There was no light.
No darkness, either.
Just words.
Sentences hung like broken chains in the void, fragments drifting past him. Some he recognized—his own descriptions, lines he had written once at his laptop, too clumsy to publish. Others were alien, jagged, full of voices that weren't his but read him all the same.
[ "The cadet with trembling hands." ]
[ "The would-be writer who failed his own draft." ]
[ "The error that must be erased." ]
The ledger's toll reverberated through it all: unpaid, unpaid, unpaid.
Hae-won floated—or maybe fell—between them. His chest still burned where he'd stabbed himself, phantom pain seared into his soul. His head split open under the weight of two lives screaming at once.
One memory: Arin falling, silver light extinguished.
Another memory: Arin alive, her hand clutching his, her voice crying his name.
Both real.
Both false.
He clawed at his scalp, desperate to hold onto one thread, any thread, but the void only answered with laughter—his own, scattered across five hundred regressions, every failure mocking him.
"No…" His voice cracked. "Not again. I can't—"
[ Regression Error Detected. ]
[ Timeline instability: 2 active anchors. ]
[ Choose primary tether. ]
Two lines of glowing script appeared before him, jagged and alive:
—Anchor One: The Chain Wasteland. (Yoo Seong-wu, Do-hyun, Ha-young, Arin… alive.)
—Anchor Two: The Fallen Path. (Arin dead. No protagonist. Scenario collapse imminent.)
His hands shook as he reached out.
The second anchor pulsed faintly, like a dying heartbeat. Arin's face flickered in it—bloodied, fading, a memory that wasn't a memory. His chest constricted, suffocating him with guilt.
The first anchor blazed, urgent, demanding. Voices from it reached him: Do-hyun shouting, Ha-young cursing, Arin—alive—screaming for him to wake.
He couldn't hold both. The system was clear.
[ Select. ]
[ 10… 9… 8… ]
Hae-won's lips curled into something like a smile. Bitter. Broken.
"Always making me choose, huh?"
The countdown tolled, merciless.
And at the last second, he whispered—
"…Then I'll choose myself."
His hand shot out—not to either anchor, but to the void itself.
The script trembled. Sentences split apart, spilling ink like blood. For the first time, the ledger faltered, its chant breaking.
[ Error. ]
[ Narrator interference detected. ]
[ Proceeding without anchor confirmation. ]
The world tore open around him.
And Cha Hae-won fell—
not backward, not forward,
but sideways.
Into a timeline where both anchors bled into each other.
Where the impossible would finally begin.
The ground hit him like a whip of stone.
Hae-won's body convulsed, lungs dragging in air that wasn't air. He rolled onto his side, coughing black dust, and only then realized what surrounded him.
It wasn't the wasteland.
It wasn't Seoul.
It was both.
Black towers rose like skyscrapers over broken asphalt. Chains coiled through cracked highways, their links larger than buses, dragging themselves through empty intersections. Streetlamps flickered with eldritch fire. And above it all, the faint glow of the system's text flickered like torn neon signs.
A nightmare stitched from two broken drafts.
"—Hae-won?"
The voice nearly stopped his heart.
He looked up. Yun Arin stood a few meters away, eyes wide, her hand reaching for him. But her clothes were wrong—half the academy's arcane uniform, half the ragged leather she'd worn in the wasteland. Her outline wavered, flickering in and out like a glitch in a recording.
"Y-you're—alive?" His voice cracked, hoarse with disbelief.
Behind her, others gathered. Do-hyun with a limp, Seong-wu cloaked in golden light, Ha-young's eyes narrowed with suspicion.
Every one of them watched him with the same expression—like they were staring at a ghost.
"Impossible," Seong-wu muttered. His hand hovered at his blade. "I saw you die. I felt your absence."
Do-hyun swallowed hard, anger and relief warring in his expression. "What the hell did you do, Hae-won? Did you… cheat the system?"
"I…" Hae-won started, then stopped. The words caught in his throat. What could he tell them—that he had torn reality itself, clawed sideways between drafts like a half-mad narrator? That somewhere else, Arin had already died?
Arin herself stepped forward. "You're shaking." Her voice trembled. She reached for his arm—and for a split second, her hand passed through him, like he wasn't fully there.
The whole camp froze.
Even the chains rattling through the air seemed to pause.
"…You're not stable," Seong-wu said, his golden aura sharpening to a blade. His tone was ice. "You're a fracture. An echo."
Hae-won's lips moved soundlessly. He wanted to say no. To deny it. But in his chest, two heartbeats pounded out of sync, like his body couldn't decide which version of him was real.
[ Regression Error: Active. ]
[ Timeline Merging: 3%. ]
The text flickered above him, cruel and clinical.
Do-hyun's jaw clenched. "So what—you're… half-dead? Half-returnee?"
"More like…" Ha-young's eyes narrowed, her voice sharp as a blade. "…a liability."
The accusation cut sharper than steel.
Hae-won staggered back, bile rising in his throat. His vision doubled—one world with Arin alive, another with her dead. Both colliding in his skull, bleeding into his sanity.
And yet—
when he looked at her, at the version of Arin still breathing before him—
he swore he would cling to this fracture, no matter the cost.
Even if it broke everything else.
The camp had gone silent after the system's message. Silent, except for the endless grinding of chains that dragged across both sky and ground, resonating in their bones like the sound of a world unraveling.
Hae-won sat on the edge of a broken slab of asphalt, hands trembling against his knees. Every breath came in uneven stutters, like his lungs didn't agree with each other on what rhythm to follow. His chest still burned where the Titan's blade had pierced him in another life, another draft.
The others kept their distance. Seong-wu's golden light hovered like a warning. Do-hyun sat on a rock, glaring into the wasteland, as though refusing to even look at Hae-won. Ha-young leaned against a broken lamp post, arms folded, her eyes sharp and suspicious.
Only Arin approached.
Her steps were hesitant, careful, like she was approaching something fragile enough to break at a touch. She crouched down in front of him, close enough that he could see her face flicker—sometimes bloodied, dead-eyed from the other timeline, sometimes soft and alive in this one.
"Hae-won…" She whispered his name like she was afraid it might disappear if she spoke it too loudly. "What did you do to yourself?"
He laughed. A broken, dry laugh that caught in his throat. "You think I know? I tried to rewrite the script, Arin. And now I'm the torn page between drafts."
Her hand reached out again, hovering in the air, before settling on his arm. This time it didn't pass through. Warm. Steady. "Then hold on to this one. Hold on to me."
For a moment, the fractured rhythm of his chest steadied. Just a little.
But the system's voice returned before the comfort could root itself.
[ Warning: Timeline Instability Detected. ]
[ Scenario Mutation in Progress. ]
The world shuddered.
The chains above writhed, their links stretching like serpents, slamming down into the cracked ground. The black towers pulsed with a sickly red light, their shapes distorting as if they were being rewritten mid-sentence.
Do-hyun leapt to his feet. "Damn it—it's changing the trial!"
Seong-wu's blade snapped free of its sheath, golden aura flaring. "Of course it is. His presence is corrupting the scenario."
Ha-young's lips curved into a bitter smile. "Called it."
Hae-won staggered upright, the sound of screams echoing in his head—not from the present, but from every death he'd lived through. The pain of five hundred endings pressed down on him like molten chains.
Arin grabbed his hand. Her voice was sharp, defiant. "No. Don't you dare blame him for this. If the scenario is unstable, then we fight through it together."
The others hesitated. The chains crashed down around them, splitting the asphalt, spewing sparks of fire and shards of black stone.
Hae-won tightened his grip on Arin's hand, even as his vision blurred, half in this world, half in the other.
Two lives. Two timelines. One choice tearing him in half.
If the system wanted him to collapse, he would drag himself forward anyway. Even if his sanity snapped like the chains above, he would not let her die again.
[ Trial of Chains: Mutated. ]
[ Survive the Collapse. ]
[ Penalty: Erasure of the unstable entity. ]
The message pulsed across the burning sky.
And everyone turned toward him