The day was too familiar.
The courtyard, the drills, the careless laughter of cadets—every detail was an echo of five hundred loops etched into his marrow.
Hae-won didn't walk like a cadet anymore. He walked like a man with an execution date carved on his back.
Do-hyun laughed, sparring under the sunlight, his crooked uniform collar the same as always. Every other regression, this moment had been an afterthought—a flicker of normalcy before the collapse. But today, the weight of it pressed like a blade at Hae-won's throat.
Because he knew.
This is where the path branches.
The Titan's shadow was not yet born. Its debt was not yet written. The script had not yet closed its jaws. And for the first time, he carried something sharp enough to cut the page apart.
[ Modifier Active: The Most Ancient Dream. ]
[ Modifier Active: Enemy of Every Path. ]
[ Modifier Fusion: Pathbreaker (Inchoate). ]
The whispers of his other selves clawed at his skull—500 deaths begging, warning, mocking—but he clenched his teeth and let the flood pass through.
Do-hyun stumbled on the training ground, laughter bubbling as his opponent's blade whistled past his shoulder. Just a spar. Just a moment. Harmless.
Except Hae-won's stomach lurched. Because he remembered the pattern.
How a "training accident" shifted into a collapse, a crack in the scenario that cascaded toward Do-hyun's fall.
"Not this time," Hae-won muttered.
The weave shivered. The air hissed.
As though reality itself had heard him.
⸻
It began small. A glint of sunlight on the opponent's blade, too bright. The ground slick with a sheen of dew, too sudden. Do-hyun's boot sliding just wrong—
The keystone aligning itself.
Hae-won's pulse thundered. His hand moved before thought.
The cursed sword, hidden beneath the academy's training garb, snarled awake. Its edge kissed air, a single strike severing the opponent's wooden blade in two before it could graze Do-hyun. Splinters showered the dust.
The cadets gasped. The instructor shouted.
But Do-hyun lived.
For the first time in five hundred cycles—he lived.
And then the world screamed.
⸻
The ledger burned into the sky, red script scarring the air above the training grounds.
[ Keystone Error. ]
[ Correction Required. ]
The earth shook. Tiles cracked. The blue of the sky bent, warping like glass under fire. Cadets clutched their heads, collapsing to their knees with screams.
Hae-won staggered under the pressure, blood flooding from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes.
The ledger hissed through his skull:
"—UNPAID. UNPAID. CORRECTION REQUIRED."
But the cursed sword howled in defiance. The Ancient Dream writhed, its insanity gnawing at the base of his mind.
And Hae-won laughed. Bitter, cracked, but alive.
"Not this time. You hear me? Not this time!"
Do-hyun grabbed his arm, eyes wide with panic. "Hae-won—what's happening?!"
Hae-won turned to him, vision blurred red, his voice shredded by rage and exhaustion.
"You're alive. That's what's happening. You're alive."
The ledger shrieked overhead. Reality itself twisted.
But the keystone was fractured. The path was broken.
And for the first time, the Titan did not stir.
The Retaliation of the Weave
The world shuddered.
Not the trembling of stone, not the groaning collapse of ceilings like he had seen a hundred times. This was deeper. The kind of shudder that made the marrow ache, that made lungs burn for air that didn't exist.
Cadets screamed as they dropped to the ground. Some clutched their skulls. Some clawed at their own eyes. Others convulsed like fish thrown onto stone.
The sky tore.
That was the only way Hae-won could describe it. A rift zigzagged across the heavens like ink spilled on silk, lines of scarlet ledger-script branching outward as if reality itself were cracking under the weight of a debt it had not accounted for.
[ Error. Keystone compromised. ]
[ Correction deploying. ]
His vision swam with the words, inside his eyes as though carved into his pupils.
Then the ground split.
From the fissures, things began to crawl.
They were not the grotesque monsters of the debt scenarios. Not Titans, not twisted cadets bound to unpaid ledgers. These were pale, faceless figures draped in red veils of script, their limbs elongated, fingers ending in quills of bone.
Collectors.
Not born of debt, but of correction.
The world's antibodies.
Their voices droned in unison, flat and cold:
"UNPAID. UNPAID. BALANCE MUST BE RESTORED."
The cadets shrieked and scattered. Some drew training blades, only for them to snap like straw when the faceless things brushed them aside. A dozen students vanished in the span of heartbeats, bodies dissolving into script and ash.
Hae-won stumbled forward, dragging Do-hyun behind him. The boy resisted, panic etched across his face.
"What are those things?! What's happening?!"
Hae-won's jaw clenched. His breath burned like knives in his chest.
"They're here because you're alive."
Do-hyun froze. "What?"
"They're here to fix it," Hae-won spat. His voice cracked under the weight of blood trickling from his ears. "To erase you. Because you weren't supposed to survive."
Do-hyun's face went pale, eyes darting to the nearest Collector as it reached for a cadet. The boy's scream was cut short as his body folded into lines of red script, erased from the scene entirely—as though he had never existed.
Do-hyun staggered back. "You're saying—"
"I broke the script," Hae-won snapped, his own teeth bloodied from biting down too hard. "And now the script is trying to break us."
⸻
The cursed sword snarled awake in his grip, vibrating against his palm. Its hunger burned hotter than ever, almost ecstatic.
Kill them. Tear them apart. They are not real. They are only words. Erase the ledger's correction, and I will drink it all.
The Ancient Dream stirred with it. He felt its weight pressing against his skull, the sensation of five hundred lifetimes rushing into his veins. His sanity cracked at the edges—memories of deaths that weren't his this time clawed at his thoughts, layering over each other until he could barely breathe.
For a heartbeat, he was drowning in himself.
In five hundred selves.
In the boy who begged. In the man who cursed. In the corpse who died.
Every version of him screamed at once.
And yet, in the middle of that storm, one thread of clarity cut through:
Protect Do-hyun.
Hae-won's lips pulled back into a ragged snarl. He raised the cursed blade, crimson script flaring across its length.
The nearest Collector lunged. Its quill-hand pierced toward Do-hyun's chest.
Steel shrieked.
Hae-won intercepted the blow, his cursed blade locking against the quill. Sparks of red script and black flame exploded outward, scarring the ground. His arm trembled under the force, bones threatening to snap.
"Not him," Hae-won growled. "Not again."
The Collector tilted its faceless head. "Balance must be restored."
"Then I'll unbalance everything."
The cursed sword flared, its edge drinking the Collector's script as Hae-won shoved forward. The faceless thing reeled, its quill-arm severed, dissolving into streaks of red text.
The ledger screamed overhead.
[ ERROR MULTIPLYING. ]
[ Correction escalating. ]
The rift in the sky deepened. Dozens more Collectors crawled free, their faceless visages turning toward him.
Do-hyun staggered back, his voice breaking. "Hae-won—we can't fight them all!"
Hae-won wiped blood from his eyes with the back of his trembling hand. His lips split in something that wasn't quite a smile.
"I don't need to fight them all," he rasped. His eyes burned with crimson script. "I just need to fight long enough."
The Dream pulsed through him, the Enemy of Every Path igniting in his veins.
His sanity frayed further. He felt words unraveling in his head, the threads of reality loosening around him. But he welcomed it.
Because he was no longer just a victim of the script.
He was becoming its enemy.
The world was unraveling.
Collectors poured from the fissures like ink bleeding through parchment, their faceless veils turning toward him in perfect unison. Each step they took distorted the floor beneath them, lines of scarlet ledger-script burning into the stone.
Every breath Hae-won drew felt borrowed. His chest burned, the phantom wound of the debt-sword screaming as if it had been carved into him again.
And still, he refused to let go.
The cursed blade writhed in his grip, its hunger clawing at his skin, drinking his blood.
But the sword was not enough. Not against this.
Not against the correction of the world itself.
⸻
The Dream stirred.
At first it was a whisper.
A ripple of silence threading through the screams.
Then it was a flood.
Five hundred lives. Five hundred deaths. Each crashing into him with the weight of oceans. His bones cracked beneath it, not physically—but conceptually. His mind bent like warped steel.
And then—
He let it in.
The Most Ancient Dream burst outward.
Reality warped around him as though rejecting his existence. The air bent like glass, folding and refolding, fractures of other selves shimmering across the hall. He saw versions of himself die and versions of himself kill. He saw paths that never happened, faces of cadets who had lived in other regressions and never even been born in this one.
The Collectors halted mid-step. Their faceless veils tilted, scripts around them spasming as though struck by static.
The ledger itself screamed into his skull:
[ WARNING. ]
[ UNAUTHORIZED REWRITE IN PROGRESS. ]
[ THE MOST ANCIENT DREAM IS NOT PERMITTED. ]
Hae-won laughed. Blood bubbled on his lips, trailing down his chin.
"Not permitted?" His voice cracked, jagged and broken. "Then watch me."
⸻
His body blurred.
To the Collectors, he was no longer one Hae-won. He was a dozen. A hundred. A thousand layered selves splintering across dimensions, each striking from a different regression.
One of him slashed with the cursed sword, its edge screaming through a Collector's chest. Another of him snapped its quill-arm in two with his bare hands. A third gutted one from behind, eyes burning with madness.
And each kill wasn't just a strike.
It was a rewrite.
The Dream devoured the Collector's existence and spat out contradictions. Their bodies flickered in and out of reality, erased in one moment, restored in another, then shattered into crimson dust as if the Dream had simply decided they had never been.
The cadets who survived could only gape, eyes wide with horror and awe.
To them, Hae-won was not fighting.
He was unmaking.
⸻
Do-hyun stumbled back, trembling, voice breaking.
"What… what are you?"
Hae-won turned, dozens of him overlapping into one broken silhouette. His eyes burned scarlet, pupils fractured into script. His voice echoed with five hundred tones, each version of himself bleeding into the other.
"I am every failure that bled before you."
His blade raised, his body flickering through versions.
"And this time—I'm the failure that fights back."
⸻
The ledger's corrections surged harder.
The fissure widened into a full-blown chasm across the sky, bleeding scarlet into the world. Dozens more Collectors swarmed through, their voices an overwhelming drone:
"BALANCE MUST BE RESTORED. BALANCE MUST BE RESTORED."
Hae-won staggered forward, blood dripping from his eyes, his ears, his nose. His body wasn't built to hold this. His sanity wasn't meant to survive it.
And yet—
The Dream didn't stop.
Reality convulsed. For a single moment, every cadet saw it:
A world where the Titan never existed.
A world where Arin never screamed.
A world where Do-hyun lived without debt.
A world rewritten by the Ancient Dream.
But the vision was fleeting. The ledger snapped back, threads of crimson script binding the rift, burning holes into Hae-won's flesh as it tried to anchor him back to the script.
His scream split the air, jagged and broken.
And yet, he swung the sword again.
He swung through the correction itself.
And the world blinked.
⸻
When the dust settled, silence reigned.
The Collectors were gone. Not slain. Not erased. Denied.
The ledger's whisper was faint now, trembling.
[ ERROR. ]
[ ANCIENT DREAM INTERFERENCE DETECTED. ]
[ MODIFIER LOCK: THE ENEMY OF EVERY PATH. ]
His body crumpled to its knees. His blade fell heavy at his side, still steaming with contradictions. His eyes rolled, red lines of script carved into his veins.
Do-hyun rushed forward, dropping beside him, hands shaking as he grabbed his shoulders.
"Hae-won! You—you're bleeding out—stop—"
Hae-won coughed blood, laughing weakly through it. His voice was cracked, unrecognizable.
"Don't you get it…?" His smile was torn. "…We broke it."
And then, behind the dust, a shadow stepped forward.
Seo Ha-young.
Her gaze was not one of shock like the others. Not even fear.
It was recognition.
Her lips curved into a thin line.
"You really did it," she whispered. "You broke a finite point."
Her eyes gleamed—dangerously.
"And now, Hae-won… you've made yourself the enemy of every path."