I took a series of deep breaths, my chest rising and falling, and allowed a sense of ease to reenter my mind. The searing, molten sensation that was permeating through my skeleton had now dissipated, and I could now be partly relieved of my pain. My body may have been battered in every which way, but at least now I could have a moment's reprieve.
'The only issues that remain are my bloodied eye, numbed right arm, exhaustion, and blood loss. When I say it all together, I'm shocked I made it this far.'
The skull was still in my hand, but I wasn't exactly sure what I should do with it.
My mind felt as though it were covered by a fog of drowsiness. It was a direct result of allowing myself to relax. So, even as I tried to ease up, I was taking a great effort to maintain my consciousness and keep myself from falling into a deep sleep. Of course, I did want to let myself slip completely and fall asleep, but a part of me had a serious worry. If I did allow the drowsiness to win out, it wouldn't be a brief nap awaiting me. Instead, I might never wake up at all!
The thought of dying right now after everything that I went through to survive is just plain depressing.
Still, a weary, warm kind of feeling settled in my chest. Welp, whatever my current circumstances might be, at least the hard part was over.
'Now it's time to return to the real world... But how does that work exactly? Actually, do we still have to worry about being erased?'
The thought struck me like a cold splash of water. I'd been so focused on surviving the fight against that monstrous eye that I'd completely forgotten about what came after. Hopefully, going back to the real world would be simple, but what if it turns out to be another uphill battle?
Seeking an answer, I glanced toward Cacophony.
She stood in front of me, poised and elegant, the remnants of her flaming crimson threads still flickering against he backdrop of the night sky. The radiance and glow of the embers floating around her illuminated her figure with the reverence of a sun goddess.
Noticing my gaze, she parted her lips and offered me an amused grin.
"Your first assignment is now complete. You've done well to survive this ordeal, as minor as it may be."
'Minor!'
I nearly blurted out the word, only being stopped by the lack of air in my struggling lungs.
So, in her mind, this is only on the level of something minor? I hope I never find out what she considers to be something major.
I shuddered at the thought.
Recomposing myself, I tilted my head upward before speaking.
"Minor, you say? Please! You're giving that puny ghost too much credit! I wasn't taking it seriously, that's all. If I were then this would've been over in a flash." Normally, I would've tried to puff up my chest, but I didn't wish to create yet another ache in my body.
Cacophony's grin remained placidly entertained, but her eyes shifted. For a brief moment, her gaze became tempered as she watched me. Then, almost too softly to be heard, she muttered something under her breath.
"Huh? What did you—"
"Veri, the ghost's possession over this street had been broken. This subspace will now reconnect with reality."
As she spoke those words, she tilted her chin toward the sky. When I looked upward, it dawned on me that the world around us had undergone, or was undergoing, a series of changes.
The gigantic eye had been burnt to ash and eradicated, but in its place was a fractured sky. Where there was once the smooth night, there was now a spiderweb of hairline cracks and fissures. Each fissure in the sky glimmered faintly, and the sky seemed to be held together not by air, but by some fragile, ethereal force. Like a broken mirror, the fissures in the night scape split it into thousands of panes.
When I squinted my eyes to focus on one of the panes, I noticed strange lights moving beneath the surface.
They weren't the usual stars that dotted the night. There were two green spheres shining in the corner of the sky. The two spheres floated eerily, waiting for... something. I couldn't tell how long they'd been there, but it was only now that they became visible.
'Are they... watching us?'
As I observed them, I got the impression that something was alive behind their silent presence.
Without any sound or indication, the two green spheres disappeared as though they'd burned themselves out of existence entirely. What, or who, were those entities?
With the sudden disappearance of the entities in question, it didn't seem like I'd be getting an answer any time soon. Based on Cacophony's relaxed expression, it didn't seem relevant to our present situation anyway.
I lowered my gaze, half expecting some other kind of anomaly to appear, but there was nothing. The house and backyard remained still as the fractured sky glimmered above.
Cacophony wasn't alarmed in the slightest. The flickering embers that surrounded her had finally all burned through and vanished, leaving her solitary figure behind. Though even without the embers, it was just as elegant as before.
Her calmness made the situation feel almost ordinary or unremarkable.
"…You're not going to explain what those were, are you?" I finally muttered.
Her crimson eyes slid toward me, a hint of amusement still lingering in their depths. "Youth is defined by curiosity, and curiosity itself is healthy, Veri. But knowing too much, too soon, can be unhealthy. For now, it is irrelevant."
The lack of concrete information was disappointing, but her dismissal was helpful in its own way. It told me that she knew, or at least had a good guess, of whoever was watching us behind those green spheres.
Still, her calling the information 'irrelevant' scratched at the sarcastic part of my personality and begged me to make a snarky remark.
Before I could muster said remark, the air shifted around us.
The cracks in the sky began to spread wider, glowing faintly with a silvery light. One by one, the shattered panes started to tilt and rotate in place, as if the entire nightscape were being rearranged. At the same time, the ground beneath us rumbled and shifted. When I looked down at the ground, I didn't see any visible changes to the dirt, and yet through my plastic throne, I felt the vibrations.
The sensation was dizzying; it felt less like being on solid ground and more like being caught in the eye of a collapsing storm.
Once again, I clung to the skull in my hands. "Ah, yes! What a familiar sensation! The transfer between worlds!"
Cacophony nodded. "With the ghost's influence broken, reality has reasserted itself. The world is rearranging to return the Null Streets to their normal state of being."
As Cacophony's words faded, the world responded with a low, thrumming pulse that coursed through the air itself. The fissures overhead widened further, their silvery light intensifying until the night sky resembled a stained glass window being pushed beyond its limits. Each pane began to slide and fold inward, rearranging with a strange, but familiar pattern.
The world, which had once been crumbled into a ball, was now unfolding and remembering its original shape. On top of that, it was reconnecting with the pieces of reality that hadn't been altered.
Natural law was returning.
The light in the sky that peeked through the broken panes intensified. The glow reached a blinding crescendo. Light poured from every fissure in the sky at once, flooding the world in a single, overwhelming flash. My breath caught in my throat as my vision went white.
And then—everything disappeared.
***
The strangely shifting ground, the air, the fractured sky, even the faint warmth radiating from Cacophony's presence—all of it was gone.
Struggling to keep up with the quick flow of events, I attempted to look at my surroundings, but found only pure white. I was still seated in the lawn chair... No, actually, I wasn't. The lawn chair had vanished alongside everything else.
Though my body remained in a sitting position, there was nothing beneath me.
I sat suspended in nothing, surrounded by the blinding nothingness.
There was no up or down, no light or darkness. Just a weightless, soundless void that pressed against me like deep water. I couldn't tell if I was drifting slowly or falling at an impossible speed. As a living being from the mundane world, my senses instinctively tried to search for some landmark to ground myself with. But here, the only thing with a well-defined form was myself.
'Where am I? Did leaving the subspace result in me being kicked into nothingness?'
I wanted to feel fear, but my heart didn't race or react.
A serenity surrounded and engulfed my being. It was gentle and soothing. A presence that had always been there, but wasn't meant to be perceived. Even without being told, its name lingered on the tip of my tongue.
"...Oversoul..."
Deep down, I knew its name and understood its weight. It was only by stepping outside the material world that I could realize its existence.
In that instant, I understood—dimly—that I wasn't surrounded by nothing at all. This space wasn't empty; it was full. A fundamental force older than stars stretched around me, invisible only because my senses were too crude to grasp it.
'If my spirituality were stronger, then I'd be able to see whatever it was that existed here.'
My momentary understanding dissipated as the boundless calm shattered.
***
My seat of nothingness was replaced with open air, and I suddenly fell backward.
My stomach lurched, and the endless void gave way to gravity's brutal reminder. I plummeted downward like a stone, wind tearing past my ears even though I wasn't sure where it came from.
Crash!
I hit the earth with bone-rattling force, a cloud of dirt and dust erupting around me. For a brief, glorious moment, I thought I might have died on impact, but after a second, I realized that I was still alive.
Despite the force of my landing, my body sustained no injuries or pain.
"Huh? Wait, really?"
It was only when I raised my right hand that I realized something strange—my fingers flexed easily, with none of the numb, deadened sensation that had plagued me earlier. I rotated my wrist, expecting at least a flare of pain, but there was nothing. My arm felt light, almost refreshed, as if the previous damage had been nothing more than a bad dream.
Cautiously, I ran my hands over the rest of my body. My ribs no longer ached with each breath, and the dull throbbing in my legs had completely disappeared. Even my bloodied eye, which once dyed the world red, was back to normal.
I blinked rapidly, half in disbelief, half in wonder.
Glancing down at myself, the shock only deepened. My clothes, which had been soaked and stained with blood, dirt, and whatever other unpleasant fluids I'd collected during that nightmare of a fight, were spotless. No tears, no crimson smears, not even a hint of the grime that had once clung to me.
But not everything was reset.
My fingers brushed against my neck and immediately recoiled at the damp, tacky texture of half-dried blood. I winced. The puncture wounds from Cacophony's bite were still there, faintly stinging when I applied pressure.
"…So that remains," I muttered.
All the injuries inflicted by the Null Streets had been erased, but the ones caused by her were untouched.
When the dust around me cleared, I realized that I was lying in the middle of a giant crater. The bare earth was scorched. Chunks of brick and foundation jutted from the earth like broken teeth.
Feeling the heat from the ground, I quickly shot up to my feet, dropping the skull onto the scorched dirt in the process.
Smoke curled upward from the scorched crater, mingling with the cool night air.
I staggered forward, still lightheaded from the fall, and almost tripped over the skull I had dropped. Its hollow sockets stared up at me, unbothered by our sudden relocation.
When I lifted my head, my throat caught.
The house—the one whose backyard had been filled with swords—was gone.
Where once there had stood a yard of gleaming blades and the strange safety they had promised, now there was nothing but devastation. In its place was this crater. Only fragments of wall and scattered splinters of wood remained, jutting from the earth like gravemarkers.
Turning my head from side to side, I could see other houses over the crater's edge. It seemed that everything that was erased by the eye's light had been returned. It was only this house that had been destroyed.
I scratched the back of my head.
"Where did I just fall from? From up in the sky? Ah! Don't tell me that I was the one who caused this crater!"
Frantically, I looked around the scorched dirt and felt a sense of guilt.
From the edge of the crater, a soft crunch of debris announced her arrival.
Cacophony stood at the rim, her bare feet perched on the jagged stone. The moonlight caught her flowing hair as her ruby eyes swept over the crater beneath her.
In my stupor, I didn't notice that she'd arrived.
"…Curious."
Her voice, too soft to carry down to me, was for herself alone.
"Despite being nothing more than a mortal with no formal training, he noticed the presence of the green spheres. Their influence isn't something fickle or careless. Even the average mage wouldn't have been able to notice their presence."
She folded her arms loosely, her expression contorting.
"And then comes the Oversoul. After falling out of reality, I knew that it was impossible for us not to encounter it, but for him to be able to realize its existence..."
A thoughtful silence hung over her. Then, slowly, the corners of her lips curled upward into a smirk. It lasted a second before she straightened, letting the amused, imperious calm return to her face.
Down below, I was still pacing in the dust like a guilty suspect at a crime scene, entirely unaware that I was being evaluated from above.