Before the chaos, everything seemed normal.
The wind blew through the corridors, the lights switched on precisely on time, and time flowed by methodically.
It was on an 'overly normal' night like this that Mio completed her anchoring.
She made no ceremony or declaration.
She simply placed a name gently into the core of the structure in the deepest part of her dream.
Not for salvation.
She knew it was too late to save anyone.
All she did was preserve.
She preserved the possibility that 'Li existed'.
She preserved that thin thread which would enable him to be identified and traced back even after the world had collapsed.
The moment the anchor was activated, there was no light or sound.
Only a gentle sense of being stripped away remained,
It was as if a person had been prematurely removed from their fate.
Li was completely unaware of this.
The next morning, he walked onto campus as usual, but he had a vague sense that something was amiss.
When the teacher called the register, there would be a pause of half a second over his name, and his classmates would always be a moment late in responding when he spoke to them.
Even when their eyes met his, some people seemed to be confirming, 'Who should be standing in this spot?'
The world didn't reject him.
It was just slow to react to his presence.
Li thought it was just fatigue, an illusion, or simply that too much had been going on lately.
He didn't know that, unseen,
His name had been stored separately,
and marked 'unalterable'.
Mio stood at the end of the dream, watching the anchor gradually stabilise.
She neither laughed nor cried.
Instead, she simply whispered a sentence as if leaving a note for the future:
'If one day the world forgets you,
At least I'll remember how you were left behind.'
At that moment, the world hadn't begun to crumble yet.
But this suicide note had already been written.
It had been a long time since Li had had a complete dream.
Most of the time, when he closed his eyes, all he could see was darkness.
It was as if his consciousness was trapped on a loading screen.
But that day was different.
The dream didn't begin with visuals.
It began with the feeling of being watched.
He stood in a corridor that felt both strange and familiar. The lights flickered.
The next second, the image shattered.
He saw a pair of hands.
Those weren't his hands.
They were covered in dried blood and cracked along the fingers.
The owner of the hands was panting, breathing rapidly but shallowly.
Li tried to look away, but found himself unable to move.
Suddenly, the image zoomed out—
He realised that this was a first-person perspective.
But this wasn't his own.
Mio's silhouette was clearly visible on the glass at the end of the corridor.
She was gazing downwards, suppressing her emotions, as if maintaining some kind of balance.
The image shattered again. This time, the scene depicted the Nightwalker's battle.
There were broken rune arrays and distorted spiritual pressure, and people were falling and being dragged away.
The sounds were muffled, as if submerged in water.
Li's heart began to race.
He wasn't 'remembering'.
He had never seen these scenes before.
However, the dream didn't stop.
The sky above the campus lowered, much like the grey sky before a downpour.
The outlines of the buildings were distorted and time seemed stretched and folded.
Everything was on the verge of 'not completely collapsing'.
Li suddenly realised something:
These images had no order.
They weren't being played.
They were approaching him.
As if drawn by something,
approaching him piece by piece.
trying to confirm his location.
He finally spoke in the dream, but his voice was very quiet.
'Wait a minute.' The scene paused.
In that instant, he knew:
This wasn't a dream.
It wasn't his subconscious or a hallucination.
He wasn't looking at memories.
Memories were looking for him.
'I don't think I'm dreaming.'
'I'm being found.'
As this thought arose,
deep within the dream, something gently responded,
as if it had been waiting for him to discover it.
The alarm didn't sound.
It appeared simultaneously in everyone's perception.
Within the Night Stalker's temporary base, the rune arrays lit up instantly and then lost synchronisation the next second.
The values on the monitoring screens began to fluctuate as if coordinates were being forcibly dragged.
Someone muttered a curse.
This wasn't a false alarm.
'The outer structure of the sealed core is being breached at multiple points.'
The Night Stalker quickly confirmed this — the enemy forces were launching a full-scale attack.
There were no probes or feints.
This wasn't a surprise attack.
This was a purge.
The rules of the world began to loosen.
The spiritual pressure monitoring values became distorted, fluctuating between the safety line and the limit.
The system's only response was a cold, impersonal message: 'Unable to determine the current state.'
At the same time, the first anomalies appeared on campus.
The end of the corridor stretched out like an unfinished texture.
Sometimes, the number of stairs increased by one, then disappeared in the blink of an eye. Someone entered the classroom only to find that the desks had been rearranged.
They hadn't collapsed;
They were simply misaligned.
Like a map that had been repeatedly overwritten and retracted,
Finally, it was stuck in a loading failure state.
Li wasn't even fully awake when he was pulled into the combat command.
He stood at the edge of the playground; the wind carried with it an unnatural sluggishness.
The silhouettes of distant buildings trembled slightly, as if being pressed down and then released.
He suddenly remembered last night's dream.
Memories that actively approached him,
those scenes that existed even before they happened.
The Night Squad's commanding voice rang in his earpiece, the speech unusually steady:
'The sealed core is under pressure. All mobile personnel, enter Level 1 response status.'
Li clenched his fist.
The world was going wrong.
This time, the error was not going to be corrected.
It was going to be eradicated.
Standing side by side at the edge of the barrier, they communicated nothing.
This wasn't due to a lack of trust,
It was simply because their positions had been compressed to this point, leaving only this one option.
The outer layer of the seal continued to be struck, with spiritual pressure surging up in waves like a tide.
Li could feel the ground trembling, but he could not tell whether this was the barrier's reaction or his own heartbeat.
Kirishima Ren moved first.
His movements were clean and swift, his trajectory precise and without any unnecessary exertion.
Li almost instantly filled the gap, as if he had anticipated where the attack would come from.
The first wave of enemy attacks was pushed back at an abnormally fast speed.
Li paused for a moment.
This wasn't because he had reacted quickly.
It was because his body had moved before the attack even appeared.
The second time was the same.
When a slight fluctuation appeared in the spiritual pressure on the left side of the barrier, he entered the battle almost thoughtlessly.
The moment the attack landed, the enemy's spell was just forming, but he had shattered it before it could take effect.
It was as if...
It was as if he had witnessed this scene before.
During a lull in the fighting, Li briefly lost focus.
An image flashed through his mind, not a memory but a lingering shadow from a dream.
The positioning, the rhythm, the openings — all had been marked before he even realised it.
It was as if another person had
had rehearsed the future for him while he slept, Kirishima Ren noticed.
Kirishima Ren noticed.
On the third attempt, he deliberately lagged behind by half a beat.
However, Li still appeared at precisely the right angle.
Ren glanced at him.
That glance was brief and unquestioning.
It simply confirmed one thing.
Li could see more than he could.
Ren said nothing.
Instead, he simply readjusted his rhythm, silently aligning his actions with Li's 'one step ahead'.
It wasn't a matter of trust.
It was because the battlefield didn't allow for any possibilities to be wasted.
The tremors from the seal continued.
They had no way out.
At first, the dream simply stopped behaving as it should.
Mio stood within its structural layers, watching tiny cracks appear in what had once been stable boundaries.
They weren't shattering, just overlapping.
She tried to rein it in.
The commands were given quickly, but a moment too late.
Reality responded.
The corridor walls shifted inwards by several centimetres for a second, then returned to their original position.
The classroom door appeared in two places simultaneously, as if it had been copied and pasted without deleting the original.
Time skipped frames — someone remembered that the previous class had ended.
yet they found themselves still sitting in their seats.
The dream began to erode reality.
Mio could clearly sense that she hadn't "released" this.
She couldn't hold it back.
Her abilities were overloaded.
It wasn't because she had done too much.
It was because she could no longer maintain a state of existence that existed only in the dream.
Each time she tried to retreat into the depths,
the force of reality pulled her back more strongly.
as if an invisible hand were confirming her position.
Time and again.
Mio finally realised the essence of the problem.
It wasn't out of control.
Rather, the world was taking her back.
Those memories, premonitions and deviations that she had long endured for the sake of others
— were being demanded by reality and returned to their vessel.
And she was that vessel.
Her existence could no longer be confined to the dream.
She was being pulled back to where she belonged.
For a moment, her vision overlapped with reality.
The outline of the campus was blindingly clear.
and the air was filled with a weight she had long forgotten.
For the first time, Mio felt fear.
not fear of collapse,
but fear that, once she fully returned to reality, there would be no turning back.
The dream reverberated behind her.
Reality unfolded before her.
Standing at the boundary between the two, she realised that she could no longer choose to remain unseen.