The words clung to him like a curse.
Hungry.
The town wasn't just strange.
It wasn't just broken.
It was hungry.
And it had noticed him.
Kaito sat hunched forward on the narrow bed, shoulders trembling. His breath came shallow, uneven. The mattress sagged beneath his weight, springs groaning softly, as though the bed itself wanted to speak.
The lantern flame on the nightstand guttered, throwing jagged shadows across the room. He found himself staring at the walls, at the warped planks of wood. Every knot, every grain seemed to twist into shapes that weren't there before—faces, mouths, watching eyes. The more he stared, the more the shadows shifted.
He tore his gaze away, squeezing his eyes shut. It's in your head. You're tired. You're imagining things.
But the air in the room disagreed. It pressed on him, heavy and damp, as if the inn was exhaling around him.
His hand drifted to the dagger at his belt. The hilt felt real, solid, unlike the shifting walls. He clung to it like an anchor.
The door latch gleamed faintly in the lantern's glow. Locked. He remembered locking it. But the longer he stared, the less certain he became. Did he really hear the click? Or had the inn swallowed that sound too?
Kaito stood, legs unsteady, and crossed the room. The floorboards creaked beneath him, but not in rhythm with his steps. It was like something else was walking with him, just out of sync.
He reached the door and touched the latch. Cold. Too cold for iron. His fingers hesitated. He pressed down slowly.
Click.
The latch lifted as though it had never been locked at all.
Kaito froze, heart thudding against his ribs. He hadn't touched the key. He hadn't turned it. The door had been waiting.
A whisper slipped through the crack. A word so faint he almost thought it came from inside his own skull.
"Kaito…"
His throat tightened. No one here knew that name. He had given them Kairen. He had been careful.
His hand dropped from the latch, trembling. The whisper faded, but the silence that followed was worse. It was the silence of something listening, patient, hungry.
Kaito stumbled back to the bed and sat, dagger still clutched in hand. He didn't want to sleep. He didn't want to close his eyes. But the longer he sat in that chair, the more the lantern flame dimmed, bowing lower and lower, as if suffocating.
When it flickered again, for half a heartbeat he swore the room was filled with people—pale faces crowding the walls, eyes wide and mouths open.
The light steadied. The room was empty.
Kaito buried his face in his hands. A laugh slipped from his throat, but it was shaky, hollow, more like a sob. "Safe night, huh? Safe night…"
The walls creaked in answer.
Kaito sat with his dagger across his knees, staring at the lantern as though his life depended on it. Maybe it did. The flame was weak, a trembling sliver of gold surrounded by too much shadow. Every time it bowed low, his chest tightened. Every time it flared, relief barely brushed him before dread rushed back in.
He whispered to himself, just to hear something other than silence. "It's fine. Just a dream. Just another trick. It's the forest again. The forest playing games."
But the name the whisper had used…
Kaito.
That wasn't the forest. That was something that knew him.
His grip on the dagger hilt whitened. He looked toward the door again. The latch gleamed faintly. He couldn't tell if it was shut now or slightly open—no matter how hard he stared, the angle seemed to change.
He forced himself to move. One step, two, across the creaking boards. He pressed his ear against the wood.
At first—nothing. Just the hush of the inn. Then—softly, too softly—he heard the creak of another step. Not his. From the hallway.
And a voice, low and rhythmic. The same phrase he had heard all day, but slower now, drawn out.
"Safe night… safe night… safe night…"
The hairs on his arms rose. He staggered back, heart hammering.
The lantern flickered again, and for a heartbeat he saw the shadow of feet under the crack of the door—too many feet. Four? Six? All pressed close, as if a crowd stood silently waiting on the other side.
When the flame steadied, the shadows were gone.
Kaito's breath rattled out of him. His skin prickled with sweat. He couldn't stay in here. Not with that door. Not with whispers using his name.
His eyes darted to the window. The shutters were drawn, but a thin seam of moonlight split through. He moved toward it, hands shaking as he pushed them open.
The night outside was thick with fog. The lamps lining the streets swayed on their posts, flickering in and out, like a heartbeat struggling to stay alive. The fog pulsed with each flicker, swelling and shrinking as though it too were breathing.
And in that moment, he saw it—down in the street. A figure standing alone beneath a lantern. Not moving. Just watching the inn.
Kaito blinked, rubbed his eyes. When he looked again, the figure was gone.
His knees weakened. He slammed the shutters closed and pressed his back against them, chest heaving. The wood was cold through his shirt, cold in a way that felt wrong—as if the world beyond wasn't air and stone, but something empty. Something that wanted to swallow him.
The lantern hissed. Dipped. Almost went out.
"No—no, no, no." Kaito lurched forward and cupped the glass, shielding the flame with his hands as though his breath alone could keep it alive. His reflection stared back at him in the sooty pane. For an instant, it didn't move when he did.
He recoiled, nearly dropping the lantern.
That was it. He couldn't stay in this room. He needed to move, even if it meant walking straight into whatever waited outside.
His legs obeyed before his mind could stop them. He strapped his dagger at his belt, pulled on his cloak, and yanked the door open.
The hallway stretched before him, dim and wavering with lamplight. Too long. Longer than it had been when he checked in. Shadows pooled in the corners, heavy and patient.
Somewhere below, laughter echoed from the common room. But it didn't rise and fall like real voices. It repeated. Over and over. A laugh caught in a loop.
Kaito's hand tightened on his dagger. His throat was dry. His chest burned.
"Safe night…" a voice whispered again, this time from the far end of the hall.
The lamp above him flickered.
And for just a moment, the hall was full of people. Pale faces, all turned toward him.
The light steadied. The hallway was empty again.
Kaito stayed still, frozen in the silence after the laughter died. His breath came shallow, his ears straining for the smallest sound. He wanted to believe it was his imagination. He needed to. But the way the inn seemed to lean closer around him told him otherwise.
The door clicked shut behind him, though he hadn't touched it. He spun, dagger raised—but the latch rested still, as if it had always been closed.
The hallway stretched on too far, the lamps sputtering in intervals that felt unnatural. Light, shadow, light, shadow—like the flicker of eyelids. Watching. Measuring.
Kaito began to walk, each step painfully loud on the boards.
He passed a door. Another. He risked a glance at the nearest handle. The wood looked chewed, splintered around the lock as though gnawed by teeth. He quickened his pace.
Another door. From behind it came a sound—soft, rhythmic thuds, like someone knocking their head against the wall over and over.
He pressed on.
At the corner of the hall, the light stretched wrong. It didn't just fade—it bent, as though pulled into the dark by invisible strings. And from that darkness, he swore he saw fingers curl out for an instant before retreating.
Kaito's stomach churned. His body screamed at him to turn back, to bolt for his room and bar the door. But he knew if he went back, he'd find someone—or something—already waiting inside.
So he kept walking.
The hall widened suddenly, opening into a balcony that overlooked the common room below. Kaito leaned forward, clutching the railing.
At first, relief stirred in his chest. He saw people—guests—sitting at tables, their shoulders shaking with laughter, tankards raised. The innkeeper stood at the counter, polishing a glass. For a moment, it looked normal.
Then he noticed the rhythm.
Every gesture, every laugh, every nod—repeated. One man raised his drink. Another clapped him on the back. They both laughed. A third leaned in. Then all three reset, starting again.
Over and over. A puppet show on broken strings.
Kaito's throat went dry.
The innkeeper's head twitched as though on cue. Slowly, far too slowly, his chin lifted. His eyes—pale and unfocused—rolled up toward the balcony. Straight at Kaito.
The glass slipped from his hands, but it didn't shatter. It hit the counter, bounced, returned to his palm. Reset.
The innkeeper's lips moved, forming words Kaito could barely hear.
"…hungry… hungry… hungry…"
Kaito staggered back, gripping the railing.
And that was when he heard it. A new voice. Not from below. From behind him.
"Safe night, traveler."
Kaito spun.
A guest stood in the hall—at least, what looked like a guest. A young man with an ordinary cloak and boots, but his face was wrong. Too smooth, too blurred, like a painting left out in the rain. His mouth opened in a wide, slack smile.
"Safe night."
Another door opened. A woman stepped out, her hands folded neatly in front of her. Her face was blurred too, her eyes two pale smudges.
"Safe night."
More doors creaked open. Footsteps emerged. Blurred faces. Slack mouths. All turning toward him, all whispering in unison.
"Safe night."
"Safe night."
"Safe night."
The words stacked over each other until they became a single droning hum, vibrating through the wood of the inn itself.
Kaito stumbled backward, dagger raised, but the crowd was already pressing closer. The hall warped, stretching longer and narrower. The lamps guttered, each flame bowing low as though suffocated.
One face pushed too close, its smudge of a mouth peeling wider. Teeth showed, but there were too many.
Kaito slashed with his dagger. The figure recoiled—but instead of blood, black smoke poured from the wound, curling up toward the ceiling.
The others didn't stop. They leaned forward, whispering faster.
"Safe night—safe night—safe night—safe night—"
The light went out.
Darkness swallowed the hall, and the only thing Kaito heard was the sound of his own panicked breath—and dozens of voices closing in.
Kaito ran.
The voices chased him down the corridor, piling into each other, their chant rattling his skull. Safe night—safe night—safe night—
The lamps died one by one as he passed, until he was sprinting blind, his boots slamming against boards that flexed too soft, like flesh stretched under his weight. His dagger's edge caught what little glow remained, a sliver of steel in a sea of dark.
He turned left. Another hallway. Right. Another. Each corner led only to more doors, more shadows, more whispering mouths pressed too close.
The air thickened. Breathing felt like sucking smoke.
"Kaito…"
The chant had changed. He stopped dead, chest heaving. The whispers weren't saying safe night anymore. They were saying his name.
"Kaito… Kaito… Kaito…"
He staggered back, clutching his weapon tighter. "Shut up!" His voice cracked against the walls, swallowed instantly, leaving nothing but the echo of his own panic.
He stumbled into a door and shoved it open.
Inside was his room. The same crooked bed. The same half-burnt candle on the table. For a heartbeat, relief surged through him. He'd made it back.
Then the figure sitting on the bed looked up.
It was him.
Kaito stared into his own face—same dark hair, same sharp jaw, same haunted eyes. Only this version smiled. Wide. Too wide. His reflection tilted its head, lips peeling open to show a mouth full of jagged, broken glass.
"Wrong place," it whispered.
Kaito slammed the door shut and bolted.
The hall bent around him, the wood groaning like ribs cracking. He tripped, his palm scraping against the boards. When he pulled back, black smears clung to his skin, tar-like, sticky, burning cold.
He pushed forward anyway. Every instinct screamed that stopping meant death—or worse.
Another corner. Another stretch of doors. This one glowed faintly, not from lamps but from thin cracks splitting the ceiling. A dull red light seeped through, dripping down the walls like veins.
Kaito's pace slowed. His heart thundered so hard it felt like it would rip through his ribs.
At the end of the hall, the innkeeper stood.
But he was taller now. His spine stretched too far, his neck bending at impossible angles. His face had split into two, one half still polishing a phantom glass, the other grinning wide enough to rip his cheeks apart.
"Hungry," the twin mouths said together.
The walls shuddered. Doors rattled. Figures spilled out—blurred faces, smudged eyes, all lurching toward him in jerks and spasms.
Kaito backed away, his blade trembling. His mind screamed at him to fight, but deep down he knew—it wouldn't matter. There were too many. And none of them were real.
The red light above flickered. One heartbeat, it illuminated everything in grotesque detail. The next heartbeat, all was darkness. Back and forth. Light. Dark. Light. Dark.
And each time the light returned, the crowd was closer.
"KAITO."
They reached for him, dozens of hands clawing.
Desperation clawed back harder. He thrust his dagger into the floorboards. The steel sank deeper than wood should allow—like plunging into water. The boards groaned, split, and something yawned open beneath him.
A void.
Cold air rushed upward, pulling at his clothes, his hair, his breath. Without thinking, Kaito ripped his dagger free and let himself fall.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
And the last thing he heard before it all vanished was the innkeeper's voice, close to his ear though he'd left him far behind:
"Hungry."
Cold swallowed him.
It wasn't the kind that only numbed skin; it was the kind that hollowed bone, that made breath feel like a rumor. He fell through a darkness that tasted like old pages and salt, tumbling past impressions and half-formed sounds until he hit a surface that gave just enough to bruise. Pain flared—sharp and immediate—but beneath it rose something worse: vertigo not of motion, but of identity. He lay on something damp and hard and could not tell whether his body belonged to him or to some other man who had worn it before.
The void above him hummed, a low electric ache that thrummed in his teeth. For a moment he did not know which way was up. When he forced his eyes open, the ceiling was not the low plank wood of the inn's basement but a roiling skin of shadow, stitched with bright veins that pulsed in time with his heart. The air smelled of iron and smoke and the faint, sweet tang of a child's candy melting in a pocket that had long since been emptied.
Voices came first—soft, everywhere, like wind in long grass. Not whispers now but lines from a thousand mouths overlaid and out of sync: the innkeeper humming his looped tune, the children's rhyme, the traveler's voice promising guidance, Thalen's greedy chuckle, Fenria's laugh, Elion's low, calm reproach, Darius's whoop—snatches of people he'd known and people he might have known. They braided together and unbraided until he could not tell whose memory belonged to him and whose the town had borrowed.
"Kaito," the voices said, and the name was not a comfort. It was accusation, demand, recognition. Each syllable felt like teeth. "Kaito, you were late."
He pushed himself up. His hands came away black. The tar-like smear clung to his palms and to the wood grooves, cold and reluctant. As he tried to wash it away with stilled water that wasn't water—dark, oily—his fingers left prints on the stone in the shape of the gate's mark: a circle, cleft with a jagged line. He did not remember making it, but it meant something. It always meant something. A key. A brand. A counting.
Something moved in the dark—closer. Not a person; a suggestion of a shape, a pressure like someone leaning over the rim of his skull. It tasted of smoke and lead and the edges of long nightmares. The voice—the Guide?—whispered in a language folded over itself. It was almost helpful. It was almost tender. Then it cocked its head and spoke in his own voice.
"You should have listened," it said. It sounded like him, but older and lined with exhaustion. Kaito flinched as if struck. "You should have listened when you heard the first cry. You should have remembered."
Images came at him in a rush: the forest, so green and full of teeth; the statue under which he had bled and woken; Darius laughing with cocky ease as he swung his greatsword; Fenria's yellow eyes reflecting moonlight; Elion's steady arrow release. Each memory popped and fizzled, reconstituted and re-stitched with something the town did: a small, wrong detail inserted—Darius's laugh a semitone higher, Fenria's grin missing a tooth, Elion's fingers too long. The falseness pricked like thorns.
Kaito clung to one: Fenria's howl after the boar fell. In his mind he reached, desperate for the warmth of a real thing. Her voice answered—then warped. It called his name and begged him not to leave, as if pleading to a younger version of himself. "Kaito—don't go. Don't chase the power. Don't be swallowed."
He answered in his head before he realized he had: I'm trying. I'm trying not to.
But the Fenria in the dark tilted her head and said, "You failed." Her tone had no pity. It had the bright hunger of a child refusing to share a toy.
He screamed. The sound ricocheted off the basement's stone and came back layered with laughter. For a dreadful second the laughter sounded like Darius and like a child and like a bird breaking its throat. The sound was a rope around his chest.
Hands—many hands—flickered at the peripheries of his vision. Not reaching for him so much as rearranging him, sorting him. The dark bit at his sleeve and tugged, and the room shifted; where once had been stone now hung a mural: a crude rendering of him as a puppet—strings, a small foolish smile, the words Kairen written beneath in a looping hand. Then the mural re-bled into the darkfloor, and the mural's eyes opened and looked right at him. They were his eyes. They were not his eyes.
The town's hunger was patient. It could wait a hundred thousand breaths. It had already learned the rhythms of mortals: fear, pride, stubbornness. It fed on those things. It gathered them up like threads and wove a tapestry that seemed tailor-made to unsettle him: memories reassembled into accusations, comforts that curdled beneath his fingers. Every promise he had kept to himself—do not cling to this world—was a scrap the town could use.
"You think you can carve memories into stone and hold them?" a voice asked, lower than anything he had heard. It seemed to come from beneath him—in the floorboards, in the marrow of the world. "You think you can make truth out of the things you pick up on the way?"
He could not answer. Words caught in his throat. The air smelled of his own sweat and of ink and of old promises he had made and broken. The Guide's voice, neutral now, said, "Not everything you touch must be kept."
A light shimmered somewhere in the dark—tiny and bright, like a moth's heart. Kaito reached for it. It flew away, only to land on a wall where a mirror hung, though the mirror was not glass but a smooth dark pool. His face hovered there like a coin cupped in water, only the coin had more years and more scars than his body. It mouthed things—a speech that he knew but hadn't yet uttered. Don't be the one who thinks he is the center, it said. Not the center. He watched his future-self mouth the words and felt them lodge like splinters.
He wanted to go back. He wanted certainty. He wanted the traveller—The Guide—to step forward and explain. Ask him to explain who he was, to tell Kaito his place in the world, to offer a map to where truth lay. Instead, the Guide's shadow bent closer, patient and unhurried.
"You cannot be spared from learning," the Guide said in a voice that was equal parts balm and blade. "You can only be spared from surprise."
Kaito stung at that. Surprise had been the thief that had taken his life again and again. He wanted to be spared from pain. He wanted to be spared from this slow erosion of himself. "Help me," he breathed. The word was useless, the same way a wick is useless without oil.
The Guide moved as if to answer, and for one breath there was warmth—then the basement changed. Walls lengthened into corridors that had no sensible architecture; doors multiplied like teeth. Kaito took a step and found he had aged by an hour; he blinked and lost minutes of his memory. Faces passed overhead in a flicker—his mother? a childhood friend?—and each face said his name and then inverted it into an insult he could not parse. He tried to hold on to at least one—Fenria's laugh—and even that frayed.
Time became granular. Moments fell apart and reassembled. He could feel himself being worn down. The town was not hasty. It needn't be. It tightened pressure like a vise, small and unyielding, day by day. Each loop was gentle enough to appear merciful. Each mercy was a false relief.
The first thing to go was certainty. He could no longer trust that the dagger at his belt belonged to him; it could be an instrument placed by the town to test his willingness to cut. He looked down at his hands and wondered if the black tar smeared across them had ever been his at all, or if the town had made it part of him like a brand.
The second thing to go was memory of the recent past. He tried to remember the traveler's exact face—the slope of his nose, the amber flash of his eyes—and it dissolved into a dozen similar faces. He tried to bring up Thalen's laugh and found only a smear. He probed at the edges of his life and fished only fragments.
The third—most painful—was the echo of Darius's fist on his shoulder in the inn, the easy camaraderie. It coalesced and collapsed into the image of Darius pushing a blade into his back because Kaito had shown weakness. That image licked at him like acid along the inside of his skull.
He roared then, a sound that had no shape, and the roars answered him with mocking silence and tiny polite applause.
Then, what should have been his breaking point crested into a different zone: exhaustion so deep his bones felt tacked with lead, and in that exhaustion, a thought arrived that was simple and as brutal as a stone: Maybe this is deserved. Maybe every loop of death, every wound and resurrection was teaching him how to be smaller, to be careful. Maybe the town was an examiner and he had failed. Maybe it was better to fold.
He did not want to become small. That knowledge buckled him. He didn't want to accept that the world could turn his resolve into something feeble and forgettable.
And yet the town did not merely attack with visions. It offered temptation. In the black pool-mirror, a version of him smiled not with glassy teeth but with a weary, sure grin. This twin tapped his chest, then pointed to a place beneath the world where a bright thing glowed—no larger than the pad of a thumb. Take it, the twin mouthed. It will make the hunger stop. It will give you truth. It will let you wake up and walk away, and no one will ever know.
Kaito reached toward the offering and his hand brushed the dark water. For one terrible instant the object's glow burned through him, and he felt the raw human pleasure of certainty—the kind that would let him sleep again without dreaming, the kind that would let him hold Fenria's laugh and not fear its fracture. It was everything.
But as his fingers closed, dozens of small voices whispered: You will owe. You will owe. You will owe. The price was not shown, not defined. It was simply a hole where obligations gathered like debt. It would be repayment for the peace he craved.
He pulled back as if struck. The glow receded. The twin sighed and turned away, an actor finishing a scene. The Guide's shadow, looming somewhere between father and jailer, simply observed. "Choice is its own torment," it murmured. "Even if the choices are false."
Kaito curled into himself in the cold. The tar on his hands seeped into his skin as if it had always been there. He wept, not for what he had lost but for what he might yet become: a man who took a bright thing to silence his doubts and traded his future for a moment of sleep. That thought—of a bargain without full knowledge—gnawed at him with teeth made of thin knives.
Above, the inn creaked. Somewhere a lamp flickered. He thought he heard the old woman's chant—soft, muffled, as if through many walls. He wanted desperately to wake, to tear himself back to the room's bed, to the mundane nail and mattress that would prove reality. He wanted proof that he had not been excavated and replaced by this thin, panicked thing.
But when he tried to pull himself up, the bones in his arms refused. They felt heavier by a pound. He closed his eyes and let the slate of darkness take him, because the alternative was perpetual motion through terror.
When he fainted—if that's what the world chose to allow—it was with the image of the Guide's face half-lit and unreadable, and the innkeeper's two mouths mouthing the single word like a benediction and a curse:
"Hungry."
And even as his consciousness slackened, a last whisper threaded through the dark, not accusatory this time but almost intimate: "We only gnaw on what resists. Try not to resist, Kaito. Try not to hurt us."
He dreamed he was back in the Forest. The tree trunks stretched clear and true, his old wounds a map of things that had been navigable. He thought of the carved statue, the save notification, the first time he'd woken with a new chance. In that dream a younger version of himself stood under a pale sky, staring at him with a clarity that made his chest ache.
Kaito tried to warn him—there was a scream caught in his throat, a story to shove back into his past self's ear: Don't drink the bright thing. Don't take the cheap certainty. Don't let the hunger teach you preference over truth. But the dream-Kaito smiled, satisfied and foolish, and walked away content. He did not listen. He did not listen because he could not yet know the cost.
And so he woke—if waking it was—the basement's damp pressing against his cheek, his lungs finding air like a fish flopping. The tar on his hands was still there, and when he rubbed it with the heel of his hand, it did not come off. The mark remained: a reminder that this had not been merely a dream.
He sat very slowly, palms to his face, and felt the first solid stones of resignation settle under his ribs. The town had not merely tasted him; it had tested him. It had learned the shape of his fear and measured the resilience of his loyalty. It had found fissures and gently blown them wider.
Outside, a lamp flared. It flickered—once, twice. The sound of the world's breathing steadied. The inn above him creaked, then settled as if satisfied.
Kaito let out a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob and whispered, "Then break me."
It was not a plea. It was not defiance. It was the beginning of a promise he didn't yet understand.
The lamp sputtered again.
Darkness swallowed the room for less than a heartbeat, but that was enough—too much. When light returned, the chairs were closer. Not just shifted this time. They were gathered, circling the table in the center of the room, like an audience waiting for a performance.
Kaito's lungs seized. His throat burned as if the air itself had turned poisonous. He wanted to scream, to shatter the silence, but his voice lodged uselessly inside him.
The breathing had stopped.
That was worse.
Silence was the cruellest sound of all.
---
He stumbled back until his shoulders pressed into the wall. Splinters dug into him. He didn't care. His body was trembling so violently it felt like his bones were trying to escape his skin.
The lamp flared once more, bright enough that shadows recoiled across the walls—then dimmed to a feeble orange glow.
And in that sickly half-light, he saw something.
A figure.
Just at the edge of sight.
Its outline quivered like smoke. A face that wasn't a face, shifting, melting, reforming, always just beyond recognition.
He blinked. It was gone.
He blinked again. It was closer.
---
"No…" The word scraped out of him. "No, you're not real. You're not real!"
But the guild mark on his skin throbbed with a faint, icy pulse. It was as though the world itself was laughing at him, whispering, If I'm not real, then neither are you.
He clutched his arm, nails digging deep enough to draw blood, desperate to anchor himself to something solid, something human. The pain was real. The blood was real.
But the floor beneath him shifted.
The wood stretched out like skin pulled too tight, veins crawling along the planks. For a moment, he thought he saw eyes—dozens, maybe hundreds—blinking up from the cracks.
The town wasn't just hungry.
It was watching him.
Everywhere.
---
Kaito's knees buckled. He sank to the floor, palms pressed to his ears as though that could shut out the world pressing against him. His chest convulsed with shallow, ragged breaths.
"I… I can't… I can't—"
But he couldn't finish. Because his voice wasn't his alone anymore.
Another voice, low and layered, spoke over his own lips.
"Stay."
Kaito's blood turned to ice. His mouth was still open, but he hadn't said it.
The sound had come from inside him.
---
The lamp gave one last flicker. Its flame stretched impossibly high, sputtered, and died.
Darkness swallowed everything.
And in that abyss, he felt it.
Hands—not flesh, not bone, but the idea of hands—reaching for him from every direction. Cold as stone, yet burning like fever. Grasping not at his body, but deeper. Clawing for his mind.
The last thing he saw, before the dark swallowed him whole, was the faint glow of his guild symbol.
But it no longer looked like a brand of belonging.
It looked like a chain.
The guild mark throbbed on his skin, not a sign of belonging but a brand of ownership. The lamp sputtered, shadows swallowing the walls until he could no longer tell where the room ended and he began. And in that suffocating dark, Kaito finally understood—the town wasn't just watching him. It had claimed him, body and soul. And when the light died, it wouldn't be the inn that disappeared.