Yara's boots pressed onto fractured glass—no, it felt like glass, but it pulsed beneath her feet like frozen time. The illusion had ended, and the world glitched back into its chaotic form—distorted streets, floating shards of memory, and twisted remnants of manga panels and frames flickering around her like shattered film reels.
The voice returned. Cold, without form. The Narrator.
"Ooooh, you're back. Took you long enough, little Reality."
Yara remained silent, eyes cold, unmoving. Her hand reached to reload out of reflex, but there was no weapon. Nothing was real here. Just fragmented code, reality-bending pages stitched together with madness.
"I must say, you held your own longer than expected." The voice echoed from all sides. "Was the classroom too sweet? Did the smell of ink on paper, that blurred memory of a mother's laugh—did it tempt you? You were almost lost, weren't you?"
Still, she didn't speak. She didn't give it the satisfaction.
The void around her twisted, as if reacting to the tension she didn't show. Screens hovered in the air—footage from every timeline, every life she never lived. Countless versions of herself. Some laughing. Some dead. Some still human.
And in the center of it all, Zephyra sat on a black armchair—legs crossed, sketching something with a childlike calm. Her white hair with black bangs fell softly over her face. She didn't speak either, but her presence was grounding, almost… too grounded.
The Narrator's laughter came again. Maniacal, echoing, reverberating across realities.
"AHAHAHAHAHH!! There she is! My beautiful anomaly! The one piece of real in this sea of trash pages and discarded arcs!"
Yara's eyes twitched. Just a fraction.
"You still don't get it?" it continued. "You're not fiction. You're not code. You're not AI. You're not a trope. You're not even a plot device."
The void tightened, the glass under her cracking.
"You're real. From the real world. A person plucked out and erased, memories reprogrammed and implanted. I didn't create you—I rebuilt you. Isn't that fun?"
Yara blinked slowly. No reaction.
The Narrator hissed, amused and irritated by her silence.
"Oh come now, don't act like your silence makes you powerful. It makes you entertaining. Your pain, your confusion, your refusal to break—it's what makes this whole world worth continuing."
Zephyra looked up briefly, her pencil pausing as if even she flinched at that remark. Then, calmly, she resumed drawing. A single petal on a page.
"You wonder why?" the voice whispered, growing more personal. "Why I keep you here? Why I made this infinite landscape of chaos?"
The world around her flickered again—glimpses of old side characters, protagonists from forgotten shōnen mangas, dark fantasy antiheroes, slice-of-life mascots, and hollow-eyed villains, all trapped in this blend of manhwas, donghuas, and manga fragments—pieces with no closure.
"Because this world needs a symbol. And symbols? They aren't written. They're born."
Yara took one step forward. The entire void cracked—like the universe itself feared her action.
"You see, the fiction can't kill the Narrator, not even it's author." the voice said, more hushed now. "But reality? Reality can erase fiction. So I brought you in."
Suddenly, a thousand voices cried out—characters screaming from panels, frozen in their final scenes, the last lines before death. All echoing.
"Keep moving forward no matter what was left behind.."
"Tell the stars I never stopped walking, even when the sky fell"
"I kissed regret on the mouth and left it behind like smoke.. So leave me behind and move on..!"
"I want history," it whispered, gently, like a lover speaking to a blade. "True history. And what better catalyst than a real girl lost in a fiction she can't wake up from?"
Yara bit her inner cheek. The metallic taste of blood reminded her she was still there. Still real.
"You were never supposed to survive chapter four," the Narrator admitted.
The world pulsed red.
"You were supposed to die. But look at you now. A protagonist I didnt expect. Surviving monsters. Saving children. Rallying and killing characters. Destroying my rookies. Inspiring Angus."
Yara's hand curled into a fist.
"All I want now is to see it happen. To see you become what I designed this world to kill."
A screen flickered open in front of her, showing the underground base again. Angus, battered and bloody, raised his sword against the void-born monster again and again—still alive, still trying.
"You made him fight without magic," the voice whispered.
Yara's eye twitched.
"You made a side character believe he could be a hero. Just like someone once made you believe you weren't just an ordinary schoolgirl. Hah."
The screens started to close. The illusion began to fade.
Zephyra looked up, finally, as if catching Yara's gaze for a moment.
The little girl didn't smile. She simply handed the sketchbook over.
And on the page—
A sketch of Yara.
Alone.
Facing an infinite army of characters.
But the real twist?
Her reflection behind her… was smiling.
The Narrator cackled again.
"You don't even remember your parents' names, do you?"
Yara didn't move.
"Because I erased them. To make room for pain. Pain makes meaning. Meaning makes chaos. And chaos—oh chaos—makes stories."
The void shuddered violently.
"Now go," the voice snapped. "Go play the part. Go back to the chaos. Go make history."
Yara blinked once.
And the moment her eyes shut—
SNAP.
Reality fractured.
She was gone from the void.
The screens collapsed.
Zephyra stayed behind, watching her leave.
And in the dark, shapeless space, the Narrator began to sing—softly, hauntingly, as if alone with its thoughts.
"We'll meet again… don't know where, don't know when…"
"But I know.. we'll meet again.. some Sunny day.."
But that grin—its grin, though unseen—was wide.
So wide..
Yara blinked.
Once.
And suddenly—she was back.
The smell of scorched concrete. The metallic tang of blood. The echoing silence of aftermath. The void was gone. The voices, the illusions, the crackling void-glass—all erased like bad pencil lines on a page.
Time had resumed where it had paused, like reality had simply waited for her return.
The monster—the Second Rookie Puppet—lay sprawled across the base floor. Its grotesque arms twisted inward, skull-like face cracked open, spilling void ichor across scorched ground. Burned claw marks were etched into the walls, deep enough to make even steel weep. But it no longer moved.
It was dead.
But not by her hand.
She scanned the room.
Side characters huddled in corners—exhausted, frightened, alive. Most avoided her gaze. Some whispered. One bowed their head and muttered the name like a ghostly prayer:
"...Nightmare Zero."
Angus sat slumped against a pillar, his longsword broken halfway down the blade. Blood crusted across his side and a deep purple bruise spread across his ribs. His left eye was bandaged tightly, and he coughed weakly as she approached.
He looked up and smiled, wincing.
"Heh. Figured ye'd be back… Didn't even get a chance to say thanks, lass."
Yara remained still.
Silent.
The weight of her body was steady. Focused. Her short-cropped hair flicked slightly with the breeze filtering in from above. The black gloves on her hands—burned around the seams—still pulsed faintly with the remnants of that casted barrier.
Angus gave a strained chuckle.
"I told 'em… I told 'em you weren't just some merciless ghost walkin' the battlefields. You chose to help. I saw it, when you saved that little girl."
His voice dropped.
"They don't know your name, lass. But I know it's not just 'Nightmare Zero.' Is it?"
Yara's gaze didn't shift.
She didn't nod. She didn't shake her head.
She merely looked.
That was enough for Angus.
He exhaled slowly, then winced again and leaned back. The base was starting to flicker to life again—people moving supplies, tending to wounds, whispering of rebuilding.
A few curious eyes darted her way. Reverent. Fearful. Awed.
She didn't want their praise.
She didn't want their names.
She didn't even want their gratitude.
One girl approached her timidly, holding a water bottle. She didn't accept it. Just stared with those empty, blackened eyes. The girl hesitated. Then turned and walked away.
The weight of memory sat like a shadow across her back. That illusion. That school. The face of her parents—blurred, unrecognizable. Laughter, muffled. A version of herself that never existed. She didn't even know if the life she remembered before chapter four was truly hers—or another cruel fiction designed to keep her docile.
She stepped forward toward Angus.
He straightened, surprised.
Yara raised her hand slowly, placing something on the ground in front of him: a small communicator stone. A short-range one. It shimmered faintly with embedded runes—techno-magic, hybrid class.
It meant goodbye.
And she turned.
Walked.
Through the cracked tunnels. Past the broken corpses of the nullifying puppet. Past the frightened faces and the quiet murmurs. Her boots echoed on the stone, firm, resolute, final.
Angus stared at the communicator, then up at her fading figure.
"…So that's it, then?" he murmured to no one.
One of the magicians nearby whispered, "Where is she going?"
"To hunt a god," Angus said.
---
Outside, the world welcomed her with cold wind and a sunless sky.
The combined universe continued to warp with every hour—cityscapes melded with enchanted forests, floating steampunk train lines crossed into wuxia mountaintops, and anime-style war zones bled into ruined manhwa metropolises.
The world was still mutating.
Still unfinished.
Still written.
She paused on a high ledge overlooking what once was a Korean skyline. Below her, hollow remnants of past worlds drifted like forgotten frames in a dying animation.
She lit a cigarette.
Her eyes gleamed through the smoke. Empty. Focused.
No one followed her.
No one dared.
Far above, in the farthest corner of the twisted sky, a ripple pulsed. A faint flicker. Like someone watching.
And somewhere within a dimension with no shape, no light, no logic—an entity without form grinned.
The Narrator chuckled softly.
"She left the base. Heh. As expected."
Zephyra sat beside it, sketching again.
"She doesn't even remember the names of her parents. Doesn't recall where her real life ended or this began. Good, good…"
The Narrator's tone deepened, slithering with amusement.
"She thinks she can kill me. End me. Rewrite me. But what she doesn't know… what none of them know…"
It leaned closer to the screen, voice lowering to a whisper that echoed across infinite timelines.
Pause.
"Readers.. keep this to yourselves.. Got it?"
Resume.
"…is that I didn't create this game."
"I became its reason why it was made."
With that, the feed cut.
But in the broken cityscape, Yara—Nightmare Zero—walked forward, a shadow among shadows, hunting a god among ghosts.
---
End of Chapter twenty.. Readers.