This will (partly) summarize the common route. Depending on how masochistic I feel I may finish it before going into routes, or else I’ll be rough summarizing the rest of it.

While I say “common route” the common route for this game follows a flowchart, which tends to imply that the story branches all over the place, and it does alright.

Like such, this summary will be mainly following the route I… somehow ended up on. Apparently I really can’t trust my own ability in judging which choice to pick as I keep ending up on wrong routes…

Perhaps it’s a good idea to open up walkthroughs so I can go into the routes I intend to but it feels a little wrong to do so for me. Well rambling things not going quite as wanted aside, this result is good in its own way.

Things start with our protagonist this time around, Ryouji being informed that his grandfather is scheduled to return home soon, meaning that he will soon be bidding farewell to his life of living alone, not that he particularly enjoys it as he finds it simply troublesome having to do everything himself.

Bantering with his childhood friends generic male friend #1 and generic childhood friend #1 (Fumika). To be fair that’s a bit exaggerated as they aren’t that bad but I have to say, it’s extremely bothering how often they have to squeeze a childhood friend into action stories like this. You can usually see them coming from a mile away, the moment you see a certain character you’ll instantaneously realize “this person is definitely a childhood friend isn’t it?” and then they promptly confirm your suspicions. At the very least that was how it was for me for this particular childhood friend. I don’t mind if it’s just a moege but they feel pretty unnecessary in stories like this. Ahem let’s return to the topic.

Ryouji returned home believing that his grandfather would be back. Instead he finds that he left a call on the answering machine saying that he’ll come back tomorrow and there will be a guest so prepare— but wait, there’s still more.

Following that there’s another message that he’ll return a bit later. Continuing, there’s another message saying that he won’t be returning for a while and the guest isn’t coming so he doesn’t need to prepare and also the letter… before the message finished it was cut off unexpectedly. Thinking that perhaps the recorder broke because of how old it is, suddenly he’s interrupted by his grandfathers voice again saying “No one is going to come, so no matter who comes don’t let them in the house”

Confused by this abrupt message, even if replaying it comes out with the same thing, Ryouji looks down and sees a letter which is probably what his grandfather is referring to.

Within it he finds an old piece of paper. Ryouji finds himself incapable of properly reading the letter but notices the mark on the bottom left which seems to be a mark of sorts. He has memory of seeing such a mark and thus leaves the house.

He arrives at an inhabited shrine near his house which his grandfather takes care of usually and as expected, he discovered the same mark carved on the pillars of the shrine.

Going behind the shrine he sees a giant rock with the same symbol engraved on it.

As he pondered just what exactly the symbol is about, he reaches to touch the symbol on the mark and just before he touches, a voice resounds in his head. Simultaneous to the voice, his finger receives a deep, clean-cut. Thinking that the wind cut him or something, he leaves the place and returns home to treat the wound.

Back at his room, Ryouji ponders about his grandfathers message again and after failing to decipher it, he decides to return to the back of the shrine again. Usually it would be difficult to see in the shrine during the night because of how dark it is so he took a flashlight but, apparently this time it’s somewhat different.

There Ryouji hears a voice once again, a voice that is asking for blood, Ryouji is suddenly hit with an intense headache and his body begins moving without his intentions. He proceeds to violently tear off the plaster so that the wound reopens and then he begins to reach towards the symbol again. As soon as he reaches the stone, a large explosion happens blowing the stone to pieces.

There, a naked woman appears in front of him.

Noticing that it was Ryouji who released her, she thanked him and decided to treat him specially, that is to say, she’ll eat him until not even a single bone remains.

When he realized it, it was already too late as a claw stabbed deeply into Ryouji, with mixed feelings of fear, confusion, pain and what not, he loses consciousness.

He regains consciousness after questioning if he managed to live. He feels something lukewarm on his shoulder and realized that it was him being eaten alive.

Ryouji struggles for his life as he doesn’t want to die here (who does?) but it was in vain as his body no longer had the energy to fight. Was all hope lost for our dear protagonist only minutes into the story? … Obviously not.

As the red-haired woman was about to begin to start eating him again, a certain thing happened, suddenly in the same places Ryouji was wounded, she receives the same wounds. Surprised by this as she thought Ryouji was just human, she becomes confused. Ryouji doesn’t quite understand the situation either but takes this as a chance to escape— he proceeds to push her away with all his might but unexpectedly the moment he touched her, he sent her flying a long way.

Realizing that situation isn’t fragrant, she leaves the remark that she’ll definitely eat him and then flees the scene. Ryouji finds his wounds gone and looks around confused about the situation still. Only commenting that the situation is irrational, that was the start of everything.

The next day he drops by the back of the shrine but does not find anything of particular interest. Since it’s a weekend and there’s no school, he leaves the house for time being where he discovers his childhood friend looking for someone. According to her, she discovered someone naked in the park late in the night but before she could properly talk to her, she suddenly vanished. The description of that girl sounds suspiciously familiar so Ryouji convinces her that it’s fine and that she does not need to look for her.

Thinking about the situation since he can’t leave the situation alone (there’s a man-eating monster running freely who worse yet vowed to devour him after all) he questions what he should do as he returns home. He was set for an unpleasant surprise however.

Apparently he isn’t the only one home. Well what will Ryouji do now?

Freezing at the sight for a second, the red-haired girl wakes up and the situation is fairly tense. He just had a life or death situation with her last night after all. The situation begins with a variety of questions. The girl is convinced that he must have special powers, after all she gave him deep wounds like such. But Ryouji being the normal person he is, of course insists otherwise. He’s a 100% perfectly normal human with no special abilities whatsoever!

He takes a chance to try to escape in vain and eventually the girl attempts something. Slightly wounding Ryouji what happened is that the same wound appeared on her as well. Deciding that it may be a spell of sorts, she wants Ryouji to remove it or else she can’t exactly go hunting (for humans) either since she doesn’t know whether or not it’ll end up greatly wounding her in reverse (that’s also how the childhood friend didn’t die on the spot when meeting her at the park last night).

Of course Ryouji wouldn’t know how.

The girl ponders for a bit and comes up with the idea that all she has to do is try to kill him. Even though she receives wounds, she can just hope that by killing the owner the ability will be canceled and she will live.

Eventually the conversation however leads to a completely different direction. The red hair gives him an offer of cooperation. She currently knows nothing about the world as she has implicitly been sealed under the stone for hundreds if not thousands of years.

In return for offering her information, she won’t eat him. Of course if he refuses, she’ll go with the original idea of killing him and seeing what happens. Having no choice, just as Ryouji was about to nod in agreement to it for now, the doorbell rang.

It is his childhood friend who arrived. She wants to talk with him a bit but as the situation isn’t exactly a peaceful one, he tries to tell her to leave for now and come back later. The red-haired girl on the other hand says that it’s good timing, he should let her in. It’s a good chance to test whether or not harming other people will reflect the damage back to her. After all, she said that she wouldn’t eat him but did not say a single thing about not eating other people. Jumping in to stop her, he immediately tells Fumika to get out of here, saying that he’ll explain later. Though confused, Fumika decides to obey and leaves the place.

Realizing that she is simply toying with him by enjoying seeing him feel powerless as she is fine with either of the options, Ryouji feels anger and at the same time he feels powerless as he can’t do anything. Unexpectedly at that moment, images cross through his head.

Ryouji comes to an understanding of what to do and remarks that he will not let her out of here and at that moment, the world changed.

Perplexed by the situation, Ryouji feels a bit of relief that even she can feel confused about what’s going on, he doesn’t understand the reasoning but Ryouji understood what he needs to do. He proceeds to pick up a small pebble and throws it— causing a large explosion upon impact.

His body automatically moves, knowing exactly what he needs to do, he enters offensive and the battle between Ryouji and her begins.

As the battle was beginning to get intense, they are interrupted by mysterious black shadows appearing. The girl saves him by slashing them apart and tells him to blow them all up in one go. She explains that she doesn’t understand why but the power he is currently using is originally her power.

Exhausted from using so much power, Ryouji loses consciousness and falls.

—

This is where I decided to take a look up and discover that I’m only just about on the third scene of the story and second day of the roughly one month length this story lasts. I took a look and discovered that I’m at 2,000 words. With a quick glance, I could see this single-handedly lasting over 5,000 words and anything past 3,000 words in one sitting turns into a pain to write. Thus I promptly gave up any more typing. To be fair the rest of the story can probably be compressed better.

And so there you have it, the summary will end here without letting you know what happens next, ha!

Well that would be too cruel though so to roughly outline things:

The girl introduces herself as Kuon, she may be powerful and all but she actually lost most of her powers from being sealed under the rock for a very long period of time. The stone she was sealed under essentially drains her of her power slowly. When her seal was released, the rock exploded and thus her power is scattered. Within that, a particularly large portion of the power ended up inside Ryouji for some reason. It’s because of that large amount of power that made Ryouji essentially become an extension of herself in a sense. Any wounds Ryouji suffers goes straight to her as she discovered the hard way.

The ultimately end up cooperating, she agrees not to eat any humans and if she really does ending up eating someone, the first person would have to be Ryouji. In return Ryouji teaches her about the modern world as the world is vastly different from the one Kuon is used to.

Later Ryouji also begins helping her collect the shards of her power which ended up within people, manifesting themselves as a world which is later named “Shindou” in reference to the earthquake measurements (so the worlds are measured in the same way) though it tends to just be referred to as the “other world” most of the time regardless. The shards of Kuon’s power is named dream stones for their effect which I’ll get to just about now.

The worlds are basically manifested through the deeply hidden worries and the likes of humans. What happens is that reality is essentially “overwritten” by the world created by the minds of those humans. The thing itself is actually later revealed to be much, much more complicated but I don’t feel like getting deeply into things yet.

In any case the objective of Ryouji and Kuon is to find those worlds and retrieve Kuon’s power by either killing or draining the power from the owner. There may be some side effects of doing such as those worlds are essentially “part of their minds”. It’s fine if it’s minor but if major, it could cause some serious problems.

As the story progresses we’re introduced to the other characters such as student council president Saori

And an old acquaintance, Elsrise who serves as the antagonist for most of the common route as she is against the destruction of the other worlds. Not only can they cause harm to the person involved, they are actually a fairly natural existence in the world.

Her servant of sorts Alice

And various other characters.

As for my actual impressions: this is entertaining. I particularly liked Elsrise but for the sake of things, I intended to go for kuon route first… I intended to. I’m not sure if it was because I liked Elsrise so I unconsciously made a beeline towards her route or something but despite my intentions to hit Kuon route, I ended up in Elsrise route instead which is fine in its own way I suppose.

If the selling point of the story is its fighting then it feels somewhat lacking in a certain sense which I may detail later but if excluding that part then the story is overall fairly pleasant to read through. The character interactions are pretty nice and the twists and turns the story takes you never leaves me bored for long, hopefully it can keep up this pace for the rest of the story.