The air in the abandoned town carried a strange stillness.
It wasn't the silence of emptiness — it was the silence of something watching.
Yara walked alone through the cracked streets, her footsteps muffled by the thick coat draped over her shoulders. A black half-mask covered the lower half of her face, concealing the thin scar that curved along her jaw. The streets were lined with skeletal buildings, their walls flaking away like old parchment, the windows blank eyes that reflected nothing back.
The Pope's words had lingered in her mind, twisting themselves into shapes she didn't want to recognize.
"Do you still… remember me? Yara."
"It's me… Takeshi, your unc—"
The syllables of his voice replayed like an unwanted song, distorting every time, warping until the name "Takeshi" no longer sounded human.
She turned a corner, avoiding the cracked stone fountain at the center of the square. The statue there — a faceless angel — had its hands outstretched toward the sky, its stone fingers chipped away as though something had gnawed at them. Water no longer flowed; only the smell of rust lingered from the corroded basin.
Her mind was not quiet.
Takeshi is dead.
No… Takeshi was never here.
But I saw him. I heard him.
Every thought collided with another. She sifted through them mechanically, as if sorting through the pages of a manuscript, trying to find the original draft beneath years of rewrites.
From the shadows between two collapsed buildings, an man's voice whispered in her ear.
It wasn't real — she knew that — but it still reached her.
"He's not the man you knew. Not anymore. Not even a man."
She stopped, hand hovering over the rifle slung against her back. Her eyes moved — once — twice — scanning the street. There was no one there. Only a strip of wind-blown paper skidding across the ground, its edges curling like dried skin.
The wind carried a faint metallic scent.
Yara continued walking, the sound of her boots brushing against gravel mixing with the soft rhythm of her breathing. She moved past shuttered shops whose faded signs still clung to the language of a world long gone. There was a café with a cracked bell above its door, an abandoned tailor's shop with a mannequin slumped forward as if asleep.
The whispers of townsfolk still played at the edges of her hearing. She'd heard them earlier, muttering in rooms she could never enter:
"Nightmare Zero isn't human. It isn't even a being."
"If you see it's eyes, you'll forget you were ever alive."
She didn't care. Their fear was a useful cloak.
But in the far recesses of her thoughts, under the armor of her silence, there was something… fragile. A memory, half-formed, like a film reel burned in the middle.
A man sitting at a desk, pen in hand. The sound of scratching ink on paper. His face was smooth, featureless, but his posture — the tilt of his head, the deliberate motion of his wrist — told her everything.
He was writing manga.
She didn't remember why she knew that. Only that she had seen it before, a long time ago, before the name "Nightmare Zero" had been carved into her.
The further she walked, the more the streets narrowed, funnelling her toward a single road that curved toward the center of the town. And there — at its end — rose the silhouette of the church.
It stood taller than anything else, its steeple like a sharpened fang against the dim sky. The stained-glass windows were black from within, no light escaping. Yet she knew he was there. The Pope. The one who called himself "Takeshi."
She didn't go in immediately. Instead, she circled the outer wall of the church, fingers brushing the stone as she listened. No voices. No prayers. Only the creak of wood as if the building itself were breathing.
She replayed his face in her mind — the way it shifted from guarded calm to raw shock.
If he was telling the truth, he was her uncle.
If he was lying, he was an enemy who knew her past.
Either way, he was dangerous.
The truth clicked into place slowly, not in a sudden flash but like a series of locks opening one by one. He wasn't real. Not in the way this world was real. He was a copy — an imitation of her uncle Takeshi. A fictional shell based on a real man, crafted to speak in a familiar voice.
She stopped in the shadow of the church doors, her hands tightening inside her gloves. She didn't know who had created him — The Narrator, perhaps — but she could feel the threads of intention that bound him.
When she finally stepped inside, the heavy wooden door groaned against its hinges.
The interior was dim. Candles lined the altar, their flames bending unnaturally as if leaning away from her. And there he was — standing in the center, hands clasped before him, his chain-handled knives nowhere in sight.
He looked at her and smiled.
"I assume you knew so yes. Indeed," he said, his voice low, almost kind. "I am truly sorry I've deceived you. I was going to confess. What is a priest when he can't confess his own sins?"
The words hung in the stale air.
"I know I may not be the real one," he continued, taking a single step closer. "But deep inside your soul, you want to be free. Free from this crucial world. Is that right, Yara?"
Yara didn't answer. The mask hid her expression, but her eyes — sharp, unblinking — locked onto his. The weight of his words pressed into her chest, not because they were true, but because they almost felt true.
And that was far more dangerous.
---
End.
"Oh… I do love fooling my dear readers. Yara — the only real soul in this wretched fabrication."
Said by the Boundless Being — the narrator, the hand that weaves every thread of this false reality.