"Ohayō."
Yukima Azuma stepped into the unfamiliar living room, offering a polite morning greeting to the elderly woman seated by the low table.
"Onee-chan, why are you so late!" a small voice rang out, light but teasing.
He turned his head to see a little girl—bright-eyed and full of spunk—pouting at him in mock reprimand. She seemed no older than ten, her tone already brimming with the familiarity of family.
He responded with a mild nod and sat at the empty cushion next to the table. Before him was a hearty breakfast: grilled fish, thin slices of smoked meat, steaming egg soup. The comforting scent of dashi and soy sauce lingered in the air.
This certainly isn't a normal morning.
Yukima Azuma reached for the rice cooker beside him, scooped a bowl for himself, and added another for the kind grandmother across from him.
As he took his first bite, his mind was already processing—calculating.
Earlier that morning, he had rifled through the belongings in the room upstairs, piecing together the current reality.
Miyamizu Mitsuha.
The name was familiar. The eldest daughter of the Miyamizu family. A shrine maiden. A soon-to-be high school student. Her world and his had crossed paths before—in name, in rumors, in something stranger still.
Mitsuha lived in Itomori, a rural town nestled deep in Gifu Prefecture, steeped in tradition and slowly fading into obscurity. She was the heir to the Miyamizu Shrine, chosen to carry out rites handed down through generations—rituals honoring ancient gods that watched over the land and skies.
And now, somehow, Yukima Azuma was in her world. But more than that—he was Mitsuha.
To everyone around him, he appeared as the shrine maiden herself. But it wasn't a typical soul-swap as he'd read in records of divine encounters. His entire physical body had been transported here. Yet, to her family and friends, he was Mitsuha in every sense.
And it wasn't one-way. When he closed his eyes, he could catch fleeting glimpses of Mitsuha's consciousness, now residing somewhere within his reality. Their lives, and perhaps fates, had become tightly intertwined.
Yukima didn't need much time to deduce what this meant. It was an echo of a miracle he had long heard whispers of—the cursed comet Charlotte, the town it would one day obliterate, and the young shrine maiden who once tried to stop it.
A voice—gentle yet incomprehensibly ancient—had stirred in his mind the moment he tried to escape this reality. Its words were not speech, yet their meaning was unmistakable:
Please, help save Itomori.
It didn't take a genius to understand. A fragment of the comet, Charlotte, had struck this town before in another timeline. This god—or perhaps the mountain spirit of Itomori—was pulling the threads of fate to rewrite history.
Pulled into divine labor without consent, Yukima felt a flicker of irritation.
Do I look like a part-time celestial contractor to you?
But the god had asked politely. And it was a god. Declining outright would be foolish, especially when the favor could be useful in the future. A few days of effort might earn him divine protection—or at least the right to smash their shrine if they ever went back on their word.
Still, Yukima wasn't naïve. There were terms.
The god explained that this time-space overlap would last forty-seven days—in Mitsuha's world.
But in Yukima's reality, time moved differently. Every seven days here equaled just one day in his world. So effectively, Yukima had forty-seven full days to act.
Mitsuha? Only seven.
It was clear that the god intended to minimize Yukima's disruption and maximize his potential to prevent the tragedy. And so far, the illusion held—the grandmother and younger sister treated him like Mitsuha, never suspecting a thing.
But what puzzled him was the time period. This wasn't shortly before the comet's impact. It was three years before.
Three whole years.
That changed everything.
If he wanted to save the town, he had to set things in motion now. Infrastructure. Political pressure. Evacuation procedures. Public awareness. He couldn't simply wait for the comet and dodge a rock. He needed to rewrite a future still unwritten.
His brows furrowed unconsciously.
"What's wrong, Mitsuha? You look troubled," the grandmother asked, voice as gentle as warm rice.
Yukima froze for half a second before offering a smooth smile.
"It's nothing, Grandma. Just spacing out."
She narrowed her eyes for a moment but let it go.
After finishing the meal, Yukima stood to clear the dishes when voices sounded from outside the traditional wooden house. Visitors.
Two people walked in, familiar strangers—Mitsuha's friends.
"Teshigawara. Sayaka. Morning."
The names had come from Mitsuha's diary, which he had hastily skimmed earlier. Thankfully, it seemed he could pass off a convincing impression for now.
"Mitsuha, ohayō!" Sayaka waved cheerfully.
"Yo." Teshigawara offered a casual nod.
They had clearly planned something together, and Yukima decided to follow. He needed more intel. Itomori was a dying town in many ways—he needed to learn its pulse before he could try resuscitating it.
They walked along the edge of narrow rice field roads, mist still clinging to the green mountains.
"We'll be high schoolers soon. I wonder if there'll be any new faces," Teshigawara mused aloud.
"Hardly," Sayaka replied. "It's all the same kids from junior high. We've got no outsiders here."
Yukima quietly observed the exchange. He could already see how limited their world was. For a town like this, the only path out was out. Escape to Tokyo, maybe. But for those who stayed, the cycle repeated.
Up ahead, a small group of students loitered on the road. Boys and girls, all around Mitsuha's age.
Teshigawara sighed. "Great. Here we go."
They'd been spotted.
"Ah, the mayor's daughter," one of them said, loud enough for it to sting. "And the construction company kid. And Miss Anchorman's little sister."
"Such a perfect trio," another added mockingly. "Birds of a feather, right?"
"That's not even the right phrase, idiot."
The laughter came freely.
Yukima's eyes narrowed slightly.
So that's how it is.
Mitsuha—the mayor's daughter.
Teshigawara—son of the town's largest construction firm.
Sayaka—the sister of a local broadcaster.
Three kids from families that stood out in a town built on tradition and envy.
Of course they'd be targets.
He exhaled through his nose, eyes calm.
Middle schoolers really have no idea what actually matters.
He said nothing, but he was already forming a strategy in the back of his mind.
Saving Itomori wouldn't just be about stopping a comet.
He would have to break old cycles, shift power balances, prepare the town to believe in something they could neither see nor understand.
A god had called him to serve.
But he wasn't here to pray.
He was here to act.