"So I really had been dead for that long..."
"You stared at your phone for half the day, and that's all you got from it?" Matsuda Jinpei stood with his hands on his hips helplessly, unsure whether to call him thick-skinned or mentally tough. "Something as outrageous as coming back from the dead, and you don't have any other thoughts about it?"
"Can't help it. It just doesn't feel real." Kenji Hagiwara leaned closer to the window and tugged at the RV's blinds. Through the gaps, Tokyo's streetscape sped backward. "I feel like one moment ago, my adrenaline was through the roof and I was throwing myself at a bomb. Then the next second, Little Jinpei and Little Morofushi, suddenly a bit older, popped up and told me I'd been dead for seven years..."
He understood the logic. That miraculous resurrection mechanism had brought back, intact, the consciousness he possessed at the moment of death. So from his perspective, it was as though the bomb had exploded with a thunderous roar; he closed his eyes, opened them again, and the world had become something else.
But the disconnect in his perception was real. Even someone as adaptable and quick to learn as him still needed time to accept that shift in memory.
He was still caught in the lingering shock of that explosion.
"There's nothing bad about that. Even if that moment was brief, in that final second, you must have replayed your whole life in your head and imagined how everyone else would react after you died..." Matsuda Jinpei ruffled his hair twice, lowering his voice. "Knowing those things came true, but that there was still a chance to make up for them... I feel relieved."
"Hah, I almost forgot. You died in pretty much the same way I