"To put it plainly," she began, her voice a calm stream in the café's mundane hum, "you are marked for death. Very soon. It was I who selected that path for you. Within the gacha game, by the choice presented."

  Thus spoke Kyouya Tsubaki, maintaining the serene, almost preternatural composure for which she, a figure renowned for both talent and beauty, was known.

  The recipient of this dire pronouncement, Seiichiro Kuremitsu, a mere lad clad in the somber gakuran uniform, glanced across the table at his classmate, then emitted a single, dry cough. It was less a choked gasp than a crude attempt to stifle the rising tide of unease churning within the pit of his stomach.

  *(Gods... she utters such madness with a face of uttermost gravity. Has her mind snapped? Has some unnamable influence claimed her reason?)*

  Kuremitsu silently spat the venomous thought. But if not madness, then what? If not delirium, then this was a matter of critical, life-altering import – a revelation that should have been imparted months prior, perhaps upon their first disquieting encounter, not three full cycles of the moon later! Why now, in this precise moment? The thought was maddening. *Though,* he mused grimly, *reports of strange lights in the sky, of unidentified aerial phenomena, have become distressingly common of late. Perhaps it is merely the season for such lunacy? And yet, winter's chill held the world in its grip...*

  His bewilderment was naked upon his face.

  Kyouya Tsubaki, the celebrated prodigy of Sanpou Middle and High School, fixed her gaze upon Kuremitsu's *sanpaku* eyes – those unsettlingly reptilian orbs where the irises floated like isolated islands in vast white seas – and continued, her voice unwavering.

  "This very world," she stated, the words falling like stones into a fathomless well, "is naught but a gacha game. 'Pale Highlight', it is named. In the sphere from which I hail, it was thus. Your existence, this reality you perceive, Kuremitsu-kun… it was mere fiction."

  Kuremitsu felt his breath catch anew, a rictus of disbelief tightening his features. They sat in a quaint, almost offensively cheerful café nestled on the fringe of the sprawling black market – a place Kyouya herself had selected, murmuring of 'matters to discuss.' The cloying, sickly-sweet aroma of the synthetic coffee – S-Coffee, a wretched simulacrum of a lost age's brew – assaulted his nostrils. He was acutely aware of the profound revulsion contorting his face.

  Then, a sharp, insistent pain erupted beneath the table. He looked down. Kyouya's impeccably maintained leather boot was grinding, with deliberate pressure, into the worn toe of his waterproof sneaker. More pressure. He winced, a low groan escaping his lips. Kyouya tapped a slender finger upon the tabletop. An unspoken command: *Attend.*

  Reluctantly, he dragged his gaze upwards, back to the damnable table, back to her. A hideous churning commenced within his stomach. He felt the vile urge to retch.

  Kyouya, her foot still pinning his, tilted her head, a slow, disconcertingly smug smile curving her lips, transforming her earlier intensity into something akin to cruel amusement.

  "Do my words strike you as... peculiar, Kuremitsu-kun? Yet, they are naught but the unvarnished truth. I was... reincarnated, you see. Thrust into this coil. And in that prior existence, the realm you inhabit was indeed a gacha game. A fabrication. You comprehend the term, I trust? Gacha games? These devices," she gestured vaguely, perhaps towards his pocket, "these 'smartphones', exist even in this blighted age. And you, Kuremitsu-kun, you dabble in such things, do you not? The proclivities of an *otaku* are often transparent."

  *(A gacha game... Sweet mercy.)*

  Kuremitsu dredged up the memory of the few meager game applications cluttering his own device. Not 'Pale Highlight'. Another one – a relic, supposedly resurrected from the 'Reiwa' era, some half-forgotten epoch seven centuries hence. A quaint thing of pixelated sprites and archaic mechanics. If this grim reality truly mirrored such a ludic construct, then perhaps Kyouya's mind had been irrevocably shattered by some cosmic gacha pull – a hundred frantic summons yielding only the SSR of utter, gibbering madness. Direst misfortune. Could any sanatorium possibly mend such a fractured psyche?

  A familiar, oppressive fullness bloomed in his belly. His throat rattled with a low gurgle. The ever-present nausea threatened to crest. He lowered his head, instinctively placing a hand over his abdomen, as if to contain the unease coiling within.

  "...Then," he forced the words out, lifting only his eyes to meet her unnervingly steady gaze, "when is my… demise… scheduled?"

  Kyouya's smile evaporated. She bit her lip, a flicker of something unreadable – pity? resolve? – in her eyes. The pressure on his foot subsided.

  "Forgive me, the precise date eludes my memory. However," she continued, her voice regaining its clinical detachment, "the central narrative, the game's true commencement, typically unfurled during the winter recess, immediately preceding the protagonist's – not I, you understand? – ascension to the second year of high schooling. As we now stand upon the precipice of that very hiatus, finishing our first year… it is probable, Kuremitsu-kun, that within this span…"

  "I shall perish," Kuremitsu finished, the words tasting like ash.

  "Indeed. While one might hope for deviation, for some unforeseen anomaly… fatality remains the most likely outcome. It is written." She pronounced the verdict with chilling finality. Wholly, irrevocably mad. Yet, the conviction in her eyes was absolute. Beyond treatment, then. Kuremitsu swallowed another acrid burp and pressed on.

  "Kyouya-san… Elaborate, if you would. Having initiated this… this grotesque discourse, I feel compelled to hear its conclusion."

  "──Yes! Of course! My gratitude, Kuremitsu-kun!"

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Her face instantly brightened, an almost feverish intensity replacing her previous gravity. She leaned forward, eager, conspiratorial. As she did, the pink cardigan shifted, affording him another fleeting, unwelcome glimpse – the delicate hollow beneath her collarbone, the pale skin, the almost imperceptible mole, the shadowed valley hinting at deeper contours. He jerked his gaze away, seeking refuge in the lukewarm dregs of his S-Coffee. The artificial taste – bitterness, acidity, that strange, cloying sweetness – coated his tongue.

  Just as Kyouya opened her mouth to spill forth her cryptic narrative, the world outside changed.

  BUUUUUUUUU────NNNNNNN............

  A profound, soul-shuddering hum vibrated through the very air, low and resonant, like the groaning of a dying world. The café's windows trembled violently; the cups upon the table danced a macabre jig. This was no terrestrial tremor. Something vast, something *other*, hung suspended in the bruised sky above the doomed city.

  Kuremitsu felt an inexplicable weight, a leaden paralysis seizing his limbs. He yearned to look out the window beside him, yet could not. An instinctual, nameless dread held his very thoughts captive.

  Then, in a blinding flash, the world outside erupted in an unholy golden glare. Eldritch lightning.

  The actinic burst momentarily annihilated the café's interior, plunging it into stark, absolute white. An infinitesimal pause of utter silence hung heavy in the air. And then──

  KRA-KOOOOOM!!!!

  A concussive roar ripped through the fabric of reality, threatening to rupture his eardrums. The building shuddered violently under the impact. The electric lights overhead sputtered and died, leaving only the guttering, anemic flame of the table lamp to ward off the encroaching Stygian gloom. Mere mid-afternoon, yet darkness had descended like a shroud.

  With a monumental effort of will, Kuremitsu tore his gaze towards the window.

  Before him lay a scene of utter devastation, a vista torn from some fevered nightmare.

  The densely packed warren of hovels and shacks that had stood there moments before was simply… gone. Replaced by a yawning, smoking crater, vast and obscene. Within its depths, sullen embers pulsed, casting a malevolent, flickering crimson upon the unnatural twilight.

  Lightning had fallen. No – that felt inadequate, somehow wrong. He forced his gaze upward, toward the turbulent heavens.

  Something *lurking* in that bruised sky had *vomited* lightning.

  He scrubbed at his eyes, disbelieving, and looked again. High, high above, in the gloom-choked zenith, floated an aberrant silhouette. Cyclopean wings, four in number, beat against the oppressive air. A grotesquely curved body, like a sliver of a dead moon given hideous, biological life. From this nightmare corpus extended two impossibly long necks, each terminating in a crocodilian *visage* twisted into something infinitely more predatory and malevolent.

  It was a **Kaiju**. A beast torn from the pages of forgotten myths, or perhaps, from the nascent terrors of this post-apocalyptic age.

  Kuremitsu had trod this broken world for nigh on two decades, yet Kaiju had always been relegated to the realm of cautionary tales, of flickering pre-Fall archive footage. But it was *there*. Tangible. Real. A monstrous sovereign holding court in the winter sky, cloaked in the stolen fire of thunderstorms, gliding with an obscene, alien grace.

  The Kaiju, folding its four titanic, elephantine limbs with unnerving dexterity, slowly parted the massive jaws of its twin visages. Within those gaping maws, a baleful, golden luminescence began to swell, pulsing with terrifying potential.

  Again, the levin-bolt spat forth.

  A heartbeat later, the thunderclap. Through the window, Kuremitsu watched in numb horror as a distant mountain range of shanties violently imploded from its peak downwards. Fresh pyres bloomed across the cityscape, spreading with horrifying speed, consuming all in their path. A symphony of infernal destruction.

  Tiny, ant-like figures scrambled from the collapsing ruins, their silent screams lost in the cacophony of the Kaiju's triumphant, multifaceted bellow.

  *(Was I being watched?)* The unsettling sensation returned, a prickling on the back of his neck. He instinctively scanned the sky beyond the window, seeking the source, finding nothing── then the Kaiju unleashed another bolt. The blinding flash erased the fleeting impression of unseen eyes, leaving only the roaring tempest.

  Kuremitsu jerked his gaze back to his companion. Kyouya was observing the cataclysm outside with a preternatural calm, as if detachedly critiquing some cinematic spectacle. The flickering, hellish light of the burning city painted her profile in shifting shades of crimson and shadow.

  "Kyouya-san? ...This... You couldn't possibly have… foreseen this?!"

  "No?" She sounded genuinely, if disturbingly, unperturbed. "The gacha game mentioned the advent of Kaiju, certainly, but not this precise timing, this specific... performance. Things appear... rather dire, wouldn't you agree? Perhaps a strategic withdrawal is in order?"

  Kyouya rose with fluid grace, pulling on the trench coat. She gathered her long, night-dark hair into a bun beneath the hood, drained the remaining S-Coffee with a single, decisive swallow, and then met Kuremitsu's stunned gaze with an expectant look.

  He remained frozen for a moment, clad only in his thin gakuran over a red sweatshirt and tattered jeans. To perish here? Today? Exactly as this mad girl predicted?

  No. That felt… unsatisfying. Insufficient.

  He met her questioning eyes, his voice a low, ragged rasp.

  "...Why? Why am I destined to perish? In that… that gacha game… after my demise, what transpired?"

  "The 'why' remains obscure, I confess. But… the world *after* your passing…" A flicker of something akin to genuine enthusiasm lit her eyes. "It proved… remarkably diverting. Sufficiently so that I, for the first time, succumbed to the lure of microtransactions."

  "Damn it all…" Kuremitsu surged to his feet. The familiar nausea churning in his gut was now overshadowed by a bizarre, almost giddy sense of defiance.

  "Then I shall *live* to witness this 'diverting' world myself! Even if it devolves into some accursed otome game!"

  "Heh," a ghost of a real smile touched her lips. "There was a notable abundance of... aesthetically pleasing female character designs, as I recall."

  Kyouya watched, seemingly content, as Kuremitsu's sanpaku eyes – typically cold, alien – now blazed with a feverish, almost unhinged light, reflecting the apocalyptic panorama outside.

  They fled the café. Turning their backs on the inferno consuming the city, they ran, ran desperately away from the direction the Kaiju had taken, ran simply towards continued, however precarious, existence.

  Kyouya led, a beacon of unsettling calm amidst the chaos. Kuremitsu followed, clutching instinctively at his churning stomach. The nausea remained, a low, insistent thrum beneath the frantic rush of adrenaline. But beneath it, deeper still, something else was stirring. Something hot, ancient, and profoundly *other*, roused from its slumber within the depths of his being.

  *(You watch, you damned gacha game world… I refuse to die yet.)*

  As he ran, Kuremitsu's sanpaku eyes seemed to drink in the surrounding pandemonium – the licking flames that scorched the night sky, the crackling lightning that rent the heavens asunder, and perhaps, something more: points of light peering down from between the smoke-choked clouds, like the watchful, **many-faceted eyes of cosmic beings**. All this malevolent, terrifying light converged, reflecting with a fierce, defiant glint in his gaze.

  Kyouya, running beside him, did not fail to notice that predatory gleam. A subtle, almost imperceptible smile played upon her lips. This terrible, beautiful, unholy brilliance she now beheld in his eyes – this, she knew, was precisely the sign she had awaited since first setting foot in this doomed, yet strangely fascinating, reality.