Yu carried the weight of yesterday into the morning like a stone swallowed in his sleep. It sat heavy in his gut, a density that refused to dissolve even as the sun rose and the city began its mechanical routine. It had felt real. It had felt as though his voice—his actual, physical voice—had punched through the barrier of the screen and reached that girl in the ruins. She had reacted. She had stopped.

  But the moment he tried to name that sensation, the certainty collapsed into doubt. Was it a mistake his tired mind had invented to fill a gap in the silence? Or was it something else?

  On the train to school, the rhythmic clack-whoosh of the tracks filled the carriage, but Yu heard none of it. He sat hunched in the corner seat, earphones plugged in tight, tapping the EWS icon with a thumb that felt numb.

  The familiar interface loaded, but the window for Rize_channel_042 remained dark. A gray overlay blocked the view, stamped with the system’s automated text: [ Next Broadcast: Pending Schedule ].

  He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and switched to the archives. Since the moment last night, he had replayed that specific ten-second clip dozens, maybe hundreds of times. He scrubbed the timeline bar back with trembling precision.

  Play. On the small screen, Rize walked. She stepped toward the trap. Pause. He stared at the frozen image, searching for artifacts in the pixels. Her boot was hovering inches above the pressure plate.

  Play. She froze. Her head turned slightly, eyes scanning the empty air of the dungeon.

  “She stopped, didn’t she?” he murmured. The words were lost in the noise of the train, barely a vibration in his throat. He knew speaking out loud changed nothing, but he needed to hear it.

  “Just for a second. She hesitated.” She had stopped, holding back that one fatal step, as if an invisible hand had grabbed her shoulder. But looking at it now, in the cold light of a commuter train surrounded by tired salarymen and students, the magic felt distant. It looked like a glitch. A network lag. A coincidence born of pixelated chaos.

  By the time he walked into the classroom, his steps felt slower than they should have, as if the floor had thickened into mud under his soles.

  The sliding door rattled open. The sound of his leather bag hitting the desk reached him from a great distance, dulled and hollow. Normally, the room would already be loud with the chaotic energy of morning chatter—classmates huddled around smartphones, laughing over viral videos or discussing the latest dungeon raids on EWS.

  But today, their voices seemed to pass through a thick layer of wet cloth before they reached him. The laughter was sharp, the gossip meaningless. Yu didn’t bother opening his notebook. He just sat with his weight folded forward, forehead resting on his arms, trying to hide inside the wooden enclosure of his desk.

  “What, you didn’t sleep?” The voice came from diagonally ahead. Yu lifted his head slowly to see Harukawa glancing back at him. It wasn’t Harukawa’s usual teasing tone. There was no grin, no playful jab. His expression was oddly serious, his eyes scanning Yu’s face with a hint of concern.

  “Something like that.” Yu lifted one shoulder in a vague, noncommittal shrug. Harukawa leaned back in his chair, the wood creaking, as if he had already decided the answer for himself.

  “EWS again?” “Yeah,” Yu said. The word came out thin, brittle.

  “You’re hooked deep, huh? My little sister’s been the same way. She’s been watching this streamer, Serena. Says the pacing is good, watches every single day like it’s a religion.” Harukawa sighed, scratching the back of his neck.

  “She keeps sending comments, though. Spamming encouragement, warnings, all that stuff. But nothing ever comes back.

  “That’s how it works,” Yu said, his voice flat. He was reciting the rules he knew by heart, the rules that kept the world safe. “It’s a one-way observation system. Nothing reaches them. Voice, text, sound—it’s all blocked.”

  “Right. That’s the official line. But she said something weird yesterday. She said the timing feels off sometimes. Like, the movement of the streamer and the flow of the comments almost line up, but not quite. Like they’re out of sync.” Harukawa shrugged, as if he had expected that answer.

  “Out of sync?” Yu’s brows knit together. The fog in his head cleared slightly.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Yeah,” Harukawa continued, his tone casual on the surface, but Yu could tell he was walking toward a specific point. “So I looked it up. Apparently, the streams have a delay.” Yu froze. “A delay?”

  “Yeah. It’s not truly live. There’s a buffer. Sometimes it’s ten seconds, sometimes it’s a few minutes.” Harukawa tilted his head, reciting what he had read on a forum. “They filter it on the system side first. You know, so they can cut stuff that’s ethically bad—gore, death, or moments that are too private—before it hits the public feed.” For a moment, Yu forgot to breathe.

  A delay. The word echoed in his skull like a dropped coin in an empty room. He had believed Rize reacted after he shouted. He had built his fragile hope on the sequence of events: Shout, then Reaction. That cause and effect was the only proof he had. But if the broadcast wasn’t truly real-time... if there was a buffer of even thirty seconds...

  Then the Rize he saw on the screen was already in the past relative to him. When he shouted, she had already stopped—or stepped—minutes ago. His reaction didn't prove his voice had crossed worlds. It proved the opposite. It proved that it couldn't have reached her. It was just a trick of timing, a cruel coincidence of lag and latency. His thoughts pitched violently, as if the classroom had shifted a few centimeters sideways and his balance hadn’t caught up. The vertigo was nauseating. He had been shouting at a recording. He had been praying to a ghost.

  ?

  That night, the notification blinked. Rize_channel_042 is now Live.

  Yu lay on his futon without moving, the room entirely dark except for the pale blue glow of the smartphone in his hand. He stared at the screen as if blinking might cost him the truth.

  Rize was walking through a forest. It was a dense, ancient place. The trees were thick pillars of shadow, their roots twisting over the ground like petrified snakes. Moss coated everything in a velvety, suffocating green, dampening sound.

  She stepped carefully, avoiding the slick patches on the roots, keeping her center of gravity low. Each foot was placed with deliberate caution—heel, then toe, testing the weight. Her breathing was steady. Almost too steady. The ragged desperation from the ruins was gone. This lack of strain didn’t read like ignorance; it read like familiarity. It was the posture of someone who had learned how to exist within the quiet, someone who accepted the danger as a constant companion.

  One of her hands drifted near the hilt of the short dagger at her waist. She didn’t grip it white-knuckled; she just brushed the pommel now and then, a subconscious check to ensure it was still there. Her gaze swept the trees, cutting through the gloom, testing the air for the sign of a magical beast or something worse.

  Her face was set in a tight mask of focus. It wasn’t fear anymore. It was survival. Small shadows flickered at the very edge of the frame—the quick, darting movements of nocturnal animals that never fully revealed themselves to the camera.

  Suddenly, Rize stopped. She angled her head slightly, listening to something the microphone couldn't pick up. Then, she spoke.

  “The wind changed.” Her voice was soft, barely a murmur, but loud enough for the high-sensitivity audio to catch. It wasn’t aimed at an audience. It wasn’t aimed at Yu. It was spoken to the forest itself, a confirmation of reality.

  A moment later, she spotted a tree heavy with small, pale fruit. She moved efficiently, picking what she could reach and tucking the harvest into her pouch. It was just another piece of the route she had memorized, another calorie to burn for tomorrow. As she continued in that same quiet, careful rhythm, Yu found himself entering a trance. The rest of his room—the posters on the wall, the pile of laundry, the distant hum of the refrigerator—faded away. There was only the screen.

  He tracked every minor motion of her hands. Every shift of her shoulders. Every blink. The doubt Harukawa had planted earlier festered in his chest. It’s delayed. It’s buffered. It’s one-way. He needed to know. He needed to break the logic that was suffocating him.

  Yu wet his dry lips. He brought the phone closer to his face, the screen illuminating his anxious eyes.

  “If you can hear me,” he whispered, the words trembling in the silence of his bedroom, “wave your right hand.” He waited. Nothing happened.

  Of course nothing happened. Rize continued walking, her gaze forward, her hands hanging naturally by her sides. There was no acknowledgment. No pause that fit the rhythm of his command. The delay was real. The wall was absolute. Yu felt a bitter, cold disappointment seeping into his stomach. Idiot, he told himself. It’s just a stream. You’re projecting.

  Then, almost immediately after the thought formed—Rize stopped. She gave a small, almost imperceptible shake of her head. And then, slowly, she lifted her right hand to her ear. She brushed a stray lock of hair back, tucking it behind her ear with a deliberate, sweeping motion. Yu's heart jumped so hard it slammed against his ribs. The delay, a part of him noted distantly. But he didn't move. The room seemed to fall away entirely. The ambient sound of the night thinned at the edges until there was only the rushing of blood in his ears. His chest filled with a heavy, frantic pulse he couldn’t control.

  Coincidence. He tried to crush the hope with reason. He tried to tell himself it meant nothing. It was a common gesture. Her hair was in her face. The wind had blown it. It was just timing. It was just a fluke with no weight attached. But the more he pushed at the thought, the clearer the image became, taking shape as if his resistance gave it bones. Coincidence, he repeated to himself, squeezing his eyes shut.

  And still, the question surfaced underneath, stubborn as a bruise that refused to heal. What if it wasn’t? What if words thrown at a screen could reach the other side?

  It shouldn’t be possible. The technology, the magic, the logic of the world said it was impossible. And yet, his chest wouldn’t settle. The silence in the room felt charged, electric. Somewhere inside him, his voice began to feel less like noise and more like something with an outline—something that could touch, and break, the world beyond the glass.