turned the corner by the convenience store, I saw someone curled up against a wall—small, shaking.
A little boy. Knees hugged to his chest. Transparent at the edges.
He was…flickering.
The suit-monster's gaze slid past me and locked onto the kid like a magnet finding north.
My legs kept moving.
Right past the boy.
Almost.
I made it three steps beyond him before something twisted in my stomach.
The image of a little girl on a crosswalk flashed in my mind. Her backpack. Her wide eyes.
My feet skidded to a stop.
"Damn it," I muttered.
Heroism: 1. Survival instincts: 0.
I spun around and ran back.
The boy looked up. His eyes were huge and glassy, like he'd cried every tear he had.
"H-Help," he whispered. His voice was thin, like static. "It's coming again."
"Yeah, I noticed," I said.
The suit-thing lurched closer. Up close, it was worse. Its body wasn't really…solid. Parts of it were smudging into the air like smoke. The only clear thing was its mouth, stretched in a permanent, hungry grin.
It stepped over a frozen salaryman like he wasn't there and reached one long, gray arm toward the boy.
My body moved before my brain caught up.
I planted a foot, pivoted, and swung at its face.
I've thrown, like, three punches in my life. All of them at arcade machines.
This was better.
My fist connected with its jaw.
There was resistance—like punching packed sand—and then the thing's head snapped to the side. Its body twisted with the impact, the form smearing.
It staggered back.
The force reverberated up my arm and rattled my bones. Pain flared in my knuckles.
"Ren Katsuragi," I told myself, flexing my hand, "you just punched a ghost."
The thing slowly turned its face back toward me. A chunk of its jaw was missing now, dissolving into smoke. It reached up, grabbed its own head, and pulled. The shape snapped back into place.
Its grin widened.
"Right," I muttered. "Of course."
It lunged.
I threw another punch, more out of stubbornness than strategy. The impact barely moved it this time. Gray arms wrapped around my torso like cold mud.
The temperature dropped. My breath came out in a visible puff.
An icy pressure sank into my chest, squeezing my lungs.
Images flooded my head.
A hospital room.
White sheets.
My mother's hands clenched so tightly her knuckles bled.
"Why…?" she whispered. "Why my son…?"
My heart lurched.
The monster wasn't just grabbing my body—it was digging through my memories like a crow tearing at roadkill.
Rage flared hot enough to burn.
"Get—out—of—my—head!"
I yelled it more in my mind than with my mouth. The pressure in my chest spiked. Something deep inside me snapped.
It didn't feel like breaking.
It felt like unlocking.
A sharp metallic clang rang through the air.
A chain burst from my sternum.
Not metaphorically.
Something bright and solid shot out from the center of my chest, links of white light forged from…images.
I saw my mother again—but not in the hospital.
In our tiny kitchen at 2 a.m., apron still on, shoulders shaking as she stared at a stack of unpaid bills. I'd secretly watched from the hallway, too scared to go in. Too scared to admit I'd seen.
The memory twisted into form.
Links wrapped around the monster's arms, shoulders, throat. Its eyes—those awful upturned whites—snapped down, wide and shocked.
The chain pulled tight.
The suit-thing shrieked, a sound like metal scraping bone.
The pressure on my chest vanished. I stumbled back, gasping, clutching at the glowing links tethered between us.
"What the hell—" I wheezed.
The chain pulsed.
Emotion surged through it. My guilt. My fear. My wish to protect my mom from everything, even things way too big for me.
The monster's form started to splinter. Fragments of its gray body flaked away, revealing something smaller inside. A dim, shivering core, like a tiny, flickering star.
It wasn't a star.
It was another memory. Broken. Not mine.
A man alone in a dark office. Empty desk. A termination letter in his hand. The crushing weight of failure.
The monster had been feeding on that. Warping it. Turning it ugly.
For a heartbeat, I understood it.
Then a voice cut through the noise.
"Not bad for an unauthorized awakening."
The chain froze.
So did I.
She stood on the roof of the convenience store like she'd been there all along.
Long black coat. Short dark hair, a little messy like she'd run her fingers through it too many times. Thin rings glowed faintly around both of her wrists, like bracelets welded to her skin.
Her eyes were the most normal thing about her.
Completely human.
And completely done with everything she was looking at.
She stepped off the edge.
My heart stopped again—
Then started when she didn't fall.
She walked down the air, each step landing on nothing like it was something. With every step, the gray around her seemed to pull back, colors bleeding in for just a second, then draining away again.
She landed on the sidewalk a few meters in front of me.
Up close, she looked…young. Maybe early twenties. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Her gaze flicked from me to the glowing chain constricting the monster.
"Crude," she said. "But effective."
The monster shrieked again, thrashing against the bonds. The boy against the wall whimpered and curled into himself.
The woman sighed.
She raised her right hand.
One of the rings on her wrist flared. Lines of light spiraled outward, forming a sigil in midair—a circle etched with characters I didn't recognize, hanging like a neon sign.
"Sleep," she said.
The word sank into the air.
The chain lit up, responding to something in her voice. The monster's body convulsed once. Twice.
Then it shattered.
Not exploded. Just…broke apart, like a sculpture made of ash finally letting go.
Dust drifted away, leaving only the tiny, flickering core behind. It hovered for a second, then floated toward the sky like a firefly.
The boy's transparency firmed up. His edges stopped flickering.
He stared at the woman with wide eyes.
"Th…thank you," he whispered.
She glanced at him and softened, just barely.
"Find your thread," she said. "Follow it home."
The boy nodded. A faint, silvery line appeared at his feet, trailing off into the distance. He stepped onto it and faded, his form dissolving into light.
Silence fell.
My chain slowly retracted back into my chest, each link passing through me without resistance. The kitchen, my mom, the bills—all of it sank back down into whatever pit it had crawled out of.
I was left standing in the middle of a frozen street, panting, staring at a stranger who had just walked down the sky.
"Um," I said intelligently.
She looked at me.
Ren Katsuragi, sixteen years old, occasional smartass, frequent idiot, self-proclaimed normal guy—
—for the first time that day, truly realized how far from "normal" he'd gone.
"Who…are you?" I asked.
She tilted her head slightly.
"Mira," she said. "Veil Agency, Eastern Ward."
None of those words meant anything to me, but she said them like they explained everything.
Then her gaze sharpened.
"You're late," she added.
I blinked. "Late to what? Dying?"
A corner of her mouth twitched.
"Late waking up," she said. "You weren't scheduled to manifest chains for at least another three months. And definitely not in the middle of an unregulated zone. Do you have any idea how much paperwork this is going to create?"
I stared at her. "…I just punched a ghost."
"Technically that was a Lesser Corrupted," she said. "Ghosts are different. Less teeth."
"That's your focus? Not that a chain came out of my chest?"
She gave me a look. "You say that like it's unusual."
"It is extremely unusual for me!"
Mira sighed like she'd had this conversation too often.
"Ren Katsuragi," she said, and the way she said my name made my skin prickle. "Age sixteen. Died approximately"—she glanced at the frozen cars and the unmoving sun—"twenty-three minutes ago. Cause of death: vehicular impact while pushing a minor out of traffic. Attempted heroism. Severe lack of self-preservation. Typical."
My stomach dropped.
"I…died," I repeated. "You're saying I'm dead."
"Technically your original body is," she said. "Your consciousness, however, did not pass forward. It slipped sideways."
"Sideways," I echoed. "Like…a glitch?"
"Like a misfiled document," she said. "You fell out of the normal afterlife pipeline and landed here instead."
I looked around.
The still cars. The unmoving people. The gray sky.
"Here," I said slowly, "being…what, exactly?"
She spread an arm.
"Welcome," Mira said, "to the Veil."
The word sank into me like a stone.
As she said it, the world seemed to…clarify.
The frozen cars were there—but now I saw faint, translucent versions of them overlaying the originals, offset by a few centimeters. People walked along the sidewalks, not frozen, but pale. Half-there. Their eyes slid past me, unfocused.
Spirits drifted between them like jellyfish in a crowded aquarium, ignoring the humans who resolutely refused to see them.
The Veil wasn't another place.
It was a second layer over the first. A ghost world overlaid on the living one.
My stomach rolled.
"This is…some kind of…spirit world?" I asked.
"Overlap realm," Mira said. "Thin enough to brush against the human world, thick enough to hide what most humans can't handle. Recently more fragile than usual, thanks to you."
"Thanks to me?" I said. "I've been dead for, what, twenty minutes?"
She gave me a flat look. "You exert a disruptive resonance. We'll get to that."
"I'd like to skip to the part where this was all a hallucination from blood loss," I said.
Mira ignored that.
She studied me more closely, eyes narrowing.
"What did it feel like," she asked, "when your chain manifested?"
"Painful," I said automatically. "Cold. Heavy. Like someone dug fingers into my chest and dragged something out I didn't want to see."
Her gaze softened again, for just a heartbeat.
"That sounds about right," she said quietly.
"Is this…normal?" I asked. "Chains, I mean. Do all dead people get…whatever that was?"
"No," she said. "Most souls drift. Some cling. A few rage." She lifted her hand, the rings gleaming. "And a tiny number can reach inward and turn their own memories into weapons. They're…useful."
Useful. Great. I'd become a tool.
"So what, I'm drafted?" I asked. "Into your…Veil Agency?"
"Normally," she said, "there would be a briefing, and an orientation, and perhaps tea."
My hopes rose slightly.
"However," she continued, "you awakened in the field without supervision, in an unstable zone, while a Lesser Corrupted was actively feeding. Which means—"
The ground shook.
Just a little.
Like a distant thunderclap under our feet.
Mira's head snapped toward the sky.
Thin cracks of darkness spiderwebbed across the gray, just for a second, then vanished. The air hummed.
She swore under her breath in a language I didn't know.
"What was that?" I asked, pulse spiking again.
"Trouble," she said. "Level we don't have time for yet."
"Yet?" I repeated. "What does that mean?"
"It means," she said briskly, "we're leaving."
She grabbed my wrist.
Her hand was warm. Solid. Real.
The world blurred.
Buildings smeared into streaks of gray and white. The frozen cars became lines of color. My stomach tried to exit through my spine. I clamped my jaw shut on a yell.
In the space of a blink, the intersection was gone.
We reappeared in a narrow alleyway behind a row of old apartment buildings. Here, the Veil felt thicker. No frozen cars, no half-overlapped humans—just stacks of broken furniture, rusted pipes, and a stray cat that watched us with glowing, too-intelligent eyes.
I bent over, hands on my knees, trying not to throw up.
"What was that?" I demanded. "Teleportation? Spirit Uber?"
"Step-shift," Mira said. "Short-range spatial adjustment. If you're going to make snide comments every time I save your afterlife, this will be a long partnership."
"Partnership?" I echoed. "We've known each other for five minutes."
"Six," she said. "And unless you want to dissolve into a confused, wandering wisp in seventy-two hours, I'd suggest you let me explain before the next Corrupted smells your instability from a block away."
I closed my mouth.
She leaned back against the alley wall, arms crossing over her chest. The rings on her wrists dimmed, like they were going into standby mode.
"Ren Katsuragi," she said, "you died with a ridiculous amount of unresolved emotion. Enough to punch a hole sideways and get lodged in the Veil instead of moving on."
"Sorry my emotional issues are inconvenient for your filing system," I muttered.
Her lips quirked. "They're more than inconvenient. They're volatile. The chain you manifested was formed from a core memory—one you've clearly been avoiding."
The image of my mom in the kitchen flashed again. The chain tugged faintly inside my chest.
"I wasn't avoiding it," I lied.
"Weapons built from denial are unstable," she said. "Weaponized guilt is worse. If you don't learn to control that Resonance, you'll either break yourself apart from the inside or attract something hungry enough to do it for you."
"Like that…thing?" I asked. "The Corrupted?"
She nodded. "That was a small one."
Small.
Fantastic.
"So what happens if I do learn to control it?" I asked slowly.
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then, for the first time, she smiled properly.
It was not a nice smile.
"If you learn control," Mira said, "you become useful to the Agency. You'll hunt Corrupted. Guard rifts. Patch holes between worlds. Prevent collapses. Maybe, if you survive long enough, you'll even figure out why the Veil is thinning and who decided to yank your soul in here early."
The way she said who made my skin crawl.
"Someone decided?" I said. "I thought this was some cosmic accident."
Her eyes cooled.
"Souls don't just fall sideways," she said. "They're pulled. Misfiled. Redirected. For a reason."
A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with spirits.
"You…think someone did this to me on purpose," I said.
"I think," she replied, "that you awakened three months early, with an unusually powerful first chain, in a zone that just experienced a minor Veil tremor. Corrupted are getting bolder. Rifts are getting wider. And now there's you."
She pushed off the wall and stepped closer.
I could see faint cracks in the skin of her fingers, like hairline fractures in porcelain. They glowed softly, pulsing with some buried light.
"I don't like coincidences," Mira said. "They tend to kill people."
"I'm already dead," I said.
She shrugged. "There are worse things."
I believed her.
Silence settled between us. Somewhere in the distance, something howled—a long, low sound that made the alley shadows shiver.
Mira held out her hand.
"So," she said. "Ren Katsuragi. Do you want to learn how not to fall apart?"
I stared at her hand.
At the faint scars. At the rings. At the tired eyes of someone who'd watched too many people make the wrong choice.
My chest ached.
Mom. The girl at the crosswalk. The boy curled against the wall.
My hand moved.
I took hers.
"I want to learn," I said. "And I want answers. About…this." I tapped my chest. "About why I'm here. About who yanked me off the road."
Mira's grip tightened.
"Good," she said. "Questions mean you're still human enough to be annoying."
She stepped closer, until I could see my reflection in her pupils: a confused kid with messy black hair, a school uniform, and eyes that looked a little too haunted now.
"Welcome to the Veil, Ren," Mira said quietly. "From this point on, every memory is a weapon. Every regret is a chain. Try not to choke on your own."
She released my hand and turned toward the alley's mouth.
"Let's get you registered before something eats you," she added.
"Comforting," I muttered, and followed.
As we stepped out of the alley, the gray sky stretched overhead, cracked for just a second in my peripheral vision.
Something on the other side of that crack stared back.
I couldn't see its face.
But I felt its smile.
The chain in my chest rattled once, like it recognized the attention.
A whisper slid through my mind, not in words, but in a feeling.
Found you.
I stumbled.
Mira glanced back. "Problem?"
I swallowed.
"Nothing," I lied. "Just…getting used to being dead."
She snorted softly. "You'll miss being alive more once we start training."
We walked into the pale, overlapping city together.
And somewhere above us, behind the painted-on sky, something hungry waited and watched.