Gray always found solace in patterns. The way the morning sun filtered through his dorm blinds at exactly 7:12 AM. The familiar clatter of sneakers against the pavement as students rushed to their early lectures. The scent of too-strong coffee wafting from the campus café. These small constants grounded him.
Gray was twenty-one, a third-year at a university tucked away in a modern city where ambition lingered like smog. Majoring in theoretical engineering, minoring in philosophy—because he liked to ask why as much as how. He was sharp, often too sharp for his own good, and always calculated.
His dorm room was a mess of textbooks, candy bar wrappers, and two unfinshed sandwiches . On his desk sat an old cracked baseball—his late father's. He'd been a varsity pitcher once, and though Gray no longer played, the edge of competition had never dulled inside him.
"Yo, Gray!" a voice barked from the hall. It was Juno, all charisma and no filter, barging in like he owned the place he had a bright small on his face like usual, brown hair and their university uniform Gray never understood why they head to wear that it seemed to preppy and proper for his taste but he put it on a anyways. "You finish that paper on mana engines that would make for a super cool steampunk comic right?" Juno said a with a almost magnetic smile that seemed to uplift laziness in the air, he had no roommate their school also though that only rooms would be better.
Gray didn't even look up. "Mana's not real. And if it were, we'd all be out of jobs so stop asking me to make weird cosmic strips for you, you dork."
"Debatable," said Rin, slipping in behind Juno with a smirk. She was the calmer one, usually half-buried in some game or manga. "But if Isekai were real, I bet you Gray would become some sort of dark hero always brooding in the night watching down on people I'd bet you do anything to survive, just thinking of it makes me laugh ." Rin chuckles a bit.
Gray offered a rare grin. "I'm not anti-anything. I just like surviving more than I like dying."
They laughed. It was a moment. One of many. And just like the others, it felt like it would last forever Gray stood up grabbing his material. "Well let's get going" Gray, Juno and Rin headed to their own class thinking of what they'd do after school.
A few hours later that evening, Gray walked back to his dorm alone. His hands were in his pockets, his earbuds in. Rain misted the sidewalks. His mind was already running simulations for his week with Juno and Rin. Nothing strange, nothing out of place—until it all… stopped.
He blinked.
The world twisted like wet fabric wrung out in slow motion. The air thickened, colors blurred, gravity seemed to pull in multiple directions at once, time and space itself seemed to warp like he was close to the floor then not anymore like he was rejected off the ground, Then, silence. Total, unrelenting silence.
He was no longer on the sidewalk.
He was on a dirt road. The air smelled of iron and woodsmoke. The sky above him was far too wide, dotted with sun's—not one, but four? His heart kicked hard he turned in place, no city, no Rin... no Juno.
No Earth. Just forest, unfamiliar stars, and the sound of his mind shattering out of his own disbelief.
"What… the hell?" His voice cracked. Panic flickered at the edge of his calm. His rational mind screamed for an explanation, a hypothesis, something. But all he had was the terrifying certainty that this was real the dirty in the ground was to realistic the lump in his throat and the tears coming down his ears he wanted to reject this reality but it clinged to his soul like a vice not wanting to let go. This wasn't a dream. This wasn't some fever hallucination.
Gray dropped to his knees.
The cool dirt bit into his palms as his breath hitched. He tried to call out. Nothing. He screamed, but there was no one to hear it. There was no logic to apply, no answer to deduce just a feeling. "Why, why, why me why" Gray cried hopping for a answer but only one thing came to his mind Rin words of being isekaied he was pretty sure he didn't die, his body looks the same he was just thrown into this world with zero explanation.
He stayed there for what felt like hours.
Eventually, the moon began to rise—larger than Earth's, in a deep crimson red like color that shook Gray if the multiple sun's wasn't enough to tell him he was in another world that moon was more than enough. And that's when he saw it: smoke, in the distance. A village. Instinct took over.
Survive, he walked for what felt like hours hunger gnawed at him, but he kept going. His legs ached, but he kept going. His mind was fractured with fear and disbelief, but he kept going.
The village wasn't much. Thatched roofs, muddy streets, and faces that stared with quiet suspicion. Their language was garbled at first—thick, alien. But as if something clicked in his brain, he began to understand fragments of it, it was close enough to english to point out what they were saying if just barely.
The people in the village all seemed to close their doors and run at the sight of a foreigner One woman, older and skeptical, gave him a cot in her barn and a hunk of warm bread. Her name was Mira, and she spoke with a warm and motherly tone.
"You won't survive long like that were are you from and what are doing without a traveling carriage monnsters might have attacked you, you could have been killed." Gray looked at her this language was alien but he got that she was worried from her expression.
He wanted to ask what that meant. Instead, he nodded, she took him into a spare place in her barn it wasn't much bed of hay and straw, not even a roof.
That night, in a stranger's barn beneath a sky with too many stars Gray curled into himself, he didn't cry not yet even do he wanted to help just wanted to cry for his mother's arms but he knew she wasn't coming so what would be the point.
But his chest ached with the heaviness of absence. He thought of Juno's laughter. Of Rin's eye rolls. Of the heat from his dorm radiator. Of his mother's voice. His sister's chaotic energy. The baseball on his desk.
Gone. All of it.
No warning. No farewell. Just ripped away, like tearing the skin off a body and leaving the soul exposed to a foreign wind, in that barn something inside him shifted.
He wasn't a hero. He wasn't special. But he was alive. And he had no intention of dying not here, not like this. Gray stared into the dark sky above and whispered to himself.
"I'll survive this world… and then I'll leave it."