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Author Note:
' ' = When thinking in mind.
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"Changing the ending of the story."
The words themselves were deceptively simple. Almost harmless. As if the act were merely a matter of will, effort, or courage.
But in truth, to change an ending was to defy existence itself.
To do so, one had to stand at the same level as the Entity that governed the narrative—or rise beyond it. Even being slightly inferior meant absolute failure. There was no middle ground, no compromise, no clever workaround. In such confrontations, strength was meaningless, wisdom insufficient, and resolve irrelevant. This was not a battle fought with flesh or steel, nor with tactics or intellect.
This was conflict at the metaphysical level.
A domain where the participants were not armies or individuals, but abstractions given form—where reality itself was the battlefield.
Where Laws clashed with Paradoxes, Concepts strangled Truths, and Rules bent beneath Anomalies.
Where Fate intertwined with Threads, Anchors pinned collapsing Dimensions, and Essences were corroded by Curses.
Where Lies masqueraded as Principles, Delusions devoured Archetypes, and Hollows erased meaning from within.
Where Anti-Elements, Null-Realms, Anti-Fundamentals, Stagnations, Subversions, Chronicles, Karma, and Destinies overlapped—contradicting, overwriting, and consuming one another endlessly.
And this was not a matter of handling some of them.
It was all of them.
Miss even a single strand, fail to account for even one contradiction, and the result was not defeat—but erasure. Not death, but unmaking. Against such Beings, death itself was a mercy, a kindness granted to those deemed unworthy of continued existence.
To face them was worse than annihilation.
To perceive them was to invite corruption.
To comprehend them—even partially—was to invite transformation so absolute that body, mind, soul, identity, history, and causality would unravel simultaneously.
Even thinking about such entities was enough to alter a being irrevocably.
And yet—
Kaelthorn claimed he could make minor changes. Insignificant deviations. Enough to allow a handful of irrelevant lives—people who were never meant to matter—to survive.
By all logic, this should have been impossible.
But there was a catch.
If the Entity lurking within the depths of the tunnel had authored this story, then even Kaelthorn would have been powerless. Absolute. Final. No exception.
However… the author was not the Entity itself.
It was the thing he carried on his back.
The Massive Blue Heart.
Yes. That heart—silent, pulsing, instinctive—was the true origin of the narrative that ensnared Yashiro Station. The proof was undeniable: the moment Kaelthorn removed it, the story began to fracture. Illusions wavered. Contradictions surfaced. Reality buckled. The anchor was gone.
Had the Entity been the creator, nothing would have changed. The story would have remained intact, immutable, absolute.
But the Heart was not intelligent. It did not plan. It did not intend.
So how had it done this?
The answer was as horrifying as it was cruel.
The Entity, dormant in the deepest reaches of the mine, had leaked a trace of its power—no more than residue, an echo, an accidental overflow. That infinitesimal fragment merged with the Heart, and guided by instinct alone, the Heart constructed a story. A flawed one. A fragile one.
A narrative born not of design… but of coincidence.
An accident.
And yet, even that truth offered no comfort. Because that trace—the power the Heart absorbed—was not even one trillionth of the Entity's true might.
Which meant the being beneath the mine was so vast, so incomprehensible, that its mere leakage was enough to rewrite reality.
Now that the Heart had been removed, the story was destabilizing.
Unless the Entity chose to intervene directly—unless it decided to reclaim control—there remained a narrow, vanishing margin where survival was still possible.
A sliver of probability.
A single breath before inevitability.
And now—
It was time to act.
.
.
.
The second Kaelthorn finished those words, everything stopped.
Ayame, Takumi, Kajika, Suzuki, and Album froze where they stood, not because something bound their bodies—but because their instincts detonated all at once. Blood ran cold in their veins. A violent chill crawled down their spines. Their scalps numbed, hairs standing rigid as if charged by unseen static. Faces drained of color, pupils dilated, breaths caught halfway between inhale and scream.
It was not fear of death.
It was something far worse.
It was the primal, annihilating terror of standing before something that should never exist.
Their bodies begged them to flee. Their minds screamed for movement. Yet the terror was so absolute that even panic collapsed under its weight. Muscles refused to respond. Thoughts fractured. Reflexes died before they could be born.
And the most horrifying part—
That pressure was not coming from the place.
Not from the collapsing station.
Not even from the Entity that still lurked unseen.
It was coming from Kaelthorn.
He had already turned away from them.
From behind, they saw only his silhouette—still, upright, unmoving—yet the space around him writhed as if reality itself was recoiling. Within his eyes, the dusk-black void churned violently, pressing outward, while the crystalline pink pupil strained to contain it. Around that, the golden-crimson iris flared like a dying star forced to burn beyond its limits.
Shadows peeled away from him, sliding backward as though frightened. Space warped, lines bending where they should not, depth losing meaning. Reality itself seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain whether it was allowed to continue acknowledging his presence.
Ayame and the others stared in mute horror.
They no longer knew what Kaelthorn was—only that he was wrong. Fundamentally, existentially wrong. A contradiction walking upright. A violation that had learned how to breathe.
Even Album—felt something she had not felt in a very long time.
Unease.
Not fear of power.
Fear of incompatibility.
Kaelthorn looked toward the floating tunnel, his gaze locking onto that unseen depth. He could feel the Entity's attention settle upon him—vast, distant, indifferent. To the others, that gaze did not exist. They were beneath notice. Irrelevant noise inside a collapsing construct.
The Entity understood immediately what Kaelthorn intended.
And it did nothing.
Not because it feared him.
Not because it found him interesting.
Not because it cared to observe his struggle.
It simply did not care.
In the endless ocean of the Dark Multiverse, Kaelthorn was not even prey—merely a ripple too small to bother correcting. Whether he survived or vanished meant nothing. Whether the story collapsed cleanly or messily meant nothing.
And Kaelthorn knew it.
He also knew something worse.
The Entity did not need to act.
With the Blue Heart—this story's original anchor—removed, the narrative itself was destabilizing. A story without an author will always seek one. And now, instinctively, inevitably, it was aligning itself with the only presence capable of sustaining it.
The Entity.
The story was choosing its new author.
That transition required time.
Not much.
But enough.
Kaelthorn's left index finger moved.
Blood spilled—not falling, not splashing—but obeying. Threads formed instantly, snapping outward with precision, coiling around Ayame, Album, Takumi, Suzuki, Kajika, and the unconscious Ikoma and Mumei. He pulled them toward him in a single, decisive motion.
Bodies collided.
Ayame and Album struck against his back and shoulder—yet Kaelthorn did not shift even a fraction. He stood as an axis, as if the universe itself were rotating around him.
Then space screamed.
Not audibly—but structurally.
Reality twisted inward, compressing them into a single point as the world folded wrong. Fractures erupted across existence itself.
CRACK!
Not glass.
Not stone.
But space.
Impossible fissures tore through the air in directions that had no angles, no orientation. Lines that should not intersect did. Distances inverted. Depth collapsed into itself.
And still, none of them saw Kaelthorn's face.
They did not see the dark violet terminal lines blooming across his skin like veins of a dying star. They did not see how his internal systems were failing in real time—how Ichor collapsed, how vital functions degraded, how his heartbeat slowed toward silence.
They did not see that, everywhere except his eyes, he was already dead.
This power could never come without cost.
The lines burned brighter, radiant and terminal. His senses faded. Strength evaporated. Consciousness thinned to a razor edge sustained by nothing but will.
Only his eyes remained.
Crimson.
Gold.
Pink.
Dusk-dark.
A containment failure held together by defiance alone.
With the last fragment of control he possessed, Kaelthorn completed the action.
CRACK!!
Everything shattered.
And in the very next instant—
Everything was whole.
No sound.
No debris.
No aftermath.
As if the rupture had never existed.
But Kaelthorn—and those bound to him—were no longer there.
In that infinitesimal moment of total collapse, while reality blinked, Kaelthorn made his move.
And escaped.
.
.
.
The moment Kaelthorn and the others vanished from the collapsing narrative, the story lost its resistance.
The Entity became its author.
And yet—
it did not care.
It did not turn its gaze toward where Kaelthorn had fled.
It did not seek him.
It did not question the rupture.
The Entity understood exactly what had happened. What Kaelthorn had done was not a mere displacement, nor a crude tearing of space. It was something far more fundamental and far more dangerous. In that fleeting instant, Kaelthorn had annihilated the metaphysical scaffolding that upheld the story itself—space, time, causality, law, authority, fate, concept, principle, narrative continuity—all of it reduced to nothing along a razor-thin vector.
The story did not break.
It was punctured.
A hole was carved through its structure—through the web of truths and lies that defined it—and Kaelthorn escaped through that void before the story could repair itself. Had the narrative been fully authored, had the Entity woven it deliberately with intent and precision, such an act would have been impossible. But this story was born of accident. Of residue. Of instinct. Its foundations were shallow.
That weakness was everything.
The Entity also knew something else.
Kaelthorn was no longer in this world.
Had it wished to, the Entity could have reached across the totality of existence and erased him. While it remained present, nothing within this world—or any adjacent layer—was beyond its awareness. The destruction of laws, concepts, karma, and fate had not obscured Kaelthorn's departure. If anything, it had made his absence painfully obvious.
And still—
the Entity did nothing.
It did not pursue.
It did not retaliate.
It did not record the loss.
Whether Kaelthorn survived elsewhere or was obliterated in the void between narratives was irrelevant. In the vast, roiling madness of the Dark Multiverse, Kaelthorn was nothing more than a slightly larger fragment adrift among infinite annihilation. Not prey. Not threat. Not curiosity.
Not worth noticing.
With that, the Entity withdrew its attention and sank back into dormancy, allowing the repaired narrative to settle into a hollow, lifeless equilibrium—stable, empty, and unexamined.
The story would continue.
However—
There was one being who would not accept this outcome.
One existence that had watched from afar.
One presence that had waited patiently.
One predator that had finally recognized something worthy of its hunger.
Before it could clash with its chosen prey, that prey had escaped.
That defiance would not be forgiven.
And that being was—
The Kabane Lord.
(End of Volume 1)
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*A/N: Please throw some power stones.
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