Takai had just finished dinner with his parents, the usual quiet weeknight meal.
He headed upstairs to his room on the second floor, flopped into his chair, and tried to wrestle with the mountain of math problems waiting for him. The numbers were not number-ing. After twenty minutes of staring at the same equation, he leaned back with a groan.
As he rubbed his eyes, something outside caught his attention — a faint purple glow leaking through the corner of his window.
Takai: "Yo… what is that? A meteor? No way."
He jumped up, snatched his phone from his desk, and pressed it against the glass. But right before he tapped the shutter—
The light blinked out.
Gone. Like someone hit a cosmic off-switch.
Takai: "Bro, seriously? Now you decide to disappear?"
He stood there for a moment, scanning the sky like the light might pop back out and apologize. Nothing. Just the regular night.
With a sigh, he dropped back into his chair and forced himself to return to the math warzone.
Eventually, he crashed for the night.
—
His alarm dragged him out of sleep the next morning. In the kitchen, he ate breakfast while his dad watched the news. The reporter's voice was unusually energetic.
"A small but incredibly bright rock crashed into an uninhabited island off the coast of Japan last night. Experts say the flash was intense enough for radar systems to mark the exact impact point…"
Takai froze mid-chew.
(So that's what I saw…)
His dad kept watching, fascinated, talking about how a research team would be visiting the island soon. Takai didn't say anything, but his mind was racing the whole walk to school.
At school, he brought it up to a couple of friends, but most of them hadn't heard a thing. Some shrugged it off. A few joked about aliens. No one seemed as weirded out as him.
After classes, he headed home, still thinking about the purple flash.
That evening, new reports dropped: the meteorite hadn't just fallen — it had slammed into another rock on the island, splitting it. Scientists recovered both pieces and rushed them to a lab for examination. Rumors online were already swirling — unusual color, strange radiation spikes, theories that sounded like sci-fi forums gone wild.
Takai sat in front of the TV, phone in hand, that purple glow replaying in his mind like it was burned into his eyelids.
Something about last night wasn't normal.
And he could feel it — whatever that rock was, it was only the beginning.