Isekai’d by Wrong Number

The heavy apartment door clicked shut behind me, the sound echoing in the shoebox-sized genkan. Finally. Sanctuary. The world outside could burn for all I cared; my eight hours of feigning competence were officially over. I leaned against the wall, my hand halfway to my dress shoes, when a muffled buzz vibrated from the blazer still draped over my shoulders.

Work. It had to be. Some fresh-faced junior probably found a typo in slide 247 and thought it was a crisis worthy of my immediate attention.

Suddenly there's a call. I could only sighed, letting my hand fall away from my shoes. "I'll call you back," I muttered to the empty air, "Right after I forget you exist for fifteen minutes."

Ignoring the persistent buzzing, I shuffled into the main room. It wasn't much. A low bed in the corner, a single armchair piled high with 'worn once' clothes, and a kitchenette that was little more than a sink, a mini-fridge, and a microwave. The scent of stale air and quiet desperation hung about the place. It was home. I shed my suit like a second skin, tossing it onto the chair and changing into a worn-out t-shirt and sweats.

A splash of cold water from the tap on my face. A quick wipe of my hands and feet with a damp towel, washing away the grime of the city. The routine was mechanical, a series of mindless steps to reclaim my own body. Dinner was a cup of Pop Mie from the cabinet, the familiar crinkle of the packaging a prelude to three minutes of bland, salty perfection. I sat on the floor, leaning against the bed frame, slurping the noodles directly from the cup.

Only then, with the warm broth settling in my stomach, did I finally reach for my phone. The screen lit up with a backlog of notifications. My eyes narrowed. It wasn't work. It was one number, an unknown caller with a strange prefix. And they hadn't called just once.

Ten missed calls. All from the same number. My thumb hovered over the log, a frown pulling at my lips.

"Persistent, aren't you?" This wasn't desperation. This was spam reaching a whole new level of insanity.

My finger tapped on the entry, expanding it. The number was a string of digits that didn't look like any country code I knew. But it wasn't the number that caught my eye. It was the name saved by the caller. Angel Azakiel.

I let out a short, humorless laugh. "Seriously? What are we, fourteen? If you're going to run a scam, at least pick a name that isn't so edgy." Curiosity, or maybe just sheer boredom, got the better of me. I hit the call back button.

It was answered instantly. "WHY DIDN'T YOU ANSWER?!" a frantic, high-pitched girl's voice yelled, the sound tinny and distorted through the phone's speaker. "I've been trying to reach you! This is the Angel of Dea—"

Click.

I hung up. Definitely a scam. A weirdly theatrical one, but a scam nonetheless. I set the phone face down on the floor and went back to my dinner, savoring the last bit of artificial chicken flavor. Peace at last.

It lasted for all of three seconds. The phone buzzed violently against the floorboards, ringing again. I let out an annoyed groan, picked it up, and answered without even looking.

 "Listen, You have to take this seriously! You are about to die—"

Click.

I hung up again. I finished the last of the broth, the warm liquid doing little to soothe my growing irritation. It was as I was about to stand up to throw the cup away that a thought surfaced, unbidden, like a piece of digital flotsam from the dark corners of the internet. A rumor. It was the kind of thing you'd see on late-night forums or hear whispered between high schoolers on the train. People getting strange warnings right before they died. Sometimes it was a cryptic message slipped under their door. Other times, it was a phone call from a number that didn't exist. The stories always ended the same way: a perfectly healthy person dying of a sudden aneurysm, a heart attack, or some other 'natural' cause just hours later. It was just an urban legend, of course.

Just a stupid ghost story.

Just as the thought of the stupid ghost story crossed my mind, my phone lit up again, its screen glowing with the name Angel Azakiel. I jabbed my thumb at the red 'decline' icon. Nothing happened. I jabbed it again, harder this time. The screen remained frozen, the call insistent. My phone was no longer mine. With a sigh of utter defeat, I answered it, putting it on speaker.

"Stop hanging up!" the voice of the girl, Azakiel, pleaded. "This isn't a scam! This is real. Your life… it's scheduled to end in the middle of the night. The Book of God said so."

I stared at the cheap laminate of my floor, my half-eaten noodles forgotten. The Book of God. Of course. It all sounded like some kind of cosmic corporate restructuring, and my name was on the layoff list. There wasn't fear, or panic, or even sadness. There was only a profound sense of exhaustion. It figured. Even my death was going to be an inconvenient, bureaucratically mandated event.

"Alright," I said, my voice flat. "So, what am I supposed to do now?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line, a moment of genuine silence that was somehow more unnerving than her previous panic. "Uh..." she finally stammered, sounding like she was flipping through a manual. "Call your family? Like, say sorry?"

"I don't have any for now," I replied, the words tasting like ash.

"Oh. Um, how about friends?" she asked, her voice filled with a textbook-level of hopeful empathy that made my skin crawl.

"They all hate me because of who I am."

"Crush...?" she offered, her voice getting smaller.

"What am I? A kid?"

A frustrated sputtering came from the other end of the line, the sound of a carefully constructed script being shredded to pieces. "Look, you're not this isn't how it's supposed to go! The soul is supposed to be repentant! Or at least a little bit scared! What is wrong with you?"

"You're the one who called me in the middle of dinner to tell me I'm going to die," I deadpanned. "I think I'm entitled to be a little annoyed."

"Annoyed? The transition is commencing in forty-three seconds and you're annoyed?!" she shrieked. "This isn't a customer service complaint! This is your immortal soul we're talking about!"

"Immortal soul or not, you're still interrupting my dinner," I started to say, but the words died in my throat. The phone screen in my hand flickered, cutting off her frantic voice. The call interface vanished, replaced by a stark white background with a simple, bold timer in the center.

07:00

It began ticking down immediately. 06:59. 06:58.

"As it is written in the holy book," Azakiel's voice announced, suddenly filled with a rehearsed solemnity, "in the final moments, a soul is granted seven minutes to reflect upon their mortal journey. This is it, Hayato Mikami. Your life in review."

As if on cue, the screen split. The timer moved to a corner while the rest of the display lit up with an image. The view was strange, like it was filmed from an invisible camera hovering near the ceiling of a small, dated apartment. I saw a baby with a tuft of black hair, lying in a crib, his tiny hand curled around a woman's finger. My hand. My mother.

The scene shifted. The invisible camera was now at knee-level, watching the same child, now a toddler, taking a wobbly, hesitant step before falling onto his behind. Another shift. The boy was older, sitting at a school desk, staring out the window with a look of profound boredom that I recognized with a startling clarity. It was me. Every scene, every moment, viewed from a detached, third-person perspective. It wasn't nostalgic. It was unsettling. Like realizing you've been the subject of a lifelong documentary you never signed up for. The montage sped up, a blur of scraped knees, tedious classroom lectures, and awkward growth spurts, a highlight reel of a life that felt anything but highlighted.

The montage on the phone screen flickered. For a moment, the dull grey of my school life was replaced by a flash of vibrant color. Me, but younger, maybe sixteen, crammed onto a sofa with two other guys, all of us laughing so hard we were crying as a character exploded on a pixelated TV screen. Another flash. University. I was in some club room, leaning forward, passionately arguing about a film, a fire in my eyes I barely recognized. There were fleeting moments of life, of actual, unadulterated fun.

But they were just that—fleeting. The screen shifted to a shot of me in a stiff, new suit, shaking a manager's hand. The invisible camera then followed me into my first tiny apartment, the one before this one. Then came the endless loop: the glow of a computer screen on my face late at night; the forced, polite nod in a sterile conference room; the lonely walk home in the rain, my shoulders slumped. The energetic, laughing boy was gone, replaced by this monochrome adult.

"Wow," Azakiel's voice cut through the silence, her solemn tone gone, replaced by an unwelcome pity. "It's like watching a flower wilt in fast-forward. That's… actually really sad."

I gritted my teeth.

"Oh, wait, look!" she chirped, and the video helpfully zoomed in on me trying to make conversation by a water cooler. "Is this the time you tried to impress that girl from marketing by explaining synergistic leverage? Oh, honey, no. Her face says it all." The scene changed to me microwaving my dinner. "And that's the fourth night in a row with instant curry. You know, there's no celestial bonus for culinary laziness. You're getting a rock-bottom score in the 'Life's Simple Pleasures' category."

That was it. The unwanted life review was one thing. The live critique from my supernatural executioner was another. "Are you finished? I'd really prefer to have my existential crisis without a heckler, if you don't mind."

There was a sigh from the other end of the line, the sound of a celestial being fighting the urge to roll her eyes. "There's no need for that tone. There's only one minute left. It's almost midnight, see? Just try to relax and watch the entire show. It's nearly over."

Relax. She wanted me to relax while a highlight reel of my own mediocrity played out, a countdown to my unceremonious deletion from existence. The "show" on my phone obliged, accelerating into its finale. It showed me sitting in the conference room just hours ago, my face a perfect mask of polite indifference. It showed me walking home, my cheap umbrella failing against the Tokyo rain. It showed me closing my apartment door, peeling the lid off my cup of noodles, and finally, sitting right here on the floor, staring at this very phone. The invisible camera was now showing a third-person view of me, watching myself on a tiny screen. A perfect, pointless loop.

The timer in the corner of the screen was now a glaring red.

00:10

So this was it. The grand finale of Hayato Mikami. Not a bang, not even a whimper, but a sarcastic commentary track from an incompetent angel.

00:05

I glanced around my tiny apartment. The single chair with my discarded suit. The low table with the empty noodle cup.

00:03

"What a waste," I breathed.

00:01

The screen flared, flooding my vision with an all-consuming, brilliant white light.

To Be Continued.