The moon presses down upon the world as the vibrant red of the aurora borealis threads through the fabric of the night sky. Moonlight should glow white, but tonight a sickly green tinge infects its surface, staining the pale faces of the pedestrians as they clump together in clusters of fear.

The cellphone in Yoshiya's hand vibrates as the terror trembles through his body. Instead of a small circle suspended in the sky, the full moon looms over an entire block of Shinjuku, its edge barely visible in Yoshiya's peripheral.

"I'm, I'm..." He needs to say something—anything to explain this awful scene that his camera captures. But the words wither and die as the red lights near the edges of the sky continue to thread themselves around the enlarged moon.

Throughout the streets surrounding Yoshiya, people cry and moan in a morass of fear that threatens to engulf him. Yet, somehow, some coherency of thought collects within his head and he manages to extract a few words despite the mind-numbing terror oozing through his body.

"I don't know what's going on." Yoshiya was walking; he doesn't remember where, not with the moon bearing down on him now. Yet, he does remember, with isolated clarity, the moment that the streets had begun to glow brighter than what had been cast by the city lights. He remembers looking up, watching as the black sky peeled open and witnessing the moment those red lights first slithered into existence around a growing moon engorged with such green luminescence that the faint stars had vanished under the brightness of its light.

Words fail Yoshiya once again. Even thoughts barely stutter into existence for what can be said when the moon devours the night?

Hysteria bubbles up from within him. Once he had gotten a better grasp of the actual language, he would have made a decent English major, thinking up metaphors like that.

Would have...Weakness cuts away at Yoshiya's legs and his knees almost fold.

He's going to die. The moon is falling towards the Earth and he's going to die. Why is he sitting here filming this, wasting time when he should be calling his mom or Kaori, someone-

A roar rips through Yoshiya, stripping away the worst of his terror and leaving him staggering from a deep sense of loss. The crowd erupts around him in yelps and yells. A woman stumbles into him, only to push away while shaking her head in confusion. It doesn't make sense, the presence of the roar engulfs him, yet he can still hear the rising shrieks as people around him begin to point and back away from something to his right.

Gripping his cellphone tighter in apprehension, Yoshiya turns to look and stares at the sight of a tornado whirling above the tallest building within the district. It glows red, a black coagulated red that scabs over every coherent thought in the boy's head.

As a hollowness spreads within Yoshiya, a new sound crawls out from the pulsating center of the glowing tornado. Drowning out the clamor of the streets, a second roar awakens, tearing through Yoshiya's ears and down the streets on the back of a harsh wind. Despite the overbearing clamor, the initial roar that had stripped away his fear continues to resonate within him, scraping away any form of emotion and leaving nothing but numbness in its place.

The wind comes back, yanking on Yoshiya's clothes and throwing loose debris into the air. Slips of paper whip past Yoshiya towards the twisting black behemoth that tears into the sky as if trying to claw at the moon itself.

Holding up his trembling cellphone, Yoshiya draws the device in front of him. The moon and the tornado are swallowed by the camera's eye, shrinking down to fit inside of the phone's screen. Funnily, as long as he beholds the hideous column through the frame of his phone's cruddy camera, it's like an evil spirit trapped in a box. Contained as it is, it won't slip off the building's edge and come howling down into the streets below.

Just as suddenly as it had appeared, the tornado vanishes from the confines of the screen. Yoshiya freezes as once again the moon's feverish glow rules the skies unfettered. Within the deep sense of loss that the roar had carved into Yoshiya's chest, sparks of fear sputter in and out of existence as he gasps from the wavering emotion. The wheezy breaths of those around him barely reach Yoshiya's ears while he grips the shirt fabric over his chest as if trying to squeeze out the numbness that has curled around his heart. He stares at the empty space left by the tornado as if at any moment it will spin back into existence.

A thin streak of orange light shoots off of the top of the building, hitting another skyscraper a block away. For the most vanishingly small of moments, a perfect circle is visible where the light explodes upon impact, carving the side of the skyscraper open. But then, smoke swallows the gaping hole as the building collapses in on itself and casts a rain of rubble down onto the streets below.

Previously quiet whimpers rise into screams. People who had been hunched over gasping now scramble past Yoshiya. As if he is a rock at the bottom of the raging river, they part around him in desperate dashes to avoid death while he stands completely still. Eyes fixed upwards, he watches as the next orange flash is followed by a set of purple explosions that encircle the sky above the city. With his camera still raised, shock freezes him solid.

He barely even notices when the moon above him starts to shrink; not when one of those orange flashes slices off the top corner of the Metropolitan Government building, sending tons of rubble cascading into the streets before him.

A shadow descends over him, blocking out the remaining green glow and finally drawing his attention upward. The top floors of an office building meet his gaze as they fall directly on top of him.

Fear bursts back into his chest, scrambling out in a scream as his knees finally fold. The impact of his knees against the pavement jars his entire body just as the building rushes towards him...but stops only a few meters above him.

Snot and tears run down his face, and his chest heaves as he gulps in air. His arm still holds the camera upwards – more from being locked in that direction than any conscious effort on his part –and it records the new sky made of metal and concrete. A small trickle of dust trails from the hovering building and brushes his shoulder. The gentle touch centers all of Yoshiya's scattered thoughts into a realization. The camera pointing up at the ceiling of concrete turns towards his face. The boy doesn't even wipe the snot from his nose as he sobs.

"Mom, Dad, I'm not coming home, I'm sorry, I'm not," His tears choke him. "Kaori, please be okay, I'm sorry, please."

The video cuts, leaving the screen in total darkness. Kaori sits on her bed, legs tucked under her and her phone held loosely by numb fingers. Once the video exits full-screen mode, white light strikes the girl's face, reflecting brightly off of her eyes as she stares unblinkingly. Below the video, the black lettering of 5,014 views trickle into her awareness, as does the nonsensical string of symbols that make up the poster's username.

She had just been surfing YouTube because she couldn't sleep. She hadn't, she hadn't meant to see that...it had just randomly appeared in her feed.

As her thoughts stutter and stall, she taps on the username, expecting something, anything besides the created date of the account to state two hours ago. The uploaded date for the video reflects the same horrible digits.

Her fingers press and slip against the screen, searching for a reason to dispel the rising unease, because that couldn't have been real, right? It certainly looked like the same streets that she herself had walked down repeatedly throughout her life but that didn't happen. She would have been able to see something like that from the windows of her house. There would have been something like-

Sirens blaring in the middle of the night, startling her awake and leaving her sitting up in bed with a throbbing heart until she sought the comfort of the mind-numbing videos of the internet.

Kaori scampers off of her bed, bare feet hitting the floor as she slides her contact lists onto the cellphone screen. She paces the length of the room, glancing out of the window that faces in the wrong direction to actually see anything important as the phone rings in her ear.

No one answers her call except for the voicemail of her friend Yoshiya Kohmaru, talking into her ear with a far calmer, happier voice than those last desperate words that had called out to her on that small video screen.