No screams.

No panic.

Just... silence.

A silence so heavy it was deafening.

A few minutes earlier, life had still gone on. Timid laughter, raised voices, hurried footsteps in the hallways. And then... six students had disappeared.

Literally.

Before the eyes of dozens of classmates.

But above all...under the cold, impartial gaze of the surveillance cameras.

The videos were immediately viewed.

On a loop.

Again.

Again.

Each disappearance had the same pattern.

A phone.

A blue light.

A shrill whistle.

Then...nothing.

Not a glitch.

Not a montage.

Not a nightmare.

Everyone had seen it. The screens in the supervisors' room. The replays in the principal's office. The videos already shared on some phones.

There was nothing to explain.

Nothing to understand.

They were gone.

And the void they left behind wasn't an absence.

It was a wound. A gaping wound in everyday life.

In the hallways, not a word was exchanged.

Gazes were empty, lost in the cold light of phones, as if each notification could announce the deletion of another.

Noah trembled, unable to speak.

Samantha, hands over her ears, tried to silence the cries she alone could hear.

Luna, for her part, murmured the names of the missing like a prayer.

A funeral litany.

And Élise…

Élise no longer spoke.

She didn't move.

Hunted against a wall, she stared at an invisible point, her eyes dry but ravaged.

She repeated a single name. Again. Again. Again. Like a stillborn prayer:

— Arnaud… Arnaud… Arnaud…

No one dared approach.

In the staff room, the atmosphere was stifling.

On the screen, the video was still playing.

The white-haired boy raised his phone.

The flash.

The image twisted.

Then… disappearance.

A blur of light.

An empty chair.

A teacher murmured, his voice breaking:

— It's like in the videos… in China… in Brazil…

No one answered.

Because everyone knew.

It was no longer a distant phenomenon.

It was no longer a foreign rumor.

It was there.

Here. Now.

The principal, pale, clung to the edge of the table as if to keep from collapsing. He whispered hoarsely:

"We're out of control... Nothing."

Three months earlier – San Francisco

A violent storm split the sky.

A very real flying saucer was struck by lightning and crashed into the headquarters of a video game company: Dimensional Playing.

The twenty-story building partially collapsed. Fires. Alarms. Total chaos.

A game was in development.

Their flagship project.

The game that would revolutionize the industry: EXITCODE.

From the rubble, two giant humanoid creatures emerged, injured.

Law enforcement quickly arrived.

One was shot dead. The other... fled aboard her saucer, miraculously intact.

Before disappearing into the sky, she uttered a sentence in an unknown language.

That day, the toll was dramatic: dead, injured, a building destroyed.

And then, a strange phenomenon.

Dozens of notifications sent worldwide.

Encrypted.

Untranslatable.

And from then on...

The disappearances began.

People, sucked into their phones.

Without explanation.

Without return.

Five giant keys were discovered around the world.

And in the Sahara Desert, a colossal door, erected in the middle of nowhere.

A chain of supernatural events.

Without logic.

Without answers.

Back to the present

At high school, fear had become a slow poison.

The laughter had disappeared. The voices had fallen silent.

Even the walls seemed to be in mourning.

Some students were praying.

Others were silent.

All were waiting.

Worried.

Broken.

A voice, barely a whisper, cut through the frozen air:

"What if it's our turn?"

A shudder ran through the entire hallway.

The world was turned upside down.

And that was just the beginning.