“Ah—!”
The impact stole the breath from Masumi’s lungs.
For a moment, she thought her stomach might leap straight up into her throat. The blow to her back was that severe. There was no room for a dainty scream. Her entire body went numb, leaving her unable to move. Her mind was clear, so she likely hadn’t hit her head, but the pain was so overwhelming she couldn’t even bring herself to open her eyes.
Her sense of balance felt intact.
Hard as it was to believe, it seemed she had fallen all the way down without catching on the stairs and landed on the platform. On her back, unfortunately, but still. For now, she could at least be relieved. She lay there, waiting for the pain to subside. If someone called an ambulance, that would be fine. Honestly, she would be grateful if someone would just help her sit up.
She stayed sprawled there for a while, yet there was no sign of anyone passing by.
Eventually, the pain began to ebb, and Masumi slowly opened her eyes. What if someone had filmed her from the opposite platform, she wondered. A video titled Clumsy Woman Falls Spectacularly would be too mortifying to bear. With that absurd worry in mind, she cautiously surveyed her surroundings.
There was no station platform.
“……”
Above her stretched a sky full of stars. No matter how many times she blinked, it didn’t change. Something was wrong. She should have been seeing the station ceiling, fluorescent lights, maybe an electronic signboard.
Still lying on her back, she turned her head to the side. Blades of grass brushed against the tip of her nose.
A faint night breeze stirred. Tall grasses like susuki bowed and swayed, gently stroking her nose and cheeks. She turned her head back again. Bringing awareness to her hands, she realized she was still clutching her violin case tightly, just as she had been in the instant she fell. For now, that was a relief.
With a quiet grunt, she sat up.
She was in an empty field.
It wasn’t particularly open or scenic. Tall grasses surrounded her, forming something like a hidden clearing, almost reminiscent of a childhood secret base.
She amended her earlier conclusion.
She probably had hit her head after all.
“Wait… where is this? Don’t tell me this is halfway to the Sanzu River?”
The wind felt real as it brushed her cheeks. If she was actually hovering between life and death, that was no laughing matter.
If this were a typical near-death experience, shouldn’t there be fields of flowers or something equally idyllic? Instead, the stars were beautiful, but the ground below was choked with dark, overgrown grass. It felt far too desolate, more like the road to hell than heaven.
If the next person she met turned out to be King Enma, she really might lose it.
The wind felt strangely dry.
She glanced to the side and spotted her shoulder bag lying nearby. From its wide opening, a bundle of sheet music spilled halfway out. Come to think of it, she should have had one of humanity’s great inventions on her. A smartphone.
“F-first, let’s check my location…”
She gently set the violin case down and crawled over to the bag. Pulling out the stack of sheet music that took up most of the space, Masumi rummaged through the bag again.
Her house keys. Gone.
Her wallet. Gone.
Her commuter pass. Gone.
Her phone. Gone.
She tipped the bag upside down and shook it, but not even a single coin fell out. She checked every inner pocket she could think of, but there was truly nothing.
No, wait. Don’t jump to conclusions.
Taking a deep breath, her gaze returned to the sheet music she had set aside. Praying for a miracle tucked between the pages, she flipped through them one by one.
Her hopes were utterly crushed.
There was no phone. Not even the thin commuter pass.
“You’ve got to be kidding me…”
She muttered in disbelief, but nothing changed.
Had she somehow dropped everything except her sheet music when she fell from the station stairs? No, that was absurd. If that were the case, at least some of the scores should have gone missing too. Yet every last page was still there, almost mockingly intact. Even the house keys she always kept at the bottom of her bag were completely gone. That kind of coincidence was hard to swallow.
Which meant…
The suspicion resurfaced.
She really might be on her way to the Sanzu River.
If that were the case, the strange state of her belongings made sense. Her physical body was probably still lying on the station platform, or if she was lucky, being rushed away in an ambulance. Her real bag and its contents would be right there with it.
She didn’t know the rules governing this world on the brink of death, but perhaps you simply couldn’t bring everything with you. Thinking of it that way was oddly convincing.
Besides, even if she had her phone, it probably wouldn’t work in a near-death experience.
It would either be out of range or refuse to turn on. And seeing a location like “Flower Field City, Sai no Kawara District” wouldn’t exactly help either.
“…Which way is back to being alive, I wonder.”
Thanks to her frantic rummaging, Masumi had regained a fair amount of composure. She stood up.
She might be a failure in life, but that didn’t mean she wanted to die. If so, there was only one course of action. Avoid reaching the Sanzu River and head in the direction of revival.
She shrugged off her coat.
For some reason, it was hot here. Perhaps the boundary with the afterlife had no seasons. She roughly stuffed the sheet music back into her bag and slung it over her shoulder. Coat in her left hand, violin case in her right, she set off, determined to escape the land of the dead.
Or so she intended.
Her journey was cut short almost immediately.
The bushes ahead rustled loudly. Masumi froze. She had no martial arts training to fend off a suspicious figure, and these delicate heels made running a lost cause.
Please, not a bear.
Demons were even worse.
As she broke into a cold sweat, desperately hoping for something harmless like a raccoon dog or at least a crying old man, a human figure emerged.
At least, human in appearance.
The man was tall, with a torch-like glowing object floating beside him. It wasn’t a perfect sphere, but a wavering, flame-like light that refused to settle into a fixed shape. Since he wasn’t holding it and it hovered freely in the air, it looked very much like a will-o’-the-wisp.
Confronted with the sight, Masumi reached a state of sudden enlightenment.
Ah. So this really was the land of the dead.
Hoping it was just before the Sanzu River had been far too optimistic.
Revising her expectations sharply downward, she stood rooted to the spot.
If she was already dead, there was no need to run. It might even be better to ask this apparent resident of the underworld where exactly she was, and what the rules here were.
The realization that she had died was a shock, in its own way.
Her life had been short. And for its length, not particularly joyful. There had been more things that went wrong than right. Perhaps because of that, even as she felt shaken, she couldn’t quite muster feelings of regret or a desperate desire to return.
It all felt oddly distant.
Like she hadn’t really done anything with her life.
Lifting her gaze from the ground, she looked at the man.
Her eyes, accustomed to the darkness, were dazzled. She blinked several times, and as her vision adjusted, his figure came into focus.
In his right hand was a longsword. In his left, a rope.
He wore armor. His features were sharply defined, with blond hair and blue eyes. No matter how generously one interpreted it, he looked Western. Did the afterlife have nations and borders too? And judging by his grim expression, it was painfully obvious she was in the wrong place.
More importantly, she was being regarded with extreme suspicion.
He didn’t need to say anything. She could feel it. After all, she hailed from a culture famed for reading the air. This much was easy. The stabbing intensity of his stare hurt. She wanted to ask who he was, but by all appearances, the suspicious party here was her.
She didn’t think she was suspicious, personally, but still, where did one even begin explaining this situation?
As she hesitated, the man stepped forward.
“Woman. What are you doing in a place like this?”
Despite his appearance, he was speaking Japanese.
Perhaps it wasn’t Japanese at all, but some universal language of the afterlife. Either way, at least there was no language barrier.
“That’s what I’d like to ask, actually, um—”
Her words died as the tip of the longsword was thrust toward her.
She fell silent, lifting her eyes slightly. The man’s stern face was young. Around her age, maybe a little older. He didn’t look thirty yet.
His build, however, was formidable. Tall, broad-shouldered, his entire body was wrapped in well-trained muscle. Every instinct screamed that he was someone she should not anger.
But.
Even if I do die here, where do I go next, exactly?
The absurd thought crossed her mind, and she lapsed into silence. The man apparently took this for fear. Keeping the sword aimed at her, his voice softened slightly.
“A spy from Reitea?”
The words themselves were anything but gentle.
Masumi had no idea what Reitea was. A person? A nation? An organization? As a complete novice to the afterlife, she was at a loss. All she could do was remain silent.
But the latter half, the word “spy,” she could firmly deny.
“I’m not a spy.”
“Oh? Then tell me where this place is.”
“Huh? Isn’t this the afterlife?”
“……”
A deep crease formed between his brows.
“Are you mocking me?”
His voice dropped, and the sword gave off an ominous clink.
She had clearly offended him, but to Masumi, it was a perfectly serious question. Otherwise, there were far too many things that made no sense. The scenery, the temperature, her missing belongings.
“What is that box you’re holding?”
“This? It’s a violin, but… you don’t know what that is, do you. I’m sorry.”
Under his fierce glare, she finally looked away. His eyes were too sharp to meet head-on without wearing down her nerves. Even simple words felt difficult, and she reflexively slipped into polite speech.
His gaze remained fixed on the violin case.
She didn’t need to ask to understand. This was the look of someone wary of an unknown object.
Someone who didn’t know what a violin was in this day and age must have died a very long time ago.
Looking at him again, his attire finally clicked.
He looked like a medieval knight. As for the floating light beside him, well, if this was the afterlife, that was just how things worked. He was probably a knight, one who had died before the violin was even invented.
The violin was thought to have emerged in the early sixteenth century. The famed Stradivarius instruments would not appear until another century and a half later, supporting the flourishing of Baroque music.
Working backward, that meant this knight had been dead for over five hundred years.
A very seasoned resident of the afterlife. With that much time, such presence made sense.
In any case, he predated Columbus.
Trying to explain modern instruments to someone like that seemed futile. As she tilted her head, the sword lowered, and the man reached out.
“If you are not a spy, I will search you.”
“—!”
She recoiled instinctively.
It was the wrong move.
Regret came too late. The moment he saw her reaction, his demeanor changed. His gaze sharpened, the air tightening with tension.
In reflex, Masumi hugged the violin case to her chest.
This was her other self, something even more precious than herself.
Otherwise, she would never have protected it with her own body when she fell down those stairs.
It was a delicate instrument. She had no idea how someone ignorant of its nature might handle it.
Please don’t touch it carelessly.
As she stiffened with that silent plea, the man narrowed his eyes.
“…So you are a spy after all.”
“No, that’s—”
He didn’t let her finish.
“You can explain later.”
In the next instant, he wrenched the violin case from her arms and bound her wrists behind her back with the rope. When she tried to scream, he smoothly covered her mouth. Unable to offer any real resistance, she was gagged, her ankles tied as well, and finally hoisted onto his shoulder like a wine barrel.
“Mmph—!”
She struggled, but he didn’t even flinch.
If anything, the rope dug deeper into her wrists. The pain made her grimace.
No one had told her it would still hurt after death.
Everything was going wrong, veering further and further from any expectation she’d had.
There might even be an afterlife beyond the afterlife. Shrinking under the man’s barely restrained fury, a chill ran straight down Masumi’s spine.
