The room grew ever colder as the minutes bled into hours, and the hours into days. The air turned thick and stagnant, like a tomb that had been sealed long before the body was actually dead.
I didn't leave the bed. I didn't eat. Food didn't matter to me anymore. I lived in the hollow space that existed between heartbeats, watching the wood grain of the bunk above me shift and swirl over and over like slow-moving ink. My perception of time had been fractured; the rising and setting of the sun were just different shades of grey hitting the stained walls of the room. Every few minutes, a blue box would flicker into life in the corner of my vision, a ghostly reminder of a life I was no longer interested in living.
[Stamina Gain (+0.005) attributed to Primary]
"Give it up," I thought, my mind sluggish and heavy. "Just stop."
The Silver Clone was still out there, driven by a mechanical directive to survive and grow. I felt like a man watching his house burn to the ground while clutching a single, pathetic, useless cup of water. Why throw it? Would the fire cease in the face of one puny attempt at extinguishing it? Why even stand up? The entities in the library had pulled back the curtain and shown me one fundamental truth: I wasn't the protagonist of this world. I wasn't even the protagonist of my life. I wasn't to-be 'hero' in the making. I was a error in the code, a glitch that the universe was finally getting around to deleting.
By the second day, my thoughts had turned into a thick, black slurry. The silence of the room was crowded with the faces of the people I had watched die in the future. They didn't scream anymore, they didn't wail and cry; they just stood in the shadows, watching me with empty eyes, waiting for me to join them. I was tired. I just wanted to lie down and rest. I was so profoundly tired of being the only person in the world who knew the exact date of Earth's funeral.
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Over in the training hall, the atmosphere was the polar opposite—vibrant, loud, and charged with the scent of sweat and effort, a hollow, useless determination. Yet, for the first time in her life, Selene couldn't focus on the flow of her mana. Her spear felt heavy, unbalanced, and wrong.
"One-two! Follow through!" Erhart's voice was steady and rhythmic as he sparred with two instructors simultaneously. He moved with a terrifying, effortless grace, like that of a machine. He was perfect. He had always been perfect, and he always would be perfect.
Selene lowered her practice staff, her chest heaving, her eyes drifting toward the exit of the hall. Her gaze kept snagging on the distant, low-rent silhouette of the lower-ranked dormitories.
"You're distracted," a voice called, breaking her trance. Julian, ranked third, wiped a bead of sweat from his brow with a smug grin. "Thinking about the mid-terms? Or are you finally realizing you'll never catch up to him?"
"No," Selene snapped, her voice sharper and more brittle than she intended. "Has anyone seen Vale?"
Julian shrugged, spinning his training sword with a dismissive flick of his wrist. "The 123rd guy? Someone mentioned he's been holed up in the Dumpster dorms since the mock assessment. Probably realized that B-rank stunt he pulled was a fluke. He's likely hiding from the embarrassment of having to prove he can do it again."
"It wasn't a fluke," Selene muttered under her breath, her grip tightening on her staff.
She remembered the feeling of his mana in the hallway—that "older," dense resonance that didn't belong to a sixteen-year-old. She remembered the look in his eyes after the fight with Deon. It wasn't the look of a student who had lost a match; it was the look of a tired soldier who had finally lost a war he had been fighting for a century.
By the third day, the whispers in the academy had turned from mockery into genuine unease. Selene overheard the chatter in the cafeteria, the voices hushed and frantic.
"He hasn't come out for food in seventy-two hours," a lower-ranked student whispered. "His roommates say the room feels... wrong. Like all the heat is being sucked out of the air. They won't even go inside anymore, they've been in the dorm of somebody else for a day now."
"Is he dead or something?" one girl whispered, clutching her tray with the grim notion.
Selene didn't wait to hear the rest of what the crowd had to say. She dropped her own tray, the clatter echoing throughout the hall, and sprinted straight for the staff offices.
"Mr. Vale? Open this door immediately."
The voice of a faculty member hammered against the wood, but to my ears, it sounded small. Distant. Irrelevant. Like a tiny bird pecking at the side of a mountain.
"We have a master key, Aren. If you are currently experiencing a mana-backflow or a mental break, we will need to intervene. This is solely for your own safety."
I stayed silent, my eyes were fixed on the ceiling. I had used the last of my physical strength to wedge a heavy metal footlocker against the door. I didn't want their "medical intervention." I didn't want their pity, and I certainly didn't want their useless diagnostic spells. None of them could diagnose a soul that had already rotted away.
I heard them fumbling with the lock, then the heavy sigh of a campus security guard.
"Kid's probably just overly sad," the guard said, his voice muffled by the thick wood. "The mock assessments always crush a few of them every year. Give him another few hours to cool off. We have a campus-wide assembly in the morning; we'll fetch him then if he doesn't show up."
The footsteps retreated, their echoes dying out in the long hallway. I felt a flicker of grim amusement. They were so close to the end of my everything, and they were worried about an assembly.
The silence returned, heavier and more suffocating than before. My left arm was completely numb now, the black mark no longer just a marking but a gauntlet of shifting shadow that felt anchored to the very centre of the earth.
I looked at the clock flickering in the air.
[0 Days, 12 Hours, 04 Minutes Left]
My mind started to feel unnervingly clear. For the first time since the weights had crushed my chest in that gym, I felt a sense of genuine control. If I couldn't stop the world from ending, I could at least choose the exact moment my ending.
"System," I whispered. My voice was a dry, haunting rattle. "Shop."
The interface appeared, a jagged, fractured mess of light that bled static into my vision.
[System Shop: Functioning]
I chuckled slightly to myself.
The one time it decides to operate is to be an accomplice.
I scrolled through the tabs with a detached coldness. I didn't need the "Elixir of Life" or some "Heavenly Grade Sword." I navigated to the 'General Tools' section.
[Item: Reinforced Hemp Rope - Cost: 2 Points]
[Purchase?]
"Yes." My mind was made.
The rope appeared on the bed beside me, cold, rough, and smelling of dry earth. I stood up, my body feeling surprisingly light—the Clone's four days of relentless, agonizing grinding had pumped my stats up, but the power felt hollow. It was like installing a high-performance engine into a car that was already driving off a cliff.
I dragged the desk chair to the centre of the room and looked up at the exposed support beam. I tied the knot with the muscle memory of a veteran. It was a soldier's knot. Quick. Efficient. Final.
I stepped onto the chair. I felt the scratchy, biting texture of the hemp against my throat. It was the first thing that had felt real in days.
"I'm sorry, Erhart, but you can figure this out yourself." I thought, staring at the shattered door.
I closed my eyes and prepared to kick the chair.
BOOM.
The door didn't just open; the footlocker I'd used as a barricade was sent flying across the room as if hit by a battering ram. A blinding wave of white light flooded the dark, stale space.
"AREN!"
Selene was a blur of silver and blue motion. She didn't wait to see the chair. She didn't ask questions. She lunged, a blade of pure, pressurized mana forming in her hand, and sliced through the rope a split second before I could drop.
I hit the floor in a heap, the noose still tight around my neck.
"You idiot!" She was on me instantly, her hands trembling violently as she grabbed my collar. She looked absolutely terrified—her hair was a mess, her uniform was singed, and her eyes were brimming with a fury that couldn't hide the heartbreak underneath. "You absolute, arrogant, selfish idiot!"
She shook me hard, her mana-enhanced strength pinning me to the floorboards.
"I've been standing outside this door for six hours! I felt your mana disappearing! I thought you were dying—I thought someone was killing you—" She choked, a single, hot tear falling onto my cheek. "Is this it? Is this the great secret you were hiding? That you're a coward?"
I looked up at her, my eyes hollow and dry, reflecting nothing, as black as those I had seen that day.
"It's not a secret, Selene," I whispered, my voice flat. "It's a mercy."
Behind her, through the ruined doorway, the sky outside was beginning to ripple. The sun was still out, but it looked pale and sickly, like a fading lamp that was about to go out.
The countdown hit the 12-hour mark.
"You should have stayed in the training hall," I said. "Because now you have to watch what happens next."
"What are you even talking about?" Her voice was a jagged edge of anger, though the sorrow was starting to bleed through the cracks.
"Eleven hours, fifty-eight minutes, and forty-one seconds," I repeated. My voice sounded like it belonged to a stranger. I wasn't looking at her; I was staring at the translucent UI hovering over her shoulder, the numbers bleeding crimson.
Beyond the shattered door, the hallway had swallowed the light. The sun was dipping below the horizon, but it wasn't a normal golden hour. The sky was the color of a fresh bruise, a sickly violet that made the shadows look deep enough to drown in. The last real sunset.
"Are you losing it? Is that what this is?" Selene's eyes were locked on mine, shining with a frantic, wet light. She refused to look at the sky. She refused to look at the rope. She only looked at me.
"Why what?" I asked. I wanted her to say it. I wanted her to strip away the "prodigy" mask and the polite filters of the academy. If I was going to stay in this world for another ten seconds, I needed someone to be honest.
"Why you tried to... to..." Her body shook violently. Her hands inched toward my collar again, her fingers twitching as if she wanted to both strangle me and hold me up. "Why you tried to kill yourself!"
The words hit me like a physical blow.
The "static" in my brain—the heavy, suffocating fog that had been drowning me for four days—suddenly cleared. It was as if someone had flipped a switch in a dark room. My vision sharpened. The smell of the stale air, the heat radiating from Selene's skin, the cold floorboards beneath me—it all rushed back at once.
What the fuck was I doing?
I actually looked at her then. Really looked at her. She was a wreck. Her pristine uniform was wrinkled, her hair—usually a perfect black silk—was matted and wild. She looked like she hadn't slept since the library. She looked like she'd been haunting my doorway for an eternity.
I had been waiting for the world to end, but I'd forgotten that there were people still living in it.
I looked down at my hands. The black mark was pulsing, the ink-dark veins throbbing against my skin as if the mark itself were excited by my sudden return to reality.
The fog in my brain didn't vanish; it simply curdled into something harder.
I looked at the black mark, and a wave of cold, rhythmic revulsion washed over me. It had claimed my wrist and was now snaking up my forearm in jagged, obsidian branches that felt like frozen lead beneath my skin. It wasn't just a mark anymore; it was a physical manifestation of every hour I had spent rotting in that bed. Every inch it had gained was a trophy for the "Weight," a map of how close I had come to letting the darkness in the library have the final word.
The entity hadn't just attacked me. It had planted a seed of inevitability, and I had spent four days watering it with my own breath.
"Aren?" Selene's voice was small, the razor-edged fury of a moment ago replaced by a fragile, terrifying hope. She saw my eyes focusing, but she didn't see a man who had found "joy." She saw a man who had looked into the grave and decided he wasn't finished with the shovelling.
I didn't feel happy. I didn't feel "saved." I felt a heavy, numb resignation—the kind a soldier feels when they realize the retreat has been cut off and the only way out is through the centre of the meat grinder.
I slowly reached up and gripped her wrists, gently prying her fingers from my collar. My movements were slow, burdened by the sheer gravity of the depression still sitting in my chest. But the strength behind the movement was undeniable. The slight stat gains from the Clone hadn't just added numbers to a screen; they had packed themselves into my marrow while I was catatonic.
"I'm here," I said. My voice was a hollow rasp, devoid of warmth. "I'm back. For now."
I stood up. The room tilted for a moment, the world swimming in shades of grey and sickly violet. I didn't jump to my feet; I dragged myself up, gravity fighting me every inch of the way. Selene stood with me, her hand hovering near my elbow as if she expected me to shatter like glass if she let go.
I looked at the snapped rope on the floor—a pathetic, brown coil of my own weakness. I didn't look away in shame. I looked at it with a tired, clinical distance.
"Where are you going?" Selene asked, her voice trembling. "You can barely stand. You need to see a healer, you need—"
"There are no healers for this, Selene," I interrupted, my gaze drifting to the shattered doorway.
I walked toward the exit, stepping over the wreckage of the footlocker. Every step felt like wading through deep water. The sadness was still there, a thick, oily layer over my soul, but beneath it was a cold, surgical necessity. I wasn't fighting for "life" anymore; I was fighting because the alternative was letting that thing in the library win. And I hated that thing more than I hated myself.
The sky beyond the dorm was wrong. Thin, hairline fractures of gold and black were beginning to spiderweb across the horizon. To anyone else, it might have been a strange sunset. To me, it was the sound of a hammer cocking.
"The assembly," I muttered, recalling the guard's voice from the other side of the door. "When is it?"
Selene blinked, trying to bridge the gap between my suicide attempt and my sudden, grim focus. "At sunrise. Twelve hours from now. The Headmaster is calling it a 'precautionary briefing' about the atmospheric shifts. Aren, talk to me. What is happening to the sky?"
I turned to her. I didn't give her a heroic smile. I just looked at her with the eyes of a man who had already seen her die once.
"The world ends at dawn," I said, the black mark on my arm pulsing with a sudden, violent heat that made my teeth ache. "And if I'm going to be the bug in the code, I might as well be the one that crashes the entire system."
I looked at the UI flickering in the air, the jagged lines of light barely holding together.
[0 Days, 11 Hours, 42 Minutes Left]
"I need to find Erhart," I said, the name feeling like ash in my mouth. "And I'm going back to that library. I didn't finish that book."
I started walking down the hallway. I didn't run. I moved with a heavy, purposeful gait, my Agility stats providing a grace that felt entirely disconnected from the exhaustion in my heart. I didn't care about the instructors, the rules, or the expulsion.
I had already stood on the chair. The worst thing that could happen to me had already happened—I had survived.
"Are you coming?" I called back, not even turning around.
Selene stood in the wreckage of my room for a heartbeat, then wiped the last of the wetness from her face with a jagged, angry motion. She stepped over the splintered wood, her resolve hardening into something cold and sharp to match my own.
"Try and stop me," she said, her voice finally finding its steel.
The walk from the Dumpster dorms to the central campus felt like traversing a funeral procession that didn't know it was mourning.
I kept my head down, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my wrinkled hoodie to hide the black ink that had claimed my arm. Every step was a battle against the leaden weight in my chest, but the stats I'd inherited from the Clone's final four-day grind were undeniable. My feet hit the pavement with a precision that felt like clockwork, even as my mind begged for the ground to simply open up and swallow me.
Selene walked a half-step behind me, her presence a silent, radiating heat. I could feel her eyes on the side of my head, a thousand questions burning behind her silver irises.
"The sky," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the wind. "Aren, look at the sky."
I didn't have to look. I could see the reflection of it in the glass windows of the Mediocris dorms we passed. The clouds weren't drifting; they were shivering. Hairline fractures of neon violet and oily black were spiderwebbing across the horizon, leaking a light that didn't illuminate anything—it just made the shadows look deeper.
The campus was eerily busy. Students were huddled in small groups, pointing upward. Some were laughing, calling it a "rare mana-aurora," while others stood in a stunned, silent paralysis.
"It's beautiful," I heard a girl say as we passed.
"It's a localized mana-collapse," I muttered, mostly to myself.
We rounded the corner near the main quad, and a group of four students blocked our path. I recognized them—they were the same ones who had mocked me during the physical assessments. At the centre stood Deon, his arm still bandaged from our duel, looking far more arrogant than a guy who had nearly lost to a Rank 123.
"Well, well," Deon sneered, stepping forward. "The ghost finally decided to haunt us. I heard the instructors were about to break your hinges, Vale. What's the matter? Run out of—"
He stopped mid-sentence. His eyes drifted from my hollow, sunken face to Selene standing behind me. The smirk died on his face when he saw the expression she was wearing. It wasn't the usual cold indifference; it was a raw, jagged look of someone who had just looked into the mouth of hell.
"Move," I said.
My voice didn't sound like mine. it was flat, heavy, and held the resonance of a man who had already stood on a chair and found the rope wanting.
"Or what, Rank 123?" Deon tried to regain his footing, his hand sparking with a weak flicker of mana. "You think because you're walking with a Validus student you're—"
I didn't use a skill. I just kept walking. I stepped directly into his personal space, my eyes locked onto his. I didn't blink. I didn't even raise my hands. I just brought the sheer, crushing weight of my resignation with me.
[Your peers are shocked by your actions]
[150 points have been awarded]
Deon flinched. He actually physically stumbled back, his mana fizzling out as if someone had poured cold water onto it. He saw it then—the thing Selene had seen. I wasn't a student. I was a countdown.
We passed them without another word. The silence they left in our wake was thick enough to choke on.
"You're scaring them," Selene muttered quietly as we reached the steps of the Great Library, just loud enough to reach my ears.
"Good," I replied, staring at the massive stone doors. "Maybe fear will make them run when the screaming starts."
I looked at the UI one last time before entering.
[0 Days, 11 Hours, 29 Minutes Left]
"Wait," Selene grabbed my elbow, her grip firm. "Before we go in. You said we need Erhart. Why? He's the Association's golden boy. He won't break the rules for you."
I turned to her, the purple light of the dying sky reflecting in my dull eyes.
"Erhart isn't the golden boy, Selene. He's the anchor. And if I'm going to survive the next twelve hours, I need to break the anchor before the ship goes down."
We stepped into the library, the last light of the sun creeping in as we opened the door.
I looked around, trying to see if there would be anyone who could be an obstacle.
Nobody.
At least I thought.
I stepped toward the South Wing, my mind set only on the book I had seen days earlier.
I couldn't say that I wasn't scared of it returning to haunt me again, but I had experienced enough doubt over the last few days, and I wasn't going to let a bygone cause the death of the people around me.
And from seemingly nowhere, the librarian stepped Infront of me.
"Aren! You need to go to the infirmary, you weren't making sense—"
She was pleading with me, trying to convince me to step down over something that happened almost a week ago.
"I've never made more sense in my life." I cut her short, I wasn't going to listen to that voice.
Not if it was directly hindering me.
"Please, you don't have to worry about the sky, if that's what's bothering you! Get treatment of some kind, we have staff on site."
The sky was exactly what was bothering me.
No staff could help with this.
About 90% of the school would die in the next 48 hours, her included.
This wasn't the time to put this in the hands of staff.
"Step aside." My voice was firm, far firmer than it should've been for my situation. But I had steeled my resolve, and I would follow through, regardless of what happened.
She stepped aside, perhaps at realising that my resolution was steadfast, and nothing she could do would change it.
"Stay safe. If you need help please ask."
That was her final request to me.
With Selene behind me, I stepped towards the South Wing.
When I had reached within about 10m of the door, I was bombarded with a wave of mana.
I turned around to Selene, wanting to see if she felt it too.
From her expression, I assumed she had.
Had Erhart found the runes?
Already?
Or was it something else?
I forced my way through the open door, against the wave of mana pushing me back.
"Erhart!" I shouted, my voice barely climbing over the continuous shockwaves.
I pushed forward further, closer and closer to what felt like the origin.
Selene had made it through, albeit with more difficulty than I had.
Erhart sat in a seat in the centre of the room, the book that had cursed me days before rested peacefully in his lap.
I was too late.
Was the Erhart sat there even the real one?
Was I 100% sure it wasn't just some clone, like the one that had existed of me before?
No, I wasn't.
There was no way I could be.
But I would have to step forward anyway.
With the belief that I can do it.
Even if it felt fake, my hope was my final fortress.
Erhart finally looked up.
Slowly at first, then his head cocked up faster, his eyes returning to their normal colour as he did.
"What... is that?" He asked, his voice deep and raspy, "That mark... that's not a mana-burn, Vale. What did you bring back with you?"
I couldn't blame his suspicion.
In my struggle to get through to him, I had allowed my sleeve to slip up my arm.
"It's nothing." I lied. I didn't think I tell him anything anyway, so it didn't matter that he had seen it.
His grip on his sword handle in it's scabbard tightened.
If he tried to fight me, I would fight.
In my current state I didn't believe I could beat Erhart alone, but Selene was behind me, and at any moment we would be willing to fight.
His mana flared up, a clear sign of his anger.
Then it returned to normal, his grip on his sword loosened.
"Alright."
He didn't seem to want to push further. My expression was enough evidence of how crucial time was right now.
"Let's go." I was referring to both of them.
I know they were suspicious of me, but that suspicion could wait until we weren't on the frontlines of an apocalypse.
I looked at the shadow on my arm, then at the two 'prodigies' standing in the ruins of the archive. They were looking for a way to save the school. I was just looking for a way to make the end hurt less.
[0 Days, 11 Hours, 10 Minutes Left]
The countdown didn't care if we were ready. It was time to go.