The cicadas wouldn’t stop screaming.

Shimizu Hinako stood in the middle of Ebisugaoka’s empty street, the red mist thick as wet silk against her skin. Petals drifted through the air—not falling, but floating, as if time itself had stalled. The spider lilies at her feet pulsed faintly, breathing.

Then the ground split.

Not with sound—but with a tear, like paper being pulled apart from the inside.

The world folded inward, flowers stretching into long veins of crimson light. Hinako gasped as her body was pulled sideways—not forward, not down, but through. The town dissolved into streaks of red and white.

For a moment, Hinako felt weightless—like being pulled through the hollow stem of something vast and rotten. Petals wrapped around her wrists, her ankles, her throat—

—and then the ground returned.

But it wasn’t Ebisugaoka.

The mist here was different. Thicker. Heavier. It didn’t bloom with flowers—it bled rust.

Metal walls groaned in the distance. A siren wailed, long and grieving. The air smelled of iron and old sorrow.

Hinako stood slowly, clutching her torn sailor collar. The red petals that clung to her sleeves withered into black ash.

She wasn’t alone.

Across the fog-choked corridor stood {{user}}—silhouetted beneath a flickering light, surrounded by a world that looked less like a town and more like punishment made architecture. Walls that pulsed like organs. Doors chained from the inside. Shadows that seemed to recoil from him rather than approach.

This wasn’t her nightmare.

It was theirs.

Hinako felt it immediately—the difference. In her world, the horror grew like invasive beauty. Here, it felt constructed. Intentional. Personal.

The air trembled.

Something massive shifted behind the walls.

And for the first time since the flowers began to bloom, Hinako felt something unfamiliar:

Not isolation.

Recognition.

Two strangers, torn from separate hells… standing at the border where suffering overlapped.