"Not every silence is empty. Some are screams trapped in time."
Inside the Dreamscape – Reina's Inner World
Darkness. Then pages. Thousands of pages falling like ash from a burning sky.
Hiragi opened his eyes. The world around him pulsed like a living book—buildings made of paragraphs, streets paved with memories. Ishigami and Airi landed beside him, breathless but steady.
"So this is her narrative core…" Ishigami murmured. "Her rewritten reality."
"Where's Reina?" Airi asked, scanning the shifting landscape.
Hiragi pointed forward. In the distance stood a crumbling school building—half-dissolved, half-remembered. From its broken windows, faint sobs echoed across the void.
The Forgotten Classroom
They pushed through warped hallways filled with ink-dripping lockers and broken bells that rang on their own.
In a dim classroom at the center, they found her.
Reina.
She sat motionless in a chair, facing a chalkboard. Her eyes were blank—trapped. Above her head floated a bookmark made of red thread and cracked glass, stitched into her shadow.
"That's the Blood Bookmark," Hiragi whispered. "It's feeding on her memory."
Suddenly, the chalkboard screeched. Words began to write themselves:
"You are the scream that never mattered."
The Librarian Appears
From behind the teacher's desk, a figure emerged.
Tattered robes. No face—only a featureless mask etched with ink lines like veins.
The Librarian.
"Do not rewrite what was written," it spoke with a hundred voices at once. "She belongs to the ending."
"Over my dead plot," Suguru shouted, appearing from a falling ceiling tile like a glitch. He threw a talisman—it exploded in sparks, but the Librarian absorbed it.
"Cheap magic," it hissed.
Fight Within the Narrative
Hiragi stepped forward, drawing his Void Blade. The air around him shimmered with anti-story energy—reality itself bent with each breath he took.
"I'll change her ending myself."
The Librarian lunged.
Each strike distorted the classroom—walls turned into torn book pages, desks melted into sentences. Ishigami chanted in binary glyphs, firing mental blasts that fractured the mask.
Airi held Reina's hand, channeling empathy into light. The bookmark pulsed—cracking.
But the Librarian screamed, unleashing a howl that tore the chapter apart.
"You cannot kill an idea," it shrieked.
"But you can overwrite one," Hiragi replied.
With one slash, his Void Blade pierced the Librarian's core.
The scream shattered.
The bookmark unraveled.
Back to Reality
Reina gasped and opened her eyes.
They were back at the office. Rain tapped gently on the windows.
Airi held a blanket over Reina. Suguru snored upside-down on the couch. Ishigami cleaned ink residue from his glasses.
Hiragi sat silently, staring at the red thread now sealed inside a jar.
"We saved her," Airi whispered.
"For now," Hiragi replied. "But that wasn't the only bookmark."
To Be Continued…