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Author Note:
' ' = Thoughts
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A golden sea.
No matter where one looked, there was only an endless ocean of gold stretching beyond the horizon. It had no shore, no island, no sky reflected upon its surface, and no visible end. The waves moved slowly beneath a silent expanse, rising and falling with the rhythm of something that did not belong to nature.
Kaelthorn found himself standing in the middle of it without warning.
He did not panic.
With both hands resting inside the pockets of his coat, he looked around and assessed his surroundings in silence. There was no immediate threat, no visible path, and no familiar structure to anchor himself to. Yet the absence of those things did not trouble him. Panic belonged to those who needed the world to explain itself quickly.
Kaelthorn only needed to observe.
He lowered his gaze toward the golden sea beneath his feet.
At first, it resembled water.
Then his sight pierced deeper.
What flowed beneath him was not liquid in the ordinary sense. It had weight, motion, and waves, but no true substance that a human hand could hold. Inside each ripple moved endless streams of symbols, patterns, memories, records, and structures too dense for any normal mind to survive.
After a moment, Kaelthorn reached a conclusion.
This sea was liquid information.
The waves rolled across its surface, but instead of reflecting clouds or sunlight, they carried layers of data. Some streams resembled language. Others resembled equations. Some were memories without owners, while others looked like the skeletons of worlds reduced into pure record.
Kaelthorn understood something immediately.
If an ordinary person entered this sea, they would not drown in water.
They would drown in knowledge.
Countless streams of information would flood into their mind at once, more than any brain could process, more than any soul could endure. Their thoughts would tear apart under the pressure. Their identity would dissolve, and whatever remained of them would sink into the ocean, becoming one more fragment inside the endless gold.
Yet Kaelthorn was not being harmed.
The sea did not force itself into him.
It did not invade his mind.
Instead, it held itself back.
No, more than that.
It welcomed him.
The feeling was faint but undeniable, like a place recognizing someone who had been absent for far too long. It did not feel like he had discovered this sea. It felt as though he had returned to it.
As though something here was happy he had finally come back home.
That was the only way Kaelthorn could describe it.
Home.
He raised his head and looked across the endless golden expanse. As his gaze moved, more secrets revealed themselves. This place did not follow ordinary rules of space and time. Distance existed only because it chose to. Time had no stable flow. Energy and matter, at least in the usual sense, did not exist here at all.
No normal lifeform should have been able to enter.
Normally.
There were always exceptions.
Kaelthorn was one of them.
Before he could examine the place more deeply, he felt a gaze lock onto him.
He stopped.
Slowly, he raised his head toward what should have been the sky.
There, above the golden sea, floated a massive rhombus.
It did not resemble a natural object. It hung in the expanse like a geometric wound, silent and enormous, its shape too clean against the endless gold. Yet Kaelthorn understood what it was the moment he saw it.
An eye.
Something was looking at him through it.
Not casually.
Not curiously.
Intensely.
Obsessively.
The gaze did not move away from him for even an instant. It watched him as though terrified that if it blinked, if it missed even one moment, Kaelthorn would disappear again.
For most beings, that gaze would have been unbearable.
It carried a dark, intimate pressure, the feeling of being remembered by something that had waited far too long. It was not simply watching his body. It was trying to look through him, past his coat, past his visor, past flesh and bone, into the soul beneath.
Kaelthorn looked directly back.
His own gaze pierced toward the rhombus eye, trying to see the entity behind it. He could feel there was a mind beyond the shape, a presence hidden behind the golden sea and the information flowing through it. Something vast. Something old. Something that recognized him.
The two remained locked in silent confrontation.
Neither moved.
Neither yielded.
Time passed, though in that place, time had no reliable meaning.
Then Kaelthorn heard a voice.
Not in his ears.
In his mind.
???: I finally found you… Doctor.
The moment those words reached him, Kaelthorn lost consciousness.
.
.
.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
The first thing he saw was the ceiling of his clinic, the LED lights still shining above him with their sterile white glow. He did not get up immediately. Instead, he remained still and looked around, confirming his position, his surroundings, and the state of the room.
He was still sitting in his chair.
The clinic was unchanged.
The desk, the tools, the walls, the faint smell of disinfectant, the quiet heaviness of the room—everything remained as it had been before.
He turned his gaze to the side.
Yukari Sakuragi was still asleep on the medical bed. Her posture had not changed. The creases in the sheets were the same. The IV line remained in position. Even the angle of her breathing looked unchanged, though the dextrose solution was almost empty.
Kaelthorn stood.
The moment he did, something fell from his pocket.
TING!
A small black crystal struck the floor.
It was semi-transparent, with a dark glasslike surface that caught the clinic light without truly reflecting it. Kaelthorn lowered himself and picked it up between two gloved fingers. Then he willed it to disappear.
The crystal disintegrated into nothing.
Kaelthorn was not surprised by its existence.
He had created it.
During his time in the Interstice, telekinesis had not been the only ability he developed. He had also created another power: crystallokinesis. Unlike telekinesis, which relied mainly on the strength and precision of the mind, crystallokinesis required both mind and soul. It was more demanding, more dangerous, and less necessary for his current situation.
That was why he had not used it openly.
For now, telekinesis was enough.
The crystal had only been a test. A quiet confirmation that, if the situation demanded it in the future, crystallokinesis remained usable despite his weakened condition.
It did.
After replacing Yukari's IV solution, Kaelthorn left the clinic and stepped outside to take in the night air.
The street was empty.
Night had already fallen. The town was quiet, with no pedestrians nearby and only a few distant lights glowing in windows. The air carried a faint chill, and the silence around the clinic felt heavier than usual.
'Kaelthorn: To think I slept from morning until night…'
He looked at the street without moving.
'Kaelthorn: In any case, it is time to close the clinic.'
His thoughts sounded calm.
But the truth was different.
Kaelthorn's guard had risen to its highest point.
Since entering this world, he had never truly relaxed. He had not allowed himself even a second of careless rest. The only place where he had permitted rest was within the Hollow Core, in Io's arms. That was different. That was controlled. That was his domain.
This was not.
In the morning, he had been fully alert and properly recovered. Yet he had lost consciousness without realizing when or how it happened. Something had forced him to sleep, and worse, it had done so without triggering his awareness in time to resist.
That could not be allowed to happen again.
Preparations would be necessary.
While those thoughts moved through his mind, Kaelthorn turned back toward the clinic.
He did not notice the reflection on the window of the building across the street.
It changed.
Instead of his hooded figure, someone else stood reflected there.
A slender, pale young woman with very long glossy black hair and soft lavender eyes appeared in the glass. Her features were delicate, her expression calm, and a gentle smile rested on her lips with a warmth that felt almost affectionate. She wore a long white futuristic laboratory coat over a black-and-white formal outfit, with a small black ribbon at her neck, dark stockings, and black-and-white strapped shoes. Practical equipment, badges, straps, and pockets lined her coat, giving her the appearance of someone both clinical and otherworldly.
For a brief moment, a rhombus shape appeared deep within her lavender eyes.
Then it vanished.
She opened her mouth.
No sound came out.
But her lips formed the words clearly.
???: Long time no see.
.
.
.
The next morning, the clinic door opened, and someone stepped inside.
???: Doctor Oracle Clinic?
Kaelthorn turned his attention away from the medical report in his hand and looked toward the entrance.
Kaelthorn: Yes.
Hearing his answer, the boy at the door turned back and called to the others waiting behind him before entering fully. There were three students in total, and from their uniforms, it was obvious they belonged to Yomiyama North Middle School. Since Kaelthorn had already obtained the list of every student in the school, he recognized them immediately.
The first was a pale boy of slightly above-average height, with short dark-blue hair and matching indigo eyes behind square green-rimmed glasses. The second was a beautiful, fair-skinned girl, also slightly taller than average, with very long reddish-brown hair tied into twin tails by two blue ribbons. The last was the boy Kaelthorn had already met more than once, and the one most closely tied by blood to this year's Extra.
Kōichi Sakakibara.
The moment Kōichi saw him, his posture stiffened slightly.
Kōichi Sakakibara: G-Good morning, Doctor. We meet again.
Kaelthorn: Indeed. You appear to be doing well now.
Kōichi Sakakibara: Yes. I was still a little weak when I returned to school, but I have recovered now.
Kaelthorn gave a small nod, then shifted his hidden gaze toward the other two students.
Tomohiko Kazami: Good morning, Doctor. I am Tomohiko Kazami from ninth grade, Class 3. And this is…
Izumi Akazawa: Izumi Akazawa.
Tomohiko Kazami: We came to thank you for saving our classmate Yukari's life.
After saying that, Tomohiko lowered his head, and the other two students followed. Their gratitude was not formal politeness. It was sincere. Even without seeing Kaelthorn's face behind the visor, they bowed with the kind of relief that came only after someone had been pulled back from a death everyone had already accepted as certain.
Kaelthorn accepted their thanks without visible reaction.
His attention moved briefly to the flowers in Tomohiko's hands, then to the bed where Yukari Sakuragi still lay unconscious.
Kaelthorn: Go on. You came to see her.
Tomohiko Kazami: Yes. Thank you.
The three students moved quietly toward Yukari's bed.
When they saw her condition up close, pain flashed across their faces. The bandages around her neck, the medical equipment beside her, and the stillness of her body made the reality of what had happened impossible to avoid. But beneath that pain was relief as well, because her chest still rose and fell, and that alone meant she had not been taken from them.
Kōichi Sakakibara: Doctor… how long will it take for her to wake up?
Kaelthorn: Her wounds are stable now, but her mind suffered a heavy shock. When she wakes depends on her.
The three students fell silent.
Izumi looked at Yukari's sleeping face, and her expression tightened.
Izumi Akazawa: I heard she is the only one left in her whole family. Even if she wakes up…
She did not finish the sentence.
She did not need to.
Everyone there understood what she meant. Yukari surviving the injury did not mean her suffering had ended. When she opened her eyes, she would have to face the deaths of her mother, her aunt, and her father. She would have to wake into a world where the people closest to her were gone.
Kōichi seemed to feel the atmosphere growing too heavy, so he forced himself to speak with a hopeful tone.
Kōichi Sakakibara: I-It's okay. We are still here. We won't let her feel alone. Right?
Fortunately, his words reached the others.
Tomohiko's expression softened first, then Izumi's. The pain did not disappear from their faces, but a small warmth returned to them as they looked at their unconscious classmate.
Tomohiko Kazami: You are right. We are still here.
Izumi Akazawa: Yes. Our class is also Yukari's family.
They remained beside the bed, standing close together around the girl who had lost everything. For a brief moment, the clinic held something almost gentle. Young voices. Flowers. Concern. A promise made by children who still believed that presence, kindness, and friendship could be enough to hold a broken life together.
Kaelthorn watched from behind them in silence.
He had no intention of joining that warmth.
Their feelings were real. Their concern was genuine. But reality did not bend simply because children wished to protect one another. No matter how sincerely they spoke, no matter how firmly they promised to remain beside her, Yukari Sakuragi would need a long time to recover from what had happened. Perhaps years. Perhaps longer.
After all, in the end, she was still only a young girl who had lost her entire family in a single day.
And beyond that—
Kaelthorn's gaze rested on the three students standing at her bedside.
'Kaelthorn: Do you truly think you will still be alive by then to witness it?'
.
.
.
Night came.
Kōichi Sakakibara, Tomohiko Kazami, and Izumi Akazawa had already left the clinic long before closing time. Like every other night, Kaelthorn waited until the proper hour, lowered the shutter, secured the entrance, and allowed the building to fall into silence. But this time, instead of returning to his quarters on the first floor, he stepped out into the empty street.
He was the only person walking beneath the dim streetlights. His shoes made no sound against the pavement, each step completely muffled as he moved forward with both hands inside the pockets of his coat. At a glance, he looked almost leisurely, like someone taking a quiet walk through town after a long day. Yet there was no carelessness in his pace, no relaxation in his posture, and no gap in his awareness. Every corner, every window, every empty alley reflected quietly inside his mind.
Surprisingly, he did not see a single person on the way.
Before long, Kaelthorn reached his destination and stopped.
In front of him stood Yomiyama North Middle School.
The building looked ordinary beneath the night sky. To a normal person, it would have appeared like any other school after hours—silent, dark, and temporarily abandoned until morning. But Kaelthorn saw something else. A heavy, bizarre power shrouded the entire school like an invisible fog, wrapping around the classrooms, corridors, staircases, and grounds. Some of it had already begun leaking beyond the school premises, spreading outward in thin, almost unnoticed currents.
He watched it for a few seconds.
Then he stepped forward and entered the school grounds.
The moment he crossed the boundary, the temperature dropped sharply. The air grew cold enough that an ordinary human body would have reacted immediately, but Kaelthorn had already covered himself with a thin layer of telekinetic force. It shielded him from the sudden chill and kept his weakened body stable.
He also noticed something else.
There was no security guard on the grounds.
Whether that absence was coincidence, negligence, or the calamity quietly clearing his path did not matter.
Kaelthorn entered the building.
The corridors were empty, and the silence inside was deeper than it had been outside. Only moonlight entered through the windows, stretching pale lines across the floor and walls. The school, which had been filled with students only hours earlier, now felt like something that had never truly belonged to the living.
As Kaelthorn walked through the corridor, the moonlight fell over him.
And something chilling became visible.
His shadow moved across the floor.
Beside it, another shadow walked with him.
The shadow of a woman.
There was no woman beside him. No footsteps accompanied his own. No breathing. No presence that ordinary senses could detect. Yet beneath the moonlight, the second shadow remained, moving quietly at his side as though it had always belonged there.
Kaelthorn did not stop.
He continued forward, passing one classroom after another without looking inside. The desks, doors, windows, and nameplates meant nothing to him. He had already chosen his destination.
Eventually, he reached a staircase sealed off with wires. A signboard had been attached to it.
Do Not Enter.
Kaelthorn gave the barrier a single glance, then stepped over it and began ascending.
The floor above felt different from the rest of the school.
Not because it had been built differently, but because it had been abandoned differently. The corridor was not completely untouched; someone clearly came here occasionally to clean or check the area. But that was all. It had not been lived in by students for years.
Cracks lined parts of the walls. Some of the window glass had fractured near the edges, thin lines spreading across them like old wounds. The air smelled of dust, wood, and stale time. Everything here felt as though it had been left behind, not forgotten fully, but avoided with enough consistency that memory itself had begun to thin.
Kaelthorn walked a few more steps and stopped before one classroom door.
Shhhk!
He opened it.
Inside were old desks and chairs, unused classroom furniture, abandoned school materials, cabinets, cobwebs, and signs of long neglect. Dust lay thick across nearly every surface, dulling the color of the room until it looked less like a classroom and more like a preserved corpse of one.
This was the old ninth grade, Class 3 classroom.
The place where the story of the calamity had left one of its older scars.
Kaelthorn did not enter.
He stood at the doorway, and an invisible force spread out from him, covering every corner of the room. It passed over desks, shelves, cabinets, boxes, walls, and forgotten materials, searching without disturbing anything more than necessary.
Before long, he found what he had come for.
One of the cabinet doors swung open by itself.
Something was attached inside, hidden near the top with old tape.
The object peeled free and floated toward him.
Kaelthorn pulled one hand from his pocket and caught it with his gloved fingers. Words had been written on it.
"To the future students who are undoubtedly suffering from the senseless disaster of this class."
His hidden gaze remained fixed on the message.
'Kaelthorn: So this is where you hid it, Katsumi Matsunaga. A way for ninth grade, Class 3 students to survive the calamity… though still a double-edged sword.'
Katsumi Matsunaga had been a student of Yomiyama North Middle School, part of Class 3 in 1983. That year, he had succeeded in stopping the calamity halfway through the school term, making it the only recorded case where the phenomenon had been interrupted before reaching its natural end. Before his memories faded, he had recorded what happened and hidden the evidence here so that future students might find it and learn how to survive.
But Kaelthorn's assessment remained unchanged.
The method was dangerous.
It only worked if someone already knew the identity of the Extra. Without that knowledge, the information could do more harm than good. Students who heard it would begin suspecting one another. Trust would decay. Every quiet classmate would become suspicious. Every absence, every strange memory, every unusual behavior would become evidence in frightened minds.
All it would take was one catalyst.
One death too many.
One accusation spoken too loudly.
Then the students would stop waiting for the calamity to kill them and begin killing each other first.
Kaelthorn put the object away.
The cabinet door closed.
The classroom door followed.
He turned to leave.
Then he stopped.
His head shifted slightly toward the window.
Beyond the cracked glass, beyond the school grounds, beyond the sleeping city of Yomiyama, his gaze extended farther and farther. It pierced through distance, passed beyond the limits of the town, and continued outward until something far away entered his awareness.
For a moment, Kaelthorn remained still.
Then his thoughts settled into a new direction.
'Kaelthorn: Interesting. It seems that instead of waiting here for a month, I can use this time to make a trip outside the city and obtain something.'
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*To be continued…
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