The hall did not collapse.
Not this time.
The ceiling held, though dust sifted down from the rafters. The walls stood, cracked but unbroken. And at the center of the chaos, Do-hyun still breathed.
Hae-won's arms shook from where he had dragged his friend clear of the blow, the cursed sword still thrumming in his grip. But Do-hyun was alive. His chest rose and fell in ragged, blessed rhythm.
Alive.
Against every law of the ledger, against every regression before this one—alive.
Hae-won's lungs tore as he let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. His knees nearly buckled, but he forced himself upright, shielding Do-hyun from the dust and the groaning stone.
"Stay down," Hae-won rasped, voice raw. "You're safe."
Do-hyun blinked at him, dazed, sweat dripping down his temple. "You… stopped it."
Stopped it.
The words rang in Hae-won's chest like a church bell. Yes. He had. Finally.
Arin staggered toward them, blood streaking her face, but her eyes shone. She looked from Do-hyun to Hae-won, and her lips trembled into a smile that was more a sob.
"You did it," she whispered. "You broke it."
For a heartbeat—a single, impossible heartbeat—the hall was alive with relief. Cadets wept openly. Some dropped their shattered weapons and collapsed to their knees. The chant was gone. The ledger's voice—gone. The Titan's hulking form wavered, destabilized, as though stripped of its anchor.
Hae-won lifted his cursed blade and roared at it, every vein in his body burning with defiance. "It's over!"
The Titan staggered back. Its chest yawned wide, the ledger-pages burning and curling into ash. The voices faltered, fractured into static.
And then—
The air split.
Script seared itself across the floor, red lines scarring the stone. The voice returned—not gone, never gone, but colder. Precise.
[ Correction Applied. ]
[ Anchor Relocated. ]
Hae-won's triumph froze in his throat.
"No," he whispered.
A cadet screamed.
At the far edge of the hall, half-buried in rubble, a boy clawed his way upright. Hae-won knew his face—barely. Ink-stained fingers, always tucked at the back of lectures, a boy who never raised his voice. Nameless in every regression. Dead before his story even began.
His body convulsed.
Blood burst from his eyes, his mouth, his nose. His chest split open with a sound like tearing parchment. Bones cracked, ribs bending outward, as a light too bright to look at poured from within.
"No… no, no, no—" Hae-won stumbled forward, reaching out.
The boy's scream cut short as the ledger burned through him, etching itself into his flesh, into his very soul. His eyes went black. Chains of script coiled around his limbs, dragging him upright like a puppet.
The Titan's form reknit itself—not Do-hyun this time, but someone else. Someone no one had thought to save.
The whisper returned, louder now, triumphant.
"UNPAID…"
The new Titan rose, ribs yawning wide, its chest a hollow ledger that consumed the hall's light.
Do-hyun's trembling hand clutched at Hae-won's sleeve. His voice cracked. "You saved me… but…"
Hae-won couldn't breathe.
The victory was ash in his mouth.
He had broken the cycle. He had defied the script. He had kept Do-hyun alive.
And still—the Titan lived.
The ledger had simply chosen another. The ledger's voice thundered through the hall like a bell tolling the end of days.
"UNPAID…"
The new Titan straightened, bones groaning as its form stretched higher and higher, the cadet's small frame now a grotesque shell stitched with chains of debt. Script burned across its skin, each line a contract signed in blood, each movement precise as an accountant's stroke.
Cadets fled screaming. Others stood frozen, their weapons useless in trembling hands.
Hae-won's body moved before his thoughts caught up. His cursed sword came up, black fire flaring along its edge as if it too had been waiting for this.
Do-hyun tried to rise, but Hae-won pushed him back down with a fierce glare.
"Stay alive. That's your job now."
Then he turned, stepping into the storm.
⸻
The Titan swung.
Its arm was not flesh but a column of script—red lines overlapping like chains, heavy enough to crush a house. The blow came down like an executioner's axe.
Hae-won met it head-on.
The cursed sword screamed in his hand, and he screamed with it, a raw sound torn from his chest. Steel and script collided. The hall erupted in shockwaves, stone fracturing outward in jagged lines. Cadets were hurled into the walls, dust choking the air.
The Titan pressed harder. Its ledger-voice hissed.
"Debt resists payment. Correction required."
Hae-won's knees buckled, the weight threatening to drive him into the floor. His vision swam with red.
And then—
The voice. Not the Titan's. Not the ledger's.
The other voice. The one that came only when he was at the edge.
Do you want to burn it?
The Most Ancient Dream.
The modifier thrummed awake in his veins, and with it came whispers of infinity—worlds he had not yet lived, deaths he had not yet tasted. And over them all, the faint image of something impossible: a future without Titans.
He clenched his jaw, blood dripping down his chin. "Show me."
The world cracked open.
⸻
Sanity frayed. He felt it slipping, his mind tugged toward the void of five hundred lifetimes. Faces, screams, laughter, betrayals—they poured into him all at once. He staggered under the weight of them.
But his other modifier ignited at the same time.
Enemy of Every Path.
It was hate given form. Not for one person. Not for one Titan. But for every possible path the ledger sought to write. It branded him an adversary to the script itself. His every strike would not only wound flesh—it would defy inevitability.
Together, the two modifiers howled through his blood.
The sword erupted in crimson light. Not flame. Not aura. Something stranger. Something older. A rewriting of the air itself, as though reality itself bent to let the blade exist.
The Titan's arm trembled. Its correction faltered.
Hae-won roared and shoved upward. The cursed sword bit through the chains of script, severing lines of glowing red contract. For the first time, the Titan staggered back, its body shuddering.
The cadets gasped. Someone whispered, "He's… pushing it back?"
⸻
Hae-won didn't stop. He couldn't stop.
Every swing was both a strike and a defiance. Every cut rewrote the battlefield, slashing through the ledger's attempt to "correct." Where the Titan healed, his blade carved the healing away. Where its scripts reformed, his modifiers burned the lines into ash.
But the cost was mounting.
Blood poured from his nose. His vision fractured, doubled, then tripled. He was seeing too many timelines at once, fighting not one Titan but dozens layered over each other, each one a possible failure. Each one a path he was forced to cut down.
His hands shook violently. His teeth cracked from the pressure. Sanity itself slipped like sand between his fingers.
The Most Ancient Dream whispered: You will break, little collector. You cannot hold me long.
He laughed—a wild, ragged laugh that tore from his throat like a sob.
"Then break with me."
⸻
The Titan screeched, ribs splitting wider as chains of script lashed out in every direction. Cadets screamed as the glowing bindings coiled toward them, dragging them toward the ledger's gaping core.
Hae-won leapt.
One slash severed a dozen chains at once. Another split a rib clean in half. The Titan reeled, stumbling back into the wall, half its form unraveling under crimson light.
The cadets looked on in awe. Arin pressed a hand over her mouth, tears streaking through the blood and dust. Do-hyun, still on the floor, whispered hoarsely:
"He's… not fighting it. He's rewriting it."
⸻
But even as victory burned close, the ledger hissed one final correction.
[ Sanction: Collector's Overdraft. ]
The Titan's chest opened, and within it a sword of pure debt forged itself—black-red, shimmering with the weight of every unpaid vow, every life lost across five hundred regressions.
The blade swung toward Hae-won.
And for the first time since he had embraced the dream, he felt fear again.
Because this sword was not aimed at his body.
It was aimed at his core. At the fragile anchor that allowed him to exist across infinite cycles.
If it struck… there would be no next regression.
Only silence.
The blade of debt screamed downward.
It was more than steel. More than weight. It was the sum of every unpaid life, every regression carved into his marrow, every failure tallied without forgiveness. And it was aimed at the only thing that mattered—his anchor. His ability to stand again.
Hae-won knew what it meant. If the sword struck, there would be no reset. No second chance. No ledger. Just silence.
For a heartbeat, fear tore at him. For a heartbeat, he considered dodging.
But then the voices surged.
Five hundred lives, all at once.
Children choking in rubble. Companions screaming in fire. His father's voice bellowing against the dark. His mother's breath guttering as the ledger dragged her name from the world.
They overlapped, harmonized, dissonant and perfect.
And in the middle of that storm, The Most Ancient Dream whispered.
Little collector. Let go of what you call 'self.' That is the price. That is the key. Burn your sanity, and you will hold me in full.
His other modifier growled in response, Enemy of Every Path, its weight pressing against his bones. If you unleash this, you will no longer be bound to their rules. But you will be hated. By ledger. By world. By all paths alike.
Hae-won lifted his head. His lips split into a grin, blood streaking his teeth.
"Then let them hate me."
⸻
The sword of debt fell.
And Hae-won stepped into it.
⸻
The scream that followed did not belong to him.
It belonged to the world.
His body twisted, light tearing through it as if he were a vessel too fragile to contain the fire poured into him. Crimson surged from his veins, but it wasn't blood—it was memory liquefied. Five hundred lives erupting outward, layering one over another until the air warped with impossible afterimages.
One moment he was standing. The next, a child. The next, an old man. The next, nothing but ash. All forms at once, all regressions unleashed.
The Titan's blade struck—
—and shattered.
The debt screamed, contracts unraveling as his dual modifiers rewrote their lines in real time. Every clause, every chain, every law the Titan had forged to bind him was rewritten in crimson script that bled from his skin.
[ Rewrite Authorized. ]
[ Rewrite Authorized. ]
[ Rewrite Authorized. ]
The world could not keep up.
⸻
He laughed. A horrible, ragged sound. Half a sob, half a roar.
Sanity bled from him in rivers. He saw cadets screaming, but not here—not now. He saw them die in timelines that hadn't even been born yet. He saw Seo Ha-young reach for him with both kindness and betrayal, a thousand different versions of her flashing by in an instant. He saw Arin's hand trembling over his corpse. He saw Do-hyun falling, falling, falling—always falling, always dying—an infinite constant.
And still he fought.
The cursed sword was no longer steel. It was a quill carved from bone, and each strike was a line across the Titan's body. Each line an edit. Each cut a revision.
"Unpaid," the ledger hissed, staggering back.
"Unwritten," Hae-won snarled, voice echoing as if a thousand of him spoke at once.
And with a final swing, he carved straight through the Titan's chest.
⸻
The creature convulsed. Its body shattered into script, pages fluttering into ash. The hall cracked, roof groaning as if about to collapse—but then froze. Time itself trembled, then snapped back into place.
The Titan was gone.
Cadets lay scattered, but alive. For the first time across countless regressions, the impossible had happened.
He had won.
⸻
And yet—
Hae-won staggered, laughter still spilling from his mouth, raw and broken. He gripped his head with one hand, nails tearing into his scalp as visions clawed at him.
Five hundred lives screaming at once.
Five hundred deaths replaying without pause.
Five hundred failures gnawing at the remains of his sanity.
He saw a child running across a meadow. He saw his mother smiling, alive, untouched by debt. He saw his father's hand on his shoulder. He saw the future he could never reach.
And it tore him apart.
"Too much…" His voice cracked, trembling. "It's too much."
The modifiers pulsed, uncaring.
This is what you asked for. This is what you burned for.
The cadets watched in terrified awe. Arin whispered, trembling:
"Hae-won…?"
But the boy who turned his crimson-lit eyes toward her was no longer the same.
He had succeeded.
He had broken the script.
He had survived.
And in the same breath, he had lost