Or rather, half of him disappears.

Not the top half or lower half, that would be creepy.

Not the left half or right half, that would be ever creepier.

Or the front half and back half, now that's just horrid.

What I meant was that Shun seems to have lost like half of his pixels. Like he has became more transparent and shimmery, but not enough to completely vanish.

"Okay, this can't be good," Natsumi murmurs.

Boy don't we know that.

And that's not even our greatest concern right now, because Jin is dying. I don't want to watch, but we all know that we have no choice but to watch. The last thing Jin would want before his eyes close and everything fades out would be to see his friends just turn away.

Little Ririka is already kneeling down by him, holding his hand, whispering encouraging words. Don't give up. You'll be fine, you're perfectly fine. Stay with us. Stay with me. Look at the flowers, look at the sky, look at the clouds. Aren't they pretty? There's one over there, it looks like a cute furry Maltese puppy.

Something in her voice may have reached Jin's unhearing ears. He listens, lips moving, forming the words "Maltese puppy".

What it is about Maltese puppies that entertains him so much we will never know. A smile of peace and joy spreads across his face.

He reaches up towards the puppy-

And then everything goes black and everywhere is chaos. Somewhere deep down inside me I know that Jin is gone.

I also realize that I have been unhooked from the simulator; the in-between state of being submerged lasts less than a second before I pull myself up, shuddering, quickly looking around the room and assessing the situation.

It is bad. The first thing I notice is Katsuki, lying face down on the ground, unmoving and unresponding. Natsumi is fighting off someone-who I haven't the foggiest idea, because he or she is hidden completely under a black raincoat and a black hood. His or her face is covered with one of those surgical masks that you can find easily in any conbini on the streets.

Natsumi may not have her ice-wielding power like during mindhacking, but in the real world she's still a badass motherfucker. The assailant, though much larger than her size (this points to their being male-Natsumi is quite tall and well-built for a Japanese girl), is actually having trouble subduing her. Ririka is out the door in a flash. I almost assume that she is running off in terror (and I don't blame her, what is going on isn't something you see every day), until she returns bringing the others, whom I've almost forgotten existed during this whole craziness.

Yukiya and Daisuke, one of our other guy classmates, immediately join in Natsumi's brawl. Hiroki flops down beside his boyfriend Katsuki and begins to whimper like the lost puppy he is. Izumi checks on Miss Furukawa outside and reports that the poor lady has been knocked out by some blunt object on the head.

All the while this is happening, Shun (or half of him) is sprawled on Jin's mattress, pressing his chest wound and talking to him. At first it was all illegible, he spoke so softly, so gently, like one would to a sleepy child. And then he gets loud. He begins to yell at Jin.

I know it's because he realizes Jin is not coming back. But he still shouts, like he thinks if he shouts loudly enough and acts mad enough it would make a difference.

"Jin, oi, oi you can't do this. Don't leave us damn it!"

But Jin has already left. I watch Shun yell at the limp, lifeless body that used to be one of our friends, his own half-transparent self shimmering as he moves.

How can someone be half-transparent? This doesn't make sense. This isn't physically doable. I stare at Shun. Are you going to leave us too?

Shun finally notices me staring. And he looks down at himself for the first time. Apparently he had been in so much of a hurry to help Jin and to unhook us as soon as he unhooked himself that he never thought of checking himself over to see if unhooking oneself causes any after effects.

He stares at his left hand, which had been pressed on Jin's chest in attempt to slow the bleeding. He then tries to touch it with his right hand.

The two hands pass through each other.

Natsumi screams. She has turned her attention away from the person she is dealing with for one fleeting moment just in time to see this happen. Both Yukiya and Daisuke turn to look too, giving the black-clad intruder just the right opportunity to escape. Ririka, who is standing near the door, jumps and attempts to go after the retreating shadow, but seeing that there's no way she would be able to do anything useful with her size she returns sulkily to us.

Heavy, important-sounding footsteps follow. I have no idea how footsteps could sound important, but those do. There's a certain sense of urgency in them, solemn and serious and angry. I could write a song on the elega about them.

My elega. My new weapon that I've just found. But it feels like so long ago.

They turn the corner, and in comes Mr. Yamada the principal, Mr. Kojima our Weapons and Weapon Conjuring teacher, and Mrs. Sato, who teaches Basics of Connecting to Minds.

They survey the scene, looking troubled (duh), but refrain from questioning us because there are much more urgent issues to deal with such as unconscious Miss Furukawa and not-sure-if-dead-or-not Katsuki and Jin who is actually dead and Shun who is half-transparent and confused. Mr. Yamada kneels down to check Katsuki and announces, to our relief, that he is merely knocked out and will easily recover after some rest in our infirmary. He sends Ririka off to get our school nurse, Miss Matsuda, and also reminds her to bring wheelable beds.

Mr. Kojima, a big, burly man in his early fifties, has a silky, calming voice that sounds like it came straight out of a TV documentary. He uses it to advantage now to coax Hiroki (obviously shaken) and Natsumi (unfortunately socked in one eye by the man-in-black), to walk down to the infirmary with him. Before he leaves, supporting one student on either side, he quietly tells Mr. Yamada that he will alert and wake the other teachers as well as students. Not that there are a lot of students-my class are the only freshmen in our school; our senpai in the two grades above ours have been selected with the same rigorous entrance exam we had taken, and there are just as few of them as there are us. They have the upperclassmen's dorm, at the back of the campus behind the track field.

Mrs. Sato steps up to Shun. She is a round-faced, good-natured lady with curly hair that doesn't seem to change shape no matter how she moves. Like most of the female teachers her age here, she is clad in unnecessarily bright colors with unnecessarily huge flower motifs spattered all over her dress. Basics of Connecting to Minds is her subject, so she's probably the one who is most likely to be able to fix Shun's current state.

"You unhooked yourself?" She asks, gently. Shun nods like a frightened five-year-old child.

"You should never have done that. You could have left your soul in the virtual world and never get it back again. Like coma-san whom you've all seen," she continues, a little reprimandingly. I would have spoken up, told her that if Shun hadn't unhooked himself, he could have not only lost his soul but his life and we might all be dead, and that I'm so tired of hearing about this nameless teacher who keeps being brought up like he's some kind of laughingstock and bad example even though he's a person and he just got unlucky and doesn't deserve to be simply referred to as coma-san as if being in a coma is his only defining trait ever but I decide not to. Mrs. Sato isn't here to debate about how comatose colleagues should be treated; she is here to help.

"Well, at least your current state isn't as bad as a coma, though I have to say it's pretty bad too. We might still be able to fix it," she says thoughtfully, massaging her temples. "I've read up on a lot of papers about this kind of thing-we'd have to hook you up to a machine, see how that works."

Shun nods again and stands up to follow her. As soon as his half-transparent feet touch the ground, however, he slides down and his eyes close.

And as the teachers bring him away, I scream, because I don't know if he will ever wake up again, or end up like the comatose teacher, forever connected to all those weird tubes and machines.

And I also scream because Jin, Jin will never wake up again.