Chapter 1: I'm Dead

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The students on the school trip bus were divided into several groups.
There were the groups making a lot of noise, the ones sleeping, the ones quietly listening to music or reading, and then there was the group that was just staring off into space.

I, Toma Isurugi, belonged to the fourth group, the ones spacing out.

Since it was my first time visiting this place, I found it kind of enjoyable to just gaze at the scenery.

As we drove through a lush green valley, the bus suddenly shook. It seemed to be swerving wildly from side to side.

"What the...!?"
"Hey, driver! Drive more carefully!"

But the driver didn’t seem to hear the voices.
What I saw was the driver slumped over the steering wheel, his face buried in it, limp and unresponsive. It looked like he had lost consciousness.

The moment I realized this, the bus broke through the guardrail.

"AAAAAAHHHH!"
"WOOOOAAAAHHHH!"

I felt a sense of weightlessness and heard the screams of my classmates.

Below the cliff was a rocky riverbed.
The ground was rushing up towards us.

"Ah, I’m really going to die."

At that moment, I closed my eyes, realizing that this was where I would die.

Then, a violent impact surged through my body.

I felt extremely cold.
When I opened my eyes, a hellish scene unfolded before me.

The bus was flipped over, standing on its head, crumpled and smashed.
My classmates were piled up on top of each other, bleeding.

I had been wearing my seatbelt, but it seemed like most of them hadn’t, and the result was horrific.

But even wearing a seatbelt, I knew I wouldn’t survive.

"Ugh...!"

I coughed up blood.

What in the world? There was a metal rod sticking out of my stomach.
It had pierced through the seat in front of me, impaling me. I was skewered.

"I’m really dead this time."

I didn’t feel any pain.
But it was as cold as the North Pole.

At this rate, I was definitely going to die.
The only question was whether help would arrive first or if I’d die before that.

Even if I were rescued, with this rod stuck in my stomach, there was a chance I’d die afterward anyway.

"Ah, it was such a short life."

Then again, maybe I should be saying, "Finally, I get to die."

I had been abused by my parents.
When I was in the second year of middle school, I was hospitalized because of the abuse, which led to a report from the hospital, and I was taken into a children's care facility.

I hadn’t seen my parents since then. I had no idea what happened to them.

At the junior high I attended from the care facility, I was mocked as "the kid without parents."
That didn’t change when I entered high school.
My classmates always called me "the kid without parents" whenever they got the chance.

But compared to the violence I endured from my parents, that was nothing. I just thought I’d have to endure it until I graduated from high school. But to think I’d die here...

Life really is a strange thing.

As I thought about that, my vision started to fade to white.

I thought I was finally about to die.
At the same time, an unimaginable pain hit me. It was pain so intense that I wanted to twist and writhe, but I couldn’t move an inch.

Even in my final moments, I couldn’t escape the agony, and it made me feel disgusted.

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