Beep. Beep. Beep.
The generic alarm from his phone dragged him out of sleep.
"Nh..."
Kiyotaka sluggishly pushed himself upright, rubbing at his eyes as he glanced around the familiar sight of his own room.
It wasn't large by any means, with just enough space for a single bed pushed against the wall, a narrow desk squeezed under the window, and a small bookshelf standing loyally beside his closet. Everything was arranged neatly, but the limited space made it feel lived-in rather than empty.
His desk was buried under textbooks and notebooks; his closet held his neatly prepared school uniform; his bookshelf was packed with study materials and a few novels he kept promising himself he'd read someday. He glanced at the shuttered window, catching sight of the morning light seeping weakly through the curtains.
He'd had a strange dream, though the details were already slipping away like water through fingers. Something about... old buildings? Kids? The more he tried to pin down the images, the faster they dissolved.
Weird. Usually his recall was better than this.
He tried focusing harder, but it was like trying to grab smoke. Every time he thought he had a detail, it scattered. Had there been chains? Or was that from a book he'd read?
Whatever. Probably just stress from yesterday's training test.
He glanced at the time on his phone.
6:30 AM. Time to get ready for school.
He swung his legs out of bed, feet touching the cool floor. The apartment was quiet, empty as it had been for months since his family left for business outside the city. He'd been living alone since then, which suited him fine.
He grabbed his towel and headed for the bathroom. The shower woke him up properly, hot water washing away the lingering grogginess and that nagging sense he was forgetting something important.
The thought slipped away before he could examine it.
Afterward, he put on his school uniform—white shirt, dark slacks, blazer that would inevitably spend most of the day draped over his chair because classrooms were always too hot.
Back in his room, he checked his phone while his hair finished drying. A few messages had piled up in the class group chat overnight. Some of his classmates were already making plans for the weekend, others were talking about the upcoming history test, and a handful were sharing memes he didn't really understand. None of it was anything that required his attention.
He packed his school bag with the textbooks he'd need for today's classes, double-checking he hadn't forgotten anything; history, mathematics, literature, science. All there. He'd done this exact same check hundreds of times before.
In the kitchen, he made toast with jam and instant coffee that tasted vaguely chemical but had enough caffeine to function. As he ate, he reviewed his notes for the history test.
The Treaty of... something. Happened in... some year that started with 18? Or 17?
He'd definitely memorized this last night. Spent a solid hour going through dates and names. But now when he reached for that information, it was like grasping at fog—not completely gone, he could feel it was there somewhere, just frustratingly out of reach.
He stared at the notes for another moment, then gave up and finished his breakfast. Rinsed his dishes out of habit, grabbed his bag, and headed out.
He walked four blocks to the transit station, his feet knowing the route without conscious thought. Left at the corner store, straight past the small park where old people were already doing their morning exercises, right at the intersection with the pharmacy.
The station was crowded with commuters; students, office workers, everyone moving toward their daily destinations. He bought his ticket from the machine and joined the flow of people heading to the platforms.
His train arrived three minutes later. The doors opened and everyone filed in with practiced efficiency, finding handholds, making space, avoiding eye contact.
Kiyotaka found a spot near the door and gripped the overhead strap, watching the city blur past the window. Buildings, stations, advertisements—familiar scenery he'd stopped actually seeing years ago.
A woman standing near him was talking quietly on her phone: "—no, I can't make it tonight. I wish I could but—yes, I know—well, what do you wish I would do about it? I'm telling you I can't—"
The word wish seemed to echo strangely in his ears.
He tilted his head slightly, then dismissed it. It was a common word. People said it all the time.
His stop came after twenty minutes. He filed off with dozens of others and climbed the stairs up to street level. His school was two blocks away, visible from here—a four-story building of concrete and glass that looked identical to a dozen other schools in this district.
Students streamed through the gates in their usual morning clusters, chatting and laughing about things he couldn't hear and wouldn't care about if he could. He walked past them without slowing, heading straight for the main building and taking the stairs to the third floor.
Class 2-B. His homeroom.
He entered to find about half the class already there; reviewing notes, standing in groups talking, or staring at their phones. Just the usual morning scene.
His seat was by the window, middle row. Not too close to the front where teachers could easily call on you, and not so far back where teachers tended to target daydreamers. A strategic position he had claimed at the start of the year.
He sat down, pulled out his textbook for first period, and began reviewing the material for today's test. They're revolving around dates, events, names of historical figures and the roles they'd played in shaping the current era; information he'd memorized last night, though it felt oddly vague now, like trying to recall something from months ago rather than hours.
He tried to focus on the Treaty of Western Accords. The date was... 17-something? No, 18-something. Or was it this century?
This is getting annoying.
"Hey, Kiyotaka."
He looked up. The student from the seat next to him was leaning over—someone he'd sat next to for months now, someone whose name he definitely should know but couldn't quite recall at this moment.
"Morning," Kiyotaka said evenly, keeping his expression neutral.
"You ready for this test? I'm gonna fail so hard. Tried studying last night but I kept falling asleep." The student laughed. "Had the weirdest dream too. I was in this old temple or something, and people kept asking me questions, but I couldn't understand what they wanted. Dreams are so random, right?"
That déjà vu sensation sharpened to a point, like someone had just jabbed a needle into the back of his brain.
"What kind of questions?" Kiyotaka asked, trying to keep his tone casual and mildly interested rather than suspicious.
"Huh? Oh, I don't really remember the specifics. Just... questions about what I wanted, I think? Super weird stuff that made no sense." The student shrugged it off easily, as if describing something completely mundane. "Anyway, you got any last-minute study tips? You're always good at these tests."
"Just review the key dates. That's usually what gets tested most heavily."
"Right, right. Thanks, man."
The student turned back to his own desk, leaving Kiyotaka staring at his textbook without really seeing it.
An old temple. Questions about what you wanted.
His own dream had involved something similar, hadn't it? Something about old buildings and questions and... what else? Why couldn't he remember anything concrete?
He tried to focus on the memory, really concentrate and pull it into sharp relief, but it kept dissolving like smoke. Not just fading naturally the way normal dreams did—this felt more like it was actively resisting his attempts to remember, slipping away faster the harder he tried to grasp it.
And it wasn't just the dream that was giving him trouble. The classmate's name—completely gone from his mental database. His own parent's names—he couldn't recall that either. The test information he'd spent an hour methodically memorizing—frustratingly inaccessible despite knowing he'd learned it recently.
He stared at the Treaty of Western Accords section again, trying to force his brain to cough up the data he knew was stored somewhere in there.
But there was nothing.
The thought that something might be preventing him from thinking clearly tried to surface, managed to hold for about three seconds before sliding away again, his attention drifting to the window, the other students, anywhere except the problem he'd just identified.
He filed away a vague sense of unease and waited for class to start.
The bell rang after that. More students streamed into the classroom, settling into their seats with varying degrees of panic depending on how ready or unready they were for the test.
Their homeroom teacher entered—Ms. Ching, or maybe Chong—carried a stack of test papers and dropped them onto her desk with a heavy thump. She's an older woman who taught history, with a countenance suggesting that she always vaguely disappointed in the world
"Alright, everyone in your seats. Put your phones away and close your books. You have forty-five minutes for this test. Do not talk or cheat. If I catch anyone looking at their neighbor's paper, you get an automatic zero."
It was the usual pre-test speech. Kiyotaka had heard variations of it dozens of times.
Ms. Ching/Chong began distributing the papers, walking up and down the aisles. When she reached his desk, she set the test down and continued on without a glance.
He looked down at it. It was a standard format; multiple choice, short answer, one essay question at the end. All topics he'd studied.
He picked up his pen and began.
The first few questions were straightforward enough. They're focusing on dates, names, and basic facts. He filled in the answers mechanically, his hand moving across the paper with practiced movement.
As he continued, however, something strange... happened.
He looked at the answer in the paper.
Question 5: In what year did the Treaty of...
He blinked, and the text blurred. When it came back into focus, the question had changed.
Question 5: What do you wish had happened instead?
Kiyotaka stared at the paper in confusion.
That wasn't a history question.
He looked up.
Around him, students were hunched over their tests, scribbling answers as if nothing was wrong.
Ms. Ching/Chong sat at her desk, scrolling through something on her tablet, completely unbothered.
Everything looked normal.
He looked back down at his test.
Question 5: In what year did the Treaty of Western Accords take effect?
It's a proper history question now. As it should be.
He looked at the next question.
Question 6: What do you wish you had studied more carefully?
...that definitely wasn't a history question.
He looked around again. No one else seemed disturbed. Everyone was just taking their test normally.
When he looked back at his paper, question 6 had reverted to a normal history question about economic reforms in the previous century.
This was... concerning.
He continued through the test, but now he was watching carefully. Every few questions, the text would shift—just for a second—into something else. Something that had nothing to do with history.
What do you wish for?
What would you change if you could?
What do you want most?
Always variations on the same theme. Wishes. Wants. Desires.
And every time—every single time—he blinked or glanced away, the question snapped back into its proper historical format as though nothing had changed.
He finished the test in thirty minutes—faster than most of his classmates—and set his pen down, staring at the completed paper in silence.
Something was clearly wrong.
Multiple memory gaps that couldn't be explained by normal forgetfulness. Recurring hallucinations all focused on a specific theme. A general sense that something was fundamentally off about today.
The thoughts kept trying to connect into something coherent, some kind of logical conclusion, but they kept sliding apart like oil on water before he could form a complete theory.
Ms. Ching/Chong collected the tests when time was up. "Alright, second period starts in five minutes. You're free until then."
Most students immediately pulled out phones or started chatting with their neighbors, relieved that the ordeal was over for now. Kiyotaka remained at his desk, staring at nothing in particular, mind still turning over the strangeness.
The student next to him—still unnamed in his mental database—leaned over with a friendly expression. "How'd you do?"
"Fine, probably."
"Lucky. I definitely failed at least three questions." The student sighed dramatically. "Hey, what'd you put for that essay question? The one about economic reforms?"
"I discussed the implementation timeline and the resistance from merchant guilds."
"Oh, good, that's kinda what I wrote too. Man, I really wish these tests were easier, you know? Don't you wish—"
"Can you stop?" Kiyotaka cut in.
The student blinked. "What?"
"Don't use that word."
"What word? Wish?" The student laughed uncertainly. "Dude, are you okay? You're acting kind of weird."
Kiyotaka didn't answer. He was watching the student's face carefully, looking for... something.
But there was nothing. Nothing except a normal classmate looking at him with mild concern.
"Seriously, you feeling alright?" the student asked.
"...I'm fine," Kiyotaka exhaled lightly, pretending to be tired. "Sorry. I'm just not feeling well today."
"Maybe you should go to the nurse's office or something. You look kind of pale, really."
"Maybe."
The second period bell rang, cutting off the conversation before it could go anywhere else. Their mathematics teacher entered, the lesson began, and the morning continued as if nothing strange had happened.
During lunch break, most students flooded out toward the cafeteria or courtyard, eager for food and fresh air and escape from the classroom. Kiyotaka stayed at his desk, staring out the window without really seeing the view beyond the glass.
"Not going to the cafeteria?"
He looked up. A girl from a few seats over stood beside his desk—someone he vaguely recognized from class discussions, though once again the name was completely unavailable in his mental files.
"I brought lunch," he lied.
"Yeah, but everyone hangs out there during break. Gets kind of lonely eating by yourself, doesn't it?" She tilted her head slightly, studying him with open curiosity. "I've noticed you're always alone up here. Every single lunch period."
"I just like it that way."
"That's kind of lonely, though." She said it matter-of-factly, without judgment. "You know, you're hard to figure out, Kiyotaka. You're clearly smart but you never show off. You're capable but you never take leadership roles. It's like you're deliberately trying to be forgettable."
"Is there something you wanted?" he asked, redirecting the conversation.
"Oh, right. For the literature project next week—we need to pair up. Want to work together? You're good with analysis."
"Sure."
"Cool. I'll message you the details later." She started to leave, then paused. "Hey, random question—what do you wish you were doing instead of being stuck in school?"
That word again...
Kiyotaka looked at her more carefully this time. "Why do you ask?"
"Just curious, I guess. Everyone has something they'd rather be doing, right? Something they wish for instead of sitting through boring classes all day."
"I don't particularly wish for anything at the moment."
She laughed, as if he'd just told a moderately funny joke. "Come on, everyone wishes for something. Better grades without studying, more friends, less homework, superpowers, winning the lottery—everyone's got something they want."
"Then I suppose I'm an exception to that rule."
Her smile faltered slightly, like she'd hit an unexpected wall in the conversation that she hadn't seen coming. "Well... if you say so, I guess."
She left, rejoining her friends across the room who were chatting animatedly about something that provoked periodic bursts of laughter.
Kiyotaka filed the exchange away for later consideration and turned his attention to the remaining classes.
The afternoon classes proceeded with the same mechanical regularity as the morning—science lecture about chemical bonds, another literature period discussing some novel he'd supposedly read but couldn't remember details about, the usual routine marching forward without deviation.
When the final bell rang, most students left immediately, flooding out the doors like water breaking through a dam. Kiyotaka packed his bag more slowly, mind still occupied with trying to make sense of the day's accumulating strangeness.
He had club activities scheduled next—though when he tried to remember which club he was actually in, which activity he was supposed to be participating in, the information simply wasn't there in his mind where it should be.
He headed toward the club building anyway, following muscle memory and habit since his conscious mind apparently couldn't be trusted to provide basic information anymore. The building was separate from the main academic structure—smaller, two stories, dedicated entirely to extracurricular activities. He'd been here dozens of times before. Hundreds, probably.
He took the stairs to the second floor, following that same automatic sense of direction. The club room was at the end of the hall, door slightly ajar, voices audible from inside.
When he pushed the door open fully, several other students were already there, setting up what looked like equipment on tables arranged around the room. He recognized their faces vaguely—fellow club members, presumably—but couldn't attach names to any of them.
"Oh, Kiyotaka! You're here!" One of them—a cheerful guy whose name Kiyotaka should know but couldn't quite recall—waved him over enthusiastically. "Perfect timing! We're just about to start today's session. Can you help set up the—"
Kiyotaka unconsciously shut his voice off, standing frozen in the doorway as he scanned the room, his confusion steadily building.
Equipment sat on tables in various configurations—shapes and colors he could see and identify as objects, but somehow couldn't process into meaningful categories or understand their purpose. Posters covered the walls with text he could technically read, the characters forming words he knew, but the meaning refused to click into place in his brain. Other students moved about the space with purpose, faces vaguely familiar in the way that people you see regularly but don't really know are familiar.
"Kiyotaka? You coming in or what?"
He looked at the cheerful student carefully, really examining him.
"What club is this?" Kiyotaka asked.
The cheerful student blinked. "Huh? Are you messing with me?"
"What club is this?" Kiyotaka repeated, firmer this time.
"Dude, are you feeling okay? Did you hit your head or something?"
The other students in the room were looking at him now with expressions of concern and confusion.
"Just answer the question," Kiyotaka said. "What club is this?"
"It's..." The cheerful student's expression flickered—just for a second—into something blank and uncertain before the smile returned. "It's our club. You know. The one we're all in."
"What do we do here?"
"We do... club activities. Obviously." The student laughed, but it sounded forced. "Seriously, are you okay? You're acting really strange."
"What are our club activities?" he pressed.
The cheerful student's smile was starting to look strained. "We... do the usual stuff. What we always do."
"Be specific."
"We..." The student paused, his expression going momentarily blank again. "We do what clubs do. Activities. Projects. You've been coming here all year, Kiyotaka. Why are you asking such weird questions?"
Because something was deeply, fundamentally wrong—and this boy either couldn't answer or wasn't allowed to.
"What's your name?" Kiyotaka suddenly asked, changing his tactics.
The student blinked. "What?"
"Your name. We've been in the same club for months apparently. What's your name?"
The student opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. "It's... I'm..." He laughed nervously. "Come on, man, you know my name."
"Tell me your name."
"It's obviously—" The student's face went completely blank for a solid three seconds. As if nothing happened, the cheerful expression returned. "Why don't you tell me your name first? Since you're being so weird about this."
"Kiyotaka."
"Right! And I'm your friend from the club. We do club things together."
He couldn't even say his own name...
Kiyotaka was growing more certainty to the idea that something is clearly wrong with this whole situation.
The other students in the room were standing now, all looking at Kiyotaka with identical expressions of mild concern. And it's not worried nor alarmed—but uniformly, blandly concerned.
"What do you wish we would do to help you feel better?" one of them asked.
"Maybe he wishes he could skip club today," another suggested.
"We should ask him what he wishes for."
"What do you wish for, Kiyotaka?"
They were all saying it now, in that same bland, uniform tone.
"What do you wish for?"
"What do you wish for?"
Kiyotaka stepped backward through the doorway and pulled the door closed.
He quickly walked away down the empty hallway, his footsteps echoing off the walls in the silence. His heart should probably be racing by now—any normal person would be deeply unsettled by what just happened. But instead, he felt only a creeping, growing sense of wrongness, as if reality had developed a fault line that was widening with every step he took.
He reached the stairs and started descending, taking them quickly.
The hallway ahead of him at the bottom of the stairs stretched longer with each step he took toward it, the exit receding even as he moved forward.
He stopped walking entirely and just stared at the impossibly long corridor stretching out before him.
Clearly, that wasn't how buildings worked. That wasn't how space itself was supposed to function either.
He turned around. The hallway behind him had also stretched in the other direction, the stairwell he'd just descended now impossibly distant, as if he'd somehow walked miles in the span of seconds.
What is happening...
Confusion settled in slowly, not as panic but as the sense that something had gone wrong. He could feel it hovering just out of reach, but every time he tried to pin it down, his thoughts veered off course before reaching the end.
The hallway didn't make sense. He knew that much. Explaining why was the problem. Buildings didn't behave like this, and space didn't stretch on a whim, yet the reasoning refused to stay intact long enough to finish forming. It was like trying to recall a word he knew perfectly well, only for it to dissolve the moment he reached for it.
He forced himself to think it through from the beginning. Hallways weren't supposed to stretch. They were solid, fixed things, shaped by design and physical limits—but the reasoning fell apart halfway through, scattering before it could settle into anything coherent.
That failure bothered him more than the hallway itself.
Why couldn't I think this through properly?
The question stayed put. This hadn't started here. All day, his focus had been slipping—names, facts, connections he was sure he knew drifting just out of reach. He'd brushed it off as fatigue, stress, or something ordinary.
But clearly, it wasn't ordinary. The interruptions were too consistent. Every time something felt wrong, his thoughts stalled, as if he'd run into an invisible barrier that kept him from looking too closely at what was happening.
And that itself was weird, wasn't it? This specific kind of mental fog that lifted occasionally but mostly kept his thoughts scattered and unfocused. He didn't normally lose his train of thought like this, let alone struggle to form basic logical connections.
He looked down at his hands again, flexing his fingers. They looked real. Felt real. But there was something about the quality of reality here that felt... thin, maybe? Insubstantial? Like a photograph instead of the actual object, a copy rather than an original.
His apartment that morning—when he tried to remember waking up, the details were oddly vague, like a story someone had told him rather than something he'd experienced.
The school day—hours had passed, but it felt like minutes. Or maybe the opposite. Time didn't quite make sense.
Most people he encountered couldn't even remember their names, like they were... what was the word? Placeholders? Templates? Things that looked like people but weren't quite complete?
This mental fog that kept him from thinking clearly—what did that remind him of?
It's something familiar. Something he'd experienced before. This exact sensation of knowing something was wrong but being unable to focus on why. This feeling of reality being slightly off but accepting it anyway because questioning it felt difficult, requiring the effort his brain didn't want to make.
When had he felt this before?
At night. When he was...
Asleep.
This is like a dream.
The thought surfaced with sudden clarity, and for once it didn't immediately slide away into that mental fog that had been plaguing him all day.
Dreams did exactly this sort of thing; defied physics without explanation or apology, made spaces expand and contract according to no logical rule or natural law, created people who couldn't answer simple questions because the dreaming mind hadn't bothered to give them complete identities or backstories.
He looked back down at his hands, turned them over slowly, examining them in the dim hallway light as if seeing them for the first time. They looked real enough—proper skin texture, the right number of fingers, familiar scars and marks he'd accumulated over the years. They felt solid and present when he flexed them.
But then again, they would look and feel real in a dream too, wouldn't they? The dreaming mind rarely questioned the reality of its own body or noticed the small inconsistencies until after waking when the memory of the dream revealed all its logical holes.
Am I dreaming right now?
And not in some vague metaphorical sense, but actually, literally still asleep somewhere in reality and experiencing all of this as nothing more than a dream construct, an elaborate simulation running in my unconscious mind?
If so, what triggered it?
He started walking forward again, and the hallway obligingly returned to its normal length, allowing him to reach the stairs leading down to the ground floor as if the impossible stretch had never happened at all.
Why would I suddenly be having such a vivid, detailed dream that mimics my normal life so precisely?
Unless...
The thought tried to surface but kept sliding away before he could fully grasp it.
He pushed through that mental resistance, forcing himself to concentrate. There was something important he was forgetting, something crucial that would explain everything if he could just remember it.
Yesterday. What had happened yesterday?
He'd been... at home. Alone. Feeling unusually tired, more fatigued than normal despite not having done anything particularly strenuous. And that fatigue had been building for days, getting progressively worse, making it harder and harder to stay awake.
And then...
And then...
The memory refused to come into focus, kept scattering like startled birds whenever he tried to pin it down.
He reached the ground floor and pushed through the main doors into afternoon light that seemed slightly too bright for his liking.
The courtyard was full of students moving in their usual patterns: clusters of friends talking over each other, others drifting toward the gates, the familiar noise and movement of the school day winding down.
He stopped just outside the entrance and watched instead, focusing on the flow of people.
A girl with a bright red backpack walked past him, talking to her friend about weekend plans with animated hand gestures. "—so I was thinking we could go to that new café that just opened downtown, the one everyone's been talking about—"
Three minutes after that.
"—so I was thinking we could go to that new café that just opened downtown, the one everyone's been talking about—"
The same girl with the same bright red backpack walked past again, having the exact same conversation with the exact same friend.
Three more minutes elapsed on his internal clock.
"—so I was thinking we could go to that new café that just opened downtown, the one everyone's been talking about—"
There she was again—perfectly identical, down to the way her ponytail bounced on the last word.
He looked around the courtyard more systematically, cataloging the patterns with growing certainty. The boy with the basketball was repeating his dribbling pattern in precise three-minute cycles, hitting the same rhythm every time. The group arguing about which restaurant to go to for dinner cycled through the same argument word for word. The teacher walked toward her car on an endless loop, never actually reaching it or getting in or driving away, just walking the same path eternally.
Everyone trapped in their own three-minute cycles, completely unaware they were repeating the same actions over and over and over like broken automatons stuck in an infinite loop.
Everyone except him.
"What do you wish for?"
The voice came from directly behind him, close enough that he should have sensed their presence.
He turned sharply. A student he didn't recognize stood there. He had a generic school uniform that could belong to anyone, a face so average and unremarkable it was almost impossible to describe, and a pleasant smile that looked like it had been painted on with a brush rather than genuinely felt.
"Sorry?" Kiyotaka asked, keeping his tone neutral but alert.
"What do you wish for?" the student repeated with the same pleasant tone and empty smile. "Everyone wishes for something, wants something they don't have. What do you wish for, Kiyotaka?"
Other students were stopping now, breaking out of their loops.
The girl with the red backpack froze mid-conversation; the boy with the basketball let it fall and rolled away; and the arguing group went silent all at once.
They turned toward him, their movements synchronized and mechanical. All of them turned to look at Kiyotaka.
"What do you wish for?"
"What do you wish for?"
"What do you wish for?"
The question came from dozens of mouths in perfect, chilling unison.
Kiyotaka took a step backward.
The students took a step forward.
"What do you wish for, Kiyotaka?"
The courtyard flickered violently—like a video with corrupted data glitching for a single frame—and he caught a glimpse of what lay underneath the carefully constructed simulation: stone walls covered in strange carved markings, ancient architecture that predated anything modern by centuries or millennia, flickering candlelight casting dancing shadows across rough surfaces, children lying motionless in rows of simple beds in a darkened room. He understood immediately.
That's reality. That's where I'm supposed to be.
The courtyard snapped back into place with audible force, the school illusion reasserting itself over the truth. But now the two scenes were bleeding together. The students' faces flickered between normal expressions and something else—blank, distorted, and inhuman. The school building behind them warped, stone pushing through concrete like a double-exposed photo.
"WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR?"
The voices were much louder now, more urgent and desperate in their insistence, as if his answer was vitally important to something.
In response, Kiyotaka simply turned and ran.
***
He sprinted toward the school gates, but the courtyard stretched impossibly long. Every step he took, the exit seemed to move further away.
Behind him, the voices chased him in a relentless chorus.
"WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR?"
"WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR?"
The world glitched faster now—school turning to stone chambers and back again, students flickering into monsters wearing human skin.
He veered mid-run and aimed for a side exit instead, bursting through it into what should have been a narrow street—
—only to step straight back into the main courtyard.
He tried again with a different door, a different route, but the result was the same, bringing him back to where he'd started.
Every path brought him to the same courtyard and the same question.
"WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR?"
He was trapped in a maze where all exits were illusions.
His apartment building suddenly appeared at the far end of the courtyard—impossible since it should be kilometers away, but dream logic didn't care about distance or geography.
He sprinted toward it because what else was there to do, and the building stayed mercifully stationary this time, actually letting him approach instead of receding. Through the doors that opened at his touch, into the familiar lobby, up the stairwell that suddenly felt too long and too dark, climbing flight after flight.
His floor. His door. He fumbled with keys that appeared in his hand without him remembering having grabbed them, had to correct which end went into the lock because muscle memory operated even in dreams apparently, and finally pushed inside.
His apartment was exactly as he'd left it that morning. His breakfast dishes still in the sink. His school bag where he'd—wait, no, he'd taken that with him. But it was here anyway, sitting by his desk as if he'd never left.
He stepped inside slowly, scanning the room with careful attention.
It was a perfect recreation, every detail accurate and every object in its proper place, all of it pulled straight from his memories as his unconscious mind rebuilt the space exactly as it remembered.
A knock on the door interrupted his examination
"Kiyotaka? You there?"
I don't recognize the voice.
He stayed silent, but the voice continued anyway.
"It's me, Kiyotaaka. From school. I followed you because you seemed really out of it. Can I come in? I'm worried about you."
He remained quiet and motionless, listening.
"Come on, man. Just let me in for a second. I just want to make sure you're okay."
A pause stretched out, but he could feel the presence through the door, standing still.
"What do you wish we would do?"
The voice shifted as it spoke—less human now, layered, as if several voices were speaking at once.
Kiyotaka stepped into the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the drawer. His grip settled naturally around the handle, fingers finding their proper positions with ease. If they broke through that door and tried to touch him, he'd at least make them regret the attempt, dream or not, he wasn't going down without testing whether they could actually bleed.
"What do you wish for, Kiyotaka?"
The door began to rattle in its frame, the handle turning even though it was locked.
"WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR?"
His eyes darted around in alert.
The walls started closing in—literally shrinking inward, the space contracting by inches with each passing second as the ceiling lowered and the walls moved like the room itself was alive and trying to crush him.
This is bad.
His window exploded inward, glass spraying across the floor in a glittering cascade. Students from the courtyard climbed through with stiff, jerky movements, their faces blank with features that kept shifting and reforming.
The knife vanished from his hand without warning, as if it had never existed at all.
Of course. Can't have weapons in a psychological trap.
"What do you wish for?"
"What do you wish for?"
"What do you wish for?"
The ceiling pressed down faster while the walls squeezed from all sides, his entire living space collapsing into a coffin-sized box.
He tried to raise his arms, to at least prepare some kind of defensive stance, but there wasn't enough room anymore. The space had compressed so tightly that his arms were pinned to his sides, shoulders pressed against the walls, unable to move more than a few centimeters in any direction. Even if he'd wanted to fight, the dream had made sure he physically couldn't.
They crowded around him in impossible numbers, too many bodies to fit in the shrinking space, some of them overlapping each other in ways that defied three-dimensional geometry. Their faces kept flickering between different people—classmates he vaguely recognized, teachers he'd seen in hallways, complete strangers, things that were definitely not human—cycling through appearances like a broken slideshow unable to settle on a single image.
"WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR?"
The space had shrunk to barely more than the outline of his body now, walls touching his shoulders on both sides, ceiling brushing against his hair, floor solid beneath his feet as everything else compressed inward.
Any normal person would be terrified at this point, screaming and panicking and desperately wishing for this nightmare to end.
—but that's exactly what they want
He forced himself completely still despite the oppressive atmosphere, his breathing slow and steady despite every instinct screaming at him to struggle, his mind analyzing instead of panicking.
The dream had been threatening him for several minutes in escalating fashion, building pressure and creating fear, trying to force an emotional response through scenarios designed to make him react without thinking.
But he ran back through the entire sequence with focus: the club room confrontation where voices chanted at him, the courtyard chase where space itself bent to prevent escape, the apartment invasion where walls closed in and figures crowded close in maximum psychological pressure.
The sheer number of times that word had been mentioned—"wish"—was comical in its obviousness, with dozens of repetitions, maybe hundreds if he counted every instance since this morning.
And through all that escalating threat, he'd noticed one crucial detail: there was not a single instance of actual physical contact. When the window shattered, all the glass had somehow missed him entirely without leaving a single cut or scratch. When the figures pressed close, he couldn't actually feel them touching him despite how it looked.
They were threatening with vigor and commitment, pressuring him relentlessly, creating this convincing appearance of imminent harm and danger, but they weren't following through with any of it—just theater, psychological manipulation, smoke and mirrors designed to provoke a specific response.
The figures appeared pressed against him now from what his eyes were telling him, but he couldn't feel them touching his skin or feel their breath, warmth, or weight, and just saw them inches away with blank faces staring and mouths moving endlessly.
"WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR?"
"WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR?"
Because they can't actually hurt me. The dream can create elaborate scenarios, manipulate the environment impossibly, pressure and threaten and intimidate, but it can't directly cause harm. It can probably just try to scare me into harming myself by making a wish.
He looked at the nightmare creatures surrounding him with something close to relief at understanding the mechanism.
They're completely toothless. All of this is just an elaborate bluff, a con game designed to make me volunteer my own downfall.
Though there was always the possibility this was itself another layer of deception—maybe they knew he was the type to resist wishing for things, so they were deliberately pushing him toward that refusal to achieve some other goal. Maybe "not wishing" was exactly what they wanted, and this whole scenario was reverse psychology designed to exploit his analytical nature.
Or maybe they were counting on him overthinking it exactly like this, second-guessing himself into paralysis.
Or maybe that was what they wanted him to think about them wanting.
He could spiral down that rabbit hole forever, questioning every layer, doubting every conclusion, and that way led nowhere useful.
No—he had to make a choice based on the evidence available. The dream mechanism had been hammering "wish" at him constantly, with increasing desperation as he'd resisted, and the escalation itself suggested they genuinely needed him to comply, not that they wanted him to refuse.
Sometimes the obvious answer was the correct one.
"I have none," he said calmly to the faces, his voice steady despite the oppressive atmosphere crushing in around him. "I don't wish for anything."
The figures froze mid-motion, suddenly motionless like someone had pressed pause on the world.
"Impossible," they said in perfect unison, dozens of voices speaking as one. "Everyone wishes for something. Everyone wants something they don't have."
"I guess I'm an exception to that rule."
"You must wish. You must want. Everyone wants. It's fundamental to being alive."
He ran back through his memories quickly, examining them for any instance of genuine wishing—his childhood where he'd wanted things, survival primarily, but wanting and wishing were different concepts. His time after escaping that place where he'd chosen a normal life not because he wished for it but because it was the only viable option available to him. School, apartment, routine—none of it born from desire, just logical decisions based on circumstances and available resources.
Even now, trapped in this nightmare, he didn't wish to escape in any real sense. He simply recognized that escaping would be preferable to not escaping, the same way he'd recognize that being dry was preferable to being wet—a preference, not a wish. One was intellectual acknowledgment, the other was emotional investment, and he'd never been capable of the latter.
Maybe he really was broken in that particular way, fundamentally incompatible with the dream's core mechanism, which was why it was failing so spectacularly.
"Wanting and wishing are different things," he said conversationally, as if discussing the weather. "One is a biological impulse I have no control over, an automatic function of being human. The other is a conscious choice to express that impulse, to give it form and voice. And I'm choosing not to express it."
The space stopped shrinking immediately, as if his words had broken whatever mechanism was powering the compression.
The figures began flickering more violently, their forms becoming increasingly unstable, edges blurring and breaking apart like wet ink running down paper.
"You wish to escape this place," they insisted, their voices becoming layered and distorted as the dream destabilized further.
"That's an accurate observation of my situation and desires, but I'm not going to formally declare it as a wish you can use against me."
"You wish to understand what's happening to you."
"Curiosity is a natural human response to confusing situations, but again—observation, not declaration."
The figures were fragmenting now, breaking apart into static and shadow, their manufactured coherence dissolving as the dream lost its grip on reality.
"You wish to survive this nightmare."
"All living things have survival instincts—that's just basic biology, nothing special about it."
The apartment was dissolving rapidly around them all—walls fading into nothing, ceiling disappearing into void, the whole construct unraveling like a poorly made sweater with a pulled thread.
"What do you wish for?" The voices were weak now, uncertain, lacking any of their earlier conviction or force.
"Nothing you can use."
The figures were barely coherent anymore, turning into vaguely person-shaped shadows fragmenting into particles of static that drifted away on nonexistent wind.
"This is impossible—no one can resist—"
"Improbable, maybe, but clearly not impossible since it's happening right now in front of you."
One last desperate attempt came as the voices combined into something that sounded like pleading: "You wish to wake up! You must wish to wake up!"
Kiyotaka paused for a moment, considering the phrasing carefully.
It's a reasonable wish, but it's still a wish.
"No," he said blandly. "I will wake up eventually—that's a prediction based on evidence, since this mechanism is clearly temporary and unstable, already falling apart around us. Dreams end naturally when they run out of power. But 'will' and 'wish' are fundamentally different concepts. One is just logical extrapolation based on observable patterns. The other is emotional desire seeking external fulfillment. And I'm not giving you the latter no matter how you try to trick me into it."
The world shattered like glass, reality fragmenting into a million pieces that dissolved into darkness.
***
Kiyotaka's eyes snapped open with sudden, jarring awareness.
The ceiling above him greeted him with rough stone instead of plaster, ancient and weathered. The mattress beneath him was hard straw instead of soft modern foam. The air smelled completely different—old stone that had stood for centuries, musty cloth that had absorbed too much sweat, unwashed bodies packed too close together, and something else metallic and unpleasant he couldn't quite identify but recognized as off.
His head pounded with each heartbeat without his conscious awareness, sharp spikes of pain stabbing behind his eyes. His body burned with fever that soaked his clothes with sweat, thin fabric clinging uncomfortably to overheated skin.
The fever was dangerously high—high enough that his thoughts felt sluggish despite the adrenaline, high enough that his vision swam slightly at the edges, high enough that most people would already be delirious or unconscious. He was walking a razor's edge between functional consciousness and complete collapse.
He forced himself to remain completely still despite the discomfort, assessing the full situation carefully before making any moves or letting anyone know he was conscious.
That dream... what was that thing?
Would I have died if I hadn't woken up? With fever this high, possibly. Or maybe the dream itself was the killing mechanism, not just a side effect.
Breathing sounds filled the dark room around him—other children in other beds scattered throughout the space, some breathing shallow and labored while struggling for each breath, some breathing too slowly with wrong and irregular patterns, and some not breathing at all anymore.
Voices nearby—guards talking quietly near what he assumed was the doorway, trying not to disturb the sleeping children with their conversation.
His mind raced through the available information, attempting to piece together what had happened while he was unconscious.
The dream hadn't been random or natural—that much seemed certain. Someone had deliberately induced that state, though the exact mechanism was unclear. The fever could be part of it, keeping them delirious and vulnerable while the dream worked on them. And that question repeated endlessly—"what do you wish for?"—that had to be significant somehow.
The children who weren't breathing anymore... had they answered the question? Made wishes in the dream? Or had they simply succumbed to the fever?
He had multiple hypotheses but insufficient data:
Theory one: Answering the question killed them directly. The dream extracted something vital when they made wishes.
Theory two: Answering trapped them in the dream permanently while their bodies died from fever or lack of care.
Theory three: Answering turned them into something else—changed them somehow. Puppets, vessels, something useful to whoever was running this.
Theory four: The non-breathing children had simply died from fever, and the dream was unrelated to survival rate. He'd escaped because his mind was naturally resistant, not because he'd solved some puzzle.
Lord Cassius had to be involved—he'd selected them specifically from the orphanage, brought them here, fed them what was probably drugged food for dinner. But his exact role and motivations remained unclear.
Was he the one creating the dreams? Or just facilitating them for someone else? What did making children wish for things in fever dreams accomplish? What was the end goal—harvest souls, create servants, extract some kind of energy, conduct twisted experiments?
Too many unknowns. He'd need more information before forming solid conclusions.
At some point, heavy footsteps approached his bed, boots on stone floor with an unhurried but purposeful pace, stopping right next to where he lay.
"Hey, this one's different."
Well, I'll be damned.
The voice came from somewhere directly above him, close enough that he could smell old leather and metal and stale sweat.
He kept his eyes closed, tried to slow his breathing to mimic sleep, to appear unconscious despite being very much awake and very much aware he was probably in serious danger now.
"Huh? What's different?" another guard replied, still stationed near the doorway, sharper and more commanding.
"Well... his fever's dropped significantly."
"Really? Then get Lord Cassius immediately. He'll want to know about this one right away. I'll handle the watch."
The footsteps of the guard next to his bed departed quickly, practically running from the sound of it, while the remaining guard stayed close, presumably watching carefully to make sure he didn't try anything.
He quickly ran through his available options, calculating probabilities of his survival.
Staying still and pretending to sleep wouldn't work anymore—they already knew he was awake and alert, which made playing unconscious completely pointless now.
Running was a terrible idea for multiple reasons: he was stuck in a child's body that had been weakened significantly by fever, there was at least one trained adult guard with weapons and armor between him and any potential escape route, and the success rate for a running attempt was maybe three percent if he was extremely lucky and the guard was extremely incompetent.
Fighting was even worse—he did have combat training from his past, but this body was maybe twelve years old and currently running a dangerously high fever while the guard had professional training, armor for protection, actual weapons, and significant weight advantage. The success rate for winning a fight was effectively zero, might as well wish for the moon while he was at it.
Talking might buy him a few seconds or minutes at best, but he had no leverage whatsoever in this situation—no information they particularly wanted, no bargaining chips to offer, and no authority to invoke—which meant they had every logical reason to just kill him quickly and efficiently rather than waste time listening to a desperate child babble.
Which left him with exactly one option that might actually work: his Aspect, Wishful.
How ironic. The same mechanism that tried to kill me in the dream might be the only thing that saves me now.
Still, he needed to be extremely careful about how he used it, because the more specific and detailed the wish, the more unpredictable and dangerous the side effects could be.
He needed something minimal and surgical, something that would give him just enough of an opening to work with without causing so much chaos that he'd end up worse off than before.
The guard's footsteps continued pacing slowly back and forth beside his bed in a steady rhythm, with metal armor creaking slightly with each movement and leather straps shifting and settling. His breathing was steady and calm, professional rather than nervous—this wasn't his first time dealing with a potentially dangerous situation.
I probably have a few minutes at most before Cassius arrives, maybe less if he was nearby.
He opened his eyes just slightly, barely more than slits, watching the scene through the screen of his lashes without moving anything else.
One guard visible, standing approximately three meters away from the bed and positioned directly between him and what looked like the main door. His hand rested casually on his sword hilt but wasn't gripping it yet, ready to draw if needed but not expecting immediate trouble. His attention was divided between watching Kiyotaka's bed and occasionally glancing toward the doorway, clearly waiting for Cassius to arrive.
Other children remained motionless in their beds scattered throughout the long room—some definitely still sleeping, some probably dead already, some maybe trapped in the dream forever. Impossible to tell which was which without closer inspection or more light.
One armed guard with professional training... a desperate situation that requires an equally desperate solution.
Time to test whether this Aspect is actually useful, or if it's just going to kill me in a more interesting way than dying of fever would have.
He took a slow, careful breath, feeling his ribs expand against damp fabric, and began formulating his wish while choosing each word with extreme care.
He hoped the price wouldn't be worse than simply dying here.
***
A/N: This chapter ended up way longer than I planned. It was supposed to stay around 5,000 words at most, but it somehow ballooned to about 8,500.
Even so, I'm not sure the density really holds up. I haven't properly shown how his Aspect works yet, the dream section dragged on longer than it probably should have, and there's still a noticeable lack of action.
I guess when it comes to fantasy, I tend to over-explain things. Probably more than necessary, honestly.
I'll work on tightening it up. Anyway, what do you think of this chapter?
Words Count: 8,540 (14,517)