Up until the day Taiga drowned, the village lived in harmony with the sea.
The sea had always been part of everyday life. Children spent entire afternoons jumping from the breakwater into the water below while fishermen sailed before sunrise and rarely returned until long after sunset. Every summer evening, six friends could be found sitting on the weathered stone steps overlooking the cove. They laughed together so loudly that their voices carried all the way across the bay. They were young and happy.
Then, on a normal spring day on May 1st, Taiga disappeared.
His shoes washed ashore three days later. His body never did.
In the weeks that followed, an old myth began to spread through the village. It said that anyone claimed by the sea without a proper burial could never leave the place where they drowned. Their souls stayed trapped beneath the waves, waiting to avenge their deaths.
Everyone claimed they didn't believe the scary tale, but things in the village still changed. Parents stopped letting their children swim in the cove alone. Fishermen avoided the deep water after sunset, no matter how calm and smooth the surface looked.
Everyone was secretly afraid that Kyomoto Taiga's ghost would return to take revenge.
-----
Taiga's five friends left town within a few months and never came back. The grief was too heavy to bear.
Shintaro became a school teacher in Kanagawa. Jesse found work overseas, putting an entire ocean between himself and his memories. Kochi started a hiking business in the mountains of Gifu. Juri moved into his brother's spare room in Chiba, looking for any distraction. Hokuto buried himself in books, moving to Tokyo to study for his master's degree at Keio University.
In the beginning, they tried to stay in touch. They created a group chat on their phones, sharing photos of their new apartments and complaining about their busy schedules. But without Taiga, it never felt right. It felt like everyone was trying too hard to pretend they were okay.
Within a few months, the notifications stopped entirely, and they lost touch with each other.
-----
Exactly two years to the day after the tragedy, Kochi returned. He drove into the village, a bouquet of white lilies in the passenger seat.
He walked down to the cove, laid the flowers on the damp concrete steps, and turned to leave.
He never made it back to his car.
The next morning, a passerby found Kochi's car in the beach parking lot with the driver's door wide open. Nearby, on the stone wall, his clothes and shoes had been folded and stacked, as if he had taken great care in setting them down before stepping into the water.
The coast guard searched the shoreline for six long days, but they found nothing. Kochi Yugo was officially recorded as a missing person.
The villagers, however, whispered a different story.
They said the sea had finally claimed its second victim. Kyomoto Taiga had come back for revenge.
-----
Juri drove into the village in the middle of the night on the third anniversary. Walking down to the steps, he felt his stomach twist in sadness when he saw a dried, withered bunch of old flowers from the year before, assuming some local villager had left them there.
He replaced the withered flowers with his own fresh bouquet, whispered an apology to the water, and went to stay at his parents' old house.
That night, Juri woke up to the sound of heavy waves crashing right outside his bedroom window, even though his family's house sat two kilometers inland, far from the beach.
When Juri got out of his bed and his feet touched the floor, the wood felt freezing cold and soaking wet. He turned on the flashlight on his phone and tiptoed out of his room.
A dark trail of seawater and wet sand wound through the hallway, leading straight to the front door, which was already standing wide open.
The next morning, Juri's parents woke to find Juri's room empty.
The front door was open, swinging gently in the morning breeze.
Like Kochi before him, Juri was officially recorded as a missing person. The villagers, however, quietly insisted there was nothing mysterious about it. They said Kyomoto Taiga's ghost had come back for another victim.
-----
Jesse arrived at the docks on May 1st, four years after Taiga's death, holding a bunch of flowers.
The water was completely still and black like glass.
Jesse wanted to see if anything was in the water. He took out his phone, turned on the camera, and pointed it down at the dark sea.
On his phone screen, the water looked empty. But suddenly, the camera's face-detector started to vibrate.
A small yellow square snapped onto the screen. Then another. And another. Three squares began flashing across the dark screen, locking onto faces that Jesse could not see with his own bare eyes.
Terrified, Jesse pushed the camera button to take a picture. The bright flash lit up the dark water for one second.
In that quick flash of light, Jesse saw something. There were three pale, bloated white faces pressed flat against the top of the water from underneath, staring straight up at him with white unblinking eyes.
Before Jesse could even scream, a freezing, wet force grabbed him by his wrist and pulled him over the edge. He dropped his phone on the stone wall as he disappeared into the dark waves.
The next morning, the police found only Jesse's phone. The battery was dead. When they opened the camera roll, they only found a very blurry, strange photo of the dark sea.
There was no clear evidence of any humans there, so the police just treated it as an unfortunate, mysterious accident.
However, by then, few people in the village believed there was any mystery left.
-----
It was the fifth anniversary of Taiga's death. Shintaro drove to the village, walked down to the cove, and placed his flowers on the concrete steps. He stood there for a long while, listening to the waves.
Suddenly, a thick fog rolled over the breakwater.
And then, all of a sudden, something cold and violently strong clamped around his ankles. Shintaro gasped, looking down in horror. From the solid, grey rock of the stairs, four pairs of wet, pale hands broke through the stone, gripping his flesh with great strength. The fingers were bloated, and their fingernails were torn and caked with mud.
Shintaro opened his mouth to scream, but a sudden gust of icy, brine-filled wind choked the sound in his throat. The hands clamped tighter and started dragging him backward. Shintaro clawed desperately at the dirt and rocks, but it was useless.
With a scrape, he was pulled right over the edge.
The sea swallowed him up in the dark.
Only a few weeks later, when he failed to show up for work, Shintaro was reported missing. The clues led the police right back to the same part of the sea where four other people had already vanished. Again, nothing was found.
Most of the villagers simply nodded when they heard the news. They had been expecting it.
-----
On May 1st, six years after Taiga had died, Hokuto arrived at the concrete steps in the fading evening light, carrying his flower bouquet.
Before heading to the steps, he stopped to talk to an old fisherman fixing his nets.
"People always say the drowned come back for revenge," the fisherman said, keeping his eyes on the grey water. "That's just a story the living tell themselves to feel better."
He tied a knot in his net.
"Revenge is a human thing. The dead don't care about that," he continued.
"What do they want?" Hokuto asked carefully.
"The dead only remember what they lost," the old man said. "The sea keeps them where they died, and they call out from there. But they aren't calling for strangers..."
"Who do they call for then?"
"The people they loved most."
Hokuto nodded. He thanked the fisherman and continued his journey to the steps.
As he walked closer, the evening mist began to clear, and Hokuto stopped in his tracks. His breath caught in his throat.
Five figures were sitting together on the concrete steps overlooking the cove, exactly where they used to spend their youth.
It was them. Taiga, Kochi, Juri, Jesse, Shintaro.
All their clothes were soaked through with seawater, their skin was an unnatural, ash-grey color, and their lips were bruised purple. Yet, despite the cold look of death on their faces, they looked peaceful. Their smiles were warmer than Hokuto had felt for over a decade.
Juri looked up. He held out a hand, gesturing to the empty spot on the step right beside him. "Hokuto."
"We've been waiting for you," Taiga said softly.
"We're finally all here," Kochi added, smiling.
"Come with us," Jesse said.
"It's time to come home," Shintaro finished.
Hokuto dropped his bouquet onto the steps. He looked at his friends one last time and returned their smiles.
"Alright."
He walked straight to the edge of the breakwater and threw himself into the dark water below.
-----
Years passed.
People in the village said that the sea had finally become quiet again. It had got what it wanted.
Sometimes, when the waves were calm and the sky turned pink, the old fishermen looked toward the concrete stairs while sailing home at dusk. They kept telling a story that if you looked closely, six young men could be seen standing shoulder to shoulder at the very edge of the stairs. Sometimes one of them raised a hand in a friendly greeting, and just before the sunlight disappeared completely, all six calmly walked hand in hand into the sea.
But in the end, it was just another old myth.