The void was silent.
No walls, no ground, no sky—just an endless black stretching in every direction. It wasn't even darkness, not really. More like the world had been erased with an unfinished brush stroke, leaving only absence behind.
Aki stood there, heart pounding, clutching the diary against his chest.
And in front of him, maybe twenty steps away, was someone.
Someone who looked exactly like him.
No—not exactly.
This boy's posture was straighter, his uniform sharper, his expression colder. His hair fell perfectly in place, not the perpetual mess Aki always had. And his eyes… his eyes weren't tired, sarcastic, or panicked. They were sharp, commanding, like he was the protagonist of this world.
The boy tilted his head slightly, studying him with quiet amusement.
"…So. You're the one running around in my body."
Aki swallowed. "Okay. First of all—creepy. Second—who the hell are you supposed to be? My evil twin? My corrupted save file?"
The boy chuckled, the sound echoing unnaturally in the void. "No. I'm Riel Arkwood. The real Riel. The one you've been pretending to be."
Aki's stomach twisted. "You've got to be kidding me."
"Do I look like I'm kidding?" Riel spread his arms, and words lit up in the void behind him—glowing lines of script, half in symbols Aki couldn't read, half in memories he recognized. Each word was written in the same style as the diary.
"…Wait." Aki's grip on the book tightened. "You're the one who wrote this? The diary? All the warnings? That wasn't… me?"
Riel's lips curved into a sharp smile. "Of course not. You really thought you were guiding yourself from another timeline? That your clever little notes were keeping you alive? No. Those were my notes. My story. My survival plan."
The void shivered. Behind him, whole scenes appeared like broken movie reels—the poisoned chair, Celis's traps, the cursed duels. Every event Aki had narrowly escaped was written in looping script, all signed with the same name: Riel Arkwood.
Aki felt his knees weaken. "…So all this time, I wasn't rewriting the story. I was just… living yours."
"Yes." Riel's smile didn't fade. "You were my replacement. My stand-in."
Aki laughed bitterly, pressing a hand to his face. "Great. I've been cosplaying a dead villain with a diary. Love that for me."
Riel's eyes narrowed. "Dead? No. I'm not dead. I never died. I was trapped here, in the system's memory core, when everything collapsed. The developers abandoned the code, the story fractured, but I remained. Watching. Waiting."
"And then I showed up," Aki muttered.
Riel nodded once. "Exactly. You arrived from outside the system. An intruder. At first, I thought you were just another bug. But then… you started changing things."
"…Changing things?"
"Yes. The world shouldn't respond to you. And yet, it did. Loops broke. Routes shifted. Even the hero—Eren—looked at you differently than he ever looked at me." Riel's smile slipped into something colder. "You stole my role."
Aki stiffened. "Hold on. Don't pin this on me like I asked for it. I didn't choose to be dropped into your tragic villain role. I've been doing nothing but dodging death flags since the tutorial, thank you very much."
"You enjoyed it," Riel said softly.
Aki blinked. "…Excuse me?"
"You enjoyed living." Riel stepped forward, his tone like a knife. "You joked. You made friends. You earned the hero's trust. You survived every trap I wrote down, every mistake I suffered through. You laughed in a story that was meant to end in despair. Tell me I'm wrong."
Aki's throat closed.
For a moment, he wanted to shout back, to deny it. But images flashed in his head—Eren smiling at him during the duel, Whiskerdoom snarking about breakfast, even Celis's dangerous grin.
Things that weren't supposed to happen.
Things Riel never had.
"…Yeah," Aki whispered. "I did."
Riel's eyes hardened. "Then give it back."
"What?"
"The diary. The body. The story. All of it. It's mine. It always was. You don't belong here."
Aki staggered back a step, clutching the book tighter. "No. No way. You think I'm just gonna hand it over? You think I went through assassination attempts, curses, and creepy glitch-Eren just to… bow out now?"
Riel's expression darkened, voice sharp with fury. "You don't understand. This world isn't yours to fix. It's broken because you exist. You're the bug. I'm the system. Without me, the game dies. Without you—"
"Without me, maybe it lives," Aki snapped.
The void trembled. Both boys glared at each other, the air between them alive with invisible tension.
Then the diary in Aki's hands burned hot, the ink bleeding across the pages, letters scrambling.
New words appeared, scrawled in messy handwriting—not Riel's precise script.
Aki's.
"The diary was never yours either."
Both of them froze.
"…What?" Riel hissed.
Aki stared at the page, his pulse hammering. He hadn't written those words. Not consciously. But there they were, his own style, his own voice bleeding through.
For the first time, Riel's calm broke. His face twisted, not in anger, but in something like fear.
"…No. That's impossible."
Aki smirked shakily, holding the diary close. "Looks like the book disagrees with you, pal."
The void cracked.
A massive sound like shattering glass split the silence, and fragments of the world began falling around them—pieces of the academy, the forest, Celis's throne room—all breaking apart like puzzle tiles.
And through the cracks, Aki saw something terrifying: another layer of the system. Endless lines of code, rewriting themselves faster and faster, trying to erase both of them.
Riel's voice rose over the noise. "You're not supposed to exist! This story is mine!"
Aki's grin widened, though his hands trembled. "Yeah? Well, guess what. The last page was blank. And I don't follow scripts."
The void collapsed—
And the two of them were pulled into the storm.