In a small room inside the student dormitory at Resonance Academy, a student sat on the edge of his bed, flipping through the orientation photos of the new batch.
Everything seemed normal.
Students standing in neat rows.
Professors in their usual places.
Lyra Vale smiling in the background with calm confidence.
But…
Every photo held a small, elusive error.
Sometimes: A void in a corner that made no sense.
Sometimes: A face blurred as if the camera refused to acknowledge its existence.
Sometimes: A tiny black dot, like a puncture in the fabric of the photo.
The student leaned closer to the screen.
Then he froze.
“There was someone here… wasn’t there?”
His friend looked up slowly, without real interest.
“What do you mean?”
Silence.
The student tried to grasp the thought, but the idea itself began to fade within his mind, as if it had never existed at all.
He closed his phone.
But the last photo remained open.
And in its background…
A long shadow stood behind the group.
Yet, that shadow itself… was slowly disintegrating, as if it were unwelcome within the image.
In the top observation tower, Selene Arctis sat before the archive screens.
The flow of data was not natural.
Everything related to Sami Kō:
Records glitching.
Photos distorting.
Names being rewritten.
Timestamps changing automatically.
She breathed slowly, not out of fear… but analysis.
“Reality has a self-correction mechanism…” she said quietly.
“Everything that is impossible… is deleted.”
She paused for a moment, then tilted her head slightly.
“But why is he still here?”
Suddenly…
The screen flickered.
Then, a single sentence appeared:
AUTHORITY DETECTED
Followed immediately by:
THRONE PRIORITY OVERRIDES CORRECTION
Selene stood up abruptly.
Her eyes widened.
“…So, the system isn’t the one erasing him.”
She whispered:
“It’s something above the system.”
In the academy corridors, Sami was walking quietly.
His hands were in his pockets, his steps steady, but something about him was no longer right.
The door no longer “acknowledged” his existence.
The hallways passed him by without keeping him.
Voices would speak his name and then immediately forget it.
Even gazes… passed over him as if he were a vacuum.
He stopped in the middle of the hall.
“Am I… existing or not?”
No one answered.
Not because they didn’t want to, but because the question itself could no longer hold in their minds.
It was as if reality refused to retain him.
Night fell over the academy.
A heavy silence, not a silence of sleep… but a silence of anticipation.
In Sami’s room, he sat on the edge of his bed.
The light was dim, and the air was unnaturally still.
Then…
CLACK.
A faint metallic sound.
Like a chair being dragged across ancient stone.
He slowly raised his head.
“…No.”
In the corner…
A man sat on a chair.
Cracked black armor.
Calm, non-human red eyes.
A presence as heavy as if war itself had entered the room.
He said in a low voice:
“Finally… the Emperor has awakened.”
Sami blinked slowly.
“…What is the Emperor?”
Before the response could come…
The shadow moved from under the bed.
Suddenly, Lira Noct appeared behind him and hugged him tightly.
“You are the Emperor, of course~”
Sami: “What—?!”
The air changed immediately.
A sense of hunger… a void… tension… inexplicable attachment…
It was as if all the world’s emotions had been spilled into the room.
Lira laughed: “Finally, we see you as we should!”
A light laugh.
Seraphine was sitting on the desk, as if she had been there the whole time.
“You’re very late.”
She looked at Sami.
“The previous Emperor didn’t take this long to be able to see us.”
Lira glared at her: “Get away from him.”
Seraphine smiled: “The drama has already begun.”
The temperature dropped suddenly.
The sounds fell silent completely.
Elysion stood by the window.
“The path has begun to move again.”
Sami sighed: “…Am I dreaming?”
But no one answered him.
Sami sat slowly.
He looked at them one by one.
Then he said quietly: “Explain this to me in a way a human can understand.”
Silence.
Then the explanation began.
Vaeldrak: “The Throne chooses an Emperor.”
Seraphine: “And reality tries to erase any Emperor who cannot handle it.”
Lira: “But you are still here.”
Elysion: “Therefore… the Throne chose you before you.”
Silence.
Then Vaeldrak said: “And we… are your guardians.”
Sami looked at the floor.
Then he said quietly: “So I am the cause of all this?”
Seraphine laughed: “Finally, a good question.”
But Vaeldrak shook his head:
“No.”
“You are the result… not the cause.”
Sami tightened his grip on his chin and kept looking at them with a calm eye, as if trying to dismantle their existence piece by piece—not as creatures, but as a phenomenon that did not align with the logic of the world.
Then he said in a low, steady voice:
“Do you not have any other form besides these?”
Silence prevailed.
It wasn’t a normal silence… it was as if the air itself stopped for a moment to understand the question.
He raised his eyes to them again and added:
“For this form… sends terror into humans.”
He paused, then continued with clear coldness:
“And above that… even the atmosphere around you refuses your existence.”
The silence inside Sami’s room was not a normal silence; it was a kind of silence that doesn’t come from the absence of sound… but from the absence of the “ability to produce sound in the first place.”
The air seemed heavier than usual, as if the entire academy was holding its breath without knowing why.
The four stood before him.
Not as ordinary people, but as if each one of them represented a complete concept that forced reality to coexist with it by force.
Vaeldrak stood firmly, his cracked black armor reflecting a light with no source, his red eyes calm in a way that was illogical for an entity representing war itself.
He smiled slightly, then said:
“Other?”
As for Seraphine, she tilted her head slightly, as if enjoying the chaos that had begun to form, and said with light mockery:
“He thinks we are just… costumes. A cute idea.”
Lira laughed, but it was a different laugh—a laugh that carried a strange attachment.
She said:
“I like this human more than I should.”
As for Elysion, he was silent.
His gaze wasn’t just toward Sami; it was as if he were looking at something behind him—something older than the room, deeper than the academy itself.
Sami blinked slowly, then said in a calm tone:
“Yeah… this form is annoying.”
He paused for a moment.
Then he added:
“It sends terror into humans. And even reality seems to refuse your existence.”
Silence.
It wasn’t a silence of hesitation, but a silence of anticipation.
It was as if something in the world itself had stopped to hear the answer.
Then Sami said, without raising his voice:
“I mean, surely you have another form… that would be less annoying.”
In that moment, the silence was no longer just the absence of sound.
It became an entity pressing on the room from the outside.
Even the light on the ceiling seemed to delay in existing.
Vaeldrak lowered his head slightly and said in a low voice:
“Interesting…”
Seraphine smiled a small smile and said:
“The first time someone asks us this in such a way.”
As for Lira, she moved closer to Sami and wrapped her arms around him as if she didn’t understand the meaning of social distance:
“Do you want us to be kinder?”
Sami looked at her coldly and said:
“No… normal.”
Lira laughed, then stepped back just one step, as if she were unable to move any further away.
“So… it’s time to clarify things.”
Seraphine said this while sitting on the edge of a desk that hadn’t actually existed a moment before, as if reality had reconfigured itself to give her a place to sit.
Vaeldrak raised his hand, and transparent layers of shadow appeared in the air, as if it were an educational screen belonging to no known technology.
He said in a steady voice:
“We are not in one form.”
He paused.
Then he continued:
“We are three levels of existence.”
Sami looked at them in silence.
He wasn’t asking… but he was grasping that what was about to be said would not be something that could be forgotten.
Lira said with light enthusiasm:
“Three states!”
Seraphine added quickly:
“Not forms… but levels of relationship with reality.”
Elysion nodded slowly and said:
“And the extent of the world’s ability to tolerate us.”
Then the truth began to unfold.
🟡 The First State — Spiritual Servant Form
Vaeldrak pointed to himself, and to the others, as if this form were the mask they used to deal with Sami.
“This is the form you see.”
Sami looked at them in silence.
Vaeldrak continued:
“At this level… we can exist within the world without it breaking.”
Seraphine said:
“We appear as understandable beings. We can be spoken to. We can interact.”
Lira added, spinning around Sami:
“A diluted version of the disaster.”
This form was clear, almost human, but carried something unnatural, as if perception itself required effort to understand it.
Elysion said quietly:
“This is not us… but the way reality allows us to be seen.”
Sami tilted his head slightly:
“You mean… this is a facade?”
Seraphine smiled:
“Exactly.”
🔴 The Second State — Manifestation State
Suddenly, the tone of the room changed.
It was no longer just an explanation, but an admission of a greater existential weight.
Vaeldrak said:
“Here… reality begins to fail.”
The pressure in the air rose.
He continued:
“When the world cannot explain us, it begins to distort.”
Lira pointed to the void around them:
“Emotions spread for no reason.”
Seraphine said:
“Meanings lose their stability.”
Elysion added:
“And time becomes unreliable.”
Sami looked around.
He began to understand that what he had seen previously in the academy—the tension, the forgetting, the distortions—was not random.
It was this level of existence pressing on reality itself.
Sami said quietly:
“And this form… I saw it.”
Vaeldrak smiled:
“Yes.”
“And that means you have begun to touch the limits of your endurance.”
Suddenly…
Sami stared at them one by one.
Then he said:
“What will happen if I see the full form?”
The air inside the room stopped for a single moment, as if the question had not been asked within a physical space, but within a deeper layer of existence itself.
No one laughed.
No one commented.
Even Lira, who couldn’t stop moving, suddenly stopped in her place, and her smile faded slightly, as if she realized that the path they had entered no longer allowed for joking.
Vaeldrak slowly raised his head.
His red eyes didn’t change, but in them was something closer to… heavy respect.
He said quietly:
“A question like this… is not asked so simply.”