Chapter 2: Game World
"Young Master."
The voice came from somewhere close, thick, like it had to travel through water before it reached me.
"Young Master, can you hear me?"
Instead of an answer, what came out was a noise, half word and cough.
My own voice, unfamiliar, coming out of a throat that didn’t feel like mine.
I tried to move and my body answered with pain. It came in one wave and then it was gone, leaving me shaking, soaked through, my chest working hard just to pull in air.
"...What the hell was that," I managed, once breathing again felt possible.
I dragged myself off the bed because some instinct insisted I needed to look at something, and the only candidate in the room was the mirror standing against the far wall, dark wood,
The face in the glass wasn’t mine.
I stood there long enough to be sure of that. Then I looked down, and stood there longer.
Fat. Not softened-around-the-middle fat. The kind with a story behind it.
No explanation was going to make that better, so I didn’t waste time looking for one. I pinched the back of my own hand instead, hard, out of habit.
It hurt.
Violet came to mind before anything else did something she’d said weeks ago, half a joke at the time.
Nobody knows what happens to the ones who go missing. Reality Walkers. A guild hall growing out of a convenience store. Whether this was what it looked like from the other side of one of those gaps.
I didn’t get long to sit with that before my own body demanded equal attention.
I pushed myself up on one elbow. It gave out immediately, and the pillow caught me.
Second attempt, both arms this time. Upright it took to swing my legs off the bed, at which point the legs made it very clear: nobody had consulted them on this plan.
I grabbed the nightstand to keep from going down sideways.
I stood anyway. One step toward the wardrobe. A second step, and winded.
Nothing answered. No warmth, no pull, no anything.
I punched the wall instead, mostly out of frustration, and regretted it immediately. Pain bloomed across my knuckles, sharp and stupid and entirely deserved.
That was the sound that brought someone running.
****
The door swung open hard enough to hit the wall, and a young man in a steward’s coat skidded to a stop just inside it, breathing like he’d taken the stairs at speed.
"Young Master!"
He crossed the room in four strides and got an arm under me before I’d decided whether I needed one.
Up close, his expression softened with relief before tightening again, as though he’d shown more than he’d meant to.
"Are you injured? Should I call for..."
"I’m fine," I said, which wasn’t remotely true, and then, because his grip was the only thing currently keeping me vertical, added, "Thanks."
His hand went still on my arm.
The room, which had been merely tense, went somewhere past silent.
"...Young Master?"
"What."
"Nothing. Forgive me." He didn’t finish whatever else he’d started to say. He set me down on the edge of the bed, bowed and left at a pace just shy of fleeing.
***
I used the steward’s absence to look at the room properly.
A silver tray sat on the desk, three days of dessert gone half to stone, each one abandoned after only a few bites. Clothes that cost more than my old apartment lay balled up across the floor like laundry day had never been invented.
A training sword leaned in the corner with a clean snap through the blade. A stack of letters sat under a paperweight, several different handwritings, none of the seals broken.
I crouched and found three empty glass bottles rolled against the desk leg apothecary labels,for sleep, the dosage line scratched off each one.
Lazy, I thought, looking at the desserts.
I looked at the sword next.
No. I revised. Ashamed.
The letters confirmed what I was starting to suspect. Itsuki Amagi had a habit of leaving things unfinished.
On the vanity sat a small hand mirror, face-down.
When I turned it over, the glass had been shattered once and carefully fitted back into its frame. The polish hid the sharp edges, but not the cracks.
Tucked beneath a stack of books at the bottom of the vanity sat a folded letter with its wax seal already broken. It wasn’t hidden so much as forgotten.
The academy crest caught my eye first. Two lines of formal rejection showed above the fold.
I didn’t need to read the rest of it to know what kind of letter it was.
Picking the hand mirror back up brought a memory with it fast, uninvited, gone before I could brace for it.
The desk gave me a quieter one. The sword, when I made myself touch it, gave me the worst: a courtyard, an audience, a blade leaving my hand before I meant to let go of it, and the particular silence that follows a public failure.
I didn’t pick up anything else for a while.
A portrait hung near the door. I hadn’t noticed a girl, painted mid laugh. That one didn’t give me a memory.
It gave me a feeling that wasn’t mine, sitting in my chest like it had been there the whole time, waiting for a body to come back and claim it.
I didn’t know her name yet. Something in me already hated her anyway.
***
The rest of it stopped arriving one fragment at a time. It came all at once instead, dense and overlapping, none of it mine, and I was on the floor before I’d made sense.
When I came back, the room was quiet, and two questions were already waiting, like they’d gotten there first and sat down.
Can I go back?
What happens to Yui?
I didn’t answer either one. I let the memories settle instead.
Itsuki Amagi.
Only son and heir of House Amagi, wardens of the Northern March. A fortress pretending to be a household.
The courtyard saw more swordwork than conversation, the Duke’s moods set the rhythm of the estate, and where everyone in the building had an opinion about the adopted daughter and exactly zero kind words for the actual heir.
In whatever life I’d had before this one, I had a sister who shared my birthday and most of my childhood, currently lying in a hospital bed I visited because it was the only thing left I could still do for her.
I’d never gotten around to telling her where the studio’s flagship project had ended up. I supposed it didn’t matter now whether I ever did.
I pulled myself to the window, mostly to have something to do with my hands.
Snow fell in quiet contradictions. One flurry drifted toward the ground while another climbed past it.
Mana lamps lined the courtyard path below, lighting one after another as servants walked past, each pool of blue fading behind them.
Further out, a shape with too many wings for any bird I knew passed low over the wall and didn’t slow for the guards at the gate, who didn’t bother looking up.
Past all of it, a spire caught the moonlight at an angle I’d personally spent two weeks getting right in a lighting pass, eighteen months ago, for a building I’d never once seen finished in any trailer.
Aurelian Academy.
Whoever had designed the mountains had clearly prioritized spectacle over practicality. The peaks were too sharp, the ridgelines almost unnaturally clean, arranged to look perfect from exactly this angle.
Beautiful to look at. Miserable if anyone ever had to march an army through them.
Even the castle wall gave the illusion away.
Along the northern ridge, sections of it disappeared straight into the mountainside without so much as a foundation, like someone had hidden the seams instead of finishing the work.
I remembered flagging that, once. Nobody had considered it worth fixing.
The Forgotten Sin of Heaven.
I knew the building. I didn’t know the plot. That was the part that should have scared me more than it did.
Itsuki Amagi had shown up exactly once in any document I’d ever read and not the novel, because I’d never read the novel, just the internal wiki page the writers kept for characters who weren’t getting screen time.
A single paragraph, tagged cut content, low priority, filed in the same folder as the Arc 4 outline.
Itsuki Amagi. Disowned heir. Dies off-page during the Hollow March, killed by [ANTAGONIST TBD].
Iris Amagi’s entry ran four pages longer.
Hers always did the adopted daughter whose talent made people stop talking mid sentence when they saw it, several arcs further than the studio had ever gotten to build, who went on to earn a title that made entire kingdoms reconsider their borders.
The Empress.
I’d filled that bracket in myself eighteen months ago. Before she had a face. Before she had a proper name. Before tonight, when I’d loaded her up one last time just to hear my own terrible placeholder line again.
Not something worth thinking too hard about yet.
The door was the first thing I tried.
It should have been simple. Open the door, walk out, find someone who could explain why my life had apparently decided to become a problem.
Except the handle didn’t turn.
It wasn’t locked. That would have been normal.
"Of course."
The window was my next option. It opened easily, which was almost worse. For a moment, I actually considered climbing out.
Then I looked down.
The courtyard was much farther away than this current body seemed to think was reasonable.
Right. That was another problem.
This body.
I stepped back from the window and tried calling for someone.
"Steward."
Nothing.
I frowned and tried again, louder this time.
"Steward!"
Still nothing.
The silence that followed was almost insulting.
Then it hit me.
Everyone in this house probably knew exactly what Itsuki Amagi sounded like when he raised his voice. They knew the tone, the volume, the warning hidden behind every word.
And judging by how quickly they disappeared whenever he called for them, they’d probably decided the safest strategy was pretending they hadn’t heard anything at all.
I was still working out when the air in front of me folded, and a single black feather drifted down out of nothing, unfolding before it ever touched the floor.
A blue panel bloomed into the space beside it.
[Notice: an unregistered soul has been detected occupying contracted property. The Envious Compact does not extend credit to free riders.]
Great. A contract.
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