Yu’s room after school had the uneasy stillness of a place pretending to be ordinary.

  A half-open textbook lay face-down across his desk, pages bent where he’d stopped mid-sentence. Mechanical pencils were scattered like dropped needles, one rolling against a smudged eraser that had lost its corners weeks ago.

  A sticky note clung to the edge of a notebook—reminder for an assignment he had already forgotten the moment he stepped through the door. Even the air smelled like routine: faint detergent from his uniform, dry paper, and the weak, stale sweetness of the convenience-store snack he’d eaten without tasting.

  He was supposed to be doing homework. Instead, his gaze was pinned to the smartphone in his hands.

  Lately, the routine had become absurdly consistent, like a ritual that had replaced everything else. He’d come home, tossed his bag aside with a dull thump, dropped into his desk chair, and opened his notebook out of habit—then stopped. The notebook was just a prop now. The real first step, the only step that mattered, was drawing his phone into both palms as if it could keep him from falling apart.

  It felt less like holding a device and more like holding a fragile door. At first, calling her name had been awkward. The syllables had stuck in his throat, too intimate to say aloud to an empty room. He’d worried the neighbors might hear through the thin walls, worried he would sound delusional, worried—most of all—that nothing would answer and the silence would prove he’d imagined everything.

  Now the awkwardness was almost gone. His tongue moved naturally. His breath adjusted without conscious effort. Even the way his heart started racing before he spoke had become familiar, filed under usual alongside the mundane sensations of being alive. His fingertips dampened against the phone’s smooth casing, sweat beading where his grip tightened. That, too, no longer surprised him. His body learned anticipation the way it learned habit. It didn’t ask if it was reasonable.

  It simply prepared. Yu drew in a slow breath through his nose, held it for a beat, and let it out carefully, like he was trying to steady a trembling line. His room was quiet enough that he could hear his wall clock ticking. The sound wasn’t comforting. It felt like pressure, like time tapping its nails against the door.

  “Rize.” He swallowed, and the phone seemed heavier, as if gravity itself had decided to make a point. The name left his mouth with a soft certainty, and the world reacted.

  Not dramatically—at first. Just a subtle shiver in the air, like heat haze rising off asphalt. The stack of printed handouts near the corner of his desk rustled as if a draft had slipped beneath his window frame, even though the window was closed. A faint, pale light spilled across the phone’s screen, washing out the icons and notifications until they looked like weak stains under bleaching sun.

  Then the space in front of him answered. A frame opened. It wasn’t a screen in his hands anymore. A rectangular outline floated in midair, suspended as if reality had forgotten how to behave. It didn’t glow with the clean brightness of a display. The light was thin and cold, more like moonlight filtered through dirty glass. The edges trembled slightly, like something alive trying to stabilize its shape.

  Yu’s breath caught in his throat. The hairs along his arms lifted. The picture inside the frame sharpened, colors correcting themselves in small pulses, and a room appeared—stone, dim, real. The kind of texture a normal video never captured properly. He could almost feel the grit in the mortar lines just by looking at it.

  His hands tightened around the phone, though he didn’t know why. The phone was irrelevant now. The frame existed whether he held anything or not. It’s here. She’s here.

  ?

  The image resolved into the interior of a stone inn.

  The room on the other side looked colder than his, not just in temperature but in presence. Rough-hewn stone walls caught lamplight in uneven patches, making the shadows deeper where the light couldn’t reach. A wooden bed sat against one wall with a thick blanket folded at the foot. A small table held a pitcher and a cup, and the air looked faintly dusty, as if the room had been used by too many travelers carrying road grit into every corner.

  Rize sat upright on the bed. The first thing Yu noticed was her posture—straight, controlled, as if she refused to let the room decide what she was allowed to be. Heavy bandages that had wrapped her shoulders and arms were mostly gone now. Pale marks remained where cloth had pressed into skin. Her shoulders moved, subtly but freely, and when she shifted her hands in her lap, it was with the careful confidence of someone testing their own body and finding it answered.

  “…Connected,” Yu said, the word escaping like relief. He made a sound he didn’t realize he’d been holding back, something between a gasp and a laugh.

  “It feels like…” she said, voice quieter than the inn’s stillness, “…it lasts longer than before.” Rize’s eyes brightened when she saw him. She smiled—not wide, not carefree, but real. It softened her face in a way the battlefields never did.

  Yu’s throat tightened. He nodded, too quickly, as if moving would keep the frame from collapsing.

  “Did you go out for a request today?” he asked. He tried to make it sound casual, tried to pretend this was normal conversation between people who lived in the same world.

  Rize shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Just getting my body used to moving.” Her fingers flexed once, then she drew a slow breath. “But I’m fine now.” The words were calm, but he heard the thinness under them—the residue of fatigue, the kind that clung to someone even after wounds closed. Her eyes were steady, though. Her voice didn’t shake.

  Yu stared at her face, searching it the way he searched the frame for glitches. He exhaled and only then realized his shoulders had been locked high with tension.

  Recently, this was what their connection had become. Not a dramatic rescue or a desperate warning. Sometimes it was only a few minutes. Sometimes it was broken fragments of words, the frame sputtering out before either of them could say what mattered. But lately, more often, they had been given these small stretches of time where they could simply exist with each other—exchange something ordinary, even if the ordinary was built on impossibility.

  Today, Rize’s posture was firm. Her words were clear. The simple statement I’m fine now seeped into Yu’s chest slowly, easing a knot he’d been carrying for days without naming it. She’s really… strong. The thought wasn’t admiration in the abstract. It was something heavier. He still remembered the day she fell. The moment her body stopped obeying her will and gave in to damage.

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  The sight of her collapsing had burned itself into his memory like a brand—something he couldn’t scrape off no matter how many times he replayed the archives and tried to tell himself it would turn out differently.

  And now she was here, sitting up straight, breathing, looking at him like she expected tomorrow. That alone felt like a miracle. Yu’s gaze dropped to his own hand resting on the desk’s edge. His palm was slightly damp. He clenched it, then loosened it, as if testing whether he could control even that.

  “It’s amazing,” he said, before he fully understood what he was about to say, “that you can say you’re fine.”

  “What is?” she asked. Rize tilted her head a little, a small movement that came through the frame with unsettling clarity.

  Yu looked away for a split second, not because he wanted to hide but because he needed to find words that didn’t make him sound like a child. Silence fell, only a few seconds, but it felt like the frame itself held still to listen.

  “…I’m frustrated.” His lips trembled. He forced them to move. The moment the word left him, his heart slammed against his ribs as if he’d confessed something forbidden. What shocked him most wasn’t the content—it was the sound of his own voice. It came out weaker than he expected, stripped of the certainty he pretended to have.

  Rize’s gaze sharpened. Her eyes narrowed slightly, not with anger, but with focus.

  “Frustrated?” she repeated. Yu swallowed.

  “Frustrated at myself,” he said, and the phrase cracked something inside him. “For being unable to do anything. Back then, I couldn’t protect you.” His jaw tightened, and his voice turned choppy, each sentence catching on the next. “I just watched.” His breath hitched. He stared down at the open notebook on his desk, but the ink lines blurred, useless. His fingers curled into a fist so tight his knuckles ached. “I am… truly powerless,” he said.

  On the other side of the frame, Rize didn’t interrupt. She watched him, silent, and the absence of immediate comfort made the confession feel sharper. Yu felt her attention like weight. He waited, and in the wait the ticking clock behind him grew louder, hammering his eardrums with the steady announcement that time didn’t pause for shame.

  Rize’s eyes held no blame. There was no softness that tried to erase his feelings, either. There was only a plain, steady light—as if she was looking directly at the truth and refusing to lie about it. Then her lips parted, and her voice came low.

  ?

  “…So?” Rize said.

  The single word punched the air out of Yu’s lungs. His heartbeat surged into his ears. Cold sweat slid across his palms, and his grip on the phone tightened out of instinct, even though the phone wasn’t the connection anymore. It was just something to hold onto.

  Rize leaned forward slightly, and he saw a faint tremor in the way her shoulders moved, like a memory tugging at her muscles.

  “Do you remember?” she asked. Her voice didn’t rise, but it sharpened. “I was grabbed by that hand… and I thought I was going to be crushed.” As she spoke, her shoulders shook once, small and involuntary, and the terror of that moment leaked through the frame like cold fog. Yu’s stomach tightened. He bit the inside of his cheek, eyes fixed on the frame’s lower edge because looking at her face felt unbearable. “Still,” Rize continued, and her voice trembled just enough to betray what it cost her to say it, “I screamed desperately.”

  “Help me, Yu. Help me!” She drew a breath, and then she said it—the words that had been carved into Yu’s memory, the ones he heard every time he closed his eyes. The sentence echoed in Yu’s skull like a bell struck too hard. Her voice calling his name in panic. The helplessness. The way his own body had frozen on his side of the world, trapped behind glass and distance and rules he didn’t understand. Shame surged hot in his chest, burning away whatever defensiveness he might have had.

  “So,” she said quietly, “what could you do?” Rize’s expression didn’t soften. If anything, her eyes steadied further.

  The question gouged into him. Yu tried to answer. His throat closed. His lips parted and nothing came out. Silence pooled between them, heavy and thick, as if the air itself had decided to become liquid.

  In his mind, the scene replayed without permission. Rize hanging in the grip of something vast, her body small and fragile against impossible force. His hand reaching out, desperate, useless. His voice trapped behind a screen that didn’t care. I couldn’t do anything. His fingers trembled against the desk’s edge. A pen near his hand bounced from the vibration, tapping once and nearly rolling off before stopping. The trivial noise stabbed him, too—like the universe mocking him with how easily objects moved when he couldn’t.

  Yu raised his face slowly. It didn’t matter if his voice shook. It didn’t matter if he sounded pathetic. If he stayed silent, he would stay the same. He drew in a breath that scraped his throat and forced his eyes to meet hers.

  “…Even so,” he said, and his voice came out rough but unbroken, “I won’t give up anymore.” The words pulled heat up from somewhere deep, something raw and stubborn that didn’t care about logic. His breathing was uneven, but his voice didn’t collapse. He leaned forward without realizing, as if closing the distance could make the promise more real.

  Yu stared straight at Rize.

  “Next time,” he said, and the phrase rang with a clarity that surprised even him, “I will definitely— I will save you.” His jaw clenched on the words, turning them into something hard enough to bite. “No matter what happens. Absolutely.” For a heartbeat, the room around him felt tense, like a wire pulled tight. The distant sound of a dog barking outside his window faded behind the force of his own declaration. Even the ticking of the clock seemed to hesitate.

  “…Optimistic, aren’t you?”Rize said. She narrowed her eyes, and she let out a short breath that was almost a laugh.

  But her tone wavered just slightly, and Yu felt it like a crack in armor—proof that his words had reached her somewhere she didn’t want to admit.

  “It’s not a lie,” Yu shot back, and he didn’t look away. The heat in his chest washed away reason until there was only one clean impulse left: protect. His fingers flexed, and the desire to do something—anything—spiked so sharp it hurt.

  Then the frame reacted. A harsh zzzzt crawled along the edge of the rectangle, like static tearing through cloth. Pale light pulsed, brightening and dimming in quick breaths. The air in Yu’s room thickened for a split second, then thinned, like someone had pulled oxygen out of it. His ears rang with a low groan that didn’t come from the phone or the clock or the street outside.

  The pen on his desk vibrated minutely, trembling as if something unseen was passing through the wood. The eraser began to roll, slow and deliberate, without being touched. Yu’s skin prickled. The window glass creaked faintly, a thin complaint. The fluorescent lamp above him blinked once—off, on—casting the room into a strobe of shadow.

  His stomach dropped. What is this? He didn’t get time to finish the thought. The heat in his chest surged again, and this time it didn’t stay contained. It pushed up his throat and into his limbs, turning impulse into movement.

  “…Rize,” Yu said, and the name came out like a hook thrown into the dark. Yu took a step forward. He extended his hand toward the frame. There should have been cold glass. A hard, indifferent surface. The familiar barrier.

  Instead, his fingertips sank in without resistance, the way fingers sink through water’s skin. The frame rippled around his hand. Light bent, warping like a lens trying to decide what was allowed to exist. Yu’s breath stopped. Something touched him back. Not metal, not glass, not air. A definite softness pressed against his palm. Warm. Slender. Trembling. A shoulder. Undeniably human.

  Yu’s heart jumped so violently it felt like it might tear free. His hand froze in place, half inside the frame, and sensation flooded him with frightening clarity—the living heat of skin, the minute shiver of muscle beneath it, the reality of another person where there should have been only distance. He snapped his gaze up.

  Rize’s eyes were wide, shock making her look younger for an instant. Her body had gone still on the bed, as if she didn’t dare move and break whatever this was. Her lips parted, and her breath hitched, matching his.

  “…Eh?” Their voices overlapped perfectly, startled in the same instant, the same disbelief spilling from two different worlds.