The door to his dorm room clicked shut behind him, and the sound seemed to echo in the sudden quiet.
Silence settled, thick and unnatural after the noise of the city and the fight and the infirmary, and it made his skin prickle like he had stepped into cold water.
His ears strained for footsteps outside, for voices, for anything that meant he wasn't alone with himself, and when there was nothing, his stomach tightened again.
Soren crossed the room on autopilot, pulled out the chair by his desk, and dropped into it, the wood scraping softly, the seat taking his weight with a blunt thud that sounded far louder than it should have.
He set the coin pouch down in front of him.
It landed with a dull, solid weight, the kind of sound that should have meant security, the kind that should have soothed him.
He stared at it anyway, unblinking.
Enough.
More than enough to matter, heavy enough that the pouch didn't lie flat, and for a moment his mind tried to latch onto that, to treat it like an anchor, to pretend that if he focused on numbers and weight and practical outcomes he wouldn't have to think about the other part of the night.
'…Was it worth it?'
The question hung there, unanswered, because there wasn't a version of the answer that didn't make his throat tighten.
A quiet, hollow laugh escaped him, and it sounded wrong in the room, like someone else had made it.
"I guess this really is a fantasy world," he murmured, not amused, not impressed, just tired.
Earlier, before he had passed out, his thoughts had been frantic, spiralling wildly from one fear to the next, each one clawing at him like it might be the last.
'What if I get arrested?'
'What if they expel me?'
'What if killing someone changes everything?'
Now those thoughts felt distant, almost ridiculous, not because they were wrong, but because the world had answered them with a shrug.
Nobody even cared.
Not the guards, not the priestess, not even Felix, not in the way Soren had expected the first time he ever imagined this line being crossed.
In Ivansia, as long as the person you killed could be labelled a criminal, as long as you could point at the right kind of justification, it wasn't a moral cliff, it was paperwork, it was a reward, it was a problem neatly resolved.
The realisation sat heavily in his chest.
Here, murder wasn't a line you crossed once and then spent the rest of your life staring at the drop behind you; it was a task, another obstacle to remove, another thing people did and then moved on from.
'What a barbaric world.'
He knew they had been trying to kill him.
He wasn't stupid enough to believe they would have let him walk away once they had taken what they wanted, and he could still remember the pressure of the blade going in, the way his body had gone cold and hot all at once.
Logically, he understood the necessity.
Emotionally, his body didn't care about logic.
It cared about the feeling of flesh giving way, it cared about the wet warmth splattering across his skin, it cared about the metallic stench thick enough to taste, it cared about the sound that had come out of the man's throat when Soren's axe had done what it was meant to do.
His hands trembled as the memories surfaced, uninvited, because they weren't memories in the normal sense, not faded images he could choose to glance at and then put away, they were perfect, sharp, immediate, like he was still there.
"Hahh… fuck."
The swear came out on a breath, and his stomach rolled hard enough that he had to brace a hand against the desk.
Just thinking about it made him want to vomit.
He pushed back abruptly, the chair legs scraping, and stood, one hand gripping the edge of the desk to keep himself steady as bile rose in his throat.
He dragged a hand down his face, fingers catching on dried sweat, and turned toward the window, staring out at the dark campus grounds, trying to focus on the distance instead of the inside of his skull.
'I need a change of pace.'
Staying here alone with nothing but his thoughts, with the pouch on the desk like an accusation, felt like a bad idea, the sort of bad idea that ended with him sitting on the floor shaking until morning.
He stripped off his ruined clothes and changed quickly, movements rough and impatient, as if speed could keep the memories from catching him.
His hair was tied back with little care, his appearance far messier than usual, and he didn't bother fixing it.
He didn't care.
Grabbing the pouch, he left the room.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
[Den of Ina]
The sign creaked softly as he looked up at it, swaying a little on its chain.
A bar.
The word should have been enough to make him pause, to make him turn around, because he had never been the type to drink alone, not even back on Earth, not even on the nights where the silence in his flat felt too loud.
Without giving himself time to second-guess it, Soren pushed the door open.
Warm air rushed over him, thick with the scent of alcohol and sweat, and the noise hit him next, laughter and low conversation blending into a constant hum.
It was crowded but not packed, bodies close enough to feel real without being suffocating, the kind of place where people went to forget themselves for a few hours and didn't ask too many questions about anyone else doing the same.
Normally, he would have turned around immediately.
Today, he walked in, because the alternative was going back to a room where the walls felt too close and his own hands felt like they didn't belong to him.
Back on Earth he had only ever drunk socially, at celebrations, birthdays, nights out where the point was the people rather than the alcohol.
He had never liked drinking alone, because drinking alone only held bad memories, the kind that came with quiet rooms, poor decisions, self-loathing, and mornings you didn't want to remember.
But today wasn't normal.
He sat at a table near the bar, close enough that the noise could swallow him, and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, because he didn't want this to be comforting; he wanted it to be effective.
The mug was set before him soon after, sloshing slightly, foam clinging to the rim.
"Thanks," he said automatically.
He took a sip.
"Cough—!"
It burned, harsh liquid sliding down his throat like he had swallowed fire, and his face twisted as his eyes watered.
'Still tastes like shit.'
No matter the world, alcohol apparently tasted awful.
He forced himself to drink again anyway, slower this time, swallowing past the sting, swallowing past the urge to push it away, because the warmth it left behind was real, and for a few seconds it gave his body something else to focus on besides the cold memory of steel and blood.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
By the time the alcohol really hit him, Soren had lost track of how many mugs he'd had.
It wasn't that he couldn't count; his mind could count perfectly, it could track every detail of the night with cruel precision.
It was that the numbers slid away the moment he tried to hold onto them, like his brain had decided the quantity didn't matter, only the effect did.
Warmth pooled in his stomach, creeping outward, loosening the tightness in his shoulders by degrees, taking the sharpest edge off the constant tremor that had been living in his hands since he woke.
It wasn't relief, not really.
It was numbness.
A thin blanket thrown over something rotting underneath, and he knew it, he knew it in the same way he knew every other unpleasant truth about himself, but he kept drinking because numbness was still better than feeling everything at once.
'I should leave soon,' he thought, the idea drifting lazily through his mind as he stared at the condensation sliding down the side of the mug.
Getting properly drunk with a pouch of coin in his pocket sounded like a great way to wake up robbed, or worse, and some distant, practical part of him still cared about survival enough to whisper warnings.
He finished another mug and ordered one more, telling himself it would be the last.
When it arrived, his gaze lingered on the surface of the drink, on the way the lanternlight caught it, and the memories came back anyway, not because he wanted them to, not because he invited them, but because he couldn't stop them.
Thanks to his unique skill, every second of the fight replayed with perfect clarity.
Every sound.
Every movement.
Every mistake.
The way his breath had stuttered when the knife went in, the way his fingers had gone numb, the way his vision had narrowed until the world was nothing but the attacker's hand and Felix's voice and the desperate, ugly command in Soren's own head to move, to do something, to not die.
'So this is the downside,' he thought, and the bitter humour of it almost made him laugh again.
Perfect memory was a gift when you wanted answers, when you wanted certainty, when you wanted to believe the world could be mastered by collecting enough information.
But it was a curse when what you wanted was to forget.
He swallowed, then winced as the alcohol scraped down his throat again.
"It makes things hard," he muttered, voice low enough that it disappeared into the tavern noise.
Resting his chin in his hand, he stared at nothing, letting the chatter around him wash past like a river, faces and voices blurring into background texture.
People laughed, argued about odds, complained about professors, flirted, lived, and the normality of it sat wrong in his chest, like an ill-fitting coat.
From the moment he had been transmigrated some part of him had known this would happen eventually.
A medieval fantasy world, an academy that trained fighters, a society that treated violence as a tool, it would have been stranger if killing had never crossed his path.
He had just… avoided thinking about it properly, pushed it away whenever it tried to become real, because as long as it stayed theoretical he could treat it like a story beat, something that happened to characters rather than him.
'Honestly, I don't feel guilty about killing them.'
The thought came bluntly, and he didn't flinch from it, because it was true.
If he hadn't acted, he would be dead, stabbed in some filthy alley with his throat filling up and his coin pouch torn from his hand, and the world would have moved on without noticing.
What haunted him wasn't the choice.
It was the reality.
The screams, the blood, the weight of the axe in his hands, the resistance when it met bone, the way his body had kept moving even when his mind wanted to stop, because stopping meant dying.
And then the aftermath, the way nobody cared, the way it had been filed away as 'deserved' and therefore acceptable, the way the priestess had looked at him like he was a patient with a headache rather than someone who had just crossed a line he never thought he would cross.
…and Felix's eyes.
Soren's fingers tightened around the mug until the wood creaked faintly.
Felix had always been a joke character in the game.
A playboy, loud and shallow, a source of comic relief you didn't take seriously unless the game wanted a quick emotional sting.
Even here, that image had mainly held up, he flirted, he teased, he wore charm like armour, and it had been easy to file him away under 'safe'.
Until tonight.
The moment danger appeared, Felix had changed, like someone had flicked a switch.
Cold.
Efficient.
When Soren was stabbed, Felix hadn't panicked; he had moved, decisive, ruthless, casting and cutting without hesitation.
When Soren had realised he had to kill, Felix hadn't argued, hadn't tried to soften it, he had simply made space for it to happen, like it was inevitable and therefore not worth wasting breath on.
And when Felix killed them himself…
His expression never shifted.
Soren took another drink, slower, feeling the alcohol settle like a stone.
'What if that was the real him?'
The thought made his stomach twist, not because he believed Felix was evil, or because he wanted to paint him as a monster, but because it meant something simple and comfortable had been stripped away.
It meant Felix wasn't just a friend-shaped distraction in a world that kept trying to make Soren bleed; he was someone who could do what needed doing, someone who could look at violence and not flinch, someone who could step over bodies and keep walking.
It made Soren uneasy, because it reminded him that people here had grown up with this, that for them the line he had just crossed might not even exist.
He knew it was unfair.
Felix had saved his life.
Still, characters could change between game and reality, and he had already seen that, more than once, the cracks in his memorised 'map' widening every time someone behaved like a person instead of a script.
'What if Alex is like that too?'
The idea slid in next, and with it came a brief flash of Alex's calm, the competence, the way he carried himself like someone who had already decided what he would do in a crisis.
Soren exhaled, long and slow, trying to breathe past the tightness in his throat, trying to convince his body it was safe to be sitting in a bar with a drink instead of crouched in an alley with blood on his hands.
He stared into the mug like it might answer him.
"What am I even thinking?" he muttered, and it came out tired rather than amused.
The problem was that the alcohol wasn't doing what he wanted it to, not properly.
It softened the edges of his panic, made his limbs heavier, made his thoughts drift instead of claw, but it didn't touch the memories.
It couldn't, because nothing could, not with that damned skill burning the night into him as neatly as ink on paper.
He could still feel it, if he let himself.
The wet warmth.
The copper smell.
The sound that had cut off too suddenly.
The fact that his hands had done it, and that those hands were now holding a mug like any other person in the room.
Soren swallowed hard, then took another drink anyway, because at least the burning in his throat was a sensation he could choose, and right now choice mattered more than comfort.
The clock on the wall caught his eye, and he blinked slowly, processing the numbers with a delayed, drunken insistence.
'3:19 am.'
Time had moved without asking his permission.
A wry smile tugged at his lips for a second, then faltered before it could become anything real, because the weekend didn't make this better, it just meant there would be fewer consequences in the morning, fewer people to notice the shadows under his eyes, fewer reasons to pretend he was alright.
He stared at the clock a moment longer, then looked down at the half-empty mug, at the thin ring of foam clinging to the rim, at the way his fingers still shook faintly even after everything he had poured down his throat.
"Another one," he said quietly, voice almost lost beneath the tavern's hum.
He wasn't ready to go back yet.
————「❤︎」————