Yu Shiro’s desk had disappeared beneath a flood of textbooks and worksheets.

  Not neatly stacked—slumped. A chemistry reference book lay open facedown like it had fainted. A history text had been shoved under a thin pile of printouts, its corners peeking out like it was trying to breathe. The worksheets themselves were a patchwork of abandoned effort: pencil lines that started confidently and then stopped, margins crowded with half-formed calculations, and one long string of symbols that simply ran out of courage.

  A red pen had circled a problem so aggressively the paper was faintly scored. Review.　That single word looked less like instruction and more like a verdict.

  His mechanical pencil lay across an open notebook, thrown there with the careless finality of someone who knew he wouldn’t pick it up again. The lead at the tip was cracked, hanging on by a hairline fracture, as if even the graphite had been worn down by indecision.

  Yu wasn’t working anymore. He wasn’t even pretending to. His phone—propped upright against a stack of reference books at the edge of the desk—spilled light and sound into the dim room like a spill you couldn’t mop up.

  The curtains were drawn just enough to let in a weak strip of evening color, the sky outside fading toward gray. In the glow of the screen, dust floated through the air in slow, lazy spirals. The room carried the stale warmth of electronics left running too long, and the faint scent of paper—old ink, graphite, and the dry bite of eraser shavings.

  At the top of the phone screen, a notification blinked.

  [EWS – Live Now: Claval in Avras]

  And there she was—Claval—filling the screen with another world. Avras spread wide behind her: a grand avenue paved with pale stone, buildings lined in orderly rows, arches rising like ribs into the sky. Sunlight washed over everything, too bright and too clean to belong to the place Yu was sitting. The camera followed as she moved, stable and smooth, keeping her dead center like the world itself had agreed she was the point.

  She vaulted over a chunk of broken masonry and landed without hesitation, silver hair flashing as it caught the light. Her blue cloak snapped behind her, the fabric twisting in sharp ribbons with every step. She looked like she belonged in motion—like stillness would be unnatural for her.

  A message popped up along the side of the screen, overlaying the stream.

  Haru_K: The goddess is steamrolling again lol

  Harukawa. Classmate. The only person in his life who could casually send something like that and mean it.

  “Watching,” Yu murmured, thumb tapping out the shortest reply he could manage.

  Yu: Watching.

  The stream’s audio surged as if reacting to his attention. A mob of magical beasts spilled into the avenue from the side streets—snarling bodies warped by mana, hides thick with unnatural growth, eyes glowing like embers. Their footsteps slapped against stone, claws scraping as they accelerated. The sound was ugly and raw, layered with the distant cries of civilians and the harsh echo of chaos bouncing off old walls.

  Claval didn’t retreat. She stepped forward. Her sword came up in a smooth arc. Light tore across the avenue. It wasn’t just a slash of steel. It was a radiant blade that extended beyond the weapon’s edge, a clean line of brilliance that carved the air and stayed there for a fraction of a second like a wound in reality.

  The impact was immediate—beasts split, thrown backward, their bodies collapsing into the stone with wet finality. Cobblestones cracked under the shockwave, chips skittering across the ground like thrown dice.

  She moved again, faster than the camera should have been able to follow, and yet the stream kept up. A second arc of light crossed the first, forming a bright X that burst into sparks. The avenue lit up as if someone had pulled stage lights from the sky and aimed them directly at her.

  The comment feed rained down the side of the screen, a waterfall that never paused long enough to read cleanly.

  “Too strong,” someone wrote.

  “Hearts, hearts, hearts,” another line, just symbols tumbling endlessly.

  “Archived!”—a clipper bragging.

  “New best girl,” more declarations, more devotion.

  Yu watched the text scroll like it belonged to a world adjacent to his own, a language he understood only in fragments. The excitement was there, obvious, contagious in theory.

  But it didn’t reach him. His chest tightened anyway—an ache that didn’t match the tone of the stream. It wasn’t admiration. It wasn’t hype. It was something messier, something that tasted like dry metal at the back of his throat.

  “…She’s too strong,” Yu said aloud. His own voice sounded small in the room. It didn’t fit with the roar coming through his earphones, with the crisp clarity of the other world.

  And yet the words felt true in a way his homework never had. The paper on his desk might as well have been blank. The math problems were just shapes now—symbols without weight. Between equations, his earlier scribbles sat like panic trapped in graphite: crooked lines, messy spirals, meaningless marks that looked like they were trying to crawl off the page. Nothing in this room held him in place. The phone did.

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  On screen, Claval cut through another wave of beasts with the same calm efficiency. Her hair flashed silver, her cloak snapped blue, and the avenue behind her stayed bright, clean, heroic. She didn’t look exhausted. She didn’t look afraid. She didn’t look like she had ever doubted her own place in this story.

  Yu’s throat went dry. He knew what she was—ranking upper tiers, Gold Shield, a name that made the comment section erupt on sight. He’d known it as information, the same way he knew test scores and class rankings and the dates of exams that seemed to come no matter what he did.

  But seeing it—watching it—made that knowledge feel cruel. She wasn’t just strong. She was distant. Not physically—digitally, she was inches away, glass and pixels between them. Existentially, she was lightyears.

  This is a hero’s story, Yu thought, and the sentence landed like a stone. A story where her triumph was expected. A story where the crowd knew what to do—cheer, praise, clip, archive, worship. A story where Yu had a role too, and that role was simple. Watch. Don’t reach. Don’t speak. Don’t imagine you could ever matter.

  He swallowed again, but it didn’t help. His mouth felt like paper. His fingers clenched around the phone without meaning to, sweat slicking the edges. He loosened his grip and felt the device shift slightly against the textbooks, the tiny scrape loud in his ears because his body was listening for something it couldn’t name.

  On screen, Claval pivoted. Her sapphire eyes flicked up. For a heartbeat, the camera angle aligned just right—and it looked like she was staring directly at him through the lens. Yu froze. His breath stopped so sharply his chest hurt. His skin prickled, and a cold line ran up his spine like someone dragging ice along his vertebrae. Rational thoughts tried to climb up and take control—coincidence, framing, the camera is auto-tracking—but his body didn’t care.

  He tore his gaze away from the screen as if it had burned him. His palm was damp now. Sweat had gathered around the phone’s edges, turning the glass into something treacherous.

  “…Just my imagination,” Yu whispered. He needed the sound of his own voice. He needed something anchored in the room: the dull hum of the fan, the faint traffic outside, the rustle of paper when he shifted.

  It didn’t work. His heartbeat kept slamming. The comment feed kept roaring. And Yu, alone in the dim room, felt like he was drifting further away from the world he was supposed to be living in.

  ?

  [ Stream ending in 10 seconds ]

  The countdown appeared in the corner of the screen, crisp and clinical. Yu leaned back in his chair, which creaked under him, and let his head rest against the cheap plastic. The room seemed suddenly smaller, the air heavier. Outside, the last light had thinned; the strip of sky at the curtain gap had darkened toward blue-gray.

  Another message slid onto the screen.

  Haru_K: might switch my oshi ngl

  “Do what you want,” Yu said, and the words came out flat.

  Yu: Do what you want.

  On screen, Claval’s expression was bright and easy, as if she hadn’t just carved through a street full of monsters. She raised one hand in a casual wave, sunlight catching the edge of her glove. The camera framed her perfectly—hero centered, city behind, the avenue still glowing from the residue of mana and light.

  “Request complete,” Claval said, voice clear through the stream. “Avras is safe today as well.”

  The Gold Shield icon shimmered beside her name, a small badge that carried the weight of a crown. The comment feed erupted harder than before—hearts, praise, jokes, people begging for clips and shouting her name in endless variations.

  Yu’s fingers moved toward the close button. He didn’t feel angry exactly. He felt… detached. Like he was watching a celebration through thick glass. Like this victory belonged to a world that wouldn’t even notice if he left. He tapped. The screen began to fade. Then—

  Zzzzh.

  A distortion breathed into his earphones, soft at first, then sharp enough that his scalp prickled. The fade-out stalled. The black screen wasn’t clean. It had texture—faint banding, a ripple like a bad signal. The room’s silence didn’t return the way it should have. Something lingered in the audio, thin and wrong, like a whisper trapped inside the wire.

  “…You know, I already understand.” A voice slid through. It wasn’t Claval. It wasn’t bright. It wasn’t lively. It wasn’t warm. It was dry. Flat. Emotionless.

  “Wh—who was that?” Yu demanded, voice cracking on the first syllable. Yu jerked upright so fast his chair screeched backward, legs scraping against the floor in a sound that seemed too loud for the tiny room. His hands moved before his mind caught up. He scrubbed the stream timeline back, dragging his thumb across the screen so hard it left a faint smear. The archive loaded. The last seconds played again—Claval waving, the Gold Shield icon shimmering, the clean farewell.

  No distortion. No whisper. No extra voice. Yu’s stomach dropped as if he’d missed a step on a staircase. His skin felt cold, despite the warm air. He opened his messages with trembling fingers.

  “Did you hear that just now?” Yu typed, then erased it, then typed again, shorter, sharper.

  Yu: Did you hear that just now??

  The reply came instantly, like Harukawa had been staring at his phone the same way Yu had.

  Haru_K: hear what lol

  Yu stared at the screen. The letters didn’t change. No follow-up. No confusion beyond that casual laugh. The room settled around him—fan hum, distant traffic, the faint tick of something in the wall that might have been the clock he didn’t remember owning. The silence should have been reassuring. It wasn’t.

  Because Yu could still feel the distortion in his ears, like static had left a residue. His earphones sat heavy, cords brushing his neck, and every tiny movement sent a soft scrape of plastic against skin that made him flinch.

  He lowered the phone slightly. The screen was black now, reflecting his face in dim, warped shapes. His eyes looked too wide. His own expression didn’t look like him.

  “Yu.” And then, at the edge of hearing—so close it felt like it came from inside his skull—a whisper breathed out again.

  His lungs locked. The name wasn’t shouted. It wasn’t dramatic. It was intimate. Soft. Wet in a way words weren’t supposed to be.

  Yu’s spine went cold, ice racing upward, and yet at the same time a heat bloomed in his chest—fierce, immediate, confusing. Fear, yes, sharp and undeniable. But tangled with it was something that didn’t make sense.

  Recognition. As if some part of him had been waiting to hear that voice for far longer than he could explain. His fingers tightened around the phone. The glass creaked faintly under the pressure. Yu didn’t move. He didn’t blink.

  He stared at the black screen, at his own faint reflection, and waited—because even as dread crawled through him, he couldn’t let go of the certainty that had snapped into place the moment his name had been spoken. He had been called.