“Half of the class will shrink. That half will be decided by gender…and it looks like we have 30 minutes to vote. Alright. So same as before. Well, we had 30. Now it's 15—a little over 15, actually.”
I assume that’s what the projector is saying, but I can’t bring myself to look up. Instead, I listen to Shun parrot everything written on the board. It’s a habit of his, although this is the first time nobody complained about it. Instead, the students who have trickled back into the classroom sit with their arms folded in a quiet moment of mourning—like they’ve witnessed an accident.
But it wasn’t an accident. Sayaka still had blood on her shoe. The red pulp that had once been Momo dried like insect gunk, turning a nasty shade of brown. Each time Sayaka's knee bounced, she flashed gore to those behind her. Nobody mentioned it. Nobody looked at her for too long.
By now, Daiki had also stormed into the room. His eyes darted to the screen, then to Kaede, then to me. “What the hell is this?”
“The next round,” Kaede mumbled, marching back to the podium.
Rika raised a hand. There was no teacher here, but the prez mimicked the usual nod of acknowledgment he gave to us. “So one of the sides will shrink, right?” The way her lips are always parted. The way her eyes squint in confusion. She’s good. She’s really good. On a dime, Rika could pull a thin layer of femininity tightly over her monstrous body.
Kaede nodded again, running her fingers along the desk’s polished surface. “It appears so, yes.”
“Oh. Okay.” She suppressed a smile—I just know she did. “We were lucky that the first vote was for only one person. But now…now we have to think.”
“Not really.” Daiki flicked his hands at the blackboard. “No offense, but there’s a reason sports are separated.” His forehead creased as he searched for a softer way to say it, but in the end, nothing came to him. “Guys will handle the physical challenges better, yeah?”
THUD.
Daiki whimpered with his arm tucked in. Chō then pulled her fist away, flicking her knuckles like she’s gotten some dirt on them. “What’s wrong, big guy? Thought you said you could take a punch.”
Chō was always a bit of a tomboy. You could see it in the way she dressed, how she cut her blonde hair purely for utility, and the stuff she was into. Even now, she was wearing our PE uniform with a blazer loosely draped over it like a cape. That said, I’d never dare call Chō a tomboy to her face. She tended to beat up anyone who did. Apparently, the word tomboy sounded ‘fetishy’.
Daiki scowled and rubbed his shoulder. “Real mature.”
Chō cracked her knuckles with a smirk. “Walked right into it.”
“Can we please stay focused?” Kaede ordered, instinctively looking for a gavel. “We don’t know if there even will be any physical challenges.”
Chō pointed a finger gun at Kaede. “Listen to the prez, dude. This isn’t Takeshi’s Castle.”
“So—what—we flip a coin?” Daiki scoffed. “This is stupid. There are six guys and six girls left. Nobody’s going to vote to make themselves tiny. Obviously.”
Obviously…
Chō put on the face of an ancient Greek mathematician while trying to calculate if a six can be larger than another six. Then, Eureka! “What if we keep spamming a tie?”
“Yo! That’s actually a good one!” Daiki pumped his fists. “Yeah, let’s go with that, Chō!”
...
Wait. They’re serious?
I guess that could have worked, but it felt like solving a puzzle by nailing all the pieces together.
“The person—or group—who organized this clearly put a lot of resources into this…project,” Kaede reasoned, walking back to the podium. “I doubt they’d allow us to stall without some kind of safeguard in place.”
“Would make for a boring game,” Rika sang with a side of her face sprawled against the desk. “If we don’t act, they might force something to happen. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would rather it be us who make the decisions.”
That’s something everyone could agree on.
Shun slouched forward, using his elbows to prop his chin up. “So nobody’s gonna say it?” His eyes searched the room. “Really? Nobody?” With a small shrug, he continued. “Alright then. Ahem. Sayaka is a psycho. There is an actual psycho in this room. She already killed Momo. She is probably going to kill us.”
For a moment, Sayaka didn’t move. Then, she leaned back in her seat, putting one leg on the knee of the other. Shun recoiled from the sight of the bloodied sole facing him, fixing his glasses with a quick tap. “If the girls shrink, she’ll be easier…easier to deal with.”
“I don’t think that’s fair,” Kaede said with her head hanging low. “Someone had to be eliminated. One way or another, Momo was going to be…she had to be eliminated.”
Shun winced, raising his upper lip. “Can’t say killed? Gotta protect the members of your tribe now that it’s convenient, right?”
“As far as I am concerned, Momo was killed—if you really want to use that word—through mob justice.” Kaede sounded exhausted—like a teacher explaining to a kindergartener why their pet fish had to die. “Don’t tell me you didn’t vote for her as well.”
“We are not a mob.” Shun looked like he was about to snap—maniacally fixing his perfectly leveled glasses. “We are Japanese students. We should be better than this.”
Kaede just leaned against the blackboard in response, taking out her phone. “Cast your vote, Shun. 10 minutes left.”
10 minutes…
My hand hovered over the cold glass of my phone as I opened the voting app. The fact that nobody looked at their neighbor’s screen was both reassuring and frightening. It’s like we were following the etiquette of the game—internalizing its unwritten rules. At least there would be no witnesses to my crime.
This time, instead of a simple scroll wheel, the person organizing this wanted to be cute. They displayed a stylized ‘Lovers’ tarot card. It was minimalistic in both its design and color palette, reminding me of the Bauhaus style we discussed while studying the Weimar Republic. A blue man and a red woman stood on opposite sides of my screen, facing each other but separated by a jagged, yellow fracture running down the center. Their bodies were perfect mirrors—same posture, same outstretched hands.
TAP.
The blue man dims.
In the school gym, the men had set up their camps. If I remembered correctly, Kaede had claimed the teacher’s lounge for the girls, dragging a few couches together into makeshift beds. At least we had looted the cafeteria jointly. Everyone had gotten a proper meal consisting of a few stale anpans and as much off-brand cola as we could carry from the shattered vending machine.
The six of us sat in a circle, sprawled across the sports mats. High above, the narrow window showed a sliver of the sky. Instead of the usual light-polluted glowy fuzz, I could see crisp indigo decorated with tiny white points. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen stars in the city.
Of course, I was stalling. We all were. Shun tapped away at his phone, trying to reconnect to the internet for the twenty-eighth time. Kaito seemed happy enough re-reading the same volume of manga for the third time. He sometimes laughed, but it felt forced—like he was laughing just to break the silence. Meanwhile, Daiki kept bouncing a basketball he had fished out of the supply closet. There was no rhythmic THUMP-THUMP of rubber against the floor. Instead, he occasionally slammed it down like the drip of Chinese water torture.
THUNK.
The basketball fell with more force than before, bouncing off at an awkward angle. Now that his hands were free, Daiki cracked his knuckles. “Alright.” He then spread his fingers apart, flexing them like he was getting ready for a fistfight. “Who the hell voted for us to shrink?”
Shun didn’t even look up from his phone. Kaito kept his eyes locked on the paper, pretending he was somewhere else. I just shifted uncomfortably, digging my finger into the mattress’s exposed yellow foam.
“Y’know.” Daiki leaned in like he was telling a campfire story. “When we got trapped in here, I checked the lockers. Looked for supplies, yeah?”
Kaito finally perked up.
“Found some pens. Food. Batteries. Some ballsy bastard even brought half a pack and this into school.” With raised eyebrows, Daiki produced a cheap red plastic lighter, its ancient barcode scratched and browned with age. “Because I was thinking to myself: in a situation like this, anything could help—anything.”
Nudging his finger, we finally heard the sharp hiss of the spark wheel. The orange flame lit Daiki’s face as he swung the lighter back and forth, tilting his head like he was having a conversation instead of a monologue. “Guess what I found in your locker, Kaito.”
Kaito said nothing, maybe waiting for his lawyer to show up.
“A whole stack of manga. Typical hentai stuff.” Daiki’s fingertip dug into the spark wheel as his grip tightened, leaving a red mark. “So I say: alright, alright. Nothing wrong with a guy having some reading material.” The flame went out. “But then, I flipped through one.” He grinned like a hyena. “It was ‘Ahh, I am so small! Ahh, don’t step on me, mistress!’”
Kaito’s mouth moved, but nothing came out—like a fish gasping for water.
Daiki stood, tossing the lighter from hand to hand. “Admit it. You voted for us to shrink.”
Kaito stood too, the manga slipping from his grip and hitting the floor between them. “That’s not-”
“Then who?!”
“I don’t know—I don’t!”
Daiki’s nostrils flared like a venting industrial furnace. “In twelve hours, we’re all going to be tiny because of you. You know what?” He reached for the basketball that had rolled to my side and gripped it tight. “I should…I should just kill you, yeah?” Daiki sputtered like he was telling the punchline of a really funny joke.
If you compared the ratio of people who told others they were going to kill them to actual murder victims, the odds were in favor of it being an empty threat. Nonetheless, Kaito stumbled back, raising his hands.
“Daiki.” Shun lowered his phone and lifted his chin. “I am just as upset as you are—trust me, I am. But that seems a little violent. Might be against the rules.”
Not illegal.
Not wrong.
Against the rules.
Daiki flicked the basketball into the air, letting it roll into the gym’s shadows as he pulled out the scavenged pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Whatever.”
The changing room’s lights detected movement and turned on with a sharp CLICK as I once again found myself washed in bleached fluorescent blues. The school’s showers had always had a liminal feeling to them, so the game’s atmosphere hadn’t had a chance to worsen anything here.
The water soon drizzled over my face, but I didn’t feel any cleaner. Instead, it became continuous with my skin—like the air on a summer morning. Despite this, I went on with my ritual, slathering the cheap soap over my naked body.
CLICK. The hallway lit up as another figure entered the men’s changing room. I quickly flung the soap off my face, but there was enough left to burn my eyes as I gazed upon Rika’s blurry figure. Before I could even turn the shower off, she began frolicking toward me. I looked down, seeing the heel of her black flats darkened by the thin layer of water.
She slowly lifted her head. Rika’s face was completely red, and I could feel the heat radiating off of it as she pressed her cheek against mine. There was a weird comfort I found every time we touched—one that felt nostalgic, for some reason. “You’re such a good boy.”
I couldn’t bring myself to respond. Instead, I stood there, frozen under the weight of her body perched against mine. She wasn’t even hugging me, just leaning on me like I was an extension of the wall. Every time she shifted—every time she so much as twitched—the tip of my cock was tickled by the soft folds of her skirt.
“Hey,” Rika continued, squeezing my jaw between her thumb and index finger. “Look at me when I am talking to you. Okay?” She yanked my face from side to side, turning it into an amusing fidget toy. “Now say: ‘Thank you, mistress.’”
I tried to speak, but my throat tightened. Tomorrow, I will be tiny. This was my last chance to raise a hand against this creature. I could do us all a favor by bashing her head with the shower handle.
“Thank you, mistress.”
Rika squealed in excitement. Then, her tongue drilled past my lips, and I detected the faintest taste of something citrusy and sweet. Both of our mouths soon became joined and clogged with saliva, forcing us to exhale sharply through our noses. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about this, but something—a survival instinct, perhaps—told me that I was being assaulted. This wasn’t what a kiss was supposed to be. This wasn’t what I wanted a kiss to be.
But I let it happen.
When Rika pulled away, there was a strand of bubbly spit connected our lips. Rika stared at it for a while as if trying to capture the moment before wiping the spit away.
“Whatever happens, you’ll live. I’ll protect you. We’ll both live. Okay?”
“Why?”
Rika squinted her eyes as if to check whether I was having a stroke.
“Why?” I should have kept quiet. “Why me?” I should have walked out of there.
“Why?” Rika looked down at her uniform drenched by my shower water. “It’s simple.” My entire body tensed as she leaned in for another round. Instead, Rika just placed a little peck on my cheek. “Because you do as you’re told.”
The next morning, I felt the type of relief you get after finally being called into the doctor’s office. I wasn’t thrilled. I wasn’t excited. After half an hour of waiting, I just wanted to get it over with.
I had only been half-dressed, but the classroom felt colder than the day before. By the time the guys filtered in, the girls were already at their desks, sitting like a jury finalizing their sentence. Sayaka was with them. She might have been a black sheep, but she was still part of their herd.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Rika purred, chin resting on her palm as we stepped inside. Since our clothes wouldn’t shrink with us, we had ditched the blazers and come in wearing only our white shirts. She seemed to find that amusing—as did many others of her tribe. Emiri probably thought I looked so stupid…
“We’ve decided,” Kaede addressed us as the liaison, “that each of us will take the phone of one guy. That way, nobody has an unfair voting advantage.”
Chō agreed, stretching her muscular arms. “Can’t have you shrimps holding onto them. It would be like dragging a plasma TV around—one of the big ones. You’re gonna get squuuished.”
I couldn’t blame them for being so casual about this. The most primal emotion when seeing another human suffer—one that predated ethics—was the resounding ‘thank god that’s not me.’
“You. You’ve decided.” Shun clasped his hands together. “Isn’t that nice?”
The president tapped her screen. “The countdown says you have a few minutes before shrinking. It might be a good idea to sit down.”
“Great.” Shun slumped to the floor. “We can all hold hands and sing while we’re at it.”
At that moment, Daiki finally sauntered in, leaning on the desk near the window. He seemed calmer than before, although a more apt term would have been defeated—like a terminally ill patient waiting to get his diagnosis. There was no physicality about him anymore, for what good had that done? He had kicked. He had punched. It hadn’t worked. Nothing would.
Now that we were all in the room, the doors locked with the same metallic whirl as the day before, and a low hum filled the air—like the sound of an old movie projector.
“It’s starting,” Rika whispered, popping a lemon-flavored candy into her mouth like a piece of popcorn.
I felt it in my teeth before I heard it properly: this strange vibration that made my head spin. I had seen Momo shrink before, but being on the other side of the process was something else. It felt like going up an incredibly stuffy elevator, with an invisible force wrapping around my body and compressing me toward my core. I stumbled over the desk, dropping to my knees to make the impact less jarring. The pain spread from my heart to my limbs—a clenching tightness that made me want to fold in on myself.
When the pain cleared, it was hard to recognize the world around me as real anymore. As a kid, I had read this book—it was about optical illusions or something like that. One page that stuck with me showed pictures of everyday objects taken from weird angles, asking the reader to guess what they were. Right now, I am assuming that the plateau above me was the desk, while the riverbanks below were the laminate attempting to imitate wood.
And then, there were the titans. The six girls stood around us in a circle. Their distant faces were backlit by the room’s light, making them impossible to make out. Instead, I relied on their shoes to tell who was who: the heels of Kaede’s boots, with their arches resembling an avant-garde acrylic aqueduct; the plain brown loafers of Emiri, decorated in a bumpy leather pattern; and the black flats of Rika. Behind me were two pairs of sneakers—one scuffed with dirt, the other with blood—as well as the shoes of a sixth girl I didn’t quite recognize.
I turned to my fellow men but found them scattered around like sheep grazing on a field of laminate. Even though we had only stood meters apart before, now we were so far that I could only see them as fuzzy, flesh-colored shapes. I wondered what we looked like to the girls.
Daiki produced a sharp whistle, trying to make us cluster up like a coach letting the class know it was time to leave the field. We eventually did, and I could see Shun—deprived of his glasses—squinting painfully like there was something in his eye.
“Guess that settles it,” Sayaka boomed, her voice brimming with satisfaction. Her gaze locked on Shun. I didn’t know how she recognized him at this scale, but she took a step forward nonetheless. Watching a giantess in motion at this size was surreal. Her movements seemed sluggish, almost as if I were watching them in slow motion, yet Sayaka could cover kilometers in mere seconds.
“Hey—hey!” Kaede tried to grip Sayaka’s wrist, but her forward momentum carried the load of her foot.
THUD. If Shun had any last words, I couldn’t hear them. The impact of the shoe produced a wave of force, popping my ears from the sudden change in pressure. Instead of rubber-scented wind, there was something wet and metallic decorating the backs of my hands, which I had used to shield my face. When I flipped them over, I found Shun’s blood—carried by the red mist—splattered on all of us.
Kaito began desperately wiping the foul ichor from his face, taking sharp, shallow breaths as tears swelled in his eyes. Daiki looked like he was trying to stop himself from throwing up, slowly descending—collapsing—to the floor. I sat down too, trying to fit in like an uninvited funeral guest.
Kaede exhaled sharply, letting go of Sayaka’s wrist. “Sayaka…”
“Dude!” Chō looked annoyed, raising a side of her face and snarling like a dog. “What the fuck?! The computer didn’t tell us to do that!”
“He was an insect.” Sayaka lifted her foot, pointing at the mess. “We have to get used to this. Right? This is how you play this game. Right?”
The projector didn’t seem to think so.
[UNLAWFUL TERMINATION]
[APPLYING PENALTY]
I had seen somebody shrink as a normally-sized person before, so it was only fitting that I would eventually experience it as a tiny. Instead of disappearing, it looked like Sayaka was falling on top of us, and for a moment, we all worried that her massive form would crush us. Only for a moment, though, since she soon diminished right alongside us. And instead of a goddess, she was now a mortal.
The president would prove it.
Kaede reached into her pocket, pulling out a neatly folded white handkerchief. Without hesitation, she knelt, giving us a prime view of the panties that shared the same color, and dropped the handkerchief over Sayaka. The tiny girl thrashed—muffled shrieks of terror escaping from the fabric.
Squinting, the president lowered her arm like the right hand of God, spreading out her slender fingers to ensure she wouldn’t miss the tiny woman. Without fail, the thrashing stopped, and there was now just a bulging shape under the cloth, like a cadaver in the morgue.
But the grip didn’t falter. Kaede stood up, turned to the waste bin in the corner of the room, and dropped Sayaka inside.
“That’s that.” She wiped her hands on the whole ordeal as a hollow THUNK echoed through the classroom.
It seemed like Shun was right. Randomly killing people really was against the rules.