***
The fly was a speck of black against the relentless afternoon sun, its trajectory a problem of vectors and wind resistance. Akuto Mimori traced its path with his eyes, a pencil hovering over a notebook filled with half-formed equations. *Sine theta over V initial equals…* He was an "Active Genius," a label the school counselors had slapped on him to explain away the unnerving way his mind dissected the world. To him, reality was just a series of problems waiting to be solved.
The problem with the fly was interrupted by a problem with Kenji Tanaka.
Kenji, who sat three rows ahead, didn't scream. He didn't bleed. One moment he was there, slumped over his phone, the next he was… not. There was a soft, final *pop*, like a champagne cork, and where a boy had been, there was only an empty chair and a faint shimmer in the air, as if heat was rising from pavement. The sunlight streaming through the window seemed to warp around the void.
Then Yumi Sasaki, two seats to the right, popped. *Pop.*
Panic was a predictable algorithm. Screams rose in a crescendo, the predictable symphony of terror. But Akuto's mind wasn't on the screaming. It was on the timing. 3.7 seconds between pops. He began counting, his fingers twitching against his desk. *Three. Four. Five.*
His eyes scanned the room, not for an escape, but for the constant. In the chaos, he found him. Leaning back in his chair, perfectly still, was Arata Yumeko. While others cowered or fled, Arata was observing, a faint, almost imperceptible smile on his lips. His gaze wasn't on the explosions; it was locked directly on Akuto. He wasn't scared. He was taking notes.
*Pop. Pop. Pop.* A percussive rhythm of erasure. The air grew thick with the smell of something sterile, like a hospital and an electronics store combined. The fire alarm finally shrieked, its wail a useless siren for a disaster no one could understand.
Akuto calculated the rate of spread, the probability of the next victim. He saw the shimmer of distortion heading for him, a wave of nothingness. *Probability of survival: zero percent.* He closed his eyes, not in fear, but in acceptance of the final, solved equation.
The fire never touched him.
He was sitting at his desk. The fly was still tracing its lazy path against the sun. His notebook was open to the same half-finished equation. But the date on the chalkboard was different. Forty-eight hours earlier.
The loop had begun.
***
His second attempt was a mess of human error. He tried to warn people, of course. He cornered Hina, the girl who volunteered at the animal shelter, whose smile was so pure it seemed coded. "In two days," he said, his voice shaking with an unfamiliar urgency, "we're all going to explode. You need to listen to me."
Hina's smile didn't break; it cracked. Under the pressure of the loop's absolute truth, the mask of her personality shattered. "Explode?" she whispered, her eyes wide with a different kind of fear. The fear of being seen. "Good. I hope Mr. Watanabe is the first one to go. Last year, I put antifreeze in the hamster's water bottle just to watch him cry. He said it was natural causes. Everyone believed him."
The revelation was a physical blow. The "truth" of the loop wasn't just about the massacre; it was a solvent for all pretense. He tried another classmate, the stoic basketball captain, who confessed to breaking a rival's leg out of jealousy. The quiet girl in the library admitted she'd been starting malicious rumors for years for the "fun of it."
They weren't victims. They were caricatures of vices, wearing thin skins of civility. A dark, cold satisfaction began to bloom in Akuto's chest. He stopped trying to save them. He started taking notes, just like Arata. He began to *anticipate* the pops, to find a certain clean beauty in the way the world unmade its lies.
On his seventh loop, he watched Kenji Tanaka pop, and for the first time, he felt nothing. He looked at Arata, who offered him a slow, deliberate nod of approval.
***
The seventeenth loop ended on the roof.
Akuto had him cornered, the wind whipping at their school uniforms. "You're the variable," Akuto said, his voice steady. "You're the only one who's different. You're causing this."
Arata didn't even flinch. He adjusted his glasses, the lenses catching the grey light of the overcast sky. "Am I? Or am I the only one who's paying attention? Akuto, your plan is flawed. You're looking for a bomb, a trigger, a single point of failure. This isn't a mystery novel. It's a character study. And your character is getting… repetitive."
The word hit Akuto like a physical punch. *Repetitive.*
"And your dialogue needs work," Arata continued, a teacher critiquing a student's paper. "All this 'I'm the only one who knows' business. It's a bit cliché, don't you think?"
For the first time, Akuto's logic failed him. The static he'd been seeing at the edge of his vision, like a poorly rendered video game, intensified. The world felt thin, like a painted backdrop. He lunged, not with violence, but with a desperate, grabby need for answers. His hands passed through empty air. Arata was gone, and the bell was ringing, summoning him back to the beginning.
***
He decided to change the character study.
On the forty-eighth loop, he didn't warn anyone. He didn't take notes. He acted. He spent the first forty-seven hours not calculating vectors, but calculating a murder. He stole chemicals from the lab, synthesized a fast-acting neurotoxin, and waited.
He found Arata in the same empty classroom, staring out the window as if he'd been waiting, too.
"It's over," Akuto said, holding a syringe.
"Is it?" Arata turned, a look of profound, almost paternal disappointment on his face. "You've chosen to delete the other main character. A bold choice. But what if the story isn't about the conflict? What if it's about you?"
Akuto didn't answer. He plunged the needle into Arata's neck.
There was no struggle. No fear in Arata's eyes. Only a deep, knowing sadness. As the life left him, he whispered, "The void is so much louder than you think."
Akuto waited. He sat beside the cooling body and watched the clock on the wall. The pops never came. There was only silence. He waited for 48:01. The minute hand twitched past the hour.
And stopped.
The world didn't reset. It went black. Not the darkness of a closed room, but an absolute, sensory-depriving void. There was no up or down, no sound, no touch. Just the screaming of his own thoughts in a universe without dimensions. Years, centuries, eons could have passed. His genius mind, once a tool, became a prison, endlessly replaying every loop, every conversation, every single *pop*.
Then, a bell rang.
He was in his seat.(From Chapter 1-7) The fly was tracing its path. The sun was hitting the desks. And three rows ahead, Arata Yumeko turned and gave him a slow, deliberate smile. The loop was intact, and Akuto was the one who had been reset.
***
The guilt was a poison of its own, one that logic couldn't parse. In the loops that followed, he began to notice things. Things that weren't there before. A faint smudge of his own fingerprint on the underside of Kenji Tanaka's desk, right where the shimmer of the explosion had originated. A line in a shared class document, typed in his own font, detailing the precise atmospheric conditions needed for "spontaneous human denaturation."
The worst discovery was a journal. Tucked in his own locker, in his own handwriting. The entries were cold, clinical, and horrifying.
*Loop 14: Confirmed. The emotional catalyst is unnecessary. The pops occur regardless of ambient fear levels. Progress is steady.*
*Loop 27: The subject 'Arata Yumeko' proves resilient to standard psychological pressure. He continues to observe. Annoying. May need to be terminated.*
*Loop 43: Hypothesis: I am the cause. My 'Active Genius' is not a cognitive ability, but a creative one. I am the author of this event.*
He confronted Arata on the school's empty athletic field. The sky was a flat, colorless grey.
"I found the journal," Akuto said, his voice hollow.
Arata was bouncing a basketball, the rhythmic thud echoing in the silence. "Did you? Good. You're finally reading your own source material." He stopped bouncing, holding the ball. "Akuto, you've been misdiagnosed. 'Active Genius' is such a boring, clinical term. It's what they call psychopaths when they have good grades."
The word hung in the air. *Psychopath.* His mind, his greatest asset, turned against him. He began to run the numbers. *I am the only constant. I am the only one who remembers. Therefore, I am the only one who can be the cause.* The logic was perfect. Inescapable. A prison built from the very tools he used to understand the world.
***
The loops melted away.
It wasn't a reset. It was a transition. The school didn't just disappear; it dissolved, its walls and floors bleeding into a brilliant, all-encompassing white. He was floating in nothingness, a disembodied consciousness. This was the space between the pages. The Collective Silence.
Here, he finally understood. He pieced it all together with a clarity that was both transcendent and soul-crushing. Arata wasn't the author. Arata wasn't even real. He was a mirror. A narrative construct Akuto had created to externalize the monster he couldn't face in himself. A coping mechanism. An inhumane genius needed an equal and opposite nemesis. So, he had dreamed one up.
A profound, aching solitude settled over him. He was alone. Utterly and completely alone in a reality of his own making. The horror wasn't the explosions or the loop; it was the unbearable emptiness of being the only thinking thing in a universe he had willed into existence. He accepted it. He would be the Monster. He would be the Author. He would be the God of this tiny, terrible hell, because it was the only role that made sense of the void.
***
In the sterile white space of his own mind, Akuto built a perfect replica of his classroom. Every desk, every scuff on the floor, every streak of dust on the windowpane was exactly as it had been. He sat at his desk. He watched the fly trace its path. He would sit here, in this eternally recurring moment, and he would atone. He would live this single second over and over, a self-imposed prison of penance for a crime he now fully understood.
He didn't notice the edges of the room blur.
He didn't see the black text of the ceiling flicker for a moment, revealing a different kind of ceiling above.
He didn't hear the faint, mechanical click of a cursor.
The view pulled back. The classroom became a page on a screen. Words, sentences, paragraphs.
`...He would live this single second over and over, a self-imposed prison of penance for a crime he now fully understood.`
The cursor blinked at the end of the line, patient as a vulture.
Above the text document, a file path was visible in the window's title bar: `C:\Users\Anonymous\Documents\WebNovels\DeadMaskAct48\Characters.docx`.
A scroll through the file revealed a list of names. Akuto Mimori. Hina. Kenji Tanaka. And there it was: `Arata Yumeko (Avatar): A self-insert to deliver exposition and challenge the protagonist's worldview. DELETE?`
A pair of hands rested on a laptop keyboard. They paused, hovering over the keys. One finger moved, tapping the trackpad. The cursor slid over to the 'File' menu.
The user selected 'Close'.
'Do you want to save changes to "Characters.docx"?'
'Don't Save' was clicked.
The document window vanished, replaced by a tranquil desktop wallpaper of a misty forest. The hum of the laptop's fan was the (From Chapter 1-7) only sound in the quiet room.
The story was over.
Akuto Mimori, the Active Genius, the Monster, the Author, was gone. He had been unwritten. His loops, his logic, his guilt, and his atonement ceased to be, not with a pop, but with the silent, final execution of a command.
Because the Author had decided it was finished.