For three days straight, Yu hadn’t left his bed.

  At first he’d told himself it was just exhaustion, the kind that came after an all-nighter and too much adrenaline. But exhaustion didn’t feel like this. This was weight—dense and absolute—like someone had poured molten lead into his bones and let it cool there. Every limb belonged to gravity now. Even blinking felt like asking permission.

  Pain sparked again and again at the back of his skull, electric and bright, like a wire shorting behind his eyes. It didn’t throb in a steady rhythm. It snapped. It hissed. It flared without warning until his teeth clenched on instinct. The ache left a metallic taste on his tongue, as if the pain itself carried charge.

  His throat was scorched dry. Not ordinary thirst—dryness that scraped and caught, the kind you got after breathing smoke. When he tried to speak, only a brittle rasp escaped, thin enough to vanish into the air before it became a word. The sound embarrassed him. It sounded like a stranger.

  He was conscious. He could think. He could remember. But consciousness alone couldn’t move his body.

  Even when he forced his eyelids open, the ceiling above him wavered like ripples on water. The wood grain stretched, shrank, and swam as if the room were breathing around him. The edges of the curtains blurred into the wall, then snapped back into focus only to blur again. Light seeped in from the gap where the curtain didn’t quite meet the frame, a pale stripe that drifted slowly across the room like a lazy sundial.

  Mana poisoning. The term drifted through his feverish mind, cool and clinical, borrowed from a world that had no right to touch this one. It didn’t feel like fantasy. It felt like being contaminated by a reality that didn’t fit inside a human body.

  He couldn’t roll over. Couldn’t sit up. The soaked sheets clung to his skin, cold and suffocating, as if the bed itself were trying to keep him pinned. Sweat cooled against him in waves, soaking the fabric and then chilling as the room temperature held steady. His heartbeat was too loud in his ears, too fast for someone who wasn’t moving.

  On that day—the moment he seized the satellite and dragged it into the other world—something inside him had broken. He still remembered the sensation on his palm.

  It had been like touching lukewarm water, except it wasn’t wet. It had weight without texture, pressure without substance. The air had thickened around his hand, charged with something that made the hairs on his arms rise. A door he couldn’t see had opened in front of him, and something had flowed through. Mana. A word that should have stayed trapped inside a broadcast, inside an app, inside fiction.

  He remembered the unnatural pressure in his nerves as he connected with the void. A cold, bottomless presence beyond the room, beyond Earth, beyond the thin shell of his life. The moment he widened that connection, he’d felt something snap—not in the air, but inside him, like an overstretched tendon finally giving way. And now his body was paying the price.

  Time lost all meaning. Morning light, evening shadows—he watched them change through the curtain without being certain how many cycles had passed. The room smelled of stale sweat and detergent, the sour-sweet mix of sickness and laundry. Somewhere in the apartment, the refrigerator clicked on and off. Water pipes sighed when someone in another unit ran a tap. Normal sounds from a normal world. They felt impossibly distant.

  His phone lay on the desk across the room, face down, out of reach. He could imagine it buzzing with messages he couldn’t answer, notifications stacking like accusations. He could imagine the EWS app—icons, streams, comments—still moving without him, still hungry, still watching. But he couldn’t even turn his head far enough to see it clearly.

  Rize. The name surfaced again and again, stubborn as a heartbeat. The last thing he’d done before collapsing had been for her. That was the only thought that didn’t rot into guilt. Then—

  Knock. Knock.

  The sound hit the room like an alarm. It wasn’t loud, but it was sudden in the hush, a blunt reminder that the world could still touch him. Yu’s eyelids jerked wider. His throat tightened, dry and raw.

  “Yu!” His mother’s voice. Close. Real. It pushed through the fog in his head, dragging him toward the surface.

  He tried answering. He tried to say he was fine, or at least awake, or at least not dead. All that came out was a faint grunt that scraped his throat and didn’t sound human.

  There was a pause. He could almost feel her listening through the door, deciding whether to worry or panic.

  “Ms. Mamiya came to visit you.” His mother spoke loudly.

  The moment that name hit the room, something cold slid down his spine. The pain in his skull sharpened. His fingers curled into the blanket with what little strength he had, clutching fabric like it could anchor him.

  School teachers didn’t visit students for colds. If Mamiya was here, it meant the outside world had finally caught up with what he’d done.

  ?

  The door opened with a soft click, and light from the hallway spilled into the room in a pale rectangle. Footsteps approached—two sets. His mother’s lighter steps, familiar and quick. Behind her, a heavier, measured tread that carried no hesitation.

  “Excuse me.” Mamiya’s voice was calm, a professional smoothness that made it worse.

  She appeared in the doorway with her usual posture: straight back, shoulders squared, glasses neat. She wasn’t wearing a lab coat today, but the impression of one clung to her anyway, like she carried her authority in the air around her. Her hair was pinned back the way it always was when she didn’t want distractions. Her expression looked composed at first glance.

  Her eyes did not.There was weight in them—sharp, heavy, and focused, carrying something far beyond a teacher’s concern for a sick student. A storm held behind glass.

  “I’ll leave you two to talk,” his mother said, voice gentle but strained at the edges. She didn’t step farther inside. She didn’t look directly at Mamiya. She smiled at Yu the way parents do when they’re pretending not to be afraid. The door closed gently. Silence fell into place like a lid.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Mamiya pulled the desk chair closer to the bed and sat down. The wood creaked faintly under her. She exhaled a long, tired sigh that sounded like the end of a long day and the beginning of a longer one.

  “Honestly… you’ve done something outrageous, Shiro.” Her tone wasn’t loud, but it cut sharper than shouting. It didn’t wobble. It didn’t cushion.

  Yu tried speaking. He tried to form an apology, an explanation, anything. His voice cracked, breathless and thin, and the word collapsed into a cough that burned his throat. All he could do was lower his gaze and clutch the blanket harder, as if hiding his hands would hide what they’d done.

  “What you did isn’t something that can be dismissed as a prank.” Mamiya’s voice stayed steady, and that steadiness was terrifying. “Or an accident. This has already become an international diplomatic incident.” She didn’t look away.

  The air in the room tightened. Yu could feel it, or maybe it was the residue of mana in his senses, making normal air feel thick. His heartbeat slammed once, hard enough to hurt.

  “That satellite was not just a satellite.” Mamiya leaned forward slightly, elbows near her knees, eyes locked on him. “It was armed. Weaponized. Several nations are already in uproar behind closed doors.”

  Yu’s ears rang. The sound wasn’t in the room. It was inside him, a high, thin whine like feedback. Cold sweat slid down his back. His stomach rolled, nausea rising in a slow wave.

  He knew. He’d known the moment the data had poured into his mind, the moment the weapon names had become more than words. But hearing it out loud—hearing it in her voice—made the weight real. Crushingly real.

  “Mamiya sensei… what should I…” He fought his throat for each syllable. “What am I supposed to do…” It took all his strength just to squeeze those words out. They came trembling and pathetic, and he hated them. He hated that his body wouldn’t even let him beg properly.

  “Return the satellite to our world.” Mamiya’s voice was clear, each word placed like a nail. “And then—it down. You know?” Her expression didn’t soften.

  Yu’s breath hitched. The pain at the back of his skull flared like a warning siren. His fingers spasmed against the blanket.

  “That is the only way to put a temporary patch on this situation,” Mamiya continued. “Not a solution. Just a delay. An extension before everything collapses.”

  A delay. The phrase lodged in Yu’s chest like ice. He swallowed, throat burning, but the dryness didn’t ease.

  “A delay,” yu whispered, more to himself than to her, as if repeating it might make the shape of it understandable.

  “Yes.” Mamiya didn’t let him escape into vagueness. “What you’ve taken on is no longer personal guilt. No longer something you can apologize away.” Her gaze sharpened, and the room seemed to shrink under it. “You have acted on a scale that can destabilize the entire world order.” Her voice dropped slightly, becoming colder, more precise. “Do you understand that?”

  Yu couldn’t answer. His body refused to sit up. His mind refused to offer a defense. Only the sinking cold in his chest proved he understood. He stared at the blanket, at the wrinkles his fists had made, and for a moment he saw not fabric but sand—desert sand turning to glass under a pillar of light. He’d saved Rize. He’d done it by ripping a weapon from orbit.

  ?

  “Now tell me, Shiro.” Mamiya’s tone shifted—not gentler, but more focused, like she’d moved from scolding to surgery. “I can guess based on the data, but I need to hear it from you.”

  Yu’s lips tasted of blood where he’d bitten them days ago. He swallowed anyway. The memories rose unbidden, sharp despite the fog.

  “I… at first, I just opened a small door.” His voice was barely above breath. He hated how weak it sounded. “Into… somewhere.” He forced himself to keep going, because stopping would mean drowning in silence. “The air in my room changed slowly.” His eyes flicked toward the curtains, toward the thin line of light leaking in. “It got heavier. Like there was pressure on my skin.”

  Mamiya’s eyes narrowed a fraction, not in anger but in concentration. She didn’t interrupt.

  “Mana particles came through.” Yu’s fingers twitched, remembering that impossible sensation in his palm. “It felt like touching warm water… except dry. Like I could scoop it up, even though there was nothing to scoop.” He closed his eyes for a second, and the room tilted. When he opened them again, Mamiya was still there, unmoving, anchored. “I could hold it.” His voice steadied a fraction. Saying the truth out loud made it more solid. “Shape it.”

  Mamiya’s expression sharpened. She leaned in a little more, as if proximity could catch details.

  “When I repeated it, a flow gathered in my hands.” Yu swallowed hard. His throat scraped. “And when I tried to ‘shift’ that sensation… I reached the black of space.” Even now, remembering it made his stomach turn. “I felt the target,” Yu whispered. “I opened a door… to it. To that satellite.”

  “You pulled it through using Transfer.” Mamiya said the word like she was confirming a diagnosis.

  “Yes.” Yu’s eyes squeezed shut. “Into the other world.” The words should have sounded like nonsense. In this room, with the smell of detergent and sweat, they sounded like confession. “But… it didn’t end there.” His voice cracked again, and he clenched his jaw until the pain in his skull spiked. “When the [Bind] connected… the satellite’s insides just—entered me.” He lifted his shaking hand slightly, palm up, staring at it as if it might still glow. It looked normal. It felt like a weapon. “I understood everything.” The words came out faster now, tumbling like he couldn’t stop once he’d started. “The circuits. The encryption keys. The system architecture.”

  Mamiya’s face remained composed, but something tight flickered behind her eyes. Recognition. Alarm.

  “The weapons system,” Yu said, and the room seemed to drop a degree in temperature. “Even the firing authority.”

  Mamiya folded her arms, posture controlled, but the movement looked like she was bracing herself.

  “And you used that authority.” She said. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement waiting for confirmation.

  “To protect Rize.” Yu’s voice broke on her name, and heat stung his eyes. “I launched… the ballistic missile.” His throat tightened. The image of Rize in the desert slammed into him—her boots sinking, her sword slipping, the mandibles closing. The sound of her voice through the stream, thin and desperate, calling his name like it was a rope.

  Silence.

  Not the ordinary quiet of a bedroom, but a suffocating, held silence, like the air itself had stopped moving. Yu could hear the faintest hum of electricity in the walls. He could hear his own heartbeat struggling. He could hear the small, wet sound of his breathing.

  “You reversed the EWS framework.” Mamiya stared at him as if he were a formula that shouldn’t balance but did. “You used the logic of observation to seize control.” She didn’t move for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was lower, almost to herself.

  Yu couldn’t meet her eyes. He stared at the wrinkles in the sheet instead, but even those seemed to swim.

  “Special abilities—Unique Skills—were never meant for individuals to wield freely.” Mamiya’s tone chilled, sharp as winter air. “Especially not in the modern era.” Her gaze pinned him. “Shiro… your power can connect the worlds.” She paused, letting the words settle, letting them become undeniable. “But it can just as easily destroy them.”

  At that, Yu’s chest tightened painfully, as if a band had cinched around his ribs. The tears he’d been holding back finally broke free, sliding down his cheeks and soaking into the pillow. He couldn’t wipe them away. His arms wouldn’t lift. He could only lie there and let them fall. I saved her. The thought rose, desperate and bright. But I broke something I can’t put back.

  Mamiya watched him, expression unreadable, and for the first time Yu understood the true shape of what he’d done—not the heroic moment in the desert, not the pillar of light, not the relief in Rize’s voice.

  He understood the shadow behind it. A door that could open anywhere. A hand that could reach orbit. A world that could be rewritten by a single person’s panic and love.