Yogiri Takatou awoke to the sound of shouting right beside him. Turning bleary eyes towards the voice, he found a girl with disheveled hair shaking his shoulders.

“Who are you again?”

A strange feeling came over him.

He was in the middle of a school trip, on a sightseeing bus. Since he was sitting by the window at the very back of the bus, there should only have been other guys around him.

“Tomochika Dannoura!” the girl shouted desperately.

It was one of his classmates, he finally remembered. He couldn’t recall most of their names, but hers was a bit strange, so it had left something of an impression on him.

“Ah, Dannoura. Did we arrive already?” he asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

Their bus was heading to a ski resort in Nagano. It was kind of odd for Tomochika to be the one waking him up as they had never spoken to each other before, but it was about the right time for them to have arrived.

“No, no! I just didn’t know what to do!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

...

“You may think me unreasonable, but this is simply the way of the world. ‘Darkness is only a single step away,’ and all that. Now, why don’t I explain the situation to you? As you may have noticed, you are no longer in the world you call home. I have summoned you into a parallel world.”

-Volume 1 pages 5 and 15