The sheer, jarring dissonance of the Jester's mandolin was the psychic tripwire. The forced panic, the chaos—it was the moment the fragile connection snapped.
Wolf's awareness slipped out of Hyung-woo's dying body — a clean, fluid pop, like a cork freed from pressure — and he returned to his own physical form.
The cold air of the memory-realm hit him first.
His fingers were still wrapped around Lamentia's hand, her grip warm, steady, unnervingly casual considering where they had just been.
He exhaled once, slow.
Three remaining hallways still stood before him, each one humming with its own aura… each one waiting.
Before he could decide which to enter next, a bored voice slid in from beside him.
"Hey. Are you gonna tell me about what you saw or what?"
Lamentia droned without looking at him, purple hair floating in lazy coils as if underwater.
Wolf blinked.
Right. She didn't know about the system.
He glanced at the shelves where she had almost started reading Hyung-woo's memories from books earlier.
If she had actually opened one… she might have discovered everything — the system, the regressions, the truth behind each life.
But she didn't.
That meant she never would.
His mind clicked cleanly into place. Good.
He let out a tiny breath, then answered with a flat tone, "If we talk here, it'll waste time. So let's get the rest and talk outside. Better, don't you think?"
Lamentia frowned, slight, barely a wrinkle… then shrugged with an ugh, fine energy and let Wolf do whatever he wanted. Stuff like this clearly didn't bother her. Or maybe she simply didn't care.
Wolf didn't waste another second.
He headed straight for the second hallway.
The Corroded Steel Hallway
The air here was colder — metallic, sharp, carrying the ghost of sweat and bitter medicine. The walls shimmered like steel hammered too thin, each dent telling a story of trial and failure.
Faint murmurs of calculations floated in the background, like whispers rehearsing an equation that never resolved.
Wolf didn't hesitate.He grasped the first door and pulled it open.
Light surged.
He woke again in Hyung-woo's body.
A sharp inhale burst from Hyung-woo's lungs as he jolted upright.
He was alive.
His hands trembled violently, shaking so hard Wolf almost felt the phantom vibration in his own fingers.
"I… live…?" Hyung-woo whispered, voice cracking. His own breath stuttered as he stared at his shaking hands. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, pulled in a harsh breath, exhaled slowly… and looked around.
Recognition slammed into him.
The camp.
Wolf relaxed deeply, stretching inside Hyung-woo's mind like someone lounging with his feet on a table.
Alright. Second life.
He began unpacking everything as it unfolded — each memory, each thought, each detail Hyung-woo processed.
"So pretty much everything Lamentia said is true… good thing," Wolf muttered to himself inside the shared consciousness.
"Adventurers hold more information than she ever had. Makes sense. She was sealed away for centuries."
His thoughts sharpened.
"She never met Nova Laminton… old generation. Never met Aurora or Flynn either — they're newer era. But she claimed she met Lady Blur."
Wolf snorted. "Two thousand years ago. Useless..."
Hyung-woo, meanwhile, had pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, the raw shock of resurrection running through him. He moved through the camp again, eyes scanning faces, movements cautious, breath shallow.
Wolf ignored the emotional weight and focused on the timeline.
"Year 3220… alright. Let's piece this together."
His internal voice ticked through centuries like flipping pages.
"Saint Valen and his prophecy: year zero to around one hundred."
"Lysander discovers ether somewhere there too. Goes mad... or just an act. Probably second one."
"Saint Faxilim unites everything after."
"Endless War starts at 688… but ends not in 788 like Lamentia claimed."He narrowed his eyes.
"No. The war actually continued for a millennium, lasting another 300 years after Lamentia's supposed disappearance."
His jaw tightened.
"So she lied..."
He continued gathering through Hyung-woo's scattered recollections.
"And after that… peace again," Wolf murmured in his own inner voice.
Hyung-woo didn't hear him, but Wolf narrated it to himself as if laying out an autopsy report.
"The world dragged itself back into a stable age. Lady Blur wandering the map somewhere between year 1700 and 2000… showing up, disappearing, reappearing…"
He scoffed softly.
"She leaves less trace than a ghost and more problems than a demon."
Hyung-woo moved through the camp, listening to others talk, absorbing every tone and scrap of information.
Wolf's thoughts rammed forward.
"Right… adventure guilds. They existed before the Endless War. But after that war ended? They exploded. Became the backbone of civilization. Hunters, scavengers, knowledge-seekers. Half the ruins in this world exist because someone's great-great-grandfather died fighting in that war."
Wolf's voice sharpened.
"And after the Endless War ended, everything became… mythology. Artifacts passed down. Treasure caches sealed away. Half the world started living off legends the other half left behind."
He leaned mentally back, arms metaphorically folded.It was all lining up.
All of it aligned. All of it fed into the clean shape of the world in his head.
Hyung-woo slowly steadied himself, going through the same motions he had in the first life — processing, testing, observing.
Wolf watched him calmly.
This time the story would unwind differently. And this time Wolf didn't feel even a grain of hurry.
He only felt curiosity.
And the taste of puzzle pieces clicking together.
Wolf drifted out of the steel hallway's final echo, his expression tightening with something between annoyance and genuine confusion.
"…Is that supposed to be me?" His fist lightly tapped at his own sternum—reflexive, irritated.
The scene of Hyung-woo's death replayed in suspended memory-light, the jester silhouette framed in Crystal Cloud Kingdom's shimmering air, mandolin trembling with impossible sound.
Wolf stared at it again.
Arms crossed. Eyes narrowed. Jaw shifting slowly left then right as if trying to grind logic out of nonsense.
"…Why the hell am I wearing a jester suit?" His voice dropped with flat disbelief.
"And a mandolin… as a weapon?"
He scratched his chin with his left hand, thumb rubbing the corner of his jaw thoughtfully.
"I mean… it's not like I can't imagine myself doing that. Sure. A bit theatrical maybe… but fine. The question is the purpose. Why?"
His eyebrow twitched.
"Or maybe—it isn't me? Someone under me? Someone I'll eventually create? Or someone following my path?"
He leaned back, breath leaving him in a slow, skeptical exhale.
"And if that was me… would I still have that jester suit now that he died…?"
He shook his head once, as if clearing static, then let his focus soften.
Hyung-woo's memory resumed—smoothly, seamlessly—drawing him in again.
The camp. The second life.
Everything familiar, but sharpened. Reinforced. Hyung-woo repeating the cycle—but this time stronger, quicker, calmer… and far more calculating.
Wolf observed from behind his eyes, amused and annoyed in equal measure.
"Well. That explains why I treated him like a real threat this time."
Hyung-woo gathered water faster. Hunted more efficiently. Coordinated the union with precision he didn't possess in the first life.
And Wolf—the Wolf of that timeline—answered that growth with schemes of his own.
Breaking their water supply. Snapping weapon racks under moonlight. Planting scraps of bone, tied strings, meaningless symbols atop roofs and under blankets. Listening to whispers spread: Something is watching us. Something is wrong. Something is coming.
Wolf watched himself—his other self—burn their security to ash with surgical cruelty.
"…That's definitely something I would do," Wolf muttered in his own mind. His tone was dry, unimpressed but begrudgingly accepting.
Then came the hornmaws.
The pack he lured.
The panic he calculated.
Breaching the camp.Crushing morale.Thinning numbers.Turning strong survivors into limping ones.
Wolf clicked his tongue.
"Efficient. A bit dramatic, but efficient."
And then the last month.The slaughter.
This time Hyung-woo met him stronger, faster, mentally hardened.Yet still—
Lamentia intervened.Wolf's blade missed.Hyung-woo survived again.
And the world swallowed them all.
Hyung-woo awakened in the new world.Again.
Wolf leaned in closer inside the memory, as though examining Hyung-woo's soul through a magnifying lens.
This second-life Hyung-woo did not break.He doubled down.
Requests turned from peaceful tasks to monster exterminations.His routine sharpened.His sleep shortened.
His eyes hollowed.
"What are you doing…" Wolf muttered, watching the boy walk into another dungeon with exhaustion carved into his shoulders. "You're grinding yourself into dust."
But Hyung-woo didn't stop.
He followed the same pattern.The same village.The same monster outbreak.
And again he met Jasper, Cassian, Mayumi, and Willow.Again he joined the group.
Except—
Wolf tapped the inside of Hyung-woo's consciousness with two metaphorical fingers.
"There it is."
The shift.The fracture.The difference.
In the first life, Hyung-woo stood beside Jasper like a steady pillar—calm, grounded, honest, hopeful. Loyal to the bone, content to support.
But in this life—
Hyung-woo tightened his jaw whenever Jasper made a decision.He double-checked Mayumi's scouting routes.
He hovered behind Willow's healing spells, correcting her technique.
He barked at Cassian for recklessness.
He pushed himself harder than all of them combined.
His footsteps were heavy with pressure.
His breaths trembling with old fear.
His eyes permanently scanning for cracks in fate.His chest full of a weight only he could feel.
Wolf felt it through him.
Where the first-life Hyung-woo had hope—this one had dread.Where the first-life Hyung-woo had friendship—this one had obsession.Where the first-life Hyung-woo was stable—this one was unraveling beneath invisible future scars.
Wolf exhaled slowly.
"Ten years living like that."
His voice lowered into a murmur.
"It's no wonder he cracked hahah."
And as the memory continued rolling forward—
Wolf watched the second-life Hyung-woo slowly approach the same fate again, step by step, heartbeat by heartbeat, carrying the weight of two lifetimes and the pressure of knowing too much.
Hyung-woo stood once more at the crystalline threshold of the Crystal Cloud Kingdom, the very place where he and his companions had died in last life.
The floating kingdom shuddered around him, suspended in the sky like a severed dream drifting through layers of mist. The clouds below churned slowly, rolling waves of silver and white that reflected the harsh brilliance of the enormous crystalline towers. Every structure hummed faintly, as if breathing with the ether currents that held the kingdom aloft.
Wind slid between the crystal arches in thin, glass-like wails that tightened the air with an eerie sense of deja vu.
His shield felt heavier than usual in his grip, not from its physical weight but from the memories carved into its.
His heartbeat thudded against the inside of his ribs with a steady pressure that reminded him of walking toward an already known grave.
Behind him, the other four members of the Zenith Quintet moved in formation, each footfall sharp, attentive, restrained.
Jasper murmured an incantation under his breath, sparks swirling slowly around his fingertips. Cassian rolled his shoulders, gauntlets creaking, knuckles cracking one by one.
Willow whispered a small prayer as she touched the charm tied to her staff.
Mayumi lowered her body slightly, bowstring already half-tensed, the subtle tremble of a predator who had waited too long to fire.
Hyung-woo raised his shield with a firm breath, eyes scanning every angle, every floating shard of reflective crystal above them. He felt his grip tighten.This is it. This time I am ready. Not one of you dies today.
Then the laugh returned.
It came from nowhere and everywhere at once. A rippling distortion that crawled along the edges of their hearing, coiling inside their skulls like a cold wire. The laugh danced between contempt and amusement, each vibration sharp enough to make the air ripple lightly. Crystal surfaces around them flickered with phantom reflections as if the sound itself carved temporary shapes upon them.
Hyung-woo froze for only a fraction of a second before sliding one foot backward and anchoring his stance. His shield lifted. His sword angled low. The others snapped into position behind him.
The figure appeared.
A long-limbed silhouette stepped forward from a fold in the air, emerging with a theatrical twirl of fabric. The Jester stood before them once again. The disheveled black headscarf framed his mask like ragged curtains, and the pale porcelain-like face showed no emotion at all. His shawl swayed gently with dull gold bells clicking softly, each sound too slow and too out of rhythm to belong to a human gesture. His boots landed silently, almost gliding rather than stepping. The mandolin in his left hand gleamed faintly, its strings catching the glow of the kingdom like thin spider threads drawn tight.
Hyung-woo felt his chest tighten with a mixture of dread and familiarity… but he no longer recoiled. He raised his shield instead.
The Jester placed his right hand over his chest, bowing with exaggerated slowness, lifting his chin afterward in a disturbingly smooth motion before speaking a single phrase, his voice soft and clear:
"Be my audience. Enjoy my performance."
Then the mandolin shrieked to life.
His fingers attacked the strings with lightning ferocity. The tremolo erupted like a vibrating blade ripping straight through the air, each rapid-fire pluck carving jagged lines of pressure that struck the crystal ground in violent ripples. The notes were sharp, icy, unsettling, each tone stuttering like a dying animal's cry. The frequency was unnatural, slicing past the ears and piercing directly into the nerves of anyone who heard it.
The shockwave hit them immediately.
Hyung-woo felt the impact slam into his shield like a battering ram, his entire left arm vibrating violently as if it would snap clean at the elbow. His teeth clenched hard enough to hurt. His ears rang. His vision began to vibrate at the edges. Cassian stumbled to one knee, a snarl ripping from his throat as he pressed his palms to the ground. Willow gasped and clenched her staff with both hands, eyes trembling as if she were choking on her own heartbeat. Mayumi's fingers shook around her bowstring, pupils contracting into tiny, frantic points.
But before the sound claimed them, Jasper snapped his spell.
"Sound Dampening Field!"
A translucent dome of swirling pressure wrapped around the group. The sound bent against its walls like water thrown against stone. The tremolo still stabbed at them — its pitch drilled at their bones — but the killing force behind it began to thin, losing its full murderous intent.
Hyung-woo pushed forward through the assault. Every step felt like shoving his legs into a hurricane. His shield groaned under the sound-waves, metal vibrating violently.
The Jester tilted his head slightly. Not dramatically. Not mocking. Just a small, curious motion.
A gesture that asked, almost politely:
Why are you still standing?
Hyung-woo answered with movement.
He lunged.
His boots cracked the crystal floor, shield thrust forward at full force. His sword pulled back to strike. His muscles screamed from the pressure, but he ignored it and slammed into the Jester with his full body weight.
A metallic clang exploded outward as shield met mandolin.
The mandolin's frame dented. A deep fracture split across its front, crystal dust flaring from the impact. The sound that escaped it was no longer music but a broken metallic cough.
Hyung-woo didn't let the momentum die.
Cassian darted in from the side, his gauntlets blazing with ether. He delivered brutal punches to the Jester's elbow, hip, and knee, each strike aimed at snapping joints or breaking movement patterns. The Jester shifted backward in an unnatural glide to avoid the crushing blows, bells chiming faintly as if complaining.
Mayumi drew an arrow, eyes narrowing sharply. She inhaled deeply, fingers pulling the bowstring back until it trembled. Her aim steadied even as her vision blurred from leftover sound distortion. The arrow gathered a faint glow.
The Jester finally retaliated.He inhaled sharply.
Then he screamed.
Not through his mandolin.Not through any instrument.The scream tore out from his suit itself.
Violent. Penetrating.A raw blast of sonic energy that cracked the floor beneath him like shattered ice.
Hyung-woo's shield nearly flew from his hand. His ears burst into a high-pitched buzzing, vision flickering toward white. Cassian's balance faltered for a fraction of a second. Willow gasped as she fell to her knees. Jasper clenched both hands, reinforcing the field desperately, veins bulging against his temples.
Mayumi felt the pressure slam into her ribs, but she released the arrow anyway.
The arrow tore through the fading distortion.It sliced past Hyung-woo's shoulder, shot through the shimmering air, grazed the side of the Jester's head…
And struck the edge of the mask.
The mask cracked.
Hyung-woo saw opportunity in that one tiny fracture — a narrow, single-second weakness created by arrow and soundwave colliding in pure luck.
He seized it!
Hyung-woo roared through clenched teeth and swung his sword down from above, every muscle in his arm burning with vengeance. His blade met the Jester's shoulder, cutting fabric, cutting deeper, cutting toward the clavicle.
The Jester tried to twist away — but the damping field, Cassian's strikes, Mayumi's shot, and Hyung-woo's forward momentum made escape impossible.
The blade landed!
The Jester's suit tore open at the shoulder.
The mask split apart as if struck by a hammer.
Fragments loosened.Something beneath the mask shifted, a shadowed shape not yet visible.
The final blow from the tremolo and the sword combined with Mayumi's arrow sent a long vibration through the Jester's entire body.
The mask broke free.
A sharp crack echoed through the floating kingdom.
The mask separated from the Jester's face —
and flew into the air.
Hyung-woo's eyes widened.
His sword still raised.
Breath ragged.
Heart pounding.
The Jester's true face was finally revealed—
The falling mask struck the crystalline floor with a brittle clatter, skidding a short distance before it spun to a stop. The Jester's face, finally exposed, stood raw under the kingdom's fractured glow.
Black hair — unkempt, uneven, streaked with ash-gray along the edges — framed a pale face. His eyes, deep black, hollow as a moonless well, carried no glimmer of thought or fear. Not even anger. Not recognition.
Nothing.
His expression remained eerily blank, as though emotion had been surgically removed from him long ago. The stillness of his features was unnatural, too empty, as if carved from soft wax rather than born of flesh.
And the moment Jasper, Cassian, Willow, Mayumi, and Hyung-woo saw that face, the same thought surged through them, a synchronized ripple of disbelief:
Who is he?
Even Hyung-woo — whose heart should have leapt at recognition if fate were playing tricks on him — felt nothing but confusion. The man looked alien. Unfamiliar. A stranger wearing a corpse-like calm.
Hyung-woo's breath hitched as he lowered his sword slightly. His voice trembled, not with fear but with a growing, icy bewilderment.
"Who are you? Who are you, really?"His question cracked through the shimmering air, raw and cutting.
The anger that had carried him here thinned instantly, replaced by a tight, hollow confusion. His chest tightened with doubt. His pulse faltered. For the first time since arriving at this kingdom again, he hesitated.
Cassian did not.
He forced himself upright, gauntlets groaning under the dents inflicted earlier. His voice tore out in a rough, furious rasp:
"It doesn't matter who you are! Take him down now!"
Hyung-woo snapped his focus back to the Jester — but something was wrong.
The Jester didn't flee.Didn't dodge.Didn't even raise his weapon.
Instead, he stared blankly at Hyung-woo, the slightest quiver of confusion flickering across his empty eyes — a microsecond of lostness, like a machine receiving an input it could not process.
He stepped back once.A tiny shuffle.And in that thin, distracted slice of time, he lifted his uninjured left hand.
His fingers slid into the gap in his torn suit — into the exposed hollow near his sternum, right where Wolf had struck earlier. He curled his fingers as if grasping an invisible string.
And then—
He began to play.
Not the mandolin.Not strings.Not wood or metal.
His own body.
A sound wave erupted from within him — not music, but a raw distortion of the sonic dimension itself. It was a pitch that did not belong in the world of the living. The air shivered violently, bending like heated metal. The kingdom's crystals flickered. The sky dimmed as the note expanded, vibrating through the floating citadel with a force that felt like grief made audible.
The sound was despair, pain, ruin — the shudder of a collapsing empire expressed through vibration and death.
Jasper's Sound Dampening Field might as well have been a paper screen.
The wave obliterated it instantly.
A pulse shot outward — silent for half a heartbeat.Then—
It hit them.
Hyung-woo
The impact slammed into him like a falling mountain.His shield exploded — split into needle-sharp fragments that scattered across the crystal floor.
A violent shock tore through Hyung-woo's skull.His brain felt as if it had ruptured.
Blood burst from his ears.Then his nose.Then the corners of his eyes.
He dropped to his knees, legs gone limp, his sword slipping from his trembling hand. His vision filled with white static, his heartbeat stuttering in broken rhythms. Through the fog of agony, he forced his gaze upward — just for a second — to see the Jester's face one last time.
Expressionless.Empty.Unknowable.
His fingers spasmed on nothing, curled inward as if still trying to reach for his weapon.
Then his body fell completely still.
Cassian
The sonic blast hurled him backward like a ragdoll struck by a hurricane. He slammed into a crystalline pillar with enough force to crack its surface. His gauntlets bent inward, metal folded like wet parchment. His chest caved slightly from the shock. He slid down the pillar, leaving a faint smear of blood as gravity took him. His jaw hung open in a frozen half-snarl.
No breath escaped.
Jasper
The mage tried — desperately — reflexively — to weave a defensive spell. Ether flared around him, frantic and unstable. His lips moved, trembling through incantation, but the soundwave annihilated the spell structure instantly. The unstable ether around him imploded, then detonated outward in a burst of white flame.
He vanished inside the explosion.
When the flare faded, nothing of him remained but scorched dust drifting upward.
Willow
Her fingers trembled desperately over her staff. She tried to conjure a healing field — light flickered weakly at the tip of her staff — but the wave struck her chest like a hammer made of pure vibration. Her ribs bent inward. Her lungs collapsed before she could even finish the spell. Her face twisted in agony for a single, breathless moment.
Then she collapsed, eyes already emptying.
Mayumi
Her fingers strained to pull back her bowstring one last time, though her pupils had already blown wide, losing vision entirely. The shockwave hit her optic nerves first — blinding pain erupting behind her eyes like shattering glass. She let out a silent gasp, knees buckling. Her bow slipped from her grip as her arms fell limp.
She collapsed without a sound.
Her arrows scattered beside her like fallen feathers.
The Crystal Cloud Kingdom Fell Silent
The Jester remained standing — barely. His chest rose and fell in ragged, trembling breaths. Using that final sound had torn at him, too. His posture sagged, one knee bending slightly. His right hand shook.
But he endured.
He looked down at the bodies around him, turning his head slightly as if observing a distant painting rather than the corpses of five extraordinary adventurers.
Then, slowly… almost gently… he crouched.
He picked up the fallen mask from the crystalline floor. His fingers brushed over the cracked edge with a strange, fragile care. Then he lifted it, aligned it with his face, and pressed it back on.
The bells hanging from his shawl jingled softly — mournfully — as he stood upright again.
He turned.Walked away.Step after step, without hurry, without sound, disappearing into the drifting mists of the kingdom.
Left behind on the shining crystal floor lay Hyung-woo's body, twisted slightly on its side, hand still half-stretched toward the sword that had fallen just beyond reach.
There was no music.No laughter.Not even wind.
Only the crushing silence of a kingdom that had witnessed death twice.
Wolf's consciousness peeled away from Hyung-woo's body.He drifted backward, leaving the memory like a man stepping out of a dream soaked in cold sweat.
His awareness snapped back into his own body, Lamentia's fingers still tightly wrapped around his hand.
Wolf exhaled slowly.
"…hm. As expected, that isn't me."