The sea smelled different that morning. Not the usual crisp salt air drifting in from Sagami Bay, but something heavier… briny and damp, as though the ocean was hiding a secret just beneath the tide.

Yuka walked a few steps ahead of me, her sandals crunching over wet, flattened sand. The tide had just gone out, leaving mirror-pools caught in the ripples where the sun’s early light shimmered like scattered gold coins. I shoved my hands into my pockets, letting the wind run through my hair, and tried not to think too hard about why this beach felt both familiar and… wrong.

She was talking about the summers we’d spent here as kids—at least, the summers she remembered. I could feel her glancing at me, like she was searching for something in my expression that wasn’t there.

That’s when I saw it.

A pale shape in the surf ahead, tangled in drifting kelp, half-lost in the foam. At first, I thought it was driftwood, a smooth piece of a broken pier maybe. But as we walked closer, the shape became… human.

My steps slowed. Overhead, gulls circled and cried out in short, impatient bursts.

Skin. Wet. Bare. The curve of a shoulder, an arm limp in the shallows. My chest tightened. She was lying on her side, half in the water, as if the tide had tried to claim her but changed its mind.

“Yuka—” My voice was smaller than I meant it to be.

She turned, followed my gaze, and froze. The color drained from her face.

We ran.

The cold sand bit into my knees as I dropped beside her. Long, soaked strands of pink hair clung to her cheeks, plastered there by salt water. Her skin was pale, almost translucent in the early light, speckled with grains of sand. But my eyes locked on something else—two small protrusions rising from her head. Horns.

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

She stirred faintly, her lips parting just enough for a fragile, breathless sound—“Nyu…”—to slip out. Her voice was barely there, as if the sea had stolen most of it.

Yuka was talking quickly now, asking if I had my phone, if we should call someone, but her words felt distant, muffled under the thudding in my ears.

The horns. The pink hair. Something about her face brushed against the edges of a memory I couldn’t quite reach—a shadow of another time, another place. My mind strained, but the images wouldn’t come, only the sense that I knew her.

The wind whipped along the shore, pulling at her hair. She shivered, and without thinking, I shifted to support her, the cold of her body seeping into my arms.

Whoever she was, whatever this meant… she was alive.