The news app refreshed the same three stories for the fifteenth time. Reiji closed it. Opened it again. Closed it.

  His apartment had somehow become smaller since morning. The walls were a color that had probably been described to him once—beige, maybe, or taupe—but which now looked like the inside of something dying. The light from his phone cast everything in that particular gray-white that made it difficult to care about physical space at all. The kitchen table was three steps from the window. The window was four steps from the bed. His apartment had become a circuit.

  Forty-eight hours until the System. Two days. One thousand one hundred and twenty minutes if he were the sort of person who counted minutes, which he was, which meant it was two thousand eight hundred and forty seconds if he got weird about it, which he was about to.

  He stopped that train of thought. His brain was turning into grit.

  The notebook sat on the table where he'd left it three hours ago. He'd read it six times. The entries were becoming strange to him, written by a person he'd once been but wasn't anymore. The handwriting looked frantic. Dungeon spawn points in chronological order. Monster distribution maps sketched from memory. A list of items that would be valuable in the first week—salt, iodine, needles, fishing line. Why had he written that? He couldn't fish. In the first timeline, he'd never fished. But the memory of writing this list, of believing these things mattered, was so solid it hurt.

  Five years was a long time to be alone with a single set of memories.

  He'd left Tokyo once he realized the System was happening, going back to Sendai where it had started the first time. That had been the logical choice, the prepared choice. But he was alone here in a one-bedroom apartment with spotty internet and a supermarket downstairs that would be empty in two days. In forty-eight hours, everything would change, and he would be alone in a way he'd never been alone before.

  His phone buzzed. He checked it. An ad for a credit card company. He'd somehow ended up on seventeen mailing lists in three days.

  The window showed an ordinary street. A woman passed pushing a stroller. A young man on a bicycle, phone in one hand, handle bars in the other. An old couple walking slowly, the man's arm linked through the woman's. They had no idea. They were living in their ordinary Thursday afternoon, completely unaware that the version of Thursday they were experiencing had an expiration date. In two days, Thursday would mean something entirely different. Thursday would be the day the world ended and began again at the same moment.

  He was sure of this. Almost sure. Ninety-five percent sure.

  The System arrived at 11:47 PM on Friday. Simultaneous across the planet. Every person received a notification—a blue box that appeared in their vision, not on any screen, but directly into their perception. The notification said: "System initialized. Awaiting authorization to access baseline human data. Y/N?"

  He'd clicked yes. Everyone had clicked yes. What else were you supposed to do when reality offered you a choice and the alternative was admitting that you were hallucinating?

  Except he wasn't sure it was Friday anymore. It was Thursday afternoon. He'd calculated backward from his memory of waking up, and the math had felt solid at the time, but now he sat with it and the certainty curdled. What if it had been Thursday instead? What if the System came on Thursday night?

  What if it came tonight?

  He stood up. Walked to the window. The street hadn't changed. Same woman, now halfway down the block. Different bicycle rider—no, maybe the same one, just from a different angle. He couldn't tell anymore if he was noticing things or if his brain was just cycling through the same images it had already processed, creating fake motion where there was none.

  His apartment had three chairs, one table, a bed, and a small kitchenette that he'd never used. He had a microwave. He had a rice cooker he didn't remember buying. The floorboards were wood-colored laminate that had started to feel hostile. He sat on one of the chairs.

  The notebook pages crinkled when he picked them up again. His writing had been careful once, each kanji perfectly formed. But as he read deeper into the entries, the handwriting became jagged. Abbreviations appeared. At one point he'd drawn a dungeon schematic and then scribbled it out so hard the pen had torn the paper.

  "Stop," he said aloud. His voice sounded unfamiliar.

  He'd been alone for three days before meeting Akari. Then he'd talked to someone for twenty minutes and it had broken something in him. The pattern of speech, the familiar tilt of her head, the way she'd laughed at something he'd said—none of that was new information. He'd lived five years with those details. But experiencing them in real time, in a version of her that didn't know him, had made the gap between what he remembered and what was real into something he could feel in his teeth.

  She was alive. That was the thing. She was alive in a way that the version of her he carried in his head wasn't. The real Akari had never met him. She'd never joined his party. She'd never died trying to clear a dungeon that was too high level because Reiji had miscalculated the progression curve and gotten her killed.

  He didn't call her. He turned off his phone. Then he turned it back on. Then he turned it off again.

  The waiting was worse than anything else would be. He understood this intellectually. The System would arrive, and then there would be objectives. Survive. Grow. Learn the new rules. Adapt. The panic of a new paradigm would settle into the baseline of existence, and people would figure it out the way they figured out everything else. But the waiting was clean. The waiting was pure. The waiting was the only time he could be sure that he was the only person who knew what was coming, and the weight of that knowledge was beginning to crush his spine into powder.

  ---

  The park was empty at three in the afternoon on a Thursday. This was the parking lot where the first dungeon had spawned, the one that had opened in a shopping mall's underground garage and had killed forty-three people before anyone understood what a dungeon was. He'd been here in the first timeline, not during the spawn but a week after, when curiosity and boredom had driven him to the location. The scarring on the concrete had already been covered up by that point, but he'd felt it anyway. The wrongness of the place.

  Now the concrete was smooth and ordinary and completely unmarked by the future.

  He stood in the center of the empty lot for twenty minutes. A few people passed. A dog walker. An elderly man jogging with impressive determination. A group of elementary school children in green and gold uniforms, on some kind of field trip. None of them looked at him. He was wrong-shaped to their eyes somehow. The way he stood, the way he breathed—it was all slightly off. He was a person carrying information from a dead timeline, and it showed.

  "You lost, buddy?"

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Reiji turned. The man asking was maybe sixty, with the papery skin and loose clothing of someone who'd been living rough for long enough that it had become a permanent state. His eyes were sharp though. Aware.

  "Yeah," Reiji said. "Ten out of ten lost. No notes."

  The homeless man laughed. Not at the joke, maybe, but at the strangeness of the answer. "Well, where're you trying to go?"

  "Nowhere in particular."

  "That's the best kind of lost." The man settled onto a bench that definitely hadn't been there a moment ago, or maybe had always been there and Reiji was having problems with continuity. "The kind where you don't need to be found."

  Reiji wanted to sit down. He also wanted to run. He did neither. "How long have you been in this city?"

  "Sendai? Hell, I don't know. Years. The kind of years that all blur together. Why? You selling something?" The man's tone was idle, not suspicious.

  "No. Just wondering if you've noticed anything strange. Lately."

  "Strange is my baseline, friend." The man pulled out a cigarette. Didn't light it, just rolled it between his fingers. "Nothing changes here. Same buildings every day. Same people. Same questions from people like you. 'You lost?' I tell them I found something a long time ago and lost it again, and now I'm content with the losing part."

  Reiji sat down next to him. The bench was harder than it looked.

  "If I told you something was going to change," Reiji said carefully, "in two days, would you believe me?"

  The homeless man considered this with the seriousness of a philosophical problem. "Depends on whether you seem like someone who knows the future or someone who got pushed out of reality real hard and landed weird."

  "I'm not sure there's a difference."

  "Now that's wisdom." The man looked at him properly for the first time. "Yeah. I'd believe you. Everything changes. The trick is noticing it while it's happening instead of after. That's when you lose things. The in-between part."

  Reiji left him on the bench and walked toward the school. The fence was high enough that he couldn't see over it, but he could hear the children. They moved with the careless energy of creatures who had no concept of impermanence, who believed that tomorrow would be fundamentally similar to today. In forty-eight hours, that would stop being true. Their Saturday would have rules that didn't exist on Friday. Their concept of growing up would become tied to systems and numbers and progression trees.

  The oldest he'd known anyone to get in the first timeline was twenty-eight. The Rifts had started appearing at year five, and by year seven, the world had developed a permanent weather system that was essentially incompatible with human survival. But these children had maybe thirteen years before things got genuinely bad. They had time.

  He stood at the fence for a long time. No one asked him why.

  ---

  The subway station had a woman on a bench who was checking her phone and being completely ordinary about it. Reiji watched her for three minutes. She was reading news articles. Sipping coffee from a paper cup. Adjusting her bag. Everything about her suggested a person who believed that tomorrow would contain surprises that were pleasant and manageable. A work email, maybe. A message from a friend. A text from someone important asking her on a date.

  In two days, all of those contexts would be meaningless.

  This was the station where the second major dungeon had formed. It had opened in a tunnel connection that was sealed off now in Reiji's memory but which was probably operational right now, in this timeline. The dungeon had gone deeper than expected. They'd sent in three full parties before realizing that the structure went down five levels, not two. Most of the people he'd known had learned the dungeon hierarchy by dying in it.

  The woman stood up, gathered her things, and walked away. Reiji sat on her bench. It was still warm.

  The anticipation was a physical thing now, sitting in his chest like something that had been swallowed wrong. It was worse than fear. Fear had a point. Fear meant your body understood the danger and was preparing a response. But anticipation was the knowledge that change was coming without the ability to prepare for it, because the change was too fundamental. It was like trying to brace yourself for the removal of gravity. The action didn't matter. The result didn't matter. The in-between moment of waiting was where you actually died.

  He counted the tiles on the subway platform. There were forty-three tiles between the bench and the edge of the platform. He counted them three times to make sure. The third count gave him forty-four, and he started over.

  A train pulled in. A train pulled out. The woman he'd been watching was long gone, and he had no way of knowing if she was on the train or if she'd taken a different exit entirely. The certainty that he'd been tracking her had evaporated the moment she'd left his line of sight.

  His phone buzzed. A reminder he'd set three days ago: "Check preparation supplies."

  He had a four-star hotel that he was saving for after. A reservation under a fake name, paid for in cash. Ten thousand yen in small bills. Five liters of water. Twenty energy bars. A first aid kit that was probably more useless than it was useful. A notebook with copies of the dungeon spawn locations from the first timeline. Maps of the city drawn from memory.

  It was nothing. It was everything. It was the gap between thinking you knew what was coming and actually knowing.

  ---

  His apartment was a dark room at 11 PM. He'd turned off most of the lights and was sitting in the glow of his phone, watching a news cycle that had stopped being informative around hour three and had become something closer to meditation. Celebrity gossip. A scandal involving a politician nobody important. A weather forecast that suggested the weekend would be slightly warmer than the weekday.

  The world was going to end in approximately thirty-eight hours, and nobody was writing about it because nobody knew.

  This was the part that was actually driving him insane. Not the knowledge itself—knowledge was manageable. Knowledge was something you could write in a notebook and keep in your apartment and tell yourself was real. But the isolation of that knowledge was something else. It was living in a world where reality was fundamentally different for one person and staying that way for everyone else.

  He wrote a will on his phone's notes app. It took twelve minutes.

  "My name is Kazuki Reiji. I was born in Tokyo in 2006. I've lived in Sendai for three days. If you're reading this, something went very wrong, and you should probably not trust anything I said before the System arrived. Sorry about that. Ten out of ten dying confusing."

  He read it back. He deleted it.

  The light from his phone was too bright. Everything was too bright or too dark. There was no medium. He lay in bed without sleeping, listening to the sounds of the building. Someone above him was watching television. Someone below him was running water. The world was full of people doing ordinary things, and he was a ghost in it, existing in a different timeline than everyone else.

  Akari was probably asleep right now. She was probably having normal dreams about normal things. In two days, she'd be terrified. In three days, she'd start adapting. In a week, she'd be one of the first to figure out how to use the System to heal. She'd be good at it. She'd be great at it. She'd survive longer than most.

  In his timeline, she'd died at the bottom of the Shinjuku Rift. At level 34, fighting monsters that scaled to level 38. Reiji had misjudged the progression curve, and she'd followed him down anyway because that was who she was. She'd followed him down and she'd died, and he'd had to carry her corpse up seventeen floors of dungeon to get her to a place where she could resurrect.

  He should have called her. He should have warned her somehow, without explaining where the knowledge came from. He could have said anything. "Stay inside on Friday night. Don't open any blue boxes. Just ignore them."

  Instead, he'd walked away from her.

  Sleep was not coming. Sleep required believing that you would wake up in a world that was substantially similar to the one you'd gone to sleep in. Reiji couldn't manage that particular faith. He watched the news cycle again. He'd watched it three times already. The anchors' words were starting to sound pre-recorded, like they were playing back a tape of a world that had already ended.

  The ceiling of his apartment was textured in a way that suggested water damage at some point in the distant past. He lay on his back and counted the damaged patches. There were seven of them. He counted them again. Still seven.

  Time was moving wrong. The hours were stretching. It was 11:47 PM on Thursday. He was sure of this. Almost sure. The math had worked out when he'd calculated backward, but the math might have been wrong. The date on his phone said Thursday. The time said 11:47.

  Forty-seven hours left.

  He closed his eyes and opened them immediately, afraid he'd miss the exact moment the System arrived if he wasn't conscious to witness it. Which was stupid. The System arriving was not dependent on his attention. The blue box would appear regardless of whether he was looking. But the idea of waking up to a changed world, of discovering that the System had come and gone while he was unconscious, felt like a failure he couldn't manage.

  He fell asleep at 2 AM anyway, phone still in his hand, news still playing on the screen. The world was still ordinary in sleep. In forty-seven hours it would stop being. He'd be asleep when it happened, probably. He always missed the important parts.