Ima, Soko ni Iru Boku

In Ima, Soko ni Iru Boku, Shuuzou "Shuu" Matsutani drifts through an ordinary life defined by friends, a crush, and kendo, until a loss to his rival sends him to a smokestack at sunset, where he meets Lala-Ru, a quiet blue-haired girl carrying a strange pendant. Shuu tries to win her trust even when her answers are flat and distant, but that brief encounter is shattered when a woman and two serpentine machines appear out of nowhere to seize Lala-Ru. Shuu rushes to protect her and is dragged into a desert world far removed from anything he knows. There, survival is ruled by scarcity and violence. Lala-Ru's pendant can summon water, a miracle in a land where the resource is precious, and when it is lost, Shuu becomes the prime suspect. Thrown into a harsh landscape of soldiers, imprisonment, torture, and hunger, he is forced to endure the horrors of war while clinging to the hope of saving the lonely girl he met atop the smokestack. Ima, Soko ni Iru Boku moves from the shock of abduction to a bleak struggle for empathy, survival, and human decency in a world that offers very little of any of them.