The green meadow continued to stretch out in every direction, an ocean of grass blades and wildflowers that seemed to know no geographical or temporal boundary. Above them, the sunless blue canopy continued to radiate a diffused, constant, and unreal light, utterly incapable of casting distinct shadows on the ground.
The two walked side by side or rather, Hayjin followed the quiet, ethereal steps of the female figure. Neither spoke a single word. The silence between them was neither peaceful nor comforting; it was a membrane stretched to the breaking point, saturated with a creeping anguish and questions that burned in the boy's throat like glowing embers.
Hayjin didn't take his eyes off her. He stared at her sideways, his gaze heavy with poisonous suspicion mixed with a deep, paralyzing doubt. His fingers, still marked by the cuts on his palms that kept shedding tiny droplets of congealed blood onto the grass, clenched and unclenched rhythmically.
Who is she? Hayjin kept asking himself, struggling to synchronize his breathing with their pace. Why is she guiding me? Her "kill"... what the hell does that mean? Is she managing this hellish loop? Is she the architect of every rebirth, or is she just someone who enjoys watching me die?
The girl with the long blue hair didn't turn around even once. Her pure white dress floated lightly with every step, brushing the tips of daisies and lilies without bending a single stem. She emitted no sense of mana, nor any tangible physical presence; it was as if her very existence were merely a conceptual projection imprinted upon the fabric of that limbo.
Suddenly, the girl stopped.
Instinctively, Hayjin froze two steps behind her, his left shoulder tense, his right hand habitually reaching for a hilt that wasn't there.
The girl did not turn toward him. She simply raised her right arm in a slow, graceful movement, and snapped her fingers.
SNAP.
The sound of her middle finger striking her palm echoed not through the air, but directly inside the cranial sutures of Hayjin's skull.
An instant later, the reality of the green meadow completely crumbled. There was no transition, no sensation of vertigo: the grass, flowers, and blue sky were swallowed in a sweep of pure white light.
Hayjin blinked, bringing a hand to his eyes to shield himself from the blinding glare. When he managed to focus on his surroundings once more, he realized he was no longer on solid ground.
He was immersed in an almost entirely ivory dimension, a vast, horizonless space dominated by layers and shades of cyan blue and spectral violet flowing through the air like invisible currents of water. The floor was a translucent crystalline surface that reflected light without revealing what lay beneath. Far at the end of that void, hundreds of meters away, stretched endlessly tall, imposing staircases of white marble ascending into nothingness, vanishing into the violet mists of the upper dome.
But what turned Hayjin's blood to ice was not the majesty of that abstract structure.
Floating mid-air around him like gigantic transparent membranes or screens made of rippling water were dozens of visual projections.
Hayjin's eyes widened, and a terrible shiver ran up his spine to the nape of his neck.
In one of the screens to his left, he saw himself in the first time loop: his head exploding from the inside under the influence of the dark curse, his skull shattering into a shower of blood and brain matter onto the floor of the room.
In another screen slightly further away was the scene of his second death: the dark blade piercing his back in the shadows, the chill of the stone, and the sight of his own blood slowly pooling on the floor as life left his eyes.
And finally, directly in front of him, on a gigantic translucent surface emitting a low hum, was his latest death. He saw the three-ton block of stone break away from the ruins of Opes castle, plummet through the smoke, and crush his chest and skull, reducing him to a shapeless smear of flesh and shattered bone beneath the frightened eyes of no one.
The visual impact of those images was so devastating that Hayjin had to stagger back two steps, nearly losing his balance on the crystalline floor. Nausea instantly surged back up his throat, his face turning pale as a washed rag.
"N-no..." Hayjin stammered, his voice cracked with pure, almost childlike terror.
He snapped his head toward the blue-haired girl standing motionless a few meters away, the violet and cyan hues of the dimension brushing against her white dress.
"Who are you..." Hayjin choked out, forcing the words from his lungs with immense effort, his jaw trembling uncontrollably. "Who are you really?! What is this place?! Why are you showing me all of this?!"
The girl did not answer verbally. With her usual maddening calm, she raised her right hand and beckoned with her palm, inviting him to take another step closer.
Hayjin hesitated. Every survival instinct screamed at him to run, to close his eyes, to reject that demonic vision. But the gravitational pull of the mystery was too strong. Anchoring himself on his exhausted willpower, the boy took two steps toward her, stopping beside the membrane showing his final death.
But the moment he drew near, the projection on the screen changed.
The girl made a slight movement with her fingers, and the screen no longer showed Hayjin's death. The image expanded, the perspective widened, and it began to reveal with terrifying, hyper-detailed clarity the final moments of the people to whom he had bound his soul in this world.
Hayjin saw Wilder. He saw the man's severed arm, his gouged-out eye weeping blood, and the exact moment the dark blade impaled his chest, putting an end to his desperate redemption in the fortress dungeons.
Then the projection shifted again, and Zhilian appeared. Hayjin was forced to rewatch every single, agonizing second of that carnage: the princess's right arm ripped from her torso with inhuman force, the beasts tearing open her stomach to devour her entrails while she was still conscious, and finally the feline's blade severing her head from her neck, sending it rolling into the dust of the tunnel.
"STOP IT!" Hayjin roared, bringing his hands to his face to cover his eyes. "STOP IT! I DON'T WANT TO SEE THIS! PLEASE, STOP!"
But the membrane did not vanish. In fact, a third, larger one opened right in front of his tightly shut eyes.
Through the gaps between his fingers, Hayjin saw Riko's room appear during the early stages of the attack on the castle.
Little Isabelle was there. She was hunched over on the floor, her hands clasped in a desperate attempt to maintain the magic barrier containing Riko. But while the maid was entirely focused on channeling her mana, a slender, thread-like shadow rift opened in the wall directly behind her back.
Neither Karjalan nor one of the deformed beasts emerged from that rift.
Out of the darkness stepped the figure of Sage Arkon.
The old sage, his wrinkled face wearing an expression of pure, cold, and ruthless calculation, drew a short stiletto from the sleeve of his solemn robe. Without a shred of hesitation, without making the slightest sound, Arkon drove the steel blade straight into Isabelle's back, plunging it between her vertebrae and abdominal muscles until the bloody tip emerged from the front of her white garment.
Hayjin's eyes bulged. His breath caught in his throat.
Arkon?! The thought exploded in his mind like a plasma bomb. Arkon stabbed Isabelle?!
"No... no, it's impossible... Isabelle..." Hayjin muttered, shaking his head frantically as tears welled behind his eyes once more. "Arkon is the sage... Arkon is the guide of the realm... Why... why would he do this..."
He tried to turn away, pressing his hands against his ears and clamping his elbows against his head to block out everything.
"I don't want to look!" Hayjin screamed at the girl. "Leave me alone! LET ME OUT OF HERE!"
But the blue-haired girl had no intention of letting him escape.
A cyan and violet glow suddenly burst from the ethereal figure's palms. A surge of unknown magic, dense and fluid, enveloped Hayjin's body. It was not a physical attack; it was a perceptive force that pierced his skull, seizing his consciousness and literally ripping it from the ivory dimension.
The crystalline floor vanished. The floating membranes dissolved.
Hayjin found himself projected directly into the timeline of the latest loop.
But he had not returned to his own body.
Hayjin stood in the middle of Riko's room, but his body was invisible, impalpable, entirely devoid of material substance. He was an observer spirit, a condensed ghost of pure perception. His feet didn't touch the floor; dust, smoke, and flames passed through him without friction. No one could see him, no one could hear him, and he could not interact with a single atom of that world.
Before him, the scene he had witnessed on the screen was playing out in real time.
The translucent barrier trembled like a sheet of paper caught in a gale, emitting a low, metallic hum that vibrated directly in the bones of anyone in the room. Isabelle kept her hands clasped to her chest, her palms pressed so tightly her knuckles showed white, while drops of cold sweat washed over her forehead, mixing with the tears silently streaming from her swollen eyes. Her spatial mana was burning at an unsustainable rate, exhausting her from within, yet the young girl refused to yield even an inch.
On the other side of the enchanted bubble, Riko tried once more to push against the wall of energy, but the magic repelled her with ruthless pressure, trapping her wrists and ankles in an invisible cage.
"Why, Isabelle?!" Riko screamed, her voice cracking with rage and frustration, her face twisted in grim incomprehension. "Why are you doing this to me?! How can you take that monster's side?! I'm doing this for us! I'm trying to protect Wren! I'm trying to defend the realm before he destroys everything! Why the fuck did you betray me like this?!"
Isabelle slowly shook her head, choking back a sob that constricted her throat. Her breath came in short, ragged gasps.
"You... you don't understand anything, Riko..." Isabelle whispered, her voice a fragile breath soaked in tears. "You have no idea what I had to go through to be here. You know nothing..."
"I only know that outsider will ruin us all!" Riko shot back, hammering her fists against the sheer surface of the barrier. "He's a danger! A threat that has to be eliminated before it's too late! Why are you defending him so fiercely?! Who is he to you?!"
"He's the only reason I'm still alive!" Isabelle screamed, finding an unexpected surge of strength in her lungs for a moment as a new wave of tears tracked down her dust-stained cheeks. "If it weren't for Hayjin... if he hadn't come to this place, I would be dead! I'd be just a forgotten corpse in the dungeons! You don't know how many times he risked everything... you don't know how many times he broke himself to protect me!"
In Isabelle's mind, the echo of a distorted, bloody memory resurfaced with the intensity of a lucid nightmare. Images from the second time loop, when Hayjin had been slaughtered in the darkness of the alley, surged back to her brain with terrifying clarity. She remembered the terror of that night, the bitter taste of helplessness, and the sight of his body pierced by six ruthless, deep knife strikes delivered with surgical precision and blind hatred.
For hours, Isabelle had lived with the weight of that horror, unable to put a name or a face to it. But then, reality had piece by piece come together.
She recalled that afternoon just a few hours prior. Hayjin had locked himself in his room, alone, submerged in his thoughts, obsessed with trying to connect the dots trying to figure out who the killer lurking in the court shadows was, who was orchestrating the slaughter from the inside. Isabelle had observed him from afar, seeing in his bloodshot eyes the paranoia, the unbearable weight of someone who feels relentlessly hunted.
At that moment, while brooding alone in the corridor adjacent to the guard room, desperately trying to assemble the fragments of that senseless story, Riko had approached her. With a cold, almost detached expression, Riko had confided in a low voice her intention: she would find a way to "eliminate" Hayjin, to kill him before he could make his move.
It was in that exact instant that every puzzle piece clicked into place inside Isabelle's head with a sickening crack. The six knife wounds in the dark. The ease with which the attacker had navigated the royal quarters. The flawless knowledge of the guard shifts. The confirmation hit her like a ton of bricks: it had been Riko. It was Riko who had stabbed Hayjin in the back during the previous loop.
Isabelle stared at her companion through the translucent veil of the barrier, her hands trembling from exhaustion and emotional pain.
"I know, Riko..." Isabelle said, her voice weakened by sobs. "I know it was you. You killed him last time... you buried that knife in his chest in the dark. At first... at first I didn't want to believe it. I tried to convince myself it was a mistake, that I misheard... But when you told me with such coldness that you were going to kill him again... I had absolute proof. It wasn't just suspicion. It was you."
Riko stood petrified inside the magic bubble, her lips slightly parted, her gaze wavering for a second before hardening once more.
"I'm sorry..." Isabelle continued, wiping her nose with her sleeve while the spatial mana around her fingers began to spark with erratic discharges. "I'm sorry, Riko... but I can't let you go. I can't let you lay a hand on him again. I'm doing this for him, and I'm doing it for Wren's sake too."
Isabelle took a step forward, her torso bowing under the strain of the spell, staring Riko straight in the eye with desperate intensity.
"Tell me the truth, Riko... is this really what you want?" Isabelle asked, her words falling like drops of lead into the room. "To see Hayjin dead... to see him lying on the ground in a pool of blood... do you honestly think that would make you happy? Do you really believe eliminating him would solve anything?"
Riko didn't move a muscle, but her grip on the barrier walls slackened slightly.
"Do you really think a slaughter like that would help Wren's mind?" Isabelle pressed on, tears washing relentlessly down her cheeks. "Wren is just a child! She's fragile, she's terrified, she's already lost almost everything she had in this world! Do you honestly think seeing the only person who tried to defend her at the cost of his own life die would make her feel better?! Do you think seeing him wiped out would make her safer?! Answer me, Riko! Answer me!"
Riko's eyes widened. For the first time since their confrontation began, the mask of rigid conviction covering her face cracked dramatically. Her lips trembled, but no sound came from her throat.
She looked at Isabelle. She looked at the young maid's hands, bleeding from the strain of maintaining the spell, looked at the genuine, malice-free despair burning in her eyes, and the framework of justifications she had constructed in her mind began to creak ominously.
Riko merely stared at her in a total, heavy silence, unable to formulate a single word in response while the hum of spatial magic continued to fill the emptiness of the room.
Suddenly, however...
Isabelle collapsed forward onto the stone floor, releasing a muffled sob of pure agony, her fingers pressed against the abdominal wound that leaked warm blood onto her white dress. With her fall, the spatial magic holding Riko trapped shattered with a sound like breaking glass.
Riko fell to her knees, regaining her freedom of movement. Panting heavily, she pushed herself up and looked around. The instant she caught sight of Isabelle slumping in a pool of blood and Arkon standing over her with the bloody stiletto between his fingers, her face twisted in a mixture of sheer shock and terror.
Riko bolted toward Isabelle, dropping to her knees at her side, her hands trembling violently.
"Isabelle! Isabelle, no!" Riko cried, her voice broken by visceral panic. She tried to stem the maid's wound with a fold of her skirt while tears streamed down her face.
Then Riko looked up at Arkon. Her expression wasn't that of a satisfied accomplice; it was filled with blind anguish and desperate rage.
"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?!" Riko screamed at the old sage, her voice rising to a hysterical shriek. "WHY DID YOU STRIKE HER?! THAT WASN'T THE DEAL, ARKON! THIS ISN'T WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN!"
Hayjin, floating less than half a meter away from them in ghostly form, was utterly dumbfounded. Riko's words battered his impalpable chest like sledgehammer blows.
A deal? Hayjin thought, his eyes wide. Riko had a deal with Arkon?!
Arkon wiped the stiletto blade with a slow, methodical gesture using the hem of Isabelle's dress before sheathing it back into his sleeve. His wrinkled face showed not the slightest trace of emotion or remorse; the sage's eyes were two cold, calculating slits devoid of any human warmth.
"You are a fool, Riko," Arkon said, his voice low, calm, steeped in glacial severity. "The single task assigned to you was to eliminate the boy. Hayjin was supposed to die in his room before the plan could proceed. We provided you with the means, we gave you the opportunity... and you failed miserably."
"If you had given me just a little more time, I would have killed him!" Riko protested, wiping away her tears with the back of her bloody hand as her grip on Isabelle shook. "But Isabelle had nothing to do with this! She wasn't supposed to be involved! You promised me nothing would happen to the others!"
Arkon shook his head with disgust, as one would with a spoiled child failing to grasp adult dynamics.
"There is no time for your childish sentimentality. The fortress is falling, and the Cult's forces are sweeping the area. I cannot afford to have you remain here making mistakes."
Arkon raised his left hand. From his wrinkled fingers burst a tangle of dark magic strands, like pitch-black serpents, instantly coiling around Riko's wrists and neck and yanking her forcefully off the ground.
"Let... let me go!" Riko shrieked, thrashing in the magic grip as she was dragged toward the room's doorway. She cast a desperate glance toward Isabelle's limp figure lying on the floor. "ISABELLE! ISABELLE!"
Her screams faded down the corridor as Arkon dragged her away with the force of his dark magic.
Hayjin instinctively lunged toward Isabelle.
"Isabelle!" Hayjin cried, dropping down beside her. He reached out to lift her head, to stem that terrible wound draining the life out of her, to channel even a fraction of energy.
But his transparent fingers passed right through her shoulder as if she were made of smoke. Hayjin tried again, and again, and again, frantically clawing at thin air while his ghostly tears fell without leaving a trace on the blood-soaked floor.
"No... no, no, no! Please, please let me touch her!" Hayjin pleaded into the emptiness of the room. "Isabelle, look at me! I'm here! I'm here with you!"
Left alone in the devastated room, Isabelle feebly moved her lips. Her vision was almost entirely dark by now, the chill of death creeping up from her feet toward her chest.
"H-help..." the young maid whispered, an imperceptible thread of a voice lost in the thunder of distant collapses. "Someone... please... it's so cold..."
No one heard her. No one entered the room to come to her aid.
Hayjin collapsed to his knees beside her, covering his face with his transparent hands and weeping silently, crushed by the powerlessness of his ghostly existence.
"I'm sorry..." Hayjin sobbed beside her body. "I'm sorry for not protecting you... I'm sorry for being so blind... for not being there when you needed me..."
Isabelle's breath grew fainter and fainter, dwindling into a final faint gasp before her chest stopped rising for good. The girl died there, alone, on the cold floor of a gutted room, while Hayjin's spirit watched over her corpse in helpless agony.
After several minutes, Hayjin's grief began to mutate into something else. A cold, thick, poisonous rage began to course through his ghostly consciousness.
He stood up. There was nothing more he could do for Isabelle in this fragment of the past, but he had to see how far the rot of this betrayal reached.
As an observer spirit, nothing in this world could hurt or stop him.
Hayjin phased through the room's wall and began following the trail of dark mana Arkon had left behind through the devastated corridors of the fortress.