“Ah. It already started.” Yu heard his own voice only because the living room was quiet enough to make it sound intrusive.

  The television was on, but the variety show had become a wash of laughter and canned applause that didn’t quite reach him. He sat on the sofa with one leg tucked under the other, his phone balanced in his palm like it belonged there—like it had always belonged there. Dinner was finished, but the plates and bowls still sat on the table, greasy and cooling, reflecting the ceiling light in dull patches. He had meant to stand up and wash them.

  Instead, his thumb had found the EWS icon as if it were a reflex built into his skin.

  The app opened with the familiar smoothness that always felt a little too clean. A dark interface. A faint pulse at the edge of the screen that suggested something alive on the other side. A list of channels in neat rows—some with bright thumbnails, some with blurred silhouettes that looked like they’d been captured mid-motion. He didn’t scroll. He didn’t choose.

  The stream was already waiting for him, filling the display the moment the app settled.

  On screen, a huge woman in heavy armor advanced through a narrow passage, a lantern held high in one gauntleted hand. The lantern’s flame made the metal plates on her arms glow and fade with each step, light sliding over curved edges and rivets, turning her into something halfway between a knight and a moving statue. The corridor around her was damp stone, black where it drank in shadow, slick where moisture caught the light. Her boots struck the ground with slow, confident impacts that made the camera mic pick up a steady rhythm of weight and purpose.

  Team Emera.

  They weren’t like Rize. They were loud, professional, and comfortable in front of an audience. Yu had clicked them once out of curiosity—because their subscriber count was high enough to put them on the front page—and then watched again because the easy banter had felt almost like a shield. A silver Verified badge sat beside their channel name, shining with official approval, as if the system itself had stamped them safe.

  Emera’s voice rolled through the stream, confident and casual, the way people sounded when danger was something they expected and managed rather than something that surprised them.

  “I’ve got a feeling we missed something this way~,” she said, the drawn-out note at the end almost playful.

  “So we’re backtracking to that fork from earlier.” A male voice replied off-screen, close enough to the mic that Yu could hear a faint laugh behind it. “Your intuition again? It was a bust last time. You remember that, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah. But this time feels different. I mean—don’t you feel it? The air’s heavy.” Emera snorted, and the lantern bobbed as she shifted her grip.

  “It’s a cave. The air’s always heavy.” Another man answered, farther back, his voice slightly muffled as if he’d turned his head while speaking.

  The three of them moved like they’d done this a hundred times—one leading, the others invisible but present in the tiny cues: the way Emera paused before a turn as if waiting for a signal, the way the light angled for a moment as though someone behind her adjusted their position. Even through a screen, the coordination was obvious. Not desperate scrambling. Not frantic, solitary caution. A practiced dance.

  Yu rested his chin on his knuckles and let the stream run. The TV show’s laughter rose and fell, distant and irrelevant. Notifications buzzed in some other corner of his attention and died unanswered. This is fine. He told himself that without even forming the words. This is just watching. Just a broadcast. Just a one-way window.

  But somewhere beneath the comfort of their professionalism, something else stirred—an irritation at the edges of his focus that he couldn’t name. The feeling didn’t hit like fear. It arrived the way a minor headache did: subtle, easy to ignore, until it wasn’t.

  The anomaly began as a ripple so small he almost blamed his eyes.

  ?

  The corridor widened, and the party stepped into an open cavern that made the stream’s sense of scale shift all at once. The ceiling rose high overhead, vanishing into shadow as if the darkness had swallowed the rock and refused to give it back.

  The walls were wet and black, glistening with a thin sheen that made them look oiled. Every time Emera’s lantern swung, the light caught on that slick surface and slid away, leaving the impression that the cavern was breathing—brightening and dimming in slow pulses.

  The floor was worse. Moss clung thickly to stone in uneven mats, and patches of mud shone where water pooled shallow. Each step looked like it might betray them, suctioning at boots, pulling at balance.

  The camera angle shifted as whoever was filming adjusted, taking in the width of the space, the way the cavern opened into multiple deeper channels like veins branching in a living body.

  “Whoa,” Emera said, and for the first time the confidence in her voice sharpened into something more alert. “This place is huge. I’m gonna swing the light around.”

  The lantern lifted, and the flame threw an arc of trembling gold across rock. It revealed nothing but more wet stone and moss—no ruins carved into the wall, no clear path, no relics. Just space. Too much space. The cavern swallowed the light like it wanted to keep it.

  A beat of silence passed. Not true silence—there was always drip-water, always the faint scrape of armor, always breathing—but enough of a pause that Yu felt it in his chest.

  “No traps,” Emera said, lighter again, but her tone didn’t quite match her words.

  “Looks like.” Then she added, quieter, and Yu heard the shift like a blade sliding out of a sheath.

  “But I’ve got a bad feeling.” Her armored hand drifted toward the greatsword strapped across her back.

  It was a ridiculous weapon by modern standards—thick, broad, made for cutting through things that shouldn’t exist. She didn’t draw it yet, but the touch alone changed the air of the stream. Her companions moved outside the camera’s view, and Yu could tell by the way the lens jerked slightly, by how the lantern’s light now seemed steadier. They were repositioning. Covering angles. Tightening formation without needing to speak.

  Yu remained on his sofa, warm and dry in a room that smelled faintly of soy sauce and dishwater. They’ve got this, he thought, and the thought felt like something he wanted to believe rather than something he knew.

  Emera took another step forward. Mud squelched softly under her boot. The sound echoed, returned thinner, and then vanished into the cavern’s depth.

  She stopped.

  “It’s coming,” Her voice dropped, not because she wanted to be dramatic, but because the instinct to be quiet had risen before she could stop it.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Something’s here.” Emera said. At that exact moment, the image became… textured.

  Not fully broken. Not obviously glitched. Just faintly grainy, as if the stream’s clarity had been dusted over with fine sand. It lasted less than a second, and Yu’s eyes narrowed without permission. Did the signal drop?

  The grain faded. The cavern remained. Emera drew her greatsword in one smooth, practiced motion, metal sliding free with a sound that made Yu’s teeth itch. The blade caught the lantern light and flared sharp, a line of brightness cutting through the cavern’s dark.

  “Above!” from somewhere off-camera, one of the men hissed, quick and hard.

  “Shit—knew it!” Another voice snapped back, half curse, half vindication.

  The camera whirled. The lens tilted up toward shadowed height, then down, then sideways as the operator moved, trying to track something too fast to follow. Emera stepped forward into frame, swinging her sword in a brutal, protective arc. For an instant, the blade thrust toward the camera so close it filled the screen—silver, bright, edged with reflected firelight.

  And then something hit the “glass.”

  It happened in the corner of Yu’s vision first, because his brain didn’t want to accept what it was seeing.

  A splatter. Dark. Viscous. A red so deep it looked almost black, spreading across the lens in a fan as though something had burst close enough to throw fluid straight at the camera.

  It wasn’t a neat smear. It wasn’t a clean droplet. It was messy and alive, and it made the warm living room around Yu feel suddenly thin, as if the barrier between worlds had become a sheet of brittle film.

  The stream didn’t shake the way it should have. That was the worst part. The camera didn’t jerk like someone had been struck. Instead, the motion paused for a half-beat—an eerie stillness, as though whoever held the lens had frozen.

  Yu’s stomach tightened, and his throat went dry so fast it hurt.

  The comment feed exploded. Text began to crawl up the screen in panicked bursts, overlapping so fast it became a white storm at the bottom edge of the display.

  “What was that?!”

  “Blood?!”

  “That’s not allowed, right?!”

  “Whoa, seriously?!”

  “Did you see that?!”

  Yu barely registered the words. He was staring at the splatter, at the way it clung to the lens like it belonged there, at the impossible implication that something physical had reached the interface.

  A scream tore through the audio. It wasn’t Emera’s. It was too high, too raw, ripped out of someone who didn’t have time to shape it into language. It lasted only an instant—Then the image vanished.

  Not a fade. Not a cut to black. One frame of cavern and blood and motion, and then nothing.

  The screen became a flat, lifeless gray. Centered on it, the EWS logo appeared—clean, corporate, reassuring in a way that made Yu’s skin crawl. Beneath it, a system message rendered in crisp white text.

  [This stream has been suspended due to content violating ethical regulations.]

  [Details regarding this case will not be disclosed.]

  The comment feed stopped.

  Not slowed. Not hidden. Stopped, as if someone had grabbed the entire rushing river of viewer reactions and shut off the source. A purge. A wipe so thorough it made the last ten seconds feel like something the world itself was refusing to admit had happened.

  “…What,” Yu stared at the gray void until his eyes began to burn. “What was that just now?” he whispered, and the word came out thin. His thumb tapped the screen. Nothing. He hit the back button. No response.

  He tried again, harder, like pressing with force could restart reality. The gray screen remained, indifferent. The ethical suspension message stayed perfectly centered, perfectly calm.

  Yu’s pulse thudded in his fingertips. He forced himself to navigate away, to find the channel page, to confirm that at least the stream existed in some record—some archive, some trace, something to prove he hadn’t imagined the blood.

  The app flickered once. A new message appeared, even colder than the last.

  [The corresponding streamer does not exist.]

  For a second, Yu forgot to breathe. The living room’s ceiling light seemed too bright, too white. The variety show on TV hit a punchline and erupted into laughter, and the sound didn’t belong in the world anymore.

  Just minutes ago, Team Emera had been walking and joking through that passage. Emera’s voice had been steady. Their companions had been teasing her intuition. They had been alive. They had been there.

  Now the app insisted they had never existed at all.

  “…Emera?” Yu said, the name scraping against his throat.

  He exited the app and opened social media with shaking fingers, not because he trusted it, but because he needed to see other people reacting—needed proof that this wasn’t a private hallucination. The search bar felt slippery under his thumb. He typed fast, misspelling and correcting, and the results populated before he finished.

  Tags were already trending.

  #EthicalBAN

  #GoreTolerance

  #TheyDidItAgain

  Clips—short, corrupted fragments—floated around like bait, people posting slowed frames, arguing about what the splatter was, boasting about having seen it before it got wiped. Some treated it like a scandal. Some treated it like an achievement. Some made jokes.

  “That scene was definitely out.”

  “It slipped through the R18 filter.”

  “RIP channel lol.”

  “EWS is doing this again, huh.”

  Yu scrolled until his thumb hurt, but the farther he went, the worse it felt. It wasn’t the chatter that made him sick. It was how quickly the event was being flattened into entertainment—how easily people replaced shock with speculation, replaced fear with memes.

  Because inside Yu, only one thing remained sharp.

  The final instant. He had heard a voice.

  Not the banter. Not Emera’s callouts. Something else—something that pierced through the action like a needle through flesh. Someone screaming as their life was cut short.

  He tried to recall the words, to pull them out of the memory like a thread.

  But every time he reached for it, it slipped away, becoming fog. The sound blurred, the syllables smudged, as if the system itself was scraping at his recollection. Like the ethical suspension wasn’t just a screen message but a hand reaching into the viewer’s mind.

  Still, the horror remained in his ears, stubborn and physical. The scream didn’t need words to be remembered.

  — [REDACTED]!

  Yu’s grip tightened around his phone until his knuckles whitened. The plastic edge bit into his palm, grounding him in something real. His breath came shallow, and he realized with a faint, stunned disgust that the dishes on the table still hadn’t been moved. The mundane detail felt obscene.

  If the same thing happens to Rize… The thought arrived fully formed, and his lungs locked.

  Rize wasn’t Team Emera. She didn’t have a three-person party. She didn’t have a Verified badge like a talisman. She moved through ruins alone, careful and quiet, with a cheap lantern and daggers that looked too small for the threats she faced. She didn’t joke to fill the silence. When she spoke, it sounded like she was trying not to disturb the world around her.

  And Yu—Yu had spoken. His voice might have reached her. His presence might have pressed against her world in ways the system wasn’t supposed to allow.

  If EWS could wipe a high-subscriber channel out of existence like it had never been there, then what did that mean for someone who had never been “safe” to begin with?

  The idea wasn’t abstract anymore. It wasn’t a distant fear. It sat heavy in his chest, cold and solid.

  She could be killed by a magical beast. And then killed again by the system. Erased twice—first by claws, then by policy.

  Yu swallowed, but his mouth stayed dry. The variety show laughed again. Outside, a car passed, its headlights sliding across the curtains for a brief moment, and the ordinary motion made him feel like he was trapped behind glass.

  His thumb hovered over the EWS icon.

  For a heartbeat, he hesitated, because opening the app meant choosing to look again—to keep staring into a world that might swallow people and then pretend it never did.

  Then he pressed down. The icon sank under his thumb like a button being pushed too deep.

  The app opened. This time, it didn’t feel like a habit. It felt like a vow. As long as she’s in that world… Yu stared at the dark interface as if it might blink back.

  I can’t just watch in silence anymore.