The air split with a sound that was not thunder.
It was sharper, thinner, like a quill gouging through parchment the size of a sky.
The infirmary walls shuddered as fractures crawled across reality itself. The windows warped, glass bending like water before cracking inwards. All at once, the medicinal incense that clung to the Academy was drowned out by a stench so foul it pulled bile into every throat that breathed it—copper, rot, and something too sweet, the smell of spoiled nectar mixed with burning feathers.
[ Main Scenario #1 — Debt Collection ]
[ Payment not yet received. ]
[ Descending… ]
The text unfurled across the air like scripture. It wasn't words written on a page—it was carved into the bone of the world itself. Every student and professor heard it not with their ears, but with their marrow. The bones in their bodies seemed to hum in recognition.
And then the sky tore open.
The first of the debt collectors fell through.
Not monsters in the usual sense—these weren't beasts with fangs or talons. They were… unpaid sentences, failed promises, half-forgotten memories given body. Their shapes flickered with unfinished stories: a headless knight who swung a rusted blade, a child with too many teeth whispering lullabies backwards, a scholar with his face smudged out like a censored manuscript.
They should not exist, and yet they bled onto the cobblestones, one by one.
Screams rose from the Academy courtyard. Students ran in all directions, robes flaring, mana sigils bursting in futile defense. Professors summoned their contracts, talismans, their weapons of noble bloodlines—but the collectors walked through them as though none of it mattered.
Every strike they landed made debts blossom across their victims' skin like glowing scars. And when the scars spread far enough, the bodies fell in silence. Paid. Collected.
Seo Ha-young's hand seized Hae-won's collar and dragged him out of the infirmary before the first fracture split the ceiling above his bed.
He staggered into the chaos of the courtyard, vision still stinging with system text. His body felt as though it was being forced to remember something too large, too endless. The hymn whispered again, faintly, but Seo's voice drowned it out.
"On your feet, Chaos boy. It's begun."
Her smile was sharp, blood already staining her cheek from where a splinter of reality had grazed her. She didn't bother wiping it away until after she'd spoken, then smeared it across her knuckles like war paint.
The collectors howled—a sound like a debt ledger slammed shut.
Hae-won's stomach knotted. He wasn't seeing creatures. He was seeing regressions. Every flicker, every incomplete body, every jagged smile—they were fragments of failures, echoes of endings that had once belonged to him.
The whispers confirmed it:
[ 148th Regression stirring… ]
[ 211th Regression stirring… ]
[ 372nd Regression stirring… ]
They weren't monsters. They were his debts.
"Hae-won." Seo's voice snapped his spinning thoughts like glass. "Sword."
His hand moved without thought. The cursed blade lay in his grip before he'd realized he'd summoned it. The black edge shimmered, faintly veined with threads of crimson, like blood dried into iron. The name above it was still unstable, text writhing as if it hadn't chosen what it wanted to be.
[ Fable Weapon: ??? Sword of ??? ]
The collectors turned, drawn to the resonance of their author. Dozens of eyeless faces locked onto him at once. The silence that fell across the courtyard wasn't from peace—it was the hush of predators realizing prey was within reach.
Hae-won's chest locked. His throat worked, trying to remember how to breathe.
And then Seo slammed her fist into his ribs.
The air punched out of him in a wheeze, but the pain cut through the fog. He stumbled, cursed, then glared at her.
She smirked, teeth glinting in firelight. "There. That's more like it. Now let's carve this nightmare apart."
The first collector lunged.
It was the headless knight, sword swinging with the weight of a forgotten oath. Its blade should have severed him, but Hae-won's body moved—not from instinct, but from memory. 500 regressions had carved reactions into his bones. He bent, ducked, his cursed blade rising in a brutal arc.
Steel met shadow. The cursed sword cut not flesh, but the debt tether itself. The knight froze, blade collapsing like wet paper before its entire body shattered into dust.
The sword drank the debt like a parched throat swallowing rain.
[ Cursed Weapon Synchronization +1% ]
[ Unstable name evolving… ]
The collectors howled louder now, broken voices layering into a choir of unpaid stories.
Hae-won's breath tore ragged from his lungs, sweat streaking his brow. One swing. Just one swing, and his body already remembered the despair of hundreds.
Seo moved beside him, quick and feral. Her movements weren't graceful—she fought like a survivor, not a noble. Each kick, each strike, each blade she borrowed from fallen students was aimed to maim, to buy seconds, to spill just enough blood to keep herself breathing.
"Don't stop swinging," she shouted. "Every one of these bastards is yours."
He didn't argue. His sword sang.
Each collector fell differently—some shattered into dust, some melted into ash, some screamed as though he was tearing chapters from their throats. Each time, the cursed sword drank, evolving, its text convulsing across his vision.
[ Cursed Sword of… Slain Companions? ]
[ Rejected. ]
[ Cursed Sword of Debt? ]
[ Rejected. ]
The name fought itself as fiercely as he fought.
The courtyard became a furnace. Fire sigils failed, barriers collapsed, the Academy spires cracked under the weight of screams. Students died in heaps. Professors were dragged under debts they couldn't pay.
And through it all, the cursed sword kept whispering into Hae-won's palm. Not words. Hunger.
Seo's voice cut through again, rough, mocking, alive. "Keep going, Hae-won! Don't you dare stop. If you fall here, every one of us is already dead!"
His arms trembled. His ribs ached from her earlier strike. His lungs burned.
But he swung. Again. And again.
The hymn of the martyr coiled faintly in the air. The collectors weren't just dying—they were being written into the sword, rewritten into something sharper, crueler, something meant to end more than just their lives.
By the time the second wave descended, the cobblestones were red rivers.
And the sword's name was almost ready to change.
The collectors didn't stop with the courtyard.
The fracture in the sky pulsed like a living wound, spilling more figures into the Academy. Their bodies were even more grotesque than the first wave: one towered with arms stitched from three different creatures, another dragged a chain of screaming masks, another was nothing more than a tangle of eyes stitched onto an enormous wing.
Each of them carried the weight of unfinished accounts.
[ Debt Collection: Wave Two initiated. ]
[ Kill, be killed, or pay what cannot be paid. ]
The message scrawled itself across Hae-won's sight until it blurred, until the words themselves seemed to carve into his eyelids. He stumbled under the weight of them, but Seo shoved him forward again, knuckles bloodied, laughter still raw in her throat.
"Don't stop moving! They'll bury you alive in their books if you hesitate!"
Her grin was madness, or maybe just survival. It was hard to tell in the light of burning towers.
The cursed sword vibrated in his grip. Its hunger had sharpened. Every kill added new cracks of light across the blade, faint veins of molten red. But the name still would not settle.
[ Cursed Sword of… Betrayed Oaths? ]
[ Rejected. ]
[ Cursed Sword of Companions' End? ]
[ Rejected. ]
The rejection burned through his head like rejection letters from the gods themselves.
And then he froze.
Through the chaos, through the shrieks of dying professors and the collapse of stone spires, he saw her.
Yun Arin.
Unlike Seo, who moved like a street brawler made for ruin, Arin fought with a stubborn optimism that looked almost absurd against the carnage. She was drenched in blood, her school uniform shredded, but her staff still glowed with golden light. Each spell she cast was not efficient—it was hopeful. She was shielding wounded students, dragging professors back from the jaws of collectors, screaming encouragement even as her own legs buckled.
"Stand! Please—don't give up yet! If we stand together, we can—"
Her words cut short when a collector surged toward her, the child-thing with teeth where its eyes should be.
Without thinking, Hae-won moved.
The cursed sword met the creature's mouth of endless gnashing. He felt its teeth grind against the blade, felt its shrieks echo through his chest as the edge ripped it apart. The creature dissolved into cinders that the sword swallowed whole.
And in that moment, the cursed blade pulsed.
[ Cursed Sword of the End ]
The name settled.
It didn't ask. It declared.
The air bent around it, and the collectors flinched for the first time, as if recognizing a predator greater than themselves. The cursed sword throbbed, its black surface now burning with veins of crimson light, a scripture of endings carved into steel.
Seo barked a laugh, bloody teeth flashing. "Finally! That's the face I wanted to see!"
But Hae-won didn't smile. The name weighed on him like chains. The End. That was his weapon now. That was what it demanded.
Yun Arin clutched her staff, eyes wide, sweat streaking her brow. She looked at him not with fear, but with a desperate kind of faith. "That sword… it's resonating with you. Please—don't let it take you."
Her optimism was absurd in the bloodbath, but it was also the only light cutting through the darkness.
Seo sneered. "Don't listen to her, Hae-won. That sword's yours. Use it before it uses you."
The second wave closed in. Collectors circled them, debts burning like brands across their skins.
And then another voice cut through the din.
Measured. Calm. Sharp.
"Form ranks. Stop bleeding in circles like frightened cattle."
A young man in noble garb stepped through the chaos. His robe was torn, but his posture immaculate. His spectacles glinted in the light of burning banners, and in his hand was no weapon but a folded fan etched with runes. He snapped it open with a click.
"Hyeon Seok," someone gasped.
The Noble Strategist.
He didn't swing a blade. He didn't hurl fire. Instead, he raised his fan and pointed—not at enemies, but at students and professors scattered in panic.
"You, fortify the north wing. You three, triage the injured. Anyone still able to channel, anchor the courtyard. And you—" his eyes flicked to Hae-won, unreadable, "—you're the blade. Stop wavering. Cut."
Something in his tone brooked no refusal.
Even through the chaos, even as debts raged across the courtyard, people obeyed. Lines formed. Barriers reassembled. The Academy began to look less like a massacre and more like a battlefield.
Seo spat blood and grinned. "Finally. Someone who sounds like he knows what he's doing."
Arin gave a shaky smile, staff glowing again. "We can hold. If we just believe—"
"Belief doesn't win wars," Seok interrupted coldly. "Strategy does."
His gaze lingered on Hae-won, sharp and dissecting. "And sometimes… a sword that doesn't belong to this world."
The cursed sword pulsed in Hae-won's grip, as if acknowledging the strategist's words.
[ Debt Collection continues. ]
[ Failure condition: Total Academy Collapse. ]
[ Survive, or be written off. ]
The third wave began to descend.
And this time, the collectors weren't faceless horrors.
They were familiar.
Students who had died in the first minutes of the scenario—reborn as debts, their faces twisted, their voices chanting the ledger of unfinished stories.
Seo's grin faded. Arin's hands shook. Even Seok's fan hesitated mid-snap.
The debt wasn't just external anymore. It was personal.
And Hae-won's sword—The End—hungered louder than ever.