The Titan fell.
The earth didn't just shake—it screamed. Its collapse cracked the stone beneath the cadets' boots, splintered columns, sent glass raining from the shattered ceiling. For one breathless moment, no one moved. No one dared to.
Then came the silence.
It wasn't victory's cheer. It was the silence of disbelief. The silence of the condemned realizing they had somehow survived their execution.
Blood pooled in uneven lines across the ruined floor. The smell of charred flesh and dust clung to every gasp.
And in the center of it all, Cha Hae-won stood trembling, his sword angled toward the ground. His knees nearly gave out, but he held himself upright through sheer spite.
The Titan's body had already begun to dissolve into script—the glowing debt runes unraveling into strands of ash that scattered like paper burned in wind.
Arin was the first to stumble forward, clutching her side. Her hand trembled as she reached out for him.
"…Hae-won."
Her voice cracked—not from pain, but from something worse. Something like fear.
He wanted to tell her not to worry. He wanted to tell her he was fine. That the blood soaking through his uniform wasn't his own, that he hadn't just sacrificed a piece of his mind to kill something that shouldn't exist.
But his throat burned.
So he only met her gaze, eyes hollow, and forced the smallest of nods.
Do-hyun staggered up behind her, coughing up dirt and blood. He looked at the smoking crater where the Titan had been. His jaw trembled.
"That thing… it's… dead?"
No one answered.
It was dead. The evidence lay before them, dissolving into nothing. But every heartbeat told them it couldn't be so simple. That nothing this enormous, this invincible, died without consequence.
Seo Ha-young sat against a cracked wall, her leg bent at an unnatural angle. She bit down on her sleeve, blood streaking her face as she forced her bone back into place with a brutal crunch. Her eyes never left Hae-won.
Not with gratitude. Not with admiration.
With suspicion.
She had seen something in that fight—something that no cadet should've been capable of.
And she wasn't going to let it go.
The others began murmuring now, their voices thin and unsteady.
"Did… did he really do that alone?"
"Impossible. A cadet can't—"
"Then what the hell is he?"
The questions tangled into the smoke rising above the battlefield.
But Hae-won didn't answer. Couldn't. His breath was ragged, his chest heaving. Each heartbeat pressed knives into his skull.
The system's notifications still echoed faintly, burned into his vision:
[ Regression Counter: 503 ]
[ Temporary Unlock – Most Ancient Dream ]
[ Dual Modifier in effect. ]
503.
His hands trembled. He wanted to scream. To rip the words out of the air and deny them.
But he couldn't.
Because he remembered all 503.
Every failure. Every death. Every scream.
The fragments slithered across his sight, a thousand moments overlapping. He could still hear his mother's laugh fading, his father's desperate plea as the world tore apart. Memories from before the Academy, before this nightmare world. Memories that shouldn't even exist here.
Sanity cracked like thin ice beneath a giant's step.
He bit down on his lip until he tasted iron. He had to ground himself.
Not yet. Not here.
Arin's hand brushed his arm again, tentative, fragile. "You're shaking… sit down before you—"
He stepped away.
Her expression faltered, and silence pressed heavier than the ruined air.
Hae-won's voice, when it came, was low. Strained.
"…Don't touch me."
It wasn't anger. It was fear. Not of her—but of himself.
He saw the way she froze, the hurt flickering in her eyes, and it stabbed him deeper than the Titan's blade ever had.
But he couldn't take it back.
Not when every drop of his blood, every fragment of his mind, screamed at him that he was becoming something no one should ever stand near.
The silence stretched.
Until—
A sound.
A faint, hollow ding in the air.
Like a bell tolling at the end of a story.
Every cadet stiffened. Their eyes flicked upward.
And then they heard it.
A voice.
Not the system. Not a human tongue.
A voice layered with pages turning, with pens scratching, with ink spilling into silence.
"Candidates identified."
The cadets shuddered. Their shadows twisted.
"Begin selection. Choose your Narrator."
⸻
The world was shifting again.
And Hae-won… Hae-won alone felt the weight of a thousand unseen eyes pierce into him.
Watching. Judging.
Fearing.
Because he wasn't supposed to be here.
He wasn't supposed to hear them.
And yet he did.
The air warped.
It wasn't like mana. Mana hummed, it rippled; you could feel it thrumming against the skin like wind.
This—this was something else.
Words bled into the air itself. Paragraphs. Sentences. Fragments of narration that coiled through the smoke like pale serpents. Each cadet stiffened as a thread of ink tethered itself to their chest.
"Candidates identified."
"Begin selection. Choose your Narrator."
The voice wasn't a voice. It was a thousand narrations spoken at once, tumbling over each other:
—"The boy who always stood in the shadows."
—"The girl who believed survival was the only justice."
—"The companion who became a weapon."
Each whisper cut to bone, too precise to be coincidence. They were being read. Their entire beings, stripped down and inked into stories.
Hae-won clutched his skull. The words weren't just around him—they were inside him. Crawling like centipedes behind his eyes.
Do-hyun staggered back, his tether shimmering like molten gold. It pulsed with warmth. His face contorted with confusion and awe.
Arin's thread gleamed silver, twisting into a thousand rays of light. Her breath caught in her throat as she reached toward it.
Seo Ha-young—bloodied, smirking despite her cracked ribs—her thread burned red, sharp and jagged like barbed wire.
They were all being chosen. All being read.
But Hae-won…
No thread attached to him.
No narrator's ink reached for his heart.
Instead—
Something deeper stirred.
[ Regression Counter: 503 ]
[ Dual Modifier Confirmed. ]
[ Unlocking… Most Ancient Dream. ]
[ Unlocking… Enemy of Every Path. ]
The world tilted.
He stumbled, clutching his chest as black veins threaded across his arms, as if ink itself had burst through his skin. The air around him rippled with words that did not belong to this world.
The cadets recoiled. Even Arin. Especially Arin.
"W-what… what's happening to him—?"
Hae-won saw it. He saw everything.
Not just his lives. Not just the failures.
But the scripts themselves.
He saw the parchment of this world curling in fire, saw lines of narration written and rewritten until the margins bled. He saw hands—ink-stained hands—tearing drafts apart.
His own hands.
"…I wrote this."
The memory slammed into him, merciless.
He had written this world.
Not as it was—but as a failed story.
Back when he had been no one, just Cha Hae-won, another faceless student in Seoul, hammering out drafts no one would ever read.
He had been the narrator once. And he had failed.
Now he was inside his own story. Trapped in the bones of his abandoned world.
Laughter bubbled in his throat, cracked, manic. He smothered it with his hand, but the sound escaped anyway—half a sob, half a scream.
The cadets edged further back. Even Ha-young, who had sneered at everything, looked pale.
The voice returned.
"Selection complete. Narrators bound."
One by one, the cadets' threads burned into their flesh, merging with them. Gasps filled the ruin as new strength coursed into their veins, as foreign whispers began to guide them.
Do-hyun's golden glow solidified—The Guardian's Flame.
Arin's silver script etched itself into her arms—The Star of Renewal.
Ha-young's barbed thread coiled like chains—The Red Hound.
Each one became something more. Not just cadets. Incarnations of stories written above their heads.
But Hae-won…
No thread bound him.
Because he didn't need one.
He wasn't chosen.
He was the one who had written them in the first place.
[ Warning: Sanity Threshold Critical. ]
[ Shared Cost Activated. ]
Pain like boiling glass ripped through his head. His scream echoed raw in the silence.
But alongside it—power surged. Power that wasn't granted, but reclaimed.
For one fractured heartbeat, he stood in both places: as the failed writer staring at his glowing monitor in the dark, and as the cadet standing in blood and ruin.
For one moment, he saw the entire stage.
And then it broke.
He collapsed to one knee, blood streaming from his nose.
The ledger whispered again, jagged, furious.
"…unpaid… unpaid… unpaid…"
But beneath it—something new.
A chorus of voices.
Narrators. Watching.
Shocked.
Terrified.
Because no incarnation had ever looked back at them before.
And Hae-won had.
⸻
Arin reached for him again, desperate this time. "Hae-won, stop! You're—"
Her words cut short.
Because in his eyes, for the briefest flicker, she saw it.
Not madness. Not pain.
But clarity.
And it terrified her more than anything else. Blood dripped down his face in rivulets. It wasn't the blood of injury, but the blood of something rewriting itself.
His veins glowed faintly, threads of ink pulsing beneath the skin, crawling up his neck like creeping vines. The cadets whispered, horrified—none daring to step closer.
But above them, far above the ruined ceiling, something stirred.
The Narrators are watching.
They had always watched. Silent quills scratching in the dark, weaving fates for their chosen incarnations. But never had one of their "characters" looked up. Never had one stared back.
And now—
[ Alert: Unbound Incarnation detected. ]
[ Modifier: Most Ancient Dream — Reality Rewrite (Temporary). ]
[ Modifier: Enemy of Every Path — Hostility Triggered. ]
The sky split.
Not with thunder. Not with light. But with sentences. Entire paragraphs unraveling in glowing ink, crashing down like storms of scripture.
Arin gasped as a silver script halo shielded her. Do-hyun roared as golden runes hardened around his body. Ha-young snarled, her crimson chains snapping taut. Their Narrators—their gods—were protecting them.
Hae-won had none.
Because he was not chosen.
He was the choice itself.
And so every Narrator's ink lashed at him.
"This one cannot exist."
"A mistake in the manuscript."
"Erase him."
Thousands of voices. Thousands of quills trying to blot him out.
Hae-won's laughter cracked the silence. Too sharp, too raw. He pressed his palm against his chest, feeling the phantom wound of the debt-sword, the hollow ache of every regression.
"…Erase me?"
His eyes gleamed red with madness.
"You already tried that. Five hundred times."
The Most Ancient Dream surged. His vision split into layers upon layers of possible futures. In one, Arin lay dead beneath rubble. In another, Do-hyun bled out with a Titan's rib through his chest. In another, Ha-young betrayed them all for power.
He saw them. Every failure. Every loss.
And with the power of the Dream, he began to rewrite.
The words in the sky faltered. Ink recoiled, like predators suddenly caught in their prey's gaze.
"…Unacceptable. Unstable. Unpaid."
The ledger roared in his ears. His sanity cracked another inch.
Because rewriting came at a cost. Every time he forced the script to change, he had to bleed himself into it. Memories, stability, pieces of his mind—burned away like paper.
But Hae-won grinned through the blood.
If the price was his sanity, he would pay it.
If the debt was endless, he would drag the collectors down with him.
He staggered to his feet, body trembling, power spilling like black fire.
"Listen well, you parasites with your quills and your ink," he snarled, his voice carrying through the broken hall, through the fractured sky, through every layer of the narration.
"I'm not your character."
He bared his teeth, madness and clarity coiling in equal measure.
"I am the writer."
The world shook.
For the first time, the Narrators hesitated. Their quills paused. Their whispers broke into silence.
And then—
The ledger shifted.
Not erased. Not destroyed.
But altered.
[ Scenario Progression Halted. ]
[ Warning: Next Event — The Second Titan Emergence — begins in 4 days. ]
⸻
Hae-won collapsed to his knees. His vision doubled, trebled, fractured into a kaleidoscope of overlapping timelines. He heard himself dying again and again, felt himself drowning in blood, watched Arin's scream loop endlessly.
Madness crawled into his bones.
But through it all—
A thread of clarity remained.
He had succeeded. For the first time across hundreds of regressions, he had shifted the script.
Do-hyun was still breathing. Arin was still whole. Ha-young still standing.
The Titan was dead.
And the cycle was broken.
Even if only for four days
The Titan fell.
The earth didn't just shake—it screamed. Its collapse cracked the stone beneath the cadets' boots, splintered columns, sent glass raining from the shattered ceiling. For one breathless moment, no one moved. No one dared to.
Then came the silence.
It wasn't victory's cheer. It was the silence of disbelief. The silence of the condemned realizing they had somehow survived their execution.
Blood pooled in uneven lines across the ruined floor. The smell of charred flesh and dust clung to every gasp.
And in the center of it all, Cha Hae-won stood trembling, his sword angled toward the ground. His knees nearly gave out, but he held himself upright through sheer spite.
The Titan's body had already begun to dissolve into script—the glowing debt runes unraveling into strands of ash that scattered like paper burned in wind.
Arin was the first to stumble forward, clutching her side. Her hand trembled as she reached out for him.
"…Hae-won."
Her voice cracked—not from pain, but from something worse. Something like fear.
He wanted to tell her not to worry. He wanted to tell her he was fine. That the blood soaking through his uniform wasn't his own, that he hadn't just sacrificed a piece of his mind to kill something that shouldn't exist.
But his throat burned.
So he only met her gaze, eyes hollow, and forced the smallest of nods.
Do-hyun staggered up behind her, coughing up dirt and blood. He looked at the smoking crater where the Titan had been. His jaw trembled.
"That thing… it's… dead?"
No one answered.
It was dead. The evidence lay before them, dissolving into nothing. But every heartbeat told them it couldn't be so simple. That nothing this enormous, this invincible, died without consequence.
Seo Ha-young sat against a cracked wall, her leg bent at an unnatural angle. She bit down on her sleeve, blood streaking her face as she forced her bone back into place with a brutal crunch. Her eyes never left Hae-won.
Not with gratitude. Not with admiration.
With suspicion.
She had seen something in that fight—something that no cadet should've been capable of.
And she wasn't going to let it go.
The others began murmuring now, their voices thin and unsteady.
"Did… did he really do that alone?"
"Impossible. A cadet can't—"
"Then what the hell is he?"
The questions tangled into the smoke rising above the battlefield.
But Hae-won didn't answer. Couldn't. His breath was ragged, his chest heaving. Each heartbeat pressed knives into his skull.
The system's notifications still echoed faintly, burned into his vision:
[ Regression Counter: 503 ]
[ Temporary Unlock – Most Ancient Dream ]
[ Dual Modifier in effect. ]
503.
His hands trembled. He wanted to scream. To rip the words out of the air and deny them.
But he couldn't.
Because he remembered all 503.
Every failure. Every death. Every scream.
The fragments slithered across his sight, a thousand moments overlapping. He could still hear his mother's laugh fading, his father's desperate plea as the world tore apart. Memories from before the Academy, before this nightmare world. Memories that shouldn't even exist here.
Sanity cracked like thin ice beneath a giant's step.
He bit down on his lip until he tasted iron. He had to ground himself.
Not yet. Not here.
Arin's hand brushed his arm again, tentative, fragile. "You're shaking… sit down before you—"
He stepped away.
Her expression faltered, and silence pressed heavier than the ruined air.
Hae-won's voice, when it came, was low. Strained.
"…Don't touch me."
It wasn't anger. It was fear. Not of her—but of himself.
He saw the way she froze, the hurt flickering in her eyes, and it stabbed him deeper than the Titan's blade ever had.
But he couldn't take it back.
Not when every drop of his blood, every fragment of his mind, screamed at him that he was becoming something no one should ever stand near.
The silence stretched.
Until—
A sound.
A faint, hollow ding in the air.
Like a bell tolling at the end of a story.
Every cadet stiffened. Their eyes flicked upward.
And then they heard it.
A voice.
Not the system. Not a human tongue.
A voice layered with pages turning, with pens scratching, with ink spilling into silence.
"Candidates identified."
The cadets shuddered. Their shadows twisted.
"Begin selection. Choose your Narrator."
⸻
The world was shifting again.
And Hae-won… Hae-won alone felt the weight of a thousand unseen eyes pierce into him.
Watching. Judging.
Fearing.
Because he wasn't supposed to be here.
He wasn't supposed to hear them.
And yet he did.
The air warped.
It wasn't like mana. Mana hummed, it rippled; you could feel it thrumming against the skin like wind.
This—this was something else.
Words bled into the air itself. Paragraphs. Sentences. Fragments of narration that coiled through the smoke like pale serpents. Each cadet stiffened as a thread of ink tethered itself to their chest.
"Candidates identified."
"Begin selection. Choose your Narrator."
The voice wasn't a voice. It was a thousand narrations spoken at once, tumbling over each other:
—"The boy who always stood in the shadows."
—"The girl who believed survival was the only justice."
—"The companion who became a weapon."
Each whisper cut to bone, too precise to be coincidence. They were being read. Their entire beings, stripped down and inked into stories.
Hae-won clutched his skull. The words weren't just around him—they were inside him. Crawling like centipedes behind his eyes.
Do-hyun staggered back, his tether shimmering like molten gold. It pulsed with warmth. His face contorted with confusion and awe.
Arin's thread gleamed silver, twisting into a thousand rays of light. Her breath caught in her throat as she reached toward it.
Seo Ha-young—bloodied, smirking despite her cracked ribs—her thread burned red, sharp and jagged like barbed wire.
They were all being chosen. All being read.
But Hae-won…
No thread attached to him.
No narrator's ink reached for his heart.
Instead—
Something deeper stirred.
[ Regression Counter: 503 ]
[ Dual Modifier Confirmed. ]
[ Unlocking… Most Ancient Dream. ]
[ Unlocking… Enemy of Every Path. ]
The world tilted.
He stumbled, clutching his chest as black veins threaded across his arms, as if ink itself had burst through his skin. The air around him rippled with words that did not belong to this world.
The cadets recoiled. Even Arin. Especially Arin.
"W-what… what's happening to him—?"
Hae-won saw it. He saw everything.
Not just his lives. Not just the failures.
But the scripts themselves.
He saw the parchment of this world curling in fire, saw lines of narration written and rewritten until the margins bled. He saw hands—ink-stained hands—tearing drafts apart.
His own hands.
"…I wrote this."
The memory slammed into him, merciless.
He had written this world.
Not as it was—but as a failed story.
Back when he had been no one, just Cha Hae-won, another faceless student in Seoul, hammering out drafts no one would ever read.
He had been the narrator once. And he had failed.
Now he was inside his own story. Trapped in the bones of his abandoned world.
Laughter bubbled in his throat, cracked, manic. He smothered it with his hand, but the sound escaped anyway—half a sob, half a scream.
The cadets edged further back. Even Ha-young, who had sneered at everything, looked pale.
The voice returned.
"Selection complete. Narrators bound."
One by one, the cadets' threads burned into their flesh, merging with them. Gasps filled the ruin as new strength coursed into their veins, as foreign whispers began to guide them.
Do-hyun's golden glow solidified—The Guardian's Flame.
Arin's silver script etched itself into her arms—The Star of Renewal.
Ha-young's barbed thread coiled like chains—The Red Hound.
Each one became something more. Not just cadets. Incarnations of stories written above their heads.
But Hae-won…
No thread bound him.
Because he didn't need one.
He wasn't chosen.
He was the one who had written them in the first place.
[ Warning: Sanity Threshold Critical. ]
[ Shared Cost Activated. ]
Pain like boiling glass ripped through his head. His scream echoed raw in the silence.
But alongside it—power surged. Power that wasn't granted, but reclaimed.
For one fractured heartbeat, he stood in both places: as the failed writer staring at his glowing monitor in the dark, and as the cadet standing in blood and ruin.
For one moment, he saw the entire stage.
And then it broke.
He collapsed to one knee, blood streaming from his nose.
The ledger whispered again, jagged, furious.
"…unpaid… unpaid… unpaid…"
But beneath it—something new.
A chorus of voices.
Narrators. Watching.
Shocked.
Terrified.
Because no incarnation had ever looked back at them before.
And Hae-won had.
⸻
Arin reached for him again, desperate this time. "Hae-won, stop! You're—"
Her words cut short.
Because in his eyes, for the briefest flicker, she saw it.
Not madness. Not pain.
But clarity.
And it terrified her more than anything else. Blood dripped down his face in rivulets. It wasn't the blood of injury, but the blood of something rewriting itself.
His veins glowed faintly, threads of ink pulsing beneath the skin, crawling up his neck like creeping vines. The cadets whispered, horrified—none daring to step closer.
But above them, far above the ruined ceiling, something stirred.
The Narrators are watching.
They had always watched. Silent quills scratching in the dark, weaving fates for their chosen incarnations. But never had one of their "characters" looked up. Never had one stared back.
And now—
[ Alert: Unbound Incarnation detected. ]
[ Modifier: Most Ancient Dream — Reality Rewrite (Temporary). ]
[ Modifier: Enemy of Every Path — Hostility Triggered. ]
The sky split.
Not with thunder. Not with light. But with sentences. Entire paragraphs unraveling in glowing ink, crashing down like storms of scripture.
Arin gasped as a silver script halo shielded her. Do-hyun roared as golden runes hardened around his body. Ha-young snarled, her crimson chains snapping taut. Their Narrators—their gods—were protecting them.
Hae-won had none.
Because he was not chosen.
He was the choice itself.
And so every Narrator's ink lashed at him.
"This one cannot exist."
"A mistake in the manuscript."
"Erase him."
Thousands of voices. Thousands of quills trying to blot him out.
Hae-won's laughter cracked the silence. Too sharp, too raw. He pressed his palm against his chest, feeling the phantom wound of the debt-sword, the hollow ache of every regression.
"…Erase me?"
His eyes gleamed red with madness.
"You already tried that. Five hundred times."
The Most Ancient Dream surged. His vision split into layers upon layers of possible futures. In one, Arin lay dead beneath rubble. In another, Do-hyun bled out with a Titan's rib through his chest. In another, Ha-young betrayed them all for power.
He saw them. Every failure. Every loss.
And with the power of the Dream, he began to rewrite.
The words in the sky faltered. Ink recoiled, like predators suddenly caught in their prey's gaze.
"…Unacceptable. Unstable. Unpaid."
The ledger roared in his ears. His sanity cracked another inch.
Because rewriting came at a cost. Every time he forced the script to change, he had to bleed himself into it. Memories, stability, pieces of his mind—burned away like paper.
But Hae-won grinned through the blood.
If the price was his sanity, he would pay it.
If the debt was endless, he would drag the collectors down with him.
He staggered to his feet, body trembling, power spilling like black fire.
"Listen well, you parasites with your quills and your ink," he snarled, his voice carrying through the broken hall, through the fractured sky, through every layer of the narration.
"I'm not your character."
He bared his teeth, madness and clarity coiling in equal measure.
"I am the writer."
The world shook.
For the first time, the Narrators hesitated. Their quills paused. Their whispers broke into silence.
And then—
The ledger shifted.
Not erased. Not destroyed.
But altered.
[ Scenario Progression Halted. ]
[ Warning: Next Event — The Second Titan Emergence — begins in 4 days. ]
⸻
Hae-won collapsed to his knees. His vision doubled, trebled, fractured into a kaleidoscope of overlapping timelines. He heard himself dying again and again, felt himself drowning in blood, watched Arin's scream loop endlessly.
Madness crawled into his bones.
But through it all—
A thread of clarity remained.
He had succeeded. For the first time across hundreds of regressions, he had shifted the script.
Do-hyun was still breathing. Arin was still whole. Ha-young still standing.
The Titan was dead.
And the cycle was broken.
Even if only for four days