The room was unlit. The faint backlight washed his face in a cold, underwater blue that made his features look thinner than they were. Everything else in his room sat outside that circle of light—desk, chair, the edge of his bed—reduced to shapes. He could smell yesterday’s laundry detergent from the clothes piled on the chair, the slightly stale sweetness of a convenience-store snack wrapper in the trash. Ordinary things, stubbornly present.
But his chest still held the afterimage of something that wasn’t supposed to exist.
Rize had looked at him. Not past him. Not at the “camera” that EWS pretended was a camera. At him. She had spoken to the air, and the air had answered by becoming a frame.
And then—silence.
Not the normal kind of silence, where a streamer simply ends a broadcast and the app politely tells you Offline. Not the regular emptiness of a channel between uploads. This was different. Wrong. A sealed mouth. A cut wire.
Rize_channel_042 didn’t say Ended. It didn’t say Archived. It didn’t even say Suspended the way Team Emera had been suspended, with boilerplate warnings and moral language.
It didn’t say anything.
The space where her streams should have been looked scrubbed clean, as if the system had taken a cloth to reality and wiped her off the glass. Yu’s instincts refused to accept “technical trouble.” Something colder crawled under his skin each time he opened the app. It was severed.
That thought slid up his spine like ice. He couldn’t stop it from returning, because every time he tried to remember the last connection—Rize’s voice, the strange rectangle of light, the way the world behind her had changed—his memory broke into jagged fragments. Forest wind screaming in reverse. Red diagnostic text bleeding across the screen. The sound of something enormous moving where it shouldn’t.
He blinked and realized his eyes were burning. He hadn’t been crying, but his body had been holding itself too tight for too long.
His thumb moved before his mind decided. He switched streams. Then another. Then another, diving blindly through other adventurers’ channels as if one of them might contain her by accident: a glimpse of silver hair in a crowd, a familiar cloak passing behind someone’s shoulder, the smallest proof that she was still moving somewhere beyond his reach.
Anything. Anything at all.
?
The first stream he opened felt like an insult.
A carriage rocked gently over an old stone road, the camera swaying with each bump in a way that made the motion feel slow and soothing instead of dangerous. Hooves clopped in a steady rhythm, and the wooden wheels crushed gravel with a soft, almost pleasant scrape. The audio wasn’t crisp like Rize’s lonely wilderness streams; it was crowded with life—market chatter, distant laughter, the clink of pottery and the rustle of fabric as shoppers squeezed past stalls.
Color spilled across the street. Bright cloth canopies in reds and yellows stretched over tables piled high with fruit, spices, trinkets, and bundles of herbs. Sunlight filtered through a sky layered with cloud, the light soft enough to make the whole town look warm and forgiving. Vendors called out with practiced cheer. Children darted between adults, their footsteps tapping like quick drumbeats.
The comments flowed lazily.
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Yu watched the passing faces anyway. A man with a scarred cheek bargaining over dried fish. An older woman lifting a bolt of cloth to the light to test its weave. A pair of apprentices carrying crates, laughing at something one of them whispered. He scanned their silhouettes with a hunger that didn’t care how unreasonable it was.
No Rize. Not in the crowd. Not reflected in a shop window. Not a familiar figure leaning against a post in the background.
The carriage rolled on, peaceful and oblivious, and Yu’s jaw tightened.
“…She’s not here,” he breathed, so quietly his own voice felt like a lie.
The peace on the screen pressed against him, bright and wrong. It was the kind of scene that made other viewers exhale and loosen their shoulders, but in Yu it twisted into something sharp. How could this world keep laughing and selling fruit and showing off fabric when a single person could vanish from its observation like she’d never existed?
His thumb flicked down, and the stream collapsed back into a thumbnail. He didn’t even close it properly.
?
The next stream opened with noise.
Steel rang on steel. Armor scraped. Someone shouted an order, and the word hit the microphone hard enough to crackle. The camera swung with urgency, trying to keep up with movement that didn’t slow down for an audience. Mud flew. Boots pounded. A spell detonated in a burst of light that strobed across the frame and painted everyone in harsh whites and blues for a split second.
A party of adventurers moved with practiced coordination. One fighter held the front, shield catching impacts with brutal efficiency. Another darted in from the side, blade flashing in tight arcs. A caster stayed just behind them, hands moving in quick, precise patterns that pulled mana through the air in visible ripples—thin distortions that made the background waver like heat haze.
The chat exploded with excitement and analysis.
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People argued. People cheered. People treated it like sport.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Yu’s eyes didn’t linger on the spectacle. He searched the edges. The back line. The shadows behind the casters. The space near the camera operator’s shoulder where a lone figure might slip in and out of view.
A woman with braided hair shouted a warning and slammed her shield down. A young man with a spear stumbled and recovered. A healer’s hands glowed faintly as she pressed them to someone’s bleeding arm. Not her.
“…Not here either,” Yu whispered, and felt his throat tighten on the words.
He switched again. A blacksmith’s stream: hammer strikes ringing like a metronome, sparks blooming and dying in the air. A quiet herbalist sorting dried leaves, fingers stained green. A fisher on a foggy lake, line humming softly in the wind.
A town square where someone played a string instrument, the music thin but earnest, and passersby tossed coins into a bowl with casual kindness.
So much life. So much motion.
And her absence was not an empty spot in a crowd—it was a weight. A pressure that spread out from his sternum as if his body were trying to make room for dread and finding it didn’t fit.
His fingers trembled against the glass. Not violently. Just enough to tell him he was losing control in a way no one could see.
She’s somewhere. She has to be. He kept scrolling. His thumb moved in the repetitive rhythm of someone picking at a wound because stopping would mean feeling the full shape of it.
But the screen stayed mercilessly ordinary.
?
At school, the world sounded muffled.
The classroom buzzed with quiet chatter, chairs scraping, pencil cases snapping open, someone laughing too loudly near the window. All of it reached Yu as if through thick glass. His vision blurred at the edges, like his mind refused to focus on anything that wasn’t a missing channel page.
He sat with his notebook open, pen poised, and realized he had been tapping the pen’s tip against the paper in a tiny, repetitive pattern. The sound was small, but it felt too loud to him, sharp enough to snap his thoughts loose.
He inhaled. Exhaled. Just breathe. Just act normal.
The teacher’s voice drifted across the room, but the words slid off Yu without sticking. He tried to force himself into the rhythm of ordinary life—lecture, notes, the small fatigue that came from school, the predictable timeline of day to night.
But daily life felt thin now. Like a fragile curtain hung over a dark doorway.
Every time someone mentioned EWS—casually, like it was the weather—Yu’s gaze flicked away before he could stop it. A reflex.
A shield. He didn’t want anyone to see his face when that name hit his ears, because worry and fear and frustration were tangled together in his chest so tightly they sometimes felt like the same emotion wearing different masks.
“Did you see that clip from Team Emera?” His friend leaned close at one point, grinning at a message on his phone.
“The one where it got taken down?” he whispered, excited. Yu’s stomach clenched so hard he almost flinched.
He forced a noncommittal sound out of his throat, something that might pass as acknowledgment. His friend, satisfied, leaned back and went back to his own screen.
Yu stared at his notebook until the lines on the paper blurred. If they can vanish… if streams can be erased like they never existed… what about her? He pressed the pen down and wrote a line, then realized the line made no sense. He stared at it anyway, because looking up felt dangerous.
?
Home was warm.
The entryway smelled like cooking oil and soy sauce, the comforting mix of dinner preparation and familiar living space. A light was on in the living room, casting a soft yellow spill across the floor. The sound of television floated out—a variety show laugh track, bright and artificial.
Yu opened the door and stepped inside.
“Oh, welcome back, Yu!” his mother called, cheerful, the kind of greeting that usually reached into him and tugged him back toward normal.
Today it landed strangely, like it was meant for someone else.
He slipped his shoes off automatically. The small, practiced motions felt distant, as if he were watching himself from above. He could hear his mother moving in the kitchen, the clink of a pan, the gentle rush of running water. Domestic sounds. Safe sounds.
“You seem down today,” she said when he stepped into view. “No energy at all.” Her eyes narrowed slightly—not suspicion, just concern.
Yu tried to answer quickly, to keep her from looking too closely.
“I’m… just tired,” he said. The words came out hollow. They didn’t even fool him.
His mother’s expression softened. She reached out and touched his arm, a small gesture of warmth and grounding. Her hand was warm from cooking. Yu felt it, registered it, and still couldn’t fully respond. His chest was too full of something else, something he couldn’t explain without sounding insane.
He nodded again, too stiff, and looked away, letting his hair fall forward to hide his eyes.
“Make sure you eat,” she said gently, as if food could fix whatever was wrong. “You’ve been spacing out lately.”
Yu managed another nod.
He sat at the table when dinner was ready, answered when spoken to, laughed when the conversation demanded it. But everything was slightly out of sync, as if his body was half a beat behind the world. His mother’s warmth felt like a light shining through fog—visible, real, and still somehow unable to reach him.
How do I tell you I’m worried about someone who might not even exist to you?
The thought sat in him like a stone.
?
Night swallowed his room.
The phone lay in his hands like a shard of cold glass. The screen was dark, a void that reflected only vague shapes: his nose, his eyes, the pale smear of his own face hovering over nothing. The lack of light should have been restful. Instead it felt like a sealed mouth.
Yu’s fingers trembled faintly.
He wasn’t shaking from fear in the obvious way. It was quieter than that. A nervous system running too hot, trying to discharge energy with nowhere to put it.
“That expression…” he whispered into the darkness, voice barely more than breath. “She looked like she’d be okay.”
“She… has to be okay.” He swallowed, the motion loud in his own ears. The words were an attempt at magic. Not the kind that used mana and spells, but the older, more desperate kind: say it enough times and reality might comply.
His mind pulled up the moment again, relentless.
Rize’s face turning toward the frame. Her eyes widening. Her voice, cautious and trembling and strangely steady at the same time.
…I heard you. from somewhere…
The memory came with physical sensation—his throat tightening, his palms sweating, the sharp heat behind his eyes. Sometimes he could almost feel the phantom weight of the connection in his hands, like the phone had been heavier for those seconds because it was holding more than data.
He stared at the black screen until his eyes ached.
In the corner of his vision, his room’s familiar objects seemed unreal. The stack of textbooks, the chair, the curtain shifting slightly with a draft. Normal, harmless things. And yet they belonged to a world where you could pretend EWS was entertainment, pretend a stream was just content, pretend the other side was safely unreachable.
Yu’s heartbeat slowed and then sped up again, unable to settle.
The clock on his wall ticked steadily. Each second sounded like a small, blunt hammer, marking time he couldn’t use. The silence between ticks felt too wide.
He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, forcing air into lungs that didn’t want to expand.
If she’s alive, she’ll stream again. If she streams again, I’ll see her. If I see her… maybe I can warn her.
The logic was thin, desperate, and still it was all he had.
Yu pressed his forehead lightly against the phone for a moment, as if closeness could turn absence into presence. The glass was cool. The gesture was childish. He didn’t care.
“…Rize,” he whispered again, and the name fell into his room without echo.
He wanted to say more. He wanted to send something across the worlds the way his voice had crossed once, like a hand reaching out. But there was only silence. He opened his eyes and stared at the darkness until it stared back.
For now, all he could do was endure—endure the weight of the warmth she’d left behind in her words, and the ache of everything he couldn’t deliver back. Because somewhere out there, beyond observation, beyond the app’s polite lies, Rize existed. And her silence had become unbearable.