Negative emotions are common. That much is obvious—anyone who has lived even a little would understand that. But what's truly interesting isn't their existence, but their effect.
For some people, emotions like fear, guilt, or resentment are nothing more than temporary disturbances. They acknowledge them, process them, and move on. Others, however, aren't as fortunate.
A single moment of weakness can distort their judgment, their perception—even their sense of reality. At that point, it stops being something as simple as "emotion." It becomes something else entirely. Something capable of breaking a person from the inside.
…Which makes me wonder.
If that distortion continues long enough—would they even realize they've changed?
---
The first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes was the silence.
Not the peaceful kind.
The kind that sits wrong.
I pushed myself upright slowly. My body felt heavier than expected—unfamiliar, like it didn't fully belong to me yet. White walls. Medical equipment arranged neatly around the bed. A faint sterile smell that had probably stopped registering for anyone who worked here a long time ago.
A hospital.
"…This feels strange."
My voice came out dry. Weaker than I anticipated.
The last thing I could place was Maya. I remembered being with her. After that—nothing. Not darkness. Not dreams. Just a clean, empty gap where memory should have been.
Before I could think further, footsteps approached from outside. The door slid open and a nurse stepped in—then froze the moment she saw me sitting upright.
"…Eh?"
She stood there for a moment, her expression catching up slowly to what she was seeing.
Then—
"D-Doctor!! Patient 223 has woken up!"
Her voice echoed down the corridor as she rushed out.
I watched the empty doorway.
A reaction like that, from something as simple as a patient sitting up.
"…How did I end up here in the first place?"
My memories felt blurry. Like something had been carefully removed and the space left behind hadn't closed over yet.
But one thing remained—
"…Maya."
After that.
Nothing.
---
Several doctors rushed in shortly after.
"Oh my God… this is unbelievable…"
"He's regained consciousness…"
"Quick, call his parents!"
Their voices overlapped—somewhere between disbelief and relief. I watched them move around the room without saying anything.
I turned toward the nearest nurse.
"…Can you explain what's going on?"
She hesitated before answering.
"You… you were in a coma."
A brief pause.
"For five years."
Five years.
I let that sit for a moment.
"…I was nineteen when it happened," I said quietly. "Which means I'm twenty-four now."
The room kept moving around me—doctors talking, someone on a phone call, a nurse adjusting equipment that probably didn't need adjusting. I observed it without comment.
Five years wasn't a short time.
Not for me.
For them.
Mom.
Maya.
---
For a while no one spoke to me directly. The room filled with nothing but machine sounds and quiet footsteps. Time passed—minutes, maybe more.
Then—
Rapid footsteps from outside. Unsteady. The kind that don't bother with composure.
The door opened.
And in the next moment—
I was pulled into a tight embrace.
"Klein…! Klein—!"
My mother.
She held on tightly, her shoulders shaking. Her grip was strong but careful—like she was afraid I'd disappear again if she let go.
Another presence wrapped around me from the side.
"Stupid brother…!"
Maya.
"You idiot… do you even know how much we went through…?"
Her voice broke as she hit my shoulder weakly.
"…You stupid… stupid brother…"
I looked at her.
She'd been fifteen the last time I saw her. The person holding onto me now had been built from that same girl—taller, older, carrying five years of time in the way she held herself without seeming to realize it.
"…You were fifteen."
The words slipped out before I decided to say them.
"…You've grown a lot, Maya."
Her expression trembled.
"Don't say that like nothing happened…!"
Tears ran down her face as she tightened her grip.
"Don't you ever… ever leave us like that again…"
The room went quiet.
I raised my hand and placed it on her head.
"…Sorry."
"For causing you both so much trouble."
---
After talking with the doctors for a while, my mother stepped out to handle the discharge paperwork. I could still hear fragments of their conversation from outside.
"God seems to be very kind to you, Mrs. Ryu."
"I… I still can't believe it myself."
I tried to stand on my own.
The moment my feet touched the floor, a strange weakness ran through my legs. Not pain—more like my body had forgotten what standing felt like. Before I could lose balance, a hand caught my arm from the side.
"Don't push yourself," Maya said, holding on. "You just woke up after five years."
"…Thanks, kiddo."
She frowned immediately. "Don't call me that. I'm an adult now."
"You'll always be my little sister."
"Mugh…!" She turned away—but the frustration lasted about half a second before something quieter settled underneath it.
I kept my eyes on her for a moment longer than necessary.
It had been a long time since I'd seen that expression.
"…I'm glad," I murmured. More to myself than anyone else.
My mother appeared in the doorway a moment later, documents in hand. She paused before stepping inside—just long enough to look at me in a way she'd probably been stopping herself from doing all afternoon. Like she was confirming something she still didn't fully trust.
Then she moved on.
"Everything's done. We can go home now."
Home.
The word felt familiar but distant—like something I recognized the shape of without quite being able to hold it.
---
We took a taxi back.
I sat by the window with mom and Maya beside me, the city moving past the glass.
Tokyo.
I'd grown up here. It had always been dense, fast, modern in that particular way that Tokyo is modern—like the city never quite agreed to stop. But what was outside the window now didn't fully match what I remembered. The skyline had changed. Buildings stood taller, the architecture more deliberate, like the city had been rebuilt with something specific in mind rather than just grown. And smaller things too—the pedestrian crossings near Shibuya had green strips running along the ground at intervals. Evacuation route markers, built into the infrastructure like they'd always been there.
To everyone outside, they probably had been.
"The city looks different," I said.
"…Yeah," Maya replied after a brief pause. "It's changed quite a bit."
There was a small hesitation between those two sentences that she didn't seem aware of.
I turned back to the window.
The taxi slowed and stopped.
I leaned forward slightly. A large crowd had gathered ahead, barricades set up across the road. Several people in uniform were moving toward the restricted area—equipment far heavier than regular law enforcement, movements too coordinated to be improvised.
An announcement echoed from somewhere up front.
"It's an Eidolon invasion! This route is restricted! Please divert your vehicles!"
The word was unfamiliar.
I watched the uniformed individuals. They moved against the flow of fleeing civilians without urgency—calm, precise, like this wasn't the first time and they'd long since stopped being surprised by it.
"Not again…" the driver muttered under his breath.
"Maya," I said. "What's happening there?"
She hesitated. "…It's—"
"You should rest, Klein." My mother's voice was gentle. "Don't overwhelm yourself right now."
I shifted my gaze back to the window.
The civilians were panicking—uncoordinated, instinctive. The uniformed individuals were the opposite. Whatever was happening behind those barricades, both groups already understood something about it.
I didn't yet.
The driver sighed and turned the wheel.
We took another route.
---
We arrived about twenty-five minutes later.
I stepped out and looked up at the building.
It was exactly as I remembered. Same structure, same entrance, same quality of afternoon light. Nothing had changed.
"…It's been five years," I said. "Feels unreal."
"Yeah," Maya replied softly. "It does."
I kept looking at it for a moment longer.
Everything looked the same.
The feeling that came with looking at it did not.
---
The conversation with mom and Maya moved through the past five years the way those conversations do—gradually, without a clear shape, one thing leading to another. I listened, responded where it made sense, asked the occasional question.
But part of my attention hadn't fully left the street outside.
Eidolon invasion. This route is restricted.
The word had been used like it meant something specific. Everyone around me had reacted to it the way people react to things they've long since accepted—not with fear exactly, but with the quiet resignation of something that had become routine. Even when it turned fatal.
I'd missed five years. That much was obvious.
What wasn't obvious yet was the shape of what I'd missed.
"Maya."
She looked up.
"Can I borrow your phone for a while?"
"Sure." She handed it over without asking why.
I started with recent articles. Then worked backward.
---
My room was the same.
That was the first thing I noticed stepping inside—not the way the building outside had felt the same, which had sat wrong somehow, but genuinely unchanged. Like someone had kept it that way deliberately. Books along the right wall. Trophies and certificates on the left. The same quality of afternoon light through the window that I hadn't thought about once in five years and recognized immediately.
I sat on the edge of the bed and kept reading.
The books were mostly what they'd always been—Freud, Nietzsche, a few niche novels I'd picked up for reasons I no longer fully remembered. The trophies weren't something I thought about much. National Olympiad placements. Top one percent on a standardized cognitive assessment. A research participation certificate from when I was seventeen. They sat on the shelf the way old things do—present without asking for attention.
I turned back to the phone.
Eidolon.
The word had roots in classical mythology—phantom, image, a double of something real. A copy without an original. I noted it and moved on.
The older articles read differently from the recent ones. Uncertain. Words like alleged and unconfirmed showed up constantly in the early coverage—then vanished entirely within six months.
Whatever happened five years ago, the world had stopped being skeptical about it quickly.
One recently published article from a major outlet had what I was looking for—
"Eidolons are classified as non-human conscious entities capable of breaching into physical reality under specific psychological conditions. Upon manifestation, the entity establishes what researchers have termed a distortion scenario—a localized warping of the immediate environment that overlays the physical world with a psychologically structured alternate state. These scenarios are not random. The distortion reflects the internal psychological condition of a designated host—a human individual whose emotional state served as the threshold for the entity's entry."
I read that paragraph twice.
Conscious entities. Psychological conditions. A host.
The article went on—incident statistics, containment protocols, civilian advisories. I skimmed the rest.
The threshold for entry, it said, was tied to a specific psychological condition in the host.
I set the phone down.
The Freud on my shelf had a chapter on the uncanny—the feeling produced by something familiar behaving wrongly. I hadn't thought about that in years.
I looked at the ceiling for a while.
Then I got up and went back to the living room.
---
Mom and Maya were still there. I rejoined the conversation without mentioning what I'd been reading. Whatever they knew, they'd already shown they weren't ready to explain it.
That was fine.
I had time.
Or so I thought.
---
A few days passed.
They were quiet days, mostly. Mom kept the kitchen busy — there was always something on the stove, always a reason to call us for tea or food. It was her way of keeping things normal without saying she was trying to.
Maya was different about it. She didn't hover exactly — but she talked more than I remembered her talking. Filling silences that didn't need filling, updating me on things that didn't really need updating. The neighborhood, her friends, a show she'd been watching. Small things. Like she was slowly rebuilding something between us one sentence at a time and didn't want to stop long enough to acknowledge that was what she was doing.
I didn't mind it.
On the third morning she appeared in the doorway already dressed, jacket on.
"Going to the grocery store. Mom needs some things." She glanced at me briefly. "You've been inside for three days. Come on."
Not an invitation exactly. More like a younger sister deciding something on her brother's behalf and not leaving room for argument.
I looked up from the phone.
"Sure."
A short nod. She turned and headed for the door.
I'd been thinking about the articles again — specifically the gap between what had been published and what clearly hadn't. I set that aside and reached for my jacket.
It was an ordinary morning. The kind that doesn't ask to be remembered.
I didn't know yet that I would.