A sweet scent filled Kai's nose. It wasn't lilies. Roses. Fruity and heavily aromatic.
Kai slowly opened his heavy eyes, blinking against the harsh fluorescent lights, only to find his vision completely blocked by a dark crimson bouquet.
"Kai? Are you awake?"
He recognized the voice immediately.
Weakly, he pushed the flowers aside and turned his head. Nyra was sitting in a chair beside his bed, legs crossed, casually reading a newspaper.
"Hi, Nyra," Kai yawned, his throat feeling like sandpaper.
"How are you feeling?" she asked, lowering the paper.
"I don't know. There is a pounding pain in my head."
Hearing his voice, Nyra's shoulders dropped in a brief moment of immense relief. But in the next second, her expression hardened back into steel.
Sensing the sudden shift in temperature, Kai frowned. "What's the matter? Is something bothering you?"
Nyra opened her mouth to speak, then abruptly shut it. Instead, she reached into her purse, pulled out her phone, and shoved the glowing screen into his face.
As Kai squinted, a blurred string of pixels vibrated in the blue light of the phone.
He vigorously massaged his eyes, assuming the hospital painkillers were still messing with his visual cortex.
He gazed at the screen a second time. Everything was normal. He read the date.
Kai's eyes shot wide open.
"What? Two months have passed?!"
Nyra remained silent, her arms crossed tight.
"We were only inside the Inverse Pyramid for three or four days!" Kai protested, his heart racing against the monitors.
"Dimensional flow," Nyra said flatly.
Kai's face twisted in disbelief. "Did you drink something weird this morning?"
Nyra immediately rolled up the newspaper and threw it directly at his face.
"Ouch!" Kai yelped, rubbing his nose with innocent, victimized eyes. "Is this how you treat a patient?"
Nyra scoffed, her posture stiffening.
"Yeah, yeah. The guy who fought a goddess himself is crying over a rolled-up piece of paper."
Kai looked down at the newspaper she had thrown at him. His eyes widened again.
"What?" he grabbed the paper. "Are you sure this isn't fake?"
Slap.
Nyra smacked the back of his hand.
Staring back at him from the front page was a massive, high-definition poster of Nyra.
She was holding a trophy. The headline read that she had just been awarded the Edgar Award—the absolute pinnacle, the Oscars of mystery journalism.
"How... how did you get this?" Kai asked, completely stunned.
Nyra smirked, leaning back in her chair. "A nerd like you will never understand the effort of a true journalist."
"Yeah, yeah, stop acting arrogant and tell me how you got it."
Nyra puffed out her chest with obvious pride.
"I wrote an exclusive exposé about the inside of the Inverse Pyramid. I explained exactly how the gravity was reversed, and I provided the scientific answer for the phenomenon."
Curiosity completely overwrote Kai's headache.
"What was the reason?"
Seeing Kai suddenly so excited, leaning forward like a little child wanting to hear a bedtime story, Nyra's eyes softened.
A strange, fleeting look of deep affection crossed her face before she quickly cleared her throat and took a sip of water to reset her expression.
"Why was the gravity inverted?" Nyra asked rhetorically, her pride returning.
"Because the pyramid we were inside wasn't built on Earth. It was trapped in a different dimension."
"Wait, what are you saying?" Kai asked, his analytical brain spinning.
"Listen first. There are two pyramids. One from Earth, and another from a completely foreign dimension. That other dimension sits upside down relative to our world. So, when the architecture of the other dimension bled into our reality, it manifested completely inverted."
Kai's eyes narrowed as the logic clicked into place. So that was the reason the physics were completely shattered.
Nyra scrolled on her phone and showed him a new photograph. It was a massive, terrifying body of water.
Sensing Kai's silent question, Nyra's voice dropped into a deadly serious tone.
"When you passed out, the Inverse Pyramid started to violently crumble. It collapsed entirely. But the water from that other dimension spilled through the rift into our world as we escaped. They call it the Bloody Lake now. Because the water... is literally made of blood."
"How did you analyze all of this?" Kai asked, shivering at the thought of the lake.
Nyra arranged the flowers in the pot beside his bed. "I wasn't the one who analyzed it. It was the mad scientist himself. Alfred."
Kai opened his mouth to ask about Alfred, but the heavy hospital door suddenly clicked open.
A security guard stepped into the room.
Kai froze. Something was wrong.
The man's expression was completely blank, his eyes devoid of any actual focus—exactly like a machine running on standby. He moved with a slight, unnatural stiffness.
"My friend, do you need tea or coffee?" the guard asked in a flat, monotone voice.
Kai and Nyra stared at him, simultaneously confused.
"Who are you?" Kai asked, a sudden chill creeping up his spine.
The security guard began mechanically stirring a packet of sugar into a cup, staring at the blank wall instead of looking at them.
"How can you say that? We are childhood friends. We had a bath together."
The words tumbled out of the guard's mouth like a desperate algorithm trying to justify a corrupted line of code.
It was the system rationalizing the command Kai's Override state had implanted on the roof two months ago: We are friends.
The human brain couldn't process the forced loyalty, so it fabricated a bizarre, fake memory to make it make sense.
Kai's face flushed, a mix of embarrassment and deep, unsettling dread. "Wait... wait, what the hell are you talking about?!"
Nyra sat on the sidelines, trying to muffle her laughter behind her hand, completely unaware of the terrifying reality glitch happening right in front of her.
Kai coughed loudly, trying to break the bizarre tension. "Why are you actually here?"
The security guard suddenly snapped his head toward Kai. The unnatural, glitchy demeanor vanished instantly, replaced by standard, waking professionalism.
He blinked, as if waking from a micro-sleep, and handed Kai the cup of tea along with a small envelope.
"There is a sunflower bouquet and a letter for you," the guard said normally.
Kai took the envelope, thoroughly creeped out. "Who gave you this?"
"Some cops," the guard said, already turning to leave. "They asked me to deliver it to you." The door clicked shut behind him.
Kai smelled the sunflowers. The fragrance was incredibly refreshing, a stark contrast to the heavy smell of the hospital and the dark crimson roses Nyra had brought.
"Why sunflowers?" he muttered.
Nyra leaned in, nodding in agreement as Kai carefully broke the seal on the envelope.
They unfolded the letter. Both of their faces dropped into total confusion.
Printed perfectly in the center of the white page were just a few words:
We will meet soon.
— By your Number 1 fan.