The moment the Titan's ash scattered, the system screamed.
[ Warning: Scenario instability detected. ]
[ Error: Narrative thread unraveling. ]
[ Correction protocol initiated… ]
Hae-won staggered on his knees, blood still dripping from his nose. His vision flickered—one moment seeing the battlefield, the next the half-familiar glow of a blank computer screen. He couldn't tell what was real anymore.
And then Arin stepped forward.
Her silver-threaded script still blazed around her, more luminous than anyone else's. Her eyes burned with something desperate, reckless.
"…If the story is breaking, then I'll break it further."
Before Hae-won could ask what she meant, she raised her hand. The silver ink coiled tighter, not into words—into clock hands.
A luminous dial spun into the air above her palm. The numbers bent, distorted. Her skin split as veins of light burst through, as if the system itself resisted what she was about to do.
"Arin, stop—!" Hae-won lunged toward her, but his body moved like lead, crushed by the aftermath of the Titan's death.
Her lips trembled, but her voice was clear.
"Temporal Rewrite: Once-Only Shift."
The air screamed.
The battlefield collapsed inward, as though someone had smashed a mirror across the world. Shards of time itself fractured into the air—scenes of futures that never were, pasts that should've died, lives that had no place here.
Each cadet saw themselves reflected in those shards:
• Do-hyun, older, withered, dying with a sword still in his hand.
• Ha-young, crowned in chains, ruling over corpses.
• Arin herself, crumbling into dust with a smile that didn't belong to her.
And Hae-won… Hae-won saw nothing. Only a blank page. A page waiting for ink.
The shards folded inward. Time itself swallowed them whole.
⸻
When the light faded, Hae-won's ears were filled not with the hum of mana… but the buzz of neon signs.
The stench of smoke and blood was gone. Instead, he smelled gasoline. Hot food stalls. Wet pavement.
He staggered to his feet, vision reeling—then froze.
Cars.
Billboards.
Buses lined bumper to bumper across the street.
The broken battlefield of the Academy was gone.
They were standing in the middle of Seoul, 2025.
⸻
Do-hyun crashed onto the asphalt beside him, coughing. He looked up at a passing delivery scooter, his jaw dropping. "…What the f—what the hell is that?"
Ha-young lay sprawled against a bus stop sign, blinking up at the LED display announcing arrival times. "This… isn't mana. This is… electricity?"
And Arin—Arin knelt on the ground, panting, her body trembling from the backlash of her skill. She looked up at Hae-won, pale but resolute.
"I… pulled us forward. Into a… different stage." Her voice cracked, but she smiled faintly. "You said the story came from here… so I brought us here."
Hae-won's chest locked tight. His mind struggled to piece together the impossible truth.
Because this wasn't an illusion. This was real.
And for the first time in five hundred regressions, he was standing not in a fantasy world—
—but in the year he had lived in before everything collapsed.
⸻
The first horn blared.
A car screeched to a halt, the driver leaning out of the window, furious.
"Are you kids insane?! Get out of the damn road!"
The party stood in the middle of an intersection, clad in their cadet uniforms, bloodstained and burned.
And Seoul, oblivious to the broken timelines stitched into its veins, rushed on around them.
⸻
[ Scenario Shift Successful. ]
[ Current Stage: The Seoul Ledger – Prelude. ]
[ Countdown: 2 days until "Descent to Hell." ]
⸻
Hae-won's hands trembled.
This wasn't just a shift.
This was the stage he had abandoned. The world he had written into ruin.
And now they were living inside it.
The world did not let them stand in disbelief for long.
[ Correction Subroutine Engaged. ]
[ Adjusting environment to narrative frame. ]
The words appeared across the sky, faint but visible like a second layer of reality. And then—like brushstrokes across paper—the city rippled.
The neon signs blurred into chalkboards. Cars warped into desks bolted into polished floors. The honks of horns became the chatter of voices.
One blink—
—and they were no longer in the intersection.
They were sitting at desks.
Hae-won blinked furiously. His sword was gone. His torn uniform had been replaced with a hoodie and jeans. His trembling hands were ink-stained, his fingers resting on the keyboard of a laptop.
"…No." His voice was hoarse. "…No, no, no."
Because he recognized this place.
The whitewashed walls, the humming lights, the window view of the campus lawn.
It was his old university classroom.
⸻
Do-hyun shot up from his seat, wide-eyed. His cadet's armor had been replaced by a varsity jacket, textbooks spilling from his bag. "What the—what the hell did it do to us?!"
Ha-young stared down at herself, jeans torn stylishly, a cheap earbud dangling from her ear. She touched her reflection in the windowpane with a trembling hand. "…We're… students?"
Arin was sitting directly beside Hae-won, her silver-threaded glow gone, replaced by a neat blouse and skirt. She looked down at her hands, blinking rapidly. "…It made us… like you."
Her words were quiet, but they stabbed through him.
Like him.
Like Cha Hae-won, the failed student, before cadets and Titans and regressions.
⸻
The class buzzed around them, normal students chattering about exams and festivals. Nobody screamed. Nobody reacted to the blood still etched into their memories.
It was as if the world had erased the battle and written a softer scene over it.
But Hae-won… Hae-won's laptop was still open.
On the left side of the screen: a webnovel site. Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint. He remembered this page vividly, the one he had read before writing.
On the right side: a document window. His own unfinished draft. The one that had eventually collapsed into the nightmare they were now trapped inside.
His throat tightened.
"…It's the same. Exactly the same."
The cursor blinked, waiting for him.
And then the system cut in again.
[ Ledger Stabilized. ]
[ Narrative Substitution Complete: University Campus. ]
[ Duration: Until Scenario Activation. ]
[ Countdown: 2 days. ]
⸻
Do-hyun slammed his desk. "Two days?!" He looked around, panicked. "Two days until what? Titans spawn in the middle of… this? With all these people?!"
Ha-young scoffed, though her voice shook. "It doesn't matter what stage it is. We fight or we die. Simple as that."
Arin looked between them, her face pale. "…But this is his world." Her gaze landed on Hae-won. "Isn't it?"
The room fell quiet. Even the background chatter seemed to dim.
Dozens of pairs of eyes—Do-hyun's, Ha-young's, Arin's—locked on him.
Hae-won clenched his jaw. He couldn't deny it. Not when his own draft was staring him in the face.
"…Yeah." His voice was hollow. "…This is the world I left behind."
Silence.
And then the system delivered the blow.
[ Scenario 2 Announcement: Due to narrative error, Scenario will begin early. ]
[ Time Remaining: 2 Days. ]
[ Currency: Pain. ]
[ Exchange Rate: 1 Pain = 1 Skill Point. ]
⸻
The campus around them shifted again. Just for a second.
The laughter of students warped into screams. Desks blurred into chains. The white ceiling above them split into black parchment, dripping ink.
And in those brief moments, Hae-won felt it—hundreds of students crying out, their bodies writhing under invisible torture.
They were already buying. Already selling.
Do-hyun stumbled, covering his ears. "What the hell is that sound—why are they screaming?!"
Ha-young licked her lips, face paling as the smell of blood invaded the campus. "…To earn pain… you either suffer it… or cause it."
Arin clutched Hae-won's arm, her eyes wide with horror. "No… Hae-won, this—this is—"
He stared at his laptop. At his old words on the screen. At the cursor blinking.
And for the first time in five hundred regressions, he realized the truth:
The nightmare hadn't been born in some other world.
It had started here.
The screaming didn't stop.
It grew.
From the hallways, from the courtyard, from every dorm and lecture building—voices tore through the calm campus like glass shattering in an empty cathedral.
Students clutched their arms, tearing at their clothes, weeping and shrieking as invisible knives carved into them. Others laughed with mania, dragging desks across the floor, slamming heads against chalkboards, causing pain not for survival—
—but for currency.
[ Pain Acquired: +37 ]
[ Pain Acquired: +102 ]
[ Skill Exchange Open. ]
The messages scrolled across the ceiling like graffiti written in blood.
Arin pressed her palms against her ears. "Make it stop, Hae-won! Please—"
Do-hyun was already on his knees, retching. "This isn't… this isn't a fight. This is slaughter."
Ha-young, pale but composed, was gripping the edge of her desk until her knuckles whitened. "…They're not people anymore. They're rats in a cage. And the system is shaking the bars."
⸻
Hae-won's gaze burned holes into his laptop screen.
On the right: his old draft, blinking cursor waiting.
On the left: the skill exchange window.
[ Available Skills: ]
— Pain Conversion (Active) – 50 Pain
— Lesser Regeneration – 200 Pain
— Mana Bolt (Low-tier) – 120 Pain
— Authority (Unique) – 10,000 Pain
His balance pulsed in red at the bottom of the window.
[ Total Balance: 503,881 Pain. ]
The number nearly blinded him.
Every death. Every blade. Every scream across five hundred regressions—collected like a ledger that had never closed.
"…I'm the richest person in this world."
His voice shook. His hands trembled on the keys.
Arin grabbed him. "Hae-won, don't—what are you thinking?!"
His smile was thin. Broken. "The only thing I can do."
He typed.
[ Confirm Purchase: Authority (Unique) ]
[ Cost: 10,000 Pain. ]
The screen pulsed white.
And the world stopped.
⸻
The screams cut. The tearing of flesh muted. Students froze mid-motion, their bodies trembling as though their agony had been paused between breaths.
A dome of silence spread outward from Hae-won, crushing the chaos into stillness.
[ Authority Activated. ]
[ You may command the ledger's participants. Duration: 10 minutes. ]
Hae-won stood, his desk scraping against the floor. His eyes burned with ink and blood.
He spoke, and his voice wasn't his voice. It carried like scripture being read aloud.
"Stop."
Every student stopped. Their eyes rolled back, their bodies stiffened, their screams gagged to silence.
The cadets—Do-hyun, Arin, Ha-young—stared at him as if he had just become the Titan himself.
"Hae-won…" Arin whispered, voice trembling. "What did you just buy?"
He looked at her. His eyes were hollow. His voice was worse.
"…The right to tell the story."
⸻
But Authority was not merciful.
Because along with the silence came a pressure—heavy, suffocating—that pressed on his ribs and skull.
Every scream he had stopped, every chain he had broken, every flicker of torture he had denied—it pressed into him.
The debt did not disappear. It shifted.
His veins pulsed black with borrowed ink. Blood dripped from his nose, his eyes, his ears.
Arin caught him before he fell. "You're bleeding! Hae-won—stop using it, you'll—"
He grabbed her wrist, voice cutting. "I can't stop. If I do, it all comes back. All of it."
Do-hyun clenched his fists, horror plain. "You mean… they'll keep hurting each other the second you let go?"
Hae-won's silence was the answer.
⸻
Then—
The system trembled.
[ Warning: Authority Usage Detected. ]
[ Narrative Error Critical. Correction Required. ]
The campus ceiling cracked—not physically, but narratively. Sentences bled down the air, forming jagged shapes.
And through that breach, someone walked in.
A figure in a tattered blazer, carrying a broken satchel over his shoulder. His face was pale, his eyes cold. A returnee.
The moment Hae-won's gaze met his, the ledger screamed:
[ Returnee Detected: Jisung ]
[ Objective: Eliminate or Assimilate. ]
The man smiled faintly, his teeth stained red.
"…So you're the one using Authority."
The paused students trembled, caught between silence and collapse.
Hae-won steadied himself, blood dripping down his chin. His grip tightened.
For the first time in this new stage, he felt it—the fight was about to begin again.
But this time, the enemy wasn't a Titan.
It was another returnee