The sky above did not look like a sky. It was a fracture, a slow, bleeding wound of dark light that stretched across the horizon. Shadows moved against it, unnatural, writhing in the spaces where clouds once belonged. I stumbled across the street, every step uncertain, my stomach churning as though the Earth itself had decided to vomit.
Everything was wrong. Street signs bent like melted wax. Cars, frozen mid-motion, teetered on the edge of collapse. I blinked—and blinked again. Houses that had been familiar the day before now looked prehistoric, made of rough stone and thatched roofs, as if history itself had been rewritten in real time.
And then I saw him—the Unknown. Or rather, the fragment of him that remained visible in this unraveling world. His grin stretched impossibly wide, his two hands lifted, not touching anything yet somehow shaping everything.
"Ah, Souta Renjiro," he purred, voice echoing off mountains that hadn't existed yesterday. "Behold your little friend's wish. Mathematics… undone. The laws of numbers, erased. Civilization, trivial. Logic, meaningless. Order, obsolete."
My knees went weak. I wanted to scream, but no sound left me. Across the streets, people froze mid-action—or worse, dissolved into incoherence. Bridges bent like sine curves ripped from reality. Trees split open as if the geometry that held them together had been stolen.
I staggered into the street. "This… this can't be happening!" My voice trembled. "It was just a school test! A middle-schooler! You can't just—"
The Unknown laughed, a sound like shards of glass across a marble floor. "And yet, here we are. Because wishes do not measure the wisdom of their makers, Souta. Only the consequences."
The ground beneath me quivered. I watched, paralyzed, as water flowed backward, rivers carving new valleys in seconds, oceans reshaping continents. Humanity's greatest achievements—the pyramids, the Great Wall, the Louvre—blurred into crude stone approximations of themselves. Animals walked like humans, humans stumbled like apes. The world was unraveling into its primitive past.
I fell to my knees, clutching the pavement. "No… no… Why—?"
But I could feel it. That same familiar, oppressive presence crawling over the edges of my mind. The Unknown had slipped away from me, yes, but I still bore the weight of responsibility. Every second, every ruined building, every trembling mountain—was a reminder that one small wish could cascade into infinite disaster.
And above it all, the dark light of the altered sun poured down on Earth, illuminating the chaos, casting every wrong equation, every failed formula, every lost theorem into stark, impossible relief.
I knew then that the coming days would be nothing short of cataclysm. And I, Souta Renjiro, would have to face it—because someone had wished Mathematics out of existence.
I stumbled, trying to comprehend the scale of destruction, but my eyes were drawn downward—our clothes. Shirts stretched and warped, pants ballooning like sacks in uneven gravity. Shoes flattened and twisted, as if the laws that had kept fabrics and leather in place had also been erased. A student backpack, caught mid-step, floated a meter off the ground before spinning out of reach. Gravity no longer had rules, and even air felt like it was folding in on itself.
Then, piercing through the chaos, came a sound I had never thought I'd hear in the middle of a catastrophe: prayer.
From a distant hilltop, a formation of figures appeared, radiating a strange, stabilizing energy. Their robes flowed like liquid metal, amulets glowing with a white fire that fought the creeping darkness.
One of the exorcists raised a hand to the sky, speaking a strange language with a voice strong and unwavering:
"יְהוָה אוֹרִי וְיִשְׁעִי—מִמִּי אִירָא?
יְהוָה מָעוֹז חַיַּי—מִמִּי אֶפְחָד?"
Another voice joined in, echoing over the fractured city:
"וְגָעַר בַּאֹכֵל לְמַעַנְכֶם, וּבֵרַךְ אֶת־אֲסָמֶיךָ וְאֵת כָּל־אֲשֶׁר בָּהֶם."
The chanting and prayer interwove, building like a rising tide. Their words were not mere sounds—they were commands, their syllables carrying divine authority into the very fabric of reality. Sparks of white fire licked the ground where the exorcists stood, forming a lattice of energy that fought to tether the world back together.
The Unknown hovered above, grin widening despite the blows from earlier. "Exorcists… Now I remember."
He raised his arms, and the fractured sky pulsed with dark energy, sending shards of twisted light raining toward the Earth. The ground buckled, splitting into jagged rifts. Rivers of molten air snaked through the city streets. And yet, the exorcists did not falter.
Then it happened. A phenomenon I could not comprehend, yet could not tear my eyes from. Light, pure and radiant, erupted from the center of their circle. It wasn't like sunlight or fire—it was heavier, denser, as though reality itself had been rewritten in a single instant. Gravity snapped into uneven alignment, then corrected. Air shimmered and cleared. Structures, though primitive, began to settle into functional forms.
The arch-exorcist lowered his hands slowly, sweat beading his brow. "A miracle… May it guide the world back."
For the first time since the catastrophe began, I felt a tentative stability. People and animals moved with caution, as if testing the rules of existence again. Yet the devastation remained. Stone huts replaced skyscrapers, fires burned where buildings had fallen, rivers meandered in strange, impossible patterns. Mathematics, logic, even the simplest measurements had fractured—only faint traces survived.
The Unknown, weakened but still defiant, floated above the miracle like a storm cloud refusing to dissipate. His grin remained, teeth glinting like shards of obsidian. "Delightful," he whispered.
I blinked rapidly, trying to force my mind back into the present. The miracle had stabilized the ground beneath me, but the world still felt alien. Smoke curled from overturned huts, rivers ran in impossible loops, and animals eyed me warily as if I was the cause of it all.
I scrambled to my feet, knees scraping against jagged stones, and my chest heaving. "Everyone…" I muttered, my voice swallowed by the strange wind.
I sprinted through the fractured streets, weaving around floating debris and twisted remnants of what had once been cars and streetlamps. The familiar shouts of my classmates, the teasing laughter, even Kae's sharp voice—all of it was gone.
"Kenta? Hiro? Kae, Kae! Anyone?" I called desperately. My words echoed off the stone huts, carried away by the unstable currents of air.
I stumbled over a collapsed wall and peered into what had been a city park. A twisted tree loomed above, leaves floating as though gravity itself had forgotten them. There were footprints—too many to count but none of them seemed to belong to Kae.
A hollow panic began to give way around my ribs. "Kae!" I shouted again, louder, voice cracking. I couldn't hear her reply. My stomach sank as I realized she might have been swept away or… worse, caught in the Unknown's chaos.
I grabbed a shard of stone, using it to vault onto higher ground, hoping for a vantage point. The world stretched before me, a fractured landscape of stone huts, floating debris, and rivers twisting like molten silver. My friends' voices, my friends' faces, not one could I see.
My hands shook. The miracle had saved the planet from complete annihilation, but it hadn't restored what mattered most. Kae was missing. And somewhere above, The Unknown hovered, facing off against the exorcists.
"I have to find her," I whispered to myself, voice low and desperate. "No matter what… I have to find Kae."
I took a deep breath and began moving again, stepping carefully over warped ground, ignoring the pain in my legs, the scratches on my hands. Every step carried the weight of a world teetering between ruin and fragile order, and every second I delayed could mean losing her forever.
I followed the sound of distant coughing — a weak, hoarse rhythm barely cutting through the strange hum of the world. My heart leapt. Someone was alive.
I tore through a cluster of half-formed huts — primitive stone structures that looked like they had been sculpted by time itself in an instant. Their edges were uneven, their walls pulsing faintly as though still solidifying.
"Kenta! Hiro!" I yelled.
A muffled voice came from inside. "Oi—! Souta?! That you?!"
Relief hit me like a punch. "Yeah! Hold on!" I braced my shoulder against the wall and pushed with everything I had. The stone was heavier than it looked, but something inside me refused to give up. After a few seconds that felt like forever, the slab cracked and shifted, just enough for me to squeeze through.
The inside of the hut was dim and humid, lit only by flickering remnants of the exorcists' miracle light. Kenta sat slumped against the wall, his shirt torn and face smeared with dirt, while Hiro leaned over him, trying to pry a rock off his leg.
"About time you showed up," Kenta wheezed, forcing a grin. "You look like you've been through an apocalypse."
I stared at him. "Bro, we are going through one."
"Fair point," Hiro muttered, his usual composure replaced by grim focus. "Help me with this."
Together, we lifted the rock off Kenta's leg. He winced but managed to stand, limping slightly.
"What the hell happened out there?" Hiro asked. "One second we're walking, the next—boom—everything's stone and sky and floating junk!"
"I… can't explain," I said, not daring to explain the part about wishes or demons. "Where's Kae?"
Kenta frowned. "Wasn't she with you?"
The question cut deeper than any wound. My throat tightened. "No… I thought she was gone along with you guys."
They exchanged a look — the kind of look that makes silence deafening.
Hiro straightened his glasses, though one lens was cracked. "Then she's still out there."
Outside, the wind howled. The world was eerily quiet beneath it — no birds, no engines, just the whisper of stone settling into its new, impossible shape.
Kenta placed a hand on my shoulder. "We'll find her, man. You know she's not the type to go down easy."
I nodded, but the knot in my chest didn't loosen.