First (4)
First (4)
Time inside the room moved slowly, thick with weight.
Or maybe it had stopped altogether.
Knowing that dying just meant coming back didn't exactly make time feel precious.
I started each morning by counting the empty bottles scattered across the floor.
I ended each night by counting the patterns on the ceiling and the stains spreading across the damp wallpaper, until the alcohol finally dragged me under.
That morning was no different.
I woke to a vicious hangover, sour bile climbing up my throat.
I staggered to the sink, turned the tap, and splashed cold water on my face again and again. Then I lifted my dripping face to the mirror.
A stranger stood in the glass.
The skin beneath his eyes was dark and sunken. His cheeks were gaunt, nearly skeletal.
Several days of unchecked stubble covered his face in a filthy scruff.
He looked nothing like the name "Ravin Edelgard" was supposed to carry. Just a broken wreck on the verge of collapse.
Maybe this is who I really am.
I'd spent so long flailing at pointless things — trying to change my reputation, win over my fiancée, get into the good graces of the half-sister who'd someday inherit the family and had never once approved of me.
A thought surfaced, quiet and sudden.
If everything was already finished.
If all that was left was getting thrown out of the family and the Academy, left on the street with nothing.
Did I really need to sit here, in this dark, damp corner of a room, and wait patiently for whatever ending was coming?
I didn't know what the Ending was. Didn't know what I was supposed to collect.
Could've been a hallucination for all I knew.
This wasn't an impulse born of hope or will. It came from somewhere far from either.
The same impulse that had made me grab the revolver when Levina told me I'd been expelled from the family.
Or the way a condemned man carefully chooses his last meal.
An oddly light feeling.
Against my own mood, I dragged my heavy body upright. I grabbed the wrinkled uniform draped haphazardly over the hanger and pulled it on.
The shoulder seams sat wrong. The clothes carried a faint, stale reek.
When I opened the door and stepped into the hallway, the Academy's morning landscape felt foreign in a way that caught in my chest.
Sunlight streaming through the windows. Students laughing with bright, careless energy. The constant hurried rhythm of footsteps moving up and down the corridor.
All of it felt like a story from another world — one that had nothing to do with me.
I walked through them like a ghost, moving without direction.
There was no destination. I just went where my feet took me.
Countless gazes brushed past and glanced away.
Some looks carried open contempt. Some held cheap curiosity. Others flicked away fast, the way people recoil from filth on the roadside.
Plenty of students in this Academy knew my face.
Famous enough. I could take pride in that much.
Born into a prestigious family, spent every moment acting like a degenerate, got kicked out to the Academy, and still couldn't stop — challenged the original protagonist, or in other words a commoner with a little too much talent and a lot too much arrogance, Kyle, to a duel and lost in the most humiliating fashion.
That was who the world knew me to be.
Regrettably, none of it was my doing.
It was all Ravin.
If I'd entered this body just three days earlier — hell, even one day — I never would have done something that stupid.
Not that I wanted to live here in the first place.
Still wandering without purpose, I passed near the lecture hall where the advanced magical herbology course was held.
Class must have just ended. The doors opened, and a tide of familiar faces poured out.
And among them, Serepina.
In just a few days, she'd grown visibly gaunt.
The golden hair she'd always maintained with meticulous care looked dry and dull. Her pale face carried deep shadows of exhaustion.
Though her green eyes still shone with their usual beauty.
And that light turned toward me.
Our eyes met.
Serepina's green eyes widened.
Her lips parted as if to speak, then pressed together. She bit down on her lower lip.
Her expression was a tangled mess — bewilderment, the faintest trace of relief, guilt, hatred, all layered on top of one another.
Ravin had no desire for another miserable argument. He turned away without a word.
No voice called out from behind him.
They weren't in a place for that anymore.
Serepina stared blankly at Ravin's retreating back after he glanced past her and kept walking.
His shoulders looked narrower than she remembered. His footsteps carried no weight at all.
A sickly plant about to wither and twist into itself. A disheveled vagrant sprawled on the roadside. There wasn't much difference between those things and a man who had failed at everything.
"Hey, that person who just passed... wasn't that Ravin Edelgard?"
Her friend Elise tugged at her arm.
Serepina jerked back to the present.
"He looked horrible. Like a corpse."
She couldn't form a reply.
She just bit her lip.
"Serepina? What's wrong? You don't look well."
Elise jerked her chin toward the end of the hallway, where Ravin had disappeared, her voice dripping with contempt.
"Is it because of that bastard? I heard you're finally breaking off the engagement?"
"...Yeah."
Serepina forced the word out.
"Don't make that face over trash like him. You should be celebrating! You're finally free of that degenerate!"
Celebration.
The exact words she'd wanted to hear for so long.
So why did hearing them now feel like something was lodged in her chest?
Instead of relief at escaping a suffocating chain, an emotion she couldn't name filled Serepina's heart to the brim.
She couldn't get that day out of her head. Couldn't forget Ravin's expression.
When he'd heard that she'd prayed for his death, his eyes hadn't shown surprise or anger.
He'd just stared at her, empty, as if nothing about it interested him at all.
"Look at him. A complete wreck. Word is the family's about to throw him out too. Guess he's got nowhere left to go. Reaps what he sows, I suppose."
Serepina couldn't answer any of them.
Her eyes didn't see a drunk, staggering degenerate. They shimmered with the image of the childhood friend she'd always had to look after.
She couldn't focus on her friends' conversation anymore.
She stared blankly at the end of the hallway where Ravin had vanished.
Serepina couldn't concentrate in any of her classes that afternoon.
The professor's voice droned past her ears like meaningless noise. The letters in her textbooks looked like nothing but an arrangement of arbitrary symbols.
The moment class ended, she declined her friends' dinner invitation and headed straight for the dormitory.
She returned to her room. The instant the door closed behind her, the breath she'd been holding broke free.
She slid down against the door and sat on the floor.
Everything in the spacious, elegant room felt foreign.
It's over.
She'd thought so. Thought she'd finally ended an unbearable relationship and claimed her freedom at last.
Serepina opened a drawer.
Inside were faded letters and a single dried lilac bloom. She couldn't even remember when she'd received it.
She gazed at them for a very long time.
* * *
Ravin shoved through the crowds filling the hallways, pushing past students, walking blindly through the labyrinthine corridors.
He didn't know where he was going.
The only thought in his head was getting out. Getting away from this place, from this unbearable place.
Everywhere you looked — more of these goddamn idiots in the same goddamn uniform.
What was so happy about their lives that they could walk around grinning like that?
Some of us were going insane just wanting out.
After walking for what felt like a long while, he found himself standing in front of an old tower, tucked into the most secluded corner of the Academy.
The same spire he'd once stared at vacantly through his window.
It had been out of use for a long time. Ivy sprawled across the walls like scar tissue. The entrance was shut tight.
He looked up at the tower.
Without hesitation, he grabbed the firmly closed door handle and wrenched it open.
With a screech, the rusted hinges screamed.
The door swung wide, and the smell of trapped decades — dust and mildew — blasted out.
Inside was dark and cool.
A narrow spiral staircase stretched endlessly upward.
Step by step, he began to climb.
The wooden stairs groaned underfoot with every shift of weight, threatening to splinter.
Thin shafts of light slipped through narrow window slits in the wall, illuminating the dust suspended in the air.
How long had he been climbing?
The stairs ended at last before a small wooden door.
He pushed it open. A gust of wind and the wide-open sky burst into view.
The top of the tower. A narrow space hemmed in by a low railing.
He walked to the railing and looked down.
The entire Academy spread out below him.
The convoluted buildings he'd been wandering through minutes ago. The plaza where students scuttled like ants. The dormitories and the library far in the distance.
He'd once wondered where Serepina's landscape painting had been drawn from. This must have been the spot.
The wind lashed his hair around wildly.
He pulled a crumpled cigarette pack from his pocket and lit the last rolled tobacco inside.
The acrid smoke hit the wind and scattered instantly.
He stood at the railing, looking down for a long time.
[Collect the Endings. 1/?]
[Reward: Return to the Original World]
Even with the message floating right in front of his eyes — practically telling him to jump — he didn't feel the urge.
He'd just fail anyway. No point in repeating something painful.
And death aside, high places scared him a little.
At the top of the tower, he stood looking down for a long while.
The view was better than he'd expected.
Looking down at students moving like ants, buildings that looked like toys — it came with a strange sense of liberation. As if he'd become something like a god.
It didn't last long.
The cigarette had already burned down to the filter.
He stepped onto the creaking wooden stairs and began the slow climb down the spire.
The world was still exactly where he'd left it.
Leaving the darkness and dust and the smell of time behind, he stepped back into the hallway. The sun was already tilting west.
He needed to get back to his room.
Without alcohol, the headaches that felt like his skull was splitting open and the suffocating reality would be impossible to endure.
He cut across the Academy's back paths toward the dormitory.
A shortcut few people used.
That was when several students stepped into his path.
He stopped. No need to check their faces.
The cheap cologne and low-grade tobacco smoke wafting off them were recognition enough.
Faces he knew far too well.