Prologue
##
That day.
That day too, as if it were obvious, Yuji Sakai was living his normal life.
His freshman year of high school, the end of April. He’d more or less adjusted to his new environment, and the time to worry about exams and future plans was still a long way off. He wasn’t short-tempered enough to bother people, so he had also made a few friends.
His family was middle class. He was an only child, his parents in good health. But his father, Kantaro, was working overseas. He lived with his mother Chigusa, who took pride in her calm demeanor, in a house twenty minutes’ walk from school.
His grades were average and had been since middle school. He wasn’t strong-spirited enough to want to improve himself, but he was afraid to slack off, so he put in a moderate amount of effort. In a strange way, he was good at dealing with things – that was the evaluation of his old friend and current classmate, Hayato Ike.
He didn’t have a girlfriend. He sometimes talked with the girl who sat next to him in class, Yukari Hirai. But mostly just to ask for help with his homework, and he hadn’t thought any deeper than that. He didn’t think he had to rush to find someone.
His current worry was how to spend his money during Golden Week*. Part of him wanted to go out somewhere with his friends, but there were also games and manga he wanted to buy.
That was why, after class that day, he left the residential area surrounding his school and headed for the shopping district across the river. He’d planned to browse the game and book stores there.
That day.
Until that time….
Yuji had thought that his normal life would last forever.
…No, he hadn’t even had that much self-awareness. He had lived, as if it were obvious, in a completely baseless certainty.
But that day, at that time….
Under a blood-red sunset, all too easily… his normal life, his certainty, crashed and burned.
Or, they went up in flames.
##
*TN: Golden Week is a week in late April/early May that contains several Japanese national holidays. It’s a week off for many companies and schools.