Rize walked through it with a lightness that still surprised her. Her boots tapped a steady rhythm over the cobblestones, each step returning a clean, satisfying push—no dull ache, no protest from the leg that had haunted her for days.
The sword at her hip swayed with her stride, a familiar weight that should have felt heavy and burdensome, yet now it grounded her. Leather creaked softly with every movement. Metal clicked against the buckle at her waist. Small sounds, ordinary sounds, proof that her body was finally obeying her again.
The air was crisp. It smelled like cool stone and faint smoke from early cooking fires. Somewhere down a side street, a baker pulled a tray from an oven and the scent of warm bread drifted for a heartbeat before the wind carried it away.
A voice sounded in her ear—clear, intimate, impossible. Yu. No one on the street reacted. No heads turned. No one blinked at her. Because they couldn’t hear him.
Rize was in Stream Mode. Her broadcast carried her own sight and sound to the EWS platform—only her feed, only what her world allowed the audience to observe. But the line between tell-and-show didn’t apply to the voice in her ear. That voice wasn’t part of the stream. It was threaded through her, private as breath.
“What’s the job today?” Yu asked, his tone light, like he was trying to make this feel normal.
“Edge of the forest,” she replied softly. “A small animal problem. Nothing serious.” Rize kept her gaze forward and swallowed down a smile that wanted to rise too easily. If she looked too pleased, the passersby might notice. If she spoke too warmly, she’d look like an adventurer flirting with empty air.
“Is it dangerous?” His question came a beat too quickly. She could hear the restraint under it, the way he tried to make concern sound casual and failed. Rize exhaled through her nose. The breath came out steady. She made her voice steady too.
“I’m fine, Yu. I can run now—and I can swing my blade.” She pushed off the ground a little harder on her next step, just to prove it to herself. The leg responded cleanly, springy and strong, and satisfaction warmed her chest.
There was a brief pause on the line, the kind of hesitation that carried more meaning than words. She could almost picture him on the other side—leaning in, brows drawn, trying to decide what he was allowed to say.
“It’s just…” Yu began, then stopped. Rize’s fingers tightened around the strap of her pack.
“What?” she asked, pretending she didn’t already feel the shift in him.
“It feels like I’m walking right there with you.” Yu’s breath changed—subtle, but the connection made it intimate, like his hesitation was right against her skin.
Rize’s cheeks warmed immediately, heat blooming beneath the cool morning air. Her next step almost faltered, not from weakness but from the sudden awareness of her own body—how close his words made her feel to him, how easily a simple sentence could tighten her throat.
To anyone watching, she would look like a lone adventurer muttering to herself. But in her reality, he was beside her. Her pace eased without her meaning it to. Her eyes drifted down to the shadows on the cobblestones, and for a heartbeat she imagined another set of footsteps falling in sync with hers—his stride matching hers, a presence moving at her shoulder where the air was empty.
“Then try not to fall behind,” she said, forcing her voice into a prim edge to hide her embarrassment. She lifted her chin sharply, as if she could shake the image loose. There was a quiet laugh in her ear—soft, ticklish, and strangely close. The sound settled warmly behind her ribs and stayed there, refusing to leave.
Rize’s expression softened before she could stop it. The city gate drew near. The stone arch was tall enough to swallow a carriage. Guards in worn armor stood with spears angled toward the ground, their posture more routine than vigilant in the safety of morning.
One of them recognized her. Rize straightened her back. She nodded once as she passed. The guards nodded back, accustomed to the sight of adventurers and merchanters heading out for work like it was a daily commute.
He’s not actually beside me, she reminded herself, a thought that should have been grounding. And yet denying the feeling of his presence had become harder with every passing day.
?
Yu sat in his room with the phone held too close, as if shrinking the distance would make the connection more secure.
On his screen, Rize’s broadcast carried the bright morning of Avras into his dim, cluttered space. The contrast made his room feel even more like a cave—stale air, scattered papers, the faint hum of a fan, and the cold glow of electronics. Outside his window, Japan’s morning was ordinary and quiet. Inside his screen, another world breathed.
Rize walked down the road with confident steps, her posture looser than it had been when he first met her. Even through a stream, he could see it—the way she carried herself when she wasn’t hurting.
“You really are back to full strength,” Yu said, unable to keep the bounce out of his voice.
“Told you,” Rize replied, and there was satisfaction in it. “I can run.” The rhythm of their conversation felt right. Easy. Like a routine that belonged to them. Like something they had quietly built without noticing—morning check-ins, small talk, a shared sense of presence threaded through impossible distance. Yu’s chest loosened.
For a moment, it felt like peace. Then a low tremor rolled through the audio feed. It was faint—barely more than a vibration under the city noise—but it was real enough that the picture on Yu’s screen twitched. A tiny judder, like the camera had flinched.
“Hear that?” she asked, voice sharp now, the softness gone. On-screen, Rize stopped dead in the street. Yu’s heart lurched. The quiet routine snapped, replaced by the familiar edge of danger. Before he could answer—
CRACK.
The stone pavement ahead of Rize exploded upward. Cobblestones burst like shrapnel. Dust and grit sprayed into the air, the cloud thick enough to swallow the sunlight for a heartbeat. Something punched through the ground from below—a spined, spear-like limb, hard as steel and sharp as a pike, driving straight toward Rize’s chest with the terrifying certainty of an ambush timed perfectly.
“Rize!” Yu shouted her name so hard his throat burned.
His hand crushed the phone, fingers clawing uselessly at the screen. He knew he couldn’t touch her. He knew he was worlds away, helpless in a room that smelled like paper and dust. Yet his body didn’t care about logic. It reacted anyway—reaching, grasping, trying to pull her back through glass and pixels.
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Time stretched thin. On the screen, Rize’s eyes flared wide with shock. Her body moved—fast, trained, controlled—but she was half a step late. The limb was too fast. Too close. The point of it was inches from piercing her heart.
Yu’s vision tunneled. His breath stopped. A bright line of brilliance tore in from the side.
FLASH.
It was razor-thin, clean enough to feel silent even through the speakers. A slash of light so precise it seemed to cut the sound itself. The monstrous limb sheared apart in mid-air, severed cleanly as if the world had been edited with a blade. The stump burst into a spray of black mist and gore.
Not red blood—something darker, thicker, wrong. It smoked as it hit the stones, mana-tainted and hissing. The severed section fell, clattering against cobblestone with wet finality. Rize sprang backward in the same motion her sword cleared its sheath.
Steel flashed. Her stance snapped into place, knees bent, blade angled forward, eyes locked through the dust haze. Her breathing was rough, not from exhaustion but from sudden adrenaline, the kind that floods the body and makes every sense sharpen.
Yu’s hand shook so hard the phone wobbled. Through the churn of dust and blood-smoke, a figure stood. A girl.
She looked mid-teens at most. Silver hair hung ragged and unkempt, strands clinging to her forehead like she’d run through rain and mud. A smear of dirt stained her pale cheek, as if she’d been crawling through the earth rather than walking its roads.
Her weapon was a rapier—slim, elegant, out of place amid the gore. It hummed with the residue of a skill, pale light crawling along its edge like a dying ember. Around her feet, blood-smoke drifted in lazy coils from the felled beast, spreading across the stones like a living stain.
She didn’t look at the monster she had just obliterated. She didn’t look at Rize. She looked through everything—through dust, through distance, through the camera . As if the only thing that mattered was on the other side of the frame.
“Fast…” Rize murmured, tightening her grip until her knuckles whitened.
The girl’s fever-bright stare didn’t waver. Then she opened her mouth and called out, voice clean and piercing—
“Yu!” The name rang through the stream and hit Yu like a physical blow.
Yu stopped breathing. His heart missed a beat, then slammed back into motion with panicked force. On-screen, Rize heard it too. Her brow twitched, and the air around her seemed to go colder. She took a step forward, blade still raised, eyes narrowing as if she were trying to stare through the invisible boundary the stream represented.
“Yu, you can see me, right?” the silver-haired girl cried out, trembling with a kind of obsession that didn’t bother to hide itself. “I’m—Claval! We finally—met!” Her cheeks flushed—not from exertion, not from combat heat, but from something far more volatile.
The words speared straight into Rize’s chest. The atmosphere shifted instantly. Not into combat tension, but into something sharper and more intimate—like the air had filled with glass dust.
“Who?” Rize’s voice cut the street, flat and dangerous.
Yu’s throat locked up. His mind reeled. Claval—the Gold Shield goddess, the one he’d watched from afar, the one whose stream had felt like a myth. Why is she here? Why is she saying my name? He forced sound out anyway, barely more than a whisper, because the silence felt like a trap.
“Claval…?” At the sound of his voice acknowledging the name, Rize’s expression changed as if someone had hammered steel into place.
“Yu?” Her tone was softer than a blade and sharper than any shout.
It pinned him. Yu bit his lip hard enough to taste iron. He couldn’t deny what he’d said. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t heard the name. But confirming anything felt like stepping off a cliff. Rize’s eyes held him through the frame like a needle stitching cloth—precise, unyielding.
“Are you…” Rize asked, voice even, almost gentle, and somehow that made it worse. “Are you someone Yu knows?”
Yu had no answer. The question wasn’t angry. It wasn’t accusing. It was crushing in its implication.
Claval didn’t wait for him to find words. She stepped forward, desperate and unguarded, ignoring Rize’s blade, ignoring the tension, ignoring the very obvious fact that Rize was standing between her and the camera like a drawn boundary.
“Yes!” Claval blurted, eyes shining too brightly. “Yu and I—I’ve wanted to meet you for so, so, so long!” Mud still stained her cheek. She didn’t seem to notice. Her entire body vibrated with longing, the kind that made restraint impossible.
Yu’s chest twisted painfully. Wanted to meet. The phrase echoed in his head, too intimate for a stranger, too possessive to be harmless. His heart jumped, traitorously, and he hated that it did.
Rize’s shoulder tightened. Her grip on the sword shifted—subtle, but Yu could see it. The tremor in her hands wasn’t fatigue. It was emotion trying to break through control. It crossed the digital divide and stabbed straight into him.
“Yu.” Rize’s voice dropped lower, colder.
He froze in his chair. Two arrows struck his heart at once—Claval’s burning obsession, wild and chaotic, and Rize’s quiet jealousy, sharp as winter air. Yu’s mouth opened. No words came.
?
Rize’s stream remained uncomfortably quiet after that—daylight, her point of view, the aftermath of dust settling on stone. The broadcast carried the ambience of Avras, but the chat was confused by the one-sided audio and the sudden stillness. It was as if the entire platform had leaned forward, waiting for someone to explain what had just happened.
Yu felt a bad prickling along his skin. Cold sweat broke out on his back, dampening his shirt. His fingers moved too fast, fumbling with the EWS interface as if speed could undo what had been heard.
He flipped channels. The app’s UI slid and shimmered under his touch, icons snapping into place with practiced smoothness—until he found it. Another broadcast. Same road, different angle. Yu’s breath caught.
There it was, clear as a nightmare made sharp: Claval standing amid the dust, monster remains scattered behind her like discarded props. Floating beside her stream window was the unmistakable symbol—
[ Gold Shield ]
A mark that didn’t belong to ordinary adventurers. A rank that screamed power and prestige. And the chat beneath it was a festival gone feral.
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The messages flooded so fast they turned into a white blur. The scroll bar shrank into a useless sliver. Viewer count in the corner climbed like it had been thrown upward.
Yu couldn’t breathe. This was impossible. He was nobody. A high school student in Japan with unfinished homework and a desk drowned in paper. No one in that world should know his name. No one should be able to call it out into a public stream like it belonged there.
On the screen, Claval faced the camera. Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes stared dead ahead into the lens, unblinking, as if she could see through it and into him. Then she smiled—radiant, terrifying, and utterly sincere, like only he could hear her even though the whole platform was watching.
“Yu!” Claval called, voice trembling with triumph. “You can hear me, right? I’m Claval. I want to see you!”
Yu’s stomach dropped. The world tipped. His anonymous existence—his quiet corner behind the glass—was being swallowed by the roar of a million viewers. The chat exploded with his name, multiplying until it was nothing but a chant.
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Yu’s heart hammered against his ribs like it wanted out. The phone felt too small in his hands, too fragile to contain what was happening. His fingers went numb. The edges of the screen seemed too bright, the whites of the UI bleeding slightly as if the device itself was straining.
The app stuttered. The video froze for a split second—Claval’s smile held in place like a still image burned into glass. Then the screen hard-cooled to black.
Crash.
No warning. No fade-out. Just dead darkness and Yu’s own reflection staring back at him, pale and shaken. Even with the screen dark, the image of her smile burned behind his eyes.
Yu swallowed hard and tasted dryness and fear.
“Why…” Yu whispered, voice sinking into the walls of his room like it had nowhere else to go. he swallowed hard and tasted dryness and fear.
The fan kept humming. The city outside kept being ordinary. His desk remained piled with abandoned schoolwork. Reality did not move to make space for the impossible.
“Why does she know my name?” Yu asked to dark screen. The secret was out. And there was no taking it back.