00:13
Lock-in Session: 05:45:16
The seconds bled away in the bottom right corner of the ancient CRT monitor.
Those relentless digital digits, plastered across the dull, archaic blue of the Billing Explorer interface, felt less like a timer and more like a merciless countdown to the end of his miserable life.
Torrential rain had been hammering the corrugated tin roof for two hours straight, but the deafening racket did absolutely nothing to drown out the feral screams of the kids in the front row, hurling toxic, profanity-laced slurs typical of hardcore Point Blank junkies.
Slumped in the dimmest, filthiest corner of the room, Arka pressed his weight against a rigid plastic chair that groaned in pitiful protest.
He pinched the throbbing bridge of his nose.
His pitch-black hair was a chaotic rat's nest, sticking up at odd angles from the sheer number of times he'd dragged his fingers through it in sheer frustration.
He was draped in a designer shirt—a piece of fabric that once cost enough to rent out every single rig in this wretched internet cafe for an entire month.
But now? That luxury fabric was stained, threadbare, and thoroughly stripped of its former glory.
Just like Arka.
A thick plume of smoke from a dirt-cheap cigarette—the kind he could only afford to buy loosely by the single stick—curled from his lips. It melted into the room's suffocating atmosphere, an intoxicatingly rancid cocktail of moldy carpets, stale sweat, and cheap instant noodle flavoring.
Click.
Highlight.
Delete.
Operating as a bottom-feeder "data executioner," Arka had one solitary objective tonight: taking out the digital trash.
He wasn't some prestigious editor, and he sure as hell wasn't a writer.
He was nothing but a hired lapdog, a junkyard mutt guarding the fragile public opinions of anyone pathetic enough to pay for his services in pocket change.
He burned through the first three hours obliterating absolute digital garbage—everything from cringe-inducing flame wars typed out in obnoxious alternating caps, to some low-rent scammer peddling "bulletproof" amulets.
But then, Arka's cursor abruptly froze over a fantasy fiction thread buried deep within a forgotten community forum.
At the very bottom of the sprawling manuscript, the anonymous author had left a raw, bleeding footnote:
"This draft has been rejected by twelve different publishers. There's just no room for the Fantasy genre to breathe in this country. I'm done. I give up."
Arka took a long, dragging hit of his cigarette.
His pitch-black, onyx eyes—now heavily framed by bruised, sunken bags from severe sleep deprivation—stared vacantly at the string of text.
'Really? The story wasn't even half bad,' he sighed internally.
A manuscript, no matter how terribly written, was essentially the agonizing scream of a soul too cowardly to bare its fangs in the real world.
Arka wasn't a writer, but he knew exactly what it meant to be a spineless coward.
He was the exact brand of coward who had initially wanted to turn tail and run from the fragile life currently growing inside his girlfriend's womb.
He let out a heavy, ragged sigh.
Pulling the smoldering cigarette from his lips, he flicked the ash into a makeshift, overflowing tin-can ashtray.
He shot a glance beneath the filthy desk, his eyes landing on a small, worn-out bag. Hidden inside was an envelope containing the clinic bill for next month's ultrasound.
What he had saved up wasn't even close to enough.
Reaching into the bag, Arka pulled a creased piece of thermal paper from a crinkled brown envelope.
Printed on it was that same monochrome blur—a curved, fragile silhouette, its heartbeat translated into jagged lines of static.
Six months.
He could faintly trace the shadowy outline of tiny fingers and a small head resting peacefully in the dark.
Staring at it always triggered the exact same wave of nausea.
It wasn't disgust.
It was a suffocating, paralyzing shame that sucker-punched him right in the gut.
And just like that, the memories began to loop in his mind like a corrupted, broken cassette tape.
"Arka, I'm pregnant."
Kirana's trembling voice, accompanied by a cheap plastic test with two damning pink lines, was shoved right in his face.
At that exact moment, Arka watched his entire world cave in.
His inflated ego—born from a silver-spoon upbringing that sharply contrasted with Kirana's life as a dirt-poor orphan—shattered into a million pathetic pieces.
Instead of stepping up, he let out a harsh, cynical laugh, pointing a trembling finger at her face, paralyzed by sheer, pathetic terror.
"Whose bastard is that? Don't you dare say it's mine! I always wrap it up, Na! You're just trying to bleed me dry because you know my old man is loaded, aren't you?!"
He would never forget the look of absolute devastation that crushed Kirana's face.
Without even waiting for a response, Arka, the ultimate spineless coward, bolted.
He scrambled into his flashy sports sedan, revved the engine until it screamed, and abandoned her on the side of the road without a single backward glance.
SMACK!
Arka slapped his own cheek, hard, inside the suffocating, stale air of the net cafe cubicle.
The sharp crack of flesh was instantly swallowed by the bleeding gunfire leaking from the headset of the feral kid next to him.
The stinging burn grounded him, dragging him kicking and screaming back to reality.
There were no more luxury car.
There were no more black credit cards with limitless ceilings.
His parents had written him off as dead the second the scandal hit their ears, a death sentence only cemented by the formal expulsion letter from his prestigious university.
"Stop daydreaming, dumbass. You need the cash," he muttered to himself.
His voice was a raspy growl, nearly drowned out by the relentless drumming of the rain.
Tearing his eyes away from the ultrasound scan, he locked back onto the flickering CRT monitor.
His hand gripped the mouse, his fingers turning cold and flawlessly mechanical.
Back to the grind: scrubbing the digital footprint of this failed manuscript because the author—or whatever client tossed him the change—wanted all evidence of this massive failure nuked from the internet before they rolled the dice on their next pathetic venture.
Arka began scrolling through the comment section beneath the fantasy draft.
It was an absolute slaughterhouse—a barrage of verbal daggers explicitly designed to brutally execute the mental health of whatever poor bastard wrote it.
"No romance? Boring as hell."
"A Kobold? The fuck is that? The monster descriptions are trash,"
Another keyboard warrior typed.
Arka paused.
He read over the paragraph where the protagonist—a wealthy merchant in this fantasy setting—died a gruesome, pathetic death after locking himself in a basement vault just to protect his gold from a monster raid.
"Besides, the MC is a fucking idiot. Getting himself killed by locking himself in with the monster? The fight scenes are written like shit," sneered another comment.
"The Kobolds are just 'savage'? No descriptions of long claws or fangs? Are we supposed to just magically know what they look like?"
Arka let out a harsh, cynical scoff.
"You keyboard warriors don't know shit about what it's like to be backed into a godforsaken corner where trapping yourself with a monster is the lesser of two evils," he muttered under his breath.
To Arka, the merchant in the story wasn't a dumbass.
He was just utterly, hopelessly desperate.
Just like Arka himself, currently holed up in net cafe cubicle number seven with a monster named regret.
His fingers flew across the keys with practiced, mechanical agility.
Click.
Ctrl+A.
Delete.
A whole chapter of the manuscript dissolved into nothingness.
But right as he went to nuke the next file, the ancient CRT monitor shuddered violently.
The clean, structured rows of text went completely haywire.
The letters on the screen detached themselves from their lines, twisting and swirling into a chaotic digital sandstorm.
"What the fuck? Did this piece of shit freeze?"
Panic spiked in his chest.
He yanked the mouse aggressively and began slamming the Escape key, the clatter of the ancient keyboard sounding like a malfunctioning typewriter.
But the cursor remained utterly frozen.
The screen was now a total clusterfuck of erratic, bleeding words—Kobold, Savage, Green, Scaled, Death, Merchant—every key descriptor from the story's blurb bleeding into a single, unreadable mass.
Arka leaned closer to the monitor, squinting to catch a glimpse of the Task Manager or any goddamn solution before he was forced to swallow his pride, call the cafe attendant, and waste the precious hours of his night package.
Suddenly, a blinding white flash detonated from behind the glass.
Every raw character and forged word erupted out of the screen, tearing into physical space.
They swarmed the air, circling Arka's body like a hive of furious, stinging hornets.
"What the living fuck?!" Arka shrieked, swatting wildly at the empty air as the floating syntax bit into his skin like hot needles.
He bolted out of his seat with such violent momentum that his plastic chair flipped over backward, crashing into the floor with a loud, echoing bang that should have had the cafe operator breathing down his neck.
Then, the world just... died.
The relentless drumming of the rain against the tin roof vanished.
The feral screaming of the Point Blank junkies was violently severed, like a power cord brutally snipped in half.
Arka found himself standing in the dead center of a boundless, blinding white void.
No shadows.
No horizon.
Just him and a silence so deafening he could hear his own heartbeat hammering against his ribs like a frantic war drum.
"Hah... hah... Hello?"
There was no echo.
His voice just died in the air, swallowed whole as if this space was an absolute vacuum for sound.
Arka inspected his trembling hands; the ash from his cheap cigarette still clung to his skin, but his grimy designer shirt now looked like a filthy smudge against the sterile, absolute purity of this room.
"Boss? Boss Leon?! The fuck is this, a joke?! My night package is burning out here!" Arka yelled, though his throat felt like sandpaper, dry and raw.
He started running, but no matter where he stepped, the scenery refused to change.
White.
Empty.
The total loss of spatial orientation began to gnaw viciously at the edges of his sanity.
Until finally, in the midst of that absolute void, his eyes locked onto an anomaly.
A massive, transparent sphere hovered in the air.
Swarming around it at breakneck speeds were thousands of unrecognizable letters, forming tight orbital rings—exactly like the Rutherford atomic model they'd shoved down his throat back in his elite prep school days.
Arka approached hesitantly.
Every step felt impossibly heavy, as if the air surrounding the sphere had physically densified.
But as he closed the distance, the contents of that bizarre object came into sharp focus, making the man's onyx eyes widen in sheer disbelief.
He squinted, trying to process the absurdity of what he was seeing.
"Wait..."
Suspended inside was a young man with spiky, crimson hair, curled up in a deep slumber.
He was clad in nothing but a grime-covered, threadbare white shirt and dark trousers held up by a single, half-snapped suspender.
Arka circled the sphere, scrutinizing the figure from every angle until his gaze locked onto the side of the kid's head.
"Those ears... aren't human," Arka muttered.
A pair of long, sharply pointed ears poked out from beneath the messy red hair.
"Hello! Hey, who the hell are you? You're human, right?" Arka braced himself and rapped his knuckles against the invisible barrier of the sphere. "Can you tell me where the fuck we are? Can you even understand me?"
Arka held his breath.
The youth inside didn't even twitch, seemingly bound in an impossibly deep, eternal sleep.
Driven by a reckless urge, Arka pushed harder, trying to force his hand through the transparent casing to reach the kid.
But before he could even breach the surface, an unnatural, paralyzing chill slithered up his spine.
It wasn't the familiar chill of the night rain creeping beneath the internet cafe's shutter doors.
This was a paralyzing, unnatural frost, as if liquid nitrogen had been injected directly into the marrow of his bones.
Right on its heels came a pungent, suffocating stench—the metallic tang of fresh blood coiling around the foul odor of stagnant, waterlogged rot.
"This... is all... your fault..."
The voice didn't register in his ears; it detonated directly inside his skull. It was heavy, drowning in an ocean of absolute, unadulterated malice.
Arka turned with mechanical stiffness.
Hovering a mere breath away from his face was an abomination that instantly hollowed out whatever courage he had left.
Its skin was ghastly and waterlogged, bloated to a sickening blue and stretched so taut it looked ready to burst from whatever pressure was building inside.
In jagged patches, the epidermis had sloughed off completely, exposing strips of macerated, ghostly white flesh rotting underneath.
Its tattered clothes dripped a viscous, pitch-black fluid that defiled the pristine white void beneath them, bleeding outward like a spreading pool of ink.
Its face was a landscape of pure horror; the lips were entirely missing, laying bare blackened gums and a row of loose, rotting teeth.
Yet, the worst part was its eyes—clouded, lidless, and completely gray, staring directly through Arka with a lethal, vacuous deadness.
"Gah!" Arka shrieked, scrambling backward.
But his knees buckled, his cheap flip-flops catching on his own feet, and he crashed hard onto his ass.
The raw panic left no room for him to even wince at the impact.
His head snapped up defensively, but in a fraction of a second, the creature lurched forward.
Its movements were unnaturally disjointed, glitch-like, yet blindingly fast as it collapsed the distance between them.
Slam!
A slick, clammy, ice-cold hand clamped brutally over Arka's mouth.
A foul, viscous slime oozed from between the monster's fingers, forcing its way past his lips.
The bitter, nauseating taste made his stomach violently heave, triggering a desperate urge to vomit.
The vise-like grip was so monstrously powerful he felt his jawbone fracturing beneath the pressure of those calcified, rigid fingers.
The abomination leaned its mangled face closer, a freezing, putrid mist escaping its blackened maw.
"I hate you!" it rasped, a sound like coarse sandpaper tearing through raw wood, vibrating painfully inside Arka's skull. "Don't you dare be happy! Don't you dare waste that blank page on yourself!"
Arka thrashed in pure desperation.
Then, things shattered into absolute absurdity.
Dozens of ancient, yellowed sheets that resembled blank parchment materialized out of nowhere, swirling frantically around them.
They formed a claustrophobic cage, trapping Arka, the creature, and the floating sphere holding the long-eared youth inside an inescapable perimeter.
Several pages slammed flat against his arms, and the moment they touched his skin, his limbs locked up completely, paralyzed by an invisible force.
The oxygen in his lungs was practically spent, replaced by a crushing, agonizing pressure that threatened to implode his chest under the creature's unrelenting grip.
Arka's entire frame convulsed.
He absolutely, thoroughly loathed shit like this—irrational, supernatural garbage that couldn't be quantified by cold, hard science.
He wanted to scream, to tear his throat apart, but only a pathetic, muffled gurgle escaped his lips.
This... this has to be a fucking hallucination. A vivid nightmare because I'm chain-smoking this cheap trash...
Arka's mind raved in a blind, chaotic panic. Get the fuck away from me... please, just fuck off... don't kill me...
The abomination canted its mangled face even closer. A sickening, wet gurgle bubbled up from deep within its throat before it forced out another suffocating whisper.
"You flee from the very thing you created..."
In that exact split second, a foreign, violent surge of imagery was forced directly into Arka's brain.
He saw the silhouette of a girl bathed in blinding, ethereal light, laughing with pure, radiant joy while anchoring her grip on the hand of someone trying to run away.
The girl's piercingly clear blue eyes seemed to forcefully gouge out what little remained of Arka's sanity.
"You will exist merely to hunt for her shadow..." the monstrosity continued, its voice an agonizing, wooden rasp. "...bleeding yourself dry to protect her... and in the end..."
Protect her? Who the fuck is she? What is this goddamn psycho talking about?! Arka's mind screamed in raw, suffocating frustration.
A thick, black droplet of sludge oozed from the creature's ruined face, landing heavily against Arka's cheek.
The crushing vice clamped over Arka's mouth slackened just a fraction—not to grant him mercy, but to ensure he swallowed every single syllable of its final decree.
"...you will put an end to my misery with your own two hands."
Misery? Arka's heart flatlined for a beat. Does it mean... I'm getting fucking murdered? Am I actually gonna kick the bucket over some cheap monitor hallucination?!
The absolute terror of death hit him harder than any physical blow. Kirana's face flashed across his mind—the utterly devastated look he had callously abandoned on the side of the road.
No... I can't die right fucking now. If I croak, what the hell happens to Kirana? She's probably losing her goddamn mind... she's entirely alone... I'm a piece of shit, but I can't die before I... before I...
Arka thrashed with the absolute last dregs of his failing strength, but the dozens of ancient parchment pages hovering around them suddenly erupted into flames all at once.
The pitch-black fire aggressively devoured what was left of the sterile white void.
Arka's vision began to fracture into darkness.
Kirana... I'm sorry...
Right before his consciousness was snuffed out entirely, the entity tilted its head, its missing lips twisting into what felt like a mocking sneer.
"Let us meet again at the very edge of Midgaria's pages."
And then, Arka's world went dead black.