Then the pressure finally receded. Zekai slowly opened his eyes.
"...!"
The intersection was gone. The buildings were gone. The cars were gone. Even the blue sky had disappeared. For one brief moment, there was only an endless white void.
Then shapes began to emerge from the fading light.
Stone. Walls. Broken pillars.
A chill seeped through the soles of his shoes.
Zekai blinked several times as his vision adjusted. The white glare receded. And the world returned.
But it wasn't his world. Zekai stood in the middle of a ruined stone courtyard.
He stared. "Oh wo—no..." His voice died in his throat. "...That's not possible."
For a moment, the place reminded him of every nightmare he'd ever had as a child. Except nightmares were supposed to end when you opened your eyes.
Ancient palace walls surrounded the courtyard, cracked and half-collapsed. Broken marble statues lay scattered across the ground, many of them missing their heads. Dark water sat motionless inside ruined fountains while thick vines wrapped around the statues like snakes strangling corpses.
Shattered stone crowns were scattered among the rubble. The entire place looked like a royal garden that had been abandoned for centuries.
No.
It looked like something had destroyed it.
Zekai slowly turned in place.
The ruins stretched beyond the courtyard. Collapsed buildings. Broken towers. Jagged streets buried beneath debris.
Giant statues lying shattered across the land.
Dark scorch marks spread across the ruins as far as he could see, as though some enormous force had burned through an entire civilization.
What happened here?
The place didn't feel empty. That was the problem. It felt like something had already chosen him.
Watching was no longer enough. He was inside. Beside him, Aron slowly reappeared through the fading distortion.
He still had his eyes squeezed shut. "I can't see!" His hands moved frantically through the air.
Zekai turned toward him. "What is this idiot doing now...?"
He walked over and grabbed both of Aron's shoulders.
"This idiot's going to panic himself to death."
"Ahhh—!" Aron jumped at the sudden voice and slowly opened his eyes.
The moment he saw Zekai, his shoulders loosened.
"Mr. Zekai..."
He exhaled shakily. "Thank God... we're alive." The relief lasted less than a second. Aron finally looked around. His expression froze.
He slowly turned his head, taking in the ruined courtyard, the broken statues, and the endless wasteland beyond it.
"Where..." His voice became quieter. "Where are we?"
Zekai didn't answer. For the first time, even the question felt inadequate.
Where implied there was somewhere familiar to return to.
He was looking upward. The sky was no longer blue. A dim crimson glow stretched across the heavens like smoke from a distant fire. There was no sun. No clouds. No visible stars.
Only an endless red twilight.
"That's not the same sky..." Aron whispered.
Zekai lowered his gaze. Something else was wrong. He turned around. "Look behind us."
Aron followed his gaze. The remains of an entire civilization stretched behind them.
Stone buildings had collapsed into jagged piles. Towers lay broken across ruined streets. Giant statues had been reduced to fragments, and black scorch marks covered the land as though something had burned through the city and erased everything in its path.
Aron instinctively stepped backward.
"Why did we end up in a cursed place like this...?"
Zekai continued staring. "Whatever destroyed it..." His eyes moved across the ruins. "...might still be here."
Aron's face tightened. "...Then why are we still standing here?"
"We should move." Aron said it quickly, but neither of them knew where to go.
There was no visible road leading out. No city. No people. No sign that this place even belonged to the same world.
There wasn't even a direction that felt safer than the others.
Zekai reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
The screen lit up. 1 missed call - Marcus Grandpa
The timestamp read: 8:43 AM.
Zekai stared at it. Then the numbers flickered.
8:43 AM
9:30 PM
8:43 AM
9:30 PM
Aron leaned closer. "That... changed just now, didn't it?"
The seconds continued jumping erratically. "Damn it..."
It wasn't behaving like a broken clock. It was as though the phone couldn't decide which moment was real. Zekai watched the screen. "It keeps glitching..."
"Why is the time changing like that?"
Morning had become night without either of them noticing. Zekai tightened his grip around the phone before forcing himself to relax.
Panicking won't solve anything. Usually, staying calm came naturally to him.
This time, it didn't. For the first time in years, he had no idea what was happening around him.
Aron suddenly held something out. "You forgot this at the counter."
The black-and-red tarot box rested in his palm. Zekai silently took it.
"Thanks."
He slipped it into his coat pocket. For a moment, his eyes dropped toward his empty arm. Nothing remained except a few crushed petals caught against his sleeve.
He brushed them away without saying anything. Then he glanced at Aron.
"And because you came after me, you're trapped here too."
Aron gave a nervous smile. "I have no idea what's happening either..."
He looked around. "...but standing here panicking won't help."
Zekai didn't answer. Nothing here made sense.
The frozen intersection. The vortex. The voices. The transfer. The ruined world.
And Marcus's missing call. Everything felt like pieces of a puzzle. Pieces that didn't belong together.
Aron swallowed. "...Do you think this is still Earth?"
Zekai stared toward the ruined city. "Maybe." He paused. "Or something pretending to be."
The words left his mouth before he could stop them. And once he said them, the possibility became harder to ignore.
Another dimension?
If so, they had no idea what kind of world they had entered. And more importantly—
They had no idea whether anything here wanted them alive.
Zekai's hands tightened. Then—
Thump.
A sudden pulse of heat bloomed inside one pocket of his coat. At the same time, an unnatural cold spread through the other.
Zekai's eyes narrowed. He immediately pulled both objects free.
The black-and-red tarot box glowed with a faint crimson light. The strange glow cast no light across the courtyard, yet Zekai could see it perfectly.
The black stone cube remained completely dark.
One was reacting. The other wasn't.
It should have felt harmless. Somehow, that made it worse. Zekai stared at them. That difference bothered him.
The tarot box was reacting. The cube wasn't.
"...Aron."
Aron looked at him. "Yes?"
Zekai raised both objects. "Do these look like they're glowing to you?"
Aron stepped closer and squinted. He shook his head.
"No." He looked confused. "They look normal to me."
As I thought.
Zekai studied the tarot box. The crimson glow was obvious to him.
Yet Aron couldn't see it. That meant the reaction was connected to him.
His gaze shifted toward the black cube. It remained completely inert.
If something here is reacting to me... the Tarot box is the obvious candidate.
The cube was cold, unnaturally heavy, and somehow wrong. But since arriving here, it hadn't done anything.
Zekai needed to test it. One observation meant nothing. A reaction could be evidence.
He held the cube toward Aron. "Hold this for a bit."
Aron hesitated.
"I'll take it back later."
"...Okay." Aron accepted the cube. The moment it touched his hands, he simply looked down at it. Nothing happened. No reaction. No pain. He turned it over like an ordinary piece of stone.
Zekai watched him carefully.
So it isn't reacting to Aron.
Aron slipped the cube into his coat pocket.
"I'll keep it for now," he said.
Zekai gave him a brief nod. "Fine. Just don't lose it."
He was about to say something when—A cold sensation passed through his body. Zekai stopped. His eyes moved across the courtyard.
The statues. The broken fountains. The vines. The rubble.
Nothing moved. Then his gaze returned to one particular statue.
His expression changed.
"...!"
His boots stopped. Aron noticed.
"Mr. Zekai?"
Zekai didn't answer. A second crack crawled across the statue's face.
He was sure of it. Yet now—
It was a statue of a man.
Unlike the other ruined figures scattered across the courtyard, this one remained almost completely intact. The ancient stone armor covering its body was worn by centuries of erosion, yet its posture remained perfectly upright, as though it had been standing guard over this place since the day the civilization fell.
Around its neck coiled a stone serpent.
Its body wrapped tightly around the statue's shoulders, its carved scales overlapping one another with unnatural detail. The serpent's head rested beside the man's cheek, its open mouth revealing a row of tiny stone fangs.
A guardian.
Zekai's eyes narrowed.
He hadn't noticed it before.
And several meters away, on the opposite side of the courtyard, another statue stood with a massive sword resting against the ground. Unlike the serpent-bearing guardian, that figure remained completely motionless.
Zekai's fingers tightened around the tarot box.
"...Aron."
"What?"
"Don't move."
Aron's face went pale.
"Why?"
Zekai didn't answer.
The stone guardian's head had turned toward them.
Crk.
Another fracture spread across its neck.
The serpent wrapped around its shoulders slowly lifted its head.
Its stone eyes opened.
Then—
The guardian smiled.
✦ End of Chapter 3 — The Fallen Realm ✦