Coats brushed coats. Wet umbrellas dripped onto the rubberized floor. A faint smell of rain clung to everything, mixed with deodorant and hair wax and the metallic scent of the rails that seeped up through the soles of Yu’s shoes. The carriage swayed, a slow pendulum motion that made shoulders bump and backpacks knock against knees. Above the windows, fluorescent lights buzzed softly, flattening every face into the same pale tone.
Yu stood near the door, one hand looped around a strap, his phone tucked in his pocket like a weight he couldn’t set down. The train’s rhythm should have been soothing. It had always been soothing. Today, every vibration felt like an aftershock.
Across the aisle, two students sat facing each other, leaning close over a smartphone held between them like a shared secret. The speaker was turned up just enough that the sound bled into the carriage—tinny, excited, alive.
On the screen, a colossal sword descended. Even compressed into pixels and framed by a cheap phone case, the moment hit with the same violent clarity: the sky splitting, lightning sheathing steel, the blade slamming down as if the world itself had been judged and found wanting. The camera shook. A shockwave rolled through the image. Comments streamed past in a waterfall of text and emotes.
“Whoa—Naz is insane!” one of the boys said, his voice cracking with laughter.
“No, look at Roa!” the other one replied, eyes wide. “She’s a demon. This stream is legendary!”
Their excitement was contagious in the way excitement always was. A few heads turned. A woman in a business suit glanced over with mild irritation, then looked away. Someone behind Yu chuckled as if they, too, had seen the clip. The city had decided, overnight, that this was a story worth repeating.
Yu’s stomach tightened. He didn’t look at the video directly. He didn’t need to. The sound alone was enough to bring the memory back—not the clean, edited version.
But the raw thing: ash-filled air, screaming, the feeling of being trapped behind glass while a world burned on the other side. It wasn’t a highlight reel. It wasn’t entertainment. It was— The thought snagged and refused to finish.
The train lurched around a bend. Yu’s grip tightened on the strap. His palm was damp, and the plastic bit into his skin, a small pain he welcomed because it proved he was still here—still in this world, still surrounded by students arguing about clips like it was last night’s game.
He reached his stop and stepped out with the crowd, carried along by the tide of uniforms and briefcases. On the platform, the cold air felt like a slap. It cleared his head for half a second. Only half.
By the time he reached school, the story had already spread. In the hallway, someone was watching a vertical clip on loop, the sound turned down but the captions big and bold. In the classroom, a group near the windows crowded around a desk, their heads bent close, voices overlapping.
“Did you see the cut?” a girl asked, tapping her nails on the table as if she couldn’t sit still. “The moment the sword landed—like, the whole city shook!”
“Who even is he?” another student said, half-laughing. “Naz Galevald? That guy’s cracked.”
“And Roa—Roa’s not a healer, she’s a war crime.” A boy in the back leaned over the aisle, grinning.
“Did you see that kid who got caught in the blast? Like, in the background?” Someone else chimed in, oblivious to the way their words scraped.
“What kid?” a different voice answered immediately.
“Was there someone like that? I didn’t even notice. I only remember Roa-sama being awesome.” Laughter broke out, light and careless. Yu sat at his desk and kept his eyes down.
The student next to him had their phone propped against a pencil case, the clip playing in a loop while they ate a convenience store bread roll. Yu’s gaze drifted to the screen without permission, like his eyes were magnetized.
Yes, it was the same footage. The same city. The same smoke. The same enormous shadow pinned by impossible steel.
But it felt wrong. It wasn’t that the others weren’t watching it. They were watching it. They were watching it hard, rewinding, replaying, turning it into a shared language of awe. The comment section they quoted in class was proof of that—thousands of voices stacked into a single roar of approval.
Yet the battle Yu had watched that night had contained something else entirely. Something that didn’t fit into a “legendary” cut. Something raw and ugly and terrifying in a way that didn’t become cool just because a hero arrived.
I’m not saying they didn’t see it, he thought, the words forming in the quiet part of his mind where no one could laugh at them. But that’s not the battle I saw.
The strange part was his heartbeat. All around him, excitement flickered like electricity. Yu should have been swept up in it, if only by proximity. Instead, his pulse sat low and steady, almost cold. Not calm in the sense of peace—calm in the sense of numbness.
He watched a slow-motion replay of Naz’s line—“Kept you waiting, you piece of shit!”—and felt nothing like admiration. He felt a thin, stubborn anger, like a wire pulled too tight. He lowered his gaze before anyone could see what was on his face.
?
After school, the sky had already shifted toward evening, the light washed thin and gray over the station plaza. People flowed in and out of the gates in waves, voices and footsteps blending into a constant urban murmur. The air smelled like hot oil from a nearby takoyaki stall and the exhaust of buses idling at the curb.
Yu slipped into a café tucked beside the station, the kind designed for turnover—bright lights, narrow counter seats, tables just barely big enough for a tray and a phone. The place was crowded with workers and students killing time, each person sealed in their own pocket of noise.
Yu took a counter seat in the corner where the wall made it harder for people to glance at his screen. He ordered something he didn’t taste and put his earphones in. The plastic tips sat deep in his ears, isolating him from the clatter of cups and the hiss of the espresso machine.
On his phone, the battlefield played again. He wasn’t watching for Naz. He wasn’t watching for Roa. He wasn’t watching for Hanara, either, though her voice had cut through the stream like a knife. He was searching.
A finger flicked. Another clip loaded. Another cut. Another “analysis stream” with a thumbnail of the giant sword and bold text promising secrets and rankings and “TOP 10 MOMENTS.” Yu scrolled until his thumb began to ache. There. There— For a few seconds, beyond the dust clouds and the dramatic framing, he saw her.
A girl lying on rubble, half-hidden by smoke. A bandaged arm against gray stone. A shape being lifted, carried awkwardly—someone’s shoulder under her weight, someone’s hand supporting her head so it didn’t slam back against the broken street.
Rize. The camera cut away almost immediately, snapping back to the “main” action—Naz standing like a silhouette carved out of wrath, Roa’s light spilling over the city, Hanara’s spell circles biting into the Threat’s legs.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
The comment section buzzed as if the brief glimpse of a wounded girl was a punchline:
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Yu’s thumb stopped. He replayed the same three seconds. Again. Again. The café’s background noise washed over him, but inside his earphones the battlefield sound was clear: the low rumble of collapsing stone, distant shouts, the faint crackle of fire. Over it all, the streamer commentary—excited, breathless, addicted to spectacle.
Yu paused the video. There she was, frozen mid-frame, her face half turned away, hair matted with dust. A smear of darker color at her temple that could have been blood or shadow. It was her. It had to be.
Yu stared until the edges of the screen blurred, until his eyes hurt. His hand slowly curled into a fist on the counter. His nails dug into his palm hard enough to sting.
“…‘Mob,’ huh.” His voice was small. Almost swallowed by the café’s chatter. Still, the words came out clean.
The anger he’d been swallowing since morning finally found shape. It wasn’t the explosive rage of someone throwing a chair. It was something worse—controlled, concentrated, sharp.
“She was the first one to fight,” he said, barely above a whisper. No one around him heard. No one around him cared.
On screen, the frozen image of Rize remained untouched by anyone’s attention. The “analysis” overlay circled Naz’s sword trajectory, highlighted Roa’s “insane healing range,” added a countdown timer for Hanara’s binding spell.
No marker pointed to Rize. No caption named her. Not even as the “kid caught in the blast.” Yu’s jaw tightened.
“How can you watch that and feel nothing?” he murmured. He hit play again and kept scrolling. Clip after clip, summary after summary—the same structure repeated like a ritual.
The mysterious giant creature that attacked the city. A desperate crisis. The appearance of the strongest adventurer, Naz Galevald. The heroic struggle of Roa and Hanara. Victory.
Yu clicked his tongue, the sound soft but bitter. Rize wasn’t there. No—he corrected himself immediately, because it mattered.
She was on screen. She existed in the background like a smudge the camera tried to wipe away. There were shots of her being treated, her body limp in Roa’s arms, her breath returning under the wash of light.
But the fact that she had fought—truly fought, with her own blade in her own hands, running toward that gate when everyone else was still scattering—was nowhere. Not in the captions. Not in the streamers’ commentary. Not in the “top moments” lists.
Who drew their blade first? his mind demanded, a question that felt like a splinter under skin. Who ran first to protect that gate?
He opened the search bar, fingers stiff, and typed. Rize. No channel name found. No stream history. He erased it and tried again with different spellings, different spacing, desperate as if the right arrangement of letters might force reality to admit what he knew.
Nothing. It was as if there was a void where she should have been. As if she had never existed in the first place. Yu stared at the clean, polite error message until his vision swam.
“…So that’s how it is.” The words slipped out without permission.
His voice trembled slightly more than he expected. Not from fear—fear had already been burned out of him last night. This was something colder. The world wasn’t just ignoring her. It was erasing her.
The café’s warm air suddenly felt thin. The lights overhead seemed too bright. Yu swallowed and tasted coffee he hadn’t realized he’d been drinking, bitter and burnt. He set the phone down on the counter like it might bite him. He looked at his own hands. They were steady. But inside his chest, something scraped and shifted, trying to become a decision.
?
Night came quietly.
Yu didn’t remember turning on his desk lamp, but it was lit now, casting a pool of warm light across notebooks he hadn’t opened and textbooks he hadn’t read. Shadows pressed into the corners of his room, soft and heavy, the kind that swallowed sound.
His smartphone lay face down beside him. The screen was dark. No notifications chimed. No vibration crawled up the wood of the desk. The device might as well have been a dead thing.
Yu lay with his cheek pressed against the desk, staring at the grain of the wood until patterns formed and dissolved. He could hear his own breathing, the faint hum of the refrigerator somewhere in the apartment, the distant traffic outside. Ordinary sounds.
Videos, articles, summaries—he’d watched them until his eyes burned. No matter how much he searched, he couldn’t find evidence of Rize fighting. Even when she appeared on screen, no one spoke her name. She was treated like scenery. Just a background character. Just a mob. But Yu’s memory refused to cooperate with the world’s version of events.
He could still see her on the rooftop from before, wind tugging at her hair. He could still hear her voice, steady even when afraid. He could still feel the way the frame had strained when the Threat returned, the way the connection shattered like glass under pressure.
And he could still see her, lifted in that monstrous hand, limp as if the world had finally decided to break her. The thought made his throat tighten again.
“…I want to see you,” he whispered. The words came easier than he expected, sliding out like they’d been waiting behind his teeth all day. He didn’t dress them up. He didn’t pretend it was a rational request. It was a confession to empty air.
The room stayed silent. No clock ticked. No curtain stirred. And yet—Yu felt something change. Not a sound. Not a light. Density. As if the air in front of his desk thickened for a heartbeat, as if the space remembered it could be used for something else. Yu lifted his head slowly. Ahead of his gaze, a single point in the empty air blurred.
Only there. Only that spot, as if someone had pressed a thumb against the world and smeared it slightly. The edges of the blur shimmered like heat haze over asphalt in summer, out of place in the cool night air.
Yu’s breath caught. Before he could even blink hard enough to confirm it, the blur rose—unfurling. A frame. It wasn’t his phone. It wasn’t connected to any device. There was no glow from a screen, no interface, no familiar EWS borders.
And yet it was unmistakable. A “frame” suspended in mid-air, thin and flat as glass, reflecting a world that was not his.
Inside it—stone walls. Warm amber lamp light pooled over rough texture, revealing the uneven surface of an inn room, the kind built to survive centuries of wind and weather. The air inside the frame looked warmer than his own room, the colors richer, the shadows softer.
And there—on a bed—Rize was sleeping. Yu’s chest tightened so hard it almost hurt. Her bandaged arm rested atop the sheets, wrapped neatly, the cloth stained faintly darker in spots. The rise and fall of her chest was slow and steady. Her breathing was quiet, rhythmic, the kind of breathing that belonged to someone who had finally been allowed to stop running.
She looked smaller in sleep. Not weak—just unguarded. Yu’s fingers curled against the edge of the desk as if he needed to hold onto something solid.
“…Rize,” he said. He didn’t think. He couldn’t stop himself. His voice was rough from disuse and earlier screaming, but it crossed the room like a thread. It shouldn’t have reached her. It shouldn’t have touched anything beyond the frame.
And yet— Rize’s finger twitched. Just slightly. A tiny motion, barely more than a tremor—like the body reacting to a distant sound in a dream. Like a person on the edge of waking recognizing their name without understanding why.
Yu’s heart slammed so hard it made him dizzy. He leaned forward, mouth opening, desperate to say it again—desperate to prove it wasn’t coincidence, desperate to be seen even once by the world that kept pretending she didn’t exist.
“Rize—” Poof. The frame vanished. Not shattered. Not glitching. Not fading slowly. It popped out of existence like a bubble bursting, leaving nothing but empty air where it had been.
Yu froze mid-breath. The room returned to its original silence, unchanged. The desk lamp hummed faintly. The shadows remained in the corners. His phone stayed face down, dark and dead. No history updated. No notification appeared. No evidence lingered that anything had happened at all.
For a few seconds, Yu couldn’t move. His body stayed locked in the posture of someone who had almost touched something precious and then had it ripped away. His heart buzzed with heat. Not adrenaline—something more intimate, more fragile. He swallowed hard.
“…That wasn’t a dream,” he said softly. He needed the words again, the way he’d needed them earlier. He needed to nail the moment to reality before his mind tried to protect itself by calling it hallucination.
His eyes had seen it. Rize was sleeping. Her finger had moved. Yu sat back slowly, hands shaking now that the miracle had been taken away. No basis. No proof. No logic that could survive daylight. And yet certainty settled in him like a stone.
“…Then it will definitely happen again,” he whispered. He didn’t know why the frame had appeared. He didn’t know why it had vanished. He didn’t know what Hanara had severed, or what the word observation truly meant when it could reach across worlds.
But the scene was burned into him now, branded into his memory with the same clarity as fear. As long as it stayed there, as long as he could still see that inn room and that slow breath, the connection would return.
Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not when he begged. But it would. For this night alone, Yu allowed himself to believe in himself—the powerless version of himself who could do nothing but watch, and still refused to let her be erased.
He reached out toward the empty air where the frame had been, fingers stopping just short of touching nothing. And in the silence of his room, he held onto the only thing he had. Hope.