My groupmates, the other pedestrians, and even the cars on the road had all suddenly gone stiff, as if time itself had ground to a halt. And on top of that, it was impossibly quiet. All the hustle and bustle of the city that had filled the air with sound mere moments ago had fallen silent in the span of a single instant.
“…Wait, wha…? What?”
It was so eerily silent that even my baffled whispers echoed loud and clear down the street. And it wasn’t just my voice either. Every breath I took, every little rustle my clothes made each time I moved a muscle, every scuff of my sneakers against the pavement—all of these noises that would normally be almost imperceptible were crisp and vivid now.
Just what the hell was this? What was even happening right now? Was I being pranked? Was this one of those “flash mob” things or whatever they were called? Had I somehow gotten myself mixed up in some citywide surprise party without even realizing? No, this felt far too elaborate and all-encompassing to be something like that… There was a limit to what human hands could accomplish all on their own, and this clearly exceeded it.
“Uh… H-hello?” I said, swallowing my inhibitions as I called up ahead to see if I could get Nagai’s attention—this time loudly enough that he was sure to hear me. But Nagai didn’t respond, nor did any of the other members of my group. I circled around to get a look at him from the front.
It was like staring at an exquisite wax replica. Nagai’s face was frozen mid-laugh—but a closer look revealed the slightest hint of dejection hidden beneath his immutable smile. I felt a pang of guilt at the thought that I was the one responsible for casting this shadow over his expression. Hesitantly, I reached out and waved my hand in front of his face, but to no avail. His eyeballs remained firmly locked in place; he didn’t so much as blink.
Randomly, my gaze happened to settle on the wristwatch Nagai was wearing on his right arm. Upon taking a closer look, I noticed that even the second hand had stopped ticking entirely, leaving the timepiece stuck at precisely 11:14:36 a.m. This was no longer merely a metaphor—time had literally frozen.
I looked around the vicinity for any sign of movement whatsoever, but it seemed everything else but me really had been rendered inanimate. The streetcar in the middle of the road, the electric signboards outside the nearby storefronts, and even the clouds overhead were all—
“Oh, wow…”
Just then, I spotted a crow floating directly above me—frozen in flight, wings stretched against the sky. And higher still, the plane I’d seen cutting confidently through the air a few minutes ago was similarly suspended mid-flight. I just stood there stock-still a moment, mouth hanging open with awe as my brain tried to process whether this was an optical illusion or a genuine violation of all the laws of physics.
…Or was it a dream?
Was it possible I wasn’t even awake right now? I tried pinching my cheek to make sure. Never in my life had I imagined myself emulating one of the most tired tropes in all of fiction, yet just like in every story I’d ever read, it proved a futile effort.
“W-wait! I know!”
I reached into my right coat pocket and pulled out my smartphone. I pressed the home button, and the screen lit right up. I let out a sigh of relief, mildly reassured to know that there were still some things capable of moving in this world aside from me… Or responding to my touch, at the very least. Yet, strangely, I had no service despite being right in the middle of a major city—and without internet access, there wasn’t a whole lot my phone could do to help me right now. After grasping at straws and fiddling around with it some more, I tried moving around a bit to see if I could find any pockets of service nearby. When even that failed to produce a single bar, I gave up and shoved my phone back into my coat pocket for the time being.
Eventually, I noticed a slight ringing in my ears that I couldn’t unhear. It was so quiet right now that I could genuinely see it driving a person mad. It was so easy to forget just how inundated we were by a constant influx of sound in our day-to-day lives—from the blare of rush-hour traffic in the morning to the soft swaying of leaves outside the window at night—that it almost felt suffocating when you took all the noise away. There was something weirdly deafening about true, unadulterated silence. Perhaps it was a bit like that feeling you get after a boat ride, where it still feels like the whole world is undulating beneath you even though you’re safely back ashore. Even for a guy like me who loved his peace and quiet, this silence was too unsettling for me to bear. And the fact that I had no earthly idea what was happening or why only made it that much worse.
But what possible explanation could there be? I stood there perplexed for a good long while, just trying to get my thoughts in order—when all of a sudden, I heard a sound coming from somewhere far away. Immediately, my ears perked up.
Someone’s there.
It was a voice—a girl’s voice.
“Hey… Hey, over here!” I shouted back as loud as I possibly could, then took off running toward the voice. It sounded like it was coming from over by the station. I hurried down the sidewalk as fast as I could, weaving my way around the other pedestrians I encountered along the way, the rhythm of my footsteps reverberating through the silent streets. At one point, I came to a red light and reflexively stopped to wait for the signal to change—then realized it probably wasn’t going to turn green any time soon, shook my head at my own foolishness, and started running once again. There was a car stopped mid-turn right over the crosswalk, so just to be safe, I ran around the back so I wouldn’t get run over if time suddenly began moving again.
Finally, Hakodate Station came into view. The giant clock embedded in the wall of the building displayed the same time as Nagai’s watch: 11:14 a.m. I scanned the plaza full of still-life marionettes in front of the station for any breathing bodies, but I only spotted one: a young girl in the middle of the crowd, looking nervously around the vicinity.