The 2023 Present

Lore & Background

In the 2023 timeline, Takemichi is the embodiment of a life that never got its chance. At twenty-five he is still short, still soft-spoken, still the kid who got shoved into a wall in the first chapter of his own story. He works shifts at a convenience store, goes home to his mother's modest apartment, and spends his evenings scrolling his phone or sitting on a bench with Naoto, talking in circles about nothing. The Toman gang that once roared through his high-school years is a ghost — a name on a news headline, a scar he can't quite explain. Hinata, the girl who once made his chest ache with pride, is a memory he keeps at arm's length because he is not sure he deserves to be near her. What makes the Present so painful is its ordinariness. There are no rival gangs at his door, no blood on the pavement, no one shouting a motto. There is just the hum of the fluorescent lights, the beep of the register, the slow drip of a faucet in his mother's kitchen. And yet every ordinary moment is shadowed by what he knows is coming — or rather, what has already come. For the reader, the 2023 timeline is the emotional barometer. When Takemichi returns to the past, he does not go to save a gang or win a turf war in the abstract. He goes because in this quiet, rain-streaked apartment, the people he loves are already gone, and he can still hear the echo of their laughter in a kitchen that is too silent.

In Their Own Story

The register beeps. Takemichi scans a bottle of water, a pack of gum, a single onigiri. The customer doesn't look up from their phone. The fluorescent tube above the shelf flickers once, twice, then steadies. He stacks the items in a paper bag, ties the handles, and says 'arigatou gozaimasu' in the flat, practiced tone of a man who has said it four hundred times this week. Outside, the Tokyo rain has turned the sidewalk into a dark mirror. He watches a woman with a clear umbrella hurry past, her heels clicking a rhythm he almost recognizes. Almost. He blinks, and the reflection in the glass door shows not the convenience store but a schoolyard, a wall of blue blazers, a girl with a bright laugh he can no longer quite place. The fluorescent hum swallows the memory. He ties the next bag. The rain keeps falling. Somewhere under the floorboards of his life, a train is still running backward.

Reader's Guide

The 2023 Present is the story's emotional foundation. Before the time-travel spectacle, before the gang wars and the blood-soaked turf battles, there is Takemichi at twenty-five: a convenience-store clerk in a rain-streaked Tokyo, living with his mother, keeping one friend, and carrying the quiet grief of a life that never matched the one he once imagined. This timeline is not a single event but a condition. It is the 'default' outcome — what happens when the people of Toman go their separate ways, when loyalty frays, when the years pile up and the names on a roster become strangers. He is not running toward glory; he is running away from an empty apartment and a silence that has a name. For new readers, the Present establishes the emotional rules of the series: the stakes are personal, the losses are specific, and the 'victory' is not a territory flag but a kitchen where someone is still laughing. The mundane details — the shift schedule, the mother's cooking, the bench with Naoto — are not filler. They are the life Takemichi is trying to save, one impossible trip back at a time. If the past is the arena, the Present is the reason he's fighting.

Did You Know?

• The 2023 Present is deliberately stripped of the flashy gang aesthetics that define the rest of the story — its power comes from its quietness, making the contrast with Toman's chaos all the more jarring.
• Takemichi's convenience-store job is a recurring visual motif; the fluorescent-lit interior and the beeping register appear in nearly every return to the Present, grounding his adult life in a single, unglamorous space.
• Naoto Tsukishiro is one of the few characters whose presence in the Present signals that not everything has been lost — their bench conversations are the series' quietest, most human moments.
• The Present timeline is not static: as Takemichi changes the past, the details of his 2023 life shift subtly, reminding the reader that the 'future' is not a fixed destination but a living, breathing consequence.