Ethan spun around, his hand rising reflexively even though he wasn't holding a weapon.
A man stood a few steps away, wearing a dark gray robe with an unfamiliar emblem embroidered on his chest: a circle crossed by three lines. His face was calm—too calm for someone who had just found a stranger in the middle of a forbidden forest. His eyes, an unnatural golden color for an ordinary human, stared at Ethan as if reading something written on his forehead.
“You feel it too, don't you?” the man asked, his voice low and measured. “The decline. The wavering synchronization.”
Ethan stepped back, his heart pounding even harder. “Who are you? How do you know about—”
“The System,” the man cut in, taking a step closer, “only works one way in this world, young one. And I've been waiting long enough for someone to appear carrying that vessel.”
Something cold crept up Ethan's neck. The man's words were too specific, too precisely aimed, as if he already knew what was happening to Ethan before Ethan himself fully understood it.
“Vessel?” Ethan repeated, his voice trembling despite his efforts to sound calm.
The robed man smiled thinly, a smile that wasn't reassuring at all. “The body you're inhabiting now isn't yours. I think you've already realized that. That body belongs to someone whose family has been searching for him for three days, and they aren't the kind of family who'll thank you for borrowing it.”
The status box at the edge of Ethan's vision flickered wildly, its letters turning deep red.
[Critical Warning: Tracking Entity Detected at Close Range. Identity Partially Verified: Member of Clan Veyrath.]
That name made something inside Ethan—something that wasn't entirely his own—tremble with fear.
The man slowly raised his right hand. A golden glow appeared in his palm, swirling like dense mist and forming something resembling a thin but clearly dangerous chain.
“Don't worry,” he said, his tone remaining calm even as the light in his hand grew brighter. “I only need to bring you back. What happens after that is no longer my concern.”
Ethan stepped back once more, his foot touching the edge of the cliff. For the first time since opening his eyes in this unfamiliar forest, he realized he truly had nowhere left to run.
The chain of light shot toward him, swift as lightning. The last thing Ethan saw before the world around him began to spin was a new notification appearing, its letters larger and redder than before.
[Warning: Synchronization Plummeting Drastically. Vessel Beginning to Reject Host.]
Ethan didn't fall.
He'd expected the sensation of floating, cold wind slapping his face, and hard ground rushing up to meet him at the bottom of the cliff. But what he felt instead was the opposite—as if time around him had slowed into something as thick as honey, while his own body moved at an unnatural speed.
The chain of light that had shot toward him now hung motionless in the air, a fraction of an inch from his chest, as though trapped in a different frame of time from the world around it.
[Hidden Ability Activated: Time Fracture] [Duration Remaining: 4 seconds]
Ethan didn't have time to understand what had just happened. His feet were still at the edge of the cliff, his body still leaning toward the ravine, but now he had four seconds that felt like four minutes to think.
He turned to look at the man in the gray robe, who was also frozen in place, his right hand still outstretched and his calm expression fixed on his face, unaware that time had stopped for him.
Ethan's thoughts raced. Maybe he could step away from the chain of light. Maybe he could try to run before time returned to normal. But the cliff was still behind him, and running in any direction carried the same risk.
Then he saw it—something he hadn't noticed until now. A thin streak of light, almost invisible, stretched from the man's chest down beneath his robe, like a thread connecting two points.
[Warning: Time Fracture Drains Synchronization Drastically. Estimated Synchronization After Ability Ends: 61 percent.]
That number made his stomach drop, but he had no time to dwell on it. Three seconds remained. An instinct that wasn't entirely his own—an instinct that felt like an inheritance from the body he was inhabiting—urged him to move, not away from the chain of light, but toward the thin thread stretching from the man's chest.
His hand moved on its own, as though this body knew exactly what to do even though Ethan's mind didn't understand it at all. His fingers touched the thread of light.
The world exploded into color.
It wasn't pain that came, but images—fragments of memories that weren't his own, flooding into his head. A young man with a face resembling his own smiled in front of a mirror, wearing the same robe as the man standing before him. A stone room filled with shelves of ancient books. A name shouted in anger by someone whose face he couldn't recognize. And at the end of all those images, one face stared back at him from within the mirrored reflection—not the robed man's face, but his own: the face of the body's true owner.
[Duration Remaining: 0 seconds]
Time resumed its normal flow in a shattering fraction of a second. The chain of light, which should already have struck his chest, suddenly veered off course as though pulled by something unseen and struck the robed man squarely in the chest.
The man staggered, his golden eyes widening with a shock far deeper than mere physical pain.
“How could you—” He didn't manage to finish his sentence.
Because behind him, beyond the trees, another figure stepped out—someone whose face was identical to the one Ethan had just seen in that foreign memory.
His own face.