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(Scenario 1: Protect the Academy)
The air itself tasted of blood.
Cha Hae-won gagged on it, thick and coppery, every breath dragging iron across his tongue like rust scraped from a blade. His stomach lurched. It wasn't just battle—the world itself was bleeding.
The courtyard stones were slick, painted red until each step made a wet slap, until his boots drank in the copper that refused to dry. The scent clung to his nose—hot, feral, as though the entire academy had been shoved into the belly of a slaughterhouse.
Screams echoed down the ruined halls. Not sharp, but ragged—like parchment being torn, like throats fraying into silence. Each cry folded into another, swelling into a chorus that shook the marrow of his bones.
[ Scenario 1: Survive the Descent. ]
[ Condition: Protect the Academy. Failure will result in assimilation. ]
The text burned across his vision, as cold and absolute as a blade laid at his throat.
From the sky, something wet dripped. Hae-won looked up.
It wasn't rain.
A fissure had ripped the heavens apart, bleeding tar-thick shadows that writhed like veins across the clouds. The things descending through it didn't fall—they slithered, jointed limbs unfolding with sickening pops, like bones breaking themselves into new angles. Their bodies looked wrong, as though someone had tried to remember a human from memory and failed halfway through. Mouths where eyes should be. Spines that bent outward. Fingers like sharpened wire.
The ground shuddered under their arrival.
Seo Ha-young's voice cut through the carnage like a dagger.
"Focus. If you break now, they'll gut you before I can."
Hae-won snapped his gaze toward her. She stood with blood across her cheek, black hair whipping in the storm of their descent. Her grin was feral, teeth bared like a wolf scenting prey. The light in her eyes was too bright, too alive, for this carnage.
"Breathe," she ordered, and the word struck harder than any strike.
He inhaled. Air thick with blood, shrieking, and ash. He exhaled, coughing crimson.
The world tilted. But he found his balance again.
The courtyard filled with shapes. Students scattered like startled cattle, professors shouting orders that were swallowed by the storm. The fissure spread, bleeding wider.
One of the creatures screeched. Not with a throat, but with its bones. A sound like nails dragged against the walls of his skull. His teeth rattled. His vision blurred.
The sword in Seo Ha-young's hand sang. Just once. A note of cursed steel cutting through the shrieking static.
"Move, Hae-won!"
He stumbled forward, his boots tearing across the blood-slick stones. The creature lunged, limbs snapping at angles that should not exist. Its joints cracked like splintered wood as it stretched wider, mouth yawning open across its chest. Rows upon rows of teeth.
The world pressed down on him. Every sound was too sharp, every taste too thick, every breath like drowning in iron.
And then—
The hymn returned.
Not in words, not in melody. In sensation. The memory of Regression 148. The song of Seo Ha-young bleeding, silent but eternal, folded itself into his chest.
He gritted his teeth, the hymn pounding in his veins, and lifted his trembling hands.
The creature's shadow fell across him.
(Scenario 1: Protect the Academy)
The shadow came down on him like a collapsing sky.
Cha Hae-won's hands rose too slowly, trembling, the weight of every regression clawing against his bones. Fragments of deaths he didn't remember—yet felt—scraped their nails against his skin. His knees buckled. His chest tightened as if invisible hands tried to wring the breath out of him.
Then a blade cut across the dark.
Seo Ha-young's sword carved through the creature's limb, black ichor splattering the courtyard in an arc that hissed where it touched stone. The thing shrieked, a metallic screech that rattled windows and splintered the air itself.
"Don't freeze!" Ha-young snarled, shoving him backward. Her hand was warm, slick with blood that wasn't her own. Or maybe it was. It was hard to tell anymore. "You've survived worse than this."
Had he?
Hae-won's vision flickered. He saw not one courtyard, but hundreds—burning, collapsing, drowning in ash, torn apart by the same shadows. His own corpse among them. Faces of companions he couldn't place, their eyes wide, throats torn, reaching for him before darkness swallowed them whole.
His breath stuttered. "I… I don't—"
"Breathe, Hae-won!" Her voice cracked across the chaos like thunder. "Not in the past. Not in whatever nightmare is clawing at you. Here. Now."
The sword she wielded glowed faintly. Not from light, but from the curse bound inside it—The Cursed Sword of the End. It trembled as if alive, as though it too hungered for the scenario's blood.
And the creatures hungered back.
They poured from the fissure above like locusts, bending themselves into new shapes mid-fall. Their bones snapped and reformed with every impact, as if gravity was only an inconvenience, not a law.
The screams of students rose higher. One boy tried to flee toward the gates—only for the shadow to spear him through the chest with a limb that looked like a spinal column sharpened into a lance. His cry turned wet, cut short as he was pulled upward into the creature's mouth.
Hae-won gagged. He could taste the blood in his throat though it wasn't his own.
His hands clenched. He wanted to look away. To close his eyes and vanish into the fragments of memory where he had already died a thousand deaths. But the hymn of Regression 148 pulsed in his veins, burning him back to the present.
[ Regression Memory Activated. ]
[ Fable: Sword of Cursed Salvation — Suppressed. ]
He staggered, clutching his skull as the system text seared across his vision. Suppressed? His throat went dry. He hadn't even used it yet. Did the world fear it enough to silence it before he could?
"Hae-won!"
Seo Ha-young slammed her boot into his shin—hard enough to shock pain through his fogged mind. Then, with a grin too sharp to be anything but human, she kneed him in the solar plexus.
The breath ripped out of him. Pain flared, sharp and undeniable.
"Good," she hissed, steadying him as his body doubled forward. "Pain's better than fear. Now fight."
Something inside him clicked. The fragmentary chorus of regression deaths fell quiet, if only for a heartbeat. His body steadied.
The creature lunged again.
This time, Hae-won moved.
He ducked beneath the snapping spine-lance and rolled across blood-slick stones, his fingers brushing broken metal—one of the training swords dropped by a fallen student. It was little more than iron, nicked and half-broken, but it was weight. Something real.
The monster turned, too many joints cracking as it twisted unnaturally fast. Its chest-mouth gaped wide, dripping saliva that hissed like acid where it hit stone.
Hae-won's pulse slammed against his ears.
He swung. The blade tore into its jawline, steel squealing against bone. The thing reeled back, shrieking.
He didn't kill it. But for the first time since the fissure tore open the sky, he'd hurt something.
Blood spattered across his face. It wasn't human. It was colder, thicker, and it burned like frost against his skin. His lips caught the metallic sting of it and bile rose in his throat.
Ha-young's sword pierced through the creature's spine, pinning it against the courtyard wall in one smooth motion. She twisted, black ichor splattering across her cheek, and grinned at him again.
"There. That's more like it."
Her grin didn't ease the horror. If anything, it deepened it.
Because behind her, more creatures were descending. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. The fissure above screamed open wider, vomiting shadows that clattered against one another like broken glass.
And for every one Ha-young cut down, three more replaced it.
The professors shouted commands. Spells lit the night sky. Students screamed as their bodies broke.
The metallic taste of blood grew thicker. The sound of bones snapping echoed louder.
And through it all, Cha Hae-won felt his chest constrict with a truth colder than the ichor burning his skin:
This was only the first scenario.
[ System Notice: Scenario 1 will continue until the quota of blood has been met. ]
[ Current Status: 12% Fulfilled. ]
Quota.
Not survival. Not victory. Blood.