The room didn't collapse in one clean moment.
It kept going like it wasn't sure how to stop.
Jin noticed that first and immediately decided he didn't like the situation at all.
The student beside him was still changing, but calling it "changing" felt too polite now. It was more like reality kept trying different versions of the same body and refusing to settle on one.
The arm bent, stopped, corrected itself, then bent slightly differently again. Like someone experimenting with how bones were supposed to work without checking the manual first.
Jin took a small step back.
Not dramatically.
Just enough that if things got worse, he wouldn't be "right next to it."
That felt like a reasonable life decision.
The student exhaled.
The sound didn't come out right.
Not broken exactly—just… like the breath had missed a step and didn't feel like trying again.
Jin frowned slightly.
"Okay," he muttered under his breath. "That's new."
He wasn't sure who he was talking to. Probably no one. The room didn't look like it was in a conversational mood.
Around them, the classroom still existed, technically.
But it was starting to behave like it had bad memory.
A chair scrape came late, like it forgot it already happened.
A blink didn't match the face doing it.
A shadow appeared where nothing was standing, which felt like a lazy design choice from reality itself.
Jin leaned slightly to one side, watching it.
"I really should've taken something more useful than philosophy," he thought.
Not because philosophy was useless.
Just because none of it covered "what to do when reality starts lagging."
The student beside him moved again.
Too fast this time.
Then too slow.
Then both at once, somehow.
The body didn't seem injured or dying. It was more like it couldn't decide what version of movement it preferred, so it tried all of them and let them overlap.
Jin watched carefully, then added silently:
"Yeah. I don't like that at all."
He took another step back.
This time it wasn't even a thought process. It was just instinct pretending to be polite.
Behind them, the classroom had stopped being normal in the quiet way disasters usually begin.
Some students were frozen mid-motion. Others were halfway through turning into something else entirely. A few were still sitting like nothing had happened, which Jin found slightly impressive and deeply suspicious.
The professor was no longer clearly there in any meaningful sense. Not gone. Just… not staying consistent long enough to notice properly.
Jin squinted slightly.
"If this is a dream," he thought, "it's doing a terrible job with continuity."
The student beside him suddenly turned its head.
Slowly.
Then not slowly enough.
The motion corrected halfway through, like it couldn't decide what speed heads were supposed to rotate at.
Its eyes landed on Jin.
Not emotional.
Not aware.
Just… focusing.
Like Jin was the only thing in the room that hadn't started buffering.
Jin gave it a long look back.
"…Yeah, no," he said quietly.
No panic in his voice. Just honest refusal.
The student reached out.
The arm stretched forward.
Then paused halfway, like it forgot what the rest of the instruction was supposed to be.
Jin stepped aside.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Just casually avoiding being involved in whatever that was.
The hand passed through where he had been standing a second earlier and hit the desk instead.
Wood cracked.
The sound arrived slightly late, like the world was still buffering the impact.
Jin glanced at the broken edge.
Then back at the student.
"That desk didn't deserve that," he muttered.
The student didn't respond.
It tried again.
The movement was more confident this time.
Which somehow made it worse.
Jin stepped back again.
Still calm.
Still watching.
Still mildly annoyed, like someone interrupting his quiet study time with an extremely poorly written emergency.
Then he noticed something else.
From across the room.
A student stood up.
Not one of the ones already changing.
One of the ones who hadn't reacted yet.
That was… new.
Jin tilted his head slightly.
"Okay," he thought. "So now we have observers too."
The standing student didn't move like the others.
No distortion. No instability.
Just clean motion.
Too clean.
Like it had already adapted to whatever this situation was supposed to be.
Jin didn't like that conclusion forming in his head, so he didn't finish it.
The standing figure turned slightly.
Not toward chaos.
Toward patterns.
Or maybe just toward Jin.
Hard to tell.
Jin rubbed his thumb lightly against his pen without realizing it.
"I feel like I'm missing context," he muttered.
The figure took one step forward.
This time, the floor didn't hesitate.
That bothered Jin more than everything else so far.
Because everything else had been uncertain.
This was not.
The student beside Jin convulsed again, but it wasn't even worth watching anymore. The transformation had become background noise at this point, like a malfunctioning machine that refused to stop making noise even after you stopped caring.
Jin looked at the standing figure again.
Then back at the room.
Then sighed quietly.
"Alright," he said under his breath. "So that's where we are now."
Not fear.
Not acceptance.
Just… acknowledgment that the day had gone completely off schedule.
The standing figure tilted its head slightly again, like it was waiting for something.
Jin met it with a blank look.
Then said, almost casually:
"I don't know what you are."
Pause.
"But I'm guessing I'm not supposed to stand near it."
He took one step back.
Then another.
Not running.
Not panicking.
Just adjusting his position in the universe to something slightly less stupid.
The figure watched him.
The room continued breaking in the background.
And Jin, for now, remained exactly what he had been before all of this started.
Confused.
Alert.
And very mildly annoyed that nobody had warned him reality came with live updates.