The pain did not fade.
It expanded.
The sword of light had punctured clean through his chest, and for a moment Hae-won thought he had already regressed. The burn in his ribs, the crushing weight in his lungs—it was too familiar, too cruel. His knees hit the scorched stone, black dust staining his lips.
Arin's voice echoed dimly, too far away. "Hae-won—!"
Do-hyun tried to lunge forward, chains dragging him back.
Seong-wu's golden silhouette loomed above, blade still dripping light. His gaze wasn't victorious—it was cold, like a judge delivering sentence.
But Hae-won… Hae-won wasn't done.
Through the blood filling his mouth, he forced himself to breathe words. Each syllable tore his throat raw, but he spat them anyway.
"Not yet…" His vision blurred, his body convulsing against the chains of fate. "I'll be back. Again. And again. Until even this script breaks."
The wasteland trembled.
For the briefest instant, all the chains sang at once—metal shrieking, stone groaning, as if the scenario itself heard his defiance.
[ Regression Locked. Pending Execution. ]
[ Warning delivered: Cycle will resume. ]
His body gave out. Darkness closed in, not gentle but suffocating, as though the entire world pressed down on him.
And then—
Silence.
⸻
Hae-won opened his eyes to void. A sea of shattered mirrors stretched in every direction, each shard showing fragments of lives—his lives. Deaths stacked upon deaths, futures never lived. Five hundred broken reflections glared back at him, bleeding light.
One mirror cracked louder than the rest. It showed Seong-wu standing triumphant, Arin screaming, Do-hyun dragged into chains. A "fixed point."
But even here, in the echo between regressions, Hae-won clenched his fists.
He whispered to the mirrors. To the system. To the narrators watching.
"I warned you. I'm not your pawn. I'll rewrite even this."
And with those words, the collapse came.
[ Regression Initiated. ]
[ Restart point: one cycle before protagonist emergence. ]
The mirrors shattered fully. And the void swallowed him whole.
The first thing he felt was air.
Not heat. Not chains. Not the suffocating dust of the wasteland.
Air—fresh, cold, cutting into his lungs.
Hae-won's eyes snapped open. The academy ceiling stretched above him again, banners fluttering gently in a breeze that no longer carried ash. The sunlight was warm, too warm, pouring across desks polished clean.
For a heartbeat, he thought it had been a fever dream. That none of it—the chains, the wasteland, the blade through his chest—had happened.
But then his chest screamed.
His hand flew instinctively to his ribs. No wound, no hole—but the pain remained, phantom and deep, as though Seong-wu's sword still lingered in his body. His breath rattled, shallow and uneven.
[ Regression Complete. ]
[ Restart Point: Pre-Protagonist Cycle. ]
[ Warning: Mental Integrity compromised. ]
The words carved themselves across his vision, harsher than before, jagged around the edges like broken glass.
Hae-won shuddered. He had seen the void. The mirrors. The five hundred deaths staring back at him. And he knew—he hadn't returned whole.
I can still feel them.
It wasn't memory alone. It was presence. Voices clawing at the back of his skull, fragments of selves screaming in unison. For a moment, the lecture hall blurred, overlayed with half-seen deaths—the sound of chains, the smell of burnt stone, Arin's screams.
He clutched his temple, fighting nausea.
Students nearby glanced at him, but quickly looked away, dismissing his pallor as nerves or fatigue. No one else could see the cracks spiderwebbing behind his eyes.
Focus. Focus, damn it.
This was before the protagonist spawns. His one chance. He could rewrite what followed. Stop the spiral before Seong-wu's blade fell, before Arin screamed, before Do-hyun was dragged into ruin.
But as he forced himself upright, another presence intruded.
[ Narrator's Commentary: "The cycle bends, but the chain resists." ]
[ Narrator's Commentary: "He carries fragments not meant for this loop." ]
The whispers weren't from the void. They were external—distant voices, narrators peering in, their tones curious, even unsettled.
They're watching closer now.
His hand trembled against the desk. If even the narrators sensed instability, the script would tighten around him.
He clenched his jaw, forcing steadiness into his voice as he muttered under his breath.
"Then I'll use it. Even this madness. If I can tear open one chain, I can tear open them all."
The phantom pain pulsed again, sharp enough to make his vision blur. But this time he didn't collapse. He embraced it—shaping it into focus.
⸻
When the bell rang, cadets filed out with the same chatter as always. Familiar. Repetitive.
But Hae-won's gaze was sharp. His pulse measured. This wasn't a fresh start. This was war.
Because soon—too soon—the so-called protagonist would spawn. And this time, Hae-won would be ready.
Even if his sanity cracked piece by piece.
Even if the voices of five hundred dead selves never left him.
He had already promised.
He would be back.
And this time, he would not fall.
The corridors were too bright.
Every lantern, every pane of sunlight through stained glass cut his eyes like a blade. Too sharp. Too real.
Hae-won walked slowly, deliberately, steps echoing across marble that felt hollow, as if one stomp too heavy would shatter it. Students brushed past him, laughing, arguing, carefree.
He could almost see them burning.
One blink, and they were cadets with ink-stained fingers.
The next, they were corpses bound in chains, mouths open in silent screams.
Not hallucinations, he told himself. Fragments. Foresight bleeding in.
The ledger whispered in his ear, low and relentless.
unpaid… unpaid… unpaid…
He exhaled shakily, gripping the bannister until the wood creaked.
From the corner of his vision, he saw Arin. Her laugh was soft, real—gentle sunlight in a world drowning in blood. She didn't yet know. She hadn't yet been forced to choose between betrayal and survival.
Hae-won's throat tightened. A dozen timelines slammed into his skull—her scream as Seong-wu dragged her away, her eyes wide as blood pooled beneath her, her smile just before the Titan awoke.
All of them true.
All of them false.
And yet one thing remained constant: her death had always been a turning point.
Not this time.
He turned sharply, breaking his line of sight. He couldn't falter. Not now.
⸻
By evening, the signs had begun.
The script always trembled before the protagonist appeared. Most cadets couldn't see it, but Hae-won's fractured vision painted it vividly.
Shadows bled across the academy's walls where no torches flickered. Voices echoed faintly in the silence of empty halls. Dust fell from ceilings that should have been pristine.
The world was rehearsing for collapse.
And Hae-won saw more.
He saw names scrawled faintly across the air above students' heads—threads of fate the others couldn't glimpse. Some names were already blackened, marked as "consumed." Others glowed faintly gold, choices waiting to be made.
And one… one space remained empty.
The blank slot where the "protagonist" would emerge.
Hae-won stopped breathing for a moment. The emptiness pulled at him like a wound. No form. No name. Just inevitability.
That's the spawn point.
But as he stared, something shifted.
For a heartbeat, the blank wasn't empty. It reflected him.
His own name. His own face.
Then it snapped back to void.
Hae-won's pulse raced. His sanity frayed, laughter almost bubbling from his throat.
"Of course," he whispered to the empty corridor. "Of course it was me. All along."
The voices of the narrators stirred, their words curling like smoke in his mind.
[ Narrator's Commentary: "The fragment sees the wrong reflection." ]
[ Narrator's Commentary: "Or perhaps… the truest one." ]
He pressed a hand over his chest, where phantom steel still burned.
Whether the protagonist was him, or someone else waiting to be written into the script, he knew one thing—
This cycle would not unfold as before.
This time, he would not simply endure the script.
He would devour it.