Chapter 103
Forever
IAM stepped out into the light.
The sun was bright, almost unnaturally clean, with not a single particle of dust floating through the air. It was breezy today—the kind of soft, crisp breeze that slipped beneath your clothes and tapped against your skin with playful chill. His outfit fluttered gently in the wind, each thread catching the movement like it was dancing.
He stood there for a moment, blinking in the light, wearing a white top that looked like something out of a minimalist fashion commercial. The collar of the shirt was detailed in sharp red lettering: 'mine'—simple, blunt, and a little arrogant. His black bottoms were covered in chaotic, seemingly random placements of the word 'mine' in both black and white, forming an almost hypnotic pattern when he moved. It was both absurd and oddly stylish, in a corporate brand-name kind of way.
It was one of many outfits he'd received recently.
Because the moment word got out that IAM had been officially admitted into Hope Academy—despite everything, despite what they all must have assumed about him—the people from mine pounced like starving animals. They were sharks in designer suits, practically ripping through the water in their eagerness to stake their claim. The brand wasted no time flooding him with clothing: jackets, hoodies, shirts, pants, accessories, even socks—everything branded, everything loud.
He'd sent his uniform, shoes, and all the equipment he received from hope academy as soon as he could. So they could do whatever crazy design they were planning to promote their brand.
The boxes from mine kept coming. It reached a point where IAM didn't even need to buy clothes anymore. His entire wardrobe could have easily consisted solely of mine apparel, to the extent that he started to feel like a walking advertisement. The only reason it didn't was because IAM had an instinctive need for diversity. Wearing the same brand every day felt suffocating, even if the clothes were technically different.
And so he kept a few plain things. Which was unbranded. But still, the presence of mine filled the drawers and lined the closet racks of his temporary home.
His temporary home, by the way, was a government-paid hotel, a sleek modern building just ten minutes away from the gates of Hope Academy. That fact alone still sat strangely in his mind.
He wasn't sure what felt more surreal: being here, or the government actually paying for something for him.
Days passed. Then weeks. Slowly, without him even realizing it, he started to fall into a kind of rhythm—something like normalcy.
There was no doom lingering above him. No sense of imminent death or failure.
No unnatural grey clouds in the sky or weird fog curling in corners where it didn't belong.
No brown sand.
No silhouettes of strange shapes looming just out of sight, in the background.
Just... Normal.
The streets here were polished and clean, paved with smooth material that didn't even crack under weather. The buildings were tall, crafted by the hands of geniuses—architects who seemed to treat gravity as a suggestion rather than a rule. Glass, steel, and glistening stone danced across the skyline like brushstrokes on a dream.
Luxurious stores lined every avenue, boasting technology and fashion that to him, still felt slightly absurd, but functional.
IAM often wandered through the area, trying to map it in his head. Sometimes, he'd get lost—hopelessly, hilariously lost. But he didn't mind it too much. There was something relaxing about walking here, even if his feet ached and the digital signs didn't always make sense.
He would stumble across food stands or restaurants, and to his surprise, a lot of them sold meals eerily similar to those from Earth. Even the fruits—many had the same shapes, colors, and textures as apples, pears, bananas. A few had different names, and looked different but the taste was familiar enough.
That wasn't the only thing, either.
Time here functioned exactly the same as on Earth. Twenty-four hours. Sixty minutes per hour. IAM had once read that on the Sun, time moved 0.18 seconds slower per day than on Earth. That thought came back to him randomly as he looked up at the sky and realized: this planet was the size of the Sun.
The similarities piled up. The language. The social structures. The mundane habits of the people.
If not for a few... rather obvious differences, IAM might have been tempted to question everything.
He might have believed this was Earth.
Maybe just Earth... way in the future.
But then again—how could this be Earth?
Not when the world was infested with Deadline Creatures.
Not when people had powers—actual supernatural abilities that bent the laws of nature.
Not when the entire planet was ringed by massive walls, built around every country like they were fortresses inside a prison.
And definitely not when the sky was home to nine moons.
Nine.
Fucking.
Moons.
IAM stared at them looking out his balcony one night, all clustered in strange gravitational balance, and just shook his head.
No, this wasn't Earth. This wasn't even trying to pretend. It just so happened to look like it sometimes.
He chuckled dryly.
If someone were writing his story, he'd probably accuse them of lazy world-building.
There was so many similarities. And too few changes. It almost felt like someone copy-pasted Earth and slapped a few sci-fi labels on it. But hey—he wasn't complaining.
Not every main character got a good author.
At least his story was easy to follow. At least he didn't have to learn a new language or decode some convoluted writing system. That alone was a blessing. He could walk into stores, read signs, and understand people without feeling like his brain was melting.
He'd probably explode just from looking at educational material.
And math? The horror.
The sheer horror.
If he had been born here and had to study this world's mathematics from scratch… that would've been a real villain origin story.
He shook off the thought and focused.
There had been a massive delay in informing him that he'd been accepted into the Academy. They told him with only a few days to spare.
That wasn't an accident.
It was reluctance.
They didn't want him there. Not really.
They had let him in, yes. But not because they believed in him.
He could already imagine scenarios where instructors made things harder for him—pressured him, questioned him, doubted him more than the others.
They wouldn't really discriminate against him for being a so-called talentless bum, would they?
Would they?
IAM kissed his teeth and shook his head again, louder this time, his thoughts spiraling.
He thought to a discovery he could confirm.
Something he had suspected for a while, but hadn't allowed himself to believe.
Now, after weeks of subtle eavesdropping, careful observation, and quiet deduction, he could finally say it with certainty.
IAM could finally admit it to himself.
He didn't want to believe it before. He told himself Raj —what felt like a lifetime ago.
But now… now there was no more room for denial.
So now, standing in the clean streets of a city too pristine to be real, IAM let the truth sink in.
All the descendants of the Dwarf…
Were..
Extinct.
In the entire expanse of Holem—across every border, inside every wall, under every sky—
There wasn't a single one left.
Not a trace.
Gone.
Forever.