A wall of digital grey slammed down over the monitors, extinguishing the window to the other world. In the center of the void floated the EWS logo—a stylized eye—and beneath it, a text box radiating cold, bureaucratic finality:

  [This broadcast has been suspended due to an ethical guideline violation.] [No further details will be provided.]

  The message was absolute. It was the system saying: Look away.

  A wave of relief washed through the EWS main control room, audible as a collective, tired sigh from many throats. The blazing storm of the comment section—the scrolling waterfall of confusion, fear, and accusations—vanished instantly, replaced by the sterile stillness of a suspended feed.

  The crisis, publicly, was contained. But deeper inside the operations floor, behind the tiered rows of lower-level terminals, another feed still pulsed with life. On the restricted internal monitors, the signal from the other world remained unbroken.

  The screen showed the high-definition reality of the night field. Claval was still collapsed in the grass, her chest heaving. Roa was still pouring her desperate, milky light into the wounds. Naz stood like a monolith, his sword raised against the darkness. The suspension was a lie. The observation never stopped.

  "Viewer-side termination complete," an operator reported. His voice was hollow, scraped clean of emotion. Dark circles bruised the skin under his eyes, the blue light of the monitor highlighting his exhaustion. The surprise stream had pushed his body past its limit, but his hands kept moving across the keyboard. "Connection severed to all public nodes. We are now in Ghost Mode."

  "…Orders from HQ."Another operator, a senior supervisor, stood up. He held a freshly printed memo in his hand. The paper was still warm.

  "[Priority Alpha: Identify the male subject who appeared in the footage. Cross-reference voice and biometric data immediately.]" The room went quiet. The supervisor read aloud, his tone flat and monotonous.

  "Yeah," someone muttered from the back row. "I figured this was coming…" A murmur rolled through the room, heavy as lead. It wasn't excitement; it was the groaning of gears grinding into motion. They weren't just observers anymore. The technical team sprang into action with practiced lethargy that quickly sharpened into focus. Laptops snapped open. Cables sprawled across desks like synthetic vines.

  "Audio team! Isolate the track! Bring the voice samples over to Server 4!"

  "Video team! I need a clean silhouette! Extract, enhance, and run the skeletal mapping!"

  A different kind of battle began behind the gray screen—a war fought not with swords and magic, but with algorithms and data points.

  ?

  "Starting audio analysis. Sample extracted," the lead audio engineer muttered, tapping a key. "Language is… well, obviously, Japanese. Dialect matches standard Kanto region."

  "We can narrow the search to domestic candidates, then," the supervisor said sharply, leaning over the shoulder of the technician. Multiple staff members nodded, their faces illuminated by the spectral glow of waveforms. On the main screen, lines of green light danced—voiceprints being layered, stabilized, and dissected. Even the low-quality clips already spreading on social media were being sucked into the system, cleaned of noise, and indexed for comparison.

  "The mic on their side was better than expected," one tech noted, adjusting a slider. "Frequency quirks are distinct. I’ve got a 98% clear print on the vowels."

  Another team handled the video. They froze the frame on the boy’s silhouette. He was hunched over, head down, body trembling. Digital calipers appeared on the screen, measuring shoulder width, spinal curvature, and femur length.

  "Judging by the height relative to Claval… maybe a high schooler?"

  "Frame ratio suggests late adolescence or early adulthood. But the voice? Still breaking. It’s young."

  Someone snorted from the back of the room.

  "And? Do we get anything out of identifying him? It’s not like we can arrest him in another dimension."

  "Maybe it counts for our quarterly evaluation," another voice replied dryly. "Find the lost kid, get a bonus You know?."

  Dry, brittle laughter followed. It wasn't humor. It was a pressure valve releasing steam from frayed nerves. They were treating a human life as a data point to be solved.

  Kaori Mamiya sat at her designated station, listening. She didn't join the laughter. She didn't speak. Her face remained the perfect mask of a researcher—calm, analytical, detached. But beneath the desk, her hands were clenched so tightly her fingernails bit into her palms. Her heartbeat thudded in her ears, syncing with the rhythm of the audio waveform on the screen.

  That voice… She knew the cadence. She knew the timbre. She knew the way the breath hitched before the words came out. It was Shiro Yu. Her intuition was no longer just a feeling; it was a mathematical certainty screaming in her brain. The boy who had vanished, the student whose empty desk she looked—he was there. Alive. Breaking down.

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

  But she didn’t speak the name. If she said it here—if she typed "Shiro Yu" into the search bar—the machine would eat him alive. His life on Earth would be over before he even returned. The media, the government, the military… they would swarm. The conflict between her duty as a researcher and her morality as a teacher tightened around her throat like a garrote.

  "Upload the candidate list!" the supervisor barked. "I want the top ten matches by the hour!"

  Data surged across the screens. Names scrolled by in a blur. Algorithms sifted through thousands of possible matches, discarding faces and lives in milliseconds.

  Kaori lowered her gaze to her notebook. Her pen trembled in her hand, the tip tapping an erratic rhythm against the paper. No one noticed. They were too busy hunting.

  ?

  At Yu’s home. The contrast was jarring enough to induce vertigo in the TV. A bright, saturated studio. The set was a kaleidoscope of pastel colors and neon lights.

  "These days, online streaming services are getting more and more advanced! It’s a whole new world out there!" The host, a man with teeth whitened to an unnatural gleam, smiled cheerfully at the camera, holding up a glittery cue card.

  "That’s right! I can barely keep up!" The assistant, a young idol with a ribbon in her hair, nodded dramatically. "And speaking of advanced, here’s the one gaining the most buzz lately—Echoes Watching System!"

  Flashy captions, adorned with cartoon sparkles, scrolled across the bottom of the screen: 《Live From Another World!? The Youth Are Obsessed!》

  "Apparently, this app lets you watch streams from another dimension! Can you believe it?" The host flipped a card with comic exaggeration. The studio audience burst into commanded laughter.

  "People’ll believe anything these days, huh? Is it CGI? Or just some elaborate prank?" A commentator, an older comedian known for his cynicism, shrugged.

  Light banter ensued. Upbeat, generic pop music played in the background. It was the sound of a peaceful, ignorant world.

  "Now… please take a look at this footage that went viral just minutes ago." But the atmosphere shifted completely. The music cut out. The screen changed. The bright studio vanished, replaced by the dark, grainy footage of the field. Claval lying in the grass. Sweating, unconscious, glowing faintly under Roa’s alien healing light. And beside her—a boy’s silhouette, head lowered, shoulders trembling in the cold wind. Then the audio looped, amplified for the broadcast: “…I… called them…”

  A beat of uneasy silence rippled through the studio. The comedians stopped smiling. The audience forgot to laugh. The raw, unfiltered pain in the voice cut through the artificial cheerfulness of the variety show.

  "Aaaand there you have it—the ‘mysterious figure’ spotted in Claval’s live stream! Who is he? A ghost? A glitch?" The host recovered quickly, plastering his smile back on with visible effort.

  "Social media is going wild with theories!" the assistant added, though her voice wavered slightly.

  Sunlight filtered through lace curtains, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. The smell of fabric softener hung in the room. A woman stood by the sofa, folding laundry. Yu’s mother. She had been half-listening to the TV while she worked. It was just background noise—a silly segment about internet trends she didn't understand. Until she heard that voice. “…I… called them…” Her hands stopped moving. A folded shirt slipped from her fingers and landed softly on the floor.

  Yu’s mother turned slowly toward the television. On the screen, the clip played again. And again. The silhouette was dark, but a mother memorizes the shape of her child. The slope of the shoulders. The way he held his head when he was upset. The specific pitch of his voice when he was trying not to cry.

  “…Yu?” Her breath hitched, a sharp intake of air that hurt her chest. The name fell from her lips, fragile and terrified.

  The clip repeated. “…I… called them…” Every replay made the resemblance sharper. It wasn't a resemblance. It was identity. Her blood ran cold, draining from her face, leaving her dizzy. The room seemed to tilt.

  "That’s… not possible…" Yu’s mother grabbed the back of the sofa to steady herself. Denial tried to rise up—It’s a fake video. It’s a stranger.—but it crumbled instantly against the instinct in her gut. A mother knows. "What do I do…?" she whispered to the empty room. "Yu… where are you?" Her hands shook violently. Should she call the police? Should she call the TV station? Would they even believe her?

  Before her chaotic thoughts could form a plan—Ding-dong. The doorbell rang. It wasn't a frantic ring. It was a polite, measured, mechanical sound. Her heart jumped into her throat. She froze, staring at the hallway. Ding-dong. A second chime followed. Insistent. Patient.

  She forced her legs to move. She walked down the hallway, her footsteps heavy, feeling like she was moving underwater. She reached the entrance and unlocked the door. Two men stood on her doorstep.

  They wore identical black suits, crisp and tailored. Their ties were dark. Their expressions were carefully neutral—unsmiling, unfeeling, efficient. Sunlight glinted off the badges pinned to their lapels.

  "Good afternoon, Ma'am." The man on the right spoke. His voice was polite, but it held the weight of an iron door slamming shut. "We’re with the Ministry of Defense—Special Counter Isekai world Task Division."

  Yu’s mother's breath collapsed in her lungs. The world narrowed down to the men in front of her.

  "We’d like to ask a few questions… regarding your son, Yu Shiro." The man said.

  Blood roared in her ears, drowning out the chirping of the birds outside. She couldn’t speak. She could only stare. Behind her, in the living room, the TV continued its cheerful babble, oblivious to the tragedy unfolding at the door.

  "Well folks, who is the mystery boy? The internet is spinning theories—is he an NPC? A hacker? Stay tuned!" The host said.

  The two worlds overlapped— Studio laughter and a breaking mother. A silly segment and a government inquiry. Yu’s mother stood frozen in the doorway, caught between the sunlight and the shadow of the state.

  A dark progression fantasy where a former reaper is reborn into flesh.

  Bound by duty, tied to an emperor, and hunted by the damned.