Ritsu didn't remember falling.
He remembered impact. A weight crushing his chest. Dust filled his mouth—gritty, alkaline, and tasting of crushed concrete and blood. Then nothing.
Then sound.
Not screams anymore. Silence. Heavy and wet.
He opened his eyes.
Light filtered through cracks in the rubble—thin, dusty beams that illuminated floating particles. His body ached. His ears rang. He tried to move his legs and felt... nothing. Not pain. Just absence.
Am I dead?
No. He could feel his heartbeat. Slow. Steady. Wrong.
He pushed against the debris. A slab shifted. Then another. He clawed his way up through broken desks and shattered glass and things he didn't look at too closely.
When he finally broke the surface, he wished he hadn't.
The classroom was gone. The hallway was gone. The school was a crater of twisted metal and splintered wood. Bodies lay scattered like fallen leaves—some buried, some half-exposed, some reaching toward a sky that didn't care.
Ritsu stood.
His legs held. Barely.
He turned in a slow circle. Looked at the faces he recognized. The kid who sat behind him. The girl who always laughed too loud. The teacher—still gripping a piece of chalk, even in death.
Ritsu looked down at his hands.
They were cut. Bleeding. But the blood didn't drip. It steamed and then vanished. The cuts closed. Fresh skin stretched over the wounds. He watched it happen. He observed his body healing itself.
Something was holding his left hand.
He looked.
It was Hoshi's hand.
Just the hand. Severed at the wrist. Her fingers still curled around his palm, frozen in the grip of her final embrace.
Ritsu opened his mouth.
No sound came out.
He fell to his knees. The impact sent pain shooting up his shins, but he didn't feel it. He stared at the hand. At the small silver ring on her finger—the one she always twisted when she was nervous.
He remembered twisting it once. Asking what it meant.
"My grandmother gave it to me," she'd said. "She said to give it to someone I love before I die."
Ritsu screamed.
It wasn't a word. It wasn't a cry for help. It was just sound—raw and ugly and torn from somewhere deep. He screamed until his throat gave out. Then he sat there, knees in the dust, holding a dead girl's hand, and waited for the world to end again.
It didn't.
A bell.
Ritsu heard it behind him. A single, clear chime—the kind that belonged in temples, not ruins.
He turned.
The buffalo stood three feet from his face. Its nostrils flared. A hot, grassy breath washed over him. And on its back, sitting cross-legged like a farmer returning from market, was the man.
But not the man.
Yama had changed. His robes now shimmered with constellations. His eyes burned with the light of dying stars. In one hand, he held the leather-bound book. In the other, a bell on a long chain.
"Why?" Ritsu's voice was a rasp. "Why was I the only one?"
Yama tilted his head. "Your name is not written in the book." He said it simply. Like it explained everything. "That is your fate."
Ritsu's hands curled into fists. "What if I choose to die right here?" His voice shook. "Will that change my fate?"
Yama stroked his beard. The gesture was almost... gentle. "Choosing to die here?"He laughed—a low, rumbling sound that vibrated through the rubble. "You can die here. But the question is, will you?"
Ritsu bowed his head.
The silence stretched.
"...No."
"Don't be ashamed." Yama's voice softened. "It is the nature of life to cling to life." He turned the buffalo. Began to ride away.
Then stopped.
"Ah. One more thing."
Ritsu looked up.
"Young one, lift your head." Yama snapped his fingers. A book appeared—smaller than the original, bound in dark leather, unmarked. "I have a job for you. You seem... competent enough."
Ritsu stared at the book. Said nothing.
"If you complete the task, I will reward you with a boon." Yama paused. Let the weight settle. "And the life of that Yamamori girl."
Ritsu's breath caught.
Her soul. Still out there. Still somewhere.
"I accept."
He didn't ask what the job was. He pulled a pen from the rubble—cracked, leaking ink—and signed the contract without reading a single line.
Yama laughed. Deep. Ancient. Satisfied.
"Then prepare to become the God of Death in another universe."
He raised his bell.
Rang it once.
And Ritsu was gone.
Ritsu landed on cold stone.
His knees buckled. He caught himself with one hand, palm scraping against rough granite. The air smelled different—ozone and old incense and something sweet that might have been decay.
He looked up.
The sky was wrong.
Two moons hung overhead—one large and gold, one small and red. Stars clustered in patterns he didn't recognize. A city glowed in the distance, its towers built from black glass and pale bone.
No Yama. No buffalo. Just Ritsu, alone, on his hands and knees, in a world that had never heard of linear algebra.
"I cannot be there," Yama's voice echoed inside his skull. Ritsu flinched. The voice was inside him—not in his ears, but behind his eyes, woven into his thoughts. "I have my own responsibilities in my universe. The universe you are in now has a missing death god. You will fill that role until the higher gods choose a replacement—or until we find the old one."
"But how?" Ritsu's voice was small. "What should I do?"
"Do not worry."
Pain.
Not the sharp pain of injury—the deep, existential pain of something unfolding inside his mind. Knowledge poured into him. Not learned. Unlocked. The weight of every soul that had ever died. The texture of a last breath. The thousand small rituals of passing—the prayers, the silences, the moments when the living let go and the dead moved on.
Ritsu doubled over. His nails scraped against the stone. He gasped—not from pain anymore, but from the sheer size of what he now understood.
"Young one, this is what we call enlightenment. The divine knowledge I have given you is the Enlightenment of Death."
The pressure eased.
Ritsu sat up slowly. His hands were no longer shaking. His breathing had steadied. He looked at the two moons, at the strange city, at the book now resting in his lap.
He didn't feel joy.
He didn't feel peace.
But he felt clarity—cold and sharp as a blade. He could comprehend the nature of death itself. Every death. Every ending. Every last breath across an entire universe.
"Now you are capable enough to handle everything by yourself." Yama's voice was fading, stretching thin like a thread about to snap. "Farewell, young Kaminagi. Do not disappoint me."
The voice vanished.
Ritsu sat alone under an unfamiliar sky, holding a book that wasn't his, carrying a power he never asked for.
He raised his left hand.
Hoshi's blood was still on his fingers. Dried now. Flaking.
He pressed those fingers to his lips.
Then he opened the book.