The pain didn't fade.
That was the first sign something was wrong.
Not the dramatic, world-ending kind of wrong. No alarms. No red warnings. No collapsing sky.
Just pain that stayed.
I lay on the trampled grass of the training yard, staring at the clouds drifting lazily overhead. They moved too slowly. Or maybe time just felt strange when you expected everything to end and it didn't.
Lira's hands glowed above my shoulder, green light spilling between her trembling fingers. Healing magic usually felt distant to me, like a scripted effect layered over a body that didn't truly exist.
This time it burned. Warm. Real.
"Hold still," she whispered, voice tight. "You're bleeding more than you should."
I almost laughed.
NPCs don't bleed like this.
I turned my head. Players stood a short distance away, staring.
Not at the monster corpse.
At me.
"That NPC jumped in front of the boss."
"I've never seen that before."
"Is that part of the tutorial update?"
They weren't afraid.
Just confused.
To them, I was still a feature.
The boss's massive body lay crumpled nearby, dissolving into particles far slower than usual. Normally, its defeat triggered the reset instantly. No victory screen. No loot.
Just white.
But the world remained.
Birds chirped. Wind rustled leaves. Someone coughed.
Nothing was resetting.
Lira pressed harder, magic flaring. "Why would you do that?" she asked quietly. Not accusing. Not angry.
Just shaken.
I didn't answer right away.
Because the truth sounded insane, even to me.
"Because it was going to hit you," I said finally.
"That's normal," she replied automatically. "I get knocked down all the time during tutorials."
She smiled faintly, like it was a joke.
It wasn't.
"You weren't supposed to be there," she added. "NPCs don't leave their zones."
"I know."
She stilled.
Her eyes lifted to mine.
"You know?"
I looked away.
Footsteps approached. Kai stopped a few feet from us, still breathing hard, sword lowered.
"Hey… Ren, right?" he said. "You saved me."
I'd heard those words before.
Dozens of times.
They never mattered, because they vanished with the reset.
This time they stayed in the air, heavy.
"Are you… like a special NPC?" he asked. "Because that fight was different. The boss changed patterns."
I pushed myself up slowly. Lira tried to stop me.
"Don't—"
"I'm fine."
Lie.
The world didn't correct me.
Kai scratched his head. "Usually the tutorial boss wipes us and the game restarts. That's what the forums said."
Forums.
So the players knew about the resets too. To them it was just a mechanic.
To me it was a life sentence.
"Maybe you were better than the forums thought," I said.
He grinned. "Yeah, maybe!"
He didn't notice how Lira was still watching me.
Not my wound.
Me.
Like she was trying to solve something.
A soft chime echoed in my ears.
Not from outside.
Inside.
Words appeared faintly at the edge of my vision. Not bright blue like the tutorial prompts. Dim. Unstable.
I froze.
Persistence recognized.
My pulse quickened.
This was new.
The text flickered, like it wasn't meant to exist.
Calculating deviation value.
Lira's voice cut through it. "Ren?"
I blinked. The text vanished.
"You look pale," she said. "You should rest in the chapel."
"I've rested there enough," I muttered.
Too many times. Too many lives starting on that stone floor.
Kai sheathed his sword. "So what happens now?"
Good question.
Normally, after the boss killed me, the world rewound. Players kept their vague memory of progress, NPCs reset, and the tutorial loop continued.
But the sky was still blue.
The chapel bell rang in the distance.
Time was moving forward.
"I think," I said slowly, "you continue the quest."
Kai lit up. "For real?"
"For real."
He laughed, energized, already turning toward the northern path.
Players loved progress.
He didn't see the way the air shimmered faintly where the boss had died, like the world hadn't finished deciding what had happened.
When he was gone, the yard felt quieter.
Lira helped me stand fully this time. I didn't pull away.
Her hand was warm around my wrist.
"Something's different," she said softly.
"Yes."
"You feel different too."
That made my chest tighten.
"How?"
She hesitated, searching for words. "Before, it was like talking to someone behind glass. You'd say the right things, but it felt far away."
Her fingers tightened slightly.
"Now you feel here."
I didn't know what to do with that.
"You shouldn't have gotten hurt," she added. "If NPCs start acting outside their roles, the system sometimes corrects it harshly."
"I've noticed," I said quietly.
She didn't catch the weight behind it.
Or maybe she did.
Wind passed through the yard, lifting her hair slightly. For a second, everything felt almost peaceful.
Then a distant rumble rolled through the ground.
Not loud.
Deep.
Wrong.
We both looked north.
The forest line trembled.
A flock of birds burst into the sky.
"That's not part of the tutorial," Lira whispered.
I knew that too.
The system had always been precise. Contained. Predictable.
This felt like something expanding.
Like the world had been nudged off its rails.
A faint blue line tore across the sky for a split second, like a scratch on glass.
No one else reacted.
"Did you see that?" Lira asked.
"Yes."
Her hand didn't leave my wrist.
"I don't think the reset failing was small," I said.
She swallowed. "What did we do?"
We.
Not you.
We.
I stared at the forest, where the rumble had come from.
Somewhere out there, the story that was never supposed to move forward had just taken its first step.
And for the first time since I arrived in this world, the future wasn't something I remembered.
It was something waiting.
That scared me more than the resets ever had.
Because this time, if I died, I might not wake up on the chapel floor again.
And Lira might remember me.
Or lose me forever.