Everything Feels Strange
The room was too quiet.
That kind of quiet that feels wrong, like silence had swallowed sound and left behind only pressure. Yuji sat up in his Flame Land Academy dormitory, blinking twice. The world around him felt... off. Like the edges of reality had been smudged with charcoal and dreams.
He reached for his boots.
And stopped.
His hand trembled as a sudden weight bloomed in his chest — no, deeper — inside his Eternal Ring.
It pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Like something ancient inside had stirred from slumber.
> "Why… why does it feel like my whole body is heavier than before?"
"No... it's not my body. It's the ring. The ring is screaming."
The walls of the room… they began to fade. Not slowly, not gently — but like they were peeling away, as if reality were just painted glass under a black sun. Yuji stepped forward. The floor creaked like it didn't recognize him. His shadow dragged behind him — too long, too slow, too alive.
He opened the door.
What waited was not the hallway.
Instead, it was a staircase.
Then another.
And another.
Thousands of rooms. Thousands of doors. Thousands of stairs.
Endless — recursive — sickening. Yuji ran down one hall, opened a door… and stepped into a room he had just left. He went up a stair… only to descend from another above it. It was a loop, a maze, a curse stitched into architecture.
> "This isn't real. This isn't real. THIS ISN'T REAL—"
Then he saw her.
Sitting on a chair beneath flickering light. Hair soft. Eyes distant. Fingers curled in her lap like she was praying in stillness.
"Aika…?" Yuji whispered.
She looked up.
She smiled.
He ran toward her. His heart surged forward — desperate, confused, aching.
But just as he reached to grab her hand—
She moved.
Not like Aika.
Not like a human.
She attacked.
Her hand curved into a blade. A shriek left her mouth, not a voice, but a distorted howl, sharp like broken glass and too long to belong to a person. Yuji fell back, barely dodging. His wind didn't come. His dark didn't answer. His instincts screamed.
She charged again. Her face twitched — stretched — and split down the center, revealing not skin but thread, like she was a marionette sewn from memory.
> "You're not her—"
And in the blink of an eye—
She was gone.
Vanished.
No sound.
No trace.
Only a chair. Empty. Still warm.
Yuji backed away. The world behind him rumbled. He turned—only to find himself standing not in the hallway, but in the central arena of Flame Land Academy.
The air was thick.
No crowd.
No sky.
Just a canvas of grey above.
> "Wait… how… how did I get here?"
His hands trembled. He summoned the Wind — nothing. He summoned the Dark — silence.
The Eternal Ring inside him pulled, like something was collapsing inward. Like a dying star trying to suck in the last bits of its own light.
> "No. No no no—WHY CAN'T I FEEL MY ELEMENTS?"
He looked at his palm. Nothing.
No glow. No aura.
No trace of the powers he had suffered to control.
Yuji dropped to his knees.
Reality around him began to peel, like wallpaper unraveling from the inside of his mind. The arena trembled — the stands folded into each other — the ground shook like it was stitched over a heartbeat that no longer existed.
Everything was unmaking itself.
> "Am I dreaming?" he whispered.
"Or is this what it feels like to die… again?"
His shadow beside him twitched.
It didn't match his movement.
He stood.
The shadow did not.
> "That's not me."
He stepped forward.
The shadow split.
And disappeared.
He turned slowly, slowly—trying to find something real to hold onto. A name. A voice. A friend.
But the walls cracked with silence.
And Yuji realized something terrifying.
He wasn't being attacked.
He was being undone.
He clutched his chest. The Eternal Ring inside was fighting, spinning wildly, like a wheel with broken brakes. It dragged at his mind. At his senses. He stumbled.
The ground vanished.
No—he was still standing. But the ground had turned to glass, and beneath it was nothing. A void. A memory. A war.
> "This isn't the academy…"
"This isn't the Flame World…"
"This isn't even… real."
Then came the laughter.
Distant. Mechanical. Familiar.
Not cruel, but… disinterested. Like something was watching this not as a villain, but as a scientist — or worse — a puppeteer.
Yuji didn't know what was real anymore.
But he knew something now for sure.
> His powers were fading.
His elements were dying.
And whatever he was… wasn't human anymore.
---
in a quite different timeline
She is Human
Blood scattered in curves of red art.
But none of it was real.
None of it could be.
Aika's blade slid across the fake Yuji's throat, and he dissolved into smoke—his face still frozen in a twisted grin, like he didn't feel betrayed.
Another clone charged her. Same eyes. Same voice.
Same posture.
Not him. Not him. Not him.
Her hand didn't tremble.
But her heart?
It shattered a little more with every slice.
> "I'm killing him again… and again… and again…"
She leapt through the air. Blade down. It sank into another Yuji's chest.
The illusion didn't scream.
It only whispered:
> "Why did you leave me behind?"
Her knees buckled as she landed. Her breathing ragged.
Not from exhaustion — but from the ache.
The ache of being trapped in a battlefield sculpted by guilt.
Clones. All of them.
Tearing through the smoke, their eyes empty. Their mouths twisted. But their faces—still his.
And she — Aika Flameborn —
Was tearing them apart one by one.
> "Why… am I doing this?"
"Is this truly my own decision?"
Her blade arced again, slicing a Yuji across the abdomen. His body crumbled like paper soaked in fire.
But he looked into her eyes before he vanished.
That look.
That damn look.
It always screamed:
"You failed me."
She staggered backward.
The battlefield was looping. A horizon of ash. A battlefield of broken Yuji masks and flickering sky. There was no sun. No time. No end.
Just her…
And the echo of what she once loved.
Aika fell to her knees.
> "Where are the others?"
"Where… am I?"
"Why am I not in the Flame World?"
"Where's Yuji? The real one? The one who laughed with me. The one who called wind weak, then made it powerful…"
She cried.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
But quiet… silent… a tear rolling across her cheek like it had to sneak past her pride.
And that's when—
A voice.
So familiar.
So soft.
> "Aika, stand. You are better than this."
Her eyes widened.
"…Yumi?"
Standing before her — cloak of purple and gold, hair tied up, that cold-firm stare of a warrior who once commanded dimensions.
Aika reached out.
"…Yumi, I… I don't know what's happening…"
Yumi's expression softened.
Her hand reached forward.
Aika touched it.
And felt nothing.
Her hand passed through the figure like fog.
And the smile Yumi wore twisted — turned — bled into something else.
The flesh of the illusion peeled, like paint burning under poison.
What emerged—
Was Mina.
Blue hair. Cold eyes. Lab coat soaked in ink-black veins. A cruel softness to her expression.
Aika screamed and stumbled back.
Mina did not speak.
She only watched, like a predator observing emotional decay.
The battlefield pulsed.
Then—
From the ash—
They rose again.
More Yujis.
Twenty. Thirty. Fifty.
All walking toward her, step by step, identical in every breath.
And her blade — her loyal flame-forged blade — cracked in her hand.
"…No…" she whispered. "I can't…"
She turned to run—
Too late.
One of them moved faster. Like a blur.
She spun — but another came from the left.
Then the right.
Then—steel pierced her side.
She gasped.
It wasn't the pain.
It was his face.
Yuji's face.
Smiling… sad… broken.
He pulled the blade from her body like it was a goodbye letter.
Another Yuji clone wrapped his arms around her from behind.
Another stabbed her leg.
She screamed—
Not in pain.
But in horror.
> "STOP USING HIS FACE!"
Another blade.
This time across her shoulder.
Blood painted her skin.
Aika dropped to one knee.
Mina watched.
Unblinking.
The Yuji clones surrounded her. But none moved again.
They just stared.
Like statues carved by regret.
She whispered—
> "He would never hurt me…"
"Even in his darkness… Yuji would never…"
"He's not these things. He's not this…"
Her hand clutched her chest, where the pain bloomed like a dying flower.
The battlefield faded again — dissolved like salt in water — and Aika felt her mind slipping.
She was strong.
But she was human.
And even strength, when twisted hard enough, breaks like bone under burden.
She fell onto her back, eyes trembling toward the strange grey sky above.
And in the distance, she saw something.
A memory, maybe. A dream. A soul cracking open.
A little boy with dark hair and a cracked mask.
Staring at a mirror.
> "Somewhere in a timeline no one believed in…
Eylzion was watching."
---
In another different timeline
Forest of Loops
Step.
Turn.
Speak.
Step.
Turn.
Speak.
Again.
And again.
Ryen Sylvan blinked — for the fourth time in what felt like a thousand years — and there she was again:
Xioner, sitting under the withered tree. One hand wrapped around a cup of invisible tea, the other gesturing toward the sky like she was explaining constellations that had long stopped caring.
> "We were never meant to win, Ryen," the fake said, same voice, same sigh, same half-bored expression. "We're ghosts of a war no one's even writing about."
Ryen didn't answer.
He didn't move.
He just watched.
Watched the same breeze brush the fake Xioner's white hair.
Watched the same leaf fall at the same angle.
Watched the sun skip just slightly — a glitch in the light.
Then the words again.
> "We were never meant to win, Ryen—"
"No," Ryen finally spoke, eyes narrowing.
Voice colder than silence.
He didn't blink this time.
> "You said that sentence four times already."
The fake Xioner froze.
A fraction too late.
The tea in her hand… evaporated.
The tree behind her… bent the wrong way.
And suddenly, the scent of ash vanished.
"This isn't real," Ryen whispered. "You're not her."
With that, he raised his hand — not to attack — but to slice through the illusion like cutting through silk.
The world tore open.
Light bled.
Walls crumbled.
The sky turned inside out.
And in the explosion of unraveling dream, Ryen dropped to one knee — disoriented — breath shaking.
His ADM Ring flashed.
> EB = 0
FE = 0
"…Impossible," he muttered.
No fuel.
No energy.
No fallback.
Then—
Shadows fell.
Not illusions this time.
Not memories.
But men.
Figures cloaked in smoke and silence — assassins wearing faces blurred by smoke. Weapons curved, serrated, dipped in venom that never needed to be tested — because one cut meant silence.
Ryen backed away.
Slow. Measured.
But the ring stayed dark.
He whispered a command. Nothing. Tried again. Still nothing.
The assassins stepped closer.
And for the first time in years—since the war on Vein-19, since the fall of the Snowlight Fortress, since the day he buried thirty friends and walked away—
Ryen felt it.
Fear.
Not panic.
Not dread.
True, uncut fear.
His legs moved before his mind did.
He ran.
Through smoke.
Through broken terrain.
Then—
He broke through into something… impossible.
A forest.
Except—
The trees floated.
Not above the ground—
Instead, the ground floated above him.
The sky was beneath his feet.
And the earth?
It hovered in inverted loops above him, tree roots curling into the stars.
"…What is this place?"
The sky blinked.
A tree drifted sideways.
Gravity meant nothing here. Logic bent like paper in rain. The air pulsed like it had breath. The leaves whispered.
> "She is not Xioner. She was never Xioner."
He ran until his lungs caught fire.
Until the forest broke into a mirror-like lake.
Until even his own reflection didn't look like him.
Ryen fell to his knees, whispering.
"…Where are we?"
No one answered.
Except the wind.
And somewhere…
Somewhere beyond this place—
Beyond loop and illusion,
Beyond twisted physics and fake memories—
A figure trembled.
The real Xioner.
Strapped to a medical slab.
Eyes half-open.
A breath shallow and inconsistent.
Dark fluid oozed into her veins from five different syringes.
The scientists whispered, jotted notes, injected more truth-serum coated in hallucinogenic EB.
Her fingers twitched.
Her heart pounded softly against the edge of death.
And through the blur of toxins…
Xioner saw something.
A shadow.
A friend.
A forest.
> "Ryen…?"
But the word never made it to her lips.
She was breaking.
Not from pain.
But from remembering.
Remembering what it felt like to walk. To smile. To bleed. To love. To choose.
And as one more drop of poison was pushed into her veins—
A line echoed across time:
> "Somewhere in a timeline no one believed in…
Xioner knew how it felt like to be human."
---
END OF CHAPTER 32