The smell reached you first.
Rice. Garlic in oil. The specific morning smell of a kitchen you knew — had always known — except you had not smelled it in years. Decades. And yet here it was, exactly as you remembered, down to the particular creak of the floorboard just outside your bedroom door.
You lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling. Your ceiling. Your childhood ceiling, with the small water stain in the shape of something that Kiana used to insist looked like a dog.
It still looked like a dog.
One week, you thought. One week before school starts.
You did not know how you knew that. You just did — the same way you knew the layout of this house, the sound of your mother's footsteps on the stairs, the particular quality of morning light through these curtains. Your body was fifteen years old. Your mind was not.
Downstairs, the television was already on.
"—gate formation confirmed in the Tondo district overnight. Irontide Mercenary Group has dispatched a response team. Scout classification is pending but early indicators suggest a Minor-class gate. Residents within a 500-meter radius are advised to follow standard evacuation protocol until—"
The anchor moved on. Weather. A brief segment on a local high school student who had just re-awakened from D to B-rank — cameras, smiling officials, a Hunter Association representative shaking a teenager's hand. Then a commercial for Solano's new line of ability-enhancement supplements.
You sat up slowly.
Kiana's voice carried up from downstairs, saying something to your mother. Monet's voice answered — warm, unhurried, the sound of someone who had done this morning a thousand times and expected to do it a thousand more.
Same house. Same family. Same ceiling, same smell, same television, same voices.
Except in your world, there had never been anything on the morning news about gates.
You looked down at your hands. Fifteen years old. Soft. Unhardened by the decades you remembered. Somewhere in these hands — in this body, in this version of you — was an ability you had apparently been assessed for. Registered with the Hunter Association. Filed somewhere in a database you had never seen, in a world you had never lived in.
What did I wake up as?
That was the question, was it not. Everything else — the regression, the isekai, the impossible wrongness of all of it — could wait. First things first.
Downstairs, Monet called up: "Breakfast is ready. Come down before it gets cold."
Kiana, presumably already at the table: "Kuya/Ate, hurry up!"
One week before Sakuragaoka. One week before Class 1-C. One week before a life you had never lived began in earnest.
You got up.
