Right before he woke, Yu had the distinct sensation of being watched.

  It wasn’t the vague unease of a nightmare where something lurked in the corner. This was precise. Directional. A pressure that had an angle, as if a gaze could be drawn with a ruler.

  In the dream, he was in a classroom that looked like his but wasn’t quite right. The fluorescent lights were too bright, the corners too sharp. The desks were arranged the same way, yet every surface felt sterile, as if the room had been scrubbed of fingerprints and history. Beyond the windows, there was nothing—no sky, no courtyard—only a white void that pressed against the glass like fog.

  And inside that white, something stared.

  It didn’t blink. It didn’t move. It simply existed with a steady, stabbing persistence that made his skin crawl even in sleep.

  Yu tried to turn his head, to locate it, to force a face onto that pressure so it would make sense. The moment he did, the dream fought back—his neck turned as if thick syrup resisted him, and the classroom walls leaned inward, narrowing his world.

  Then the alarm pierced through it.

  Yu’s eyes snapped open, his breath catching in his throat, and for half a second he couldn’t tell which part was real.

  The ceiling above his futon was the familiar off-white of his room, faintly stained by years of condensation. The morning light leaked in through the curtains, dull and gray-blue, not yet warm. Somewhere outside, a truck rolled by, its engine a low vibration that belonged completely to this world.

  And yet the sensation didn’t vanish.

  It lingered in his skin like warmth with physical weight, leaving a slick, oily impression along the back of his neck that refused to fade. He lay still, listening. The hum of the apartment. The distant caw of a crow. The soft tick of a cheap clock.

  Nothing. No footsteps. No voice. Then why does it still feel like someone’s right there?

  He sat up slowly, rubbing at the side of his neck as if he could wipe the feeling away. His fingers came back dry, normal, and the normality made him angrier than it should have.

  He reached for his phone by instinct. The screen lit his palm a pale, clinical color, and for a moment the reflection in the glass looked like someone else—eyes a little too wide, mouth a little too tight, as if his face hadn’t caught up to morning yet.

  No notifications. No error messages. No warning that anything last night had been strange.

  Yu forced himself up. He dressed in his uniform with mechanical motions, buttoning his shirt while the room remained silent around him. The air felt colder than it should have, and his skin kept prickling, as if the dream had left behind static electricity that the world couldn’t discharge.

  “…Right.” He found himself speaking to the empty room, words slipping out before he’d decided to make sound. The syllable caught in his throat and landed dead on the floorboards.

  What remained clearest wasn’t the dream itself—it was last night’s broadcast. The cave. The hush of dripping water. Rize’s voice, low and trembling, swallowed by static as she tried to form something like language.

  Yu stood there with one sock in his hand, staring at nothing. That wasn’t a dream.

  The thought wasn’t logical. It wasn’t supported by proof. It was a stubborn instinct that refused to be argued away. It sat in his chest like an ember that wouldn’t cool, no matter how many rational words he threw at it.

  His steps down the stairs felt heavier than usual, as though the air itself resisted him.

  He stopped at a convenience store on the way to the station, grabbed a bag of cheap bread without thinking, and left with the plastic crinkling in his hand. The bread tasted like nothing—no sweetness, no comfort—food that existed only to fill an empty space. He chewed through it on autopilot, jaw working while his mind replayed last night in fragments.

  The walk to the station passed in disjointed pieces: a signalless intersection where cars hesitated and then flowed; the thin whir of bicycle wheels on asphalt; the scrape of a broom against pavement as an old man swept his storefront.

  Ordinary morning sounds that usually stayed in the background. Today, they felt too clear and too distant at the same time, as if Yu had stepped half an inch out of alignment with the world.

  On the platform, he drifted into the crowd, pulled out his phone, and touched the EWS icon by instinct.

  The app opened with its familiar clean UI: a bright, minimal home screen that tried to feel friendly. Category tiles. Trending banners. A rotating panel of “Recommended Streams,” each thumbnail a slice of Isekai world framed like entertainment.

  He shouldn’t be here. Not in the sense of being on a platform—everyone used it now—but in the sense that he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. Something that didn’t behave like content.

  Grimm’s channel appeared first, shoved at him by the algorithm like a cheerful shove in the back. Even at this hour, the viewer count was absurd, numbers pulsing with that subtle animation designed to make you feel as if popularity were alive. The thumbnail showed bright sky, bright armor, bright danger—flashy and loud even without sound.

  Yu didn’t tap it. He searched for what he needed. Rize_channel_042.

  The list loaded quickly. Archive entries stacked in neat rows. Dates. Short titles. Tiny thumbnails of forests, roads, ruins—quiet images that barely looked like anything at first glance, which was exactly why they pulled him in.

  Yu scrolled. Yesterday should have been near the top. He scrolled again, slower.

  Then faster. His thumb dragged the list down, down, down, as if speed could force the app to cough up the missing piece. Each time he reached the end, he yanked back to the top and searched again.

  Nothing. No record. No trace. As if last night’s stream had never existed.

  Yu’s mouth went dry so suddenly it hurt. The inside of his throat felt sandpapered, and he swallowed hard, trying to force saliva that wouldn’t come.

  “It’s gone,” he whispered.

  The train arrived with a gust of air, the doors sliding open with a clean mechanical sigh. People shifted forward. Shoulders brushed. Someone’s bag bumped his arm.

  Yu didn’t move at first. He stared at the screen, trying to force sense into it, but the wrongness only sharpened. It wasn’t simply deleted. Deletions left shadows—an empty slot, a “Removed” notice, a gap in numbering, some evidence that something had occupied a place.

  This looked like erasure. Clean enough to rewrite reality. Like it never occupied a place in the first place.

  Yu stepped onto the train because the crowd moved him, because his body still knew how to obey social gravity. He gripped the strap overhead with one hand and kept his phone low in the other, the screen dimmed but still open, still accusing.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The train’s motion blurred his thoughts as he swayed with the crowd. He kept replaying the memory like a wound he couldn’t stop touching.

  Rize in the cave. Her head turning slowly, listening. Her eyes, not aimed at the walls, not aimed at the floor, but aimed through the lens—through the screen—toward him.

  And the question that had pushed its way into clarity through distortion: Is someone watching?

  EWS was supposed to be one-way. A system of observation. A vacuum where the presence of viewers could never reach the other side. Interference was impossible by design. That’s what everyone said. That’s what the official explanations implied, wrapped in polite language about safety and stability.

  And yet, she had spoken as if she could feel him. Yu lowered his phone and slid it slowly into his pocket, as if hiding it could keep the day from splitting open.

  The platform speaker announced his stop. He got off. He walked. He entered the school. His feet carried him through routines his mind barely followed. He was there, but he wasn’t.

  ?

  Morning classes barely registered. The teacher’s words reached Yu as sound, not meaning. He watched the chalk move, watched the board fill, watched students nod and write and yawn, and it all felt like watching a stream on mute—motion without weight.

  His notebook filled with meaningless scribbles: half-formed diagrams, repeated lines, the same kanji written too many times until it stopped looking real. The pen kept moving because stopping would invite someone to notice. Act normal. Just act normal.

  At lunch, Harukawa dropped into the seat beside him with the comfortable arrogance of someone who assumed he belonged everywhere.

  “You’ve been weird lately,” he cracked open a carton of milk, leaned close, and grinned as if the world were still light enough to tease about.

  “Watching streams so much you’re doing it in your dreams? What’s that about?” he said.

  Yu blinked at him, delayed by half a beat. Harukawa’s grin softened into curiosity, like he’d expected a joke and instead found something heavier.

  Yu could have told him everything. He could have said: the stream vanished. The archive is gone. She asked if someone was watching. The screen tore like it was being ripped apart from the inside.

  But the words wouldn’t fit into the space between cafeteria noise and lunch trays. He offered the same vague smile he’d worn all day, the kind that made questions slide off without sticking.

  “Maybe it was just a dream,” Yu said. The lie felt wrong the instant it left his mouth.

  His body refused to accept it. The sensation remained, quiet and immovable, like a stone at the bottom of his stomach. That wasn’t a dream.

  “Man,” Harukawa studied him for a moment, then shrugged with forced ease. “you’re getting hooked. Just don’t let it mess with your head.” he said, dragging out the syllable.

  Yu didn’t answer. Because something had already crossed into his head, and it wasn’t leaving.

  ?

  After school, Yu didn’t go straight home.

  He walked to the station and boarded the train like he always did, but when his usual stop approached, he stayed seated. The doors opened. People got off. New people got on. The doors closed again, and the train carried him farther, away from the familiar streets that could anchor him.

  His reflection in the window looked faint and distorted, layered over passing buildings like a ghost superimposed on reality.

  He got off in a nondescript residential district where the streets felt hollowed out and quiet. Houses lined the roads with tidy fences and potted plants, the kind of neighborhood that seemed designed to make nothing dramatic ever happen. A dog barked once behind a gate and then went silent, as if even it had realized noise was unwelcome here.

  Yu walked until he found a small park tucked between rows of houses.

  It was deserted.

  A sandbox, a rusting swing set, a metal slide polished dull by years of hands. The only sound was wind whispering through the trees, moving leaves with a soft, restless hiss. The air smelled faintly of dry grass and warmed metal.

  Yu sat on a bench that felt cold through his uniform pants and pulled out his phone. His thumb hovered over the EWS icon. For a second, he hesitated. If it’s gone again—

  He swallowed, and the motion felt too loud in his own body. He opened the app. The screen loaded.

  Centered in the display, white letters floated up as if they had been waiting for him: Rize_channel_042 — Live Now. Yu’s breath caught so sharply it hurt.

  The timing was too perfect. Too precise. It felt as though the stream had anticipated his arrival here—alone, away from school, away from home, away from any eyes that could see his face if it changed.

  Without thinking, he tapped. In the next instant, a sun-drenched grassland opened beneath his gaze.

  The image was so vivid it almost embarrassed his senses. A high, clear sky stretched overhead, blue so clean it felt painted. Sunlight glanced hard off the field, turning blades of grass into flashing threads. Wind rolled across the landscape in visible waves, bending the grass like water.

  Yu could almost smell it through the screen: green, sharp, alive.

  Rize walked alone over a low hill, one hand holding her hat against the wind. Her other hand hung near her waist, close enough to her dagger that the gesture looked unconscious. She moved with caution that didn’t belong in a place this open, as if the space itself could hide teeth.

  She paused near the crest of the hill and turned her head slowly. Searching. Not scanning for monsters in the way adventurers did, but searching for something she couldn’t name.

  Yu’s throat tightened. On the screen, Rize stopped and lifted her eyes straight toward him. Not toward the sky. Not toward the grass. Not toward some distant object.

  Toward the lens. Toward the thin glass barrier between worlds.

  “A gaze.” Her lips moved. Her voice came through in short, careful pieces, as if she were testing the shape of words, as if she didn’t fully trust that sound would behave properly.

  Yu’s fingers went numb around the phone.

  “No… a voice.” Rize blinked once, slow and deliberate, as if tasting the sensation in her own mouth. Yu’s heart hammered hard enough that he felt it in his teeth.

  Rize’s brows drew together, the smallest crease forming between them. The wind tugged at her hair, at the edge of her cloak, and the sunlight made her look painfully real.

  Then she spoke again, and this time the sound carried something sharper than uncertainty—something that wanted an answer.

  “Hey,” she said, gentle but firm, “who are you?”

  The phone shook violently in Yu’s hand.

  Not his hand trembling—something else. Something inside the device, as if the app itself were convulsing. The image tore. Noise sliced across the stream in harsh bands, a sudden storm of static that looked like the screen was being scraped by invisible claws. Colors fractured. The audio splintered into a high, thin whine.

  “Wait—!” Yu jerked the phone closer to his face, eyes wide. The app crashed. The screen snapped to black so abruptly it felt like being slapped in the dark.

  "You've got to be kidding me!" His voice sounded too loud in the empty park. He didn't bother checking if anyone heard. His thumb was already moving, stabbing at the screen to restart the app—too fast, too frantic, tapping and swiping with a desperate insistence that felt humiliating.

  The EWS logo appeared. Loaded. Returned to the home screen. Yu searched.

  [Rize_channel_042.] Nothing. No live indicator. No archive. No history. No trace that the stream had ever existed. Not even a blank space where it should have been.

  It was as if the entire thing had been a hallucination the system refused to acknowledge.

  Yu sat there, gripping his phone so tightly his knuckles ached, unable to move. Something under his skin burned—not pain, but the kind of heat that comes when a boundary is finally pushed aside and the body realizes it has been wrong about what’s possible. His palms were damp. Cold sweat clung to the inside of his fingers.

  He stared at the app’s clean, friendly UI—trending streams, recommended thumbnails, cheerful categories—and felt a sick, crawling disconnect.

  This was supposed to be a broadcast. This was supposed to be observation.

  One-way. Safe. But Rize had looked at him. She had spoken into the wind like she expected someone to be there.

  And the moment she asked who he was, the system had torn itself apart to silence her.

  Yu’s throat tightened until swallowing hurt. There was no proof. No recording. Nothing he could show anyone and say, look, I’m not crazy.

  But the sensation remained. Undeniable in his body, even as his mind reached for logic like a drowning man reaches for a ledge. That was real.

  Not in the abstract way streams were “real,” like footage from a distant place. Real in the personal way that left fingerprints on his nerves. Yu lowered his phone slowly, as if it had become fragile or dangerous.

  Yu lowered his phone slowly, as if it had become fragile or dangerous. The wind moved through the trees. The park stayed quiet. His palms were still damp. He didn't know what had just happened. He didn't know what it meant. But his body already understood something his mind hadn't finished processing yet—that the distance between his room and that world had changed shape. Not closed. Not opened. Just… different. The kind of different that didn't have a name until you were already inside it.