A humid, tepid breeze crept beneath the collar of his T-shirt, adhering to his skin like a damp shroud.
Sho Takahashi sat perched on the seawall, watching the sky hemorrhage its colors. Beyond the horizon, a searing vermilion was being swallowed by a deep, concussive ultramarine. To Sho, it looked like a countdown—the final seconds of summer before he was dragged back into the suffocating, mundane clockwork of his own existence.
“…I don’t want to go back.”
The words escaped his lips as a faint tremor, meant for no one. He had come to this desolate seaside town as if fleeing from a verdict he hadn’t yet received. The waves struck the shore in an erratic, jagged rhythm.
Then, he heard it. The faint crunch of gravel. A girl stood there—a pale apparition in a white dress, her eyes possessing both a piercing intensity and a fathomless, ancient sorrow.
“Have you ever wanted to simply… vanish?” she asked. Her voice was cool, dissolving perfectly into the salt air.
“Why would you ask that?”
“Because your eyes are screaming it.”
She led him to a derelict research institute perched on the cliffside. At the heart of the vaulted hall sat the machine—a massive, archaic apparatus that emitted a low, predatory hum.
“It’s a device that blurs the boundary between matter and spirit,” she whispered. “It swaps the contents.”
Sho’s vision exploded into white light. Every cell in his body was dismantled, shredded, and hurled into an unknown torrent.
He felt as if he were submerged in a lightless trench. Finally, a piercing electronic ringing stabilized into the frantic thumping of a heart.
“…Hah… ngh…”
He opened his eyes. His vision was a blurred white fog. His body felt horrendously heavy. No—it wasn’t just weight; it was an indescribable, visceral wrongness, as if his consciousness had trespassed into a foreign vessel.
Sho tried to sit up and realized the horror.
First, the center of gravity was fundamentally skewed. The floor felt unnaturally close. His arms, when they came into view, were impossibly thin, pale, and lacked the mass he remembered.
“What… what is this?”
What emerged from his throat wasn’t the low, cracked voice of a teenage boy, but a clear, crystalline soprano. The uncanny dissonance made his skin crawl. As he shook his head, something brushed his cheek—long, black hair spilled into his field of vision, possessing a damp, organic weight.
Then, with every breath, he felt a strange, pressurized gravity on his chest. Protuberances, independent of his will, were pushing against the cotton of the dress.
“You’re awake. Congratulations, Sho-kun.”
A boy was crawling out of the opposite capsule. He had the face Sho saw every morning in the mirror—but that “self” was now looking down at him with a cold, cruel smirk.
“…Haruka?” Sho—inside Haruka’s body—gasped.
“Yes,” Haruka—inside Sho’s body—replied. She opened and closed her fists in ecstasy. “This body is incredible. The kinetic force… the heart echoes like a drum. This is what I wanted.”
“Change us back! Now!”
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