The first sign wasn't sound.
It was silence.
The dorm at night should have been alive with breathing, the faint rustle of bodies shifting in bunks, the low mutter of cadets half-trapped in dreams. But tonight, silence seeped into every corner, swallowing the air whole.
Hae-won lay awake, back slick with sweat, eyes wide open.
[ Warning: Unauthorized Narrative Edit Detected. ]
[ Collection Initiated. ]
The system's words pulsed faintly at the corner of his vision.
He sat up. Slowly. Carefully. His breath fogged the air, even though the room wasn't cold.
Something was here.
He turned his head—
—and froze.
A cadet across the room, one he barely knew, was sitting upright in his bunk. But his face was gone. Not bloodied, not torn—gone. Skin smoothed flat where features should be. His chest rose and fell once, then stilled.
Hae-won's stomach turned.
The blanket shifted. Another cadet sat up. Then another. Dozens. All faceless, their skin blurring like melted wax.
They moved in unison. Turning. Facing him.
The whispers came next.
"Unpaid… unpaid… unpaid…"
The chant of the ledger, but fractured, warped, overlapping like glass splintering inside his skull.
Collectors.
They weren't shadows anymore. They weren't whispers behind the ledger. They were here.
Hae-won stumbled to his feet, clutching his chest where the phantom wound throbbed. The air warped around him, gravity twisting like it was being rewritten line by line.
One of the faceless cadets lurched forward, its movements jerky, too sharp. Fingers like ink-stained quills clawed toward him.
Hae-won staggered back, heart hammering. He whispered the only command that came to him:
"Stop."
The modifier flared.
[ Script Line: Collector advances. ]
[ Proposed Edit: Collector freezes in place. ]
The system hesitated.
[ Exchange Required. ]
His breath hitched. "Take it."
Pain lanced through his skull. Memory ripped free—his sister's laughter, sharp and bright, a fragment of childhood he hadn't thought of in years. It bled away like ink into water.
The Collector froze mid-step.
But the others didn't.
More moved, their hands outstretched, ledger script burning faintly across their blank skin. The dorm walls flickered, warping like parchment curling in flame.
The entire room was becoming a ledger. A page to write his death.
Hae-won staggered, teeth clenched. "No—no, not yet."
He grabbed the nearest chair, hurling it through the nearest Collector. Wood splintered—but the figure didn't fall. It simply absorbed the impact, reshaping itself around the shards.
The whispers grew louder, overlapping until they became a roar.
unpaid unpaid unpaid unpaid unpaid
His knees buckled. His hands shook. His body screamed to collapse.
Then—
The door burst open.
Seo stood there, eyes wide, sword in hand. Her breath hitched when she saw the faceless crowd.
"What the hell—?"
"Don't look at them!" Hae-won rasped, voice raw. "They're not—real."
But they were. Too real.
The Collectors turned toward Seo, dozens of heads tilting in perfect, unified motion.
She froze. Just for a heartbeat. And that was enough for one of them to lunge.
Hae-won's throat tore with the scream.
"STOP!"
The modifier flared again.
[ Script Line: Collector tears into Seo. ]
[ Proposed Edit: Collector's arm dissolves. ]
The exchange cut deep. Not just memory this time—blood. His nose gushed, his vision swimming red.
But the Collector's arm melted into black ash mid-swing.
Seo gasped, staggering back. She swung her sword wildly, cutting through the nearest faceless figure. It split—then immediately re-formed.
"They don't die!" she shouted.
"I know!" Hae-won's voice cracked. "Just run—"
The Collectors surged all at once. The dorm was gone now, replaced by blank parchment stretching infinitely, ledger-script scrawling across every wall.
The cadets sleeping in the bunks were gone. Or maybe they had never been there.
Only Hae-won, Seo, and the faceless tide remained.
And the whisper that followed, deeper than all the rest:
—Narrator—
Hae-won staggered back, chest burning, blood dripping from his chin. The system's words burned across his sight.
[ Narrator Status Confirmed. ]
[ Rule Clarification: A Narrator writes, but must pay. ]
[ Collection will not cease until balance is restored. ]
Balance.
His knees hit the parchment-floor. He could feel the Collectors closing in, their ink-claws reaching.
Seo's scream rang out as she slashed another one apart, sweat and fury in her voice. "Hae-won! What do we do?!"
His vision swam.
And through the blur of blood and script, he saw it:
A single line, glowing across the page-wall.
[ Current Scene: Hae-won devoured by Collectors. ]
[ Edit Option Available. ]
He could change it.
But he would pay.
The whispers closed in.
"Unpaid… unpaid…"
Hae-won lifted his head. His bloodied lips split into a ragged, trembling grin.
"Then write me something else."
The parchment-wall dissolved. Not into dust. Not into smoke.
Into something softer. Something alive.
A dream.
Hae-won's knees buckled. His head tilted back as the ceiling bent open, unfurling into a sky made of ink and half-remembered lullabies. The chant of the ledger died, replaced by something far stranger—whispers that weren't words, images that weren't his.
His breath rattled. His hand dug into his own chest, trying to hold onto something solid. But everything inside him was loosening. Sliding.
[ Modifier Accessed: The Most Ancient Dream. ]
The words didn't appear in the air. They appeared inside him, searing across his ribs like brands. His skull rang like struck metal, and with it came a flood.
⸻
The first vision was his mother.
Her hair was long, falling over her shoulders in strands glimmering like firelight. Her lips were curved in a song—a lullaby, though the melody was cracked, warping at the edges. She stood in a field of white flowers that bent away from her, their stems curving as if pulled by an unseen tide.
Behind her stood a man—his father. He held his arms wide, a sword of blinding silver in his grip. His face was a blur, but the stance was clear: shielding her. A barrier against the storm pressing down.
And then—blood.
So much blood.
The flowers stained crimson as a shadow the size of a mountain fell upon them both. His mother's voice cut short mid-song. His father's sword shuddered against a weight he could not stop.
Hae-won staggered. His throat tore in a soundless scream.
No. Not this. Not now.
But the dream didn't obey.
It never obeyed.
⸻
The second vision was himself.
Not the boy at the academy. Not even the one who swung against the Titan.
Another self. A hundred selves. A thousand.
A face drowning in fire.
A hand severed by chains.
Bones shattering under the Collector's ledger.
Eyes burning, fading, waking again.
Regression. Regression. Regression.
It wasn't memory. It wasn't dream. It was all of it. At once.
Every failure.
Every scream.
Every hand he couldn't save.
Every name etched into the red ink of debt.
And it tore him apart.
His knees hit the ground. His fingers clawed at his face until blood welled under his nails. His lungs convulsed, choking on air that tasted like iron and ash and ashes and iron.
Make it stop.
The dream laughed. Or maybe he laughed. He couldn't tell anymore. His teeth ached from the pressure of his own jaw grinding. His eyes burned until it felt like something was carving them hollow.
Five regressions.
Fifty regressions.
Five hundred.
Each one smashed into him like a hammer, overlapping until his mind split into shards.
And yet—
[ Rewrite Possible. ]
The words cut through the chaos. A thread. A lifeline.
Limitless.
Anything.
All he had to do was dream it differently.
⸻
The ground beneath him pulsed. It wasn't stone anymore. It was parchment. Lines of text crawled under his palms like veins. He could see the scene written in front of him—every cadet screaming, the Titan crushing, the Collector's sword raised.
And with the Ancient Dream burning inside him, he reached.
His finger dragged across the script.
Words bent. Lines shivered.
"Not this time," Hae-won hissed, though his voice cracked with madness. His words echoed in a dozen different tones, as though every version of him across five hundred lives had spoken at once.
The script blurred, and with it—the Titan froze. Its debt-sword hung mid-swing, trembling against invisible chains. The cadets who had been screaming… stopped. Their mouths opened and shut in silence, caught between breaths.
Reality stuttered.
[ Rewrite Accepted. Temporary Override Initiated. ]
The debt-sword split like glass. The Titan roared—not the guttural chant of "unpaid," but something rawer, more human. It clutched its chest as crimson script tore across its ribs, bleeding into the parchment sky.
Hae-won gasped, blood dribbling from his lips. His vision swam with double-images—this hall, another hall, another collapse, another death, stacked like mirrors crashing down.
It was working.
He could change it.
But every line he touched carved deeper into him. Every rewrite flayed another piece of his sanity.
And he didn't care.
Not anymore.
Because in the farthest corner of the parchment sky, he saw them again—his mother's face, his father's stance. The dream whispered: Do you want to rewrite them too?
The offer was a knife pressed against his heart.
For the first time, Hae-won's hand trembled. Not with rage. Not with resolve. But with a grief so vast it hollowed him.
His laugh came cracked, jagged, too loud for his own ears. "Rewrite… all of it. Every failure. Every death. Every—"
But the dream cut him off.
[ Cost Incurred: Sanity Deterioration. ]
[ Regression Load: 500 iterations synced simultaneously. ]
And then the flood returned.
This time it didn't just show him. It made him live it.
All five hundred deaths.
All five hundred failures.
Layered together until he was choking, drowning, burning.
Arin screaming.
Do-hyun's lullaby breaking.
Seo's laughter cut off in blood.
Hayoung's hand reaching through ruin.
His mother's lullaby ending mid-note.
His father's body standing, falling, standing again.
Hae-won shrieked. His body convulsed. Blood poured from his ears, his nose, his eyes. The cadets around him hadn't even moved—the world was still frozen in his rewrite—but inside him, entire lifetimes were tearing him apart.
And still—
He dragged his finger across the script again.
One more line.
One more change.
One more fight against the inevitable.
⸻
The parchment-wall split, ink bleeding outward. The dream bent reality like molten glass, reshaping it under his hand.
The Titan screamed. The cadets blinked, as if waking from suspended nightmare. The debt-sword shattered into shards of script that scattered like stars.
But Hae-won's eyes were gone—rolled white, veins blackening, his body little more than a vessel cracked open by the weight of too much truth.
Still, a smile carved itself onto his blood-slick lips.
"Rewrite… succeeded."
And then he collapsed.
The dream folded itself shut.
The world began again.
The echoes of five hundred deaths still clung to his mind. Hae-won's vision swam, blurring between past and present, between this desk under the morning sun and the thousands of ways he had bled in the dark.
He felt his pulse drag, ragged and uneven, as if his heart didn't know what tempo to follow anymore.
And then her voice cut through.
"You saw it, didn't you?"
Seo Ha-young's tone wasn't mocking. It wasn't sharp. It was steady in a way that made his blood run cold.
He turned. The girl who had been a rival in one regression, an ally in another, a stranger in others still—looked at him now with an expression too knowing for their age.
"What exactly do you think I saw?" His voice was hoarse, threaded with the strain of sanity fraying.
Her gaze didn't flinch. "That his death—Do-hyun's death—isn't yours to prevent. No matter how many times you claw your way back."
The words struck harder than any blade.
He wanted to deny it, but the memories betrayed him. Again and again, the boy's laughter silenced by the Titan's roar. His body broken. His voice cut short. Do-hyun's death had always been there. Always.
Ha-young folded her arms, stepping closer. "That's because he isn't just Do-hyun. He's an anchor. A finite point written into the script of this dimension."
Hae-won's nails dug crescent moons into his palms. "…You talk as if you know the script."
Her lips curved—not into a smile, but into something thinner, bitterer. "Because I do. You're not the only one bound to this cycle, Hae-won."
He froze.
Her voice dropped, quiet enough for only him.
"I've walked other worlds. I've stepped through lives where the Titans wore different faces, where the debt ledger was written in flame, or ice, or bone. I remember them all. That's why I know Do-hyun's death is one of the few things that never changes."
Dimensional traveler.
The words hit him like cold water.
His chest tightened—not just at her confession, but at the calm way she said it, like someone stating the color of the sky.
"Then you're saying it's impossible?" His voice cracked despite himself. "That no matter how many times I regress, he—"
"—dies," she finished. "Yes."
Silence pressed between them, heavy as stone.
Hae-won's breath scraped his throat, each inhale too sharp. Rage welled, thick and black. "And if I stop it?"
For the first time, Ha-young's expression shifted. Not mockery. Not cruelty. Something like… fear.
"Then the Titan doesn't come." She swallowed, voice lower. "And if the Titan doesn't come, the ledger doesn't open. And if the ledger doesn't open…" Her gaze locked onto his. "You stop existing."
The courtyard seemed to tilt.
A finite point. A paradox. Do-hyun's death was not just tragedy—it was the hinge of their entire reality.
Ha-young's words were iron:
"Save him, and you erase the very cycle that allows you to stand here."
Hae-won's hands shook, not with fear this time, but with a fury that threatened to shatter his sanity all over again.
Five hundred deaths pressed down on him. The ledger's whisper gnawed at his ears.
And still—he could not, would not, accept that some lives were written only to be lost